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02 maio 2002
Asia Times Online
March 2, 2002 atimes.com
THE ROVING EYE
IRAQ DIARY, Part 4: Sorry, your credit is no good
By Pepe Escobar
BAGHDAD - The United States consistently accuses Iraq of being a country incapable of development, and under a "merciless Stalinist dictatorship". Iraq consistently accuses the US of enforcing an inhuman embargo which has caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. Some voices in the West recognize that the United Nations embargo and sanctions are not only playing against the interests of Iraq, but against the interests of the international community as well.
Mohamed Mamdi Salim, Iraq's Minister of Trade, received Asia Times Online in his office, dressed in military uniform, to talk about the UN embargo.
Excerpts:
Asia Times Online: What kind of trade is Iraq still allowed, considering the country is subjected to an array of UN sanctions?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: As you know, Iraq is allowed the "oil for food" program, in certain limited quantities: food, medicine, and other requirements for education, sanitation, agricultural equipment, etc. But there are severe difficulties in the process of approval of contracts, and consequently opening letters of credit and delivering the commodities.
Asia Times Online: How many contracts are blocked at the moment?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: More than US$8 billion worth of contracts.
Asia Times Online: Most of them are with European, Arab or Asian companies?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: With Arabian countries, Russia, France ...
Asia Times Online: Who blocks these contracts?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: The United States, of course, and the British. There's no objection at all from other members of the Security Council. Only the United States and Britain, since the beginning of "oil for food" in 1996. Sometimes Japan supports the United States, although the support is limited. The United States and Britain have a political attitude, rather than [an attitude] relating to the procedure of "oil for food".
Asia Times Online: In the Iraqi government's view, what could be done to circumvent this dead-end situation? Is there a way out?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: No, unless they change their position. The situation of approval runs through the veto system. [If] any country rejects any contract, or has any complaints on any contract, then that contract will be on hold. They have the power over the Security Council 661 Committee. So they are doing their job efficiently, rejecting contracts for the Iraqi people. The implementation of "oil for food" has reflected that policy and has become a project for meeting the requirements of United Nations compensation, United Nations expenses, balancing of oil prices, and not for the Iraqi people, due to the fact that Iraq received, from the US$52 billion during this program, only US$17 billion worth of commodities. US$10 billion was deducted by the United Nations for compensation and their expenses, and the remaining contracts are on hold.
Asia Times Online: So who is benefiting from the embargo and the "oil for food" program?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: The United Nations. And those who import oil.
Asia Times Online: What kind of contracts are blocked?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: Even food and medicine, they are blocking it. Basically the humanitarian side, which is related to water supply and purification of water. We are not allowed imports of pipes for supplying water to houses, for example. They have actually a policy of selecting any contract at random. Sometimes they approve a contract to import a commodity from certain countries, and reject one [for importing] from others.
Asia Times Online: Is there a fixed list of what you cannot import?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: They don't say, "We are not allowing you to buy." So we have to decide what kind of items to buy, we put them on the list, then we submit this list to the Sanctions Committee, and the committee decides whether to allow it or not.
Asia Times Online: Hospital doctors in Baghdad say they cannot import incubators, for instance. And you cannot import computers as well.
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: Yes. We are not allowed. Everything is 100 percent politically motivated.
Asia Times Online: Diplomatically and politically, would Iraq be able to change the situation with more support from other parts of the world?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: Europe itself has benefited from the contracts. "Oil for food" reflects the reality of the policy of the United States for the international community - using the blockade policy against their contracts with Iraq. They [the Europeans] know what is the real intention of the United States and Britain against Iraq. They [the Europeans] are trying but they cannot do much.
Asia Times Online: Is this all oil motivated?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: Of course it is oil, to stabilize the supply of oil rather than deliver food and medicine to the Iraqi people. This is entirely for the United States and United Nations compensation and expenses. The United Nations has been saved by this program, which has financed it significantly. Who works in this program? The richest people in the United Nations.
Asia Times Online: Wouldn't Iraq be able to get the medicines it needs by evading the blockade?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: No. The important thing is how to pay. And we can pay only through an escrow account. The money is under United Nations approval. If you have the money controlled by the United Nations no one can sell you anything unless he gets the money.
Asia Times Online: Is Iraq part of an "axis of evil"?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: The "axis of evil" is the United States and Britain. Not Iraq, Iran or other Muslim countries.
