Rene — Blueprint for war
Topic(s): Activism | Comments Off on Rene — Blueprint for warA different kind of activism and an interesting interview – rg
Since 1997, an obscure US organisation has been promoting a preemptive and explicitly aggressive approach to securing American dominance in the 21st century. Under cover of such terms as “benevolent hegemony” and “preventive war”, they have spent the last years elaborating their plans for the use of excessive military force to intimidate the rest of the world. Many of the key supporters of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) entered the White House along with George W Bush in 2000, and have been instrumental in designing and launching the war on terror in general, and the occupation of Iraq in particular. This week, a People’s Tribunal opens in Brussels, Belgium, to try the PNAC for their part in dragging the world into a state of permanent war. The BRussells Tribunal, inspired by the hearings held in 1967 by philosopher Bertrand Russell into American war crimes in Vietnam, is just the first session in a series of citizens’ forums which will be held around the world over the next year, and which seek to expose and condemn the dark face of current American foreign policy. As the Tribunal opens in Belgium,Frederick Bowie spoke to participants about what they hoped to achieve, and what the world needs to know about America’s neo-conservative palace revolution.
Blueprint for war
The BRussels Tribunal began life as the brainchild of Belgian philosopher Lieven de Cauter. On the eve of the proceedings, he talks to Fredrick Bowie about “benevolent hegemony” and the coming state of permanent catastrophe
How did you get involved in setting up the BRussells Tribunal?
I discovered the existence of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) almost by accident. I was surfing on the Web last spring, trying to find out what was behind the politics of the impending war. I had planned to spend the spring writing a novel, and finishing up another book: because I am and remain a writer and a philosopher. But when I came upon the PNAC Web site, I was so shocked, that I thought, No, we cannot just let this happen without trying to do something about it.
The war had not yet begun, but it was clear that if it did go ahead, it would break the existing international legal order. The PNAC documents made it clear that this was not just an unreflective reaction: there was a plan, and it had all been written down. So the American invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 — that’s the bad news! 9/11 was just the occasion to implement and execute the plan.
So that was the initial impetus?
Yes: I wanted to do something, and I thought that as Russell was a philosopher, I should take up the tradition he had established. So I decided to try and set up a people’s tribunal, in the spirit of the tribunal Russell had convened in 1967 to investigate American war crimes in Vietnam.
I began by drawing up a petition signed by 500 intellectuals and citizens demanding a people’s tribunal, not just on the war, but on the war logic that lay behind it, and calling, if possible, for legal action against the PNAC. The petition was published in Belgium one day after the war began. A week later, we were already round the table planning how the tribunal would work. Two of the big cultural centres in Brussels, Les Halles de Schaerbeek and the Beurschouwburg, offered their support. We also discovered that all around the globe there were other people who had been having similar ideas. We were able to meet at a peace conference here in Brussels last June, and we decided to work together: this was too important a matter for us to go it alone. In November, we held another meeting in Istanbul, and the World Tribunal on Iraq was born. Over the course of the coming year there will be sessions all around the world, from Hiroshima to Mexico. New venues and new commissions are emerging all the time.
Why have you taken the PNAC as the focus for the BRussells Tribunal?
Through the years 2000-2002, the PNAC was the most powerful think-tank in the US. The signatories of its mission statement included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and George W Bush’s brother, Jeb! They published their crucial report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, in 2000, before Bush had even been elected. The 2002 National Security Strategy, which Bush himself signed personally, was entirely based on the proposals which the PNAC had put forward two years earlier. So it is not hard to see the relationship between what they had written, and the events that have been unfolding over the last year!
How would you sum up the PNAC’s agenda?
They are very clear about what they want: they are going for hegemony in a very straightforward way. Terms such as American preeminence, Pax Americana, benevolent hegemony, and so on: these are all notions they have invented and defined. They want to be the boss of the world. And in order to ensure that no one can challenge them, they have decided to embark upon a policy of “preventive war”. They also write about the need to achieve their goals “by fighting and decisively winning, multiple simultaneous major theatre wars”. So the doctrine of preemptive war is also a doctrine of permanent war. This is the end of international law as we knew it. And this is also the world in which we are now living.
Does the international legal order matter to you as a philosopher? Or is it just something which as a citizen you had always supposed was there?
I’ve worked a lot with the ideas of Jacques Derrida and of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. So through them, and through my own experience, I was aware that there was something like a state of exception, a state of emergency, lurking just underneath the surface of our normal politics. Agamben and Derrida are quite opposed in their general analyses, but in the case of the Iraq war, they have both reached the same conclusion. They both argue that the Bush administration has chosen the dark face of sovereignty — namely, that for these people, sovereignty is not the installation of the law, but the suspension of the law.
The theory of the preemptive strike is a theory of exception. You suspend the international legal order, and declare instead that you have the right to wage aggressive war against all your supposed enemies. This is against all legal logic! In law, you only have the right to self-defence. You have to prove that your territory is facing an imminent threat. That’s why Tony Blair had to lie about the 45 minutes thing, otherwise he would not have had a casus belli.
