Intelligence by Mel Goodman,
Culture by Noy Thrupkaew,
Central Asia by Ahmed Rashid,
Middle East by Stephen Zunes,
Africa by Martha Honey
excerpts from the book
Power Trip
U.S. Unilateralism and Global
Strategy After September 11
edited by John Feffer
Seven Stories Press, 2003,
paper
Intelligence
by Mel Goodman
p96
Less than two weeks after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed a high-level military
and civilian commission to determine the causes of the intelligence
failure. Following the September attacks, however, President Bush,
CIA director George Tenet, and the chairmen of the Senate and
House intelligence committees were adamantly opposed to any investigation
or postmortem.
Culture
by Noy Thrupkaew
p106
The defense budget for 2003 will be close to $400 billion, an
increase of nearly 30 percent since 2000. The intelligence budget
will increase by 20 percent in 2003, climbing to more than $35
billion.
p109
Colin Powell
"I wanted one of the world's greatest
advertising experts, because what are we doing? We're selling.
We're selling a product. That product we are selling is democracy.
It's the free enterprise system, the American value system."
p111
CONTROLLING THE MESSAGE
According to New York's Sunday Tribune,
"Most television networks have. . . taken their orders directly
from the Pentagon" and enjoyed a good deal of access to military
installations as a result. Journalists, on the other hand, have
found themselves standing out in the cold. CBS anchor Dan Rather
told the New York Times, "Somebody's got to question whether
it's a good idea to limit independent reporting on the battlefield
and access of journalists to U.S. military personnel and then
conspire with Hollywood." The administration has maintained
a tight hold on military information, surprising even seasoned
spokespeople of other conflicts. Barry Zorthian, chief spokesman
for the American campaign in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, told the
New York Times that the flow of information in this conflict is
"much tighter than Vietnam."
Commentators and editorial writers who
disagreed with the administration came under fire. The Daily Courier
in Oregon sacked a columnist who criticized Bush for his less
than-rapid return to the capital following the attacks. The Texas
City Sun issued an apology for a column written by a city editor
entitled "Bush Failed to Lead the U.S." and fired the
editor. Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory's column criticizing
the president's action following the attacks drew more angry letters
from readers than any other column in her forty-year career.
Perhaps the most public blowout took place
after Bill Maher, host of the ABC-TV show Politically Incorrect,
said, 'We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from
two thousand miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane
when it hits the building, say what you want about it, is not
cowardly." Stations across the country dropped or suspended
Maher's show, even as Maher scrambled to apologize for his remarks.
At the White House, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer warned Americans
that "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.
This is not a time for remarks like that. There never is."
Although Politically Incorrect was canceled in May 2002, the network
insisted that Maher's comments about September 11 had nothing
to do with the decision. Maher had another take on the matter.
"To them, Politically Incorrect was just, ooh, a cool title,"
he said of the network. "I don't think they really got it,
that I really was politically incorrect."
Even more politically incorrect was the
Pentagon's short-lived Office of Strategic Information. In February
2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced the closing
of the Pentagon's controversial office only seven days after allegations
surfaced that the office's mandate may have included purposefully
deceiving foreign media and running covert operations characterized
by one Pentagon official as the "blackest of black programs."
Rumsfeld vehemently denied that the office had ever been involved
in spreading misinformation, or would have done so. "I guess
notwithstanding the fact that much of the thrust of the criticism
and the cartoons and the editorial has been off the mark,"
Rumsfeld said in a February 2002 news briefing, "the office
has clearly been so damaged that...it's pretty clear to me that
it could not function effectively."
Despite Rumsfeld's protestations to the
contrary, shortly before the United States launched its bombing
initiative in Afghanistan, an unidentified military officer told
the Washington Post, "This is the most information-intensive
war you can imagine.... We're going to lie about things."
And when the New York Times inquired about closed-door meetings
Charlotte Beers was holding for foreign journalists, the State
Department's Deputy Director of Media Price Floyd explained, 'We
can't give out our propaganda to our own people."