Asia Times Online: So there are other motives for demonizing Iraq?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: Now Israel is destroying the Palestinian people, the Palestinian state, and Palestinian entities which are approved by the international community through the Oslo agreement supervised by the United States. The terrorist Sharon and the terrorist state Israel are destroying everything, even hijacking President Arafat. And the United States is supporting this policy.
Asia Times Online: Will the Arab world finally unite, politically and economically?
Mohamed Mamdi Salim: Well, they should. And they must. Because the United States will never look to their interests, even those who are under [the greatest] control of the United States. But the Arab people, even in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, are rejecting United States policy toward Arabs and toward Palestinians.
(Copyright 2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact ads@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
22:30
comments-[ comments.]
5/1/2002 1:38:52 AM | Marcelo Nardin]
March 2, 2002 atimes.com
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS - Osama bin Laden is here, there and everywhere. For Russian intelligence, he is in the Pankisi Gorge, in northeastern Georgia, not far from the Chechen border, alongside a clutch of al-Qaeda operatives.
In European diplomatic circles he is said to be in north Yemen, close to the Saudi border. For Pakistani intelligence, he is already inside Iraq, after previously being sheltered by anti-Tehran Sunni mujahideen in southeast Iran.
And during the recent carnival in Brazil's steamy Rio de Janeiro, bin Laden was everywhere: on the beach, in the streets, drinking beer or champagne and dancing till dawn in clubs around town - bin Laden's was the best-selling carnival mask in the swinging city. This even prompted an Asian-style counterfeit industry: you could buy the genuine article for about US$4, complete with white turban, or a plastic fake for little more than a dollar. There were few takers for the mask of US President George W Bush.
22:13
comments-[ comments.]
01 maio 2002
[10/15/2001 12:55:06 AM | Marcelo Nardin]
THE ROVING EYE
Asia Times: To have and have not
By Pepe Escobar
Almost four years after the beginning of the 1997-98 financial crisis, more than 900 million people in Asia still live on less than one US dollar a day, according to the Asian Development Bank. Millions of day workers on construction sites in Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta are still unemployed.
But the ADB - financed by Western countries and Japan - still believes poverty can be substantially reduced by 2015. Along with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the ADB is now a convert to Christian socialism. During the 1980s, the ADB promoted policies of mass export and trade liberalism with gusto. This year, in its headquarters in Manila, it has decided that 40 percent of its loans will now go to the fight against poverty. Tadao Chino, the bank's president, acknowledges that "if Asia fails to fight poverty, the whole world will suffer the consequences".
The fight against poverty is not necessarily related to the reduction of global inequality. A series of recent studies demonstrates that world inequality is rising, and rising fast - contrary to the widespread mantra of globalization's cheerleaders. If globalization is capable of lifting millions out of poverty, it is also increasing the gap between the global workforce and the near-starving masses.
In the beginning of the 18th Century, Western Europe was almost three times richer than Africa. At the end of the 20th Century, it was more than 14 times richer. The richest 20 percent of the world's population have 75 times the income of the lowest 20 percent: it used to be 30 times in the beginning of the 1960s.
The top 200 multinational corporations have sales equivalent to 30 percent of the world's measured economic output - but they employ less than 1 percent of the world's workers. According to the Institute of Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, at least two-thirds of the world population are left out, hurt or marginalized by the globalization process.
No wonder the Institute of Policy Studies goes as far as to portray a new global economic apartheid - the real face of the Brave New World of the 21st Century. Thus we live in a world of only 24 rich countries, a dozen fast growing developing countries, and around 140 that are growing very slowly, or not at all. Someone included in the poorer 10 percent of the American population lives better than 4 billion people scattered around the planet.
Robert Wade, professor of political economy at the London School of Economics, is among the few academics stressing the inequality gap. According to Wade, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), people in most of Africa, India, Indonesia and rural China have an average income of less than US$1,500 a year. North America and Western Europe have more than $11,500 a year. In between, lies most of the developing world, such as urban China, Russia, Brazil and Mexico. But there are practically no countries with annual incomes between $5,000 and $11,500.
According to Wade, global inequality is increasing due to a host of factors: rich countries are growing faster than the large group of developing countries; populations in developing countries grow faster than in rich countries (rural China, rural India and Africa grow very slowly); and there is a growing internal divide between rural and urban China, and rural and urban India (the same applies to Indonesia, Brazil or Russia).
