National Socialism and National Greatness

Posted by Justin Raimondo on February 05, 2007

In the Museum of Discarded Notions and Laughable Nostrums, surely the concept of “national greatness” deserves a special place. It was all the rage in neoconservative circles circa 1997, when David Brooks, then an editorialist for the Weekly Standard, penned his ode to the sense of “grandeur” and America’s imperial greatness as embodied, he thought, in the Library of Congress building. With its golden curlicues, and overly ornate projection of self-importance, and ideological symbolism, this structure represented, for Brooks, the spirit of an American past that had, by the 1990s, been nearly exhausted:

“The designers of the Library of Congress, like so many of their countrymen, thought America was on the verge of its own golden age. At the dawn of the 20th century, America was to take its turn at global supremacy. It was America’s task to take the grandeur of past civilizations, modernize it, and democratize it. This common destiny would unify diverse Americans and give them a great national purpose.”

With the end of the cold war, and the absence of any overwhelming threat to American national security, this great national purpose had shrunk to something no more impressive than, as Francis Fukuyama, the neocons’ former philosopher-in-residence, put it, “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

We had reached, said Fukuyama, “the end of history,” which, he averred, “will be a very sad time” because “the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” will be replaced by such mundane matters as earning a living, recycling old wine bottles, and the eternal problem of keeping both wife and mistress happy. The age of heroism is past, and from now on our task will merely be the “endless care-taking of the museum of human history” and “centuries of boredom.”

Without any wars to fight, you see, or any causes requiring the spilling of copious amounts of blood, your archetypal neocon is bored—not that these typically soft, physically incapable, often dwarfish and invariably pear-shaped policy wonks would ever consider personally fighting for any of these noble causes, mind you: Their role is to instigate the wars, it is for others to fight them. War, for the neocon, is strictly a spectator sport, rather than a hands-on business. However, the very idea of a world without any really serious conflicts struck them as the ultimate in ennui, although at the end of his “end of history” essay, Fukuyama was hope that “perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

He was right about history getting started again, albeit not in the manner he or anyone else anticipated: the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon put the neocons back in business again, opening up, as it did, a new world fresh with possibilities of conflict.

The end of the Soviet empire had made their cachet as ex-Commies—which imbued them with an aura of expertise, and gained them easy entry to the then-booming field of Kremlinology—obsolescent, and deprived the world of its Manichean gloss. Post-9/11, what Fukuyama termed “the worldwide ideological struggle” was revived, albeit with an Islamic-Arabic adversary rather than a Slavic one. Once again, the cry went up: “To the barricades!” And its echoes were heard from Washington to Tel Aviv.

Instead of building monuments to our global supremacy, and devoting ourselves to the endless caretaking of the museum of human history, we could once again get back to the noblest cause of them all—war. And not any ordinary war, but a “War on Terrorism” —a war without end. Oh, for joy! History was back —with a vengeance.

The neocon response to this was to develop a new ideology; or, rather, to distill and perfect their old ideology—warmed over Social Democratic nostrums combined with a merciless devotion to the cult of Ares —that has morphed, in its later stages, into what might be categorized, without a whole lot of Procrustean maneuvering, as a variant of fascism. The contempt for the “bourgeois” virtues, as given expression by Senor Fukuyama, the longing for the heroic, the valorization of death for the sake of an abstraction —these “aristocratic” virtues, as Fukuyama characterized them, are back in vogue, along with the cult of militarism, the idea of Big Government, and the revival of genuinely authoritarian impulses in the West.

That these impulses were manifesting themselves among rightist intellectuals, rather than nesting exclusively on the left, as in the past, was merely a function of the neoconservative mindset, which is as much a history as it is an ideology. Many of the leading neocons, after all, had been leftists, usually of the Trotskyist variety, and retained the universalist-totalitarian frame of reference long after abandoning left-sectarian politics. Neoconservatism, in an important sense, is merely Trotskyism turned inside out. Instead of exporting the “world socialist revolution,” they are intent on spreading what George W. Bush described as the “global democratic revolution.” And they do it with the same revolutionary fervor that they —or their intellectual ancestors —once hailed the Red Army and its founder.

On domestic matters, historically, the neocons have been all over the map: their one true and abiding belief is in the liberating power of American military might. With the implosion of the Leninist project, and the apparent “end of history,” the neocons were essentially put out of business — until the worst terrorist attack in American history revived their fervor, and their fortunes. And this marked yet another milestone in their long odyssey from Marxism to a new kind of authoritarianism on the right.

