Dressed
to kill –
Under
the cloak of Bush’s foreign policy
Jeff Sommers, Khaled Diab and Charles Woolfson expose what lies beneath the cloak of US President George W Bush’s foreign policy. (Extended essay).
December 2005
Things are not going well for US President
George W Bush in Iraq. The death of 10 marines in early December 2005 following
a roadside explosion in Fallujah brought the number of American military
personnel that have returned home in body bags to at least 2,125 since the
US-led invasion in 2003.
The Iraqi military and civilian death toll is
harder to calculate since no official tab is kept. But by 9 April 2003, some
30,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed by the US military’s own reckoning, and
thousands of combatants have died since, particularly during the bloody siege
of Fallujah last year. According to the conservative estimate of the
independent IraqBodyCount.net, the civilian death toll stands as high as 30,000
(4/12/2005).
Bush’s European allies, after a short-lived
period of mending fences, are displaying a growing sense of disgruntlement. A
transatlantic row has broken out over the USA’s alleged torture of terror
suspects in secret gaols in Eastern Europe and human rights groups have accused
the CIA of flying suspects to these covert prisons in planes that have used
airports throughout Europe. While working on this essay, one of the current
authors passed through a capital airport in one of the Baltic states, where he
saw a large, grey, windowless, pot-bellied transport plane squatting menacingly
on the runway, with a discreet US flag, like a designer logo, on its tailfin.
Displaying the Bush administration’s unique multilateral tact, US Foreign
Secretary Condeleeza Rice has warned the European Union to ‘back off’ on the
issue.
But the news that’s probably keeping Bush up
late at night is his plummeting credibility at home. The American public is increasingly
questioning Bush’s self-proclaimed ‘war on terror’ and are demanding
explanations for why the reality on the ground does not resemble the virtual
reality being emitted from the White House. Why has Bush failed to deliver the
two things he promised in Iraq, they ask: former Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and freedom, peace and prosperity
to the Iraqi people?
Bush increasingly appears somewhat like a frustrated
Lyndon Johnson, US president from 1963 to 1969, who could not quite understand
why “all” Americans did not recognise their prosperity during the Vietnam War
and the democratic upheavals of the 1960s.
Lest we remember
In a bid to claw back his shaken reputation,
Bush decided to use 11 November (Veterans Day in the USA, Armistice Day in
Europe) to justify his foreign policy failures since the terrorist attacks on
the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. Surrounded by
serving officers and retired soldiers, the Commander-in-chief told his
audience: “A handful of veterans who live among us in 2005 stood in uniform
when World War I ended 87 years ago today. These men are more than 100 years
old.”
Some of these centennial veterans may have been
scratching their heads in bafflement that their president was using their
legacy and that of Europe’s ‘lost generation’ to defend his administration’s
stridently militaristic foreign policy. Apparently, the irony of using the
memory of the First World War – which was known at the time as the ‘war to end
all wars’ – was lost on the president.
Ignoring the deafening echoes of history, Bush
ploughed on: “At this hour, a new generation of Americans is defending our flag
and our freedom in the first war of the 21st century.”
He would have done well to heed Wilfred Owen’s
famous warning nearly nine decades ago, particularly given reports that the
Americans have used chemical weapons in Iraq:
If you could
hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend,
you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori[1]
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
From ‘Dulce et decorum est…’
The irony of this moment cannot have been lost on Bush’s most ardent
supporter, UK Premier Tony Blair. Blair’s justification for intervention in
Iraq has shifted from the threat posed by alleged weapons of mass destruction,
to ‘our boys’ in UK bases in Cyprus, to ‘invasion was the right thing to do, as
Saddam was a monster who deployed chemical weapons against his own people’.
Benign power
Yet
throughout his address, President Bush beseeched his audience to recognise the
goodness of American foreign policy and the inherent democratic character of
the United States on the world stage. Like a stereotypical American abroad who
cannot seem to communicate with the locals, his solution is merely to turn up
the volume and repeat the message as a tautology: US policy is democratic
because America is free. Disingenuously, he mentioned ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, or
‘liberation’ no fewer than 23 times, and repeated the words ‘tyranny’ or
‘tyrant’ on at least eight occasions during his address.
