Time for Multilateral Negotiations with the al Qaeda Movement
Quite erroneously, most Americans believe there are few if any options for ending terrorist attacks around the world, and those that exist depend on what the Bush administration chooses to do. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are many viable options looming into view as the Bush administration exhausts its political capital and lumbers from defeat after defeat in its domestic and foreign policies.
Direct action can be taken on many fronts by the international community of nations, civil society constituents and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the U.S. and abroad. The most promising is to start multilateral negotiations with all interested parties, including the al Qaeda movement’s representatives, proxies and supporters around the world. Contrary to popular beliefs and the Bush administration’s misrepresentations, al Qaeda’s core economic and political demands (apart from its Islamist rhetoric and unforgivable attacks) are entirely reasonable and it has offered to negotiate them on many occasions. My analysis of these demands convinces me that they can be accommodated alongside the security needs of American citizens and global civil society in transparent, even-handed negotiations conducted by non-aligned members of the international community.
Clearly, al Qaeda’s despicable terrorist attacks against “soft” targets cannot be condoned. Nor should its delusional notions about establishing a theocratic state, a Muslim caliphate, be given any more serious consideration than assertions that George W. Bush has been inspired by his Christian faith to launch a hegemonic global war against Islam. Putting aside the rhetoric and smokescreens that both sides use to conceal their real objectives, the core economic and political demands and interests of both al Qaeda and the American people are entirely reconcilable. In fact, as an American citizen born and raised in the U.S., I believe that many of my fellow citizens are long overdue in recognizing the legitimate grievances that sparked the Middle East struggles that culminated in the al Qaeda movement. It is time to acknowledge these grievances and support multilateral negotiations that can make amends for U.S. government policies and actions that have fueled them.
For the past five years, important international power shifts have been underway as a result of the Bush administration’s squandering of U.S. resources. Tax cuts for the rich and war profiteering have bankrupted the U.S. government, which must now borrow billions of dollars a month from countries like China to keep its head above water. U.S. influence, respect and trust abroad have ebbed to what may be a permanent low tide. This decline appears to stem from the widespread perception that the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies are a counterproductive failure, and that it unnecessarily invaded Iraq using falsified intelligence to justify an invasion decision it had already made before the attacks of 9/11. While Bush’s Republican party may be able to maintain control of the federal government for the next few years through its usual under-handed, hard-ball tactics and right-wing fundamentalist electoral base, the political rug will soon be pulled out from under it by the financial straits in which it has plunged working middle class voters. However firmly “red state” loyalists embraced GOP ideologies in the past, they will inevitably withdraw their support from a party whose policies are ruining them financially in the largest non-wartime transfer of wealth to the wealthy ever recorded.
These precarious relationships and impending power shifts leave wide open the doors of opportunity for the international community to seize the initiative from the Bush administration and stop global terrorism non-violently by responding to the legitimate grievances of the al Qaeda movement and its global Diaspora. The movement’s spokespersons are demanding that the U.S. and its Western allies make amends for the role they played over the past 75 years in the political and economic disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, which resulted from U.S. and Western support of corrupt dictators in exchange for economic leverage and natural resources like oil. According to published al Qaeda statements, their core demands are for the U.S. government to cease supporting oppressive Middle East regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, withdraw its military forces from Iraq and the rest of the region, and alter its unconditional support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.
The al Qaeda movement is only the tip of a global iceberg when it comes to the countless numbers of people around the world who believe they have been victimized by U.S. policies and actions and those of their predatory economic allies, which have led to the impoverishment of their native lands and their political and economic disenfranchisement. The metastasis of the al Qaeda movement into countless numbers of self-constituted autonomous cells throughout the world is a spontaneous coalescence of geographically and culturally diverse peoples united by their hatred of the U.S. government and the predatory economic forces with which it has been allied for the past 75 years.
According to Middle East historians, the region is a microcosm of these predatory relationships and the virulent anti-U.S. insurgency movements they have spawned. A case in point is Iran, and the U.S. government’s apparent connivance with the British government and British Petroleum (BP) in the 1950’s. Convincing evidence indicates they toppled the country’s democratically-elected prime minister, Mossadegh, because he had nationalized the country’s oil industry. They replaced him with the autocratic Shah of Iran who at their behest allowed British and American oil interests to retain control of Iran's oil industry. So infuriated were the Iranians and their Islamic clerics that two decades later they staged an anti-American uprising in 1979. They ousted the Shah, seized control of the U.S. embassy, took U.S. citizens hostage, and set up an Islamic fundamentalist state that is still an avowed enemy of the U.S. twenty-five years later.
