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The invisibility of the
American
Empire in America
David
Ludden
In the old days of imperialism,
before 1945, citizens of imperial nations learned about
their empires in school; they imbibed imperial anxiety
and pride, and discussed and debated empire publicly. It
was never thus in America, where US empire remains
mostly invisible. Americans are just now starting to
learn about their imperial history, amidst its current
crisis, but there is pervasive resistance, for such
learning contradicts patriotism and received truths
about American national character. Resistance to
learning supports a national denial of reality that
keeps Americans ignorant of the empire built,
maintained, and defended in their name. This ignorance
helps explains the cognitive shock — as distinct from
the emotional and ethical horror — of events on
September 11, 2001. For most Americans, the animosity in
those planes appeared literally out of
nowhere.
National ideology only
begins to explain the gap between America’s identity in
the world and its self-understanding. In the world of
national states that emerged after 1945, the old meaning
of “empire” became archaic, because no country could
then legitimately administer another country. In
addition, America itself emerged from an anti-imperial
struggle; and it supported national movements elsewhere,
from nineteenth century Latin America to twentieth
century Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Support for
nationalist struggles could not be offered Communists,
who had to be constructed as aliens in their own lands,
no matter how indigenous their roots, most notably, in
Vietnam, where France and America drew a line between
North and South that made liberation forces in the north
seem alien invaders, while Americans backed “native”
nationalists in the South. Embracing this kind of
ideological history, Americans can never admit to being
imperialists.
After 1945,
imperialism acquired a new format under American
leadership.
First, the Cold War
allowed the US to expand military, economic, and
political power around the world, posing as a crusader
against Communism, committed to liberal modernisation.
In 1989, the Cold War ended; so then economic
globalisation, global security, and a war on terrorism
came to justify more US expansion. Since 1945, US power
has expanded steadily and dramatically; it now covers
the world of nations, but does not deploy the formal
discourse of imperialism. Rather, the US sees itself as
the world’s leader. Americans lead global progress,
facing enemies and obstacles everywhere. In this guise,
America uses its power inside international
institutions, like the UN, but strikes on its own when
necessary. America refuses to allow international laws
to operate inside US borders unless they conform to US
law. Thus, US power projects itself onto the world, but
the world cannot respond; this imbalance is typical of
the imperial settings, but Americans think of it instead
as a natural state for the “world’s only
super-power.”
A flurry of books has
appeared recently in America using the term “empire” to
describe US power. The growth of an American empire
built on the old repertoire of “indirect rule” had been
obvious outside America for decades before “empire”
began to appear in US public discourse after the
conquest of Iraq without international legitimacy.
Nevertheless, the idea that the US is an imperial power
is not popular among Americans. Journalists, scholars,
teachers, students, analysts, and politicians prefer to
depict the US as a nation pursuing its own interests and
ideals. The phrase “American empire” will not appear in
2004 election debates, where voters will focus on
domestic issues. The war in Iraq is a bigger domestic
issue with each passing day, not because of Iraqi
suffering, but because of American deaths. Wars come
home when bright young people return dead; and to make
matters worse, people do not understand the war in Iraq,
which most people supported out of patriotic fervour,
trusting their President to lead. Now, US “intelligence”
is under scrutiny. Everyone knows Bush lied about
“weapons of mass destruction.” The war in Iraq appears
now to have been a mistake, but the US cannot simply
back out, and Kerry along with all but one US Senator
voted for the war, and Kerry says the US must stay to
see the job done.
Living conditions
in Iraq are not a political issue in America. Few people
even know what they are. Only bombing and death are in
the news, sometimes called features of “resistance” to a
US occupation that must seem to most Americans not as
popular in Iraq as US propaganda once portrayed it. No
one in the US could now believe that Iraqis want
Americans there, based on reading or watching the news.
The New York Times now seems against the Iraq war, but
meekly. Voters will not see in the news the suffering in
Iraq caused by American empire, only security threats
and policy options. The cost of empire at home is not
open for discussion. The war budget called the “defence
budget” continues to soar, without protest. The empire
continues to operate out of public view. A tiny
proportion of decisions that sustain the empire ever
come under public scrutiny.
This
imperial condition contrasts sharply with that of
Britain in the old days. US taxpayers and voters pay the
entire cost of the America Empire, and so must be kept
in the dark about its operations. The British people
never paid for the empire that so many loved because it
was funded by Asians and Africans. If Americans ever
engaged in a cost-benefit analysis of the US Empire, who
knows what would happen. But you can be sure, that will
not happen soon. Because Americans do not see their
empire; what they see is an ever-more-pressing,
ever-more-expensive need for national security. Global
threats to America must be magnified as much as possible
to keep the empire going amidst its rapidly rising cost
and surely diminishing returns. Bill Clinton began
scaring Americans about terrorism. But 9/11 was the
biggest gift imaginable for American imperialists: it
buried empire out of sight.
