The past year has been a momentous one in world affairs. In the normal
rhythm, the pattern was set in September 2002, a month marked by several
important and closely related events. The most powerful state in history
announced a new National Security Strategy asserting that it will maintain
global hegemony permanently: any challenge will be blocked by force, the
dimension in which the US reigns supreme. (See Manifesto for world
dictatorship.)
At the same time, the war drums began to beat to mobilise the population
for an invasion of Iraq, which would be "the first test [of the
doctrine], not the last," the New York Times observed after the invasion,
"the petri dish in which this experiment in pre-emptive policy
grew." And the campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections,
which would determine whether the administration would be able to carry
forward its radical international and domestic agenda.
The new "imperial grand strategy," as it was aptly termed at once
by John Ikenberry (a leading US academic on international relations) presents
the US as "a revisionist state seeking to parlay its momentary advantages
into a world order in which it runs the show," a "unipolar
world" in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge" it
as "global leader, protector, and enforcer". These policies are
fraught with danger even for the US itself, he warned, joining many others in
the foreign policy elite.
What is to be "protected" is US power and the interests it
represents, not the world, which vigorously opposed the conception.
Within a few months, polls revealed that fear of the United States had
reached remarkable heights, along with distrust of the political leadership,
or worse. As for the test case, an international Gallup poll in December,
barely noted in the US, found virtually no support for Washington's announced
plans for a war carried out "unilaterally by America and its
allies": in effect, the US-UK "coalition".
The basic principles of the imperial grand strategy trace back to the early
days of World War II, and have been reiterated frequently since. Even before
the US entered the war, planners and analysts concluded that in the postwar
world the US would seek "to hold unquestioned power," acting to
ensure the "limitation of any exercise of sovereignty" by states
that might interfere with its global designs. They outlined "an
integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United
States" in a "Grand Area," to include at a minimum the Western
Hemisphere, the former British empire, and the Far East, later extended to as
much of Eurasia as possible when it became clear that Germany would be
defeated.
Twenty years later, elder statesman Dean Acheson instructed the American
Society of International Law that no "legal issue" arises when the
US responds to a challenge to its "power, position, and prestige".
He was referring specifically to Washington's post-Bay of Pigs economic
warfare against Cuba, but was surely aware of Kennedy's terrorist campaign
aimed at "regime change," a significant factor in bringing the world
close to nuclear war only a few months earlier and resumed immediately after
the Cuban missile crisis was resolved.
A similar doctrine was invoked by the Reagan administration when it
rejected World Court jurisdiction over its attack against Nicaragua. State
Department Legal Adviser Abraham Sofaer explained that most of the world
cannot "be counted on to share our view" and "often opposes the
United States on important international questions." Accordingly, we must
"reserve to ourselves the power to determine" which matters fall
"essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States"
- in this case, the actions that the Court condemned as the "unlawful use
of force" against Nicaragua; in lay terms, international terrorism.
Their successors continued to make it clear that the US reserved the right
to act "unilaterally when necessary," including "unilateral use
of military power" to defend such vital interests as "ensuring
uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic
resources."
Even this small sample illustrates the narrowness of the planning spectrum.
Nevertheless, the alarm bells sounded in September 2002 were justified.
Acheson and Sofaer were describing policy guidelines, and within elite
circles. Other cases may be regarded as worldly-wise reiterations of the maxim
of Thucydides that "large nations do what they wish, while small nations
accept what they must."
In contrast, Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell and their associates are officially
declaring an even more extreme policy. They intend to be heard, and took
action at once to put the world on notice that they mean what they say. That
is a significant difference.
The imperial grand strategy is based on the assumption that the US can gain
"full spectrum dominance" by military programs that dwarf those of
any potential coalition, and have useful side effects. One is to socialise the
costs and risks of the private economy of the future, a traditional
contribution of military spending and the basis of much of the "new
economy."
Another is to contribute to a fiscal train wreck that will, it is presumed,
"create powerful pressures to cut federal spending, and thus, perhaps,
enable the Administration to accomplish its goal of rolling back the New
Deal," a description of the Reagan program that is now being extended to
far more ambitious plans.
As the grand strategy was announced on September 17, the administration
"abandoned an international effort to strengthen the Biological Weapons
Convention against germ warfare," advising allies that further
discussions would have to be delayed for four years. A month later, the UN
Committee on Disarmament adopted a resolution that called for stronger
measures to prevent militarisation of space, recognizing this to be "a
grave danger for international peace and security," and another that
reaffirmed "the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of poisonous
gases and bacteriological methods of warfare." Both passed unanimously,
with two abstentions: the US and Israel. US abstention amounts to a veto:
typically, a double veto, banning the events from reporting and history.
