Why imperialism will lose the first war of the 21st century

By Peter Boyle

• Using September 11
• The attempt to re-legitimise imperialism
• Clash of civilisations?
• New colonialism?
• The war and the future of the left
• Notes

When the US government declared an open-ended “war on terrorism'' in retaliation for the September 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, world politics shifted into a new and more dangerous phase. US President George W. Bush warned that it might last many years and extend to many countries other than Afghanistan, the first military target. Bush also threatened to “use every necessary weapon of war'' and served the whole world an ultimatum:

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.¹

The imperialists foreshadowed complementing the terror bombing tactics used against Iraq, Serbia and, most recently, Afghanistan with a legitimised use of the “dirty tricks” the US organised in the so-called “low intensity conflicts” of the 1980s. In the 1960s, the US also facilitated the Indonesian and Iraqi anticommunist massacres that set back the left for decades in those countries. This is already the fate of Islamic dissidents in Algeria. Will the CIA now help organise new massacres against alleged terrorists?

The more hawkish wing of the US ruling class is pushing the line that Washington must finish the “unfinished wars” of previous US administrations, mainly the war against Iraq (although some of their spokespeople even include Vietnam and Korea). After a month of relentless bombing by US warplanes and cruise missiles, the Taliban relinquished control of most of Afghanistan. But from his secret bunker, US Vice-President Dick Cheney warned that the war was just beginning and that after defeating the Taliban, the US would target terrorists spread over fifty other countries.

The war is also being fought on the home front with draconian attacks on civil liberties. Within weeks of September 11, more than a thousand people, mostly Arab Americans and Arab visitors to the US, were detained without trial on suspicion of being involved with terrorism. The state was given more powers to spy on its citizens. The Bush administration also sought laws to detain foreigners indefinitely without trial and to eliminate the right to a fair trial for alleged foreign terrorists. Some FBI officials even made public bids for the right to torture “terrorist suspects”. Other imperialist governments are introducing similar restrictions on civil liberties.

Using September 11

Mass fear and outrage after the September 11 attacks gave the US and other imperialist governments unprecedented public support at home for some sort of retaliatory military action. Bush’s pitch to US workers was simple:

Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.²

Conservative ideologues have welcomed the chance to shift mass consciousness to the right. Writing in the November 5 us Weekly Standard, senior editor David Brooks predicted a sea change in politics and culture after September 11:

The next few years will be defined by conflict. And it’s possible to speculate about what that means. The institutions that fight for us and defend us against disorder—the military, the fbi, the cia—will seem more important and more admirable. The fundamental arguments won’t be over economic or social issues, they will be over how to wield power—whether to use American power aggressively or circumspectly. We will care a lot more about ends—winning the war—than we will about means. We will debate whether it is necessary to torture prisoners who have information about future biological attacks. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, bourgeois virtues like compassion, tolerance, and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory.³

The right has a lot of ground to win back. Certainly a significant political feature of the 1990s was the widespread discrediting of many of the institutions of capitalism in the imperialist countries. There was a steady erosion of confidence in traditional ruling parties, in the parliamentary political system, in the police, spy agencies and international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation. This showed up at elections, in opinion polls and in popular mobilisations at the local, national and international level.

In the cultural field, deep cynicism about capitalism and its institutions was widely expressed in popular music, in fiction and even in Hollywood movies. There is a conscious attempt to turn this around. The corporate media empires are self-censoring and disciplining media personalities who dare express opposition to war. Hollywood’s movie moguls have formed a committee to insert pro-military propaganda into their future productions.

But the war drive is not uncontested. Anti-war demonstrations began in all the imperialist countries, including the US. Anti-war activists formed committees and coalitions. The new movement built on the huge activist base of the movement against corporate globalisation (essentially another name for imperialism). There were thousands of new activists already educated about imperialism and strongly committed to building solidarity with the Third World. Indeed, the anti-war movement was substantially the same movement, subjected to the test of war.

