That the US is now the world's sole
remaining superpower is above challenge. This
status has affected the United States' approach to
formulating foreign and domestic policies in the
post-Cold War era.
In foreign policy, the
US has been operating on the basis that its
national values have been validated by triumph in
the Cold War and that its resultant
sole-superpower status now earns it both the moral
right and the military means to spread such values
over the whole world. Resistance to such
self-righteous values is now
deemed
evil by US moral imperialism, in need of
elimination not by persuasion but by force. This
new approach has made the world less safe than it
was during the Cold War, the end of which briefly
entertained a false hope for a new age in which a
world with only one superpower could thereafter
live without war, hot or cold. Instead, the world
has been plunged into successive holy wars of
imperialistic moral conquest by the sole remaining
superpower, bringing escalating terrorist attacks
on to the US homeland. The impact on domestic
policy from terrorist threats has in turn been the
wholesale suspension of civil liberties in the
name of homeland security.
Such holy wars
of moral imperialism cannot be blamed entirely on
neo-conservatives in the second Bush
administration. While the two wars on Iraq were
initiated by the two pere et cie Bush
administrations that sandwiched eight years of
Clinton rule, the Bosnia and Kosovo wars were the
handiwork of Clinton administration neo-liberals.
The faith-based foreign policy of George W Bush
echoes the value-based interests of the foreign
policy of Bill Clinton, such as the grandiose aim
of enlarging democracy by force around the world
and preventing mass starvation and ethnic genocide
by spilling more blood.
The Balkans
adventure The US under Clinton sent troops
into Bosnia-Herzegovina with a host of policy
delusions, such as revitalizing an outmoded North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to perpetuate
European security dependence on the US, ending a
local war that could spill beyond the borders of
Croatia and Serbia, establishing a closer
relationship with the Russian military,
demonstrating that the US was willing to use its
super military power to spread its national values
overseas even though the security of the US was
not threatened and neutralizing domestic criticism
of amorality in a foreign policy based of
realpolitik.
The wary US military
demanded and received clear rules of engagement
toward these flamboyant political objectives,
allowing soldiers who were attacked, or threatened
with attack, field authority to respond with
lethal force quickly and massively; exempting the
military from having to perform jobs of refugee
resettlement, monitoring elections, controlling
civilian traffic, supplying food, clothing, fuel
or other basic needs to the civilian population;
no hard time lines for moving forces into Bosnia,
hence allowing the military to enter slowly with
deliberation and in the safest possible way;
committing to a clearly defined departure date
(December 1996) for military forces; limiting the
mission to peacekeeping and not peace enforcement
and, if there were major attacks on the
Implementation Force, US forces would withdraw; a
solid understanding that "mission creep" would be
firmly resisted; provision of the best of the
newest equipment to US forces on the ground, in
the air and on the sea, and the State Department
arrangement for military cooperation from
neighboring states, especially Hungary, Albania,
Croatia and Serbia.
In fact, the US
military served notice that it was the wrong tool
for achieving the administration's limited-war
political objectives. It was a perfectly
appropriate position. The US military is arguably
the best in the world, best led, best equipped and
best trained. But its performance and morale are
steadily eroded by assignments to missions that
are best handled by non-military means. When a
well-oiled machine is use inappropriately, both
the machine and the task suffer. The experience in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, a nation that existed only in
the imagination of US ideologue policymakers,
should have served as a clear warning for Kosovo
and Iraq. It was Bosnia that "animated our policy
towards Kosovo", Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to
Greece, told Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the
conservative Cato Institute. Even though the
United States spent US$12 billion and occupied
Bosnia for more than three years, Clinton's
arm-twisting Dayton scheme was a policy failure.
To this date, nationalist Serbs continue to
dominate local politics and refugees are not
returning home. There is little home-grown
economic growth. The kind of democracy being
introduced by the US "more represents Boss Tweed
than George Washington" as the US and its NATO
allies force Bosnians to live under a government
that represents none of them. Internecine local
conflicts always have a longevity that exceeds the
US political attention span.
Bandow
testified on March 10, 1999, before the House
International Relations Committee hearing on "The
US Role in Kosovo" that the Clinton administration
attempted to impose "an artificial settlement in
Kosovo with little chance of genuine acceptance by
either side". A US diplomat in Belgrade was
reported to have said: "If you're a Serb, hell
yes, the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] is a
terrorist organization." Even moderate ethnic
Albanians admit that the KLA had targeted Serb
police officers and other government employees,
any Serbs viewed as abusing Kosovars, as well as
Albanian collaborators. Each cycle of violence
spawned more deadly violence. Belgrade
understandably accused the US of aiding and
abetting terrorists in Kosovo directly but
remotely from Washington.
Intervention in
Kosovo was even more perverse than in Bosnia. US
secretary of state Madeleine Albright warned: "We
are not going to stand by and watch the Serbian
authorities do in Kosovo what they can no longer
get away with doing in Bosnia." She announced that
the US reserved the right to take unilateral
action against the Serbian government, saying, "We
know what we need to know to believe we are seeing
ethnic cleansing all over again." Not only did the
US and its NATO allies have no workable plan
behind their intervention of moral imperialism,
Washington's proposal for autonomy status
satisfied no one and required yet another
interminable occupation, as the opposing sides
remained determined to continue fighting. The
conflict in Kosovo is a complex clash of mutually
exclusive claims, a conflict between
political/cultural legitimacy principle and
demographic principle, which is aggravated by
conflicting historical grievances.
For
more than six years, the small Balkan province of
Kosovo was the victim of an ambitious but futile
nation-building experiment by the US, implemented
by a United Nations mission exercising dictatorial
authority to implement democracy, backed by a
NATO-led "peacekeeping" force, in a region torn by
decades of bitter, bloody ethnic clashes between
an ever more assertive Albanian majority and an
isolated Serb minority. Originally,
nation-building referred to the efforts of newly
independent nations to mold former colonial
territories carved up by colonial powers without
regard to ethnic or natural boundaries into viable
and coherent national entities. Nation-building
has come to be used by the US since the end of the
Cold War in a completely different context from
its original meaning, with reference to what has
been succinctly described by James Dobbins, former
special envoy for Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo
and Afghanistan, as "the use of armed force in the
aftermath of a conflict to underpin an enduring
transition to democracy". Nation-building is
lauded as "the inescapable responsibility of the
world's only superpower".
At the cost of
about $1.3 billion a year, some 11,000
international civil servants and police officers
have been trying to nation-build by constructing
new make-believe ministries, an ineffectual
parliament, corrupt local councils, a demoralized
bureaucracy, dysfunctional courts,
foreign-controlled customs and a militarized
police force that answers to foreign commands, as
well as new media orchestrated to spread pro-West
propaganda. The region remains in economic
depression as the poorest part of the Balkans, and
the least stable. Enmity between the Serbs and
Albanians continues to run deep. Estimates of
unemployment range from 30-70%. The regional
government is bankrupt, and the economy continues
to shrink every year. Such are the gifts of US
moral imperialism. The same pathetic fiasco
appears to be repeating itself in "democratic"
Iraq, which is expected to slide into civil war as
soon as US forces withdraw.
Nuclear
power Iraq's strategic error was its
premature geopolitical neutrality. Had Iraq placed
itself under the protection of a nuclear power
prior to achieving its own independent nuclear
capability, it would not have been invaded by
anyone. The tragedy of Iraq was not that a weak
non-nuclear power was invaded arbitrarily by the
sole superpower, but that the world order of
sovereign states failed structurally to preserve
the sanctity of sovereignty. Other nuclear powers
in the system failed to preserve the principle of
sovereignty by protecting a helpless, small
non-nuclear state from naked aggression on flimsy
pretext by the sole nuclear superpower.