I hesitate to use the far too often abused term “fascism,” which has been used to describe everyone to any opponent of the New Left during the 1960s to anyone who opposed U.S. entry into World War II. The Communists, during the “third period” of the 1930s, routinely describe the Social Democrats as “social fascists,” and this has been a favorite term of abuse employed by the neocons to smear anyone who crosses their path. Yes, even I, a libertarian, i.e., one who believes that the best government is no government, have been so described, by no less an authority than David Horowitz’s Frontpage.

Yet there is such an ideology as fascism, historically speaking, and its main themes are being revived in contemporary neoconservative ideology to a chilling degree. Aside from the fin-de-siecle romanticism of Fukuyama’s pining for a rebirth of history, the neocons have replicated most if not all of the classic symptoms of the fascist mindset, if not quite yet generated all the characteristics of fascism in power. No, we don’t have a single-party state, which is the central organizational principle of fascist ideology. But that’s only because the neocons have yet to seize total power, and sweep away the last vestiges of constitutional democracy. However, they lack none of the telltale symptoms of fascists out of power, that is, of aspiring authoritarians..

The essence of neoconservatism is war and the valorization of conflict, and, as such, seems tailor made for the post-9/11 era. To the early fascist theoreticians, and the first successful fascist politician, Mussolini, war was the noblest cause of them all, not merely a necessity but a sacred obligation. Acts of war were, for the fascists, acts of worship: Ares replaced Zeus in the fascist Olympus. The one true abiding faith of the fascists was in the efficacy of military force as a means to shape society, and this militarism dominated every aspect of fascist society, which was built around war and preparations for war. Mussolini sought to recreate the Roman Empire —an ambition shared by neoconservative columnist and military maven Max Boot, whose “The Case for An American Empire” lays out the American claim to the imperial purple.

The faith of the neocons in the ability of the American military to “transform” the Middle East, and create Jeffersonian republics where before there had been nothing but tyranny and grinding poverty, is surely a mystical phenomenon, just as surely and frankly religious as faith-healing or Christian Science. Whereas the foreign policy of a constitutional republic is necessarily limited to the defense of the nation and its interests, a nation that declared its foreign policy goal to be “benevolent global hegemony”—as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan put it in their 1996 foreign policy manifesto — is a creature of a different type. It is surely not a republic, in any meaningful sense of the term, but an empire: perhaps even an evil empire, for all its “benevolent” pretensions. Not since the fascist and national socialist movements of the 1930s had any mass political movement put forward a program of world conquest as a political goal.

The ideal fascist model was Sparta —a warrior nation geared for conquest, in a permanent state of mobilization for war. For the fascist, life is war, nations are necessarily always in conflict, and this inevitable clash of interests must always in end war —and in the victory of one over the other. This worldview is mirrored in the endless “war on terrorism,” which our rulers promise us will last at least a generation. Perpetual war, as far as the eye can see —this is the core doctrine of neoconservatism, and the animating spirit of classical fascist movements, as well as German national socialism.

War abroad means an atmosphere of conformity and hostility to dissent on the home front, and this has translated, in contemporary neoconservative thought, to the equation of antiwar sentiment with treason. In his infamous smear attack on paleoconservative and libertarian critics of the Iraq invasion, David Frum, the neocon Vyshinsky, attacked yours truly, as well as an entire platoon of antiwar right-wingers, as “unpatriotic conservatives.” On a lower level, where neocon ideology meets talk radio and Fox News, we have Sean Hannity howling “Enemy of the State” at war critics and dissenters from the neocon party line. Like classic fascist movements of the past, neoconservatism today values and promotes uniformity of thought, and seeks to enforce intellectual homogeneity with strictures equating dissent with treason. Andrew Sullivan, a leading warmonger and neocon shill, infamously accused a “fifth column” on “both coasts” with not so secretly sympathizing with Osama bin Laden and other enemies of America. On a cruder level, we have the rantings of David Horowitz, who routinely accuses his political opponents of being in league with the terrorists, either consciously or “objectively,” as the Marxists used to say.

Conservatism used to mean anti-statism. Today, under the rubric of neoconservatism, this has been stood on its head. It is a Bizarro World conservatism, where the individualism of Barry Goldwater and Frank S. Meyer has given way to the militarized groupthink of David Frum and the Dittohead demagoguery of Rush Limbaugh. From The Conscience of a Conservative [.pdf] (or, perhaps, A Choice, Not an Echo) to An End to Evil is a long way to travel: it has been a long way downward, but it seems today’s ostensible “conservatives,” committed as they are to what is rapidly becoming an openly fascist movement, are finally scraping rock bottom.

