[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Sarkozy

[C. G. Estabrook]

[As Perry Anderson points out in his difficult but important article, 
"Depicting Europe" <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/ande01_.html>, Sarkozy 
represents less of a break with previous French policy that seems to be 
the case.  --CGE]

...Europe split over Iraq ... But the extent of European opposition to 
the march on Baghdad was always something of an illusion. On the 
streets, in Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, huge numbers of people 
demonstrated against the invasion. Opinion polls showed majorities 
against it everywhere. But once it had occurred, there was little 
protest against the occupation, let alone support for the resistance to 
it. Most European governments – Britain, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, 
Denmark, Portugal in the West; all in the East – backed the invasion, 
and sent troops to bulk up the US forces holding the country down. Out 
of the 12 member states of the EU in 2003, just three – France, Germany 
and Belgium – came out against the prospect of war before the event. 
None condemned the attack when it was launched. But the declared 
opposition of Paris and Berlin to the plans of Washington and London 
gave popular sentiment across Europe a point of concentration, 
confirming and amplifying its sense of distance from power and opinion 
in America. The notion of an incipient Declaration of Independence by 
the Old World was born here.

Realities were rather different. Chirac and Schröder had a domestic 
interest in countering the invasion. Each judged his electorate well, 
and gained substantially – Schröder securing re-election – from his 
stance. On the other hand, American will was not to be trifled with. So 
each compensated in deeds for what he proclaimed in words, opposing the 
war in public, while colluding with it sub rosa. Behind closed doors in 
Washington, France’s ambassador Jean-David Levitte – currently Sarkozy’s 
diplomatic adviser – gave the White House a green light for the war, 
provided it was on the basis of the first generic UN Resolution 1441, as 
Cheney wanted, without returning to the Security Council for the second 
explicit authorisation to attack that Blair wanted, which would force 
France to veto it. In ciphers from Baghdad, German intelligence agents 
provided the Pentagon with targets and co-ordinates for the first US 
missiles to hit the city, in the downpour of Shock and Awe. Once the 
ground war began, France provided airspace for USAF missions to Iraq 
(which Chirac had denied Reagan’s bombing of Libya), and Germany a key 
transport hub for the campaign. Both countries voted for the UN 
resolution ratifying the US occupation of Iraq, and lost no time 
recognising the client regime patched together by Washington.

As for the EU, its choice of a new president of the Commission in 2004 
could not have been more symbolic: the Portuguese ruler who hosted Bush, 
Blair and Aznar at the summit in the Azores on 16 March 2003 that issued 
the ultimatum for the assault on Iraq. Barroso is in good company. 
France now has a foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had no time for 
even the modest duplicities of his country about America’s war, 
welcoming it as another example of the droit d’ingérence he had always 
championed. Sweden, where once a prime minister could take a sharper 
distance from the war in Vietnam than De Gaulle himself, has a new 
minister for foreign affairs to match his colleague in Paris: Carl 
Bildt, a founder member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, 
along with Richard Perle, William Kristol, Newt Gingrich and others. In 
the UK, the local counterpart has proudly restated his support for the 
war, though here, no doubt, the corpses were stepped over in pursuit of 
preferment rather than principle. Spaniards and Italians may have 
withdrawn their troops from Iraq, but no European government has any 
policy towards a society America has destroyed that is distinct from the 
outlook in Washington.

For the rest, Europe remains engaged to the hilt in the war in 
Afghanistan, where a contemporary version of the expeditionary force 
dispatched to crush the Boxer Rebellion has killed more civilians this 
year than the guerrillas it seeks to root out. The Pentagon did not 
require the services of Nato for its lightning overthrow of the Taliban, 
though British and French jets put in a nominal appearance. Occupation 
of the country, which has a larger population and more forbidding 
terrain than Iraq, was another matter, and a Nato force of five thousand 
was assembled to hold the fort around Kabul, while US forces finished 
off Mullah Omar and Bin Laden. Five years later, Omar and Osama remain 
at large; the West’s puppet ruler, Karzai, cannot move without a squad 
of mercenaries from DynCorp International to protect him; production of 
opium has increased tenfold; the Afghan resistance has become steadily 
more effective; and Nato-led forces – now comprising contingents from 37 
nations, from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Poland down to 
such minnows as Iceland – have swollen to 35,000, alongside 25,000 US 
troops. Indiscriminate bombing, random shooting and ‘human rights 
abuses’, in the polite phrase, have become commonplaces of the 
counter-insurgency.