Whereas nuclear-arms control and
non-proliferation during the Cold War were
complementary regimes to prevent a
world-destroying nuclear exchange between two
superpowers, such regimes since the dissolution of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have been
modified by the US agenda of depriving an "axis of
evil" of an effective nuclear deterrence against
US military coercion. The invasion and occupation
of Iraq were based on a pretext of eliminating the
proven existence of weapons of mass destruction,
not just suspected programs to produce such
weapons. The fact that no such weapons were found
after the invasion was dismissed as immaterial.
The issue was that Iraq could be logically
expected to require nuclear weapons and could have
had such weapons if it had not been invaded.
"Better safe than sorry" was the modus operandi of
indiscriminate preemption, notwithstanding that
the logic to require nuclear weapons on the part
of small nations is traceable to a belligerent US
militaristic policy of preemption.
US
nuclear-arms policy echoes century-old US societal
values toward gun ownership. Extremists on the US
political spectrum regularly argue that guns do
not kill people; evil people, or criminals, kill
people. Thus anyone the US considers unfit to
claim the natural right to own guns must first be
labeled evil. Extending the same logic, nuclear
weapons do not kill; evil governments do. This
peculiarly American rationale extends to US
posture on nuclear proliferation. World safety is
not threatened by US possession of nuclear weapons
because US values by definition are righteous. The
United States now possesses 10,300 warheads, 20
times the total number possessed by all the other
six nuclear powers besides Russia. While the US
has reduced its arsenal of warheads from 150,000
to 10,300, the TNT tonnage of destruction power
with bigger warheads still commands the equivalent
of 120,000-130,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs. The US
nuclear arsenal is designed not merely for massive
destruction to win a war, but total destruction of
all opponents to rid the world of evil.
A
1998 study ("Atomic Audit: The Costs and
Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940" by
Stephen Schwartz) ranks US nuclear-weapons
spending against all other federal government
spending from 1940-96, as documented by the Office
of Management and Budget. During this period, the
US spent nearly $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons
and weapons-related programs in constant 1996
dollars. Non-nuclear-related national defense
totaled $13.2 trillion. Social Security, at $7.9
trillion, is not government spending per se but
funds collected from payroll taxes and
redistributed to older citizens or placed in the
trust fund. Nuclear-weaponry spending over this
56-year period exceeded the combined total federal
spending for education; training, employment, and
social services; agriculture; natural resources
and environment protection; general science,
space, and technology; community and regional
development (including disaster relief); law
enforcement; and energy production and regulation
(including nuclear energy). Such non-military
spending is the center of US core values, and the
influence of the US would have been enhanced with
better funding. On average, the United States has
spent $98 billion a year on nuclear weapons, or
$1.40 per capita per day, while more than 20% of
the world's people live on less than $1 per day.
By investing its $162 billion trade
surplus (2004) with the US in US sovereign debt,
China alone provides enough credit to finance the
US nuclear arsenal which someday may be used
against China, a card-carrying evil nation on
account of its being communist.
The US has
steadfastly refused to adopt a no-first-use
commitment on nuclear weapons. Yet it presumes the
God-given right to attack any nation with the
suspected intention to develop nuclear arms.
Non-proliferation has been distorted by US
machination into a counterproductive regime. The
US policy of indiscriminate preemption now
encourages all nations to try to achieve nuclear
capability as soon as possible, for the danger of
attack from the US resides in the window of the
defenseless vulnerability between planned
acquisition and actual possession, as only
non-nuclear nations are at risk from US superpower
conventional forces with counterstrike immunity to
the US itself, except via terrorist attacks.
The Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace estimates that Israel now possesses between
100 and 170 nuclear warheads, but Israel is a
client state of the US and thus enjoys immunity
from non-proliferation sanctions. With Iraq and
Libya disarmed of official nuclear-weapon
intentions, the Arab world now is nuclear-free, at
least temporarily, but the Middle East is not,
with as many as 170 nuclear warheads in the
Israeli arsenal. Nuclear-arms-control scholastics
dictates that nuclear deterrence only works with
parity between antagonists. While the Arab-Israeli
conflict remains basically unresolved, the absence
of nuclear weapons on the Arab side is highly
destabilizing to regional peace through the
doctrine of deterrence. Peace is the inevitable
victim of power imbalance.
The fact is
that all weapons of mass destruction are
inherently evil, regardless of who owns them. And
the nation that uses weapons of mass destruction
first is evil beyond redemption. For the sole
superpower that has used such weapons twice with
the flimsiest excuses and has since jealously
guarded its right to first use against all others
to deny the right of allegedly evil target nations
to possess nuclear weapons is hypocrisy of the
highest order.
Arms control as an
international regime is the enemy of disarmament.
Non-proliferation is a selective regime than
applies only to non-nuclear nations. The world is
not safe unless and until universal nuclear
disarmament comes into full effect.
The
award of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize to the
International Atomic Energy Agency and its chief,
Mohamed ElBaradei, whom the Bush administration
had recently tried but failed to remove from his
post, is an indication of the disconnect between
US nuclear policy and world opinion. ElBaradei
expressed pre-invasion skepticism over the
non-proliferation pretext of US invasion of Iraq
and he has declined to support the US claim that
Iran is secretly implementing a program to produce
nuclear weapons. Echoing world opinion, ElBaradei
said: "The Prize recognizes the role of
multilateralism in resolving all of the challenges
we are facing today. It will strengthen my resolve
and that of my colleagues to continue to speak
truth to power." He might have said "superpower".
Crusades, then and now Basic to
US national values are individual freedom and
democracy, which the US now aims to spread around
the world even though the current manifestation of
such values is hardly recognizable from their
original form. These values are not abstract
concepts with natural universality. The US view of
freedom and its version of democracy are deeply
and fundamentally rooted in its unique historical
conditions, which are far from universally shared.
The global propagation of such values amounts to
nothing more than moral imperialism. And the
authority to decide which sovereign nation in the
world order of sovereign nations is evil has not
been granted to the US by any global democratic
process. Such awesome authority has been usurped
by the US on the basis of military and economic
power, and is not accepted by others around the
world, especially those who have been arbitrarily
accused of being evil.
No one outside of
the US voted for the US president to represent
them. A sizable number of the world's citizens
consider the US president evil by the nature of US
policies. As a universal principle of democracy,
the critics of the United States have as much
right to their opinion as US policymakers have
about the morality of other nations. The US
invasion of Iraq was not sanctioned by world
public opinion or even by the United Nations. The
US forgets that the world organization is called
"United Nations", not "United Nation" led by a
superpower, the way the US federal government
often forgets that the name of the country is
"United States", not "United State" led by a
strongman. In fact, US unilateralism and
intolerance of legitimate dissent are the reasons
there is rising anti-US reaction around the world.
The US is now pursuing a foreign policy
that harks back to the medieval rite of trial by
ordeal based on the principle of might is right.
This militarized strategy of imposing US national
values on alien societies by force is rationalized
by the empty promise of permanent peace, since
nations of similar values are supposed to be less
likely to resort to armed conflict to settle their
differences. This view has not been validated by
actual events.
Throughout history, nations
of similar faith and values have gone to war
against one another not over ideological
differences, but to engage in power struggles and
to settle territorial or economic disputes, even
after an external common enemy has been
identified. The Christian Crusades against Islamic
lands were clear examples. Even with Islam
identified as a common enemy, the Crusades failed
to unit the European Christians, who continued to
war among themselves. The current US crusade to
make the world safe for freedom and democracy in
its own image is a dangerous delusion of grandeur.
Like all crusades in the past, this one will also
cause great destruction and misery for no
redeeming purpose.
