By Mathew Maavak
The "Clash of Civilisations" and "New World Order" are present day simmering topics that have heated up further in the wake of the yet to be concluded Iraqi imbroglio. But is there any credibility to these grandiloquent discourses? Or are they factitiously trumpeted by power-mongers who use them as stalking horses?
Samuel P. Huntington is the foremost proponent of the Clash of the Civilisations thesis. One of his central themes revolve around the inherent conflict between the Western and Islamic worlds, grounded on the antipodal values of the two dominant religions.
One synoptic leitmotiv of this work is Barry Buzan’s vision of a civilisational cold war emerging between "the West and Islam" which has its roots in the "historical rivalry between Christianity and Islam…jealousy of Western power," and "the invidious comparison between the accomplishments of Islamic and Western civilisation in the last two centuries."
Another salient point is that the "sources of conflict between states from different civilisations are, in large measure, those which have always generated conflict between groups: control of people, territory, wealth and resources, and (the) relative power to impose one’s own values, culture and institutions on another group as compared to that group’s ability to the reverse."
While Huntington’s work certainly does resonate within a limited paradigm, we shall see if it can be readily extrapolated to the larger international arena.
First of all, is there clash between Islam and Christianity? It certainly does exist in the Weltanschauung of the former domain, as any long-time resident of an Islamic nation can testify. Islamic texts, vitriolic sermons from mosques and the call to "resist" (a term made as deliberately nebulous as the word Jihad) infidels are almost a routine fare all across the Muslim world. And it gains impetus with any new attack – real or otherwise – against an Islamic nation.
The most recent test of this "clash" thesis is Iraq, where The US had contemptuously dismissed virtually every rule in International Relations and performed callisthenics on the crude power-based concept of Realism. But as ex-foes Saddam and the imams suddenly found common ground to resist the infidel armies (actually just two besides Aussie hangers-on), one should again analyse whether this is really a clash between antipathetic cultural/religious systems. The events in Iraq throw the first clue while this essay works counter-chronologically.
The US army did pulverise Iraq’s sinews of sustenance right from its decades-long sanctions to the coup de grace in recent weeks. The Islamic phobia of bible-toting missionaries towing closely behind the huge "waves of steel" –cheer led by Reverend Franklin Graham and his Samaritan Purse – have yet to materialise. It is reminiscent of the countless rumours like it that date from the Crusades right through to the colonial era and the present day. Islamists seldom realise that Jesus Christ can be sacrificed, yet again, for nobler pursuits like oil. The American conduct, so far, throws another clue to debunk Huntington’s thesis.
After Iraqi ministries, secret bunkers, palaces and essential infrastructure were blown to bits; victorious US soldiers took a deserved break to turn into voyeurs as a suddenly "emancipated" society disintegrated.
Looters, and perplexingly arsonists, ran amok, ripping apart the fabric of their once proud society. Where were the liberators when one of the greatest repositories of human history were smashed and looted in the centre of Baghdad?
Islamists should note that the "Christian army" didn’t seem to care for those priceless earthen pots that the Patriarch Abraham may have once used, not to mention other artefacts that may have had a propinquity of sorts to biblical figures like Daniel, Nebudchadnezzar and a host of others who had left behind a rich heritage for the world, including the West, all by the Rivers of Babylon.
Biblical-related treasures were treated as if they were spurious objets d’art, while the uglier Oil Ministry, oil fields and the Interior Ministry were treated as the Sacred Cows. (The last one actually is no surprise).
The nexus of US politicians, media, and super evangelists who churned out the farcical jingoistic slogans of WMD’s, terrorism and Axis of Evil ad nauseum were rather silent over the destruction of these priceless umbilical chords to our past.
The buzzword now is reconstruction – it has already supplanted Osama Bin Laden and perhaps even Saddam Hussein under a propaganda cocktail that induces amnesiac torpors –all during a game of power poker where the Ace of Spades may be conveniently forgotten. Wasn’t this the man who replaced Bin Laden as the mastermind of Sept 11 in American eyes?
The rest of the world can only gawk in astonishment at how this shameless canard can be foisted on a society situated right at the heart of the information superstructure.
Perhaps a lie repeated in a thousand different ways, right from Nayirah’s WW1-inspired, Oscar-deserving, maudlin account of rampaging Iraqi Huns throwing Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators, to ricin that were eventually traced to the Pankisi Gorge in Georgia to faked invoices of Saddam’s uranium purchases from Niger did the trick. Goebbel’s legacy is still alive, though he may be demonised by the enlightened vanguard of all things good and free.
"Freedom" and "justice" are relativistic terms that flit from one recess of the collective mind to other, according where it is welcomed in that neural world call Power. Ask the former scientists of the Japanese Imperial army Unit 731. Some might still be around to recount those sadistic experiments on US POWs. For a quid pro quo of "freedom", they presented enough data to boost the US bio weapons program. So what’s all this current fuss about Rihab "Dr Germ" Taha when American planes dropped deadly microbes inside creative receptacles over enemy territory during the Korean War?
