By Ulrich Knapp | Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 2 (IPS) – People in seven majority Muslim countries favour a more active United Nations with broader powers, while simultaneously viewing the world body as dominated by the U.S. and failing to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a new poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a global network of research centres.
The survey was conducted in Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Iran, Indonesia, the Palestinian Territories and Azerbaijan. Nigeria, which has a 50 percent Muslim population, was also polled.
The survey found conflicted attitudes towards the United Nations. There was, however, clear support for a U.N. with much broader powers than it has today. Asked about a number of options for giving the U.N. greater powers, nearly all received strong support.
Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, told IPS: “If we compare the results in Muslim-dominated countries to those in other regions, there is virtually consensus around the world on giving the U.N. more powers. This consensus is rather striking.”
“While many people in Muslim countries express disappointment with the U.N., this actually masks their underlying desire for a U.N. that is robust and powerful,” Kull said.
An average of 64 percent of the people polled in all nations favoured the U.N. Security Council having its own standing peacekeeping force. With 80 percent, Nigeria supported this idea the most, whereas Egypt was the most torn nation on this issue with 53 percent in favour of it and 47 percent opposing a standing force.
An average of 63 percent would like the Security Council to have the authority to go into countries to investigate human rights violations. Nigeria (79 percent) and Azerbaijan (77 percent) were the strongest supporters of this mandate, whereas Turkey (47 percent) was the weakest.
An average of 76 percent of all people polled want the Security Council to have the right to authorise military force to stop a country from supporting terrorist groups or to prevent severe human rights violations such as genocide (average 77 percent). There was, however, a wide perception in the nations polled that the U.N. is dominated by the United States.
“One of the reasons for this may be the fact that the U.S. used their veto to prevent resolutions of the Security Council dealing with Israel,” Kull noted.
In all but one nation, the most common view was that the “U.S. basically controls the U.N. and can almost always make the U.N. do what the U.S. wants”, as opposed to the view that “through its veto the U.S. can stop the U.N. from doing things, but the U.S. cannot make the U.N. do things the U.S. wants.”
The view of the U.N. as controlled by the United States was endorsed by 68 percent of Egyptians, 63 percent of Palestinians, 59 percent of Jordanians, and 53 percent of Turks. In Indonesia, 43 percent agree, while 13 percent said the U.S. can only stop the U.N. from doing things (44 percent did not answer). The only exception was Azerbaijan, where a plurality said the U.S. can stop the U.N. from acting, but cannot make it do what the U.S. wants (49 percent to 36 percent).
Respondents were also asked to assess a variety of U.N. efforts, rating them on a scale from zero, meaning “not all helpful”, to 10, meaning “extremely helpful.” Ratings were generally lukewarm at best, WorldPublicOpinion.org said.
The lowest ratings were for U.N. efforts “to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict.” The mean response was 3.7 with the lowest ratings coming from Jordanians (2.5) and Palestinians (2.6). Only Azerbaijanis were above 5 (5.3). Low ratings of U.N. performance on the Israel-Palestinian conflict are highly correlated with the perception that the U.S. controls the U.N.
Kull told IPS: “People would like the U.N. to resolve the problems. They are disappointed that it has not occurred.”
Also very low were ratings of U.N. efforts to resolve the conflict in Darfur. The mean rating was 3.8. The lowest ratings came from Jordanians (2.6), and the highest from Indonesians (5.3).
The most positive ratings were for the U.N.’s performance in providing humanitarian aid, ranging from 4.5 (Palestinians) to 7.8 (Indonesians), with a mean of 5.9. Nearly as high were U.N. peacekeeping operations, with a mean of 5.3, ranging from 3.5 (Palestinians) to 7.5 (Indonesians). U.N. efforts to address climate change received mixed reviews, with three nations above 5, three below 5 and a mean of 4.6.
WorldPublicOpinion.org is a project managed by the Programme on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. The survey was conducted in two waves over Jan. 12-Feb. 18 and Jul. 21-Aug. 31, 2008. Some 11,538 people participated. Margins of error range from +/-two to five percent. Not all questions were asked in all countries.
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Putting a human mask on imperialism
December 3, 2008Politicians and historians may argue that the U.S. is a force for good around the world, but the facts show the opposite.
Socialist Worker, December 3, 2008 | Issue 686
MAINSTREAM AND liberal opposition to the Iraq war is based on accepting the aims of the war, but criticizing its lack of success, its “excesses” or its tactical or strategic mistakes.
The argument of people who hold this view is that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, not because it denied the sovereignty of the Iraqi people, or that it has led to the deaths of tens of thousands, the displacement of millions and the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. It was a mistake because it failed to achieve U.S. objectives.
