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Today's
Stories
September 13,
2004
Gabriel Kolko
Elections,
Alliances and the American Empire
September 11
/ 12, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Swatting
at Flies
Fred Gardner
Yet Another Prozac Scandal
Saul Landau
When Our Assassins Go Free
Jennifer Van Bergen
How to Beat Bush: a Simple Strategy for the Average American
Roger Burbach
/ Jim Tarbell
The Real Dead Enders: Iraq and the Crisis of Empire
Christopher Reed
9/11 in an Historical Context: a Minor Event When Compared to
Worldwide War Casualties
Francisc Catalin
An ABC of American Interventions
Carl Estabrook
Big Science and Government Terror
Bernard Chazelle
Anti-Americanism: a Clinical Study
Sharon Smith
Third Party Blues
Dave Lindorff
Perhaps This Time We're the Silent Majority
Mike Whitney
Fallujah: an Iraqi Beslan?
Frederick B.
Hudson
Their Sons Perished in the Flames, But Not Their Faith
Mickey Z.
Round Up the Usual Suspects: a Look Back at 9/11
Ron Jacobs
Redneck Music for the New Century
Greg Moses
Soap Opera Moments in Texas School Funding Trial
Benjamin Dangl
/ Andrew Kennis
An Interview with Leslie Cagan
Poets Basement
Del Papa, Albert, Gelman
September 10,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Disappointment
at Samarrah?
Michael Donnelly
Democrats v. Democracy
Alan Farago
Mosquitoes in a Hurricane
Doug Giebel
Karl Rove's Terror Playbook
Mike Whitney
Bob Graham's Political Tsunami
David Domke
God's
Will, According to the Bush Administration
September 9,
2004
Joe Bageant
Karaoke
Night in Bush's America
Ed Kinane
Abducted in Baghdad
Peter Bohmer
The Cuban Revolution: Present and Future
Todd May
The Emerging Case for a Single-State Solution
Jeremy Scahill
The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad
Joshua Frank
Green House Party Gasses
Fran Shor
The Crisis in Public Dissent: When Protest is Considered a Terrorist
Act
Patrick Cockburn
Welcome
to the Dirtiest City in the World: Despair in Baghdad
Website of
the Day
Liberty Street Protest: No to War at Ground Zero
September 8,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
This
Doesn't Smell Like Victory: A War on Two Fronts in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush Confuses; Kerry Mute: Spinning 1000 Dead
Bulent Gokay
Russian and Chechnia After Beslan
Lisa Viscidi
Land Reform and Conflict in Guatemala
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Byrd's Eye View
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan: American's Drug Colony
Stan Goff
Body
Count: 1001
Website of
the Day
Bush and the Love Doctors
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
September 7,
2004
Diane Christian
Hostage Tactics: a Game of Mortal Poker
Joshua Frank
Greens
Unravel from Within
Patrick Cockburn
Fallujah
Erupts Again: US Death Toll in Iraq Nears 1000
Ron Jacobs
Bush and Putin: "We're Not Girlie Men"
Chris Floyd
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Dr. Carol Wolman
No Blood for Oil at Paul Bunyan Day Parade
John Ross
The
Politics of Darkness North / South
September 6,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
An
Anti-Labor Day That Lives in Infamy: How Many Democrats Voted
For Taft-Hartley?
Ralph Nader
The
Cruel Legacy of Taft-Hartley: a Labor Day Call for Rights for
Working People
Lee Sustar
What's Driving the Attack on Pensions?
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
Dual
Loyalties: the Bush Necons and Israel
September 4-5,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Elephants
and Gramsci
Ted Honderich
The
Way Things Are
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The
Holy Empire: Who We Are and What We Do
Douglas Valentine
What the World Should Know About Guantanamo
Patrick Cockburn
New Iraqi Police State Flexes Its Muscles
Gary Leupp
Neo Cons Under Fire
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: the Hempstead T-Shirt
William A.
Cook
The
Day of the Lemming
Dave Zirin
Kobe Bryant and the Price of Freedom
John Chuckman
The Day the World Ended
Karyn Strickler
God Save the Endangered Species Act
Vanessa Jones
Bad Day with an Ikea Cup
Mike Whitney
Kerry: the "Better" War Candidate
Mark Donham
Dear John (Kerry): Start Explaining and Fast
Mickey Z.