This is
perhaps not surprising given that he started his second term with a pledge to
unleash “the force of freedom” on the entire world. “The best hope for peace in
our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world,” he had said at the
time. But with Iraq in anarchy, Afghanistan in mayhem and thousands of ‘enemy
combatants’ being held illegally by the US military, the only force the
president seems to have let loose is that of chaos.
“People of
Baghdad, remember for 26 generations you have suffered under strange tyrants,”
British Major-General Stanley Maud, not George W Bush, proclaimed upon entering
the Iraqi capital in 1917. “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands
as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”
In this
light, we should inspect the Bush administration’s latest attempt to persuade
us of its case. In some ways, his Veterans Day address presented both familiar
and novel themes relating
to US adventures abroad. On the familiar side is the government’s usual
rhetoric when detailing its use of force to command obedience from those
insolent enough to question American authority: be sure that only ‘good’
motivates the ‘benign superpower’. But this tradition extends back to America’s
original sin – the ethnic cleansing of its indigenous people – and the path of
‘manifest destiny’ it has followed since.
Roused to
arms
According to
President Bush, the ‘war on terror’ was not one of America’s choosing. “The war
came to our shores on September the 11th, 2001,” he claimed. “And
our nation has made a clear choice: we will confront this mortal danger to all
humanity. We will not tire or rest until the war on terror is won,” he said to loud
applause.
“We didn’t
ask for this global struggle. But we are answering history’s call with
confidence and with a comprehensive strategy,” he stressed.
Despite the
apparent emotional rawness of his appeal, there appears to have been little
that was spontaneous about the ‘war on terror’. “It’s insulting to believe that
9/11 was a turning point that made of Bush an angry Greek god bent on
destruction,” observed veteran Egyptian journalist and one of the Middle East’s
best-known political analysts, Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, in an interview
broadcast on Arab satellite TV shortly before the invasion. “The American
empire grew faster than any empire in history. It is the most powerful in the
history of mankind and it’s a power that plans and does not improvise its
policies – it made think tanks an industry.”
And the war
was not just about oil. “What is about to happen in Iraq is a process of taming
the coming international monsters, or international competitors who do not
include Iraq nor the Arab world,” Heikal argued. He pointed to the resurgent
powers of China, and lesser, but still potentially awkward rivals, Russia,
Japan and Germany, as being the primary targets.
New American
century
The most
influential think tank influencing the Bush administration is undoubtedly the
neo-conservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC) which wants to
extend previous American ascendancy throughout the 20th century to
the 21st century. According to its website, it believes that
“American leadership is good both for America and for the world” and that “such
leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to
moral principle” and that “too few political leaders today are making the case
for global leadership”.
In 1998,
members of the PNAC, including Donald Rumsfeld (current US secretary of
defence) and Paul Wolfowitz (deputy US secretary of defence at the time of the
Iraq invasion) wrote to then president, Bill Clinton, urging him to remove
Saddam Hussein from power using US diplomatic, political and military power.
The BBC’s
leading investigative journalism programme, Newsnight, revealed, in
March 2005, that the Bush
administration had already made plans for war and for Iraq’s oil before the
9/11 attacks. Insiders told the programme that planning began “within weeks” of
Bush’s first taking office in 2001.
Ominously,
given the current spat over Iran’s civilian nuclear programme, PNAC’s 2000
report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses,
recommends that: “Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to
US interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should US-Iranian relations
improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an
essential element in US security strategy given the longstanding American
interests in the region.”
Oiling the wheels of democracy
During his Veterans Day address, Bush suggested
that: “These extremists want to end American and Western influence in the
broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace and stand in the
way of their ambitions.”