Global terrorism shares
common operational tactics, but the strategic
political aims of terrorism in every country
threatened by it are unique, as are the conditions
that bring them about. There is no common goal or
solution for global terrorism. All terrorisms have
localized causes and localized solutions; only the
tactics are universal.
The historical
Crusades were a long series of expeditionary
military campaigns with a religious pretext
sanctioned by the popes that took place during the
11th through 13th centuries. They began as
Catholic endeavors to capture from the Muslims
holy Jerusalem, which the Christians had never
controlled politically in their entire history,
even during Jesus' triumphant entry into the city
almost two millennia ago. The Crusades developed
into extensive territorial wars devoid of
Christian morals.
The Crusades gave birth
to nationalism in Europe that subsequently plunged
the world into the Napoleonic Wars and the two
World Wars of the 20th century. They allowed the
papacy to consolidate its systematic dominion over
the then known world. They demoralized the
Crusaders rather than saving the souls of those
against whom they crusaded. They changed Christian
Europe more than the Islamic Middle East. They
weakened Christianity more than Islam.
George W Bush's new crusade against
Islamic terrorism may also change the US more than
the rest of the world, and not toward more freedom
and democracy. When his crusade against evil
finally ends, Hamiltonian capitalism, like
feudalism of the old Crusades, may well subside if
not disappear from the US, and a new Jeffersonian
economic democracy aspired to by the founders of
the nation may see a revival.
The Crusades
failed in all three of their geopolitical
objectives. The European Christians failed to win
the Holy Land. They also failed to check the
global advance of Islam. They failed to heal the
schism between the East and the West in the
Christian world by focusing on a common foe.
Eastern Orthodox Christians saw the Crusades as
attacks also on them by the Western Church of
Rome, especially after the sack of Constantinople
by the Fourth Crusade. Despite the fact that they
also belonged to Western Christianity, countries
in Central Europe were the most skeptical about
the idea of Crusades. Many cities in Hungary were
sacked by passing Crusader armies. Poland and
Hungary were subjected to conquest from the
Teutonic Crusaders. It is likely that the US "war
on terrorism" will also fail in all its
geopolitical objectives.
There is symmetry
between crusade and jihad. In the Islamic world,
the term "jihad" has positive connotations that
include a much broader meaning of general personal
and spiritual struggle, while the term "crusade"
has negative connotations of institutional
aggression. In truth, the Crusaders committed
atrocities not just against Muslims but also
against Jews and even other Christians. The
saintly objectives of the Crusades were
transformed into causes of great evil. As a school
of practical religion and morals, the Crusades
were no doubt disastrous for most of the
Crusaders. The campaigns were attended by all the
usual demoralizing influences of war and the long
sojourn of armies in enemy territory. The
occupation of Iraq is having the same demoralizing
effect on the US military.
The vices of
the crusading camps were a source of deep shame in
Europe, as the obscene abuses of the US occupation
forces in Iraq are a source of shame in the US.
Popes lamented them. Like Robert McNamara, who
almost single-handedly led the US into a quagmire
of fantasy escalation to win an unwinnable war in
Vietnam and later confessed his errors and regrets
in public long after retirement, Bernard of
Clairvaux (1090-1153) exposed the evils of the
Crusades long after he preached in favor of a
Second Crusade. At Easter 1146 at Vezelay, Bernard
preached his sermon in front of King Louis VII of
France, who became inspired to take up the cross
and spent the years 1147-49 conducting the Second
Crusade. Many writers have since set forth the
fatal mistake of those who were eager to make a
conquest of the earthly Jerusalem while forgetful
of the City of God as annunciated by Saint
Augustine. "Many wended their way to the holy
city, unmindful that our Jerusalem is not here."
So wrote the English writer Walter Map (c 1104-c
1210) after Saladin's victories in 1187.
Similarly, it is a travesty of truth to claim that
democracy can be born of a regime change forced on
any nation by a foreign power. The bogus
democratic governments that the US sets up in
conquered lands are the most effective arguments
against democracy.
The schism between the
East and the West was widened by the insolent
action of the crusading popes in establishing
Latin patriarchates in the East and their consent
to the establishment of the Latin empire over
Constantinople. The institutional memory of the
indignities heaped upon Greek emperors and
ecclesiastics has not faded completely even now.
Another evil of the Crusades was the deepening of
the contempt and hatred in the minds of the
Mohammedans for the doctrines of Christianity. The
savagery of the Christian crusading soldiers,
their unscrupulous treatment of alien property,
and the bitter rancor in the crusading camps were
a disgraceful spectacle that left a lasting and
bitter image for the peoples of the East.
While the Crusades were still in progress,
conscientious objection was made in Western Europe
that they were not followed by spiritual fruits,
but that on the contrary, the Saracens, who had
invaded France in the 8th century and occupied
Sicily from the 9th to the 11th century, had been
converted to blasphemy rather than to the true
faith. The cronyism and profiteering that now
permeate the reconstruction of Iraq make mockery
of free markets and democratic processes. The
systemic persecution of Islamic clerics by the US
occupation in Iraq and elsewhere will leave a gulf
of hate between Muslims and Christians for
generations to come.
The Crusades gave
occasion for the rapid development of the system
of papal indulgences, which became a dogma of the
medieval theologians. The practice, once begun by
Urban II at the very outset of the movement, was
extended further and further until indulgence for
sins was promised not only for the warrior who
took up arms against the Saracens in the East, but
for those who were willing to fight against
Christian heretics in Western Europe. Indulgences
became a part of the very heart of the sacrament
of penance, and did incalculable damage to the
moral sense of Christendom. To this evil was added
the exorbitant taxation levied by the popes and
their emissaries. Matthew of Paris, an English
historian and a monk of St Albans, in his
Chronica majora complained of this
extortion for the expenses of the Crusades as a
stain upon that holy cause. Similarly, the
financial drain from the "war on terrorism" acts
as a cancer in the US economy and forces
supply-side theologians to accept fiscal deficits
as patriotic dogma while drastically cutting
social programs at home to reduce government
spending.
The spell of ignorance and
narrow prejudice that separates civilizations can
only be broken with extended peaceful interaction.
Peace alone will open a new horizon of thought,
and within that horizon, institutions and
aspiration of a new civilization of diversity
would be nurtured from reason and human
commonality. The modernity that liberated the West
from its dark ages, which some Western scholars
accuse the Muslim world of lacking, was in no
small way inspired by exposure to Eastern
cultures. After the lapse of six centuries and
more, the Crusades still have their stirring
negative lessons of wisdom and warning that the
Bush team and subsequent US leadership would do
well to examine.
War games This
mentality of superpower moral imperialism is not
unique to the United States. History is a long
parade of such collective self-righteous human
afflictions. The US is merely the latest
manifestation. Yet there are some aspects of US
moral imperialism that are unique.
The US
was born of a secessionist movement from an
emerging British Empire. The national psyche of
the young nation was molded from a deliberate
rejection of the societal values of the Old World.
The idea of a United States was inspired by new
ideals of liberty, individualism and anti-statism.
The new society was the child of 18th-century
liberalism with the promise of a new world that
was expected to be free of feudal hierarchy and
superstition. In that sense, the evolution of the
US into another old-style superpower in the
super-statist mode is a momentous disappointment
in history, rather than the end of history. The US
has failed the promise of a New World in a new
age. It has evolved into a superpower in military
force wrapped around an underdeveloped society in
moral strength. The threat to the founding ideals
of the United States from the "war on terrorism"
is greater than that from terrorism itself.
The reasons for this moral failure are
complex. Yet much has to do with the experiential
void on the real horrors of war on the part of the
US public. The US had been exempt from the
destructiveness of war on its homeland until the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the
exception of the War of 1812.