Once
upon a time, Americans believed that Soviets would
attack them with nuclear missiles. In the 1950s, we as
school children hid under our desks for air raid drills
once a week. Families built bomb shelters in their
basements. In classrooms, cinema, cartoons, and TV,
Americans learned that a “communist menace” roamed the
world and that only strong, brave American soldiers
could defend the world against the “Soviet threat.”
America was like Superman, called to duty when evil
reared its head, and otherwise living as a “mild
mannered reporter,” Clark Kent. The idea that America is
essentially good, caring, innocent, and naïve, like
Clark Kent, has managed to survive inside US popular
culture despite virtually continuous US imperial warfare
since 1945.
Not only do Americans
wear ideological blinders, they daily imbibe information
filtered and fed by media barons, politicians, scholars,
and educators who collaborate in imperialism for
different reasons, typically unknowingly. Individualism
combined with expert specialisation creates incoherently
fragmented images of an imperial reality that looks like
an elephant groped by four blind men: one feels the feet
and calls it a tree; another feels the trunk and calls
it a snake; and each in turn convinced by his own
palpable facts, they as a group cannot describe what is
there. In the same way, some Americans focus on Islamic
ideology; some, on nuclear threats; some, on evil
rulers; some, on the ghostly al-Qaeda; some, on military
options; and others, on civilian and economic issues.
Many Americans are humanitarians concerned with
suffering. But each group having gathered its own data
on its specialised topic, and each struggling daily with
work and family “just making a living,” as we say their
understandings do not add up to a coherent picture.
Empire appears to be a piecemeal scattering of
individual facts and events, never a coherent product of
a democratic political system where many people might
oppose empire, if they could, but where voting against
it is not an option.
The
ideological composition of American knowledge also leads
Americans into raging debates among blind men rather
into a serious search for better information. Foreign
information and opinions are discounted, as in other
countries. Non-nationals are always kept away from the
levers of public opinion. Because the US has such a
heavy impact on so many countries, this nationalist
resistance to foreign opinion might be usefully compared
to a father discounting cries from his family. A US
national structure of intellectual work and debate sets
firm limits on factual input and applies appropriate
filters. Most Americans never learn anything about any
other country except what is deemed relevant to the
American national context by American experts and
defenders.
Americans learn a lot
about the world, but not what people in other countries
want Americans to learn. Rather, Americans learn how
every country fits into the American scheme. Some fit
better than others, and those that do not fit need
fixing. The world appears to be a collection of
countries where people emulate America, and where people
who can migrate come to America to thrive inside an
absorbent American culture that seems to provide a
workable model of the world, a much better model,
indeed, than the United Nations. In the American model,
all cultural diversity fits neatly inside a politics of
identity that revolves around the white elites who
prescribed the US constitution, assay US values, and
dominate all major US institutions. Most Americans
believe that people everywhere would be better off
adopting the American model of cultural and political
stability and economic
progress.
The confidence with which
American feminists promoted the criminalisation of the
Taliban and conquest of Afghanistan is a good indication
of how liberal Americans support imperial expansion.
Liberal Democrats led the fight against Communism at
home and abroad. US imperialism can only be undone if
its reality and costs become visible to people who would
dismantle it, if they could see it. This will not happen
on the battlefield. Rather, in papers, books, schools,
chat rooms, bar rooms, churches, dinner parties, and
eventually, election campaigns, Americans can eventually
imbibe the wisdom of the world and engage in dialogue
with people who see empire from the other side. It is
critically important to write books based on experience
outside America to sell in America; to get citizens of
the world and foreign students in America to bear
witness in public to the empire at work; and to organise
programmes for action around the world that make sense
in America but change the way Americans think. The
obstacles against all of these endeavours are formidable
and mounting.
David Ludden is a
Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania,
USA. He may be reached at http://www.history.upenn.edu/faculty/ludden.htm
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AS I SEE IT... Maverick
Over half a dozen friendly scamps from the
countryside managed to get through all the security
barriers of the House of Commons, and “stormed” the
chamber. We saw this on TV, but the Censors did not
permit us to hear what the country bumpkins had to say
to the Members present at the time. Depending on which
county or shire they had tramped from, the language used
must have been rich, and heady as rough
cider!
This rude intrusion into the
Mother of Parliaments, clearly demonstrates that the
English spirit of sportsmanship, or perhaps I should say
sportspersonship, since I believe more and more women
ride to hounds these days, has not been much diminished
in the odious environment created by New
Labour.
