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COMMENTARY
From Cold War to Holy
War
By Henry C K Liu
Barely a
decade after the end of the Cold War between the two
superpowers, the world has entered decidedly into an age
of Holy War between the sole remaining superpower and
minor states deemed by it as rogue.
The US
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, billed as part of a
"war on terrorism", were essentially the remote
unleashing of overwhelming military power on defenseless
minor states. One unique characteristic about this new
Holy War is that it seems to be open ended, that while
major combats have ended, or never even took place,
victory remains not at hand in the near future. In fact,
the US itself refers to these one-sided military
operations as "battles in an on-going war on terrorism".
That of course is the nature of religious wars. Another
unique aspect is that while many governments around the
world opposed or at least disapproved of US unilateral
use of force, none came to the aid of the victim states.
The war against Iraq was not about oil, or about
keeping oil denominated in dollars. These objectives,
while not trivial, can be achieved by means other than
war. The war was about eliminating the will of any state
to defy US global intentions, which neo-conservatives
define as faith-based benign hegemony. It was above all
a warning of similar fate to all who would be foolish
enough to follow the footsteps of the Taliban or Saddam
Hussein and stand in the path of America's march toward
its strategic objective of establishing a world order
based on US imperium through preemptive war.
Taken at face value, the war as explained by the
White House is part of a US strategy to spread
democracy, to safeguard freedom and to reinstate popular
control of national resources and destiny around the
world. Americans generally understand democracy to mean
a representative form of government based on majority
rule with minority rights, administered by elected
officials of fixed terms, with separation of powers
between the executive, legislative and judiciary
branches, and the institution of peaceful change of
administrations through general elections. The American
notion of freedom focuses on freedom of speech, freedom
of religion, freedom of association and freedom to
disagree with and oppose government policies through
legal means. Associated with these political freedoms
are institutions of free enterprise and free markets.
Any nation deemed deficient in any of these
characteristics is fair game for regime change through
the application of overwhelming military superpower,
unless it possesses credible counterattack deterrence.
The Bush administration's neo-conservative view
of terrorism is that it has become the major threat to
US national security. This view is understandable since
the September 11, 2001 attacks. Less understandable is
its assertion that terrorism is caused by a lack of
democracy and freedom associated with domestic
oppression, and not by neo-imperialism and the poverty
it creates. Curiously, the US domestic recipe for
fighting terrorism requires the suspension of civil
liberty. Furthermore, terrorists are deemed to be
enemies of democracy and freedom.
Thus only half
the objective of a preemptive war has to do with the
elimination of weapons of mass destruction from the
control of "rogue states", the other half has to do with
the forceful spread of democracy and freedom around the
globe to strike at the root of terrorism. The grand
strategy of US neo-conservatism is to bring the full
force of US superpower to bear on the crusade to spread
democracy and freedom around the world, through regime
changes by military force if necessary.
Unilateralism is justified by moral imperialism.
Just as neo-liberal globalization of free trade sweeps
aside economic nationalism, neo-conservative
globalization of democratization and liberation aims to
sweep aside national sovereign and a world order that
has operated since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648.
Notwithstanding that such views on terrorism may
be simplistic and misguided, that others, including many
Americans as well as previous US administrations, view
terrorism as last resort reaction from the
disfranchised, the persecuted, the defenseless, the
exploited and the desperate poor, the political
objectives of the war on terrorism as enunciated by the
Bush administration cannot be accomplished by military
operations alone. President George W Bush himself
acknowledged as much when he announced on May 1 that
while the military phases in both Afghanistan and Iraq
have essentially been completed, the war on terrorism is
expected to be long and challenging. Winning the peace
is much more complex than overthrowing governments by
force.
The US, to make the war on terrorism
legitimate, must now deliver democracy, freedom and
self-determination to the Iraqi people on their terms, a
task that cannot be done with precision cruise missiles
and bunker busting bombs released at long distance by
remote control. It is a tall order that the US will find
almost impossible to fulfill, due to its own internal
contradiction. Democracy is compromised when the US
occupation authority serves notice that "there is no
way" a Shi'ite theocracy would be tolerated in the new
Iraq, even when 60 percent of the population are
Shi'ites, nor that the Iraqi Communists Party would be
allowed to participate in the formation of the new Iraqi
regime.
