Introduction to "Selling US Wars"

The US today is militarily far and away the most powerful
country in the world. Who can doubt this? Nor should
anyone be surprised that its leading elites seek to sustain,
extend, and deepen the US's political dominance. The major lines
of division within the elites are on how to go about doing this.
Indeed, the terms of discourse have now shifted so dramatically
that the language of empire and empire-building can be considered
respectable, a view worthy of a hearing in the mainstream media
in the US. Even in Europe, there is a greater willingness than in
decades past to talk of the "benevolence of Empire" or of the US
as the "benevolent" imperial power; of how the expansion of this
empire can now be understood as the pre-condition for the
"expansion of freedom." A side consequence of the emergence of
this new kind of political discourse is also a much greater
willingness to reassess in a much more favorable manner previous
imperialisms such as the Pax Britannica with a view to providing
historical insights and advice on how a Pax Americana can be
instituted. Niall Ferguson's recent works are but one striking
example of this turn toward a modern form of the "White Man's
Burden"-the claim that British imperialism was (and by analogy
US imperial behavior today is) in fact primarily of benefit to its
supposed victims, the colonized rather than to the colonizers. The
former were the real beneficiaries, the liberated rather than the
exploited or oppressed!

But if such right-wing effervescence is to be expected in today's
climate, perhaps more disturbing is how liberal intellectuals like
John L. Gaddis and Paul Kennedy are now willing to lend
legitimacy and an attentive ear to such views. If during the Cold
War liberals justified US foreign policy behavior as a necessary
"defensive posture" to "contain" the threat of communism and
the USSR; today the blatantly offensive character of US foreign
policy behavior can no longer be disguised and is therefore in
greater need than ever before of legitimizing discourses, which
many North American and European intellectuals of the right and
"liberal" center seem eager to provide and endorse. One possible
overarching discourse-of "expanding freedom" through imperial
behavior-is apparently unable to quite fit the bill. A range of
such legitimizing discourses has been required partly because
global domination requires not just one all-encompassing
discourse but separate discourses to justify US actions in different
parts of the world that have different political contexts; that is,
where there exist variant alliance arrangements and rationales for
a US presence.

This book therefore aims to delineate, analyze, and evaluate
these discourses separately in chapter treatments, thereby
exposing their role in relation to how the US's overall empire
project is unfolding in different parts of the world. At the same
time, there is one overarching imperial project and though the
components of the legitimizing discourses differ, they remain part
of an overall package. These discourses have their separate
dynamics. They aim to highlight different "dangers" and
"concerns" to the US. But they also have their areas of overlap
and reinforcement, which therefore need to be uncovered. Such
overlaps mean that the US can and does shift from the use of one
discourse to that of the other. For example, justifications for the
invasion of Iraq shifted from "weapons of mass destruction" to
"regime change" to "fighting terrorism," and Washington has
continued to justify its occupation via periodic slippages between,
and combinations of, the latter two themes, all "in the name of
democracy."

The objective here is to reveal the origins, nature, and
purposes of these ideological constructions or political discourses
as well as the consequences of their application in particular
geographical contexts. It should be clear that this is a project to
dissect the "software" of US empire-building. The book is not
primarily about the hardware of empire-building or aiming to be
a narrative about the conduct and course of US foreign policy
behavior.

All the contributors to this book are in one way or the other
associated with the Transnational Institute (TNI), founded in the
early 1970s and based in Amsterdam. As both a research body
devoted to addressing the various developmental problems of the
South and their linkages to the practices and perspectives of the
countries and institutions of the North, and (perhaps uniquely) a
longtime international fellowship of scholar-activists from the
South and North, the TNI is uniquely placed to initiate and carry
out this project. Its participants are bound by a shared
commitment to a "radical necessity"-the struggle for a
qualitatively more humane and just world order than that which
currently exists.

The fellows, associates, researchers, and friends of TNI all have
their individual areas of expertise and concerns, ranging from issues
of water conflicts to the iniquities of the WTO to the dangers of
nuclear weaponization to promoting solidarities with the antiinvasion
and anti-occupation movements of Iraq to the search for
a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine issue. Given this intrinsic
character, the TNI is ideally situated to bring such a project to
fruition since the central themes of this book meshed naturally with
the ongoing preoccupations of the respective contributors.What is
more, almost all the chapters were subjected to collective discussion
and argument-often fierce-the result being that there were
substantial rewrites of these chapters in response to criticisms of
style and content. This was another important way to utilize the
advantages of a grouping like the TNI and to make this a genuinely
collective work and not just a collection of disparate essays simply
brought together by the editor.

The thematic structure of the book, then, is as follows. In
place of the one overarching ideological banner of the Cold War
era-defending the "free world" against the communist threat-
six ideological banners have emerged, which to greater or lesser
extent serve the interests of US empire-building. These are:

(1) the global war on terror (GWOT),
(2) weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in the "wrong
hands,"
(3) failed states,
(4) the necessity and justice of external and forcible humanitarian intervention,
(5) regime change in the name of democracy, and
(6) the war on narcotics.

The domains in which consent is to be elicited through use of
these banners are threefold. There is the domestic population of
the United States itself-a terrain of very great importance. There
are the elites, governments, and general public of the target areas
of US imperial activity themselves, be these Central andWest Asia
(the Middle East) or the countries of Upper Amazonia. There is
finally the rest of the world, comprised of countries that might be
allies, neutrals, or critics of the US, but whose governments and
publics need also to be persuaded of the righteousness of
American behavior. None of these six themes are purely or solely
functional for the purposes of empire-building. They all refer to
concerns that actually predate the end of the Cold War, though it
was not until after the collapse of the Soviet Union that a
calculated US projection elevated most to a newer and much
higher status, where they could achieve a much stronger public
and international resonance.Moreover, they all represent genuine
problems and dangers that, regardless of how the discourses about
them may be manipulated, need to be addressed in their own
right. That is why the extent to which each banner is functional
for empire also varies. Some are more useful than others in this
regard even when their political and geographical terrains of
application are separated and do not overlap.

