Rationalising imperial conquest

BOOKS

PRAFUL BIDWAI

The book is a devastating critique of the U.S. Empire-building project and its principal rationalisations.

FIVE and a half years after the United States launched its Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by invading Afghanistan, the world has become considerably more insecure, and terrorism has become more menacing than ever before. A study for Mother Jones magazine in the U.S. by the Centre on Law and Security at the New York University (NYU) Foundation finds that there has been a 607 per cent increase in the incidence of terrorism between September 2001 and March 2003, and March 2003 and September 2006.

One of the biggest failures of GWOT strategy is none other than Iraq, where over 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed. A country free of religious extremism and terrorism until its invasion four years ago, Iraq now reports the world's largest number of terrorist and violent incidents, week after week. Over 650,000 civilians have perished in Iraq, besides 3,000-plus U.S. troops. The occupation forces there have no grip on the fast-deteriorating situation despite the "surge" in U.S. troops.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has seen any of the promised "stabilisation" or "democratisation". In Afghanistan, there is a strong resurgence of the Taliban amidst rampant warlordism, and a serious danger that President Hamid Karzai's regime may come unhinged altogether. Opium production is booming as never before and now accounts for well over one half of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).

Worse, GWOT has alienated and antagonised large numbers of people in the Islamic world. The U.S. has lost all credibility in their eyes, as well as among growing numbers of people in the West. Discontent in the Islamic world, in particular West Asia, is growing along with the expanding cesspools of unaddressed grievances — further feeding violence, counter-violence and terrorism.

The U.S. is now increasingly perceived as a power in search of an Empire, to be built primarily by military means. It presents a new, ugly, aggressive and belligerent face in the post-Cold War era. New apologists have also emerged for the new imperialism of the post-Cold War era. During the Cold War, U.S. hegemonism was based on "saving the world from communism", and presenting a benevolent face to the "free world". Today's Empire needs different, if equally irrational, justifications or rationalisations.

Six of these rationalisations or banners and apologies for Empire are important: (i) the global war on terror; (ii) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the `wrong hands'; (iii) failed states; (iv) the necessity and justice of external and forcible humanitarian intervention; (v) regime change in the name of democracy; and (vi) the war on narcotics.

The present book, an initiative of the Transnational Institute, an Amsterdam-based radical fellowship, and authored mainly by its Fellows, is a devastating critique of the U.S. Empire-building project and its principal rationalisations. Its greatest merit is that it centrally confronts the reality of post-Cold War U.S. imperialism and tries to analyse it comprehensively. It persuasively argues that each of the slogans and premises through which U.S. Empire-building is sought to be legitimised is fundamentally flawed.

The book's authors make their case on a broad canvas, which includes a discussion on the purposes of Empire (themselves related to specific regimes of economic power and to furthering inequality-enhancing neoliberal capitalism); the manufacture of intellectual opinion in favour of neoliberal ideas; and the special role played by American exceptionalism in legitimising Empire-building through its assertion that the U.S. is unique as the world's "natural" leader, in that "it is the one country whose pursuit of its national interest is, at one and the same time, the pursuit of a cosmopolitan universal interest".

These essays are followed by six chapter presentations on the six ideological banners. As important as these sections are the Introduction and Conclusion, both by Achin Vanaik, who weaves together the different themes and illuminates numerous connections between them.

To begin with, Walden Bello analyses the economics of Empire by postulating a massive crisis of over-accumulation: overproduction and building up of excess capacities, whose output the economics of the industrial North cannot absorb. He argues that recent attempts by international capital to develop new communications technologies; to colonise public spheres such as health, education, power, water supply and transport; to "financialise" itself; and to tap China's rapid growth to finance a debt-led consumption boom in the U.S. will not adequately remedy the causes of this crisis. Walden Bello presents U.S. post-Cold War belligerence as a consequence of economic weakness, not strength.

Susan George presents a critique of the neoliberal doctrine, rooted in a combination of conservative interpretation of neoclassical economic theory, and libertarian and ultra-individualist legal-political ideas. Susan George convincingly shows that the dominance of neoliberalism owes little to its intrinsic merit; nor was it a "natural" outcome of intellectual debate.

Rather, it followed a systematic and lavishly funded effort to "sell" the ideology through think tanks, select university departments, policy institutes and key individuals in the media. She explores and exposes the institutional framework through which this $1 billion enterprise was conducted.

Mike Marquesee's chapter is a searing critical analysis of American exceptionalism and its historical roots in settler colonialism. This notion sees the U.S. not just as a territorial entity, but as a "great social experiment", which must be propagated — if necessary, through colonial wars and the Monroe Doctrine. American exceptionalism sees the U.S. as the ultimate telos and goal of modernity itself.