Pearl Harbor
was a precision attack on a US military base on an
overseas island territory. At the time of its
attack, Hawaii was not yet a state, but a colony
with a less odious label. Most Americans then
viewed Hawaii as not much different than the
Philippines, a US colonial outpost in the Pacific.
The Japanese attack brought on a response to
damaged national pride that led directly to US
participation in World War II not because the
survival of the United States had been threatened
by a Germany at war in Europe, but because US
military assets in a US overseas island colony
were attacked and destroyed by a Japan that had
viewed a US oil embargo against it as an overt act
of war that left Japan with less than three months
of oil supply.
The Japanese militarists
had wrongly calculated that US losses of Pacific
naval assets in the Pearl Harbor attack would
force the United States to accept a Japanese
sphere of influence in Asia until it could rebuild
its Pacific Fleet, at which time Japan could reach
naval parity with the US. Had the Japanese delayed
the Pearl Harbor attack by a year, the history of
Europe might have been very different, as Britain
might not have survived German aggression without
direct US intervention. Or if the technology of
war had extended the distance of force projection
to overcome the oceans to neutralize the
safe-haven protection of the US mainland, World
War II might have turned out differently, without
uninterrupted US war productivity.
Today,
the US is no longer a natural safe haven from
attacks of all kinds protected by two oceans. Yet
US policies continue to act as if such
vulnerability does not exist and that the United
States can handle any threats to its national
survival.
The fact that US civilian
experience of war has been limited largely to
movies that depict death and displacement of
foreign civilians and widespread destruction of
cities on foreign lands tends to reinforce the
fantasy in the United States that the missionary
spread of righteousness US values by military
means can be a risk-free endeavor. US soldiers
went to war overseas in the secure milieu of a
military institution and experienced war as a
highly structured game, much like the game of
professional football or hockey, albeit massively
more bloody. The war dead came home in sanitized
flag-draped coffins and the survivors came home
well scrubbed in fresh uniforms to partake in
victory parades on Memorial Day. Docudramas on
battles of the previous wars are played on
television as entertainment, in locales that are
exotic beyond the realm of discourse.
Hollywood celebrated the mujahideen as
freedom fighters against Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan in an endless supply of B-movies. When
the Soviets left Afghanistan in disarray in 1989,
the communist government remained in power in
Kabul, but soon regional factions led by local
mujahideen supported by the US began fighting one
another trying to replace it. In 1992, the
government in Kabul fled, and a terrible fight
between different warlords destroyed most of the
city. This continued also when the Taliban
captured Kabul in 1996.
The Saudi Wahhabi
movements played a key role in recruiting
volunteers to fight in the Balkans. According to
Yossef Bodansky, director of the US Congress' Task
Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the
war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret
summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in
Mogadishu, Somalia. Michael Moran, MSNBC's
international editor, wrote on August 24, 1998,
that "at the CIA, 'blowback' is the term that
describes an agent, an operative or an operation
that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden,
our new public enemy No 1, is the personification
of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a
hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again
the old adage: reap what you sow." The US did not
turn against the Taliban until bin Laden went to
Afghanistan. Clinton sent a missile to try to kill
him.
The disastrous Battle of Mogadishu on
October 3, 1993, has been memorialized in the hit
action movie Black Hawk Down as a tribune
to battlefield bravery and camaraderie. There was
an unspoken assumption that bombs only fell on
people who speak strange languages and cities with
exotic architecture. Accordingly, US society as a
whole felt safe enough to construct a social
fabric that views government as an intrusion,
collective efforts as a violation of
individualism, with a naive faith that most
problems can be better solved by market forces and
those that cannot, voluntarism can handle well
enough.
The forgotten war The
War of 1812 was a forgotten war for good reasons.
That war was the only war fought on US soil, in
the course of which Washington, DC, was sacked by
British forces. That is a reality that the United
States does not want its citizens to remember,
lest such memories fan pacifism. The immediate
origins of the war were foreign seizure of US
ships, insults and injuries to US seamen by the
British navy, and British interference on rapid
western expansion of the US frontier.
British outrages at sea took two distinct
forms. One was the seizure and forced sale of US
merchant ships and their cargoes for allegedly
violating the British blockade of Europe. Although
France had declared a counter-blockade of the
British Isles and had also seized US ships,
England was the chief offender because its navy
had greater command of the seas. The second, more
insulting outrage was the capture of men from US
vessels for forced service in the Royal Navy. The
pretext for impressment was the search for British
deserters who, the British claimed, had taken
employment on US vessels. The British seized 1,000
US ships, the French about 500. Between 1803
and1812, British captains took more than 10,000 US
citizens to man British ships.
As with the
Iraq war of 2003, the US entered the War of 1812
with confused objectives and divided domestic
loyalties and finally had to made peace without
settling any of the issues that had originally
induced the nation to go to war. Yet unlike the
holy wars of the past decade, the War of 1812 had
its roots in upholding the nation's right to
international commerce amid great-power conflicts.
Beginning in 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte's
Continental System clashed with the 1807 British
Orders in Council, establishing embargoes that
made international trade precarious. The maritime
war between Britain and France was a great
opportunity for neutral trade. Exports from the US
rose from $20 million in 1790 to $140 million by
1807. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1793 saw
the British government gradually enforcing
increasingly rigorous policies toward neutral
trade. To counter British naval superiority,
France had opened its colonial ports, which had
been closed before the war, to neutral trade.
Britain pledged to put an end to all neutral
trade. The US held that if a ship was neutral, the
goods on board were also neutral, hence the slogan
"Free ships make free goods." Britain on the other
hand followed its Rule of 1756, a policy the US
had accepted as part of Jay's Treaty of 1795,
which held that neutrals could not in wartime
engage in trade that had been prohibited during
peacetime.
As the US after World War II
has since done, restricting trade was a policy
that Britain had long used to destroy an enemy's
commerce. Once war was declared on
post-revolutionary France, Britain again undertook
a maritime war against French commerce. The
renewal of the trade war after the breakdown of
the Peace of Amiens put the whole of the carrying
trade to Europe into the hands of neutrals.
Britain decided to end this trade with blockades
and ever more rigorous orders in council.
Orders in council issued on May 16, 1806,
known as the "Fox Blockade", put the coast of
Europe from the Elbe in Germany to Brest in
France, a distance of almost 1,300 kilometers, in
a state of blockade. In response Napoleon, in his
Berlin Decree of November 21, 1806, declared the
British Isles in "a state of blockade, forbade all
correspondence or trade with England, defined all
articles of English manufacture or produce as
contraband, and the property of all British
subjects as the lawful prize of war". Britain
retaliated with more stringent orders in council.
The orders of January 7, 1807, prohibited coastal
trade with France and its allies. Those of
November banned neutrals from trading with ports
from which British ships were prohibited; only by
going through a British port, and paying duties
and obtaining a license, could a neutral trade
with an open European port. British prime minister
Spencer Perceval (1809-12) explained, "The object
of the orders in council was not to destroy the
trade of the Continent, but to force the Continent
to trade with us."
From 1803-07 the
British seized 528 US-flagged ships, while the
French seized 206 between 1803 and the end of
1806. Maritime trade for neutrals was profitable
but increasingly dangerous.
The US under
president Thomas Jefferson responded to these
restrictions on trade by passing the Embargo Act
of December 1807, prohibiting US ships from
trading with Europe and banning the importation of
manufactured goods from Britain. The embargo was
repealed in March 1809 and replaced by a
Non-Intercourse Act, opening trade with all but
France, Britain and their colonies. "Our lot
happens to have been cast in an age when two
nations to whom circumstances have given a
temporary superiority over others, the one by
land, the other by sea," Jefferson commented.