Surely there must be
somebody in Tony Blair’s political gang (no, not
Alastair Campbell!) capable of handling a simple PR job
of smoothing riffled feathers, wagging a warning finger,
(“Tut! Tut!”) and at least giving the impression that
they understand something of the psychology of fox
hunting. Surely urbanites should not poke their noses
into traditional country pastimes about which they
understand little, and care
less?
All urban members of
Parliament, whose constituencies are in the rural areas,
should not laugh this incident off in the bars as
another piece of “country nonsense”. The outrage is
assuming the character and size of a grave blow to
national security. A red alert is on in the Palace of
Westminster, you might say, and Mr. Peter Hain, Leader
of the House of Commons, has already hinted that a new
21st century special police task force will have to be
created, to protect the Palace of Westminster, and all
persons connected with it officially, in some form or
other, apart from members of the voting
public.
The pundits who provide the
Labour Party with political and intellectual nourishment
should see the romp on the floor of the House as a
warning to those who require rural support that they
must change their ways, and show due respect for the
freedom loving lads of meadowland, rather than
indifference to their sports and pleasures. Or else,
come the next general election, and the Labourites might
feel the jolt of seeing precious ballots going into
other boxes!
It came as no surprise
to me when Mr. Hain announced that the affair in the
House of Commons might have been the dastardly work of
al-Qaeda. And that still includes Osama bin-Laden, by
the way. The yokels from the villages are therefore, by
inference, Terrorists. Here we go again, back to the
realms of lunacy!
The matter of the
SUN’s reporter is a lurid example of the
irresponsibility and disregard for the law displayed by
certain British newspapers. Lack of interest on the part
of the Blair regime for palaces, heritage, anything in
fact connected with Great Britain’s proud past, and
certainly anything to do with the “royals” has prompted
H.R.H. Prince Charles of Wales to take an angry and
clear-cut view of the situation. The Prince announced
that he wants “military protection” for Britain’s royal
residences, two days after an “activist” dressed as
Batman scaled the walls and climbed to a parapet of
Buckingham Palace. One would have expected him to fly.
This lack of spectacular technology is very
disappointing for a publicity stunt. The edition of The
Times on 15 September reported that Prince Charles had
told friends that some members of the royal protection
squad had become complacent. The newspaper also cited a
report by a London police official which recommends the
possible use of soldiers as part of regular patrols.
Without wishing to sound over-confident in the spirit
and skills of the Military, when compared with those of
the Police in the U.K. these days, I think such a move
would be a wise one.
Some cynics
may sneer that the British officials concerned are
becoming paranoid about “security”. Use of the word
“intelligence” continues, when the word no longer has
any use or meaning, in the context of spying for
information, except where journalists and members of
M.I.5 gather for a little gup-shup, or perhaps some
political tittle-tattle, over a cup of cha, and a
communal joint.
The recent security
breaches in England have only been motivated by persons
hoping to have a little innocent fun, at the expense of
officialdom in general, which is held these days in very
low esteem by the public. It would be more beneficial
for British society, if the various branches of the Law
Enforcement Authorities got down to the serious business
of dealing effectively with crime, in all its aspects,
especially drugs trafficking, child prostitution,
thieving on the streets, and hooliganism after the pubs
close. The policy should be: Let the axe fall where the
blame lies!
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50 million cultural
creatives
changing the world?
Seema
Nusrat Amin
Lieutenant, this corpse will
not stop burning.
— Galway
Kinnel
I
began my stay in New York a year before 9/11, in an
‘alternative’, ‘artsy’ college, in a country where the
political culture seemed an apparition imagined by those
living in a bubble like Sarah Lawrence College (SLC)
within the greater bubble of
America.
Many of us were a part of
that scattering of groups that political scientist Paul
Ray in The New Political Compass found to be rooted in
the civil rights, peace, women’s liberation, spiritual
lifestyle and environmental movements of the sixties.
Ray researched the evolution of a new orientation in the
American political compass: the North. He called the new
force that could disempower the two-party system the New
Progressives, an unofficial constituency that is part of
a global trend towards a new political direction. In his
1992 book, he describes the global trend as being set by
the ‘50 Million Cultural Creatives Who Are Changing the
World’. He characterises them as ‘In-front, Deep Green,
Against Big Business and Globalisation, and Beyond Left
vs. Right’.
