DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Bush's faith and the Middle East
aflame By Tom Engelhardt
So, as the world spins on a dime, where
exactly are we?
As a man who is no fan of
fundamentalists of any sort, let me offer a
proposition that might make some modest sense of
our reeling planet. Consider the possibility that
the most fundamental belief, perhaps in all of
history, but specifically in these last
catastrophic years, seems to be in the efficacy of
force - and the more of it the merrier. That deep
belief in force above all else is perhaps the
monotheism of monotheisms, a faith remarkably
accepting of adherents of any other imaginable
faith - or of no other faith at all. Like many
fundamentalist faiths, it is also resistant to
drawing any reasonable lessons from actual
experience on this planet.
The Bush
administration came to power as a fundamentalist
regime; and here I'm not
referring to the Christian fundamentalist faith of
the US president. After all, White House aide Karl
Rove, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice
President Dick Cheney seem not to be Christian
fundamentalists any more than were Paul Wolfowitz
or Douglas Feith. President George W Bush's top
officials may not have agreed among themselves on
whether End Time would arrive, or even on the
domestic social issues of most concern to the
Christian religious right in the US, but they were
all linked by a singular belief in the efficacy of
force.
In fact, they believed themselves
uniquely in possession of an ability to project
force in ways no other power on the planet or in
history ever could. While hardly elevating the
actual military leadership of the country (whom
they were eager to sideline), they raised the
all-volunteer US military itself on to a pedestal
and worshipped it as the highest tech, most
shock-and-awesome institution around. They were
dazzled by the fact that it was armed with the
smartest, most planet-spanning, most destructive
set of weapons imaginable and backed by an
unparalleled military-industrial complex as well
as a "defense" budget that would knock anyone's
socks off (and their communications systems down).
It was enough to dazzle the administration's top
officials with dreams of global domination; to
fill them with a vision of a planetwide Pax
Americana; to send them off to the moon (which, by
the way, was certainly militarizable).
Force, then, was their idol and they bowed
down before it. When it came to the loosing of
that force (and the forces at their command), they
were nothing short of fervent utopians and blind
believers. They were convinced that with such
force (and forces), they could reshape the world
in just about any way they wanted to fit their
visionary desires.
And then, of course,
came the attacks of September 11, 2001, the "Pearl
Harbor" of this century. Suddenly, they had a
divine wind at their back, a terrified populace
before them ready to be led, and everything they
believed in seemed just so ... well, possible. It
was, in faith-based terms, a godsend. Not
surprisingly, they promptly began to prepare to
act in the stead of an imperially angry god and to
bring the world - particularly its energy
heartlands - to heel.
First, however,
because they had long been People of the Word,
they created their sacred texts, their doctrine.
In the form of "preventive war" and keeping other
potential superpowers or blocs of powers from ever
rising up to challenge the United States, they
enshrined force at the apex of their pantheon of
deities in their National Security Strategy of
2002. (The term "preventive war" was in itself
reasonably unique. Usually even the most
aggressive dictators don't label their planned
wars with terms that creep right up to the edge of
"aggressive" and then promote them that way to the
world.) At the same time, Bush began speaking out
about the need not to wait until the threat of
destruction was upon us, as in his 2002 State of
the Union Address where he said: "We'll be
deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will
not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will
not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer.
The United States of America will not permit the
world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with
the world's most destructive weapons."
Soon enough, his advisers began raising
Iraqi mushroom clouds over US cities and
describing fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles
that might spray those cities with chemical or
biological weapons to make an already scared
populace and cowed Congress into believers as
well. This was, of course, in the period when
their longtime supporters and a supportive corps
of pundits, radio talk-show hosts, and
communicators of various sorts were speaking
proudly, even boastfully, about the United States
as the sole "hyperpower" on the planet or the
globe's New Rome; when even a liberal Canadian
commentator, Michael Ignatieff, could publish a
piece in the New York Times Magazine extolling
George Bush's US as "a new invention in the annals
of political science, an empire lite, a global
hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human
rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome
military power the world has ever known." He wrote
as well of the necessity of Americans shouldering
the "burden of empire" in Iraq. (Historically,
there's only one such "burden", by the way - and
it's Rudyard Kipling's 19th-century "white man's
burden".)
Those, of course, were the good
times when "neo-conservatism" (partially a
shorthand term for this religious bent, for the
love of "the most awesome military power the world
has ever known") was truly ascendant. That term
was also shorthand for an imperial mission to be
shouldered by officials convinced that America's
empire should stand tall, alone, and on one leg -
the leg of "force".