Whatever the totalitarian ambitions of the
Islamic extremists may be, it is not America’s record on democracy that most
Arabs stand opposed to. Prior to the invasion of
Iraq in 2003, the country had lived under more than a decade of punitive US-imposed
international sanctions that resulted in the death of at least half a million
children, according to UN estimates. Following the 1991 Gulf War, it had also
endured an ongoing attrition campaign of Anglo-American airstrikes. Clinton’s
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once described the
collateral deaths as “worth it”.
In the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was fighting the Iranian Ayotollahs – a
war which cost a million lives – he was seen by America and her Western allies
as ‘our friend’ and his human rights violations and use of chemical weapons
were politely ignored both by the government and its apologists.
The old American century
Despite the more openly imperial, unilateral and militaristic tone of the right-wing
Bush Doctrine and its neo-con sponsors, American foreign policy in the Middle
East has, since the United States ousted Britain and France in the mid-20th
century, been surprisingly consistent and has, in many ways, perpetuated the
Anglo-French tradition that preceded it.
Besides Iraq, an earlier example of meddling in the politics of an oil-rich
state occurred in 1953, when the United States and Britain sponsored the
overthrow of the first democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohamed Mossadeq,
and propped up his successor, the corrupt Shah, Mohamed Reza Pahlavi. The
Shah’s corruption and oppression led to the student protests that toppled him
in 1979 and paved the way for the Islamic republic.
The United States is a staunch supporter of the 20,000-member House of Saud
which rules Saudi Arabia with a mix of ruthlessness, backwardness and an iron
fist. It also backs semi-authoritarian and sometimes brutal leaders, such as
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf. And it is, of course,
the US’s traditionally unflinching support of Israel, with its nuclear arsenal
and belligerent military policy, against Palestinian aspirations for statehood
that strikes the deepest emotional chord of outrage with the average Arab.
But these historical parallels are ignored by apologists and quickly
forgotten by the collective consciousness desperately seeking to believe in the
goodness of the government supposedly representing its will. “The nationalist
not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side,” George
Orwell once wrote. “He has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about
them.”
The famous English novelist, in his landmark novel 1984, took
this idea to extremes when he showed that the government – in need of a state
of perpetual war to keep control over the population – rewrote the history
books and newspapers depending on the enemy of the day: “Today we are
at peace with Oceania, and we have always been…Today we are at war with
Oceania, and we always have been.”
Despite
Bush’s convenient revision of history, he still tried to turn the tables on his
critics by saying: While it’s perfectly legitimate to criticise my decision or
the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of
how that war began.”
Green, the new red
In a desperate attempt to turn America’s fight into a global one, Bush told
his audience of war veterans that: “These militants are not just the enemies of
America or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and they are the
enemies of humanity.”
In a bid to frame the situation in epic terms familiar to his
American audience and dehumanise the enemy, Bush sought, as on previous
occasions, to draw a parallel between Islamic fundamentalism and Communism. “Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent
individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision.” This compelling
catechism of evil is all the more dangerous for its spurious associative
coupling.
Islamists, who themselves regard Communism as an ‘evil’ and ‘godless’
ideology – and whose views resemble closely those of Bush’s staunchest
supporters, the Christian fundamentalists – may be surprised to hear Bush’s
description. Yet unlike Islamic fundamentalists, communist movements tended
to be at the forefront of the women’s movement, struggles against racism, and
the promotion of better conditions for labour.
Despite the obvious ideological differences between Islamic fundamentalism and
Communism, and the power disparity (the Soviet Union was a superpower with
imperial designs, whilst Muslim extremists are small groups and cells of
radical individuals), Islamists have served a convenient role for US
politicians seeking to strike fear into the public consciouness.
The
collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War led to panic in the
halls of American power as the architects of American expansionism no longer
had a fig-leaf enemy behind which to hide their obscene designs for global
hegemony. New, even more terrifying ‘folk devils’ had to be created.
Then the neo-conservatives found a way out, when the movement’s leading
thinker, Daniel Pipes, followed the lead of his ‘cold warrior’ father, Richard,
and likened Islam to the red threat. “Whereas the closest parallels to Islam
are Judaism and Christianity, those closest to Islamism are other radical
utopian ‘isms’, namely fascism and Marxism-Leninism. Islamism is a scourge, a
global affliction whose victims include peoples of all religions,” he alleged
in an interview with Harvard Magazine.