According to Sterling Seagrave’s Yamato Dynasty, other bloodstained Japanese war criminals later became corporate shoguns, leading politicians and even Prime Ministers through the connivance of Herbert Hoover, Gen Douglas MacArthur and Gen Bonner Fellers.
Guess the lives of tortured, mutilated and slain US soldiers were not worth their weight in gold to the slush funds generated by Japan’s secret wartime Golden Lily booty. Where did all that looted Asian gold go anyway? And what really happened to that American investigator George Atcheson who stumbled upon these shameless shenanigans in post-war Tokyo that wildly strayed from the noble ambitions of transforming Japan into a true democracy?
Japan is now "our ally", when pervasive prosperity enables the majority on both sides to offer libations to that unifying, ancient deity called Mammon. This is not something the overwhelming majority in the Islamic world enjoys. Hence a ready recourse to fundamentalism, while the orchestra conductors remain well hidden in the background.
So where does this assertion fit in? That the "sources of conflict between states from different civilisations are, in large measure, those which have always generated conflict between groups: control of people, territory, wealth and resources, and relative power to impose one’s own values, culture and institutions on another group as compared to that group’s ability to the reverse."
In the New World Order (this definition keeps evolving, the essence remaining the same), valuable transactions lubricate testy frictions. It is significant that in the post-WW2 era, no fully developed nation had warred against another. The elite will not permit this, no matter how much vituperation is still thrown at the Germans, French and other historical whipping boys of the "Old Europe."
Is there a clash of civilisations in the Iraqi context? Well, Bechtel and Stevedoring Services of America received the contract to rebuild Umm Qasr though UK soldiers did a good deal of the dirty work. Despite this slap on the face, Tony Blair, true to his lapdog, poodle image, is frantically engineering a promissory note for British sub-contracts. Blood for oil – the real cause of the war – has its own asymmetric rewards.
The offal for the Brits is still in the offing.
Dick Cheney-linked Haliburton of course has secured a big fat deal, predetermined one might wonder, and how this goes unnoticed or unchallenged defies logic. But then, the US government has always been the faithful agent of home grown capitalist puppet masters, who surreptitiously pull strings behind the benign-sounding benefactor called USAID. Almost any big shot in the White House right now has some link to the lucrative Iraqi reconstruction process.
Henry Kissinger once came out with a book Does America Need a Foreign Policy? (Simon & Schuster, 2001) which I didn’t bother to read cause it really doesn’t and never did. The stuffed suit in the White House only has to listen to his campaign financers and business lobbies to execute the "flourishing of democracy and human rights around the world."
Ingenuous Americans may believe this moral hi-falutin twaddle but tell it to those Vietnamese, Central Americans and virtually half the world where the bogeyman was once communism (often only a form of socialism or anything else that trammelled vulgar capitalism).
Despite Francis Fukuyama’s Panglossian "End of History" thesis, the bogeyman has apparently shifted to the Islamic world. Still, it’s a tenuous reality. Fifteen out of the 19 Twin Tower terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, none Palestinian or Iraqi. But who gets the punishment?
A steady supply of Saudi oil greases the US industrial machinery even while the House of Saud plays a consummate double game. One sanctified hand tacitly palms off Wahabbi fundamentalism – effectively its second major export after oil - while its less virtuous counterpart, probably the left one, gleefully rolls the dice with Western business interests. This shows the matrix of power - the custodians of Mecca and Medina are let off shamelessly within a symbion of mutually flowing wealth. Is there a clash of civilisations here, between the epicentres of two inimical religions?
As the sociologist Johan Galtung had pointed out, the elite of the periphery (i.e Third World) forms a synergistic link with the elite of the centre (US). Though he could have added that this temporal unity can only be accomplished through that omnipresent broker called Mammon. The elite bloc, wherever they are, are religiously trained in this common propitiation while the rest of their citizenry are left to fight over other gods.
For instance, Islamic leaders the world over point out that North Korea (perhaps an even greater menace with its purported nukes and long-range missiles) is being handled with diplomacy but the Iraqi solution was quick and brutal in its most pyrotechnic glory. So, it seems "this was a war against Islam," a time-tested crass ploy by those leaders to rally a billion behind their respective, brutal regimes.
It is an old game.
Yet, deals are still being struck with the "Crusaders", weapons bought from them, and FDI deals clinched. Just where does the Christian vs Islam element come in? It’s artificially invoked in the minds of Islamists and well-funded US evangelists, while their leaders play the millennia-old game of profitable barter. Regime change is only used to serve Mammon. Except for potentially exportable nukes, North Korea doesn’t have the subterranean oleaginous treasures or other resources worth commandeering. Iran certainly has and it will be interesting to see how events develop in the near future despite a huge swath of young Iranians conforming to varying forms of Western values. But does Mammon care?
It does, in a most grotesque way. The tyrannical Communist China is now an investment paradise and Kim Jong Il can just as easily slough off his Stalinist image by playing ball via non-proliferation and open markets. The same Donald Rumsfeld who was instrumental in selling two light water reactors worth US$200 million to North Korea, when he was a Clinton-era director at Swiss multinational ABB, now wants another regime change. A few investments in Pyongyang can avert this impending disaster.
