- A man, a plan -- a new Ivory Coast. Eric Walberg looks
at the rationale behind the Western intervention
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- Few around the world watching the drama unfolding in
Ivory Coast rout for the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, who to his
credit held reasonably fair elections last year, but then promptly ignored
the results, suddenly claiming that those who voted for his rival Alassane
Ouattara were not really citizens of Ivory Coast at all. With even the
cautious African Union against him, his demise looks inevitable.
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- This good guy/ bad guy scenario, with modest, universally
approved international intervention under UN auspices, is a perfect example
of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P), the policy for governing
the world promoted by George Soros, probably the most important single
individual shaping the political and economic world order today. The greatest
speculator of all times, he has become a legend as "The Man Who Broke
the Bank of England", philanthropist extraordinaire, loved and loathed
for his massive funding of world financial, economic and political reforms
that meets his approval,. He has been doing this for 30 years now, as author
of Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (2000), author of colour revolutions,
and supporter of the UN and not-so-UN interventions such as that in Ivory
Coast.
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- Soros called sovereignty an "anachronistic concept
originating in bygone times when society consisted of rulers and subjects,
not citizens" in a 2004 article in the Council for Foreign Relations
Foreign Policy magazine. Sovereignty is not "a right", but rather
a "responsibility", and can be overuled by the international
community if necessary.
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- The UN-backed regime change now taking place in Ivory
Coast is the latest in a string of international interventions justified
on humanitarian grounds, dubbed by critics as the "imperialism of
human rights". This new policy is sometimes called the Annan Doctrine,
defined as the loss of the traditional prerogatives of sovereignty in the
face of crimes against humanity. Kofi Annan was UN general secretary 19972006
and the term was coined during negotiations in 1999 over Kosovo when Annan
approved "collective international pressure on the parties to come
to the negotiating table with the possible threat of use of force".
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- In response to Annan's call, Canada's government established
an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2000,
which issued its report "The Responsibility to Protect", recommending
military intervention where "large-scale loss of life is occurring
or imminent owing to deliberate state action or the state's refusal or
failure to act." These principles were endorsed by both the UN General
Assembly and, with Rwanda's 1994 genocide in mind, the reconstituted African
Union in 2005.
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- As Soros contemplates the imminent success in Ivory Coast
of his policy to solve the world's political problems, he is busy solving
the world's financial and economic problems as host of a secretive meeting
of the world elite in peaceful Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where the
UN's financial institutions were set up in 1944. On 8 April, 200 academic,
business and government leaders, including the likes of Paul Volcker and
Gordon Brown, are gathering under the auspices of Soros's Institute for
New Economic Thinking (INET) to agree on the international financial institutions
for the postwar world.
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- Reads INET's conference promo: "Spurred by the financial
crisis and recent developments in the economics field, a far more realistic
view of the economy is emerging that takes into account imperfections in
individuals, institutions, and information, as well as the existence of
complex global networks of interaction, and the dynamism of innovation."
This could easily be used as a template for Soros's beloved R2P: Spurred
by the need to protect civilians, a far more realistic view of the rationale
to invade other countries is emerging that takes into account imperfections
in individuals, etc, etc.
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- The problem in applying R2P is: "Who decides when
enough is enough?" Bush junior ran rough-shod over the concept of
humanitarian imperialism, invading Afghanistan and Iraq without any UN
mandate. This proved a disaster, undoing the careful efforts of Annan,
Clinton and others to entrench a new world order based on consensus through
the UN. While some cases may appear indisputable, such as Ivory Coast today,
R2P is easily misused. Reports of Libyan government forces bombing civilians
were used to justify UNSC Resolution 1973, but it turns out the reports
were false. Too late: with Resolution 1973 in hand, the French and British
proceeded to invade Libya to overthrow a pesky dictator they and the US
had long despised.
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- Such cynical misuse of this new Golden Rule worries those
who cherish the principles of international law based on national sovereignty.
In the UN Charter "states agreed not to use force against each other
to accomplish their foreign policy ends," notes Curtis Doebbler. But
the new disdain for sovereignty really just acknowledges the emptiness
of national sovereignty as a uniform principle applicable to all nations
equally, given the imperial set-up. While lesser western states former
empires such as France and Britain may have lost sovereignty to the
now dominant imperial power and its institutions, "third world sovereignty
never existed anyway," writes US analyst Alan Freeman.
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- The equation in sub-Saharan Ivory Coast has just as much
imperial murkiness behind it as the Libyan intervention, but is less controversial.
The African Union is solidly behind the UN mediation efforts between Ivory
Coast's north-south divide. France always had a small military base there
even after Ivory Coast became independent in 1960, and 4,600 French troops
have been there since the civil war broke out in 2002 under Operation Licorne
(Unicorn). There are 12,000 French citizens and as the civil war heats
up, the troops are truly protecting civilians (especially French ones)
and working under UN auspices.
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- R2P in Ivory Coast is actually being used to support
the Muslim pretender against the Christian poor loser. When the dust settles,
this will be seen as a success story for the UN and a relatively benign
flexing of French imperial muscle, far less suspect than French fighter
jets bombing civilians in Libya in defiance of the world community.
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- This is good news for Soros and his protégé
United States President Barack Obama, who is present at least in spirit
if not in the flesh at Soros's conference in Bretton Woods. Obama's Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton said she would institutionalize R2P in the State
Department. Such NGOs as the Soros-funded International Crisis Group (1995),
the Centre for International Governance Innovation (2003), the Clinton
Global Initiative (2005), the Soros-funded Global Centre for the Responsibility
to Protect (2008), and Soros's very own INET (2009) are trying to create
a new world economic order based on his financial wizardry and R2P to face
of the many crises in the world. Confirming Ouattara a former IMF
official as president of Ivory Coast will be good news indeed, moving
both of Soros's agendas forward.
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- Soros is despised not only by anti-capitalists, but by
capitalists too for believing "the main enemy of the open society
is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat." He is despised
by neocons but loved by the Obama-style supporters of empire. As he explained
in 2010, "we need a global sheriff" to police both the world's
economy and politics, but Soros's sheriff must be perceived as a "good
cop" not as Bush junior's "bad cop".
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- While R2P as embodied in the intervention in Ivory Coast
has a broad consensus among the world's nations, the same cannot be said
for most of the other interventions of recent years, from the former Yugoslavia,
Iraq, Afghanistan to Libya. Nor is there any consensus around Soros's financial
agenda for a new world order. In Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism,
he called not only to reconstitute the International Monetary Fund but
the United Nations, trimming US imperial ambitions in the interests of
a global order. The US "could lead a cooperative effort to involve
both the developed and the developing world, thereby reestablishing American
leadership in an acceptable form."
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- Soros's ambitions for the world are truly breath-taking.
Whether his pet R2P and his plans for a new world financial order will
be accepted by both the empire and its opponents as the answer to the world's
political, financial and economic problems has yet to be seen. But the
man and his plan are probably the only way to salvage the imperial order.
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- ***
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- Eric Walberg writes for Al-ahram Weekly <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/>http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
You can reach him at <http://ericwalberg.com/%20>http://ericwalberg.com/ <http://ericwalberg.com/>
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