Here
we are, just past our Independence Day, past that moment
in memory when the United States was, by active example,
a "beacon of freedom" to the world, past the moment in
memory when, as Barbara Ehrenreich reminded us in the
New York Times on July 4, the signers of the Declaration
of Independence penned their names to the following line
(Their George and Ours): "And for the support of this
declaration ... we mutually pledge to each other our
lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."
She
adds: "Today, those who believe that the war on terror
requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue
that 'the constitution is not a suicide pact'. In a
sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was
precisely that. By signing [Thomas] Jefferson's text, the signers
of the Declaration were putting their lives on the line
... If the rebel American militias were beaten on the
battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged
as traitors. They signed anyway, thereby stating to the
world that there is something worth more than life, and
that is liberty."
Now, let's leap a couple of centuries-plus
and consider another group of Americans who
signed on to what's looking more and more like an
inadvertent (political) suicide pact. Our media wash
over us like some mind-cleansing drug, so today, in the
shambles of Bush administration Iraq policy, in the wake
of Abu Ghraib, just beyond the "transition to Iraqi
rule", it's difficult to recall what life was like back
when the press was simply a lapdog; CBS's Dan Rather was
burbling, "George Bush is the president, he makes the
decisions and, you know, as just one American, he wants
me to line up, just tell me where"; war was a swift,
smiting blow (when was the last time you heard the
phrase "shock and awe"?), and we were about to be
anointed as the New Rome.
It's hard to remember
that we were then ruled by the greatest, and most
arrogant, gamblers in our history, men (and a single
woman) ready to roll the dice any old time on the fate
of the Earth. In the wake of every crumbling
pseudo-explanation for the war in Iraq, it's hard to
remember just how sweeping their vision actually was or
what they had in mind when, not so long after September
11, 2001, they loaded some high-tech Hummer (regular
cars being far too retro for them) with explosives and
drove out into the world looking for something to blow
up. Now that the strategists among them are in decline
and the "realists", long left in the lurch, are wheeling
and dealing in Iraq and Washington, it's hard to recall
the Utopian (or dystopian) fantasies they were so intent
on imposing on what turned out to be a surprisingly
recalcitrant world.
For the nostalgia buffs
among you, the increasingly lonely Vice President Dick
Cheney, who not so long ago imagined himself to be the
co-ruler of our energy planet, continues to hoof it
around the country reiterating charges of
al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein ties on a "best of 2001-02"
Bush administration top-10 tour. But even the man who
prided himself on never cracking, no less cracking a
smile, has had his public bad moments and temper squalls
- and all without a duck, quail or pheasant in sight to
knock out of the skies. In a bow to the Veep's
oldies-but-badies routine, let's try, for a moment, to
recall the strategic thinking that lay behind the
shock-and-awe campaign seen around the world: from the
start, of course, this was an energy administration.
After all, how many national security advisers in our
history have had an oil tanker named after them? How
many vice presidents ran a giant energy company deeply
entangled with the US military? The fact is, when it
came to energy, like a group of vulgar Marxists with oil
on the brain, most of them saw the world quite naturally
in terms of energy flows, just the way a doctor might
see blood flows as the body's essence.
They
identified an
"arc of instability" that stretched east-west from
the former Yugoslavia to the borders of China and
southward into Africa. (It was sometimes also said to
include the Andean parts of Latin America.) This "arc", covering
significant parts of what once was called the
Third World, took in most of the planet's prime, or
prospective, oil lands. Even before September 11 in
this vast region, some of which had dropped out of the former
Soviet empire, the administration of President George W
Bush began to plant, or expand, US military bases. The heart
of these oil lands lay in the Middle East, a region with
- in better times - the world's five leading oil
producers.