Saddam can attest to a variant of this arcane game. He was "our man" in the 80s when US dignitaries, including Rumsfeld visited him while a chemical genocide was being perpetrated to repel the Iranian "human wave."
According to human rights campaigner, Joost Hiltermann, a senior Baghdad-based US diplomat quipped that "Ambassador Rumsfeld's visit has elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level" – a veiled carte blanche for the likes of Gen Ali Hassan al-Majid to develop a certain chemistry towards a town called Halabja (March 1988). The atrocities – including that famous Kurdish genocide - were swiftly disinterred after the invasion of Kuwait. Saddam’s crimes were no longer sotto voce in the corridors of Capitol Hill but were now loudly juxtaposed to those of Hitler, Stalin and a host of other butchers – all who had one thing in common. They had made important deals, of one kind or the other, with Uncle Sam. (IBM and Ford’s archives alone will throw a clue to the Hitler connection).
This lesson of history is however unappreciated. Rather, it is wilfully left to collect dust through the amnesiac spins of the world media. It’s a pan-global affair, not just a Western machination despite all those hollow, self-righteous clamour about a New World Information and Communications Order two decades back and similar neo-colonialist recriminations before and since. These kinds of pontifications are needed for public consumption, while the well-detached elites are connected through the tentacles of finance.
The Islamic collective memory is well conditioned to think that the West has nefarious designs on their religion. But Westerners are also equally duped to believe in those clichéd rallying cries of democracy, human rights, freedom of religion etc which all mask the hidden agenda – free markets, for the rich. More Christians have been regularly slaughtered in Pakistan during brazen, religiously motivated attacks than in either Syria or Iraq, two Arab nations where the followers of Christ thrive to a significant extent.
It's a different scene in Saudi Arabia. Forget liquor unless you are in the presence of a well-connected sheikh, but can you easily buy an Easter card or spot Christmas trees in the expatriate-packed Riyadh? The Saudi religious police keep a zealous eye over any imaginary affront to their religion, where they are tasked to peer beyond the issue of women’s robes.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are US allies – the former probably hosts Bin Laden in the murderous Northwest Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan while the country that produced the majority of the most vicious terrorists America ever faced is still ensconced in an oasis of relative prosperity. Sept 11 can be superfluously repackaged as if it came from Iraq and it did.
Yarns like "Islam vs Christianity" and similar "civilisational clashes" are concocted by a cabalistic elite that doesn’t discriminate between creed, race or other divisions, usually created by humans for their lesser brethren. The fighting is left to the people on the streets.
Power dictates, the Plebeian obeys, and People are expendable.
The Patrician who started it all watches on the sidelines like a vulture, only to swoop down on the latest carrion. This is the true "clash" that resounds through history. The religious dimensions provide a worthy pretext, sometimes among the same adherents. The age-old Shia-Sunni violence and the crazy killings in Northern Ireland are just two examples. They come and go a long way.
The European wars fought after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) could no longer be forcefully decided or arbitrated by the Pope. Now, a New World Order is being swiftly reworked by a bible-toting warrior-pope who can mobilise millions despite his dyslexic gaffes. (Due credit should be given to his speechwriters, a smoothie called Ari Fleischer and shadows adept at political marionette).
Bush’s popularity is now sky-high. And this too after cowering between air force bases like a jet-propelled chicken in the hours after Sept 11 while frantic attempts were underway to rescue potential survivors.
It’s a similar story in the internecine Islamic world, though the Koran-quoting Islamic paladin Bin Laden is probably more articulate and valiant than Bush. There is something odd connecting these two. The ties that bind them go far beyond the "Crusades" (now crisply called "freedom") and "Jihads."
There were past business ties that linked their families - a brotherhood that only Mammon can accomplish. Their mutual indispensability, can in fact, continue if status quo is allowed to remain. The holy shrieks against Western infidels and the constantly regurgitated pall of terrorism will benefit both. Bin Laden can keep his warrior-saint aura while Bush can be assured of re-election in 2004. And if Saddam is never found, this is almost a surety. Forget the economy, stupid! Bogeymen, tax cuts for the fat cats, and incumbency are more important.
In the meantime, the tattered, ancient scrolls of Iraq have forever lost its priceless value, but they can be easily replaced by cheap revolutionary tracts, including the Islamic fundamentalist variety, that will only fuel the smouldering buncombe called the "Clash of the Civilisations".
The riff raff, the poor, the vulnerable and the patsies will be forced to fight again while their leaders wait to meet at plush negotiating tables and sumptuous peace banquets. Provided they still hold the trump cards. Only villains without the Ace of Spades or even Ten of Hearts end up getting disposed or indicted as war criminals.
There is nothing new under the sun. Saladin used to send fresh fruits with mountain snow to a febrile King Richard during the Third Crusades, after thousands perished on both sides. Once in a battle against Saladin's armies, Richards weary horse supposedly foundered, which Saladin duly replaced with two fresh horses and the message, "A gift from one king to another."
Foot soldiers, the hoi polloi and myopic patriots should take note.
Copyright@ 2003 Mathew Maavak
May 15 2003
(Originally published in the Online Journal)
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