And to make matters worse, the prices of industrial goods and services exported from rich countries increase much faster than the goods and services produced by developing countries, and much faster still than what is produced in poor countries with minimal global trade.
International institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the ADB hail as "progress" the only paradigm in town: market-oriented economic policies and the rule of law. But in real life this does not authorize the automatic transformation of the Ivory Coast into another Singapore. The World Bank may be a "world" institution but it does not think in terms of world income distribution, or the effects on the world environment produced by the degradation of the atmosphere.
International institutions tend to promote dubious growth strategies in many developing countries - China and Indonesia - which include widespread devastation of forests, overfishing, indiscriminate exploitation of mineral riches and land-poisoning by agrochemical products. Their immutable version of "progress" is a job in a global factory, access to the cash economy, and the inevitable purchase of a TV set and a video player.
For centuries, rural communities in many developing countries have been well-oiled social cells, assuring the well being of subsistence farmers and fishermen. Their people may not have had a lot of disposable cash, but they always had social peace, some form of education, and had enough to eat. For globalization's purposes, though, they are "unproductive" because their subsistence agriculture cannot support large urban populations.
"Geography is destiny" is another mantra now being brandished in the United States to explain social inequality. In the apex of social Darwinism in the 19th Century - during the expansion of European colonial powers - geography was used as a way to justify the supremacy of the white man. No wonder intellectuals in the developing world today consider the notion of "geography is destiny" as racist and determinist.
Some of the facts, though, are graphic. Among the 24 rich countries, none is situated between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Only Brunei, Singapore and Hong Kong - a Special Administrative Region of China - are tropical, and thrive on trade because of their privileged geographic location.
Income levels, female education and life expectancy are lower in tropical countries, compared to countries in temperate zones. Countries far from a coastline are usually even poorer. This would spell trouble for the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia (although it does not take into consideration their riches in oil, gas and minerals). If a country is tropical, far from any coast, and landlocked - like many in Africa - its prospects are definitely hellish. This would also apply to vast regions of China and India.
It is possible to wonder what are the benefits of a market-oriented policy and the rule of law if a country has low agricultural productivity, not a lot of market access, and is prone to endemic diseases - all because of its geographic location (like many countries in Africa). The answer - according to the "geography is destiny" crowd - would be more investment in transport infrastructure, and new technologies for agriculture and public health. And no more borders. Development banks like the ADB usually grant loans to national governments, following national priorities, instead of supporting projects that would benefit a whole region.
So, according to the "geography is destiny" crowd, the solution to poverty forced by geography is ... more globalization.
By some sort of reverse-engineering, AT Kearney and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace even came up with a Globalization Index. Some of its results are quite obvious, but some go completely against the grain.
The index suggests that "global economic integration has wound down to something of a crawl", although techno-globalization is still growing fast. It comes as no surprise that small countries are the most globalized. Their small domestic markets and highly educated workforce lead to the formation of globally competitive companies - such as Philips, Ericsson or Nokia.
Singapore, according to the Index, is Globalization No 1, followed by Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Ireland, Austria, the United Kingdom, Norway and Canada. The index gives the best marks to Singapore based on criteria including trade volume, telephone traffic and international tourism. But it is slightly schizophrenic: it criticizes Singapore for "low progress in privatization", "failure to win endorsement for a regional free trade agreement" and "tight controls over Internet development". Translation: Singapore is not as free a market as it should be.
The United Nations is so worried about the digital divide these days that it even established an Information and Communication Task Force. The index shows there is not only a digital divide between the 24 rich countries and the rest of the world, but different divides between North America, Scandinavia, Western Europe and a cluster of developing countries.
North America - with 40 percent of the population online - is only twice more wired than Scandinavia, but five times more wired than Western Europe. The real digital abyss is between North America-Scandinavia, and the rest of the world. Developing world efforts are usually plagued with problems. Malaysia spent $4 billion - so far - and will spend another $6 billion on its Multimedia Super Corridor, an area larger than Singapore itself. But there are no computers in most of its primary schools. Most of Kuala Lumpur still has no broadband access. It's a major headache to attract multinational corporation staff to work in Cyberjaya - one hour's drive from Kuala Lumpur: It is described as boring, desolate and with no social life. So far, the Multimedia Super Corridor has not benefited Malaysia as a whole.
