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April
29, 2003
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April 30,
2003
Battling for the Soul
of the American Republic
Strategic
Myopia About the Middle East
By AHMAD FARUQUI
As the battle for Baghdad comes to a close in
Iraq, a battle for the soul of the American republic has begun
in Washington, D.C. This is a battle of ideas being waged by
people with an imperial concept of American power, or "flag
conservatives," with a diverse coalition of other groups.
The flag conservatives have taken the view that America needs
to fight a long war of self defense until the last of the cold-blooded
killers of 9/11 has been hunted down and killed and until all
regimes in the axis of evil have been changed. The opposing
coalition does not support such an imperial expression of power.
The opposing coalition counters that an imperial war will erase
the very freedoms domestically that the U.S. seeks to project
internationally. This coalition spans the ideological spectrum,
and includes conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, libertarians
such as Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute and Jacob Hornberger
of the Future of Freedom Foundation, mainstream democrats and
the various groups who were active in the no-war movement.
This battle will gain momentum in the
run-up to the 2004 presidential election. The first shots have
already been fired by some of those who are seeking the Democratic
Party's presidential nomination. For example, Senator John Kerry
of Massachusetts began to call for regime change in Washington
while the war was underway, drawing considerable flak from the
proponents of war. Similarly, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont
made the anti-war issue a primary topic of his speech at the
recent Democratic Party convention in Sacramento and came in
for sharp rebukes from the other side.
The "flag conservatives" are
exultant, since their long-standing objective of gaining mastery
of the Middle East appears within reach. As discussed later
in this article, Paul Wolfowitz first articulated this viewpoint
shortly after the First Gulf War. Facilitated by the tragic
terrorist attacks of 9/11, the first campaign of the "war
against terrorism" took place against the ragtag army of
the Taliban whose strength did not exceed 40,000. The regime
in Kabul, which boasted that it would not be crushed as easily
as the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, collapsed within
two months. The second campaign, which became the Second Gulf
War, took place against the woefully under-fed, under-equipped
and demoralized army of Saddam Hussein, whose famed Republican
Guard simply became a mirage in the Iraqi desert once hostilities
commenced. The Baathist regime in Baghdad, which had boasted
that it was far stronger than the Taliban and would turn Iraq
into a graveyard of the invading armies, collapsed within a month.
While temporarily restrained by global
public opinion, the war machine being directed by the flag conservatives
threatens to branch out toward the east and the west from Iraq,
with campaigns directed at effecting regime change in Damascus
and Teheran. In the not-too-distant future, campaigns may be
directed at effecting regime change in Riyadh and Cairo. There
are even rumblings of effecting regime change in Islamabad, since
Pakistan is the only Muslim country with nuclear weapons and
ballistic missiles, and it is alleged to be supporting terrorism
in India.
Any who doubt this grim forecast need
only consult the "National Security Strategy of the United
States of America," published last November by the White
House. It commits the U.S. to supporting "moderate and
modern government, especially in the Muslim world, to ensure
that the conditions and ideologies that promote terrorism do
not find fertile ground in any nation." Having both the
intent and the capability to make war, the Bush administration
has sent a clear message to Muslim governments throughout the
world. If they do not comply with U.S. dictates, they will be
forced out of power, and their leaders either killed or captured
without even the pretense of due process.
Richard Perle, a key architect of the
drive to topple Saddam, has declared that the war will not stop
with Iraq: "We shall continue to fight against countries
who harbor and develop weapons of mass destruction." He
ruled out any U.N. role in the new war, since the Security Council
"was created to manage classic crises such as Germany invading
France with divisions of Panzer tanks. This institution is incapable
of dealing with the toughest problems of our time such as terrorism
or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
Today, the global military presence of
the U.S. encompasses more than a thousand bases in nearly a hundred
countries. This number includes "ghost bases," which
are not staffed with U.S. personnel but are important repositories
of military hardware and supplies that can be tapped on a moments
notice. These bases, like the forts of imperial Rome, are a
perceptible indicator of Washington's ability to force a regime
change when it chooses and where it chooses. Some have argued
that the bases are primarily intended to convey a political message
to countries in their neighborhood and to cultivate "relationships"
with the host countries. Sometimes, the existence of the bases
is kept a secret from the population of the host country.