Post-September 11, the top strategists of
this administration followed their president happily into the "war
on terror", the wilder among them imagining it as World
War IV, the equivalent of, if not World War II, at least the
Cold War, and so engendering dreams
of another half-century twilit struggle to victory. Endless years
of war would release them to act exactly as they
pleased. The president (and his speechwriters), dreaming "good
war" dreams from his movie-made childhood, then elevated
a pathetic "axis of evil" (Iran, Iraq and North
Korea, none of which previously knew of their close
relationship) to the role of the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan,
Italy) in World War II; and so, with an enemy of nation-states
in hand, far more worthy of a world at war than Osama
bin Laden and small groups of fanatic Islamists,
they announced a policy of global supremacy not over
terrorists, but over all the other nations of our planet,
swearing that no future bloc of powers would be allowed
to interfere with our benevolent hegemony over the Earth
- and of preventive war. We would reserve the right
to take out anybody we even thought might sooner or
later in some way or another challenge us. A list of up
to 60 states believed to "harbor" terrorists was also
drawn up. This was a list for a lifetime.
And finally, declaring weapons of mass destruction evil, they made
it our job to decide who exactly shouldn't have them
and to bolster our own nuclear forces to prepare for a
series of what author Jonathan Schell has
called "anti-proliferation wars". With this trio of policies
in their foreign-policy quiver, they looked around for some
action.
Of course, the neo-con strategists
of this administration had long been spoiling for,
planning for, and dreaming of a second American Gulf War
that would take down former Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein's regime. (Just a peek at the wonderfully named
Project for the New American Century website, where they
proudly posted their wares, will give you a sense of
this.) Assessing the satanic trio that made up the axis of
evil - a fierce and desperate despotism with a sizable
air force but no fuel to get pilots aloft to practice
flying planes; an increasingly embattled and unpopular
but combative semi-theocracy; and a country sitting on
the world's second-largest oil reserves, strung out by three
failed wars, 12 years of economic sanctions and periodic
bombings, and run by a detested, brutal, increasingly
out-of-touch regime with a military that was just a
ghost of its former self - they naturally chose the
third. It was a grudge rematch to begin with; it looked
like a snap (there was little question that Saddam's
army, crushed in our first Gulf War, wouldn't last long
in a second one); and the assaults of September 11, 2001,
had made it a far more sellable commodity (hence the
endless administration linkages of Iraq and al-Qaeda).
Nothing could be worse than Saddam, so
Iraq's crushed people would prove both pliable and grateful
for their "liberation". (You remember that "cakewalk",
and all those flowers to be strewn in our path by
joyous Shi'ites.) In return for a Saddam-less life, they
would, of course, let us proceed apace with our plans.
In an over-armed region, we would drastically downsize
their army so that they would need our protection
forever, build a string of permanent bases to the tune
of billions of dollars (in part to replace those being
mothballed in Saudi Arabia), and install a government
run by Ahmad Chalabi, the sweet-talking exile with so
much useful intelligence so close at hand, who was so
deeply beloved by the neo-cons in the Pentagon and the
Veep's office. He would be our satrap in a formally
democratic Iraq. It was all so obvious.
And then,
of course, there was all that oil. In our desperately
over-determined world where the multiple
explanation is the only explanation, the point
of all this was never simply to take Iraq's oil, though
the neo-cons did think it would be most useful in
reconstructing and running the country on the cheap, as
Pentagon Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made quite
clear numerous times and still claims. In a world of
rising oil desire and potentially limited oil resources,
the point was to find ourselves ensconced militarily at
the very heart of the Middle East, controlling the taps
to the energy veins of the globe, and to do so before
any of those future blocs of irritated countries could
form to challenge us.
