Peace Matters Index

ONLINE contents

- barbarians at the gate
- non sibi sed patriae
- chancers crooks and con men
- wanted: a new global paradigm
- iran in a calmer light
- human rights


- compled issue pdf




What we care about, and care about a lot, is Nato, and ensuring that nothing is done in Europe, which could undermine it.
Vice-President Cheney

Sinister forces are at work, and not just in Buckingham Palace. ‘Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World’ is a 150-page document authored by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists. The Guardian called it a ‘radical manifesto’. This may be an over-generous description of what is by and large a fairly conventional view of the world in certain quarters. Calling something ‘grand’ does not make it so. But it comes from the same stable as the ‘Great Game’, the name given to strategic rivalry and conflict between two empires, the British and the Russian, in their 19th century contest for supremacy in Central Asia. Today, as hopes fade for the ‘American Century’ in Brussels, they burn bright for a Military Century.

The report paints a dismal picture of the future and sees the ‘west’ as under siege from human hordes, the weather and the irrationality with which national governments, who don’t always agree with each other, are unable to cope. What will save us from this, apparently, will be a grander, stronger, less democratic NATO, flouting international law. And ‘the first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation….’ Not all authors agree on that last perhaps most controversial point. Britain’s former chief of the defence staff Field Marshal Peter Inge, however, is in no doubt . He argues that ‘to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence’.

The report could be said to be a blend of the earthly and the metaphysical. ‘A concept of interactive escalation requires escalation dominance, the use of a full bag of both carrots and sticks’, and ‘traditional forms and methods of governments and international organisations will today no longer be capable of meeting this requirement’.

The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 removed NATO’s de facto adversary. On its 50th anniversary in 1998, NATO was clearly purposeless, ready for speedy demise. But old soldiers don’t like to fade away. In the absence of any role, NATO has now expanded to more than double its original size, and finally muscled in on the Kosovo War, which became NATO’s first broad-scale military engagement in its 51 years.

The search for a purpose goes on. The ‘uncertain world’ report is being presented to the April NATO summit in Bucharest just a few days short of its 60th anniversary. There are a lot of people to persuade.

‘A modern grand strategy must include a media strategy aimed at winning the hearts and minds of people around the world. It must ensure information dominance, and thus guarantee the credibility of the action. It ought to be a “first strike” media strategy, aimed at hitting the headlines first ….’ The context here is ‘in case of conflict’ but it is hard to escape the view that such a strategy will be deployed in NATO’s ideological and political interests.

‘To overcome [a] disquieting state of public relations affairs, NATO must urgently develop an information strategy that will get it and its nations back into the driving seat; otherwise it runs the risk of losing on the home front, even as its forces win at the tactical or operational level.’

To be sure there are many problems facing people around the world. For example, decades of fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo is continuing to kill some 45,000 people each month - half of this number are small children. It is the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. Fortunately for the generals, the DR Congo is not in NATO, otherwise their report might have sounded even more extraordinary. This grand strategy sees threats everywhere but is blind to the opportunities that co-operation – however difficult to achieve at times – can provide.

We deplore military coups elsewhere (well some of them, anyway) but the generals seem to know best. ‘In addition, nations have commonly imposed too many national caveats on use of their forces. There exists an unwillingness on the part of nations to transfer authority to the operational commander once in the theatre of operations. Finally, there is a tendency for nations not to resource operations effectively.’

This no doubt reflects the bitter divisions between Washington and its NATO allies in Afghanistan, to which the US were obliged to send more Marines because Germany, France and Italy refused to provide more of their own troops or waive restrictions on the rules of engagement. At the same time, the European criticised US military for excessive use of force, which they blamed for the mounting resistance.

‘The UN must ensure that it is the rule of law that prevails, and not the power of force,’ says the report, apparently ignoring its own illegal recommendations. ‘In the absence of a UN Security Council (UNSC) authorisation, we regard the use of force as being legitimate if there is no time to get the UNSC involved, or if the UNSC proves incapable of reaching a decision at a time when immediate action is required to protect large numbers of human beings.’ It continues: ‘The fact that we are aware of the UN’s shortcomings and deficiencies and believe there are no remedies for those problems in the short to medium term does not, however, mean we do not think that the UN can play a role.’

The Executive Summary makes things clear: ‘In their long-term agenda the authors propose abandonment of the two-pillar concept of America and Europe cooperating, and they suggest aiming for the long-term vision of an alliance of democracies ranging from Finland to Alaska. To begin the process, they propose the establishment of a directorate consisting of the USA, the EU and NATO. Such a directorate should coordinate all cooperation in the common transatlantic sphere of interest.’

