Who is America’s new enemy?

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America’s new enemy?

By ANDREW SIA star2@thestar.com.my

 It used to be the Nazis, the Soviet Union and then Osama and al-Qaeda. Now that he is dead, who will become the new enemy America focuses its energies on?

 SO what now? With Osama bin Laden dead, will his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, continue a new wave of terrorism against the West?

Yet a report in British newspaper The Guardian in late July indicates that most Syrian activists reject the new al-Qaeda leader. Mohammad Al-Abdallah, the spokesman of local coordination committees in Syria, said: “Zawahiri is trying to convince the world that he has supporters in Syria, which will provoke international public opinion against us and give the regime the right to commit crimes against our people.”



For Tom Engelhardt, academic, author and editor of Tomdispatch.com, al-Qaeda was a ragtag crew that engaged in some dramatic terror acts over the past 10 years but, in reality, it had limited operational capabilities, while the movements it spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven “remarkably unimportant”. While Osama sat isolated in a Pakistan mansion, ironically, it was the Americans who did the work of creating war and chaos (and increasing people’s resentment of the United States) for Osama!

“Think of him as practising the Tao of Terrorism,” writes Engelhardt, comparing Osama to the way a tai chi master fights – not with his own minimal strength, but leveraging on his opponent’s strength, in this case, America’s massive fire power.

 

China rising: Will the United States next turn its attention to China?

And what can we hope for 10 years after 9/11?

Journalist Robert Fisk, writing in British newspaper The Independent, said, “Bin Laden told the world that he wanted to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic Caliphate. But these past few months, millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn’t get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn’t want a caliph.”

Jason Burke, author of The 9/11 Wars, notes that back in 2004, American intelligence agencies had foreseen “continued dominance” for many years to come. But in 2008, they judged that within a few decades the US would no longer be able to “call the shots”.

“If the years from 2004 to 2008 brought victory, then America and the West cannot afford many more victories like it,” he adds.

But in this second decade of the 21st century, will America learn the lessons of history?

Two years ago, when President Barack Obama intoned general platitudes about human rights for the Middle East in his landmark Cairo speech, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had this to say about the Egyptian dictator: “I consider President and Mrs Mubarak to be friends of my family.”

As the comedian and talk show host Jay Leno once joked, the invasion of Iraq was initially supposed to be called Operation Iraqi Liberation, until they realised that it spelt O.I.L. – and the name was then changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Haroon Siddiqui, a columnist at the Toronto Star, believes that Obama has reverted to Washington’s old double standard of one law for allies, another for adversaries. And so dissidents in Iran and Syria will be cheered on and materially backed to overthrow their regimes but not the people rising up in Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Uri Avnery, a former Israeli Member of Parliament and author of several books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflects that the American empire always needs an antagonist, an “evil, worldwide enemy” to focus its energies on, be it the Nazis or the Soviet Union.

“The disappearance of the communist threat left a gaping void in the American psyche, which cried out to be filled. Osama bin Laden kindly offered his services as a new global enemy.

“Overnight, medieval anti-Islamic prejudices are dusted-off for display. Islam the murderous, the fanatical, the anti-freedom, anti-all-our-values. Suicide bombers, 72 virgins, jihad,” he writes in the online “political newsletter”, Counterpunch. Avnery adds that the present Islamophobia hysteria is similar to how Europeans used to demonise Jews in the past.

American civil rights lawyer, columnist and author Glenn Greenwald predicts in online news and culture website salon.com that even though US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta has acknowledged that al-Qaeda has a grand total of “fewer than two dozen key operatives” on the entire planet, the War on Terror will be continued by trotting out more “fear-mongering propaganda” against a new alliance of villains from Somalia and Yemen – the “scariest since Marvel Comic’s Masters of Evil”.

As the future unfolds, will other villains be found to replace Osama? How about China?

John Feffer, the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus (a project of the Washington DC-based Institute for Policy Studies), notes that perhaps the only country in the world that has benefited from the War on Terror is China.

“Beijing has watched the United States spend more than US$3tril (RM9tril) on the war on terrorism, devote its military resources to the Middle East, and neglect pretty much every other part of the globe. The United States is now mired in debt, stuck in a recession, and paralysed by partisan politics. Over that same period, meanwhile, China has quickly become the second largest economy in the world.”

