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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The Bush administration conquers
Washington By John Brown
As I write, on a cloudy Washington
afternoon, my "Bush's Last Day Countdown Keychain"
tells me there are 433 days, 11 hours, 50 minutes
and 41.3 seconds left before our 43rd president
leaves office. Like other citizens concerned about
the fate of the republic, I wonder what the George
W Bush legacy will be.
Many commentators
have written about how the domestic politics of
this administration have left the United States
more divided than
ever; or perhaps the
unsettled illegal immigration issue is what Bush
will be most remembered for - with an unfinished
barrier across the US-Mexican border as the main
monument to his eight years in office.
To
some concerned with foreign affairs, the Bush era
will be remembered most for the acceleration of
America's putative march to empire. Advocates of
such a view highlight the exorbitant sums the US
has sunk into its land bases in the Middle East
and Afghanistan, its massive sea power, and its
all-volunteer professional army; the inordinately
expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter
being evidence that the US is engaged in a
ruthless effort to control the world's oil
resources); the threats of possible military
action against Iran (interpreted as a desire to
control the Middle East in collaboration with
Israel); the growing tensions with Russia, as well
as the urge to maintain and expand its foothold in
former Soviet areas in Eastern Europe and Central
Asia (seen as a reflection of America's
determination to remain the global hegemon); the
increasing frictions with China (proof that the US
will not tolerate a competitor in Asia); the
constant disagreements with the Europeans (a
reminder on our part that we - not they - are the
boss).
Indeed, there is little doubt that
the military, economic and cultural impact of the
United States continues to be enormous. Calling
this global footprint "imperial" is certainly
tempting. But for a nation to be an empire, its
leaders must have a plan or vision for how to deal
with the rest of the world - as, arguably,
Theodore Roosevelt and his entourage did with
their "large policy" for American overseas
dominance. Some historians cite these schemes as
the beginning of an American-style empire that led
to "the American century", a period that now seems
so long ago and so far away. (Are we not now, in
fact, living in the Anti-American Century?)
Bush and visions of empire The
immense (but declining) global power of the United
States notwithstanding, the conceptual baggage
required to engage in truly imperial ambitions has
simply not been a part of the Bush
administration's mindset. This remains so despite
its assembly-line-style production of countless
"national security" reports on a vast range of
global security matters - committee-written,
unreadable documents marked by a total lack of
intellectual coherence or clear direction. These
can, if anything, be seen as a collective
"cover-up" for the administration's obvious lack
of thought beyond the here-and-now.
To be
sure, no imperial plan is ever perfectly framed or
implemented (as Roosevelt himself realized), but
the Bush administration's version of such now
appears to have been remarkably without rhyme or
reason - on, in fact, an automatic pilot, driven
by a self-aggrandizing Pentagon budgetary process
and "priorities" strikingly determined by shifting
domestic politics (what Congressional district or
crony corporation had put in the best, or most
influential, bid for a base, military-style
activity, or war-production plant).
True,
our generals remain engaged in the
fearsome-sounding "war on terror" by order of the
White House - but this has proven a helter-skelter
example of global confusion, regularly renamed by
an administration clueless about what its "war"
really is.
Put another way, the Bush
administration was never able to define, shape, or
direct in an "imperial" fashion the powerful
forces, negative and positive, stemming from
various segments of American society that do so
much to determine the destiny of our planet. (This
may have been inevitable, given the contentious
nature of American democracy.)
As for the
once-dynamic duo who characterized much of this
administration - Vice President Dick Cheney and
secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld (and those
clustered around their "offices") - the only
"empire" that really counted for them was the
parochial world of Washington, DC, with its
lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians and assorted
supporting think-tankers, all absorbed in their
petty turf-wars about who among them would get
government money for their minions and projects,
overseas or at home.
This was the
narcissistic province that the vice president and
secretary of defense had the urge to dominate with
their "unitary executive", "wartime"
commander-in-chief presidency and the foreign wars
that made it all possible. Developments outside
the US, however, mattered largely to the extent
that they helped in the aggrandizement of their
own power, their fiefdoms, and those of their
cronies, on the banks of the Potomac.
The president and his diplomats
To make some sense of all this, let's
start at the top. With his utter lack of
experience in foreign affairs and complete lack of
curiosity about the outside world (with the
possible exception of Mexico), Bush was incapable
of having a global vision himself, imperial or
otherwise. In the words of commentator William
Pfaff, "Bush is happy deciding, even though he
knows nothing."
The president's major
foreign-policy decision - to invade Iraq - was
certainly not based on any understanding of the
global implications of what he was doing
(including, conceivably, expanding an empire). It
was taken for reasons that still remain unclear,
but may have ranged from his tortuous relationship
with his father to his desire to portray himself
as a decisive commander-in-chief to the American
electorate. Perhaps, to use his words, the former
cheerleader frat boy just wanted to "kick ass"
overseas to show the media, voters and possibly
even himself that he was doing something other
than sitting in the Oval Office preaching the
virtues of compassionate conservatism.
Kicking ass - playing cowboys and Indians
with the world, as little boys once did on
playroom floors or in backyards - has remarkably
little to do, however, with anything that might
once have been defined as imperial planning or the
knowledge necessary to implement such plans.
For example, a year after his "axis of
evil" State of the Union address, when informed by
Iraqi exiles that there were both Sunnis and
Shi'ites in their country, "emperor" Bush
allegedly responded that he thought "the Iraqis
were Muslims". (No way, after all, that you can
tell those Indian tribes apart!) And what better
summarizes Bush's preparation for putative empire
building than the following nugget from the 2000
presidential campaign season, as related by Elaine
Sciolino of the New York Times:
When a writer for Glamour Magazine
recently uttered the word "Taliban" - the regime
in Afghanistan that follows an extreme and
repressive version of Islamic law - during a
verbal Rorschach test, Mr Bush could only shake
his head in silence. It was only after the
writer gave him a hint ("repression of women in
Afghanistan") that Mr Bush replied, "Oh. I
thought you said some band. The Taliban in
Afghanistan! Absolutely.
Repressive."
Given the tabula
rasa in Bush's mind regarding the world
outside "the homeland" (a word his administration
has regrettably contributed to the American
language), it is hardly surprising that he
selected as his main foreign policy advisers two
people with very limited global visions of their
own: Condoleezza Rice as national security advisor
and, as secretary of state, Colin Powell. (Rice
herself admitted in 2000 that as a "Europeanist,
I've been pressed to understand parts of the world
that have not been part of my scope"; and Powell's
qualifications were based on his military savvy -
and loyalty - not his geopolitical perspectives.
The general, as Bill Keller of the New York Times
reported in 2001, was "a problem solver, not a
visionary".
As became clear after the
horror of September 11, 2001 - a foreign policy
failure of the first order, if ever there was one,
that
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