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Gerard Baudson: The New World Order And Yugoslavia
PART ONE
The New World Order"Two catastrophes are threatening the world, the order and the disorder"
Paul ValeryChapter I
The Delights of The International Free Exchange"The thief stole everything from me,
except the moon reflected on my window."Mr. Anthony Lake, adviser to President Clinton for questions of national security, on September 21, 1992 announced a conference entitled "From Containment to Enlargement" - at the John Hopkins University in Washington:
"We should promote democracy and market economy in the world because it is protecting our interests and our security, and because it is the reflection of the values which are at the same time American and universal."
"We should also", continued Mr. Lake, "accord to the democratic nations the maximum of benefits of integration in the foreign markets, which in part explains why NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association) and GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) are placed at such a high level in the program of our security".
He also added: "On the one side, there is protectionism and a limited exterior engagement; on the other, there is an active engagement of the United States abroad in the name of democracy and trade promotion".
The trade and international free exchange are the parts of the program of American security of the same level as the NATO or any other foreign intervention.
American economic strategy is articulated on the basis of the following three principal elements:
1. Formation of zones where the United States will have a privileged position in respect to their industrial competitors. This is free case of NAFTA, a free trade zone between United States, Canada and Mexico.
NAFTA is eminently protectionist: it prescribes what may be called "continental preferences", but of a ten-fold size: all products manufactured in one of these three countries in order to be accepted by the others, must use raw material originating from this continent.
NAFTA covers 300 million inhabitants with a gross national product (GNP) of 6,854 billion dollars at the end of 1994. The American companies will be able more easily to relocate to Mexico where the labor is cheap, at the same time helping to contain and decrease the continuous flow of Mexican immigrants across Rio Grande.
2. Supremacy over international free exchange through GATT (now World Trade Organization).
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) was established in 1947. In the beginning it was conceived as an attempt at regulating international trade, founded on the principle of exchange of mutual concessions. This means that tariff facilities granted to one GATT member-country would automatically apply to the other countries. In 1947 there were only 23 GATT members, the main industrialized countries. In 1993 there are 111 and since its creation, the customs duties of industrialized countries have passed from 50% to 6% in the average! This treaty of GATT is a real treason of the fundamental interests of European countries. Actually, placing in competition of countries whose forms of political. economic and social organization are, in the best case, divergent, and in the worst case radically opposed, is completely denaturalizing a system of exchange based on complete openness of frontiers.
GATT is the most violent expression of free exchange at the world level, which is allowing every enterprise to manufacture its products anywhere in the world and to sell wherever they wish. This is a separation of the place of manufacture and the place of consumption. Manufacturing there where it is the cheapest and selling there where purchasing power is the strongest, has as consequence massive destruction of employment in Europe.
GATT has allowed the Americans to circumvent the Joint Exterior Tariff established by the EEC. This tariff is now at an average of 4.5%. The consequences are dramatic: anyone can manufacture anything anywhere and import it quasi-freely into Europe.
3. Setting up of the Third World economies indirectly through the International Monetary Fund.
The International Monetary Fund is for the poor countries what GATT is for the rich ones: a machine to crush down individuals, to break up societies. In the world in which 40% of population has to survive with only 3.3% of the world revenues (world report on human development - United Nations 1992), the IMF established in 1945 with the aim "to facilitate expansion and harmonious growth of international trade", by ostracizing the loans to the Third World countries (but not exclusively), is practicing the policy of "economic adjustment" which is ruining them!
At the end of the 90's, the total debt of the developing countries was estimated at 1,300 billion dollars. Every year only the repayment of foreign debt by far exceeds the totality of aid and of loans. Instead of helping countries of the South, the IMF is engaged in cashing-in the servicing of debts due to the creditor countries of the North. Between the years 1986 and 1990, 31 billion dollars have been repaid to the IMF, or 225 of the outflow of capital of the countries of the South and East towards the North (program of the United Nations for development). The economies and exports of the poor countries are in advance mortgaged in order to assure repayment of debts owed to the rich countries!
In order to disengage exports which will allow repayment - in hard currency - of the debt, the IMF is proposing loans accompanied by conditions of the so-called "structural adjustments". These are, actually, Draconian austerity measures, measures of suppression of government expenditures but at the same time and above all, elimination of government subsidies on products of primary needs - flour, sugar, milk - having as immediate consequence the jump in prices and the fall of purchasing power of the population whose salaries are frozen in order to stabilize the demand and avoid inflatory pressures. This shock therapy imposed by the IMF is being applied in over eighty countries of the Third World, where it is destroying both the economy and the society. Standard of living is falling down and troubles are erupting in almost all of these countries (Venezuela, Mexico, Tunisia, Egypt, etc...). But the IMF couldn't care less; fighting hunger is not within its competencies.
Market economy today, promoted by Mr. Anthony Lake, is becoming the ruling master and is imposing its will and destroying all policies not in conformity with the interests of the international capital.
From the prices of raw materials - corn or petroleum - through the convergence criteria of the European Union, passing through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht Treaty, the GATT, multinational capital takes the upper hand over the national state. The national market, corner-stone of the nation-state and of the social compact which is linking together all the citizens, is on the way of disappearance, delivering all the social and human activities to the internationalized laws of market economy. Weakening of the sovereignty of states, of their capacity to intervene economically and to regulate social relationships, causes the creation of geographic "outlaw" zones - Africa, Asia, Latin America - where neither salaries are respected nor the norms of social protection, of hygiene and pollution.
As to Europe which had the task of becoming an economic and political rival of the United States, it is slowly passing from the concept of Europe of Motherland, conceived by General De Gaulle1 ("The states are the only entities having the right to order and the authority to act. To imagine that it is possible to build something efficient for action and also approved by the people above and beyond the state, is a chimera ") - into a federal Europe and a regional one, brought into life by the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl2 ("Our aim is unity of Europe. Federalism, subsidiaries, integration of regional interests are for us the structural principles essential for edification of Europe of tomorrow"), which will end in atomization of the European states.
1 Press conference May 31 1960
2 To make the United States of Europe, interview with Helmut Kohl Politic Internationale (International politics). No. 52, summer of 1991, page 25
Chapter II
German Federal Europe"From now on with the reunification there is only one country
which is dominating over Europe, Germany. There is no use denying it. "
Margaret Thatcher (interview for "Le Figaro", 1994)One of the essential components of the New World Order is the triumph of the German Federal Europe.
One of the fundamental aspects of Europe is that it is composed of three zones historically constituted in different fashions and mutually incompatible.
The first zone is grouping England, France, Spain and Portugal. These four countries have in common the fact that they have very early realized their political union and that they were governed by the interior capital. In England fundamental institutions were elaborated during the reign of the dynasty of Normans (1066 - 1154), then of the Anjou dynasty of Plantagenets (1154 1399), characterized by a strong government monarchy and a single law applicable on all (common law).
In this small and scarsly populated kingdom energetic kings like Henry I (1100 1135) Henry II (1154 -1189) or Edward I (1271 - 1307) could strongly impose their authority over their vassals. Magna Carta of June 1215 granted by King John Lackland to his rebellious barons, marks the beginning of the idea of the nation, created around the constitutional text which is the foundation of the English liberty.
In France in that same period Philip II Augustus crushed down on July 27 1214 at the Battle of Bouvins, the reunited armies of the Germanic Emperor Otto IV, Count of Flandria Ferrand and King of England John Lackland. Thereafter, Hundred Years' War (1337 -1435) will allow for the royal authority to emerge reinforced and will make of the French England's hereditary enemies, all the way up to the year 1870, the year when France will change this hereditary enemy, and actually exchange England for Prussia!
Spanish union followed slightly later. In 1469 Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castille and this marriage made possible the reconquest through the capture of Grenada (1492). In this same year, Christopher Columbus discovered America. Spain will dominate Europe and the world for an entire century and a half, until its defeat in 1643 at Rocroi by the French.
In Portugal the unity was achieved in the 13th century. It is after the defeat of Almorada at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) in Castille, where the Portuguese troops of Alphonso II King of Portugal (1211 -1223) took part, that the re-conquest of the lands seized by Arabs accelerated, to be completed by seizure of Algarve (1249) under the reign of Alphonso III (1248 - 1279). This territorial gain of Portugal in mid-13th century coincides, in part, with its institutional achievements.
Unity of kingdoms, interior capital, real independence, these are the essential characteristics of the countries of the first zone. In her interview for "Le Figaro" of November 2, 1993, the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher recalls:
"There are two ways to make Europe. Either to try to impose on people an European unity which they do not want, or to preserve national identity. Please remember that there are only four state-nations: Great Britain, France, Spain and Portugal. It is necessary to satisfy their pride, their sense of history and their confidence in their culture".
The second zone regroups the regions of "Lotharingian" Europe, that of the Spanish Netherlands, of the Roman Germanic Holy Empire and of Italy. It is stretching from Denmark down to Sicily.
These regions are specific for the fact that they have been for a long time fragmented into an infinite number of dukedoms and counties, that they have passed from the Spanish influence to the Austrian influence, that they have very late achieved their independence. Thus, the Netherlands belonged at one time to Spain (1598 - 1713) before becoming Austrian (1713 - 1790). Vienna Congress decided to reunite Belgium and Holland in a single kingdom of The Netherlands (1815), but Belgium obtained its independence in 1830. The Holy Empire founded by Otto I The Great (962) initially comprised the kingdoms of Germania, Italy and Burgundy. It was dissolved in 1806 by Napoleon I.
The Treaties of Westphalia (1648) destroyed all hopes for unification of Germany by fragmenting it into 350 states. German unity will take place in 1870 against France which had crushed Prussia in 1806. Italy will achieve its unity only in 1862 thanks to France and against the will of Austria. All these regions for a very long time were governed from the foreign capitals: Madrid or Vienna, and even London in the name of Hanover!
As a consequence, these countries do not have the same idea of the nation, the same conception of the state, as the four "old countries" of the first zone, they themselves in the process of evolution.
Great Britain is conserving an isolationist concept forged by its history and vastly inspired by its geography. It has not resigned on the idea of the nation-state. France until the year 1980 did not resign as well. What was needed was the economic disaster of the 80's and 90's to precipitate the movement towards federalism, the vote for Maastricht Treaty, to make obvious that the French themselves are depending on a capital city that is located abroad. And worst of this all, the capital of money: Frankfurt, the officially enthroned seat of the "European Monetary Institute" in late October 1993.