The flag conservatives have sold the
long war to the American people as a necessary war of self-defense.
Dick Cheney has said that the world before 9/11 looks different
than the world after 9/11, "especially in terms of how we
think about national security and what's needed to defend America.
Every significant threat to our country requires the most careful,
deliberate and decisive response by America and our allies."
Roger Morris, who was on the staff of the National Security
Council under Presidents Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, notes
that President Bush waged war on Iraq by asserting that Iraq
posed a clear and present danger to peace. Morris says
that war was waged, even though the danger was neither clear
to Iraq's Arab neighbors nor to the rest of the world; nor was
it present in a one to five year time horizon. By unilaterally
attacking Iraq, the president "erased long-recognized limits
on the right of any nation to attack another."
Furthermore, the president's writ went
unchallenged on Capitol Hill, "another sign that any internal
democratic restraint on the President's war-making was a dead
letter." Morris notes that the terrorist attacks of 9/11
transformed the president's image from being the butt of satire
to that of a commanding leader in the mold of Winston Churchill:
"Mr. Bush took on his own reconstruction with earnest determination,
even gusto, finding his yet undefined political destiny in an
expansively defined war of terror."
Norman Mailer, one of America's leading
men of letters, says that the war has gratified the need of the
flag conservatives to avenge 9/11. He argues that it is of
no consequence that Iraq was not the culprit for 9/11, and President
Bush proved that he would not let the lack of evidence get in
the way of implementing his grand vision: "9/11 was evil;
Saddam is evil; all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq." Bush
has also promised the American people a bonus from the war, which
will begin to accrue once democracy and free markets permeate
the Arab world.
The casus belli
Learned American scholars such as Yale's
Paul Kennedy and Harvard's Joseph Nye have argued that this long
war, based on "hard" military power, is not going to
serve the vital interests of the U.S. So why is it being waged?
At least four reasons suggest themselves.
First, after the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, a special interest group in this country found
itself marooned from reality. Its raison d'etre had disappeared.
President Eisenhower was the first man to suggest the existence
of this special interest group, and he dubbed it the military-industrial
complex. Being a former military man, he knew better than most
the tenacity of this complex. As the Cold War came to a close
with the fall of the Berlin Wall, members of this complex were
seriously concerned that any "peace dividend" would
drive them out of business. The "evil empire" of the
Soviet Union had provided an eminent rationale for continued
U.S. military spending, and a new enemy had to be found quickly.
After a process of trial and error, this enemy appeared in the
face of militant Islam.
Second, the state of Israel was gripped
with insecurity flowing from its 30-year occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza. It retreated from Lebanon and now faced an increasingly
belligerent second intifada in the Occupied Territories
that had begun to intrude into Israel. Israel turned to its
patrons in Washington for assistance, using the ethnic ties of
its leaders to the leaders of the neo-conservative movement in
the Republican Party. In the views of Norman Mailer, President
Bush regards the protection of Israel as obligatory for strategic
reasons having to do with his re-election in 2004, but also because
of tactical military reasons. The Mossad has the finest intelligence
service in the Middle East at a time when there was a paucity
of Arab spies in its American counterpart. Mailer argues that
by threatening to go to war against any Arab country that poses
a threat to Israel, the president can also satisfy the more serious
polemical needs of a great many neocons in his administration
that believe "Islam will yet be Hitler Redux to Israel."
Third, U.S. dependence on imported oil,
especially from the Middle East, has continued to grow as Americans
having few incentive to invest in energy efficiency continue
to buy increasingly larger and heavier sports utility vehicles
typified by the Hummer, a civilian variant of the Army's Humvee.