While US neo-cons embrace the Straussian
notion of the need for theocracy, in direct
contradiction of the US constitutional doctrine of
separation of church and state, they accept only
Judeo-Christian theocracy. The Bush faith-based foreign
policy of one world under God is derived from its
domestic vision of "one nation under God",
notwithstanding that in the Supreme Court's 1961 Torcaso
vs Watkins decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote in a foot
note: "Among religions in this country which do not
teach what would generally be considered a belief in the
existence of God is Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture,
Secular Humanism, and others."
Neo-cons argue
that the First Amendment's religion clauses were
intended only to prevent the establishment of a national
church, and to keep the state from interfering with the
church, not to bar religious groups from co-opting the
government, notwithstanding Thomas Jefferson's claim
that the First Amendment had erected a "wall of
separation between church and state". The co-oopting of
the US government by the religious right has launched a
new religious war, over which even the Pope, whose
church has long since retreated from the doctrine of
Ceasaropapism, has expressed wariness. It takes a
theocracy to start a religious war.
On May 2,
Bush, in what is generally billed as the beginning of
his political campaign for a second term, discussed
national economic security in a speech to the employees
of the Ground Systems Division of United Defense
Industries in Santa Clara, California, a defense company
that produces military vehicles and technology that are
being used by soldiers in Iraq, including the Bradley
Fighting Vehicle and the Hercules Recovery Vehicle. It
is not surprising that the president chose the defense
sector as a platform to discuss national economic
security, given that the Bush White House has
reorganized national economic policy under the umbrella
of national security, and given that the defense sector
is the only growth sector in the stalled economy at this
time, despite the fact that the US defense budget is
only about 3 percent of the GDP.
A day before,
the president spoke to the American people from the deck
of the homeward bound USS Abraham Lincoln super-carrier
off the California coast, a political stunt that caused
Senator Robert C Byrd to comment on the Senate floor, "I
am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as
an advertising backdrop for a presidential political
slogan, and yet that is what I saw." The president
declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended,
and that the US and its allies had prevailed. The world
has never doubted that the US superpower would prevail
over tiny Iraq, isolated and emaciated by a decade of
economic sanctions. Ironically, the fall of Iraq sent a
clear message around the world that in this age of
superpower holy war, national security lies in the
possession of weapons of mass destruction. The US is
concerned with Saddam's team of 1,000 nuclear
scientists, whom defense officials called "nuclear
mujahideen". These scientists, the Defense Department
fears, can restart Iraq's weapons program once the
crisis passed. Would any new government in Iraq have
less reason to possess nuclear weapons after what
happened?
What was unexpected was the ease and
speed with which the US achieved the military phase of
the invasion. Despite the fact that its prowess was
never fully tested on account of the enemy having failed
to put up an expected fight via asymmetrical urban
warfare, the US military is nevertheless an undeniably
excellent fighting machine, one that any nation would be
proud to possess. That US forces suffered unprecedented
light casualties, due also to emphasis on protecting and
rescuing soldiers in distress, is professionally
admirable. The morale of the troops has been as high as
any commander can wish. Whether this high morale can be
sustained when troops are used as an occupation police
force in a hostile country is another question.
Invoking September 11 as America's lesson that
vast oceans no longer protect it from terrorism - the
threat of the new era, the president said, "On that day,
19 months ago, we also began a relentless worldwide
campaign against terrorists, those who hate freedom, in
order to secure our homeland and to make the world a
more peaceful place." He referred to "the battle of
Afghanistan" and "the Iraqi theater" and declared that
"Iraq and Afghanistan are now free". With daily reports
of guerrilla resistance and suicide bombers inflicting
US casualties and US soldiers firing on civilians
demonstrating against US occupation, such a sweeping
declaration raises a credibility gap. It is also
arguable that terrorists hate freedom, rather than
foreign oppression.
The US military has
performed professionally and is deserving of
recognition. The same cannot be said of the political
rationale behind its deployment. Throughout history, the
misuse of the military for dubious political causes has
led to the downfall of governments and empires. It would
not be surprising if the Democrats would separate pride
in the military's professionalism from the political
folly of its deployment to support the flawed grand
strategy adopted by a Republican administration captured
by neo-conservatism.
