The Revenge of History

The Battle for the 21st Century

Seumas Milne

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781781684511
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

From 9/11 to the Arab Spring and beyond - encompassing the economic crisis, the rise of China, and conflicts in the Middle East - The Revenge of History turns the orthodoxies of the past generation on their head.
In this coruscating account of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Seumas Milne presents a powerful indictment of the United States, a global and corporate empire in decline. Milne also examines the causes of the credit crisis and the Great Recession, reveals the policy of humanitarian military intervention to be a failed land grab, explains the dynamo behind the roaring Chinese economy and discovers new models of society flourishing in Latin America. Brilliant, bold and always incisive, The Revenge of History is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand what has gone wrong.

Chapter One

Last Days of the New World Order

THE RISE OF LIBERAL INTERVENTIONISM (1999–2002)

The 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington did not come out of a clear blue sky, as was often said in the West at the time. They were the product of decades of US and Western support for client dictatorships across the oil-rich Middle East, sponsorship of Israeli occupation, war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and the militarily enforced asphyxiation of Iraq. They also followed a decade of untrammelled US power and neoliberal globalisation in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. These were the days of the US-proclaimed New World Order, reflected in a growing Anglo-American appetite to intervene militarily in the name of human rights – from Kosovo to Sierra Leone – while corporate-tailored triangulation set rigid limits on political alternatives and progressive change. But a backlash had already begun.

9/11: They can’t see why they are hated

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don’t get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force – just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process – or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world – seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-Western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of ‘civilisation’, with its overtones of Samuel Huntington’s poisonous theories of post-cold-war confrontation between the West and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.

As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked for his opinion of Western civilisation, ‘it would be a good idea’. Since George W. Bush’s father inaugurated his New World Order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel’s thirty-four-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.

If, as yesterday’s Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration’s Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.

It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swathes of the world’s population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday’s attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden’s supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons’ teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.

It was the United States, after all, which poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.

But by then bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-backed Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push four million people to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.

All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching through the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil – as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the two million estimated to have died in Congo’s wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. ‘What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?’ one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.

Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counterproductive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every ‘terror network’ that is rooted out, another will emerge – until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.¹

(13/9/01)

KOSOVO: A powerful and ominous precedent

As Nato embarks on its fourth week of ‘humanitarian war’ over the immolation of Kosovo, similar disasters around the world are attracting rather less attention. In East Timor, illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1975 in defiance of the United Nations, state and army-sponsored militias have massacred hundreds of civilians in recent weeks, in an apparent effort to prevent a UN-organised referendum on the territory’s future.

More than 200,000 people – around a third of the population – are estimated to have been killed since the Indonesian invasion. David Ximenes, deputy leader of the Timorese liberation movement Fretilin, remarked this week: ‘We have had our own Kosovo here for the last twenty-three years.’

The parallels between the treatment meted out by Serbia to Kosovan Albanians and Turkey’s war on its Kurdish minority are even closer – except that in the Turkish case, it has been on a larger scale. The Turkish war against Kurdish PKK guerillas – Turkey’s own Kosovo Liberation Army – has so far claimed 30,000 lives, driven three million Kurds from their homes and razed 4,000 villages to the ground. This week, Turkey sent a 5,000-strong force, backed up by fighter aircraft and attack helicopters, to hunt down PKK units in northern Iraq, where US and British bombers have also been in action again, ostensibly to protect Iraqi Kurds from Saddam Hussein.

And while Nato bombs rain down on Yugoslavia, Israeli warplanes have also been back in action in Lebanon against Hizbullah fighters in and around the Lebanese territory it has held for the past twenty-one years – along with the Syrian and West Bank territory it has occupied for rather longer – in violation of a string of UN resolutions. Meanwhile, Israel has accepted 112 Kosovan refugees, while well over two million Palestinian refugees and their families are still unable to return to their homes, in many cases more than fifty years after they were forced out of them.

There is no lack of other Kosovo parallels around the world. The significance of these particular instances of repression and war is not simply that the West is failing to act against the three states responsible, but that all are long-standing staunch Western allies and continue to be armed and funded by the US, Britain and other Nato states, even while the occupations and atrocities roll on. Indeed, Turkey, which also illegally occupies half of Cyprus, is not only a Nato member but also an enthusiastic participant in Tony Blair’s ‘war of values’ against Yugoslavia.

That is not an argument for air strikes against Jakarta, Ankara or Jerusalem. But if Nato’s self-proclaimed new internationalism is to amount to more than a modernised version of gunboat diplomacy and Liberal imperialism, it must at least mean that Western support is withdrawn from those states carrying out some of the very crimes for which it says it has gone to war with Serbia.

Nothing of the kind, of course, is going to happen. But what credibility can there be in a policy which claims to be based on a moral imperative, but only punishes ethnic cleansing and human rights abuses by regimes that refuse to toe the Western line? This is the fourth air assault on a sovereign state by the US, supported by Britain, in eight months, following those against Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. None was carried out in response to aggression against another state, and none has been sanctioned by the UN.

Even by Nato’s own lights, this war has scarcely been a success. It has self-evidently generated a worse humanitarian disaster than the one it was supposed to bring to an end – a point horrifically underscored by yesterday’s aerial slaughter of refugees – and failed to contain the conflict, while risking a wider war in the region.

