The war on Iraq in perspective

Citation

Bunzl, J. (2003), "The war on Iraq in perspective", European Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2003.05415fab.003

The war on Iraq in perspective

John Bunzlis the Founder/Director of the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation, London, UK and author of The Simultaneous Policy: An Insider’s Guide to Saving Humanity and the Planet (New European, London, 2001)

AbstractThe Iraq war, and its aftermath, raises questions even larger than those of USA “hegemony” or the search for a Middle East peace settlement. Iraq challenges us to reflect on the nature of power, both international and interpersonal. Argues that the whole idea of competition between nations – and other human groups – is now outmoded and has become the underlying cause of conflict. A new model of international relations should be based on co-operation and interdependence, at economic and ecological as well as political. Draws on the recent insights of holistic science, which suggest that the role of co-operation in evolution has previously been under-valued.

Keywords: Iraq, International politics, International cooperation, Evolution

From the moment following 9/11 when George W. Bush declared to the world “you’re either with us or against us”, it was inevitable beyond any shadow of a doubt that there would be war in Afghanistan. And even as the recent diplomatic machinations in the United Nations (UN) continued in the hope of avoiding it in Iraq, it was nonetheless equally inevitable that, there too, there would be war.

For the Bush administration, backed as it is by the US military-industrial complex and the oil industry, this has always been the inevitable and thus entirely foregone conclusion, regardless of the will of very many American citizens who oppose it. For as discerning historians know, unassailable power is always abused to further the interests of its possessor – and always has been.

In his widely influential book, The Breakdown of Nations, Kohr (1957) argued more than half a century ago that the larger and more powerful a social unit becomes – i.e. a principality, region or nation – a critical mass is reached where its propensity to abusive aggression and war becomes inevitable. Having convincingly established the point, Kohr (1957) went on to ask: “But what is the critical magnitude leading to abuse?” and then rightly concluded that “It is the volume of power that ensures immunity from retaliation. This it does whenever it induces in its possessor the belief that he cannot be checked by any existing larger accumulation of power”.

As such, those non-Americans who are against the present war and who generally decry the over-bearing, unilateralist and blatantly self-interested policies of the present US administration should, perhaps, have some sympathy for Uncle Sam. After all, if it was not the USA but their country in that unassailable position of power, it would be their country doing the bombing; it would be their country ducking out of the Kyoto Protocol; it would be their country refusing to recognise the International Criminal Court; and it would be their country with designs on the world’s oil wells. So don’t let us be too quick to judge Uncle Sam – because he is only doing what all nations in a similar position of unassailable power have always done throughout human history.

Of course, nations and peoples that have suffered at the hands of unassailable powers like the US and the British Empire have always strove to redress the balance, but in doing so they inevitably overshot power equilibrium. While that drive initially served to get the oppressed out from under, in time the pendulum swung too far resulting in a continuing cycle of abuse: the once oppressed inevitably became the new oppressors. Thus, although each cycle allowed states to achieve a high degree of inner social cohesion and peace, this was purchased at the expense of an external competitive leap-frogging drive for ever superior power over other states and a new cycle of oppression was born. By the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, as Hirst and Thompson (1996, p. 171) point out, “governments ceased to support co-religionists in conflict with their own states. The mutual recognition by states of each other’s sovereignty in the most important contemporary matter, religious belief, meant that states were willing to forgo certain political objectives in return for internal control and stability … Thus, to a significant degree the capacity for sovereignty came from without, through agreements between states in the newly emerging society of states”. Having secured internal peace, the nation states of Europe then embarked on a new stage of external competition, first, by colonising the rest of the world and leading, eventually, to the intense economic competition that today characterises “globalisation”.

So throughout human history, this competitive process has driven the development of ever-larger scales of human societies towards more powerful – and thus to potentially more violent – units.

