- Frank Viviano Writes
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BEFORE & AFTER
Chalk up another potential victim of terror: Globalization
- PARIS -- It was commonplace, in the first aftershock
of the terrorist strikes on New York and Washington, D.C., to
assert that the world would never be the same again. As the grim
year of 2001 moves into its final days, we are only beginning
to grasp what that means.
- The attack "upended the very logic of history and power,"
says French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, "along with the
terms for analyzing them."
- Sept. 11 and its aftermath have re-ordered our perception
of reality -- merging all of the major themes and issues likely
to dominate the 21st century into a single, bewilderingly complex
story.
- Its subject is globalization on an unimagined scale: a maze
of interrelationships that links military and diplomatic affairs,
broad economic trends, international legal protocols and financial
transactions, immigration, law enforcement and the labor market.
Unless these linkages can be charted and understood, the new
Age of Hyper-Globalization could well remain an Age of Terror.
- Consider just a partial map of this maze, beginning at its
most critical intersection, where armed Islamic militancy collides
with the needs of modern industrial society.
- The oil reserves of the Middle East and the predominantly
Islamic ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia currently stand at
nearly 750 billion barrels, 2 1/2 times the combined total of
all of other oil-producing regions. By 2030, almost all of the
world's oil and natural gas will be produced by or piped through
states that today harbor Muslim extremist movements or are immediately
threatened by them.
- The war on terrorism is, ipso facto, a defense of an entire
lifestyle that could not exist without fossil fuels and their
byproducts. It's also, by default, a collective action by the
United States and its allies to protect the operations of the
multinational energy giants -- with linkages encompassing the
world's stock markets, gross national products, employment rates
and currency exchange values.
- The sinister genius of Osama bin Laden has been to recognize
the dimensions of hyper-globalization, and to expropriate its
chief symbols -- seizing long- distance airliners to topple the
most conspicuous icons of international capital, in the key bastions
of geopolitical power and global finance.
- The war set in motion on Sept. 11 has raised questions in
almost every realm of contemporary belief and experience, especially
for Americans.
- How tall should our buildings be? Is it safe to open a letter?
Go to work? See a football game? Go to New York, Washington,
London, Paris, Jerusalem or Cairo?
- What are the limits of civil liberties? Of due process under
the law? Of religious tolerance? Who are our friends? Who are
our enemies?
- The intersection of oil and extremism explains why Washington
continues to treat Saudi Arabia with kid gloves despite the disproportionate
presence of Saudis among the Sept. 11 hijackers and the Saudi
origins of bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.
- It explains, too, why the Bush administration and Russian
president Vladimir Putin have established a startling new bilateral
alliance, with roots in the linkage between Afghanistan and Chechnya
-- the breakaway Russian province. Chechnya, which provided al
Qaeda with many of its most implacable fighters, is itself an
oil producer and the site of strategic oil and gas pipelines.
- It explains why Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's appearance
in Afghanistan, the first by a senior U.S. official since the
war began, was combined with a trip to Azerbaijan, the nexus
of Central Asian oil production and transshipment.
- Central and Southeast Asia are the globe's main sources of
heroin -- and undocumented immigrant workers. But drugs and clandestine
labor, like oil and natural gas, have no value if they can't
be shipped to market.
- A parallel set of alliances mirrors those of the anti-terrorism
coalition. A partnership exists among extremist movements and
the organized crime groups in Russia, Turkey, Albania, ex-Yugoslavia
and Italy. These groups control the routes that bring drugs and
desperate human beings west.
- Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who has reported on
terrorist movements for more than 40 years, maintains, "Without
the hidden face of globalization, the clandestine and criminal
face, the events of Sept. 11 would not have been possible."
- In the war's second phase, the map's borders must expand
to incorporate vast transport and money-laundering schemes. B-1
bombers, Afghan irregulars and U.S. Marine battalions must be
replaced on front lines by accounting firms,
- jurists and local police.
- Charting the next passages in the maze will disgorge more
unforeseen linkages -- and a torrent of troubling questions.
- "Is it fair and civilized to protect banking secrecy?"
asks Italian philosopher Umberto Eco.
- "A great number of people would say yes. But what if
such secrecy permits terrorists to keep their funds in the City
of London? Is the defense of so- called privacy a positive value
or a dubious one?"
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