Campaigning for Absolut vodka and a free Tibet

This is the ad that sparked heated comment on many US conservative blogs and web sites. It belongs to a campaign that promotes ‘absolut scenarios’ under the slogan ‘In an Absolut world’. This one, dedicated to the Mexican market, shows a 1830s-era map when Mexico included several Southwestern US states, including California and Texas. An AP wire writes that ‘Mexico still resents losing that territory in the 1848 Mexican-American War and the fight for Texas independence.

But this ad ignited heated comments, like : “In an Absolut world, a company that produces vodka fires its entire marketing department in a desperate attempt to win back enraged North American customers after a disastrous ad campaign backfires,” on web sites like Malkin.

Absolut said the ad was designed for a Mexican audience and intended to recall “a time which the population of Mexico might feel was more ideal.”

“As a global company, we recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market, and for that we apologize.

The very same US activists who gained the withdrawal of this campaign by Absolut are probably today demonstrating for the ‘freedom of Tibet’.

Maybe could they consider just for a minute the Chinese stance and understand what it means to have part of what you consider your own territory, based on historical facts, amputated.

The integrity of a national territory is among the most sensitive issues in the international law. This question can not be highjacked by a public relations campaign like the one we are witnessing.

The question is not if I’m advocating for the Chinese or promoting the oppression of the Tibetans. The question is that the future of a territory (and consequently the relationship between two people) should not been adressed through a world opinion campaign that seems better marketed than an ad for Absolut.

War buzz is good for business

An infamous deal. George Bush’ regional tour in the Gulf was due to rise awareness against the dangers of Iran, pictured as the « world’s leading state sponsor of terror ». By the way, he got the unexpected help of an alleged naval incident, a kind of modern Maddox - you can read Maddox’s history here, enlighted by the recent disclosure of US intel.

But the very first tangible result is an enormous commercial deal : 20 billions dollars of new weaponry to be sold to Saudi Arabia. Actually, a war with Iran is no longer needed : the US military industry (and its powerful lobbies) already harvested its main benefits !

This news brings two thoughts to my mind.

First, we may question how moral it is to use fear in international relations to promote the sale of weapons. Not very moral, indeed, but not new at all !

Second, we must remind the genesis of Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was born from a double move. First, at the end of the soviet occupation of Afghanistan, thousands of jihadis (at the time sponsored by the West) came back home. They found themselves jobless, so to say.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In the Gulf region, this event caused a huge emotion. The people there believed that their armies were strong, but the Gulf leaders didn’t know how to face Saddam’s potential danger. Since 1945 and the conclusion on the USS Quincy of a long term strategic agreement, US and Saudi Arabia were linked by an « oil for security » deal. Cheap oil against security. And the West gets back part of the money it spends in oil purchases, as the product of the sales of weapons. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries spent billions and billions of dollars to purchase weapons.

Soon after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Ossama Bin Laden offered the late Saudi king Fahd to rise a mudjahideen army, based on his fellow fighters back from Afghanistan, to fight the secular Saddam and free the conservative monarchy of Kuwait. But Fahd was offered by the US the coalition that we know and eventually refused Bin Laden’s proposal.
For the Saudis, that was a major blow. For decade, their country had spent a big part of its income to buy weapons to the West and the first regional crisis caused what was considered by many as a foreign invasion (by the West !). All these billions were spent in loss, as their country was not even able to face alone a very regional security issue.

This humiliation is seen by several analysts as the founding momentum of Al Qaeda. Partly as a reaction to the 1991 Gulf war, Bin Laden established the World islamic front for jihad against the Jews and the crusaders, the first stone of his organization.