Roadmaps to Nowhere
excerpted from the book
Rogue State
America at War with the World
by T. D. Allman
Nation Books, 2004, paper
p253
All wars, to one extent or another, are exercises in mass hallucination.
Why, otherwise, would perfectly normal people gather together
in large groups and walk into cannon fire? Crowds of people firing
off guns, dropping bombs, and shooting off artillery shells (that
is to say, armies) are very dangerous, but nowhere near as dangerous
as an out-of-control political elite in the grip of a shared delusion.
World War I was a catastrophe of elitist
decision-making; it remains history's bloodiest war. One of its
astonishing features is that the folly of starting it was at least
partially visible to those who unleashed it. People ranging from
the German Emperor Wilhelm II to British Foreign Secretary Sir
Edward Grey, sensed they were acting insanely. Yet swept along
by the delusion that unleashing a general war in Europe was the
unavoidable course of action, Europe's rulers chose self-destruction.
Within five years the czar was dead, the kaiser in exile, and
the
p281
As George W. Bush peevishly strode toward his defining moment
beside the Euphrates, Tony Blair's United Kingdom followed along,
wagging its tail all the way to Iraq. In the neocon schema of
US hegemony, allies do not play a policymaking role; they serve
a policy-implementation function. The Brits started calling their
prime minister "America's poodle" when it became clear
that, so far as Blair was concerned, his master's voice emanated
from the White House.
p284
British prime ministers love toadying to American presidents,
imagining it gives them "influence." This illusion goes
back to Winston Churchill and his groveling "Former Naval
Person" messages to Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR and all subsequent
presidents have let British prime ministers sleep over in the
White House-and then gone on to do exactly whatever they please.
Every British prime minister dreads being abandoned by the Americans.
Every American president knows full well that the Brits will always
tag along, even into the mouth of hell, and if they don't, who
cares? In its capacity as dominant ally, there are no limits on
the demands the United States is entitled to make. The "special
relationship" involves no reciprocal privileges for the British,
however.
p290
Unlike the United States, Britain has no written constitution.
Its various spy organizations, including those in charge of domestic
snooping, are less stringently regulated than the CIA and FBI.
This allows British prime ministers to help out American presidents
in ways that under US law could be construed as criminal offenses.
p291
Not until Tony Blair formed his own very "special relationship"
with George W. Bush, however, was it clear how truly supine a
British prime minister could be.
In the course of his ineffectual pandering
to George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war, Blair demeaned
himself, lost the respect of his own people, and incurred the
contempt of the rest of the world. Then, afterward, as the wicked
web which he had woven tightened around him, the British prime
minister shifted his fire away from Saddam Hussein. He started
lashing out against the one remaining British institution which
still commands universal respect now that the royal family's sexcapades
have so diminished their stature in the eyes of the world. Blair
attacked the BBC.
The tragic events in Iraq that followed
the invasion had not ruffled Tony Blair's aura of utter certitude,
but crisis gripped 10 Downing Street when the British Broadcasting
Corporation reported in June 2003 that the Blair's allegations
about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction had
been "sexed up." Prime Minister Blair and his director
of spin, Alastair Campbell, professed themselves shocked-shocked!-that
an organization of such repute had indulged in such a lewd lapse
from propriety.
"Sexed up" was too genteel a
euphemism for what actually had been done to the truth, but it
was enough to set Blair and Campbell off on a ferocious vendetta.
Before they were finished trying to settle scores with the truth-tellers,
the BBC correspondent who broke the story, Andrew Gilligan, was
hauled before a Foreign Affairs Select Committee and the BBC itself
was excoriated in an official report. Blair, via the Hutton report,
managed to make it seem that the BBC, not he and his government,
had foisted a false impression on the British public.
Neither then nor later was there any doubt
about the truthfulness of the BBC report, which was that the Blair
government had recklessly spread unfounded (and, as it turned
out, false) allegations concerning the military dangers posed
by Saddam Hussein.
p302
Anyone seeking to understand why world events have unfolded as
they have during the presidency of George W. Bush must consider
the mystery of why Tony Blair-the leader of a significant nation
possessing the material qualifications for sovereignty -chose,
at the exact historical moment when Britain might have actually
exerted some influence for good in the world, to act like a camp
follower. Before he attached himself to Bush, Blair appeared to
be an authentically independent leader with a role of his own
to play in the world. Blair's toadying to the Americans disappointed
many in Britain. It was an even greater disappointment to those
Americans who imagined the prime minister would help contain George
W. Bush's excesses. But Blair's behavior came as no surprise to
the Europeans, especially, of course, to the French. From their
perspective, Blair was simply doing what the English have been
doing since the Hundred Years' War: keeping Europe divided.