But these people don’t simply want to act above the law and then lie about it: they also want to overturn the legal order, quite explicitly.
Absolutely! For example, Bush’s advisor Richard Perle has stated this quite clearly. In an article he wrote last year, at one point he says, “Thank God, the UN is dead”! Or look at the American refusal to recognise the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC is a major historical achievement. Before, it was always the victors who tried the losers for war crimes. Now, we have a truly international court, before which we can indict people who commit crimes at the highest level, almost at the state level. Here again, the US played the state of exception card. In August 2002, they passed what is now commonly known as the “Hague invasion act”. This act said that, even though the US had not recognised the ICC, if for whatever reason an American citizen should still be brought before that court, they reserved the right to invade the Netherlands in order to liberate him!
So they are prepared to invade the territory of a country which is not only a longstanding ally of theirs, but also a member of the coalition of the willing!
Another crucial aspect of the state of exception is, of course, Guantanamo. I don’t just mean Guantanamo the place in Cuba: rather, Guantanamo is the name for a particular kind of situation, which also exists in Diego Garcia, and in Bardan, to name but a few. All over the world there are many thousands of people who are being held without charges, and with no legal status. These are, and I weigh my words, concentration camps, in the very strict definition that Agamben has given of a concentration camp, which is a space outside the law. I think that for a state — and in particular, for a state which claims in an almost sickening way to be attached to freedom and democracy — to act like this is quite disgusting.
When I first heard Agamben use that definition, he was talking about the zones in European airports where immigrants are held on arrival. So this isn’t just an American problem: there’s more than one rogue nation…
Of course. Camp-like situations are spreading throughout the world for many reasons. Even within Europe, there are the walls in Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves in Morocco. And there are the walls at Steenokkerzeel here in Belgium, around the closed centres where we keep illegal migrants.
But the six Africans who are being held in the transit zone at Zavantem airport while we sit here in this café are, in some sense, being held there by default, however shocking it may be that they are there. The Belgian government doesn’t want to let them onto Belgian territory, but at the same time, they don’t really have any way to expel them, and they can’t put them in jail either. So instead they keep them in the transit zone. The people who are in Guantanamo, however, are not being held there by default: they have been put there quite deliberately. The US had lots of other options. They could have said, this is a war, and they are prisoners of war. But prisoners of war have a whole legal system around them. Or they could have said that they were American prisoners, and put them in a gaol in America. But then, of course, another whole legal system of attorneys, indictments, family visits, and so forth, would apply. In Guantanamo, nothing applies. The testimonies we have from the British prisoners who have been freed are atrocious. They really have been tortured: they’ve been forced to live an unliveable life.
But the point is not just that these people are badly treated…
No, they are outside the law. In Agamben’s terms, they exist only as bare life. Agamben makes a distinction between bios and zoe. Bios is life in the polis, in the city, in the political space. Zoe is just mere life. Mere life is when you strip somebody of everything, and you are left with just the zoological composition of a body. When the distinction between the private and public, between my private functions and my political recognition as a citizen is collapsed, you get bare life: in the sense that, for instance, people in a camp are in a no-zone. They have neither a political existence, nor privacy.
These extra-legal zones mirror the state of exception when the law is suspended. Their proliferation is very dangerous. You could even go as far as to say that Afghanistan and Iraq are now just huge zones where the law has been suspended. For what is Iraq now? Is it officially at war? Is it occupied? Is it under a transitional government? What is it?
Do you think America had a plan for Iraq, beyond the desire to invade it?
I think that if one thing is clear, it is that they had no plan. In fact, I believe that the absence of a plan was part of the plan. On page 14 of Rebuilding America’s Defenses, they point out that the United States has for decades sought to play a more substantial role in the Gulf Region’s security. And then they go on to say: ” Whilst the unresolved conflict with Saddam Hussein supplies an immediate justification, the necessity of a substantial American force presence transcends the issue of Saddam Hussein”.
They’re writing that in 2000. Which means, to put it simply and directly: we want American bases there, and that’s our aim, and all the rest is bullshit and alibi. And the more they destabilise the country, the more it’s a mess, the more the international community will say, well, at least America is making sure that we have some control over this: so they agree to them having their bases there. And that’s what they want.
You identify the PNAC as if it represented a decisive shift in the America political project. But at the same time you say that there is already a state of emergency underlying our civilisation. What is it in our civilisation that is taking us inexorably in that direction, without the need for Wolfowitz and Perle to get up and give us a push?