McBypass Nation: Feeling Clinton's Pain
Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Fixed?
Poets' Basement
Landau and Albert
September 3,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Jesus Told Him Where to Bomb
Rahul Mahajan
Bush's RNC Speech: an Annotated Response
Carl Estabrook
The
Book of Slaughter and Forgetting
Joshua Frank
The Florida of the Northwest: Oregon Dems Sabotage Nader Again
Gary Leupp
Music to My Ears: Sunday's March
James Hollander
Deja Vu in Manhattan: Assisted Political Suicide?
Mark Engler
Republicans
Among Us: a Week at the RNC, Inside and Out
Jesse Sharkey
Making Students and Teachers Pay for the Crisis in Education
Jane Stillwater
Calling the Cops on Your Own Kid
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend Edition
September 11 / 12, 2004
Why Bush May
Well Be The Lesser Evil
Elections,
Alliances and the American Empire
By
GABRIEL KOLKO
[This
essay by historian Gabriel Kolko is excerpted from CounterPunch's
must-have new book, Dime's
Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, now available from
CounterPunch/AK Press.]
Alliances have been a major cause of
wars throughout modern history, removing inhibitions that might
otherwise have caused Germany, France and countless nations to
reflect much more cautiously before embarking on death and destruction.
The dissolution of all alliances is a crucial precondition of
a world without wars.
The United States' strength,
to an important extent, has rested on its ability to convince
other nations that it was to their vital interests to see America
prevail in its global role. With the loss of that ability there
will be a fundamental change in the international system, a change
whose implications and consequences may ultimately be as far-reaching
as the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. The scope of America's
world role is now far more dangerous and ambitious than when
Communism existed, but it was fear of the USSR that alone gave
NATO its raison d'etre and provided Washington with the justification
for its global pretensions. Enemies have disappeared and new
ones--many once former allies and congenial states--have taken
their places. The United States, to a degree to which it is
itself uncertain of, needs alliances. But even friendly nations
are less likely than ever to be bound into complaisant "coalitions
of the willing'.
Nothing in President Bush's
extraordinarily vague doctrine, promulgated on September 19,
2002, of fighting "preemptive" wars, unilaterally if
necessary, was a fundamentally new departure. Since the 1890s,
regardless of whether the Republicans or Democrats were in office,
the U.S. has intervened in countless ways--sending in the Marines,
installing and bolstering friendly tyrants--in the western hemisphere
to determine the political destinies of innumerable southern
nations. The Democratic Administration that established the
United Nations explicitly regarded the hemisphere as the U.S.
sphere of influence, and at the same time created the IMF and
World Bank to police the world economy.
Indeed, it was the Democratic
Party that created most of the pillars of postwar American foreign
policy, from the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and NATO through the
institutionalization of the arms race and the core illusion that
weapons and firepower are a solution to many of the world's political
problems. So the Democrats share, in the name of a truly "bipartisan"
consensus, equal responsibility for both the character and dilemmas
of America's foreign strategy today. President Jimmy Carter
initiated the Afghanistan adventure in July 1979, hoping to bog
down the Soviets there as the Americans had been in Vietnam.
And it was Carter who first encouraged Saddam Hussein to confront
Iranian fundamentalism, a policy President Reagan continued.
In his 2003 book The Roaring
Nineties Joseph E. Stiglitz, chairman of the President's
Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997, argues that the
Clinton Administration intensified the "hegemonic legacy"
in the world economy, and Bush is just following along. The 1990s,
Stiglitz writes, was "A decade of unparalleled American
influence over the global economy" that Democratic financiers
and fiscal conservatives in key posts defined, "in which
one economic crisis seemed to follow another." The U.S.
created trade barriers and gave large subsidies to its own agribusiness
but countries in financial straits were advised and often compelled
to cut spending and "adopt policies that were markedly different
from those that we ourselves had adopted." The scale of
domestic and global peculation by the Clinton and Bush administrations
can be debated but they were enormous in both cases. In foreign
and military affairs, both the Clinton and Bush administrations
 have suffered from the same procurement fetish,
believing that expensive weapons are superior to realistic political
strategies. The same illusions produced the Vietnam War--and
disaster. Elegant strategies promising technological routes
to victory have been with us since the late 1940s, but they are
essentially public relations exercises intended to encourage
more orders for arms manufacturers, justifications for bigger
budgets for the rival military services. During the Clinton
years the Pentagon continued to concoct grandiose strategies,
demanding--and getting--new weapons to implement them. There
are many ways to measure defense expenditures over time but--minor
annual fluctuations notwithstanding--the consensus between the
two parties on the Pentagon's budgets has flourished since 1945.