A generation ago, Charles de Gaulle vetoed
Britain's entry into the Common Market. England wasn't ready to
be a part of Europe, he said; maybe it never would be. De Gaulle
predicted that someday there would come into existence a united
Europe stretching from "the Atlantic to the Urals."
This was a conception that could, but did not necessarily, exclude
Britain, and which definitely foresaw the collapse of Communism,
and Russia's loss of its Caucasian and Central Asian dependencies.
De Gaulle's doubts about England proved to be prescient.
Over the decades, the veneer of England
has changed. You can drink Beaujolais nouveau in Birmingham, and
find fresh ducks' breasts for sale in Hungersford. But if there
had been any doubt about England-or at least its governing elite,
including Tony Blair's "New Labor"-retaining a profoundly
hostile attitude toward the possibility of becoming European,
Blair's behavior proved that Perfidious England remains the inveterate
enemy of a united Europe.
The mystery here is that Blair, by dividing
Europe instead of working to keep it united, threw away a historic
chance to exalt his own, and Britain's, role in the emerging power
arrangements of the twenty-first century. George W. Bush's unilateralist
foreign policy, especially his disdain for America's European
allies, give the European Union-which is supposed to have a shared
foreign policy-the chance to act like an emerging independent
power. More than a chance, it was an opportunity. No previous
challenge had united the people of Europe more than George W.
Bush's scheme to invade Iraq. It wasn't just in France or Germany.
In Britain itself there was overwhelming popular opposition to
the Iraqi invasion.
The British are skeptical of the euro.
They don't like the bureaucrats in Brussels, but by a two-to-one
ratio they agreed with the Italians, the Spanish, the Germans,
the French, and virtually all the Europeans who believed that
this time, Europe must check American arrogance and impetuousness
with a constructive policy of its own. Forging a united European
alternative to Bush's Iraq war was a kind of Europeanism the majority
of the British public could have supported.
This unanimity of public opinion gave
European leaders the opportunity for the first time to provide
an independent, friendly alternative to an American policy they
and the people who had elected them did not support. What makes
his rejection of those possibilities truly odd is that these very
same circumstances also gave Tony Blair, who favors closer integration
into European Union, including British adoption of the euro as
its currency, a tremendous chance to further his own European
objectives. In the process, he could have done more than simply
advance his own agenda at the expense of the opposition Tories
and "Euroskeptics." He could have raised British influence
to new heights in both the United States and in Europe. Instead
Blair wound up demeaning his and Britain's status on both sides
of the Atlantic.
p306
Tony Blair himself seems unlikely ever to explain this failure
of moral vision and political nerve. Yet one explanation for his
behavior that fits the facts of the mystery is that when you scratch
Tony Blair's telegenic "Cool Britannia" persona, all
you really find underneath is that old English fear that the jungle
begins at Calais. And if the Yanks won't save us from all those
garlicky foreigners, who will? Blair has said as much a number
of times while attempting to justify his policy of dependence
on the United States to domestic audiences in the United Kingdom.
The following is from his speech to his annual party conference
in October 2003.
"Britain should be in there,"
Blair said, speaking of his support for the US invasion of Iraq,
"not because we are America's poodle, but because dealing
with it will make Britain safer." He continued: "It's
not so much American unilateralism I fear. It's isolation. It's
walking away when we need America there engaged."
p307
And when the courtier's dream of power is rebuked by reality?
There always remains the option of denial. "On weapons of
mass destruction, we know that the regime has them, and we know
that, as the regime collapses, we will be led to them," Tony
Blair insisted in April 2003, even as invading US and British
forces failed to find any weapons of mass destruction. Even after
the facts were verified, Blair continued telling interviewers,
"We have already found two trailers, both of which we believe
were used for the production of biological weapons."