Central Asia
by Ahmed Rashid
p119
THE NEW "GREAT GAME"
The U.S. military presence in Central
Asia will certainly prove to be a turning point in the history
of the region. In the initial weeks after September 11, the United
States and its European allies quickly signed treaties with Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan to lease military bases and use of
their air space for the military campaign in Afghanistan This
is the first time that the United States has placed its military
forces in such close proximity to the borders of Russia and China,
both of which consider Central Asia as part of their sphere of
influence. So far Russia and China have gone along with Washington's
aims, but as the war in Afghanistan winds down, nationalists and
hard-liners in both countries are expressing their resentment
toward and apprehension about a long-term U.S. presence in a region.
p123
For many Central Asian people the key question is not the issue
of big power rivalry, but whether the United States will use its
presence and newfound influence to urge the regimes to carry out
desperately needed political and economic reforms or merely take
advantage of their strategic assets. So far the signs are not
hopeful. Building on the Clinton administration's Central Asian
Border Security Initiative, which funneled millions of dollars
to the five states for counterinsurgency, Washington has tripled
military and economic aid to Uzbekistan ($50 million to $173 million)
and substantially increased assistance to Tajikistan (to $125
million) for the year 2002. Instead of conditioning that aid on
a timetable for economic and political reforms, the United States
has publicly lectured the leaders about improving living conditions
for their people and sought mere verbal assurance of reform from
the regimes. With the encouragement of the United States, other
major donors such as the World Bank and the European Bank for
Reconstruction and Development have jumped on the bandwagon, lending
money with few stipulations.
Middle East
by Stephen Zunes
p128
DEMONIZING IRAN
Recent political trends in Iran-such as
the 1997 election of the moderate Islamist Mohamed Khatami as
president, sweeps by other moderates in parliamentary elections
the following year, and Khatami's landslide reelection in 2001-should
have pleased U.S. policy makers. Still the United States has refused
to reestablish diplomatic relations severed since 1979 with this,
the largest country in the Middle East. Despite the dramatic if
uneven steps toward liberalization in Iran, various U.S. sanctions
and other anti-Iranian measures were stricter at the end of Clinton's
term than during the regime's most repressive and extremist period
in the mid-1980s.
Nevertheless, after a toning down of anti-Iranian
rhetoric in the waning months of the Clinton administration, there
was some hope that the new Bush administration might be willing
to pursue less hostile relations than its Democratic predecessor.
However, in his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush linked the
increasingly pluralistic Iran with the totalitarian regimes of
Iraq and North Korea as part of an "axis of evil," a
serious blow to Iranian moderates who had been fighting for greater
political openness and better relations with the West. U.S. policy,
in offending nationalist sentiments, has enhanced the credibility
of the very hard-line elements Washington purports to fear. Liberal
elements within Iran have rebuffed recent statements of support
from the Bush administration, recognizing that such backing actually
hurts their cause. In addition, despite the long-standing hostility
of the Iranian regime to the Taliban and their decision to turn
over al-Qaeda suspects to Saudi Arabia, the Bush administration
has charged that Iran is harboring al-Qacda suspects, without,
however, releasing any evidence to support this highly unlikely
claim.
While elements of the Iranian intelligence
community continue to support extremist groups outside the country,
repression is ongoing within the country, and many Iranian democrats
remain skeptical of the Islamist reformers in government, few
Iranian pro-democracy activists find current U.S. policy helpful
to their cause.
p132
PRESSURING PALESTINE
Ariel Sharon, the far-right-wing general
implicated in a series of war crimes against Palestinian civilians,
was elected prime minister just weeks after President Bush assumed
office in 2001. Sharon played a key role in precipitating the
outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000 when, as talks
between Israel and Palestine broke down at Camp David, he made
a provocative trip to a religious site claimed by both Jews and
Muslims in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. On taking office,
Sharon refused to reenter peace negotiations with the Palestinians,
and the repression in the occupied territories increased dramatically.
Despite State Department and CIA analyses
criticizing Sharon's ongoing provocations and overreactions, Bush
has focused almost exclusively on Palestinian terrorism as the
cause of the crisis, using the same basic rhetoric as Sharon.
Under Bush, Defense Department officials have unprecedented clout
in the formulation of U.S. policy toward the conflict, which had
previously been largely under the purview of the State Department.
As a result, hard-line Pentagon officials who view the conflict
strictly in security terms-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and Undersecretary
of Defense Douglas Feith-have marginalized the more pragmatic
conservatives, such as Secretary of
State Colin Powell, who see the conflict
more in political terms. Feith and Wolfowitz have long been on
record opposing the peace process and have advocated continued
Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These hawkish
voices have been augmented significantly by a coalition of Democrats
and right-wing Republicans in Congress who also support an expansionist
Israel and oppose Israeli moderates calling for an end to Israeli
occupation of Palestinian lands in exchange for security guarantees.
The struggle in the occupied territories, in the eyes of the Bush
administration and both parties in Congress, is not a matter of
the military occupation of one country by another, but the suppression
of terrorism. Without U.S. pressure, the Israelis have refused
to lift their siege of Palestinian towns and cities or end the
border closures. Not surprisingly, the violence has continued.
