One of these days, some scholar will do a
little history of the odd moments when microphones
or recording systems were turned on or left on,
whether on purpose or not, and so gave us a bit of
history in the raw. We have plenty of American
examples of this phenomenon, ranging from the
secret White House recordings of President John F
Kennedy's meetings with his advisers during the
Cuban missile crisis (so voluminous as to become
multi-volume publications) and Richard Nixon's
secret tapes (minus those infamous 18 1/2
minutes), voluminous enough so that you could
spend the next 84 days nonstop listening to what's
been made publicly available, to the moment in
1984 when a campaigning President Ronald Reagan
quipped on the radio during a
microphone check (supposedly
unaware that it was on): "My fellow Americans, I'm
pleased to tell you today that I've signed
legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We
begin bombing in five minutes."
Just last
week, a lovely little example of this sort of
thing came our way and, 22 years after Ronald
Reagan threatened to atomize the "evil empire",
Russia was still the subject. Last Thursday, at a
private lunch of G8 foreign ministers in Moscow,
an audio link to the media was left on, allowing
reporters to listen in on a running series of
arguments (or as the Washington Post's Glenn
Kessler put it, "several long and testy
exchanges") between US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov over a collective document no one
would remember thenceforth
The whole event
was a grim, if minor, comedy of the absurd.
According to the Post account, "Reporters
traveling with Rice transcribed the tape of the
private luncheon but did not tell Rice aides about
it until after a senior State Department official,
briefing reporters on condition of anonymity as
usual, assured them that ‘there was absolutely no
friction whatsoever' between the two senior
diplomats". (What better reminder do we need that
so much anonymous sourcing granted by newspapers
turns out to be a mix of unreliable spin and
outright lies readers would be better off
without?) In, as Kessler wrote, "a time of rising
tension in US-Russian relations", the recording
even caught "the clinking of ice in glasses and
the scratch of cutlery on plates", not to speak of
the intense irritation of both parties.
"Sometimes the tone smacked of the
playground" is the way a British report summed the
encounter up, but decide for yourself. Here's a
sample of what "lunch" sounded like - the context
of the discussion was Iraq (especially outrage
over the kidnapping and murder of four employees
of the Russian embassy in Baghdad):
Rice said she worried [Lavrov] was
suggesting greater international involvement in
Iraq's affairs.
"I did not suggest
this," Lavrov said. "What I did say was not
involvement in the political process but the
involvement of the international community in
support of the political process."
"What
does that mean?" Rice asked.
There was a
long pause. "I think you understand," he said.
"No, I don't,'" Rice said.
Lavrov tried to explain, but Rice said
she was disappointed. "I just want to register
that I think it's a pity that we can't endorse
something that's been endorsed by the Iraqis and
the UN," she said, adding tartly: "But if that's
how Russia sees it, that's fine."
Behind Rice's irritation certainly
lay a bad few Russia weeks for the administration.
Not only had the Russians been flexing their
energy muscles of late, consorting with the
Chinese and various of the Soviet Union's former
Soviet Socialist Republics in Central Asia, which
the Bush administration covets for their energy
resources; but, as the ministers were meeting,
Russian President Vladimir Putin - you remember,
another one of those world leaders George Bush
"looked in the eyes" and found to be "trustworthy"
(but that was so long ago) - made it frustratingly
clear that he would not back US moves against
neighboring Iran and its putative nuclear program
at the UN. "We do not intend to join any sort of
ultimatum, which only pushes the situation into a
dead end, striking a blow against the authority of
the UN Security Council," Putin told Russian
diplomats in Moscow in the presence of
journalists. "I am convinced that dialogue and not
isolation of one or another state is what leads to
resolution of crises."
Destabilizing
Russia There is, however, a larger, far
more perilous context within which to view the
"testy" relationship between the two former Cold
War superpowers and, for once, someone has managed
to lay it out brilliantly, connecting the dots for
the rest of us. In The New American Cold War, the
cover story of the most recent Nation magazine,
Russia specialist Stephen F Cohen finally catches
the essence of that ever degrading relationship.