Keeping all this in mind, each of the chapters on these six
themes are broadly united by their common concern (a) to identify
the origins or emergence of the particular legitimizing discourse or
ideological banner; (b) to examine the character and composition
of the banner; (c) to point out the purposes or aims that lie behind
the unfolding of the banner; (d) to evaluate how effective the use
of the banner has actually been; (e) to highlight the falsity of the
banner or the dishonesties, deceits, and hypocrisies that have
guided or lain behind its use; (f) to suggest how in all moral
honesty and seriousness one should address the particular
problem, be it terrorism or violations of universal human rights or
the proliferation of WMDs or opium, heroin, and cocaine
production, distribution, and use.

These six chapter presentations-the section on the
ideological banners-are preceded by three other chapters.
Empires are always constructed for the purposes of accumulating
power and wealth for some, even if many seek to justify empire in
the name of prosperity for all. There is then always an economics
of empire. The American imperial project today, unlike those of
the capitalist past, is an informal one. It is not a formal
colonization project of establishing long-term direct foreign rule
but of ensuring indirect domination and enduring and significant
influence on local elites and their governments. How is this to be
achieved? Why, through the organization of consent, which itself
is of three types. There is active consent, which is the best of all.
Here, local elites and middle classes and even sections of the
population lower down must be persuaded to believe that such
indirect domination or "influence" is good because they have
come to share the values that the hegemonizer claims to uphold,
be these the fight against terrorism, the assurance of democracy,
or the promise of prosperity. The second form of consent-
passive-will do. But this is essentially resignation in the face of
a dominant power rather than enthusiastic embrace of its
proclaimed values and promises, and therefore carries the
potential of being somewhat politically unstable for empire.

The third form is bought consent-not just the promise of
prosperity for collaborating groups but the institutionalized
realization of such benefits. And if the price for such prosperity for
some is rising inequality and deprivation for substantial others,
so be it. This is where current neoliberal economic globalization
and the US imperial project converge. These are the two sides of
the same coin. US political expansion also aims to expand
neoliberalism. An expanding neoliberalism (as economic doctrine
and policy direction) promotes and helps stabilize the project of
securing US political hegemony globally through the recruitment
of cohort groups materially benefiting from such expansion. This
means even this survey, essentially of the software of empire, finds
it necessary to precede its dissection of legitimizing discourses by
an initial overview of the character of the current global economy,
its distinctive characteristics, and the roles played by US capital
economically and financially and by its dominant classes through
and besides the US government. This initial overview is followed
by two other chapters that examine the ideological preconditions
that underlie both the ascendance globally of neoliberalism as the
economic and social "common sense" of our times, and the role
played by the belief in an American exceptionalism.

The ascendance of neoliberalism ideologically was not a
happenstance. It was systematically prepared for, to begin with in
the US and Britain from the late 1970s, but has since spread its
influence worldwide. Here, is the story par excellence of the
organization of consent, of creating hegemony, one that rewards
study even-especially-for its opponents. This chapter is also the
logical follow-up to the preceding one on the economics of empire
since it uncovers the institutional and ideological foundations that
have led to the practices themselves.Moreover, the six legitimizing
discourses of the American right and center after the end of the
ColdWar benefited from the changed intellectual-political climate
(the shift rightward) from the late 1970s onward; that is, the rise
of neoliberalism in economic, social, and political thought. This
came about through a deliberately constructed and systematic
intellectual-institutional process in the US, the West in general,
and more widely. And empire-promoting doctrines since the end
of the Cold War have also emerged through some of these
established mechanisms and structures of the fast rising and
increasingly hegemonic right. All the more reason therefore for
having an important chapter treatment of all this.

"Americanism" or "American Exceptionalism" is the belief
in the special worth and mission of the US globally. It is the belief
that the US is uniquely equipped to be the best model of a modern
and humane society, which others should seek to substantially
emulate-really the best that a modern capitalist democracy has
to offer (though some lessons from the European experience can
also be imbibed)-and furthermore, that the US must take on the
responsibility of helping other countries and societies to move in
this direction. Empire then is a misnomer. The US is merely the
leading power in a global project to bring prosperity and dignity
to all. It is a lumbering giant. It needs sympathetic but also critical
friends. It makes mistakes. It even sometimes abuses its enormous
power. But who can doubt its fundamentally good intentions or
the importance and validity of its global project? There is no way
then that this US imperial project can be undermined intellectually
and politically without attacking the self-deluding and self-serving
character of this belief in American uniqueness. The fact that the
US might consider itself exceptional is not exceptional. Many
countries or societies have their own versions of exceptionalism.
But their exceptionalisms reside in their past and make them
inimitable. They cannot be exported. American exceptionalism is
different because it also claims to be imitable universally, indeed
insists on the necessity and desirability of being emulated. It is the
emblem of "modernity" without parallel and the US has the
responsibility, nay duty, to use its immense power to share this
vision and its construction with all who also wish to be truly
modern. Hence the innate connection of 'Americanism' to the US's
current empire-building project.

In the survey of chapters that follows the aim is not so much
to provide a comprehensive summary but more to provide a
window of sorts, an enticing glimpse of some of the furniture in
the larger room of ideas and arguments presented by each
contributor.