"Degrading themselves thus from the character of
lawful societies into lawless bands of robbers and
pirates, they are abusing their brief ascendancy
by desolating the world with blood and rapine.
Against such a banditti, war had become less
ruinous than peace, for then peace was a war on
one side only." It is an attitude that Islamic
terrorism shares today about the US.
Jefferson's embargo was especially
unpopular in New England, where merchants
preferred the national indignities of impressment
to the halting of overseas commerce. (Corporate
America today is similarly showing signs of
increasing unhappiness with confrontational US
foreign policies.) This discontent contributed to
the calling of the Hartford Convention during the
War of 1812 to consider the sentiments of New
England.
Prior to the war, New England
Federalists had opposed the Embargo Act of 1807
and other trade-restricting government measures.
Many of them continued to oppose the government
after fighting had begun. The Federalist Party was
the first anti-war party in the history of the
United States. Although manufacturing fostered by
trade restriction on manufactured imports,
together with contraband trade, brought wealth to
the region, the War of 1812, and its expenses
became steadily more repugnant to the New
Englanders. The Federalist leaders encouraged
disaffection over government policy. The New
England states refused to surrender their militia
to national service, especially when New England
was threatened with invasion by Napoleon in 1814.
The federal war loan of 1814 got almost no support
in New England, despite war prosperity there.
Federalist extremists, such as John Lowell and
Timothy Pickering, contemplated a separate peace
between New England and Great Britain.
Finally, in October 1814, the
Massachusetts legislature issued a call to the
other New England states for a conference in
Hartford, Connecticut. Representatives were sent
by the state legislatures of Connecticut,
Massachusetts and Rhode Island; other delegates
from New Hampshire and Vermont were popularly
chosen by the Federalists. The meetings were held
in secret. George Cabot, the head of the
Massachusetts delegation and a moderate
Federalist, presided. The proposal to secede from
the Union was discussed and rejected, the
grievances of New England were reviewed, and such
matters as the use of the militia by federal
authorities were thrashed out. The final report
issued on January 5, 1815, arraigned president
James Madison's administration and the war and
proposed several constitutional amendments that
would redress what the New Englanders considered
the unfair advantage given to the south under the
constitution.
Only the news of Andrew
Jackson's victory at New Orleans and of the Treaty
of Ghent ending the war made the recommendations
of the convention a dead letter. The Hartford
Convention continued the view of states' rights as
the refuge of sectional groups, and it sealed the
destruction of the Federalist Party, which never
regained its lost prestige. Concern for states'
rights and thoughts of secession were not
exclusive or original to the south. Unpopular and
unsuccessful wars can topple governments and break
up nations.
The War of 1812 was supported
by a group of young Democratic-Republicans known
as the "War Hawks", led by House Speaker Henry
Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of South
Carolina. Clay was the leader of the American
System in opposition to British-dominated
globalized free trade. He was the original
anti-globalization politician. The War Hawks
advocated going to war against Britain for a
variety of reasons, mostly related to the
interference of the Royal Navy in US shipping,
which the War Hawks believed hurt the US economy
and injured US prestige. War Hawks from the
western states also believed that the British were
encouraging native Americans on the frontier to
attack US settlements, and so they called for an
invasion of British North America (Canada) and
pushing Britain off the continent once and for
all. To Canadians, the war was clearly a case of
naked US aggression, much as the US invasion of
Afghanistan and Iraq is viewed today by many
around the world.
On June 1, 1812, Madison
gave a speech in Congress, recounting US
grievances against Britain, after which the House
of Representatives quickly voted 79-49 to declare
war, and after much debate, the Senate also voted
for war, 19-13. President Madison's use of
economic pressure to force England to repeal its
blockade in fact succeeded. The revival of the
Non-Intercourse Act against Britain, prohibiting
all trade with England and its colonies, coincided
with a poor grain harvest in England and with a
growing need of US provisions to supply the
British troops fighting the French in Spain. As a
result, on June 16, 1812, the British foreign
minister announced that the blockade would be
relaxed on US shipping. Had there been a
trans-Atlantic cable, war might have been averted.
The conflict formally began on June 18 when
Madison signed the measure into law.
This
was the first time that the new US nation had
declared war on another nation, and the
congressional vote would prove to be the closest
vote to declare war in US history. None of the 39
Federalists in Congress voted in favor of the war;
critics of war would subsequently refer to it as
"Mr Madison's War". The slogans such as LBJ's War,
Clinton's War and Bush's War are signs of deep
division in US politics that steadily eats away
national unity.
The War of 1812 was
sideshow of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe; the
main event of 1812 was Napoleon's invasion of
Russia. The low point came on August 19, 1814,
when a force of some 4,000 British troops under
Major-General Robert Ross landed on the Patuxent
River and marched on Washington, DC. At the Battle
of Bladensburg, five days later, Ross easily
dispersed 5,000 US militia, naval gunners, and
regulars hastily gathered together to defend the
capital. The British then entered Washington,
burned the Capitol, the White House and other
public buildings, and returned to their ships.
Britain, the then superpower, learning from the
disastrous Revolutionary War, realized that
military occupation was not a viable policy.
The war created a new sense of nationalism
in both Canada and the United States. The
successful defense of the Canadian provinces
against US invasion ultimately ensured the
survival of Canada as a distinct nation, and the
end of the war marked the decline of a
long-standing desire of the US to see the British
Empire expelled from North America. Peace between
the US and British North America also meant that
native Americans could no longer use conflicts
between the two powers to defend native lands
against the expansion of white settlement.
The war progressed through three distinct
stages. In the first, lasting until the spring of
1813, England was so hard-pressed in Europe that
it could spare neither men nor ships in any great
number for the conflict in North America. The
United States was free to take the initiative, to
invade Canada, and to send out cruisers and
privateers against enemy shipping. During the
second stage, lasting from early 1813 to the
beginning of 1814, England was able to establish a
tight blockade but still could not materially
reinforce the troops in Canada. In this stage the
US Army, having gained experience, won its first
successes.
The third stage, in 1814, was
marked by the constant arrival in North America of
British regulars and naval reinforcements, which
enabled the enemy to raid the North American coast
almost at will and to take the offensive in
several quarters. At the same time, in this final
stage of the war, US forces fought their best
fights and won their most brilliant victories. It
is a law of conflict that forces defending the
homeland command decisive advantage over invading
forces. That advantage was neutralized in Iraq by
the infiltration of the Iraqi high command by US
special operations.
According to Office of
the Chief of Military History of the US Army,
British Major-General Sir Edward Pakenham was sent
to America to take command of the expedition. On
Christmas Day 1814, Pakenham arrived at the mouth
of the Mississippi to find his troops disposed on
a narrow isthmus below New Orleans between the
Mississippi River and a cypress swamp. They had
landed two weeks earlier at a shallow lagoon some
16km east of New Orleans and had already fought
one engagement. In this encounter, on December 23,
General Jackson, who had taken command of the
defenses on December 1, almost succeeded in
cutting off an advance detachment of 2,000
British, but after a three-hour fight in which
casualties on both sides were heavy, he was
compelled to retire behind fortifications covering
New Orleans.
The news of the peace
settlement at Ghent on Christmas Eve, followed two
weeks later by Jackson's triumph in New Orleans,
allowed the war as a whole to be popularly
regarded in the US as a great victory. Yet at best
it was a draw. US strategy had centered on the
conquest of Canada and the harassment of British
shipping; but the land campaign failed, and during
most of the war the navy was bottled up behind a
tight British blockade of the North American
coast. Ironically, while Jackson won the Battle of
New Orleans against the British in a demonstration
of US resolve, some two centuries later, President
Bush lost the Battle of New Orleans to a hurricane
in a demonstration of US vulnerability.
