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Why World
War IV can't sell
By John Brown
In a recent essay (Are we in World War IV?)
Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch commented quite
rightly that "World War IV" has "become a
commonplace trope of the imperial right" of the
United States. But he didn't mention one small
matter - the rest of the US, not to speak of the
outside world, hasn't bought the neo-cons' efforts
to justify President George W Bush's militaristic
adventures abroad with crude "we're in World War
IV" agitprop meant to mobilize Americans in
support of the administration's foreign-policy
follies. That's why, in his second term, Bush -
first and foremost a politician concerned about
maintaining domestic support - is talking ever
less about waging a global war and ever more about
democratizing the world.
A neo-con
global war
America's neo-conservatives have
long paid lip service to the need for democracy in
the Middle East, but their primary emphasis has
been on transformation by war, not politics.
You'll remember that, according to America's
right-wing world warriors, we Americans are
inextricably engaged in a planetary struggle
against fanatic Muslim fundamentalists. There
will, they assure us, be temporary setbacks in
this total generational conflict, as was the case
during World War II and the Cold War (considered
World War III by neo-cons), but we can win in the
end if we "stay the course" with patriotic
fortitude. Above all, we must not be discouraged
by the gory details of the real, nasty war in Iraq
in which we're already engaged, despite the loss
of blood and treasure involved. Like so many good
Soviet citizens expecting perfect communism in the
indeterminate future, all we have to do is await
the New American Century that will eventually be
brought into being by the triumphs of US arms (and
neo-con cheerleading).
Since at least
September 11, 2001, the neo-cons have rambled on
... and on ... about "World War IV". But no matter
how often they've tried to beat the phrase into
our heads, it hasn't become part of the US
mindset. Peace and honest work, not perpetual war
and senseless conflict, still remain our modest
ideals - even with (because of?) the tragedy of
the Twin Towers. True, right before the
presidential election, World War IV surfaced again
and again in the media, fed by neo-con propaganda;
and even today it appears here and there, though
as often in criticism as boosterism. Pat Buchanan
and Justin Raimondo have recently used the phrase
to criticize neo-con hysteria in their columns;
and in its Winter 2005 issue, the Wilson Quarterly
published "World War IV", an important article by
Andrew J Bacevich, which turns the neo-cons'
argument on its head by suggesting that it was the
US that started a new world war - a disastrous
struggle for control of Middle Eastern oil
reserves - during the administration of president
Jimmy Carter. For Bacevich, it appears, the
neo-cons' cherished verbal icon should not be a
call to arms, but a sad reminder of the hubris of
military overreach.
Try it
long
For all the absurdity of their
arguments, neo-cons are, in many ways, men of
ideas. But they do not live on another planet.
They know that "World War IV" or even the milder
"global war on terrorism" are not the first things
ordinary Americans have in their thoughts when
they get up in the morning ("Does anyone still
remember the war on terror?" asked that master of
the zeitgeist, Frank Rich of the New York Times,
early in January). This unwillingness among us
mere mortals to see the world in terms of a
universal death struggle, which neo-con
sympathizer Larry Haas, a member of the Committee
on the Present Danger, believes is caused by "our
faith in rationality", upsets some of the
Spengler-like neo-cons, most noticeably their
cantankerous dean, Norman Podhoretz.
In
February in Commentary (a magazine he once
edited), Podhoretz offered the world "The war
against World War IV", a follow-up to his
portentous and historically falsifying September
2004 piece, "World War IV: How it started, what it
means, and why we have to win". In his latest
piece, stormin' Norman castigates Americans right
and left - including "isolationists of the
paleo-conservative Right", "Michael Moore and all
the other hard leftists holed up in Hollywood, the
universities, and in the intellectual community at
large", and "liberal internationalists" - for
being "at war" with his Rosemary's baby "World War
IV". Somewhat defensively (for a rabid warmonger),
he assures us that we, the American people, will,
despite the best efforts of the critics, continue
to support Mr Bush, who in turn will not fail to
uphold the "Bush Doctrine", which reflects,
Podhoretz leaves no doubt, his own "brilliant"
World War IV ideas (as admiring fellow neo-pundit
William Safire described them in a New York Times
column last August).