But Iraq wasn't the end
of their plans. Not by a long shot. Seen as the
region's soft underbelly, Iraq was to be but a pit stop on
a long-imagined armed drive through the Middle East -
and implicitly the world. (After all, the third member
of the axis of evil was conveniently located on the
other side of the planet.) Iraq was to be the motor
for regional change. Once we stood triumphant in our
Iraqi bases, Syria would find itself between the pincers of
a US Army and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
militarized Israel. The Palestinians would find
themselves completely isolated and would be forced to
make a humiliating peace of the defeated with an
expansive Israel. (Remember, this administration was
filled with died-in-the-wool Likudniks who saw
themselves delivering long-term safety to an Israel
triumphant, while making regional use of the Sharonistas
and their skills to help establish that New American
Century.)
Iran, another
of those grudge-match countries, with US encampments on two
of its borders - don't forget our war in Afghanistan
here - would be ripe for an Iraqi-style regime
change, a bring-back-the son-of-the-Shah event filled
with Orange County Iranians (already promising the
same cakewalks and flowers). The Saudis, that giant oil-well
of a state, would, of course, be thoroughly
intimidated. With the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
well established in the old Eastern Europe preserves of the
Soviet Union, US troops flowing into increasingly
permanent encampments in its former Central Asian republics
as well as into a complex of expanding bases in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with a strengthened US alliance
with a right-wing Hindu government in India (also
growing ever closer to Israel), impoverished Russia
would finally be "contained" along its
many-thousand-mile frontier (in a way the Cold Warriors
of the 20th century could only have dreamed of).
Energy-starved China, with its booming economy,
seen by many in this administration as our great future
competitor and enemy, would be left out in the cold, and
the North Koreans would have been safely stowed in the
refrigerator, a fit object for mopping up in a second
Bush administration. The uppity old Europeans would be
put in their place; the new (Eastern) Europeans would be
eternally grateful for whatever economic favors and
bases we dropped in their laps; the Middle East would be
reorganized on a basis favorable to Israel and so to the
US; and there would be an American Iraq with, as they so
liked to say, "an Iraqi face" and a democratic facade.
This was to be a New Rome indeed, not to say an Earth
towered over by a single colossus. Pentagon planners
talked about our military configuration in the world as
our "footprint" as if we were indeed a giant capable of
planting only a single vast foot on the planet. (Note
that in all this, the war on al-Qaeda played at best a
modest role, except as an enemy of convenience that
explained everything to a terrified American populace -
largely because this vision preceded September 11 and
had next to nothing to do with terrorism.)
By
the way, if you consider this vision, you immediately
grasp one of the great, postwar mysteries of Iraq. Now
that Iraq policy has crumbled, it's often asked why,
given the Powell Doctrine (and the fact that he was,
after all, secretary of state), we never prepared an
"exit strategy" for Iraq. Consider, for example, this
sentence from a recent Christian Science Monitor piece:
"Much of the discussion [about future US military
doctrine] revolves around the so-called Powell Doctrine
of war (explicit objectives, overwhelming use of force,
clear exit strategy) versus the 'Rumsfeld Doctrine'
(smaller numbers of highly maneuverable ground forces,
emphasis on special operations, and high-tech air
power)."
What's the difference between the
two military strategies? Rumsfeld's was a no-exit
strategy. Remember, administration strategists were setting up
in Iraq in order to drive elsewhere. They never
imagined leaving, just as they never imagined all sorts of
other possibilities that didn't go well with their dreams.
In this sense, our president embodied our
no-exit administration in his rhetoric. Only one party was
going to leave town in this showdown on Main Street -
the Saddamist enemy, and they were going to exit stone-cold
and feet first.
For such a vision of the world,
gaily decorated with much talk about bringing
"democracy" to the benighted, they were ready to take
any step imaginable: targeted assassinations (a
la
Israel), the setting up of an offshore mini-gulag, the
torture of those from whom information must be extracted
- all the dark arts of the world were to be mobilized
for that bright dream of benevolent imperial domination.