About the state of the US
economy, the president acknowledged that unemployment is
now at 6 percent, which he claimed should serve as a
clear signal to the US Congress a bold economic recovery
package is needed so people can find work. "We need
robust tax relief so our fellow citizens can find a
job," the president said in his Santa Clara speech. The
original $726 billion tax package over 10 years Bush
sent to the Congress is now pared down to $550 billion
and it may be cut further in the Senate by those who are
worried that the growing budget deficit will lead to
higher interest rates that will stall any hope of
recovery. Administration economists say that the tax cut
will create 1 million new jobs by the year 2004, when
Bush will face a second term election. A million new
jobs would still leave 7.8 million people unemployed.
Historically, the Republican Party prided itself
as not being a foreign war party. It was formed in 1856
by anti-slavery activists and individuals who believed
that government should grant western lands to settlers
free of charge. Abraham Lincoln became the first
Republican to win the White House in 1860. The word
democracy does not appear in the Republican Oath, a
statement of Republican philosophy published by the
Republican National Committee. As the party of
prosperity, the GOP benefited from the boom of the
1920s. The Great Depression destroyed the Republican
majority. After years of taking credit for prosperity,
the GOP found itself branded as the party of depression
after the economic collapse in 1929. By the late 1930s,
Republicans in Congress sided with those who hoped to
avoid involvement in any future European war. Most
Republicans were isolationists who supported the
neutrality laws and voted against increased defense
appropriations. Their isolationism was supported by some
prominent Democrats, including Joseph P Kennedy,
ambassador to England, father of J F Kennedy. By the end
of World War II, most Senate Republicans, led by Arthur
H Vandenberg of Michigan, had repudiated isolationism
out of realist pragmatism, but foreign war remained not
a Republican theme.
The surprising loss in the
1948 election to Harry S Truman, a Democrat, again
showed how desperately Republicans, out of power for two
decades, needed fresh issues. They soon found one in the
hysterical charge that communists had infiltrated the
Democrat-controlled federal government. In 1950, Senator
Joseph R McCarthy of Wisconsin charged that the State
Department under the Democrat administrations had been
infested with communists, which among other things
"lost" China to communism, as if China were America's to
lose. Although McCarthy failed to prove his wild
accusations, in the process of ruining many lives,
Congressional investigations gave Republicans their best
issue since the pre-Depression era.
Robert
McNamara, defense secretary under Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson, attributed the Vietnam debacle to the thorough
purge of China experts by McCarthyism. He wrote, "The
irony of this gap - Asian experts - was that it existed
largely because the top East Asian and China experts in
the State Department - John Patton Davies Jr, John
Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent - had been
purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s.
Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced
insights, we - certainly I - badly misread China's
objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a
drive for regional hegemony."
There are clear
signs that the Bush administration also badly misread
Arab political culture and the root cause of terrorism,
mostly as a result of experts on Arabism who did not
tote the neo-con pro-Israel line having been purged from
all US policy establishments. Bernard Lewis, who
describes the separation of church and state as a
Western disease, and Fouad Ajami are the neo-cons'
favored Middle East experts who see the Arab World as
ripe for liberation from itself into modernity by the
West. The president is not being well served by the
neo-cons around him, nor is the peerless US military
being used to fight for a good and viable cause.
A split between conservative and moderate
Republicans flared into the open during the Korea War.
The conservatives, led by Senator Robert A Taft of Ohio,
continued to oppose the New Deal. Moderates questioned
whether this ideological fixation could win the
presidency, and they looked to World War II hero General
Dwight D Eisenhower to carry their standard in 1952. The
popular Eisenhower soundly defeated Adlai Stevenson,
liberal governor of Illinois, one of the great figures
in US politics, taking 39 states by promising to end the
Korean War. Republicans also won control of Congress by
a narrow margin. Ironically, the war hero won the
election on a pledge to end war.