What a difference a decade makes. When US President George W. Bush came into office over 10 years ago, he called Beijing a “strategic competitor” rather than a strategic partner. When a US spy plane flying off Hainan Island was involved in an accident with a Chinese plane, the Americans refused to apologise.

Ten years later, after US government debt was downgraded, we see China’s official Xinhua news agency lecturing the Americans – in English, mind you – that “the days when debt-ridden Uncle Sam could leisurely squander unlimited overseas borrowing appear to be numbered.”

In a Time magazine article in April, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that “the single biggest threat to our national security is our debt”.

While America is still building aircraft carriers at US$15bil (RM45bil) a pop, China is developing missiles expressly designed to sink them – at a cost of US$10mil (RM30mil) each. Talk about being cost efficient. Economix, a unit of the New York Times, reveals that the US accounts for 43% of all the military spending on Earth – six times as much as China, which accounts for 7.3% of world military spending: “We’ve waged war nonstop for nearly a decade in Afghanistan against a foe with no army, no navy and no air force. We send US$1bil (RM3.02bil) destroyers to handle five Somali pirates in a fibreglass skiff.”

Yet the irony is: “(The US is) borrowing cash from China to pay for weapons that we would presumably use against it. If the Chinese want to slay us, they don’t need to attack us with their missiles. They just have to call in their loans.”

If Time’s scenario ever comes to pass, then the war on terror would be ended by Chinese financial tai chi.

US Debt deal reached to avoid default, what others are saying?

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What China, Others, Are Saying About US Debt Deal?

Debt ceiling raised...again.

President Barack Obama said Sunday night that both houses of Congress finally reached an agreement to reduce the budget deficit and avert a debt default that would have likely sent the country into a recession.

“Leaders of both parties, in both chambers, have reached an agreement that will reduce the deficit and avoid default — a default that would have had a devastating effect on our economy,” Obama said in his remarks to the White House press Sunday shortly after the bill was signed. The first part of the debt deal cuts nearly $1 trillion from the federal budget over the next decade. Exact details were not immediately available.

“The result would be the lowest level of annual domestic spending since Dwight Eisenhower was President,” Obama said. The debt limit and cut spending between $2 trillion and $3 trillion.

The Economic Times of India polled readers who said overwhelmingly that the Indian market would be impacted on Monday as investors in the US digest this weekend’s news. A total of 85% of the paper’s readers polled on line said it would impact India’s market all week.

Russian newswire columnist Andrei Fedyashin said recently, before Sunday’s deal, that “cuts in social spending and higher taxes are still the only way of reducing budget expenditures and a country’s sovereign debt.”



Yao Yang, director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, weighed in at China Daily. He said that the US deficit problem “is ultimately the result of the conundrum of a welfare state following the capitalist system. Both are uncompromising ideals cherished by a substantial percentage of the population. The fight will resurface in the future even if the present deadlock is broken. There is a lesson for other countries here. The best a country can do is to fence off the contagious effects of such fights and rely more on the domestic economy for further growth.”

Also reprinted in China Daily, Mohamed El Erian, CEO of PIMCO, says, the next few weeks will provide plenty of political drama. “The baseline expectation, albeit subject to risk, is that Democrats and Republicans will find a way to avoid disruptions that would damage the fragile US economy, but that the compromise will not meaningfully address the need for sensible medium-term fiscal reforms.”

In Brazil, an article in Folha de São Paulo, the country’s largest daily newspaper, said that Americans woke up too late to its serious spending problems. Not only government spending, but consumer spending as well. A foreign correspondent for the paper interviewed US think tanks and scholars who said that the average US citizen was “uninformed” about the country’s economy and pending debt crisis. Despite having nearly every country south of Texas run into similar debt dead ends, the US — printers of the world’s reserve currency and the largest economy — didn’t seem to flinch when society, and government, became overweight with debt. The US is in a unique world situation because of its status as world’s reserve and trade currency, and issuers of the most trustworthy debt in the market.

“Americans are not well informed about the economic crises that occurred in other countries to learn from them,” said Isabel Sawhill, an analyst from the Brookings Institute in Washington. “They don’t see any parallels with crises in other countries because they think the US has the capacity to resolve all problems.
The population knows there is a problem, they just don’t know to what extent or where it comes from.”