What Cohen points out is that, after the USSR
unraveled, the Cold War never actually ended, not
on the American side anyway, and today it not only
continues at nearly full blast, but the Russians
have finally reentered the game.
To offer
a little context: In the early years of the Cold
War, when the A-bomb and then the H-bomb were
briefly American monopolies, there were, among
American hardliners, those who, in the phrase of
the time, wanted to "rollback" the Soviet Union in
whatever fashion necessary. At an extreme, as
early as 1950, the Strategic Air Command's Gen.
Curtis LeMay urged the implementation of SAC
Emergency War Plan I-49, which involved delivering
a first strike of "the entire stockpile of atomic
bombs … in a single massive attack", some 133
A-bombs on 70 Soviet cities in 30 days. However,
it was another policy, "containment" (first
suggested by diplomat George Kennan in his famous
"long telegram" from Moscow and then in his 1947
essay, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", written
under the pseudonym "Mr X" in Foreign Affairs
magazine), that took hold. Increasingly, as the
years went by, as superpower nuclear arsenals came
ever closer to parity, the US and the USSR settled
into the equivalent of family life together,
bickering (at the cost of untold numbers of dead)
only on the borderlands of their respective
empires. In the later 1960s, containment became
detente.
When Ronald Reagan won the
presidency in 1980 and relaunched the Cold War
against the "evil empire", matters threatened to
change, but in the end - despite a massive
rearmament campaign (that began in the Carter
years) and the launching of Reagan's Strategic
Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), meant to
militarize space, detente hung in there; finally,
to the surprise of all American strategists, the
Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet empire in
Eastern Europe quickly unraveled without
opposition from the remarkable Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev (a rare instance of the head of
an imperial order not turning to force as it was
dismantled). After a moment's hesitation,
America's cold warriors, including the massively
funded intelligence community which had never so
much as suspected the weakened state of the Soviet
Union, declared global victory. Much of the rest
of the story (the lack of a "peace dividend", the
rise of the US as the globe's supposed sole
"hyperpower", the way the neo-conservatives and
others fell in love with American military might
and its potential ability to alter the world in
directions they passionately desired is now
reasonably well known - except for the very large
piece of the puzzle Cohen contributed last week.
In his essay, Cohen points out that
Russia, despite recent gains, is still in "an
unprecedented state of peacetime demodernization
and depopulation", suffering "wartime death and
birth rates" in a time of relative peace; while
its unstable political system rests on the
popularity of one man, Vladimir Putin. What was
left of the USSR having almost imploded in the
1990s, he writes, even today we cannot be sure
what the collapse of a power armed with every
imaginable weapon of mass destruction might "mean
for the rest of the world".
How, he asks,
has every US administration reacted to this
globally perilous situation?
Since the early 1990s Washington has
simultaneously conducted, under Democrats and
Republicans, two fundamentally different
policies toward post-Soviet Russia - one
decorative and outwardly reassuring, the other
real and exceedingly reckless. The decorative
policy, which has been taken at face value in
the United States, at least until recently,
professes to have replaced America's previous
cold war intentions with a generous relationship
of "strategic partnership and friendship'" ...
The real US policy has been very different - a
relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of
Russia's post-1991 weakness. Accompanied by
broken American promises, condescending lectures
and demands for unilateral concessions, it has
been even more aggressive and uncompromising
than was Washington's approach to Soviet
communist Russia … [This policy includes a]
growing military encirclement of Russia, on and
near its borders, by US and NATO bases, which
are already ensconced or being planned in at
least half the 14 other former Soviet republics,
from the Baltics and Ukraine to Georgia,
Azerbaijan and the new states of Central Asia.
The result is a US-built reverse iron curtain
and the remilitarization of American-Russian
relations."
Destabilizing
Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and the United
States This is the new, American-driven
cold war - a striking feature of our landscape,
almost utterly ignored by the mainstream media -
that Cohen lays out at length and in compelling
detail. Since 2000, these new cold war policies
have only taken a turn for the disastrous. From
its first moments in office, the Bush
administration, made up almost solely of rabid
former cold warriors, has been focused with an
unprecedented passion and intensity on what can
only be called a "rollback" policy. Defined a
little more precisely, what they have pursued, as
Cohen makes clear, is a policy of Russian
"destabilization" with every means at their
command - and, until recently, with some success.
