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Contents
Stop the War Stop the Killing
Edward Said
Has the Gulf War taken place yet?
Daniel Jewesbury
TERMINALS AND FRONTIERS
interview
Climate Change: Prognosis And Courses Of Action
Phil England
Lunch With The Chairman: Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
Seymour M. Hersh
Invasion of the Kiddyfiddlers
Mick Wilson
Solway's Silver Bullet
Mike Small
Istanbul September/October 2002
A journey to understand why thousands of political prisoners were prepared to starve themselves to death in Turkish prisons
David Green
Internationalism revisited or In praise of Internationalism
Benita Parry
Br(other) Rabbit's Tale
Tom Jennings
Letters
Derry on its Hobby Horse
Colin Darke, March 2003
Discussion on Corporate Sponsorship of the Arts
Arts Programme, BBC Radio Scotland, 6/6/03
_____________________________________________________
Stop the War Stop the Killing
Edward Said
The UN Security Council has been meeting today to listen
to the report of the weapons inspectors operating in Iraq and responses
to it. I doubt there is a widespread consensus for war in the US, but
there is no doubt that the administration led by President Bush and his
associates are pushing for a war sooner rather than later. The ostensible
reason given for the war against Iraq is that it's an imminent threat
to the US, and that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction, of which
none have been found. In theory Iraq threatens the US from a distance
of 7,000 miles. From what we gather from the inspectors, Iraq in the 12
years since the first Gulf War (between Iraq and Iran, started 1980) is
in a much depleted and weakened condition - being an imminent threat
to the US is preposterous. They are not even considered to be a threat
to their neighbours. Should bombing begin, it is to me a mystery if the
excuse is really Iraq's military threat.
The other US administration line is equally confected: that Iraq might
be distributing arms to al-Qaeda terrorists. There is no direct evidence.
But since one of the alleged al-Qaeda people was supposed to be in Northern
Iraq, it follows that Iraq and al-Qaeda are in cahoots to wreak terrible
violence on the US and other countries. Then again, I don't want
to minimise the nefarious quality of the Iraqi regime - its Human Rights
record is one of the worst in the world and it is a state based upon repression
and terror. But to suggest that Iraq is an immanent danger to the US and
the rest of the world is extremely far fetched.
Would there be this kind of US military, diplomatic and political pressure
placed on Iraq - and on the rest of the world to join the US in war - if
it was a net exporter of oranges? Of course it isn't, it is an oil
producing country with the proven second largest oil revenues after Saudi
Arabia. It is also a leading Arab country which has gone through an horrendous
cycle of sanctions imposed against it for the last 12 years. Sanctions
and a very tight embargo which haven't affected Saddam Hussein and
his regime at all, but which have affected the Iraqi population - with
hundreds of thousands of people dead from malnutrition, the absence of
medicine resulting in the onset of terrible diseases, plus the fact that
the civilian and military infrastructures were destroyed during the last
Gulf War by the US. All in all we have a state which is in an extremely
weakened condition, with a rogue government (no doubt) and an extremely
long suffering, punished population which, if there is a war, will bear
the brunt of American power.
There are many reasons for this war. One of them is oil, and it is not
a coincidence that Afghanistan near the Caspian Sea is in a direct line
with the oil supplies and regions of the Arabian Gulf - all of which
fall under direct American military and political hegemony in the event
of a war. Although there is a hegemony right now, what the US seek are
the assurances of vast oil supplies, the guaranteed control of this enormously
important resource. Remember, China by the end of this decade will be
using as much oil as the US already does. So, the contest for cheap and
relatively accessible oil supplies is one of the reasons for this war,
not so much the crimes of humanity committed by Saddam Hussein's
regime, which it is important to remember was politically and militarily
backed in many of those crimes by the US and various European countries.
Another reason is that this is a highly strategic area of the world. There
is a real felt need, partly as a result of 9/11, that the old order is
no longer of use to the US - those undemocratic, repressive regimes
in Iraq and other Middle East countries supported for over 50 years by
the US and European allies. This area is unstable now, partly because
the people have risen up against their unpopular rulers, but also because
of the rise of political Islam - a much exaggerated force but still
seen by the US because of 9/11 as a threat. There is a sense in which
US interests - which since WWII have always been oil and Israel - would
be better served in a realignment of the area, so that Israel and the
US with allies like Turkey or India at a further remove, would better
control and dominate the area.
Finally, the threat represented by Iraq is considered also to be a threat
to the interests of Israel. It is important to remember that many of the
hawkish members of the US administration - like Paul Wolfewitz and
Richard Perle - have always been close to the Israeli right wing. Perle
himself, head of the Intelligence Review Board of the Pentagon [see: 'Lunch
with the Chairman', S.M. Hersh, p.18], was a political adviser to
Netanyahu when he was a candidate for the Premiership of Israel. Perle
argued that he should discard anything like a peace process, annex the
West Bank and Gaza, expand the settlements, and perhaps in the future
throw out a few more Palestinians so that the area would be relatively
easy to control. So somehow the interests of Israel are very much part
of this multifaceted war as seen by a right wing, neo-conservative group
in Washington which believes Israel is best served by expansion, brutality
and a continued contempt for the UN.
One important factor not usually taken into account by commentators in
the West is the importance of Iraq to Arab culture and Arab civilisation.
Iraq enjoys a particularly privileged place - during the Abassi period,
from 750 AD, Baghdad was the capital of the world and for a period of
600 years was the capital of science, art, humanities, in what was then
the civilised world and the core of the Arab Empire, which extended into
Spain, Southern Europe, as well as Northern Africa, and to the East, today's
Sri Lanka. So, the travail of the Iraqi people, as the White House circular
suggests, is to bomb Baghdad to produce "shock and awe" in the
population. All of this is considered to be, for most Arabs and Iraqis,
an attack at the very heartland of the Arab world, Arab people, Arab civilisation
and of Arabism itself. And the US planners' reason for this is to
break once and for all the spirit of Arab unity and nationalism, which
has historically been a thorn in the side of Western Imperialism. The
battle, I contend, is still going on for control of this rich area and
for the self-determination of those people.
The link question which is never discussed in the media is Palestine.
If you listen to Secretary Powell, all the commentators in the media (during
what is the worst moment in the history of the American media when they
simply support without question, comment or sufficient investigative energy
what the administration says, and are themselves involved in stirring
up hysteria for war and a kind of xenophobia against Iraq; a place which
they have no idea of, which they personalise with this demonic figure
of Saddam Hussein) and the furore over Iraq being in contravention of
the UN Charter, it's never mentioned that aside from the US, which
is also a state which is in contravention of numerous UN treaties and
protocols, there is the question of Israel. Israel has been in contempt
of 64 UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. For 35 years
since the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, it has systematically
flouted the Geneva Convention, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and
64 resolutions drawing attention to abuses of human rights by Israelis.
Sharon - who is now threatened with a law suit against him in Belgium
for War Crimes committed during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon resulting
in the massacres of Sabra and Chatila - has conducted a policy of purist
repression against Palestinians which must be examined against the abuses
of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Israeli army has used Apache helicopters,
missiles, rockets, F16 jets against civilian populations in the West Bank
and Gaza. It has imposed curfews sometimes lasting over 200 days on a
civilian population which is basically unarmed: there is no Palestinian
Army, Navy or Airforce. Close to 2,000 people have been killed by the
Israeli military, some designated as terrorists although none of them
ever had trials. There has been a whole policy of "targeted killings",
"extra judicial assassinations" against Palestinians, sometimes
whole families are killed by mistake or through "collateral damage".
The economies of the West Bank and Gaza have suffered an enormous and
catastrophic economic blow on a day-to-day basis, partly because of the
closures where no Palestinian can leave or enter, or go from one part
of the same town to another; partly because of the deliberate policy of
Israel razing agricultural ground, destroying it, confiscating land, building
settlements on it; making it impossible for people to go to work, for
students to study, for university professors and students to enter classes.
This is the longest military occupation in modern history and yet the
US connives in this to supply Israel. The total is $135 billion since
the beginning of the occupation. This is the largest amount of foreign
aid ever given by any country to another country. In addition, in the
UN the US vetoes resolutions which condemn Israel, which ask Israel to
cease and desist for example from demolishing houses - 60 houses alone
this week and 21 people killed. But that does not even deserve a mention
in the American media as they focus on the imminent threat to the US - the
largest and most powerful military machine in the history of the world - from
this incapacitated, tyrannical regime in Baghdad. All the while, as Sharon
has openly said, his government has been abusing the Palestinian civilian
population by attacking hospitals and ambulances, by making it impossible
for people to have kidney dialysis and pregnant women to have their children
in hospitals - they are held up in the rain and mud at barricades sometimes
dying as a result. Trees are uprooted - an average of 896 trees have
been uprooted every day by the Israeli Army since the beginning of the
Intifada and that does not even touch upon the question of the settlers.
Israel entered lands that were Palestinian in 1967, including East Jerusalem
which was annexed that year, and has implanted 400,000 settlers against
every UN Resolution and Convention. These settlements are now connected
to each other by a roads system which cost $780 million to build, paid
for almost entirely by the US, on which only settlers can travel in such
a way as in Apartheid South Africa. The economy has been deliberately
destroyed on the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. It has de-developed the
economy of Palestine so that there is a rate of 65% unemployment. It is
estimated that over 60% of the population lives beneath the poverty line
of $2 a day. Malnutrition, as the UN has been saying, is now an endemic
structural problem for the West Bank and Gaza. About 70% of the population
is in need of food because Israel will not allow them to grow their own,
import it or even travel to places where they can get food. In the case
of some of the villages near the green line, which have been fed or supplied
to some degree by well intentioned Israeli resisters bringing food in,
that is now forbidden. The West Bank and Gaza is basically locked up.
On the western side there is the sea, of which two thirds of the coast
is closed to Palestinians. Three large settlements numbering 7,500 Israelis
inside the middle of Gaza, chopping it up, are protected by 12,000 troops.
Whereas 1.2 million Palestinians live like sardines in refugee camps,
tenements and towns mostly filled with the stench of rubbish, which they
are not allowed to remove; putrefying carcasses, stagnant water, in fact
every possible condition of abject poverty, malnutrition and psychological
trauma experienced by no other population on earth today. All this has
been going on with the sponsorship of the US in a case of the most monumental
human hypocrisy. As the US pushes an aggressive policy against Iraq, accusing
it of every nefarious crime against its own interests under the cover
of fighting terrorism, Sharon and his army pursue an active policy of
collective punishment against Palestinian civilians.