At the multilateral level, the United
States has blocked the UN from authorizing a multinational peacekeeping
force, human rights monitors, or even an inspection team to investigate
an alleged massacre by Israeli occupation forces at a Palestinian
refugee camp. The United States scuttled a series of proposed
UN resolutions by European nations by threatening to veto anything
that used the term "siege" to refer to Israeli occupation
forces surrounding and shelling Palestinian towns, or that mentioned
Israel's illegal settlements, the Geneva Conventions, international
law, or the principle of land-for-peace. In December 2001, the
United States vetoed a UN Security Council resolution strongly
condemning Palestinian terrorism because it also criticized Israeli
policies of assassinating Palestinian dissidents and imposing
collective punishment on civilian populations. In December 2002,
the United States vetoed a measure criticizing Israel's slaying
of UN humanitarian workers and the destruction of a food warehouse
belonging to a UN development agency. In each of these cases,
the United States was the only dissenter within the fifteen-member
world body.
p134
BUILDING REAL SECURITY
... there is increasing evidence that
some leading segments of Saudi society, including members of the
Saudi royal family, support terrorism. Much of the financing for
al-Qaeda comes from this U.S. ally, and fifteen of the nineteen
hijackers were Saudi citizens. Instead of targeting Saudi Arabia,
however, the war on terrorism has included countries with no apparent
links to al-Qaeda, such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Similarly,
the Bush administration ) continues to support a fundamentalist
and authoritarian; regime in Saudi Arabia while refusing to support
the Palestinians' right to statehood until they create a democratic
political system based upon "tolerance and liberty".
The Saudi regime's close ties to American oil interests ;have
made it difficult for successive administrations to challenge
the country's repressive theocratic rule and ties to Islamic extremists.
p136
Top Arms Recipients
in the Middle East: 1998-2001
Country
US Deliveries (billions)
Total Receipts (billions)
Saudi Arabia
$12.8
$29.3
Israel
$3.8
$4.8
Egypt
$3.1
$3.5
Kuwait
$1.5
$2.4
p137
The United States became the target of terrorists not because
of the country's freedom and democracy, as President Bush claims,
but because U.S. Middle East policy has had nothing to do with
freedom and democracy. A policy based more on support for democracy,
international law, arms control, and sustainable development will
make American interests far safer than the current policy based
on punitive sanctions, invasion, arms exports, and support for
repression and economic policies that primarily benefit wealthy
elites. The shift to the right in U.S. Middle East policy actually
began when the Clinton administration came to office. However,
the events of September 11, 2001, made it politically possible
for the United States to move in an even more extreme direction.
Most prominent Democrats in Congress, including traditional skeptics
of U.S. foreign policy, were supportive of this rightward drift
during the Clinton administration out of party loyalty and have
remained largely supportive of Bush's Middle East policy as well
out of fear of being labeled "soft on terrorism." It
is very unlikely, then, that there will be a shift in U.S. Middle
East policy unless a popular movement develops within the United
States to force such a change.
Africa
by Martha Honey
p144
OIL AND SECURITY
One year after the September 11 attacks,
the lead story in the New York Times proclaimed that "Africa,
the neglected stepchild of American diplomacy, is rising in strategic
importance to Washington policy makers, and one word sums up the
reason: oil." In early 2002, the newly created African Oil
Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG), composed of congressional members,
administration officials, industry executives, consultants, and
investors, drew up a blueprint for U.S. energy and mineral resource
interests in Africa. As House Subcommittee on Africa chair Ed
Royce (R-CA) explained, "African oil should be treated as
a priority for U.S. national security post 9-11, and I think that
post 9-11 it's occurred to all of us that our traditional sources
of oil are not as secure as we once thought they were."
U.S. imports of crude oil from West Africa-Nigeria,
Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon-equal 15 percent of total imports
and are set to rise to 25 percent by 2015, according to the National
Intelligence Council. In his 2001 National Energy Policy Report,
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney projected that the area would
be "one of the fastest-growing sources of oil and gas for
the American market." Expansion plans include reopening the
U.S. consulate in Equatorial Guinea, where off-shore reserves
have been recently discovered, a new embassy in oil-rich Angola,
construction of a pipeline linking southern Chad to Atlantic ports,
increased military exchanges with West African countries, and
a possible new U.S. naval base on Sao Tome and Principe, a tiny,
two-island nation strategically located in the Atlantic oil-bearing
basin of the Gulf of Guinea.
With civil war and unrest in Colombia
and Venezuela, upheavals in the Middle East and war looming with
Iraq, Africa was playing "an increasingly important role
in our energy security," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham
told the House International Relations Committee in June 2002.