If
it favored neither side, the War of 1812 at least
taught the United States several lessons.
Artillery contributed to US successes at Chippewa,
Sackett's Harbor, Norfolk, the siege of Fort Erie,
and New Orleans. The war also boosted the
reputation of the Corps of Engineers, a branch
that owed its efficiency chiefly to the Military
Academy. Academy graduates completed the
fortifications at Fort Erie, built Fort Meigs,
planned the harbor defenses of Norfolk and New
York, and directed the fortifications at
Plattsburg. Almost two centuries later, the Corps
of Engineers failed to defend New Orleans from
Hurricane Katrina because of budget cuts. If
larger numbers of infantrymen had been as well
trained as the artillerymen and engineers, the
course of the War of 1812 might have been entirely
different and Canada might have become a part of
the US.
Sea power played a fundamental
role in the war. The militia performed as well as
the regular army. The defeats and humiliations of
the regular forces during the first years of the
war matched those of the militia, just as in a
later period the Kentucky volunteers at the Thames
and the Maryland militia before Baltimore proved
that the state citizen soldier could perform well.
The keys to the militiamen's performance, of
course, were training and leadership, the two
areas over which the national government had
little control. The militia, occasionally
competent, was never dependable, and in the
nationalistic period that followed the war when
the exploits of the regulars were justly
celebrated, an ardent young secretary of war, John
Calhoun, would be able to convince Congress and
the nation that the first line of defense should
be a standing national army. The US has since
moved toward an all-volunteer army exempting the
rich and the educated from military service and
from harm's way in foreign wars. Decisions on war
now are made by those whose children would not
have to fight. Actual battles are now fought by
those who are grossly under-represented in the US
system of representative democracy. Little wonder
that US policy has become warlike.
The War
of 1812 was fought over trade and territory. It
was a comparatively rational war with potential
winners and losers measurable by success in
economic interests. The "war on terrorism" is a
holy war against evil. There are no winners in a
holy war, for one man's holiness can be another
man's evil. In the interconnected world of the
21st century, no nation can wage war with immunity
on its homeland. A global "war on terror" cannot
be waged with a homeland safe haven. The US public
who fervently support foreign wars need to
understand that such support is not like
cheerleading at a football game. Foreign wars now
come with serious bloody consequences at home that
they were hitherto only familiar with on the
television screen. What happened to Baghdad can
happen to New York or Chicago, and the dead bodies
can be those of US citizens.
The
'global war on extremism' In an item titled
"Calling Islamism the enemy", on January 29, 2004,
Daniel Pipes, founder and director of Project for
the New American Century and son of Professor
Richard Pipes, Harvard historian of Russia and
communism, wrote in his weblog:
David E Kaplan of US News and World
Report who wrote The Saudi Connection:
"Nearly four years after [September 11, 2001],
officials have finally figured out who the enemy
is. The White House's new counter-terrorism
strategy, now being revamped at the National
Security Council, will focus more sharply on
Islamic extremism, not terrorism. One important
sign of the change: policymakers are ready to
abandon their shorthand for the conflict - GWOT,
or the global war on terrorism. The likely new
name is simply WOE - the war on extremism. The
reason, explains a senior national-security
official: 'Terrorism is the method rather than
the enemy.'" (Sometimes, it's just all in the
name, US News & World Report,
June 6, 2005) In this context, the term "global
war on extremism (GWOE)" appears first to have
been mentioned in print on March 18, 2005, by
Henry C K Liu in Asia Times, with reference to
the Pentagon's 2005 Third Quadrennial Review.
A month after my aforementioned GWOE
article in Asia Times Online (Militarism and the
war on drugs, Part 5 of the World Order, Failed States and
Terrorism series), Jim Hoagland,
two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote in the
Washington Post ("A shifting focus on terrorism",
April 24):
A new look for President Bush's
global war on terrorism sits atop Condoleezza
Rice's early to-do list at the State Department.
Expect fairly soon some useful new handles on
the problem and a more coherent overall strategy
to guide the struggle that the bureaucracy
abbreviates as GWOT … Although greatly reduced
since Rice replaced Colin Powell at Foggy
Bottom, wrangling between the departments of
State and Defense continues - this time over
operational details of the National Security
Policy Directive that is being pulled together
for what some policymakers are starting to call
the global war on extremism (GWOE). Moreover,
the snippets of the internal debate that have
emerged do not make it clear that the
administration will acknowledge the politically
sensitive objective of rolling up the religious
networks that produce and support the global
jihadists of the Wahhabi, or Salafi, sect of
Islam. If not, the Bush team will fight on with
one hand tied behind its back.
Those
caveats, however, should not obscure the
importance of the refocusing and redefining
exercise going on behind closed doors at the
White House. In the election campaign and
inaugural period, official Washington lost focus
on the war on terrorism and, to a lesser extent,
on the closely related battle for democracy in
Iraq.
A Pentagon concept paper that
sought to spell out new ways of looking at the
war on terrorism languished at the White House
for a year. The failure of the administration to
move urgently to name a new ambassador to Iraq
signaled the loss of US political and diplomatic
momentum after the January 30 elections there.
But now sitting in the cabinet, Rice has
pumped new energy and discipline into a
fractious system that languished when she was
Bush's national security adviser. She moved
quickly to establish clearer definitions and
responsibilities for her department in the
struggle to eradicate al-Qaeda, the [Abu Musab
al-]Zarqawi gang in Iraq and other jihadists.
That means defining other departments'
responsibilities as well. In Bush's first term,
bitter disputes - based in personality clashes
and a settling of old scores as much as in
substance - would have handicapped such an
exercise.
But internal strife has
largely subsided since the departure of Powell
and his powerful deputy, Richard Armitage, who
skillfully provided background information on
the shortcomings of perceived enemies at the
Pentagon and elsewhere to congressional and
other allies. Here's an interesting coincidence:
Armitage was a mentor to virtually all of the
State Department personnel whose cases of
mistreatment by UN ambassador-designate John
Bolton were cited in Senate hearings last week,
and Powell has pointedly declined to support
Bolton.
The essential question the
review faces is put this way in a private musing
by one cabinet officer: How does the United
States, which is good at fighting countries we
are at war with, fight a war against extremists
in countries we are friends with? (Hello? Saudi
Arabia? You still on the line?)
The
policy directive is set to delineate three
essential tasks in GWOE: the Department of
Homeland Security keeps the lead in defending US
territory against terrorist attack; the State
Department will be in charge of counter-ideology
against Islamic extremism, tasked with
broadening and greatly strengthening the weak
"public diplomacy" campaign of the first Bush
term; and the Pentagon will destroy or disrupt
"networks" of terrorism, wherever they exist.
The daunting task of defending
against disaster Defending US territory
against massive terrorist attacks is an impossible
task. The United States relies on the automobile
for mass movement. Traffic engineers know that
each lane of traffic on an expressway can
accommodate about 500 vehicles per hour at a speed
of 65 miles per hour (105 km/h). The speed
decreases as the volume of traffic increases. At
peak volume of 800 vehicles, the speed slows to 15
mph (24 km/h). Beyond 800 vehicles per lane,
traffic jams develop to reduce both the speed and
volume abruptly toward zero. It is a fact every
motorist has learned from personal experience. To
evacuate 2 million people from a city such as
Houston at the average density of three persons
per car adds up to 700,000 cars all moving in one
direction to flee from impending disaster on four
lanes of interstate highway traveling at 105 km/h
would take 350 hours, or 15 days of 24-hour
continuous traffic flow, assuming gas stations
along the way can supply the needed fuel. It is
obvious that massive evacuation is not a workable
option against threats of imminent massive
destruction, notwithstanding all the planning of
the Department of Homeland Security. The
experience of recent hurricanes highlighted the
vulnerability of the US urban system. The chaotic
evacuations of New Orleans and Houston have
prompted local officials across the country to
take a new look at plans for emptying their cities
in response to a large-scale natural disaster or a
terrorist attack.