The U.S. consumes a quarter of the world's oil consumption,
and is forced to import more than half of its requirements.
Much of this comes from the Persian Gulf, and this dependency
is likely to grow over time as domestic production dries up.
The surest way for the U.S. to sustain its overwhelming dependence
on oil is to control 67% of the world's proven oil reserves that
lie in the Gulf.
Fourth, and most importantly, a small
group of people began to argue for the virtual American takeover
of the globe within a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
As mentioned in the beginning of this article, the leading exponent
of this position was Paul Wolfowitz, at the time a little-known
defense under-secretary for policy reporting to Dick Cheney,
then defense secretary. Wolfowitz drafted a document that envisioned
the United States would be "a Colossus astride the world,
imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and
economic power." Not in so many words, he called for the
establishment of Pax Americana. The proposal drew so
much criticism that it was withdrawn hastily and repudiated by
then President George H. W. Bush. The document was re-issued
in the fall of 2000 during the presidential election campaign.
It laid out in plain English a game plan and script for the
Americanization of the globe under an ambitious rubric, the Project
for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC, which described U.S.
armed forces abroad as "the cavalry on the new American
frontier," became U.S. foreign policy after 9/11.
En masse regime change
in the Middle East
Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of the
neocons, has called for en masse regime change in the
Middle East. Podhoretz's list of the "axis of evil"
goes beyond the three countries cited by President Bush in his
January 2002 State of the Union speech, and includes Egypt, Lebanon,
Libya, the Palestinian National Authority, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
He wants the U.S. to unilaterally overthrow these regimes in
the Arab world and replace them with democracies cast in the
mold of Jefferson and Wilson.
But what the neocons seek is not just
a political transformation of the Middle East. Their end game
is to bring about "the long-overdue internal reform and
modernization of Islam." These ideologues are fundamentally
confrontational in nature. They recognize that American military
intervention in the Middle East will provoke terrorist attacks
on Americans, both at home and abroad. They would welcome such
an attack, since the terrorists would provide the U.S. with the
pretext for even stronger military intervention. Neocons believe
that the U.S. will emerge triumphant in the end, provided that
it shows the will to fight the war against militant Islam to
a successful conclusion, and provided too, that it has "the
stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties."
All of these policies suggest that the neocons believe they
have liberated the U.S. from the constraints of history in a
post-9/11 world.
Contrarians in the true sense of the
word, the neocons pride themselves on being politically incorrect.
Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, provides a particularly
horrific example on the magazine's web site. He argues that
if terrorists from Muslim countries detonate a "dirty bomb"
in the United States, the U.S. should launch a nuclear attack
on Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Lowry justifies this outrageous proposal
by portraying it as a deterrent to terrorist attacks, believing
that Muslim militants would not want to risk the destruction
of their holiest shrine.
Professor Elliot Cohen is the most influential
neocon in academe. From his perch at John Hopkins, Cohen refers
to the war against terrorism by a chilling name: World War IV
(citing the Cold War as WWIII). His viewpoint is diametrically
opposed to that of the distinguished historian of war, Sir Michael
Howard, who has cautioned that the fight against terrorism is
not even a war, let alone a world war. Cohen claims America
is on the good side in this war, just like it has been in all
prior world wars, and the enemy is militant Islam, not some abstract
concept of "terrorism."
Cohen argues that the U.S. should throw
its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces in the
Muslim world, beginning with the overthrow of the theocratic
state in Iran and its replacement by a "moderate or secular"
government. He was one of the first neocons to call for an attack
on Iraq, even though there was no credible evidence linking Iraq
with 9/11 or al-Qaida.
A few months prior to the invasion of
Iraq, the neocons launched a bipartisan Committee for the Liberation
of Iraq with much fanfare. One of its prominent members is the
81-year old George Schulz, a fellow at the Hoover Institution
at Stanford. Schulz served as Secretary of State in the Reagan
administration and Treasury Secretary in the Nixon administration.