In describing
the father-son ideological likeness, the university paper noted that: “With the
birth of Daniel, Richard Pipes was indeed reborn, perhaps even cloned.
Daniel…is what old-timers would call a chip off the old block.”
Ideological
double-think
Interestingly,
the United States’ equating of Islamism with Communism is a fairly recent
innovation and is another example of near-Orwellian double-think. In past
decades, Islamism was seen by Washington as a necessary and effective
counterbalance against the spread – both perceived and actual – of Communist
influence and the Soviet empire.
It was also
perceived as an effective counterbalance against pan-Arabism and Nasserism,
which had mass appeal on the Arab street throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Starting from that period, the CIA funded and trained Egypt’s Muslim
Brotherhood, who attempted to assassinate former Egyptian President Gamal
Abdel-Nasser on at least a dozen occasions, and grew in strength and popularity
on the back of government oppression. The USA also backed the promotion by
Saudi Arabia of its conservative model of Wahbi Islam across the Arab and
Muslim worlds.
Later,
through carefully camouflaged shell companies, the CIA funded, trained and
armed the mujahedeen fighters – including the ‘prince of darkness’
himself, Osama bin Laden – in Afghanistan against the Soviets who invaded the
country in 1979. In fact, then National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
commented in a 1998 Le Figaro interview, that he recommended to
President Carter that, giving aid to the Afghani forces opposed to rule from
pro-Moscow Kabul “…was going to induce a Soviet intervention. It had the effect
of drawing the Russians into an Afghan trap.”
The CIA-backed
combatants came from all over the Muslim world to push back the ‘godless
despoiler’ of Muslim soil. Although the quagmire in Afghanistan helped lead to
the premature demise of the Soviet Union, it also unleashed a new monster. We
are now experiencing the blowback from that strategy. In 1998, Brzezinski commented that the only cost of this success
were a “few stirred up Muslims”. As with several wars fought in the past, the
true cost comes in instalments, with no foreknowledge of how many bills will
come due later.
Afghanistan
II
The victory
in Afghanistan bolstered the confidence of the militant groups who began to
believe that they had brought down a superpower by themselves and they turned
their attention to the United States, whom they believe is the enemy of Islam.
Now they hope to turn Iraq into America’s ‘Afghanistan’, rather than another
Vietnam.
“The
militants are aided, as well, by elements of the Arab news media that incite hatred
and anti-Semitism, that feed conspiracy theories and speak of a so-called
American war on Islam,” Bush lamented in his speech.
This is both a consequence of the wrecking ball the US has wielded in the
region and a failure of Middle East intellectuals to correct misperceptions –
although, on the latter, it must be remembered that America has had a hand in
eliminating left-wing and secular intellectuals – who were often admirers of US
domestic democracy and culture – throughout the Middle East to take the sting
out of the nationalist and pan-Arabist movement.
In addition, the Qatar-based Al Jazeera news channel which was once
praised for its independence by the US government has been viciously attacked
by senior American officials and had its offices in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose
locations were known to the US military, hit – ‘accidentally’ – by American
‘smart’ bombs.
Under
friendly fire
As with all powerful states, America acts in its own perceived strategic
interests. And this is truly the greatest flaw in the fundamentalist analysis:
assuming America is at war with Islam.
America merely pursues its selfish ends. As America and the world
changes, its interests will also shift and so, too, will its enemies and
friends. The wild card, however, is democracy. American democracy is usually
what sociologist William Robinson terms a polyarchy: a system which represents
a small menu of choice acceptable to the ruling elites, while presenting the
illusion of variety to the electorate. Yet, embedded within this polyarchy –
and what the status quo attempts to thwart – is democracy, which periodically
erupts from the shackles placed upon it.
The USA has a
long history of making friends with its future enemies: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin,
Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein count among that illustrious group. Osama bin Laden,
who, like Bush, is the privileged son of an oil dynasty, was once the good
friend of the United States. Now the Commander in Chief has turned his guns on
this one-time ally in a repetitive mantra of demonology.