The Economics of Empire: Neoliberal Globalization
and the US

Amidst so much hype about the emergence of a "new economy"
centered on the revolutionizing impact of information and
communications technologies (ICT), and about the spreading
benefits of globalization, Walden Bello provides a cool and
balanced corrective. It is the Northern economies taken together
that most shape the character of the world economy and it is an
unassailable fact that the "golden age" era (1950-1975) had
higher average growth rates and far more equitable distribution of
benefits to the general public than the era of neoliberal
globalization (roughly from 1980 onward). Indeed, Bello argues
that this very pattern of globalization characterized much more
by the incredible financialization of the world economy than by
the transnationalization of production, is basically a response to
the structural crisis of capitalism after the golden age.

This is a crisis of overaccumulation, that is to say, of
overproduction and excess capacities relative to demand in the
North; of too much capital and too few investment opportunities.
The overall result is declining profit rates and therefore the search
for another way to continue the never-ending pursuit of more and
more profits. This, after all, is the engine that drives capitalism. It
explains why neoliberal globalization is what it is-investing
hopes in ICT to create new areas of massive and continuous
investment and product expansion; the shift from productive to
financial activities as a way of making profits; the extension of
capital to other territories; the commercialization of hitherto
public spheres of life such as health and education, public utilities
and transportation, pensions and social security measures. If it
wasn't for China's extraordinary growth over the last two-and-ahalf
decades, absorbing huge amounts of investment at home and
from abroad, and churning out goods for a debt-based
consumption boom in the US (still the locomotive of the global
economy), the world would have been in an even greater mess.

Nevertheless, according to Bello, all that has happened is a
postponing of a time of greater reckoning. The crisis of
overaccumulation remains. Compared to the golden era of "stable
cooperation" the era of neoliberal globalization is one of
"unstable competition." Earlier, tension between the major
European allies and the US were much less. The US was the
accepted hegemon in a world order where the pie was growing
fast enough for others to grow relatively faster than the US itself.
But from 1980 onward with a slowly growing world pie, the US
is much more concerned to corner as much of the benefit as
possible relative to other major capitalist powers. If this is one
source of growing tension, the impact of neoliberal structural
adjustment programs in the South has been devastating-
promoting ever greater inequalities and further impoverishment.
The constitutionalization of neoliberalism through the WTO,
IMF, and WB is getting stalled.

If the Clinton administration at least sought to sustain some
degree of multilateral cooperation on the world scale for both
economic and political purposes even while seeking competitive
advantages for US capital and strategic dominance for the American
state, the administration of George W. Bush has been much more
nakedly partisan toward a certain faction of the US ruling class,
namely the oil companies, steel, agribusiness, the military-industrial
complex. These are sectors more concerned about protecting their
existing turfs via government support than with expanding free
trade and the market mechanism globally. Furthermore, Bush
differs from Clinton in his greater unilateralism and militarism.
Here, the goals of enhancing both US economic power and strategic
power remain, but the former gets subordinated to the latter. Yes,
the invasions of Central and West Asia (Middle East) are partly
motivated by the need of the US to secure control over energy
sources, but the political-imperial behavior here and elsewhere is
motivated as much, if not more, by the need to assert itself-to send
an "exemplary" message that the US will not hesitate to use all
means necessary (including the military) to secure whatever it
considers to be its vital interests. Either accept US domination or
face the consequences of resistance, big or small.

Bello's central point is that this greater belligerence is not the
expression of a greater strength but of a greater weakness-
deepening problems of the world economy and of the US
economy; a massive overextension of US military power; a
growing disillusionment politically and ideologically that is
progressively undermining the credibility of the US as a supposed
force for positive change worldwide.

Neoliberal "Common Sense"

No rightward shift in economic thinking can hope to stabilize
itself as the dominant "common sense" if it is not also
accompanied by a rightward shift in political and social thought.
That is why the rise of neoliberalism in the Anglo-Saxon world
(US and Britain) necessarily has an impact on the thinking and
behavior of policymaking and policy-shaping elites with respect to
both domestic politics and foreign affairs. In tracing the rise and
spread of neoliberalism in the US, it is just this general paradigm
shift that Susan George writes about, as much a shift in moral
attitudes, positions, and concerns as of anything else.

Neoliberalism is a marriage of the most conservative
interpretation of neoclassical economic doctrine with the Austrian
school of libertarian political-legal thought best embodied in the
work of Friedrich von Hayek. Neoclassical economics recognizes
"market failure." The most right-wing current within the
neoclassical streaminsists, however, that "government failure" is so
much more serious that better market failure than government
intervention, hence the advocacy of the minimalist state. But the
minimalist state also gets its defense from the libertarian
contractualist political philosophy of those like Robert Nozick and
Hayek. There is no such thing, they declare, as society, only
individuals. Notions about collectivities having common needs and
goals or pursuing a common conception of the good life are
extremely dangerous. Above everything else must be the freedom of
individuals anchored firmly in property rights thatmust be protected
legally, and it is this freedom that must take precedence over all
illusory claims to promoting social welfare, justice, or equality.

This is a vision of liberal democracy in which a conservative
liberalism (the most restrictive conception of the individual) is
considered far more important than a fulsome democracy (the
search for greater collective empowerment of ordinary people).
How in some three decades this has become the dominant vision
of how society should be organized nationally and internationally
is the story that George seeks to reveal. Much has been made
recently about the emergence of neoconservatives. George reminds
us, however, that they are but a subset of neoliberals and that the
similarities among them are ultimately more important than the
differences. That neoliberals only aim to roll back the state is
incorrect. They also aim to roll forward the state in other
domains, most notably in regard to domestic surveillance and
defense preparations. Withdrawing the state from the economy
worldwide goes hand in hand with promoting the power of the
American state worldwide, precisely to constitutionalize and
stabilize neoliberal globalization. George points out that the same
institutions and connections in the US that have promoted the
ideology of neoliberalism have promoted the ideology of empire.

