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COMMENTARY
Battling for the
soul of the American republic
By
Ahmad Faruqui
As the battle for Baghdad comes to
a close in Iraq, a battle for the soul of the American
republic has begun in Washington. This is a battle of
ideas being waged by people with an imperial concept of
American power, or "flag conservatives", with a diverse
coalition of other groups. The flag conservatives have
taken the view that America needs to fight a long war of
self defense until the last one of the cold-blooded
killers of September 11 has been hunted down and killed
and until all regimes in the "axis of evil" - Iraq, Iran
and North Korea - have been changed.
The
opposing coalition does not support such an imperial
expression of power. The opposing coalition counters
that an imperial war will erase the very freedoms
domestically that the US seeks to project
internationally. This coalition spans the ideological
spectrum, and includes conservatives such as Pat
Buchanan, libertarians such as Ted Galen Carpenter of
the Cato Institute and Jacob Hornberger of the Future of
Freedom Foundation, mainstream democrats and the various
groups who were active in the no-war movement.
This battle will intensify in the runup to the
2004 presidential election. The first shots have already
been fired by some of those who are seeking the
Democratic Party's presidential nomination. For example,
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts began to call for
regime change in Washington while the war was under way,
drawing considerable flak from the proponents of war.
Similarly, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont made the
anti-war issue a primary topic of his speech at the
recent Democratic Party convention in Sacramento, and
came in for sharp rebukes from the other side.
The "flag conservatives" are exultant since
their long-standing objective of gaining mastery of the
Middle East appears within reach. As discussed later in
this article, Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz first
articulated this viewpoint shortly after the first Gulf
war in 1991. Facilitated by the tragic terrorist attacks
of September 11, the first campaign of the "war against
terrorism" took place against the ragtag army of the
Taliban, whose strength did not exceed 40,000. The
regime in Kabul, which boasted that it would not be
crushed as easily as the Palestinians in the West Bank
and Gaza, collapsed within two months.
The
second campaign, which became the second Gulf War, took
place against the woefully underfed, under-equipped and
demoralized army of Saddam Hussein, whose famed
Republican Guard simply became a mirage in the Iraqi
desert once hostilities commenced. The Ba'ath regime in
Baghdad, which had boasted that it was far stronger than
the Taliban and would turn Iraq into a graveyard of the
invading armies, collapsed within a month.
While
temporarily restrained by global public opinion, the war
machine being directed by the flag conservatives
threatens to branch out toward the east and the west
from Iraq, with campaigns directed at effecting regime
change in Damascus and Teheran. In the not-too-distant
future, campaigns may be directed at effecting regime
change in Riyadh and Cairo. There are even rumblings of
change in Islamabad, since Pakistan is the only Muslim
country with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and
it is widely alleged to be supporting terrorism in
India.
Anyone who doubts this grim forecast need
only consult the "National Security Strategy of the
United States of America", published last November by
the White House. It commits the US to supporting
"moderate and modern government, especially in the
Muslim world, to ensure that the conditions and
ideologies that promote terrorism do not find fertile
ground in any nation". Having both the intent and the
capability to make war, the Bush administration has sent
a clear message to Muslim governments throughout the
world. If they do not comply with US dictates, they will
be forced out of power, and their leaders either killed
or captured without even the pretense of due process.
Richard Perle, a key architect of the drive to
topple Saddam, has declared that the war will not stop
with Iraq, "We shall continue to fight against countries
who harbor and develop weapons of mass destruction." He
ruled out any United Nations role in the new war, since
the Security Council "was created to manage classic
crises such as Germany invading France with divisions of
Panzer tanks. This institution is incapable of dealing
with the toughest problems of our time such as ...
terrorism or proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction".