France has created an absurd regionalization, a decentralization which is costing it dearly, which has doubled French administration, which has destroyed the nation-state, which is a very heavy financial burden and which is placing the French citizen between direct local Administration and the State which, itself, is cornered between Brussels with its plethoric legislation and the Regions. The French state is on the way of disappearance, dislocation.
As far as Spain is concerned, it has passed through a crisis. The Pyrenees have existed for a long time, and it was finding itself excluded from the main centers of activity in Europe situated in the North. Also for the entrance in the Community, did Spain slightly give up on itself, feeling too happy not to be held apart any longer. This situation is a temporary one, inflation and unemployment are gradually making the Spanish people realize certain realities and especially the particularity of its way of life and the dangers of foreign investments on which the country has become too dependent.
For Portugal, the affair is simple: taking into consideration its difference in the standard of living and its relative poverty in comparison with the northern Europe: it is European because it is receiving subsidies.
The third zone is the Eastern Europe. Contrary to the Western Europe partitioned by the mountain chains, the Euro-Asian plain is continuous and no river or mountain are marking its frontiers. It is the grand route of invasion. The Mongolian incursions repeated themselves: Genghis Khan in 1223 penetrated the entire Russia. From 1237 to 1240 great army of the Mongols of Batu Khan ravaged and subjugated Russian and Bulgarian regions. In the West, Roman Church 'organized' christianization of the coasts of the Baltic Sea by Teutonic Knights and Porte-Glaives who penetrated territories of the East.
Teutonic Knights will be defeated in 1410 at the great Battle of Grunwald by the armies of the King of Poland, Ladislas Jagillion, and the Germanic push towards the East will be temporarily stopped. It will resume later with the Kingdom of Prussia. The fear of invasion and encircling will become a true obsession of the Russian and Soviet politics and it is this fear that will, tomorrow, become the ferment for the re-composition of the former Soviet Union.
This "Europe of the East" - Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary - has three principal characteristics. First of all, these countries that are its component parts have never accepted the "re-tailoring" and their frontiers are still today "mobile". Furthermore, Eastern Europe was the arena of secular confrontation between Germans and Slavs. Finally, it is a Europe that for 45 years was a Communist one, under the Soviet control and has regained its sovereignty only recently, which was violently disputed during the two world wars and the re-composition of which is still taking place today.
This Europe of the East, in decomposition and recomposition, contains one major fact. The reunification of two Germanies. There is no example in the world that the people of 80 million inhabitants, having the Gross National Product (GNP) for 40% above the one of France, by far the greatest economic European power, sometimes the primary world exporter, does not have an expansive national diplomacy and later on military means of coercion corresponding to that diplomacy. Within the scope of the Maastricht Europe, Germany incited disintegration of Yugoslavia and threw its net on Croatia and Slovenia, the ancient provinces of Austro-Hungary. German diplomacy has two faces of Janus: the one which it is presenting during international conferences and negotiations, during Franco-German summits, the face of peace, of concord and feeling of European responsibility; but there is this other face, the face of underground subdued diplomacy of Mr. Genscher who is preparing for Germany of tomorrow, the diplomacy, economy and army of its power. This exponential Germany has attracted the attention of the United States. It represents an essential pole of action of the American politics in Europe and has become its main counterpart.
Europe is on the way of becoming German, with what Germany has of the universal, in the sense that it is not a nation-state, but an assembly of Landers. German Europe can not be anything else but Federal and Regional. The United States agree with Germany for this emphasis on regionalization and decentralization of the nation-states because the manipulation of the regions, provinces is much easier then manipulation of the states. Yugoslavia exists no more and the disappearance of Czechoslovakia took place on January 1, 1993. Belgium has become a federal state. Whose turn is next?
Chapter III
Geopolitics of Islam"Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim".
In the name of God, All Mighty and All Merciful.One man out of every five in the world is a Muslim. Organization of the Islamic Conference gathers 52 states from the total of 185 member-countries of the Organization of the United Nations. Islamic religion is a universal one, encompassing without any differentiation the spheres of both spiritual and temporal. Muslims are present in Africa, in the Near and the Middle East, in Asia, but also in Europe, where five centuries of the Ottoman occupation in the Balkans have left the regions inhabited by Muslims, whose political revival goes hand in hand with their galloping demography (Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia).
Disposing with abundant power resources - 70% of the entire world reserves of petrol - and forming a strategic zone between Europe, South-East Asia, Indian Ocean and the Pacific, the Islamic world is one of the keys to the 21st century. Or, Islam is something very complex and very divers. There is not only one Islam, there are Islams. There is not a "good Islam" tolerant, and a "bad Islam" fundamentalist. There is a whole crowd of Islams. With relevance to the New World Order, three points, among many others, are of major importance: the existence of the Shiah Islam where Iran is the political center and which is revealed in its secular struggle against the Sunnah, where the Americans are seeing themselves as protectors; the obligation made to the entirety of the Muslims to lead a perpetual war until the end of times - to lead the Jihad; the problematic of the relations with the Jews in the function of the Koran verses - the identity of Israel.
The Shiah
For all Muslims, Mohammed is the last and the greatest of all the prophets. He was the chief of the community of believers and the first head of a Muslim state. The succession of Mohammed did not concern the prophetic function which was accomplished and did not ask for any prolongation, except the political-religious aspect of the prediction.
The first caliphs to exercise functions of both the religious and the political leaders were chosen from amongst the companions of the prophet. Some were of the opinion that the succession should be kept within the family of Mohammed and that the position of the caliph should go to Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the prophet, married to Fatima. Mohammed died in the year 632 and Ali was assassinated in 661. From his marriage to the daughter of the prophet, he had two sons, Hassan and Hussein. Hassan died also assassinated and Hussein was killed at the battle field during the Battle of Kerbala in 680. This episode shall constitute one of the two fundamental pillars of the Shiah, by introducing in the Islam the theme of a martyr and of the passion. "The death of Hussein, grand-son of the prophet, is to become for the Shiah a symbol of the fight for Islam, of the fight for the right and the good, and the necessary martyrdom, inevitable for all the fighters of the true faith. Thus, over a long time in Shiism the link was made between the martyr and the truth, between suffering and justice".
The Shiah are recognizing as imams the descendants of Ali. In the year 740 the first rupture occurred, the Zeydism, from the name of Zeyd, a half-brother of the fourth imam. In the year 765 the second rupture occurred. The sixth imam Jafar, designated his son Ismail for his successor, but one part of the Shiah community preferred Musa in his stead. This rupture is called Ismailism.
The rest of the Shiah community continued to recognize the filial progeny of Ali and the descending imams up to the twelfth imam, Mohammed al Mahdi. The Shiah wish to believe that he is not dead, that he has "occulted". It is a question of a disappearance through the will of God, allowing Mohammed al Mahdi to guide men in an esoteric fashion. It is from the year 874 that Shiah becomes duo-decimal, marked by "the occultation of the 12th Imam" and the second pillar of Shiism.
Four conclusions may be drawn from this schematic presentation of the Shiah:
1 - There is not one Islam, but many of them, among them the main ones being the Sunnah and the Shiah, the latter one being a religion unto itself having given birth to a series of confessional entities very diverse among themselves, of which we have described the appearance of the three branches: the Zeydism still present today in Yemen, the Shiah "Seveners" or Ismailis and certainly the "Twelvers", a Shiah sect which exists in Lebanon, Iran and Iraq.
2 - The religion based on awaiting messianic appearance, the religion of despair, Shiism is a dramatic vision of history nourished by the social and economic marginalization that the Sunnies were imposing for centuries on the Shiah:
"The Shiah is awakened in a secular struggle against Sunnah which has always tried to suppress it, and against the western world which the Shiah rightly or wrongly associate with a domination of not only non-Muslims over Muslims, but also of the rich over the poor. The strength of the Shiah is not only in its religious prophetism, it is in its interpellation of the powerful and in its fidelity to the tradition of fight against injustice. Even in its history by associating with this or that dynasty or this or that state, it has distanced itself from its prophetic and revolutionary vocation. To live by awaiting the return of Imam while fighting for the justice on this earth, this is, very globally, the program of this religion in its profane aspect."2
At the summit conference of "The Builders of Peace" in mid-March of 1996 at Sharm el Sheik, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, together with Syria, were the absent ones. Operation "Grapes of Wrath" exercised in mid-April 1996 in Lebanon, brought under the question mark, except Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah and the Baas team in power in Syria: all of them Shiah.
3 - The Shiah communities are living in the zones of hyper-sensibility from the geopolitical point of view and the point of view of petroleum. They are especially present in the Persian Gulf.
4 - In the 16th century, Iran adopted a "Twelver" Shiism as its national religion. In the year 1979 the Islamic revolution will make of Iran the world leader of "Pan-Shiism" aimed at the restoration of the Shiah Islam in the heart of the Muslim world, with the perspective of a general Islamization of the world, through contestation of all the other social and political orders.
Such a conception erupted through the suicidal assassinations of October 1983 in Lebanon - the time-bomb truck parked at the general headquarters of the American marines in Beyrouth and against the French "Drakkar" (241 marines and 58 paratroopers killed) - through the human bombs of March 1996 in Israel (more than 80 killed) - and explains the mass attacks of Iranian infantry composed of adolescents during the Iran-Iraq war (45,000 children killed of the age from 12 to 14).
The Jihad
Islam means a total submission to God. In Islam, the feeling of divine transcendence is imposed in a total manner, to the point of crushing down the individual. Such overwhelming is manifested in the prayer which is a prosternation of the face on the soil, the physical expression of adoration of the divine consciousness and annihilation of the free will. Islam is a great universal monotheistic religion, but contrary to the Christianity, it is not spiritual in the sense of the words of Jesus: "Give to Caesar what is due to Caesar", with a well marked distinction between the temporal and the spiritual.
The primary preoccupation of the politics in Islam is the very essence of the religious contents of Islam. Since it is a question of an universalistic religion, the entire world is involved and most of all in its territorial dimension. For a Muslim, the world is divided into two spheres, the first is Dar Al Islam, the House of Islam, the space on the terrestrial globe where Islam is dominant and where it exercises its political power. If the political and judicial powers are in the hands of the Muslims, even if the entirety of the population is not Muslim, this part of the terrestrial globe where such a political power is exercised is integrated in the House of Islam.
The other part of the world, the one which is not subjugated to the political domination of Islam is called Dar Al Harb, the House of War. This is a dualistic vision of extreme clarity. All persons coming from the outside of the House of Islam are "harbi", the ones living in the House of War. Obligation is given to the community of believers to lead perpetual warfare to the end of times, with an absolute prohibition of stopping the extension of domination. This is jihad: the war of Dar al Islam against the Dar al Harb. To succeed in enlarging the Dar al Islam is to accomplish in the greatest totality the will of Allah. Once the entire world is conquered by the armies of Islam, once the Dar al Islam is spreading all over the world, there will exist only Dar al Salaam, the House of Peace. Islam therefore, wants peace, but in an Islamic sense and a very precise one.