My experience at
Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Quebec City and
other sites of large rallies, marches and gatherings,
supports the existence of substantial
anti-globalisation, anti-poverty, immigrants’ rights and
anti-sweatshop and prison movements within America. The
politicised minority (as I see them, although Ray
designates them as 36% of voters in the 2000 elections)
that constitutes these groups do not suffer the amnesia
that accounts for much of the depoliticisation of many
Americans. They have withstood the myth of innocence
that has acted like a painkiller against charges of
American neo-imperialism, blurring the mirror the Global
South holds up to Uncle Sam. As memory-revivers of
Vietnam and the global, nefarious effects of the Reagan
years, they have a high tolerance for the combination
drugs of bootstrap economics, Statue of Liberty
sentimentality, narrow localism and
consumerism.
The evolution of left
issues into what Ray calls ‘north’ issues is largely
post-modern (that is, separate from the modern liberal
left of American politics and modern communism) and very
green (that is, planet-focussed).
I
remember that in the November, 2000 elections a great
number of the student body voted for Nader, although
quite a few decided ‘none of the above’ which is what
Paul Ray would explain as a sign, not of the ‘political
alienated’, but of the unsatisfied New Progressives. I
remember one classmate warning the Naderites that Bush
would win if they took votes away from Gore. He was not
a ‘socialist’ by any means and he might not fall into
the ‘north’ of Ray’s political compass; he was not an
altruistic volunteer or very green, he was an
individualistic artist. But he had that which was
lacking in many Americans: a cultivated distaste for
what Bush stood for in American
politics.
Bush was instinctively —
that is aesthetically — not pleasing to him. Of course
Bush did not need the help of the Naderites and it was
the word on the street at SLC that in his first term in
office he had taken the presidency at Florida, although
it took years before the scandal about repressing the
black vote was slowly revealed in its complexity. Ani De
Franco, a popular Indie-girl rocker, supported Nader.
The politics of style and the success of the sixties in
merging ‘cool’ with ‘alternative’, mingled with the
politics of substance intimately within the alternative
youth movement at large. However both Ani and that
classmate who voted for Gore simply to prevent Bush from
winning could be seen as Cultural Creatives being
stretched in 2000 to figure out a way to work within the
voting system.
Ray believes that in
2000 the Creatives were divided, a critical mass of
dissatisfied voters: dissatisfied with the two-party
system, unable to decide on the third party’s (Green)
intentions, and capable of creating a fourth party if
awakened to their existence as a
constituency.
However in 2000 I
felt what Ray admits, that this potential constituency
was not necessarily self-aware as part of a radical 50
million and were dissatisfied without a clear
orientation or direction. They form a part of those
altruistic volunteer and activist groups you can find in
most major cosmopolitan cities in America, that could be
disorienting as a result of the great variety and
specificity of their issues, and the chant of
‘solidarity’ but the appearance of
fragmentation.
I can only affirm
that all these progressive tendencies existed in 2000.
Tracy Chapman’s song, “They’re talking about a
revolution, sounds like a whisper”, was related to the
anti-poverty movement built around welfare and
homelessness issues. The Palestinian movement was
gaining momentum and the largest ever protest was to
occur in September, 2001 but was derailed, of course.
There is truth in the slogan that the seeds of
post-modern, decentralised revolutions ‘would not be
televised’. Although strangely enough, one of the
hallmarks of this ‘revolution’ is often claimed as
Seattle, where media attention accounted for a large
part of its importance.
As for
leadership, there were the a few scattered intellectuals
like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and well-known
alternative media icons like Amy Goodman. But talking
about political culture still felt like speaking of an
absence in 2000. The ghosts of those leaders of the
black independence and Native American movements loomed,
in absence from historical memory, or in a presence
behind bars. What was alive was a culture of
misrepresentation and marginalisation of these leaders
and groups labelled ‘anarchists’, conspiracy theorists,
anti-Semites, tree-huggers and so
on.
I don’t know if all the
dispersed groups could have come together in the way
that they did in Washington and in almost every big city
in America against Bush and his agenda after
9/11.
I could not have predicted
that the metaphorical vacuum I was sensitive to as a
child of the ‘fourth world’ would become tangible by an
actual vacuum: that burning, cindered space of Ground
Zero.
Throughout Bush’s reign those
misrepresented groups and marginalised leaders suddenly
rose from a mere constant muffle. They became a loud
antidote to the loud and simplistic speeches of Bush, in
forums like Znet.org, alternative radio programmes like
Democracy Now, and countless college debates. Michael
Moore is a symbol of the greater reach of the new
platform from which such intellectuals, artists and
activists could begin the rapid education and
integration of those potential Cultural Creatives as
well as a suddenly politically sensitive mainstream
America. The success and reach of Internet essays like
“The Algebra of Infinite Justice” and movies like
Fahrenheit 9/11 are gauges of temperature as well as
more fuel for the fire.