The trend has thus been subtly apparent all the way from early human tribes, via the small-state system of the Middle Ages right up to today’s nation states and supra-national groupings of states, such as the European Union (EU). Indeed, the drive towards closer European integration is itself rooted in Europe’s need to maintain its (primarily economic) competitiveness with the USA and China. Conversely, the growing power of the EU’s currency, the Euro, in turn poses a competitive threat to the US dollar’s hegemony as the world’s major trading currency and Iraq’s decision to sell its oil in Euros instead of dollars could, as some astute commentators have pointed out, be an important reason underlying the US-led assault on Iraq. Be that as it may, that one nation or grouping – in this case the USA – should have today emerged as the unassailable single all powerful social unit was thus the entirely logical outcome. And throughout that process, the competition of war was merely a more extreme and overtly violent manifestation of economic competition: if “plunder by trade” became too difficult or inconvenient, there was a prompt resort to “plunder by raid”. In the course of this evolution of human societies, empires have come and gone, each inevitably abusing its dominant power – and so it is today with the USA: plunder by “free” trade is now augmented and cemented by the plunder by raid needed to secure control of dwindling fossil fuel resources.

For as Kohr so rightly pointed out, if you have unassailable power, you use it.

It’s never been different. In this light, widespread reports that US oil company executives are busy discussing with their ex-oil company colleagues in the White House the fate of Iraq’s oil and that lucrative re-construction contracts are being awarded only to US corporations, Tony Blair’s assurances that “it is our desire to ensure that the UN … are centrally involved” in administering post-war Iraq (Financial Times, 2003) or that future revenues from Iraqi oil should be held in a UN trust fund for the benefit of the Iraqi people thus appear to represent the height of geo-political naïveté.

However, the quasi-automatic abuse of power I describe is not a failing peculiar to humans. As evolutionary biologists will tell you, it is a biological fact of evolution common to all organisms, depending on their stage of species maturity. By “species maturity” I mean the level of co-operation the particular society of organisms has been able to achieve in order to ensure its continued survival. For it should be clear that the growing threats to humanity’s survival which now manifest themselves through the problems associated with “globalisation” – problems of unassailable US power, of global warming, of the yawning gaps between rich and poor, widespread global poverty, environmental destruction and so on – all exist in the context of a world which remains essentially competitive and not co-operative. As the present powerlessness of the UN shows, it is a world in which there is no overarching and effective system of world governance capable of keeping abusive national economic or military power in check.

Our world thus remains a place where the Darwinian notion of “survival of the fittest” inevitably reigns supreme as each member of the competitive society of nations pursues its “national interest”. So while the context of international relations remains essentially competitive rather than cooperative, this sorry state of affairs is bound to continue and could, in evolutionary terms, even be described as “natural”. Humanity, thus, remains a relatively young, immature and competitive species even as it faces social, economic and environmental challenges that threaten its demise.

In her article entitled “Globalization, an evolutionary leap”, the highly regarded evolutionary biologist Sahtouris (2002) [1] invites us to consider three fundamental possibilities: “First, we are part of a living planet, in a living universe. Second, the patterns of Earth’s evolution actually help us understand the current human process of globalisation. Third, we’re in a process of species maturation. We are moving now from competition to cooperation, from fear-based economies to love-based economies”.

There is a “cycle of evolution”, she says, “that occurs all over, across time and space, at the tiniest levels of biology, and in the largest cosmic processes. It always begins with unity that then individuates – as in the ancient Vedic creation story in which a little wavelet forms in a smooth sea, and forever after is torn between loving its own individuality and wanting to merge back into the One. This universal tension between part and whole, and among parts, drives evolution. Individuation always leads to a kind of tension and conflict [i.e. to competition]. And if the parts don’t kill each other, they start negotiating. Negotiations can lead to resolutions of some of the tensions, moving from conflict to cooperation, and then to some new level of unity. One way this has played itself out is that young species are found to have highly competitive characteristics: They take all the resources they can, they hog territory, they multiply wildly. Sound familiar? But a lot of species have managed to grow up, to share things and territory, to cooperate. It’s what keeps them alive”.