The anti-corporate movement commanded an influence much wider than the ranks of the activists who mobilised in Seattle, Washington, Melbourne, Seoul, Prague, Nice and Genoa. In particular the new movement commanded the attention of large sections of the working class of imperialist countries. Some NGOs and trade union officials who helped mobilise at the famous Seattle actions have deserted to the side of the imperialist warmongers or become fence-sitters since September 11. While most of the street activists remain, the significant support they once enjoyed in the working class is no longer assured.

The battle for the hearts and minds of the workers in the imperialist countries will continue, shifting back and forth with the military and PR victories and defeats of the imperialists. The early overwhelming pro-war majorities fell sharply first in the imperialist countries other than the US—in Germany, Britain and New Zealand. In continental Europe, the pro-war sentiment was even weaker. This was while the reported casualties of the US bombing remained in the hundreds and before any serious casualties among the imperialist forces.

Even in the US, opinion polls showed poor support for an extended foreign war with significant US casualties. For example, a Washington Post-ABC poll released on November 8 showed seventy per cent support for sending significant numbers of US troops to Afghanistan but only fifty-two per cent if this meant a long war with many US casualties.

At the time of writing, the “Vietnam syndrome” had yet to be tested by returning body bags. But the Vietnam syndrome cannot be reduced to a public aversion to wars with significant casualties. It is just one expression of the political defeat the imperialists suffered in Vietnam, a defeat grounded in the fact that it was an unjust, imperialist war of aggression.

The attempt to re-legitimise imperialism

If the US is to win the ambitious “war against terrorism” that Bush has threatened, the idea of imperialism has to be re-legitimised. Right-wing ideologists might hope that mass insecurity after the September 11 attacks will be enough to frighten the masses into seeking protection at any cost from the generals and CIA chiefs, but it is not so simple.

Imperialism was favourably regarded in the West until the early twentieth century. It was justified as “the white man’s burden” to civilise backward natives of Africa, Asia and the Pacific. World War I put imperialist ideas under the microscope, and Lenin’s indictment of imperialism as responsible for the bloody human toll in the trenches found widespread resonance. The rise of anti-colonial revolts in Asia and the Middle East challenged the moral claims of empire. Liberal opinion gradually turned against imperialism. By the time of World War II, the imperialists were even more on the back foot. The Nazi holocaust was a grim reminder of where the racial logic of imperialism led.

In the more than half a century after the end of World War II, imperialism has waged countless wars, openly or covertly, in the Third World—including in Korea (1950-53), Guatemala (1954, 1967-69), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1959-60), the Congo (1964), Peru (1965), Laos (1964-73), Vietnam (1961-73), Cambodia (1969-73), Afghanistan (1979-1988), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991-present), Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1995), Sudan (1998), Kosova and Serbia (1999). And now in Afghanistan again.

Most of these wars were justified by the imperialists in terms of the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But while the Cold War ended over a decade ago, the wars in the Third World continued. The idea of “rogue states” was whipped up to explain the last decade of imperialist wars but it has failed to persuade increasing numbers of people—even in the imperialist countries—that these wars were not, essentially, about defending the interests of the large corporations that have achieved unprecedented global dominance.

Two main arguments contend for pride of place as imperialist explanations of the current crisis. The first was famously summed up in Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of a liberal global free market capitalism as the “end of history”. This has quickly come unstuck. The post-Cold War world has been shaped by the intensification of the capitalist neo-liberal offensive. So the free market has delivered greater inequality and less freedom for the world’s majority.

This liberal explanation is still favoured by most imperialist politicians. The problem is, it just doesn’t fit the facts. Rather than a few rogue dictators being steadily removed by “market forces” and/or smart bombs, we see the US increasing its support for “friendly” Third World dictators. At the head of the list is General Pervez Musharaf, the self-appointed president of Pakistan. Ironically, it was the Pakistan armed forces that trained, equipped and led the Taliban armies, with covert US funding. Equally fundamentalist and as brutal, the Northern Alliance warlords have now become the immediate beneficiaries of the US bombing of Afghanistan. A string of repressive regimes to the north of Afghanistan are now also good friends of US imperialism.

A bloody imperialist war in the Third World inevitably puts a strain on the idea that democracy follows the advance of the Western powers and the free market. Also, getting the troops in a spirit to become cannon fodder requires a different sort of propaganda.