And the
space that was necessary for that voice to be heard, as
it has been, was created by the symbolic corpse that
started burning 9/11: the corpse is the cracked face of
America, the remedy to which was being offered by Bush
on one hand and the New Progressives on the
other.
If America was a kind of
Brave New World, in which only a few were not
conditioned, then the 1984 upside-down, in-your-face
Bush regime cracked the etherised mirror (that the world
holds up to Uncle Sam) for those that the dissatisfied
Cultural Creatives reached out to. Nothing like a
direct, overt war on the world and on the environment to
explain the distance Ray’s Creatives have walked from a
fragmented potential 50 million to the millions able to
hear, see or know of the half a million Americans who
marched against the Republican National Convention on
August 29 this year in Manhattan. That globe with the
sign, “The World is Watching”, which was the largest
prop in the march, represents a subterranean message
coming out in the frontline with the help of umbrella
groups like United For Peace and
Justice.
It did not occur to me
then as clearly as it does now, but that political
instinct of my wary classmate back in 2000 would be the
first victory of any attempt at politicisation, at
education. A smart slogan, an intelligent march, is
actually a daunting challenge. In some ways 9/11 has
been a great opportunity for acquiring that instinctive
linking of the aesthetically displeasing right with the
substance of their repugnant agenda through not only
smart slogans and intelligent marches but intense
Internet networking.
The corpse
that began burning is the battleground for two polar
sets of equations. One, the familiar security — war. The
other, the Bush Plagued System. Activists knew the space
was up for grabs: Bush only had the monopoly on ears the
day after 9/11; ever since then we haven’t stopped
talking against his tide, and creating our
own.
The year Iraq happened I was
in Paris, watching some of the French gasp at the
crudeness with which Bush spoke of adjoining ‘might’ and
‘right’. What a French author discovered was that his
smugness spoke to Americans because it came from a pool
of ‘innocence’ that Americans draw from. Their inability
to see a tragedy as such, by dramatising it immediately
through war and the media (not to mention consumer
products of patriotism), was a key to understanding the
way the corpse was burning for a significant part of
America.
Much of the North and Left
recognised ‘sublimation’ for what it was immediately;
and many also immediately recognised that the fight for
the minds of Americans was to be won by one who could
revive memory, speak truth to a false sense of
innocence. At SLC, in the first forum we called CAUR
(Coalition against Unjust Retaliation) immediately
following Bush’s ultimatum of war, all the various
minority groups and political groups read out a list of
atrocities the US had committed in recent years against
numerous countries. The point was not to justify wrong
with wrong, but link what Senator John McCain could not
link in his speech at the RNC. “Who America is” and
“What we have done wrong” is intimately linked. The task
of political culture has ever been to show that the
system or one of its vital parts is plagued, and Bush is
the face of a plagued America, not merely her ‘bad
side’.
The task of the already
self-aware Cultural Creatives, as I see it now, is to
clarify the dangers of the Big-Business and
War-Mongering Right Coalition, personified in Bush, as
both aesthetically and intrinsically repugnant. The same
slogans (No more Blood for Oil, No Justice no Peace, and
Down with the Military Industrial Complex) were not as
powerful as they are now, after two wars, the Patriot
Act, the immigrant round-ups, Guantanamo and Abu
Ghraib.
The Cultural Creatives have
tried a hundred things, from theatre to the town hall
and legal process, from visions explained simply (as you
can find the UFPJ website) to complicated, large
meetings.
The night has become
infinitely darker due to 9/11, but the shadow-wounded
have come to keep pace with that night. And perhaps, as
a result of the evolution of political culture, from a
seeming absence, the 50 million might just recognise
each other on the streets, and in the great street of
the Internet where their slow revolutions are radically
recorded. In many ways, the lack of political maturity
prior to 9/11 has made all this too late. But, for all
the pessimism I left America with in May, 2004, in the
wake of the revelations of torture in Iraq, watching the
process of Americans redefining their country (beyond
political innocence and wealth) — on the streets and in
the halls — has made Paul Ray’s compass seem real.
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Note by Tomdispatch.com editor
Tom Engelhardth, a co-founder of The American Empire
Project, consulting editor at Metopolitan Books and a
teaching fellow at the journalism school of the
University of California, Berekley, USA : In
Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky suggested that our
leaders, facing the choice in the book’s title, might
well opt for hegemony over survival. “There is ample
historical precedent,” he wrote, “for the willingness of
leaders to threaten or resort to violence in the face of
significant risk of catastrophe. But the stakes are far
higher today. The choice between hegemony and survival
has rarely, if ever, been so starkly
posed.”
