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CounterPunch
January
10, 2003
Behind
the Power Curve: Bush's Epitaph?
Lost in the Folds of Iraq and
North Korea
By BILL CHRISTISON
former CIA political
analyst
A few decades ago, a cliché invaded Washington's
bureaucracies. It was a cliché that many of us self-decreed
sophisticates in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment came to
use, and then shamelessly overuse, to belittle anyone (sometimes
a superior, more often a competitor in another agency) who happened
to disagree with the one's own views. Low-voiced comments about
this or that #$&* SOB being "way behind the power curve"
filtered into government conference rooms, dining rooms, and
even hallways. Until it succumbed to parody from the crescendo
of overuse, this was truly a multi-purpose cliché. It
sounded so good that some of us would, pompously and with just
the right profession of cynicism and self-deprecation, apply
it in a less insulting way to ourselves. As in, "We can't
afford to fall behind the power curve on this one [i.e., any
issue that seemed important at the moment], so here's what I
think we ought to do."
The "power curve" itself normally
went undefined, but the very word "power" elicited,
as was intended, knowing nods and narrowed eyes suggesting that
most users or hearers of the cliché, at least those who
valued their positions in the bureaucracy, wished to be seen
as hard pragmatists with a lesser interest in "unrealistic"
ethics, morals, or principles. Not surprisingly, the dominance
of this cliché coincided with the early 1970s, the last
years of the Nixon administration.
Today there are grounds for hope that
the Bush administration itself is already falling irretrievably
behind the power curve of its own amoral and unprincipled pragmatism.
The immediate reason for such hope arises from the embarrassment
and bumbling inside the administration over the inconsistencies
between U.S. policies toward Iraq on the one hand and toward
North Korea on the other. We need to look at recent history to
see why recent events concerning North Korea, assuming they are
ultimately resolved without an East Asian nuclear holocaust,
should be seen as a positive development by those of us who want
peace and justice in the Middle East as well as in East Asia
in the next few decades, rather than more wars initiated by the
United States.
Early in 2001, far-right, hawkish, and
violence-prone governments took power at roughly the same time
in both the U.S. and Israel. The leaders of the two new governments
had already developed a very good personal and political chemistry
with each other. The events of September 11 further strengthened
the ties between them as they became ever-firmer allies in the
War on Terrorism and quickly agreed on each other's highly selective
definitions of who were terrorists and evil-doers (and who were
not). A few months later, Bush lumped Iraq, Iran, and North Korea
into an Axis of Evil in his January 2002 state-of-the-union address
to Congress. Then, egged on by Vice President Cheney, Secretary
of Defense Rumsfeld, and a small but very influential group of
pro-Likud neo-cons scattered through the administration, as well
as by U.S. Christian fundamentalist leaders who solidly support
both Bush's and the Sharon government's present policies, the
president spent much of the year 2002 ratcheting up the pressures
for war against Iraq. Actually, the neo-con officials in the
U.S. and Likud leaders in Israel have been pressing for the ouster
of the present Iraqi government for the past decade.
On the issue of Iraq, disagreement within
the administration, largely from Secretary of State Powell and
a few former officials like Brent Scowcroft, has slowed the Bush
drive toward war since the early fall of 2002. But so far at
least, Powell has been willing to confront Bush only on the issue
of unilateralism. Right now, the odds on what will happen over
the next month or two run something like this.
First, there is a tiny chance that in
response to a low-key Arab campaign, Saddam Hussein will take
up a proposal that he resign and accept sanctuary in some Arab
land. The U.S. conceivably could then decide it was impossible
to go to war. Not a good bet.
Second, a larger but still pretty minuscule
chance exists that a successful coup attempt against Saddam will
take place and bring about regime change, thus putting off at
least temporarily Washington's need for war.
Third, a considerably greater but still
less than fifty-fifty chance exists that the current inspection
scenario will play out to an impasse in which so many of the
nations now on the U.N. Security Council will refuse to support
the U.S., and Colin Powell will oppose Bush so strongly, that
Bush himself will back off and at least postpone a war for some
months or an entire year.
Fourth and most likely (here the odds
are definitely greater then fifty-fifty), the Bush administration
will start a war against Iraq in the next 30 to 50 days.
