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July 31, 2007
George (ooops Gordon) Brown, the British PM, goes to America and talks to the child-President about their rspecial relationship. Does that mean the UK will no longer be the poodle of the Republican administration that has only 18 months to run?
Peter Brookes
What about liberal interventionism and Iraq? Isn't Iraq a key factor in global oil supplies? Isn't Britain in the process of withdrawing from Iraq? What is the US going to do?
Does the conflict shaping up around Iraq--civil war and ethnic cleansing -- indicate that the US no longer has the ability to mould events in the region? John Gray, the British political philosopher, argues aginst liberal interventionism in The Guardian. He says that:
The era of liberal interventionism in international affairs is over. Invading Iraq was always in part an oil grab. A strategic objective of the Bush administration was control of Iraqi oil, which forms a key portion of the Gulf reserves that are the lifeblood of global capitalism. Yet success in this exercise in geopolitics depended on stability after Saddam was gone, and here American thinking was befogged by illusions. Both the neoconservatives who launched the war and the many liberals who endorsed it in the US and Britain took it for granted that Iraq would remain intact.
Gray adds that as could be foreseen by anyone with a smattering of history, things have not turned out that way. The dissolution of Iraq is an unalterable fact, all too clear to those who have to cope on the ground, that is denied only in the White House and the fantasy world of the Green Zone.
What then of liberal internventionism? He says that whilst neoconservatives spurned stability in international relations and preached the virtues of creative destruction. Liberal internationalists declared history had entered a new stage in which pre-emptive war would be used to construct a new world order where democracy and peace thrived. He adds:
Many will caution against throwing out the baby of humanitarian military intervention together with the neocon bathwater. No doubt the idea that western states can project their values by force of arms gives a sense of importance to those who believe it. It tells them they are still the chief actors on the world stage, the vanguard of human progress that embodies the meaning of history. But this liberal creed is a dangerous conceit if applied to today's intractable conflicts, where resource wars are entwined with wars of religion and western power is in retreat
He says that the liberal interventionism that took root in the aftermath of the cold war was never much more than a combination of post-imperial nostalgia with crackpot geopolitics. It was an absurd and repugnant mixture, and one whose passing there is no reason to regret. What the world needs from western governments is not another nonsensical crusade. It is a dose of realism and a little humility.
Gray seems to have spoken too quickly as we have liberal interventionism in Darfur. Or is this a case of the US and the UK's case for foreign intervention in Darfur being based on the fighting Arabs in the war on terrorism?
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Sadly it appears as if the Blair sycophancy continues. Britain, like Australia, also must've been promised a cut of the oil.
The billions in arms that America is pushing into the region as part of its 'moulding' will ensure conflict for decades.