In January 2000 Clinton added $115 billion to the Pentagon's
five-year plan, far more than the Republicans were calling for.
When Clinton left office the Pentagon had over a half trillion
dollars in the major weapons procurement pipeline, not counting
the ballistic missile defense systems, a pure boondoggle that
cost over $71 billion by 1999. The dilemma, as both CIA and senior
Clinton officials correctly warned, was that terrorists were
more likely to strike the American homeland than some nation
against which the military could retaliate. This fundamental
disparity between hardware and reality has always existed and
September 11, 2001 showed how vulnerable and weak the U.S. has
become, a theme readers can explore in my book, Another Century
of War?
The war in Yugoslavia in the
spring of 1999 brought to a head the future of NATO and the alliance,
and especially Washington's deepening anxiety regarding Germany's
possible independent role in Europe. Well before Bush took office,
the Clinton Administration resolved never again to allow its
allies to inhibit or define its strategy. Bush's policies,
notwithstanding the brutal way in which they have been expressed
or implemented, follow directly and logically from this crucial
decision. NATO members' refusal to contribute the soldiers
and equipment essential to end warlordism and allow fair elections
to be held in Afghanistan (it sent five times as many troops
to Kosovo in 1999), is the logic of America's bipartisan disdain
for the alliance.
But the world today is increasingly
dangerous for the U. S. and communism's demise has called into
fundamental question the core premises of the post-1945 alliance
system. More nations have nuclear weapons and means of delivering
them; destructive small arms are much more abundant (thanks to
swelling American arms exports which grew from 32 percent of
the world trade in 1987 to 43 percent in 1997); there are more
local and civil wars than ever, especially in regions like Eastern
Europe which had not experienced any for nearly a half-century;
and there is terrorism--the poor and weak man's ultimate weapon--on
a scale that has never existed. The political, economic, and
cultural causes of instability and conflict are growing, and
expensive weapons are irrelevant--save to the balance sheets
of those who make them.
So long as the future is
to a large degree--to paraphrase Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld--"unknowable",
it is not in the national interest of America's traditional allies
to perpetuate the relationships created from 1945 to 1990. Through
ineptness and a vague ideology of American power that acknowledges
no limits on its global ambitions, the Bush Administration has
lunged into unilateralist initiatives and adventurism that discount
consultations with its friends, much less the United Nations.
The outcome has been serious erosion of the alliance system upon
which U.S. foreign policy from 1947 onwards was based. With
the proliferation of destructive weaponry and growing political
instability, the world is becoming increasingly dangerous--and
so is membership in alliances.
If Bush is reelected then
the international order may be very different in 2008 than it
is today, let alone 1999. Regardless of who is the next president,
there is no reason to believe that objective assessments of the
costs and consequences of its actions will significantly alter
America's foreign policy priorities over the next four years.
If the Democrats win they will attempt, in the name of "progressive
internationalism", to reconstruct the alliance system as
it existed before the Yugoslav war of 1999, when the Clinton
Administration turned against the veto powers built into NATO's
structure. There is important bipartisan support for resurrecting
the Atlanticism that Bush is in the process of smashing, and
it was best reflected in the Council on Foreign Relations' banal
March 2004 report on the "transatlantic alliance",
which Henry Kissinger helped direct and which both influential
Republicans and Wall Street leaders endorsed. Traditional elites
are desperate to see NATO and the Atlantic system restored to
their old glory. Their vision, premised on the expansionist
assumptions that have guided American foreign policy since 1945,
was best articulated the same month in a book, The Choice:
Global Domination or Global Leadership, by Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who was Carter's National Security adviser. Brzezinski rejects
the Bush Administration's counterproductive rhetoric that so
alienates former and potential future allies. But he regards
American power as central to stability in every part of world
and his global vision no less ambitious than the Bush Administration's.
He is for the U.S. maintaining "a comprehensive technological
edge over all potential rivals" and calls for the transformation
of "America's prevailing power into a co-optive hegemony--one
in which leadership is exercised more through shared conviction
with enduring allies than by assertive domination". Precisely
because it is much more salable to past and potential allies,
this traditional Democratic vision is far more dangerous than
that of the inept, eccentric melange now guiding American foreign
policy.