This pattern of interference by the U.S. in the Middle East was replicated in 2003 when the Bush administration invaded Iran’s neighbor Iraq, toppled its leader, Saddam Hussein, and turned over control of its economy and oil fields to U.S. and Western economic interests. In the interim, however, the U.S. government’s prior interferences in the region coupled with the actions of despotic regimes it supported had sown the seeds of violent pan-Arab insurgent groups that would converge in the al Qaeda movement.
The U.S. government’s constant meddling in the region’s economic and political affairs has boomeranged over and over again, compromising prospects for peace and stability in the years preceding the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Decades before the invasion, the U.S. had equipped, trained and supported Saddam Hussein, who then invaded Iran, America’s archenemy. Subsequently, Hussein invaded Kuwait, a U.S. ally, and precipitated the U.S.-led Gulf War to oust his forces. Similarly, the U.S. equipped, trained and supported Saudi Arabian national Osama bin Laden and his supporters to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He, too, turned against the U.S. government after it abruptly withdrew from the region following the defeat of the Soviets and left him and his supporters in dire straights in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan – armed with U.S. weapons and years of training.
As soon as it became clear that the U.S. government intended to continue its pattern of interference in the Middle East by maintaining large military bases, and supporting dictatorial rulers and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, bin Laden and his followers transformed their base of operations in Afghanistan and adjacent regions into a training camp for preparing recruits to attack the U.S. After the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, the country became a magnet for terrorists from around the world and a terrorist training ground for al Qaeda’s recruits as well as homegrown Iraqi insurgents. As the civilian death toll from U.S. military operations mounts, the numbers and ferocity of these terrorists and insurgents are increasing, in tandem with the number of their international supporters.
The only way for the Western world to stop al Qaeda’s global metastasis is for the international community to step into the breach between the Bush administration and al Qaeda to negotiate cease-fires and peace accords with all parties in areas beset by terrorist conflicts, starting with Iraq and Afghanistan. These accords must comprise long-term, non-aligned international police forces combined with workable programs and adequate resources permitting the disenfranchised to become the authors of their own political and economic enfranchisement. Despite the good intentions of those pushing the charity-based “poverty-reduction” approach, handouts and expensive infrastructure development projects should not be the priority. Instead, these accords must engage successful non-predatory lending institutions and non-predatory capitalists working with the field staff of development agencies in collaboratively rolling up their sleeves to share their capital and entrepreneurial know-how with the developing world.
Their end goal must not be the West’s usual extraction of natural resources and profits from developing countries leaving indigenous peoples in dire straits mired in debt. Instead, the goal must be to empower all working people to exercise their inherent right to develop sustainable livelihoods working in locally- and regionally-owned businesses that provide them the necessities of life and ownership of a fair share of the wealth they help create. In contrast to the predatory, unfettered free market approaches of the past whose inequities have kindled terrorism, the international community of nation-states and NGOs with expertise in implementing rights-based approaches to development must act quickly to bring about a pivotal shift in the locus of global wealth creation and ownership. This pivotal shift is indispensable to staving off the global metastasis of the al Qaeda movement and its offspring that is now taking place. Economic enfranchisement must go hand in hand with political enfranchisement along the lines so brilliantly articulated by India’s Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen.
Why do I believe the international community is destined to assume the role of peacemaker and interpose itself between the U.S. and al Qaeda to achieve these ends? The first reason is the mounting global toll of deaths and injuries they are causing, as increasing numbers of civilians get caught in their spreading crossfire. The second reason is the obvious facts that neither side can defeat the other, and the offspring of the al Qaeda movement will continue to multiply and attack the West as long as the conflict continues. The third is the uncompromising intransigence of the Bush administration even in the face of the quagmire it has created in Iraq. Recent statements by president Bush asserting that nothing can deter him from pursuing a demonstrably failed counterterrorism strategy, and that he views his “war on terrorism” as a long-term sequel to the Cold War, show that the neoconservatives are still up to their old tricks of trying to terrify the American people into giving U.S. war profiteers a multi-generational blank check to profit from yet another endless war.
