We can all take it as read that various shivers have gone down various spines in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The real question is whether one is going down ours.
A military victory over Iraq—indeed even a fairly quick one—was always inevitable, even if the initial resistance proved greater than expected. The big issue was always going to be the peace and how the world would be remade. Where does George Bush—or John Howard for that matter—take it from here?
The shock and awe was partly about sending an unequivocal message to the rulers of those states that their days were numbered. It was also a clarion call to the people living under their oppressions that the US was serious about destroying havens of terror, about wanting democracy, the rule of law rather than arbitrary tyranny, free markets and free and transparent institutions, and that US policy—military, diplomatic and economic—was henceforth to be directed to that end.
That’s the theory, anyway.
There is a case for a new colonialism, and for concluding that most of the people on earth would be better off with a rule of law—and disinterested, paternalistic but benevolent Western-oriented administrators supervising their institutions, and building market economies out of the wreckage of Third World socialism, religious, tribal ethnic violence, and the despotism and opportunism of the current leaders. One has only to think of Zimbabwe, Ghana, Papua New Guinea or Sudan to accept that almost anything else would be better for the inhabitants than the mess their leaders have made of things.
The medicine has been about for quite a while, and any number of US-dominated institutions—the World Bank, for example—have been attempting to force it down various throats, but with little success in making the people more free.
‘You will be free—free to build a better life instead of building more palaces for Saddam and his sons,’ President Bush told Iraqis in his moment of military triumph. A Bush whose primary recipe for rebuilding a faltering US economy consists of tax cuts for the rich which, by allowing them to build palaces, will create jobs for the poor.
‘Free to pursue economic prosperity without the hardship of economic sanctions,’ said the leader of the nation that enforced the sanctions. ‘Free to travel and free to speak your mind,’ from a representative of the three nations working hardest to close the door against economic and political refugees.
‘Free to join in the