Racism is not necessarily related to fascism, yet the example of German national socialism makes the connection inevitable. And here, too, there are ominous parallels. Neoconservatism, like Nazism, has its “Other,” it’s equivalent of the Eternal Jew, and that is the Eternal Arab. A great deal of how the neocons see the Arab and Muslim worlds is rooted in a brazenly racist mindset, exemplified in the writings of Raphael Patai, whose book, The Arab Mind, reportedly had a large influence in official Bush administration circles, as well as among neoconservatives outside the government. As Seymour Hersh pointed out in his investigation into the horrors of Abu Ghraib:

“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. ‘The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,’ Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, ‘or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.’ The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.’ In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged —’one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.’"

Torture as a political act, the central theme of a propaganda campaign, is something we must surely associate with fascist movements. Furthermore, to single out persons of a particular ethnicity or religion —in this case, Arabs and Muslims —is so evocative of the National Socialist German Workers Party that one has to wonder if it’s intentional. That the neoconservatives are now carrying the pro-torture banner is a major milestone is their journey to a peculiarly Americanized form of fascism.

In terms of ideology and policy, as well as in style and spirit, the post-9/11 neoconservative movement exhibits all the classic characteristics of a genuinely fascist phenomenon: militarism, leader worship, intellectual authoritarianism, delusions of “national greatness,” hatred of the Other, the romanticization of violence, and a program of permanent war. All that is lacking is a one-party state —and we are, perhaps, a major terrorist attack away from that.

Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is Editorial Director of Antiwar.com.

Why the US Is Not Leaving Iraq

Jan 10, 2006

It is crucially important that public attention is shifted away from the confining official narrative of the war, parroted by the corporate media and political pundits, to the economic crimes that have been committed because of this war, notes Ismael Hossein-zadeh.


“The military-industrial-complex [would] cause military spending to be driven not by national security needs but by a network of weapons makers, lobbyists and elected officials.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.” — General Smedley D. Butler.


Neither the Iraq Study Group nor other establishment critics of the Iraq war are calling for the withdrawal of US troops from that country. To the extent that the Study Group or the new Congress purport to inject some “realism” into the Iraq policy, such projected modifications do not seem to amount to more than changing the drivers of the US war machine without changing its destination, or objectives: control of Iraq’s political and economic policies.

In light of fact that by now almost all of the factions of the ruling circles, including the White House and the neoconservative war-mongerers, acknowledge the failure of the Iraq war, why, then, do they balk at the idea of pulling the troops out of that country?

Perhaps the shortest path to a relatively satisfactory answer would be to follow the money. The fact is that not everyone is losing in Iraq. Indeed, while the Bush administration’s wars of choice have brought unnecessary death, destruction, and disaster to millions, including many from the Unites States, they have also brought fortunes and prosperity to war profiteers. At the heart of the reluctance to withdraw from Iraq lies the profiteers’ unwillingness to give up further fortunes and spoils of war.

Pentagon contractors constitute the overwhelming majority of these profiteers. They include not only the giant manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing, but also a complex maze of over 100,000 service contractors and sub-contractors such as private army or security corporations and “reconstruction” firms.[1] These contractors of both deconstruction and “reconstruction,” whose profits come mainly from the US treasury, have handsomely profited from the Bush administration’s wars of choice.

A time-honored proverb maintains that wars abroad are often continuations of wars at home. Accordingly, recent US wars abroad seem to be largely reflections of domestic fights over national resources, or public finance: opponents of social spending are using the escalating Pentagon budget (in combination with drastic tax cuts for the wealthy) as a cynical and roundabout way of redistributing national income in favor of the wealthy. As this combination of increasing military spending and decreasing tax liabilities of the wealthy creates wide gaps in the Federal budget, it then justifies the slashing of non-military public spending—a subtle and insidious policy of reversing the New Deal reforms, a policy that, incidentally, started under President Ronald Reagan.

Meanwhile, the American people are sidetracked into a debate over the grim consequences of a “pre-mature” withdrawal of US troops from Iraq: further deterioration of the raging civil war, the unraveling of the “fledgling democracy,” the resultant serious blow to the power and prestige of the United States, and the like.

Such concerns are secondary to the booming business of war profiteers and, more generally, to the lure or the prospects of controlling Iraq’s politics and economics. Powerful beneficiaries of war dividends, who are often indistinguishable from the policy makers who pushed for the invasion of Iraq, have been pocketing hundreds of billions of dollars by virtue of war. More than anything else, it is the pursuit and the safeguarding of those plentiful spoils of war that are keeping US troops in Iraq.

