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CounterPunch
March 5,
2003
How to Swagger
& Bully Your Way to Disaster
Bush's Foreign
Adventurism
By BERNARD WEINER
Americans don't like to distrust their leaders.
In a world that appears so chaotic, one wants, needs, some sense
of firm, unshakeable foundations. If we can't trust our cops,
our priests, our corporate accountants, our elected officials,
who will be there to provide that container of stability, our
sense that the world works and that we're not just victims waiting
for the random finger of fate to tap us on the shoulder?
I'm not just talking about other people
here. I feel that way often.
For a long time, even though I didn't
vote for them -- and had anxieties about their motives -- I didn't
want to believe that the Bush Administration was all that bad,
or had lied, or had done terrible things. I so believe in the
goodness of this country and in its institutions -- especially
in the Constitution that has served us so well for more than
200 years -- that I tried to avoid seeing the awful things being
done in Washington, D.C.
But when time after time, the facts revealed
otherwise, I finally left the world of denial and moved into
the world of sadness and disappointment -- and anger. My government
had been hijacked by those who cared hardly a wit for the genius
of our Constitution, or for treating political opponents with
civility, or for the traditions of careful, respectful diplomacy
abroad.
It became more and more clear that the
folks inhabiting the White House were not good people. Oh, they
said publicly that their actions were being taken for all the
right reasons -- freedom and liberty and the Constitution and
to protect America -- and they certainly wrapped themselves not
only in the flag but in religious-sounding trappings as well.
But their motives in private seemed mostly
to involve a drive for profits for themselves and their corporate
friends, and a seemingly insatiable lust for power and control.
And all done in secret -- the most secretive Administration in
modern times -- so that we wouldn't be able to find out what
they're really up to.
Rather than delve into the full list
of economic, political, environmental and civil liberties catastrophes
for which they're responsible, let's just focus today on Bush
Administration foreign policies, since they involve the U.S.
in military adventures that are potentially disastrous to our
citizenry.
We're about to launch a "pre-emptive"
war against Iraq -- without an overt provocation, without a large
international coalition behind us, without United Nations authorization,
without the support of most of Europe's populations (not even
in Great Britain, our lone major supplier of troops), without
the support of more than half of the U.S. citizenry, without
the support of Iraq's 22 fellow Arab countries, without the support
of NATO-member Turkey, without even the support of the first
President Bush's chief advisors, and without the support of many
of America's military and intelligence leaders. In short, it's
pretty much a unilateral White House operation, with a few hangers-on
nations who don't want to risk angering the U.S.
Given this strange situation, we had
better damn well be clear on how we got to this place. Having
some context will help us shape our thinking, our tactics, our
strategies, in trying to stop the war before it begins. (And,
if we're unsuccessful in doing that, in how to deal with the
political and strategic necessities of opposing U.S. policy during
a war.) Whichever way we go, we need to be involved in helping
build a Movement for peace and justice that will take back the
country from the shadow forces currently in control.
The Paper
Trail
The first thing to understand is that
the true motivating factors for Bush&Co. policy in Iraq have
precious little to do with Saddam Hussein's weaponry. That is
but the pretext, the cover story -- which, as you may have noticed,
tends to shift daily. First it's "regime change"; then
(so as not to frighten potential U.N. supporters) it's "disarmament
of Iraq"; then, when Saddam moves in the direction of at
least partial disarmament, it's "regime change" again;
then it's "democracy" for Iraq and the region. But
it's really smoke and mirrors, my friends. Let's see what is
actually at play here.
The Administration's stated reasons may
flip on a dime -- how does Ari Fleischer do the daily flipping
with a straight face? -- but a nation's major foreign policy
doctrine doesn't arrive overnight, and certainly this one didn't
emerge full-grown from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It had been
in the works for quite some time, at least for a decade.
How can we be so sure? Well, it turns
out that there's a long, highly visible paper trail that fills
in the context. Let's take a look.
During the years when Bill Clinton was
struggling with the rising tide of conservatism in the House
of Representatives, and then with fighting off the various "scandal"
investigations, and then battling for his political life when
he was impeached for lying about sex, the intellectual cadres
of the HardRight were shaping a foreign policy for the next century.
