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ANALYSIS
A heavy-handed
hegemon
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Hawks in the administration of US
President George W Bush received a rude reminder last
week that Washington's vaunted power to determine the
course of events around the world is more limited than
perhaps they had thought.
They had hoped to
focus world opinion on Iraq's submission of an allegedly
deceptive and incomplete inventory of its missiles and
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to the United Nations
Security Council in order to ease the way for an
invasion of Iraq by mid-February. They had also hoped to
get Turkey to agree to act as a base for US ground
troops, so that they could attack Baghdad from the north
as well as from the south via Kuwait.
They got
neither. In fact, all they got was aggravation,
complaints and defiance - from friends and foes alike.
The week started auspiciously enough.
Hyper-eager US diplomats grabbed the original Iraqi
report from the Colombian chairman of the UN Security
Council before he had a chance to have it copied.
The White House cleared the latest additions to
its controversial new national security strategy: a
promise to respond with "overwhelming force", meaning
nuclear weapons, if WMD were used against its troops,
territory or allies; and the authority to conduct
"effective interdiction" and preventive strikes against
states or groups that are close to acquiring WMD or the
missiles needed to deliver them.
Diplomatic and
military muscles thus flexed before the (presumably
awestruck) world, the administration spent the rest of
the week on the receiving end of a collective obscene
hand gesture by countries great and small.
No
sooner had the new anti-WMD policy been released then an
unflagged ship that had been tracked by US satellites
since leaving North Korea was seized by Spanish warships
in the Indian Ocean and found to be carrying Scud
missiles. "A perfect opportunity to demonstrate US
determination and international cooperation", thought
the hawks, until Yemen, a key US ally in the war on
terrorism, claimed that it had bought the missiles fair
and square, protested their seizure and demanded that
they be delivered.
Washington meekly, if
angrily, climbed down, managing in turn to anger the
Spanish, one of its strongest supporters in the war
against terrorism, who asked why they had risked the
lives of their own commandos at Washington's request for
nothing.
But that was only a foretaste of what
was to come - a much more serious challenge from North
Korea itself. The country's announcement that it was
re-starting a nuclear power plant that had been frozen
under the terms of a 1994 accord with Washington in
response to the administration's decision to cut off
heavy oil deliveries early next year constituted direct
defiance of repeated US demands over the past two months
that the country dismantle all of its nuclear programs.
By announcing that it was resuming operations in
the Yangbyon plant, whose plutonium was believed to have
already produced one or two nuclear bombs, the North
appeared to be calling Washington's bluff, even as it
restated its position that serious bilateral talks, so
far rejected by Washington, could resolve all
outstanding problems.
Pyongyang's move - made
more dramatic by its announcement on Friday that it has
asked the International Atomic Energy Agency to remove
equipment that has been monitoring 8,000 spent fuel rods
whose plutonium could be used to quickly produce several
bombs - puts administration hardliners, who have pursued
the tough line on North Korea over objections from US
Secretary of State Colin Powell and others, between a
rock and hard place.
On the one hand, the
credibility of the administration's tough preemption
policy has been challenged directly by a charter member
of the axis of evil, which, unlike Iraq, already admits
to having an active nuclear-weapons development program.
On the other, hardliners know that a preemptive
military strike risks not only a major conflagration on
the peninsula, but also the permanent derailing of their
plans in Iraq and the Middle East, not to mention
straining ties with their closest allies in East Asia -
South Korea and Japan - both of which have urged
Washington to be more flexible toward the North.
"The alternative to getting back to the table
[with North Korea] is to risk a continuing spiral of
action-reaction that will lead nowhere good," said Alan
Romberg, a retired State Department expert on Korea now
with the Washington-based Stimson Center.
How to
resume talks without both losing credibility and
provoking cries of double standards in its kid-gloves
treatment of a nuclear-armed North Korea and a far
weaker Iraq will not be easy. For now, the White House
has said that Pyongyang's decision is "unacceptable".
If Yemen was the most embarrassing of the week's
episodes and North Korea the most dangerous, yet another
major setback revolved around Turkey and the European
Union (EU).
During what one senior
administration official characterized as "intense" White
House talks on Tuesday with the Turkish ruling party
leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Bush team offered an
aid package worth more than US$20 billion - twice the
entire annual US foreign aid budget - in exchange for
full Turkish cooperation with Washington on a ground
invasion of Iraq from Turkish soil.
Erdogan,
citing overwhelming domestic opposition to the idea,
reportedly declined to strike a deal, but stressed that
Ankara would be much more favorably disposed if the EU
agreed to launch talks on Turkey's membership in the
body within the next year.
Washington, which had
already been lobbying the EU hard, intensified its
efforts by getting Bush personally involved, but to no
avail. By the end of the week, EU members agreed only to
meet again in two years to determine whether Turkey had
met political and human rights conditions on membership.
The decision initially provoked fury in Ankara, while in
Washington, officials said that they were still trying
to get clarification.
European diplomats
complained that Washington's pressure had, if anything,
been counter-productive and raised real resentments.
"The Americans acted as if we don't have real rules and
conditions on EU membership," said one based here. "What
would have been your reaction if we demanded that you
admit Canada as a state?"
European diplomats
were particularly angry with Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, the leader of the administration's
"attack-Iraq" faction, who travelled to Brussels after
meeting Erdogan and Turkish generals in Ankara last
week. "He really does believe that this is the Roman
Empire," said one.
The Europeans are also
increasingly angry over Washington's refusal to push
forward a "road map" to be put together by "the quartet"
- the United States, the EU, Russia and the United
Nations - to achieve an independent Palestinian state
within three years.
The White House, which
appointed a prominent pro-Likud neo-conservative,
Elliott Abrams, to oversee its Mideast portfolio 10 days
ago, has defied EU pressure to finish work on the plan
this month, before Israel's elections at the end of
January.
Some EU diplomats reportedly favor
dropping out of the quartet and launching their own plan
given the administration's recalcitrance.
(Inter
Press Service)
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