Today, the global military
presence of the US encompasses more than 1,000 bases in
nearly 100 countries. This number includes "ghost bases"
which are not staffed with US personnel but are
important repositories of military hardware and supplies
that can be tapped on a moment's notice. These bases,
like the forts of imperial Rome, are a perceptible
indicator of Washington's ability to force a regime
change when it chooses and where it chooses. Some have
argued that the bases are primarily intended to convey a
political message to countries in their neighborhood and
to cultivate "relationships" with the host countries.
Sometimes, the existence of the bases is kept a secret
from the population of the host country.
The
flag conservatives have sold the long war to the
American people as a necessary war of self defense. Vice
President Dick Cheney has said that the world before
September 11 looks different than the world after
September 11, "especially in terms of how we think about
national security and what's needed to defend America.
Every significant threat to our country requires the
most careful, deliberate and decisive response by
America and our allies." Roger Morris, who was on the
staff of the National Security Council under presidents
Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, notes that President
George W Bush waged war on Iraq by asserting that Iraq
posed a clear and present danger to peace. Morris says
that war was waged, even though the danger was neither
clear to Iraq's Arab neighbors nor to the rest of the
world; nor was it present in a one- to five- year time
frame. By unilaterally attacking Iraq, the president
"erased long-recognized limits on the right of any
nation to attack another".
Furthermore, the
president's writ went unchallenged on Capitol Hill,
which was as Morris said, "another sign that any
internal democratic restraint on the president's
war-making was a dead letter". Morris noted that the
terrorist attacks of September 11 transformed the
president's image from being the butt of satire to that
of a commanding leader in the mold of Winston Churchill:
"Mr Bush took on his own reconstruction with earnest
determination, even gusto, finding his yet undefined
political destiny in an expansively defined war of
terror."
Norman Mailer, one of America's leading
men of letters, says that the war has gratified the need
of the flag conservatives to avenge September 11. He
argues that it is of no consequence that Iraq was not
the culprit for September 11, and Bush proved that he
would not let the lack of evidence get in the way of
implementing his grand vision: September 11 was evil;
Saddam is evil; all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq. Bush
has also promised the American people a bonus from the
war, which will begin to accrue once democracy and free
markets permeate the Arab world.
The casus
belli
American scholars such as Yale's Paul
Kennedy and Harvard's Joseph Nye have argued that this
long war, based on "hard" military power, is not going
to serve the vital interests of the US. So why is it
being waged? At least four reasons suggest themselves.
First, after the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, a special interest group in this country
found itself marooned from reality. Its raison d'etre
had disappeared. President Dwight D Eisenhower was the
first man to suggest the existence of this special
interest group, and he dubbed it the military-industrial
complex. Being a former military man, he knew better
than most the tenacity of this complex. As the Cold War
came to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall,
members of this complex were seriously concerned that
any "peace dividend" would drive them out of business.
The "evil empire" of the Soviet Union had provided an
eminent rationale for continued US military spending,
and a new enemy had to be found quickly. After a process
of trial and error, this enemy appeared in the face of
militant Islam.
Second, the state of
Israel was gripped with insecurity flowing from its
30-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It
retreated from Lebanon and now faced an increasingly
belligerent second intifada in the Occupied Territories
that had begun to intrude into Israel. Israel turned to
its patrons in Washington for assistance, using the
ethnic ties of its leaders to the leaders of the
neoconservative movement in the Republican Party. In the
views of Mailer, Bush regards the protection of Israel
as obligatory for strategic reasons having to do with
his re-election in 2004, but also because of tactical
military reasons. Israel's Mossad has the finest
intelligence service in the Middle East at a time when
there was a paucity of Arab spies in its American
counterpart. Mailer argues that by threatening to go to
war against any Arab country that poses a threat to
Israel, the president can also satisfy the more serious
polemical needs of a great many neoconservatives in his
administration who believe "Islam will yet be Hitler
redux to Israel".