The situation was staring them in the
face: There was a vacuum on the world scene. No more Superpower
rival. The Soviet Union had collapsed of its own internal contradictions.
The time was ripe for moving and taking in the world, as there
was nobody and no force that could stop the U.S.
The Foundations
are Laid
A number of HardRight position papers
and books spelled out the justification for the U.S. seizing
the moment. Some of these you may have heard about already, others
are less known. In all cases, the folks creating the imperial
policy on paper are now creating and shaping the imperial policy
for real inside the Bush Administration.
1. In 1992, then-Secretary of Defense
Dick Cheney had a report drafted for the Department of Defense,
written by Paul Wolfowitz. In it, the U.S. government was urged,
as the world's sole remaining Superpower, to move aggressively
and militarily around the globe. Somehow, this report leaked
to the press, and, since the objective political forces hadn't
yet coalesced in the U.S. that could implement this policy free
of resistance, President Bush the Elder repudiated the paper
and withdrew it. (Wolfowitz, then undersecretry of defense for
policy, is now Deputy Secretary of Defense; Cheney, of course,
now holds the title of Vice President.)
2. Various HardRight intellectuals outside
the government were spelling out the new policy in books and
influential journals. Zalmay M. Khalilzad (formerly associated
with big oil companies, currently U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan)
wrote an important volume in 1995, "From Containment to
Global Leadership: America & the World After the Cold War,"
the import of which was identifying a way for America to move
aggressively in the world and thus to exercise effective control
over the planet's natural resources. A year later, in 1996, neo-conservatives
Bill Kristol (now editor of the rightwing Weekly Standard newspaper)
and Robert Kagan, in their Foreign Affairs article "Towards
a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," came right out and said
the goal for the U.S. had to be nothing less than "benevolent
global hegemony," a euphemism for total U.S. domination
(but "benevolently" exercised, of course.)
3. In 1998, Kristol, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz,
out of nowhere, lobbied to convince President Clinton to attack
Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The January letter
from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a HardRight
think-tank founded the previous year, said that a war with Iraq
should be initiated "even if the U.S. could not muster support
from its allies in the United Nations." Sound familiar?
(President Clinton replied that he was focusing on dealing with
al Quaida terrorist cells.)
4. In September of 2000, the PNAC, sensing
a GOP victory in the upcoming presidential election, issued its
white paper on "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy,
Forces and Resources for the New Century." These were no
lightweight pundits; these guys were (and are) the heavy-hitting
movers and shakers of far-right Republican strategy, including:
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz,
Bill Kristol, Eliot Abrams, John Bolton, I. Lewis Libby, et al.
The 2000 PNAC report was quite frank
about why the U.S. would want to move toward imperialist militarism,
a Pax Americana, because with the Soviet Union out of the picture,
now is the time most "conducive to American interests and
ideals...The challenge of this coming century is to preserve
and enhance this 'American peace'." And how to preserve
and enhance the Pax Americana? The answer is to "fight and
decisively win multiple, simultaneous major-theater wars."
In serving as world "constable,"
the PNAC went on, no other countervailing forces will be permitted
to get in the way. Such actions "demand American political
leadership rather than that of the United Nations," for
example. No country will be permitted to get close to parity
with the U.S. when it comes to weaponry or influence; therefore,
more U.S. military bases will be established in the various regions
of the globe. (A post-Saddam Iraq may well serve as one of those
advance military bases.) 5. George W. Bush moved into the White
House in January of 2001. Shortly thereafter, a report by the
Administration-friendly Council on Foreign Relations was prepared
("Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century")
that advocated a more aggressive U.S. posture in the world and
called for a "reassessment of the role of energy in American
foreign policy," with access to oil repeatedly cited as
a "security imperative." (It's possible that inside
Cheney's energy-policy papers -- which he refuses to release
to Congress or the American people -- are references to foreign-policy
plans for how to gain military control of oilfields abroad.)
6. Five hours after the 9/11/2001 terrorist
attacks, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his aides to begin
planning for an attack on Iraq, even though his intelligence
officials told him it was an al Qaida operation and there was
no connection between Iraq and the attacks. "Go massive,"
the aides' notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up.