Several key members of the Bush administration have worked for
him-including Dick Cheney, Paul O'Neill (the former Treasury
Secretary) and Donald Rumsfeld-while Colin Powell worked at the
National Security Council when Schulz was Secretary of State.
Schulz began to call Saddam Hussain a menace to peace for months
prior to the war, and forecasted that the U.S. would attack Iraq
by the end of January. His words confirmed the suspicion of
many scholars and peace activists that the Bush administration
merely wanted to use U.N. Resolution 1441 as a cover to attack
Iraq.
For President Bush, overthrowing Saddam
Hussein served a political, ideological and personal agenda.
Politically, Saddam was the best available substitute for the
un-locatable bin Laden and even if the U.S. could not find
Saddam, it could at least depose him and say, "Saddam can
no longer threaten us with his weapons of mass destruction."
Ideologically, this long war and the doctrine of preemption express
the militarism, unilateralism and fear of international institutions
that characterize much of the Republican power base in the South
and the Mountain States.
Conventional wisdom had argued that a
U.S. attack on Saddam would fuel popular uprising against other
Arab governments. But the neocons turned this argument on its
head. Regime change in Baghdad could stimulate regime change
elsewhere in the region, and that would be all to the good.
Notes Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of Classics at California
State University, Fresno and an advisor to President Bush, "Baghdad
for the Bush administration was never the end. It was the beginning.
And that's why it's such a controversial move because it threatens
every idea of stability, every idea of normality, every idea
of who's friendly and who's not in the entire post-war world.
It's the most revolutionary event, I think, in our times. At
least, it rivals the change in the map in eastern Europe."
The original imperialists
As we begin the 21st century, are we
witnessing a re-enactment of the 20th century? The ideas of
World War I British imperialists such as Mark Sykes and Leo Amery
bear an uncanny resemblance to those of today's American neocons.
As Yale historian Paul Kennedy puts it, they "wanted to
diminish French, Russian and German influence in the region.
They sought secure access to Middle East oil, and to sites for
staging posts and air bases. They also believed that British
genius could reconcile Arab and Jewish interests in Palestine.
All this turned out to be a romantic delusion"
Baghdad experienced its first liberation
in 1917. The liberator was Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude.
The Mesopotamian provinces of Baghdad and Basra were the first
to be liberated by the British from the Ottoman Empire. Palestine
was next, followed by Syria and Lebanon. In a few years, the
Arabs were rioting in Palestine and rebelling in Iraq.
An uprising of more than 100,000 armed
tribesmen against the British occupation swept through Iraq in
the summer of 1920. Air Commodore Harris, reacting to the Palestinian
revolt, declared, "the only thing the Arab understands is
the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied."
The Royal Air Force was brought into action, and thwarted the
rebellion by killing nearly 9,000 Iraqis. But there was great
concern in Westminster, since the operation had cost more than
the entire British-funded Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire
in 1917-18. Winston Churchill suggested the use of chemical
weapons against "recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment."
Specifically, he suggested the use of poisoned gas against uncivilized
tribes "to spread a lively terror."
All of this came at a bad time. The
economy of the Empire was collapsing and the Crown's time, energy
and resources were needed to revive it. An exasperated Winston
Churchill told His Majesty's government that it was spending
millions for the privilege of sitting atop a volcano. Lamenting
on the British experience in Palestine, the "last lion"
was to write, "At first, the steps were wide and shallow,
covered with a carpet, but in the end the very stones crumbled
under their feet."
Much has changed during the past century.
A former colony across the Atlantic has eclipsed Great Britain,
and is the new home to an empire on which the sun never sets.
The armies of the new empire have invaded Baghdad, with the
armies of the old empire in tow in Basra, bearing this time the
gift of democracy.
The tactics of liberation have changed
as the empires have changed places, but the objectives remain
the same. Iraq remains the lynchpin to the Middle East, and
whoever controls Baghdad will control the Middle East. As the
French say, "Plus çà change, plus c'est la
même chose (the more things change, the more they stay
the same)."