Barack Obama, for example, criticizes the Iraq war because it has weakened U.S. power–it has emboldened its enemies, such as Iran and North Korea–and created a crisis of U.S. credibility abroad. Instead, he argues, the U.S. should shift troops to Afghanistan, organize a phased withdrawal from Iraq (but leave a “residual force”) and maintain an “over the horizon” military presence to intervene when necessary.
Obama is fully committed to the idea that the U.S. should continue to be the world’s unchallenged global military power; he merely believes that there are better ways to achieve that goal.
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AHMED RASHID, in his new book on Afghanistan, Descent into Chaos, offers a tortured variation of this argument.
He says he supported the invasion of Afghanistan as a “just war and not an imperialist intervention, because only external intervention could save the Afghan people from the Taliban and al-Qaeda and prevent the spread of al-Qaeda.”
Rashid himself admits, however, that none of these aims have been achieved:
Rashid’s logic boils down to this: because I supported the stated aims of the invasion, it cannot be imperialist.
This is a bad method. Better to look at the facts of the case: The biggest military power in the world invaded a country halfway around the world that had never threatened the U.S. It proceeded to occupy the country, remove the existing government from power and install a government to its own liking, which it maintains through a military occupation. Pardon me for concluding that this is imperialism.
What galls Rashid is not that a great power violated Afghanistan’s sovereignty, but that it wasn’t done with sufficient tact. “Above all, arrogance and ignorance were on display,” he complains, when the Bush administration “invaded two countries in the Muslim world without any attempt to understand the history, culture, society or traditions of those countries.”
In other words, it’s not arrogant to invade and conquer another country; it’s arrogant to not learn more about it first.
The Bush administration wanted to “declare victory” after removing the Taliban, “get out, and move on to Iraq,” when it should have had a longer-term commitment, according to Rashid. By his own account, Afghanistan was primarily a stepping-stone to the war in Iraq, and both wars were part of a long-term plan to reshape the Middle East and the wider region under the rubric of an open-ended “war on terror.”
Part of the Bush and Rumsfeld Doctrine was the idea that regimes could be changed on the cheap by swift, decisive invasions, after which things could quickly be wrapped up, and messy, long wars of occupation could be avoided. That is why security in Afghanistan was handed over to “warlords and drug barons.”
What the U.S. should have done, he explains, is commit itself to “nation-building” in Afghanistan–a decades-long plan involving “massive aid, internal economic reforms, democratization and literacy.”
To believe in this paternalistic fantasy, one must ignore America’s long history of genocide and conquest in North America; its brutal occupations, annexations and colonizations in the Caribbean and Pacific; its destruction of Korea and Vietnam; its sanctions against Iraq that killed a million people; and finally, one must ignore what Rashid admits to be true–that the U.S. has wrecked both Iraq and Afghanistan over the past several years.
Rashid is either naïve or is trying to deliberately put a human mask over the ugly face of U.S. imperialism.
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RASHID IS a kind of utopian imperialist, who looks at what is and can only counterpose to it a kinder, gentler version. To counter this neocon fantasy, Rashid offers a fantasy of his own: the revival of British-style colonialism. I must quote him at length here to give the reader the full flavor of his argument:
History might beg to differ. At its height, the British Empire covered a quarter of the world’s land surface and ruled over 400 million people. It ruled first by conquest, then by dividing up the populations and pitting them against one other. It “learned” about its subjects in order to better dominate them.
When it could not cow its subjects into believing in their own innate inferiority, it resorted to unstinting force. The history of British colonialism begins with the brutal conquest and partition of Ireland, moves through the enslavement of Black Africans to work the great plantations of the Caribbean, on to the conquest of India and China, and ends with the carving up, with the other great powers, of Africa in order to get at its diamonds, gold and other precious resources. The bones of those who resisted the British are strewn across several continents.
Britain drained India of its wealth. Under the first 120 years of British rule, there were 31 famines in India in which at least 15 million people died, all during which Britain drained tribute from India and exported grain from its ports.
Historian Irfan Habib calculates the average annual drain at about 9 percent of India’s GNP. At the time just before the British conquest, 1750, India accounted for about one quarter of the world’s manufacturing output. By 1900, India accounted for only 1.7 percent.
Clearly, the British did not “put back in almost as much as they took out,” either in India or in Africa, which to this day remains, despite being resource-rich, the poorest continent on the planet.
“History does not record a single instance,” remarked the Indian nationalist Romesh Dutt, “of one people ruling another in the interests of the subject nation.” When politicians and apologists for U.S. intervention talk about “saving” another country by invading it, we should remember Dutt’s words.
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Tags: Afghanistan, Ahmed Rashid's book, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Iraq war, Irfan Habib, Karl Marx, US power
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