A few weeks later, the Space Command released plans to go beyond US
"control" of space for military purposes to "ownership",
which is to be permanent, in accord with the Security Strategy. Ownership of
space is "key to our nation's military effectiveness," permitting
"instant engagement anywhere in the world... A viable prompt global
strike capability, whether nuclear or non-nuclear, will allow the US to
rapidly strike high-payoff, difficult-to-defeat targets from stand-off ranges
and produce the desired effect... [and] to provide warfighting commanders the
ability to rapidly deny, delay, deceive, disrupt, destroy, exploit and
neutralise targets in hours/minutes rather than weeks/days even when US and
allied forces have a limited forward presence," thus reducing the need
for overseas bases that regularly arouse local antagonism.
Similar plans had been outlined in a May 2002 Pentagon planning document,
partially leaked, which called for a strategy of "forward
deterrence" in which missiles launched from space platforms would be able
to carry out almost instant "unwarned attacks". Military analyst
William Arkin comments that "no target on the planet or in space would be
immune to American attack".
"The US could strike without warning whenever and wherever a threat
was perceived, and it would be protected by missile defenses." Hypersonic
drones would monitor and disrupt targets. Surveillance systems are to provide
the ability "to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle
in a foreign city." The world is to be left at mercy of US attack at
will, without warning or credible pretext. The plans have no remote historical
parallel. Even more fanciful ones are under development.
These moves reflect the disdain of the administration for international law
and institutions or arms control measures, dismissed with barely a word in the
National Security Strategy; and its commitment to an extremist version of
long-standing doctrine.
In accord with these principles, Washington informed the UN that it can be
"relevant" by endorsing Washington's plans for invading Iraq or it
can be a debating society. The US has the "sovereign right to take
military action," Colin Powell informed the January 2003 Davos meeting of
the World Economic Forum, which also strenuously opposed Washington's war
plans. "When we feel strongly about something we will lead," Powell
informed them, even if no one is following us.
Bush and Blair underscored their contempt for international law and
institutions at their Azores Summit on the eve of the invasion. They issued an
ultimatum - not to Iraq, but to the Security Council: capitulate, or we will
invade without your meaningless seal of approval. And we will do so whether or
not Saddam Hussein and his family leave the country. The crucial principle is
that the US must effectively rule Iraq.
Since the mid-1940s, Washington has regarded the Gulf as "a stupendous
source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world
history" - in Eisenhower's words, the "most strategically important
area of the world" because of its "strategic position and
resources". Control over the region and its resources remains a policy
imperative.
After taking over a core oil producer, and presumably acquiring its first
reliable military bases at the heart of the world's major energy-producing
system, Washington will doubtless be happy to establish an "Arab faade,"
to borrow the term of the British during their day in the sun. Formal
democracy will be fine, but only if it is of the submissive kind tolerated in
Washington's "backyard," at least if history and current practice
are any guide.
To fail in this endeavor would take real talent. Even under far less
propitious circumstances, military occupations have commonly been successful.
It would be hard not to improve on a decade of murderous sanctions that
virtually destroyed a society that was, furthermore, in the hands of a vicious
tyrant who ranked with others supported by the current incumbents in
Washington: Romania's Ceausescu, to mention only one of an impressive rogues
gallery.
Resistance in Iraq would have no meaningful outside support, unlike
Nazi-occupied Europe or Eastern Europe under the Russian yoke, to take recent
examples of unusually brutal states that nevertheless assembled an ample array
of collaborators and achieved substantial success within their domains.
The grand strategy authorizes Washington to carry out "preventive
war": Preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for
pre-emptive war may sometimes be, they do not hold for preventive war,
particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the
use of military force to eliminate an invented or imagined threat, so that
even the term "preventive" is too charitable. Preventive war is,
very simply, the "supreme crime" condemned at Nuremberg.
That is widely understood. As the US invaded Iraq, Arthur Schlesinger
(historian and biographer of John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt) wrote
that Bush's grand strategy is "alarmingly similar to the policy that
imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier
American president said it would, lives in infamy." FDR was right, he
added, "but today it is we Americans who live in infamy."
It is no surprise that "the global wave of sympathy that engulfed the
United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American
arrogance and militarism" and the belief that Bush is "a greater
threat to peace than Saddam Hussein".