Things related and not." (In the past year, Rumsfeld leaned
heavily on the FBI and CIA to find any shred of evidence linking
the Iraq government to 9/11, but they weren't able to. So he
set up his own fact-finding group in the Pentagon, with similar
results.)
7. Feeling confident that all plans were
on track for moving aggressively in the world, the Bush Administration
in September of 2002 published its "National Security Strategy
of the United States of America." The official policy of
the U.S. government, as proudly proclaimed in this major document,
is virtually identical to the policy proposals in the various
white papers of the Project for the New American Century and
others like it over the past decade.
Chief among them are: 1) the policy of
"pre-emptive" war -- i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks
a country may be amassing too much power and/or could provide
some sort of competition in the "benevolent global hegemony"
sweepstakes, it can be attacked, without provocation. (A later
corollary would rethink the country's atomic policy: nuclear
weapons would no longer be considered defensive, but could be
used offensively in support of political/economic ends.) And,
2) ignoring international treaties and opinion whenever they
are not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals.
In short, and stated proudly to the public,
the Bush Administration seems to see the U.S. as a New Rome,
an empire with its foreign legions (and threat of nuclear weapons)
keeping the outlying colonies, and potential competitors, in
line. Those who aren't fully in accord with these goals better
get out of the way; "you're either with us or against us."
The Bush
Drool
Which brings us back to Iraq. Bush is
like a drooling, fixated hounddog on scent; other vital crises
may be exploding all around him (North Korea's increasingly bellicose
nuclear-missile strategy, the U.S. economy in tatters), but his
eyes and nose are locked onto Direction Baghdad.
Bush risks doing irreparable harm to
America's short- and long-term economic, political and military
interests, but, damn it, Saddam is still in Baghdad and he's
gotta go. No second attack front via Turkey? Forget it, Saddam's
gotta go. No support from the rest of the world? Ignore it, Saddam's
gotta go. Why? Because America's foreign/military policy -- its
goals of dominance and control of natural resources -- requires
it. Don't bother me, I'm eatin'.
So, unless some amazing event occurs
in the next several weeks -- a worldwide boycott aimed at U.S.
economic interests, Saddam having a heart attack (or going into
exile in Las Vegas), North Korea launching a nuclear missile
at Kuwait, the courts ruling that only the Congress has the right
to declare war -- hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops will head
into the Persian Gulf desert, after the "Shock & Awe"
cruise-missile bombardment, to locate and decapitate the Iraqi
leader and to "protect" the oilfields "on behalf
of the Iraqi people" (not).
Tens of thousands of civilians and military
personnel likely will die or be maimed. Dissent inside the U.S.
will make the Vietnam era look like a beach party. Terrorism
will explode worldwide, especially inside America. The U.S. will
be more and more isolated. The economy will tank. A global recession
or depression will follow.
And why? Because a few HardRight ideologues,
most of whom have never been to war, decided more than a decade
ago to start a conflagration in the Persian Gulf that the U.S.
could profit from, both monetarily and in terms of dominating
power. It's disgraceful. It's disgusting. It may even be impeachable.#
Bernard Weiner,
Ph.D., is co-editor of The
Crisis Papers, has taught at various universities, and
was a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly
20 years.
Ann Harrison
No
Lock Up for Medical Marijuana Advocate Jeff Jones!
Gary Leupp
A Very
Fine Thing: Turkey Stands Up to Bush
Winslow T. Wheeler
Inside
the Pentagon's Pork Factory
Chris Floyd
Swing
Blades: How Rumsfeld Filled His Pockets with Pyongyang's Nuclear
Loot
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Sleight of Hand
Ron Lare
UAW Local
600's Opposition to War
David Krieger
Meanwhile, Back at the Security Council
Ralph Nader
How MSNBC Sabotaged Donahue
Anthony Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Donahue: a Response to Ralph Nader
Harry Browne
The
Curse of Bono
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February 28,
2003
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Saul Landau
Now
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George W. Bonaparte
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Whiteout:
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by Alexander
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