After nine months of fruitless searching,
Blair remained in denial. On December 16, 2003, Blair made the
following statement in an interview with the Arabic service of
the BBC: "INTERVIEWER: Forgive me to ask you, are you still
confident that they may be found? PRIME MINISTER: I am confident
that the Iraqi Survey Group, when it does its work, will find
what has happened to those weapons, because that he had them,
there is absolutely no doubt at all."
Beneath the absurdity, as always, lay
the guile of the spin. Consider the following quote. It comes
from Tony Blair's official website: "There is no doubt about
the chemical program, the biological program, indeed the nuclear
weapons program. All that is well documented by the United Nations.
Now, our priority, having got rid of Saddam, is to rebuild the
country. So the focus at the moment is on the humanitarian and
the political reconstruction of the country. The threat from weapons
of mass destruction, obviously with Saddam out, is not immediate
any more."
In the end there is not really a contradiction.
The Tony Blair with the clever, professional wife, who helped
gentrify Islington in North London, who vacations in Tuscany and
Aquitaine, who is at his best both classy and classless is exactly
the self-same Tony Blair who, the moment George W. Bush decides
he's going to invade Iraq, is also just another spineless Brit
politician who snaps to attention whenever America snaps its fingers.
p310
Rumsfeld made his "old Europe" remark in Prague, showcase
of the new Europe. A reporter asked him about "European opposition"
to the Iraq invasion plan, and Rumsfeld seized the moment.
"You're thinking of Europe as Germany
and France," Rumsfeld rejoined. "I don't. I think that's
'old Europe." He then laid out the administration's strategic
vision for Europe: "If you look at the entire NATO Europe
today, the center of gravity is shifting to the east. And there
are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all
the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in
recently-what is it, twenty-six, something like that?"
Continuing on in his signature stream-of-consciousness
manner, Rumsfeld then made the comment that more than any other
made the rupture between George W. Bush's America and Europe irreparable.
"Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem,"
Rumsfeld said. Then he added: "You look at vast numbers of
other countries in Europe. They're not with - France and Germany;
they're with the United States."
After Rumsfeld left, Cohn Powell rushed
around Europe with his diplomatic mop and pail, but it was Rumsfeld,
not the secretary of state, who had defined George W. Bush's Europe
policy, which was to exploit Europe's divisions, not help heal
them.
p311
There truly is an "old Europe" that, until Rumsfeld
stuck his verbal wedge in there, had been coexisting, more or
less amicably, with the new Europe that began to emerge after
the fall of the Berlin wall. The old Europe had started, in the
1950s, as a bloc of nations that steadily dismantled the trade
barriers dividing them. Free trade was only a first step toward
fulfilling the dream of a united Europe extending far beyond the
original Six (France, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries),
as the founding members of the common market were called. By the
time Rumsfeld made his comment, the grouping had renamed itself
the European Union. It also had expanded to include fifteen countries
stretching from Finland to Portugal, and from Ireland to Greece.
Even at that size, it remained mostly a rich man's club. But by
the time George W. Bush started taking his "for-us-or-against-us"
approach to the world, the balance of power and also the way things
are done in Europe, had started to shift.
Over the next few years, at least ten
more nations will join the European Union. NATO also will greatly
expand. The new members of both organizations will include such
countries as Romania, Cyprus, Lithuania, and Malta. The days when
"Europe" was a stroll down the Champs-Elysee, or a performance
of Verdi at La Scala, or a scenic Rhine cruise, are gone. Poor
people are pouring into rich countries. Polish farmers now want
subsidies French farmers fear losing. The euro and the unified
European market have made some things (computers, VCRs) cheaper,
while making many other things more expensive than ever. Europe
is becoming more like America in ways some Europeans, especially
in "old Europe," are not sure they want. Meanwhile,
many of the new members, especially those in Eastern Europe, are
less interested in European unity than they are in using membership
in the European Union (as well as NATO) to maximize their independence-an
opportunity the George W. Bush administration would most adroitly
exploit.
The motor and soul of "old Europe"
(which is still very much in business) is the fusion of French
and German interests. The two countries coordinate their domestic
as well as foreign policies. On some occasions, when the chancellor
of Germany cannot attend an important conference, the president
of France speaks for both countries, or the other way around.
Two nations that three times in less than 100 years drenched Europe
in blood today live in peaceful symbiosis. This deep friendship
between the two old enemies truly is a special relationship. Particularly
in the United States, where it is scarcely noticed all, the French-German
fusion is one of least appreciated as well as one of the most
noble international accomplishments of the post-World War II era.