At the heart of this chapter then, is a remarkable exposure of
the institutional network that made possible this victory of rightwing
ideas. It is in fact more a galaxy than a network that has as
its sun, key funding institutions (extremely wealthy, private, rightwing
family foundations) that support a host of orbiting bodies
from think tanks to university departments to single-issue
development centers to grassroots organizations to publications to
electronic media channels to individual intellectuals and activists.
Over the last thirty years and more, these funders have put in over
a billion dollars into the pores of civil society in the US with
profound effects at both the popular and policymaking levels.

What the political right has done, says George, is what the
genuinely liberal center and the political left can learn from. They
must draw the necessary lessons for their own task-to carry out
their own form of what the great Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci
called, "the long march through the institutions" to establish
another kind of intellectual and moral hegemony that
unequivocally rejects neoliberalism and empire.

American Exceptionalism

Mike Marqusee starts off by alerting us to the US government's
National Security Strategy (NSS) paper of 2002, which declared
that there was now only a "single sustainable model" for the
world, and the US represents this model and is the vanguard of
progress worldwide. American exceptionalism (AE) has always
insisted that the US has a mission, that it is the one country whose
pursuit of the "national interest" is at one and the same time the
pursuit of a cosmopolitan universal interest! AE has of course
historical roots as well as a variability of component themes that
amalgamate in flexible ways, all of which Marqusee seeks to
investigate. To what extent and in what ways has the US been
exceptional? If it really is exceptional then how does it deviate
from the supposedly general law of development? Unlike in other
cases, US nationalism elevated national identity to the status of
an ideology-Americanism. Other nations have ideologies;
America is one. And since this ideology is supposed to express the
best elements of Enlightenment universalism and rationalism-
"freedom, individualism, opportunity, the rule of law"-America
could simply not be or have an empire, formal or informal.

This is the mystification thatMarqusee dissects. America as a
mission or ideal meant that from the beginning it was not to be
seen as a fixed territorial entity but as a "great social experiment"
whose own expansion was natural and benevolent, bringing
"freedom" and "progress" to those it embraced. That, indeed, is
how its history of expansionist wars against Mexico, Spain and
the indigenous Indian population has always been portrayed in
mainstream discourse. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was not to
be seen as an expression of the US desire for hemispheric
dominance but as its adoption of the generous role of "protector"
against possible European depredations. In short, Marqusee
documents a long history of the US as an "empire in denial." For
a certain period from the 1890s onward as the US began to
acquire territories in the Pacific outside the continental landmass,
elite opinion for the first time talked of the US becoming an
empire to rival those of Europe, of accepting the "White Man's
Burden" of bringing civilization to the Philippines. This phase also
saw the emergence within the US of an intellectual and political
current that opposed such imperialist behavior and, ironically,
both sides sought sanction for their respective views from the
tenets of AE.

Expansion in the Pacific and in the Americas was always
compatible with a posture of isolationism that only meant (in
contrast to the "internationalists") refusal to involve the US in the
politics of the European powers. And once again, both
isolationists and internationalists could call upon AE in their
support.WorldWar II discredited isolationism and AE could now
be brandished to justify the US mission of exercising moral and
political leadership worldwide against the danger of Communism.
It was Vietnam, Marqusee says, that shook the general US selfimage
as nothing else had ever done. But it did not overturn AE.
The rise of the right during Reagan's presidency and then the
collapse of the USSR put paid to the prospects of any further selfquestioning.
Indeed, this retreat from Vietnam-inspired self-doubt
gathered increasing momentum, so much so that a new hubris and
triumphalism emerged by the beginning of the new millennium.
AE was once again alive and well. Through all the political twists
and turns-the rise of the New Democrats and then of the
Neoconservatives, the post-Cold war interventions in Central
America, Africa, the Balkans,West and Central Asia-the empire
remains in denial. True, elite discourse is now much more willing
to talk of today's America as an empire that should recognize itself
as being one and behave accordingly. But Marqusee correctly
points out that this elite discourse cannot hope to displace the
mass public discourse and belief that the US is not and cannot
become an empire.

9/11 though, reinforced already existing tendencies in
American society toward insularity, chauvinism, and xenophobia.
It also reinforced existing expansionist and imperial interpretations
of what legitimate self-defense should entail. Not only does
the dominant ideology of AE feed such interpretations, it also
obscures realization of what is truly exceptional or at least
distinctive about US society in comparison with other advanced
capitalist democracies. Compared to them, the US has the worst
system of public healthcare, the highest levels of poverty, the
greatest levels of inequality of income and wealth. AE prevents
comparison between, even an interest in comparing, the US and
other advanced capitalist democracies; just as AE prevents a more
truthful engagement by Americans with their own history.

Yet, as Marqusee also points out, no other empire has
experienced as great a degree of internal dissent that on occasions
rises to very significant policy-changing levels. There is much then,
in the history of the US that gives cause for optimism-rejection
in many circles of the Cold War, the anti-Vietnam war movement
(the greatest anti-imperialist popular movement of modern
history), the black exception to AE (Malcolm X's declaration to
blacks that they were not so much Americans as victims of
America). Today, more young Americans are traveling abroad
than ever before and developing a greater awareness of how the
US is perceived abroad, while at home there is growing
disillusionment with the consequences of America's war on, and
occupation of, Iraq.