Their view was simple enough. In the wake
of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the United
States was the sole military power of significance
left standing. It had, as they saw it, enough
excess power to ensure a Pax Americana into the
distant future, in part by ensuring that no future
or resurgent superpower or bloc of powers would,
in any foreseeable future, arise to challenge the
United States. As the President put it in an
address at West Point in 2002, "America has, and
intends to keep, military strengths beyond
challenge". The administration's new National
Security Strategy of that year seconded the point,
adding that the country must be "strong enough to
dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a
military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or
equaling, the power of the United States".
This was to be accomplished by:
-
Ensuring that the former challenging superpower,
once rolled back to something like its
pre-imperial boundaries, would never arise in any
significant new form from the rubble of its failed
empire.
- Ensuring that no new superpower
would arise in economically resurgent Asia; in
this regard, the Chinese would be essentially
hemmed in, if not encircled, by American (and
Japanese) power; a potentially independent Taiwan
supported; and the Japanese and Chinese set at
each others throats.
- Ensuring that the
oil heartlands of the planet in what was by then
being called an "arc of instability" running from
the Central Asian borderlands of Russia and China
through the Middle East, North Africa (later, much
of the rest of Africa), all the way to Latin
America would be dotted with American military
bases, anchored in the Middle East by an
emboldened Israel and new more pro-American and
subservient regimes in formerly enemy states like
Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and that the planet's oil
flows (hence the fate of the industrialized and
industrializing parts of the planet) would remain
under American control.
The
administration's destabilization strategy, as
convincingly laid out by Cohen, was not, however,
limited to Russia. The ambitions of top
administration officials and their supporters,
after all, were world-spanning. (It wasn't for
nothing that the neocons and allied pundits began
talking about us as the planet's New Rome back in
2002, while we were tearing up treaties, setting
up secret prisons, and preparing to launch our
first "preventive" war.) In retrospect, it seems
clear that destabilization was their modus
operandi. Despite what some have argued in
relation to Iraq (and elsewhere in the Middle
East), they were undoubtedly not voting for chaos
per se. What they were eager to do was put the
strategically most significant and contested
regions of the planet "in play", using the
destabilization card, always assuming in every
destabilization situation that the chips would
fall on their side of the gaming table, and that,
if worse came to worse, even chaos would turn out
to be to their benefit.
In that spirit,
they began working to destabilize Russia, hoping
that even if "regime change" weren't possible, all
sorts of energy resources and other political and
economic fruits would fall their way from the
rotting tree of the former Soviet Union. As we
know, they didn't hesitate to do the same in
Afghanistan, claiming that they were simply taking
out al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts (with whom they
had, not so long before, been in pipeline
negotiations). What they actually did, however,
was settle in to that country for the long haul,
setting up their normal run of bases and prisons,
and in the process not fretting enormously about
what destabilization was actually doing there -
creating a narco-warlord-Taliban failed state that
now, of course, befuddles them.
Then, as
we all know, they invaded Iraq, claiming they were
pursuing Saddam Hussein's nonexistent WMD program
via "decapitation" shock-and-awe attacks on his
regime, the disbanding of his military, the
dissolution of the Baath Party, the disbarment of
many of its former members from office or jobs,
and the dismantling of the state-organized and run
economy -- a program of destabilization so
sweeping as to take one's breath away and meant to
launch a far more sweeping destabilization (and
hence remaking) of the Middle East. The results of
this project, still in progress, are by now well
known - including the fostering of a complex,
bloodthirsty, sectarian bloodletting in Iraq which
now threatens to spill across borders into
neighboring lands (along with terrorism and oil
sabotage).