Acting as one gives France and Germany
stupendous power within Europe. They will remain very important
whatever form new Europe takes, but in the "old Europe"
almost nothing could be done without French-German support. This
was a European fact of life that small countries, and even large
ones like Italy, Spain, and Britain, had no choice but to accept.
But what about the new Europe? With so many new members piling
on board, will the French and Germans still control the tiller,
even when they want to pilot Europe on a different course from
the United States?
Arrogance and self-importance are far
from being alien traits in either France or Germany. The truth
is, if you aren't French or German, or happy to let them take
the lead on practically everything, this admirable French-German
amity can be a pain in the neck. To put it another way, the European
"Union" is still much more an expression of principle
than it is a reality. Everything it does (especially when the
French and Germans make it happen) is done over the opposition,
and incurs the resentment of at least some of its members. At
least one of those members Britain, whether under Blair or Thatcher-is
almost always looking for an excuse to gum up the works. If it
weren't for the traditional European commitment to policy-making
by consensus, respect for opposing views, and civility in deliberation,
wedge-issue politics might have torn Europe apart long ago.
p321
... George W. Bush, having sent his fellow Americans to their
deaths, shirks their funerals. There are no photos of him next
to a coffin with an American flag on it in the newspapers or on
TV. An Internet search reveals how successfully the White House
media management folks have been in visually detaching George
W. Bush from the American deaths his war is producing. An image
search elicits the following message: "Your search-'Bush
coffin flag'-did not match any documents." The search "Bush
flag" produces 502 hits, the majority showing him patriotically
backed by immense American flags while he salutes or holds his
hand over his heart.
p322
In the end George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing"
was a motley assembly, which is the way the neocon radicals like
it. The problem for them with organizations like the UN and NATO
is not that allies sometimes oppose us. The problem is that allies
are allies. The pundits' laments that the US-induced splits on
the Security Council and within the European Union are "mistakes"
which now need to be corrected miss the point. The success of
the whole strategy behind "coalitions of the willing"
depends on creating division. Only division can provide the United
States with the utter freedom of action that is the real strategic
goal of the George W. Bush foreign policy.
Go back and look again at Wolfowitz's
list of "Countries Eligible to Compete for Contracts Funded
With US Appropriated Funds for Iraq Reconstruction." You
are looking at wedge-issue politics in the process of assuming
geopolitical form. This unilateral detachment of US war-making
from traditional alliances operates in two directions. The absence
of many of America's traditional treaty allies from Wolfowitz's
list means that the United States no longer has to waste its time
reasoning with them. It is finally liberated from "constructive
contribution" and is free to do exactly what it wants.
Replacing treaty alliances and collective
security with "coalitions of the willing" provides other
advantages, including the illusion, useful in the 2004 election
year, that "coalition" forces are taking the causalities
in Iraq, night after night. It also serves the deeper purpose
of helping to prevent regional alternatives to US hegemony from
emerging in reaction to American unilateralism. France, Germany,
and Russia may have stood up to America, but notice on Wolfowitz's
list how Spain, Italy, Ukraine, and, of course, Britain compensate
for the loss of those countries' support. Thanks to Iraq, it will
be a long time before Europe has a unified foreign policy of its
own.
In this strange new world disorder, in
which US freedom of action, and nothing else, is the great strategic
goal for which wars are provoked and Americans are sent off to
die, the relationship of allies to the United States comes to
mirror the postindustrial relationship of American workers to
the corporations which employ them.
Think of "old Europe" nations
like France and Germany as experienced executives and unionized
workers. Following the hostile takeover of America, Inc., after
the 2000 elections, the new management doesn't want to pay the
costs, and above all it is uninterested in maintaining the kind
of social benefits necessary to keep France on the management
team and Germany loyal and productive. It fact it wouldn't mind
getting rid of them altogether.
Though the new board of directors still
has a few distinguished holdovers from an earlier, more collegial
era in executive management, it is dominated by asset-strippers
and greenmailers, who have decided the time has come to show who's
in charge now. It's time for some union-bashing or, in this case,
some Euro-UN bashing. It works! France resigns and Germany takes
early retirement. Now we can hire all those undocumented workers
who never talk back, go on strike, or ask us to honor a contract
(treaty).