Linda Bilmes, a former government consultant turned Harvard lecturer in Cambridge, the main problem with the debt deal is taxes and political ignorance over tax laws. “The biggest reason our debt is so high is because George W. Bush cut taxes two times exactly when we were spending money on two wars,” Bilmes told Folha. “In the last two major US wars, taxes went up to support those expenditures.”

See: White House, Congress Reach Debt Deal

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The polarised world of politics

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Musings By Marina Mahathir

Politicians of every stripe have two bad habits. Firstly, they think that those who don’t belong to any political party are incapable of having a single political thought. Secondly, when non-politicians think of a good populist idea, politicians of all stripes rush to hijack it.

Image via Wikipedia

George W. Bush, that giant of intellectuals, famously said after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks that “Either you’re with us, or you’re against us.”

Those words unleashed a world polarised by politics with no hope for peace, which necessarily requires a coming to the table of all sides to discuss common issues.

This “Us versus Them” mentality is an affliction that has befallen not only American politicians but many others around the world, including in our own country.

It creates an illness known as hyperpartisanship, which can be defined simply as “if you’re not on my side, you must be wrong.”

It’s the only explanation I can give for the consistently delusional statements that tend to come out from our politicians’ mouths.

To their minds, nobody can be right unless they’re on the same side.

Additionally, if you don’t agree with them, then you must surely be on the “other” side. Politicians can’t seem to fathom anything but a bipolar world.

They can’t seem to get it into their heads that firstly, there may yet be a third (or fourth, fifth) way of looking at things, and secondly, that the ones with these different perspectives could conceivably be civilians.



Politicians of every stripe have two bad habits.

Firstly, they think those who don’t belong to any political party are incapable of having a single political thought.

They forget that every five years or so, it is they who insist that we think of politics when we go and vote.

Secondly, when non-politicians think of a good populist idea, politicians of all stripes rush to hijack it.

Non-politicians, otherwise known as civil society, then have to fight them off tooth and nail.

How many times have we had politicians turning up at big events organised by non-politicians and trying and making it sound as if it’s a big endorsement of themselves?

Some politicians are certainly more delusional than others. Since Bersih 2.0 shocked them, they have been working overtime to demonise it.

It is one thing to badmouth the rally in the days before it happened but it’s quite shocking to see the pathetic attempts to paint it as a riot when it was clearly not.

From calling the teargassing “mild” to denying that the police had fired teargas into the Tung Shin Hospital, to trying to check the motives and bank accounts of those who went for the rally, our dear leaders insult us every day.

Yet all they have to do is, instead of surrounding themselves with sycophants who will only tell them what they want to hear, read all the heartrending and heartwarming personal accounts written by the many ordinary people who went to the Bersih 2.0 rally.

These were housewives, retirees and young people, all fearful of what violence they might encounter, but who steeled themselves to go and exercise their right to voice their opinions.

These were people who had probably never done anything more confrontational than argue with a salesperson in their entire lives, who faced teargas and water cannons fired at them by a government they probably voted in.

How much courage does it take to insult your own people from an airconditioned room compared to facing the FRU?

If our leaders think teargas is something mild, they should ask the FRU to try it on them. I was lucky that day because I chose a route where the police decided not to deploy their gas and water cannons on us.

But many of my friends and colleagues were not so lucky. I feel ashamed that I suffered no more than tiredness, compared with what they so courageously went through.

And all our hapless leaders can do is call them names. The people who went to Bersih 2.0 are Malaysians who will forever feel united and bound to each other because of that experience. Some may have been politicians and NGOs but so many more were just people of every race, religion, age and creed.

So many have said they never felt more Malaysian than they did that day. At a time when everyone has been lamenting how divided we are, we came together. What more could we have wished for?

Perhaps we should take another leaf from Sept 11. In the wake of the death and destruction wreaked by the US government to avenge the World Trade Centre deaths, some of the families of those who died, horrified by such violent vengeance, started an NGO called Not In Our Name.

Perhaps those many decent Malaysians, the “silent majority” our leaders like to claim as their own, can come out and say that, even if they disagree with Bersih 2.0, they will not stand by and let their fellow citizens be insulted and abused in this way.

At least, not in their name.