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CounterPunch
November
23, 2002
Proverbial Wisdom
Now, About That Big Stick
by SUSAN DAVIS
"Speak softly and carry a big stick."
Theodore Roosevelt
"When you pick up a stick at one
end, you pick up the other end too."
Indiana, mid-20th century
Theodore Roosevelt coined a new proverb at the
1902 Minnesota State Fair. "Speak softly and carry a big
stick" summarized the foreign policy of the day, and moved
into oral circulation. It meant the U.S. had enough military
force that it didn't need to threaten. It could exercise its
power and still look gentlemanly, graceful and cool. After all,
by 1902 the Philippines and Cuba were squared away.
The proverb is now out of date, at least
in foreign policy circles, as the United States sees no need
to talk softly, although it still talks behind the scenes. The
saying might be changed to "Yell as much as you want, and
whack a few countries whenever you feel like it." And we
feel like it. As Frank Bardacke
wrote recently in Counterpunch, it's now a naked empire.
The purpose of the coming, already unfolding
war is to secure and advance an empire. This is not a war about
a nasty dictator, and it is not caused by American consumer greed,
whether or not you can afford to gas up your sport utility vehicle.
This is a war about extending imperial control around the globe
-- and Central Asia and the Middle East are critically important
to that control. That's what an empire is -- controlling basic
resources and making decisions about their use worldwide, unchallenged,
long-term.
If we use this framework to understand
a war on Iraq, it is clear that there's a good chance this will
not be the only war, but others will follow to bring the rest
of these regions under U.S. control. U.S. military bases and
access agreements in the Gulf and Central Asia have been growing
quickly, especially in the last year. As one friend put it, anywhere
there is an oil rig or platform, there's a U.S. military base
or landing strip. American troops are already moving very quickly
into Djibouti in the Horn of Africa (New York Times, November
17, 2002); a few weeks ago the New York Times reported that about
one-third of Kuwait has been sealed off so it will be accessible
to the U.S. troops being deployed there. This buildup is not
for military convenience; it is intended as permanent, as are
all the new bases in the Central Asian "stans": Uzbekistan,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan.
Even before the 2000 presidential election
future Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney developed a document
that explains U.S. foreign policy goals: the document is called
"Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources
for a New Century." As Glenn Ford has written in The Black
Commentator (www.blackcommentator.org), this plan was policy
the moment Bush and Cheney assumed office. "The Project
for the New American Century" calls for U.S. engagement
in as many as four simultaneous wars at any given time for the
foreseeable future. These wars would be initiated by the U.S.
to eliminate threats from any quarter. The document raised concerns
about preparation for four simultaneous fronts. Would this be
possible, the Joint Chiefs of Staff worried? Are we prepared
enough to fight four simultaneous wars? What about two? The Joint
Chiefs have reassured us, yes, two we can handle. More, well,
we'll see.
Ford notes that in the document the word
"threat" has been redefined to mean the capability
of any state to resist American intervention anywhere on the
globe. In other words, any country which dares to act like it
ought to be making its own decisions about its territorial integrity
and natural resources is a threat to the United States security.
Threat means resistance to American and multinational imperial
ambitions. Of course Cuba has been treated this way for decades.
We can argue whether the empire is truly American, or whether
Americans are simply playing, as the folksinger Phil Ochs put
it, "cops of the world" for multinational corporations.
In this framework, if the United States
attacks Iraq, it will likely follow up by attacking any state
which feels threatened by or is seriously destabilized by the
assault -- that may include Iran -- Dick Cheney has said that
Iran will follow Iraq as a target. Maybe Syria, perhaps North
Korea. The axis of evil changes week by week, but when asked
recently what he wanted Americans know about the war, Cheney
replied "it will be long."
Speaking softly is now passé.
The citizens of the United States are being told to think of
themselves as imperial, as running the world -- the citizens
of the U.S. are also being asked to think of themselves as at
war more or less all the time. Simultaneous ongoing war mobilization
and propagandizing will be the normal state affairs domestically.
As Glenn Ford points out, "no nation in human history has
ever spoken words that remotely sounded like this."