Marquesee explains how this exceptionalism survives despite the blows delivered by the U.S.' ignominious defeat in the Vietnam war and the visible inferiority of the U.S. model of capitalism in relation to its Western European variants in respect of, say, public services.

The six chapter presentations that follow delve into the rationalising banners, by analysing their provenance and purpose, and their structural weaknesses and deceitful nature. They also suggest some alternative approaches.

Vanaik argues that the one-sided view of terrorism contained in the dominant discourse in the U.S. (which excludes state terrorism altogether), and the militarised solutions offered to it through GWOT, is an excellent "framing device" for the imperial project and "possesses the greatest capacity to mobilise domestic support for the U.S. pursuit of Empire abroad".

Vanaik, however, dissects GWOT's failure. He holds that demonisation of Islam and Muslims is "an inevitable corollary" of GWOT. Vanaik offers the International Criminal Court as an alternative framework within which to prosecute and punish terrorist acts.

Zia Mian takes apart the WMD argument as an excuse for waging war on Iraq. Washington deliberately concocted falsehoods about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of WMD and manipulated the media. The "in the wrong hands" proposition is a means of selectively rewarding friends, allies or client-states, while attacking enemies and "Axis of Evil" states.

Mian documents the U.S.' spectacular hypocrisy in developing new uses for and designs of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defence systems, while preaching disarmament to others. He also shows how the mystique built around the bomb comes back repeatedly to haunt the U.S. through its spread to other countries. This is the inevitable consequence of the "Empire of Fear".

The U.S. claims that its wars in Central and West Asia were rationally calculated to promote regime change in the interests of "democracy"; or they were humanitarian interventions, necessitated by the failure/paralysis of the multilateral system (the United Nations, in particular). This argument has some resonance outside the U.S., especially given the context of the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda — although the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisaion (NATO) allies failed to act in these very cases.

But as Mariano Aguirre shows, unilateral, offensive, armed intervention mocks at international law and weakens multilateral institutions that ought logically to intervene and honour their obligation to protect threatened civilians.

Aguirre persuasively argues that the Left "should not abandon the moral imperative to protect victims, nor the principles of democracy and international law... We need to recognise that there are massive violations of human rights, that there are dysfunctional states that do not protect their people... Also, that the U.N. system lacks the administrative capacity and flexibility to respond and that power politics limit its capacities, and that, therefore, the international community has a role to play."

Phyllis Bennis writes a blisteringly critical account of how the U.S. first contemptuously bypassed the U.N. Security Council, and then cynically manipulated it to obtain a carte blanche in Afghanistan and Iraq. She criticises the U.S.' mollycoddling of regimes with dubious human rights records (for instance, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Russia), its setting up of puppet regimes in the occupied countries, and its policies of creating or widening sectarian divides and of promoting the outright loot of Iraq's wealth through corporatisation and privatisation.

Bennis presents a scathing analysis of the effects of U.S. policy in West Asia, including promoting authoritarian allies, legitimising Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine, and the negative examples all this has set for West Asia as a whole.

David Sogge exposes state weaknesses, fragility or "failure" as a dishonourable pretext for Empire-building.

Most characterisations of failing states totally ignore the causes of failure, typically rooted in the structure of the global economy, neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions or Western governments, and absence of democracy and accountability. Military interventions rarely offer a solution, nor does the "shell of elections".

Last but not least is a discussion by David Bewley-Taylor and Martin Jelsma of the "war on narcotics" as yet another excuse for Empire. The U.S.'s supply-side approach to the drugs problem emphasises physical interdiction, although this has proved a failure. In practice, as "Plan Colombia" shows, the "war on narcotics" provides a convenient excuse for attacking Left-wing insurgents and maintaining a heavy U.S. military presence in select Third World countries. The authors argue for an alternative "harm reduction" and "decriminalisation" approach to drugs.

Vanaik concludes with a final summing up, which takes a bird's-eye view of the six legitimising themes and their weaknesses, and argues for a comprehensive, critical, Left-wing approach to dissecting Empire.

The book is, then, a broad-horizon yet penetrating critique of the rationalisations for Empire in the post-Soviet era. One wishes it had explored some themes (for instance, the economics of Empire, the relations between the U.S. and its allies, the manufacture of domestic consent in different countries, and alternative international arrangements, and so on) in greater depth.

Above all, one wishes it had devoted some space to a discussion of the growing resistance to Empire through the anti-war and peace movements, themselves linked to the global justice agenda.

Despite these shortcomings, the book remains one of the sharpest critical analyses of contemporary imperialism published recently. It is highly recommended.

