Profiting from war: MEDIA REVIEW

A VERY interesting article by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (also known for his rather harsh views on Pakistan) in last week’s issue of The New Yorker seems to have created quite a stir. Targeting the Head of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, Richard Perle — arguably the chief architect of the US government’s Iraq policy (and war, probably by the time this goes into print) — Mr Hersh writes that he met Saudi wheeler dealer Adnan Khashoggi in January of this year in France. The 4,000-plus word article, ‘Lunch with the Chairman’, alleges that Mr Perle used his position in the US government to garner investments of his own security firm.

The chief of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board, who at one time wrote policy briefs for former Israel Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, met Saleh Al Zuhair, a Saudi financier whose investments include extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East. Mr Perle, Mr Hersh writes, met the Saudi to discuss possible investment in his firm Trireme Partners LP, registered in November 2001, in the US state of Delaware.

Mr Perle is described as a managing partner of Trireme whose main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Mr Khashoggi last November, is to “invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defence”. The letter, the New Yorker article says, mentioned the company’s connections with the US government: “Three of Trireme’s management group members currently advise the US Secretary of Defence by serving on the US defence policy board, and one of Trireme’s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board.”

The letter said that 45 million dollars had already been raised, including 20 million dollars from Boeing. Hence, the reason Mr Perle was meeting with the Saudi investor was clearly to raise money for his firm.

Now a bit about the defence policy board of the Pentagon. It is an advisory group composed primarily of former US government officials, retired military officers and academics. Members receive no salary and include former national security advisers, secretaries of defence, and heads of the CIA. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review, monitor and evaluate America’s defence policies and objectives.

The extremely-well researched story seems to create beyond a shadow of doubt one thing about America’s campaign against Iraq: that it was being formulated by people who were pressing the rest of world to get rid of a nuclear-armed dictator or face war, and found nothing wrong in setting up companies that would benefit in case hostilities did break out.

The story went on to allege that after the meeting, one of Mr Perle’s associates sent the Saudi investor a “12-point memorandum” saying that if Saddam Hussein admitted to possessing weapons of mass destruction and agreed to resign and leave Iraq with sons and some of his ministers, the US “would not have to go to war against Iraq”. (The exile option is precisely what George W. Bush offered Saddam on March 16.) This letter was leaked to Saudi and Lebanese newspapers, where it was portrayed as a plan backed by Richard Perle who was in negotiations with the Saudi government.

All this happened while in the public realm Mr Perle missed no opportunity to publicly criticize Saudi Arabia for being soft on terrorist, inviting even a consultant with the Rand Corporation to come and give a briefing at the Pentagon portraying Riyadh as Washington’s key adversary. However, he saw nothing wrong in asking a Saudi investor to put money into his company at the height of the US war rhetoric against Iraq.

The fact is — and at the risk of sounding anti-Semitic — Mr Perle has been closely identified with Israel, specifically with the right wing Likud Party. In 1983, when he was an assistant secretary of defence in the Reagan administration, Mr Perle was criticized for recommending that the US Army buy weapons from an Israeli company whose owners had paid him a $50,000 fee just two years earlier. He has also been accused of passing classified information to the Israeli embassy in the early 1970s, when he was an aide to Senator Henry Jackson (Democrat of Washington).

He was also in the forefront of passing on the (eventually fake) story to the world media that the alleged leader of the Sept 11 attacks, Mohammed Ata, had met an Iraqi official in Parague. The Czech government later denied this story as did senior US officials, but Mr Perle continues quoting it.

The fact of the matter is that Mr Perle has not denied the contents of the New Yorker article. In fact, he admitted, as the article itself points out, that he did indeed meet two Saudis in France this past January, but that meeting had nothing to do with America’s impending war on Iraq. As for Seymour Hersh, he is the one who exposed the US army’s massacre of 600 Vietnamese civilians at Mai Lai in 1968. He is also the recipient of a Pulitzer prize and several other journalism awards.— OMAR R. QURAISHI

(email: omarq@cyber.net.pk)

The US versus the rest: COMMENT

THE US invasion of Iraq poses a new set of problems. The clash in the UN regarding Iraq reminds one of Samuel Huntington’s thesis of clash of civilizations. The clash is very much there but the scenario is not following Huntington’s script. The central issue that has emerged around the Iraqi crisis is whether the custodian of world order is the United Nations or the US, with the brute force of the greatest military power of the world. If world order is not merely a euphemism for world hegemony, the United States cannot be accepted as being above the law.

The rhetoric of ridding the world of the danger from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction does not carry much weight when the US invades Iraq with weapons of mass destruction that can destroy dozens of Iraqis in one go. It was SAARC that reminded the world after the subcontinental blasts that the issue of non- proliferation should be dealt with in tandem with the issue of dismantling nuclear arsenals. No country that possesses bloated armaments can be accepted as a policeman with a right to demand that subject peoples disarm.