While Israel enjoys US military support and unending financial support,
the US will not even allow the UN to discuss the Palestinian question;
even for International Observers to protect the Palestinians from human
rights abuses carried out by Israeli troops who are encouraged in a kind
of racist contempt to treat them like animals and make sure their pride
and dignity as human beings are trampled upon. They're humiliated
whether through random house searches, ransacking of buildings, vandalisation
of property, or through more brutal means where they remove the records
of the Central Bureau of Statistics, Ministry of Education, Ministry of
Health, to make sure that Palestinian records of a collective national
existence are erased forever. Those are crimes against humanity, active
war crimes committed by acknowledged war criminals like Sharon, who in
Israel in 1982 after the illegal invasion of Lebanon (the first modern
instance of announced regime change) was convicted by an Israeli court
of the responsibility for the massacres of Sabra and Chatila, which occurred
under Israeli supervision.
Our protest against war has to be inclusive and has to deal with the issues
which are connected to each other. That this military action against Iraq
has to be seen as a part of a collective punishment, and that the problem
of Palestinian refugees started in 1948 when Israel was established as
a result of ruining and destroying Palestinian society. One has to understand
and accept this is very much at the core of the tension between the Arab
and Islamic world on the one hand, and the West, especially the US, on
the other. That our battle against war is also our battle against human
rights abuses, where ever they occur. We cannot be invidious and just
focus on Iraq, bring them to their knees, occupy the country and rule
it militarily just because Iraq is a net exporter of oil connected to
the Caspian axis. There ought to be a broad front in the protests not
only against US action in Iraq but also against US action in Palestine.
It is simply ludicrous to hear President Bush describe Saddam Hussein
as a Hitler, as a demon, as an evil man, and on the other hand, with a
straight face, describe General Ariel Sharon as a man of peace, which
he did in June last year.
Questions:
What immediate effect would an attack on Iraq sanctioned by the UN or
otherwise have on the situation regarding Israel and Palestine?
How do you asses the chances of the demonstrations or the peace movements
in the US?
What is the effect of the anti-terrorism laws in the US?
Is there a place for non violence as a response to any of this, either
in Palestine, on the marches, or in relation to Iraq?
You wrote three weeks ago in the Guardian: "When will we resist";
we 'the Arabs'. As you rightly said, the US is close to an attack
on the Arab world to redesign the Middle East and control the oil, and
you suggest that the Arabs remain passive and submissive and you call
for a collective, genuinely Arab alternative. Could you outline this alternative?
Edward Said:
The likely effect of an attack on Iraq by the US, what would be the
effect on Palestine? The most nightmarish scenario suggests that under
the cover of a conflagration in Iraq with the world's attention turned
to that locale, the Israeli government under Sharon might undertake what
it calls a "transfer of populations" - use the opportunity
of the distractions to drive out another large segment of the Palestinian
population to places like Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. Although I think
it's also unfeasible because we're dealing with a politicised
and galvanised population that hasn't submitted to the terror tactics
of Sharon. Speaking as a Palestinian, I am extremely proud of the fact
that Palestinians have not surrendered, and that Palestinian life - in
its terrible tatters today - is still going on. There will be resistance
to an attempt to drive out large numbers of the population.
Another scenario is increasing the number of lands taken from Palestinians,
while Sharon says he is willing to make a peace deal, in which case there
will be little land left - the figure is now 40% of the West Bank and
75% of Gaza, the rest is annexed by Israel, taken for settlement, and
Israel will continue to control the entrances, exists, water and air rights.
So anything like a real sovereignty for the Palestinians is definitely
not in Sharon's programme and the war in Iraq will make it easier
for him (with the support of the US) to impose draconian solutions.
An attack on Iraq would be extremely deleterious to the Palestinians also
because the attention of the world will be focused on Iraq and the tremendously
needed humanitarian aid for food, shelter and health services required
by the Palestinian population under siege, living in a system of Apartheid,
will be suspended. There are already stories that UNRWA, the agency for
Palestinian refugees, is running out of money. They have a few months
left in funds and supplies. There is a humanitarian catastrophe in the
offing for a population that has already suffered for 35 years under Israeli
occupation.
There is also the possibility that more people will understand the linkage
between Palestine and Iraq. That the Imperial hand in both places, the
contravention of human rights and UN resolutions in both places, need
to be considered together. What we are living through is a continued attempt,
which has gone on for over 150 years, to keep the Arab countries of the
Middle East divided, weakened and basically under outside domination.
Imperial domination is still flourishing, the result being social distortion,
wide spread military governments and human rights abuses that one associates
with countries like Iraq and Syria.
The question about demonstrations in the US. This is the first time in
modern history that there has been such a wide spread set of demonstrations
and protests in the US before war begins. There's a very widespread
feeling on the part of the population that this is an unnecessary war,
that it's being waged for obscure and constantly changing purposes,
that the war on terrorism that we were supposed to be fighting in Afghanistan
has been forgotten, and that we are now in a state of war based on pre-emption
(the new military doctrine of the US) that most Americans refuse. The
demonstrations are serious and important and not to be underestimated
in their effect on government in the long run. What's so important
about them is that people are being asked to choose between being a rogue
power acting out of enormous strength, obduracy, and a kind of blindness
to everyone else, or acting like a member of the world community. And
most Americans, like most people everywhere, want the latter: to be part
of the world community bound by the laws of war and the conventions of
the UN, etc. We are too small a world, and now because of the systems
of modern electronic communication, no part of the world is distant or
without its effect on any other part. So I think there's a dawning
consciousness among vast numbers of Americans, certainly among the young.
As a result of the outrages of September 11th there has been an atmosphere
of repression increasing over time in the US, with alarm shown by the
civil liberties communities, and especially communities of Muslims, Arabs
and people of colour, for whom preventive detention, racial profiling
and invasions of privacy have become routine. Many thousands of Americans
and resident aliens in the US are invidiously discriminated against simply
on the basis of their race, religion and country of origin. There is a
mass hysteria, an atmosphere symbolised by the Terrorism and Patriot Act
which makes it a crime, in a way, to be an Arab. There are many incidents
of people sitting on planes and buses reading Arabic newspapers and being
asked not to do so, or to leave, or being taken into custody because they
disturb the other passengers. And people are picked up simply on their
name, taken aside at airports and other public places because of this
fear. I've seen the deliberate identification of Islam with terrorism
which has occurred at least since the Iranian revolution of 1979. A foreign
devil is very important to the foreign policy of the US - Islam and
Muslim people are the foreign devil. Plus the fact that the Israeli government
has waged an unceasing war against Palestinians under the rubric of fighting
terrorism, which they were very clever to adopt as their policy. So there's
a sense of justified vigilance and pre-emptive punishment which has caused
wide sectors of the American public to be alarmed at the loss of civil
liberties, the suspension of due process - for example the case of
prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, and many others throughout the US who have
been picked up, not allowed to see lawyers, not charged, detained for
three months at a time and then maybe re-detained. The atmosphere is such
that people have to be careful of what they're told, what they say.
There's a McCarthyite atmosphere on some American campuses where
criticism of Israel and US policy in the Middle East is immediately equated
with anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.
I don't want to conclude on an entirely negative note - most people
have been aroused in this country to the dangers of abuses to the constitutional
rights and privileges that every American ought to enjoy. Which is one
of the great prides of this country. But these rights are threatened.
The government is deeply conservative, reactionary, and it wants submission
and docility, rather than a democratically active, participating citizen.
And it is the duty of intellectuals to try to remind people of our rights
and our heritage as a people in search of more freedom, freedom through
community and common goals rather than through the assertion of power
and force. That the US is a capitalist society which has recently gone
through tremendous revelations of corporate greed and corruption, plus
the fact we're in the middle of a very severe economic recession,
have awakened people to the abuses of which this system is capable - the
fact that we don't have health insurance as you do; that the so-called
welfare safety net has been removed due to neo-liberal policies beginning
with the Clinton administration but certainly continuing now; the state
of public education is disastrous, especially in large cities like New
York, Baltimore, Los Angeles. A hopeful sign is that there is an awakened
public consciousness now, that we needn't be patriotic, patriotic
being one of the supreme US virtues towards everything that the President
and his coterie of advisers want us to do.
As to the question of non-violence, I would prefer to use the phrase 'mass
action', here and in the occupied territories. Every liberation movement
has tried to protect itself from injury, killing and abuse of the kind
that is heaped on Palestinians each day by the Israeli Army. There are
instances of peaceful marches broken up by soldiers using live ammunition
where 30 or 40 people are killed, or bulldozers demolishing houses with
people in them, or the razing of the Jenin refugee camp in which many
people lost their properties but also their lives. The Israeli army is
not shy about using all its enormous weaponry, which includes weapons
of mass destruction. Israel has an estimated 200 nuclear warheads plus
biological and chemical warfare capabilities, and has not signed a non-proliferation
or nuclear treaty. Against all that, one has to talk about organised mass
action in which large numbers of people impede, at great risk to their
lives, the processes of segregation, property destruction, above all land
expropriation. That's beginning to emerge as the principle means
of struggle in Palestine. Most people feel that suicide bombing - which
I've opposed from the very beginning - is counter-productive.
It's of course an expression of desperation and a kind of terminal
frustration, but in the end it brings nothing but more reprisals, more
punishment and more suffering. There is now a search for democratic participation
in mass protest. What we have is the slow emergence of national initiatives
in the Occupied Territories, of people coming together to perform self-help
and protest actions, actions that engage and mobilise Israelis, because
you can't talk about self-determination in Palestine without also
talking about the participation of Israelis in the same process. It's
two people in one land, and that reality means that they have to share
not only in each others' fate but in each others' troubles.
There are all kinds of hopeful signs that will expand the struggle against
militarism, for example young Israeli reservists who refuse to serve on
the West Bank and Gaza.
The point I made in my article on submissive Arabs, please don't
misunderstand. I was talking about the Arab regimes, which are unrepresentative,
undemocratic, maintained by repression and force - every country in
the Arab world (to a greater or lesser degree) is ruled by the secret
service and the military. Most countries, including some of the most liberal
in appearance like Egypt and Jordan, have very severe press laws where
freedom of expression is highly circumscribed, and where the powers of
the government - like the Israeli and US governments - claim to
be fighting Islamic terrorism and have imposed very harsh measures on
the population, making them isolated from their people. It's these
governments that I was talking about, that now cringe in submission. They
realise that their continuation in office depends on the patronage of
the US and therefore will say nothing in public that might upset the US,
for fear that after the war protection will be taken from them and they
will fall prey to their people's desires and wishes. What I'm
really talking about is the need for Arab intellectuals - writers,
film makers, philosophers, journalists, the women's movement and
human rights movements - to continue to mobilise as many Arabs as possible
to enter the political struggle and not sit back waiting for an American
military government to redesign the whole area. The great danger we face
as a people, that all people face, is the imposition of government and
power from above - whether from globalisation or military power of
the sort the US wields - and the resultant depoliticisation. Informed
in part by the internet, mass media and satellite channels like Al-Jazeera - some
Arab channels have a wider range of discussion and opinion, and because
they're satellite are not so liable to censorship and control by
the government - there's a general movement towards mobilisation
and a feeling that if we don't take our fate in our own hands and
become responsible for our future, it's not going to be done by the
ruler and it's certainly not going to be done by the Americans.
