Relax the human rights demands

If we need to compromise with Arab societies, that may include working with regimes we find repugnant

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

A little-known Canadian proverb: Those who list faults in others merely point out their own. With that truism in mind, we turn to US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who recently used pen in place of sword to defend his illegal war and occupation in Iraq in the pink pages of the pre-eminent British business newspaper, The Financial Times. “They seek to destroy what they could never build in 1,000 years,” he faulted the opponents of his Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (formerly known as the War on Terror), “and they kill people they could never persuade.” I looked everywhere for the literary equivalent of the tongue in cheek for that second-half whopper, but found none.

But then again, there is no need to guffaw here, for Rumsfeld has only confirmed that this is indeed a war, since it has been known since 1812, when Clauswitz wrote his Principles of War, that war is diplomacy—that is, persuasion—by other means. Anyone engaged in a war, or in fact, anyone engaged in murder in any context, is trying to kill people they could not persuade.

War is what you wage when the other side isn’t listening, and war is successful when you get the other side’s attention. People often make the mistake of thinking all wars are always existential—aimed at utterly destroying the enemy’s total society—but very few wars are waged with this end in mind. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was very clear that his and President Nixon’s plan to secretly bomb Hanoi and to carpet bomb farming districts that fed the capital city, a set of actions that certainly looked existential to the Vietnamese, was only aimed at bringing North Vietnam to the peace talks in Paris. In his memoirs, Kissinger relates getting up from the table itself, when talks were not going completely according to US desires, and making a phone call to the Pentagon to up the rate of B-52 bomber aircraft dispatched with bombs to northern Vietnam, expecting the results to be relayed back to his counterpart across the table sometime after lunch. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with his Vietnamese counterpart at the Paris peace talks, Le Duc Tho, in 1973. (Le had the decency to refuse to accept the peace prize, on account of the fact peace had not yet been declared. Kissinger showed no such hesitation.)

Rumsfeld’s commentary in the August 1 communiqué at least shows some movement in an otherwise rigor mortis-stricken regime in Washington, even if the movement is only a dawning recognition barely registering on a slightly raised eyebrow that a defense of the US position should at least be tried. It is certainly welcome throughout the world whenever any US official acknowledges that there may be dissenting points of view that are nonetheless valid. In this case, it is nothing short of miraculous that a US official has implied his acknowledgement that the terrorists, as he calls them, may have a point, and more importantly, may be amenable to negotiations. Granted, Rumsfeld does that acknowledging in the negative and only to shoot the idea down, but at least the idea has reached Washington’s famously potato-stuffed ears.

It is an especially significant point to seize on for those looking for some good news, particularly in the context of recent Pentagon confirmations that Rumsfeld himself, as well as other high-placed military officials, have already been conducting negotiations with Iraqi terrorists. (A note about the term “terrorists”: I only mean by it to identify who we are talking about here, but not to judge what they do, which is more accurately described as occupation resistance. I’d call them resisters, except that is a whole other argument.)

Here we can see even through the continuing bluster (“Some seem to believe that accommodating extremist demands . . . might put an end to their grievances . . . but consider that when terrorists struck America on September 11, 2001 the US had been nowhere near Afghanistan and Iraq”), the beginnings of what the end of the current madness may start to look like. It’s a scenario Canada would do well to help foster and encourage, and right now would be a good time for Canada to get involved in the conflict—but solely along these lines.

What the US wants is dibs on remaining stocks of oil for consumption at home by US cars and around the world by US-based companies. It’s not an unreasonable desire. American companies are on the verge of being outbid for those remaining stocks of oil, as Chevron has been by Chinese state-owned company CNOOC over the pickings owned by Unicol. There’s only two ways to get anything in this world: buy it or steal it. If they can’t buy it, reason the Americans, they better beef up their security, if you know what I mean.

Should oil prices spike a lot higher than they have already (they are sitting at new records over US$61 per barrel as I write), and if they do so even more rapidly (Alberta’s 2005 budget, prepared as recently as late 2004, assumed a price of $27 per barrel), the very car-lubricated US economy could utterly collapse. Much of the consumer demand that has propped up the economy for so many years will not only be usurped by more cash going to the gas station than to WalMart, but also, higher gas prices mean fewer car trips to the mall. The Chinese minister of trade noted recently that the US consumer buys much more Chinese made goods than the European consumer because the European usually has to walk home and carry his stuff while the American consumer has a car with a back seat and trunk to carry home more stuff. With such esoteric considerations is the world’s economy operated.