Thanks to the
declassification and release (by The National Security
Archive) of documents related to America’s first Single
Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), developed in 1960,
we now know just how true this was over four decades
ago. What we know, in fact, is that our military high
command had laid out, and our top civilian leadership
approved, a plan for the possible launching of a first
strike meant to deliver over 3,200 nuclear weapons to
1,060 targets in the then-Communist world. Had all gone
well, at least 130 cities would have simply ceased to
exist. Official (classified) estimates of casualties
from such an attack ran to 285 million dead and 40
million injured — and some military men feared that the
lethal effects of fallout on the United States itself
from such an apocalyptic attack might be devastating.
Given the underestimation of those fallout effects at
the time, such an attack might indeed have meant, in a
world of bizarre imperial conundrums, hegemony rather
than survival. As it happens, we’ve had a SIOP ever
since and still have one today. But what kind of an
instrument of overkill it may be remains highly
classified.
The paperback version
of Hegemony or Survival, America’s Quest for Global
Dominance (part of The American Empire Project series)
has just been released with a new afterword by Chomsky
in which he returns to the subject of dominion and our
fate. He considers ways in which the Bush
administration’s elevation of force as a principle above
all else has driven up the levels of terrorism, of
violence, and of danger to our long-term survival. It
should not be missed — and neither should the book.
Shortened and slightly adapted, the afterword appears
below.
The Resort to Force
Noam
Chomsky
As Colin Powell explained the
National Security Strategy (NSS) of September 2002 to a
hostile audience at the World Economic Forum, Washington
has a ``sovereign right to use force to defend
ourselves’’ from nations that possess WMD and cooperate
with terrorists, the official pretexts for invading
Iraq. The collapse of the pretexts is well known, but
there has been insufficient attention to its most
important consequence: the NSS was effectively revised
to lower the bars to aggression. The need to establish
ties to terror was quietly dropped. More significant,
Bush and colleagues declared the right to resort to
force even if a country does not have WMD or even
programmes to develop them. It is sufficient that it
have the ``intent and ability’’ to do so. Just about
every country has the ability, and intent is in the eye
of the beholder. The official doctrine, then, is that
anyone is subject to overwhelming attack. Colin Powell
carried the revision even a step further. The president
was right to attack Iraq because Saddam not only had
``intent and capability’’ but had ``actually used such
horrible weapons against his enemies in Iran and against
his own people’’ –– with continuing support from Powell
and his associates, he failed to add, following the
usual convention. Condoleezza Rice gave a similar
version. With such reasoning as this, who is exempt from
attack? Small wonder that, as one Reuters report put it,
``if Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein in the dock, they
want his former American allies shackled beside
him.’’
In the desperate flailing to
contrive justifications as one pretext after another
collapsed, the obvious reason for the invasion was
conspicuously evaded by the administration and
commentators: to establish the first secure military
bases in a client state right at the heart of the
world’s major energy resources, understood since World
War II to be a ``stupendous source of strategic power’’
and expected to become even more important in the
future. There should have been little surprise at
revelations that the administration intended to attack
Iraq before 9/11, and downgraded the ``war on terror’’
in favour of this objective. In internal discussion,
evasion is unnecessary. Long before they took office,
the private club of reactionary statists had recognised
that ``the need for a substantial American force
presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime
of Saddam Hussein.’’ With all the vacillations of policy
since the current incumbents first took office in 1981,
one guiding principle remains stable: the Iraqi people
must not rule Iraq.
The 2002
National Security Strategy, and its implementation in
Iraq, are widely regarded as a watershed in
international affairs. ``The new approach is
revolutionary,’’ Henry Kissinger wrote, approving of the
doctrine but with tactical reservations and a crucial
qualification: it cannot be ``a universal principle
available to every nation.’’ The right of aggression is
to be reserved for the US and perhaps its chosen
clients. We must reject the most elementary of moral
truisms, the principle of universality — a stand usually
concealed in professions of virtuous intent and tortured
legalisms.
Arthur Schlesinger
agreed that the doctrine and implementation were
``revolutionary,’’ but from a quite different
standpoint. As the first bombs fell on Baghdad, he
recalled FDR’s words following the bombing of Pearl
Harbor, ``a date which will live in infamy.’’ Now it is
Americans who live in infamy, he wrote, as their
government adopts the policies of imperial Japan. He
added that George Bush had converted a ``global wave of
sympathy’’ for the US into a ``global wave of hatred of
American arrogance and militarism.’’ A year later,
``discontent with America and its policies had
intensified rather than diminished.’’ Even in Britain
support for the war had declined by a
third.