While it is truly horrifying to witness al Qaeda’s capacity to brainwash traumatized individuals into believing that they become martyrs when they carry out suicide attacks, no less frightening are Bush administration counterterrorist policies that kill, torture, maim, injure and detain people all over the world in inhumane conditions -- without having to provide the international community a shred of evidence of their alleged guilt, or any form of due process of law, whether domestic or international. (They do not even provide the names of dead or count their bodies.) Worse still is the fact that these policies are proving far more deadly than al Qaeda’s attacks when measured by the tens of thousands of unarmed civilians and combatants who have been killed by the U.S. military.
In light of these developments, it has become apparent to the international community that a military power on the prowl for oil and economic leverage which arrogates to itself the right to unilaterally and preemptively attack sovereign countries, and torture and assassinate anyone it deems an enemy, is clearly the gravest threat to civilization that has yet appeared. Al Qaeda comes in a close second – especially if it obtains nuclear weapons -- but a second nonetheless.
In reaction to these twin threats, a growing number of key members and emerging economic powers in the international community like Russia, India, China, Brazil and Venezuela are increasingly charting their own foreign policies independently of the U.S., often in ways that diverge from U.S. foreign policy goals and in some cases openly oppose them. Too numerous to list are the former U.S. allies who have condemned U.S. policies in Iraq, or who originally joined U.S. forces and then pulled out. As a manifestation of the rise of new, independent economic powers outside the U.S. orbit, Russia and China (both U.S. creditors) recently conducted their first-ever joint military exercises involving 10,000 troops from air, land and sea forces. Uzbekistan recently expelled U.S. military bases from the country. Last summer, the Indian government rejected the Bush administration’s attempt to pressure it into distancing itself from China on a matter affecting U.S. security interests, despite U.S. offers of increased foreign aid and nuclear technology. What is significant about the growing autonomy of new political and economic power blocks is that they have the potential to contain, outflank, outmaneuver and marginalize the U.S. politically and economically, especially if the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” continues to antagonize Muslims, fuel Islamist militancy, and cause terrorist-related death and destruction inside their borders.
With this writing on the wall, these emerging power shifts naturally segue into initiatives by the international community to open transparent, non-aligned multilateral negotiations with all parties interested in stopping global terrorism, including al Qaeda. The negotiations can work out the terms of ceasefires and eventual peace accords in regions affected by terrorism, commencing with Iraq and Afghanistan. Any number of non-aligned countries and actors might take the lead in opening these negotiations, which should be conducted outside the framework of the United Nations so that they are beyond the reach of paralyzing Security Council vetoes. These include Scandinavian and northern European countries with traditions of neutrality and non-violent conflict resolution; blocs of countries with large Muslim populations; nation-state alliances that are emerging in the developing world, such as those led by Brazil and Venezuela; global civil society groups like the Club of Madrid, which is comprised of more than 60 former heads of democratic countries; and the newly formed Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, which was established by the leaders of 900 NGOs in 118 countries last summer at the initiative of UN Secretary General Kofi Anan. Multiple, parallel negotiations conducted by different combinations of negotiators and participants are conceivable. Citizen diplomacy and initiatives launched by civil society groups and organizations can feed valuable insights and ideas into ongoing negotiations.
These multilateral negotiations can and should go forward with or without the participation of the U.S. government. Even if the Bush administration elects to participate, in no case should it or any other government be allowed to dominate the proceedings. Nor should the U.S. or any other party be allowed to interfere with the objective of devising workable ceasefires to be implemented by non-aligned members of the international community in areas affected by terrorist conflicts, coupled with effective programs for eradicating their political and economic roots. As accords are reached, they should be widely publicized throughout the world to mobilize popular support and bring political and economic pressure to bear on political leaders who fail to support them or attempt to interfere with their implementation. If the Bush administration continues its intransigence and maintains popular support for continuing counterterrorist military operations and its occupation of Iraq even after ceasefires and peace accords are signed, international economic and political boycotts should be envisaged.
Hopefully, peace can be attained without such stringent measures. Once the American people see the negotiations bearing fruit with accords that can truly protect their security and prevent future terrorist attacks, they will no doubt insist that the U.S. government fall in step with the international community. With the Bush administration's political capital spent and its war-making resources exhausted, it and its successors will have no choice but to terminate hostilities. The American people can then proceed to reformulate the U.S. government’s foreign policies -- and those of its predatory economic allies -- so that they prevent and stop conflicts rather than start and perpetuate them.
