CNN's East India nexus and the post-Saddam order
When legions of American troops are still hunkered down in Iraq, can Iraq be a sovereign country? Trust the Americans, Iraq is today a sovereign country. "Sovereignty'' is posited in the definition, and America has re-defined the meaning of the word. There have been some requests for this column to deal with the Abu Ghareb prisoner abuse scandal in the meanwhile. For the complete tyro in world affairs, this is the story of how US army personnel forced Iraqi prisoners into having sex with one another and subjected them to extreme forms of humiliation and torture. There is photographic evidence of these abuses.

But for a long time this columnist was in two minds about going into print on this Abu Ghareb shimozzle. Shimozzle it is not. Serious it is. But, since the Americans are redefining everything these days, very soon there will be a new definition of 'torture' and a new definition of what it means also to be humiliated. There has also been a showboating of the Saddam Hussein trial. Things are getting more surreal by the hour, and in these circumstances it seems the best thing to do is to leave these topics behind and move on to less bizarre subjects like Muttiah Muralitharan's disputed bowling action.

But the requests are mounting. Deal with Abu Ghareb they tell me. You have lost your sense of perspective they shout. So I write about Abu Ghareb. There was a good deal of derring-do about Saddam Hussein because there is an urgency to show the world that scandals like Abu Ghareb are inevitable because America is acting in the greater good of the world.

The United States keeps prisoners without any due process in Guantanamo Bay, and then gives Sadam Hussein what is purported to be a very fair trial.

In effect this means that the US believes in hierarchical justice. Saddam Hussein is more important than the wretches who have been taken to Guantanamo Bay and imprisoned there without a right to trial or to any form of due process whatsoever.

But the Sadam Hussein trial is a media festival. The whole lesson being imparted is that the US does not believe in victor's Justice. The trial is said to be carried out by the Iraqi government to which sovereignty has been handed over while some 30,000 US troops are still remaining in Iraq.

The essence of all of these recent American actions is that the world is ready now to make a nonsense of all the international norms and law, all internationally accepted definitions of concepts such as sovereignty, human rights, due process etc., The cost of all this will probably not be immediately felt. But, sooner or later, there will be incursions into sovereign territory and enormous human rights abuses by other powers which will all be justified by using the recently established American standard. Hypothetically for instance the European Union can decide unilaterally to invade Sri Lanka, station 30,000 troops here, hand over sovereignty to a government led by Thamilselvan and bring Chandrika Kumaratunga before a criminal court -- plus the CNN cameras of course.

This scenario may invite a stern lecture from the offices of the European Union -- even a hypothesis must be rationally constructed they may say. But it's the rationale of the story that's valid -- not the structure of the hypothesis itself, or its contours. In the post Iraqi-invasion international order such a situation may be considered not just possible but even probable. That's for the simple reason that this is exactly the parallel of what has been done in Iraq today. The carefully constructed jurisprudence of international law is going by the board without so much as a Hello or a by your leave…..

But strangely nobody is yet feeling the full significance of these international events. There is no sense that these are watershed events of tremendous import. There is nobody with the chutzpah to say something in the order of ''Mr Gorbachev you must tear down that wall.''

Those words uttered by Ronald Reagan during the waning hours of the Cold War, marked an important landmark event in international history. There are memorable utterances such as these which etch memorable events into the collective consciousness of the global human family.
But the events of today attract no such sentiments. But, in effect these events may surpass in importance the whole business of the end of the Cold War.

What we are seeing is perhaps something like the first forays of the East India Company into territories such as Ceylon. When the East India Company established itself in various outposts such as Sri Lanka for ostensible purposes of trade several centuries ago, nobody quite expected probably that these relatively puny trading outposts carried the germ for what was to be the most momentous change in the world order of that time. Soon the East India Company became a government, countries and entire continents succumbed to colonialism, and the rest is history. So Iraq could also carry the seed for the concept of the new empire. Those who say that this is an overreaction to events may also be right.

But even they may want to consider the fact that even if the events in Iraq today don't carry the seeds of the new Empire, that they still radically alter concepts of sovereignty, due process, human rights etc., as we know them. So it's a change of the entire order, not just one element of it.

Once these notions undergo a change of these dimensions, then who can really predict the rest? Who can really discount the hypothesis that the European Union might one day decide to install Thamilselvan in Colombo and then parade Chandrika before CNN? (Or maybe that's BBC then.)

The net results of the Saddam trial, Abu Ghareb, Guantanamo Bay etc., etc., is that its making international realpolitik very elastic We live in an era when international politics is parlayed through the sound byte, and international law is 'discovered'' via the anchorpersons of CNN. That's not an overstatement, because Saddam Hussein is being brought before CNN cameras, and with this one act several cannons of international law are being established.

For instance it is established that America shall not be held accountable for Abu Ghareb, because in effect the Americans are still holding the fort in Iraq, and Hussein is returned to American custody every day after the show trial. But CNN is the process by which all this is granted legitimacy in the eyes of the world. CNN is the East India Company of today.

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