There was an item in today's paper about a group of Iraqi opposition
people who only two weeks ago were deeply impressed with how President
Bush was committed to civilian democracy in Iraq, since then they have
had meetings with the real people whom they're going to have to deal
with (people like General Tommy Franks, the Pentagon and State Department
Planners who are in charge of post war, post-Saddam Iraq) and they finally
realised that the US administration's only interested in securing
its interests in Iraq, in oil, and, as for the Iraqi people and the opposition,
they can go fly a kite. That's the fallacy most people believe when
they rely on and ally themselves with Imperial powers who they think will
drive them gloriously into a liberated country. What is happening now
is an awakening in the US, the Arab States and elsewhere in the world,
that announcing a war and going at it with flimsy purposes and without
fairness or justice are unacceptable policies. We live on a planet where
people want to live together and not be subject to the enormous power
of the last remaining super power like the US, and the people that rule
it.
Question:
What are the likely consequences of the re-election of Sharon in Palestine
and Israel?
Edward Said:
It seems to me his government, for all the appearance of strength
and determination it tries to exude, is a troubled government. The most
likely scenario is that Sharon will continue what he's doing, and
under the cover of affairs of war in Iraq perhaps be able to do it with
a little more impunity and more damage, but it's likely also that
an election will be called, that his government will fall sooner rather
than later. But I'm quite discouraged by the Israeli peace movement,
the so called liberals, who claim that they were really defeated by the
Intifada, that they were betrayed by Arafat's refusal to accept the
Camp David suggestions in 2000. That's simply unacceptable hand wringing.
First of all there's no reliable record of what was offered at Camp
David, and if Arafat and his people refused it they must have known, having
accepted so many preposterous things in the past, that this would not
be acceptable to their people. And whatever we now know about the plan,
it was that Israel was willing to return a percentage of the land (a very
high percentage according to them) but it would be divided land, cantonised,
with Israel controlling the spaces between. When Israeli propagandists
in America - like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman - keep
saying the Palestinians were offered 95% and they turned it down, it's
like saying prisoners run 95% of the jail, but of course the guards and
wardens control the walls, exits, windows, water and electric supply.
So the Israeli protest movement withdrew from the struggle against their
own government's depredations, policy of occupation, demolitions
and settlement building. There is no way anybody should be convinced by
so-called liberal Israelis saying "we want peace but the Palestinians
aren't doing their part." The thing to remember is, that if
there is a military occupation, the burden is on the occupier and its
citizens to end it, not on the oppressed people to stop resistance. The
problem is to get rid of the occupation and the only people who can do
that - aside from the Palestinians who are fighting it - are the
Israeli citizens themselves. It is the Israeli government that has been
committing crimes against humanity, against the Palestinian people.
This is an edited transcript of a live video link-up from Colombia
University, New York, to public meetings called by the Palestine Solidarity
Campaign and Globalise Resistance, on 14/2/03. It was directly followed
by a live video link-up from Gaza with Mrs Al-Durrah.
Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Peace & Justice Centre, Princes Street
Edinburgh, EH2 4BJ
Tel: +44 (0)131 538 0257
email: palsolcam@blueyonder.co.uk
Globalise Resistance
http://www.grscotland.net
Participants and sites included: Edinburgh University, University of Sussex,
Durham University, Napier University; Augustine United Church, London
School of Economics, Ullapool, University of Dundee, University of Teeside.
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Has the Gulf War taken place yet?
Daniel Jewesbury
Shortly after the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999,
Michael Ignatieff published a book called 'Virtual War'1.
In it he argued that Kosovo was a new type of conflict, marked most particularly
by the ability of Western nations to wage what he called 'war with
impunity'. This impunity had two defining characteristics. Firstly,
'the citizens of the NATO countries ... were mobilized not as combatants,
but as spectators. The war was a spectacle ... The events in question
were as remote from their essential concerns as a football game'
(p.3). Secondly, the sheer wealth of the West means that, even with relatively
small defence budgets, we can afford to fight wars and not suffer noticeable
changes to our standard of living. Both these conditions, Ignatieff argued,
were new, and fundamentally altered the nature of global power relations.
'If Western nations can employ violence with impunity, will they
not be tempted to use it more often? The answers ... are not obvious.
For the future depends not on us but on our enemies. They, like us, are
drawing their own conclusions from the way we seek to avoid the mortal
hazard of war' (p.5). Contained in Ignatieff's words is a warning:
as we continue to enjoy such absolute asymmetry of power, we find ourselves
inexorably drawn into other asymmetries: the only options available to
the 'enemies' of such nonchalant belligerence are terrorism
and guerilla warfare.
So it is that only three years after the book's publication, its
prophesies having come to pass, we must yet again find new theorisations
of the global order, even whilst that order is still mutating. It has
been suggested that we should put our deliberations to one side until
the sandstorm abates and the vista becomes clear again; however, is it
not possible that this new state of flux is (for some time to come, at
least) the new world order? 'Stability' is supplanted by contingency,
impunity by uncertainty, war without end, Amen.
If we return to Ignatieff and consider the way in which he describes the
nascent phenomenon of 'virtual war' at the end of the twentieth
century, we might find some ways of drawing out historical threads that
can reconnect us with the world before September 11th 2001, when Ground
Zero initiated an American Year Zero every bit as all-consuming as that
of the Khmer Rouge or the Jacobins. We might trace some background to
current crises in conceptions of 'democracy' and 'society',
in addition to offering some correctives to what may be an occasionally
deterministic or premature account on Ignatieff's part. This is a
complex investigation, however, since we're dealing with two sets
of schismatic events; first the 'virtualisation' of war, as
Ignatieff sees it, with all the changes concomitant to that, and subsequently
the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, and the commencement
of the War on Terror. We therefore have to address two mutually interdependent
determinisms, both of which are claiming, to a greater or lesser extent,
to have witnessed the end of the world as we previously knew it.
Virtualities
Most of Ignatieff's book is composed of articles and essays republished
from other sources; only the concluding chapter (also called 'Virtual
War') was written specifically for the book. It's this chapter
and its contentions that I want to consider in detail here, and to follow
up. Before I begin that consideration, however, I want to examine some
of the different potential meanings of the term 'virtual'; Ignatieff
uses it pointedly, in a specific context, but it has a variety of resonances
that we should not overlook. These days, the word is most often used to
refer to concepts and technologies connected with cyberspace and 'Virtual
Reality' (a technology which, significantly, is almost always considered
in terms of video games). Underlying all three of the meanings or connotations
described below is a sense of some schism between the 'real'
and the 'simulated'2. War, it is routinely and blithely
asserted in the media and by philosophers, political theorists and strategists,
is now little more than a computer game3; Ignatieff comments,
'The bombing of Baghdad was the first war as light show and the aerial
bombardment of Iraqi forces was the first battle turned into a video-arcade
game' (p.168). Bear in mind two things, as you read on. Firstly,
the phrase 'shock and awe' was briefly registered as a trademark
by Sony, before they decided that this was in 'bad taste' (does
this mean that the war in Iraq will not be coming to a Playstation™
near you soon? Of course it will, they just decided to do it with better
taste). Secondly, the ubiquitous web video provider, Real.com, made this
the first pay-per-view war. It 'offered' users of American media
websites such as CNN.com and ABC.com the 'opportunity' to pay
a subscription to view their live video streams from Baghdad.
Most immediately, then, 'virtual' refers to the way in which
not only the everyday citizenry, in the West, are now removed from the
fighting (mobilised, in the overwhelming majority, as spectators, rather
than as conscripts or munitions workers), but so also are the military
leadership themselves. According to the rhetoric of 'precision bombing'
and 'smart warfare', war is fought remotely, with computer-
and satellite-guided armaments.
The second level of virtuality concerns the increasing mediatisation /
mediation of the war, the manner in which it has been delivered to 'us'
spectators - as in a recent history of war reporting, from Vietnam
to Qatar, Basra and Baghdad. Following the significant impact that images
of the fighting in Vietnam had on public opinion in the US (and remember
here the UK and US governments' contrived dismay at Al Jazeera's
broadcasting of images of civilian casualties4), Western governments
knew that, as communications technologies developed, much tighter control
of the media would be required during wartime. The Falklands war took
place only twenty years ago, and yet at the time footage still took two
weeks to make its way back to TV studios in London. Reporters in the Falklands,
'embedded' as they were with the military, were generally much
more compliant than their colleagues had been in Vietnam, taking a clearly
'patriotic' line rather than raising issues about the worth,
or conduct, of the conflict (hardly surprising when even Michael Foot,
then Labour leader, was falling over himself to express his support for
the war). For the military, the Falklands was a media success, questions
concerning the sinking of the Belgrano only emerging some time after the
war.
It was not until a decade later, however, that the so-called new technologies
started to change fundamentally the manner in which war was covered; nor
was it necessarily in the way that is so often described. War reporters
in Kuwait were the first to be able to take advantage of new satellite
transmitters portable enough to be used in the field, meaning that live
pictures of a war could, in theory, be beamed around the world; in addition,
CNN was the first broadcaster to be able to offer twenty-four hour coverage
of a war5. However, military concerns about what live TV coverage
might potentially mean for the execution of a war strategy led to tight
controls, such as the pooling of sanctioned video footage. Thus the news
networks had all the technology required to cover the war as it happened,
but were able to say almost nothing about it. What we were offered instead
was the war as a pyrotechnic display, at a safe distance, even when, paradoxically,
the images might be coming from the nose of an airborne Cruise missile.
Successive technological developments in the ten years since the Gulf
have accentuated this dichotomy between filling the schedules of rolling
news channels and extended bulletins and actually finding something to
report. Sony made an earlier appearance in the virtualising of war when
it transpired that their walkman-sized DV editing decks were a great favourite
with the Kosovan Liberation Army. The KLA became extremely adept at turning
out propaganda and handing it, broadcast-ready, to journalists desperate
for a story. It seems that US and British forces have taken this tactic
into the mainstream with some relish in recent weeks; and now, of course,
the journalists are conveniently placed within the army, ready to receive
the story 'as it happens' (or perhaps, as it is 'helped
into happening').