Global War on Terror

Though a war on terrorism has been announced by the US on past
occasions during the Cold War (when the USSR was designated
the main terrorist culprit) it is really after 9/11 that the declaration
of a global war on terror (GWOT) takes center stage. It becomes
the latest and among the most important of the ideological
banners of empire. Using the metaphor of war to combat
terrorism only militarizes the approach to dealing with it and
paves the way for using one unacceptable form of political
violence-terrorism-to deal with another form of terrorism.
Indeed, the most dangerous and damaging form of terrorism has
been that of the state, whose scale has always been enormously
greater. The main reason why state terrorism has never been as
strong a focus for public recrimination and anger is because states
have had much greater capacities to disguise their terrorism as
something else or to justify it in the name of some higher ideal, be
it national security or some other supposedly worthy goal.

This essay starts from an examination of the complexities of
the very concept of political terrorism, which has prevented any
universally accepted definition of it from emerging. Yet, a working
understanding of it adequate to identifying most of its forms and
its agents is easily reachable. Its agents are multiple from al-Qaeda
to the US government. GWOT provides an excellent framing
device for the imperial project, for in comparison to the other five
ideological banners, it possesses the greatest capacity to mobilize
domestic support for the US pursuit of empire abroad. This is not
to decry its capacity to win over other governments and publics.
Terrorist bombings as in London, Madrid, Bali, and elsewhere
strengthen the claims of those who would justify GWOT, which
in any case is a cover that so many governments needing to repress
their own insurgency movements (Russia, China, India) and
others needing to justify their collaboration with the US assaults
on Afghanistan and Iraq, find indispensable.

An inevitable corollary of the US-led GWOT has been the
demonization of Islam and Muslims. This is unfair but the
temptation to resort to it has proved irresistible. At the heart of
the empire project is the requirement that Muslim Central and
West Asia be permanently subordinated to American power. And
for this it is necessary to mobilize maximum support from within
the US population and from the publics and governments of the
West and Japan. This demonization must be resisted and exposed
for its dishonesty and hypocrisy. Along with this, the whole issue
of terrorism must be put into proper perspective. We need to
impartially condemn both the "terrorism of the weak" (non-state
actors) and the "terrorism of the strong" (state actors). Indeed, it
is the latter that is our biggest problem. Without developing and
strengthening adequate international mechanisms such as the
International Criminal Court and addressing fairly the actual
political contexts in which terrorism occurs, we cannot hope to
diminish significantly the occurrence of such terrorism by any and
all its agents. Meanwhile, it remains incumbent on us to expose
the GWOT for what it primarily is-currently the most widely
and frequently waved banner to hide and justify the US
government's imperial ambitions and practices.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Weapons of mass destruction (more specifically nuclear weapons)
in the "wrong hands" was first used as an excuse to justify
external military intervention by the US in 2003 when it invaded
Iraq. There were no such WMDs and no real evidence that Iraq
was preparing them after its secret nuclear program had been
dismantled following the 1991 invasion. Zia Mian shows
conclusively how the US deliberately created and promoted this
falsehood and how systematically the government sought to
manipulate the media to deceive the American public, and
succeeded. The point, though, is that there was already a strong
predisposition to believe whatever theWhite House declares, with
the media only reinforcing prior prejudices. This suggests a deeper
malaise in the American political system especially as it affects
foreign policy behavior. The "presidentialization" of the political
system both reinforces and expresses a general "depoliticization"
wherein very large sections of the public, unaffected by the
availability of alternative information sources, is simply willing
to take the US president on trust. For a quite significant part of the
public what he says goes.

Of course, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was motivated by
various strategic calculations well beyond the specific issue of
WMDs. And now that this ideological banner has been unfurled
it is not about to be quietly stashed away. Despite the deluge of
criticism that the US government has had to face once it became
clear that there were no WMDs in Iraq, Washington is perfectly
willing to use the same justification ofWMDs in the wrong hands
against other deemed enemies. This is what has happened with
respect to Iran, which has been singled out for a campaign aimed
at politically isolating it in the wider comity of nations. Again,
broader geo-strategic considerations lie behind this pressure that
given appropriate conditions could escalate to the level of a US
military assault on Iran. Naturally enough, this issue features
prominently in Mian's analysis. But his exposition also aims to
highlight two other key themes.

First, there is the obvious selectivity and hypocrisy with which
the US treats the problem of nuclear proliferation, horizontal and
vertical. Since the end of the Cold War, American conservatives
have established as a guiding framework for US foreign policy the
Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The threat of
military power must now be exercised as never before to ensure
American supremacy globally. The specifically nuclear dimension
of the PNAC perspective requires the preparation of new kinds of
weapons such as low-yield tactical and battlefield weapons
alongside the more traditional high yield ones. The Ballistic
Missile Defense (BMD) system and its associated Theatre Missile
Defense (TMD) systems are to be constructed to give the US "fullspectrum
dominance" over the coming decades. There is to be (1)
the blurring of lines between nuclear and conventional arms in
wartime policy planning, deployments, and preparations; (2) the
blurring of the distinction between nuclear weapons and
biological/chemical weapons, that is, a shift in doctrine justifying
the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear
opponents suspected of having or preparing biological or chemical
weapons; and (3) a selective identification of enemy countries that
must on no account be allowed to possess or develop WMDs,
even if this requires pre-emptive and preventive military
action/war against them. Here, the contrasting perspectives with
which the US has related to North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Israel, India,
and Pakistan have come in for investigation, not only to highlight
the obvious hypocrisies and contradictions but also to explore the
flexibility with which the US uses this discourse about WMDs to
pursue its regional-global ambitions.

