I read with very fascinating interest, a culled article from the Baltimore Sun (US), published in the Sunday Independent of October 31, 2004, titled, Nigeria has potentials to be next Afghanistan, co-authored by former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, Princeton Lyman and Scott Allan.
By dint of providential connivance, the Lyman’s are linked to Nigeria. The former US mega Professor of Humanities, Stanford Lyman, had as one of his greatest students, Professor Olu Ogunika; currently a visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Abuja. He had visited Nigeria on several intellectual tours before his death. As faith would have it, his brother, Princeton Lyman was to be later made the US Ambassador to Nigeria. It is therefore, logically correct to say that this affective bond inspired Lyman’s fear of the impending potentialities of Nigeria becoming another Afghanistan.
The wind of terrorism blowing across the globe portends no end of good to the human race. It is rather an anti-civilizational vampire sucking the blood out of human civilization. As such, measures of exterminating it, terrorism, should rightly preoccupy the mental exertions of all good men. I commend them.
Although, it has been the cardinal agenda of the US foreign policy since the end of the Second World War, to bring down the Eastern Socialist bloc’s towering influence in international relations, little or nothing, so it seems, did she do to strategically plan ahead for the post-collapse period. When the communist empire crum-bled in 1989, America was pleasantly surprised, ill equipped and embarrassingly unprepared to face the reality.
To worsen matters, America was not under an Abraham Lincoln that would seize this great opportunity of historical calling to re-invent the America Dream on a global scale. Rather, America was under the spell of Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood freak and assisted by the CIA infanterrible, George Bush
Lacking in strategic vision, these duo, frittered away this rare moment of heroic reckoning on the altar of the end of history. America was now the last man; stick in hand and ready to teach any stubborn pupil that dares her power an unforgettable lesson. These martial dance steps of the triuimphalism of a unipolar-policeman world order marked the first whistle-blow for the commencement of the game of terrorism.
Having won the East-West war, America was on the prowl for little perturbations that had the faintest tendency of upsetting the balance of the global society. Before long, Huntington discovered the virus of the clash of civilizations in the biology of the New World Order.
The clash of civilizations is a clash between Euro-American civilizational forces and anti-Zionism, anti-imper-ialist globalization, anti-dependency and political Islamism among many other civilizations. US foreign policy strategies of managing the post-cold war clashes have left much to be desired in its trail. To many observers, noticeable elements of her activities in this period under review has been the pursuit of policies of economic strangulations of third world nations and Israelo-centrism in Middle East initiatives. For many of the marginalized forces that came under the dead weight of US domination, self-help outside the institutionalized supra-national agencies of the international system became a survival imperative. This is the second motivating factor for the rise of terrorism in the contemporary international scene.
Terrorism, it should be noted, is not an infraction forced on us from an outer galactica. It is a product of the sociology of the international organization of power relations and its dynamics. As Osama bin Laden, the patron saint of terrorism in a recently broadcast five-minute video footage on Al-Jazeera Television said, he was inspired by the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, whereupon towers and buildings in Beirut were destroyed. As he intoned, “while I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women. God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind”. This may be a rhetorical rationalization of terrorism, but non the worst for that, the point has been made that terrorism is socially cons-tructed.
It should also be pointed out that, it is widely insinuated that the crisis of economic underdevelopment, poverty and political strangulations that pervade under developed countries is engineered by US using the Breton Woods Institutions. Media commentaries in these countries are ever torrentially awash of radical and popular analysis of the US McDonaldization of the globalization process and pauperization of citizens of poor nations. For instance, many Nigerians see the reform programmes of Obasanjo as nothing else but mere measures of playing the good boy to America. In all probability, it is likely that this thinking may have informed the recent cartoon in a Zimbabwean newspaper where Obasanjo was shown polishing the shoes of President George Bush.
State department officials should endeavour to enter the foreign policy analysis laboratory with their minds free from the burden of prejudice and the visualized image of the glory of the homogenization of the American Dream on the global society. America must commence a process of national self-auditing with the express aim of expunging from itself character flaws that are in variance with the tenets of global multiculturalism, freedom and peaceful co-existence. A good way of starting this campaign is a re-examination of its foreign policy goals and objectives.
Mr Pine writes from Gboko, Benue State.