By attacking an independent state over government-sponsored repression within its own borders, Nato has created a powerful but potentially ominous precedent. The emerging consensus that there must be some scope for human rights-based interventions will be destroyed unless they are made exclusively on the basis of recognised rules and explicit support from the UN or other universally accepted regional bodies. Without those safeguards, the risk must be of increased international conflict, as governments become judges in their own cause and the world’s most powerful states commandeer the new doctrine to promote their strategic interests.²

(15/4/99)

Sierra Leone: Raising the crusader’s flag in Africa

Any thought that the aftermath of Nato’s Kosovan imbroglio might have dimmed Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for ‘humanitarian wars’ has been swiftly dispelled. His government has emerged as the most interventionist British administration since decolonisation. No opportunity is now to be passed up, it seems, to raise the twenty-first-century crusader’s flag across the globe.

The increasingly grim Sierra Leone adventure, with its kidnappings and bloody military rescues, is the third time in eighteen months that New Labour has used British armed force outside UN control. It has also been the biggest independent British overseas military operation since the Falklands war.

Thirty-nine years after the union flag was hauled down in Freetown on almost two centuries of bloody colonial rule, British squaddies have now been back in force for months, their commanders directing the conduct of a gruesome and intractable civil war. With barely a murmur of public debate at home, British troops are once again killing Sierra Leoneans in their own land, while Royal Navy gunboats patrol the West African coast and the limb-hacking rebels of the Revolutionary United Front are routinely compared to Nazis, the standard designation for all post-1945 British enemies.

The British ‘training mission’ and its backup security units, denounced by the UN’s commander for their ‘Rambo tactics’, are now embroiled in a growing conflict with renegade British-armed militias, among others. The declared intent is not only to rescue hostages and maul the formerly pro-government ‘West Side Boys’, but also to take back control of Sierra Leone’s lucrative diamond fields.

The Blair administration’s intervention sprees began with the four-day Anglo-American onslaught against Iraq in December 1998. Bombing raids have continued ever since, outside UN resolutions and opposed by a majority of the permanent UN Security Council members, while the US and Britain’s enforcement of the failed sanctions regime is now almost universally recognised as having created a humanitarian disaster. US Democratic congressman David Bonnier described the sanctions as ‘infanticide masquerading as a policy’.

It was Nato’s self-proclaimed war of values over Kosovo that triggered Blair’s clarion call last year in Chicago for a new wave of worldwide intervention. It would be based, he declared, on a ‘subtle blend’ of self-interest and moral purpose, echoing the liberal imperialists of the late nineteenth century. A year on, reverse ethnic cleansing proceeds apace in Nato-occupied Kosovo.

But the full flowering of Blair’s new doctrine has been in Africa, where the United States still fears to tread in the wake of its Somali debacle of the early 1990s. After weeks of interference in Zimbabwe’s internal crisis – with British ministers defending the cause of the white landowners who stood behind the racist Rhodesian regime – Blair’s paratroopers were despatched to Freetown to fill the vacuum left by the disintegrating UN peacekeeping force Britain refused to join a year ago.

The fact that Iraq, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone are all former British colonies doesn’t trouble the cheerleaders of the new ‘doctrine of international community’, enveloped as they are in a blanket of cultural amnesia about the horrors of Britain’s colonial past. It is less than half a century since British soldiers shot dead striking Sierra Leoneans on the streets of Freetown, nailed the limbs of Kenyan fighters to crossroads posts and posed for pictures with the severed heads of Malayan guerrillas.

With such a record, Britain might be thought the least suitable country on the planet to sort out the ‘savagery’ of its one-time colonial subjects. The world, we are told, has moved on. But for the people of Africa – burdened with Western debt, arms, mercenaries, mineral-hungry multinational companies and commodity prices that have been falling for forty years – it has not moved on enough.

After supporting one corrupt dictator after another in Sierra Leone, Britain has thrown its military weight behind President Kabbah and his supporters, who Tony Blair insists are the democratic ‘good guys’, against the rural-based RUF, led by Vice-President Foday Sankoh until his capture by British soldiers in May.

But the 1996 elections which brought Kabbah to power, held when the country was already engulfed in civil war, did not include the RUF and were racked by violence and ballot rigging claims. While the RUF has the worst record of atrocities, according to Amnesty International, Kabbah and his Kamajor militias have also been heavily involved in torture and extra-judicial killings—and his ally Johnny Paul Koroma is responsible for the mutilation and massacre of thousands of civilians. These are the people British troops are supporting – or were, until Koroma’s former protégés, the West Side Boys, started kidnapping British soldiers.

The reality is that Britain and its corrupt friends are part of the problem in Sierra Leone, and no outside force can impose the necessary internal settlement. If Blair wants to build a genuine international community, he should be working through the UN and universally accepted regional bodies – rather than, as Nelson Mandela charged earlier this year, playing ‘policemen of the world’ with the US, and ‘introducing chaos into international affairs’ by acting unilaterally.

The record shows that the more effective peacekeepers in Sierra Leone have been regional forces, including Nigeria’s. The most useful contribution Britain and other Western states – which still refuse to write off the debts of countries such as Nigeria – could now make to Sierra Leone would be to support an African solution to an African crisis.³

(11/9/00)

Israel: Men of blood and global justice

Governments and their leaders can no longer hide from global justice, we have been repeatedly assured. They cannot shelter behind national jurisdictions and state sovereignty. Those responsible for human rights abuses, ethnic cleansing atrocities and, most of all, war crimes, must and will be pursued regardless of national ...