In this new schema of neocon unilateralist
US force projection, America's own cross-cultural fighting force-the
multihued members of those racially, ethnically, and sexually
integrated military units you see dying every night on TV-are
like temp workers. In fact that is exactly what the National Guardsmen
suffering most in Iraq are in relation to America's professional
armed forces: temps you hire when you don't want to expose top-grade
employees to industrial accidents.
Temps-National Guardsmen-don't have expensive
pension rights. If they do manage to get home alive and uninjured
from Iraq (or anywhere else George W. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld,
and Wolfowitz decide to send them), you don't have to pay, promote,
educate, or house them. You just dump them back onto the local
labor market.
Getting rid of traditional allies serves
a similar purpose. Since, in the end, all the United States really
wants now is to prevent any other power from being able to block,
or even disagree with whatever it decides to do, it no longer
really wants traditional allies anymore. On a shifting basis,
though, it does need "platforms" for projecting US power,
and "local hires" to man them. It's also nice to hire
troops from low-income countries to soak up the kind of casualties
Americans don't like to take. This is precisely what Secretary
Rumsfeld proposed doing with India and several other nations,
but they proved to have too exalted an idea of their sovereignty
to accept such a deal.
p328
In ... Gulf war [II] the great victor was media manipulation.
Even when it was proven beyond a doubt that Saddam Hussein's weapons
of mass destruction had never existed, the fact that the war had
been fought for a lie no longer seemed consequential.
"What difference does it make?"
answered George W. Bush, in a Christmas interview after the capture
of Saddam Hussein, when it was pointed out to him that no weapons
of mass destruction had been found.
p346
George W. Bush seemed safely on the road to electoral oblivion
before 9/11. Objectively, the security lapses that day still provide
the greatest grounds for his transformation an from accidental
president into an ex-president. But subjectively? The upwelling
of patriotism and love for America and its institutions, including
the presidency, gave George W. Bush a second chance. He used it,
at home, to fight the reforms that might make America less vulnerable
to future attack, and to accelerate his program of expanding government
for the benefit of the rich. As a result his popularity again
eroded, but the Iraq invasion once again revived his fortunes.
When the folly of that adventure started to become apparent, Saddam
came to the rescue.
The timing of Saddam's capture was not
ideal for George W. Bush. It would have been better for it to
have come closer to the 2004 presidential election-though Osama
bin Laden is still out there, and thus potentially of great utility.
p347
Whatever the spin, the key to winning is going to be more and
more money, stupendous amounts of money. Victory will also involve
waving flags and creating division, but whatever it takes, this
time he intends to win.
p355
"Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever
he deems it necessary," a junior Illinois congressman named
Abraham Lincoln protested, "and you allow him to make war
at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power."
p358
In his farewell address ... president ... Dwight Eisenhower ...
reflected upon how much and how fast the United States had changed.
He talked to his countrymen about how that change had created
a new kind of danger. "Until the latest of our world conflicts,"
Eisenhower recalled, referring to the American participation in
World War II, "the United States had no armaments industry.
American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required,
make swords as well." But World War II, the Korean War, and
especially the Cold War had changed that. The United States, Eisenhower
went on to note, now had "a permanent armaments industry
of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men
and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We
annually spend on military security more than the net income of
all United States corporations," the outgoing president reminded
his countrymen.
As Eisenhower now emphasized, for the
first time in its history the United States had an economy-and
therefore a society and a politics-in which war, notably the development
and production of increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction
provided the livelihood for millions of people on a permanent
basis. "This conjunction of an immense military establishment
and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,"
he said. "The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-
felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal
government."
Then Eisenhower sounded the warning that
would give his 1961 farewell address, like Adams's July 4 speech
in 1821, a permanent place in the American debate about the interrelationship
of liberty and force. "In the councils of government,"
Eisenhower urged, "we must guard against the acquisition
of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex! (One hundred forty years after Adams issued his warning,
Eisenhower perceived that, thanks to the creation of a permanent
American war machine, the dangers Adams foresaw were becoming
reality. His warning about this was quite explicit.), The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes." Then Eisenhower, in his
own fashion, reminded Americans that the price of liberty is eternal
vigilance: "We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert
and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the
huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful
methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
p361
... America's liberties, Eisenhower's farewell speech made clear,
were now threatened by a whole political as well as economic class
of Americans who had never seen war, never served in a war, but
who now prospered by insuring that even in peacetime, the United
States spent more and more on "defense" whoever was
President-whether or not any external threat to the country existed.
p362
Where most Americans perceive a triumph of liberty, others have
always seen a much darker history beneath the endless rhetoric
-a long, unfolding pageant of American usurpation in which the
selfish use of power is robed in hypocrisy and outright lies.