Eisenhower's
personal popularity did not carry over to the GOP as a
party. Eisenhower continued Truman's foreign policy of
containment of communist expansion, but not Truman's
readiness to deploy US troops overseas. Domestically, he
tried to hold the line on government expenditures, which
satisfied neither GOP conservatives who wanted sharp
cutbacks nor special interest groups that wanted more
government contracts and subsidies. In 1956, he won a
rematch against Stevenson, taking 58 percent of the
popular vote. But the Democrats won control of both
houses of Congress.
The 1960 election was the
closest of the century. Democratic senator John F
Kennedy defeated vice president Richard M Nixon, who
actually won the popular vote if Alabama had been
counted properly. Ballot fraud in Illinois has since
been been established as the reason Kennedy won the
electoral vote. Nixon gracefully accepted the results of
a fraudulent election, declining to file a contest, thus
avoiding a constitutional crisis. Al Gore was less
graceful in 2000 and the decision was left to a
pro-Republican Supreme Court.
A split between
conservatives and liberals again weakened the GOP during
the 1960s. Governor Nelson A Rockefeller of New York
emerged as the spokesman for party liberals and Senator
Barry M Goldwater of Arizona as leader of the
conservatives. A narrowly based presidential campaign by
Goldwater produced a stunning defeat for the GOP in
1964. Goldwater took only six states and 38 percent of
the popular vote. But his ideology won control of the
Republican Party.
Nixon led a unified Republican
party to a narrow victory in the 1968 race against a
Democratic ticket weakened by a split on the race issue
between liberal Democrat Hubert H Humphrey and racist
George C Wallace, who split to run as an American
Independent candidate. Taking only 43 percent of the
popular vote, Nixon was the first new president since
1848 to take office with both houses of Congress
controlled by the opposition party. Nixon won in part by
promising to end the Vietnam War.
Nixon won
re-election by a lopsided margin in 1972 on the strength
of his historic opening to China and his policy of
detente with the USSR, but he was forced to resign in
1974 over the threat of impeachment in the wake of the
Watergate affair, succeeded by Vice President Gerald R
Ford. Republicans lost control of the White House in
1976, when Ford was defeated by Democrat Jimmy Carter.
Economic stagflation under Carter and American
hostages held by Iran led to a Republican landslide in
1980. The Republican team of Ronald Reagan and George
Bush seizing on Carter's spiritual crisis, ridiculing
his "malaise speech", and promising to reduce federal
spending, cut taxes, and strengthen defense, won 51
percent of the popular vote and 489 electoral votes. The
Republicans gained 12 seats in the Senate, giving them
control of that body for the first time since 1954.
In the 1984 presidential elections, the
Reagan-Bush ticket won overwhelmingly, carrying all the
states except Democratic candidate Walter Mondale's home
state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia, while
amassing 59 percent of the popular vote and 523
electoral votes. The Republicans retained control of the
Senate but did not gain a majority in the House.
Reaganomics produced the largest budget deficit and
highest level of national debt in history. In 1985, the
Plaza Accord pushed the exchange value of the dollar
down against the yen to stem the rising trade deficit.
As a result, in the midterm elections of 1986, the
Republicans lost not only control of the Senate but also
more ground in the House. This pattern was repeated in
1988. Although Vice President George Bush and his
running mate, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, won the
presidential election for the Republicans with 53
percent of the popular vote, the party lost ground in
both houses of Congress. While Bush took 40 states and
scored a 426-to-11 win in electoral votes, the
Republicans lost five seats in the House and one in the
Senate.
In 1992, despite victory in the first
Gulf War, the election turned out to be a referendum on
the economy, and voters expressed their concerns in a
stunning defeat of incumbent Bush by Democrat Bill
Clinton of Arkansas. The gradual erosion in Republican
party strength in Congress allowed the Democrats to
control both branches of government for the first time
in 12 years. Bush received only 38 percent of the
popular vote and 155 electoral votes. The Republicans
retained the same number of seats in the Senate and
gained nine seats in the House. It was under Clinton
that the concept of dollar hegemony took hold, allowing
a rising trade deficit to be financed by a capital
account surplus, making possible the notion that a
strong dollar is in the US national interest.
