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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The
Bush administration conquers
Washington By John Brown
no
"empire" in its right mind would have allowed -
Rice and Powell essentially became talking-point
briefers on day-to-day events they had not
foreseen and did not control.
Compare them
to Henry Kissinger, who held each of their
positions at some point in his White House career.
A cynical maneuverer who may not have been to
everyone's liking, he nonetheless worked in the
realm of global strategy. In the way he
attempted to play off the
Soviet Union against China in relation to the
Vietnam War, he was an imperial planner of the
first order (if not always with the greatest
success). Contrast his meaty books on Metternich
and on nuclear weapons to the sole tome that Rice
authored by herself - a bland monograph on the
relationship between the Soviet Union and the
Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983, excoriated by the
scholarly American Historical Review in 1985. What
her sad little historical "study" demonstrated, if
anything at all, was that Rice was, from scratch,
anything but a geopolitician of Soviet - or any
other - affairs.
Had Rice and Powell been
capable of a global imperial vision - or even of
grasping essential global cause and effect - they
doubtless would have advised their president that
his much-desired Mesopotamian (mis)adventure was
bound to be a bloody, costly imperial mess. With
certain down-to-earth military smarts, Powell may
have sensed this, but evidently he lacked the
nerve (or was it intellectual inclination?) to ask
the simple questions at White House meetings that
would have been the key to any imperial
decision-making process: "Why exactly are we doing
this?" "Is it really in our interests to invade a
Third-World country thousands of miles from our
shores?" Or, put another way: "How does this
invasion preserve or expand the American empire"?
All the president's men: Cheney and
Rumsfeld According to some commentators,
when it came to the American ascendancy abroad,
the real powers behind (or in) the White House
were Cheney and Rumsfeld, who had been
collaborators ever since the distant Ford
administration. Some argue that they - and their
neo-con poodle and second-in-command at the
Defense Department, Paul Wolfowitz, as well
assorted neo-cons once linked to the Likud party
in Israel and the Christian right in the US - were
the true framers of a Bush empire.
To be
sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project
for the New American Century and no doubt had
ideas - or perhaps simply fantasies masquerading
as ideas - about a more aggressive use of American
military strength throughout the world. Cheney's
former position as chief executive officer of
Halliburton and his connections with large
corporations certainly made him the prime imperial
candidate for considering global energy flows and
eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field just waiting to
be seized, one more country with must-have natural
resources for the American imperium.
Even
if the duo were eager indeed to expand US
influence and resources overseas, as veterans of
countless Washington partisan and personal
battles, what really got their aged blood flowing
was the sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway
world of Washington, DC. Rumsfeld's utter
inability to focus on post-invasion planning in
Iraq was in itself strong evidence that what
happened there ("events" which he so often simply
made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq - or
success in that country - was indeed important but
mainly to the extent that it heightened his
profile as a monster player in Washington.
For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the
imperial capital, not the empire itself that
really mattered. There, "war" would mean the
loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency
unchecked by Congress, courts, anything - which
meant power in the only world that mattered to
them. War in the provinces was their ticket to
renewed prominence within DC's self-absorbed
biosphere, a kind of lost space station far
removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they
had longstanding, unfinished accounts - both
personal and political - to settle.
"Foreign policy," in other words, was an
excuse for war in a far-off country that 63% of
American youth between the ages of 18 and 24 could
not, according to a National Geographic survey,
find on a map of the Middle East. That, in turn,
would make both the vice president and secretary
of defense (for a while) little Caesars in the
only place that mattered, Washington, DC.
If Saddam and assorted terrorists were
enemies, they weren't the ones who really
mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on
the banks of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld
were, above all, targeting those symbols of
American internationalism that they had grown to
despise in their previous Washington stays - the
State Department and the Central Intelligence
Agency - perhaps because those organizations, at
their best, aspired to see how the world looked at
the United States, and not just how the United
States could dismiss the world.
Just as
Bush "kicked ass" in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld
used Iraq to "kick ass" among the striped-pants
weenies at Foggy Bottom and the eggheads in the
intelligence community. (Consider Cheney's
treatment of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who
questioned the validity of the administration's
claim about Saddam's search for uranium yellowcake
in Niger in the late 1990s.)
In toppling
Iraq, the "imperial" aim of Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, their foreign policy "experts" and their
acolytes was to raise the flag of their own power
high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and
humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession
interested in the outside world for itself, those
willing to consider how it related to actual US
national interests, not fantasy ones, and who
therefore dared to question the goals and
intentions of the dynamic duo.
To see how
Washington-centered this cast of characters
actually was, just recall the secretary of
defense's self-glorifying press conferences in his
post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting
comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by,
among others, aging neo-con Midge Decter in a
swooning biography, was the king of the heap and
visibly loving every second of it.
Front-page headlines in the imperial
capital were what counted, never the reality of
Iraq - any more than it did when Bush strutted
that aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up
for his "mission accomplished" moment, launching
(against a picturesque backdrop of sailors and
war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the
butt of the imperial joke, as was - for a while -
the rest of the outside world.
Political
theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush
foreign-policy moment perfectly. The US, he wrote,
made "foreign policy to indulge a host of domestic
concerns and self-celebratory varieties of
hide-bound insularity. The United States remains a
hegemonic global superpower sporting the narrow
outlook of mini-states like Monaco and
Lichtenstein."
In the end, the Bush
administration is likely to be remembered not for
a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism,
an inability to perceive a world beyond the
Washington of Cheney and Rumsfeld, beyond Bush's
national security "homeland". That may be the
president's ultimate legacy.
John
Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who
resigned from the State Department over the
planned war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily Public
Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, available free by
requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com.
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