Finally, there is a sense in which the war in Iraq is virtualised simply
because the political systems which justify (demand) it are themselves
no more than the simulation of politics. In a supposedly 'post-industrial',
'post-ideological' age, we are denounced as naïve if we
even lament this turn. Thus Baudrillard famously described the Gulf War
as 'the absence of politics pursued by other means'. Public
political life no longer exists in the neo-liberal even-newer world order,
where pragmatism rather than principle dictate policy. A simulated politics
gives rise to a rolling war with no clear justification or endpoint (currently
the choice is between régime change and the destruction of weapons
of mass destruction, and there's no clear indication yet where the
roadshow will visit next).
Debunking the myth of isolationism (a further aside)
Isolationist exceptionalism - the sense of the United States being
a city on a hill, safe from the fratricide of Europe - runs deep in
the American electorate (pp.178-79).
It's become a cliché to describe the way in which September
11th roused the US from its slumber, forced it to slough off its isolationism,
to re-engage with global politics, and so on. The truth of these statements
is usually seen as self-evident, but should proof be required, America's
former unwillingness to commit even to humanitarian and peacekeeping missions
around the world (or at least to commit its infantry) is cited.
The idea that America pursued anything approaching an isolationist policy
in the decade after the end of the Cold War is blatantly untrue. The 1980s
saw a series of both covert and open interventions in Latin America, and
continued US support for friendly despots elsewhere. Following the implosion
of the communist bloc, the US Army did not abandon its many bases around
the world, nor did the CIA cease to seek to influence the geopolitical
order on the basis of US self-interest. That the US assists the continuing
illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine is but one example of this, although
Israel is one of very few steady themes in what is otherwise a capricious
and opportunistic foreign policy.
The point of all this is simply to reiterate that 'virtuality',
in all the above senses, has not delivered us into a 'post-territorial'
age. And whilst there seems to be an overwhelming urge in the media and
in political circles to describe the way in which everything changed after
September 11th, such that the rupture threw up 'new realities',
this is also misleading; what we find, in fact, after September 11th are
persistent themes made more clear. One is that the physical presence of
US forces in bases around the world is not only more important now than
it was before (indeed the US can only conduct its wars with such impunity
by both maintaining and strengthening these commitments), but that this
global presence never really went away just because of the onward march
of virtuality. Furthermore, even though openly illegal unilateral wars
may have been frowned upon by the Clinton administration, the idea that
before September 11th the US was a sleeping giant, a benevolent superpower
reluctant to interfere in the affairs of others, is quite clearly and
demonstrably a myth.
Precision bombing, virtual armies, propaganda, lies and the new nation
state
Ignatieff claims that 'precision weapons', armaments that could
be remotely guided and controlled, were first developed in Vietnam, a
war definitely not fought with impunity. He describes the way in which
new conventional weaponry became a necessity due to the nuclear stalemate
of 'Mutually Assured Destruction' (MAD):
"The beauty of such weaponry was that, unlike the nuclear arsenal,
they could be used. But only in a certain way. To make the use of these
politically and morally acceptable, it was essential to increase the precision
of their targeting; ... and to reduce, if not eliminate, the risk to
those who fired them ... " (p.164).
He goes on to state that Western advances in computer technologies, often
explicitly led or commissioned by the military, finally sealed the fate
of the Soviet Union. As Moscow clung to an industrial economy of scale,
the US responded by committing itself to the new technologies. Ignatieff
cites Mikhail Gorbachev, who described evidence of Star Wars (Reagan's
short-lived space-based Missile Defence System, recently revived by Bush
Jnr.) as the one development which forced the Soviet Union's capitulation6.
Ignatieff goes on to describe some other attributes of precision warfare,
noting that 'the aim of post-modern warfare' is not 'attrition
and destruction', but 'to strike at the nerve centers - command
posts, computer networks - which direct the war-machine ... Command
and control can be attacked both by direct missile bombardment and also
by information warfare: electronic jamming, release of computer viruses,
disinformation and propaganda' (p.169). This is virtual warfare in nearly
all senses of the word.
'Cyberwar' is just an extension of the old-style propaganda
warfare that Psychological Operations (PsyOps) teams have been churning
out for decades. It's notable, however, now that journalists are
on the battlefield and able to send their stories back instantaneously,
how the propaganda war is much more consciously waged on the Home Front.
Surely this is a central part of the 'post-modern war'? David
Leigh, writing recently in the Guardian, highlighted three types
of 'disinformation'.7 He summarises these as follows.
'Level 1: Unconfirmed false reports presented as fact to make exciting
news stories ... Level 2: Disputed events presented as fact for propaganda
purposes ... Level 3: Military disinformation.' There are many
ways in which news agencies and embedded journalists conspire, whether
consciously or not, to assist in the propagation of these various levels
of lying. Into what category, for example, would we place the infamous
ITN pictures of Bosnian prisoners at Trnoplje? In that case, ITN camera
crews, journalists and editors conspired to give the false impression
that prisoners at Trnoplje were kept behind barbed wire in a 'concentration
camp' (the barbed wire behind which prisoners were seen actually
comprised the animal pen into which ITN had placed their camera)8.
Much more recently, the toppling of the statue of Saddam in Fardus Square
(conveniently just outside the Palestine Hotel where the international
press were staying) has been shown to have been a stunt organised by the
US military and its 'official' Iraqi opposition, flown in by
the Pentagon a few days previously. No more than around 75 non-US personnel
were present at the event, and the square itself was sealed off by US
Marines while the stunt went ahead9. An equally important level
of disinformation, which requires a great deal of complicity between reporters
and the military, is that of simple omission. In recent arguments about
the ethics of embedding, journalists have striven to assert that their
integrity, their ability to smell a rat, to maintain their cynicism, remains
intact. What the military realised early on, however, was that, so long
as the agenda was set by them, it didn't really matter how
it was reported. Could this be why 'non-embedded' journalists
in Baghdad were labelled as the mouthpieces of the Iraqi régime
by David Blunkett? (The vague accusations made by Blunkett were almost
certainly directed most categorically at the Independent's
Robert Fisk.)
The arguments surrounding precision bombing themselves come into the frame
of the propaganda war:
"While precision guidance weaponry is supposed to reverse the twentieth-century
trend towards ever greater civilian casualties, warfare directed at a
society's nervous system, rather than against its fielded forces,
necessarily blurs the distinction between civilian and military objectives.
The most important targets have a dual use. Television stations transmit
military signals as well as information. Power stations run military computers
as well as water pumping stations and hospitals. There is no guarantee
that war directed at the nervous system of a society will be any less
savage than war directed only at its troops (p.170)."
After the negative publicity generated by the bombing of the TV station
in Belgrade10 during the Kosovo campaign, the British government
in particular was anxious to be seen to prosecute this war in as 'sterile'
a manner as possible: this was the war in which the lights would be left
on, demonstrating that in the four years since Kosovo precision warfare
had once again advanced immeasurably. At the time of writing, the power
and water are still off in Baghdad after several days (this no doubt due
to the dastardly machinations of the otherwise invisible Ba'ath régime).
This often repeated intention of the government, to strike at the régime
and somehow leave the Iraqi people unmolested, alerts us to another 'new
reality' that Ignatieff does not address. Whilst the government and
media (and large, particularly hypocritical parts of the anti-war movement)
assert that 'we' are fighting this war, collectively, as a nation,
'we' are not fighting 'them' (the Iraqi people, collectively,
as a nation). So what entity, exactly, are we at war with? What is nationhood
if it is not nation states who fight wars? Is it too now virtualised,
in some way? The people of Iraq, we are told, are glad that the United
Kingdom and United States - us - have liberated them, because 'we'
have taken on their régime. Then again, the people of the United
Kingdom clearly did not approve of this conflict before it started. This
is, we learn, a new, oxymoronic phenomenon: an imperial war of national
liberation. This should alert us to some profound difficulties in
our understanding of what exactly the nation state is in this virtualised,
post-September 11th world. It seems infinitely mutable; on the one hand,
the 'democratic' nations who wage this war presume that the
executive is entirely inseparable from the people who confer its legitimacy;
on the other, the despotic 'rogue states' against whom this
war is waged have an exclusively parasitic relationship to their subjects.
Unfortunately there are plenty of good despots whose relationship with
their people is as yet undetermined. In all cases the same dictum seems
to apply: the Leader is the People.
Having won the Cold War by virtue of its high-tech, post-industrial economy,
the West is now caught in a peculiar paradox of the 'virtual war'. Even
though they allow servicemen's and women's lives to be saved
and wars to be fought 'with impunity', the military resists
the wholesale adoption of the new technologies and the new warfare, simply
because it, like the old Soviet Union, depends on economies of sheer scale.
A large army is 'reassuring' precisely because it mobilises,
by implication, the threat of attack. As long as this cycle continues,
the army can be confident that its future is guaranteed. A scaled-down,
technological army, even if it possesses all the firepower and might of
its predecessor, appears to be an acknowledgement that the 'threat'
has diminished, and thus one of two things must happen: either people
start to feel less secure, or, conversely, they understand that their
security is no longer dependent on a large national army, and the armed
forces' insulation from the vagaries of the information economy disappears.
Ignatieff takes up this theme: 'If you have Cruise missiles, why
do you need all those airplanes? If you have precision guided weapons
launched from submarines, why do you need all those aircraft carriers
and destroyers?' (p.172)11.
Kosovo, then, was not really the 'virtual war' that it might
have been, because the military did not want to adopt all the new technologies
that the administration wanted to deploy. And in many ways, the war in
Iraq has been both 'more new' (politicians now realise that
they must at least make the appearance of wanting to kill fewer civilians,
however credible that may be) and 'less new' (ground forces
with heavy artillery were deployed, and tanks laid roads behind them in
order to establish supply lines). Ignatieff highlights a previous conflict
between generals in the army and defence chiefs in the Pentagon:
" ... the central claim of the new technological gospel was that
computers, battlefield sensors and spy satellites could dispel the 'fog'
of war - the chaotic uncertainty in which battles unfold; and eliminate
the 'friction' - adverse terrain, climate, equipment failure,
troop morale and other incalculable factors - standing in the way of
military victory. Generals like Norman Schwarzkopf were skeptical: they
had bitter combat experience of both fog and friction in Vietnam. They
also knew that the 'systems analysts' of the Pentagon had promised
then that new technologies married to new tactics ... would dispel the
fog and grease the friction of warfare. And they hadn't.
