Dayan Jayatilleka
Let’s not beat about the Bush — and the pun is intended. Sri Lanka must add its voice to the those of almost a billion people in 600 cities worldwide, who opposed last weekend, an American attack on Iraq. It must do so for the following fundamental reasons:

I) The threatened war is a moral outrage, a crime.

II) The war would be dangerous to the world system and world order.

III) The war is against the basic interests of Sri Lanka both as a state and as a society.

The Bush administration’s behaviour towards Iraq is a resurgence of the dark underside of the American experience: the phenomenon of lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan. Bush and his gang want to do it like they did in Texas in the good old days. They are impatient to bust Saddam Hussein out of ‘jail’ (the UN inspections regime) and string him up; hang ‘em high. Saddam is one uppity Arab (and Third World) leader. He needs to be made an example of.

Saddam and Iraq find themselves utterly vulnerable today because of his past adventurism: the invasion of Iran (1980) and Kuwait (1990). But that is not why he is being punished by the US, which supported and armed him in the war against the Iranian Revolution. If Saddam Hussein is to be lynched by America because he possesses weapons of mass destruction — and while IAEA chief El-Baradei says there is no evidence of nuclear weaponry — then what of Israel, which acknowledges that it does have them? If the Baathist regime is to be buried because it is in ‘material breach’ of UN Security Council resolutions, what of Zionist Israel which has ignored and violated so many UN resolutions, including Resolution 242, passed over 35 years ago? If Iraq is to be invaded because it has been aggressive towards its neighbours and remains a danger to them, then what of Israel which is the only country in the world to have grabbed land from every one of its neighbours? If Iraq is to be bombed in order to liberate its people from the yoke of tyranny, then what of Saudi Arabia? If Saddam is to be overthrown because he has committed war crimes, then what of Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Sabra and Shatila? But the Bush administration coddles Israel while Ariel Sharon crushes the Palestinian community and the Oslo peace process under his tank treads.

Utter hypocrisy

The utter hypocrisy of the US-UK position is evidenced by their mealy-mouthed, touchy-feely, softly-softly approach to the Tigers. Ignoring the global hyper-sensitivity to suicide-bombing after 9/11, the LTTE just demonstrated its total contempt for the ‘international community’ with the suicide blasting (notwithstanding and endangering Norwegian monitors) by their cadres discovered in a heavy-weapons run off Delft. But there were no harsh denunciations, deadlines, threats and penalties by the US-UK. Indeed they will press the flesh of the Tiger representatives including Karuna, the executioner of 500 captive policemen and slasher of sleeping babies, in Tokyo this June. It’s OK if you assassinated more elected democratic leaders than any other terrorist outfit did: a former Prime Minister, a President, a leader of the Opposition, many members of Parliament, and half-blinded and almost killed a President. They weren’t white. If you are the PLO, then you have to change your leadership. If you are the LTTE, nobody in Washington suggests that you do. It’s OK if you are a suicide-bomber, so long as you aren’t Islamic. It’s cool if you are a terrorist so long as you don’t kill US citizens and white Caucasians anywhere — and you never supported the other side in the Cold War. It’s an atrocity if you blow up an aircraft, unless it was an Air Cubana plane off Barbados with athletes on board, and you’ve been contributing to the Republican Party in Florida — then you don’t get prosecuted, and if you do, you get out of jail real fast.

There is a pattern discernible in post-Cold War US policy: the fulfilment not only of all Cold War goals, but of all Cold War fantasies. During the OPEC oil price hike of 1973, US hawks called for a military intervention to ‘secure’ the oil fields. At the Algiers Non-Aligned summit that year, Fidel Castro reminded Muammar Ghaddafi that all the rhetoric against the Soviet Union notwithstanding, it was the existence of the USSR that prevented the USA and the West from redrawing the world map and seizing the oil resources as they did, by gun-boat diplomacy and annexation, during the colonial era. Today, The US is planning precisely that, in Iraq. After the fall of the USSR, the US has incorporated as willing vassals, the ex-Warsaw Pact nations of Europe, moving NATO right upto the borders of Russia. It has also knocked over two states which were strong members of the Non-aligned movement: Yugoslavia and Iraq. Uni-polarity means a process of levelling down of state formations and structures which provide a discernible degree of national autonomy. The national minorities must have a maximum of autonomy (unless you are a TURKISH Kurd, then you can’t have even a music programme on radio!); the nation-state or multi-national state must have a minimum. In terms of political economy this makes for unfettered mobility and dominance by monopoly capital and fast-track installation of an unprecedentedly asymmetrical global division of labour. This makes the policy of ‘rolling-back the state’ an economically functional one, but the economic is not the only or the pre-eminent logic of Empire (take Rome). The Telos is power, rulership, control, authority, domination.