So what are the domestic effects of this?
Here's what we know about empires. They are expensive. They keep
expanding until strain on their centers is intolerable. They
must constantly be shored up, not only by tribute from abroad
but by tribute at home. This tribute is money, but of course
it is also human lives, quality of life, and liberty.
When I mentioned that empires are expensive,
I'm thinking first about the economy. I don't want you to think
that I am a crude materialist, so let me also say that the effects
will be social, cultural, and racial. I think our social infrastructure
will take a hard hit and our civil and political rights will
be drastically eroded as we come to terms with implications of
the USA Patriot Act. Our culture will become narrower and more
militaristic than it already is. We will learn less of our own
history, and less about other countries than we already do because
to justify controlling other people's worlds we must be ignorant
of their pasts and their aspirations, and of our own pasts. Our
race relations will likely to become worse, because it is very
important for Citizens of an Imperial Nation to believe in their
own superiority. On November 17, we learned from the New York
Times that Iraqis in the US and Iraqi American citizens are now
under surveillance and being pressured to inform on each other.
Since the world we wish to control has become part of us through
immigration, we'll see a lot more of this and it will exacerbate
racial and ethnic divisions. Already our military adventures
are justified by racism. That can't not have an effect at home.
Back to my crude materialism. Bill Moyers
recently said that no one ever discussed the economic costs of
the Vietnam War in the early years because no one wanted to bring
it up. No one had any real idea. Four years later, as young men
were coming home in body bags, Johnson took to his bed, pulled
the covers up over his head, realizing it was too late to make
a true accounting. Today no one is saying, and no one has any
real idea. It's liars poker. Even if the war is limited to Iraq,
unfolding over about six or eight months, with a six to eight
year occupation and reconstruction following, this will be very
costly. And as their document show, the Bush Cheney plan is much
more extensive than this six-month scenario.
The most conservative estimates, not
including any occupation to contain the hostile parties in the
civil war that will follow in Iraq, ring up at about $100 billion
for a one year war, this from Harvard University. But a White
House economist guesses $278 billion for a six-month war. Needless
to say, those estimates are very vague and wildly out of line
with each other. no-one has any idea what will happen.
But let's accept $278 billion over six
months, a tiny fraction of the U.S. economy but still a lot of
money. Follow that with the same amount over a ten-year occupation,
not including reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan. There are
two schools of thought about how to think about the social effects
of this kind of military spending. Our economic thinkers and
political leaders, such as they are, are by no means agreed on
this.
The first view, probably dominant in
public debate, is that the economy is very vulnerable. Unemployment
is up to nearly six percent in the last several years, consumer
debt is high, consumer confidence is low, savings are in the
negative, the airlines are going under, the telecommunications
industry has tanked, major accounting and computer corporations
have folded in the last year, the stock market has been sinking
drastically for the better part of the last year. The only bright
point is housing starts, and they may have peaked.
An oil shock -- that is any rise above
current prices of about $27 per barrel -- would be a direct consequence
of an attack on Iraq and the chain reaction of upheaval and disruption
in the Middle East. Such a price rise could throw the U.S. economy
into a deeper longer recession, one we might actually have to
call a depression. Rising oil prices would lead to higher prices
and higher costs of doing business, which usually leads to more
unemployment, or at least downward pressure on wages, which leads
to less spending -- all this would be loaded onto a wagon that
is already missing at least one wheel.
The stock market clearly does not like
the war news for these reasons, among others. The United States
situation vis-à-vis the balance of payments is terrible.
If foreign banks and investors holding dollars decide the U.S.
economy is in trouble, and begin to trade for a stronger currency,
the value of the dollar could decline sharply. There is also
the question of how the U.S. economy, if it takes a nosedive,
affects the rest of the world. If we sneeze and cut back on our
imports of cheap goods, as the saying goes the rest of the world
catches pneumonia. So, even in a short-term sense, an attack
on Iraq could be very destabilizing far beyond the boundaries
of the U.S. That is a cost of imperial ambition, and it might
not be short-term.