The 1994 mid-term elections brought an equally
dramatic reversal as the Republican party gained control
over both houses of Congress for the first time since
1954. Most congressional Republican candidates had
signed on to Representative Newt Gingrich's "Contract
with America", a list of conservative proposals that
shaped the congressional agenda under Republican
leadership in 1995. Both parties were focused primarily
on domestic affairs.
Except in 1964, Republican
presidential candidates since 1948 have taken most of
the votes cast in growing middle-class suburbs. Since
1952, Republican presidential candidates have repeatedly
captured at least three of the 11 former Confederate
states. Reagan's popularity among young voters was
reflected in a marked increase in Republican ranks after
1980. This trend changed with the election of Clinton, a
southern Democrat, who brought many young voters into
the Democratic party.
As with any political
coalition, the Republican party has had difficulty
finding issues that unite rather than divide its
followers. In 1968, Nixon succeeded with appeals to the
"silent majority" for "law and order." Despite some
success in presidential and congressional races since
1952, the Republican party remains a minority in search
of a majority. It was never successful in attempt to
include labor and minorities.
The Republican
party originally built its political majority on state
organizations in the northeast and midwest. The two
bases of power in these areas were New York and Ohio.
Twentieth-century GOP leaders have included Theodore
Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, Thomas E Dewey and
Nelson A Rockefeller, all noted liberal governors of New
York. Ohio produced five Republican presidents:
Rutherford B Hayes, James A Garfield, William McKinley,
William Howard Taft and Warren G Harding.
After
being reduced to minority status in the 1930s, the
Republican party controlled a small number of largely
rural states, such as Maine and Vermont in New England
and North Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska in the West. On
the local level, the strongest Republican organizations
have been in rural and suburban areas. The GOP generally
has been unable to elect mayors in the nation's big
cities, except liberal New York City and conservative
Los Angeles.
The backbone of the Republican
party was historically composed of eastern businessmen
and midwestern farmers. Big business was attracted by
the party's pro-business philosophy and farmers by
Lincoln's successful effort to preserve the Union.
Emancipation and congressional reconstruction also
brought black voters into the party. By 1896, the GOP
had a large following among industrial workers in the
nation's growing urban centers. During the 1930s,
Republicans lost their grip on urban industrial states
with the rise of labor unions whose loyalty remained
with the Democrats. The Rockefeller liberal Republicans
never captured the midwest because of the problematic
history of the Rockefeller oil monopoly in key states,
like conservative Ohio, liberal Minnesota and
progressive Wisconsin.
After World War II, the
Republican party found a new base of support in the
middle class suburbs that surrounded the country's
metropolitan areas. This has enabled the GOP to elect
governors and US senators in states such as New York,
Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.
As a
result of the Second Reconstruction, which began in the
1950s, the Republican party has made increasing headway
in the once solid south. Opposition to civil rights for
blacks led a number of southern whites to bolt to the
Democratic party, especially in presidential elections.
Although Democrats still win most state and local
elections in the south, Republicans have won a number of
statewide elections in Virginia, Tennessee, North
Carolina and Texas. The GOP has had less success in the
deep south, but in 1978, Mississippi elected its first
Republican senator since Reconstruction. However, even
with its new supporters in the south and increasing
electoral victories, the GOP remains a minority party,
trailing behind the Democratic party in its following
until Reagan.
Neo-conservatism, supported by its
bedfellow neo-liberalism, is opposed in current US
politics by libertarians as well as the radical left.
Charley Reese, syndicated paleo-libertarian conservative
columnist wrote on June 17 last year: "Where is George
Bush's conservatism? He's taken another massive step in
nationalizing the education system, he's busted the
budget, he shows unwavering loyalty to the
military-industrial complex, his foreign policy is
imperialistic, and he is expanding government at the
expense of liberty ... A conservative wishes to preserve
the prosperity and health of both the land and the
people, not squander them in unnecessary wars ... Nor
does American business support a free economy. What it
supports and what we have is mercantilism. In its
present form it retains its old core - a strong
centralized government that manages the economy, and a
standing army to protect corporate assets overseas. The
Taliban was overthrown not because it supported al-Qaeda
but because it opposed an oil pipeline from the Caspian
Sea fields." While some aspects of these views can be
better informed, the general thrust does represent
libertarian sentiments against neo-conservatism.