But the second crucial and distinctive argument that Mian
makes is that the US belief in the power of the nuclear bomb
comes back to constantly haunt it. The bomb that the US has
wanted to possess to drive fear into others also creates fear within
the American power establishment, even from countries lower
down in the power scale. From the beginning in 1945 when the US
first acquired this weapon, it has sought to prevent perceived
opponents from securing the same, to the point that it has
seriously contemplated a possible nuclear launch against Russia
and China in the past and North Korea and Iran more recently.
The US has created an "empire of fear" but also finds itself
trapped within its own construct. If we want a sane future,
perhaps any kind of future, then there is no escape from the
necessity of global nuclear disarmament, and this can only come
about if the US is willing to take the lead in pursuing it.

In the Name of Democracy: Humanitarian Intervention &
Regime Change

The ideological cover for direct and forcible intervention can also
be described as "military humanism." Not all such intervention
ends with, or aims to, unseat existing governments and install
another. But it can also at times mean precisely such "regime
change." Of all the legitimations of empire this is among the most
useful for the US because it is the most widely applicable
geographically, and because it can claim great plausibility in the
areas of most strategic concern for the US-West and Central
Asia-since most regimes in the region are authoritarian and
undemocratic. This discourse also has the advantage of being
among the most persuasive for a wider global audience beyond
the population of the targeted area who can also be expected to
be most resentful of the US's foreign policy behavior and the
rationales provided for it. This particular ideological banner is
probably more effective for winning over a European public,
which historically has already been socialized to interpret its
colonial past in relatively more benign terms than colonialism's
victims, and is more willing to accept the idea of a "democratic
mission" for the non-Western world-the gift of the occident to
the rest.

How much continuity and change of structure and subthemes,
of carriers and agents, is there between this discourse of
military humanism and the dominant discourse of the Cold War,
namely the "defense of freedom and democracy" against the evil
of that time, namely Communism? Can this "democratic crusade"
be as successfully sustained and promoted as the "anti-
Communist crusade" was? Or is it doomed to be much
shorter-lived? If so, why? Since "defending democracy" and
"defending the free world" was the principal banner behind which
the US fought the ColdWar, it was very important. There were no
other equally effective or convincing optional banners. But despite
the emergence of new and more banners in the post-ColdWar era
behind which to advance US interests, it can be said that in certain
respects the "democracy banner" has become even more
important now. The absence of a Soviet countervailing force
means that US imperialism has shifted into a much more offensive
mode and must therefore have a more aggressive interpretation
of the need to "promote" democracy (not merely "defend" it) as
its preeminent disguise.

There is a difference between the two banners of humanitarian
intervention and a democracy promotion that envisages regime
change. Humanitarian intervention is supposed to be a response
to a humanitarian crisis and is supposed to end after it has
accomplished its purpose-the ending of that crisis. Regime
change in the name of democracy is necessarily a more long term
and drawn-out affair. There is, of course, no Chinese Wall
between the two. The first can easily flow into the second-shortterm
intervention becoming a longer-term occupation. Mariano
Aguirre's chapter is a powerful defense of international law and
the limits it imposes on forcible, that is military, intervention to
correct human rights violations. It is also a subtle analysis of the
crucial differences between concepts that are often deliberately
jumbled together so as to provide the most flexible set of
justifications for unjustifiable state actions.

Humanitarian action should not be confused with
humanitarian intervention, or the latter with war operations. Nor
should humanitarian action or humanitarian intervention be
confused with peacekeeping and peace-enforcing, the special
domains of the UN. US behavior since the end of the Cold War
has relied on a discourse which carries out just such distortions
and the result has been the delegitimation of the UN, the
usurpation of its functions by NATO, and the self-elevation of the
US to a level where it claims not just global leadership but
endorsement from all others for its interpretation of the dictates
of international law and the articles in the UN Charter. Under the
pressure of contemporary developments, the UN top bureaucracy
has conceded ground to the legally ambiguous notion of the "right
to interfere," sometimes interpreting the failure of states who have
the "responsibility to protect" their citizens-that is, correct
severe human rights violations-as tantamount to being "threats
to" or "breaches of" international peace.

This opens the way for powerful countries like the US to
pressure the UN Security Council to sanction military
interventions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, when the
spirit and letter of the Charter basically makes national
sovereignty paramount and denies forcible intervention except in
the case of genuine self-defense. Not that the US has bothered too
much about securing UN endorsement for its actions. It has
generally preferred since the end of the Cold War to manipulate
and suborn the UN when possible and to ignore it when it has
somehow resisted such subordination. Aguirre provides
illuminating evidence of this in his surveys of humanitarian
intervention and "democracy promotion" in such cases as Bosnia,
Kosovo, and Iraq.

Phyllis Bennis makes much the same point. After 9/11 the US
could have, if it had wanted to, propelled the UN and
international law to a new level of global authority and credibility.
No one then would have objected to a proposal to set up a special
global anti-terrorist tribunal backed by an international police
force empowered to trace out and bring to trial the perpetrators
of 9/11. Instead, the US preferred not to bring in the UN but to
leave itself a completely free hand to do whatever it wanted with
regard to Afghanistan. The hollowness of US claims to be
concerned about democracy is revealed in several ways, all coolly
exposed by Bennis. Democracy promotion was a later justification
for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 preceded by the false claims of the
presence of WMDs and then of some kind of nexus between alintroduction
Qaeda and the Saddam Hussein regime. Similarly, the "Coalition
of the Willing" rounded up by the US was no glorious front of
democracies. All too many of its members had dismal democratic
records, witness Pakistan and Uzbekistan. The likes of Russia,
China, India, Turkey were delighted that their own repressive
behavior toward the insurgency movements they faced could now
be overlooked internationally, courtesy the US, since they too had
jumped onto the American war bandwagon.