Praful Bidwai is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute. He co-authored with Achin Vanaik South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.

War on Terror in Campaign 08

BLOG | Posted 04/30/2007 @ 12:20am

Ari Melber

The most significant moment in last week's Democratic presidential candidate debate came during the evening's most simplistic question. Moderator Brian Williams asked for a show of hands on whether the candidates "believe" there is a Global War on Terror, yielding a four-to-four split. It was a silly choice, since Williams was technically asking if the candidates believe that Bush's foreign policy exists, but it could still spark an important discussion. John Edwards was the only one of the "top three" candidates to vote no, which swiftly brought him praise, scorn and ridicule. After saying the U.S. must strongly deal with "dangerous leaders in the world," Edwards emphasized the need to use all the tools of foreign policy, not simply hard military power. His argument was not really a denial of the existence of Bush's Global War on Terrorism, but a nod towards an alternative.

There is really no denying that President Bush has organized U.S. foreign policy around an endless Global War on Terrorism (or "GWOT" in government circles). As he declared in his historic address to a joint session of Congress after 9/11, even if Al-Qaeda is destroyed, Bush envisions a war that "will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." He means that literally. It is a war that targets a tactic instead of an enemy; like declaring war on war, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has noted. Without a defined enemy, of course, it is a war that can creep far from our vital security interests. In 2002, administration officials claimed Bush could invade Iraq without any congressional authorization at all, based on GWOT, and Condi Rice made the same claim about Syria in 2005. The administration invokes the same endless war to justify imprisoning American citizens without trial; suspending habeas corpus; illegally spying on American citizens; and detaining hundreds of people for years without charges in the lawless Gitmo prison. The policy is built on the twin fallacies that the best defense is a reckless offense, and the world wants (and hates) our freedom. In the name of fighting terror, President Bush aims to advance democracy abroad while restricting it at home, treating Congress and the Courts as barriers to national security. The 2005 National Defense Strategy report even argues American "judicial processes" can be a weapon of choice for our enemies.

Yet as everyone knows, GWOT has resulted in a total security failure. A new State Department report shows terrorism is up 29 percent; Bin Laden remains at large; Iraq is in a civil war, draining resources from counterterrorism and Afghanistan; and Gitmo, which has generated no major terrorist convictions, is such a failure that Defense Secretary Robert Gates made shutting it down one of his first priorities in office. Meanwhile, it is only through congressional and judicial oversight, which Bush derides as counterproductive to his endless global war, that the public has learned about critical vulnerabilities exploited by the 9/11 hijackers; false intelligence regarding WMDs; wasteful defense spending; and the failed detention system at Gitmo, to name a few items.

The question is not whether people "believe" these facts. The question is what the U.S. can do to change them.

Any credible presidential aspirant must present a detailed alternative to Bush's Global War on Terrorism. On the merits, it's hard to understand why candidates (in either party) would try to attach themselves to such a discredited policy from a very unpopular president. For too long, the Global War on Terrorism has been presented as little more than a tough slogan that all mainstream figures must support. By daring the candidates to doubt its existence in a show of hands, Brian Williams cracked the door just wide enough for simplistic protest. Now it's up to the candidates to elaborate on their proposed alternatives. And it's up to activists and voters to make sure this consequential issue stays on the agenda.

To that end, some Democratic bloggers are cheering Edwards and pressing other candidates to challenge the GWOT. MyDD's Matt Stoller writes that Edwards' opposition was a welcome "departure from the bipartisan consensus" backing GWOT. Writing on the same blog in 2004, Chris Bowers called on Democrats to abandon the war on terror frame. This argument is not confined to bloggers or liberal critics, either. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, an influential foreign policy adviser to Democrats across the political spectrum, argued in 2005 that while GWOT had "entered the English language" as the "way our highest national priority is described by almost everyone," it was simply "not an accurate description of America's enemy or of what we are engaged in." He called for jettisoning GWOT and adopting a more focused attack on Al Qaeda.

The public should demand leadership and bold policies from these candidates who would be president. So how about a show of hands of voters who believe in this position: Any candidate who cannot outline an effective alternative to Bush's failed Global War on Terrorism does not deserve to be president.

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NOTES AND FURTHER READING

Zbigniew Brzezinski repeated his opposition to GWOT in an essay this weekend.

I elaborated on GWOT in this op-ed about the President's authority under the 2001 authorization of force, coauthored with Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and these remarks at last year's YearlyKos convention.

It's also worth noting that even the Bush Administration has conceded flaws in the GWOT framework, and it briefly experimented with a different concept in 2005. The Christian Science Monitor summarized responses to that effort at the time, and Democracy Arsenal's Suzanne Nossel proposed several alternative priorities.