In the wider Middle East, the scene is the same. Europe is joined at the 
hip with the US, wherever the legacies of imperial control or settler 
zeal are at stake. Britain and France, original suppliers of heavy water 
and uranium for the large Israeli nuclear arsenal, which they pretend 
does not exist, demand along with America that Iran abandon programmes 
it is allowed even by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, under menace of 
sanctions and war. In Lebanon, the EU and the US prop up a cabinet that 
would not last a day if a census were called, while German, French and 
Italian troops provide border guards for Israel. As for Palestine, the 
EU showed no more hesitation than the US in plunging the population into 
misery, cutting off all aid when voters elected the wrong government, on 
the pretext that it must first recognise the Israeli state, as if Israel 
had ever recognised a Palestinian state, and renounce terrorism (read: 
any armed resistance to a military occupation that has lasted forty 
years without Europe lifting a finger against it). Funds now flow again, 
to protect a remnant valet in the West Bank.

Lovers of Europe might reply that some of this record may be 
questionable, but these are external issues that can scarcely be said to 
affect the example Europe sets the world of respect for human rights and 
the rule of law within its own borders. The performance of the EU or its 
member states may not be irreproachable in the Middle East, but isn’t 
the moral leadership represented by its standards at home what really 
counts, internationally? So good a conscience comes too easily. The war 
on terror knows no frontiers and the crimes committed in its name have 
stalked freely across the continent, in the full cognisance of its 
rulers. Originally, the subcontracting of torture – ‘rendition’, or the 
handing over of a victim to the attentions of the secret police in 
client states – was, like so much else, an invention of the Clinton 
administration, which introduced the practice in the mid-1990s. Asked 
about it a decade later, the CIA official in charge of the programme, 
Michael Scheuer, simply said: ‘I check my moral qualms at the door.’ As 
one would expect, it was Britain that collaborated with the first 
renditions, in the company of Croatia and Albania.

Under the Bush administration, the programme expanded. Three weeks after 
9/11, Nato declared that Article V of its charter, mandating collective 
defence in the event of an attack on one of its members, was activated. 
By then American plans for the descent on Afghanistan were well 
advanced, but they did not include European participation in Operation 
Enduring Freedom; the US high command had found the need for 
consultation in a joint campaign cumbersome in the Balkan War, and did 
not want to repeat the experience. Instead, at a meeting in Brussels on 
4 October 2001, the allies were called on for other services. The 
specification of these remains secret, but as the second report to the 
Council of Europe – released in June this year – by the courageous Swiss 
investigator Dick Marty, has shown, a stepped-up programme of renditions 
must have been high on the list. Once Afghanistan was taken, Baghram 
airbase outside Kabul became both interrogation centre for the CIA and 
loading-bay for prisoners to Guantánamo. The traffic was soon two-way, 
and its pivot was Europe. In one direction, captives were transported 
from Afghan or Pakistani dungeons to Europe, either to be held there in 
secret CIA jails, or shipped onwards to Cuba. In the other direction, 
captives were flown from secret locations in Europe for requisite 
treatment in Afghanistan.

Though Nato initiated this system, the abductions it involved were not 
confined to members of the North Atlantic Council. Europe was eager to 
help America, whether or not fine print obliged it to do so. North, 
south, east and west: no part of the continent failed to join in. New 
Labour’s contribution occasions no surprise: with up to 650,000 
civilians dead from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, it would have 
been unreasonable for the Straws, Becketts, Milibands to lose any sleep 
over the torture of the living. More striking is the role of the 
neutrals. Under Ahern, Ireland furnished Shannon to the CIA for so many 
westbound flights that locals dubbed it Guantánamo Express. 
Social-democratic Sweden, under its portly boss Göran Persson, now a 
corporate lobbyist, handed over two Egyptians seeking asylum to the CIA, 
who took them straight to torturers in Cairo. Under Berlusconi, Italy 
helped a large CIA team to kidnap another Egyptian in Milan, who was 
flown from the US airbase in Aviano, via Ramstein in Germany, for the 
same treatment in Cairo.10 Under Prodi, a government of Catholics and 
ex-Communists has sought to frustrate the judicial investigation of this 
kidnapping, while presiding over the expansion of Aviano. Switzerland 
proffered the overflight that took the victim to Ramstein, and protected 
the head of the CIA gang that seized him from arrest by the Italian 
judicial authorities – he now basks in Florida.

Further east, Poland did not transmit captives to their fate in the 
Middle East, but incarcerated them for treatment on the spot, in torture 
chambers constructed for ‘high-value detainees’ by the CIA at the Stare 
Kiejkuty intelligence base, Europe’s own Baghram – facilities unknown in 
the time of Jaruzelski’s martial law. In Romania, a military base north 
of Constanza performed the same services, under the superintendence of 
the country’s current president, the staunchly pro-Western Traian 
Basescu. In Bosnia, six Algerians were illegally seized at American 
behest, and flown from Tuzla – beatings in the aircraft en route – to 
the US base at Incirlik in Turkey, and thence to Guantánamo, where they 
still crouch in their cages. In Macedonia, scene of Blair’s moving 
encounters with refugees from Kosovo, there was a combination of the two 
procedures, as a German of Lebanese descent was kidnapped at the border; 
held, interrogated and beaten by the CIA in Skopje; then drugged and 
shipped to Kabul for more extended treatment. Eventually, when it became 
clear, after he went on hunger-strike, that his identity had been 
mistaken, he was flown blindfold to a Nato-upgraded airbase in Albania, 
and deposited back in Germany.