Third, US dependence on
imported oil, especially from the Middle East, has
continued to grow as Americans, having few incentives to
invest in energy efficiency, continue to buy
increasingly larger and heavier sports utility vehicles
typified by the Hummer, a civilian variant of the army's
Humvee. The US accounts for a quarter of the world's oil
consumption, and is forced to import more than half of
its requirements. Much of this comes from the Persian
Gulf, and this dependency is likely to grow over time as
domestic production dries up. The surest way for the US
to sustain its overwhelming dependence on oil is to
control 67 percent of the world's proven oil reserves
that lie in the Gulf.
Fourth, and most
importantly, a small group of people began to argue for
the virtual American takeover of the globe within a year
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As mentioned in
the beginning of this article, the leading exponent of
this position was Wolfowitz, at the time a little-known
defense under-secretary for policy reporting to Cheney,
then defense secretary. Wolfowitz drafted a document
that envisioned the US as "a Colossus astride the world,
imposing its will and keeping world peace through
military and economic power". Not in so many words, he
called for the establishment of Pax Americana. The
proposal drew so much criticism that it was withdrawn
hastily and repudiated by then-president George H W
Bush. The document was re-issued in the fall of 2000
during the presidential election campaign. It laid out
in plain English a game plan and script for the
Americanization of the globe under an ambitious rubric,
the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC,
which described US armed forces abroad as "the cavalry
on the new American frontier", became US foreign policy
after September 11.
En masse regime change in
the Middle East
Norman Podhoretz, the godfather
of the neoconservatives, has called for en masse regime
change in the Middle East. Podhoretz's list of the "axis
of evil" goes beyond the three countries cited by Bush
in his January 2002 State of the Union speech, and
includes Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, the Palestinian
Authority, Saudi Arabia and Syria. He wants the US to
unilaterally overthrow these regimes in the Arab world
and replace them with democracies cast in the mold of US
presidents Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson.
But what the neoconservatives seek is not just a
political transformation of the Middle East. Their end
game is to bring about "the long-overdue internal reform
and modernization of Islam". These ideologues are
fundamentally confrontational in nature. They recognize
that American military intervention in the Middle East
will provoke terrorist attacks on Americans, both at
home and abroad. They welcome such attacks, as they
would provide the US with the pretext for even stronger
military intervention. Neoconservatives believe that the
US will emerge triumphant in the end, provided that it
shows the will to fight the war against militant Islam
to a successful conclusion, and provided too, that it
has "the stomach to impose a new political culture on
the defeated parties". All of these policies suggest
that the neoconservatives believe they have liberated
the US from the constraints of history in a
post-September 11 world.
Contrarians in the true
sense of the word, the neoconservatives pride themselves
on being politically incorrect. Rich Lowry, editor of
National Review, provides a particularly horrific
example on the magazine's web site. He argues that if
terrorists from Muslim countries detonate a "dirty bomb"
in the US, the US should launch a nuclear attack on
Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Lowry justifies this outrageous
proposal by portraying it as a deterrent to terrorist
attacks, believing that Muslim militants would not want
to risk the destruction of their holiest shrine.
Professor Elliot Cohen is the most influential
neoconservative in academe. From his perch at Johns
Hopkins, Cohen refers to the war against terrorism by a
chilling name: World War IV (citing the Cold War as the
third world war). His viewpoint is diametrically opposed
to that of the distinguished historian of war, Sir
Michael Howard, who has cautioned that the fight against
terrorism is not even a war, let alone a world war.
Cohen claims that America is on the good side in this
war, just like it has been in all prior world wars, and
the enemy is militant Islam, not some abstract concept
of "terrorism".
Cohen argues that the US should
throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical
forces in the Muslim world, beginning with the overthrow
of the theocratic state in Iran and its replacement by a
"moderate or secular" government. After September 11 he
was one of the first neoconservatives to call for an
attack on Iraq, even though there was no credible
evidence linking Iraq with the attacks on the US or
al-Qaeda.
A few months prior to the invasion of
Iraq, the neoconservatives launched a bipartisan
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq with much fanfare.