Mr Podhoretz is angry
at those who simply cannot accept his crude
Hobbesian view of humanity, so he keeps shouting
at us, but less virulent neo-cons and their
allies, realizing "World War IV" has not caught
on, are thinking up new terms to con Americans
into the neos' agenda of total war.
Foremost among these is "the long war",
evoking - to my mind at least - World War I, "the
Great War" as it was known, which did so much to
lead to the rise of fascism in Europe. (But how
many Americans actually care about World War I?) A
Google search reveals that as early as May 2002,
in a Cato Policy Analysis, "Building leverage in
the long war: Ensuring intelligence community
creativity in the fight against terrorism", James
W Harris wrote of a "long war" in describing
post-September 11 world tensions. In June of last
year, John C Wohlstetter, a senior fellow at the
Seattle-based Discovery Institute, proclaimed:
Now George W Bush must rally the
nation in the latest fight to the finish between
imperfect civilization and perfect barbarism,
that of free countries versus mega-death terror
from both "WMD states" and groups like al-Qaeda.
The Gipper's [former US president Ronald Reagan]
testamentary gift to us is what should be our
goal in a long war that strategist Eliot Cohen
calls World War IV. Podhoretz himself
mentioned the "long war" in his September
Commentary article. "We are only," he noted, "in
the very early stages of what promises to be a
very long war." But the real star of the long-war
proponents is Centcom commander General John
Abizaid, about whom pro-Iraqi invasion journalist
David Ignatius wrote a fawning portrait in the
Washington Post in late December. "If there is a
modern Imperium Americanum," Ignatius announced,
"Abizaid is its field general." Playing the role
of intrepid "action" journalist at the forefront
of the global battle lines in "Centcom's turbulent
center of operations", Ignatius breathlessly
informs his readers that
I traveled this month with Abizaid
as he visited Iraq and other areas of his
command. Over several days, I heard him discuss
his strategy for what he calls the "Long War" to
contain Islamic extremism ... Abizaid believes
that the Long War is only in its early stages.
Victory will be hard to measure, he says,
because the enemy won't wave a white flag and
surrender one day ... America's enemies in this
Long War, he argues, are what he calls "Salafist
jihadists". That's his term for the Muslim
fundamentalists who use violent tactics to try
to re-create what they imagine was the pure and
perfect Islamic government of the era of the
prophet Mohammed, who is sometimes called the
"Salaf". So now we understand why
we're in a long war: to free ourselves of the
salacious Salaf.
If you think it's not
long enough, how about millennium?
Former
Central Intelligence Agency director James
Woolsey, an early proponent of "World War IV", is
now turned on by the "long war" idea as well. In
December, in remarks titled "The war for
democracy", he said:
Well, let me share a few thoughts
with you this morning on what I have come to
call the Long War of the 21st Century. I used to
call it World War IV, following my friend Eliot
Cohen, who called it that in an op-ed right
after [September 11, 2001] in the Wall Street
Journal. Eliot's point is that the Cold War was
World War III. And this war is going to have
more in common with the Cold War than with
either World War I or II.
But people
hear the phrase World War and they think of
Normandy and Iwo Jima and short, intense periods
of principally military combat. I think Eliot's
point is the right one, which is that this war
will have a strong ideological component and
will last some time. So, in order to avoid the
association with World Wars I and II, I started
calling it the Long War of the 21st Century.
Now, why do I think it's going to be long? First
of all, it is with three totalitarian movements
coming out of the Middle East. The
three totalitarian movements, Woolsey goes on to
say, are "Middle East Fascists"; "the Vilayat
Faqih, the Rule of the Clerics in Tehran -
Khamenei, Rafsanjani and his colleagues"; and "the
Islamists of al-Qaeda's stripe, underpinned, in
many ways, by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia".