As predicted, the war
increased the threat of terror. Middle East expert Fawaz
Gerges found it ``simply unbelievable how the war has
revived the appeal of a global jihadi Islam that was in
real decline after 9/11.’’ Recruitment for the al-Qaeda
networks increased, while Iraq itself became a
``terrorist haven’’ for the first time. Suicide attacks
for the year 2003 reached the highest level in modern
times; Iraq suffered its first since the thirteenth
century. Substantial specialist opinion concluded that
the war also led to the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction.
As the anniversary of
the invasion approached, New York’s Grand Central
Station was patrolled by police with submachine guns, a
reaction to the March 11 Madrid train bombings that
killed 200 people in Europe’s worst terrorist crime. A
few days later, the Spanish electorate voted out the
government that had gone to war despite overwhelming
popular opposition. Spaniards were condemned for
appeasing terrorism by voting for withdrawing troops
from Iraq in the absence of UN authorization — that is,
for taking a stand rather like that of 70 per cent of
Americans, who called for the UN to take the leading
role in Iraq.
Bush assured
Americans that ``The world is safer today because, in
Iraq, our coalition ended a regime that cultivated ties
to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction.’’
The president’s handlers know that every word is false,
but they also know that lies can become Truth, if
repeated insistently enough.
There
is broad agreement among specialists on how to reduce
the threat of terror — keeping here to the subcategory
that is doctrinally acceptable, their terror against us
–– and also on how to incite terrorist atrocities, which
may become truly horrendous. The consensus is well
articulated by Jason Burke in his study of the al-Qaeda
phenomenon, the most detailed and informed investigation
of this loose array of radical Islamists for whom
bin-Laden is hardly more than a symbol (a more dangerous
one after he is killed, perhaps, becoming a martyr who
inspires others to join his cause). The role of
Washington’s current incumbents, in their Reaganite
phase, in creating the radical Islamist networks is well
known. Less familiar is their tolerance of Pakistan’s
slide toward radical Islamist extremism and its
development of nuclear weapons.
As
Burke reviews, Clinton’s 1998 bombings of Sudan and
Afghanistan created bin-Laden as a symbol, forged close
relations between him and the Taliban, and led to a
sharp increase in support, recruitment, and financing
for al-Qaeda, which until then was virtually unknown.
The next major contribution to the growth of al-Qaeda
and the prominence of bin-Laden was Bush’s bombing of
Afghanistan following September 11, undertaken without
credible pretext as later quietly conceded. As a result,
bin-Laden’s message ``spread among tens of millions of
people, particularly the young and angry, around the
world,’’ Burke writes, reviewing the increase in global
terror and the creation of ``a whole new cadre of
terrorists’’ enlisted in what they see as a ``cosmic
struggle between good and evil,’’ a vision shared by
bin-Laden and Bush. As noted, the invasion of Iraq had
the same effect.
Citing many
examples, Burke concludes that ``Every use of force is
another small victory for bin-Laden,’’ who ``is
winning,’’ whether he lives or dies. Burke’s assessment
is widely shared by many analysts, including former
heads of Israeli military intelligence and the General
Security Services.
There is also a
broad consensus on what the proper reaction to terrorism
should be. It is two-pronged: directed at the terrorists
themselves and at the reservoir of potential support.
The appropriate response to terrorist crimes is police
work, which has been successful worldwide. More
important is the broad constituency the terrorists — who
see themselves as a vanguard — seek to mobilise,
including many who hate and fear them but nevertheless
see them as fighting for a just cause. We can help the
vanguard mobilise this reservoir of support by violence,
or can address the ``myriad grievances,’’ many
legitimate, that are ``the root causes of modern Islamic
militancy.’’ That can significantly reduce the threat of
terror, and should be undertaken independently of this
goal.
Violence can succeed, as
Americans know well from the conquest of the national
territory. But at terrible cost. It can also provoke
violence in response, and often does. Inciting terror is
not the only illustration. Others are even more
hazardous.
In February 2004, Russia
carried out its largest military exercises in two
decades, prominently exhibiting advanced WMD. Russian
generals and Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov announced
that they were responding to Washington’s plans ``to
make nuclear weapons an instrument of solving military
tasks,’’ including its development of new low-yield
nuclear weapons, ``an extremely dangerous tendency that
is undermining global and regional stability,...
lowering the threshold for actual use.’’ Strategic
analyst Bruce Blair writes that Russia is well aware
that the new ``bunker busters’’ are designed to target
the ``high-level nuclear command bunkers’’ that control
its nuclear arsenal. Ivanov and Russian generals report
that in response to US escalation they are deploying
``the most advanced state-of-the-art missile in the
world,’’ perhaps next to impossible to destroy,
something that ``would be very alarming to the
Pentagon,’’ says former Assistant Defence Secretary Phil
Coyle. US analysts suspect that Russia may also be
duplicating US development of a hypersonic cruise
vehicle that can re-enter the atmosphere from space and
launch devastating attacks without warning, part of US
plans to reduce reliance on overseas bases or negotiated
access to air routes.
