Today’s political reality is very different than seven years ago.
Seven years ago Mr. Francis Fukuyama was still an esteemed scholar, known for his methodical sociological studies with a conservative leaning.
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), the brain-child of Fukuyama and likeminded academics and experts in Washington consensus based foreign policy.
Seven years ago, in 2001, the big news, the grand narrative or meta-narrative, in the words of Lyotard, was 9/11 and the General War on Terror launched from the Bush-controlled White House with full support from PNAC, the think tank that even before George W. Bush was elected president encouraged the idea of invading Iraq to boost the democratization process in the Levant and improve the American strategic positions in the region.
A fundamentalist allianceGeorge W. Bush, a man of faith, found a strange bedfellow in the hugely popular leader of the New Labour party in United Kingdom, Tony Blair. Tony Blair had become Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1997, and he too was a man of faith.
After the attack on America on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair would meet frequently to discuss the campaign against terrorism. Tony Blair was the only foreign state leader present, when George W. Bush gave his
notorious speech to Congress in the wake of 9/11:
“Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”
The speech was a harbinger of the brutality and indiscriminating hostility the Bush administration would display – towards enemies, towards allies and towards dissidents and critics and sceptics abroad and at home, even towards public servants like former US ambassador Joseph C. Wilson and his wife, Valerie Elise Plame Wilson, the target of the infamous White House scheme to out a covert CIA operations officer.
Today a new administration led by President-elect Barack Obama has announced investigations into numerous abuses and civil rights violations conducted by American forces under the leadership of George W. Bush.
Operation Downing StreetThe bond between Blair and Bush marked the doom for the British Prime Minister, until then considered the golden boy of the Labour Party and “the one,” the man who could lead the party into the 21st Century and usher in a new era of prosperity for the old empire.
In 2007 Tony Blair, a once hugely popular politician, was dethroned and replaced by Gordon Brown.
The determining event occurred in 2005, as a secret memo was leaked to the press.
The note, popularly known as the Downing Street Memo, refers to a secret meeting of senior United Kingdom Labour government, defence and intelligence figures discussing the build-up to the war.
The meeting was held on 23 July, 2002, and it included direct reference to classified United States policy of the time.
According to the memo the head of MI6 expressed his view of the invasion of Iraq, following his recent visit to Washington:
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was quoted for saying that it was clear that Bush had "made up his mind" to take military action, but that "the case was thin".
Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith warned that justifying the invasion on legal grounds would be difficult.
The Premature Ejaculator of GeopoliticsThe most extraordinary thing about James Bond movies as a franchise is that the protagonist is a British intelligence agent working under the MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6), also known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
James Bond is not an American, and yet he is out to save the world. The fact that this does not strain the credulity of the audiences around the world has to do with the legacy of the British intelligence agencies and Great Britain as an imperial force to be reckoned with.
Graham Greene’s The Quiet American describes the transition from the British mandate to American style global governance, viewed through the lens of diplomats and journalists working in Saigon in 1952, seven years before the Vietnam War or Second Indochina War.
The title is ironic, suggesting that if you meet a quiet American, he is about to launch disaster on the world. American reviews called it anti-American for its portrayal of a young American idealist whose ham-fisted approach to intelligence work leads to his destruction.
Graham Greene, himself and SIS agent spying for Britain in World War II in Sierra Leone and reporting to the British intelligence until his death – most likely also when he served as a reporter for The Times and Le Figaro in Saigon from 1951 to 1954 – portrays the difference between the waning British imperialism and emerging US imperialism as the difference between the experienced player and the new hustler on the table.
The Quiet American uses sex and seduction as a metaphor for what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls “The Grand Chessboard” of geostrategic manoeuvring. The young and idealistic American, Alden Pyle, comes off as a premature ejaculator in the world of geopolitics, juxtaposed against the narrator, a British journalist in his fifties, representing the sobering perspective of political pragmatism.
So yea, the story is an insult, but as most British insults both subtle, to the point and eloquently put.