"Vietnam veterans like Schwarzkopf were also angered by the argument ...
that putting troops on the ground was no longer necessary ... Sooner
or later, they argued, the army would need to put its soldiers on the
ground to fight their way in and take and hold ground (p.173)."
The very recent and open disagreements between General Tommy Franks and
Donald Rumsfeld about the size of force that would be needed in Iraq are
only the most recent example of a conflict that has been continuing for
at least the last fifteen years.
Kosovo, Ignatieff maintains, occurred 'in mid revolution'. 'America ...
has not yet reorganized its troops around the strategic doctrine which
the revolution in military affairs makes possible: air-lifted maneuver-based
warfare by lightly armed squads, working in and around enemy lines, to
call in high precision fires from naval and space based assets12.
To some extent, America and its NATO allies fought a virtual war because
they were neither ready nor willing to fight a real one' (pp.175-6).
This throws up some confusion. After September 11th, should we conclude
that the 'revolution' has been completed, since the tactical
pattern Ignatieff describes sounds very much like that deployed in Iraq
(at least those parts we know about); or is there a certain amount of
'fog' surrounding this too? Was this war more 'real',
in that it (eventually) was waged in the most part by large infantry and
Marine battalions, or more 'virtual', in that it deployed tactical
airstrikes and 'precision bombing'?
Virtual democracy, virtual humanitarianism, 'virtual consent'
and other hollow noises
Writing only three years ago, Ignatieff was able to claim that '[l]eaders ...
address their electorates and afterwards pollsters consult samples of
citizens to see just how far they support what the leader has in mind ...
When leaders call for more risk than an electorate will support, the polls
pull them back into line' (p.177). Not this time. The government
of the United Kingdom very nearly unseated itself, such was its determination
to go to war in the face of public disapproval of such an action (including
the largest demonstration ever held in the United Kingdom).
In a section entitled 'Virtual consent' Ignatieff writes that
'[t]he power to give or withhold consent to war is an essential element
of the freedom of citizens' (p.176), but goes on to note that in
the years since the Korean War, no formal declaration of war has been
made by either Congress of the Houses of Parliament.
"This bypassing of the constitution is assisted by linguistic subterfuge.
Since constitutions state that war requires a declaration to be legitimate,
the word 'war' never passes a leader's lips ... The word
'humanitarian' figures prominently (p.177)."
In the recent simulation of political dissent that immediately preceded
this war, both on the streets and in the House of Commons, what actually
happened? Tony Blair was able to override the wishes of the British people
on this issue, not in spite of, but because we live in a 'democracy'.
The question we should be asking is not 'how could this happen in
a democracy' but 'what does democracy mean'. Members of
Parliament were able to enter the House and vote on a government motion,
and on various amendments, not on the basis of what their constituents
might have wanted (those whom they are elected to represent), but solely
on the basis of their consciences (and career ambitions). Thus 'consent',
such as it was, was given to an illegal conflict, and this was not anti-democratic
but part of our democratic system. There is surely yet another
irony in the fact that our own democratic system allowed the clearly-heralded
wishes of its citizens to be over-run in the name of providing 'democracy'
to someone else. 'Our vision for the future of Iraq is of a country
free of repression able to live peacefully alongside its neighbours and
develop in a way its own people choose. I believe it is a progressive
vision.' So wrote Tony Blair in a letter emailed to all Labour Party
members after the vote in the Commons.
"But if war in the future is sold to voters with the promise of impunity
they may be tempted to throw caution to the winds. If military action
is cost-free, what democratic restraints will remain on the resort to
force? ... Democracies may well remain peace loving only so long as
the risks of war remain real to their citizens. If war becomes virtual ...
democratic electorates may be more willing to fight especially if the
cause is justified in the language of human rights and even democracy
itself (pp.179-80)."
What has become apparent from the rhetoric that preceded and has accompanied
the war, is that we are entering a new era where 'democracy'
needs constant protection from a vaguely mobilised terrorist threat. That
this is a circular argument should hardly need reiterating by now. Nor
should it need to be said that 'humanitarian warfare' has delivered
us - and this time quite without irony - to a state where peace
is literally war. It's just so easy that way.
Ignatieff describes how the Anti-War campaign in the States helped to
bring the Vietnam War to an end. One lesson of the virtual war is that,
once it has started, it cannot be stopped by 'public disapproval'.
This war, which needed no public approval to begin, could theoretically
have been prevented by a sustained anti-war campaign, had that very clear
mandate been reflected in the House of Commons. If parliament had voted
against British involvement in the war, it is doubtful that American troops
could have fought the war alone, from both the north and south of Iraq.
However, once hostilities began, it was clear that the pretense of seeking
approval was over.
Inconclusion
Some of Ignatieff's own conclusions can be held up and re-examined
in the light of subsequent developments. Whilst they remain useful, there
are a few points that are striking now for their premature obsolescence.
'Virtual war,' he writes, 'proceeds to virtual victory'
(p.208). This is clear enough. When we consider the conflict in Afghanistan,
can we say for sure when it ended, or even whether it has ended? The Gulf
War never really ended, since US and UK planes carried on bombing Iraq
in the subsequent twelve years. And what was the effective outcome of
Kosovo? 'Wars fought in the name of the human rights of other nations'
national minorities are bound to be self-limiting. We fight for victory
and for unconditional surrender only when we are fighting for ourselves'
(pp.208-9).
But this time round, according to one of the excuses at least, we were
fighting for ourselves, to protect against the threat of Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction. Or were we fighting for the human rights
of the Iraqi people? Or to topple a régime that was no longer useful?
At least this much is certain, there appears to be no way this war can
ever really end, since there is no-one to surrender to the occupying army
('George Galloway', suggested one wag in the House of Commons).
And the power vacuum which immediately followed 'liberation'
has not gone away, despite the assertion that US and UK forces are now
policing the streets of Iraqi cities.
For Ignatieff, of course, the concept of régime change as an
overt policy was still a distant and unlikely possibility (even though,
as I have pointed out, the US has been changing régimes covertly
for many decades).
"A rogue state is judged to be better than no state at all. A Serbia
and an Iraq that remain intact, under despotic leadership, are both preferred
to societies dissolving into civil war. And since - a further contradiction - Western
nations believe in self-determination, they are unwilling to occupy these
defeated states and rebuild them from the bottom up in a properly imperial
fashion (p.209)."
Yet this is precisely what we find ourselves confronted by now: virtual
victory, for sure, in that it remains as inconclusive as any of the campaigns
that Ignatieff lists; but for different reasons. 'We' have toppled
the régime, and 'we' will set about installing a new
one, but in the interim 'we' do not want to take responsibility
for the anarchy that ensues. And the transition will be long, and complex,
and uncertain, and 'we' may not even get the régime we
wanted in the end ...
Ignatieff's arguments are tainted by a kind of determinism, an 'endism'
(linked to the arguments propagated originally by Francis Fukuyama that
we had reached the 'end' of history with the collapse of the
Soviet bloc), that we should always be careful to avoid. This applies
as much to prescriptions concerning the 'post-9/11 world' as
to Ignatieff's pre-September 11th arguments about virtual war.
We can close by reconsidering one of the themes with which began this
essay, that of terrorism. Conor Gearty, an expert on the way in which
Western nations use the threat of terrorism to curtail civil liberties,
wrote in 1997 on some paradoxes that this threw up13. After
signing the Oslo Peace Accords with the PLO in 1994, the Israeli government
was in a precarious position: it could not simply walk away from the White
House saying that the terrorist threat was no more, since the fear of
it had been so carefully fostered for the preceding 45 years. Nor could
it admit as much. Thus, by agreeing peace, the 'moderate' Israelis
effectively ensured their own downfall. The terrorist threat had to be
re-articulated, but the 'people' refused to credit this re-articulation14.
So the current terrorist threat must be kept alive, not diluted, if the
same fate is not to befall the neo-conservative administration in Washington.
'If Western nations can employ violence with impunity, will they
not be tempted to use it more often? The answers ... are not obvious.
For the future depends not on us but on our enemies. They, like us, are
drawing their own conclusions from the way we seek to avoid the mortal
hazard of war' (p.5). This is one of Ignatieff's prescient insights
that remains unchanged by subsequent events, indeed it is substantially
proven.
Speaking recently in Paris, Jean Baudrillard, who got into so much trouble
for stating that the Gulf War 'would not take place', 'was not happening'
and then 'did not take place', described a variation of this interrelationship15.
Re-animating the 'Master:Slave' dialectic of Hegel, Baudrillard suggested
that terrorism was now victorious. The Master, he said, was always that
which 'gave life' to the Slave, 'he who has no right to his own death'.
The suicide bomber, however, reclaims their own death, and thus unseats
or deposes the 'Master'. America, however, still engaged in the work of
mourning September 11th, is unable to control or 'own' its 'death(s)'
and so becomes the slave. As US forces wander around the globe in search
of retribution, they merely act a part which has already been written
for them. But this revenge can never be exacted; if it were, if terrorism
were 'defeated', 'we' should have to stop fighting it. Western governments
gave life to the logic of the terrorist threat, but it surpasses their
control, and cannot be readily extinguished, as Yitzhak Rabin discovered.
Perhaps this argument seems to overdramatise the effect that any informal
or guerilla resistance can have against the only global superpower: there
is really no 'dialectic' to speak of, we could argue, such is the asymmetry.
Furthermore, the threat presented by Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda, and whoever
else may come into the frame, is massively overstated, for economic and
political ends. Baudrillard does not mention (as Gearty implies) that
if terrorism didn't exist, governments would have to invent it, so convenient
is the 'threat' in justifying the withdrawal or curtailing of civil liberties.
Whichever way we choose to approach this problematic, it seems 'we' have
got ourselves into a quite intractable predicament by attempting to virtualise
a world that, every so often, insists on asserting its own reality.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Dan Fleming, Arshad Sharif, Stuart Watson and Chris Jewesbury.
Notes
1. Michael Ignatieff (2000) Virtual War (London: Chatto & Windus)
2. This is intensely problematic; virtuality is nothing new. Enlightenment
ontology and epistemology, by constructing the sovereign subject prior
to the world, also constructs the technological drive for mastery over
the world that is at the heart of Virtual Reality. The world is objectified,
turned into usable data, or 'standing reserve' in Heidegger's
terms. VR, which places us literally at the scopic centre of a fantastic
universe, fulfills the aims of modernity, rather than surpassing them.
See Martin Heidegger (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays (London: HarperCollins)
3. Bizarrely, one of those who has most recently criticised the media
for turning war into a 'spectator sport' and a 'reality
TV show' is none other than the gamesmaster himself, commander of
British forces Air Marshall Brian Burridge.