But vice-president Richard
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the neoconservatives and eclectic
hawks in Bush's administration are oblivious to the consequences
of their recommendations or to the way they shock America's overseas
friends. Many of the President's key advisers possess aggressive,
essentially academic geopolitical visions that assume overwhelming
American military and economic power. Eccentric interpretations
of Holy Scripture inspire yet others, including Bush himself.
Most of these crusaders employ an amorphous nationalist AND MESSIANIC
rhetoric that makes it impossible to predict exactly how Bush
will mediate between very diverse, often quirky influences,
though thus far he has favored advocates of wanton use of American
military might throughout the world. No one close to the President
acknowledges the limits of its power--limits that are political
and, as Korea and Vietnam proved, military too.
Kerry voted for many of Bush's
key foreign and domestic measures and he is, at best, an indifferent
candidate. His statements and interviews over the past months
dealing with foreign affairs have mostly been both vague and
incoherent, though he is explicitly and ardently pro-Israel and
explicitly for regime-change in Venezuela. His policies on the
Middle East are identical to Bush's and this alone will prevent
the alliance with Europe from being reconstructed. On
Iraq, even as violence there escalated and Kerry finally had
a crucial issue with which to win the election, his position
has been indistinguishable from the President's. "Until"
an Iraqi armed force can replace it, Kerry wrote in the April
13 Washington Post, the American military has to stay in Iraq--"preferably
helped by NATO." "No matter who is elected president
in November, we will perservere in that mission" to build
a stable, pluralistic Iraq--which, I must add, has never existed
and is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future. "It
is a matter of national honor and trust." He has promised
to leave American troops in Iraq for his entire first term if
necessary, but he is vague about their subsequent departure.
Not even the scandal over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners evoked
Kerry's criticism despite the fact it has profoundly alienated
a politically decisive segment of the American public.
His statements on domestic
policy in favor of fiscal restraint and lower deficits, much
less tax breaks for large corporations, are utterly lacking in
voter appeal. Kerry is packaging himself as an economic conservative
who is also strong on defense spending--a Clinton clone--because
that is precisely how he feels. His advisers are the same investment
bankers who helped Clinton get the nomination in 1992 and then
raised the funds to help him get elected and then defined his
economic policy. The most important of them is Robert Rubin,
who became Treasury secretary, and he and his cronies are running
the Kerry campaign and will also dictate his economic agenda
should he win. These are the same men whom Stiglitz attacks
as advocates of the rich and powerful.
Kerry is, to his core, an
ambitious patrician educated in elite schools and anything but
a populist. He is neither articulate nor impressive as a candidate
or as someone who is able to formulate an alternative to Bush's
foreign and defense policies which themselves still have far
more in common with Clinton's than they have differences. To
be critical of Bush is scarcely justification for wishful thinking
about Kerry, although every presidential election produces such
illusions. Although the foreign and military policy goals of
the Democrats and Republicans since 1947 have been essentially
consensual, both in terms of objectives and the varied means--from
covert to overt warfare--of attaining them, there have been significant
differences in the way they were expressed. This was far less
the case with Republican presidents and presidential candidates
for most of the twentieth century, and men like Taft, Hoover,
Eisenhower, or Nixon were very sedate by comparison to Reagan
or the present rulers in Washington. But style can be important
and
inadvertently, the Bush administration's falsehoods, rudeness,
and preemptory demands have begun to destroy an alliance system
that for the world's peace should have been abolished long ago.
In this context, it is far more likely that the nations allied
with the U. S. in the past will be compelled to stress their
own interests and go their own ways. The Democrats are far less
likely to continue that exceedingly desirable process, a process
ultimately much more condusive to peace in the world. They will
perpetuate the same adventurism and opportunism that began generations
ago and that Bush has merely built upon, the same dependence
on military means to solve political crises, the same interference
with every corner of the globe as if America has a divinely ordained
mission to muck around with all the world's problems. The Democrats'
greater finesse in justifying these policies is therefore more
dangerous because they will be made to seem more credible and
keep alive alliances that only reinforce the U.S.' refusal to
acknowledge the limits of its power. In the longer run, Kerry's
pursuit of these aggressive goals will lead eventually to a renewal
of the dissolution of alliances, but in the short-run he will
attempt to rebuild them and European leaders will find it considerably
more difficult to refuse his demands than if Bush stays in power--and
that is to be deplored.