And Greene is not alone in his “anti-American” criticism of the inadequacies of the Central Intelligence Agency. American film-makers, from Oliver Stone to Robert de Niro, have enjoyed flogging the paranoia and the provincial approach to politics repeatedly displayed by American military intelligence.
Beholden to queen or to governorWhat is unknown to most people is that the British interest and experience in geopolitics far outdo the American. The Commonwealth of Nations, most often referred to as simply the Commonwealth, is a voluntary association of no less than 53 countries, most of which are former British colonies.
Significantly, Commonwealth once counted the 13 American states represented on the dollar bill as stars above the head of the eagle, the symbol of Pax Americana.
At the pinnacle of colonialism, when the European powers divided Africa between them, the first imperial conference between Great Britain and the so called “white colonies” was held. It was 1887, and the British Empire was busy stacking colonies around the world.
Even without India and Hong Kong – India gained independence on August 15, 1947 and Hong Kong was returned to China only 50 years later, in 1997 – the size and grandeur of the former British Empire can be easily assessed by simply listing the names of the countries that are members of the Commonwealth and, as such, beholden to Great Britain.
The following countries are actually still part of a personal union, answering to Queen Elizabeth II as their queen, called Commonwealth realms:
Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and The Grenadines, Solomon Islands, United Kingdoms, Tuvalu.
The rest are either monarchies or republics:
Bangladesh, Botswana, Brunei, Cameroun, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, Gambia, Ghana, Guyana, India, Kenya, Kiribati, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nigeria, Pakistan, Samoa, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Vanuatu, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
The Singapore Declaration outlines the mission of this association, which is the promotion of democracy, human rights, good governance, the rule of law, individual liberty, egalitarianism, free trade, multilateralism, and world peace, carried out through multilateral projects and meetings.
Technically speaking Queen Elizabeth II is only the symbolic head of the Commonwealth of Nations, and members are equal in status, but one need only consider the distribution of economic, military and political power to guess which way the water flows.
The case against militant democratizationFrom a certain perspective, the perspective of Western hegemony or at least global dominance, the neo-conservative scheme to boost democracy through pre-emptive warfare and nation building also served the interest of the Commonwealth.
The vision is the same, but the methods differed so vastly that enormous animosity built up in the United Kingdom as well as the rest of democratic Europe. In spite of Tony Blair’s charisma and impassionate speeches a real opposition formed against him, even inside intelligence agencies.
By 2005 it was evident even to foreign policy experts in the establishment, unaffected by the public anti-war protests and preference for international law, that the quest was doomed to fail.
The premise of PNAC was, to a large extent, the enthusiastic message conveyed by Francis Fukuyama in the futuristic The End of History and The Last Man, stating that democracy had won with no serious ideological challengers left after the Cold War. In other words: It is time for the final onslaught against dictators and human rights violators.
It was premature.
Instead USA embarked on a Middle East adventure, costly in both casualties and cash, and widely – not only among Islamic extremists – considered a new Crusade, triggering also a new Inquisition with all the zeal and fervour of the Dark Ages combined with new technology, allowing for elaborate electronic eavesdropping of societies and scientifically enhanced torture of terrorists, suspects of terrorism and dissidents.
The West had become its own worst enemies, and the calamity was best described by former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in April 2006, basically stating that the US was losing “the battle for the hearts and minds.”
He was begging for funds for Public Diplomacy and certainly did not mean to say what most bloggers concluded – that it was the illegitimate means by which the war was conducted as much as the illegitimacy of the war, which undermined the campaign to engage Muslims in the idealistic project of democracy, human rights, good governance, the rule of law, individual liberty, egalitarianism, free trade, multilateralism and world peace, the scope of UN and of the Commonwealth of Nations.
The importance of a well-regulated allianceLeaking the Downing Street Memo to the press was the beginning of the end for Blair, with high ranking intelligence personnel revolting against what was by then perceived as a critical blunder.
A report from the British intelligence about England’s role in the Iraq war and the increased threat of terrorism was titled The Danger of Riding Shotgun. Again, the title says it all.