Huntington projected the scenario of the West versus the Rest. He warned the West of the danger from Confucianism and Islam. But the battle-lines as drawn today are not between the West and the Rest. They are rather between the United States and the Rest. Christian Europe, at least non-English speaking Europe, is among the Rest. The only ‘civilization’ with the United States is that of Zionism.

Current affairs have neither confirmed Francis Fukiyama’s ‘End of History’ nor Huntington’s clash thesis. History provides a panorama of facts. Many social scientists are not able to pinpoint the particular seed that will grow. The United States was assumed to be a power for peace and law. But at the moment, the United States, with more military power than the next 25 advanced countries combined, is on the imperial path; it is building a pax Americana far greater than Pax Britannica. But the 21st century is not an ideal time for empires. The entire humanity, glued to their TVs, monitoring the great and the mighty, is not ready to tolerate that anachronism.

The jihadi attack of 9/11 did seem at the time to prove Huntington’s clash thesis. The United Nations endorsed the anti-bin Laden war in Afghanistan. But beyond that the perceptions of the United States and the United Nations diverged. With every passing day more and more countries — and world citizenry — are rallying to the defence of the United Nations, the defence of dialogue and peace, and opposing US unilateralism. The actual danger to world peace has turned out to be from US weapons of mass destruction and not those of puny Baghdad.

The United States has managed to place itself in a no-win situation. It has invaded Iraq, but it is isolated in the world community. Even Pakistan is not in a position to support it. But America was not able to wait. Its build up is overflowing. President Bush has donned the shining armour of his father who had spoken about ‘knocking out’ Saddam Hussein, and has reverted to the battlefield, bringing tension to America and to the world. The earlier president, Clinton, had rejected the battlefield and stated in his presidential message that America’s future war would be fought in American classrooms. He was also alive to the dynamics of globalization. He knew that technological and industrial advance in some parts of the world was bound to widen the gap between the more advanced and less advanced regions. Protests as that at Seattle were thus natural.

American industry and technology are an asset for everyone. It is paradoxical that while MacDonalds and KFCs can achieve wonders in market research and salesmanship, the US is not able to understand, at least the Bush administration is not able to understand, that world order can only be built by consent and not by bullying. Americans are brilliant on specifics but poor Pauls on generalities. America’s massive military strength has become its Achilles’ heel, blinding it to the nuances emerging in international relations. After all, Soviet Russia collapsed under the weight of its massive military might. The US is slow in learning that life has certain demands that cannot be measured on the scale of dollars and guns. European and other statesmen, including Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, value American assets and are trying to rescue America’s soul against its own will.

It is the bane of civilization that prosperity increases inequality between the so-called ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’ Poverty and pauperization can create suicidal/killing tendencies. The industrial revolution, in the early period of laissez faire, created a class of proletariat, poor workers, who had nothing to loose but their chains. So they united for revolution. Their militancy evaporated when welfarism came along and they had their old-age pension and many other allowances to lose. The UN has been appealing to the prosperous countries for decades to earmark just 0.7 per cent of their incomes for poor countries, which they have failed to do. It should be kept in view that the jihadi is just the tip of the iceberg. It is in the interest of all to remember that there are limits beyond which poverty and backwardness can become really dangerous. Not only for themselves and their societies but also for the advanced globalized economies. Prosperity, to be stable, must be like the top of a pyramid. If it lacks a strong base, it is in danger of being pulled down.

Where did Huntington go wrong? He probably overlooked the fact that civilizations always grow in conditions of complexity and interdependence. They move towards co-operation, minimizing clash. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ are intermingled. Debating and wheedling and quarrelling and compromising, the international apple-cart trundles on. The United Nations is there. It may not be an ideal institution, but it does project the interdependence of all the peoples of the world. Those who defy or ignore that august body, as George Bush and Tony Blair are doing at the moment, are certain to be besieged by the ‘multitude’ as well as the nations of the world.

No civilized country of the world approves terrorism. But at the same time, the United Nations cannot endorse the use of force for countering terrorism before exhausting all avenues of diplomacy. As Kofi Annan and others have pointed out, terror is not an appropriate weapon for fighting terrorism. The unilateralism of the United States in Iraq has emboldened North Korea to send out a bizarre signal: we will be conducting nuclear tests; take us on if you dare!

Saddam Hussein may be a pariah but the US is already in an unenviable position and most probably will be a loser politically. This loss can be far greater if Iraq announces some measures of democratization. The Revolutionary Council has been there long enough.

The US is now flouting the UN Security Council and incurring the mischief of the law. From being an accuser it will become an accused. As the American invasion gains momentum general disorder is flaring up in the region. The humanitarian problem will be huge. It seems the world is in for a long period of turmoil in West Asia regarding which the American perception of a quick and clean victory seems dicey.