Convergence of Catastrophes, page 8
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Is there a chance of an Islamic Republic in France? The Kabyle[75] Rachid Kaci, founder of the Free Right (la Droite libre), writes in his essay, La République des laches:[76] ‘The debate about the veil depends less on religion than on tactics, the goal of which remains above all political. It is a question of leading French society to be sufficiently immersed in Islam so that in the end this religion may be in a position to influence French law. The penetration of the veil into public schools is only a stage of this process. Once the principle is admitted, Islamists will raise their bids even higher. Have we not heard them demand, in the name of the equality of all religions before the law, that French schools and society devote the same attention to Muslim holidays as to Catholic holidays.’
Kaci does not discuss the problem of demography. What arguments will he use when Muslims will be in the majority, which is actually happening? Obviously he never calls for ‘deportation’, but he is lucid, when he criticises the lax politics of Sarkozy: ‘These people have a political project, which is to create a Muslim community in France and manage it with a view to its final domination over the nation. This is their ambition. Do not doubt it for a minute.’
China against the USA
China is preparing for war, but against whom? First the implacable facts: the People’s Republic of China is increasing its military budget in the largest percentages of any nation on Earth. On 6 March 2001, Beijing announced an increase in military expenditure of 17.7 per cent in 2001, which will bring them to 141 billion yuan, or 19 billion euros or 120 billion francs. Western experts estimate that China’s real military expenses are ‘two to three times higher than the official figures’ (Le Monde, 7 March 2001). This striking increase is the largest observed in twenty years and represents the thirteenth consecutive increase of more than 10 per cent.
Unlike Europe, which is disarming and reducing its military budgets, China is in the process of rearmament with a massive increase in its military power, higher than that of Germany between 1933 and 1940 and the increases in the United States after Pearl Harbor.
Why is China doing this? It has always been known that a country that is rearming is doing so for one of two reasons: either it feels threatened and wants to protect itself, or it wants to attack. Does China want to attack Taiwan, in order to conquer it again? No, because it does not need to rearm so heavily in order to retake Taiwan and it prefers a strategy of ‘persuasion’. China wants to regain Taiwan peacefully, by threats rather than direct force. A war would ruin Taiwan’s successful economy, which China needs. China envisages Taiwan as a future ‘autonomous region’, like Hong Kong.
A French correspondent, Régis de M., suggests, ‘We need to compare the Chinese military budget and the depopulation of Russia.’ So does China want to attack Russia? Clearly China could claim part of eastern Siberia, which Chinese immigrants are infiltrating. One remembers the Sino-Russian conflict over Amur in the 1960s.[77] This, however, is not China’s geopolitical preoccupation. The Middle Kingdom feels no more threatened by Russia than by India (all the more so because the Russians still supply the Chinese with weapons, notably Sukhoi fighter-bombers). It is in China’s interest to maintain good relations with these two continental powers. Then why is China rearming?
Because the Chinese sense the possibility of a major conflict in the Twenty-first century with the great thalassocratic superpower, the United States. China, a nation that (like France) is both maritime and continental, has understood that the Pacific — currently under American control — is going to become a locus of major friction. Let us not forget that the two military superpowers by 2015 will be China and the United States. So China foresees a situation similar to that of the ‘Cold War’ between the West and the USSR between 1947 and 1991. In the context of this rearmament, China is not increasing her territorial strength at all (which would be the case in the hypothesis of conflicts along her continental frontiers),[78] but as though accidentally, 1) she is strengthening her naval and submarine fleets on the high seas — Beijing has plans to launch aircraft carriers — and her air force; 2) she is improving her rocket and nuclear capacities and preparing military spy satellites, and 3) she is revaluing her currency to motivate her army. The Chinese are preparing for a ‘post-modern’ type of conflict, centred on electronic war, missiles, airplanes and submarines. This conflict would inevitably have a (partly) nuclear aspect. The Pentagon understands the situation perfectly. The recent crisis concerning the aerial ‘accident’ between a US Navy EP-3 spy plane, which was forced to land at Hainan, and a J-8 fighter of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army[79] confirms the start of serious disputes between the two principal waterfronts of the Pacific that will relegate the Jewish-Arab conflicts of the Near East to the status of regional quarrels.