The President of Bosnia Mr. Alija Izetbegovic is a "fundamentalist" writer. His book published in 1970-71, and re-edited in 1990 has a provocative title "The Islamic Declaration". On page 22 of this book the following phrase is to be found: "There can be no peace and neither the coexistence between the Islamic faith and the non-Islamic institutions". This is very clear, for the logic of the concept of the Islamic world where the temporal and the spiritual have remained united, and fully acceptable for the adepts of the Islamic faith, but for them only.
The country which President Izetbegovic is hoping for - which does not mean of course that all the Muslims are sharing his desire - is inspired by the Pakistani model, the only Islamic non-Arab state. In his work, the already quoted Islamic Declaration, Mr. Izetbegovic writes the following:
"It is not possible to have Islamic faith on the one side and on the other the fashion of work, of creation, of amusement, of government which is non-Islamic".
"Having the right to govern by itself its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and the possibility of applying any foreign ideology in its territory. Therefore, there is no principle of lay government and the state must be an expression and support of the moral concepts of the religion".
Never will the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs accept to live in such a country!
Islam, Jews and Israel
When Mohammed escaped from Mecca to Medina in 622 - the commencement of Hegira - he was well received there. Actually, in Medina the power was in the hands of three Jewish tribes who were, religiously speaking, close to Mohammed. The fate of these Jewish tribes will be dramatic. Two will be expelled and the third massacred, women and children reduced to slavery and all men decapitated. Thus, the foundation of the first etatistic Islamic structure goes hand in hand with the death of Jews.
Mohammed, contrary to Mosses and Jesus, will have his hands bathed in blood. Mosses never killed. He is the executor of the God' s will, but it is not him he who provokes the ten plagues on Egypt or causes the waters of the Red Sea to drawn the Pharaoh' s cavalry.
Many verses in the Koran are speaking of Israel and of the Jews, verses extremely problematic for the present-day Muslims. "And to people of those who were degraded, (children of Israel exiled from Egypt), we are giving in heritage the stretches of land to the east and to the west of the land that we have blessed (East and West of Jordan)".3
In yet another surrah of the Koran, Mosses addresses the children of Israel and says to them: "Oh, my people, enter the holy land that God has destined for you".4
How can these texts be interpreted in order to deny the right of Jews to the Land of Israel? This is the problem which is facing today certain Muslims. The answer is that all the Jews are not those Jews mentioned in the Koran. They are the descendants of the Khazars, the tribe converted in the Middle Ages. This is the thesis developed in the "Protocol of the Sages of Scion", an anti-Semitic pamphlet from the times of Czarist Russia. The Jews are the people reassembled from all corners of the Earth...
Thus, God has effectively granted the land of Israel to the Jews, but only to those of the Biblical times, who have nothing to do with what is happening today. And when the Jews are not acting as the descendants of the Jews mentioned in the Koran, they are comforting the Arabs in their affirmation that the Jews are actually not Jews at all. These verses do not concern them. Thus the Arabs are claiming the right to Jerusalem and Hebron, but they would never understand that the Jews - those of the Koran - would cede The Holy City ("If I forget you, Jerusalem"), or the Graves of the Patriarchs!
Some Israelis are well aware of this necessity to affirm the identity of Israel in an Middle-Eastern affiliation and not a European one. This is the reason why, in 1993, Israel will grant welcome to many hundreds of Bosnian Muslims. In their negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israeli Government placed in the fore ground the fact that Jews and Palestinians are Semites and both of them sons of Abraham. The support to the Bosnian Muslims for a large number of Jewish journalists, as well as American and European ones, was the way to help Israel succeed in its "peace process".
NOTES
1 Francois Thual, Geopolitique du chiisme (The Shiah Geopolitics)
2 Ibid
3 Koran, the 7th surrah
4 Koran, the 5th surrah
Chapter IV
The Gulf War"War is the continuation of politics by other means".
Karl Von Clausewitz - De la guerre, 1833Ever since the end of the cold war, the American strategy has been granting privileges to the two zones: the first one stretches from the columns of Hercules up to the Bosporus, and across the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, Near East and the Indian Ocean; the second one covers the European East and the former republics of the Soviet Union. These two zones are touching the Balkans and the Turkish-speaking republics of the former Soviet Union.
The region of the Near and the Middle East is a military platform leading in the direction of the Indian Ocean, Africa, the European South-East and Asia Minor. Furthermore, the petroleum reserves, the most important in the world and the easiest for exploitation, are situated there.
This zone has always posed a problem for the United States, taking into consideration two major imperatives of their politics which were, until the introduction of the New World Order, contradictory in themselves, not to say unreconcilable: the survival of Israel and the defense of strategic and petroleum interests of the Americans.
For this reason, where the origins are both ideological and religious, as well as moral and designed by the motives of interior policy, the United States have always supported and still are supporting today not this or that particular aspect of the Israeli politics, but the Right of Israel to live in this region and within the frontiers which are safe and recognized. In view of the wars of 1948, 1956, 1973 and the Israeli intervention in South Lebanon in 1982 within the operation "Peace in Galilee", the United States which are supporting Israel at arm' slength since the Kippur War, have always considered that their fundamental interests in the region are menaced, and that they themselves might be placed in the situation of culprits. These interests are petroleum and finances.
In the year 1973 the U.S.A. were importing 36% of their needed petroleum. Twenty years later they are importing half of their needs and the projections for the year 2000 are indicating the figure of 60%.
Some twenty years ago the United States have signed an agreement which has remained secret with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait: if the petrodollars of these countries would stop being secret, the two countries will stop pumping petrol! The agreement was concluded in the year 1974 by William Simon, Secretary of the Treasury of the Nixon Administration. The agreement covered also the United Arab Emirates.
Why was this agreement necessary? According to James Jackson, the economist of the U.S. Congress, "The Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority (or SAMA) was effecting investments in the United States. SAMA is actually the royal family itself. The U.S. Treasury agreed that the USA will not divulge any information which could be identified as being the possession of an individual, either an individual himself or a person who is in the government.
Jonathan Winer, a judicial adviser to Senator John Kerry affirms that "the ruler of Abu Dhabi is investing in the United States all of his petrol revenues: some 10 billion dollars per year!"
The experts are estimating at 90 billion the amount of annual investments in the United States by the Arab petroleum states (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates).
To give an example: the Gulf states have bought Saks of Fifth Avenue (45 shops) for 1.5 billion dollars, as well as Tiffany jewelers and even Gucci.
Kuwait has paid 2.5 M. for a petroleum prospecting and producing company La Santa Fe International in California. Many Hilton hotels have followed, 100 million invested in the American Telephone & Telegraph, 52 in the Dow Chemicals, 43 in Atlantic Richfield.
Saudi Arabia has purchased half of the refineries of Texaco as well as the petrol stations in 33 states.
Saudi Arabia is also in possession of the United Press International, one of the strongest news agencies of the world. The U.S. treasury prevented the CIA from submitting to the Congress the information on the Arab investments. In the United States there are now from 6.5 to 7 million Muslims, more than 5.7 million Jews. In the USA there are 1,200 mosques and 165 Islamic schools.
In some fifteen years the American foreign policy will succeed in overcoming the dilemma and will present the United States of America not only as a friend of the Arabs; but also as the defender of the world peace, while at the same time guaranteeing the vital interests of Israel. Nevertheless, at the beginning in the year 1979 they have experienced an enormous political disaster with the coming into power of Khomeini in Iran. How did they progress from a disaster in 1979 to the summit of peace builders in 1996? Through the Gulf War...
From 1979 to 1996 the United States have elaborated and brought into life one strategy which simultaneously combines judicial, political, financial and military aspects, a true master-piece of foreign policy, the one which will lead the observers to show more respect for the American men of politics, who have been much too often presented as the "big children", while they are actually perfect cynics, this being an indispensable quality in politics.
The Iran-Iraqi War
On January 16, 1979 the Shah left Iran for Egypt. The Khomeinist revolution triumphed. The Iranian Shiism will pass from the opposition to Pahlavi power to the holder of absolute power, having as its principal enemy The Great American Satan. How did they arrive there and what were the consequences for the United States?
The state religion of Iran, since the year 1501, the "Twelvers" Shiah, performed its fusion with Iranianism from the 18th century under the Quadjar dynasty which lasted until 1924 before it was replaced by the Pahlavi dynasty. The Shiah clergy surrounded the Iranian society before becoming a political force at the end of the 19th century. It is in the year 1924, when the Quadjar dynasty was overthrown through a coup d'etat fomented by the Iranian cavalry colonel Reza Khan that the Shiah clergy took the stand of opposition to the regime of Reza Khan who wished to transform Iran into a modern and secular country, in the fashion of what Ataturk was doing in Turkey. The policy of modernization brought to its height by his son Mohammed Reza Shah (1941-1979) increased the social injustices, favored corruption and created a devouring bureaucracy. In order to contain the discontent, the repression was becoming stronger day by day, hitting especially hard the Shiah clergy. In fact, the regional aspirations at hegemony of the Shah brought about the creation of an army of 500,000 men, well equipped, but gulping up 10% of the GNP and 50% of budgetary expenditures. The social and cultural efforts - hospitals, literacy, universities - could not compensate for this profound unbalance which was not the only attribute of Iran: a policy of industrialization and modernization was too ambitious for one traditional society which was not prepared for it.
On April 1, 1979 Khomeini proclaimed the Islamic Republic and on November 5th the Iranian students took 100 hostages at the American Embassy, 60 of them Americans. On April 7,1980 the United States broke up diplomatic relations. On September 22nd of that same year Iraq attacked Iran. In reality, the Iranian Islamic revolution was a mortal danger to the American interests - and European at that - in the region and they counted on Saddam Hussein to defeat or bleed to death the ayatollah Iran.
Like all the ideological revolutions, the Iranian revolution presents in its foreign policy a double composition: the first and the traditional one, is the consequence of unchangeable geopolitics, drawn from history and geographic constraints, which led Iran to great precautions regarding the threat coming from its traditional rivals - Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan - and the second, the question of the very nature of the Islamic revolution: its vocation, destiny, and mission to restore Shiah Islam in the midst of the Muslim world, with a perspective of general Islamization of the world.