The index is adamant: small developing countries already inserted in globalization, in Eastern Europe (Hungary, Poland, the Czech republic), and in the case of Israel, have less inequality than less globalized countries - such as Russia, China, Brazil and Argentina. But this does not explain why Malaysia is more globalized than the Eastern Europeans - but with more inequality. The problem with the index, for all its scientific marvels, is not to consider fundamental cultural factors. The index blindly insists on a pattern of more globalization equals more equality.
Rich countries, the elites of the developing world, and the so-called international institutions seem to be mired in some heavy-metal wishful thinking. They perceive no relation between widening world inequality and poverty. And they cannot acknowledge the fact that poverty simply cannot be fought without a profound change in the modes of production and distribution of wealth. They forget that growing inequality in the end is a menace to political stability in the rich countries themselves.
Is a country poor and ravaged by inequality because of globalization, or because it has not globalized as it should? The $1 trillion question remains.
00:48
comments-[ comments.]
COMMENTARY
The New Imperialism
By Pepe Escobar
ISLAMABAD - Joseph Conrad was the first modern writer to fully understand that in extreme situations the distinctions and nuances between civilization and the "heart of darkness" collapse with a bang. Conrad showed how the sublime heights of European civilization could fall into the pit of the most barbarous practices - without any sort of preparation or transition (no wonder that Belgium still has not officially acknowledged the genocide of millions during King Leopold's possession of the Congo).
Now more than ever it is rewarding to re-read Conrad - and as an added bonus to watch Francis Ford Coppola's reading of Conrad in the recently released director's cut of Apocalypse Now. The New Afghan War increasingly runs the risk of being configured as The New Vietnam. Washington has said from the beginning this is not Gulf War II. But now, deeply frustrated because they are unable to break the Taliban - those medieval architects of a pan-Islamic utopia - the Pentagon is contemplating a Desert Storm-style invasion the next Afghan spring. This won't be Gulf War II: this will be Vietnam II.
Most of the Muslim world's uneducated masses suffer from political and social underdevelopment and extremely corrupt elites. Osama bin Laden capitalized on this dysfunction. Osama and the Al-Qaeda, in their warped world-view, would have the Muslim world believe that we are now facing a war between Islam and the West. It may come as a striking revelation that the West also has its hordes of fundamentalists, of the armchair kind - but although they don't resort to jet-turned-to-missile suicide squads, they are just as deadly.
When Samuel Huntington came up with his Clash of Civilizations reductionist classic in 1993, he relied heavily on The Roots of Muslim Rage, a 1990 essay by the Orientalist Bernard Lewis. Professor Edward Said, a most acute critic of Orientalists, has pointed out that neither Huntington nor Lewis were careful enough to examine the fact that "the major contest in most modern cultures concerns the definition or interpretation of each culture". This goes way beyond a simplistic clash of cultures. Huntington's clash became a road map for American foreign policy because it is basically an ideology: a very handy ideology to fill the vacuum created by the end of the ideology-heavy Cold War.
We don't even have to invoke Freud and Nietzsche - as Said does - to realize that "there are closer ties between apparently warring civilizations than most of us would like to believe". Huntington's clash - although a dangerous warring ideology - must be ridiculed for what it is: mere defensive self-pride. As any urban youth in any world city can attest, the name of the game in the 21st century is interdependence: cultures are not monolithic, they interact in an orgy of cross-fertilization.
Bush the elder was wrong - or his formulation was ahead of his time. Not the Gulf War, but the Afghan War, fought by young Bush, is the preamble to a New World Order. The signs are already in print - and they are all offshoots of Huntington's clash.
An otherwise obscure opinion page editor of the Wall Street Journal is in favor of "colonization of wayward nations", including "the application of a dose of US imperialism". Not beating around the bush either, British historian Paul Johnson has also published in the Journal a piece titled "The Answer to Terrorism? Colonialism". The Financial Times, not to be upstaged by American competition, has carried its own "The Need for a New Imperialism". So what are all these self-important paragons of free speech and exchange of ideas basically saying? They're saying that the future, ladies and gentleman, is the past.
The New Imperialism according to the Financial Times is "defensive" - as defensive as Huntington's clash. It is based on the arbitrarily-defined concept of a "failed state". Afghanistan is given as a prime example. The FT cleverly omits to examine how Afghanistan failed because of relentless Russian and American armed interference since the late 1970s.