One of its prominent members is the 81-year old George
Schultz, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.
Schultz served as secretary of state in the Ronald
Reagan administration and treasury secretary in the
Richard Nixon administration. Several key members of the
Bush administration have worked for him - including
Cheney, Paul O'Neill (the former treasury secretary) and
Rumsfeld - while Secretary of State Colin Powell worked
at the National Security Council when Schultz was
secretary of state. Schultz began to call Saddam a
menace to peace for months prior to the war, and
forecasted that the US would attack Iraq by the end of
January. His words confirmed the suspicion of many that
the Bush administration merely wanted to use UN
Resolution 1441 as a cover to attack Iraq.
For
Bush, overthrowing Saddam served a political,
ideological and personal agenda. Politically, Saddam was
the best available substitute for the unlocatable Osama
bin Laden - and even if the US could not find Saddam, it
could at least depose him and say, "Saddam can no longer
threaten us with his weapons of mass destruction."
Ideologically, this long war and the doctrine of
preemption express the militarism, unilateralism and
fear of international institutions that characterize
much of the Republican power base in the American south
and the mountain states.
Conventional wisdom had
argued that a US attack on Saddam would fuel popular
uprising against other Arab governments. But the
neoconservatives turned this argument on its head.
Regime change in Baghdad could stimulate regime change
elsewhere in the region, and that would be all for the
good. Victor Davis Hanson, professor of classics at
California State University, Fresno and an advisor to
Bush noted, "Baghdad for the Bush administration was
never the end. It was the beginning. And that's why it's
such a controversial move because it threatens every
idea of stability, every idea of normality, every idea
of who's friendly and who's not in the entire post-war
world. It's the most revolutionary event, I think, in
our times. At least, it rivals the change in the map in
eastern Europe."
The original
imperialists
As we begin the 21st century, are
we witnessing a re-enactment of the 20th century? The
ideas of World War I British imperialists such as Mark
Sykes and Leo Amery bear an uncanny resemblance to those
of today's American neoconservatives. As Yale historian
Paul Kennedy puts it, they "wanted to diminish French,
Russian and German influence in the region. They sought
secure access to Middle East oil, and to sites for
staging posts and air bases. They also believed that
British genius could reconcile Arab and Jewish interests
in Palestine. All this turned out to be a romantic
delusion".
Baghdad experienced its first
"liberation" in 1917. The liberator was
Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude. The Mesopotamian
provinces of Baghdad and Basra were the first to be
liberated by the British from the Ottoman Empire.
Palestine was next, followed by Syria and Lebanon. In a
few years, the Arabs were rioting in Palestine and
rebelling in Iraq.
An uprising of more than
100,000 armed tribesmen against the British occupation
swept through Iraq in the summer of 1920. Air Commodore
Arthur Harris, reacting to the Palestinian revolt,
declared, "The only thing the Arab understands is the
heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be
applied." The Royal Air Force was brought into action,
and thwarted the rebellion by killing nearly 9,000
Iraqis. But there was great concern in Westminster,
since the operation had cost more than the entire
British-funded Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire
in 1917-18. Then-secretary of state for war and air
Winston Churchill suggested the use of chemical weapons
against "recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment".
Specifically, he suggested the use of poisoned gas
against uncivilized tribes "to spread a lively terror".
All of this came at a bad time. The economy of
the British Empire was collapsing and the Crown's time,
energy and resources were needed to revive it. An
exasperated Churchill told His Majesty's government that
it was spending millions for the privilege of sitting
atop a volcano. Lamenting on the British experience in
Palestine, the "last lion" was to write, "At first, the
steps were wide and shallow, covered with a carpet, but
in the end the very stones crumbled under their feet."
Much has changed during the past century. A
former colony across the Atlantic has eclipsed Great
Britain, and is the new home to an empire on which the
sun never sets. The armies of the new empire have
invaded Baghdad, with the armies of the old empire in
tow in Basra, bearing this time the gift of democracy.