There's another school of thought on
this, and that is that war is good for the economy -- military
spending generates profits, it generates new jobs in some sectors.
Wages might go up. From this point of view a war would prime
the economic pump. Wouldn't all this Empire-provisioning and
arming stimulate other spending? Maybe, for some technical and
professional sectors, but not for everyone. War spending is generally
unproductive spending. We hear a lot about the benefits to our
economy of military research and development. In places like
Southern California lots of professional and technical people
work at their computers on problems like heat seeking missiles,.
But not everybody can do that. I think these benefits are overstated.
The military tends to invest in high technology equipment with
very narrow uses -- surveillance, intelligence, command and control,
and killing people -- and it builds equipment which does not
last long and needs continually to be replaced. Bombs, chemical
weapons, ammunition, guidance systems, Predator drones. It mobilizes
tremendous numbers of people in support of this non-productive
investment. If you think replacing bombs and ammunition and gas
masks over and over is productive, I suppose this is a kind of
productivity. But it's also worth remembering that the United
States already has huge stockpiles of these materials.
We all know that military contractors
are notoriously corrupt and charge hundreds of times the real
cost for supplying ashtrays and helicopters -- and we know that
often this vaunted equipment doesn't do what it claims to. This
turned out to be the case with the Patriot missile. Apparently
the Patriot could hardly hit anything, despite the grandiose
claims of both Raytheon and the "scud-studs" of CNN.
But even if military contractors were not corrupt or inept, production
for war does not benefit the entire population in a way that
is farsighted -- it is investment that is not going into the
larger society. It doesn't build nursing homes, it doesn't build
day-care centers or schools. It does subsidize college tuition
and classrooms and labs if your professor does war-related research,
but it doesn't ensure people's health, it doesn't invest in public
transportation. But it certainly does invest in highly dangerous
and polluting technologies, like hardened missile shells made
of depleted uranium, that are very damaging to the health of
American service people. And others. According to William Hughes
in Counterpunch (Oct. 25, 2002) " During the Gulf War alone,
the United States left 600,000 pounds of radioactive waste containing
depleted uranium from its use of... dirty bombs." Tens of
thousands of veterans of the first Gulf War are still trying
to find out what strange combination of radiation, experimental
vaccinations and toxic chemicals caused their intractable illnesses,
another cost of war. And of course, production for war is a heavy
investment in the maiming and death of civilians on the other
side. It's investment in total defeat.
As we found out through the experience
of Vietnam, wars are generally inflationary. The government either
takes on huge debt to finance them, or prints money (increases
the money supply) to pay for them, or both. One way or another,
a war must be paid for, and people are generally reluctant to
pay for it through taxes. The deficit increases, interest rates
rise, and people's money is worth less. This is why a sector
of the business community eventually opposed the Vietnam War,
and why a sector of the U.S. business leaders opposes an attack
on Iraq. It isn't just that their sons might come home in body
bags -- those are mostly poor people's sons. Business resistance
to the Vietnam War was resistance to the inflation ruining the
U.S. economy.
We are not in nearly as good economic
shape today as when we ventured into Vietnam. One thing that's
different is that the current recession follows on two decades
of slashing funding for the public sector. People born in the
1980s have heard the word "budget cuts" and "budget
deficit" and " austerity" their whole lives. The
general idea that this language conveys is "there's not
enough wealth in this society to meet everybody's basic needs."
I grew up in the 1950s and '60s, in a
very prosperous time. Until the effects of the Vietnam War were
really felt, the economy was expanding. Many people's lives got
better. But for today's military-age generation, "budget
cuts" have always been part of the political landscape.
But this "shortage" of wealth is military capitalism's
own creation. Because, since the late 1970s, public funds have
been sucked from the public sector into the heavily militarized
private sector as a matter of public policy, through the massive
inflation of the military budget since the first Reagan administration
in 1980 and through tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
That's why Amtrak barely runs, and why there's lousy public transportation
in poor neighborhoods, and no decent housing for millions of
people, and poor public schools, and no universal health insurance
in this country, and that's why college students are paying more
tuition and working harder at outside jobs to make ends meet.