(Because the role of oil is discussed extensively by many other researchers and writers, I would focus here on the role of the Pentagon contractors, both as a major driving force to the war on Iraq and a major obstacle in the way of withdrawing from that country.)

The rise of the fortunes of the major Pentagon contractors can be measured, in part, by the growth of the Pentagon budget since President George W. Bush arrived in the White House: it has grown by more than 50 percent, from nearly $300 billion in 2001 to almost $455 billion in 2007. (These figures do not include the Homeland Security budget, which is $33 billion for the 2007 fiscal year alone, and the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fast approaching $400 billion.)

Large Pentagon contractors have been the main beneficiaries of this windfall. For example, a 2004 study by The Center for Public Integrity revealed that, for the 1998–2003 period, one percent of the biggest contractors won 80 percent of all defense contracting dollars. The top ten got 38 percent of all the money. Lockheed Martin topped the list at $94 billion, Boeing was second with $81 billion, Raytheon was third (just under $40 billion), followed by Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics with nearly $34 billion each.[2]

Fantastic returns to these armaments conglomerates have been reflected in the continuing jump in the value of their shares or stocks in the Wall Street: “Shares of U.S. defense companies, which have nearly trebled since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq, show no signs of slowing down. . . . All the defense companies—with very few exceptions—have been doing extremely well with mostly double-digit earnings growth. . . . The feeling that makers of ships, planes and weapons are just getting into their stride has driven shares of leading Pentagon contractors Lockheed Martin Corp., Northrop Grumman Corp., and General Dynamics Corp. to all-time highs. . . .”[3]

Major beneficiaries of war dividends include not only the giant manufacturing contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, but also a whole host of other war-induced service contractors that have mushroomed around the Pentagon and the Homeland Security apparatus in order to cash in on the Pentagon’s spending bonanza.

A highly profitable and fast growing industry that has evolved out of the Pentagon’s tendency to shower private contractors with tax-payers’ money is based on its increasing practice of the outsourcing of the many of the traditional military services to private businesses. “In 1984, almost two-thirds of [the Pentagon’s] contracting budget went for products rather than services. . . . By fiscal year 2003, 56 percent of Defense Department contracts paid for services rather than goods.”

What is more, these services are not limited to the relatively simple or routine tasks and responsibilities such food and sanitation services or building maintenance. More importantly, they include “contracts for services that are highly sophisticated, strategic in nature, and closely approaching core functions that for good reason the government used to do on its own. The Pentagon has even hired contractors to advise it on hiring contractors.”[4]

Private security contracting, a lucrative and rapidly growing industry, is a good example of the Pentagon’s policy of outsourcing. These contractors operate on the periphery of U.S. foreign policy by training foreign “security forces,” or by “fighting terrorism.” Often these private military corporations are formed by retired Special Forces personnel seeking to market their military expertise to the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, or foreign governments.

For example, MPRI, one of the largest and most active of these firms, which “has trained militaries throughout the world under contract to the Pentagon,” was founded by former Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono and seven other retired generals. The fortunes of these military training contractors, or modern-day mercenary companies, like those of the manufacturers of military hardware, have skyrocketed by virtue of heightened war and militarism under President George W. Bush. For example, “The per share price of stocks in L3 Communications, which owns MPRI, has more than doubled.”[5]

As the Pentagon’s manufacturing contractors such as Lockheed Martin make fortunes through the production of the means of death and destruction, they also create profit opportunities for service contractors such as Halliburton that, like vultures, follow the plumes of the smoke of deconstruction and set up shop for “reconstruction.”

For example, in the same month (October 2006) that the US forces lost a record number of soldiers in Iraq, and the Iraqi citizens lost many more, Halliburton announced that its third quarter revenue had risen by 19 percent to $5.8 billion. This prompted Dave Lesar, the company’s chairman, president and CEO, to declare, "This was an exceptional quarter for Halliburton.”

Jeff Tilley, an analyst who does research for Halliburton, likewise pointed out, "Iraq was better than expected. . . . Overall, there is nothing really to question or be skeptical about. I think the results are very good."

This led many critics to point out scornfully that when around the same time Vice President Dick Cheney told Rush Limbaugh that "if you look at the overall situation [in Iraq] they're doing remarkably well," he must have been talking about Halliburton.[6]

The service and “rebuilding” contractors are frequently called “reconstruction rackets” not only because they obtain generous and often no-bid contracts from their policy-making accomplices, but also because they habitually shirk on their contracts and skimp on what they promise to do. For example, an investigative on-the-ground report from Iraq, sponsored by the Institute for Southern Studies and titled “New Investigation Reveals Reconstruction Racket,” showed that despite “billions of dollars spent, key pieces of Iraq's infrastructure—power plants, telephone exchanges, and sewage and sanitation systems—have either not been repaired, or have been fixed so poorly that they don't function.”