... Writing a century later, [ HL] Mencken pointed out that Americans
had acquired their country by "butchering innocent savages
and swindling them out of their land," then built it up by
the sweat of kidnapped Africans and indentured laborers. Wars
of conquest had completed "the extension of the area of freedom"
which genocide and slavery had begun. "The Mexican and Spanish
Wars I pass over as perhaps too obscenely ungallant to be discussed
at all," he wrote. Mencken went on to quote President Ulysses
S. Grant's comment on the Mexican War: "It was the most unjust
war ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."
As Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam war adviser,
Walt Whitman Rostow would put it, in more temperate tones, there
was "a double bar-sinister which cut across the fabric of
American life"-the twin original sins of the "African
slave trade" and the "decimation of the Indian."
Throughout their history, Americans have preferred to ignore that
history. Blinding themselves with the shining glory of their own
supposed goodness has been one of the most effective ways of doing
it.
Equating power with good, so long as it
is American power, has had an additional benefit for Americans:
Besides helping them to avoid any recognition of their own defects,
it automatically makes those who resist us "evil." So
just as by extending slavery Americans "extended the area
of freedom," they also didn't kill Indians or steal land
from Mexico. Instead, Americans conquered "the frontier."
As for slavery, the nation did confront that dark circumstance
straight on once. Before the Civil War was finished, more Americans
had been killed than in any other war-more than in Vietnam, Korea,
World War II, and World War I combined.
p364
Read some American history books, especially the books used to
teach history in US schools, and you find they have been churned
out by historical spin doctors. The result, inculcated into generation
after generation of Americans, is an idea of America, and of how
it came to be what it is, that is as fake as a Dick Cheney interview
on PBS, as divorced from reality as a George W. Bush address to
the United Nations.
This "brainwashing" about America's
goodness and the resultant evil of all whom we decide are "against
us" is all the more effective because it is self-inflicted.
A 2003 poll, for instance, shows that 69 percent of Americans
believe Saddam Hussein "was personally involved in the September
ii terrorist attacks"-although not even George W. Bush has
purported that. Even many Americans who oppose George W. Bush
no doubt believe that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq has
something to do with "freedom." These beliefs exist
not only in defiance of reality, but independent of it.
A military historian would ignore all
that. Looking back at what has happened since George W. Bush took
office, he would explain events in terms of the global balance
of power, or the lack of one. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and the channeling of European and East Asian energies
into nonmilitary pursuits, he would point out, no external counterweight
to the exercise of US power remained. From this perspective, Bush,
Cheney, and Rumsfeld have been able to act as they do because
there is no one to stop them. Power, like all forms of energy,
tends to extend itself until it either meets resistance or is
exhausted.
p366
In the Western Hemisphere, the United States has been by far the
greatest military power for more than 10 years; the history of
Latin America reflects that chronic imbalance. Most Americans
are vaguely aware of how Teddy Roosevelt "took" Panama;
they are almost completely unaware that the history of military
aggression by the United States in Latin America continues in
our day. In recent decades alone, the United States has intervened-clandestinely
or openly-in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama,
Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Chile. It has
done this in order "stop Communism" or to "build
democracy"-but whether the president is a human rights advocate
like Bill Clinton (Haiti) or a national security hard-liner like
Nixon (Chile), US intervention has been unceasing.
Since World War II, the United States
has extended its Latin American model of behavior to much of the
rest of the world, especially the Third World. Within the United
States, among Americans, the debate about such interventions is
always a debate about right and wrong. Rightly or wrongly American
power goes on filling power vacuums, whatever the moral circumstances-even
when the Communist "threat" used to justify such intrusions
disappears, and cartoon-character menaces like the "axis
of evil" have to be created because real Hitlers aren't around
anymore. America's approach to the world is perpetually skewed
in a military direction because the United States spends twice
as much per person on war as any other industrialized nation.
As it struts the world stage, the US colossus, militarily speaking,
is on steroids.