They planned for the worst they could imagine with the
worst tools they could dream up. Where they failed was
in their inability to imagine the world as it was, not
as they wished it to be. In this sense they were both a
Feith-based and faith-based administration; and this was
why - despite copious prewar planning over at State -
the boys from the Pentagon arrived in Iraq largely
without Iraqis, Arabic speakers, or much in the way of
plans for the country. They had won, hadn't they? They
had Chalabi, didn't they? What else could they possibly
need?
Starting with Iraqi nationalism,
the basics of our planet in the last century, no less
the new one, escaped them, but at least one has to
grant them the audacity of their vision. It couldn't have
been grander - though there was no way for the
American public to know much about it, since at no other time
in our recent past has the US press been so
demobilized. At a time when our leaders were putting
together the most expansive of global maps, most of the
time you could hardly find a piece of analysis, no less
news, in our papers that had two countries in it at the
same time.
The administration neo-cons were
Utopian fantasists who, if you think of Afghanistan as
the first enforced stop on their path to Iraq, and Iraq
as the chosen second stop on the way to the larger
Middle Eastern region, didn't actually get far along the
path they set out for themselves. And here's the almost
incomprehensible thing (if you don't consider the
history of resistance to imperial power of every sort
over the last centuries), they were stopped by a group
of ill-armed nobodies, lacking predator drones, tanks,
billions in intelligence, access to the globe's e-mails,
or even evidently a central command. They were stopped
by relatively small groups of brutes and thugs, fanatics
and dead-enders backed by the extraordinary power, the
overwhelming desire of everyday Iraqis not to be
occupied and ruled by a foreign power or its proxies.
And yet the neo-cons weren't completely wrong.
They imagined Iraq as the motor for reorganizing first
the region, then the world - a kind of wild force for
change, a chaos machine that would scramble the previous
world order in ways advantageous to them. Their only
mistake was to believe that the levers of change in that
scrambling would remain in their hands. They loosed - to
use a classic phrase - the whirlwind and now it seems to
be in the process of sweeping them away.
They
weren't, of course, much at predictions. None of us are.
It's one of those human failings. We can't help
ourselves when it comes to predicting, but we're almost
always surprised by reality. Still, they were worse at
it than most, insistent as they were on imposing their
soaring vision on a stubborn reality (exactly the charge
long laid to the left). In a sense, of all their dreams,
only the permanent bases in Iraq and the no-exit
strategy remain, embedding Washington in the heartland
of chaos for years to come. Perhaps the moral of their
tale might simply be: Be careful what you wish for.
Of all the things they couldn't imagine, the
first and foremost - they would have found the thought
laughable only a year ago, as laughable as the idea that
George W Bush, our war president, could lose the next
election - was that a ragtag Iraqi insurgency would find
itself in the driver's seat of some battered sedan,
well-packed with munitions, and driving the Bush
administration willy-nilly toward disaster in November.
(This wasn't actually so hard to imagine. It was
something I predicted at least a year ago - and if you
were reading on the Internet rather than in our
mainstream media, you wouldn't have found me alone.)
Just about everyone who
represented respectable opinion in our country knew, only months
ago, that Americans didn't really vote foreign policy.
The media repeated this truth endlessly. The war
simply couldn't, wouldn't be the decisive factor in a US
election. Well, think again. Now they know and they still
can't quite believe it. Now the administration knows too
and can't quite believe it either. Now, they're in a rush
to repair the damage and so Chalabi is replaced by
Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, the Pentagon by the
State Department and the Central Intelligence, and Bush
II's boys by the dealers of the Bush I administration.
In Iraq the new crew is settling up some form of
martial law backed by US troops, a reconstituted
semi-Ba'athist regime, and so on. The realists are back
in the saddle and the media have given them a pass and a
respite (though only until the next obvious catastrophe
in Iraq, which is unlikely to be far down the pike). But
what a saddle it's likely to prove to be.