The first country to sense this menace was Iraq, the cradle of Shiism. The holy venues - Kerbala, Nadjef - are located there and the majority of population is Shiah. Actually 50% of the Iraqi population is practicing Shiah and if we take into account only the Arab population of Iraq, then 70% of them are Shiah. But the Shiah has always been in the situation of a political minority in Iraq.
Under the regime of General Ahmed Hassan el-Bakr (1968-1979) and even more under the regime of Saddam Hussein (elected president on July 22, 1979), the policy of the party in power, the Baas party, regarding Shiah was rather simple and derived from the same idea that Baasists are having, in Syria like in Iraq, of the nation-state.
"Having a significant number of population, petroleum resources and large quantities of water, something rare for an Arab country, Iraq had all the necessary advantages for becoming a regional power. In order to achieve this goal, it was necessary to create a modern nation-state, an Arab and a secular state. In the spirit of the leaders in Baghdad, it was convenient to weaken, then destroy all the forms of religious or ethnic particularities. Confronted with the problem of Kurds and the Shiah specifics, the Baasist ambition was to unite population around a concept of modern and secular Iraq. This means that all the expression of nationalism, like in the case of Kurds, or all manifestation of confessionalism, communalism, or communitarianism like in the case of Shiah, was to be banned and destroyed".1
When the power in Teheran was seized by the Shiah clergy, the anxiety of the Iraqi leadership was an eventual subjugation by Iran of the Shiah population in the south of Iraq, having as the consequence, fragmenting of Iraq into 3 parts: Kurdish land in the North, Sunnah land in the center and Shiah land in the South. Therefore, it was necessary to place a barrier in the face of the revolution of Mullahs. This is the origin of the Iran-Iraqi war from 1981 to 1988. The aim for Saddam Hussein was to destroy the Islamic regime before it destroys Iraq. He could count on the political and military support of the West and receive financial aid from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in the direction of the Sunnih policy. The war erupted on the pretext of the Iraqi territorial revendication for the islands in the Straight of Ormuz, occupied in 1971 by the Shah of Iran.
This eight-year war will score the death of 400,000 Iranians and 300,000 Iraqis. The estimated financial loss and lost gains from petroleum exports - at the greatest benefit to the other OPEC members - is 400 billion dollars for Iran and 200 for Iraq. The United States supported Iraq, while at the same time they were selling arms to Iran against the promise of the release of American hostages. From 1985 to 1990 Iraq was the greatest world importer of military material (10%). In order to pay its purchases, Iraq will receive 30 billion dollars from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1980-82. In 1984 Kuwait will loan 10 billion dollars to Iraq. The cease-fire took place in August 1988.
Iraq emerged from the eight years of war with Iran with practically the support of the entire world and, especially, the support of France, Great Britain and the United States. Saddam Hussein was convinced that the West will be grateful to him as well as the kingdoms of the Gulf, for having created a barrier against the contagious Iranian revolution.
Saddam Hussein, convinced also that he had become a fundamental partner of the westerners, did not understand, in good time, that these same westerners did not think that they owed him anything, and that neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia were ready to pay his war debts, which had reached 40 billion US dollars.
By presenting the "restaurant bill" and by counting on the gratitude of ones and the others, Saddam Hussein showed a particular ignorance of the human mind and of the necessary equilibrium in the region (Iraq, Iran, Syria). Furthermore, Iraq now became the main potential threat to Israel and placed the United States before a new problem. Once the Islamic revolution was checked, how to retain the control over petroleum resources, stop Iraq from acquiring atomic arms and protect Israel?
One should never despair over the territorial appetites of a dictator, and in this respect Hitler had given the example. The ambitions of Saddam Hussein stretched to Kuwait. On July 18, 1990, Iraq demanded of Kuwait 2.4 billion dollars as compensation for the "stolen petroleum" since 1980 from the oil wells at Roumallah, on the Iraqi-Kuwait border. On July 24, 1990 Iraq amassed 30,000 men at the frontier, but Saddam Hussein still hesitated because he did not know what would be the American reaction to a possible annexation of Kuwait. He summoned on July 25th Mrs. April Glaspie, the U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad who informed him that "the United States are considering Iraq as a fundamental element of equilibrium in the region", that they have no intention of intervening in the disputes with Kuwait and neither launch an economic war against Iraq.
The Gulf War
Once Saddam Hussein had fallen in the trap of the American ambassadors, the United States seized the occasion that was now offered to crush down, in a spectacular demonstration, a country which has opposed them and which at one time, did not hesitate in playing in the Soviet alliance against them.
Everyone was to understand that from now on, they can count on no one to stand in the way of their politics, of their strategies in the region and that they were there to defend the political, territorial, social and economic status in conformity with their interests and that of their allies: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
From this point of view, the Gulf War was - if we are to disregard all the moral considerations - an operation perfectly conceived and effected.
The Black Gold
In the Gulf War, the New International Order is confounded with the possession of the principal petroleum reserves, under cover of defense of international law and respect for inviolability of frontiers, the principle which will be so easily abused 2 years later when Yugoslavia was dismembered.
The revendication of Iraq over Kuwait are ancient, and from the historical and ethnic view, largely supported. It was the British that have created Kuwait at the end of World War One. Those few hectares of the Kuwaiti sand did in no way justify mobilization of 500,000 men if the game was not about petrol and the petrol of this and of the forthcoming century.
Kuwait was producing one hundred millions of tons (in 1989), of the same order of magnitude as the United Kingdom (92 millions of tons) or Venezuela (97 millions of tons). But the addition of Iraqi petroleum (140 million of tons) and of Kuwaiti one would place Iraq at the rank of the fourth petroleum producer in the world, just after the USSR, the United States and the Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, Kuwait which does not present more than 3% of the world production, disposes with 9.5% of the certified reserves, which is equivalent to Iraq (with 10%) or Iran (9.2%). If no new petroleum deposits are to be found (which is not so probable), the total of Iraq-Kuwait could easily, at the dawn of the 21st century, represent 15% to 20% of production and 25% of the world reserves, against 34% of Saudi Arabia alone. The essential part of the certified reserves are in the Near East, in a proportion surpassing 70%! Furthermore, the United States are becoming more and more dependent on the importation of petroleum. They were importing 13% of their consumption needs in 1972 and 45% in 1983. British petroleum production in the Nordic Sea dropped from 128 millions of tons in 1985 to 93 millions of tons in 1990. The reserves estimated at 1,200 millions of tons will cover the needs of 10 to 15 years only. Thus, no question of leaving the western supply of petroleum in the hands of an Iraqi dictator: 73% of the world petroleum consumption is used by 22% of the planetary population while the United States, with 4.8% of planetary population, represent 25% of the world consumption. Furthermore, the petroleum revenues of the Gulf are massively placed in the United States, whose foreign indebtedness is growing in such proportions that the American Treasury has become the financial and political debtor of the Arab petroleum monarchies. For President Bush it was not a question of preserving peace, but of making sure that the war will erupt.
A Well Prepared and Desired War
For years the Americans were warned by their Israeli allies of the danger which for them represent the formidable capacities of conventional warfare of the Iraqi army - 700,000 men with 2,800 vehicles, 2,800 diverse armored vehicles, 1,900 pieces of artillery, the SCUD missiles, 700 combat aircraft - its chemical and nuclear potential. Also since the end of the Iran-Iraqi war, the United States considered Iraq as a potential enemy. In March 1991 General G. Butler, close adviser to General Colin Powell, stated the following: "By the end of 1989 we had devoted a large part of our time and attention to the planning of a future American military defense, in order to preserve the regional stability and our strategic access (...). As the last resort, the consensus was reached on the long-term threat which presented Iraq."2
From October 2 to 7, 1989 General Norman Swarzkopf made a trip to Saudi Arabia.
During one meeting in Riyadh with the Ambassador of the United States Mr. Charles Freeman, he confirmed that an invasion of Kuwait by Iraq "is probable" and that it constituted "a threat against the Wahhabite kingdom and the stability in the region".3 On February 8, 1990 in the speech addressed to the Senate committee in charge of military affairs, General Swarzkopf underlined: "Iraq has the military capacity to exercise pressure on the neighboring states...". Among the list of his priority objectives, he quoted: "To assure permanent access to petroleum in the Arabian Peninsula".
Military exercises were organized in July 1990 in Florida, under the name "International Look 90", plans for disembarkation in the Gulf will be perfected and Saddam Hussein will be led to believe by Mrs. April Glaspie, that he "can go ahead". Once the invasion of Kuwait occurred on August 2, 1990 the American diplomacy will make everything possible to prevent any negotiated solution.
On the very day of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a certain number of governments in the region tried to put together some compromise which would allow solution of the crisis. These efforts lasted for four days, from August 2 to 6, 1990 and were initiated by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. President Moubarak was indebted to Saddam Hussein for the role played by Iraq in the return of Egypt to the bosom of the Arab world, after the Camp David Accords and isolation of Egypt which ensued. The royal Saudi family reproached Emir Jaber, the ruler of Kuwait, for his blindness and his refusal to forget the war debts of Iraq as was done by Saudi Arabia.
Three possibilities of compromise were envisaged:
- An international arbitration which would grant the right to certain Iraqi revendication and notably extension to the sea.
- Evacuation of Kuwait and restoration of Emir Jaber through annulling of Iraqi debts and payment of a financial indemnity for abusive exploitation by Kuwait of frontier wells.
- An economic and financial association between Iraq and Kuwait.
But on August 5, 1990 President Bush announced an immediate deployment of the troops in the Gulf - which arrived on August 9th - and the Arab summit which was to be held in Jeddah on August 6 was abandoned.
Politically and financially supported by the United States after signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979 and faced with the alternative of approving the American intervention or of opposing it. President Hosni Moubarak chose to take sides with the United States.
The Saudi royal family, whose economic and financial power is closely linked with the American interests both in the region and in the United States, gave its support to President Bush.
When on August 12, 1990 the Iraqi government proposed - at the advise of Yasser Arafat - that a general conference be organized to debate all the crisis in the region, from Lebanon to Israel, and the sharing of the petroleum riches among all the Arabs, by establishing a parallel between evacuation of Kuwait by Iraq and Palestine by Israel, the response of President Bush was totally negative, which was in line with the logic of the American politics.
The Obedient Allies
28 countries composed the anti-Iraqi coalition. Ten Arab countries - Algeria, Jordan, Libya and Lebanon - stayed out of the confrontation. Iran was, obviously, in no hurry to join the war, but Syria gave its support in exchange for the promise of having a free hand in Lebanon.
