Third Millennium: Shattered Illusions
Once again our condemnation of wars did not work. Another one broke out, as an alternative to hopes placed in the third millennium, in the region where biblical history had been made and age-old problems of the human race brought forth.
Another armed confrontation in world history, whose record of 5,500 years numbers only 292 peaceful ones, should not be a surprise. However, the war started by the United States against Iraq under the rubric, Shock and Awe, has special characteristics. Beginning on the early months of the third millennium, it casts a shadow on its expected values.
Hostilities in Iraq, even if on a regional scope, have global overtones and will have global consequences. They involve the principal determinants of modern history: struggle for the logistics of world civilization’s feed line, above all; for world supremacy (that may well result in a unipolar world order); for political and geopolitical interests in the intercontinental context; for the constitutionalization of the international security system — with interfaith problems in conjunction with Christian and Moslem world views (not without conflicts within the Christian camp between Catholic France, Belgium, half of Germany, and the Protestant United States and Great Britain).
The war in Iraq is evidence of the United States trying to assert a unipolar world by the use of force, so as to secure control over the wealth of oil. Depleting this source threatens a restructuring in worldwide production and economies in the next thirty years. Therefore, the allied combat operations in Iraq are in the limelight with Europe and Asia (especially China).
The Iraqi conflict is destroying the world order of security built through the incredible ordeals of the twentieth century. Hence the vague prospects of the new turn that world civilization is now taking.
In any case, hostilities in the Middle East are already telling on the vectors of history. While in the past the main trend of the historical process was first aimed from the East to the West and then vice versa, in the epoch of great geographical discoveries, the very first Iraqi war (Desert Storm) marked the appearance of yet another historical vector, aimed from the North to the South, initiated by postindustrial society and directed at the developing and semicolonial states. The modern attributes of the historical movement toward the Third World is also associated with almost esoteric Sumerian-Babylonian symbols of Euro- Atlantic civilization.
The essence of current developments in Iraq prompts one to infer that the historical drama of the US military action unfolds in a space marked by the Scriptures using the semantics of the Fall and the world dividing into good and evil. To use biblical metaphors, what happened between the Tigris and Euphrates was a temptation by the Devil of humans, attracting them to the forbidden fruit on the Tree of Knowledge, for which transgression man was punished and made mortal.
And so we have death, good, evil, the Fall — such are the symbols of the ancient topos of civilization, lending the ongoing hostilities an almost mystic touch. One is reminded of Albert Camus who said that man, after experiencing the conflicts of the twentieth century, might in the future once again find himself squeezed between the realm of cruel pharaohs and ruthless heavens, as in the times of the Old Testament. Whether true or not, the dust storms in the ancient desert are currently whipped by demons, regardless of whose side they are on and death lurks on both sides of the Kuwaiti border.
In historical reality, apart from metaphors, a strange situation emerges. The United States, declaring itself liberal democracy incarnate — i.e., a country where the problems of freedom have finally been solved and society has finally asserted man as a freely evolving individual — is actually bringing the world back to past epochs of military conflicts. Instead of living in a new society with asserted human rights, pluralism, and tolerance, we are once again threatened with return to a history brimming with blood, dirt, clanging steel, and the tears of victims.
To be precise, the war in Iraq actually marks a point of bifurcation in the modern historical process. It means that events could well take any course. The unipolar world trend might prevail or one of a multipolar nuclear world will. Our evolution could take a postcapitalist course (American type) or a postsocialist one (the Chinese model). Mankind has entered a phase of instability, meaning that the laws of supercomplex systems are effective in the modern world. These laws, as evidenced by synergy, result in the emergence of areas, within the same system, where local developments take the same course as in the past; areas where events occur the way the will dominate the future; events typical of modern realities.
Therefore, the world and its subsystems cannot be reduced to a common denominator. Both the world and its subsystems retain an opportunity to assert the ethical norms responsible for progress in the twenty-first century. Yet this very opportunity is connected with the exceptional complexity of our choice and assessment. The cultural demands of this new world implies self-understanding and cognizance in oneself of that evil which one is trying to overcome in one’s adversary, as well as that good which one is trying to assert. Here righteous fury is unacceptable. What we need is the third truth of the vertical ethical evaluation which allows one to stand over and above confrontation, from the standpoint of universal human experience, rather than the interests of the warring parties. To paraphrase Shakespeare, a plague on both your houses! It is harder to achieve consensus to block a military conflict.
Of course, the United States, by resorting to combat operations, has made a mistake in an epoch excluding the right to err simply because such errors might have disastrous consequences. Yet the price paid for this erroneous move is the need to struggle against the despotic regime of Iraq, one threatening the entire human race. The form of this struggle is wrong, not the aim, for resisting despotism is a task to be solved worldwide. It is part of the strategy of building an interconnected world in the 21st century where people will be firmly convinced that they are members of a single global civilization. Not a single country can afford to miss an opportunity to take part in the construction of a solid democratic community [of nations] in the new millennium. This has everything to do with a Ukraine that has set course on European integration after being isolated socially and politically under the Soviets. Here one must always bear in mind that, while our ability to make historical moves is determined high above, we must choose our path ourselves.