It’s only too obvious that the planet as a whole is moving towards a state of emergency. Even today in the newspaper, there was an article about these enormous deadzones which are multiplying in the oceans. Of late, we have seen huge sandstorms in China and in the Sahara. And you can even sense these things in Brussels: two weeks ago, there was sand in the rain here. So these are signs. And then we know that by 2050 there will be 9.1 billion people on the earth: the biodiversity, the equilibrium of the planet, will be under threat. Many more people than today will be going without water. So the pressure is coming, and everybody who pays any attention to anything knows it. This is what drives us into the politics of extremes. In the PNAC report there is just one phrase which alludes to this, where they say that “we have to rule in an increasingly chaotic world”. So they’re quite aware of the chaos that is coming. We are moving into what I call a state of permanent catastrophe. This is just a scientific truth, unfortunately. It’s an ecological and demographic certainty.
So if you think the world is heading towards this kind of chaotic state, there are two possible reactions: you can try and begin to deal with the causes. Or you can say: well, there’s going to be chaos, and we want to try and get as much as we can of the little that will be left: and that’s the PNAC.
Yes. I think that’s the question of the 21st century: what will we do about this permanent catastrophe that is facing us? And I think the PNAC is very much aware of that, and the whole Bush policy is secretly steered by that. Abandoning Kyoto is part of that as well. The alternative to this is the alter-globalist movement, which is an appeal for a more just and a more peaceful world. As Derrida says, that movement may be weak and contradictory, but it’s all we have to oppose to the PNAC. So we cannot give it up. We have to support it with everything we have.
The PNAC’s response to permanent catastrophe is permanent war. You have to realise that Iraq is not an end to the project; it is just one case. When they say that one of the core businesses of the American military is “to fight and decisively win, multiple simultaneous major theatre wars,” that is an ominous programme. So we are heading for permanent war. And of course, the permanent war on terror will only enhance terror. Maybe I am too radical, but I am beginning to think that this was part of the plan, too. How can you keep a gigantic economy like the military industry going, without a gigantic enemy? You need a monstrous enemy. So these people are either stupid, or very very cynical — and in my opinion, they are cynical. They knew that by going into Iraq, far from weakening Al-Qa’eda and extremist Islam, they would give them a gigantic presence. That’s why we produced a postcard of a woman veiled in the American flag. We have to oppose both brands of extremism at the same time. The people in the White House now are dangerous extremists, just as the Islamist extremists are. We have to say no to the burqa, even if the burqa is an American flag.
Does this state of exception apply to the Americans themselves, too?
Absolutely. The same thing is happening within America itself. The Patriot Act is suspending people’s most basic constitutional civil rights. I think the best example is the power to search someone’s house without a warrant. I must say I find that more than ominous. There has been a huge erosion of civil rights in America since 9/11. I hope the American people are now beginning to wake up. Some people say that I don’t sound very pro-American, but I feel very pro-American. And I think this whole tribunal is pro-American, in the deep sense that we want to defend the American people against the extremists who are now in charge in the White House. It’s not an accident that the majority of our witnesses are Americans. If we were anti- American, how can you explain that so many Americans immediately agreed to come over and take part? Saul Landau, William Rivers Pitt, Ramsey Clark, Immanuel Wallerstein, Jim Lobe, Tom Barry, they all said yes instantly!
What do you think the BRussels Tribunal can achieve?
We have no legal powers, no sanctions. We’re looking for the truth. As a philosopher, I have to believe that the truth is an end in itself. We want to make sure that the inhabitants of Planet Earth know that there was a plan, and that it has a name, it’s called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, and it’s issued by the PNAC, three of whose members are now the key members of the Bush war cabinet. And secondly, I hope that once they know about it, people will protest about it. I hope that the public opinion of Planet Earth will say no, this cannot be. Because I think that the new imperial world order is a bad idea for all of us, even, in the end, for the Americans.
Do you think you can have the same impact the original Russell tribunal had?
If we could have the influence which the Russell tribunal on Vietnam had, that would be great! And there’s one big difference, which even works in our favour. The Russell tribunal was one of the key breakthrough events in bringing the atrocities of the Vietnam War to public consciousness, both in Europe and the United States. In comparison, we have the luxury of being an echo of the 30 million people who were out in the streets on 15 February. So we don’t have to convince people that this war was unjust or illegal: I think many people know that already. What’s important now is to speak and write and argue, so that this case, which is unfortunately only a single case, does not become the norm in terms of realpolitik. Because that’s the greatest danger now: that if we say, oh well, it’s over, and now we’re back to normal, then this sort of illegal, unjust, horrible war, with all its depleted uranium and cluster bombs, will become the new normality, and we will see it repeated over and over again.
Who is your audience?
The immediate audience is the people who will be there on the day, of course. But I believe we also have an audience far beyond that small group. We’re trying to send a signal to the consciousness of the inhabitants of Planet Earth. And, of course this is also an open letter to the White House. Whether that letter will arrive or not, we cannot be sure! But I’m sure the American ambassador reads the Belgian press. So maybe the letter is arriving even as we speak!
C a p t i o n : Bombardment of Baghdad, March 2003
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