Opinion Editorials, October 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
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Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
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War can be prevented
By Jonathan Power
Jordan Times, Thursday, October 30, 2003
IS THE US' aim to prevent war or to preempt apparent threats? There is an important difference here, not just in semantics.
In Bush-speak, preemption may mean taking military action in order to avoid some presumed catastrophe looming over the political horizon. Preventing war means taking some bold, resolute action, short of war, to try and remove the probable cause of belligerency. Actually, the US can do and does both, despite the presumption by critics that it is obsessed with the second to the exclusion of the first.
In Liberia, from where it has just withdrawn its forces, by putting some ships with Marines off shore and a mere 200 peace keepers on the ground, the US shored up the morale, and expertise, of a West African peacekeeping force that so far has done a remarkable job at quieting the country and forestalling a likely new round of internecine strife.
The US, it may be forgotten, did the same thing in Macedonia, ex-Yugoslavia, in 1992. Whilst war was boiling in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, the US sent troops into still peaceful Macedonia and, working under the UN flag, reminded the local antagonists that they were being watched, at the same time bolstering those politicians inclined to compromise with the knowledge that the world was on their side.
The problems it now faces are legion. Few pretend that rooting out Al Qaeda, putting Iraq on its feet or defanging Iran and North Korea are easy tasks. On the other hand, a look at the way the world has changed since 1945 — decolonisation, the emergence of new regional powers, the rapid spread of highly sophisticated military technology and the collapse of the Soviet empire, it is striking how many of these developments, all of which could have triggered major wars, progressed to a peaceful conclusion. A great amount of radical change has been negotiated and parlayed into a peaceful transition — and a good part of that through the UN and other international institutions.
One good example is when the Baltic states finally broke away from the Soviet Union. Unsurprisingly, they tried to refuse citizenship to the large numbers of native Russians who, over the years, had settled there. Moscow was highly angered and threatened to stop the withdrawal of Russian forces. Many on both sides talked of war. The multilateral East-West body, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, led by Sweden, sent in high-powered teams of negotiators, and although the questions of troop withdrawal and citizenship for Russians living in the Baltic states were never formally linked, a deal was arranged, not least because the Western allies, infused with their own principles on the rights of minorities, could see the point of the Russian argument.
Good leadership can anticipate crises building up a military head of steam not only by the deft use of peacekeepers or international mediation but by taking a dispute to the world court. Nigeria and Cameroon recently did this, avoiding a border dispute that risked seriously destabilising the oil rich region of the Gulf of Guinea which provides a sizeable 15 per cent of US crude oil imports. There had been military skirmishes between the two neighbours and, as the Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, told me in a recent interview, he faced strong pressure from his minister of defence to go to war. Obasanjo overruled the military and insisted that the dispute be taken to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Last October, the court upheld the Cameroonian claim. There was much champing at the bit in Nigeria, but Obasanjo faced his critics down and a year later, the issue is mute.
What has become undeniably clear in retrospect — although many informed and sober people have been making the point for years — is that the preventive work the UN arms inspectors did after the 1991 Gulf War was so successful it should have avoided, in a normal, more self-disciplined, political atmosphere, the need for this year's war. If it hadn't been for Sept. 11, it is highly doubtful that the US and British governments would have ever convinced themselves (for sure, their intelligence services would not have bent so much with the political wind) that war was necessary.
Prevention has a lot more going for it than preemption. We don't have to choose between intervention and inaction. Why should we be forced to choose between two types of failure when there is a good alternative? “The problem” as Pierre Sane, a former secretary general of Amnesty International, once said: “Is not lack of early warning, but lack of early action.”
Many diplomats, aid workers and human rights activists with an ear to the ground know where the problems are building up to seismic proportions. Since 1945, the world has developed many tools to deal with them. Contrary to the defeatist spirit of our current malaise, there have been plenty of successes which should inspire us to face down the clarion calls for preemptive war and, instead, encourage us to step up the pace of preventive action.
The writer is a syndicated columnist and author. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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