No car trips by American consumers means no Americans shopping, mostly because by now, after decades of city planning assuming the car and, more to the point, its fuel, would last eternally, it is just about impossible to shop in America without a car. But the world has no interest in seeing that happen, at least not quickly and perhaps not completely. No doubt, America’s appointment as sole superpower was destined to be a short affair, and their behavior while solely at the top has made everyone in the world happy for that. But America will always be one of the leading nations of the world, if not the only one, and the best order the world can reasonably expect is one where the top group of leading nations, of which America would always be one, are constrained by each other and by the rest of the world. If you think a powerful and triumphalist America is dangerous, just imagine an utterly crushed and humiliated America. Think disgruntled employee plus Jack Daniels plus a big honking gun, times 300 million.

What the Islamist terrorists want is a world that is more balanced between the big powers and the small. No one who is intellectually honest can say that the relationship between Arab Muslim countries and the West looks like anything other than straight up imperialism of the big over the small. (Anyone who still requires the argument to be stated will in fact never be convinced.) There is in all societies an ebb and flow in their fluid leadership structures. This fact is acknowledged in the term limits imposed by all democracies on the electorally winning regimes. Muslim societies are no different. But there has been no significant change in regime philosophy in many of them for about a hundred years because external forces—Western commodity-consuming nations most of all—have an interest in one kind of regime in the commodity-producing nations, and typically the consumer nations have had the power to back the kind of leadership of the producer nations that suits them best. That usually means a leadership compliant with consumer nations’ requests for more commodities at cheaper prices under fewer regulations.

Nothing has really changed in the role the producing societies are expected to play in the global economy, and consequently, no change in regime philosophy has been required of them by consuming nations, and so no change, by and large, has occurred. This is despite massive changes within the commodity-producing societies. During the Saudi-organized OPEC oil embargo of the West in 1973, there were about six million residents of that country, a lot of them foreign workers, and most of the rest uneducated and nomadic tribes people. Today, still bristling under the very same leadership structure and in fact much the same leadership personalities, the Saudi Arabian population has exploded to over 20 million people, they are mostly urban, and well over half are under the age of 24. Guys wearing desert headdresses issuing mysterious edicts about Allah’s wishes barely worked when the scattered population was traveling by camel from tent to tent. It doesn’t work at all now that they sit in festering crowded apartments watching Friends on satellite TV and bitterly moaning about stupid McJobs jobs with their real friends over the cell phone—now that they are just like us, in other words.

A new regime may want to nationalize key revenue-generating resource-extracting industries, to take control of the national currency (as per the hugely successful Chinese model), to redistribute property, charge higher extraction fees to finance social services like hospitals and schools, and impose stringent environmental regulations on economic activity. A more in-tune Saudi government may think to restrict the flow of oil under a certain cap the better to protect the fragile oil fields for the longer future, rather than destroy that future by pumping too much oil too fast and collapsing the productive oil fields, all to simply shield the US economy from momentary recessions. For example.

But that aim, as well as all the possible others listed above, clash in the immediate time frame with the interests of consuming nations. In the end, a compromise is called for. As is now clear at this stage of the one hundred-year relationship between the oil consuming West and the oil producing Middle East, regimes must be allowed to change and producing countries must be allowed to regain sovereignty over their valuable resources, at least to the degree that decisions about oil should be made by the consensus of all stakeholders.

That means also that we have to accept different kinds of regimes in these different kinds of countries. At a time when we are called on to negotiate a compromise and accept a wider definition of what a good and healthy society and leadership looks like, it would be most unfortunate to instead introduce whole new ways in which we find we cannot accept other societies and their leaderships. But this seems to be exactly where Canada is going. Whether it’s expecting highly evolved conceptions of women’s rights and immediate and complicated applications of them in societies barely emerging from the rock age, to imposing standards of labour conditions in societies just now finding any useful work to settle down to doing in the new world, we ought to bear in mind that those same women’s rights we suddenly expect all nations to protect are ones our own societies thoroughly rejected only two generations ago (and still reject today in Alberta and Texas, and most points in between), and so too with virtually the whole spectrum of human rights demands we have opened up against those societies like a fusillade of canons.

We may do better to relax a bit on these issues. Iran is a good model. No country made a more dramatic change of regime when it went overnight from the thoroughly West-friendly Shah to the nightmarishly anti-West Ayatollah. Yet, just one generation later, that society is more contiguous with its open and liberal past than broken with it. And as recent drives for reform in Iran have demonstrated, though millions of young people born after the revolution share none of the anti-West fervor, they also seek reform, not revolution. They are ultimately loyal to the regime and Iran is consequently today among the most stable in the region.

Open mindedness is called for now, and Canada can best express this attitude toward America by acknowledging that that country does indeed face serious peril, and toward rapidly evolving Arab societies by readily accepting that others’ ideas about what makes a good society may be far from aligned with our own ideas. So be it. There may be a better time in the future when we can go around tut-tutting fallen heroes and instructing others on how to treat their women, children and workers.

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