So how is it possible to have any optimism
about this situation? Just look at where we stand. The Bush administration
really wants this war against Iraq for reasons in no way altruistic:
reasons having to do (1) with oil, (2) with the U.S. drive for
global domination, and (3) with Israel (in the belief, first,
that getting rid of Saddam Hussein will enhance Israel's position
in the Middle East and, second, that supporting the Sharon government's
own strong desire for the war will also strengthen Bush's domestic
2004 reelection bid). Bush does not want to talk about any of
these factors, and above all he certainly does not want to advertise
the fact that he desires a war in part because the present leadership
of Israel wants it. Instead, the Bush administration has essentially
lied to the American people and the rest of the world by trying
to sell the war on two other grounds that Bush himself almost
certainly regards as less important: the need for Iraq to disarm
and give up all weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and an alleged
desire to turn Iraq into a democracy. Particularly on disarmament,
the administration has carried out for months an intense propaganda
operation to persuade people that this is THE issue we must be
ready to kill for and to launch a preemptive war over.
How, you might ask, could preventing
the further spread of WMD, particularly nuclear weapons, around
the world be considered by anyone in his right mind a "less
important" issue?
The answer is quite simple. Except as
a propaganda tool, every U.S. administration since Harry Truman's
has in practice made the spread of nuclear weapons, the
major type of WMD, a less important issue than the short-term
perceived needs of U.S. national security. That's close to 58
years now. No administration has ever been willing even to discuss
giving up the United States' own nuclear weapons. In these same
years, however, most U.S. leaders and practically every American
foreign policy or intelligence "expert" who ever worked
on the nuclear-proliferation issue understood that, given this
cast-in-concrete U.S. policy, preventing the further spread of
such weapons among either friends or foes over the long run was
impossible. The result is that over the past half-century, the
U.S. has badly botched, and been completely hypocritical about,
its alleged policy of opposing nuclear proliferation. The administrations
of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who made the most noise against
proliferation, are regarded by the Arab and Muslim worlds as
the most hypocritical of all, because they acquiesced in Israel's
acquisition of nuclear weapons during the 1960s.
Let's move nearer to the present. As
early as March 2001, the Bush administration went through a phase
of blaming Russia for helping other nations to obtain nuclear
weapons. On the 23rd of that month, Donald Rumsfeld stated on
national television, "Let's be very honest about what Russia
is doing. Russia is an active proliferator. They are part of
the problem. They are selling and assisting countries like Iran
and North Korea and India with these technologies which are threatening
other people, including the United States"
Russia continues to this day providing
aid to Iran, and U.S. criticism of Russia for doing so also continues,
although since September 11 the rhetoric has cooled because Moscow
is now Bush's good ally in the War on Terror. But such statements
as Rumsfeld's have made a very unfavorable impression in nations
that do not entirely support U.S. policies. They believe the
United States itself has been an "active proliferator"
since World War II, most particularly with respect to Israel.
Rumsfeld and most U.S. policymakers, past and present, seem not
to understand how profoundly mistrusted we are because of our
lenient attitude toward Israel's nuclear capability. Many other
nations will never accept a status quo that perpetuates
Israeli possession of nuclear weapons and at the same time prevents
them from ever acquiring such weapons. They will always be suspicious
that the U.S. really opposes nuclear proliferation only for its
enemies, while acting too often as a hidden enabler of proliferation
for its friends.
This entire confusing mess has finally
come home to roost at the beginning of 2003. The U.S. has spent
years pursuing inconsistent policies on proliferation, in practice
downgrading the importance of the issue while noisily playing
up its importance in propaganda. And the propaganda volume control
has been turned to the very maximum in order to obfuscate the
real reasons why the administration wants war with Iraq.
Now, just as crunch-time is arriving
for Iraq, along comes North Korea to embarrass the big, hypocritical
bully and ramp up quiet eruptions of what must be very satisfying
schadenfreude in more nations of the world than Washington
can easily count. It's not worth bothering even to discuss the
weird statements coming out of Rome on the Potomac that attempt
to explain why we cannot use our shiny new preemptive war strategy
on North Korea right now, even though in military terms that
nation would appear to be a considerably greater danger than
Iraq to its own neighbors and even to the U.S. None of the arguments
swirling around Washington address in a meaningful way the most
important points we should be talking about.