4. See also www.informationclearinghouse.info
5. See TBN, 'Video from the Battlefield', http://www.umich.edu/~newzies/main/satellite/satellitevideo.html
6. Star Wars operates as a very efficient 'virtualisation of the
threat'. Since governments rely on cultivating fear (of the threat
of terrorism, or of hostile states, or of economic instability) to justify
war (and thus maintain their power), Star Wars, a virtual weapons system
if ever there was one, itself escalates the conflict, rather than pre-empting
or preventing it. It is thus an offensive, rather than a defensive, weapon,
as Gorbachev surely recognised.
7. David Leigh (2003) 'False witness', The Guardian, April 4th
2003, p. 19
8. See www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D0E3.htm
for an account of how LM magazine was shut down for daring to report this
fabrication.
9. For a wide-angle shot of the square during the 'toppling',
go to http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2838.htm
10. See http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/facts/bombed-RTS.html
for a contemporary account of the bombing from a Serbian political website.
11. He notes that in the decade after 1989 defence spending in the US
fell from six to three percent of GDP (although after September 11th this
has begun to climb again). In a recent lecture, he comments that even
the reduced spending on defence (latest figures, for 2002, are $336 bn,
or 4% of GDP) represents an enormous amount of money: only such a rich
nation can put so little of its budget into defence and still fight wars
without feeling the economic effects at home.
12. What Donald Rumsfeld, with no discernible trace of irony, called 'lightning
war'. See http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2002/02/01022002104506.asp
13. Conor Gearty (1997) The Future of Terrorism (London: Phoenix). See
also Gearty, ed., (1996) Terrorism (Aldershot: Dartmouth)
14. Interestingly, the foremost theoretical proponent of the terrorist
threat was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, precisely the figure who
stood to gain from the downfall of the Oslo Accords.
15. For a French report on the discussion between Baudrillard and Jacques
Derrida in Paris on the 19th of February, see http://www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/2003/2003-02/2003-02-21/2003-02-21-058.html
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_____________________________________________________
TERMINALS AND FRONTIERS
Lalchand Azad talks to video and digital artist Kooj
Chuhan from the group Virtual Migrants, about theory, practice and in
particular their set of works collectively titled 'Terminal Frontiers'
which bears the strap-line 'deportation, terror and murder by paper'.
LALCHAND: Virtual Migrants have produced educative works, artistic works,
and worked in association with campaigns. How do you see the relationship
between these areas of activity?
KOOJ: Campaigning is generally to gain support and lobby - whether
through militant action or otherwise - for a specific change and to
provide focal activity for progressive energies. Political education is
to impart positive or suppressed information and ideas, to generate critical
discussion and present systematic, coherent, alternative perspectives
and practical approaches; also to assist your understanding of your own
position among the power structures of society. Progressive art practice
in this context is that which enables heartfelt engagement with the ideas,
structures and human realities which political education deals with.
The question is how these fit into social or political change. For any
given issue or theme, the associated campaigning, education and art practice
will be part of a movement whether closely and actively or distantly and
with minimal reference. Change with any significance, foundation and continuity
can only be produced if the elements of a movement can support each other.
Ultimately, fundamental political change will only take place when a whole
range of diverse and developed elements of a mature movement can be organised
cohesively and integrated within a logistical and philosophical framework.
In Britain at the very least this is a long way off, so for now let's
talk about appraising current art practice in relation to campaigning.
Central to Virtual Migrants' work has been a connection with anti-deportation
campaigns for some years. These campaigns are part of a movement supporting
mainly asylum seekers to gain legitimate refuge in this country where
it has been denied. Over a long period of time - including the twenty
years since I first got involved in such campaigns - the success of
such campaigns has not moved forward despite certain forms of organisation
within the movement having advanced - laws have tightened and people
are being snatched and unfairly deported more than ever. Maybe this isn't
the fault of the movement and is just inevitable, along with the wider
downturn of political consciousness over the same period. On the other
hand, maybe the right seeds were just simply not sown way back. Maybe
short term victories were the order of the day and swallowed up all available
energy, in which case we should be able to redress this with benefit of
hindsight.
LALCHAND: So is Virtual Migrants about sowing seeds?
KOOJ: Recently we have worked on two responses - an educational CD-ROM
and the Terminal Frontiers series of art works. The almost unfunded CD-ROM,
titled 'We Are Here Because You Were There' - which me and
Aidan (Jolly) put together with a lot of contributions - is an introductory
critique about immigration and asylum in Britain, particularly geared
towards schools key stage 3 onwards. In compiling material for the CD-ROM
we realised that such introductory perspectives and information simply
did not exist in any form - we had to write it ourselves rather than
being able to modify existing literature that possibly should have already
been available. Perhaps that in itself answers the question about whether
seeds were sown before and whether we might be considered to be sowing
a few? I mean, after all these years it really feels to me that I have
had to create this CD-ROM to move forward from the history of the legal
discrimination focus which has dominated critical literature about deportations.
The theoretical broader base of links and contexts has never been established,
let alone popularised. The CD-ROM serves to introduce a broader contextual
base while the Terminal Frontiers artworks allow passionate and empathetic
connection with the ideas in a vivid, moving and memorable way. But this
needs to be part of a movement of sowing similar seeds if worthwhile fruits
are to be reaped in the future since we are up against reactionary ideological
seeds being sown all the time.
LALCHAND: And how does this fit in with the process of the campaigning
activity?
KOOJ: The CD-ROM addresses the need to impart information and perspectives
to a broad cross-section of the public. We felt this to be particularly
important because of the power of the media in areas where there are no
refugees yet people are very anti-asylum, and also because of the lack
of any involvement of a campaigning or progressive voice in such geographic
areas. In fact, much sincere progressive involvement of local campaigners
is directed towards assisting and working with the victims of state immigration
policies, which may be welcome but leaves behind the more awkward effort
to debunk myths and encourage proper debate with local indigenous people.
I might go on to argue a similar process having contributed to the rise
of the BNP around Greater Manchester to show it is part of a broader tendency,
and how the results of this lack of 'seed sowing' can allow
some seeds from the far right to be successfully planted instead. Basically,
I am saying that there are too few activists who venture outside 'converted'
territory, and while doing so may feel the most unrewarding and even the
least mobilising it may in the long term be the most politically useful.
Perhaps there is a short-termism about much activism and campaigning,
whereas serious political education is a long-term affair through which
we are trying to lay the foundations for the future. I think there is
a general lack of understanding among the left, progressives and minority
activists about the possible roles of art other than as putting on a benefit
or cultural event, or providing promotional media.
LALCHAND: And within progressive art practice is there perhaps too much
'preaching to the converted'?
KOOJ: Having used the phrase myself I have to say it is a really misleading
and unconstructive concept. It certainly is an accusation levelled at
progressive artists but it misrepresents the needs of progressive movements.
Similarly, my arguing for the greater sowing of educative seeds is not
the same as preaching to the 'non-converted'. First of all,
what is 'converted'? Within any group supporting progressive
activism there are many differences of opinion, a range of contradictions
and (like for everyone else) many suffer from a lot of misinformation
from the dominant discourses. There is little opportunity to explore,
understand and focus, or to resolve perspectives and further questions.
Art and media works are a key way in which people can come together and
do this in a less didactic way and retain a closeness to the central concerns,
a sense of purpose, along with the 'sing it together' sharing
of common ground which necessarily sustains any interest-based group.
Though didacticism also has its place - for example the 'We Are
Here...' CD-ROM which was intended as an educational work with a
capital 'E' - for use in schools and so on rather than as
an art product. Having said that, it is certainly no more didactic than
any school history book and probably less so; didacticism has to be placed
in context and we should challenge those accusations of being didactic
and dogmatic when indiscriminately used against work which states a progressive
critique.
LALCHAND: Lets move on to the Terminal Frontiers exhibition. Can you briefly
describe the project?
KOOJ: It was a two-year long project with a number of sections which resulted
in five different electronic art works being produced by a range of artists
at different levels, including Keith Piper, with a range of contributions
including from people seeking asylum and also from school children. The
processes involved in creating the works were very intensive with a general
attempt to scratch below the surface at the underlying causes for and
contexts around issues to do with asylum and globalisation, while at the
same time wanting to be true to our personal responses to these issues.
It's all well documented on our website.
LALCHAND: One of the two key pieces (Keith Piper's being the other)
was the 'What If I'm Not Real' installation which you directed
and which involved collaboration with a number of artists. How did this
work and what was it about?
KOOJ: 'What If I'm Not Real' was developed through much
collaborative discussion with the entire group of six artists, which included
five of migrant origin. Across three screens in a circular arrangement,
accompanied by other sculptural elements, the viewer can follow the simple
movements of the adult, child and official on their respective screens
producing a visual narrative accompanied by finely crafted, multi-directional
and alternating musical atmospheres. Among other things, the adult tries
to sew together the borders of two maps with a thread that will always
be too short, the child tries to piece together assorted fragments of
photographs of faces, and the official both sends off military vehicles
and receives money from the 'ground' of water. The interplay between the
characters leads to a final retaliation from the adult, although equally
the power of the piece is that it allows a range of mentalities between
aggressor and underdog to be woven together, explored and played out.
The mask work and plain garments were intended to minimize the specific
gender and cultural references while at the same time keeping the sense
of character and drama - the intention was to create a simpler and
more universally applicable set of meanings.
LALCHAND: Originally coming from an expression of a group of artists,
how does it work as art and as a contribution to progressive change?
KOOJ: Well, the work was very much our personal response to the issues
presented before us, though we clearly wanted the final work to support
our political sympathies. Being true and authentic to yourself and also
to your politics and beliefs is a difficult trick to play and takes some
commitment, arguments and a learning curve to achieve. The work is incredibly
rich with personal approaches and ideas such as the sense of opposites
which was so critical to our poet Tang Lin. The characters were all placed
on water suggesting on the one hand a relief from the problems of land - both
which the migrant has left and also which the migrant must go to - yet
on the other hand the disturbing sense that as land creatures they can't
float there forever and will need to leave this temporary respite. Blood
is also used to represent both life and death with the adult migrant finding
her own resolution by using her own blood along with that of others as
a form of fuel. Keith Piper's immediate comment was, 'God, the
production values are really high!' And a number of people who have
generally held the painfully common view that 'political art is just
an excuse for a slogan at art's expense' were all persuaded
otherwise once they had seen this work. In fact, a fuller text about its
aesthetics would be a significant piece in itself but unfortunately the
work's strength of provocative content usually leads the discussion
away, as it will do now.
