November 22, 2003

RICHARD PERLE, A CLINTONISTA

by Srdja Trifkovic

Not many media outlets in the United States have taken note of Richard Perle’s frank admission, on November 20, that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a remarkable break with the official position of the Bush Administration, Mr. Perle told an audience in London that "in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing." He admitted that "international law… would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone," but that would have been morally unacceptable. French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein."

Mr Perle’s remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war repeatedly put forward by the White House: the alleged right of self-defense by the United States in the face of the supposed threat posed by Iraq’s "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). His remarks are remarkably similar to Bill Clinton’s justification for the war against Serbia in the spring of 1999. Clinton claimed that the bombing of Serbia was the response to Milosevic’s genocidal campaign against the Albanian population—and that claim turned out to be as real as Saddam’s WMDs. Clinton also bypassed the Security Council and he also responded to accusations of the war’s illegality with the claim that the U.S. was defending "the very values" that had given the West its meaning for centuries.

Both Perle and Clinton subscribe to the same radical legal and moral doctrine, that what they deem to be "right" is justified even if it is admitted to be illegal. This is a revolutionary concept that undermines sovereign statehood of nations abroad and the rule of law at home. The "evolving" concept of international legality was invented by the multilateralist Left to justify Bill Clinton’s aggression against Serbia in March 1999. At that time "humanitarian intervention" was eagerly embraced by those same Euro-Socialists—Schroeder, Solana, Prodi, et al.—who were in the forefront of opposition to President Bush’s war in Iraq. With the bombing of Belgrade they paved the way for the erosion of sovereign statehood, the pillar of the Law Between Nations since 1648.

Whereas the attack against Serbia was a leftist-internationalist conspiracy to destroy the nation-state and thereby to demolish the very concept of the nation as we know it, the war against Iraq was a conspiracy by neoconservative "global hegemonists" primarily focused on enhancing Israeli security. The underlying identity of the globalist "Left" and the imperialist "Right" is made explicit by Perle. The latter’s only original theoretical contribution to the concept of "humanitarian intervention" is the doctrine of pre-emption, inaugurated in September 2002 and tested last spring.

Neither in March 1999, when the order was given for the U.S. Air Force and its assorted European minions to attack Yugoslavia, nor in March 2003, when the invasion of Iraq started, had the marching orders been preceded by a declaration of war from Congress for "the common defense of the United States." In neither case was the order given by the President as a means of repelling a sudden attack on America by a foreign aggressor, or as a measure intended to rescue Americans abroad from unexpected peril. In both cases the concept of national sovereignty that had formed the basis of Western politics and the rule of 1aw ever since the Peace of Westphalia (1648) was violated in favor of the Clinton-Perle Doctrine of Higher Justification, itself a copy of the Brezhnev Doctrine of Limited Sovereignty that was used to justify the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And just like after 1968, when just beneath the drab surface anti-Sovietism was rampant throughout the Soviet bloc, Western Europe’s antipathy to the policy of the present Administration is increasingly turning into anti-Americanism. The icy welcome extended to Mr. Bush by the British public earlier this week is similar to that in Germany, France, Italy and other West European countries.

These "doctrines" negate the nation-state, subvert the law, and provide the ever-present alibi for perpetual war. Legal formalities are passe, and moral imperatives—never sacrosanct in international affairs to start with—are replaced by situational morality, dependent on the would-be victim’s position within Clinton’s or Perle’s value system.

All rights reserved, ¿ÞÓÛÕÔØ - 2003. ÓÞÔØÝÕ.

Design and maintenance - www.proxy.co.yu     web master