To a lot of us who followed the deliberations of the World Economic Forum in New York last week, attended by 2,700 policy-makers and entrepreneurs, chief executives and prime ministers, economists and media leaders, and le tout celebrities like U2’s front man Bono, and heavies like Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neil, the event appeared to be as much about partying as it was about how to lift developing countries out of poverty, ostensibly the main focus of the conference. These fellows need opulent buffet meals at the Four Seasons, endless courses at Le Cirque, a sushi bar at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a lavish bash thrown by the New York Stock Exchange, in order to discuss how to help the disenfranchised around the world? C’mon.
Though to the conferees irony was dead, anxiety was not.
Speakers, including diplomats from Europe and several other countries, expressed concern that the US, a superpower on a roll, is now looking for trouble by reverting to unilateralism in conducting its war against terrorism. Of particular concern to America’s allies was President Bush baring his teeth toward Iraq, Iran and North Korea with his reference to them as an "axis of evil" in his State of the Union message last Tuesday.
These allies do not want just consultation in their partnership with the US, they want a real say. As a coalition that the US cobbled together after Sept. 11, they are expected to be a collective ambition where decision-making is shared by all members. If Washington, in other words, is looking to pick a fight with a real or imagined axis of enemies in the world, these members want to cast their votes before they go along.
All of this is over and above the issue of who charts the economic rules of the world and — a popular term at the conference — "drains the swamp" of poverty, disease, illiteracy and AIDS in the poor countries.
Joseph Nye, Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who led a two-hour long panel discussion at the conference, put it bluntly: "For the Europeans, ‘axis of evil’ was a bridge too far. There’s a strong suspicion here that Bush is back to unilateralism, that after Afghanistan, America isn’t especially interested in listening to the rest of the world."
The reticence that many world leaders and commentators had maintained in post-Sept. 11 about criticizing the Bush administration’s war on terrorism has been replaced by circumspection over how audacious or how prudent the world’s leading military and economic power has been in prosecuting this war. Conducting a war on terrorism is one thing; martial swagger is another.
To date, that war has been indisputably successful, but the success was achieved at a heavy cost in human lives and human suffering. Look at some of the uncomfortable realities.
It is estimated that the US killed 8,000 to 12,000 Taleban fighters, along with 1,000 Afghan civilians, over the last two months. And according to two representatives of Physicians for Human Rights, Jennifer Leaning and John Hefferman, who visited the Shebarghan prison in northern Afghanistan on Jan. 20, there are 3,500 Afghan and Pakistani men and boys held there as Taleban suspects who are at risk of dying in detention.
"We found cell blocks designed for 20 prisoners holding up to 100," they wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times last week. "There were 8 to 10 toilets for each 1000 men; bathing facilities outdoors in the mud; and grossly inadequate food and medical care. Dysentery is epidemic." They added that the prison commander, one Gen. Jarobak, told them that "many, many, many men" had already died. The rest will clearly die unless help is offered soon.
True, Afghanistan remains wretchedly poor, but as Leaning and Hefferman noted in their piece: "There is almost nothing in Afghanistan that doesn’t require international assistance. After conducting health assessments in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul as well as the prison, we came away staggered by the enormity of the destruction, suffering and need in this ruined country. But a great military power like the United States has a particular obligation to care for captured combatants whose fate it is in a position to influence."
Then there is the international brouhaha over the status and treatment of those Al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects held by the US at Guantanamo Bay ("detainees" to the US, "prisoners" to European countries) whose handling has tarnished America’s image abroad. Newspapers in Europe and elsewhere have talked about "sensory deprivation," and "inhumane treatment" in a "densely packed zoo" where rules governing the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners apparently do not apply.
So now President Bush identifies Iraq, Iran and North Korea, nations that are not natural allies by any stretch of the imagination, as an "axis of evil," (a reference to the alliance in World War II of Italy, Germany and Japan, which today are staunch partners of the US) that must be confronted.
There is something anarchic about all this, as there is about the striking extent to which the war against terrorism has become, since Sept. 11, the backdrop for all American foreign initiatives.
And, yes, one political leader missed out on participating in the deliberations, not to mention the festivities, of the World Economic Forum this time around.
And that was the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whose attendance at the conference in Davos, Switzerland, last year created a stir when he, in what now appears to have been a prescient observation, identified Israel as a state built on "policies of murder, persecution, assassination, destruction and devastation."
With Israeli tanks hemming his compound in Ramallah, in the West Bank, he could not make it this year. Well, maybe next year. (e-mail: [email protected])