The allies started financial contributions and delivered 43 billion dollars of the 61 officially spent by the American Treasury, from this 16 billion by Saudi Arabia, 11 by Kuwait, 9.4 by Japan and 6.6 by Germany.
The British support was taken for granted - they were the creators of Kuwait and have intervened the first time in 1961 - with the view of the close ties between the financial power of Kuwait and the British financial system, since the main body in charge of procreating some 100 billion of Kuwait dollars in the world, the Kuwait Investment Office, is seated in London...
The German position, in view of the all recent reunification of the two Germanies, was as is the custom, to do nothing that would oppose the fundamental choices of the American politics.
The position of France of alignment along the American thesis was in itself more surprising, in view of the very close links between Iraq and France. Since the year 1975 Mr. Jacques Chirac the then-Prime Minister, received Mr. Saddam Hussein in Paris with these words: "...a realistic leader, aware of his responsibilities, caring for the interests of his country and for the good balance in this region of the world." When received fifteen years later in Baghdad, Mr. Jean Chevenement, Defense Minister, held the same speech: "Mr. Hussein is a courageous and beloved leader, who has a long-term vision of unity".4
These two men, so much politically distant as Jacques Chirac and J.P. Chevenement had the same reasons, essentially the three of them, to hold Iraq:
- The sales of French arms from 1970 to 1989 totalled 5.5 billion dollars.
- The balance in the region: Iraq, as a secular country, formed with Syria and Turkey an alternative to the religious fundamentalism.
- To preserve independence of the foreign policy of France in respect to the United States and its relations with Maghreb.
The position of Francois Mitterrand, President of the Republic of France, was completely different. He forecasted in the second half of August the possibility of war and decided that France should participate in that event. The French President considered that France would have more weight by participating in the conflict than in abstaining from it. He hoped not to distance himself too much from the policies of the other European countries and was susceptible to the arguments concerning the Iraqi nuclear threat vis-a-vis Israel.
The French participation in the Gulf War was preceded by the resignation of Mr. Chevenement and manifested slight capabilities of the French army (only 12,000 men under arms).
The Gulf War was a general rehearsal for the weakness of France which will repeat itself in the Yugoslav conflict. France will concede politically in December 1991 in the face of Germany which wished to recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, and will prove itself to be incapable of guiding in June 1995 the Rapid Reaction Forces in Sarajevo because of heavy helicopters.
The Order Reigns Over the Gulf
The contestation of the political, economic, military but also social order in the region has been crushed for a long time to come. Five years after the Gulf War, the American hegemony over the Near East is an unavoidable reality. Iraq is continuing to die slowly from the effects of the embargo and Iran is marginalized. Saudi Arabia has concluded, in only six years, armament contracts worth 25 billion dollars, for which it has no use. Becoming the number one petroleum exporter in the world by appropriating the Iraqi quota within the OPEC, Saudi Arabia is the primary supplier of the United States, which is now keeping its armed forces in the region.
But the future belongs to no one. With the Gulf War, the Americans became the protectors of the social, economic and moral order, largely rejected by the Arab masses, often very impoverished. How does one become a friend of the billions of Muslims?
NOTES
1 Francois Thual, Geopolitique du chiisme (Shiah Geopolitics)
2 Air Force Magazine, March 1991
3 Roger Cohen and Claudio Gatti, In the Eye of the Storm: the Life of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Bloombury, London, 1991, page 185
4 Alif-Ba, Baghdad, February 7,1990.
Chapter V
THE PEACE PROCESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST"Nothing escapes God, but freedom is left to man." Avoth III. 19
The first to understand, analyze and draw consequences from the American New World Order in the region, were the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Israel was the country most strongly incited to demand from the United States to wage war on Iraq, because that country had become the greatest menace for the Hebrew state.
Iraq was no longer the fourth military power, but for the first time since its creation, Israel renounced on responding to an Iraqi attack: the one of the SCUD missiles on Tel Aviv; the Americans having formally opposed it. Israel was no longer free to react to an aggression, at the time when the benefits based on resorting to retaliation were profoundly anchored in the spirit of Israelis, who were coming out traumatized from the crisis caused by the threat of a chemical warfare and distribution of gas-masks to civilian population, and this even more so since the chemical weapons supplied to Iraq were originating from the German companies...
At the government level also they have well perceived that the Americans will never again tolerate placing in jeopardy of the regional balance and that Israel has lost in the eyes of Washington D.C. its major advantage: that of the aircraft carriers stationed as the sign of American power in the region. Egypt and Syria were ranked against Iraq and sided with the United States.
Between 12 million Jews and 1 billion Muslims, holding energy resources in abundance and forming a strategic zone between Europe, Southeast Asia, Indian Ocean and the Pacific, the United States have chosen Islam. It was out of the question, under such circumstances, to support Israel and end up by making of the United States "The Great Satan". On the contrary, they wish to be now the protectors of the Muslim countries, and certainly of the petroleum kingdoms, of the Sunnite world in general. They have acquired the intimate conviction that fundamentalism will win over moderate Islam.
The Israeli team in power took note of this evolution and decided not to impose any more the presence of Israel by force in the Near East with the American aid, but to search with the Arabs, between "Semites", for the means to have itself accepted as a necessary partner, holder of the western technology, this time placed in the service of the Muslim masses. Therefore, it was necessary to negotiate the end of the Israeli-Arab war. But with whom?
The Palestinian side has already played a wrong card by siding with Iraq. Palestinians living in Kuwait have already paid the bill, by being chased out by dozens of thousands from the Emirate. Paradoxically, a rapprochement with Israel which could lead to the creation of a mini-Palestinian state appeared to them as the only possibility for them to regain their position.
The Madrid Conference
The Madrid Conference sponsored both by the United States and Russia, started on October 30, 1991 and lasted 3 days. It made possible the first direct negotiations between Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestinians.
The choice of Madrid might seem surprising, Jews and Arabs having in common that they were expelled from Spain by Isabella the Catholic in 1492! The diplomatic relations with Israel were established only on January 17, 1986. This choice may be explained by the wish of Israelis to avoid Washington and especially Paris. France had excellent relations with the PLO and the Arab states, but the Israelis could never forgive the attitude of France between 1967 and 1974. Turning their back on their friends in order to attract good graces of their enemy has never yielded anything good, neither in the interior politics nor in the foreign relations. The French will make the same mistake by supporting Bosnian Muslims against Serbs, their traditional allies.
The Accord Israel - PLO
This new turn in Israeli-Palestinian relations should have been finalized in the Oslo Accords which were a surprise for the United States. The accord was not concluded under their auspices and neither rejected.
It totally disturbed the strategy established by the team in charge of this region: Mr. Denis Ross, Deputy Secretary of State for the Middle East Affairs, and Mr. Martin Indyk, of the National Security Council; the strategy which favored the search for agreement between Israel and the neighboring countries, and most of all between Syria and Israel.
President Clinton immediately proceeded with a remarkable revision of the American policy. He totally involved himself in the success of this enterprise knowing how to turn it to his own advantage: on September 13, 1993 he presided in Washington over the historical shake-hand between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat and the signing of the Declaration of Principles. Furthermore, the interim Israeli-Palestinian agreement on Cis-Jordania and the Ghaza Strip was signed in Washington on September 28, 1995, in the presence of Bill Clinton.
The American President also supervised the peace accords between Israel and Jordan: The Washington Declaration of July 25, 1994 signed by Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein in the presence of Bill Clinton and the beginning of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan of October 26, 1994 signed in Arava was also in the presence of Bill Clinton. Thus, Israel signed its second peace treaty since its independence, making an additional step in the direction of its integration in the Near East and the United States definitely severed Jordan from its Iraqi neighbor.
The choice of Israeli leaders was leading towards creating of Israel a platform in the Near East for the civilized world, combining at the same time industrialization and the most advanced technology with the respect for certain number of family and religious values common for both Judaism and Islam: which presupposes its complete acceptance by the Arabs, themselves conditioned by the retreat into territories occupied since 1967.
This evolution - or revolution - is not accepted by some countries like Iraq, or the Palestinian movements supported by Iran: Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who are refusing the final implantation of the Jewish state. It is also rejected by the Israeli right, supported by a notable part of the public opinion, which is seeing in this process a phenomenon of "contraction" of the Israeli territorial entity, reduced to the frontiers before 1967, encircled by the unstable Arab states and threatened in its very existence by the presence, in Israel, of one million of Israeli Arabs.
After a wave of assassination attempts in February and March 1996 in Israel and the summit conference of the "Peace Builders" at Sharm el Sheik in Sinai held in mid-March, the positions of both Shimon Peres and of Yasser Arafat are very weak. Conversely, President Clinton has again marked points by presenting the Americans as men of good will and devoted to peace, always ready to give their contribution so that justice may prevail, democracy, freedom and decisive in engaging themselves, everywhere in the world against extremists of all kinds, whether they are Jews, Muslims or Bosnian Serbs! The presence - as incredible as it may seem - of the American President at the session of the Israeli Council of Ministers, bears witness of the profound preoccupation of the Israeli leaders and their growing dependence on their protectors.
Are the Americans on the way of realizing a flawless penetration in the Near and the Middle East? Israel, Egypt and Jordan have signed the peace treaties. Iraq is banned by all nations. Iran is voluntarily confined to an extreme caution in conducting its foreign policy. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are the sure countries. Turkey remains a privileged ally. What remains is Syria. By pushing Israelis and Syrians to conclude peace, the Americans are placing the last touches on a diplomatic success which took from them fifteen years of efforts and patience.
Chapter VI
The United Nations under American Dominance"The big are those who wish,
The small are those who can".
Victor Hugo, L' homme qui rit,
("The Man Who Laughs"), 1869The signatories of the United Nations Declaration of January 1, 1942 or the participants at the San Francisco Conference, the original member-states, were 51 in number on October 24, 1945. The United States represented at that time almost 50% of the world GNP and were the only nuclear power in the world. OUN were established with the aim "to preserve future generations from the hazards of war" and given the mandate to maintain international peace and security, the main responsibility being entrusted to the Security Council. At the General Assembly every state had a vote and only the five permanent members of the Security Council - The Republic of China, France, Russia, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America - had the right of veto.
Korean War and the Gulf War
The vicissitudes of the international politics necessitate the distinction between four periods:
(1) The period 1945-55, characteristic for the USA domination.
This period, coinciding with extreme tension between western powers and the USSR and which culminated in the cold war, is marked by very sparse admission of the new members (1 per year), with sixteen states admitted after that on December 14,1955 in the scope of "a package deal" between the United States and the USSR. 76 states were members of the organization by the end of 1955.