The neo-imperialists
In the same year that Baghdad fell to
the imperial British army, Vladimir Lenin published a trenchant
piece, "Imperialism, The Highest Stage Of Capitalism."
In it, Lenin wrote, "I trust that this pamphlet will help
the reader to understand the fundamental economic question, that
of the economic essence of imperialism. For unless this is studied,
it will be impossible to understand and appraise modern war and
modern politics."
This year, as Baghdad is liberated for
a second time, Niall Ferguson, an economist and historian at
New York University and Oxford, has published a book with a very
different message. Noting that the British Empire was the chief
promoter of progressive thought around the globe for much of
the 19th and 20th centuries, Ferguson suggests that the world
would do well to get itself another essentially "good"
empire to maintain order. The good empire he's talking about
is exactly what the flag conservatives want to establish in the
U.S.
Ferguson believes that the U.S. should
sustain networks of trade, aid, investment and defense that will
mimic the British world order. Rogue states will be curbed, failed
nations healed and brushfire wars smothered-by aid and investment
where possible, by arms where necessary.
It will, of course, be an imperialism
that dare not speak its name. Some of the imperialists in progressive
non-governmental organizations will even believe that they are
anti-imperialist. And the logos under which they operate will
be derived from the United Nations or the International Monetary
Fund rather than from the U.S. But the underlying networks of
cooperation that sustain this new imperialism are likely to link
the U.S. with such "Anglosphere" nations as Britain
and Australia and perhaps, in due course, India and South Africa,
which share the same liberal heritage.
In a widely quoted speech that he gave
recently at the University of California, Los Angeles, former
CIA director James Woolsey addressed Arab leaders directly, "We
want you [to be] nervous. We want you to realize now, for the
fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are
on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you-the
Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family-most fear: We're on the side
of your own people." Woolsey noted proudly that the U.S.
was engaged in fighting World War IV.
The import of his remarks will not be
lost on Muslim and Arab leaders. A fundamental change has occurred
in the tactics of implementing regime change. What was formerly
accomplished through covert "black" operations is now
being accomplished through overt military operations. In the
near future, regime change may be expanded to include not just
those un-elected despots with access to WMDs but any rulers who
stand in the way of the neocon agenda of global domination.
In words that echo the logic that was
used for striking Baghdad, well-known Islamaphobe Daniel Pipes
issued a report in the year 2000 that warned Damascus was developing
weapons of mass destruction and encouraged swift preemption by
the U.S. Pipes co-chaired the task force that produced this
report with Ziad Abdelnour, an investment banker who since 1997
has led an organization called the United States Committee for
a Free Lebanon (USCFL). "If there is to be decisive action,
it will have to be sooner rather than later," warns the
document, which was signed by a task force of 31 members, including
several people who now hold senior foreign policy positions in
the Bush administration.
Some experienced Washington journalists
have spent time with the neocons and come back to report that
growing Islamic militancy in the Arab world is precisely what
the neocons want. It justifies the United States in extending
the conflict to other nations until the entire region is transformed.
In a sense, this parallels the beliefs of the growing number
of evangelical Christians who see chaos in the Middle East as
a prelude to the coming rapture. It's hard to say which idea
is more dangerous.
Will they succeed?
It is important to note that while the
recent U.S. victories in Afghanistan and Iraq were apparently
achieved at low cost, the real cost was considerably higher.
Firstly, they were achieved at low human cost to the U.S., but
considerably higher human cost to the Afghans and Iraqis, a fact
that has led to rising anti-Americanism throughout the globe.
Secondly, they were achieved at considerable economic cost to
the American taxpayer even though the enemies were primitive
third world nations. In the recent war on Saddam Hussein's regime,
part or all of the eight of the 10 infantry divisions of the
army were either tied down by the war or were standing by to
go to the war zone. Five of the 12 aircraft carriers were actively
engaged in operations. All this military muscle had to be used
to subdue a regime that spent about $1.4 billion a year on defense,
compared with the $400 billion a year spent by the U.S.
