Who Rules the World? (19 page)

Oslo II thus rescinded the decision of virtually the entire world, and all relevant legal authorities, that Israel has no claim to the territories occupied in 1967 and that the settlements are illegitimate. The Palestinian side recognized their legality, along with unspecified other legal rights of Israelis throughout the territories, including Zones A and B (under conditional Palestinian control). Oslo II implanted more firmly the major accomplishment of Oslo I: all UN resolutions that have any bearing on Palestinian rights were abrogated, including those concerning the legality of settlements, the status of Jerusalem, and the right of return. That wiped out with a stroke virtually the entire record of Middle East diplomacy, apart from the version implemented in the unilateral U.S.-run “peace process.” The basic facts were not just excised from history, at least in U.S. commentary, but were officially removed as well.

So matters have continued, to the present.

As noted, it is understandable that Arafat would leap at the opportunity to undercut the internal Palestinian leadership and to try to reassert his waning power in the territories. But what exactly did the Norwegian negotiators think they were accomplishing? The only serious scholarly study of the matter, to my knowledge, is the work of Hilde Henriksen Waage, who had been commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to research the topic and was granted access to internal files, only to make the remarkable discovery that the documentary record for the crucial period is missing.
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Waage observes that the Oslo Accords were certainly a turning point in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, while also establishing Oslo as the world’s “capital of peace.” The Oslo process was “expected to bring peace to the Middle East,” Waage writes, but “for the Palestinians, it resulted in the parceling of the West Bank, the doubling of Israeli settlers, the construction of a crippling separation wall, a draconian closure regime, and an unprecedented separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.”
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Waage concludes plausibly that the “Oslo process could serve as the perfect case study for flaws” in the model of “third party mediation by a small state in highly asymmetrical conflicts”—and that, as she puts it starkly, “the Oslo process was conducted on Israel’s premises, with Norway acting as Israel’s helpful errand boy.”

“The Norwegians,” she writes, “believed that through dialogue and a gradual building of trust, an irreversible peace dynamic would be created that could push the process forward to solution. The problem with this entire approach is that the issue is not one of trust, but of power. The facilitative process masks that reality. In the end, the results that can be achieved by a weak third-party facilitator are no more than the strong party will allow.… The question to be asked is whether such a model can ever be appropriate.”
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A good question, worth pondering, particularly as educated Western opinion now adopts the ludicrous assumption that meaningful Israel-Palestine negotiations can be seriously conducted under the auspices of the United States as an “honest broker”—in reality a partner of Israel for forty years in blocking a diplomatic settlement that has near-universal support.

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The Eve of Destruction

To ask what the future is likely to bring, a reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So imagine that you’re an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to take a neutral stance and figure out what’s happening here, or, for that matter, imagine you’re a historian a hundred years from now—assuming there are any historians a hundred years from now, which is not obvious—and you’re looking back at what’s happening today. You’d see something quite remarkable.

For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. That’s been true since 1945. It’s now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction—maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.

And there are other dangers, like pandemics, which have to do with globalization and interaction. So there are processes underway and institutions right in place, like nuclear weapons systems, which could lead to a serious blow to, or maybe the termination of, an organized existence.

HOW TO DESTROY A PLANET WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

The question is: What are people doing about it? None of this is a secret. It’s all perfectly open. In fact, you have to make an effort not to see it. And there has been a range of reactions. There are those who are trying hard to do something about these threats, and others who are acting to escalate them. If you, this future historian or extraterrestrial observer, looked at who is in each group, you would see something strange indeed: those trying to mitigate or overcome these threats are the least developed societies—the indigenous populations, or the remnants of them; tribal societies; and first nations in Canada. They’re not talking about nuclear war but environmental disaster, and they’re really trying to do something about it.

In fact, all over the world—Australia, India, South America—there are battles going on, sometimes wars. In India, it’s a major war over direct environmental destruction, with tribal societies trying to resist resource-extraction operations that are extremely harmful locally but also in their general consequences. In societies where indigenous populations have influence, many are taking a strong stand. The strongest stance of any country with regard to global warming is that of Bolivia, which has an indigenous majority and constitutional requirements that protect the “rights of nature.” Ecuador, which also has a large indigenous population, is the only oil exporter I know of whose government is seeking aid to help keep that oil in the ground instead of producing and exporting it—and the ground is where it ought to be.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died recently, and who was the object of mockery, insult, and hatred throughout the Western world, attended a session of the UN General Assembly a few years ago where he elicited all sorts of ridicule for calling George W. Bush a “devil.” He also gave a speech there that was quite interesting. Venezuela is a major oil producer; oil is practically their whole gross domestic product. In his speech, Chavez warned of the dangers of the overuse of fossil fuels and urged producer and consumer countries to get together and try to work out ways to reduce fossil-fuel use. That was pretty amazing on the part of an oil producer. Chavez was part Indian, of indigenous background. Unlike the funny things he did, this aspect of his actions at the United Nations was never even reported.
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So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible. Unlike Ecuador and indigenous societies throughout the world, they want to extract every drop of hydrocarbons from the ground with all possible speed. Both political parties, President Obama, the media, and the international press seem to be looking forward with great enthusiasm to what they call “a century of energy independence” for the United States. “Energy independence” is an almost meaningless concept, but put that aside. What they mean is: we’ll have a century in which to maximize the use of fossil fuels and contribute to the destruction of the world.