As with many such works, it is essentially about engaging people with
human feelings and realities at a deeper level than facts and statistics,
managing to emotionally distil global processes and relationships into
simple, universal human narratives. It is clearly non-didactic, allowing
exploration of a range of metaphors within a structured framework, yet
still makes a clear statement that is largely free from specific cultural
references. It reached out to those interested in the art and the issues,
and to art audiences more generally who would not normally frequent such
a space. Further to this, it has stimulated interest in such work amongst
artists and art spaces. I would add that the whole set of Terminal Frontiers
works - along with the CD-ROM - is a compelling, complementary combination
at all levels. One of the works was designed to be portable and toured
various public and community venues away from the gallery space. Even
though we had variable responses to this 'community tour', its
value and possibilities are enormous and we want to try it again. It is
part of our commitment to make work geographically accessible, even if
demanding, while simultaneously avoiding it being marginalized from the
mainstream where it can also be seen in a more dedicated environment.
'Terminal Frontiers' will be coming to Street Level gallery
in Glasgow this autumn, and is due to continue touring through 2004. The
show was premiered at Castlefield Gallery (Manchester) in late 2002 and
was subsequently shown at the ICA (London).
The artists involved in the Terminal Frontiers series of works are Kooj
Chuhan, Aidan Jolly, Tang Lin, Hafiza Mohamed, Miselo Kunda-Anaku, Jilah
Bakshayesh and Keith Piper.
contact: info@virtualmigrants.com
http://www.virtualmigrants.com
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Climate
Change: Prognosis And Courses Of Action
Phil England
As the USA launches an illegal invasion and occupation of the country
with the world's second largest proven oil reserves, it's as
good a time as any to step back and look at the state of the bigger environmental
picture. Fifteen years after NASSA's Dr James Hansen first warned
a congressional panel that the world was warming are we any closer to
addressing the problem of climate change? Where is unchecked warming leading
us? Have we, as a global community, achieved a commitment to action that
is sufficient to avoid global catastrophe? If not, what can we do about
it?
The science
Since the facts about climate change are often shrouded in fog to the
extent that many people are in doubt as to whether or not global warming
is benign, first: what is the state of the science?
The world's leading authority on the science of climate change is
the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in
1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Environment Programme.
The IPCC brings together over 2,000 of the world's leading climate
scientists and its Assessment Reports represent summaries of the latest
scientific consensus.
Its Third Assessment Report published in 2001 is a document to give pause.
The 0.6C increase in global mean temperature over the 20th century, it
says, is likely to have been the largest increase of any century during
the past 1,000 years and has already produced observable, dramatic changes
including widespread retreat of mountain glaciers, a decline in Arctic
sea ice thickness of about 40% during late summer to early autumn, a 10%
loss of snow and ice cover, warming oceans, sea level rises of between
0.1 & 0.2 metres, more frequent and intense warm El Nino episodes
and changes in patterns of rainfall, cloud cover and temperature.1
News of observable impacts on the natural world - such as "thawing
of permafrost, later freezing and earlier break-up of ice on rivers and
lakes, lengthening of mid to high-latitude growing seasons, poleward and
altitudinal shifts of plant and animal ranges, declines of some plant
and animal populations, and earlier flowering of trees, emergence of insects,
and egg-laying in birds" - has become part of the background noise
of our society. Yet, out of everyday sight, some natural systems that
are particularly vulnerable to climate change may be undergoing significant
and irreversible damage including "coral reefs and atolls, boreal
and tropical forests, polar and alpine ecosystems, prairie wetlands, and
remnant native grasslands."
But climate change also has wide ranging impacts on the human systems
of "water resources; agriculture (especially food security) and forestry;
coastal zones and marine systems (fisheries); human settlements, energy
and industry; insurance and other financial services; and human health."2
The UK government has funded its own assessments of how climate change
will impact over the coming decades. The temperature over central England
has risen - beyond the global average - over the course of last
century by 1ºC and the mean temperature is expected to rise by a
further 2 to 3.5ºC by the 2080s depending on the emissions scenario.
Winters will continue to become wetter and intense rainfall events will
continue to increase in frequency. High temperature extremes will become
more common and low temperature extremes rarer. Sea-level rises and extremes
of sea level will occur more frequently. And whilst the thermal growing
season will increase, the summer soil moisture will decrease.3
But while we are relatively well placed to adapt to these changes, it
is the world's poorly resourced majority that will suffer most. The
IPCC notes the low adaptive capacities of the poor and their high vulnerability.
It details the expected changes for each region - an increase in droughts
and floods in Africa, for instance - along with the degree of confidence
with which they can be predicted. It is in the developing world that loss
of life will be greatest and the impacts of climate change will serve
to "increase the disparity in well-being between developed countries
and developing countries."
In 2001 a Red Cross report noted that natural disasters had doubled between
1995 and 2000. Eighty-eight percent of those affected and two thirds of
those killed during the 1990s lived in the least developed countries.
The report warned that "Recurrent disasters, from floods in Asia
to drought in the Horn of Africa, to windstorms in Latin America, are
sweeping away development gains and calling into question the possibility
of recovery." Aid agencies capacity to adequately respond will soon
be exhausted.4
But we can expect worse to come since the IPCC predicts that without additional
measures to combat climate change the global average surface temperature
will rise a further 1.4 to 5.8ºC depending upon the development scenario
used. Such a projected rate of warming, they warn, "is much larger
than the observed changes during the 20th century and is very likely to
be without precedent during the last 10,000 years."
The professional deniers
"There is no debate among any statured scientists of what is happening.
The only debate is the rate at which it is happening."
James McCarthy, Chair of the Advisory Committee on the Environment of
the International Committee of Scientific Unions5
Faced with action to curb emissions the fossil fuel industry has conducted
a war on reality in order to preserve their trillion dollar business.
By doing so they have put the very future of the planet in the balance.
A handful of sceptics have been promoted by the carbon industries to try
and present the climate science as uncertain and flawed. They have peddled
scientifically spurious arguments and have often put forward economic
objections to change. Ross Gelbspan of the Boston Globe has shown
that the principal US sceptics such as Fred Singer, Patrick Michaels,
Robert Balling and Richard Lindzen have been bank rolled by fossil fuel
interests.6 But these scientists and their arguments are not
taken seriously by the climate scientists that lead the field.
One of the tactics of the sceptics was to play up the uncertainties in
IPCC reports. Scientists are by nature cautious in their assessments and
areas of uncertainty that were expressed in the earliest IPCC reports
have been replaced, as the science has improved, with more firmly expressed
statements. But as Ross Gelbspan noted: "Uncertainty cuts both ways
[...] Our scientific knowledge, in other words, may even be lagging behind
nature. The momentum of globally disrupting climate change may be further
advanced than earth science, with its areas of uncertainty, is currently
able to prove." This was the case with the ozone hole. When atmospheric
measurements of ozone were finally made, the results were much worse than
anything the modelling had predicted.7
International action
So what action has been taken at an international level and is it enough?
The warning signal of IPCC's first report in 1990 was enough to spur
the international community into action. The United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed at the Rio Earth Summit
in 1992 and came into force in March 1994. It established the objective
of stabilising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at levels that
would avoid "dangerous anthropogenic [i.e. human] interference with
global climate." Significantly, it recognised that scientific uncertainty
must not be used to avoid precautionary action and that industrial nations - with
the greatest historical contribution to climate change - should take
the lead in addressing the problem.8
In 1995 however, the signatories to the UNFCCC concluded its commitments
were inadequate and launched talks on a legally binding protocol. The
1997 Kyoto Protocol commits industrialised countries to an overall reduction
in emissions of 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2010. The US committed itself
to a 7% cut and the EU 8%. On announcing the agreement, the Chair of the
negotiating session, Raul Estrada claimed that "the overall target
of 5.2% is 30% below business as usual [...] This we can celebrate."9
However, Kyoto's target of an overall 5.2% reduction was much less
than the 15% originally argued for by the European Union or the 20% that
the Alliance of Small Island States wanted to see. The withdrawal of the
US - representing 36.1% of industrialised countries' greenhouse
gas emissions in 1990 - from the treaty in 2001 means that the overall
figure of 5.2% reduction is no longer relevant. Furthermore the inclusion
of 'flexibility mechanisms'10 (successfully pushed
for by the US with Japan, Australia and Canada), weaken the potential
for reductions still further, since they effectively provide get-out clauses
for any country who fails to meet their targets. In effect the Protocol
now allows for an increase on 1990 levels which perhaps even go beyond
business-as-usual projections.11
After the US pulled out of Kyoto in March 2001, 178 nations finalised
many of the protocol's key rules in Bonn in July 2001. Many compromises
were made to keep countries on board. Canada and Japan who formerly sided
with the US's negotiating position have now ratified the Protocol,
though Australia - another key US ally - has not. As soon as Russia
has ratified the Protocol - which it has stated its intention to do - it
will become law.12
In terms of emissions reductions, eleven years of international negotiations
have achieved disappointingly little. Whilst acknowledging that the current
agreement is "totally inadequate", NGOs such as the World Wildlife
Fund and Greenpeace argue that it nevertheless provides "a sound
legal architecture" upon which to build future reductions.13
UK Government
On the face of it the UK government has a relatively good record regards
climate change. It accepts the science; has a programme of action to deal
with it; lobbied along with the EU at climate negotiations for strict
targets; by setting itself a voluntary target of 20% it has gone further
than its original Kyoto commitment of 12% reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions from the 1990 level by 2010; it now has a white paper on Energy
which proposes a reduction of 60% of CO2 emissions by 2050.
Dig a little deeper however and it emerges that the bulk of the UK's
CO2 emission reductions to date have been as a result of an economically
driven switch in emphasis away from coal towards gas in electricity generating
stations. The government's existing programme of measures designed
to deliver its emissions reductions14 has been criticised for
being inadequate. A report by the government's Sustainable Development
Commission reached the conclusion that although the UK's Kyoto target
would be met, "without further measures, the UK will fall well short
of the Government's goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by
20% of 1990 levels by 2010."15
Published earlier this year The White Paper16 contains many
encouraging signs taking on many of the recommendations made by the Royal
Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) in its report 'Energy:
The Changing Climate'.17 According to the SDC it "goes
a long way to filling the gaps identified in the Sustainable Development
Commission's recent audit of the existing Climate Change Programme."18
Its main guiding consideration is that: "Significant damaging climate
change is an environmental limit that should not be breached. We need
to keep the UK on a path to 60% cuts in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050."
It also recognises that: "If we do not begin now, more dramatic,
disruptive and expensive change will be needed later." On the international
level it declares: "A concerted international effort is needed. We
will continue to work with other countries to establish a consensus around
the need for change and for firm commitments to this ambition [...] We
want the world's developed economies to cut emissions of greenhouse
gases by 60% by around 2050."