As for the post-invasion experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq,
no one can seriously claim that democracy has been
institutionalized or that this is the genuine concern of the US as the
main occupying force. In Afghanistan a puppet Karzai
government reigns in Kabul on the basis of a tacit acceptance of
the rule of different warlords in the rest of the country. Both drug
production and even the Taliban are making a comeback. But as
long as the government in Kabul holds and obeys the Americans,
Washington is satisfied. In Iraq, the façade of elections is all that
the US can point to as evidence of establishing democracy. It is a
fraudulent claim common to many a colonial master who has
sometimes had to set such elections up precisely to more
effectively rule over a foreign terrain through better collaboration
with local elites. The British did this repeatedly in India in the
decades before India achieved genuine freedom and established a
real democracy. The reality in Iraq is (1) the establishment of an
American puppet regime that will enable the US to have
permanent military bases; (2) the shameful imposition of a
basically American drafted Constitution under foreign
occupation; (3) the promotion of a corporate-privatization that
most suits American business and state interests; (4) the activation
of a divide-and-rule policy that has created terrible sectarian
hostilities now threatening to become an enduring civil war. So
much then, for the US claim to promoting democracy!

As for democratization of the Arab world as a whole, who, asks
Bennis, is the US fooling? Its major allies in the region are all
authoritarian regimes-Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf
monarchies. Worst of all is Israel, further emboldened by US
behavior and policy declarations after 9/11 to become even more
brutally repressive of Palestinians and to further expand its land
grab activities in the West Bank. For Bennis, matters are quite
clear-the pursuit of empire and the promotion of democracy are
utterly incompatible. And who exactly does the US think it is? Its
own model of democracy suffers from deep imperfections. On so
many counts it contrasts unfavorably with European models. It is
being eroded by the pre- and post-9/11 assaults on civil liberties,
earlier justified in the name of neoliberal efficiencies, now in the
name of fighting terrorism. Bennis's account is an honest, hardhitting,
unsparing exposure of the US and how it is anything but the
"beacon of freedom" for the rest of the world that it claims to be.

Failed States

State failure, David Sogge tells us, has many labels-"weak states,
fragile states, crisis states, Countries at Risk of Instability, Lowincome
Countries Under Stress." But it is a term that panders to
Western condescension and to its strong sense of superiority. This
discourse of state failure emerges really after the end of the Cold
War. Before that theWest, led by the US, wasmuchmore concerned
about the "threats" represented by "strong" but enemy states to the
world order, which therefore needed the benevolent guardianship of
the US and the Atlantic Alliance. In the 1990s "state failure" became
the source of danger. According to some right-wing ideologues, what
was happening in the Balkans, Asia, and Africa reflected an
encroaching "anarchy," a "re-primi-tivization" ofman's behavior, a
resurfacing of barbarisms and ethnic hostilities inconceivable in the
more "civilized" parts of the world. Left to fester, these places would
become hotbeds of terrorism and retrograde forms of development
antithetical to the needs of a globalizing economy and to the
associated stability that only theWest (led by the US) could provide.
After 9/11 these fears were further accentuated.

While some of the characteristics of a weak state-inadequate
provision of vital public services, great country-wide lawlessness,
immense difficulties in establishing and giving effect to collectively
binding decisions-are clearly recognizable, they can fit a very
wide array of countries. The more important question is "failure
for whom"?Who decides the norms according to which failure is
to be judged? And why? The disturbing answer here is that it is
invariably the powerful countries of the West who decide. For
them "success" is measured by the degree of "fit" of other states
in the developing world (whether in the Balkans, Central,West, or
South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, or the Americas)
to the current scheme of things-neoliberal globalization
stabilized by, above all, the power and authority of the US. Thus
recalcitrant states unwilling to accept the rules as laid down by
the US as well as those states well-endowed with valuable raw
materials but poorly governed, can all be designated as "failed" or
"failing" states with the sword of Damocles-the threat of
external intervention-hanging over them.

The part of the world where the stigma of "failed states" is
most likely to be applied (though far from being the only
geographical area) is sub-Saharan Africa, where internecine strife,
often connected to issues of control over scarce or valued material
resources (minerals, timber, oil, diamonds, et cetera) of considerable
importance toWestern powers, has been of great intensity. This has
drawn in theWestern powers including the US and led to direct or
indirect (via the UN) forms of military intervention. The US has
generally seen the strategic importance of these regions in terms of
the resources they possess rather than considering them of
geopolitical significance. Thus human rights abuses whether in
Sudan or Rwanda or in the Republic of Congo have not been taken
as realities that compel military interventions by the US or other
Western powers. Geopolitical rather than moral considerations
have usually been a much stronger spur to direct military
interventions. Moreover, interventions can be covert as well as
overt, indirect as well as direct, partial as well as comprehensive.
Direct intervention is one way of "punishing" recalcitrant states
and creating "friendly" ones. But at another level, low-intensity
warfare against "undesirables" (be they the forces of politicized
Islam or other anti-US currents) will do. After all, state failure
comes in many degrees and guises and the response to it need not
always be regime change but different forms of "nation-building,"
"state-building," and "institution-building."

Yet those who most talk of the dangers of state failure and its
spreading ambit refuse to recognize the reasons most responsible
for it. For Sogge, there are two crucially important reasons for
this. First, neoliberal forms of economic globalization demand
that states greatly reduce their involvement in the economy but
then bemoan their failure to overcome the negative consequences
of neoliberal recipes for growth and development-rising debt,
escalating inequalities, and greater poverty in much of Africa and
elsewhere. Export-oriented primary production as the main source
of wealth for ruling elites only reinforces their disregard for
balanced and widespread domestic development. Unmotivated
and independent studies, says Sogge, show clearly that the two
main sources for state breakdown and deep instability are rising
socioeconomic inequalities (not just poverty) and the
criminalization and informal "privatization" of state apparatuses
meant to serve the public but now suborned to the pursuit of
powerful sectional interests. Nor is the legacy of the Cold War-
the damage done by the superpower conflict through proxies in
much of Africa, for example-properly taken into account.
Pushing forward "democratic change" via the "shell of elections"
is no answer. Not when these states are really accountable not to
their publics but, as Sogge puts it, "upward and outward" to
foreign powers and external agencies via structural adjustment
programs, debt repayments, and pressures to meet World Bank
requirements of what "good governance" means.