With all this war-talk from the neo-cons,
it's always reassuring to hear the voices of those
who, if our world warriors had their way, would
enthusiastically give up their lives for the "long
war". On December 31, reader Robert S Stelzer
wrote a letter to the Denver Post in which he said
the following regarding Ignatius' paean to
Abizaid:
I interpret the article as a
propaganda piece to get the American population
used to the idea of a long war, and then a
military draft. Maybe we need an empire to
maintain our standard of living, but if we have
democracy we need an informed
electorate. Despite rare dissident
voices like Stelzer's, the reaction of most
Americans to the "long war" jingle (as to "World
War IV") has in essence been that of a silent
majority: nothing. Count on the neo-con bastion
the Weekly Standard (in January) to try to whip up
those silent Americans with a ratcheted-up
attack-the-mortal-enemy battle cry headlined "The
Millennium War" by pundit Austin Bay, a colonel,
who noted that "the global war on terror is the
war's dirt-stupid name. One might as well declare
war on exercise as declare war on terror, for
terror is only a tactic used by an enemy ... In
September 2001, I suggested that we call this
hideous conflict the Millennium War, a nom de
guerre that captures both the chronological
era and the ideological dimensions of the
conflict."
But Austin B's MW (apologies to
the German car maker) has not sold either, being
even less repeated in media commentaries than the
"long war" itself - which brings us to the Bush
administration's current attitude toward the
neo-cons' World War IV branding.
Drop
that war! The product no longer sells!
If
there's one thing the sad history of recent years
has amply demonstrated, it's that the Bush White
House is profoundly uninterested in ideas (even
the superficial ones promulgated by the neo-cons).
What concerns Dubya and his entourage is not
thought, but power. They pick up and drop "ideas"
at the tip of a hat, abandoning them when they no
longer suit their narrow interests of the moment.
(The ever-changing "justifications" for the war in
Iraq are a perfect illustration of this attitude.)
The Bushies are short-term and savvy tacticians
par excellence, with in essence one
long-term plan, rudimentary but focused:
Republican - as they interpret Abraham Lincoln's
party - domination of the United States for years
to come. White House political adviser Karl Rove's
hero, after all, is William McKinley, the 25th
president of the United States, who, some argue,
was responsible for creating Republican control of
US politics for decades.
The current US
administration, perhaps more than any other in
history, illustrates George Kennan's observation
that "our actions in the field of foreign affairs
are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an
internal political life dominated by vocal
minorities". Indeed, there is a strong case to be
made that the war in Iraq was begun in essence for
domestic consumption (as White House chief of
staff Andrew H Card Jr suggested to the New York
Times in September 2002, when he famously said of
Iraq war planning, "From a marketing point of
view, you don't introduce new products in
August"). While all the reasons behind this
tragic, idiotic war - which turned out far worse
than the "mission accomplished" White House ever
expected - may never be fully known, it can be
said with a strong degree of assurance that it was
sold to the US public, at least in part, in order
to morph Bush II, not elected by popular vote and
low in the polls early in his presidency, into a
decisive "commander-in-chief" so that his party
would win the upcoming congressional - and then
presidential - elections.
The neo-cons -
including, in all fairness, those among them
honest in their unclear convictions - happened to
be around the White House (of course, they made
sure they would be) to provide justification for
Bush's military actions after September 11 with
their Darwinian, dog-eat-dog, "us vs them" view of
the world. And so their "ideas" (made to sound
slightly less harsh than World War IV in the
phrase "global war on terrorism") were cleared by
Rove and other Republican politicos and used for a
while by a domestically driven White House to
persuade voters that the invasion of Iraq was an
absolute necessity for the security of the United
States.
But now Americans are feeling
increasingly critical of our Iraqi "catastrophic
success". "The latest polls show that 53% of
Americans feel the war was not worth fighting, 57%
say they disapprove of Mr Bush's handling of Iraq,
and 70% think the number of US casualties is an
unacceptable price to have paid," reported the
Christian Science Monitor, referring to a
Washington Post-ABC News poll. To the Pentagon's
great concern, the military is having difficulties
recruiting; National Guardsmen are angry about
excessively long tours of duty in Iraq; spouses of
soldiers complain about their loved ones being
away from home for far too much time.