The Stakes For The World
Critics of American foreign
policy will not rule Washington after this election regardless
of who wins. As dangerous as he is, Bush's reelection is much
more likely to produce the continued destruction of the alliance
system that is so crucial to American power in the long
run. Facts in no way imply moral judgments if we merely identify
them. One does not have to believe that "worse
is better" but we have to consider candidly the foreign
policy consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate, not the least
because it is likely.
Bush's policies have managed
to alienate innumerable nations. Even America's firmest allies--such
as Britain, Australia, and Canada--are compelled to ask themselves
if issuance of blank checks to Washington is in their national
interest or if it undermines the tenure of parties in power.
Foreign affairs, as the terrorism in Madrid dramatically showed
in March, are too explosively volatile to permit uncritical endorsement
of American policies and parties in power can pay dearly, as
in Spain, where the people were always overwhelmingly opposed
to entering the war and the ruling party snatched defeat from
the jaws of victory. More important, in terms of cost and price,
are the innumerable victims among the people. The nations that
have supported the Iraq war enthusiastically, particularly Britain,
Italy, the Netherlands, and Australia, have made their populations
especially vulnerable to terrorism. They now have the expensive
responsibility of trying to protect them.
The Washington-based Pew Research
Center report on public opinion released on March 16, 2004 showed
that a large and rapidly increasing majority of the French,
Germans, and even British want an independent European foreign
policy, reaching 75 percent in France in March 2004 compared
to 60 percent two years earlier. The U.S. "favorability
rating" plunged to 38 percent in France and Germany. But
even in Britain it fell from 75 to 58 percent and the proportion
of Britain's population who supported the decision to go to war
in Iraq dropped from 61 percent in May 2003 to 43 percent in
March 2004. Blair's domestic credibility, after the Labour Party
placed third in the June 10 local and European elections, is
at its nadir. Right after the political debacle in Spain the
president of Poland, where a growing majority of the people has
always been opposed to sending troops to Iraq or keeping them
there, complained that Washington "misled" him on Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction and hinted that Poland might withdraw
its 2,400 troops from Iraq earlier than previously scheduled.
In Italy, by last May 71 percent of the people favored withdrawing
the 2,700 Italian troops in Iraq no later than June 30, and leaders
of the main opposition have already declared they will withdraw
them if they win the spring 2006 elections--a promise they and
other antiwar parties in Britain and Spain used in the mid-June
European Parliament elections to increase significantly their
power. The issue now is whether nations like Poland, Italy,
or The Netherlands can afford to isolate themselves from the
major European powers and their own public opinion to remain
a part of the increasingly quixotic and unilateralist American-led
"coalition of the willing". The political liabilities
of remaining staying close to Washington are obvious, the advantages
non-existent.
What has happened in Spain
is a harbinger of the future, further isolating the American
government in its adventures. Four more nations of the 30-some
members of the "coalition of the willing" have already
withdrawn their troops, and the Ukraine--with its 1,600 soldiers--will
soon follow suit. The Bush Administration sought to unite nations
behind the Iraq War with a gargantuan lie--that Hussein had "weapons
of mass destruction" --and failed spectacularly. Meanwhile,
terrorism is more robust than ever and its arguments have far
more credibility in the Muslim world. The Iraq War energized
Al Qaeda and has tied down America, dividing its alliances as
never before. Conflict in Iraq may escalate, as it has since
March, creating a protracted armed conflict with Shiites and
Sunnis that could last many months, even years. Will the nations
that have sent troops there keep them there indefinitely, as
Washington is increasingly likely to ask them to do? Can the
political leaders afford concession to insatiable American demands?
Elsewhere, Washington opposes
the major European nations on Iran, in part because the neoconservatives
and realists within its own ranks are deeply divided, and the
same is true of its relations with Japan, South Korea, and China
on how to deal with North Korea. America's effort to assert its
moral and ideological superiority, crucial elements in its postwar
hegemony, is failing--badly.