“Like the
ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed
vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. bin Laden says his own
role is to tell Muslims, quote, ‘what is good for them and what is not’,” Bush
lamented.
But Bush is
silent on the self-appointed neo-con vanguard trying to lead American politics.
This
neo-conservative coterie, who often possess Trotskyist pasts, have merely
traded in one ideology for another, which they uphold with vanguardist
confidence in their righteousness.
Others are like Bush – and for that matter bin Laden: religious
fundamentalists.
Original sin
and manifest destiny
But it is not just in the Middle East where American expansionist policy has
been consistent. For the United States, it all began with the idea of ‘manifest
destiny’ propogated by the country’s founding fathers and used to justify the
ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population.
Andrew Jackson, president of the United States when the Cherokee tribe were
removed, never failed to remind the public that it was being done for the
Indians own well being. This was necessary because most people are good and
genuinely wish their government to act in accordance with their values and –
since the revolutions launched by America, France, and Haiti beginning in 1776
– demand this of the state.
“It will be my sincere and constant desire to observe toward the Indian
tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and
considerate attention to their rights and their wants,” he said in his first
inaugural address in 1829.
By December of the same year, a more militant note had entered his voice:
“By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and
from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and
others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible
names.”
The Cherokee presented an interesting dilemma. It was declared, with a
sigh, that most Indians would be removed due merely to the inexorable forces of
progress. However, the Cherokee were farmers, had developed a written language
with a vibrant press, and were even slave-owning plantation owners – from the
perspective of the day, they were “civilised”. Nevertheless, the Cherokee had
too much fertile land for cultivating cotton, and, in 1830, gold was discovered
on their remaining territory in the Blue Ridge Mountains. By 1838, the last of
the Cherokee were infamously forced on the Trail of Tears death march.
One of the current authors used to teach where the Cherokee lived. Some of
his students’ families received 600 acre grants of Cherokee land. His
university’s administration building steeple was sheathed in that gold.
Pacifying the
Spanish threat
The Mexican-American war of 1846-1848 led to the annexation by the United
States of Texas and 40% of Mexico. In his inaugural address of 1845, President
James Polk stressed that US expansionism meant extending the “dominions of
peace”. “The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our
government….. Our government cannot be otherwise than pacific,” he
insisted.
Polk got his neat military ‘victory’, but it
created instability in the form of trashed relations with Mexico. “Allow the
president to invade a neighbouring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary
to repel an invasion ... and you allow him to make war at pleasure …You may say
to him, ‘I see no probability of…[them]… invading us,’ but he will say to you,
‘Be silent: I see it if you don’t,’” observed future president Abraham Lincoln.
The entry into the Union of new slave states was to cause the first US
direct blowback and some blamed it for the subsequent American Civil War. “The Southern
rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war,” opined another future
president, Ulysses S Grant. “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their
transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war
of modern times.”
The lessons drawn by Lincoln and Grant were lost on the US Congress who
supported Lyndon Baines Johnson’s bid, in 1964, with the rigged account on the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, to further embed America in Vietnam. The same
happened in 2003, when Congress bought the Bush administration’s line on Iraq’s
supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
“I was not properly reared, and had the
illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against
shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution,” bemoaned the
all-American novelist Mark Twain, who was a prominent member of the American
Anti-Imperialist League, in a political essay. “And so when it was sent out to
the Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed
it was polluted and, in an ignorant moment, I said so.”
Manufacturing
consent
The next major innovation employed by the American government to convince
its public of the need for war was during World War I. President Woodrow Wilson
ran for re-election in 1916 on the platform of keeping America out of the dirty
trench waters of war Europeans had been bathing in since 1914.
Wilson’s message followed the American tradition dating back to George
Washington’s farewell address to stay out of European wars. Wilson, however,
thought differently. But he was faced with a dilemma: how to turn public
opinion? The answer was with the new science of public opinion management. The
new art of public relations was developed with campaigns to transform hated
figures in America, such as the ruthless oil baron John Rockefeller, into
avuncular figures bouncing children on their knees.