So,
as their pro-war manifestos become less and less
politically useful to the Bush administration, the
neo-cons are getting a disappointing reward for
their Bush-lovin'. Far from being asked to
formulate policy to the extent that they doubtless
would like, they have been relegated to playing in
essence representational roles, reminiscent of the
one performed by the simple-minded gardener named
Chance played by Peter Sellers in the film
Being There - at the United Nations (John
Bolton) and at the World Bank (Paul Wolfowitz),
two institutions that no red-blooded Republican
voters will ever care about, except as objects of
hatred.
At the same time, and despite
disquieting many foreigners by the selection of
Bolton and Wolfowitz (widely perceived abroad as
undiplomatic unilateralists) to serve in
multinational organizations, Bush appears to have
recognized the existence of anti-American foreign
public opinion, which has been intensely critical
of the neo-cons' bellicose views and US unilateral
action in Iraq. The selection of spinmeister Karen
Hughes, a Bush confidante who happened to be born
in Paris (no, not Paris, Texas), as under
secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs
at the State Department suggests that the White
House staff has begun (against its gut instincts)
to acknowledge what it dismissed in Bush's first
term - the usefulness of "soft power" in dealing
with other nations. This may only be from fear of
excessively bad news coming from abroad that could
lead to lower opinion polls at home and thus
threaten current Republican hegemony in the United
States, but no matter.
We don't
demolish, we democratize!
Few have actually
been conned into the neos' war, whatever
ingredient it be flavored with - "IV", "long" or
"millennium". Now the White House, far from
promulgating neo-con World War IV ideas, has been
dropping most references to war as Bush's second
term begins. America's commander-in-chief, still
undergoing an extreme makeover as a man who
considers peaceful negotiations at least an
option, is being turned into an advocate of the
politically oppressed in other countries and so
has come up with a new explanation to sell his
dysfunctional foreign "policy": global
democratization, with a focus on the Middle East.
Bush did mention democratization in his
first term, but today it has suddenly become the
newest leitmotif for explaining his
misadventures abroad. What, he now asks the
American people, are we doing overseas? And he
responds, we're not demolishing the world - we're
democratizing it! And thanks to our
democratizing so far in the Middle East, including
the bombing and invading of Iraq, the Arab world
is like Berlin when the Wall came down. (Forget
about the fact that these two events took place
during different centuries and in very different
parts of the world based on the implementation of
very different US policies.)
And don't you
forget, Bush tells us, that we're on a path to
reform our Social Security system, far more
important than the war in Iraq - though Dubya's
call for personal accounts may, in appeal, prove
the World War IV of domestic policy. As for
democracy at home, that can wait.
So,
after all the Bush administration has done to ruin
America's moral standing and image overseas -
"preemptive" military strikes that violate simple
morality and the basic rules of war; searching in
vain for non-existent weapons of mass destruction;
mindlessly rushing to implement "regime change" in
a far-off Third World country, an ill-planned
effort that could result in the establishment of
an anti-Western theocracy harmful to US interests;
brutally incarcerating "terrorists" with little,
if any, respect for international law; arrogantly
bashing "old Europe" just to show off all-American
Manichean machismo; and insulting millions abroad
by writing off their opinions - Americans are now
being told by Dubya and his gang what we've really
been up to all this time across the oceans: We're
democratizing the Middle East, and with great
success thus far!
I don't believe a word
of it.
Here's what the military newspaper
Stars and Stripes wrote in 1919:
Propaganda is nothing but a fancy
name for publicity, and who knows the publicity
game better than the Yanks? Why, the Germans
make no bones about admitting that they learned
the trick from us. Now the difference between a
Boche and a Yank is just this - that a Boche is
someone who believes everything that's told him
and a Yank is some one who disbelieves
everything that's told him. John
Brown, a former US Foreign Service officer who
resigned in protest against the invasion of Iraq,
is affiliated with Georgetown University. Brown
compiles a daily Public Diplomacy Press Review
(PDPR) available free by request at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com
. Aside from public
diplomacy, PDPR covers items such as
anti-Americanism, cultural diplomacy, propaganda,
foreign public opinion, and American popular
culture abroad. This article first appeared at
Tomdispatch and is
used by permission.
(Copyright 2005
John Brown) |