The tactics of liberation have changed as the
empires have changed places, but the objectives remain
the same. Iraq remains the linchpin to the Middle East,
and whoever controls Baghdad will control the Middle
East. As the French say, "Plus a change, plus c'est la
m'me chose [the more things change, the more they stay
the same]."
The neo-imperialists
In
the same year that Baghdad fell to the imperial British
army, Vladimir Lenin published a trenchant piece,
"Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." In it,
Lenin wrote, "I trust that this pamphlet will help the
reader to understand the fundamental economic question,
that of the economic essence of imperialism. For unless
this is studied, it will be impossible to understand and
appraise modern war and modern politics."
This
year, as Baghdad is liberated for a second time, Niall
Ferguson, an economist and historian at New York
University and Oxford, has published a book with a very
different message. Noting that the British Empire was
the chief promoter of progressive thought around the
globe for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Ferguson
suggests that the world would do well to get itself
another essentially "good" empire to maintain order. The
good empire he's talking about is exactly what the flag
conservatives want to establish in the US.
Ferguson believes that the US should sustain
networks of trade, aid, investment and defense that will
mimic the British world order. Rogue states will be
curbed, failed nations healed and brushfire wars
smothered - by aid and investment where possible, by
arms where necessary.
It will, of course, be an
imperialism that dare not speak its name. Some of the
imperialists in progressive non-governmental
organizations will even believe that they are
anti-imperialist. And the logos under which they operate
will be derived from the UN or the International
Monetary Fund rather than from the US. But the
underlying networks of cooperation that sustain this new
imperialism are likely to link the US with such
"Anglosphere" nations as Britain and Australia and
perhaps, in due course, India and South Africa, which
share a similar heritage.
In a widely quoted
speech that he gave recently at the University of
California, Los Angeles, former Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey addressed Arab
leaders directly, "We want you [to be] nervous. We want
you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred
years, this country and its allies are on the march and
that we are on the side of those whom you - the
Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family - most fear: We're on
the side of your own people." Woolsey noted proudly that
the US was engaged in fighting World War IV.
The
import of his remarks will not be lost on Muslim and
Arab leaders. A fundamental change has occurred in the
tactics of implementing regime change. What was formerly
accomplished through covert "black" operations is now
being accomplished through overt military operations. In
the near future, regime change may be expanded to
include not just those unelected despots with access to
weapons of mass destruction, but any rulers who stand in
the way of the neoconservative agenda of global
domination.
In words that echo the logic that
was used for striking Baghdad, well-known Islamaphobe
Daniel Pipes issued a report in the year 2000 that
warned that Damascus was developing weapons of mass
destruction and encouraged swift preemption by the US.
Pipes co-chaired the task force that produced this
report with Ziad Abdelnour, an investment banker who
since 1997 has led an organization called the United
States Committee for a Free Lebanon. "If there is to be
decisive action, it will have to be sooner rather than
later," warned the document, which was signed by a task
force of 31 members, including several people who now
hold senior foreign policy positions in the Bush
administration.
Some experienced Washington
journalists have spent time with the neoconservatives
and come back to report that growing Islamic militancy
in the Arab world is precisely what these people want.
It justifies the US extending the conflict to other
nations until the entire region is transformed. In a
sense, this parallels the beliefs of the growing number
of evangelical Christians who see chaos in the Middle
East as a prelude to the coming rapture. It's hard to
say which idea is more dangerous.
Will they
succeed?
It is important to note that while the
recent US victories in Afghanistan and Iraq were
apparently achieved at low cost, the real cost was
considerably higher. Firstly, they were achieved at low
human cost to the US, but considerably higher human cost
to the Afghans and Iraqis, a fact that has led to rising
anti-Americanism throughout the globe. Secondly, they
were achieved at considerable economic cost to the
American taxpayer, even though the enemies were
primitive Third World nations. In the recent war on
Saddam's regime, part or all of the eight of the 10
infantry divisions of the army were either tied down by
the war or were standing by to go to the war zone. Five
of the 12 aircraft carriers were actively engaged in
operations. All this military muscle had to be used to
subdue a regime that spent about $1.4 billion a year on
defense, compared with the $400 billion a year spent by
the US.