Indeed, as humanity is now forced to face these globally threatening challenges, co-operation, as Sahtouris suggests, is ultimately what will keep us alive. As with all other species when they faced potential wipeout, getting from competition to co-operation quickly became the name of the game. And, as such, the underlying perspective to be placed on the present war in Iraq and on the other global problems I have alluded to is that they are merely an inevitable (albeit dismaying) part of humanity’s natural evolution from destructive competition to fruitful co-operation. The continuance of destructive competition will result in global social and environmental disaster, whereas a transition to a new higher level of global co-operative unity will serve to keep humanity alive in its one and only home: spaceship Earth. In short, to survive humanity will – like all other organisms – have to grow up: we will have to abandon the present immature and essentially competitive paradigm of international economic relations and substitute it for an over-archingly mature and co-operative one. To survive, therefore, humanity must learn to co-operate and, thus, to reach its evolutionary species maturity.

So if we thought the human species was separate from other species in Nature, or somehow “above” them, the joke is on us! We are right in there with them! The human species, like all others, is following the same cycle of competitive individuation leading (hopefully) to negotiation, leading in turn to a new higher level of cooperative unity. The nations of the world, like the wavelets in the smooth sea of the ancient Vedic creation story, now clearly love too much their own individuality; their own “national interest”. But as the problems associated with globalisation and their attendant wars increasingly threaten us all, we the peoples of the world now want – and desperately need” our nations to co-operate: to “merge back into the One”. The “One” being an overarching framework of international co-operation within which each nation’s individuality and culture can thrive. It is, after all, an imperative for humanity’s civilised survival on Planet Earth: the next necessary – but by no means assured – leap in our evolutionary development.

As Sahtouris points out, negotiation is the key to moving from competition to cooperation; negotiation is the key to achieving that new higher-level leap to species unity. Furthermore, as she also recognises, there exists today a movement that provides a practical tool which the peoples of the world and civil society organisations can use to make political leaders take the necessary steps: “From my vantage point as an evolution biologist”, writes Sahtouris, “Simultaneous Policy is an idea whose time has come”.

The International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (ISPO)[2] offers NGOs and activists in the wider Global Justice Movement a practical way to bring real political power back to citizens the world over. ISPO’s citizen and NGO members pledge to vote in future elections not for a specific politician or party, but for any politician or party – within reason – that adopts the simultaneous policy (SP); a range of legislative measures designed by our members and their chosen experts to bring economic justice, environmental security and peace to the world. Today, no nation can implement these measures unilaterally because they fear competitive disadvantage since corporations or investors would threaten to move capital or jobs elsewhere. So the SP is instead to be implemented by all, or virtually all, nations simultaneously, thus avoiding any nation’s fear of first-mover disadvantage. So with SP, no nation, corporation or citizen loses out: everyone wins.

Furthermore, with voter apathy on the rise and with more and more elections around the world consequently being won or lost on very small margins (by just a few thousand votes in Florida at the last US Presidential election), ISPO is capable of presenting politicians in all countries with an attractive, yet compelling, “carrot and stick” proposition. Since SP is only to be implemented simultaneously, there is absolutely no political risk in adopting it. But failing to adopt it could cost politicians fighting closely contested elections dearly, for they will likely lose to rivals who have adopted SP to attract the SP voting block. Those extra votes – even if few – could make the vital difference between winning or losing a seat, or even an entire election.

SP therefore provides a practical political tool for the Global Justice Movement to “take back the world”; a potential powerhouse for driving politicians and governments to cooperate for the common good, and thus to bring humanity as a whole to its long-awaited species maturity. As Sahtouris points out, “Simultaneous Policy is … an imperative if we are to evolve humanity from its juvenile competitive stage to its cooperative species maturity. A wonderful “no risk” strategy for finding agreement on important issues in building global community!”

So if we want to see an end to wars such as the one we see today and to see a solution to the present problems now threatening all humanity, a practical framework and process is available which is entirely complementary to other important forms of action traditionally espoused by NGOs and activists. Humanity – each and every one of us – has only to adopt the SP and to find, to our surprise, that achieving the crucial evolutionary transition of our time could be easier and simpler than we ever thought possible.

Notes 1. For more on Dr Elisabet Sahtouris and her work, visit www.sahtouris.com2. International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (ISPO), available at: http://www.simpol.org; E-mail: info@simpol.org