POLITICS-U.S.: Democracy Pricks Imperial Balloon

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Mar 3 2003 (IPS) - ”Turkish support is assured”, declared deputy Pentagon chief Paul Wolfowitz triumphantly after a meeting with top military and government officials in Ankara in early December.

He was referring, of course, to the U.S. plan to deploy tens of thousands of troops to bases in southwestern Turkey from which they would open a second, northern front in their invasion of Iraq and quickly secure control of strategic oil fields around Kirkuk while racing south to Baghdad and Tikrit.

The bluff certainty with which Wolfowitz, leader of the neo-conservative faction in the administration of President George W. Bush, declared his confidence was characteristic of the way Washington’s hawks have approached the impending war with Iraq and their broader imperial ambitions.

And while Wolfowitz praised Turkish democracy, a senior U.S. diplomat told reporters who travelled with the delegation that they should not worry that Turkey’s constitution gives the nation’s parliament exclusive authority to approve the deployment of foreign troops on Turkish soil.

”Most of the U.S. requests likely will be decided by Turkey’s national security council, which includes the military’s politically powerful general staff, along with senior elected officials”, the ‘Washington Post’ quoted a ubiquitous ”Western diplomat” as saying.

So it came as a rude shock this weekend when the Turkish parliament did, after all, reject the U.S. plan, along with some 15 billion dollars in economic aid and approval for tens of thousands of Turkish troops to enter northern Iraq with U.S. forces to secure Turkish national interests in the region.

While officials here are hoping that the Turks will accede to pressure – exerted by both Washington and investors who brought down the average share price on the Turkish stock exchange Monday by 12 percent – to arrange a second vote, the setback suggests that administration hawks who have led the charge for war may be relying on a whole range of assumptions – about their power, their tactics, and the way they are perceived by others, especially in democratic states where governments must be at least somewhat responsive to their electorates – that may not correspond to reality.

”The ideologues in Washington think that the invasion can’t go wrong, but their moral certitude is going to clash with realities on the ground,” Raad al-Kadiri of the Washington-based Petroleum Finance Co. told the ‘Wall Street Journal’ last week.

The Turkish vote may also indicate that the imperial worldview that comes with such "moral certitude” makes it impossible for hawks to understand and appreciate the sensitivities of foreign public opinion, particularly in countries with democratic institutions.

It was telling that during the same weekend that the Turks rejected Washington’s military plans, half a world away the Philippines government was forced to disavow another Pentagon plan to send 3,000 U.S. troops on a joint ”operation” against Abu Sayyaf, a self-described Islamist group that specialises in kidnapping in the predominantly Muslim southern part of the country.

While the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo apparently went along with the Pentagon’s scheme to involve U.S. forces directly in hostilities, according to a detailed Post account Monday, the Pentagon publicly framed the operation in a way that made clear it would violate a constitutional ban on combat operations by foreign forces in the Philippines.

”(T)he Pentagon had failed to grasp the political and cultural sensitivities in the Philippines, a former U.S. colony in which nationalist sentiment led to the closure of two U.S. military bases a decade ago”, the Post explained.

The results: Washington’s hopes of stepping up the U.S. military presence in East Asia – a major strategic goal of the hawks – have been set back primarily as a result of public opinion in a democratic state.

Ditto for South Korea, where Washington’s adamant refusal to agree to bilateral talks with North Korea appears to be adding to growing popular anger whose latest expression began last fall when a military court acquitted two of the 37,000 servicemen based in the South for accidentally crushing two Korean schoolgirls with their armoured personnel carriers.

What could have been fixed with a straightforward apology by Bush to the South Korean people and an updating of its Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Seoul has mushroomed into a much broader questioning of the future of a 50-year military alliance that some experts here believe may be doomed unless Washington changes tack urgently. But, seemingly oblivious to or contemptuous of South Korean public opinion, the hawks appear to be digging in their heels.

Indeed, the failure to grasp political and cultural sensitivities of foreign governments, especially those that have democratic institutions, has, if anything, been the Achilles heel of the hawks, according even to its supporters.

”Ministers of defence should talk less, shouldn’t they," Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar told reporters in a reference to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld after meeting last week with Bush. Like other European backers of the administration’s Iraq policy, Aznar and his party are suffering huge major declines in the public-opinion polls at home due to the perception that they are cheerleading a new imperialism of which Rumsfeld is one of the most visible and dependably insensitive proponents.

”We don’t like the way we were pushed around by the Americans,” one of the dozens of Turkish parliamentarians who voted against his own party in rejecting Washington’s plan, told the ‘Los Angeles Times’. ”The Americans kept giving ultimatums and deadlines, asking Turkey to jump into a barrel of fire”, he said. ”They seemed to think we could be bought off.”

Indeed, the Times’ verdict in Turkey was the same as the Post’s in Manila. ”As Turks offered explanations Sunday for this stinging defiance of their strongest ally, tales of American insensitivity were high on the list.”

There is, of course, an enormous irony in this, if only because the neo-conservatives are trying to persuade the world that Washington is only trying to spread democracy in the Islamic world.

”The essence of what we believe in – we in the United States – is that people should be free to determine their own future,” Wolfowitz told Turkish reporters last July. ”Turkey is proof that democracy can work for Muslims.”

But, ”In the end, the greatest and most enduring challenge to American primacy may come not from our current or traditional antagonists – but from democracy itself,” warned Donald Emmerson, Stanford University political scientist in a Times column in January.