The report, carried out by Pratap Chatterjee and Herbert Docena and published in the Institutes’ Publication Southern Exposure, further revealed that the giant Pentagon contractor Bechtel “has been given tens of millions to repair Iraq's schools. Yet many haven't been touched, and several schools that Bechtel claims to have repaired are in shambles. One 'repaired' school was overflowing with unflushed sewage.”

The report also showed that out of a $2.2 billion “reconstruction” contract with Halliburton, the company spent only 10 percent on “community needs—the rest being spent on servicing U.S. troops and rebuilding oil pipelines. Halliburton has also spent over $40 million in the unsuccessful search for weapons of mass destruction.”[7]

The spoils of war and devastation in Iraq have been so attractive that an an extremely large number of war profiteers have set up shop in that country in order to participate in the booty: “There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield,” reported The Washington Post in its 5 December 2006 issue.

The report, prepared by Renae Merle, further points out, “In addition to about 140,000 U.S. troops, Iraq is now filled with a hodgepodge of contractors. DynCorp International has about 1,500 employees in Iraq, including about 700 helping train the police force. Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in the country, most of them providing private security. . . . MPRI, a unit of L-3 Communications, has about 500 employees working on 12 contracts, including providing mentors to the Iraqi Defense Ministry for strategic planning, budgeting and establishing its public affairs office. Titan, another L-3 division, has 6,500 linguists in the country.”[8]

The fact that powerful beneficiaries of war dividends flourish in an atmosphere of war and international convulsion should not come as a surprise to anyone. What is surprising is that, in the context of the recent US wars of choice, these beneficiaries have also acquired the power of promoting wars, often by manufacturing “external threats to our national interest.” In other words, profit-driven beneficiaries of war have also evolved as war makers, or contributors to war making.[9]

The following is a sample of such unsavory business–political relationships, as reported by Walter F. Roche and Ken Silverstein in a 14 July 2004 Los Angeles Times article, titled “Advocates of War Now Profit from Iraq’s Reconstruction:”

• Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey is a prominent example of the phenomenon, mixing his business interests with what he contends are the country's strategic interests.

• Neil Livingstone, a former Senate aide who has served as a Pentagon and State Department advisor and issued repeated public calls for Hussein's overthrow. He heads a Washington-based firm, GlobalOptions, Inc. that provides contacts and consulting services to companies doing business in Iraq.

• Randy Scheunemann, a former Rumsfeld advisor who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 authorizing $98 million in U.S. aid to Iraqi exile groups. He was the founding president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Now he's helping former Soviet Bloc states win business there.

• Margaret Bartel, who managed federal money channeled to Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, including funds for its prewar intelligence program on Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. She now heads a Washington-area consulting firm helping would-be investors find Iraqi partners.

• K. Riva Levinson, a Washington lobbyist and public relations specialist who received federal funds to drum up prewar support for the Iraqi National Congress. She has close ties to Bartel and now helps companies open doors in Iraq, in part through her contacts with the Iraqi National Congress.

• Joe M. Allbaugh, who managed President Bush's 2000 campaign for the White House and later headed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and Edward Rogers Jr., an aide to the first President Bush, recently helped set up New Bridge Strategies and Diligence, LLC to promote business in postwar Iraq.[10]

There are strong indications that these dubious relationships represent more than simple cases of sporadic or unrelated instances of some unscruplulous or rogue elements. Evidence shows that contracts for the “reconstruction” of Iraq were drawn long before the invasion and deconstruction of that country had started. In a fascinating report for The Nation magazine, titled “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein describes such long-projected “rebuilding” schemes as follows:

“Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate ‘post-conflict’ plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries ‘at the same time,’ each lasting ‘five to seven years.’”[11]

Here we get a glimpse of the real reasons or forces behind the Bush administration’s preemptive wars. As Klein puts it, “a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction.” Klein also documents how (through Pascual’s office) contractors drew “reconstruction” plans in close collaboration with various government agencies and how, at times, contracts were actually pre-approved and paper work completed long before an actual military strike:

“In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual's office keeps ‘high risk’ countries on a ‘watch list’ and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to ‘mobilize and deploy quickly’ after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks—some, Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, will have ‘pre-completed’ contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could ‘cut off three to six months in your response time.’”

