There's Still
Time for Americans to Stop Insanity
by Robert Jensen
Dissident Voice
September 9, 2002
The evening of Sept. 11, I wrote an essay that ended with a
plea that "the insanity stop here," that the brutal act of terrorism
not spark more terrorism, theirs or ours.
But the insanity didn't stop.
Instead, the Bush administration cynically manipulated
people's grief and rage to unleash an unlimited war against endless enemies, which
has made the world more dangerous and the American people less secure in any
land, home or abroad.
A year later, it's clear the so-called "war on
terrorism" is primarily a war to project U.S power around the world. Its
goal is to extend and deepen U.S. control, especially in the energy-rich Middle
East and Central Asia. Ordinary people have not benefited, and will not
benefit, from this war or the economics that drive it.
The antiwar movement argued from the start that
conventional war could not produce security from terrorism, and we were right.
Administration officials this summer acknowledged that the attack on
Afghanistan didn't significantly diminish the terrorist threat and may have
complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing potential attackers.
Those of us who criticized the mad rush to war also
suggested the Bush administration would use terrorism as a pretext to justify a
wider war; again, we were right. Officials have floundered trying to justify an
attack on Iraq with claims about Iraqi connections to al-Qaida or other
terrorist networks that are so unconvincing they have largely been abandoned.
Claims about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction are
more plausible, but riddled with inconsistencies. Iraq may have developed, or be
developing, limited biological or chemical weapons programs, but no one has
offered proof or a scenario in which Iraq might use them, except in the case of
a U.S. attack. And the Bush administration has repeatedly announced that it
won't be satisfied with renewed weapons inspections and is determined to topple
the Saddam Hussein regime, destroying hopes for the diplomacy needed for
multilateral regional arms control.
Bush's talk of democracy in Afghanistan or Iraq is a bad
joke. U.S. manipulation of the political process in Afghanistan to install a
handpicked puppet, Hamid Karzai (now being guarded by U.S. troops and agents to
protect him from his own people), was barely concealed. In Iraq,
"democracy" will be acceptable to the Bush administration so long as
a democratic process produces a similarly pliant leader.
These failed attempts to build a case for war only
highlight what has long been clear: The war in Afghanistan and a possible war
in Iraq are about U.S. dominance, at two levels. The first involves the
specific resources of those regions. In the case of Afghanistan, the concern is
pipelines to carry the oil and natural gas of the Caspian region to deep-water
ports. In Iraq, it's about controlling the country with the world's
second-largest oil reserves.
Beyond those direct interests, the logic of empire requires
violence on this scale; when challenged, imperial powers strike back to
maintain credibility and extend control. U.S. control is through mechanisms
different from Rome or Britain in their imperial phases, but there can be no
doubt that we are an empire.
Much of the world is frightened by these imperial
ambitions. A friend traveling in Europe reports back that people talk of their
fear of America's militarism. Politicians in allied nations are questioning, or
openly repudiating, American war plans.
The task for U.S. citizens is clear: We must ensure that
the U.S. empire is the first empire dismantled from within, through progressive
political movements that reject world dominance that perpetuates inequality in
favor of our place in a world struggling for justice and peace.
On Sept. 11, we got a glimpse of what it might look like if
the empire is taken down from the outside.
Today we still have a choice. We can learn from history and
step back from empire, or suffer the fate that history makes clear lies down
the imperial path.
We still have time to turn away from empire and toward democracy, away from unilateralism toward engagement, away from hoarding power and toward seeking peace.
We still have time to demand of our government that the insanity stop here.
Robert
Jensen, an associate professor of journalism at the
University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Writing Dissent: Taking
Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream and a member of the Nowar Collective. Email: rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Other articles are
available at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/home.htm.