The New York Times
reports that from Los Angeles to Boston, from
Seattle to Miami, plans to relocate, house and
feed potentially hundreds of thousands of suddenly
displaced people are impractical at best and
inoperative at worst. As the exodus from Houston
during Hurricane Rita demonstrated, in many places
highways would clog quickly, confusion would reign
and police resources would be overtaxed. New
Orleans offered a different and more deadly
example of what could go wrong, as tens of
thousands of people, many of them poor and lacking
private transportation, were left to fend for
themselves in cities without food, water, basic
services or law enforcement.
Most major US
cities have made preparations for localized
emergencies such as fires, floods or large toxic
spills that might involve the relocation of a few
thousand or tens of thousands of people. Since the
September 11 attacks, cities have received
billions of dollars from the newly formed
Department of Homeland Security to prepare for a
major terrorist attack. But few have prepared in
detail for a doomsday possibility like Hurricane
Katrina, the storm that engulfed New Orleans and
left much of the city a wasteland that is likely
to remain so for months. Nor have they prepared
workable plans to evacuate millions of people with
short or no notice, as the residents of the Gulf
of Mexico coast of Texas learned to their dismay.
Officials in Texas are now still struggling with
how to manage the return of residents.
New
York, more than most US cities, has the advantage
of a sprawling mass transportation system. Eight
million people a day use the system, and officials
count on it to be useful in an emergency as well.
That could be vital, because city traffic, already
a problem in an ordinary rush hour, would pose a
significant challenge. New York Police
Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the city has two
general evacuation plans, one for hurricanes and
another for terrorist attacks. The plans include
the opening of hundreds of shelters, mostly in
schools. But officials acknowledge that many
elements of an evacuation would have to be
improvised.
Los Angeles, the United
States' second-most-populous city, sits atop a
spider web of earthquake faults, several of which
could slip with devastating consequences, leveling
large parts of the city and touching off
widespread fires and explosions. But the city has
no plan for moving and sheltering the large number
of people who would be made homeless by such a
disaster, officials concede.
Emergency-response planners acknowledge
that no plans exist for moving hundreds of
thousands, and potentially millions, of southern
Californians out of harm's way. San Francisco's
evacuation plans depend in large part on the two
main bridges that connect the city with Oakland to
the east and Marin county to the north. Both are
vulnerable to a major earthquake, as is the Bay
Area Rapid Transit tunnel beneath the bay. The
plans call for the use of fishing boats and
ferries to get people across the bay if other
routes are blocked, a stopgap solution at best.
Since Hurricane Katrina, New York
officials have assured residents that the city is
prepared to handle the kind of evacuation that a
major hurricane would require. The city has plans
to move people from areas that are likely to
flood, plans to open shelters and reception
centers, and plans to use public transportation to
carry them there. If a huge natural or man-made
disaster ever struck Long Island, evacuating the
island is not an option. Stretching eastward 190
kilometers from the mainland into the Atlantic
Ocean, Long Island and its nearly 3 million
residents have only a few highways or rail lines
out - including the infamously jammed Long Island
Expressway - and all of them lead into parts of
New York City, which has its own evacuation
problems. As a result, most Long Islanders would
be forced to deal with such a major disaster by
staying closer to home.
As all military
strategists know, a sure way to lose a war is an
inoperative defense. Most Americans who follow
football understand this fact. The US is no longer
the only party who can bring destruction to the
homeland of another country. On the basis of an
inoperative defense, the US "war on terrorism"
cannot be won.
Goldwater and the
politics of extremism The glorification and
legitimization of extremism began with Barry
Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign when
he famously proclaimed in his acceptance speech in
the Republican national convention in the San
Francisco Cow Palace: "Extremism in the defense of
liberty is no vice. [Applause] Let me remind you
also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is
no virtue." The narration from Lyndon Johnson in
the "daisy" ad showing a little girl counting
flower pedals followed by a nuclear countdown:
"These are the stakes. To make a world in which
all of God's children can live or to go into the
dark. We must either love each other, or we must
die," allowed Johnson to pile up what was for that
time the largest landslide in US history.
Goldwater delegates and the spectator
galleries shouted down New York governor Nelson
Rockefeller with catcalls and boos when he tried
to speak against extremism. Hostile scrimmages
erupted on the convention floor, forcing
Rockefeller to cut his speech short. Afterward,
the triumphant Goldwater conservatives rejected
the defeated Rockefeller-Scranton liberals despite
the need for party unity. "Hell, I don't want to
talk to that son of a bitch," Goldwater growled
when Rockefeller called him to concede the
nomination. Life magazine bemoaned the "ugly tone"
of the entire convention. The New York Times
called it a "disaster" for both the United States
and the Republicans, saying the Goldwater
nomination could "reduce a once-great party to the
status of an ugly, angry, frustrated faction". The
Rockefeller liberals sat out the election and
failed to regain control of the Republican Party,
a reality that exists to this day.
On the
morning after his acceptance speech, Goldwater
sought an audience with General Dwight Eisenhower,
who was straying again toward rebellion over
Goldwater's chief applause line. It was reported
that, echoing a widespread public outcry,
Eisenhower demanded to know how Goldwater could
see "extremism" as good politics when it smacked
of kooks. Goldwater stammered through several
ineffective replies before trying a D-Day analogy.
What he meant was that patriotism required
sacrifice, said Goldwater, and that General
Eisenhower had been the ultimate "extremist" for
liberty when he sent the Allied troops across the
English Channel against Adolf Hitler. This
interpretation transformed Eisenhower's mood. "By
golly, that makes real sense," he said with his
famous grin of relief that nearly matched
Goldwater's. Extremism became tied inseparably to
militarism.
Goldwater extremism lost the
election but gained solid control of the
Republican Party. Commentator Bill Moyers recalled
Johnson saying that he had delivered the south to
Republicans "for your lifetime and mine", which
would turn the whole structure of politics on a
fulcrum of race. This new political landscape in
the south has continued to morph toward the
Republican Party until the candidacies of Jimmy
Carter and Bill Clinton. Goldwater extremism was
directed against communism with a defense of race
inequality. Today, the "war on terrorism" pitches
US militant extremism against Islamic extremism.
By shifting focus to "networks" rather
than "terrorists", and to "extremism" rather than
"terrorism", the US departments of State and
Defense will broaden their operations to remold
the tens of millions of real and potential
jihadists who believe, as Rand Corp analyst Brian
Jenkins recently put it, that "war is its own
reward, a perpetual condition until Judgment Day"
and not a struggle with a finite end. Jenkins
cites the case of an Egyptian former jihadist who
defected when he understood that "life was better
than paradise" gained through murder and violence.
Getting moderate Muslim leaders and nations to
convince their citizens of that proposition is now
the centerpiece of any strategy paper that comes
out of the White House. Yet Muslims can still
remember Goldwater's denigration of moderation in
the pursuit of justice as not being a virtue.
Islamic terrorists can cite Thomas Jefferson about
the US and its allies: "Degrading themselves thus
from the character of lawful societies into
lawless bands of robbers and pirates, they are
abusing their brief ascendancy by desolating the
world with blood and rapine. Against such a
banditti, war had become less ruinous than peace,
for then peace was a war on one side only." The
United States needs to recognize that the only
effective weapon against terrorism is the delivery
of justice everywhere, which will deprive
terrorists of any stake in resorting to killing
and destruction.