In The New Imperialism, the "coercive apparatus" must be provided by the West. To disguise the imperialist thrust, the FT suggests that the United Nations should be in charge of these "temporary protectorates". This is exactly what the US has in mind for Afghanistan. Obviously, nobody is listening to the UN special envoy to Afghanistan, Algerian diplomat Lakdar Brahimi, who said in Islamabad last week that the heavily-publicized utopia of a "broad-based government" cannot be forced down the Afghani people's throats: it will take time, it will have to come from within. Otherwise the end result will be, again, chaos.
Paul Johnson theorizes that the war against terrorism will lead to a new form of colonialism - of the benign or "respectable" kind - by "the great civilized powers". He can only mean America and its blind follower Britain - because the last time we checked France, Germany, Italy, Japan and China, to name but a few, are extremely civilized but not exactly keen on turning back the digital clock of history.
What Johnson really wants is to keep again arbitrarily-defined "terrorist states" under "responsible supervision" - meaning "unavoidable" political interference from the West. He even provides a list of eligible countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Iran and Syria. No coincidence: they are all Islamic. But if Johnson abandoned his leather armchair to do a bit of traveling, he could verify that at least three of these have better fish to fry.
Tony Blair bent over backwards on his recent visit to Damascus to engage Syria: Bashar Assad may not be a paragon of democracy, but he is more interested in education and information technology than bombs. Libya - not South Africa - is the new Eldorado for millions of black western and central Africans: Gaddafi, the Great Survivor, prefers to seduce African youth with economic opportunities rather than with bombs. Iran is torn between hardliners and moderates, but the young generation is fully behind Khatami and his "dialogue of civilizations" - a splendidly articulated cultural platform that strikes a chord all over the developing world.
Billions of people in Southeast Asia, China, South Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East , Eastern Europe or even Western Europe were not consulted about the designs of the New Imperialism. But it is no coincidence that the New Imperialism is being proposed exactly at this historical juncture. The current Pentagon production on the word's screens has turned out to be essentially a relentless bombing of innocent, starving civilians as punishment for terrorist attacks. It is widely regarded - not only in the Muslim world - as a very expensive and ultimately apalling exercise in futility. Apart from America, public support around the world is vanishing at an alarming rate.
This war was imposed from above on the Afghan population. They were never consulted about its legitimacy. They are not responsible for it. They are helpless victims. A cartoon in the Pakistani press explained the real meaning of "carpet bombing": American bombs fall on an Afghan carpet while a group of unflappable Taliban pose on the side for an Al Jazeera TV crew.
The proponents of New Imperialism conveniently forget to examine how the Taliban got to the ruined top of "failed" Afghanistan in the first place. The Taliban are eminently an Afghan, Pastun and tribal movement. It is easy to forget they are a direct product of the Saudi-American-financed anti-USSR jihad of the '80s. They took power in Kabul in 1996 with the absolute blessing of the US.
Afghanistan was beyond "failed" as a state in 1996. But at the time the Taliban were regarded as a convenient tool for the implementation of another classic American business plan: the construction of oil and gas pipelines from the Central Asian republics through Afghanistan, with Karachi as a major destination. The Taliban would theoretically control the whole country, impose law and order, and guarantee a safe trading environment.
The US had high hopes for the Taliban. They would clear Afghanistan of drugs. They would act against Russian and Iranian economic and geopolitical interests. They would get rid of terrorist training camps. They would pave the way for the return of former king Zahir Shah (no joke: this is what Washington thought way back in 1996). And most of all they would open the gates for the mega-pipelines from Central Asia.
So the whole thing was a sub-plot of the New Great Oil Rush: how America would win against the stiff competition of Russia and Iran. The American-Saudi coalition of Unocal and Delta was the main Western player. Then came the fall of Kabul - mostly financed by none other than Osama bin Laden himself. Unocal at the time was madly in love with the Taliban: an official statement praised the Taliban and the prospect of "immediately" doing business with them. In Afghanistan in 1996, as Afghan veterans comment in Peshawar, the perception was that the Taliban were supported or even financed by Washington.
Unocal was actively negotiating with the Taliban the construction of pipelines from Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea, via Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unocal officials were extensively briefed by CIA agents. The positioning of Unocal in relation to Pakistani sources was equivalent to the positioning of the CIA during the jihad in the '80s. Unocal's main source of information was the disinformation-infested US Embassy in Islamabad.