Brian Williams felt that the NBC organizers were too restrictive with the debate time limits, which forced him to "suppress" his "instincts to challenge candidates on unanswered questions" almost a dozen times.

For a thorough analysis of whether GWOT is a sustainable foreign policy, check out this 2003 report by Dr. Jeffrey Record of the U.S. Army War College.

Democrats put end to global war on terror

By Toby Harnden in Washington

Last Updated: 12:47am BST 10/04/2007

Democrats have banned the phrase "global war on terror" from the draft Pentagon budget, arguing that it is a propagandist term designed to boost President George W Bush's contention that the Iraq conflict was a war of necessity. The term, coined by the Bush administration shortly after the September 11 attacks, soon entered the American political lexicon. In Pentagon documents, it has its own acronym - GWOT. But Democrats on the House of Representatives' armed services committee, in an unconscious echo of Basil Fawlty's refrain of "Don't Mention the War!" in a Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans", has said that GWOT should be avoided. Republicans seized on the decision as evidence that the Democrats were weak on defence. "The attempt by Democrats to erase the words 'global' and 'terror' from our current war is an absurd effort to deny the fact that America is battling terrorism on a global scale," said Congressman John Boehner, the Republican minority leader. "How do Democrats expect America to fight and win a war they deny is even taking place?... It's no wonder Democrats don't like the phrase 'global war on terror': they have completely failed to take the threat of global terrorism seriously." But Congressman Ike Skelton, the Democratic leader of the House armed services committee and whose staff made the ruling that terms such as "the war in Afghanistan" and "ongoing military operations" should be used, was unrepentant. "GOP [Republican] objections to our efforts to clarify legislative language represent the typical Republican leadership attempt to tie together the misadventure in Iraq and the overall war against terrorists," he said. Some conservatives have questioned the use of the term, arguing that it does not communicate the full extent of the threat.

The President's Global War of Terror

Posted 04/05/2007

Tom Engelhardt

On Tuesday, meeting with the press in the White House Rose Garden, the President responded to a question about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria this way: "[P]hoto opportunities and/or meetings with President Assad lead the Assad government to believe they're part of the mainstream of the international community, when, in fact, they're a state sponsor of terror." There should, he added to the assembled reporters, be no meetings with state sponsors of terror.

That night, Brian Ross of ABC News reported that, since 2005, the U.S. has "encouraged and advised" Jundullah, a Pakistani tribal "militant group," led by a former Taliban fighter and "drug smuggler," which has been launching guerrilla raids into Baluchi areas of Iran. These incursions involve kidnappings and terror bombings, as well as the murder (recorded on video) of Iranian prisoners. According to Ross, "U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or ‘finding' as well as congressional oversight." Given past history, it would be surprising if the group doing the encouraging and advising weren't the Central Intelligence Agency, which has a long, sordid record in the region. (New Yorker investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has been reporting since 2005 on a Bush administration campaign to destabilize the Iranian regime, heighten separatist sentiments in that country, and prepare for a possible full-scale air attack on Iranian nuclear and other facilities.)

The President also spoke of the Iranian capture of British sailors in disputed waters two weeks ago. He claimed that their "seizure… is indefensible by the Iranians." Oddly enough, perhaps as part of secret negotiations over the British sailors, who were dramatically freed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday, an Iranian diplomat in Iraq was also mysteriously freed. Eight weeks ago, he had been kidnapped off the streets of Baghdad by uniformed men of unknown provenance. Reporting on his sudden release, Alissa J. Rubin of the New York Times offered this little explanation of the kidnapping: "Although [Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar] Zebari was uncertain who kidnapped the man, others familiar with the case said they believe those responsible work for the Iraqi Intelligence Service, which is affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency." The CIA, of course, has a sordid history in Baghdad as well, including running car-bombing operations in the Iraqi capital back in Saddam Hussein's day.

And don't forget the botched Bush administration attempt to capture two high Iranian security officials and the actual kidnapping of five Iranian diplomats-cum-Revolutionary-Guards in Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan over two months ago--they disappeared into the black hole of an American prison system in Iraq that now holds perhaps 17,000 Iraqis (as well as those Iranians) and is still growing. As Juan Cole has pointed out, most such acts, and the rhetoric that goes with them, represent so many favors to "an unpopular and isolated Iranian government attempting to rally support and strengthen itself."

In addition, just this week, the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and other ships in its battle group left San Diego for the Persian Gulf. Two carrier battle groups are already there, promising an almost unprecedented show of strength. As the ship left port, US military officials explained the mission of the carriers in the Gulf this way: They are intended to demonstrate US "resolve to build regional security and bring long-term stability to the region."