Second, Western powers led by the US demand that states
everywhere conform to what they believe are the conditions for
sustaining international peace and stability, a misleading label that
really means acceptance of a hegemonic global supervision carried
out by the US in conjunction with willing allies in Europe, Asia,
and elsewhere. States not willing to abide by these "rules" risk
being designated as "failed" states, or even worse, "rogue" states.

Unless the efforts at further neoliberal globalization and
empire are thwarted, there will be a growing trend toward the
emergence of more militarized protectorates for shorter or longer
periods of time. The big power interventions whether under UN
missions or separately that took place since 1990 in Cambodia,
Haiti, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Afghanistan, and Iraq should serve as a salutary reminder of what
might lie ahead.

War on Narcotics

According to David Bewley-Taylor and Martin Jelsma, the two
pillars on which US drug policy has been based are (1) a moralist
"prohibition above all" approach, and (2) a recognition of how
useful the "war on drugs" can be for legitimizing US military
presence and intervention in certain parts of the world. This
second aspect was made possible because in the 1970s President
Nixon first used the war metaphor to define US drug policy, and
in the 1980s the US went on to militarize this policy by creating
specially trained armed personnel to carry out counter-narcotics
interdiction operations in the Andes. Bewley-Taylor and Jelsma
remind us that this "war on drugs" in effect bridged an ideological
gap between the end of the Cold War and the post-9/11
declaration of the "war on terror," by helping to justify US bases,
interventions, and military operations abroad in this interregnum.

Historically, the US has always had a preference for supply-side
approaches to tackling the drug problem. It could externalize blame
on outside drug producing countries (opium-heroin and cocaine)
even though demand and much profit-making trade was from
within its own shores where Protestant moralism criminalized drug
use. Internationally formulated policies and conventions on drugs
both before and afterWorldWar II more or less faithfully reflected
the American approach. The way in which after 1945 the US could
lay down UN drug policy along the lines it wanted was an early
example of how much control the US generally had over the UN
and other multilateral bodies and how it could use this to shape the
structure of international laws and conventions. The 1961 Single
Convention, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and
the 1988 Trafficking Convention provided the international ground
rules that identified which drugs were to be banned and how their
trade was to be made illegal.

This international framework policed by the US through the
use of various coercive measures made it difficult for national
governments to pursue a very different approach to that of the
US.Moreover, the US would link a country's "good behavior" on
the drug front to other issue areas between itself and the country
in question. Indeed, the US has a "drug certification" procedure
whereby the US Congress has authorized the executive to impose
sanctions on countries that do not cooperate with US antinarcotics
efforts. This certification mechanism is, understandably,
widely resented, especially in Latin America.

The militarization of US drug policy linked it to issues of
security. Thus, having high military budgets found yet another
rationale. In 1989 one of the main reasons used to justify the US
invasion of Panama and the overthrow of one-time ally General
Noriega was the claim that he was involved in drug-trafficking.
Politically, this militarization of drug policy was clearly useful, but
when evaluated by the yardstick of how effective it was in curbing
the drug trade and use within the US, it was clearly a dismal failure.
Interdiction campaigns simply have not affected overall supplies.
But despite this, US drug policy has not seen any shift in influence
from the department of defense to the department of health. Plan
Colombia and the "war on drugs" has been just too useful an
approach for other more political purposes such as attacking leftwing
insurgency groups termed "narco-guerrillas" in Colombia,
putting pressure on left-wing governments from Venezuela to
Bolivia, and for justifying the maintenance of a large US armed
presence on the territories of collaborating regimes. The US has
gone ahead to link the "war on drugs" with the "war on terror,"
which has helped to re-legitimize a militarized approach that was
being discredited because it was both expensive and unsuccessful.
It has also provided a convenient avenue for channeling funds to
allied governments and right-wing counterinsurgency groups
operating against leftist groups and governments in Latin America.
For this there are historical precedents in Indochina and Nicaragua,
where US allies were funded through heroin and cocaine smuggling.

On the other side of the globe, Bewley-Taylor and Jelsma
point out how poorly US drug policy has fared in Afghanistan.
The Taliban drug control policy of banning and destroying
production, backed internationally, was no way to deal with a
huge humanitarian problem given the huge numbers of Afghans
dependent on poppy production. With the overthrow of the
Taliban, the opium economy has again boomed but its financial
beneficiaries are mainly the warlord allies of the US who helped
it overthrow the Taliban regime. Meanwhile the drug business
continues to flourish in the North, especially in the US.

Quite apart from how the "war on drugs" serves US imperial
interests, it remains a serious problem in its own right. Bewley-
Taylor and Jelsma reject the US "zero-tolerance" attitude to drugs.
It is in Europe that there has grown a more serious dissatisfaction
with the American approach and a search for alternative
approaches based on the principles of harm reduction and
decriminalization of the end-user. The authors endorse this change
in discourse. The HIV/AIDS crisis has played an important role in
promoting this approach. Among the great advantages of such an
alternative approach is that it is altogether more humane, much
more practical, morally more sensitive, and politically more
sensible since it demilitarizes the drug issue, thereby moving in the
direction of depriving the US of one disguise for empire.

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