Apart from all the by-products of their demented version of Islam, the Taliban in the end dealt a major blow to Washington. They did not control all of Afghanistan as expected. They did not bring peace: on the contrary, they installed a police state and engaged in ethnic cleansing (against the Hazaras). Average Afghans stress that the Taliban version of "peace" soon degenerated into an internal jihad against the civilian population.
They did not end poppy cultivation: on the contrary, they made a lot of money out of it. They treated women in the most repulsive way. And - the ultimate reason for their current predicament - they extended a precious red Afghan carpet to Osama bin Laden and his Arab-Afghans.
From courting this irascible lover, America is now bombing it to oblivion. But as millions in the Muslim world keeps on repeating, not a single piece of evidence has been produced in public to suggest that the Taliban are totally, partially, or even marginally responsible for September 11. Not a single piece of a so-called unimpeachable evidence was "independently verified" - as BBC and CNN are so fond of saying (even when they are verifying something during a Taliban-sponsored tour of Kandahar).
Any talk of a future broad-based Afghan government is a smoke screen. As far as American interests are concerned, it has to be a government that no matter what facilitates the American perspective of the Last Great Oil Rush. If push comes to shove, America may even contemplate an occupation of Afghanistan, more or less disguised via the UN. Before that happens, policy makers had better listen to Afghan professor Jamalluddin Naqvi, who says, "History is witness to the fact that Afghanistan is a human and territorial Bermuda Triangle from where no one ever comes out - at any rate in one piece."
Henry Kissinger would grumble that this is just realpolitik. It would certainly be an instance of the New Imperialism in action. The international community should thank the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times for informing us all in advance.
Another imperialist with impeccable credentials, globalization's puppy dog Thomas Friedman, wrote in the New York Times that "the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps". Globalization does not work without the New Imperialism. But another reading of history is always possible. In their seminal book Empire, Tony Negri and Michael Hardt argue that the process of globalization has generated a universal and oppressive New Imperialism - but stress that a real humanist alternative to imperialism and war is more than possible.
Ibn Khaldun, a Muslim historian of the 14th century, would agree. He was not deterministic like Huntington, Fukuyuma and assorted cohorts. He said that civilizations follow a process - they go through different stages. Centuries before Adam Smith, Ibn Khaldun came up with an extremely sophisticated analysis of free trade, the role of the market, and the rule of law. The Muqaddimah - the introduction to his immense Universal History, is a prodigy of humanism: nothing remotely similar to the intolerant Islam of the Taliban or the confrontational Islam of Al-Qaeda.
If Ibn Khaldun were alive today, he would tell us that American civilization - like the Caliphates, or the Umayyad dynasty of his time - has expanded to almost limitless power. And when you reach Absolute Power, the only way is down. Not only the eminent Muslim reached this conclusion, but also Western icons like Gibbon - talking about the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - and more recently Professor Paul Kennedy, who excelled in his examination of the concept of overextension of great powers.
In a fruitful "dialogue among civilizations" - an Iranian idea - Ibn Khaldun and Professor Kennedy would probably agree that America is now overextended. And they would certainly agree that civilizations do decline. America still is by all means a civilization of boundless, fascinating energy and dynamism. But it must beware of hubris - the essential element in Greek tragedy, the cultural foundation of Western civilization. Unfortunately, some dreamers of New Imperialism and assorted Pentagon generals have never heard of Sophocles. They'd better get their act together before they plunge America into another heart of darkness
00:39
comments-[ comments.]
By Pepe Escobar
PARIS - Osama bin Laden is here, there and everywhere. For Russian intelligence, he is in the Pankisi Gorge, in northeastern Georgia, not far from the Chechen border, alongside a clutch of al-Qaeda operatives.
In European diplomatic circles he is said to be in north Yemen, close to the Saudi border. For Pakistani intelligence, he is already inside Iraq, after previously being sheltered by anti-Tehran Sunni mujahideen in southeast Iran.
And during the recent carnival in Brazil's steamy Rio de Janeiro, bin Laden was everywhere: on the beach, in the streets, drinking beer or champagne and dancing till dawn in clubs around town - bin Laden's was the best-selling carnival mask in the swinging city. This even prompted an Asian-style counterfeit industry: you could buy the genuine article for about US$4, complete with white turban, or a plastic fake for little more than a dollar. There were few takers for the mask of US President George W Bush.
00:38
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