Re: In Jesus' name

April 28, 2003

Scholar attacks Bush on Iraq

By Martin Walker
UPI Chief International Correspondent


WASHINGTON, April 28 (UPI) -- The Bush
administration's strategy of using the victory in Iraq to spread
democracy throughout the Islamic world is doomed to
frustration, and the United States is fated to a largely solitary
future as it seeks to guard its current pre-eminence against
resentful rivals, Harvard Professor Sam Huntington warned
Monday.
"An only superpower is a lonely
superpower, and that is the reality
we will have to learn to live with,"
said the author of the best-selling
"Clash of Civilizations," which
suggested that global rivalries and
conflicts were fated to follow the
lines of religion, language and other
cultural factors.
The Bush administration or its
successors will come to realize that
it needs the cooperation of other
regional powers, Huntington went
on, a task that has been complicated by the war in Iraq.
"I don't see any real justification for what we have done in
Iraq," Huntington said. "If that is not an imperial war, I don't
know what is," he added, in delivering the annual Goldman
Sachs lecture on global affairs at Georgetown University in
Washington.
"What we see as the war against Terrorism and against a
brutal dictatorship, Muslims -- quite understandably -- see as a
war on Islam," he said.
"I am baffled by the (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld
belief in the spread of democracy from Iraq, because of the
strength of Islamist groups and their evident ability to win
recent elections in Pakistan, Turkey, Bahrain and elsewhere,"
he said.
"The world is not going to be converted to democracy
overnight, and democracy will not be established in Iraq in
three months or three years. No strategy is sustainable if it
flies in the face of major facts," he added. "In Iraq, our
emphasis should not be on democracy through elections, but on
the rule of law, free press and civil society -- the things
necessary to a functioning democracy over the long haul."
Huntington, one of America's best-known scholars on
global issues, caught the imagination of a far wider public with
his "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, particularly in reference to
Islam. Many commentators saw the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, and the wars against the Taliban in Afghanistan and
against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq as proof of his
theory.
But his lecture Monday took sharp issue with the policies of
the Bush administration, and one student during the question
and answer session confessed he had come prepared to jeer at
Huntington's hawkishness, but stayed to applaud.
"In the last six months, the Bush administration has done
everything it could to prove that we are living in a unipolar
world," he said. "My guess is that unilateral (American) action
will generate increasingly deep and broad opposition, and then
the administration will learn that it needs the cooperation of
other regional powers."
Huntington argued it is a mistake the United States now is
enjoying the "unipolar moment" when it is so much richer and
stronger than other powers that it faces no competing poles for
global influence. Equally, this was not a multipolar world of
several rival great powers all jockeying for influence, in the
way that Europe had been in recent centuries.
"The pattern of the last decade since the end of the Cold
War fits neither of these models. It is instead a hybrid, a
uni-multipolar system, in which the single superpower can
usually veto the moves of others, but usually requires the
assistance of others to get its way. If it does not, we get the
kind of crisis we saw at the United Nations over Iraq," he said.

Countries fell into several main groups, he argued. The
United States was the sole superpower. Beneath the United
States were several regional superpowers like Russia, China,
Iran and the European Union, who each had reason to
challenge American dominate in their own region. But beneath
these were sub-regional superpowers, which liked to ally with
the United States against their own regional hegemony.
So Saudi Arabia allied with the United States for far of
Iran, and Japan allied with the United States for fear of China,
and Britain allied with the United States to balance against
French and German influence in the European Union.
"The cooperation against the U.S. that we saw at the
United Nations between France, Germany and Russia could
mark the beginning of a stable anti-American alliance," he
noted. "But the common Western culture that we share with
the Europeans will set limits to it."

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