"We are at last beginning to understand
the significance o the stockpiles," Senator J. William Fulbright
remarked nearly forty years ago, during congressional hearings
into the causes of the Vietnam war. He was referring to how the
Cold War arms buildup, meant to deter a Soviet attack on Western
Europe, helped propel the United States into fighting a war 10,000
miles away in Southeast Asia. The paradigm of this unintended
causality was the B-52 bomber. A warplane designed to drop nuclear
weapons on Soviet missile sites wound up raining conventional
explosives down on thatched-hut villages in Laos. To the weapons,
over the decades, has been added a stockpile of "defense
intellectuals." Think of Cheney as a dirty bomb. Think of
Wolfowitz as anthrax. Think of Rumsfeld, Perle, and the others
as nasty little vials of smallpox. These weapons of mass destruction
are never eliminated; they are just stored in their think tanks,
consulting firms, and academic sinecures. Then someone like George
W. Bush comes along, and throws the warehouse open.
What is the consequence of all this? Objectively
speaking, the United States is the greatest threat to world peace,
and has been for a long time, and not merely because it is the
world's only superpower. Equally important, the United States
is also far more disposed to use its power than any other powerful
nation currently is. Though Americans are culturally and emotionally
blind to the fact, the mere intrusion of US power is, in and of
itself, destabilizing. Furthermore, there is no immediate likelihood
of the worldwide imbalance of power being rectified any time soon.
p368
When a republic's most venerable institutions no longer operate
as they were intended, it becomes possible for small cabals to
usurp power, and, while keeping the forms, corrupt the function
of those institutions for their own ends. Looking at things that
way, the George W. Bush presidency has been both result and symptom
of the decadence of America's constitutional mechanisms. The unremedied
defects of the Electoral College, combined with the suborning
of the Supreme Court by a partisan clique, allowed a Commander
in Chief the American people had not chosen to be installed in
the White House. By this light, the story of the George W. Bush
presidency is the retelling of a tale well-known to Plutarch.
We cannot know what catastrophes might have been averted had the
Romans been more zealous in preserving the essence, and not just
the appearances, of their republican institutions. We do know
that in America-as in Rome in its decadence-once a group of quirky,
adventurous extremists got their hands on the control levers of
the world's greatest military power, bizarre things started to
happen.
The Roman Senate endured in form long
after its functions and powers had been usurped by the Caesars,
a title which at the time was much closer in meaning to our own
"Commander in Chief" than to "emperor." It
is now unfortunately clear that in less than ten years, the United
States has seen a kind of depravity creep into its own institutions.
The impeachment power of the US Constitution was never intended
to be used as tool of political warfare-as a device for defeating
a president who could not be defeated at the polls. That, however,
was what happened in 1998, when Bill Clinton was impeached.
The installation of George W. Bush was
followed in Texas by an effort, undertaken at the behest of Republican
leaders in the US Congress, to redistrict out of office members
of Congress who could not be defeated at the polls. That was followed,
in California, by the removal from office of a governor who had
won election less than one year earlier, and his replacement,
through plebiscite, by an amiable movie star. The debates in the
US Senate prior to the Iraq invasion were particularly revealing
of a growing systemic dysfunction in America. The oratorical prerogative
of every senator was scrupulously respected. Many beautiful speeches
were given, some of them with philosophical as well as literary
merit. This formality having been observed, the Commander in Chief
launched his invasion.
What do these events demonstrate besides
the fact that control of the Republican Party has fallen into
the hands of unscrupulous radicals with no respect for the principles
of democracy? They demonstrate what Lord Acton observed more than
a generation after John Quincy Adams, in his own way, had made
the same point: "Power corrupts, and absolute power tends
to corrupt absolutely." There is nothing surprising about
this. At least there is nothing surprising about it unless you
happen to believe, as the majority of Americans do, that they
and their country are exempt from the corrosive forces of history.
From the viewpoint of a classical historian, it would be odd if
America's stupendous worldwide power had not led to a corruption
of its own internal political institutions-especially in an age
when it is so easy to use nonconstitutional mechanisms (notably
the manipulation of video images and the distribution of tax breaks,
the current equivalent of circuses and bread) to manipulate opinion
and generate money for political spending.
p371
As the Iraq war and its aftermath have demonstrated, the is a
worldwide imbalance of power. America's civil institutions are
insufficient to check, or even balance, the power of an unelected
president-and George Bush has proved himself to be unusually defective
in moral as well as strategic vision. All of which proves that
sometimes our own prophets are with honor.
