How the West got lost
Democracies must wrest the moral compass from the hands of US unilateralists, writes former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser.
FOLLOWING the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, George Bush's presidency halted and even in some aspects reversed much of the progress of previous decades. There are many who think that 9/11 changed the world and American attitudes forever. To the neo-con
More..servatives around the President, it presented an opportunity that they seized avidly.
A group of neo-conservatives issued a statement of principles in June 1997 at the core of which is a simple belief: that the century, or even the world, belongs to the United States.
What the US wills, it can achieve, and so it is necessary first to make sure that no power can ever challenge the US and, second, to challenge regimes hostile to American interests and values. The United States' role is to be unique in preserving and extending an international order, friendly to American security, prosperity and principles. It was certainly not a statement of "live and let live". It was a statement of "live and make like us".
The malign influence of the neo-conservatives was reinforced by another powerful political force, right-wing evangelical Protestant churches. Over Iraq, Islam and the role of America, the policies of those evangelists and of the neo-conservatives combined.
The attack on the World Trade Centre enabled them to establish an aggressive unilateral foreign policy. It dismissed the idea of multilateral co-operation. America would decide its own path and other nations would not be consulted. It was based on ideas that were doomed to fail.
It also provided an opportunity for Bush to throw off shackles that he and the neo-conservatives and evangelists believed acted as improper restraints on the exercise of American power. The United Nations Security Council was to be diminished and many international agreements were either rejected or abrogated or, in one case, left "unsigned". These included agreements that would have limited trade in small arms, banned the use of biological weapons and maintained controls over the development and production of nuclear weapons and defence systems.
Bush tore up the Geneva conventions. He invented a new form of "unlawful enemy combatant" or "unprivileged belligerent", not covered by the conventions and not covered by any of the protections of civilian or military law. He established a special detention camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. He set aside basic principles of the rule of law.
Because Bush was fighting, as he believed, a war on terrorism, the principles that were important to the maintenance of a civil democracy were thrown overboard. Hearsay evidence that could not be checked or verified was to be accepted. Evidence achieved by torture was to be admitted. Retrospective criminal laws were established creating new terrorist offences. Military commissions were convened with one purpose: to achieve a guilty verdict.
How do our leaders come to the view that terrorism is so different and so new that we cannot live by our own standards? How do we overturn international obligations designed to limit an arms race between the superpowers? How do we set aside international conventions against torture? How do we embrace a unilateralism that is bound to lead to conflict and instability? How do we emerge from the darker age that has emerged during the war on terror?
Already in America there are signs of revulsion at the abuse of executive power by the President. His choice for Attorney-General, Alberto Gonzales, has been forced to resign. While the dismissal of prosecutors within the Department of Justice led to his forced resignation, Gonzales' real problem was that he believed that his role as Attorney-General was to create a legal framework and argument that would enable the President to do whatever he wished. In other words, there were to be no limits to the assertion of executive power. If that doctrine were to prevail, it would have overthrown concepts critical to American democracy and American freedom, it would have diminished Congress and the Supreme Court. The resignation of Gonzales was a significant victory for the re-establishment of the rule of law and due process in the United States.
While there are those, like Bush, who act as though we cannot fight terrorism and at the same time live by our own standards, there are many examples that suggest otherwise.
Britain never went to such extremes in seeking to overcome the IRA. Germany and Italy were able to maintain the rule of law and overcome serious terrorism from the Red Army and Red Brigades. These problems and others have been overcome by an exercise of restraint, by diplomacy and within the law, even as human rights expanded and gained traction through the world.
The war against Iraq, Bush's major contribution to the war on terror, is an unmitigated disaster. It represents the worst fears of smaller nations in the developing world about the unrestrained use of American power.
The Iraqi Government is seen as the puppet of the United States, despite the election held last year. This does not mean there should be an immediate and short-term withdrawal, but it does mean that the maintenance of troops in Iraq is almost certainly futile unless major diplomacy, involving Syria, Iran and all the players of the region, is undertaken, as the French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, indicated recently from Baghdad, and former US secretary of state James Baker indicated earlier this year.
The failure in Iraq demonstrates that the idea of American unilateralism has been extraordinarily destructive.
If the processes set in place by the US under earlier administrations had been maintained, the UN would have been strengthened, the Security Council reinforced and the development of law to govern relations between states significantly advanced.
Malcolm Fraser was prime minister of Australia from 1975 to 1983. This is an edited extract from his inaugural lecture as a professorial fellow in the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law at the Melbourne University Law School.
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Added: Oct 29 2007 In: news_politics
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