And that’s pretty much the case everywhere. Admittedly, when it comes to alternative energy development, Europe’s doing something. Meanwhile, the United States, the richest and most powerful country in world history, is the only nation among perhaps a hundred relevant ones that doesn’t have a national policy for restricting the use of fossil fuels, that doesn’t even have renewable energy targets. It’s not because the population doesn’t want it; Americans are pretty close to the international norm in their concern about global warming. It’s institutional structures that block change. Business interests don’t want it, and they’re overwhelmingly powerful in determining policy, so you get a big gap between opinion and policy on lots of issues, including this one.

So that’s what the future historian—if there is one—would see. He might also read today’s scientific journals. Just about every one you open has a more dire prediction than the last.

The other issue is nuclear war. It’s been known for a long time that if there were to be a first strike by a major power, even with no retaliation, it would probably destroy civilization just because of the nuclear-winter consequences that would follow. You can read about it in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
; it’s well understood. So the danger has always been a lot worse than we thought it was.

We’ve recently passed the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a very close call, and not the only time either. In some ways, however, the worst aspect of these grim events is that their lessons haven’t been learned. Ten years after those events, in 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert. It was his way of warning the Russians not to interfere in the ongoing Israeli–Arab war and, in particular, not to interfere after he had informed the Israelis that they could violate a cease-fire the United States and Russia had just agreed upon.
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Fortunately, nothing happened.

Ten years after that, President Ronald Reagan was in office. Soon after he entered the Oval Office, he and his advisers had the U.S. Air Force start penetrating Russian airspace to try to elicit information about Russian warning systems; this was called Operation Able Archer.
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Essentially, these were mock attacks. The Russians were uncertain how to respond, with some high-level officials fearing that this was a step toward a real first strike. Fortunately, they didn’t react, though it was a close call. And it goes on like that.

WHAT TO MAKE OF THE IRANIAN AND NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR CRISES

The nuclear issue is regularly front-page news in the cases of Iran and North Korea. There are ways to deal with these ongoing crises. Maybe they wouldn’t work, but at least they could be tried. They are, however, not being considered, not even reported.

Take the case of Iran, which is considered in the West—not in the Arab world, not in Asia—the gravest threat to world peace. It’s a Western obsession, and it’s interesting to look into the reasons, but I’ll put that aside here. Is there a way to deal with the supposed gravest threat to world peace? Actually, there are quite a few. One way, a pretty sensible one, was proposed at a meeting of the nonaligned countries in Tehran in 2013. In fact, they were just reiterating a proposal that’s been around for decades, pressed particularly by Egypt, and has been approved by the UN General Assembly.

The proposal is to move toward establishing a nuclear weapons–free zone in the region. That wouldn’t be the answer to everything, but it would be a pretty significant step forward. And there were ways to proceed: under UN auspices, there was to be an international conference in Finland in December 2012 to try to implement such a plan. What happened? You won’t read about it in the newspapers, because it was only reported in specialist journals. In early November, Iran agreed to attend the meeting. A couple of days later Obama cancelled the meeting, saying the time wasn’t right.
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The European Parliament issued a statement calling for it to continue, as did the Arab states. Nothing resulted.

In Northeast Asia, it’s the same sort of thing. North Korea may be the craziest country in the world; it’s certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their position. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled—everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind.

Bear in mind that the North Korean leadership is likely to have read the public military journals of this superpower at that time explaining that since everything in North Korea had been destroyed, the air force was then sent to destroy North Korea’s dams, huge dams that controlled the nation’s water supply—a war crime, by the way, for which people had been hanged in Nuremberg. And these official journals were talking excitedly about how wonderful it was to see the water pouring down, digging out the valleys, and the “Asians” scurrying around trying to survive.
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The journals exulted in what this meant to those Asians—horrors beyond our imagination. It meant the destruction of their rice crop, which in turn meant starvation and death. How magnificent! It’s not in our memory bank, but it’s in theirs.

Let’s turn to the present. There’s an interesting recent history: in 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving toward an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.
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Shortly after that, in retaliation, North Korea carried out a minor missile test. The United States and North Korea did then reach a framework agreement in 1994 that halted North Korean nuclear work and was more or less honored by both sides. When George W. Bush came into office, North Korea had maybe one nuclear weapon and verifiably wasn’t producing any more.

Bush immediately launched his aggressive militarism, threatening North Korea (“Axis of Evil” and all that), so that country got back to work on its nuclear program. By the time Bush left office, it had eight to ten nuclear weapons and a missile system, another great neocon achievement.
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In between, other things happened. In 2005, the United States and North Korea actually reached an agreement in which North Korea was to end all nuclear weapons and missile development; in return, the West—but mainly the United States—would provide a light-water reactor for its medical needs and end aggressive statements. They would then form a nonaggression pact and move toward accommodation.