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Sovereignty takes a contract
hit
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
Almost lost in President George W Bush's twin triumphs
in last week's Congressional elections and at the United
Nations Security Council were two events that offer a
glimpse into the new world imperial order being built by
the administration.
While senior officials have
long insisted that they want to rejuvenate a global
system of strong nation states that exercise full
sovereignty over their borders as the preferred
alternative to "global government", the two incidents
help illustrate how far Washington will go in
interfering with that sovereignty to further its own
interests.
Last Sunday, the Central Intelligence
Agency launched a laser-guided Hellfire missile from an
unmanned Predator reconnaissance plane at a car
travelling in a remote region in northern Yemen,
instantly incinerating the vehicle and its six
occupants, who reportedly included a senior operative of
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group, Qaed Senyan al-Harthi.
The attack marked the first time that Washington
has used an armed Predator drone to attack suspected
terrorists outside of Afghanistan and in a country at
peace with the United States. While Washington insisted
that it had permission from the Yemeni government to
carry out the attack, Yemeni officials declined to
confirm that.
The second incident took place two
days before the attack, when Mauritius' ambassador to
the United Nations, Jagdish Koonjul, was abruptly
recalled by his government after Port Louis received a
complaint from Washington that Koonjul was not lining up
with sufficient zeal behind Washington's latest draft
resolution on weapons inspections in Iraq at the UN
Security Council.
It had apparently been pointed
out to the Mauritians, who export most of their textiles
to the United States, that by signing a preferential
trade agreement with the United States in 2000, they had
agreed not to "engage in activities that undermine
United States national security or foreign policy
interests". The not-so-subtle message was that if they
failed to support Washington at the Security Council,
their trade interests would suffer.
In many
ways, neither event was terribly surprising.
The
use of economic pressure by one state against another
for political ends, for example, is nothing new in the
history of interstate relations. On the other hand,
making a trade agreement explicitly conditional on a
state's surrendering control over its foreign policy on
issues deemed important to a more powerful trading
partner, not only narrows the definition of sovereignty;
it smacks of 19th-century imperialism.
More
dramatic, of course, was the attack over the Yemeni
desert. The incident, which sparked outrage in Arab
countries, immediately drew questions about parallels
with Israel's policy of "targeted killings" of suspected
Palestinian terrorists, a policy condemned even by the
Bush administration.
While Yemen, like the
Philippines, Georgia and Pakistan, among others, has
taken up offers by the administration of US military
advisers to provide intelligence and train their own
troops to track down alleged terrorists, this was the
first time that Washington had unilaterally killed a
target far from the battlefield in Afghanistan.
Hawks in the offices of Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld exulted over the operation, which they called a
foretaste of things to come. "We've got new authorities,
new tools and a new willingness to do it wherever it has
to be done," noted one administration source quoted by
the New York Times. "This is an extraordinary change of
threshold," a former intelligence officer told The
Washington Post.
Indeed, just 13 years ago, a
major controversy erupted when the Justice Department
under former president George Bush Sr asserted a
unilateral US right to arrest a criminal suspect in a
foreign country without the consent of the host country.
That notion, which was overruled by the State
Department, seems quaint in light of Sunday's attack.
But the larger question raised by the incident
is how such an attack furthers the administration's
stated goal of building an international order based on
strong nation-states that exercise sovereignty over
their territories. The Bush government has long made
clear that it opposes any system of "global governance"
in which multilateral institutions could, in its view,
compromise or encroach on US sovereignty.
As an
alternative, the administration and its supporters have
argued that world order is best secured by rejuvenating
the nation-state system created by the 354-year-old
Treaty of Westphalia, which ended Europe's calamitous
Thirty Years War.
That treaty, which codified
the principles of sovereignty and non-interference in
the internal affairs of other countries, was explicitly
invoked by Bush himself in the same West Point speech
last June in which he first announced his intention to
maintain unequalled military superiority into the
future.
Former secretary of state George Shultz,
who exercises a not-inconsiderable influence on the
thinking of several of the president's top aides,
particularly National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
first argued last January that the war on terror's main
aim should be to "revitalize" the nation state's
authority, which had been undermined by globalization.
That aim has been explicitly endorsed numerous
times by administration officials to justify policies
that rejected multilateral solutions to problems.
In announcing Washington's renunciation of the
Rome Statute to create the International Criminal Court,
for example, US ambassador for war crimes issues Pierre
Prosper argued that much more emphasis should be put on
building national judicial systems capable of handling
crimes against humanity and genocide.
Similarly,
when the United Nations and the European Union and even
the US-installed Afghan government called for expanding
the peacekeeping force in Afghanistan beyond Kabul,
Washington argued that such a step would only prolong
the government's dependence on the world body. Better,
it said, to focus on building the country's own army,
however long that might take.
However appealing
the notions of restoring sovereignty and state
responsibility may be from a theoretical point of view,
they bear little relation to the way in which the United
States is pursuing its war on terrorism.
On the
contrary, sovereignty - the right and power of the
nation state to regulate its internal affairs and
external relations without foreign dictation - is
clearly being subordinated to the will of the United
States.
"Complete sovereignty for us; complete
intervention for everyone else," said French
foreign-policy expert Pierre Hassner about the
administration's world view several months ago. "This is
typical of empire."
(Inter Press Service)
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