Iraq in Imperial Perspective
Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly, 27 May 2004
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to
them.
-Alfred Adler
Headlines scream torture. TV political chatterers wonder how high the
disgrace will travel. Smelling blood at last, even the media attacks. In
the May 16 Los Angeles Times, Bob Drogin described an Afghan captive who
froze to death in a CIA-run lockup in Kabul in 2002 after he was doused
with water and shackled overnight to a wall. In Iraq's Camp Bucca, a
detainee was shot through the chest last year while throwing rocks at a
guard tower&Red Cross witnesses at the facility in southern Iraq concluded
that at no point did the prisoner pose a serious threat to guards.
Bush bigwigs seek to pin responsibility on low-ranking prison personnel for
cruelty that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld knew about months ago and at least
implicitly condoned. The continuing scandal refutes the Administration s
pretensions on human rights superiority vis à vis the Arab states.
The published photos of abuses, along with 800 dead and ten thousand or
more wounded Americans, have finally provoked even some politicians to ask:
How and why did Bush get us into this Iraq mess?
Even though Saddam had admitted UN weapons inspectors in September 2002, an
implicit refutation of the weapons charge, US media dutifully reported
White House claims of WMDs as if they constituted solid news. Israel, which
actually does possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, wanted its
major potential adversary in the region, Iraq, neutralized. So, Bush
demonized Saddam and praised the killer Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, who had also committed war crimes, as a man of peace. Bush s lack
of discipline with words paralleled the absence of prudence in his decision
making. He did not learn basic foreign policy lessons from his father.
In 1991, after George Bush (41) stopped the invasion of Iraq - for good
reasons as Bush (43) has learned - he declared the triumph of the New
World Order. The United States would now lead the world unrivaled. Bush
left vague the details of this new order, but he reassured allies, caressed
the prevailing monetary agencies and even played a mid wife role at the
birth of the WTO.
The new order sounded like the old one except that without the nearby
presence of Soviet power, the United States could invade the Persian Gulf,
secure better access to oil and more easily do Israeli bidding. The Soviet
collapse occurred so rapidly that little debate occurred about alternative
strategies-at least not in public. The 70 year long international
communist conspiracy, on which the national security state had for decades
built expensive organizations, disappeared with barely a trace. But even
after NATO and other anti-Soviet organizations lost their raison d être,
they not only remained alive but got larger budgets.
Bush (41) and Clinton made brief bows to the new world reality and closed a
few bases and reduced slightly the military budget. During the 2000
election both Gore and Bush expressed eternal loyalty to NATO; and Bush
complained about excessive overseas expenses and suggested withdrawing from
some commitments abroad - words well chosen for a proper Republican.
But the policy elite did not raise alternate paths and Iraq did not surface
as an issue in the presidential debates. Entering the 21st Century, the
United States maintained the institutions for a world in which its deceased
super rival still exists.
At the end of the 19th Century, America s ruling class held a serious
debate: the future of empire. The imperialists (old fashioned colonialists)
and anti-imperialists (informal empire through money, not colonies) both
assumed that the nation had to expand throughout the world in order to
escape the cycle of economic depressions. Those advocating informal empire
prevailed.
After World War I, led by Idaho s Senator William Borah, a small group of
Senators from Western states argued that republican government cannot mix
with empire. The expansionist majority drowned out such principled voices.
The issue emerged as how to pursue aggressively interests abroad. Those who
eschewed alliances defeated President Wilson s plan for a League of Nations.
All sides shunned the word empire to describe US expansion and military
intervention abroad. Indeed, since its inception the leaders of the nation,
born fighting an empire, created a powerful myth: whatever the United
States does abroad is not imperial. The fact that thirteen states seized or
bought on the cheap land from Indian nations, France, Spain and Russia did
not deter leaders from declaring that America had no imperial designs.
During the 1920s and 30s isolationism didn t mean US troops shouldn t
occupy Haiti, Nicaragua and the Philippines.
After World War II, the United States possessed 55% of the world s
manufacturing capacity and wielded unchallenged power. Adopting the
Wilsonian alliance model with the US as senior partner, fashioned
institutions that other nations would accept or pay the price for
disobedience.
Even after the Soviet collapse, this model prevailed. Until 9/11/01. Then,
those called neo-cons, who had penetrated the highest levels of the Bush
(43) Administration, unleashed policies that the majority in the elite
world had previously rejected as imprudent. No public debate took place;
rather, neo-cons working out of Vice President Cheney s office, like Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Policy Board chairman
Richard Perle, Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby and Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy Doug Feith, carried out a virtual coup d état. Cheney s
surrogates misdirected intelligence and instigated an unprovoked war with
Iraq. Neo-con wisdom claimed that overthrowing Saddam would serve as step
one to bring democracy to the Middle East. Indeed, the neo-cons argued that
the future of democracy and America s world position rested in establishing
full spectral dominance.
They got away with it until the ugly Iraqi reality intruded.
Even in an imperial democracy - try to imagine such an entity - periodic
elections should constitute the stage for debating policies. Pat Buchanan
demands a public forum over whether to maintain US troops all over the
world, or bring them home. He wants other nations to determine their own
destiny. Unfortunately, the two candidates and two parties agree on our
present foreign policy that is conspicuously failing (May 12 syndicated
column).
For Buchanan, Pax Americana will be quietly put on a shelf and forgotten as
infantile prattle. America is not going to fight a five or 10-year war in
Iraq. Nor will we be launching any new invasions soon. The retreat of
American empire, begun at Fallujah, is underway.
Ironically, the warmongers like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, principal
authors of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), proposed
conservative internationalism as the new US doctrine. None of the
mouth-attack squad served or has kin serving in combat zones. Like Bush,
they pledge to stay the course with other people s lives. What s new?
The neo-con scenario presumes overwhelming US military superiority guiding
the world into economic and political freedom. The spinally-challenged
Europeans will bow to US resourcefulness, which translates as force or the
threat of force, whenever needed to guarantee access to markets.
When the old establishment trustees finally recovered their wealth-based
senses and reacted with alarm to the rash White House policies, it was too
late. Bush family consiglieri like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft wrote op
eds in leading newspapers warning of the dangers in such an unrealistic
scheme: mounting toll of dead and wounded, photos of tortured prisoners,
dead Iraqi women and children and polls that show Iraqis want the United
States out.
The right wing nay sayers ranged from Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde to
columnist George Will to Pat Buchanan, who in his May 12 column called Iraq
an unnecessary war that may become one of the great blunders in US
history. Buchanan pleads that Bush s $500 billion deficit alone should
argue against a war. And with the squalid photos from Abu Ghraib we no
longer have the moral authority to impose our `values on Iraq.
Yet, US forces have built 14 military bases in Iraq while Bush claims the
country belongs to Iraqis. Vintage American imperialism! Deny invading and
occupying has imperial motives and call it instead, freedom! Indeed, under
Bush the US military has expanded its overseas bases to 730. But Bush doesn
t have enough troops to operate them, invade the remaining Axis of Evil
nations and discipline other naughty nations-problems inherent in the
neo-con imperial scheme during an election year. If the Democrats had a
candidate to address these issues, the torture photos alone would provoke a
declaration that it s time to leave Iraq.
Copyright 2004 Progreso Weekly
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