This
is the famed getting-the-toothpaste-back-in-the-tube
dilemma and, given Democratic presidential candidate
John Kerry's insipid imperial suggestions for Iraq, it's
likely to be with us next January no matter who wins in
November. One of the few things the neo-cons seem to
have done successfully is pass on a no-exit catastrophe
to whomever. Ending the occupation - I mean the real one
- and withdrawing our troops, these are not live
thoughts in much of Washington. In this sense, with
Americans already at the 40% mark on withdrawal, the
public is way ahead of its leaders who, on both sides of
the aisle, seem to be opting for a Vietnam-style
response: escalation.
But, as Dr Seuss might
have said, that is not all, oh, no, that is not all. The
administration policies that crystallized in the
invasion of and high-handed occupation of Iraq seem to
have set off a process that is reorganizing the world in
ways we can't yet fully grasp. Some may be hopeful, some
frightening indeed. In South Korea and India, the right has
already been swept from power. In Italy and possibly
Japan, rightist governments totter. In Britain, Prime
Minister Tony Blair stands unsteady at the helm, as does
Australian Prime Minister John Howard in Australia, and
so on. In the Middle East, this administration has
created a border-blurring monster and God knows what
will follow. All we can say with any degree of certainty
is that it will be ugly, and every day we occupy Iraq
under whatever "face" will make it worse.
In our
country, the president's poll numbers look dreadful
indeed. (As sociologist Michael Schwartz writes, "The
really bad news for Bush in these polls lies in the
voters' evaluations of his leadership, and all three
polls concur in recording dramatic declines to his
lowest scores since 9/11. To cite just some of this
evidence, the WP [Washington Post]-ABC poll registers
Bush's overall approval job rating at 47%, below 50% for
the first time since 9/11. Only losing incumbents have
been below 50% at this point, with the exception of the
Truman miracle of 1948. His ratings on specific issues
are also at low ebbs.")
Already, for an election
victory, a number of things will have to break very
right for him - and we're only in the early days of
July. There's so much worse to come in Iraq as well as
inside the Beltway where a lethal brew of
investigations, court cases, commission reports, angry
leakers and whistle-blowers, all released by or fallout
from this administration's Iraq policies, ensure
unending months of messiness. The president may already
be political dead meat, even if the opinion poll
head-to-heads with Kerry don't yet register it.
And here's an odd little bit of polling info, pointed
out by John Nichols of The Nation magazine ("Will the
Senate tip?"): "Democratic candidate Inez Tenenbaum, South
Carolina's superintendent of education, leads in the
polls [for a South Carolina Senate seat in a state Bush
won by 57%] - despite the fact that one of her opponents
dismisses her as 'an Emily's List liberal'. And
Tenenbaum's not alone in showing unexpected strength.
Democrats are running even or ahead in four of five
races for open Senate seats in the South, and they're
also even or ahead in contests for Republican-held
seats in Illinois, Oklahoma, Colorado and
Alaska." Not so long ago, those southern Senate seats
would have been considered throwaways, obvious red-state
shoo-ins. No one may say it, but this too is Iraq.
Though not yet likely, there is the possibility that,
depending on how fast events sink in and how disastrous
the news proves, the Democrats might take back
Congress, and this might itself prove but part of a larger
seismic shift, a global reorganization that, on the
one hand, might end the quarter-century, near planetwide
reign of the right wing, and on the other
hand may bequeath us all a desperately more dangerous
world.
The Bush people were audacious; they were
visionary (and didn't mind telling you so); the only
liberty they truly valued was their liberty to do as
they damn pleased; they were focused on unilateral
global domination of a sort seen at most only a few
times in history; they had the mentality of plunderers
and didn't hesitate to use fear to herd Americans in the
directions they most desired. In the end, they may find
themselves alone and vulnerable in a
Baghdad-on-the-Potomac of their own making with no Green
Zone in sight and chaos in the driver's seat.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation
Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the
mainstream media"), is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and
consulting editor at Metropolitan Books. He is the
author of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing,
and The End of Victory Culture, a history
of US triumphalism and the Cold War.