No business model or entrepreneurial paradigm can adequately capture the nature of this kind of scheming and profiteering. Not even illicit businesses based on rent-seeking, corruption or theft can sufficiently describe the kind of nefarious business interests that lurk behind the Bush administration’s preemptive wars. Only a calculated imperial or colonial kind of exploitation, albeit a new form of colonialism or imperialism, can capture the essence of the war profiteering associated with the recent US wars of aggression. As Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher put it, “We used to have vulgar colonialism. Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it 'reconstruction.'"[12]

Classical colonial or imperial powers roamed on the periphery of the capitalist center, “discovered” new territories, and drained them off of their riches and resources. Today there are no new places in our planet to be “discovered.” But there are many vulnerable sovereign countries whose governments can be overthrown, their infrastructures smashed to the ground, and fortunes made as a result (of both destruction and “reconstruction). And herein lies the genius of a parasitically efficient market mechanism, as well as a major driving force behind the Bush administration’s unprovoked unilateral wars of choice.

Not only does the new form of imperial or colonial aggression, driven largely by the powerful interests that are vested in the armaments industries and other war-based businesses, bring calamity to the vanquished, but it is also detrimental and burdensome to the victor, namely, the imperium and its citizens. Contrary to the external military operations of past empires, which usually brought benefits not only to the imperial ruling classes but also (through “trickle-down” effects) to their citizens, U.S. military expeditions and operations of late are not justifiable even on the grounds of national economic gains.

Indeed, escalating US military expansions and aggressions have become ever more wasteful and cost-inefficient as they are hollowing out the public treasury, undermining social spending, and accumulating national debt. Viewed in this light, the new form of imperialism can perhaps be called “parasitic” imperialism.

War profiteering is, of course, not new; it has always existed in the course of the history of warfare. What makes war profiteering in the context of the recent US wars of choice unique and extremely dangerous to world peace and stability, however, is the fact that it has become a major driving force behind war and militarism.

This is key to an understanding of why the US ruling elite is reluctant to pull US troops out of Iraq. The reluctance or “difficulty” of leaving Iraq stems not so much from pulling 140,000 troops out of that country as it is from pulling out more than 100,000 contractors. As Josh Mitteldorf of the University of Arizona recently put it, “There are a lot of contractors making a fortune and we don’t want that money tap turned off, even though it is borrowed money, which our children and grandchildren will have to repay.”[13]

It follows that US troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq as long as antiwar voices are not raised beyond the premises and parameters of the official narrative or justification of the war: terrorism, democracy, civil war, stability, human rights, and the like. Antiwar forces need to extricate themselves from the largely diversionary and constraining debate over these secondary issues, and raise public consciousness of the scandalous economic interests that drive the war.

It is crucially important that public attention is shifted away from the confining official narrative of the war, parroted by the corporate media and political pundits, to the economic crimes that have been committed because of this war, both in Iraq and here in the United States. It is time to make a moral case for restoring Iraqi oil and other assets to the Iraqis. It is also time to make a moral case against the war profiteers’ plundering of our treasury, or tax dollars. To paraphrase the late General Smedley D. Butler, most wars could easily be ended—they might not even be started—if profits are taken out of them.[14]


Ismael Hossein-zadeh is a professor of economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa. He is the author of the newly published book, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism His Web page is http://www.cbpa.drake.edu/hossein-zadeh

NOTES:

1. Renae Merle, “Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq,” The Washington Post (December 5, 2006), .

2. The Center for Public Integrity, “Report Finds $362 Billion in No-Bid Contracts at the Pentagon” (September 29, 2004).

3. Bill Rigby, “Defense stocks may jump higher with big profits,” Reuter (April 12, 2006), .

4. The Center for Public Integrity, “Outsourcing the Pentagon” (September 29, 2004), .

5. Esther Schrader, “Companies Capitalize on War on Terror,” Los Angeles Times (14 April 2002), .

6. Steve Young, “What Is Bad for America Is Good for Halliburton . . . Just Ask the Vice President,” OpEdNews.com (23 October 2006), .

7. “War Profiteering,” by Source Watch (a project of the Center for Media & Democracy), .

8. Renae Merle, “Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq,” Washington Post (December 5, 2006), .

9. William D. Hartung, How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? (New York: Nation Books, 2003); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); Ismael Hossein-zadeh, The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (New York & London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006).

10. “War Profiteering,” by Source Watch (a project of the Center for Media & Democracy), .