N.J. Bordier-Skougor is a political scientist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She has held faculty, research and administrative positions at Hunter College of the City University of New York, the New School University, Fordham University and the University of Geneva. She is the founder of the Third Force Network.
Direct action can be taken on many fronts by the international community of nations, civil society constituents and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the U.S. and abroad. The most promising is to start multilateral negotiations with all interested parties, including the al Qaeda movement’s representatives, proxies and supporters around the world. Contrary to popular beliefs and the Bush administration’s misrepresentations, al Qaeda’s core economic and political demands (apart from its Islamist rhetoric and unforgivable attacks) are entirely reasonable and it has offered to negotiate them on many occasions. My analysis of these demands convinces me that they can be accommodated alongside the security needs of American citizens and global civil society in transparent, even-handed negotiations conducted by non-aligned members of the international community.
Clearly, al Qaeda’s despicable terrorist attacks against “soft” targets cannot be condoned. Nor should its delusional notions about establishing a theocratic state, a Muslim caliphate, be given any more serious consideration than assertions that George W. Bush has been inspired by his Christian faith to launch a hegemonic global war against Islam. Putting aside the rhetoric and smokescreens that both sides use to conceal their real objectives, the core economic and political demands and interests of both al Qaeda and the American people are entirely reconcilable. In fact, as an American citizen born and raised in the U.S., I believe that many of my fellow citizens are long overdue in recognizing the legitimate grievances that sparked the Middle East struggles that culminated in the al Qaeda movement. It is time to acknowledge these grievances and support multilateral negotiations that can make amends for U.S. government policies and actions that have fueled them.
For the past five years, important international power shifts have been underway as a result of the Bush administration’s squandering of U.S. resources. Tax cuts for the rich and war profiteering have bankrupted the U.S. government, which must now borrow billions of dollars a month from countries like China to keep its head above water. U.S. influence, respect and trust abroad have ebbed to what may be a permanent low tide. This decline appears to stem from the widespread perception that the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies are a counterproductive failure, and that it unnecessarily invaded Iraq using falsified intelligence to justify an invasion decision it had already made before the attacks of 9/11. While Bush’s Republican party may be able to maintain control of the federal government for the next few years through its usual under-handed, hard-ball tactics and right-wing fundamentalist electoral base, the political rug will soon be pulled out from under it by the financial straits in which it has plunged working middle class voters. However firmly “red state” loyalists embraced GOP ideologies in the past, they will inevitably withdraw their support from a party whose policies are ruining them financially in the largest non-wartime transfer of wealth to the wealthy ever recorded.
These precarious relationships and impending power shifts leave wide open the doors of opportunity for the international community to seize the initiative from the Bush administration and stop global terrorism non-violently by responding to the legitimate grievances of the al Qaeda movement and its global Diaspora. The movement’s spokespersons are demanding that the U.S. and its Western allies make amends for the role they played over the past 75 years in the political and economic disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples throughout the Middle East and elsewhere, which resulted from U.S. and Western support of corrupt dictators in exchange for economic leverage and natural resources like oil. According to published al Qaeda statements, their core demands are for the U.S. government to cease supporting oppressive Middle East regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, withdraw its military forces from Iraq and the rest of the region, and alter its unconditional support for Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.
The al Qaeda movement is only the tip of a global iceberg when it comes to the countless numbers of people around the world who believe they have been victimized by U.S. policies and actions and those of their predatory economic allies, which have led to the impoverishment of their native lands and their political and economic disenfranchisement. The metastasis of the al Qaeda movement into countless numbers of self-constituted autonomous cells throughout the world is a spontaneous coalescence of geographically and culturally diverse peoples united by their hatred of the U.S. government and the predatory economic forces with which it has been allied for the past 75 years.
According to Middle East historians, the region is a microcosm of these predatory relationships and the virulent anti-U.S. insurgency movements they have spawned. A case in point is Iran, and the U.S. government’s apparent connivance with the British government and British Petroleum (BP) in the 1950’s. Convincing evidence indicates they toppled the country’s democratically-elected prime minister, Mossadegh, because he had nationalized the country’s oil industry. They replaced him with the autocratic Shah of Iran who at their behest allowed British and American oil interests to retain control of Iran's oil industry. So infuriated were the Iranians and their Islamic clerics that two decades later they staged an anti-American uprising in 1979. They ousted the Shah, seized control of the U.S. embassy, took U.S. citizens hostage, and set up an Islamic fundamentalist state that is still an avowed enemy of the U.S. twenty-five years later.