The General Assembly was totally devoted to Washington D.C. Actually, of the 51 countries seated in the OUN, only one dozen were the countries of Africa or Asia, which had forced USSR to use 77 times its right of veto! It is only thanks to the temporary boycott of the Security Council by Moscow that the Americans succeeded in June 1950 to place the intervention in Korea under the OUN banner, by circumventing the Soviet veto through a special vote in the General Assembly (Resolution "Union for Peace" of November 3,1950).
(2) Period 1956-65, characteristic for decolonization wars. This period coincides with decolonization of the French territories of North Africa (13 states were admitted in 1960), of Algeria and of the old British colonies. 118 states became members of the organization by the end of 1965.
(3) Period 1966-85, characteristic for the emergence of a new majority in the General Assembly.
The OUN is partially marginalized because the negotiations between the Great related to the mastering of armament and those regarding the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe will be taking place outside of its midst.
The developing countries since then started to dominate the General Assembly and the topic of "the new international economic order" was occupying the focus of the scene. 159 states were members of the organization by the end of 1985.
During this period the massive afflux of Afro-Asian countries will engage at the General Assembly, one hostile majority to the United States, perceived as the principal neo-colonial power. Thus in 1970 for the first time, the USA will use their right of veto. They will reduce in 1972 their financial participation from 31.5% to 25%. The vote by the General Assembly in 1975 of a resolution associating Zionism with "some form of racism and racial discrimination", will mark a divorce between the OUN and Washington D.C.
(4) Period 1985-94, characteristic for the rise of Gorbachev in the USSR and the end of the cold war.
No state was admitted between 1985 and 1990. In 1984 the OUN condemned the blockade of ports in Nicaragua and in 1986 the American bombardment of Libya. In 1988 the American government refused to receive Yasser Arafat in New York, which obliged the General Assembly to relocate to Geneva so that it may receive the leader of the PLO. In 1989 the Assembly will condemn the American intervention in Panama. From the year 1989 two factors will modify the relations between OUN and Washington D.C. First of all the disintegration of the USSR, followed by violent separation of former Yugoslavia and the peaceful partition of Czechoslovakia which will end in the admission of 25 new states to the membership between 1990 and 1995 (the two Koreas, Namibia, Erythrea and six micro-states) and then, the Gulf War.
In reality, the fall of communism allowed the westerners whose three states are present in the Security Council, and particularly the United States, to dominate the organization and to use it at its whim.
For the first time since the Korean War, Article 42 of the Charter prescribing the use of military force was again recalled, with the consenting abstention of Beijing and the guarantee of Kremlin. This 'accord' Washington-Moscow-Beijing will be encountered again during the vote of May 30, 1992 at the OUN on the embargo against Serbia and Montenegro.
The OUN coverage presented two considerable advantages for Washington. On the one hand, this consensus in the eyes of the American public opinion was the proof that their government is working for the cause of justice and for protection of the small countries - Kuwait -against brutality of a dictator and, on the other hand, it legitimized "appeal to the people" with the financial participation of the allies for the re-establishment of the right. Most of all, by intervening in accordance with Chapter VII of the Charter, the American troops could act under their own command and without having to be "blue helmets". Article 33 of the Charter is obliging the member-states to search for a negotiated solution on all the international disputes which contain the risk of provoking a war. But not only have the efforts of Saudi Arabia and Egypt been reduced to zero by the announcement of deployment of the American military on August 5,1996, but the Resolution 678 of November 29, 1990 was a green light given to Washington to lead the war from January 15,1991. The text of this resolution declares as follows:
"Acting in accordance with Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter,
1. The Council demands that Iraq conforms fully to the Resolution 660 (1990) and to all the other pertinent resolutions, and without returning to any of its decisions, decides to grant it a grace period for leaving it the last chance of so doing;
2. Hereby authorizes the member-states who are cooperating with the government of Kuwait, if on January 15,1991 Iraq should fail to fully apply the above mentioned resolutions in conformity with para. 1 here-inabove, to deploy all the necessary means to insure the respect and application of the Resolution 660 (1990) of the Security Council and of all the other pertinent resolutions, as well as in order to re-establish international peace and security in the region;
3. Demands of all the states to insure application of the measures envisaged in para. 2 of the present resolution;
4. Demands of the member-states in question to keep it regularly informed of the dispositions that they are undertaking in application of para. 2 and 3 of this resolution;
5. Decides to remain involved in this matter."
The text is not setting any limits to the duration of conflict and no other constraints as to the level of the means deployed or the field of application of the operations. The entire affair will be executed by the Americans and only by them, the allies serving as extras.
In order to avoid a partition of Iraq, the coalition did not push as far as Baghdad for the already stated reasons: the United States, France and Great Britain did not wish to divide Iraq into religious entities (Shiah) or the ethnic ones (Kurds) and the Arab countries did not wish to see an Arab capital taken over by western soldiers. Saddam Hussein, whose regime had survived the war, was capable of handling the interior troubles which erupted in early March 1991 and which were largely encouraged by the westerners. In the North, Kurds rebelled but were rapidly defeated. On April 5, 1991 the OUN condemned in its Resolution 688 the repression of civilian Iraqi population and called for humanitarian aid. The allies launched on April 7, 1991 the operation "Provide Comfort", an aid to Kurdish refugees at the Turkish border, and established North of the 38th parallel a zone of air exclusion. On August 27, 1991 the westerners established the zone of air exclusion South of the 32nd parallel for protection of Shiah population from the month of March. It is covering a region of approximately 140,000 square kilometers in which seven million people are living, the Shiah in a very large majority. Iraq is not enjoying there anything else but a very limited sovereignty and President Saddam Hussein is no longer exercising plainly his authority except in the center of the country. A country ravaged by a new form of warfare, particularly odious, that of the mighty against the weak: the embargo.
The Weapon of Cowards
In its issue of December 2, 1995 the newspaper "Le Mond" published on an entire page, in the form of flash news, the following four lines:
"Iraq: embargo imposed on Iraq by the United Nations has caused death of 560,000 children since the end of the Gulf War in February 1991, announced the OUN Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO) in its study made public on Thursday, November 30, 1995. (Reuters)"
The embargo, the logic of horror. To punish parents - kill their children. Half a million children dead for want of care and food, a crime against humanity for which no International Criminal Tribunal has been established! Embargo is politically inefficient, humanly intolerable, economically stupid, cowardly and dangerous.
Imposed in order to incite revolt of people against their leaders, it has exactly the opposite effect by inspiring a sacred union in the face of foreign intervention. Cuba is under the embargo for 35 years now and Fidel Castro is still today in Havana! No embargo imposed against Iran, Iraq, Serbia and Montenegro, or Libya has prevented Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic or Gadafi from staying in power!
The embargo is humanly intolerable, because it strikes the most feeble: the aged, children, the sick and pregnant women. Thus during the four years of embargo imposed on Haiti, the poorest country on this planet, in order to force the military junta in power to cede its place to Father Aristide, more than 1,000 of very small children were dying every month, for the lack of care and alimentation (76% of population is living below the absolute line of poverty). This Calvary was even more futile since it took the deployment of 21,000 American soldiers in September 1995 to bring back Aristide!
Embargo is economically stupid because it penalizes the neighboring countries in their economy, sometimes fundamentally linked with the country under the embargo - the case of Jordan with Iraq - and obliges the international community to restore the economies which it had destroyed!
Embargo is the weapon of cowards, based on the idea of zero military losses. No armed intervention but slow death for the civilian population. Embargo is also dangerous because it dislocates the civilian society and serves as a jumping board for extremists of all kinds. The "International Law" becomes a caricature of equality, a new way of oppression of the most deprived countries. In the name of the right of man, of re-establishment of democracy, the mighty countries are depriving feeble peoples of the four fundamental rights: the right to dispose themselves with themselves, the right to life, the right to health, and the right to education. With the embargo, do the weak ones still have the right to exist? How is it possible that in 1996 Iraq is still under the embargo? In the case of Iraq, the reasons leading the civilian population to the slow descent into hell has nothing to do with the establishment of peace or the international law.
On the basis of Article 41 of the UN Charter, the Security Council decided on August 6, 1990 in its Resolution 661 to impose financial sanctions (freezing of Iraqi assets abroad); petroleum sanctions (closure of oil pipelines transporting Iraqi petrol through Turkey and Arabia); food sanctions (suspension of sales to Iraq of cereals, fruit and vegetable); industrial (termination of sales of spare parts necessary to maintain industrial capacities); and finally, military sanctions. The confirmed aim was to oblige Iraq to respect para. 2 of the Resolution 660 of August 2, 1990 demanding its withdrawal from Kuwait and re-instatement to power of Emir Jaber.
Thus, in April 1991 the war against Iraq was completed and Kuwait liberated. This, however, did not prevent the Security Council on April 3, 1991 to adopt the Resolution 687, the longest and the most complex resolution in the history of the OUN, drafted by the U.S.A. and Great Britain, maintaining the embargo. Certainly, the Security Council states that "sovereignty was re-established, independence and territorial integrity returned to Kuwait as well as its legitimate government", but the Council decided that "the sanctions prescribed in the Resolution 661... will be lifted only when Iraq has undertaken all measures stipulated in para. 8 to 13 (aimed at total disarmament of Iraq in the nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic fields)". Therefore, there is a substitution of facts which are punishable. Complete disarmament of Iraq is necessary (and payment of war damages). Finally, on April 14, 1995 the Security Council will adopt Resolution 986 entitled "petrol for food", adopted by Iraq in January 1996 which is authorizing Iraq - when? - to export petroleum up to the limit of 700,000 barrels per day, or 1 billion dollars quarterly, payable on a separate account, these funds to be used under the OUN control, with the obligation of paying 30% of the gains to the fund for indemnification of the war damages. The rest of the money being designated for purchase of foodstuffs. Why is Iraq being treated in this way five years after the Gulf War? The answer is called petrol. In fact, since the year 1991 Saudi Arabia experienced its production increase from 4 to 8 million barrels per day. The arrival on the market of one part of Iraqi oil production will cause an immediate fall of prices for a barrel of petrol, which may reach 3 to 4 dollars. For Iraq the embargo is the blood of petrol.
Chapter VII
NATO and the American Supremacy in Europe"America must take the responsibility for its power.
We should guide the world and we can not guide it without our armed forces."