Maybe what George W. Bush has proved,
most of all, is that John Quincy Adams and Dwight David Eisenhower
were right. Next time you have the chance, watch George W. Bush
alight from Air Force One surrounded by his "security"
men. Isn't what he emanates a "false and tarnished luster"?
Certainly that is what people all over the rest of the world see
in him. "Murky radiance of dominion and power" might
as well be his middle name.
Is there anyone else who better personifies
"the acquisition of unwarranted influence" than Dick
Cheney? Combine the "tarnished luster" that George W.
Bush epitomizes and the "unwarranted influence" of which
Cheney is the paradigm with the American public's failure to heed
Eisenhower's 1961 warnings, and you have almost a step-by-step
description of what, forty years later, has happened to America
and its government. What if we let the Dick Cheneys "in every
city, every state house, every office of the federal government"
usurp the decision processes of our democracy? What if we then
let them install someone like George W. Bush in office? "The
potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist," Eisenhower warned.
"We must never let the weight of
this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,"
he added. But what if such a combination did endanger our democratic
processes, and the American people still did nothing-not even
when the democratic process in question was the choice of president
of the United States? "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry
can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that
security and liberty may prosper together," Eisenhower declared.
What if, instead of heeding this warning, Americans took everything
for granted? What if they weren't "alert and knowledgeable"?
What if the American citizenry didn't do a damn thing as "the
huge industrial and military machinery" usurped "our
peaceful methods and goals"? Neither security nor liberty
could prosper-and, under George W. Bush, neither has.
p376
People will always argue about the nature of evil, but on two
occasions in recent modern history, the world-including America-truly
did confront it, first in the form of Hitler's Nazi Germany and
then in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Hitler's "final solution"
and Pol Pot's killing fields had something in common besides their
horror. Even after the nature and the magnitude of the evil became
known, the United States refused to help stop the killing. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the "liberal" Democrat, refused
to authorize air strikes to destroy Hitler's extermination camps.
President Ronald Reagan, the "conservative" Republican,
did FDR one better. He authorized clandestine support for Pol
Pot and the Khmer Rouge-the better to fight the Soviet Union's
"Evil Empire."
p392
... what causes most people to hang back from saying "George
W. Bush is evil" is simply that he happens to be the leader
of the United States of America, not some Balkan or Arab country.
That in itself is a very odd application of a double standard.
Should we not bold the leaders of a highly civilized country like
the United States of America to a higher standard than the leaders
of countries like Serbia and Iraq? We certainly should not excuse
their actions because we continue to hope that America, at its
heart, is still good. Instead we should apply to our own leaders
at least the same standards we use when judging the presidents
of Serbia or Iraq. That was what Henry Thoreau was urging back
in 1848, when he called protest a patriotic duty, and added: "What
makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that ours is the invading
army." The fact that Polk's attack on Mexico brought great
benefits to the United States can never make it right. To paraphrase
Talleyrand, the fact that George W. Bush's Iraq invasion "was
more than a crime, it was a mistake," does not transform
the moral significance of what he has done to the world or to
America, either. To the contrary, the fact that George W. Bush
has acted foolishly makes what he's done even worse.
George W. Bush is a lesson to be learned,
but who among Americans will teach or learn? Countries lose their
way sometimes, and that's what history will have to record: At
the beginning of the twenty-first century, at a moment when it
held the world's respect and all the world's possibilities were
in its grasp, the United States heeded a small and petulant voice
that scorned the advocates of reason and sneered at the voices
of wisdom. Turning its back on the real challenges it faced, America
abandoned its honorable responsibilities and marched stubbornly,
haughtily, into the wilderness.
In the end, it remains inexplicable-the
anger, the antagonism, the need to break things. Maybe it is George
W. Bush's "Americanism" that, in the end, makes him
so un-American. We were supposed to have moved beyond all that
destructive behavior. We were supposed to have "progressed."
That is the paradox of him, and the American complaisance that
has allowed him to act. He has changed the world more than any
L world leader since Gorbachev, but he has changed it for the
worse, and that's not what Americans are supposed to do.
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