This pattern of interference by the U.S. in the Middle East was replicated in 2003 when the Bush administration invaded Iran’s neighbor Iraq, toppled its leader, Saddam Hussein, and turned over control of its economy and oil fields to U.S. and Western economic interests. In the interim, however, the U.S. government’s prior interferences in the region coupled with the actions of despotic regimes it supported had sown the seeds of violent pan-Arab insurgent groups that would converge in the al Qaeda movement.
The U.S. government’s constant meddling in the region’s economic and political affairs has boomeranged over and over again, compromising prospects for peace and stability in the years preceding the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Decades before the invasion, the U.S. had equipped, trained and supported Saddam Hussein, who then invaded Iran, America’s archenemy. Subsequently, Hussein invaded Kuwait, a U.S. ally, and precipitated the U.S.-led Gulf War to oust his forces. Similarly, the U.S. equipped, trained and supported Saudi Arabian national Osama bin Laden and his supporters to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He, too, turned against the U.S. government after it abruptly withdrew from the region following the defeat of the Soviets and left him and his supporters in dire straights in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan – armed with U.S. weapons and years of training.
As soon as it became clear that the U.S. government intended to continue its pattern of interference in the Middle East by maintaining large military bases, and supporting dictatorial rulers and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, bin Laden and his followers transformed their base of operations in Afghanistan and adjacent regions into a training camp for preparing recruits to attack the U.S. After the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, the country became a magnet for terrorists from around the world and a terrorist training ground for al Qaeda’s recruits as well as homegrown Iraqi insurgents. As the civilian death toll from U.S. military operations mounts, the numbers and ferocity of these terrorists and insurgents are increasing, in tandem with the number of their international supporters.
The only way for the Western world to stop al Qaeda’s global metastasis is for the international community to step into the breach between the Bush administration and al Qaeda to negotiate cease-fires and peace accords with all parties in areas beset by terrorist conflicts, starting with Iraq and Afghanistan. These accords must comprise long-term, non-aligned international police forces combined with workable programs and adequate resources permitting the disenfranchised to become the authors of their own political and economic enfranchisement. Despite the good intentions of those pushing the charity-based “poverty-reduction” approach, handouts and expensive infrastructure development projects should not be the priority. Instead, these accords must engage successful non-predatory lending institutions and non-predatory capitalists working with the field staff of development agencies in collaboratively rolling up their sleeves to share their capital and entrepreneurial know-how with the developing world.
Their end goal must not be the West’s usual extraction of natural resources and profits from developing countries leaving indigenous peoples in dire straits mired in debt. Instead, the goal must be to empower all working people to exercise their inherent right to develop sustainable livelihoods working in locally- and regionally-owned businesses that provide them the necessities of life and ownership of a fair share of the wealth they help create. In contrast to the predatory, unfettered free market approaches of the past whose inequities have kindled terrorism, the international community of nation-states and NGOs with expertise in implementing rights-based approaches to development must act quickly to bring about a pivotal shift in the locus of global wealth creation and ownership. This pivotal shift is indispensable to staving off the global metastasis of the al Qaeda movement and its offspring that is now taking place. Economic enfranchisement must go hand in hand with political enfranchisement along the lines so brilliantly articulated by India’s Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen.
Why do I believe the international community is destined to assume the role of peacemaker and interpose itself between the U.S. and al Qaeda to achieve these ends? The first reason is the mounting global toll of deaths and injuries they are causing, as increasing numbers of civilians get caught in their spreading crossfire. The second reason is the obvious facts that neither side can defeat the other, and the offspring of the al Qaeda movement will continue to multiply and attack the West as long as the conflict continues. The third is the uncompromising intransigence of the Bush administration even in the face of the quagmire it has created in Iraq. Recent statements by president Bush asserting that nothing can deter him from pursuing a demonstrably failed counterterrorism strategy, and that he views his “war on terrorism” as a long-term sequel to the Cold War, show that the neoconservatives are still up to their old tricks of trying to terrify the American people into giving U.S. war profiteers a multi-generational blank check to profit from yet another endless war.
While it is truly horrifying to witness al Qaeda’s capacity to brainwash traumatized individuals into believing that they become martyrs when they carry out suicide attacks, no less frightening are Bush administration counterterrorist policies that kill, torture, maim, injure and detain people all over the world in inhumane conditions -- without having to provide the international community a shred of evidence of their alleged guilt, or any form of due process of law, whether domestic or international. (They do not even provide the names of dead or count their bodies.) Worse still is the fact that these policies are proving far more deadly than al Qaeda’s attacks when measured by the tens of thousands of unarmed civilians and combatants who have been killed by the U.S. military.