Clash of civilisations?

So Bush’s first war speeches referred to a “crusade” against the “enemies of civilisation”. It was code for “Let’s go and kill some gooks!” and a crude appeal to the propaganda line of the superiority of Western civilisation over the rest.

This tipped things in favour of Fukuyama’s main competition, the “clash of civilisations” thesis of Samuel Huntington, one of a number of right-wing intellectuals who compete for influence in the White House over how to sell the New World Order after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Huntington’s article “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs and was later expanded into a book. His main argument was:

... the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.⁴

While Huntington has pleaded that the current war should not be made into a war between civilisations,⁵ it has been cast this way by Bush, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Huntington’s idea of Western civilisation under siege has obvious war propaganda value after September 11. Ironically, it mirrors the world view of Osama bin Laden. Both Huntington and bin Laden deplore the “moral decline” of the West, but while Huntington blames this on the dilution of Western values through misguided multicultural policies of Western governments, bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists blame it on Western values!

After September 11 even Fukuyama was prepared to concede some ground to Huntington’s clash of civilisations thesis.

It has always been my belief that modernity has a cultural basis. Liberal democracy and free markets do not work at all times and everywhere. They work best in societies with certain values, whose origins may not be entirely rational. It is not an accident that modern liberal democracy emerged first in the Christian West, since the universalism of democratic rights can be seen in many ways as a secular form of Christian universalism.

... But there does seem to be something about Islam, or at least fundamentalist Islam, that makes Muslim societies particularly resistant to modernity ...⁶

These are the new arguments to buttress the racist logic of the imperialist war drive. The old biological arguments to justify racial oppression and exploitation have been widely discredited, so now we have arguments about Western cultural superiority. Fukuyama’s response to the post-September 11 crisis is to offer his rival Huntington an ideological “united front”:

We remain at the end of history because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics—that of the liberal-democratic West. This does not imply a world free of conflict, or the disappearance of culture as a distinguishing characteristic of societies. But the struggle we face is not the clash of several distinct and equal cultures struggling amongst one another like the great powers of 19th-century Europe. The clash consists of a series of rearguard actions from societies whose traditional existence is indeed threatened by modernization. The strength of the backlash reflects the severity of this threat. But time and resources are on the side of modernity, and I see no lack of a will to prevail in the West today.⁷

The cycle of war, oppression, famine and political and economic collapse in the Third World since the end of the Cold War has made Western societies seem more “civilised”. And it has suited the imperialist ruling classes to draw the attention of the working class in the West to this. Workers in the imperialist countries might face greater economic insecurity and declining social services after two decades of neo-liberal attacks, but they can see that things are much worse in the Third World and the former socialist countries.

But the rise of the new global anti-corporate movement has built solidarity and exposed the complicity of the West in the chronic problems of the Third World.

In his book, Huntington argued for maintaining Western military and economic superiority so as to win the “clash of civilisations”. But he also conceded, “Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world”.⁸

This concession sits awkwardly with the propaganda needs of imperialism today. But the warmongers can’t hide imperialism’s role in promoting and maintaining the very reactionary religious fundamentalist movements it now seeks to paint as the enemy of the West. After all, the new imperialist war begins with a familiar scenario: a former political tool of the United States has fallen from favour and become an obstacle. Washington decides to take drastic action to assert its interests. But first, the public must be ideologically conditioned; through a strident campaign in the mass media, the recalcitrant regime is painted in the blackest colours. A decade ago, the Gulf War required Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to be portrayed as an Arab Hitler; today, the terrorist Osama bin Laden is an “enemy of civilisation”.

This repeat scenario is not just the result of previous imperialist efforts to boost religious fundamentalism as a weapon against the left. The perpetuation of backward ideas is an essential consequence of the imperialist powers trapping the Third World in economic and social underdevelopment. In both its colonial and neo-colonial forms, imperialist domination has involved the perpetuation of reactionary regimes in the Third World.