George Magnus, chief economist at UBS
Warburg, estimates that the continuation of the ongoing war could
see defense spending rise from 4.0% of GDP to as much as 9.0%
in the coming years. This development will not impress the financial
markets, since it comes on the heels of the largest budget and
trade deficits in U.S. history and continuing high rates of unemployment.
Comments David Hale of Hale Advisors, an economics consultancy,
"It is unclear if America is truly prepared to accept an
imperial role on a sustained basis." Despite the 9/11 attacks,
the sustained threat to the U.S. from terrorism is less obvious
than the threat from the U.S.S.R. David Landes, a Harvard economic
historian, found that even in Great Britain-where attachment
to empire ran deep-economic necessity meant that the rapid liquidation
of imperial liabilities in India and the Middle East after the
Second World War met with little opposition. "Once the
potential cost becomes apparent, the willingness of the American
public to pay for their country's new security strategy will
be tested to the limit."
Speaking of the neocon desire for changing
the Arab world, Paul Kennedy reminds Americans of the failed
British experience and questions whether the U.S. fare any better.
And lest anyone say that America is not Britain, he cites America's
poor track record of trying to transform the societies of Central
America, Cuba and the Philippines. "We took over the latter
two territories more than a century ago, yet Cuba's history has
been a shambles and the Philippines is now receiving fresh cohorts
of U.S. military advisers. Why do we think we will do better
in Syria or Iraq or Saudi Arabia?"
In the wake of the easy Iraqi conquest,
the American generals who led the war have touted their campaign
as one of the most successful in military history. For example,
Marine Lieutenant General Earl Hailston declared from his headquarters
in Bahrain, "We fought like we'd never fought before,"
citing the campaign highlighted the military's lethal technological
advantage and the ability of U.S. forces to conduct operations
seamlessly across the military branches that historically had
been riven with age-old rivalries. Such statements lend credence
to the desire of the flag conservatives to have the American
military serve as the cavalry along America's frontiers.
Historian and political analyst Francis
Fukuyama has noted that the U.S. conquest of Iraq is likely to
mark the zenith of its perceived strength, both in a military
and political sense. He advises the U.S. to exploit this moment
of strength not by thinking of moving against Syria, Iran or
North Korea, but by contracting its empire. He goes so far as
to suggest the U.S. withdraw all of its military forces from
Saudi Arabia, where their presence has been exploited by Osama
bin Laden to pursue his campaign of terrorism. In a similar
vein, Seyom Brown of Brandeis University argues that the world's
only superpower needs to restrain itself. He comments, "Rather
than loosening the constraints against the resort to war, we
ought to be retightening them."
Even a nation as uniquely powerful as
the U.S. cannot remake the political systems at the heart of
the Islamic world. Last December, the Financial Times editorialized
that "dropping a big enough stone in the Iraqi pool"
would not unleash a wave of democracy in the region." It
is likely that the Muslim world will view a string of U.S. military
attacks on Muslim countries as the aggression of an oil-thirsty
superpower on the Muslim world, not a march to liberate people
from tyranny. And, were democracy to arrive miraculously in
the Arab countries, it will result in the election of openly
anti-American leaders. Robert Baer, a former field officer of
the CIA in the Middle East, notes that Osama bin Laden would
be elected in a landslide in Saudi Arabia if a free and fair
election were held there tomorrow.
Policy makers in Washington, including
those with an open mind in the administration and the Congress,
should seriously consider the dangers in pursuing a hubris-laden
Middle Eastern policy that has strategic myopia written all over
it.
Ahmad Faruqui,
an economist, is a fellow with the American Institute of International
Studies and the author of Rethinking
the National Security of Pakistan. He can be reached
at faruqui@pacbell.net
This article originally appeared in Asia
Times.
Copyright, Asia Times, 2003.
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