Secessionist problem

Like Sri Lanka, Iraq has a secessionist problem: the Kurds. If Iraq’s Kurds can be urged to rebel and have a de-facto separate state carved out by the West with a no-fly zone ‘umbrella’ in place (the situation prevailing post-Gulf War One); if they can be activated by the US-UK to launch military strikes into the Iraqi heartland tomorrow, who is to say that it will not be the Tamil Tigers the day after? (And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the KLA — the Kosovo Liberation Army). This is not just about Iraq. It is about us all. Most basically, what the US offensive against Iraq entails is the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state. First there was Grenada, then Panama, then Yugoslavia, now Iraq. If Iraq is attacked, invaded, occupied and ‘regime-change’ effected, i.e. a military coup through invasion takes place and a puppet regime is installed, it can be a model and a precedent. Someday it could be Sri Lanka, and the issue could be ‘Sinhala chauvinism’, ‘oppression of the Tamils’, "deviation from the Oslo and Tokyo accords on Federalism", "liberating the people from a hardline nationalist-Marxist regime". Or whatever. The world may be unable to stop the war on Iraq. But Sri Lanka must join the global anti-war coalition so as to enhance even marginally the cost of interventionist aggression to a level that it may someday stop short of our shores.

For all these reasons, the Sri Lankan State and Govt., political formations, civic associations and individuals must resoundingly oppose the US aggression. We are not alone. Indeed we are lagging far behind. If we are in any danger of being isolated, it is from the world’s conscience, which is solidly opposed to war. There is a global fissure, with the entirety of the Eurasian land-mass, stretching from Paris and Berlin to Moscow and Beijing, taking a common stand. With Prime Minister Tony Blair making the same mistake that Labour PM Harold Wilson did when he supported the US in Vietnam — catalysing huge protests in the 1960s — the terms of the Transatlantic alliance are under siege from public opinion in Britain.

With the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the defeat of the Socialist challenge, the "uni-polar moment" was celebrated (most famously by columnist Charles Krauthammer). But is that uni-polar moment drawing to a close with the US war on Iraq and the massive reaction against it? Republican policy planners think that ‘caving in’ to popular protest and opinion polls was why the US lost the war in Vietnam, and therefore they want to eyeball it, tough it out. They assume a war of short duration can prevent a Vietnam-type backlash. The trouble is that a short war will be one that requires unimaginably massive use of American force. That alone, seen on TV and in cyberspace, will cripple the American claim to be a moral power.

Coercive power

Losing the moral-ethical high ground which it occupied after ‘9/11’ may spell the end of US hegemony, properly understood and in the strict sense of the term. Hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci taught us (and his great predecessor in modern thought, who also outlived him, Benedetto Croce echoed in 1946 in ‘Politics and Morals’) is the combination of ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’. The US does not have consent (as represented by consensus) for its campaign against Iraq. What it does have is pure coercive force, and coercion alone makes for ‘domination’, not ‘hegemony’. The US is cleaved from within. Prof. Joseph Nye quite rightly identified the secret of US global leadership as its qualitative edge in ‘soft power’ i.e. cultural, intellectual and ideological influence. Today the ultra-prestigious US Academy of Arts and Sciences has come out against the Bush Administration’s militarist unilateralism towards Iraq. America’s ‘soft power’ stars are turning against its ‘hard power’ hawks. Young Americans, including families of 9/11 victims, attended huge protest rallies on East and West coasts. Humanity may be willing to accommodate itself to US leadership, but it is not willing to knuckle under to US domination. That is what the war on Iraq — and the protest against it — are all about.

Back at the ranch, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe is caught between Iraq and a hard place. Judging by the straws in the wind — Foreign Minister’s one-sided statement and the Sunday Observer editorial of a fortnight ago — the Wickremesinghe administration may be preparing to tilt towards the US in its coming crusade. This would be very much in keeping with the PM’s (political) proclivities. In 1991 President Premadasa made a courageous, principled decision that Sri Lanka would vote against the US sponsored repeal of the 1975 UN resolution defining Zionism as racism. The decision was made despite President Bush (Snr.) personally addressing the UN General Assembly asking for the repeal, having won the Gulf War (and with the USSR in dissolution). Premadasa was prophetically sceptical about Mid-East peace prospects and troubled by the fate of the Palestinians. Thus Sri Lanka was the only non-Islamic and non-Socialist country of those 25 who opposed the repeal, which predictably, went through with a large majority. He could not have anticipated it, but his principled stand paid rich domestic political dividends, solidifying the support extended by Mr. Ashraff’s SLMC, and more crucially, causing Islamic opinion to be brought to bear on the then Speaker before whom the impeachment resolution had been placed.