The report proposed a ‘super NATO’ that can guarantee security for its members and make the rest of the world a less troublesome place; it is clear who the ‘we’ are - liberal democracy rooted in the free market. Crucially, what the report fails to consider is the impact of western policies, including its own ’security’ policies and the global climate, technology, media etc.. The damage done by the world's richest states to their poorer counterparts is more than the entire global south debt of $1.8 trillion. The richest states have inflicted this damage and now demand that the majority world takes action to prevent a worldwide environmental catastrophe in the future. This is not a recipe for friendly cooperation. The leading states in the global south are all too aware of the likely effects of climate change on their own environments and the need for collective action; but the accumulated bitterness at the elitist attitudes of the Atlantic community is firmly reinforced by this report.

Just as deference was dealt a severe blow in the 1960s through greater prosperity and mobility, so in the first decade of the 21st century the growth of media in the global south, together with easy access to information and opinion that questions received western opinions, has opened many eyes to the unfairness of so many western policies. There is no going back on that; and there is no way of finessing the injustice that the powerful have wrought on the powerless. The need is for a rebalancing of the world’s order, not by a lawless super military institution but by a world-wide response to the needs and aspiration of those peoples whom our wonderful ‘liberal’ and ‘civilised’ system have for so long suppressed.

Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington and the Noaber Foundation

Jan Melichar

Peace campaigners have to be realistic as well as idealistic about their hopes. The goal of achieving disarmament and demilitarisation requires confrontation with the vested interests that will and do fight tooth and nail to stop peace breaking out. Recent events have highlighted the reality of the corruption entailed in the military industrial complex. This time the Government itself has been exposed acting against the interests of British tax payers, propping up corrupt arms deals with Saudi Arabia and stopping a corruption investigation by the Serious Fraud Office which was getting too close to the truth. The subsequent international outcry, and legal challenges from peace campaigners mean this issue is a live topic for the peace movement in 2008.
Patiently over many years the Campaign against Arms Trade (CAAT) has worked to expose the corruption of the defence sales industry and its government stooges. For its sins, CAAT has been infiltrated, investigated and threatened by various groups. Recently CAAT’s campaigns against BAE Systems ( formerly British Aerospace), and against the Defence Export Services Organisation (the arm of government responsible for promoting the sale of arms) have had some apparent unexpected success. The Government has announced the closure of the Defence Export Services Organisation (much to the disgust of the Chief Executive of BAE). However some of its functions are being transferred to the DTI (now renamed the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform), so this is not the complete end of government support for the arms trade, but certainly a welcome start.
CAAT has produced a pamphlet, Bribing for Britain, by Tim Webb, to explain the government’s past and current involvement in the arms trade and with BAE Systems, and to outline specific proposals for further action by the government to stamp out all corruption and end all subsidies for arms exports. This pamphlet provides a clear and useful explanation of these complicated issues and gives positive ideas to raise in political campaigning. Tim Webb is a former Assistant General Secretary of the trade union that was MSF (Manufacturing, Science, Finance) now called UNITE, and he dealt with the main defence companies for 25 years. His final suggestions would not go far enough for some of us, but are stepping stones on the way.

Iran in a calmer light
aim clearly: ‘To explain Iran’s current political order, we must understand not only the revolutionary movement of 1979’ its social bases, discourse and rhetoric ‘but importantly also the formation of the post-revolutionary state during the 1980s, a period marked more than any event by the long Iran-Iraq war. The Islamic Republic is, in this sense, not just a post-revolutionary state. It is a state formed both by revolution and by war, and the resurgence of militancy since the 2005 election is a manifestation of a 25-year-long contradictory process of post-revolutionary and post-war state formation’.
The book starts with the 1941 forced abdication of Reza Shah who had failed in his efforts to play Soviet, British and Nazi German rivalries against each other. His son, Mohammad Raza, became Shah when Western interests were well re-established, although there remained a strong, Soviet-dependent Tudeh Communist Party. The Shah was confronted by an ever-more diverse socio-economic reality. He tried to give something to everyone, but reforms were late and the Shah never had a broad base of supporters. Thus, as Panah writes ‘The Revolution was made possible by the participation of a broad coalition of social classes, each with its own interests and motives for the overthrow of the old order. Ultimately, the Revolution was made possible by the strike activities of the working class, among them most effectively the oil workers, supported by the bazaar, combined with popular demonstrations and the eventual breakdown of the shah’s military and security apparatus. Thus, the old regime thus gave way to the new in February 1979’.