There the Red-Green government had been well aware of what happened to 
him, one of its agents interrogating him in his oubliette in Kabul – 
Otto Schily, the minister of the interior, was in the Afghan capital at 
the time – and accompanying his flight back to Albania. But it was no 
more concerned about his fate than about that of another of its 
residents, a Turk born in Germany, seized by the CIA in Pakistan and 
dispatched to the gulag in Guantánamo, where he too was interrogated by 
German agents. Both operations were under the control of today’s Social 
Democratic foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then in charge of 
the secret services, who not only covered for the torturing of the 
victim in Cuba, but even declined an American offer to release him. In a 
letter to the man’s mother, Joschka Fischer, Green foreign minister at 
the time, explained that the government could do nothing for him. In 
‘such a good land’, as a leading admirer has recently described it, 
Fischer and Steinmeier remain the most popular of politicians. The new 
interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is more robust, publicly calling 
for assassination rather than rendition in dealing with deadly enemies 
of the state, in the Israeli manner.

Such is the record set out in the two detailed reports by Marty to the 
Council of Europe (nothing to do with the EU), each an exemplary 
document of meticulous detective work and moral passion. If this Swiss 
prosecutor from Ticino were representative of the continent, rather than 
a voice crying in the wilderness, there would be reason to be proud of 
it. He ends his second report by expressing the hope that his work will 
bring home ‘the legal and moral quagmire into which we have collectively 
sunk as a result of the US-led “war on terror”. Almost six years in, we 
seem no closer to pulling ourselves out of this quagmire.’ Indeed. Not a 
single European government has conceded any guilt, while all continue 
imperturbably to hold forth on human rights. We are in the world of 
Ibsen – Consul Bernick, Judge Brack and their like – updated for 
postmoderns. Pillars of society, pimping for torture.

What has been delivered in these practices are not just the hooded or 
chained bodies, but the deliverers themselves: Europe surrendered to the 
United States. This rendition is the most taboo of all to mention. A 
rough approximation to it can be found in what remains in many ways the 
best account of the relationship between the two, Robert Kagan’s 
Paradise and Power, the benevolent contempt of whose imagery of Mars and 
Venus – the Old World, relieved of military duties by the New, 
cultivating the arts and pleasures of a borrowed peace – predictably 
riled Europeans.11 But even Kagan grants them too much, as if they 
really lived according to the precepts of Kant, while Americans were 
obliged to act on the truths of Hobbes. If a philosophical reference 
were wanted, more appropriate would have been La Boétie, whose Discours 
de la servitude volontaire could furnish a motto for the Union. But 
these are arcana. The one contemporary text to have captured the full 
flavour of the transatlantic relationship is, perhaps inevitably, a 
satire, Régis Debray’s plea for a United States of the West that would 
absorb Europe completely into the American imperium.12

Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less 
united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in 
the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before 
the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states 
were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were 
self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters 
of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not 
just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and 
Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if 
their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national 
assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of 
a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another 
fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in 
Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn 
of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar 
generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state 
as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything 
except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.

By this time, on the other hand, the Community had doubled in size, 
acquired an international currency, and boasted a GDP exceeding that of 
the United States itself. Statistically, the conditions for an 
independent Europe existed as never before. But politically, they had 
been reversed. With the decay of federalism and the deflation of 
inter-governmentalism, the Union had weakened national, without creating 
a supranational, sovereignty, leaving rulers adrift in an ill-defined 
limbo between the two. With the eclipse of significant distinctions 
between left and right, other motives of an earlier independence have 
also waned. In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the 
market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, 
though as befits the derivative, the recipe is still blander in Europe 
than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such 
conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than 
to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global 
history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in 
your wallet. The EU ‘is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’, 
declares New Labour’s Mark Leonard, exalting Europe to the rank of a 
credit card.

Transcendence of the nation-state, Marx believed, would be a task not 
for capital but for labour. A century later, as the Cold War set in, 
Kojève held that whichever camp achieved it would emerge the victor from 
the conflict. The foundation of the European Community settled the issue 
for him. The West would win, and its triumph would bring history, 
understood categorically – not chronologically – as the realisation of 
human freedom, to an end. Kojève’s prediction was accurate. His 
extrapolation, and its irony, remain in the balance. They have certainly 
not been disproved: he would have smiled at the image of a chit of 
plastic. The emergence of the Union may be regarded as the last great 
world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie, proof that its creative 
powers were not exhausted by the fratricide of two world wars, and what 
has happened to it as a strange declension from what was hoped from it. 
Yet the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all 
parties. Even without shocks, many a zigzag has marked its path. With 
them, who knows what further mutations might occur.

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