And stability in the region, it seems, means promoting instability in Iran by any means possible. So, the President's Global War on Terror also turns out to be the Global War of Terror. Noam Chomsky recently put the matter this way, when thinking of U.S. attitudes toward Iranian influence in Iraq.

"It is useful to ask how we would act if Iran had invaded and occupied Canada and Mexico and was arresting U.S. government representatives there on the grounds that they were resisting the Iranian occupation (called "liberation," of course). Imagine as well that Iran was deploying massive naval forces in the Caribbean and issuing credible threats to launch a wave of attacks against a vast range of sites -- nuclear and otherwise -- in the United States, if the U.S. government did not immediately terminate all its nuclear energy programs (and, naturally, dismantle all its nuclear weapons). Suppose that all of this happened after Iran had overthrown the government of the U.S. and installed a vicious tyrant (as the US did to Iran in 1953), then later supported a Russian invasion of the U.S. that killed millions of people (just as the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran in 1980, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, a figure comparable to millions of Americans). Would we watch quietly?"

The rule is simple enough on this one-way planet of ours: If they do it, it's "terror," if we do it, it's foreign policy, its America's "strategic interest."

GWOT Hysteria

No, We're The Greatest Generation

by digby

One of the things thats driven me nuts over the past few years is this reflexive portrayal of the GWOT as the most dangerous and challenging in world history. They have from the beginning behaved in a way that I think history will see as panicked and overwrought. As a nation we behaved with much more calm and deliberation when we were much more seriously threatened in the past. These last few years were not our finest.

Still they audaciously insist that the forty years of the cold war were a cakewalk compared to what we are dealing with now. Indeed, many of them also believe that WWII was nothing to the horrors we face today. (Chris Hayes wrote a great piece about this for In These Times some months back.) Bush still repeats his completely absurd line about how the oceans used to protect us and he's just dumb enough to actually believe it. Paul Kennedy, a professor of history and the director of international security studies at Yale discusses this in today's LA Times:

IT WAS FUNNY, in a grim sort of way. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates responded to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin's polemical attack on the United States by remembering the 50-year Cold War as a "less complex time" and saying he was "almost nostalgic" for its return.

Gates should know. He himself is the quintessential Cold Warrior, having served nearly 27 years in the Central Intelligence Agency (facing off against the likes of Putin, who was for 17 years an agent in the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet KGB). So we should take him seriously when he suggests that the problems of 20 or 30 years ago were in some ways more manageable than our current global predicament.

Nor is he alone. There is a palpable sense of nostalgia these days for the familiar contours of that bygone conflict, which has been replaced by a much more murky, elusive and confusing age.

The argument goes as follows: The Cold War, although unpleasant, was inherently stable. It was a bipolar world — centered on Washington and Moscow — and, as UC Berkeley political scientist Kenneth Waltz argued, it was much more predictable than, say, the shifting, multipolar world of the 1910s or 1930s, decades that were followed by calamitous wars. Yes, it's true that the two sides possessed masses of nuclear weapons aimed at each other's biggest cities, but the reality is that they were constrained by a mutual balance of terror.

I see this as being two different phenomena. The first is the unreconstructed cold warriors who are both rewriting history and adhering to their long standing hysterical position that the sky is always falling and the only thing to do is fight, invade, bomb or some other form of violence. They have never seen any use in diplomacy, international law, sophisticated containment strategies or anything else that requires finesse and subtlety. It's always been about might makes right with these people. They were frustrated to no end by anyone who tried something different and that includes St. Ronnie who was roundly denounced for taking yes for an answer when the Soviets saw the light.

One would have thought that the outcome of the cold war would make them embarrassed to ever offer an opinion again, but they simply airbrushed the facts to suggest that Ronald Reagan's welfare for middle aged white males (otherwise known as the 80's defense buildup) somehow meant they had defeated the Soviets on the battlefield. But it wasn't truly satisfying and they were looking for a proper boogeyman to hate from the moment Gorbachev and Ronnie made nice.

Then 9/11 happens when they are in charge and they have a chance to do it the way they always wanted to --- by roaring and flailing about like a wounded Giant under the ridiculous assumption that this will scare the enemy so much he will just give up. They are facing this complicated threat with all the sophistication of early man trying to scare off a big predator.