America's justification for
its attack on Iraq compelled France and Germany to become far
more independent on foreign policy, far earlier, than they had
intended or were prepared to do. In a way that was inconceivable
two years ago NATO's future role is now being questioned. Europe's
future defense arrangements are today an open question but there
will be some sort of European military force independent of NATO
and American control. Germany and France strongly oppose the
Bush doctrine of preemption. Tony Blair, however much he intends
to continue acting as a proxy for the U.S. on military questions,
must return Britain to the European project, and his willingness
since late 2003 to emphasize his nation's role in Europe reflects
political necessities. To do otherwise is to alienate his increasingly
powerful neighbors and risk losing elections.
Even more dangerous, the Bush
Administration has managed to turn what was in the mid-1990s
a blossoming cordial friendship with the former Soviet Union
into an increasingly tense relationship. Despite a 1997 non-binding
American pledge not to station substantial numbers of combat
troops in the territories of new members, NATO last March incorporated
seven East European nations and is now on Russia's very borders
and Washington is in the process of establishing an undetermined
but significant number of bases in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Russia has stated repeatedly that U.S. encirclement requires
that it remain a military superpower and modernize its delivery
systems so that it will be more than a match for the increasingly
expensive and ambitious missile defense system and space weapons
the Pentagon is now building. It has 5,286 nuclear warheads
and 2,922 intercontinental missiles to deliver them. We now see
a dangerous and costly renewal of the arms race.
Because it regards America's
ambitions in the former Soviet bloc as provocation, Russia threatened
in February of this year to pull out of the crucial Conventional
Forces in Europe treaty, which has yet to come into force. "I
would like to remind the representatives of [NATO]", Defense
Minister Sergei Ivanov told a security conference in Munich last
February, "that with its expansion they are beginning to
operate in the zone of vitally important interests of our country."
By dint of its increasingly unilateral rampages, without U.N.
authority, where Russia's veto power on the Security Council
is, in Ivanov's wistful words-- one of the "major factors
for ensuring global stability", the U.S. has made international
relations "very dangerous." (See Wade Boese,
"Russia, NATO at Loggerheads Over Military Bases,"
Arms Control Today, March 2004; Los Angeles Times, March
26, 2004. ) The question Washington's allies will ask themselves
is whether their traditional alliances have far more risks than
benefits--and if they are now necessary.
In the case of China, Bush's
key advisers publicly assigned the highest priority to confronting
its burgeoning military and geopolitical power the moment they
came to office. But China's military budget is growing rapidly--12
per cent this coming year--and the European Union wants to lift
its 15-year old arms embargo and get a share of the enticingly
large market. The Bush Administration, of course, is strongly
resisting any relaxation of the export ban. Establishing bases
on China's western borders is the logic of its ambitions.
By installing bases in small
or weak Eastern European and Central Asian nations the United
States is not so much engaged in "power projection"
against an amorphously defined terrorism as again confronting
Russia and China in an open-ended context. Such confrontations
may have profoundly serious and protracted consequences neither
America's allies nor its own people have any inclination to support.
Even some Pentagon analysts (see for example, Dr. Stephen J.
Blank's "Toward a New U.S. Strategy in Asia," U.S.
Army Strategic Studies Institute, February 24, 2004) have warned
against this strategy because any American attempt to save failed
states in the Caucasus or Central Asia, implicit in its new obligations,
will risk exhausting what are ultimately its finite military
resources. The political crisis now wracking Uzbekistan makes
this fear very real.
There is no way to predict
what emergencies will arise or what these commitments entail,
either for the U. S. or its allies, not the least because--as
Iraq proved last year and Vietnam long before it--America's intelligence
on the capabilities and intentions of possible enemies against
which it blares its readiness to "preempt" is so utterly
faulty. Without accurate information a state can believe and
do anything, and this is the predicament the Bush Administration's
allies are in. It is simply not to their national interest,
much less to the political interests of those now in power or
the security of their people, to pursue foreign policies based
on a blind, uncritical acceptance of fictions or flamboyant adventurism
premised on false premises and information. Such acceptance
is far too open-ended, both in terms of potential time and in
the political costs involved. If Bush is reelected, America's
allies and friends will have to confront such stark choices,
a process that will redefine and probably shatter existing alliances.
Many nations, including the larger, powerful ones, will embark
on independent, realistic foreign policies, and the dramatic
events in Spain have reinforced this likelihood.
But the United States will
be more prudent, and the world will be far safer, only if it
is constrained by a lack of allies and isolated. And that is
happening.
Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern
warfare. He is the author of the classic Century
of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and
Another
Century of War?. He can be reached at: kolko@counterpunch.org.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
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Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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