If Prime Minister Wickremesinghe takes his place alongside the cowboys in Washington, President Chandrika Kumaratunga must not allow herself to be neutralised by a ‘fait accompli’ and the delicacies of dual power. She may find inspiration in the stand that her father took in 1956 concerning Suez (when Britain and France invaded Egypt) and her mother did throughout her tenure. Apart from the reasons of state set out here, there are sound political reasons to do so.

SWRD

S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike gave this country its voice and persona in the world. The USSR and China were recognised. Chou En-lai and ChŽ Guevara were visitors — which displayed a boldness and exciting independence of spirit in world affairs that were unthinkable under the UNP, whose post-’48 foreign policy was described by Mervyn de Silva as "a piece of luggage carelessly left behind by some departing Whitehall civil servant". SWRD’s UN General Assembly speech in the trickiest of circumstances, the simultaneous crises of Hungary and Suez, contained and captured his policy posture: "Non-aligned, but committed to the hilt!" This was to continue under his widow and successor Sirima Bandaranaike whose participation at the Non-Aligned Summit Conferences in Belgrade 1961 and Cairo 1964, gave her a special place in that global movement.

Sadly, UNP Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake reverted to type. His administration’s lukewarm attitude to the struggle for liberation of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism weakened the UNP in a country whose Buddhist majority were in sympathy with the Vietnamese national liberationists. The UNP also made no bones of its identification with Israel, South Korea and Taiwan. Anti-Chinese hysteria reached such a point that the Prime Minister actually spoke of Chinese infiltration into Trincomalee, thereby making him the object of much ridicule among newspaper cartoonists. The UNP’s tilt towards Israel alienated Muslim sentiment, resulting in a powerful anti-UNP pressure group, the Islamic Socialist Front of Dr. Badiuddin Mohammed. Once again as in 1956, UNP foreign policy offended nationalist sentiments and helped the victory of the Centre-Left coalition in 1970, with its progressive platform on international affairs.

The most important symbol of Mrs. Bandaranaike’s foreign policy was not so much the chairpersonship of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1976, but the extent and diversity of the support she secured for the Sri Lankan State in 1971, when the state faced its most serious threat to date. That support came from countries that were adversarial towards each other: the US, UK, USSR, China, India, Pakistan, Yugoslavia. In a very different and far less propitious global situation from that which her mother operated in, President Kumaratunga and her brilliantly chosen Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar (probably the sharpest analytical mind and the most thoughtful and intellectually serious man in Parliament) achieved significant progress in isolating and encircling the Tiger. Most critically they obtained the necessary external support and inputs in Year 2000 to forestall a Tiger victory in Jaffna. Prabhakaran’s Great Heroes’ Day speech that year, where he ruefully iterates the international factor that frustrated his Jaffna Offensive, is the finest testimonial to the foreign policy of this duo. They must assert themselves today, at this hinge-point in world politics and human history

Iraq has been a friend and an important trading partner of this country under both SLFP and UNP administrations. It has established friendships across the party-political spectrum. This factor alone is a solid reason to oppose an attack on Iraq, but there is a far more pressing one. An US attack on Iraq would confirm all the propaganda of the most militant segments of the Islamic community. It would exacerbate the ‘clash of civilisations’. It would strengthen existing terrorist organisations and spawn a generation of new ones, not all of them Islamic. Its political collateral damage would be the de-stabilisation of many states and societies within and without the Middle East.

Lankan Muslims

Sri Lanka has a significant Muslim population which has already — and quite understandably — shown signs of militancy in a self-defensive reaction to the Govt’s facilitation of Tiger hegemony in the East, and Minister Hakeem’s inability to resist it with the robust resoluteness that his predecessor Mr. Ashraff would have. The Muslim community is bound to be incensed by a US war on Iraq, and if the rest of Sri Lanka stays silent, then that community will develop a sense of alienation from the larger Lankan polity. If the Sri Lankan state is pusillanimous in its stand, then the Islamic irruption will become even more intensely involuted and assume an anti-state aspect. This we just cannot afford. Indeed we can afford it less than the risk of irking the Bush White House. It is a complex and difficult judgement call, but rightly comprehended, the political and diplomatic defence of Iraq’s sovereignty is a pre-emptive defence of our own vital interests as a pluralist society and an independent state.