How to
Swagger & Bully Your Way to Disaster: Bush's Foreign Adventurism
by
Bernard Weiner
Dissident Voice
March 5, 2003
Americans
don't like to distrust their leaders. In a world that appears so chaotic, one
wants, needs, some sense of firm, unshakeable foundations. If we can't trust
our cops, our priests, our corporate accountants, our elected officials, who
will be there to provide that container of stability, our sense that the world
works and that we're not just victims waiting for the random finger of fate to
tap us on the shoulder?
I'm not just talking about
other people here. I feel that way often.
For a long time, even though
I didn't vote for them -- and had anxieties about their motives -- I didn't
want to believe that the Bush Administration was all that bad, or had lied, or
had done terrible things. I so believe in the goodness of this country and in
its institutions -- especially in the Constitution that has served us so well
for more than 200 years -- that I tried to avoid seeing the awful things being
done in Washington, D.C.
But when time after time,
the facts revealed otherwise, I finally left the world of denial and moved into
the world of sadness and disappointment -- and anger. My government had been
hijacked by those who cared hardly a wit for the genius of our Constitution, or
for treating political opponents with civility, or for the traditions of
careful, respectful diplomacy abroad.
It became more and more
clear that the folks inhabiting the White House were not good people. Oh, they
said publicly that their actions were being taken for all the right reasons --
freedom and liberty and the Constitution and to protect America -- and they
certainly wrapped themselves not only in the flag but in religious-sounding
trappings as well.
But their motives in private
seemed mostly to involve a drive for profits for themselves and their corporate
friends, and a seemingly insatiable lust for power and control. And all done in
secret -- the most secretive Administration in modern times -- so that we
wouldn't be able to find out what they're really up to.
Rather than delve into the
full list of economic, political, environmental and civil liberties
catastrophes for which they're responsible, let's just focus today on Bush
Administration foreign policies, since they involve the U.S. in military
adventures that are potentially disastrous to our citizenry.
We're about to launch a
"pre-emptive" war against Iraq -- without an overt provocation,
without a large international coalition behind us, without United Nations
authorization, without the support of most of Europe's populations (not even in
Great Britain, our lone major supplier of troops), without the support of more
than half of the U.S. citizenry, without the support of Iraq's 22 fellow Arab
countries, without the support of NATO-member Turkey, without even the support
of the first President Bush's chief advisors, and without the support of many
of America's military and intelligence leaders. In short, it's pretty much a
unilateral White House operation, with a few hangers-on nations who don't want
to risk angering the U.S.
Given this strange
situation, we had better damn well be clear on how we got to this place. Having
some context will help us shape our thinking, our tactics, our strategies, in
trying to stop the war before it begins. (And, if we're unsuccessful in doing
that, in how to deal with the political and strategic necessities of opposing
U.S. policy during a war.) Whichever way we go, we need to be involved in
helping build a Movement for peace and justice that will take back the country
from the shadow forces currently in control.
The Paper Trail
The first thing to
understand is that the true motivating factors for Bush&Co. policy in Iraq
have precious little to do with Saddam Hussein's weaponry. That is but the
pretext, the cover story -- which, as you may have noticed, tends to shift
daily. First it's "regime change"; then (so as not to frighten
potential U.N. supporters) it's "disarmament of Iraq"; then, when
Saddam moves in the direction of at least partial disarmament, it's
"regime change" again; then it's "democracy" for Iraq and
the region. But it's really smoke and mirrors, my friends. Let's see what is
actually at play here.
The Administration's stated
reasons may flip on a dime -- how does Ari Fleischer do the daily flipping with
a straight face? -- but a nation's major foreign policy doctrine doesn't arrive
overnight, and certainly this one didn't emerge full-grown from the 9/11
terrorist attacks. It had been in the works for quite some time, at least for a
decade.
How can we be so sure? Well,
it turns out that there's a long, highly visible paper trail that fills in the
context. Let's take a look.
During the years when Bill
Clinton was struggling with the rising tide of conservatism in the House of
Representatives, and then with fighting off the various "scandal"
investigations, and then battling for his political life when he was impeached
for lying about sex, the intellectual cadres of the HardRight were shaping a
foreign policy for the next century.
The situation was staring
them in the face: There was a vacuum on the world scene. No more Superpower
rival. The Soviet Union had collapsed of its own internal contradictions. The
time was ripe for moving and taking in the world, as there was nobody and no
force that could stop the U.S.
The Foundations Are Laid
A number of HardRight
position papers and books spelled out the justification for the U.S. seizing
the moment. Some of these you may have heard about already, others are less
known. In all cases, the folks creating the imperial policy on paper are now
creating and shaping the imperial policy for real inside the Bush
Administration.
1. In 1992, then-Secretary
of Defense Dick Cheney had a report drafted for the Department of Defense,
written by Paul Wolfowitz. In it, the U.S. government was urged, as the world's
sole remaining Superpower, to move aggressively and militarily around the
globe. Somehow, this report leaked to the press, and, since the objective
political forces hadn't yet coalesced in the U.S. that could implement this
policy free of resistance, President Bush the Elder repudiated the paper and
withdrew it. (Wolfowitz, then undersecretry of defense for policy, is now
Deputy Secretary of Defense; Cheney, of course, now holds the title of Vice
President.)
2. Various HardRight
intellectuals outside the government were spelling out the new policy in books
and influential journals. Zalmay M. Khalilzad (formerly associated with big oil
companies, currently U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan) wrote an important
volume in 1995, "From Containment to Global Leadership: America & the
World After the Cold War," the import of which was identifying a way for
America to move aggressively in the world and thus to exercise effective
control over the planet's natural resources. A year later, in 1996,
neo-conservatives Bill Kristol (now editor of the rightwing Weekly Standard
newspaper) and Robert Kagan, in their Foreign Affairs article "Towards a
Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," came right out and said the goal for the
U.S. had to be nothing less than "benevolent global hegemony," a
euphemism for total U.S. domination (but "benevolently" exercised, of
course.)