George Magnus, chief economist at UBS
Warburg, estimates that the continuation of the ongoing
war could see defense spending rise from 4 percent of
GDP to as much as 9 percent in the coming years. This
development will not impress the financial markets,
since it comes on the heels of the largest budget and
trade deficits in US history and continuing high rates
of unemployment. David Hale of Hale Advisors, an
economics consultancy, commented, "It is unclear if
America is truly prepared to accept an imperial role on
a sustained basis." Despite the September 11 attacks,
the sustained threat to the US from terrorism is less
obvious than the threat from the USSR. David Landes, a
Harvard economic historian, found that even in Great
Britain - where attachment to empire ran deep - economic
necessity meant that the rapid liquidation of imperial
liabilities in India and the Middle East after World War
II met with little opposition. "Once the potential cost
becomes apparent, the willingness of the American public
to pay for their country's new security strategy will be
tested to the limit."
Speaking of the
neoconservative desire for changing the Arab world, Paul
Kennedy reminds Americans of the failed British
experience and questions whether the US fare any better.
And lest anyone say that America is not Britain, he
cites America's poor track record of trying to transform
the societies of Central America, Cuba and the
Philippines. "We took over the latter two territories
more than a century ago, yet Cuba's history has been a
shambles and the Philippines is now receiving fresh
cohorts of US military advisers. Why do we think we will
do better in Syria or Iraq or Saudi Arabia?"
In
the wake of the easy Iraqi conquest, the American
generals who led the war have touted their campaign as
one of the most successful in military history. For
example, Marine Lieutenant-General Earl Hailston
declared from his headquarters in Bahrain, "We fought
like we'd never fought before," citing the campaign
highlighted the military's lethal technological
advantage and the ability of US forces to conduct
operations seamlessly across the military branches that
historically had been riven with age-old rivalries. Such
statements lend credence to the desire of the flag
conservatives to have the American military serve as the
cavalry along America's frontiers.
Historian and
political analyst Francis Fukuyama has noted that the US
conquest of Iraq is likely to mark the zenith of its
perceived strength, both in a military and political
sense. He advises the US to exploit this moment of
strength not by thinking of moving against Syria, Iran
or North Korea, but by contracting its empire. He goes
so far as to suggest the US withdraw all of its military
forces from Saudi Arabia, where their presence has been
exploited by bin Laden to pursue his campaign of
terrorism. In a similar vein, Seyom Brown of Brandeis
University, Massachusetts, argues that the world's only
superpower needs to restrain itself. He comments,
"Rather than loosening the constraints against the
resort to war, we ought to be retightening them."
Even a nation as uniquely powerful as the US
cannot remake the political systems at the heart of the
Islamic world. Last December, the Financial Times
editorialized that "dropping a big enough stone in the
Iraqi pool would not unleash a wave of democracy in the
region." It is likely that the Muslim world will view a
string of US military attacks on Muslim countries as the
aggression of an oil-thirsty superpower on the Muslim
world, not a march to liberate people from tyranny. And,
were democracy to arrive miraculously in the Arab
countries, it will result in the election of openly
anti-American leaders.
Robert Baer, a former
field officer of the CIA in the Middle East, notes that
bin Laden would be elected in a landslide in Saudi
Arabia if a free and fair election were held there
tomorrow.
Policy makers in Washington, including
those with an open mind in the administration and the
Congress, should seriously consider the dangers in
pursuing a hubris-laden Middle Eastern policy that has
strategic myopia written all over it.
Ahmad Faruqui, PhD, an economist and
defense analyst based San Francisco, writes frequently
on the Middle East and South Asia. He is the author of
Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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