In light of these developments, it has become apparent to the international community that a military power on the prowl for oil and economic leverage which arrogates to itself the right to unilaterally and preemptively attack sovereign countries, and torture and assassinate anyone it deems an enemy, is clearly the gravest threat to civilization that has yet appeared. Al Qaeda comes in a close second – especially if it obtains nuclear weapons -- but a second nonetheless.
In reaction to these twin threats, a growing number of key members and emerging economic powers in the international community like Russia, India, China, Brazil and Venezuela are increasingly charting their own foreign policies independently of the U.S., often in ways that diverge from U.S. foreign policy goals and in some cases openly oppose them. Too numerous to list are the former U.S. allies who have condemned U.S. policies in Iraq, or who originally joined U.S. forces and then pulled out. As a manifestation of the rise of new, independent economic powers outside the U.S. orbit, Russia and China (both U.S. creditors) recently conducted their first-ever joint military exercises involving 10,000 troops from air, land and sea forces. Uzbekistan recently expelled U.S. military bases from the country. Last summer, the Indian government rejected the Bush administration’s attempt to pressure it into distancing itself from China on a matter affecting U.S. security interests, despite U.S. offers of increased foreign aid and nuclear technology. What is significant about the growing autonomy of new political and economic power blocks is that they have the potential to contain, outflank, outmaneuver and marginalize the U.S. politically and economically, especially if the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism” continues to antagonize Muslims, fuel Islamist militancy, and cause terrorist-related death and destruction inside their borders.
With this writing on the wall, these emerging power shifts naturally segue into initiatives by the international community to open transparent, non-aligned multilateral negotiations with all parties interested in stopping global terrorism, including al Qaeda. The negotiations can work out the terms of ceasefires and eventual peace accords in regions affected by terrorism, commencing with Iraq and Afghanistan. Any number of non-aligned countries and actors might take the lead in opening these negotiations, which should be conducted outside the framework of the United Nations so that they are beyond the reach of paralyzing Security Council vetoes. These include Scandinavian and northern European countries with traditions of neutrality and non-violent conflict resolution; blocs of countries with large Muslim populations; nation-state alliances that are emerging in the developing world, such as those led by Brazil and Venezuela; global civil society groups like the Club of Madrid, which is comprised of more than 60 former heads of democratic countries; and the newly formed Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict, which was established by the leaders of 900 NGOs in 118 countries last summer at the initiative of UN Secretary General Kofi Anan. Multiple, parallel negotiations conducted by different combinations of negotiators and participants are conceivable. Citizen diplomacy and initiatives launched by civil society groups and organizations can feed valuable insights and ideas into ongoing negotiations.
These multilateral negotiations can and should go forward with or without the participation of the U.S. government. Even if the Bush administration elects to participate, in no case should it or any other government be allowed to dominate the proceedings. Nor should the U.S. or any other party be allowed to interfere with the objective of devising workable ceasefires to be implemented by non-aligned members of the international community in areas affected by terrorist conflicts, coupled with effective programs for eradicating their political and economic roots. As accords are reached, they should be widely publicized throughout the world to mobilize popular support and bring political and economic pressure to bear on political leaders who fail to support them or attempt to interfere with their implementation. If the Bush administration continues its intransigence and maintains popular support for continuing counterterrorist military operations and its occupation of Iraq even after ceasefires and peace accords are signed, international economic and political boycotts should be envisaged.
Hopefully, peace can be attained without such stringent measures. Once the American people see the negotiations bearing fruit with accords that can truly protect their security and prevent future terrorist attacks, they will no doubt insist that the U.S. government fall in step with the international community. With the Bush administration's political capital spent and its war-making resources exhausted, it and its successors will have no choice but to terminate hostilities. The American people can then proceed to reformulate the U.S. government’s foreign policies -- and those of its predatory economic allies -- so that they prevent and stop conflicts rather than start and perpetuate them.
N.J. Bordier-Skougor is a political scientist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She has held faculty, research and administrative positions at Hunter College of the City University of New York, the New School University, Fordham University and the University of Geneva. She is the founder of the Third Force Network.
posted by the Third Force Network at 9:57 AM
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