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What are the real reasons for the American anti-ballistic missile shield? In contempt for the SALT nuclear disarmament accords[80] — and in formal disagreement with China, Russia and France — Bush wants to endow his country with a shield of anti-ballistic missile interceptors capable of shooting down nuclear warheads launched against American territory while still in flight. In so doing, he is breaking the ‘equilibrium of terror’ that has prevented nuclear war thanks to ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD), which rests on an implicit pact between the nuclear powers, according to which the aggressor, who is certain of being destroyed in retaliation, is dissuaded from launching its own nuclear weapons. If, however, a country — in this case the United States — possesses an anti-missile shield, it could wage any type of warfare against another nuclear power without fearing effective retaliation.[81]
They tell us — and all the commentators pretend to believe it — that the Americans want to protect themselves from possible future missile attacks from ‘rogue states’: North Korea, Libya, Iran, Iraq, etc. This motive is a possibility, but secondary. In reality, there is every indication that the Pentagon envisages a major confrontation with China in twenty years and intends to possess the means of striking (not necessarily using atomic weapons) without the risk of a devastating nuclear response on American soil.
Let us not forget that the American thalassocracy, despite its official ultra-pacifist and humanitarian language, is an ‘imperial-mercantile nation’ founded on war and its armed forces. The Untied States needs war (‘just war’, the crusade against evil, obviously), not only for economic reasons — the arms industry is a locomotive for technology, industry and finance capitalism — but also to maintain its international status as ‘protector and ruler’ of the world.
Since 1941, no other country has conducted more military operations and bombardments outside its borders than the United States — and with no fear of an invasion of its territory. Now things are changing. America is not dealing with little countries, Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, and so on, but with the enormous country of China, a terrifying challenger that, with its 1.25 billion inhabitants, can survive massive loss of life from nuclear strikes (as Mao noted), and is currently equipped with long-range missiles! This prospect is much worse than a confrontation with the defunct Soviet Union would have been . . .
Breaking radically with Clinton’s policy, President Bush declared in early March 2004, ‘China is a competitor and not a strategic partner.’
A war will perhaps have as its theatre and central stake the domination of the Pacific, and eventually bring the United States and China into opposition, perhaps as soon as 2010. What will be the pretext? On the basis of what disagreements will it break out? Right now, no one knows. Unlike, however, the short-sighted and pusillanimous politicians of Europe who ‘no longer have enemies’, who no longer feel threatened by anyone, who joyously disarm, for whom the military is now nothing but a police force for humanitarian intervention, America’s strategists have read Clausewitz; they think about the long term and know that, tomorrow, war is always possible between two major powers, even if they do not know the exact pretexts will be today. The question is, if such a gigantic conflict took place, which side would Europe, Russia and India choose?
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Despite the new forms that confrontations will take in the course of the Twenty-first century, such as repeating acts of terrorism, giga-terrorism and civil wars, it is perfectly possible to envisage classic wars between the great powers.
Francis Fukuyama,[82] the American professor of political science at George Mason University in Virginia and consultant to the RAND Corporation, is the author of the bestseller The End of History and the Last Man,[83] where he predicts a general pacification of the planet under the reign of liberalism and Western-style democracy. Nevertheless, in an interview given to Le Figaro (13 January 2000), he admitted that he could not exclude the scenario of a war between the great powers.
Fukuyama said, ‘Taiwan could supply the igniting spark between China and the United States. Between Russia and NATO it is not too difficult to find a pretext for war. Therefore it is not yet the end of history.’ Now carefully read these words where Fukuyama, more than a year and a half before the attacks of 11 September 2001, seems, if not to deny, at least to place severe limits around his theory of the ‘end of history’: ‘Anything could happen. The scale of risks is going to increase because terrorists and rogue states have access to increasingly murderous technology. But I do not think a sudden strike, even a very bloody one, could change the face of the Earth or the direction of history. I could be mistaken. A terrorist attack that would kill a million people would surely change our attitude on the central question of individual liberties. This would be history, in my definition. It certainly cannot be excluded.’
Fukuyama, however, with a flabbergasting naïveté, still believes — with a tone of pure ideological belief — ‘History will end in democracy.’ On the contrary, however, the Twenty-first century will be the century of the thunderous intensification of history. Fukuyama understands the concept of ‘history’ in Hegel’s sense, that is, as significant events that produce major social and political changes, like the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, the two world wars, the fall of Communism, and so on. He seems to think that such events will become increasingly rare, although they will occur with increasing frequency!
The Islamist Iranian revolution, the attacks of 11 September 2001, the civil war in Israel: these shocks are eminently creative of history. We shall see others. It was during the Cold War that history seemed to be fixed, frozen. Now it has resumed its forward course, faster, madder and more uncontrolled than ever. Far from being the kingdom of the end of history, the Twenty-first century will be the century of hyper-history, if history is understood in Hegel’s definition cited above, since we are probably going to witness a general fall of humanity out of modernity, which will end a cycle sketched in the Middle Ages and begun in the Sixteenth century.
When Everyone Has Nuclear Weapons
What will be the consequences of the new American nuclear doctrine? The United States argues: ‘Do what I say, not what I do’, with all the contradictions that follow. They want to bind the ROW (Rest of the World) to the undiluted free market through the World Trade Organization. They practice protectionism (no one dares to respond with sanctions!), as seen with their tariff on steel imports.
