Big Brother Bush, "Suicidal Saddam", And The Homegrown Threat To Liberal Democracy
by Paul Street
Dissident Voice
January 27, 2003
Beyond Democratic
Constraint?
It is hard to
avoid the chilling conclusion that the corporate plutocrats and
arch-imperialists in and around the Bush administration do not think they are
required to speak or act with even moderate respect for the political
intelligence and/or relevance of the citizenry. They believe that basic rules
of evidence and democracy, which require justifications and debate rather than
simply edicts from policymakers, offer little if any constraint on their
actions and pronouncements. They think they have achieved something like the
status of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. Big Brother never had to make
real sense to his population, which was in no position to respond to the
absurdity of his nonsensical pronouncements – War is Peace, Love is Hate, etc.
– or to his constant manipulation of history to fit the current party line.
How else to
explain the veritable flood of preposterous pronouncements and contradictory
policies flowing with regularity out of the Bush administration?:
* The claim that
it is in the interest of the American people to enact massive tax cuts for the
rich that will do nothing to stimulate a sluggish wealth-top-heavy economy and
will combine with massive “defense” expenditures to deepen the federal deficit
and undercut desperately needed social expenditures.
* The claim that
jetliner attacks carried out with box-cutters illustrates the need to spend
untold billions on a fantastic and unworkable high-tech missile defense shield.
The claim of the
existence of a global “Axis of Evil” comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea,
three states with little basis (beyond common demonization by Uncle Sam) for
mutual alliance and considerable difference and enmity between them.
* The truly
fantastic claim that the Iraqi regime is a threat to send unmanned airplanes
carrying chemical and biological weapons to the US.
* The claim to
be seriously concerned about the human rights of Iraqi and other world citizens
while the White House aggressively supports governments that inflict massive
terror on subject and occupied peoples, including Columbia, Israel, Turkey,
China and many others.
* The claim to
be concerned for “democracy” and “freedom” around the world while deepening
relationships with numerous authoritarian states in the name of the War on
Terrorism and using 9-11 as a pretext to roll back cherished civil liberties at
home.
* The claim to
champion democracy while openly embracing the short lived oligarchic coup
conducted last April against the popular elected and constitutional Chavez
government of Venezuela – a state too friendly to the poor for the White House
tastes.
* The claim to
be grievously offended by the use of “special preferences” (race-based
affirmative action at the University of Michigan) in college admissions even
while Bush refuses to criticize the aristocratic legacy system that provided
the only possible basis for his admission to Yale.
The list of Bush
absurdities along these lines goes on and on.
Spinning Divergent Responses to “Evil Axis” Others
Perhaps the most
relevant Big Lie currently rolling out of the White House spin factory relates
to the nature and objectives of the Iraqi government. Here we have the
neo-Stalinist North Korean regime of Kim Jung Il announcing its determination
to significantly expand an already existing stock of nuclear weapons. A million
North Korean troops have been placed on alert, ready to do battle with
jackbooted enemies from what North Korean state television calls “the citadels
of imperialism.” And here we have Iraq, still reeling from the first Persian
Gulf “war” (a one-sided assault by world history’s most powerful military
state) and a subsequent decade of deadly US-led sanctions. The second nation
poses no serious military threat to its own neighbors, much less the West.
United Nations inspectors under Bush’s sneering glare are hard pressed to find
significant evidence that significant “weapons of mass destruction” are being
manufactured and/or stored in the land of Saddam Hussein. They are reduced to
reporting the discovery of empty containers, hardly a refutation of former
chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a former American military
intelligence officer, who insists that Iraq has been effectively disarmed.
Bush’s response
to the first threat is to put it on the back burner, promising diplomacy and
negotiation, oiled by reassuring words that America does not seek to attack or
invade. The White House response to the second situation is a full front-burner
preparation of its awesome air-, land-, sea- and space-based military machine
for another bloody assault on Iraq, followed by occupation and
“reconstruction.”
