Thoughts from London

Paying Pooja to a new imperialism
Last Sunday's editorial in this newspaper unerringly vectored in on the crucial paragraph in Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's address to the United Nations.
That paragraph is worth quoting in full again for it shows how far down the road of servility and kowtowing we have gone in the past few months, undeterred by the growing empirical evidence that should have dictated a far less ignoble policy.

"There are members in this hall today who believe passionately that the United States and its allies were wrong to intervene in Iraq. Then there those of us who feel that the United States and their allies had no choice but to intervene, that the failure of the United Nations had created the need for a world policeman however reluctant it might be."

Academics and assorted commentators knowledgeable in our post-independence foreign policy will call it a paradigm shift, a phrase that Wickremesinghe is not averse to using himself. To ordinary mortals it means, in our everyday parlance, that the prime minister's words backing of the invasion of Iraq was not just a change of gear but a reckless swing of the steering wheel.

This speech comes as no surprise at all following hard on the heels of Minister Ravi Karunanayake's performance at the World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun where we shamelessly lent the Washington saboteurs of that crucial round of trade negotiations a helping hand.

But it is a great disappointment. Whether Ranil Wickremesinghe writes his own speeches or there is some genius who does it for him, this particular address shows clearly that we are way off base.

It shows clearly that there is no monitoring of the international situation, of the news and commentaries over the past few months, especially the large mounds of evidence that have emanated from the Hutton Inquiry here in London and the congressional hearings in Washington that have severely removed any vestige of the reasons that the United States and Britain adduced for what Wickremesinghe so blithely calls "intervention" in Iraq.

Moreover Wickremesinghe's assertion that the United States is a "reluctant" world policeman is yet more proof that our foreign policy is being shaped by those who have little knowledge of the intellectual forces and thinking that is guiding American policy, particularly under the current Bush administration.

In the past we had politicians, especially of the Left, who took the trouble to keep themselves informed of what was happening in the world and what policy makers and those influencing policy elsewhere were thinking. It was not merely to keep themselves informed. It was also a natural intellectual pursuit because they were thinking people.
If today's politicians have no time or the inclination to do so, then it is incumbent on those who serve us abroad to keep them informed and whenever possible to brief them so that policy can be founded on a rational and defendable basis.

When the Prime Minister goes to the world body and says that the US is reluctant to play the Sheriff of Dodge City he has been badly misinformed or briefed. Because many months before Wickremesinghe addressed the General Assembly, George W. Bush was already standing outside the OK Corral looking like John Wayne.

If the Prime Minister was otherwise engaged to keep himself abreast of the neo-conservative thinking that was driving America to accept an imperialist role in what the present president's father George Bush characterised as the "New World Order", it was the task of our missions in Washington and New York to direct the sights of our political leaders to the new imperatives that lay at the heart of American policy-making. Had that been done and the speech writer/writers done their homework we would not have had to listen to an assertion which, to say the least, is far from the truth.

Though some time before 9/11 American historians such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr and influential voices in US foreign policy such as Charles William Maynes argued that "America is a country with imperial capabilities but without an imperial mind", the new doctrine driving the Bush administration is something of a re-run of American colonial expansion of the late 19th century that saw US presence established in Asia, the Pacific and the Caribbean.

Today the guiding influence behind Bush policy are historians, writers, journalists and far right ideologues who see visions of a new Roman empire but not with just a global reach but a global dominance.

In his essay "The Future of War and the American Military", Stephen Rosen, head of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University wrote in May-June 2002: "A political unit that has overwhelming military power and uses that power to influence the internal behaviour of other states, is called an empire. Our goal is not combating a rival but maintaining our imperial position and maintaining imperial order."

Nothing sums up more clearly the raison d'etre of the Bush doctrine of global dominance. Even if our policy makers have not kept pace with the thinking of the neo-conservatives in the US who have influenced current policy, at least they should have read last year's national security strategy of the Bush administration that chillingly articulates American policy.

It states, as The Guardian newspaper pointed out, that any attack on US interests, however limited, from whatever source, and anywhere in the world, involving any form of chemical, biological and radiological weaponry, could trigger nuclear retaliation. Increasingly the US is also assuming the right to decree who may or may not possess such weapons."

To call the US a "reluctant" global policeman might be the kind of sycophantic posturing that the imperial masters expect from a client state but others will recognise it as an unforgivable faux pas.

While one must necessarily postpone further comments because of space constraints, it is not possible to end this commentary without one other remark.
One could have understood- though not accepted- this government supporting Washington and London at the time of the invasion last March or immediately thereafter when the justification for war had not been laid bare though its legality was vigorously challenged.

It did not explicitly do so as the foreign ministry statement in late March shows. But to do so now is surely foolish in the extreme when every day new evidence emerges totally undermining the arguments that Washington and London adduced for their attack and even those who supported the invasion then are quickly changing tack or disappearing embarrassingly into the woodwork.

While the domestic and external implications of this purblind policy will be discussed later, has it not struck those brilliant legal minds in this government that we have pledged our support to an unlawful and illegal invasion of a sovereign country setting a dangerous precedent? We have publicly committed our country not to the force of law but the law of force.

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