Highlighting the importance of energy efficiency and renewable energy,
nuclear power was put on hold as an option. The government has already
announced (January 2000) an aim that renewable sources of energy will
supply 10% of UK electricity by 2010 and now aims to double that by 2020.
Interest groups are still picking over the White Paper and their responses
to it. Friends of the Earth's cautiously optimistic response is characteristic:
"For the first time it seems that climate change has been placed
at the heart of energy policy and this has to be congratulated. We are
however concerned that the government has got a long way to go to deliver
the policies and measures that will ensure the vision outlined in the
White Paper is met."19
The White Paper includes a promise of an extra £60M for the development
of renewable energy supplies in addition to the £38M extra announced
in the 2002 spending review. Much greater amounts are needed to kick start
the renewable industry in the way the government suggests. (Compare this
amount for example to the chancellor's £3B reserves to pay
for the war on Iraq and its £7B bail out of nuclear energy20).
The Science and Technology Select Committee issued a scathing condemnation
of the White Paper as "a document full of sentiments with few practical
policy proposals that give us any confidence that its targets (and aspirations)
can be met." It argues for a massive increase in investment in renewable
energy technologies funded by a Carbon and Renewable Energy Tax (Science
& Technology Select Committee, Fourth Report "Towards a Non-Carbon
Economy: Research, Development and Demonstration", 3/4/3.
Most worrying from the UK's point of view is that any gains in CO2
savings at home have been far outstripped by emissions it has helped create
abroad. Since Labour came to power the Export Credit Guarantee Department
has put $1B into financing eleven coal-fired stations in the developing
world. BBC2's Newsnight programme calculated that for every tonne
of C02 emissions the government had saved at home, three tonnes had been
produced abroad.21
The Problem with the US
The funding and promotion of sceptics in the US has been but one prong
of a campaign fought by the fossil fuel industry to confuse the public,
play up the economic implications of the Kyoto protocol, make it politically
unacceptable to introduce a carbon tax or cuts in emissions and ultimately
impede and disrupt the international negotiations.
ExxonMobil and others have pumped millions of dollars into think tanks
and lobby groups (including the Global Climate Coalition, George C Marshall
Institute, American Petroleum Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute)
and conducted high profile media campaigns and direct lobbying to massage
the public, legislative and business communities in the US.22
And the campaign has seen some considerable successes. In 1995 Republican
congress member Robert Walker successfully argued for cuts in funding
of climate change science programmes (although these were subsequently
partly reinstated)23; and in 1997 Congress passed a key resolution
recommending that the US not sign an international climate agreement unless
it included new commitments for developing countries.24 The
fossil fuel lobby's persistent work inside the international negotiations
to bring about the weak agreement that we are left with today has been
well documented.25
Today, the fossil fuel industry no longer needs a lobby - it effectively
became the government when Bush appointed a cabinet with a majority of
its members having ties to oil and gas corporations. Since Bush came to
power his administration has pulled out of Kyoto (March 2001), unveiled
an alternative to Kyoto consisting entirely of voluntary measures by business
(February 2002), launched an energy strategy that promotes a massive increase
in fossil fuels (May 2001)26 effected the removal of Dr Robert
Watson from the chair of the IPCC (April 2002), dismissed a report written
by its own Environmental Protection Agency confirming the science of climate
change (June 2002), snubbed the Johannesburg Earth Summit by sending Colin
Powell instead of George Bush (September 2002) and now launched a war
for oil in Iraq in the face of overwhelming international opposition and
against international law (March 2003).27
With just 4% of the world's population using a quarter of the world's
energy, the US remains the largest stumbling block to effective action
to counter climate change. But perhaps the tide is turning. In January
2000 at the World Economic Forum, a vote amongst hundreds of chief executives
put climate change as the number one issue of concern to business in the
future and some predict that international diplomatic pressure and increasing
domestic pressure may yet force the US to re-engage with the Kyoto process.
The ultimate gamble
The impacts of climate change are already catastrophic: extreme weather
events are commonplace and will continue to increase. The most worrying
characteristic of the climate system is the danger posed by 'feedbacks'.
Once set in motion these have the effect of accelerating the rate of warming.
Although each of the IPCC's assessments have contained warnings about
such feedbacks The Ecologist's science editor, Peter Bunyard, believes
that the IPCC has underestimated the role of these processes by leaving
them out of its modelling. New climate modelling by Peter Cox at the Meteorological
Office's Hadley Centre suggests that if no further action is taken
to curb greenhouse gas emissions then within the next fifty years we will
reach a threshold beyond which climate will start accelerating irreversibly
and out of control.28 This threshold occurs when the Amazon
rainforests start to turn from a 'sink' (buffering the effects
of climate change by absorbing excess atmospheric CO2) to a 'source'
(releasing CO2 back into the atmosphere through an increase in forest
fires).
In Cox's modelling this occurs when levels of CO2 concentrations
in the atmosphere reach 550ppmv and according to the RCEP this level should
be considered an unbreachable upper limit. The world is not currently
on track to stay within this threshold. In order to be so, cuts of 60%
in industrialised countries' CO2 emissions from 1990 levels by 2050
would be needed.29 To achieve this will require radical changes.
Both the UK government and the EU are saying that they want to adopt these
targets and promote them at an international level. How they will achieve
this and secure the participation of the US and limit the weakening role
of flexible mechanisms remains to be seen.
Up until now, action at intergovernmental level has been characterised
by an attitude of 'How little can we get away with?' But increasingly
there is a realisation that the economic imperative alone requires a fast
pace of change. We now know that the longer we wait the more painful,
difficult, drastic and financially costly the changes will be.
Ways forward
The gravity of the climate situation means that we can't just wait
around to see whether or not governments and big business get their act
together (though we need to put pressure on them to ensure they do). We
need to start now to take action at every level we can. Beyond the obvious
things like registering for electricity from renewable sources (all it
takes is a phone call and it can be cheaper)30, considering
modes of transport and fuels31, cutting down on international
flights, ensuring our homes are properly insulated, using energy saving
light bulbs, etc. we should be raising awareness and encouraging action
with friends and relations and at the workplace.
There is also good potential for getting local government to take action.
Five hundred local governments representing 8% of global emissions have
signed up to a programme of voluntary action to address their emissions.
The Cities for Climate Protection campaign requires participants to monitor
and reduce their emissions with many adopting a target of an 8% reduction
in greenhouse gas emissions by 2005 or 2010.32 The Local Agenda
21 Initiative provides an interface with your council through which they
can be encouraged to sign up to the CCP plan.33 Alternatively,
you may have a local Friends of the Earth group who are active and could
be effective in this way.
In London, Ken Livingstone has issued a bold 'Draft Energy Strategy'
which lays out a broad programme of action and shows many of the ways
in which local councils can play a major role in encouraging the use of
energy efficiency, renewable energy and combined heat and power plants
through the planning system.34
A key lever of change in today's society is the economic one. The
Ecologist has suggested raising awareness amongst fund managers of
the risk to investments from climate change and encouraging disinvestment
in fossil fuels.35 Such action was the source of the success
of the campaign to stop the Illisu Dam and the organisers of the offensive
have written a report which shares their experiences.36 Individual
shareholders of oil companies and campaigns are an important pressure
point and campaigns against new oil developments such as the Baku-Ceyhan
pipeline37 should be supported. Development banks and export
credit agencies need to be pressurised to stop funding the development
of fossil fuel electricity plants and start funding renewable ones.38
The Ecologist discusses the option of bringing crippling
legal actions against fossil fuel companies for their knowing role in
causing the impacts of climate change, similar to the recent successful
actions against the tobacco industry.
There are limitless things that can be done. 'Stormy Weather - 101
Solutions to Global Climate Change' by Guy Dauncey and Patrick Mazza39
makes constructive suggestions for action at every level from the individual
to the intergovernmental, and the UK Rising Tide group brainstormed fifty
ideas for direct action.40 The battle for the Earth's
climate is the single most important issue facing the world today and
one way or another we need to make sure that it is not one that is lost.
Notes
1. Third Assessment Report, Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Report,
Summary for Policymakers, (IPCC, 2001), http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/reports.htm
2. Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and
Vulnerability, Summary for Policymakers (IPCC, 2001), http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/reports.htm
3. Hulme, M., Turnpenny, J., Jenkins, G., (2002), Climate Change Scenarios
for the United Kingdom: The UKCIP02 Briefing Report. Tyndall Centre for
Climate Change Research, UK - see http://www.ukcip.org.uk
for this report as well as regional and sectoral studies.
4. Disasters will outstrip aid efforts as world heats up, by Peter Capella,
The Guardian, 29/06/02.
5. The Heat is On, Ross Gelbspan, p.22 (Perseus Books, 1998)
6. These scientists received funding from Western Fuels, German Coal Mining
Association, Edison Electric Institute, Cyprus Minerals, British Coal
Corporation, Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science, Kuwait
Institute for Scientific Research, Reverend Moon, Exxon, Shell, ARCO,
Unocal and Sun Oil (Gelbspan, pp. 41-56). The American Petroleum Institute's
1998 strategy document included the grooming and promotion of five new
sceptics. See Exxon's Weapons of Mass Deception - The Assessment
of Greenpeace International, http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/5292.pdf
7. Gelbspan, p.31-2.
8. http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf
9. The Carbon War, Jeremy Leggett, p. 321, (Penguin, 2000)
10. In depth discussion of the flexibility mechanisms can be found in
Democracy or Cabocracy, Corner House Briefing No. 24, http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/briefing/24carboc.html;
and The Sky is Not the Limit: The Emerging Market in Greenhouse Gases,
by Carbon Trade Watch, (The Transnational Institute, Amsterdam, January
2003, http://www.tni.org/reports/ctw/sky.pdf)
11. See 'Extended Quantitative Analysis of the COP-6 President's
text', by Malte Menishausen and Bill Hare, Greenpeace International,
June 2001 and "Evaluating the Bonn Agreement and some key issues",
The National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) p.22.
The Netherlands 2001)
12. http://unfccc.int/resource/kpstats.pdf,
http://www.panda.org/goforkyoto/ratification_updates.rtf
13. The Ecologist Report, November 2001, pp. 21-22, http://www.theecologist.org
14.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/02.htm
15. UK Climate Change Programme - a policy audit (Sustainable Development
Commission, 12/2/03); & Policy audit of UK Climate Change Policies
and Programmes (Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management, 12/2/03.
16. Energy White Paper, Our energy future - creating a low carbon economy,
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