How does the
Bush administration explain such divergent responses to “Evil Axis” perfidy,
especially when the threat posed by North Korea would appear to be so much
greater? Kim Jong Il, the Bush administration tells us, is a “rational actor,”
subject to constraint and deterrence. He can be argued with and persuaded. He
is possessed of common sense and realism, a special instinct for survival and a
sense of limits.
But Saddam, the
White House insists, is no such animal. He is hopelessly reckless, driven and
brutal. He simply cannot be deterred from acting on his bizarre and sinister
determination to use weapons of mass destruction. If we let a lunatic like
Saddam get nuclear weapons, the argument runs, it is certain that he will use
them against us and our allies, either directly or by “handing them off” to al
Qaeda or some other like-minded group. The likelihood that such an action would
lead to his total annihilation is irrelevant, we are told. The failure to
launch a preemptive war against this madman, we are instructed, will be written
in mushroom clouds over our cities.
The proof, the
White House argues, for this judgment is found in the record of Saddam’s
thoroughly irrational, even “insane” past behavior. That historical record
includes his attacks on Iran (1980) and Kuwait (1990), resulting in millions of
Iraqi deaths, and the use of chemical weapons against “his own people” (the
Kurds of northern Iraq) and Iranian soldiers.
The Real Saddam: Sinister, Yes; Suicidal, No
It’s a
transparently manipulative and false historical argument whose primary purpose
is to frighten the American people into war. A related goal is to divert the
citizenry from the terrible shortcomings of domestic White House policies that
exacerbate the growing social and economic insecurity of the population while
distributing wealth and power upward.
The historical
facts are clear. When Saddam started a war with Iran in 1980, he did so because
that nation faced a very real and serious threat from a zealous revolutionary
nation (Iran) that was aggressively pursuing hegemony throughout the Middle
East. He fought a strictly limited war seeking a large protective swath of
expanded border territory. He never pursued the conquest of Iran or the
overthrow of its revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeni. His war was fought
with the reasonable and realized expectation that other nations, including the
United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and France, would offer considerable
financial, diplomatic and technical support to stem the spread of Iran’s
Islamic revolution.
When Saddam
invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, his goals were far from reckless. He
sought, after years of fruitless diplomacy, to punish Kuwait for its refusal to
write-off debts incurred in a war that arguably protected that nation’s oil
fields from Iranian conquest. He was also responding in arguably rational,
Machiavellian ways to Kuwait’s insistence on deflating world oil prices,
reducing Iraqi profits, by producing beyond OPEC quotas. When he invaded, he
weighed his options carefully, concluding that he had definite reason to expect
US approval, thanks to a now famous communication from Bush I’s Ambassador to
Iraq - April Glaspie. “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts,” Glaspie
told Hussein, “like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Glaspie’s State
Department had earlier told Saddam that it had “no special defense or security
commitments to Kuwait.”
Saddam
proceeded, in short, on the assumption of a “green light” from Bush I. His
invasion of Kuwait cannot be reasonably seen as proof of his non-deterrable
nature since the US never attempted deterrence.
When the US
responded with a devastating air campaign, Saddam communicated his willingness
to retreat prior to the launching of a US ground war. But Bush I refused this
option, unacceptably insisting that Saddam leave his military hardware behind
in Kuwait. This impossible demand set the stage for an American massacre of
Iraqi troops that is curiously deleted from the official record of
“pathological” atrocities in the Middle East.
During the
Persian Gulf “war,” which he curiously survived (contrary to White House
doctrine on his “suicidal” nature), Hussein never used chemical or biological
weapons against Israel, Saudi Arabia or the coalition forces that were pounding
his military. He knew that using weapons of mass destruction would lead to his
annihilation by the US. Hussein was also deterred by US troop mobilizations
from efforts to change the inspection regime in 1994.
