Peter Wanbali
2 October 2001
opinion
The opposition's stand is that the Government was over-eager in its demonstration of support for the US on the tragic September 11 terrorist attacks.
The claim is that it was a desperate ploy to catch the American government's eye. But it is a stand without merit. For it is during times like this that a nation defines its interests, refocuses its foreign policies and forms new alliances.
The attacks on New York City's World Trade Centre and Washington DC's Pentagon, in which close to 6,000 people were killed, have deeply hurt the American people, shaken their sense of invincibility and highlighted their incredible detachment from a world they boast to lord over.
More importantly, it has inspired their sense of nationalism in a manner comparable only to the post-Pearl Harbour disaster. On that occasion, Japan surprised and devastated the US fleet in the Pacific.
But it provoked a retaliation in which Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki cities were flattened by American atomic bombs.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
Although there is no conventional army, today's realities show similar parallels. The end of the war in 1945 ushered in the Cold War that defined the way the two superpowers would influence the world.
Up to the late 1980s, when the Soviet edifice crumbled following decades of internal economic and political decay, the rest of the world became either "good" or "bad", depending on a country's closeness to or distance from either the Stalinist or the imperialist evil represented, respectively, by the Soviet Union and the US.
It did not matter that governments or leaders were as evil as Cambodia's Pol Pot regime or Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko or South Africa's apartheid regime. The principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" was liberally applied.
It is grimly ironic that terrorism, used often by both powers during the Cold War, will now be responsible for redefining a new world order early in the 21st century.
That world will, in the short term, anyway, be defined by America's arrogantly defiant ultimatum to the rest of the world contained in President George W. Bush's words: "You are either with us or against us in the war against terrorism."
To this end, Secretary of State Colin Powell has been pleading with, cajoling, arm-twisting, warning and even bribing other countries to join the war.
The results have been dramatic. More than 60 countries have offered unqualified support, Pakistan and the Sudan being telling examples of the emerging pattern. These are two countries the US has had anything but warm relationships with.
Following its successful nuclear test a little over two years, its consistent support for terrorist activities and its demonstrably poor democratic record, Pakistan has been on the US villain list, with several sanctions slapped on it.
But the current reality has cast it in radically different light and it is all-too-happy to do business with a grateful US. The sanctions have been lifted, loans and other cash incentives are on the table and no one is scrutinising what its army-general-turned-civilian-president is or is not doing domestically.
The same with the Sudan, a country Bill Clinton ordered bombed because it was suspected of housing a plant linked to Osama bin Laden. It has been reported that co-operation between the two countries has never been warmer
The Sudan is providing the US with bagfuls of crucial intelligence on Osama and other terrorists and groups. The Khartoum regime for now can happily assume that pressure on it to negotiate an end to the ruinous war in the south will ease.
There will be more such cases - former pariahs welcomed aboard or bribed to join the war against terrorism. Being a long-term war, its new relationships are unlikely to fizzle out any time soon.
The benefiting governments know this and will seek to draw deeply and for a long time from this well of opportunity drilled by terrorists.
Watch out for a mellowing of the stridency
To that extent, Moi's Government is not being dumb. It sees an opportunity to worm its way back into the US good books without fully addressing the many thorny problems the IMF and the World Bank insist should be addressed before Kenya's credit rating can improve to enable it to start negotiating for more credit.
Other than the strategic and logistical advantages Kenya can offer the US, Nairobi can work on its shared pain with the US following the 1998 bomb in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
In the coming months, watch out for a mellowing of the stridency of demands from Washington, a high-powered exchange of visits and some glowing tributes to a leadership that will have demonstrated unequivocal support for the US in the new war. Trust Moi to pounce on an opportunity that can make his continued stay acceptable to the US (and hence the world) or that can make his retirement a pleasurable, elder-statesmanly experience. Either way, he cannot lose.
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