The doughy pantload generation of wingnuts, on the other hand, thinks it's some sort of game and they are the star players. They yearned to be "part" of something momentous --- but from a distance, like you are when you are watching movies about war and heroism and identify with the main characters. No need to give up your Milk Duds just to enjoy a good bloodbath. They are writing an exciting plotline that has Islamic terrorism somehow so uniquely dangerous that it has surpassed WWII and the cold war and is more like something out of science fiction: "Star Wars" or "War of the Worlds." To these people, naitonal security is cheap pulp fiction.

Of course it is all nonsense. After acknowledging that today's world is complicated and difficult, yadda, yadda yadda, Kennedy continues:

So is it true? Was the Cold War era, on the whole, a safer era? Ponder the following counterarguments:

First, however tricky our relationships with Putin's Russia and President Hu Jintao's China are nowadays, the prospect of our entering a massive and mutually cataclysmic conflict with either nation are vastly reduced.

We seem to have forgotten that our right-wing hawks argued passionately for "nuking" communist China during the Korean War and again during the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1954. We also have apparently forgotten — although newly released archival evidence overwhelmingly confirms this — how close we came to a nuclear Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Likewise, we've forgotten the shock of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which prompted then-German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to ask, "Is this the new Sarajevo?" a reference to the outbreak of World War I. And who still remembers 1984-85, when we were riveted by Jonathan Schell's argument in the New Yorker that even a few nuclear explosions would trigger such dust storms as to produce a "nuclear winter"?

Those were really scary times, and much more dangerous than our present circumstance because the potential damage that could be inflicted during an East-West conflagration was far, far greater than anything that Al Qaeda can do to us now. No one has the exact totals, but we probably had 20,000 missiles pointed at each other, often on high alert. And the threat of an accidental discharge was high.

None of today's college-age students were born in 1945, 1979 or maybe even 1984. None lived with those triangular signs proclaiming their schools to be nuclear bomb shelters.

To recapture those frightening atmospherics these days, university professors must resort to showing Cold War movies: "The Manchurian Candidate," "Fail Safe," "Dr. Strangelove," "The Hunt for Red October," "Five Days in May," "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold." Students look rather dumbfounded when told that we came close, on several occasions, to World War III.

Yet what if, for example, Josef Stalin had prevented American and British supply aircraft from flying into Berlin in 1948-49? Phew! The years 1945 to, say, 1990 were horrible on other accounts. China's Mao Tse-tung's ghastly Great Leap Forward led to as many as 30 million deaths, the greatest loss of life since the Black Death. The Soviet Union was incarcerating tens of thousands of its citizens in the gulags, as were most of the other members of the Warsaw Pact. The Indo-Pakistan wars, and the repeated conflicts between Israel and its neighbors, produced enormous casualties, but nothing like the numbers that were being slaughtered in Angola, Nigeria, the Congo, Vietnam and Cambodia. Most of the nations of the world were "un-free."

It is hard to explain to a younger generation that such delightful countries as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Poland and Czechoslovakia (to name only a few) were run in those days by fascist generals, avowed racists or one-party totalitarian regimes. I am ancient enough to remember the long list of countries I would not visit for summer holidays; old enough to recall how creepy it was to enter Walter Ulbricht's East German prison house of a state via Checkpoint Charlie in the late 1960s. Ugh.

Let us not, then, wax too nostalgic about the good old days of the Cold War. Today's global challenges, from Iraq to Darfur to climate change, are indeed grave and cry out for solutions.

But humankind as a whole is a lot more prosperous, a great deal more free and democratic and a considerable way further from nuclear obliteration than we were in Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy's time. We should drink to that.

No thanks to the rabid right which has been lobbying for a nuclear meltdown (and global domination, let's face it) since the end of WWII. It is a worldview that has almost nothing to do with actual events or facts on the ground. It reached its zenith with Bush, but they will never go away. They are fearful, insecure people whose temperament and ideology create a need for them to believe that they are warrior heroes in spite of all evidence to the contrary. They are the last people on earth who should be leading a powerful nation in a time of great challenge. Talk about putting the inmates in charge of the asylum.



Update: Tangentially related is this column by David Brooks today in which he says, "Iraq has revealed what human beings do without a strong order-imposing state." My goodness, that sounds an awful lot like and endorsement of totalitarianism, don't you think? (Read this by Arthur Silber, to see Brooks revealed as the cramped, anti-enlightenment fraud he is.)

This, again, relates more to psychology than ideology. These are people who are apparently motivated by a rather simple desire to dominate. Gone now are the lovely paeans to democracy and freedom and liberty and even private enterprise. Within three short years we are back to a Hobbesian hellhole where the wogs need a strong hand. Man, you'd think they'd get whiplash.