For the political leadership, mostly recycled from more reactionary sectors
of the Reagan-Bush I administrations, "the global wave of hatred" is
not a particular problem. They want to be feared, not loved. They understand
as well as their establishment critics that their actions increase the risk of
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terror. But that too is
not a major problem.
Higher in the scale of priorities are the goals of establishing global
hegemony and implementing their domestic agenda: dismantling the progressive
achievements that have been won by popular struggle over the past century, and
institutionalizing these radical changes so that recovering them will be no
easy task.
It is not enough for a hegemonic power to declare an official policy. It
must establish it as a "new norm of international law" by exemplary
action. Distinguished commentators may then explain that law is a flexible
living instrument, so that the new norm is now available as a guide to action.
It is understood that only those with the guns can establish "norms"
and modify international law.
The selected target must meet several conditions. It must be defenseless,
important enough to be worth the trouble, and an imminent threat to our
survival and ultimate evil. Iraq qualified on all counts. The first two
conditions are obvious. For the third, it suffices to repeat the orations of
Bush, Blair, and their colleagues: the dictator "is assembling the
world's most dangerous weapons [in order to] dominate, intimidate or
attack"; and he "has already used them on whole villages leaving
thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or transfigured....If this is not
evil then evil has no meaning."
President Bush's eloquent denunciation surely rings true. And those who
contributed to enhancing evil should certainly not enjoy impunity: among them,
the speaker of these lofty words and his current associates and those who
joined them in the years when they were supporting the man of ultimate evil -
long after he had committed these terrible crimes and won the war with Iran
with decisive US help.
We must continue to support him because of our duty to help US exporters,
the Bush I administration explained. It is impressive to see how easy it is
for political leaders, while recounting the monster's worst crimes, to
suppress the crucial words "with our help, because we don't care about
such matters."
Support shifted to denunciation as soon as their friend committed his first
authentic crime: disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding) orders by invading
Kuwait. Punishment was severe - for his subjects. The tyrant escaped
unscathed, and his grip on the tortured population was further strengthened by
the sanctions regime then imposed by his former allies.
Also easy to suppress are the reasons why Washington returned to support
for Saddam immediately after the Gulf war as he crushed rebellions that might
have overthrown him. The chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times
explained that "the best of all worlds" for Washington would be
"an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein", but since that
goal seems unattainable, we must be satisfied with second best. The rebels
failed because Washington and its allies held that "whatever the sins of
the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his
country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression".
All of this is suppressed in the commentary on the mass graves of the
victims of Saddam's US-authorized paroxysm of terror, crimes that are now
offered as justification for the war on "moral grounds." It was all
known in 1991, but ignored for reasons of state: successful rebellion would
have left Iraq in the hands of Iraqis.
Within the US, a reluctant domestic population had to be whipped to a
proper mood of war fever, another traditional problem.. From early September
2002, grim warnings were issued about the threat Saddam posed to the United
States and his links to al-Qaeda, with broad hints that he was involved in the
9-11 attacks. Many of the charges "dangled in front of [the media] failed
the laugh test," the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
commented, "but the more ridiculous [they were,] the more the media
strove to make whole-hearted swallowing of them a test of patriotism".
As often in the past, the propaganda assault had at least short-term
effects. Within weeks, a majority of Americans came to regard Saddam Hussein
as an imminent threat to the US. Soon almost half believed that Iraq was
behind the 9/11 terror. Support for the war correlated with these beliefs. The
propaganda campaign proved just enough to give the administration a bare
majority in the mid-term elections, as voters put aside their immediate
concerns and huddled under the umbrella of power in fear of the demonic enemy.
The brilliant success of "public diplomacy" was revealed when the
President "provided a powerful Reaganesque finale to a six-week war"
on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1. The reference,
presumably, is to Reagan's proud declaration that America was "standing
tall" after conquering the nutmeg capital of the world in 1983,
preventing the Russians from using it to bomb the US. Reagan's mimic was free
to declare - without concern for skeptical comment at home - that he had won a
"victory in a war on terror [by having] removed an ally of Al Qaeda."
It is immaterial that no credible evidence was provided for the alleged
link between Saddam Hussein and his bitter enemy Osama bin Laden and that the
charge was dismissed by competent observers. Also immaterial is the only known
connection between the victory and terror: the invasion appears to have been a
"huge setback in the 'war on terror', by sharply increasing al-Qaeda
recruitment, as US official concede.