What about
Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against “his own people” (if that’s what we
really want to call the minority Kurdish population he has long terrorized) and
Iranian soldiers during the 1980s? Those actions certainly indicate Saddam’s
undeniable savagery, but they are not proof of his reckless and suicidal
immunity to deterrence for two reasons. First, the people targeted were in no
position to respond in kind. Second, Saddam gassed Kurds and Iranians with the
support and assistance of the one country that happened and happens to possess
the world’s largest stockpile of deterrent weapons chemical, nuclear and
biological. That would be the United States. During the 1980s, in fact, the US
assisted Saddam’s biological weapons program by providing him with American
strains of anthrax, West Nile virus and botulinal toxin.
As for the
nuclear threat allegedly posed by Saddam, there is no reason to think that he
is willing to invite a devastating nuclear assault on Iraq and perhaps most
significantly (for him) himself – the certain result of starting a nuclear war
in the region. Also preposterous is the notion that Saddam would “handoff”
nuclear weapons to historical blood enemies in al Qaeda or other extremist
Islamic terror networks. The Bush administration’s abject failure to prove that
Iraq is cooperating with al Qaeda is hardly surprising to any serious student
of Middle Eastern politics.
The Homegrown Threat to Liberal Democracy
One does not
have to be a radical critic of American imperialism to see through the
transparent Orwellian absurdity of the White House’s line about the Iraqi
regime’s non-deterrability. Even Thomas L. Friedman, the openly imperialist and
Arab-baiting foreign policy columnist of the New York Times correctly noted
today that Saddam is “a twisted dictator who is deterrable through conventional
means” and “loves life more than he hates us.” More substantively, the
counter-argument to Bush’s claims of Saddam’s reckless non-deterrability can be
found in a recent article by two leading mainstream academics in the
establishment journal Foreign Policy (John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt,
“An Unnecessary War,” FP, January-February 2003). It can also be found, in greater
detail, in Carl Kaysen et al, War With Iraq: Costs, Consequences and
Alternatives (December 2002), produced by no less of a “respectable”
organization than the Committee on International Security Studies of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
What’s missing
in these very useful mainstream pieces is a broader framework in which to place
and thereby understand the nature of the White House’s deception. For that, we
must consider the balance of global petro-capitalist relations that provide the
basis for America’s provocative presence in the Middle East in the first place.
We should also consider the numerous domestic failures from which White House
wishes to divert popular attention in the industrial world’s most unequal and
incarceration-addicted nation – the “world’s most prosperous state,” where more
than 45 million people lack basic health insurance.
Also recommended
is an essay titled “The Orwell Diversion” (1986), written by the late
Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey and included in his 1997 book Taking
the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda Versus Freedom and Liberty. In
that essay and elsewhere, Carey argued that the most relevant long-term threat
to liberal democracy has never come from the state totalitarians of the Stalinist
left or the fascist right. It comes instead from the homegrown, big
business-connected “Respectable Right” that arose within the liberal-democratic
societies of the West (chiefly the US) largely to protect concentrated
corporate power against its natural homeland antagonist - the popular
democratic tradition.
More then
fifteen years after Carey’s essay, the Soviet Union has joined Nazi Germany in
history’s proverbial dustbin and the last classic 1984-style regime (if such a
thing has ever existed) bangs its little nuclear drum for global food
assistance in North Korea. Meanwhile, a homegrown version of Big Brother stalks
the corridors of domestic and imperial power in Washington D.C., wearing the
uniform of the Respectable Right. He is deeply enabled by a corporate
communications and entertainment empire that combines Huxley with Orwell to
muddy the waters of popular perception in ways that modern red- and
brown-fascist state-totalitarians could only dream about. He is ineluctably if
perhaps unconsciously drawn to the wisdom of Orwell’s chilling axiom: “Who
controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the
past.”
Paul Street is a political essayist and social
policy critic in Chicago, Illinois. Email: pstreet@cul-chicago.org