The neo-conservative movement began to take
shape long before September 11. Writing in the Wall
Street Journal on September 15, 1997, William Kristol
and David Brooks, editors of The Weekly Standard,
mouthpiece of US neo-conservatism, asked: "What Ails
Conservatism?" It began: "The era of big government may
be over, but a new era of conservative governance hasn't
yet begun. Why the delay? Why isn't a victorious
conservatism now reshaping the American political
landscape?
"A barrier to the success of today's
conservatism is ... today's conservatism. What's missing
from today's American conservatism is America. The left
has always blamed America first. Conservatives once
deplored this. They defended America. And when they
sought to improve America, they did so by recalling
Americans to their highest principles, and by calling
them forward to a grand destiny. What is missing from
today's conservatism is the appeal to American
greatness.
"American nationalism - the
nationalism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay and
Teddy Roosevelt - has never been European blood-and-soil
nationalism. It's true that in the absence of a real
appeal to national greatness, some conservatives are
tempted, a la Pat Buchanan, to turn to this European
tradition. But this can't and shouldn't work in America.
Our nationalism is that of an exceptional nation founded
on a universal principle, on what Lincoln called "an
abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times".
Our pride in settling the frontier, welcoming immigrants
and advancing the cause of freedom around the world is
related to our dedication to our principles.
"That's why American nationalism isn't narrow or
parochial. It doesn't believe in closing our borders or
fearing the global economy. It does believe in resisting
group rights and multiculturalism and other tendencies
that weaken our attachment to our common principles. It
embraces a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national
strength and moral assertiveness abroad.
"This
American understanding of greatness is friendly to
private property, prosperity and progress. And it isn't
unfriendly to government, properly understood. After
all, as Lincoln reminds us, it is 'through this free
government which we have enjoyed' that Americans have
secured 'an open field and a fair chance' for our
'understanding, enterprise, and intelligence'. Free
government - limited but energetic - is not the enemy.
It can be used, in the spirit of Henry Clay and Teddy
Roosevelt, to enhance competition and opportunity. In
sum, national-greatness conservatism does not despise
government."
Thus the foundation of the Age of
Holy War had been laid a good five years before
terrorism changed America on September 11. This Holy War
is based on US exceptionism, unilateralism and the
spread of American values. It is the American version of
the Augustian and Napoleonic empires, which unlike the
British empire that kept arms-length tolerance for local
culture, justified its imperialism on the spread of
superior universal values. Neo-conservatism rejects the
long tradition of American attachment to
multiculturalism. It also reverses America's tradition
of being apologetic for its power. Pushing beyond Teddy
Roosevelt's "manifest destiny" with "speak softly but
carry a big stick", the neo-cons advocate an American
missionary empire with loud shouting and hitting with a
big stick.
Lawrence F Kaplan, a senior editor at
the New Republic, and William Kristol, editor of the
Weekly Standard, co-authors of the forthcoming book,
The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's
Mission, described George W Bush, in the Wall Street
Journal on January 29, as "Neither a Realist Nor a
Liberal, W Is a Liberator" who holds a fundamentally
different world view from previous administrations. To
them, self-declared "realists" believe that foreign
policy should be grounded in vital interests - oil
wells, strategic chokepoints and most of all, regional
stability. They prefer order over liberty. It was in
Iraq that the first Bush team's realist foreign policy
philosophy manifested itself most clearly. Once Kuwait
was liberated, the senior Bush team redirected its
energies toward ensuring Iraqi "stability" - even if it
had to be enforced by Saddam.
Kaplan and Kristol
criticized Clinton's Iraq policy as reflecting very
different assumptions about America's role in the world,
a world view that reduced a complex and dangerous world
environment to a simple narrative of material progress
and moral improvement. According to the Clinton
administration's scorecard, it was not the integrity of
containment or even the value of keeping Saddam disarmed
that mattered. Far more important was the imperative of
avoiding war. As Henry Kissinger, the master of
realpolitik, said: "Peace, too, is a moral imperative."
Kaplan and Kristol see realists and liberals as
approaching the world from different directions, but
when it comes to Iraq, both ended up in the same place:
generating excuses for inaction. Bush, by contrast, does
not speak of merely containing or disarming Iraq. He
intends to liberate Iraq by force, and create democracy
in a land that for decades has known only dictatorship.