General Colin Powell: Review Foreign Affairs - winter of 1992-93. Vol. 71The withdrawal of American forces from Europe after the end of World War Two left Europeans of the West at the mercy of the Soviet armed forces stationed on Elbe, right in the heart of Europe. The main communist move on the countries of Eastern Europe, "the Prague coup" in 1948 will lead the Americans to propose to the Western European countries an alliance, a classic military one. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, signed in Washington on April 4, 1949. The defensive aim of this organization was the preservation of territories of the member-countries. The North Atlantic Council was also established consisting of the representatives from the member-countries and a military committee. The text of the Treaty, a very short one, did not envisage any military integration of the European armies and neither the primacy of one country over the others. In fact, in view of the Marshall Plan of economic aid to Europe (in 1947) and establishment of the Warsaw Pact on May 14, 1955 (dissolved on February 25, 1991), NATO was directed by the United States, which fact at that time of the Soviet menace was not contested by anyone.
NATO was the object of two fundamental changes since the year 1956 which marked very well the American wish not to restrict NATO limits only to the zone of the member-countries and to a strictly military organization. On May 5, 1956, North Atlantic Counsel entrusted Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Italy, Norway and Canada to recommend measures which will allow for the development of cooperation between the member-countries in the non-military fields and which will strengthen their unity. The report submitted on November 14, 1956 (after the Suez crisis and in full insurrection in Budapest), consisted of 25 pages against 4 of the Treaty itself, and contained two proposals.
The Alliance may have other aims except military - political, economic and cultural ones - and the zone of application of the Treaty may be extended to the entire world, if the interests of the NATO members are threatened. This is the notion of the globalization of the Alliance, with double title for its competencies and zone of action, which was never accepted, until the NATO ultimatum to the Bosnian Serbs in February 1994, by France.
Continuation and Extension of NATO
The fall of the East bloc since 1989 and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, will they cause at the same time the disappearance of NATO? How can its continuation be justified? Are the European countries not going to profit from the end of the Soviet menace to affirm their independence? One of the greatest successes of the American politics was the continuation and even extension of NATO functions in the post-cold war period, and in the sense of its "globalization" commenced in the year 1956. The United States were in this greatly encouraged by the passivity of the European governments where not one of them thought to profit from the new world set-up in order to place under a question mark the military alliance or its political organization. The Americans definitely established their dominance in Europe, and not only in the Western Europe, by developing a strategy in three phases: the extension of the geographic zone, extension of NATO competencies and reinforcement of its military structures.
The extension of its geographic zone will be done during the Gulf War. In principle, NATO was not concerned, but one of the member-countries of the Alliance, Turkey, declared that it feels itself threatened which was, of course, only imaginary. There will also be a play with the NATO mechanisms. The American, Belgian and German detachment units came and stationed themselves in the Turkish airports. There were air raid on Iraq from Turkey. This was not - stricto sensu - an involvement of NATO in the Gulf War, but it did designate extension of the field of application of the North Atlantic Treaty.
The extension of the geographic area will finally go hand in hand with the extension of NATO competencies, which will find itself confronted with a problem, unthinkable only a few years earlier: the demand for admission into the NATO of the former countries of the East bloc and former members of the Warsaw Pact! The stand of countries like Ukraine, Poland or Czechoslovakia was motivated by the fear of an eventual return to power of Russia. The response of the member-countries was negative because they did not wish to find themselves implicated in crisis or conflicts that they would not be able to control (ethnic problems and de-limitation of frontiers), and because they did not wish to hurt the pride of Russia or rather of the Russian generals. In order not to reject completely the countries of Eastern Europe and to extend NATO competencies to the periphery of Russia, a new system was devised, re-grouping of the NATO and the countries of the East, some 38 countries in total: this was NACOC or The North Atlantic Cooperation Council created in November 1991. Therefore, this is the complete picture of the situation in which the former communist countries of the East bloc and of the former Soviet Union have found themselves in (12 countries of the Community of Independent States, all members of the NACOC), which is considered interesting for NATO from the point of view of security. Thus, they will reinforce NACOC by "partnership for peace", which was adopted in January 1994 in Brussels, by the NATO countries and at the American proposal. It is a regrouping of the European countries of the East around NATO, in a rather vague fashion, in order to reinforce security and democracy. French President Mitterrand will describe in the following way the fundamental objectives of the "partnership for peace":
"If we wish at the same time to assure the security in Central and Eastern Europe and not contravene to the development of democracy in Moscow, the notation of partnership is a very reasonable answer."
And he added: "The Eastern European countries should interpret this partnership as a fact that no war can threaten their territorial integrity and their sovereignty without the countries of the Alliance feeling themselves concerned. For us the partnership implies a form of true guarantee."
The Reinforcement of NATO
Strengthening of the military structures of NATO was done through the creation of the Rapid Reaction Force (not to be mistaken for the Rapid Action Force - Force d' Action Rapid FAR of France) in 1994 which comprises 70,000 men - English, German, Italian - under the American command, designated for interventions in zones outside of NATO but where NATO wishes to involve itself. This Rapid Reaction Force is characteristic for a higher degree of integration - at the level of brigades - than the forces already integrated in NATO. France is not participating in them, fortunately!
Since there was no question of seeing any other military structure compete with the NATO, the Americans decided not to allow an European defense constitute itself around the Western European Union, an empty shell which should remain just that.
Founded in March 1948 by the Brussels Treaty, the Western European Union, further to the founding states - France, Great Britain and Benelux - is also grouping Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain. A simple organism of encounter, WEU does not dispose of any army. It is playing the role of relay between the EEC and NATO. The Maastricht Treaty establishes as its objective the joint defense - which is to be "compatible" with NATO - and entrusts WEU with a mission...
The French and Germans will create on May 22, 1992 a Eurocorps, composed of 40,000 men. Nevertheless, it is understood that Eurocorps will be placed at the disposal of NATO in case of crisis... In reality, Eurocorps Franco-German is in fact a clandestine return to the NATO, in the case of France coupled with a dramatic weakening of its defense potential in the name of budgetary imperatives.
Mr. James Baker, the former U.S. Secretary of State (1989-1993) of President Bush stated in his interview for "Le Figaro" (on February 1, 1996) the following:
"The French decision to rejoin the Counsel of Defense Ministers of NATO seems to be postponing the old attempts of France at building an autonomous European defense structure in respect to the Atlantic Alliance. During the first years of Bush Administration, we were concerned. The Eurocorps is a good idea provided its primary function is to respond to the call of NATO."
The domination of NATO in Europe and the consecration of its role were concretely manifested in the Yugoslav affair.
In fact, NATO started to go out of its territorial limits with giving the ultimatum to the Bosnian Serbs in February 1994, at the demand of the then-French Minister of Foreign Affairs Alain Juppe, doing just what the French politics have always wanted to prevent, even since the formation of NATO:
"NATO is a military alliance the most efficient one in history. It was designed to counter the Soviet threat. It is necessary today to re-define its mission. This should now include the preservation of peace and stability in Europe. Bosnia is, therefore, a natural mission. And the United States remain indispensable. When we have, at their request, left in the hands of Europeans the Bosnian dossier, they took nothing in hand." (James Baker, interview for "Le Figaro").
Chapter VIII
Disinformation and Falsehoods"Calamity, Sir! You did not at all know what you despised. "
Beaumarchais, The Barber of SevilleMosses never faced the Pharaoh and told him: "Let my people go". It was his elder brother Aaron, who spoke in his stead, but the history preferred to preserve the image of the God' s messenger pleading the cause of the chosen people. Since the invention by Gutenberg of the typography in 1440, the ideas and ideologies, until the middle of the 20th century had the print as their main support, thus taking the place of the spoken word, the verb (logos) of which the Gospel of Saint John says that it is "at the sides of God".
With the radio, at the beginning of the 20th century, we entered into an era of the media, characteristic for the speed of information broadcasting and the presence, a permanent one, and in every home, of a communication utensil, easy to switch-on and functioning at all hours of day and night. Adolph Hitler, whose raucous voice expressed itself in lamentable German language and Goebbels, his minister for "propaganda and information" (Volksaufklarung und Propaganda) knew how to electrify German masses by simplistic discourse, reductionist one, false and efficient. But writing is only the expression of an idea and the radio is argumentation of a personal opinion, both of them contestable or admissible to the measure to which one understands to language serving the machine.
The picture needs no explanation. It "speaks for itself" and makes an appeal to the powerful affected pulsations. The television, a historical phenomenon of the end of the 20th century, presents no fundamental properties: through its suggestive power it makes of the tele-spectator an actual actor and imprints itself on his mental being. Image erases the thought; through the speed of broadcasting, television intervenes in the events and can change their course. A technology so efficient could not leave indifferent the men of politics, but also the producers of images who are using and abusing the "direct emotion", the irresistible impact of what was seen and heard, recorded by the brain and engraved for ever in memory. It is no longer necessary to indoctrinate by the language and by the script, with a constraint of "incubation" shorter or longer; the media contact of the picture is immediate, instantaneous. The only thing that remains is to repeat the image in order to obtain a formed opinion ready to react, to develop a certain behavior, as soon as the image is seen again. There is no longer a need to make an ideological foundation with an individual, it is sufficient to manufacture, by injection of repeated televised falsehoods, going in the same direction of a phenomenon of automation acting at the very source of persons psychologically manipulated.
It is also possible to use the reverse effect: the absence of images. This of what no one ever speaks, this what has never been shown, slides into oblivion. For the tele-spectator who is not always aware, what he does not see on the small screen simply does not exist, and what he does see depends on the duration and emotional intensity of the image!
"The mental concrete" thus construed is foolproof to any discussion, to all the writs to the contrary. It is what some have called it "the conformism of a single thought". It is no longer necessary to appeal to the thinkers, the ideologist and the writers. It is sufficient to ensure services of professional manipulators, journalists of the audio-visual, who are not asking themselves either moral or political questions, who do not have the feeling of carrying on their shoulders the weight of the world and the sense of history. They are the executors richly rewarded by the system in which they live and for them, it little matters that such a disposition of images and sounds annihilates, tricks the collective memory or the historical remembrance. "The worse it is, the better it is accepted" and the culture cedes in the face of a media conformism which is suppressing, at a long run, and in the mind of the tele-spectator, the distinction between fiction and reality. Is the end of ends to achieve with such a system a limitation of the intellectual field of the subject, a real prohibition to think, to reflect and understand anything else but what was "seen on the tele"? In such a media machine, the truth is being replaced by the falsehood: it is sufficient for it to replace the void of the thoughts, the "mental contraception" thus being completed.
A Just and Clean War
How to make the American public opinion accept the Gulf War? How to explain that it is necessary, in the name of right of people to dispose with themselves, to prevent the annexation of Kuwait by Iraq, since Kuwait was historically always an Iraqi province, arbitrarily detached and artificially formed by the British in 1914 in order to create a principality under their protectorate?