The “clash of civilisations” world view appeals to significant layers of the working class and petty bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries. The mass fear in these layers after September 11 has fed the desperate hope of many that the West might be able to shut out the misery and conflict in the Third World through tighter immigration and political asylum laws. For others, the shock of September 11 will have underlined the futility of trying to shut out global conflict.

New colonialism?

There is a new version of the “white man’s burden” argument doing the rounds of newspaper columns and magazines in the West. The Third World seems awash with “failed states” and bitter ethnic conflicts that threaten a return to barbarism; surely it’s time for the civilised West to step in and run affairs for the natives once again.

Max Boot, editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal, in an article published in the conservative US Weekly Standard, wrote:

But when we oust the Taliban, what comes next? Will we repeat our mistake of a decade ago and leave? ... The United States, in cooperation with its allies, would be left with the responsibility to feed the hungry, tend the sick, and impose the rule of law.

... Unlike 19th-century European colonialists, we would not aim to impose our rule permanently. Instead, as in Western Germany, Italy, and Japan, occupation would be a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet until a responsible, humane, preferably democratic, government takes over.

Then there is Iraq. Saddam Hussein is a despised figure whose people rose up in rebellion in 1991 when given the opportunity to do so by American military victories. But the first Bush administration refused to go to Baghdad, and stood by as Saddam crushed the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions. As a shameful moment in U.S. history, the abandonment of these anti-Saddam rebels ranks right up there with our abandonment of the South Vietnamese in 1975. We now have an opportunity to rectify this historic mistake.

... Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul. With American seriousness and credibility thus restored, we will enjoy fruitful cooperation from the region’s many opportunists, who will show a newfound eagerness to be helpful in our larger task of rolling up the international terror network that threatens us.⁹

Boot would have his readers imagine that new US regencies (preferably rubber-stamped by the UN Security Council) would, by grand example, end the “opprobrium the US suffers in the Arab world for its backing of repressive dictators like Hosni Mubarak and the Saudi royal family”. This could be the chance to “right the scales, to establish the first Arab democracy, and to show the Arab people that America is as committed to freedom for them as we were for the people of Eastern Europe”.

Is Eastern Europe really much of an advertisement for freedom? Here is the nub of the problem imperialism faces today. The unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of the huge global corporations—speeded up dramatically through the neo-liberal economic “reforms” forced on the world by imperialist governments—has made the world a more unequal place. This has come with a loss of freedom for most in the Third World and the former socialist states in Europe. The new war on Afghanistan won’t reverse this process, but accelerate it.

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Oxford University, is one of a number of academics who have been a bit more blunt about the prospect of more direct rule of so-called “failed states”:

We have to call it by its real name. Political globalisation is a fancy word for imperialism, imposing your values and institutions on others. However you may dress it up, whatever rhetoric you may use, it is not very different in practice to what Great Britain did in the 18th and 19th centuries. We already have precedents: the new imperialism is already in operation in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor. Essentially it is the imperialism that evolved in the 1920s when League of Nations mandates were the polite word for what were the post-Versailles treaty colonies.

The future of Afghanistan must, if the war is successfully prosecuted, be very similar indeed to those states currently under this kind of international colonial rule. Nothing else will do. Contrary to popular arguments made in the 1980s, imperialism is affordable for the richest economy in the world. You could argue that the cost of isolationism could be much higher in the long run than the cost of confident intervention in rogue states. When the British empire controlled 25% of the world’s surface and population, the British defence budget averaged around 3% of GNP. Currently the US defence budget accounts for slightly less than that. It would not be beyond the bounds of possibility that by increasing the defence budget to 5% of GNP, still below the levels of the cold war, more effective military intervention could be undertaken.