Moreover, he insists that these principles apply to
American foreign policy more broadly. A century of
fighting dictators has finally alerted US policy makers
to the fact that the character of regimes determines
their conduct abroad - their willingness to resort to
aggression, their determination to acquire weapons of
mass destruction, and their relationships with terrorist
groups.
The neo-con commentators concluded,
"Hence, the Bush strategy enshrines 'regime change' -
the insistence that when it comes to dealing with
tyrannical regimes like Iraq, Iran, and, yes, North
Korea, the US should seek transformation, not
coexistence, as a primary aim of US foreign policy. As
such, it commits the US to the task of maintaining and
enforcing a decent world order. Just as it was with the
Bush team's predecessors, Iraq will be the first major
test of this administration's strategy. It will not be
the last."
The last sentence lingers in the mind
of all the world's governments. Since September 11, Bush
has declared repeatedly, "If you are not with us, you
are against us." There is no co-existence, no neutrality
and no non-alignment. Be part of the American system or
be destroyed.
What if the new US task of
enforcing a new world order comes up against a power
with nuclear deterrent or other forms of weapons of mass
destruction? In this respect, the failure of other great
nuclear powers to intervene in the US invasion of Iraq,
to preserve the existing world order of nation states,
can be viewed as a new Munich that will lead to another
global conflict.
Anticipating World War IV,
Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary
Magazine, writing in February, 2002: How To Win World
War IV - the Cold War being World War III -
characterized the first Gulf War as "an act of military
and political coitus interruptus". Podhoretz observed
that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear
sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels that
there was a purpose behind his election all along: as a
born-again Christian, he believes he was chosen by God
to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world. The
president himself defined it from the start in very
broad terms. Our aim was not merely to capture or kill
Osama bin Laden and wipe out the al-Qaeda terrorists
under his direct leadership in Afghanistan. The
governments that gave terrorists help of any kind -
sanctuary, money, arms, diplomatic and logistical
support, training facilities - would either join us in
getting rid of them or would also be regarded as in a
state of war with the US. Bush was unequivocal. These
governments, he repeated over and over again, were
either with us in the war against terrorism, or they
were against us: there was to be no middle or neutral
ground.
In defining the war and the enemy in
such terms, the president, seconded by both major
political parties and a vast majority of the American
people, was acknowledging the rightness of those who had
been stubbornly insisting against the skeptical and the
craven alike that terrorism posed a serious threat and
that it could not be fought by the police and the
courts. Perhaps most important of all was the corollary
of such an analysis: that, with rare exceptions,
terrorists were not individual psychotics acting on
their own but agents of organizations that depended on
the sponsorship of various governments. Thus the war on
terrorism is essentially a war against hostile
governments. Bush, with about 90 percent of the people
and a nearly unanimous Congress behind him for a war
against terrorism, had more than enough political
support to act on his own, without permission from
anyone, or any other government.
But if the
coalition was unnecessary both from a political and from
a military point of view, and if the inclusion within it
of states harboring terrorists undermined and obfuscated
the moral clarity of the war we were determined to wage,
why did the administration devote so much energy to
assembling it?
Podhoretz's explanation is that
getting a minimal endorsement from as many predominantly
Muslim states as possible helped create the impression
that the war was not against Islam but against
terrorism. The aim is to begin a transformation of the
Middle East that could provide many benefits to the
populations of an unfree region. That will, in the end,
make Americans infinitely more secure at home.
Thus the failure of the oceans to protect the US
from external threat now compels the US to attack all
around the world who are not with it in its war on
terrorism. It is conceivable that the US can prevail
over all other national governments militarily, but it
is pure fantasy that the US can spread US-styled
democracy and freedom all over the world, even with a
new 100-year war. Or that true democracy and freedom
around the world would support US national interests. A
healthy dose of realism and multiculturalism will save
the world from impending self destruction by superpower
theocracy. Either way, it spells the end of the age of
superpower because military power, as demonstrated in
Afghanistan and Iraq, causes more problems than it
solves.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of
the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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