Similarly, the Pentagon wants to overthrow the nuclear doctrine. Casting aside the theory of deterrence, in which nuclear weapons can only be used to answer an attack of the same type, the United States plans to employ miniaturised atomic bombs against the ‘rogue states’ of the ‘Axis of Evil’, whether they possess nuclear weapons or not, in a first strike. Such a plan, according to Robert Steuckers,[84] ‘betrays the growing frustration of the military-industrial complex and the American leadership at the inability they find themselves in to destroy the terrorists who attacked America.’ It also betrays, according to the London Times (12 March 2002), the impotence of American ground forces, which are despised by its Afghan ‘allies’, and who, in the course of the recent Operation Anaconda,[85] judged the GIs ‘unable to fight and interested only in avoiding casualties’.
One consequence of this new doctrine has been to renew the nuclear proliferation that the United States is trying at all costs to prevent. In fact, many states, feeling themselves threatened by American nuclear strikes, are going to be tempted to acquire the bomb. Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian[86] asserts, ‘[A]s the memory of September 11 inevitably fades, it is not so much Islamist hijackers as US bombs that make the world feel a precarious place’, which risks destabilising the world. Ah! The Americans who, along with Francis Fukuyama, thought that after the fall of the Soviet Union they were going to fashion the worldwide Pax Americana[87] and the ‘end of history’, on the contrary, are going to create a generalised Bellum Americanum[88] and an acceleration of history.
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Is Saudi Arabia trying to acquire nuclear weapons? Iran and North Korea may perhaps not be the only thorns in the feet of the United States. As a predictable consequence of the reckless and calamitous invasion of Iraq, Saudi Arabia is trying to preserve itself from American insanity by establishing a nuclear arsenal! This nightmarish scenario, in which the most fundamentalist state on Earth would obtain nuclear warheads, was the object of a secret report uncovered by Scotland on Sunday.[89] The report was obviously denied by the Saudis.
It is possible that the report was ‘leaked’ by the Saudi special services to impress the Americans, who have passed from the status of privileged allies to that of an imperialist threat. According to Daniel Neep, a British expert, Research Director on the Middle East and Africa at the Royal United Services Institute of London, the Saudis envisage the possibility of an American attack, among other possibilities.
This scenario would add another element to the chaos of the Middle East, which is increasingly the world’s powder keg. Saudi Arabia probably has the financial wherewithal to buy the bomb, even without the help of Saudi scientists. Judith Yaphe, an expert at the National Defense University of Washington, admits that the Bush administration frightens the Saudis. She explains, ‘We have warned that, since we are now the world’s only superpower, if someone threatens us, we have the right to a preventive attack. The next question is, after Iraq who will be next? We are giving the impression that we want to remake the Middle East to suit ourselves, beginning with Iraq. Many people are saying that the next target will not be only Iran or Syria, but maybe Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States, even Egypt. All the countries of the region are tormented by this question.’ Every day, the evidence accumulates that America’s warmongering and destabilising foreign policy is increasingly provoking uncontrolled reactions.
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Sergei Ivanov, the Russian Defence Minister, explains that the American invasion of Iraq is going to increase international military instability: ‘As the situation surrounding Iraq was developing, the Pyongyang leadership came to the conclusion that territorial integrity and independence can be guaranteed only through the possession of means of deterrence… Developments have shown that many countries are beginning to act using their own discretion, without caring much about international law. There is nothing good in this scenario.’[90] In other words, the consequences of the American intervention will be that several Third World countries, especially Muslim ones, are going to speed up their clandestine nuclear and chemical weapons programs, in order to deter American ‘police’ operations.
Israel’s Tears
Is apartheid the only solution for Israel? The current policies of the Sharon government and the heating up of the civil war is judged suicidal by an increasingly large number of Israelis who believe that the war will be lost and Israel can never recover from it. Here is the thesis we are defending: since the creation of the Hebrew state and, especially since the 1967 war,[91] Zionist policy in the region has been geostrategically stupid.
To understand matters, let us begin by examining some public statements. On 5 March 2002, Ariel Sharon announced, ‘We ought to concentrate on a single matter, striking the Palestinians as hard as possible. That is what we need, blows. They must understand that they are defeated.’ The celebrated journalist Ze’ev Schiff wrote on the same day in the newspaper Haaretz: ‘It seems that the day is approaching in the terrible war that is developing here, when anyone who comes to destroy Israeli families, including children and babies, will have to consider that Israel will harm his family, and not only his property.’[92] For the first time, a Jewish Israeli intellectual is theorising in the mainstream press about massacring innocents, in the name of the lex talionis, ‘an eye for an eye’ . . .