11. Naomi Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” The Nation (May 2, 2005), .

12. As quoted in Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”

13. Josh Mitteldorf, “Why we’re not getting out of Iraq,” Op Ed News (December 8, 2006), .

14. Smedley D. Butler, War Is a Racket (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1935 [2003]).

Living the American Dream in 2006

1-09-07, 9:21 am

In the waning days of 2006, the reality of institutional racism and aggressive imperialism were laid bare again in the U.S. The police shooting of African American Sean Bell and his two friends in Brooklyn, New York on the morning of November 25 were followed on December 6th by a report from the Iraq Study Group convened by the US government to, as the authors of the report note, "solve the problem of Iraq." In both cases, the victims – Bell and his friends Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman in the former and the Iraqi people in the latter – were blamed for the violence perpetrated against them. In the former, racist assumptions and in the latter imperialist proclamations infused the explanations, decisions, and justifications of the violators.

Revelations of systematic torture and prisoner abuse by local police and the U.S. military as a key state weapon re-surfaced in 2006. In the summer, a Special Prosecutor for the state of Illinois released a report detailing the abuse and torture of as many as 200 inmates in the 1970s and 1980s in that city’s jails to elicit confessions, including capital punishment cases, mainly from African American suspects. The prosecutor’s report on torture follows several other local and international reports indicating that city’s persistent use of brutality, racial profiling, and other racist police practices. The release of the report, which some state officials and law enforcement organizations attempted to block in court, has opened similar investigations in other cities across the country.

The Chicago revelations preceded by just a few months a 244-page FBI document exposing abuse and torture at U.S. prison camps in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba designed to house suspects in the Bush administration’s "war on terror." According to press accounts of the FBI document, after more than five years of Bush administration that torture had occurred at Guantánamo, FBI agents reported witnessing abuse that clearly violated U.S. and international law on prisoner treatment, some of which clearly qualified as torture. The abuses at Guantánamo Bay were designed as part of a racist and chauvinist belief, developed by leading Western academics such as Raphael Patai and Bernard Lewis in the 1970s and 1980s, that Muslims and Arabs respond only to violence and humiliation (often sexual). We must torture them, insisted the administration’s defenders, because they are plotting to terrorize us, and they can only be stopped if we use similar methods, as regrettable and unfortunate as that may be. This stereotypical view fuels and motivates much of the Bush administration’s approach to its new crusade in the Middle East and in other countries.

Also in 2006, the U.S. government rejected legitimate land claims and sovereignty by Native American nations in a series of decisions handed down by the right-wing dominated U.S. Supreme Court in the final months of 2006. The Court denied Cayuga land claims based on treaties with the U.S. government in western New York on the convenient grounds that the Indian nation had delayed too long to make the claim and a positive ruling would victimize current property holders. Another decision asserted Rhode Island’s authority over the Narragansett resident within its borders by subjecting Narragansett businesses to state taxes. According to one media account of these decisions, opponents of Indian sovereignty and claims to land have taken these decisions " as precedent for the termination of all land claims among the reviving Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy tribes." The right-wing orientation of the court has convinced some tribal leaders to view the Court as hostile to their interests and to pursue other avenues for attaining their claims and legal rights.

Meanwhile, anti-Muslim hysteria in the U.S. was cultivated around, of all things, the middle name of possible Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama. Media pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, Jeff Greenfield and others repeatedly told their audiences that Obama's middle name is Hussein, implying some sort of familial connection to the geography of the Middle East in which terrorists wage violent terrorist wars on all things Western. Commentators inferred a twist on the anti-Communist paranoia invoked in the Frank Sinatra classic film, The Manchurian Candidate, in which a son of the American political elite is brainwashed and directed to infiltrate the highest levels of the US government to assert a devious foreign control over the North American polis. The racist imperialist assumptions of this Obama bashing are simultaneously denied and accepted by ideologues of empire who describe Bush's "war on terror" as the "war of our lives against Islam," as Ann Coulter-esque Debbie Schlussel put it recently. Appearing on Pat Robertson’s television show this past week, The 700 Club, Sylvester Stallone, in promoting his newly released cinematic atrocity, Rocky Balboa, asserted his belief in the need to identify Bush’s war on terror as a crusade against Islam.

At the same time, Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) linked this paranoia and fear of Muslims to his promotion of a xenophobic immigration policy that would criminalize millions of people and their families, mandate mass deportations, and is particularly aimed at non-white immigrants. In a letter to a constituent explaining his angst and animosity about a fellow elected member of Congress who happens to be Muslim swearing an oath of Congress on the Koran (a pure fiction, as members swear into Congress without any sort of book) said: "I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped" (Quoted in Media Matters, 2006). In Goode’s paranoid ramblings lies a claim that repression and xenophobic exclusion is necessary to avoid our victimization at the hands of invaders.

