American military getting bogged down in Iraq with mounting military and economic losses has been included into the top ten new items of media units across China for 2007, and for the preceding years in a row as well. But I assume Iraq will be unlikely to be listed among the 10 leading news stories for 2008 with the only exception for the occurrence of unexpected dramatic or explosive news there.
Globally, innumerable newspapers opt to shift events in Iraq from the space of much-publicized news on their front pages to inner pages or edit them into news in brief or even delete them completely, since more and more people worldwide are troubled by an illness of Iraq news fatigue.
However, people should never forget all that has happened in Iraq, and several hundred thousand civilians and soldiers have paid with their lives for the defeat of new American conservative factions. Moreover, it also heralds the direction of changes in global politics for years ahead.
Scholars majored in international relations prefer citing the 21st century as the one full of risks and brambles, as the old world orders fail to keep up with drastic changes in the economic globalization, and new orders are yet to bring forth. As a matter of fact, rapid advances in the course of economic globalization have plunged the whole globe into an apparent disorderly world, and the uni-polar world some Westerners had once claimed at the end of the cold war lasted only briefly. And a thorny issue surfaced in its wake is precisely related to how to build the multilateral and peaceful world on earth.
Indeed, the humankind has not had enough experience to cope with such a world of disorder or disarrays, but it is now more matured since it has, after all, undergone the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century and the ensuing cold war era. People worldwide have reached consensuses on the existing basis, though it still needs time for a new and more efficacious international security system to grow and develop. Any nation, however powerful, must bear in mind such international consensuses at the time it wants to resort to any global move, and this is what the legitimacy means.
As noted British diplomat and scholar Robert Cooper has put it, "Ultimately there are two sources of power: force and legitimacy. People obey out of fear of violence or out of respect for authority. Civilization and order come from putting force at the service of legitimate authority … Force without legitimacy brings chaos; legitimacy without force will be overthrown."
What people have learned from the Iraq war is that Americans have a blind faith in their military might, and so the lessons they have learned reflect characteristics of this era of transition. One or two individual nations can never command the entire world or proceed to resolve all its issues no matter how powerful and overriding they might be. Standoffs, or confrontation and tangled fighting will benefit no one as all people on earth are boarding or riding in "the one and the same ship".
When the mutual interdependence has becomes a vital means for "balances and checks" in global politics, any nation has to seek international support and learn to sit down for talks and confer with other related nations whenever it comes across any tough diplomatic problems.
To date, not a single complete set of international laws, regulations or codes has been accepted by all nations, and the United Nations' role is necertheless subjected to all sorts of restrictions. But the force of world opinons is, however, taking shape. In this "global village" with the interdependent, growing ties among the nations, world opinions are vital and important to any nation and particularly to any big power without any precedence. Hence, any country, in case of violating international opinions, will lose its legitimacy and pay extremely high costs accordingly.
Consequently, the lesson that has been learned from the Iraq war also poses the greatest achievement so far scored in the arena of world politics since the September 11 attacks in the U.S. in 2001, but not the 9/11 incident itself. Neither terrorists nor new American conservative factions would have expected that the history will progress in this way. So it is fortunate for the humankind to get in a (bumper)"harvest" in the first decade of this century. Although it is too early to assert this will mean the conclusion of the era for power politics or uni-lateral actions, people can rest assured that the costs for any unilateral moves in the years ahead will be much more costly. If the Iraq war enables more people to come to recognize this truth, then we have more reasons to be optimistic on our way forward in the 21st century.
By People's Daily Online and its author is Ding Cong, a senior PD desk editor
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