The decade following the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, was characterised by a
somewhat frenzied effort to find a replacement ideology. 1n 1993, Anthony Lake,
yet another scholar-administrator, had "officially" postulated the need for a
new policy: "Clearly, the Soviet Union's collapse enhances our security. But it
also requires us to think anew because the world is new." This
more-than-two-decades-long debate leading up to the present justificatory
frameworks for carrying out direct US-led Nato invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq,
Yemen, Libya, and covert wars against Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Syria, can be
effectively summed up in terms of seven major theoretical formulations,
referenced below:
1) “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama (The National Interest: Summer
1989);
2) “The Clash of Civilisations” by Samuel Huntington (Foreign Affairs: Summer
1993);
3) “From Containment to Enlargement” by Anthony Lake (September 1993);
4) “Confronting the Backlash States” by Antony Lake (Foreign Affairs:
March/April 1994);
5) Testimony of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright Before the House
International Relations Committee (February 1997);
6) Remarks at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris by Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice (February 2005); and
7) President Obama's Cairo Speech (June 2009).
Since the contents of these seven policy statements are well known, it obviates
the need for summarising them; instead we could focus on discerning some
patterns with global implications for the curtailment of civil liberties and
human rights.
In my judgement, there are five noteworthy and revealing patterns that become
available through a comparative analysis of the above-cited seven theories:
Triumphalism, Orientalism [from geo-strategic not to geo-economics but to]
Globalised Nato, Collapse of the wall of separation between the internal (the
"Republic") and the external (the "Empire"), and rise in "Islamophobia" coupled
with the rise in xenophobia and mainstream America's ever-increasing willingness
to accept denial of human rights to Muslims and other targeted groups.
While Triumphalism and other concepts are well known, it seems necessary to
define Orientalism. Edward Said, one of the most insightful thinkers of the late
20th century, in his majestic work on "Orientalism", writes: “Taking the late
18th century as a very roughly defined starting point, Orientalism can be
discussed and analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient
[the Third World] - dealing with it by making statements about it, authorising
views about it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, by ruling over it:
in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and
having authority over the Orient."
In sum, it is an assertion of eternal - physical, intellectual, moral and
material - superiority of the Europeans over Asians, Africans and Latin
Americans. One of the most consequential aspect of Orientalism is the common,
but by no means, a universal belief that not only the European is a rational and
moral being as opposed to the irrational and immoral Oriental (who is direct
opposite of the European), but this fact that the European is rational and moral
gives him the ‘right’ to use ‘force’ to civilise the barbarian and Christianise
the heathen.
Imperial Patterns:
1) I would submit that there is an inverse relation between Triumphalism,
Orientalism, and erosion of civil liberties and human rights in the US: the more
unbridled the sense of Triumphalism, the more pronounced is that particular
theoretician's imperial attitude towards the Muslim world, and greater is his or
her propensity to condone dismantling of due process and equal justice.
2) In effect, the entire debate about the new, post-Cold War, ideology has been
a debate about Islam and whether or not it poses a threat to Western interests.
Fukuyama, for example, does not perceive Islam as a threat, differentiates among
various Muslim states, and considers only a few (Iran, Iraq and Syria) as local
irritants, but lacking an ideology with global appeal.
Here is a relatively sober version of Triumphalism culled from Fukuyama's 1989
Policy Paper. Notice Dr Fukuyama's restrained style of discussion of Muslim
fundamentalism:
"The rise of religious fundamentalism in recent years within the Christian,
Jewish and Muslim traditions has been widely noted. One is inclined to say that
the revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the
impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies. Yet, while
the emptiness at the core of liberalism is most certainly a defect in the
ideology - indeed, a flaw that one does not need the perspective of religion to
recognise - it is not at all clear that it is remediable through politics.......
In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as political
alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal
for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any
universal significance."
2) But Fukuyama's assessment was immediately challenged by Dr Henry Kissinger
and Professor Bernard Lewis, two hardcore Zionists, joined by Professor Samuel
Huntington, and the trinity declared Islam as a cosmological threat.
3) Anthony Lake, tried to restore a certain modicum of disinterestedness and
objectivity to the "official" US view of Islam. In his policy speech, entitled
"From Containment to Enlargement" and delivered on September 21, 1993, at the
Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, Lake
observed: "For half a century America's engagement in the world revolved around
containment of hostile Soviet Union. Our efforts helped block Soviet
expansionism, topple Communist repression and secure a great victory for human
freedom." Then he proceeded to make a bold declaration that was immediately
endorsed by George F. Kennan, the father of the US doctrine of containment of
communism. Categorically stating that we have neither arrived at "End of
History", nor are we witnessing a "Clash of Civilisation", Lake announced the
new doctrine of enlargement. Enlargement of what? Of democracy and market
economies. In sum, the post-Cold War US policy was to advocate and ensure
"market democracies".
Wisely, Lake had cautioned against self-congratulatory over-confidence:
"Democracy and market economics are ascendant in this new era, but they are not
everywhere triumphant. There remain vast areas in Asia, Africa, the Middle East
and elsewhere where democracy and market economics are at best new arrivals -
most likely unfamiliar, sometimes vilified, often fragile." However, within six
months, he was forced by his "superiors" to reverse himself. In his policy paper
"Confronting the Backlash States", published in the March /April 1994 issue of
the Foreign Affairs, Lake presented the concept of "dual containment" - dual,
simultaneous and non-interdependent containment of Iran and Iraq by keeping
"both countries boxed in with economic sanctions and military monitoring."
4) In 1996, when asked: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I
mean, that’s more than died in Hiroshima. And, and you know, is the price worth
it?” Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the UN, responded: “I think this is a
very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.” A year later,
after being sworn-in as the first woman Secretary of State, Albright tried to
appear impartial by introducing a quasi-juridical taxonomy of four types of
states: liberal states (US, Western Europe and Canada), semi-liberal states
(India and the liberated states of Eastern Europe), failed states (Somalia,
Sudan, Afghanistan, etc) and the outlaw states: (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, etc).
Although, her taxonomy was generally agreeable, it was the application of its
classification system that revealed her Islamophobic bias. The critics point out
that if we are to understand an outlaw state as a state consistently violating
"international legal and moral consensus", then how is it possible not to place
Israel in that category? After all, Israel has violated more UN Security Council
and UN General Assembly resolutions than any other state in the world.
Hardly anybody outside the US was fooled by this pontification.
In an editorial, entitled "US Public Opinion and Foreign Affairs", the Brazilian
mainstream publication Folha de Sao Paulo (1997), commenting on Albright's
policy, voiced the opinions of many in the third world: "Muslim fundamentalism
is certainly one of the phenomenon for which the new Secretary seems not to have
an answer capable of satisfying US public opinion……..In nations such as Algeria,
Egypt or Afghanistan, Muslim fundamentalism continues to fight and to be fought
in an ostentatious way like a kind of open wound of colonisation. To win it [the
fight for and against fundamentalism], seems to be a task difficult to be
achieved - or even not feasible. Without other strategies to dissipate cultural
and political tensions involved in this fight - that are typical of the more
complex world to which Secretary Albright refers - the international community
has preferred to be a spectator only and wait for an impartial solution."
by
Dr Agha Saeed
May 06, 2013
The writer is the CEO of the ‘AMA-Foundation’, a Washington DC-based think tank.
(https://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/columns/06-May-2013/islamophobia-in-usa)