How to make it understood that re-establishment of democracy can take place only by return into power of Emir Jaber whose princely palace has as the main characteristic all of its faucets made of massive gold? Was it possible to admit that war will be waged for petroleum and that they will die for Kuwait the same way they were dying for Dantiz? Was it not better "to prepare" the population, to solicit its acceptance of the war by transforming the obscure reasons of petroleum geopolitics into a humanitarian endeavor? This task was entrusted to the Public Relations Agency Hill and Knowlton, in autumn of 1990. It performed beyond all hopes:
"The Agency used the most efficient of all strategies, the one of the surest for mobilizing the entire United States: the deliberate death of a newly-born baby, told by a young and charming refugee, having by a miracle escaped from the Iraqi soldiers. Withholding her name for fear of retaliation against her family which remained in the hands of invaders, she recounted in detail how the Iraqis snatched from cradles twenty-two babies, threw them to the ground, leaving them in agony, all this recited with tears in her eyes. These dozen of minutes shook up the Americans so much that they demanded revenge. Saddam Hussein was satanized, his people placed at the ban of nations and in advance justified the massacres which are to follow and the embargo which caused death of some 200,000 Iraqis, primarily children. Once the war was over, the truth emerged that for 10 million dollars, thanks to the televised images, Hill and Knowlton have 'manipulated' with 250 millions of Americans: the 'refugee' was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, the history of babies snatched from cradles an invention to which President Bush himself gave credibility by making reference to it at least half a dozen times before the U.S. Congress and the press."1
Thus the Gulf War inscribed itself in the framework of the struggle between The Good and The Bad, between a just cause against barbarianism.
It is true, the war had to be "clean". The American generals and politicians were still traumatized with the war in Vietnam and the images of blood and death, of tears and sufferance, broadcasted at that time on television which have literally mined the moral of the nation by attacking its conscience. There was no more question of leaving the television cameras film the drama, and the violence of war. The war was going to become invisible! It is impossible to see anything else on the small screen but a parody of an electronic game for children or a telephone report, maps, models, expert explanations or a triumphant close-up over destroyed enemy material. Corpses - none! A clean war assumes utilization of euphemisms better than even diminishing the invokative effect of words. Thus, the repeated bombardment of Baghdad becomes "an outing"; the massacre of Iraqi soldiers abandoned by their generals and destined to be "caramelized" in dozens of thousands under the air raids was called "surgical attacks"; the civilians victims are identified as "collateral losses". The pictures coming from the front are carefully filtered and supervised before broadcasting and the absence of real information is immediately replaced by a vast over-comment by generals having become for this occasion war correspondents! There were 100,000 Iraqi dead, but they will remain invisible, forever!
The procedures of disinformation tested during the Gulf War will be applied to Yugoslavia. The Agency Ruder Finn Global Public Affair will replace Hill and Knowlton, the babies will be replaced by "concentration camps"; the ambassador's daughter will be replaced by the bread-line massacre of May 27, 1992 in Sarajevo and the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia will become "the aggressors" in their own land, Yugoslavia, for which they were the only ones to fight both in 1914 and in l941!
NOTES
1 Pierre Marie Gallois, preface to the book "Les verites Yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes a dire" ("All the Truth About Yugoslavia Is Not Very Nice To Tell")
Chapter IX
The Choice Of Washington"We are the guardians of peace which does not exist and which we can no longer impose. The solution is Islam."
Statement by one high American State Department official after the Gulf WarIn Great Britain foreign policy is determined by the Prime Minister under the close control of the House of Commons.
In France, traditionally after the 3rd Republic, the foreign policy is the task of the President of the Republic and of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. This presidential supremacy in the diplomatic field is inscribed in the Constitution of 1958 with the effect of double jeopardy: if the President should make a mistake or should find himself in a physical position handicapping in part his intellectual facilities and physical resistance - was this the case with Francois Mitterrand since 1990 during the Gulf War and the beginning of the Yugoslav crisis? - it is the entire French politics in the world that will suffer, and at the same time the fact that in such a system of reserved field, the foreign politics of France has become totally strange to the French! Since the presidential elections, the questions of foreign policy arc very seldom tackled and, generally, totally absent from the electoral debate until the legislative elections.
On the American Policy
In the United States, the situation is different. How is the American foreign policy conceived? Essentially, in two ways. On the one hand, there are official sources of information and reflection: CIA, FBI, State Department, embassies, Pentagon, White House, National Security Council, whose tendency is to confirm to the official ideas, to the generally held line.
On the other hand, there is a very large number of research bodies, "Foreign Policy" centers at most of the universities in major American towns, which are either autonomous or financed by the state, the CIA or the private donors. These centers analyze and forecast typical cases and are sending their documents and reports to Pentagon, State Department, senators, newspapers, and some of them even directly approach the White House. Thus the reports of the official sources are average because of their care not to hurt anyone and to accommodate all the world, but the official documents, more or less anonymous, are very forceful.
From time to time, some rather highly placed personality in the political hierarchy, for the lack of inspiration, would resort to a forgotten document, insuring its public disclosure on the foreign policy of the U.S.A.
In such a mixture of sources and genres, it is difficult to differentiate what is serious and thought to be a fundamental element, from the ones that are "trial balloons" and destined to remain only that. The daily politics is being made in the function of information supplied by the official feeders, entrusted in part with a mission to disseminate an image valuing the New World Order, created by the Americans and which is to be convenient for them. Therefore, this is an order which, for the religious feelings resting in the souls of all good Americans, is a democratic order, respectful of the human being in the God fearing world, with the good and gentle, but also with the bad, which is necessitating and justifying also the resort to a policy rather strict for maintaining all the world on the right track if need be (Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, etc...).
For a longer term policy, the new strategic axes are again and more and more often being suggested by the research bodies which, being without a political responsibility, do not hesitate to engage on more ambitious tracks.
On the morrow of the Gulf War, the American policy could be schematically, classified in three fields:
THE FIRST ONE reuniting the geographic zones on which a general agreement existed, both between the "officials" and the authorized persons but "non-official".
Latin America - or "the backyard of the U.S.A.", the guarded case ever since the Monroe Doctrine (1823) by which the United States are proclaiming that they will no longer tolerate interventions of European powers in Latin America (America For the Americans), a doctrine based on the politics called "The Big Stick" and "The Big Brother", which is permitting continuous U.S.A. interventions on the American continent ("Poor Mexico, so far away from God and so close to the United States", General Porfirio Diaz).
The Sub-Saharan Africa - which is no longer presenting a strategic interest after the cold war, the settlement during the Angola affair and the programmed departure of the Cubans from that country. Africans can never become mass consumers, their political regimes being too unstable, and they wished to leave the other countries - especially France - occupy itself with this continent ravaged by the AIDS, hunger, civil wars, tribal conflicts and the international monetary fund!
Europe - where the United States must maintain their presence. Military on the basis of NATO in spite of the disappearance of the Soviet threat, economic through the GATT accords favoring fragmentation of the European nations, by supporting European federalism inscribed in the Maastricht Treaty, by giving privileges to the sure allies: Germany in the North and Turkey in the South.
THE SECOND FIELD contains the zones in which the American decline was forecasted: especially in Asia, which was a great deception. The Pacific side has been for a long time a priority in the minds of American leaders, because of the gigantic market which its population presents. But the reign of Americans on the Asian continent is coming to its end. The Japanese technology (Japanese investments in technological research are 14 times above those of France) supported by the Chinese market (1.5 billion of human beings), present a certain danger. Since the take-off of the Chinese economy, it is forecasted that it will become the second world economic power between 2005-2010, above Germany and Japan (not to confuse economic power with the super-power).
The United States are now concerned over protecting themselves from the invasion of Chinese and Japanese products and those originating from the Five Dragon countries (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, etc...) and are turning away from Asia.
THE THIRD ZONE is the Islamic world which is controlling a part of strategic space which is isolating Europe from the Pacific, which is containing the vital petroleum reserves and already presents one billion of consumers. On all the aspects concerning Islam, the divergence of opinion was proceeding well. After the Gulf War, majority of men of politics and analysts considered that a reverse should be made of the 40 years of inept American politics which had as the only result in turning the United States into a great "Satan", a friend of Israel and an enemy of the Arabs, and that it was now necessary to become a protector of Islam, but not of just any Islam.
Support to "Conservationist" Islam
The American policy is basically linked with the strategic, financial and petroleum interests of the United States. It is in this aspect that it differs from the French policy based on historical, philosophic and humane considerations, inherited from the particularly close relations with the countries of Maghreb.
It is with the Saudi Arabia, a traditional and conservationist monarchy and the princely states of the Persian Gulf - Kuwait, United Arab Emirates - that the United States are maintaining privileged relations ever since the beginning of the thirties. As a consequence, the American policy was always to support the regimes, parties and social forces proclaiming themselves as strict interpreters of Islam. For the reasons of the Cold War, the U.S.A. - and especially the CIA - considered the political and social Islamic forces as the best fortress against communism; thus, they did not hesitate to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt against Nasser, or to bring their support to President Zia in Pakistan, General Numeiri in Sudan and to the most extremist Islamic movements in Afghanistan in order to counter the Soviet intervention.
"The tendency which prevails in the United States is to oppose to a contesting Islam a conservationist Islam, to the Iranian Islamism, a Sudanese Islamism".1
After the Gulf War, unanimity was gradually achieved among the American decision-makers, to adopt a different policy which will finally make of the Americans the friends of the Arabs and protectors of the Muslims. Their attention was then drawn by their principal European allies. Germany and Turkey, to the region of the Balkans, populated by a relative majority of the non-Arab Muslims which would allow them not only to realize their pro-Islamic designs, but also to weaken the European Community and confirm the need for their presence in the Old Continent.
When the computers in Pentagon were questioned, they revealed the complexity and diversity of the country, where "going from the North to the South you discover in turn the Catholic tradition of Central Europe, Mediterranean culture, civilization of Islam under most varied forms, a Byzantine heritage in the Serbian and Orthodox variant, and finally an Ottoman substract with the Slav and Albanian links" , a country composed of six nationalities, of six republics and two autonomous regions, in which even the language is being written in two different alphabets, and which is coming out of the fifty years of communism. This country responded to the sweet name of Yugoslavia, the land of the South Slavs and named by Winston Churchill "the soft belly of Europe".
NOTES
1. Paul Marie de la Gorce, Le Monde Diplomatique, 1994
2. Dusan T Batakovic, "Yugoslavia", published by 1'Age d'Homme.
PART TWO: The Yugoslav Space >>
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