Their most recent target is
Iran - or rather, ostensibly, Iran's nuclear
energy program. In his latest report on the
administration's Iranian policy, New Yorker
journalist Seymour Hersh quotes a "high-ranking
general" this way: "[T]he military's experience in
Iraq, where intelligence on weapons of mass
destruction was deeply flawed, has affected its
approach to Iran. ‘We built this big monster with
Iraq, and there was nothing there. This is son of
Iraq.'" In fact, as Hersh has previously reported,
administration strategists have long been trying
to destabilize Iran in a variety of ways, while
threatening future military assaults on that
country's nuclear establishment. If, at some
future point, they were to follow through on this,
the results for the global economy would
undoubtedly prove both staggering and
destabilizing in ways it's quite possible no one
could handle.
In the meantime, they have
been willing to destabilize the world by
essentially growing terror in the pursuit of other
ends. Despite the centrality of the "global war on
terror" to their plans, it's obvious that the
taking out of hostile terrorist groups has not
been the only, or even perhaps the primary item on
their agenda - after all, they curtailed the hunt
for Osama bin Laden in order to whack Iraq.
Rhetoric aside, they seem, in fact, to be quite
willing to live with the global phenomenon of ever
proliferating, ever more homegrown terrorist
organizations.
Though it's been little
noted, their program in the United States has been
hardly less based on playing the destabilization
card. As their minions in occupied Iraq were
intent on radically "privatizing" - that is,
destabilizing - the Iraqi government and economy,
so they have been intent on radically privatizing
(and destabilizing) the American government and
economy. Recently, Frank Rich of the New York
Times wrote a striking column, The Road from K
Street to Yusufiya, on exactly this, pointing out
that "nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal
discretionary spending now goes to private
companies". It hardly mattered to them that they
were essentially emptying civil government of its
can-do powers; that they were replacing those
hated bureaucrats in Washington with even less
competent bureaucrats linked to private, crony
corporations of their choice. As Rich put the
matter:
[T]he Bush brand of competitive
sourcing, with its get-rich-quick schemes and
do-little jobs for administration pals, spread
like a cancer throughout the executive branch.
It explains why tens of thousands of displaced
victims of Katrina are still living in trailer
shantytowns all these months later. It explains
why New York City and Washington just lost 40
percent of their counterterrorism funds. It
helps explain why American troops are more
likely to be slaughtered than greeted with
flowers more than three years after the American
invasion of Iraq.
The Department of
Homeland Security, in keeping with the Bush
administration's original opposition to it,
isn't really a government agency at all so much
as an empty shell, a networking boot camp for
future private contractors dreaming of big
paydays…
Caesar's
Palace The top officials of this
administration are remarkable gamblers and
optimists. They have also proven remarkably
single-minded in playing the destabilization game.
If they are in the Roman-Empire business, don't
think Augustus, think Caesar's Palace. Like so
many gambling addicts, they've never run across a
situation in which they're unwilling to roll the
dice, no matter the odds. They just give those
dice that special little rub and offer a prayer
for good luck, always knowing that this just has
to be their day.
Medicare, roll the dice.
Social security, roll the dice. Tax the poor and
middle class by untaxing the rich, no problem.
Wipe out what's left of the checks and balances of
the American system in favor of a theory of an
all-encompassing "commander-in-chief" government,
roll those dice. Launch endless, Swift-Boat-style,
bare-knuckle campaigns of fear, lies, and fantasy
(accompanied by gerrymandering and
vote-suppression schemes) meant to install
Republicans in power for decades to come, no
matter the cost to the political system - don't
wait, toss ‘em now!
This is, essentially,
a full-scale a program for the destabilization (as
well as plundering) of this country, one that fits
snugly with their operations potentially
destabilizing the planet. And through it all, like
the good cold warriors they are, they've never let
up on that rollback campaign against Russia.
Perhaps, as in the previous century, if all that
needed to be compared was the relative powers of
two superpowers, their acts, however fierce or
cruel, might not have seemed so strategically
wrongheaded. Having taken advantage of the
weaknesses of their opposite number,
administration officials might now be standing
tall; while the Russians, crimped, impoverished,
embittered, might indeed have been licking their
wounds, while complaining angrily but impotently.
Such is not the case. The twenty-first
century is already turning out to be far more than
a hyperpower, or even a two superpower, world.