On a political level, this all means that it's silly to believe that anything they say or do is sincere. We have seen the Bush administration cast aside virtually every tenet of modern conservatism and yet the base remains devoted believers in the Party. Indeed, they are getting ready to vote for one of three other world class conservative hypocrites, knowing full well that they are liars, cheats and panderers. So let's cut the crap about them ever having strong principles. It's all about kicking ass and taking names with these people. All other aspects of the conservative "philosophy" clearly mean http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html#1055216383903338644#1055216383903338644


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Live: President Bush speaks on global war on terror

Live: President Bush speaks on global war on terror

Tensions are the Empire’s Coin of the Realm

Related
Putin's NATO Beef
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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

by Jacob G. Hornberger

Conservatives are upset over critical remarks made by Russian President Putin about the U.S. Empire and its interventions and abuses all over the world. Not surprisingly, they’re resorting to attacking Putin for hypocrisy rather than considering the distinct possibility that what he is saying about the U.S. government might be true.

After all, let’s not forget that the U.S. government has attacked and occupied a country that never attacked the United States, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of people in the process, and is threatening to do the same to Iran and North Korea. It is a government that claims the right to attack any other country on earth as the self-proclaimed enforcer of the GBOT (global war on terror). And that it claims the right to torture, abuse, and execute any suspected terrorist found anywhere in the world, regardless of citizenry, without any judicial involvement.

The Los Angeles Times pointed out in an editorial yesterday a classic case of U.S. foreign-policy double-dealing and double-cross.

The Times points out that at the end of the Cold War, a deal was struck between Russia and the U.S. in which Russia would accede to German reunification and a withdrawal of troops from Eastern Europe in return for the U.S. commitment to not expand NATO to Russia’s borders.

As the Times editorial points out, “That is precisely what followed…. Within a few years, the U.S. turned vindictive victor in the eyes of Russia, allowing former Warsaw Pact members into NATO, including the formerly Soviet Baltic republics. The humiliation, and seeming encirclement, of Russia continues relentlessly to this day, with talk of someday bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the club.”

How many Americans are aware of this? I’d bet 0.01 percent (about the same number that know about the CIA’s secret, illegal ouster of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in 1953 and the installation of a brutal dictator that tortured his people until extremist Iranian revolutionaries succeeded in ousting him from power in 1979). It’s how the U.S. Empire has operated for decades — in secrecy so that they can “play the innocent” when there is retaliatory blowback.

Why wasn’t NATO, whose mission was to protect against a Soviet attack, dismantled after the dismantling of the Soviet Union? Good question! Maybe because if it was dismantled, it could not be used to increase tensions with Russia.

After the Cold War, U.S. officials turned on their old partner and ally Saddam Hussein and made him the bad-guy poster child of the 1990s to scare Americans to death. Throughout the 1990s, they poked hornet’s nests in the Middle East with their Persian Gulf intervention, their brutal sanctions against Iraq, their stationing of troops on Islamic holy lands, their no-fly zones, and their foreign aid to both Israel and Arab governments.

That produced terrorist strikes on American ships abroad, U.S. Embassies, the WTC in 1993, and of course the 9/11 attacks.

By increasing tensions abroad, the Empire had finally provided the Pentagon with its new mission — the GWOT — and its new justification for ever increasing budgets (and debt, inflation, and taxes) for the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against.

Will Americans finally see through the big-government, big Empire foreign-policy scam before it’s too late?

Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

The Cost of a Surge

by Gordon Adams

01.04.2007

The president is widely expected to soon announce a plan for Iraq that hinges on sending more U.S. military forces to Iraq, above and beyond the 140,000 currently in that country. And while there has been some bipartisan cheerleading for such a prospect, there has been less discussion of where the troops for this famous surge would come from, what it would cost, or how it would further unravel a national-security, budget-planning process that has served the nation well since the Second World War.

Budgeting for Iraq and the so-called Global War on Terror (or GWOT), is already out of control. In large part because of its “emergency” status, the nation, and even Congress, does not know what the funding for this war covers or how it has been spent. It is virtually impossible for Congress or the American people to track Iraq spending.

The Bush Administration has demonstrated that it vastly prefers to fund Iraq as an “emergency”, allowing it to sidestep the kind of detailed justification and reporting that Congress seeks in the regular budget process and has started to request on Iraq. A decision to “surge” forces this winter would only exacerbate the problem, since it will be coming long after the Pentagon has already put the next “emergency” budget request together.

Demands and Recommendations Rebuffed

The December 2006 Iraq Study Group report urged the administration to return to normal budget procedures: “costs for the war in Iraq should be included in the president’s annual budget request starting in 2008.” The White House has made no response.