In any case, having
enshrined "preventive war" at the heart of the
Bush Doctrine, they went in search of some place
to loose it on the world, some place that might
look militarily strong enough and heinous enough,
but would be weak enough to make a point fast.
They needed a roguish country, preferably run by a
nasty dictator, preferably smack in the oil
heartlands of the globe, that could be taken down
quickly as a demonstration of that "awesome
military power", a place that could be
shock-and-awed into instant submission. It would
be both a cakewalk and a case in point for the
rest of the region about what a group of
determined fundamentalists might do to anyone who
opposed their religion and their wishes.
Well, we know the place; we know how they
first shock-and-awed Congress and the American
people into an invasion; and we all remember how
they put their plan into practice - with a
confidence and lack of planning for any
alternative possibilities or realities that was
typical of true believers. And so, on March 20,
2003, they loosed their cruise-missile-styled
lightning bolts on Baghdad, because they knew one
thing - that the force was with them and that,
because the United States was the military
superpower of all superpowers in all of history,
it was theirs alone ...
Stock and Awe:
The force of an anxious market Now, let's
jump a few familiar years ahead on our
fast-spinning, wobbly globe and see if we can land
on the present moment, July 16, 2006. In the
process, let's also take a little spin through our
"empire lite", that vaunted New Rome, that Pax
Americana as it's developed since the Bush
administration decided to "take the gloves off",
and apply its power fully and brutally from Iraq
to Guantanamo. In fact, let's do a fly-by of what
the neo-cons' once called "the arc of instability"
three years later:
In Afghanistan, as an
American Broadcasting Co network news journalist
touring US bases reported the other night,
American officers are begging for more troops.
(The Brits, just taking over in the south, are
already desperately sending them in.) This is a
response to the "eradicated" Taliban unexpectedly
ramping up their force levels; narco-warlords
growing ever more entrenched; the security
situation in the capital, Kabul, and elsewhere
deteriorating; and US bombing runs (including the
use of B-52s) increasing. Force has truly become
the arbiter of Afghanistan's terrible fate.
The situation has, in fact, deteriorated
so rapidly in the Bush administration's model
"nation-building" project that Rumsfeld, on a
quick dash through sunny Tajikistan last week,
suggested that bad news, looked at in another
light, might actually be splendid tidings.
According to David S Cloud of the New York Times,
"Mr Rumsfeld acknowledged that the number of
Taliban attacks may be up this year. But he said
the increasingly brazen tactics had made it easier
for American, Afghan and NATO [North Atlantic
Treaty Organization] forces to find them. 'Every
time they come together,' he said, 'they get hit
and they get hurt. So the fact that we see a
somewhat different method of operation during this
period is correct, but it has not necessarily been
disadvantageous because the more that are in one
place, the easier they are to attack.'"
For a while, back in 2003-04, when things
began to go sour in Iraq, various neo-cons
suggested that the country might providentially
prove to be a kind of global "flypaper" drawing
all the terrorists to one spot for what, in
near-biblical terms, would prove to be a
terrorist-zapping Armageddon. The theory was
quietly dropped into the dustbin of history when
only its first half proved accurate; but here it
is back with us again in devolving Afghanistan and
on the lips of the US secretary of defense because
... well, the idea of overwhelming force solving
all problems just feels so good and sounds so
right to a believer when things are going so
wrong.
In the former flypaper-land of
Iraq, the Bush administration's application of
full-frontal force has, by now, released every
two-bit sectarian thug, death-squad killer,
jihadist fanatic, and angry rebel on to the
streets of the capital, Baghdad - where perhaps a
fifth or more of the country's population lives -
armed to the teeth and ready to maim, mutilate,
torture, and kill. Not surprisingly, overwhelming,
shock-and-awe force has released a nightmare of
counterforce there that has shoved every other,
more peaceable possible way of doing or thinking
about anything into the shade and on to the
sidelines (if not simply into the morgue).
In the wake of the killing of Abu Musad
al-Zarqawi, a potential turning-of-the-tide
moment, according to Bush, the Iraqi capital, in
particular, has been drenched in a high tide of
blood; and, despite all the talk about possible
"draw-downs" of US troops, General George W Casey
Jr has just called for yet more American soldiers
to be sent into the lawless, uncontrollable
capital. At the same time, in America's fantasy
Iraq, a single, relatively quiet southern province
bordering Saudi Arabia has just been officially
"turned over" to the charge of Iraqi security
forces and the act declared a "milestone" by Casey
and US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. (When any
American official even mutters "milestone", or
"tidal change", or "turning point" in relation to
Iraq, watch out!)