When the game of nuclear
terror was played between two superpowers, the
rules were clearly defined and the outcome
rationally predictable because calculation was
based on state interests. When the game of mass
destructive terror is played between a superpower
and terrorist groups, the game becomes
uncontrolled and wild, with no rules. What do the
followers of al-Qaeda want? They want foreign
troops out of Saudi Arabia. Such specific aims are
a fundamental definition of the defense of
liberty, which, according to Goldwater, is no
vice. The people of the US would do no less to get
foreign troops off US soil. The Crusades were
launched to get infidels off the Holy Land.
Terrorists are not extremists. Terrorists
have specific limited aims and strategies.
Extremists want total solutions. A war against
evil is an extremist undertaking. A war to
eliminate a particular evil condition is not an
extremist undertaking as it has limited
objectives. Extremism is a term used to describe
either attitudes or actions thought by critics to
be hyperbolic and unwarranted, beyond what is
necessary for the problem. In terms of ideas, the
term "extremism" is often used to label political
ideology that is far outside the societal center
or mainstream. In terms of actions, "extremism" is
often used to identify aggressive or violent
methodologies used in an attempt not just to right
a political wrong, but to banish all that is
wrong. Political radicals are sometimes called
extremists, although the term "radical" originally
meant to go to the root of a problem. In medicine,
a radical cure means invasive surgery. "Radical"
is a somewhat less negatively connoted self-label.
In terms of the use of violence, the terms
"extremist" and "radical" are generally used to
label those who use violence against the will of
the larger social body, rather than those who
believe in violence to enforce the will of the
social body on dissidents. State or policy power
is never deemed radical. Revolutions are by
definition radical.
The terms "extremism"
and "extremist" are almost always applied to
others. The terms connote using illegitimate means
such as subterfuge or violence to promote one's
agenda beyond the realm of discourse. No sect of
Islam describes itself as "Islamic extremism", and
no political party calls itself "right-wing
extremist" or "left-wing extremist". Goldwater
legitimized a politics of extremism that evolved
into neo-conservatism. In security parlance, to
terminate with extreme prejudice means to kill
without reservation.
The idea that there
is a philosophy of extremism is thought by some to
be suspect. Within sociology, several scholars who
study (and are critical of) extreme right-wing
groups have objected to the term "extremist",
which was popularized by centrist sociologists in
the 1960s and 1970s. The labeling of a person,
group or action as "extremist" is often a
technique to further a political goal - especially
by governments seeking to defend the status quo,
or political centrists. Rather than labeling
themselves "extremist", those labeled such tend to
see the need for extreme actions in a particular
situation, such as assassination of a foreign or
domestic head of state.
Extremism is a
position defined by its distance from the
mainstream of the moment. History and the
mainstream beliefs of a later time may see a
different picture. Market fundamentalism, like all
other forms of fundamentalism, can be viewed as an
extremist doctrine. Benjamin Franklin's admonition
"We had better hang together or be hanged
separately" applies to all fundamentalists. There
is no solution by war. Peace is the only solution.
The "war on extremism" needs to be refocused as a
war on all forms of fundamentalism, Christian,
Islamist and market. Remove extremists from both
sides and let the moderates negotiate a new peace.
A lost cause, and the loss of
liberty If the aim of the "global war on
extremism" (GWOE) is to spread democracy, then the
war has already been lost because democracy in the
United States, the headquarters of the war machine
to spread democracy, appears to have been the
first victim of such a war. Daniel Pipes wrote in
the New York Sun on December 28, 2004 ("Why the
Japanese internment still matters"):
For years, it has been my position
that the threat of radical Islam implies an
imperative to focus security measures on
Muslims. If searching for rapists, one looks
only at the male population. Similarly, if
searching for Islamists (adherents of radical
Islam), one looks at the Muslim population.
And so, I was encouraged by a
just-released Cornell University opinion survey
that finds nearly half the US population
agreeing with this proposition. Specifically,
44% of Americans believe that government
authorities should direct special attention
toward Muslims living in America, either by
registering their whereabouts, profiling them,
monitoring their mosques, or infiltrating their
organizations ... the bad news is the
near-universal disapproval of this realism.
Leftist and Islamist organizations have so
successfully intimidated public opinion that
polite society shies away from endorsing a focus
on Muslims.
In America, this
intimidation results in large part from a
revisionist interpretation of the evacuation,
relocation, and internment of ethnic Japanese
during World War II. Although more than 60 years
past, these events matter yet deeply today,
permitting the victimization lobby, in
compensation for the supposed horrors of
internment, to condemn in advance any use of
ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion in
formulating domestic security policy.
Denying that the treatment of ethnic
Japanese resulted from legitimate
national-security concerns, this lobby has
established that it resulted solely from a
combination of "wartime hysteria" and "racial
prejudice". As radical groups like the American
Civil Liberties Union wield this interpretation
"like a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate",
they preempt efforts to build an effective
defense against today's Islamist enemy.
The apology for internment by Ronald
Reagan in 1988, in addition to the nearly $1.65
billion in reparations paid to former internees,
was premised on faulty scholarship ...
especially in time of war, governments should
take into account nationality, ethnicity, and
religious affiliation in their homeland-security
policies and engage "threat profiling". These
steps may entail bothersome or offensive
measures but they are preferable to "being
incinerated at your office desk by a flaming
hijacked plane".
By the logic of
Pipes, the US should have put the German-American
Eisenhower in an internment camp, since the key
enemy in World War II was Germany. But then white
Americans are mostly above suspicion of ethnic
disloyalty. German-Americans are the largest
ethnic group in the US, with approximately 60
million Americans claiming German ancestry.
German-American loyalty to America's promise of
freedom can be traced back to the Revolutionary
War. Nevertheless, during World War II, the US
government and many Americans viewed
German-Americans and others of "enemy ancestry" as
potentially dangerous, particularly recent
immigrants. During that war, the US government
interned 11,000 persons of German ancestry out of
a population of 120 million, while 120,000
Japanese-Americans were interned, comprising the
entire Japanese-American population on the west
coast.
In World War II, the war to defend
democracy, the US government used many
interrelated, constitutionally questionable
methods to control those of enemy ancestry,
including internment, individual and group
exclusion from military zones, internee exchanges
for US citizens held in Germany, deportation,
"alien enemy" registration requirements, travel
restrictions and property confiscation. The human
cost of these civil-liberties violations was high.
Families were disrupted, reputations destroyed,
homes and belongings lost. Meanwhile, untold
numbers of German-Americans fought for freedom
around the world, including their ancestral
homelands. Some were the immediate relatives of
those subject to oppressive restrictions on the
home front. At least 2,000 Germans,
German-Americans and Latin Americans were later
exchanged for Americans and Latin Americans held
in Germany. Some allege that internees were
captured to use as exchange bait.
Of
course, the loyalty of Jewish Americans was not
above suspicion during the Cold War and the Joseph
McCarthy era, despite the shameful in-group
persecution of left-wing Jews by their
conservative brothers. Jews, of course, are
less-than-honorable whites in the West. Should the
Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews be prevented
from being used "like a bludgeon over the War on
Terror debate", to rid of world of evil Islam?
Even in wartime, the US government should
have exercised greater vigilance to protect the
liberties of those most vulnerable because of
their ethnic ties to enemy nations. Some were
dangerous, but too many were assumed guilty and
never able to prove their innocence. A war to
spread democracy abroad cannot be fought, let
alone won, by destroying democracy at home. The
protection of civil liberty cannot be selective.
The loss of liberty to one is the loss of liberty
to all. That is the most fatal vulnerability for
the US as a democratic superpower.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the
New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing
.)