The first point that needs more discussion
is that, even if the U.S. quickly and successfully polishes off
Iraq, in an immediate military sense anyway, and then a few weeks
later goes and does the same to North Korea, the world has already
seen the most aggressive U.S. administration since Teddy Roosevelt
blink, and blink big time. The perceived value and reliability
of the U.S. as a protective shield against potential enemies
of our allies will inevitably diminish. In this regard, think
immediately of Japan and Taiwan, which look on the U.S. as a
shield against both North Korea and, more importantly, China.
Think also, in a somewhat longer time frame, of other Southeast
Asian countries from Thailand to Australia that might question
the "stayability" of the U.S. Whatever else happens,
a sea-change is probable in the U.S. relationship with Asia.
(But think too of positive changes, both in Asia and elsewhere,
that might be more likely to emerge over time than seemed possible
even a few weeks ago. A multipolar world has its pluses.)
The second point to be aware of is that,
if the stalemate between North Korea and the U.S. drags on for
more than a few weeks, other nations in the world will see even
greater value in having their own nuclear weapons, and perhaps
also other types of WMD. The Bush administration can argue all
it wants that it does not have to hurry in solving the North
Korean problem. Its arguments will be nonsense. Each week that
passes will to some degree increase the likelihood that one nation
or another, or even some subnational group, will initiate or
expand a WMD program. At a minimum, nuclear weapons alone will
have made it possible for North Korea to stand up to the U.S.
for a longer period than most of us up to now would have thought
possible.
(At the unthinkable opposite extreme,
of course, if either side should actually use nuclear weapons
in an effort to resolve this confrontation between the U.S. and
North Korea, the long-term results would be completely unpredictable.
The only useful thing one can say about this contingency is that
the U.S. should not start any conventional military action that
might lead to the use of nuclear weapons, and it categorically
should never be the first to use nuclear weapons.)
A third point: North Korea has made it
clearer than ever that in a world of nation-states, the only
world we'll have for some time to come, small countries are increasingly
able to obtain nuclear weapons and other WMD. One small country,
Israel, got them in the late 1960s, but its ties with an acquiescent
United States made it a special case. North Korea already has
become, or is on the verge of becoming, the second small country
to acquire nuclear weapons. (Pakistan and India are both much
larger and more powerful, and not really in the category of "small.")
The Bush administration is seriously in error if it believes
that it can ever so dominate the rest of the world militarily
that it can suppress all nuclear and other WMD threats against
itself. The best rational judgment one can make is that the opportunity
for global domination is already lost to this and any future
administration. Not only the threats but also the actuality of
further nuclear and other WMD proliferation will almost certainly
increase in the next few years. The present events involving
North Korea, and the U.S. reaction thereto, only encourage such
a development.
A fourth point: The inconsistencies of
U.S. policy and tactics toward Iraq and North Korea will undoubtedly
increase suspicions among governments of the world that Washington's
emphasis on immediate disarmament as critical in the case of
Iraq is really a false issue. These suspicions, to the extent
the peace movement in the U.S can emphasize and publicize them,
should make it harder for the Bush administration to start the
war against Iraq.
Brief Thoughts
for the Longer Term
The argument asserted earlier that preventing
further nuclear and other WMD proliferation is impossible because
the U.S. refuses even to discuss eliminating its own weapons
of mass destruction cries out for serious discussion and study
of the "what-should-we-be-doing-that we're-not-doing-now"
variety. This single paragraph contains only a couple of suggestions.
First, anyone with the chutzpah to address the issue needs
to decide whether any possibility exists that the political climate
in the U.S. and elsewhere can be so changed that a multilateral,
global, and democratic solution to the world's WMD problem
might be reached in the next decade. Then, if the answer is yes,
the person with the chutzpah has to come up with a specific
plan to achieve the multilateral solution. The author of these
words once tried to do that, and his specific plan is, for better
or worse,
summarized here on CounterPunch in an earlier article. But
if the answer is no, here's another suggestion. Do nothing. Stop
making it difficult for any sovereign nation that wants them
to acquire WMD. Do not antagonize other nations and peoples by
arguing that you, or I, are entitled to WMD because we already
have them, but you other folks, who don't have them yet, are
not entitled to them. The result will be the same in any case.
The process of spreading WMD around will just occur a little
more rapidly. Why irritate the rest of the world over something
you can no longer prevent?
This is not written in jest. If today
there is no general agreement that the world needs a multilateral,
global solution to nuclear and other WMD disarmament, just possibly
the increasing dangers of global chaos will bring closer the
time when such a general agreement does become possible.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
a 250-person unit. His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring
in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue
of Palestine. The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
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