In fact, Iraqis seem to
be paying ever less attention to US commands,
demands and orders - and no wonder, since over the
past four years every attempt to impose the US
administration's will on Iraq purely by force of
arms and in an imperial manner has failed dismally
- and to this dismal failure there is neither an
end in sight, nor an imaginable bottoming-out
tidal moment.
Meanwhile, as no one could
have missed by now, the Mediterranean edge of the
Middle East is teetering at the edge of full-scale
war, behind which lurks the threat of an even
wider regional war of some previously almost
unimaginable sort. There, too, the recourse to
arms has overwhelmed any other possible option.
Hamas guerrillas broke into Israel, killed two
soldiers and captured another. They certainly must
have had a sense of what the Israeli reaction to
such a raid might be; but for the sake of
argument, let's say they didn't.
In the
meantime, at the Lebanese border with Israel, the
guerrillas of the Hezbollah movement watched the
Israelis mercilessly take out a power plant,
government offices, and various other
infrastructural targets in Gaza, while killing
civilians and hammering urban areas as a
"response" to the capture of their soldier.
Hezbollah then launched their own incursion into
Israel, killing several soldiers and capturing two
more. With the example of Gaza in front of them,
they had to know just exactly what the Olmert
government would do to the civilian infrastructure
of Lebanon itself - and clearly it made no
difference.
As for the Israelis, at this
point they visibly feel free of all outside
restraint or constraint, given the Bush
administration, and so can bomb, blockade and
attack almost at will - and, with their eyes on
Syria and Iran, are threatening to widen this war
yet further, setting the region ablaze. As in the
slums of Baghdad, so too in Gaza, Lebanon, and
possibly elsewhere, the urge is to settle historic
grudges via shock-and-awe tactics. And yet, as
Rami Khouri has written recently, the Israelis are
"in the bizarre position of repeating policies
that have consistently failed for the past 40
years". The last time this happened, the Israelis
made it all the way to Beirut and ended up stuck
in Lebanon for 18 years before withdrawing
ignominiously. In the process, they helped midwife
the Hezbollah movement and give it luster, a
reputation, and strength.
We seem today to
be headed into Lebanon redux in a region where the
principle of force has been set loose to trump all
else. On all sides, fundamentalists in the
religion of force are thundering threats and
imprecations, while issuing sets of impossible
demands. In the typical words of Hezbollah leader
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah (whose home and office had
just been wiped out by Israeli missiles): "You
wanted an open war, and we are heading for an open
war ... We are ready for it ... The surprises that
I have promised you will start now." And, of
course, as in Gaza, where random Palestinian
civilians suffer and die under Israeli attack, so
in Israel random civilians are wounded or die
under a barrage of Hezbollah rockets; so, in
Lebanon, helpless civilians die in homes, on
highways, wherever, under a rain of Israeli bombs
and missiles.
And all this is happening
without either Iran, the third member of George
Bush's axis of evil, or Syria, the unspoken fourth
member (like an unindicted co-conspirator), have
truly entered the fray (except, possibly, by proxy
through their stand-ins in Gaza and Lebanon). Yet
Iran is already offering up increasingly
bloodcurdling threats. Emboldened by the US
disaster in Iraq, its fundamentalist leaders, too,
seem in a rush to threaten force and more force.
Now, just try to imagine a US attack on
suspected Iranian nuclear facilities - something
that journalist Seymour Hersh, in a recent New
Yorker piece, reports a "senior military official"
claiming Rumsfeld and his "senior aides" still
"really think they can do ... on the cheap, and
they underestimate the capability of the [Iranian]
adversary". In a similar fashion, the Iranian
leadership undoubtedly underestimates its
bogged-down US adversary. It's the nature of such
a faith to overestimate your own ability to use
force and underestimate the capabilities of your
opponents.
If Bush and his top officials
arrived on the Iraqi scene believing that the
force was with them and only them, the past
three-plus years have offered (if not taught) a
rather different lesson. After all, they now find
themselves in a roiling crowd of medium-sized and
smaller states, stateless movements, and extremist
grouplets, all passionately devoted to the same
principle of force as them. The fundamentalist
belief in force, once let loose in this fashion -
once (you might say) modeled by the globe's
reigning hyperpower - turns out to be a distinctly
pagan faith. From the streets of Gaza to the slums
of Baghdad, from the mountains of Afghanistan to
Beirut International Airport and the halls of the
Pentagon, this is a religion open to one and all,
ready to embrace many contradictory gods into its
pantheon.
And here's the irony. The
hyperpower that loosed this singular round of
force on our world seems strangely sidelined,
while others move boldly to apply its most
essential principles profligately, every one of
them emboldened both by the US example and by its
dismal failure. Talk about Pandora's box (without
Hope anywhere in sight)!