It's not that there's not enough money to go around, it's that
a huge portion of it has been shifted to the military part of
the federal budget. At the same time, this has been the greatest
and longest period of wealth creation in U.S. history.
So this is where we are starting from
as we contemplate expanding our Empire -- we are starting from
what is on many dimensions the worst record in the industrialized
world. In terms of health care, literacy, education, infant mortality,
and nutrition the U.S. is a laggard, even at the bottom of the
rankings -- and we are being asked to pour more of our own resources
into the bottomless project of controlling the resources of the
rest of the world. A world which we are well aware is not at
all happy to have the United States step into this role and will
resist. Or, at least the ordinary people of this world are not
so happy about it. A lot of small sticks can kindle a great fire.
We may win cleanly with our snappy technology, but no war stays
won forever. No occupying power is completely invulnerable. We
may see uncontrolled social banditry, or we may see one, two,
three, many Vietnams.
I view the effects of the war at home
as pushing us faster and harder into the downward economic, social,
and environmental spiral that we have been spinning in for 20
years now. So, you can't pick up just one end of this stick.
You have to pick up the whole stick.
What would some of the other costs of
this empire be? An empire depends on a lot of people defending
it at its borders and, and it needs the acquiescence of the population
on the home front to being taxed more heavily -- through a declining
quality of life -- to support it. There may be a draft, and that
would absorb some of the young unemployed, forget about the middle-aged
unemployed. If there is a draft, it will come as a shock. Americans
have gotten used to the idea that they could hire other people
to fight for them, either with promises of education after completion
of service -- a promise that is not as good as it is made to
sound -- or simply because it's the best job going, which is
sometimes called the economic draft. This would be a new draft
for which we are already completely prepared through Social Security
registration at birth, and selective service registration at
age 18 for men. So another cost would be a generation of young
people, although it may be possible for privileged Americans
to insulate their sons from a draft. This wasn't entirely possible
in Vietnam, although combat casualties were heavily poor, black
and brown. During the first Gulf War in 1991 students asked me
if I thought it made sense to go to Canada if the draft were
revived. As far as I know, there is now an extradition agreement
between Canada and the U.S. for draft evaders. Some young men
who resisted registration on grounds of conscience in recent
years have received heavy prison terms. A draft resistance movement
would certainly arise, but penalties will be harsh and swift.
But it's a good bet American leaders will do anything to avoid
a draft, because it helps bring the war home to the middle class.
That was one of the lessons of Vietnam.
Empires usually become unpopular at home
pretty fast. So they require repression and censorship. Another
domestic consequence of this war will be increased surveillance,
repression, cutbacks in our rights and liberties, and censorship.
It is very important that the domestic supporters of wars not
know what their empire is doing in their name. Already we are
seeing overt censorship of films and filmmakers from Iraq and
Iran in this country, their directors (who are censored at home)
are refused visas to enter the U.S., that we might not see the
people in their films as human beings suffering under U.S. policies.
This is a sort of cultural blockade in a country that is already
ignorant of the rest of the world. There will also be, is already,
repression and censorship of criticism of our new empire -- and
of course such censorship is already well in place in the USA
Patriot Act of 2001. Web sites are being scrubbed, books and
CDs are being removed from federal depository libraries; people
on my campus are being called "anti-American" for criticizing
American policy towards Israel. Green political activists are
being classified as terrorists and prevented from boarding international
flights. Admiral John Poindexter, a convicted though subsequently
pardoned felon, is back in government, in charge of breaking
down the barriers between private, commercial, and government
information on individuals. For some reason, Adm. Poindexter
calls these barriers "stovepipes" which gives me hope
that he knows very little about the problems of information management.
Anyway, he's hoping to harmonize us all into a giant database
in the service of Homeland Security. These are just a few examples.
We have been through a lot of "love it or leave it"
before in this country and I think are in for another heavy round.
This time, it may be love it or get locked down.