With the world heading directly towards what Samuel Huntington has dubbed “the Clash of Civilizations”, action was taken to remove the Teflon shield that protected Tony Blair. George W. Bush, in a sense, was collateral damage. The impact from the Downing Street Minutes, however, reached across the Atlantic at the speed of fibre-optic communications, sending the neo-conservative administration spinning downwards.
Plamegate had already been running as a controversy from the publishing of the identity of Valerie Plame by op-ed author Robert Novak in Washington Post on July 14, 2003, but the controversy about the leaking of the identity of a CIA operative to intimidate, discredit or punish her husband for speaking out against the files used to build a case for invading Iraq stole the thunder.
The Downing Street Memo provided “the smoking gun”, establishing the credibility of Wilson’s assertions in the public, making the case for war protesters arguing that assuming WMD was not an intelligence error but a series of statements made in bad faith.
Support for Blair peaked right after 9/11, but went into a permanent rut only six months later, a crisis from which he never fully recovered. Blair suffers his first Commons defeat as prime minister over the proposal to extend the length of time suspects can be held without char$ge to 90 days. 49 Labour rebels vote against the government, and Tory leader Michael Howard calls for his resignation.
At the same time the coalition of the willing began to crumble. Withdrawals by members of the multi-national force in Iraq had already begun in 2004.
Multi-lateral politics, the approach of the old empire and the design beneath the Commonwealth of Nations, is on the Washington agenda by 2006 as the Republican Party prepares for what looks to become a devastating mid-term election.
The unfortunate “hearts and minds” rhetoric echoed in the media is replaced by an even more critical buzz-word, “relations to allies”.
By the end of George W. Bush’s second term he is deprived of his most loyal European ally. Senator John McCain has to run for president on a platform defined by what is essentially European politics, mirrored in the progressive and liberal agendas of the Democratic Party – human rights, multilateral geopolitics, incremental democratization.
On top of it comes financial crisis, highlighting the vulnerability of the working class to the gross errors of laissez-faire economics, a new wave of global warming campaigning calling for green economy and CO2 reduction, as well as the devastating impact from new progressive voters cleverly mobilized via the new medium of the age, the internet.
Give Peace a ChanceWhen it comes to politics, as well as music, USA and England have always competed about being the main source of cultural influences. Today’s big news is a report from the US intelligence community stating that the unipolar world order is doomed, with the world facing nuclear war by 2025.
The economic break-down of the USA has been anticipated and analyzed for some time. Even Osama bin Laden claims his strategy is to make USA suffer financially, bleeding the enemy to death.
The thing about James Bond is that he never loses his cool. The British philosophy of the stiff upper lip is summarized in the drink order: “Shaken, not stirred.” The least popular Bond-movies are the ones where he is Americanized and vindictive, pursuing a personal goal rather than elegantly disposing of enemies to the Commonwealth. He symbolizes the difference between the muscular approach of USA and the subtle manipulations of levers and cogs in the public opinion conducted by an apparatus that legitimately can call itself "intelligence".
The world order we are living may still be unipolar, with USA standing tall as the superpower, revitalized by Barack Obama’s election victory. But the cultural climate we are living in is more Beatles than Rolling Stones, more Give Peace a Change than Paint it Black, so to speak. It is a return to the old way of doing things, to soft power against hard challenges, and to that age old virtuous discipline of geopolitical manoeuvring called diplomacy.
Greed and selfishness will still rule the agenda. Terrorism will still be the big boogie-man used to install loyalty to government and tolerance for harsh security measures. Secret agents will still scheme to topple governments, assassinate guerrilla leaders and collect data on dissidents and thought-offenders.
The US wing of Western intelligence is desperately trying to regain control with intelligence reports suggesting that Osama bin Laden is planning a massive terrorist attack on US soil or the recent Global Trends 2025 - a Transformed World, projecting global thermo-nuclear war in the year 2025 as a result of the end of American supremacy.
But brute force is, for a little while, no longer an approach we take delight in. The cowboy is out… and coming out shooting is frowned upon. The professor is in… even if he may still have a license to kill.