There is no excuse for the relative weakness of the US as a quasi-imperial power. The transition to formal empire from informal empire is an affordable one. But it does not come very naturally to the US—partly because of its history and partly because of Vietnam—to act as a self-confident imperial power. The US has the resources: but does it have the guts to act as a global hegemon and make the world a more stable place?¹⁰

Leaving aside the question of “guts”, the real contradiction is between stability and imperialist domination. The extrajudicial execution of Osama bin Laden, other leaders of the al-Qaeda network and the Taliban leaders (which is what Bush has ordered) and the installation of a pro-Western regime in Afghanistan won’t end terrorism, because the root causes of the “terrorist threat” are inequality, oppression and exploitation. As Renfrey Clarke has noted:

If close to half the Earth’s population lives in misery on less than US$3 a day, while a small minority lives in luxury on more than US$1000 a day, the resulting sense of injustice is going to be bitter and widespread. Historically, gross social injustice has been quite sufficient to spur violent revolt, not just on an individual but on a mass scale. In our own time as well, there is no reason to expect that the world’s poor will passively accept their fate. On this level, the existence of terrorism is no mystery whatever; the mystery is that the world’s rich can pretend to be shocked when it occurs.¹¹

The reason that most of the world’s population is forced to live with underdevelopment (or even de-development) is not because the most industrialised countries do not have the means to address these problems. It is precisely because these industrialised countries produce more than can be sold at a profit for the large corporations that run them that they hold back the industrialisation of the Third World.

When the Taliban fled Kabul on November 13, there was dancing in the streets. The Western TV camera crews that swept in with the Northern Alliance captured these scenes of liberation, and they have been played and replayed endlessly to millions of people around the world. But the same images will have to be replayed over and over again because the people of Afghanistan have yet to be liberated.

The new rulers of Kabul butchered 50,000 of that city’s population when they were last in power less than half a decade ago. That regime was notorious for corruption, torture and mass rape. While it is possible that the imperialists could choose to make a sort of Potemkin village of Afghanistan to legitimise the bloody war, the imagined scenario of the broader war against terrorism becoming one of liberation for the Third World is a lie.

Today the Western powers have more than enough bombs and money, but they may not have the psychological and political means to recolonise parts of the Third World. What drove the imperialist powers, in the second half of the last century, to concede formal independence to their former colonies was not the financial burden of colonies but the political cost of directly resisting the powerful movements for national liberation.

Part of the neo-colonial concession involved the regulation of imperialism’s rights in the Third World through formally independent Third World states. This implied working within a framework of international laws and conventions. But over the last decade, the US has demonstrated time and time again that it does not consider itself constrained by international law. The US government has yet to ratify 12 UN anti-terrorism conventions and the UN conventions against biological warfare, and it seeks to break the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The current war against Afghanistan has no real endorsement from any international body, and thus remains “illegal” under international law according to Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. The US tried three times but failed to get any authorisation from the United Nations Security Council to use military force.¹²

Then the new US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte (who, as ambassador to Honduras during the Contra War, has the blood of 35,000 Nicaraguan civilians on his hands), sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the UN Charter. It said that the US reserves the right to use force in self-defence against any state that it deems necessary in order to fight the war against international terrorism. But an act of war, in international law, means an attack by one state against another state. That is what happened on December 7, 1941, at Pearl Harbour, but not on September 11, 2001.

According to Boyle, the only precedent for such a claim appeared at the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946, where the lawyers for the Nazi defendants took the position that they had reserved the right of self-defence (as determined by themselves) under the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928—the predecessor to the UN Charter. The tribunal rejected this argument.

The increasing abandonment of international law by the US might be convenient in the short term, but it is one more weak spot in the drive to re-legitimise a more naked imperialist domination of the world.

The war and the future of the left

There was a broad consensus in the revolutionary left's assessment of the September 11 attacks and the imperialists' retaliatory war. We knew that the terror bombings would be used by Bush and the US ruling class to create a more favourable political climate in which to implement their reactionary agenda. So far, there have been few new deserters to the imperialist war camp.

Some in the left worried that there might be a return to a situation in the imperialist countries like that in the 1950s, and that September 11 would provide public support for a “new McCarthyism”. But the mass fear and hatred for the perpetrators for the September 11 attacks has yet to wipe out the widespread cynicism about imperialist governments and the dictatorships they have supported in the Third World. This cynicism has been amplified as a direct result of the distorted globalisation that imperialism has bequeathed. In a sustained war, all imperialism’s gross contradictions will become even more glaring, potentially making the work of the movement easier.