3. In 1998, Kristol,
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, out of nowhere, lobbied to convince President Clinton
to attack Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. The January letter from
the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a HardRight think-tank founded
the previous year, said that a war with Iraq should be initiated "even if
the U.S. could not muster support from its allies in the United Nations."
Sound familiar? (President Clinton replied that he was focusing on dealing with
al Quaida terrorist cells.)
4. In September of 2000, the
PNAC, sensing a GOP victory in the upcoming presidential election, issued its
white paper on "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and
Resources for the New Century." These were no lightweight pundits; these
guys were (and are) the heavy-hitting movers and shakers of far-right
Republican strategy, including: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle,
Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Eliot Abrams, John Bolton, I. Lewis Libby, et al.
The 2000 PNAC report was
quite frank about why the U.S. would want to move toward imperialist
militarism, a Pax Americana, because with the Soviet Union out of the picture,
now is the time most "conducive to American interests and ideals...The
challenge of this coming century is to preserve and enhance this 'American
peace'." And how to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? The answer is
to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major-theater
wars."
In serving as world
"constable," the PNAC went on, no other countervailing forces will be
permitted to get in the way. Such actions "demand American political
leadership rather than that of the United Nations," for example. No
country will be permitted to get close to parity with the U.S. when it comes to
weaponry or influence; therefore, more U.S. military bases will be established
in the various regions of the globe. (A post-Saddam Iraq may well serve as one
of those advance military bases.)
5. George W. Bush moved into
the White House in January of 2001. Shortly thereafter, a report by the
Administration-friendly Council on Foreign Relations was prepared
("Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century") that
advocated a more aggressive U.S. posture in the world and called for a
"reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy," with
access to oil repeatedly cited as a "security imperative." (It's
possible that inside Cheney's energy-policy papers -- which he refuses to
release to Congress or the American people -- are references to foreign-policy
plans for how to gain military control of oilfields abroad.)
6. Five hours after the
9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered his aides to
begin planning for an attack on Iraq, even though his intelligence officials
told him it was an al Qaida operation and there was no connection between Iraq
and the attacks. "Go massive," the aides' notes quote him as saying.
"Sweep it all up. Things related and not." (In the past year,
Rumsfeld leaned heavily on the FBI and CIA to find any shred of evidence
linking the Iraq government to 9/11, but they weren't able to. So he set up his
own fact-finding group in the Pentagon, with similar results.)
7. Feeling confident that
all plans were on track for moving aggressively in the world, the Bush Administration
in September of 2002 published its "National Security Strategy of the
United States of America." The official policy of the U.S. government, as
proudly proclaimed in this major document, is virtually identical to the policy
proposals in the various white papers of the Project for the New American
Century and others like it over the past decade.
Chief among them are: 1) the
policy of "pre-emptive" war -- i.e., whenever the U.S. thinks a
country may be amassing too much power and/or could provide some sort of
competition in the "benevolent global hegemony" sweepstakes, it can
be attacked, without provocation. (A later corollary would rethink the
country's atomic policy: nuclear weapons would no longer be considered
defensive, but could be used offensively in support of political/economic
ends.) And, 2) ignoring international treaties and opinion whenever they are
not seen to serve U.S. imperial goals.
In short, and stated proudly
to the public, the Bush Administration seems to see the U.S. as a New Rome, an
empire with its foreign legions (and threat of nuclear weapons) keeping the
outlying colonies, and potential competitors, in line. Those who aren't fully
in accord with these goals better get out of the way; "you're either with
us or against us."
The Bush Drool
Which brings us back to
Iraq. Bush is like a drooling, fixated hounddog on scent; other vital crises
may be exploding all around him (North Korea's increasingly bellicose
nuclear-missile strategy, the U.S. economy in tatters), but his eyes and nose
are locked onto Direction Baghdad.
Bush risks doing irreparable
harm to America's short- and long-term economic, political and military
interests, but, damn it, Saddam is still in Baghdad and he's gotta go. No
second attack front via Turkey? Forget it, Saddam's gotta go. No support from
the rest of the world? Ignore it, Saddam's gotta go. Why? Because America's
foreign/military policy -- its goals of dominance and control of natural
resources -- requires it. Don't bother me, I'm eatin'.
So, unless some amazing
event occurs in the next several weeks -- a worldwide boycott aimed at U.S.
economic interests, Saddam having a heart attack (or going into exile in Las
Vegas), North Korea launching a nuclear missile at Kuwait, the courts ruling
that only the Congress has the right to declare war -- hundreds of thousands of
U.S. troops will head into the Persian Gulf desert, after the "Shock &
Awe" cruise-missile bombardment, to locate and decapitate the Iraqi leader
and to "protect" the oilfields "on behalf of the Iraqi
people" (not).
Tens of thousands of
civilians and military personnel likely will die or be maimed. Dissent inside
the U.S. will make the Vietnam era look like a beach party. Terrorism will
explode worldwide, especially inside America. The U.S. will be more and more
isolated. The economy will tank. A global recession or depression will follow.
And why? Because a few
HardRight ideologues, most of whom have never been to war, decided more than a
decade ago to start a conflagration in the Persian Gulf that the U.S. could
profit from, both monetarily and in terms of dominating power. It's
disgraceful. It's disgusting. It may even be impeachable.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., is co-editor of The
Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org),
has taught at various universities, and was a writer/editor with the San
Francisco Chronicle for nearly 20 years. He is author of Boy Into Man: A
Fathers’ Guide to Initiation of Teenage Sons (Transformation Press, 1992).