Shortly afterward, Secretary of State Powell was dispatched to
visit Gabon, Sao Tome, and Angola, oil-rich countries that rarely,
if ever, have been visited by a high-level U.S. official. Powell
avoided Nigeria, the most important African oil supplier to the
United States, where popular resistance continues to grow against
oil companies in the Niger Delta region. Quietly, however, the
Bush administration has increased its military ties to Nigeria,
while pressuring it to pull out of the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC), the quota and price-setting cartel.
As one oil industry official explained, "There is a long-term
strategy from the U.S. government to weaken OPEC's hold on the
market and one way to do that is to peel off certain countries."
By summer 2002, Bush's Africa policy was characterized as "build
the military and extract the oil."
While most current military training programs
predate September 11, the United States has sought to strengthen
relations with African police, military, and security forces in
a bid to identify Islamic radicals and secure access to oil resources.
At present, nearly every sub-Saharan country receives International
Military Education and Training (IMET) funding. U.S. Special Forces,
through the African Crisis Response Initiative started in 1997,
have trained eight thousand troops from Senegal, Ghana, Mali,
and other countries.
p148
DIFFERING U.S. AND AFRICAN AGENDAS
A growing discomfort with U.S. unilateralism
has increased anti-American sentiment across the continent and
prompted calls for UN rather than U.S. leadership in the war on
terrorism. Within just two weeks of the September 2001 attacks,
Egyptian President Mubarak warned that Washington's "cure
should not be more bitter than the illness." Terrorism is
far from the most critical problem confronting the continent.
Poverty, AIDS, protracted violent conflicts between countries,
debt burdens, and the breakdown of states have all ranked higher
on the agendas of African leaders and regional organizations.
As Salih Booker, director of the U.S.-based policy organization
Africa Action, wrote, "Whether measured by numbers killed
or nations wounded, by economies upended or families crushed,
the AIDS pandemic is a deadlier global threat than that posed
by terrorist groups.... The war on AIDS is more important than
the war on terrorism." Yet, after September 11, the J U.S.
government began to look at Africa almost exclusively through
the lenses of terrorism and oil.
When the Bush administration took office,
it signaled that Africa would remain a low priority, economically
and strategically. During the Cold War, the U.S. foreign aid and
alliances in Africa were largely aimed at checking Soviet and
Chinese influence. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration proclaimed
that free market prescriptions-trade, not aid; export-led growth;
and structural adjustment policies- would define its relations
with Africa. But less U.S. foreign direct investment goes to Africa
than any other world region-less than one percent of the total
in 2001 - and over half of that goes to the oil industry. And
Clinton's much-touted trade access bill, the Africa Growth and
Opportunity Act (AGOA), helped increase African exports (mainly
textiles) to the United States for a handful of countries, including
Mauritius, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Kenya.
The Bush administration continues to press
African economies to privatize, open up to foreign capital, develop
"good governance" practices, and uphold agreements to
end conflicts in the Congo and elsewhere. At the same time, the
administration has modestly increased development assistance,
while favoring neoliberal proteges such as Mozambique, South Africa,
and Nigeria. U.S. contributions still lag far behind Europe, and
by mid-2002, the $700 million that the United States had committed
for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative had yet to
be disbursed. Most of the Bush administration's $2.2 billion in
total aid to Africa for 2003 was not appropriated by Congress.
Meanwhile, the United States provided
only a modest contribution of $200 million to the UN Global AIDS
Fund, which estimates its needs at $7 to $10 billion.
By the time Americans commemorated the
first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, African support and
goodwill, as symbolized in the gift of cattle, had largely vanished.
The Bush administration's unilateralist policies combined with
its aggressive and narrow obsession with security and oil in Africa
have increasingly alienated many Africans. In September 2002,
Africa's most respected statesman, Nelson Mandela, charged in
uncharacteristically bitter language that "the attitude of
the United States is a threat to world peace." Mandela, who
had supported the U.S. war in Afghanistan, lashed out at Bush
officials for pursuing war in Iraq. He went a step further, charging
that in the eyes of many, U.S. actions-from not paying compensation
to Africans killed or injured in the two embassy bombings, to
snubbing the world summits on racism and sustainable development
(both held in South Africa), to showing contempt for UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan-contain "that element": racism. This
racism, which also underlies U.S. designs on African oil, the
prioritizing of counterterrorism over tackling poverty and AIDS,
and the militarizing of the continent, has distorted Washington's
perception of what truly matters to Africa and Africans.
Power Trip