What force has
done, thanks to the Bush administration's utopian
foolishness, is to tie the region's many competing
groups, movements and states into an
ever-tightening, Gordian-style knot - and that
knot, in turn, has been ever more tightly hitched
to the global economy, so that every tug on any
loose end now sends oil prices up another
disastrous notch and trembling stock markets into
convulsions. (Call it stock-and-awe!)
Just
last Friday, the Dow Jones completed a three-day,
400-point shuddering drop, while oil, not so long
ago hovering in the vicinity of US$30 for a barrel
of crude, managed to hit a staggering $78.40 a
barrel by the end of last week - and remember,
this was just based on "nerves", not on more oil
supplies actually going off the market, as would
certainly happen, one way or another, in a
widening conflict in the region.
In fact,
the oil heartlands of the planet look to be
heading for further rounds of violence and turmoil
and, potentially, the US and global economies with
them - and the only tool imaginable to anybody is
still: force.
The Bush administration had
no wish for other tools - that was the meaning,
after all, of "unilateralism" - and so now it has
no other tools in its "arsenal". It lost most of
its allies while in its unilateral dream-state.
Focusing all its attention on the Pentagon and on
military-to-military relations globally, it also
lost whatever modest capacity might have been
available to it not just to head down another
path, but to deploy the most basic tools of
diplomacy. What it has left is, of course, force;
but its own on-the-ground forces are dangerously
depleted and it's evidently no longer obvious to
top administration officials exactly where US
force (and forces) should be applied (much as they
may loathe the Iranians and Syrians).
They
launched a force party in the Middle East. Now
it's in full swing; the club's piled high with
dancers; many of the exits are bolted shut; the
bouncers are no longer at the front door; and,
onstage, the performers are brandishing
blowtorches, while the Earth's last hyperpower and
its hypercommander-in-chief are watching,
helplessly, from the sidelines. As Dan Froomkin,
the fine Washington Post online columnist, pointed
out in a column headlined "Bush the bystander",
"stopping off in Germany on his way to the G8
[Group of Eight] summit in Russia", as the Middle
East caught fire, "Bush reserved his greatest
enthusiasm for tonight's pig roast - technically,
a wild-boar barbecue - bringing it up three times.
'I'm looking forward to that pig tonight,' he
gushed."
Conceptually, what else could he
do but offer his support to the Israelis (with but
polite demurrals about "restraint" from his
secretary of state)? After all, what are the
Israelis doing but fighting their own hopeless
"war on terrorism" US-style?
As journalist
Warren Strobel summed up the regional situation:
"Virtually every president faces a plethora of
global crises, sometimes simultaneously. What's
new is that the United States' ability to
influence events has shrunk, largely because US
troops and treasure remain mired in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and the Iraq war has diminished
foreign confidence in American leadership,
according to foreign-policy experts and some US
officials." Former Israeli cabinet minister Yossi
Beilin made a similar point to Haaretz: "The
worsening conflict in the Middle East is a blatant
reflection of the weakness of the American
partner."
Everywhere the Bush
administration is being less attended to.
Everywhere, others are sharpening their knives,
loading their weapons, and preparing to smite
their enemies, inspired by the US example,
liberated by its failure.
Hair-trigger
world Oh, and while I've been mentioning
the international face of the two-faced religion
of force, I've forgotten to mention how it's been
playing out at home.
After all, in the
Bush years the Pentagon and the military have been
fully elevated to the role of first providers (of
everything) - a role for which they are visibly
unprepared. Nation-building and diplomacy have
largely become military, not State Department,
matters, as has intelligence-gathering of every
sort. For the first time, a permanent, peacetime
North American Command (Northcom) has been
established for the continental US, while the
military, not the civil government, is now to be
the initial, and possibly main, responder in
situations ranging from disastrous hurricanes to a
potential avian-flu pandemic.
But for
overwhelming force to be effective at home or
abroad, it must be, in the minds of
fundamentalists like, say, America's gray and
secretive vice president, or his own eminence
grise, David Addington, not to speak of eager
force-hounds like "torture memo" author John Yoo
or former general counsel for the Pentagon William
J Haynes II, now up for for a federal appeals
court judgeship, applied in a timely fashion and
effectively. Democracy, officially to be spread to
the world, turns out to be such a messy
contraption in "time of war" at home. If you're a
believer, then you don't want anything, certainly
not congressional oversight or an informed public,
to get in the way of that necessary, firm, and
preventive application of force in a time of
crisis - and what time isn't?