More astute observers recognized that Bush's carefully-staged Abraham
Lincoln extravaganza "marks the beginning of his 2004 re-election
campaign," which the White House hopes "will be built as much as
possible around national-security themes." The electoral campaign will
focus on "the battle of Iraq, not the war," chief Republican
political strategist Karl Rove explained : the "war" must continue,
if only to control the population at home.
Before the 2002 elections, he had instructed Party activists to stress
security issues, diverting attention from unpopular Republican domestic
policies. All of this is second-nature to the recycled Reaganites now in
office. That is how they held on to political power during their first tenure
in office, regularly pushing the panic button to evade public opposition to
the policies that left Reagan the most unpopular living President by 1992,
ranking alongside Nixon.
Despite its narrow successes, the intensive propaganda campaign left the
public unswayed in more fundamental respects. Most continue to prefer UN
rather than US leadership in international crises, and by 2-1 prefer that the
UN, rather than the United States, should direct reconstruction in Iraq.
When the occupying army failed to discover WMD, the administration's stance
shifted from "absolute certainty" that Iraq possessed WMD to the
position that the accusations were "justified by the discovery of
equipment that potentially could be used to produce weapons". Senior
officials suggested a "refinement" in the concept of preventive war
that entitles the US to attack "a country that has deadly weapons in mass
quantities". The revision "suggests instead that the administration
will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and
ability to develop [WMD]." The bars for resort to force are significantly
lowered. This modification of the doctrine of "preventive war" may
prove to be the most significant consequence of the collapse of the declared
argument for the invasion.
Perhaps the most spectacular propaganda achievement was the lauding of the
president's "vision" to bring democracy to the Middle East in the
midst of a display of hatred and contempt for democracy for which no precedent
comes to mind. One illustration was the distinction between Old and New
Europe, the former reviled, the latter hailed for its courage. The criterion
was sharp: Old Europe consists of governments that took the same position as
the vast majority of their populations; the heroes of New Europe followed
orders from Crawford Texas, disregarding an even larger majority in most
cases.
Political commentators ranted about disobedient Old Europe and its psychic
maladies, while Congress descended to low comedy. At the liberal end of the
spectrum, Richard Holbrooke (whoi was Bill Clinton's Balkan's expert) stressed
"the very important point" that the population of the eight original
members of New Europe is larger than that of Old Europe, which proves that
France and Germany are "isolated." So it does, if we reject the
radical left heresy that the public might have some role in a democracy.
Thomas Friedman (New York Times
columnist) urged that France be removed from the permanent members of the
Security Council, because it is "in kindergarten," and "does
not play well with others". It follows that the population of New Europe
must still be in nursery school, judging by polls.
Turkey was a particularly instructive case. The government resisted heavy
US pressure to prove its "democratic credentials" by overruling 95%
of its population and following orders. Commentators were infuriated by this
lesson in democracy, so much so that some even reported Turkey's crimes
against the Kurds in the 1990s, previously a taboo topic because of the
crucial US role - though that was still carefully concealed in the
lamentations.
The crucial point was expressed by (Bush deputy defence secretary) Paul
Wolfowitz, who condemned the Turkish military because they "did not play
the strong leadership role that we would have expected" and did not
intervene to prevent the government from respecting near-unanimous public
opinion. Turkey must therefore step up and say "We made a mistake...Let's
figure out how we can be as helpful as possible to the Americans."
Wolfowitz's stand is particularly instructive because he is portrayed as the
leading figure in the crusade to democratize the Middle East.
Anger at Old Europe has much deeper roots than contempt for democracy. The
US has always regarded European unification with some ambivalence, because
Europe might become an independent force in world affairs. Thus senior
diplomat David Bruce was a leading advocate for European unification in the
Kennedy years, urging Washington to "treat a uniting Europe as an equal
partner" - but following America's lead. He saw "dangers" if
Europe "struck off on its own, seeking to play a role independent of the
United States".
In his "Year of Europe" address 30 years ago, Henry Kissinger
advised Europeans to keep to their "regional responsibilities"
within the "overall framework of order" managed by the United
States. Europe must not pursue its own independent course, based on its
Franco-German industrial and financial heartland.
In the tripolar world that was taking shape at that time, these concerns
extend to Asia as well. Northeast Asia is now the world's most dynamic
economic region, accounting for almost 30% of global GDP, far more than the
US, and holding about half of global foreign exchange reserves. It is a
potentially integrated region with advanced industrial economies and ample
resources. All of this raises the threat that it too might flirt with
challenging the overall framework of order which the US is to manage
permanently, by force if necessary, Washington has declared.
Violence is a powerful instrument of control, as history demonstrates. But
the dilemmas of dominance are not slight.
