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CounterPunch
November
15, 2002
FRONTIER
JUSTICE
From TR to Bush
by TOM BARRY
"Warlike intervention by civilized
powers would contribute directly to the peace of the world."
This type of bellicose formulation of U.S. foreign
policy could have easily come from any member of Bush's foreign
policy team. One thinks first of the hawks like Paul Wolfowitz,
Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, or Richard Perle. But it could
just as easily have been a statement by the president himself
or by the moderate conservatives like Colin Powell or Richard
Armitage when referring to U.S. plans to wage war on Iraq.
This "war for peace" doctrine,
however, came from the U.S. president whom neoconservatives honor
as America's model of an "internationalist" president:
Teddy Roosevelt--the hero who led the famous charge up "San
Juan Hill" in Cuba and championed the Spanish-American War
of 1898, which made the U.S. an imperial power with territorial
possessions around the world. Here was a man who was unapologetic
about power and its uses. "All the great masterful races
have been fighting races," boasted Roosevelt, "And
no triumph of peace is quite so great as the triumphs of war."
Any attempt to understand the ideology
and the type of frontier justice that distinguishes U.S. foreign
policy today will fall short if it does not keep in mind the
heroes of the ideologues and enforcers of the Bush foreign policy.
Beginning in the 1970s, neoconservative groups, like the Committee
on the Present Danger, started criticizing mainstream scholars
of international relations for their purported misrepresentation
of the history of U.S. internationalism. America's true internationalism
is not the liberal variety advanced by Presidents Woodrow Wilson
and Franklin Roosevelt, they have argued, but the conservative,
interventionist internationalism of Teddy Roosevelt. Today, the
neoconservatives include Ronald Reagan in their models of conservative
internationalists. At the same time, the neoconservatives who
have set the foreign policy agenda of this administration also
rail against the proponents of "realism" in international
relations. They contend that U.S. foreign policy needs to have
a "moral clarity" (a pet phrase of the conservative
camp), and shouldn't be based just on strictly defined national
or economists interests, as the realists would have it.
The Bush foreign policy team has been
champing at the bit to get on with the foreign policy agenda
laid out in the 1990s by groups like the American Enterprise
Institute, Hudson Institute, Center for Security Policy, and
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). These and other
right-wing think-tanks and policy institutes believe that George
W.'s father and Clinton squandered the opportunity to fashion
a truly global U.S. hegemony or imperium in the 1990s. High on
the list of priorities for the interventionist agenda of the
conservative internationalists is overthrowing Saddam Hussein--a
case of a U.S. foreign policy objective where moral clarity partners
with U.S. national interest, namely controlling a major source
of oil.
The White House's National Security Strategy
of the United States, released September 2002, briefly outlines
the new Bush foreign policy doctrine of global military domination
and interventionism. But the full scope and ambition of the Bush
foreign and military policy is more comprehensively laid out
in a book called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American
Foreign and Defense Policy produced by the Project for the New
American Century in 2000. In this edited volume by PNAC founders
Robert Kagan and William Kristol, one can find what amounts to
a blueprint for the current objectives of U.S. global engagement.
Nonstate terrorism is given short shrift in the book, which includes
chapters written by such current top foreign policy team players
as Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and Peter Rodman.
It's a call for a doctrine of frontier
justice in which the top gun--the U.S.--saddles up and hustles
together a posse to pursue bandits and rogues. According to the
conservative internationalists, like Paul Wolfowitz, we "must
descend from the realm of general principles to the making of
specific decisions." While laws, judges, and trials are
what we "want for our domestic political process ... foreign
policy decisions cannot be subject to that kind of rule of law."
PNAC's Present Dangers apparently functions
as a playbook for the Bush administration. In his chapter on
the Middle East, Elliott Abrams lays out the "peace through
strength" credo that has become the operating principle
of this administration. "Our military strength and willingness
to use it will remain a key factor in our ability to promote
peace," wrote Abrams, who is the administration's National
Security Council Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights,
and International Operations. Like the other PNAC principals,
Abrams calls for a preemptive "toppling of Saddam Hussein."
Strengthening our major ally in the region, Israel, should be
the base of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit
the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly
uphold U.S. policy in the region, according to Abrams.
Under a heading labeled "Regime
Change" in the introductory chapter, Kristol and Kagan target
Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and China as challengers that need to
be confronted. With respect to Iraq and North Korea, the two
PNAC founders conclude that U.S. "preeminence" in the
21st century cannot rest on "simply wish[ing] hostile regimes
out of existence." They warn that the U.S. will have "to
intervene abroad even when we cannot prove that a narrowly construed
'vital interest' of the United States is at stake."
This is precisely why the Bush administration
is having such a difficult time explaining why it is on the war
path against Iraq. The arguments made by the Pentagon, State
Department, and White House about the Iraqi regime's support
for international terrorism, its obstruction of UN inspections,
or its repressive character don't go to the heart of their agenda--namely
to effect "regime change" in all countries that constitute
a challenge--real or potential--to the American "imperium,"
with their control of essential global resources and its global
military domination.
The Bush administration contends, like
Teddy Roosevelt, that U.S. war-making is a strike for peace.
Writing during the last presidential campaign, Kagan and Kristol
called for a new foreign policy based on the principles of superior
military power and conservative internationalism. "Conservative
internationalists," they said, "...are the true heirs
to a tradition in American foreign policy that runs from Theodore
Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan." Fortunately, most of the
international community and growing numbers of Americans reject
the revival of 19th century gunboat diplomacy as an appropriate
manifestation of 21st century internationalism.
Tom Barry
is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric
Resource Center and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus.)
He can be reached at: tom@irc-online.org.
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November 10,
2002
Ali Abunimah
Sharon's
Appendix
M. Shahid
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Political Geography
Zionist Theses and Anti-Theses
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Personal Possession:
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Ralph Nader
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Robert Fisk
Bush's "Clean Shot"
Dave Marsh
And the Beat(ing) Goes On
Adam Engel
No Blood for Marijuana in Iraq
Josh Frank
Sleater-Kinney
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Zeynep Toufe
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Philip Farruggio
In Name Only
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Mountain Party Rising!
Bernard, Krieger, Alam
Poets'Basement
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