Later in December Congress again urged this change. In a letter, Senate Budget Committee Chair Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) and his House counterpart Representative John Spratt (D-SC), along with Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), asked the president to “include in [his] budget the best possible projection of war costs beyond 2008, and to specify war costs with the same level of detail as items in the regular budget.”

There is no indication the president, or the Pentagon, will agree to this request, which will in all likelihood lead to a continuation of the dance we have grown familiar with: forces go into Iraq; they are not budgeted in advance; an “emergency” budget is put together to cover them and shipped to the Congress on a “fast track”, leading to little scrutiny and yet more funding.

The opacity of Iraq and GWOT spending has increasingly been the focus of concern. Last year, Congress, led by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Gregg, asked the Pentagon to change its budget practices and submit Iraq budget requests as part of the regular defense budget, providing equally detailed justification for the funding. The White House chose to interpret this legislation as inconsistent with the president’s constitutional authority.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has committed more than $507 billion to these struggles, three quarters of it for operations in Iraq, 91 percent of it for the Pentagon and over 90 percent as “emergency” funding. In all likelihood, the White House in February will request another $100 billion in emergency funding, as well as a roughly $50 billion down payment for the same “emergency” in the next fiscal year.

If Congress approves all of these requests, the GWOT will be at least as costly as any other war in American history, save World War II, when more than 12 million at a time served in the U.S. military. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, very conservatively, that the United States could spend another $320 billion over the next nine years in Iraq alone, putting the total war costs over $1 trillion.

If U.S. deployments do not decline, these costs could rise significantly. The annual trajectory for GWOT spending is ever upwards, from $31.4 billion in 2001-02 to a possible $170 billion for 2007 alone. To tether these astronomical figures closer to the ground, this fiscal year we are likely to spend $14 billion a month on the GWOT, or $3.3 billion a week. Put another way, emergency money for the GWOT will consist of roughly a quarter of all the funds the Pentagon will receive for the current fiscal year.

Transparency, Interrupted

There are serious issues of good government, accountable budgeting and spending control buried in this pile of dollars. When the budgets for Iraq and GWOT are put together in the Pentagon, they consist of “lump sums” for categories of spending, not detailed budgets for specific programs or requirements. For example, the Army discloses what it is requesting for “operations and maintenance”, but does not detail the funding for specific provisions, supplies, spares, or logistics. Nor does the Pentagon distinguish between the uses of these emergency funds and the regular budget funds for non-Iraq activities. Congress has been asked to take on faith that all of these funds are needed, that they are all dedicated to Iraq and the GWOT, and that other regular budget funds are not being siphoned into the war.

When the Iraq and GWOT budgets come to the Congress, the accompanying justification is thin and the emergency designation means that only one set of committees—the appropriators—get to look at it. The Budget and Armed Services Committees don’t get to scrutinize the funding, unlike the normal defense budget.

These requests have also frequently included funding for items that are questionably linked to Iraq and GWOT needs and, in any case, are certainly not urgent, such as the long-term transformation of the Army, or helicopters that will take two or three years to deliver. The forthcoming GWOT emergency request is rumored to include funding for the military’s new F-35 fighter.

And once funds for Iraq and the GWOT are appropriated, there is little reporting back to the Congress on how the funds have been actually been spent. Repeated legislation requiring detailed reporting has not been followed by the Defense Department. It argues that because so much of the funding is mixed with regular budget funds for operations, maintenance, etc., that it simply cannot sort it out by emergency funds or by particular operations.

Meanwhile, the State Department reports to Congress the type of program that funds its diplomatic and foreign assistance budget, but provides no reporting on the actual execution of programs and projects.

And because it is budgeting for the war six months at a time (by now there are usually two emergency requests a year), the Defense Department has done no forecasting of what the Iraq War and the GWOT are likely to cost in the future. It says the war is unpredictable, so they cannot make a forecast, leaving it up to Congress’ Budget Office to make its own estimates without any DOD input.

This rolling approach to funding the war every six months makes a clear break with past wartime practices. Historically, even wartime budgets have been put through the normal budget process in the Pentagon within a year or two of the start of combat. Today we are entering the seventh year of this unusual budget process.

Over the past six years, this practice has undermined both the administration’s budget-planning system and the normal scrutiny and control Congress has given to the defense and foreign policy budgets. The budgetary consequence is real: projections of future deficits are meaningless, because Iraq costs are not forecast into the future as part of the regular budget and actual spending is counted only after the fact. The national security consequence is equally serious: neither the Congress nor the American people have a clear view of how much the war actually costs, how we are spending the funds or how much it is likely to cost in the future. The nation’s fiscal—and therefore security—health is at stake.

Gordon Adams is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. From 1993-97, he was associate director for National Security and International Affairs at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.