This new art/science was created by figures such as Edward Bernays – the
double nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays introduced such phrases as “engineering
consent”. Power did not derive from the people, but the people had to be given
the illusion of such. Bernays used the analogy of his chauffer, who he called
Dumb Jack, to describe why the levers of power must be in the hands of an
enlightened class. It would not do to have the Dumb Jacks running the country.
Woodrow Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information, also known as
the Creel Commission, to unleash a public relations onslaught on the American
public to turn them to war. It succeeded just enough to keep Americans from
rising up en masse against Wilson’s adventure. Among the admirers of Wilson’s
propaganda effort were the Bolsheviks.
The next major challenge to forge consent for US policy was with the Cold
War. President Harry Truman – more accurately his advisors James Byrnes and
Henry Stimson – were convinced of the need to place the United States on a
permanent war-time footing. After the Second World War, the US economy was
strangled by the post-demobilisation. Economists and manufacturers alike were
convinced America would sink into a depression such as existed before the war,
and the Marshall Plan was partly in response to this.
This, combined with the United States inheriting the global system abandoned
by the weakened British and French, placed the fledgling superpower in a new
role of world leadership. Moreover, US-Soviet relations soured after the war,
leading to the ‘cold war’.
The need to frighten American citizens into accepting the new conflict was
detailed in National Security Council Document 68. The Communist – and later
Islamist – threat had to be magnified in order for Americans to back a
permanent war economy. President Dwight D Eisenhower would warn a decade later
in his departing address that this military-industrial complex was out of
control. General Eisenhower’s warning shot was not heeded and, today, ‘nation
building’ (preceded by ‘nation dismantling’) has become the Bush
administration’s stock-in-trade. We seem to have reached a point where the same
corporations provide the weapons to demolish a soveriegn country at inflated
prices to the US taxpayer, and the contractors to rebuild it from scratch at
inflated prices to the citizens of the occupied land.
As CNN relayed live Bush’s Veterans Day speech from Tobyhanna, Monroe County, Pennsylvania to the world, his message sought an audience for US foreign policy beyond
the comforting enclosure of a US military base. Yet that global audience cannot
be assumed to be passive receptors, taking ‘on trust’ the words of the world’s
most powerful man. We should heed the words of Lincoln, Grant, and Twain on
power. Every ruling class attempts to impart fixed, immutable meanings in its
political discourse to ‘key words’, a term coined by Raymond Williams, the
great English cultural historian. These key words can sometimes become the
blunt instruments of rhetorical domination, as in the prelude to the current
‘War on Terrorism’. ‘Democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘free markets’, ‘peace’ – heavily
loaded with ideological content – can become tokens in a fixed currency of
self-enclosed discourse that does not acknowledge critical interrogation.
Only at rare historical moments, periods of gathering crisis and
discontent, does the full measure of this linguistic violence become apparent.
Such moments are marked by the springing apart of hitherto suppressed meanings,
contesting and subverting the previously established ‘legitimate’ discourse. What
formerly was ‘unsayable’ finds popular voice. Such a moment of flux seems to
have arrived now. And the key words that have hitherto justified the actions of
the US administration are to be found in profound, unresolved inner dialogical
tension.
Jeff Sommers is a professor of history at Raritan Valley
Community College and visiting professor at the Stockholm School of Economics
in Riga. He publishes on US foreign relations, political economy, and global
studies. He has held several Fulbrights and divides his time between the
US and Baltic states.
Charles Woolfson is holder of a European
Commission Marie Curie chair and is Professor of Labour Studies, University of
Glasgow. Currently, he teaches and researches in the new EU member Baltic
states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. A former associate dean of faculty and
director of the Graduate School in Social Sciences at the University of
Glasgow, Woolfson has held a number of prestigious international fellowships
and has led international research projects. He has published widely on labour
relations, corporate social responsibility and European issues.
©2005 J. Sommers, K. Diab, C. Woolfson
ã2005 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.