There was some concern that the September 11 terror attacks would derail the global anti-corporate movement. At the time of writing, in mid-November 2001, it seems fair to say that fears of the demise of this movement are exaggerated. The movement has had to adjust its tactics, but the activists have regrouped as a movement against the new imperialist war.

The decision at the November 2001 World Trade Organisation meeting in Qatar to launch a new trade round is unlikely to demoralise this movement critically. Ironically, the US blackmailed many Third World countries into accepting a new round of “free trade” negotiations by threatening to restrict their access to US markets! This threat had greater bite because of the onset of a new global recession, led this time by the US.

As more jobs go, workers in the imperialist countries will become increasingly angry with their governments. The union bureaucracies in the imperialist countries, now mostly in the pro-war camp, will become increasingly uncomfortable as governments seek to use the open-ended war against terrorism as an excuse for imposing more sacrifices on the working class.

One immediate challenge for the left in the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia is the boost to the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist movements as a result of the war on Afghanistan. Comrades in Pakistan and Indonesia have noted this dangerous development.

At a local level, the Labour Party Pakistan has taken a brave lead by contesting the Islamic fundamentalists for leadership of the anti-war protests, despite an increasingly unfavourable balance of forces and violent threats from the government and the fundamentalists. The LPP has also launched an international solidarity campaign with the left in Afghanistan. The fundamentalists still enjoy links with the Pakistani armed forces, which are now a recipient of increased US support. This is one of the terrible ironies of this war, that imperialism raised the reactionary fundamentalist forces to destroy the left and now in the name of fighting these same forces gives them a boost.

The international left has a duty to support these comrades facing the twin challenges of imperialist war and the consequent strengthening of Islamic fundamentalist movements. While imperialism is clearly the main enemy, the latter is also a deadly foe of the left. Imperialism won’t be defeated by the ultra-reactionary Taliban but by a mass, global, anti-imperialist movement.

The future of socialism has always rested, in the final analysis, not on the small minority who hold on to revolutionary consciousness in periods of relative capitalist stability, but on the mighty movements thrown up from time to time by capitalism’s internal contradictions. If the revolutionary left shows leadership in the new anti-imperialist movements, then the left will grow in the next period, as it did through the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The imperialists can destroy the Taliban regime with their bombs. They might even knock out Saddam Hussein, but in the end their new global war is not against these monstrous creations of their schemes for neo-colonial domination, but against the oppressed masses of the Third World. The imperialists can win this war only if they make the working class in the imperialist countries their ally. The clear duty of the left is to subvert that attempt by building international solidarity.

The imperialists may yet retreat from their ambitious “first war of the twenty-first century”, but even this will have its political costs. The US can withdraw from Afghanistan after a suitable high-tech retribution—if that is all it deems necessary to “keep the natives in check”. But then this war will be seen for the brutal act of imperial terror it was.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the US and allied imperialist powers face a problem analogous to that which faced the French in Vietnam in the 1950s. Vietnam’s famous General Vo Nguyen Giap noted that the colonial aggressor was “caught in a dilemma; he has to drag out the war in order to win it, but he does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long-drawn-out war”.¹³

Notes

1. George W. Bush, September 20, 2001 address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, United States Capitol, Washington, DC, .

2. ibid.

3. David Brooks, “The Age of Conflict: Politics and culture after September 11”, US Weekly Standard, November 5, 2001.

4. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations”, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.

5. Interview with Samuel Huntington by Michael Steinberger, Observer (UK), October 21, 2001.

6. Francis Fukuyama, Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2001.

7. ibid.

8. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996, Chapter 12.

9. Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire”, US Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001, Volume 7, Number 5.

10. Niall Ferguson, “Welcome the new imperialism”, Guardian, October 31, 2001.

11. Renfrey Clarke, Green Left Weekly, October 17, 2001.

12. Speech delivered by Professor Francis A. Boyle at Illinois Disciples Foundation, October 18, 2001. Disseminated on the internet by Nizkor International Human Rights Team, .

13. Vo Nguyen Giap, Dien Bien Phu, Hanoi, 1955, New York, 1968.