Before the eyes of much of humanity, between
November 2001 and March 2003, the Bush
administration decided to demonstrate its singular
strength by playing its destabilization trump card
and setting in motion the vaunted military power
of the United States. To the amazement of almost
all, that military, destructive as it proved to
be, was stopped in its tracks by two of the less
militarily impressive "powers" on this planet -
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Before all eyes,
including those of George, Dick, Don, Paul,
Stephen, Condi, and their comrades, we visibly
grew weaker. While the Bush administration was
coveting what the Russians called their "near
abroad" -- all those former SSRs around its rim --
and were eagerly peeling them away with "orange,"
"rose," and "tulip" revolutions, its own "near
abroad" (what we used to like to call our Latin
"backyard") was peeling away of its own accord,
without the aid of a hostile superpower. This
would once have been inconceivable, as would
another reality - up-and-coming economic powers
like China and India traveling to that same
"backyard" looking for energy deals. And yet a
destabilized planet invariably means a planet of
opportunity for someone.
In fact, Iraq
proved such a black hole, so destabilizing for the
Bush administration itself that its officials
managed to look the other way while China emerged
as an organizing power and economic magnet in Asia
(a process from which the US was increasingly
excluded) and Russian energy reserves gave Putin
and pals a new lease on life. Now, administration
officials find themselves stunned by the results,
which are not likely to be ameliorated by floating
a bunch of aircraft-carrier task forces menacingly
in the western Pacific.
In one of his
recent commentaries, historian Immanuel
Wallerstein pointed out that the "American
Century", proclaimed by Time and Life Magazine
owner Henry Luce in 1943, lasted far less than the
expected 100 years. Now, the question - and except
for a few "declinist" scholars like Wallerstein,
it would have been an unimaginable one as recently
as 2003 - is: "Whose century is the 21 century?"
His grim answer: It will be the century of
"multi-polar anarchy and wild economic
fluctuations".
If you think about it, the
single greatest destabilizing gamble this
administration has taken has also been the least
commented upon. A couple of years back "global
warming" was largely a back-page story about
tribal peoples having their habitats melted in the
far north or finding their islands in danger of
flooding somewhere in the distant Pacific. It was
all ice all the time and if you didn't live near a
glacier or somewhere in the tundra, it didn't have
much to do with you - and certainly nothing
whatsoever to do with those nasty hurricanes that
seemed to be increasing in strength in the
Atlantic as were typhoons in the Pacific.
Now, global warming is front-page stuff
and you don't have to go far to find it. Alaska
isn't just melting any more, we are. Lately, a
plethora of major stories and prime-time TV news
reports have regularly talked not about the north,
but about the planet "running a slight fever from
greenhouse gases", or undergoing unexpectedly
"abrupt" climate change, or of the US itself
having its warmest years in its history -
something reflected even in local headlines ("For
N Texas, it's warmest year on record"). And yet in
our media the Bush administration still largely
gets a free pass on the subject. No major cover
stories are yet taking on the ultimate
destabilization gamble of this administration, the
fact that they are playing not just with the fate
of this or that superpower or set of minor powers,
but with that of the human race itself.
The willingness of the president and his
officials to bet the store on the possibility that
global warming doesn't exist, or won't hit as
ferociously as expected, or soon enough to affect
them, or will be solved by some future quick-fix
still isn't thought of as real front-page news. In
other words, their maddest gamble of all, next to
which the destabilization of Iran or Russia
dwindles to nothing, receives little attention.
And yet, based on their track record, we know just
what they are going to do - throw those dice
again.
For George W Bush and his top
officials, taking the long-term heat on this
probably isn't really an issue. They have the
mentality not just of gamblers but of looters and
in a couple of years, if worse comes to worse,
they can head for Crawford or Wyoming or estates
and ranches elsewhere to hunt fowl and drink mai
tais. It's the rest of us, and especially our
children and grandchildren, who will still be here
on this destabilized, energy-hungry planet without
an air conditioner in sight.
Tom
Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's
Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the
mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project and the author of The
End of Victory Culture, a history of American
triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The
Last Days of Publishing, is now out in
paperback.
