The Age of War Continues
Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly, 11 May 2006
George W. Bush has converted the White House into Regime Change Headquarters. Bush shelved more prudent imperial policies of his father’s New World Order and Bill Clinton’s eclectic drive for globalization. Previous presidents consulted allies and the UN – well, most of the time – and paid lip service to international law. After all, a new order, global production and marketing require international rules.
After World War II, U.S. officials set rules for the world economy and forged military and political alliances to advance "freedom", and "security". These words, however, masked the practical purpose of policy: opening markets for U.S. corporations.
Then, after 9/11, W and his neo conservative team changed tradition and showed a naked American fist. "You’re with us or the terrorists", he told his opponents. Most Democrats acquiesced: intimidated, they shut their mouths. Indeed, they passed The Patriot Act, assented to the invasion of Iraq and now fail to answer Bush’s inflamed rhetoric about bombing Iran. They have allowed Bush to initiate yet another "crisis". Yes, nuclear weapon proliferation should frighten sensible people, but Iran’s possible future acquisition a nuclear weapon hardly constitutes a cause for another pre-emptive war.
Fortunately, the public has begun to emerge from its 9/11 shock stage and has not offered strong support for the launching of another military strike to abort Iran’s nuclear fetus. Indeed, the lack of progress in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the continuing death and wounded toll of U.S. troops in their fourth year of "mop up" activities, has made the public skeptical of Bush’s aggressive rhetoric and disgusted with the scandals and cronyism that surround him.
Opinion polls did not resonate with approval in 2005, after Iran announced that it had enriched a tiny quantity of uranium and former Defense official Richard Perle said that an attack could "be over before anybody knew what had happened". He was referring to "Big Blu, a 30,000 lb. bunker-buster bomb", that will soon be ready for use. (Sarah Baxter and William Smith, The Sunday Times, April 9, 2006)
Such statements might have actually hurt Bush’s approval ratings. A late April Fox News poll showed that only 32% approved of Bush’s performance. So, Bush hired a new press spinner. Tony Snow might help shift political debate away from the unaccomplished missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and toward demonizing Iran as the new terrorist threat.
Given Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s fanatic anti-Israeli statements, the neo cons projected a nuclearIran as an immediate threat to world oil supply and thus global production. Although experts insist that it will take Iran several years to develop one bomb, the Washington "crisis crowd" ignored such sobering facts.
Instead of leading Democrats screaming their objections to the new warmongering on the floors of Congress, the reasoned responses to Bush’s muscular rhetoric came in the form of two new books. They implicitly call for a return to a kinder, gentler imperial rule, one that doesn’t turn most of the world against the United States or fill everyone with fear.
Julia Sweig’s Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century and Steven Kinzer’s Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, question the swaggering power clappers and promote a more reasonable foreign policy.
Sweig argues that the United States cannot lead in a world where the majority of people despise its aggressive, insensitive and often illegal military, political and economic policies. "Power without constructive influence", she argues, "is not power at all".
Referring to the growing wealth-poverty gap and environmental crises, she appeals to policy makers to demonstrate "that their interests coincide with those of the wider world". Sweig doesn’t blame anti-Americanism on Bush or his post 9/11 policies. Rather, she shows that historic U.S. interventionism had already established anegative legacy. While Americans tend to forget, the rest of the world remembers events before the Iraq war. They recall CIA overthrows of governments and support of third world dictators. What Bush’s policies did, she argues, was to dramatically increase anti-American sentiment and reverse the brief love affair after 9/11, when the world extended its solidarity to the shocked American public.
Kinzer’s Overthrow also turns those interventions into policy lessons. His previous books,All the Shah’s Men and Bitter Fruit, (with Stephen Schlesinger) described the CIA’s ouster of Mosadegh’s regime in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz’s government in Guatemala. His new book attacks the "alarm bell ringing" syndrome, whereby disobedient third world governments produce in Washington an unstoppable impulse to intervene.
In 1953, for example, Mosadegh declared his intention to nationalize Iranian oil. U.S. oil executives complained to the White House. Secretary of State John Foster Dulless assumed that governments challenging U.S. corporate rights to exploit their resources and labor must be repressive, dictatorial, and thus a tool of communism.
After the CIA overthrew the elected government of Iran, the Agency empowered the Shah and his repression for 25 years. They failed to foresee the consequences: "a fanatically anti-American clique of mullahs who began their regime by taking American diplomats as hostage".
Kinzer also analyzes U.S. interventions in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Chile, Honduras, South Vietnam and Panama. "We’re always looking for some individual to point at. The idea behind this is that the natural state of all people in the world is to have U.S.-style democracy and to be friendly to the United States. If…we could only just remove this one individual…the people in that country would return to the normal state of all people, which is to wish to have the U.S. system of government and politics and economics and to embrace the United States". (Kinzer on Democracy Now, April 21, 2006)
While high profile potential Democratic presidential aspirants said little about the "get Iran" crusade, a former Democratic hawk responded with sobering words to the urgent demand to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski declared the obvious: No imminent threat exists.
"Without a formal congressional declaration of war, an attack would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the president", wrote Brzezinski. (LA Times, April 23, 2006) He added that "Iranian reactions would significantly compound ongoing U.S. difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps precipitate new violence, and in all probability bog down the United States in regional violence".
Brzezinski picked up on a theme the Democrats should have leaped at. "Oil prices would climb steeply, if the Iranians were to cut their production or seek to disrupt the flow of oil from the nearby Saudi oil fields. The world economy would be severely affected, and the United States would be blamed".
He believes that an attack on Iran would bring about the premature demise of the era of American preponderance. The U.S. "has neither the power nor the domestic inclination to impose and sustain its will in the face of protracted resistance, lessons taught by experiences in Vietnam and Iraq".
After four plus years, some centrists and liberal Democrats have used the media to respond to the "regime change uber alles" approach of the neo conservatives in and out of the White House. But the underlying themes in the Sweig and Kinzer books suggest that even a kinder and gentler imperial policy will not suffice as policy guidelines. Democracy and empire simply do not mix well as ingredients for a 21st Century leadership cocktail. The continuation of imperial rule, by any means, will require war.
In his new book, Gabriel Kolko offers wisdom for the foreign policy elite. "All states that have gone to war over the past centuries have not achieved the objectives for which they sacrificed so much blood, passion and resources. They have only produced endless misery and upheavals of every kind". (The Age of War)
What Naomi Klein called Bush’s use of "Likudization" (Guardian September 10, 2004) has virtually paralyzed the leading Democrats. Klein saw Bush’s foreign policy as derived from former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s notion that "all Israeli action against Palestinians is an act of self-defense, necessary to the country’s very survival". When Bush applied this brawny and inflexible approach to the rest of the world, it allowed him to label his doubters as weak. Those questioning lethal attacks "on the enemy, is themselves an enemy. This applies to the United Nation, other world leaders, to journalists, to peaceniks".
"The Bush Doctrine", "pre-emptive wars" and attacks on "terrorist infrastructure", meant two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and massive corruption. Capricious presidential aspirant Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), called for more efficient imperial management, trisecting Iraq and gradually withdrawing U.S. troops.
Instead of such flummery, Democrats should stop calling Bush inefficient, as if Democrats could wage a better war in Iraq, and use Kolko’s insight: demand a serious reduction in the military budget.
Copyright 2006 Progreso Weekly
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