Of course,
what you really need to concentrate force
effectively elsewhere - consider this to be the
unwritten part of the Bush Doctrine - is a
concentration of power at home in a single figure,
not the president (a peacetime title describing a
fettered office), but the president as
"commander-in-chief" - a military man, freed in
"wartime" of all those nasty checks and balances,
and so able to act decisively in any way necessary
to make force utterly effective, whether in a
distant, recalcitrant foreign land or in a nearby
prison.
That summarizes, of course, the
now-infamous unitary executive theory of
government, a creative form of not-exactly-strict
constructionism, which in essence was aimed at
reinventing the US constitution (like the wheel),
neutering Congress and sidelining the American
people in favor of ... a single commander-in-chief
preserving democracy for the rest of us as he sees
fit - in essence, when you come right down to it,
an autocrat or king. And we know how America's
present commander-in-chief saw fit. In fact, he -
they - came so very close, even managing to get
two new justices on the Supreme Court who were,
above all else, believers in the most extreme
theory of the presidency ever proposed.
But as in Iraq, force, or the domestic
equivalent - the "preventive" politics of fear,
manipulation, lies and secrecy - proved not quite
enough, and so at home, as abroad, the president's
foes in Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the
courts and elsewhere, watching the opinion polls,
noting his faltering performance, absorbing the
sinkhole quality of Iraq, sensing that the current
administration was losing its forcefulness, began
pushing back or paying less attention. In turn, as
with the recent Supreme Court decision on
detainees at Guantanamo (or the National Security
Agency surveillance issue), the administration has
been slowly giving way, twisting and squirming,
parsing words and pretzeling meanings as it
retreats.
If your religion is force, then
showing weakness, not smiting your foes, only
encourages the look of a woebegone
commander-in-chief presidency. In that light, the
recent Hamdan vs Rumsfeld decision of the
US Supreme Court was but another blow to the
president's unfettered self.
And yet old
faiths, and the habits that go with them, die
hard. When the Hamdan decision came down, Bush's
reaction was an interesting (if hardly noted) one.
He immediately said: "We will seriously look at
the findings, obviously, and one thing I am not
going to do, though, is that I am not going to
jeopardize the safety of the American people." The
findings? Was he under the impression that a
Supreme Court decision was like the "findings" of
a presidentially appointed commission, like the
9-11 Commission, offering advice to the president
to be seriously looked at and considered?
Then again, that was just his first
reaction. With time and further thought, here's
what he said about the decision at a news
conference in Chicago last week: "I am willing,"
he assured the assembled journalists and the
American public, "to abide by the ruling of the
Supreme Court." He was now willing to abide ...
hmmm. If that wasn't the imperial
commander-in-chief of the United States hanging in
there, I don't know what would be. He added: "They
didn't [say] we couldn't have done - made that
decision, see. They were silent on whether or not
Guantanamo - whether or not we should have used
Guantanamo. In other words, they accepted the use
of Guantanamo, the decision I made." Aha ...
And, of course, the acolytes of his
fundamentalist faith haven't exactly gone away
either. Last week, for instance, the Senate
Judiciary Committee heard testimony from Steven
Bradbury, head of the Justice Department's office
of legal counsel. Vermont's Democratic Senator
Patrick Leahy asked him about the president's
claim that the court's Hamdan decision "upheld his
position on Guantanamo".
Leahy: Was
the president right or was he wrong?
Bradbury: It's under the law of war ...
Leahy: Was the president right or was
he wrong? Bradbury: The president is
always right.
The president's record in
the Middle East and elsewhere tells us otherwise,
of course. From Pyongyang to Tehran, Baghdad to
Gaza and Tel Aviv, smaller powers - or simply
parties, militias or mass movements - are going
their own way, considering their own narrow
interests, and exploring just how far force can
take them, while ignoring the words of the Bush
administration. In this sense, they learned their
new religious catechism well: if you can't impose
it on me by force of arms, then to hell with you.
So here we are, armed to the teeth in a
hair-trigger world with a bevy of angry states
happy to declare their own unilateral "wars on
terror" and pursue their own armed solutions.
They've all got the fervor and the faith. As for
the rest of us, who knows what we're sliding into
or how in the world to put on the brakes?
Out of the last Israeli invasion and
occupation of Lebanon came the fundamentalist
extremism of both Hezbollah and Ariel Sharon. Who
knows what will come from this round of the same -
certainly, nothing good as long as force is the
only ruling deity in our world.
Oh, and
there's one fundamentalist character I've left out
of the mix, someone who definitely bows down to
force. Call everything that's happened these last
few years Osama's dream. It's hard not to think of
William Butler Yeats' poem "The Second Coming",
and then wonder: "And what rough beast, its hour
come 'round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to
be born?"
Tom Engelhardt is
editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback.