US analysts
estimate that Russian military expenditures have tripled
during the Bush-Putin years, in large measure a
predicted reaction to the Bush administration’s
militancy and aggressiveness. Putin and Ivanov cited the
Bush doctrine of ``preemptive strike’’ –– the
``revolutionary’’ new doctrine of the National Security
Strategy –– but also ``added a key detail, saying that
military force can be used if there is an attempt to
limit Russia’s access to regions that are essential to
its survival,’’ thus adapting for Russia the Clinton
doctrine that the US is entitled to resort to
``unilateral use of military power’’ to ensure
``uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies,
and strategic resources.’’ The world ``is a much more
insecure place’’ now that Russia has decided to follow
the US lead, said Fiona Hill of the Brookings
Institution, adding that other countries presumably
``will follow suit.’’
In the past,
Russian automated response systems have come within a
few minutes of launching a nuclear strike, barely
aborted by human intervention. By now the systems have
deteriorated. US systems, which are much more reliable,
are nevertheless extremely hazardous. They allow three
minutes for human judgment after computers warn of a
missile attack, as they frequently do. The Pentagon has
also found serious flaws in its computer security
systems that might allow terrorist hackers to seize
control and simulate a launch –– ``an accident waiting
to happen,’’ Bruce Blair writes. The dangers are being
consciously escalated by the threat and use of
violence.
Concern is not eased by
the recent discovery that US presidents have been
``systematically misinformed’’ about the effects of
nuclear war. The level of destruction has been
``severely underestimated’’ because of lack of
systematic oversight of the ``insulated bureaucracies’’
that provide analyses of ``limited and `winnable’
nuclear war’’; the resulting ``institutional myopia can
be catastrophic,’’ far more so than the manipulation of
intelligence on Iraq.
The Bush
administration slated the initial deployment of a
missile defence system for summer 2004, a move
criticised as ``completely political,’’ employing
untested technology at great expense. A more appropriate
criticism is that the system might seem workable; in the
logic of nuclear war, what counts is perception. Both US
planners and potential targets regard missile defence as
a first-strike weapon, intended to provide more freedom
for aggression, including nuclear attack. And they know
how the US responded to Russia’s deployment of a very
limited ABM system in 1968: by targeting the system with
nuclear weapons to ensure that it would be instantly
overwhelmed. Analysts warn that current US plans will
also provoke a Chinese reaction. History and the logic
of deterrence ``remind us that missile defence systems
are potent drivers of offensive nuclear planning,’’ and
the Bush initiative will again raise the threat to
Americans and to the world.
China’s
reaction may set off a ripple effect through India,
Pakistan, and beyond. In West Asia, Washington is
increasing the threat posed by Israel’s nuclear weapons
and other WMD by providing Israel with more than one
hundred of its most advanced jet bombers, accompanied by
prominent announcements that the bombers can reach Iran
and return and are an advanced version of the US planes
Israel used to destroy an Iraqi reactor in 1981. The
Israeli press adds that the US is providing the Israeli
air force with ```special’ weaponry.’’ There can be
little doubt that Iranian and other intelligence
services are watching closely and perhaps giving a
worst-case analysis: that these may be nuclear weapons.
The leaks and dispatch of the aircraft may be intended
to rattle the Iranian leadership, perhaps to provoke
some action that can be used as a pretext for an
attack.
Immediately after the
National Security Strategy was announced in September
2002, the US moved to terminate negotiations on an
enforceable bioweapons treaty and to block international
efforts to ban biowarfare and the militarisation of
space. A year later, at the UN General Assembly, the US
voted alone against implementation of the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty and alone, with its new ally India,
against steps toward the elimination of nuclear weapons.
The US voted alone against ``observance of environmental
norms’’ in disarmament and arms control agreements and
alone, with Israel and Micronesia, against steps to
prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East –– the
pretext for invading Iraq. A resolution to prevent
militarisation of space passed 174 to 0, with four
abstentions: US, Israel, Micronesia, and the Marshall
Islands. As discussed earlier, a negative US vote or
abstention amounts to a double veto: the resolution is
blocked and is eliminated from reporting and
history.
Bush planners know as well
as others that the resort to force increases the threat
of terror, and that their militaristic and aggressive
posture and actions provoke reactions that increase the
risk of catastrophe. They do not desire these outcomes,
but assign them low priority in comparison to the
international and domestic agendas they make little
attempt to conceal.
Source:
TomDispatch.com, September 16, 2004, on the Net.
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