There's also the question of violence
coming home. There is an argument to be made that war with its
accompanying military training and service does great damage
to the psychology of the men who survive it. We can think of
Timothy McVeigh. We can think of John Mohammed. We can think
of the wife murderers and wife beaters of Fort Bragg, North Carolina,
men who are just back from Afghanistan. There's a blowback of
violence into the home society when people witness or are asked
to commit horrific violence on other human beings. During the
first Gulf War I knew commercial pilots who knew military pilots
who had been debriefed on returning from the Gulf. They were
told to say nothing of what they had seen to anyone, and they
suffered greatly, according to my friends. Later, the news leaked
out about the "turkey shoot" on the road to Basra;
the news leaked out about the hundred thousand retreating, surrendering
Iraqis killed or buried alive by U.S. super tanks. General Colin
Powell said he was indifferent to the number of Iraqi soldiers
killed in 1991. All these kinds of events, and Powell's comments,
reveal a culture accepting of extreme violence.
High schools around the country report
increasing pressure to reinstitute junior ROTC training, and
pressure to extend military studies down into middle and elementary
schools. All of this weaves militarism deeper into everyday life.
I think of schools having patriotic assemblies on Veterans Day,
and my kindergarten-age daughter being asked to sing "Johnny
Got His Gun" a few years back. (The principal wasn't taking
any protests from outraged mommies, either). And I think of watching
reruns of Saturday Night Live the other night with my son. We
saw a Sony PlayStation ad for a "teen level" game called
Attack Iraq. It has been designed by Special Forces who served
in the Gulf in 1991, and it's very realistic. It's almost a training
program. We had to see the ad twice before we realized it was
not a joke. It's being offered for the Christmas season.
Finally, but not finally at all, since
it is central, there's the question of race. A lot of people
our empire is deployed against are not white, and for historical
reasons, powerful Americans find it easy to make them less than
human on the basis of skin color. Sadly, a lot of black and brown
people will be fighting a lot of other non-white people in this
war, but I imagine that the dominant images will be of whites
against people of color. You remember the phrase "nuke the
sand gooks" from 1991? A lot propagandistic pressure is
going to have to be applied to get people to buy into the empire
for the long haul. Racism will grease the wheels of a machine
that will not otherwise run by itself. Racial division may be
one of the lubricants. Again, Glenn Ford has made this point
eloquently. And he also points out that much of the empire --
or our future empire -- is here at home, too. We already know
how Iraqi-Americans are being treated. How will Arab-Americans,
Pakistani-Americans, and Iranian-Americans be treated? How will
they be expected to act? Will they be able to fade into the woodwork
in fear, as German-Americans did here during World War I? Will
they be interned like the Italian-Americans and Japanese-Americans?
Will they be deported? Will they have any rights of dissent at
all? After what has happened in Lackawanna NY, with the secret
and summary arrests of 12 Arab-Americans, I would imagine that
recent immigrants are very frightened indeed. You can't pick
up just one end of this very dirty stick.
Susan Davis
teaches at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. This
column was adapted from a teach-in there on Nov. 12. She can
be reached at sgdavis@uiuc.edu
Yesterday's
Features
Jason Leopold
Secrets
and Lies:
Bush, Cheney and the Great Rip-Off of California Ratepayers
Ali Moayedian
Letter
from Ayatollah Ashcroft to His CounterPart Ayatollah Shahroudi
of Iran
William MacDougal
Heroes and Villains:
The Sun, Saddam and the Fire Strike
Carol Norris
Secret
Burial for the Bill of Rights
4th Amendment R.I.P
Mark Hand
From Wal-Mart to Proudhon
Michael Neumann
Reflections
on Kant and Moral Equivalence
Philip Farruggio
The Dagger of Futility
Michael Rossman
The Betrayal
of Lenny Glaser
Michael Rossman
The Free Speech Movement & the Rossman Report:
A Memoir of Making History
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to Subscribers:
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The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
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- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
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Effort, But What Did They Get?
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November 14,
2002
Edward Said
Europe vs.
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Todd May
The Ironies of History
Paul de Rooij
US Aid to Israel
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Vertov's
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Michael S.
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An Open Letter on the Augusta Golf
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