Pyrrhic defeat, Pyrrhic victory
 The
mid-week Parliamentary debate on the American resolution at the United
Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was illuminating in the congruence
of views between the government and Opposition.
United National Party’s Lakshman Kiriella said that the strategy
which had been adopted against Sri Lanka was precisely the same as that
used to carve South Sudan off from Sudan. He was in effect repeating
what Minister Douglas Devananda said, that there was a hidden agenda
behind the resolution.
Meanwhile his front-bench colleague Mangala Samaraweera said that the
passing of the resolution in Geneva had been a defeat for Sri Lanka. He
was echoing the words of Minister DEW Gunasekera, who said that this was
not just an individual defeat but a defeat for the entire region.
Indeed it was in a sense a setback for the entire Third World. But
then, defeats of this nature are built into the system to benefit what
is usually referred to as ‘The International Community’ - shorthand for
the USA and its allies.
An American philosopher, Jeffrey Reiman, had a name for this kind of
built-in imbalance. His concept, called Pyrrhic defeat theory, is that
those with the power to change a system benefit from the way it
currently works.
Justice system
Reiman, who first expressed this theory in 1979 in his ‘The Rich Get
Richer and the Poor Get Prison’, was actually looking at the American
criminal justice system. He argued that the criminal justice system
fails to define the criminal acts of the wealthy as crimes and to
enforce the law against the well off when they commit acts that are
defined as crimes. It creates an image of crime as almost exclusively
the work of the poor - which serves the interests of the powerful.
He might have extended his argument to include the widespread use by
US law enforcement agencies of framing innocent people and of ethnic
profiling. This would certainly have completed the analogy with the
prevalent ‘justice’ system of ‘The International Community’, in which
Third World countries, the global poor, are purveyed as the ‘bad guys’,
as against the White Knights of the First World, the ‘good guys’.
Consider the history of the past decade. Iraqi expatriate Rafid Ahmed
Alwan al-Janabi, code-named ‘Curveball’ by the Americans - has admitted
he concocted false evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The
Americans took this false evidence and ‘sexed it up’ - such was
confessed by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of
staff, who also said that ‘intelligence was being worked to fit around
the policy’.
They then used this false evidence to justify their illegal invasion
of Iraq, which caused anything upto a million casualties. During the
occupation, they observably committed other war crimes, notably
executing prisoners, using banned chemicals at Fallujah and shooting up
a journalist from an attack helicopter - the last on videotape.
Funds from America’s National Endowment for Democracy were used to
payroll the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, a terrorist
group based on the Duvaliers’ Ton Ton Macoute thugs. Its leader, Louis-Jodel
Chamblain, became the face of the rebels who, funded by the American
International Republican Institute, invaded Haiti from the neighbouring
Dominican Republic.
Human rights violations
The US and Canada then invaded Haiti, quoting their R2P
(‘Responsibility to Protect’/‘failed state’) doctrine, and ousted the
democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide and sent him to
exile. Parenthetically, abortive efforts were made to force the R2P
doctrine down Sri Lankan throats as well, not too long ago.
The same pattern could be observed in Libya: allegations of human
rights violations, an internal rebellion funded by the First World,
intervention by the air forces and special forces of ‘The International
Community’ - leading to ‘regime change’.
These apart, the US has with impunity killed people on the ground,
globally, most of them innocent civilians, using pilotless drones. It
has made legal the extra-judicial murder of its own citizens. It has
violated the sovereignty of its declared close ally, Pakistan - most
famously by attacking the Osama bin Laden residence and by shooting up
Pakistani border troops.
However, despite the widespread and easily available evidence of war
crimes by the USA, no action has been taken against, either in the UNHRC
or elsewhere. So Sri Lanka, as a Third World country, was facing the
pre-condition of Pyrrhic Defeat - declared guilty before it even stepped
into the dock at Geneva. As it was, the country came off far better than
could have been expected - which is why there has been less of a hue and
cry about the matter in the European press than anticipated.
Obama administration
There is also evidence that the US is not triumphant at its victory
at Geneva. In order to gain the extra votes needed to prevent a
humiliating defeat, the Americans were forced to concede an amendment to
their resolution, which in effect extracted its teeth.
The balance of world power has been moving against the US for some
time. The Afghanistan and Iraq adventures have bled it of military
might, so it no longer looks so imposing. The Georgian adventure
revealed the weakness behind US threats. Now there are rumours that the
Obama administration has been putting out feelers to the Syrians and
Iranians, sure signs of weakness.
Countries will no longer side with the US automatically, without
duress. Even the British ‘Daily Telegraph’, staunchly Tory and hitherto
unashamedly in favour of the Anglo-American alliance, has been
questioning the so-called ‘Special relationship’ in its op-ed columns.
The problem with Pyrrhic defeat is that the powerful have to remain
powerful in order to enforce it. For might to be right, might must be
preserved. The clay feet of the American idol were brought to light
during the US resolution on Sri Lanka at the UNHRC, the passing of which
might well prove to have been a Pyrrhic victory for the USA. |