The Bush administration continued to deny U.S. imperial intentions in the Middle East, an ironically ahistorical frame of reference which fell on deaf ears as government designees (US State Department officials) and subterranean delegations (CIA agents) wander the globe extending, withdrawing, and leveraging US influence, power, demands, and policies. For example, take the visit of US State Department representative Richard Boucher to Bangladesh in early November 2006 granting Bush administration approval to the right-wing BNP-Jamat alliance-led government (and interfere in that country's election struggle) and its neoliberal and militaristic policies. Primarily aimed at encircling China and its economic dynamo, U.S. interest in Bangladesh also includes exploiting its low-wage workforce and its geopolitical position. Just three countries away, U.S. fighters are pursuing U.S. geopolitical predominance and control of natural resources under the guise of saving faceless, silent Afghan women shrouded in the burkha. To the north, a small army of US officials, at the bidding of finance and industrial capital based primarily in the U.S. sought to pressure China to accept an array of economic "reforms" aimed mainly at allowing great foreign financial penetration into the country and exploitation of its reserve army of labor. On the other side of the world, U.S. government financed non-governmental organizations worked vigorously to block the reelection of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and to fund anti-government groups in Cuba. Imperialist intervention is needed to prevent these countries from hurting U.S. interests.

But so far this is a one-sided tale of domination couched in the language of pretended victimization by a dangerous and savage world. Are there no voices, no movements that resist? Is the globe an empty wilderness? It is represented as a geography inhabited by passive, voiceless bodies eager to be penetrated by North American capital and civilized into "moderates." Post Cold War triumphalism from the capitalist ramparts that claim no alternative and insist on uniform acquiescence to the imperatives of accumulation aside, the world is a cacophony of voices, aflame with turbulent resistance, and bellowing for justice.

What these events as a frame of white supremacist/imperialist reference, a complex of global interactions, events, rhetoric, policy debates, and social issues have to with one another may not be readily apparent. A careful digging into the inventory of history, as Edward Said borrowing from comrade Antonio Gramsci might have put it, and U.S. cultural memory and its imperial ambitions, successes, and failures, however, shows us that these interactions have specific origins, motives, intentions, and real affiliations and dialectical relationships.

In his study of the relationships between culture, class and empire in European and North American history, The Hidden Heritage, Marxist cultural critic John Howard Lawson astutely noted in 1968, "No one in an exploitative society is truly ignorant of its character. The pretense of innocence is itself a symptom of moral sickness." But "pretense of innocence," at the heart of claims of victimization by the "other," and it logical corollary of silencing the "other" is the cultural thread that runs through the history of the U.S. empire. This pretense was ingrained in the very first pieces of literature produced in the newly minted United States, and resonates today as the pretense drips from the lips of President George W. Bush denying the atrocities of the war in Iraq and the imperialist goals of his administration.

But the exploited and oppressed talk back to and struggle against the brutality and domination of the empire. While imperial authority claims that "[p]eople condemned to servitude or destruction can have no valid past, no culture worth saving, no enduring social achievement," Lawson argues, they cannot be silenced forever. Their history and culture is ever-present. Lawson continues: "the people of the abyss are not literally separated from the exploiters: on the contrary, they are present and indispensable. For example, the Negro is so much and so threateningly a presence in the South that he has shaped and possibly dominated the consciousness of Southern whites. The continuing exploitation of the Negro has an incalculable effect on attitudes, ideas and arts in the Northern United States." In a speech delivered in early 2006 Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcón also noted that capitalism creates a boundary-breaking global process: "The third world penetrates the first. The latter needs the former and at the same time rejects it. In Europe and North America appears an undesirable protagonist, a mute guest that demands its rights." In other words, imagined essential boundaries between cultures and identities have been eroded not only by exploitation and oppression but also by struggle and resistance.

By Joel Wendland

--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs magazine and can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net
---
Related

Simon Tisdall

The prospective collapse of democracy in predominantly Sunni Muslim Bangladesh is raising concerns reaching far beyond the south Asian nation.

Militarism and U.S. Trade Policy

Dave Ranney December 15, 2006

Editor: Erik Leaver, IPS

Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org

It is rare to think about the links between militarism and U.S. “trade” policy. But in recent decades, U.S. global economic policies have increasingly driven U.S. military policy. And under the Presidency of George W. Bush and the “war on terrorism” the trend has rapidly and dangerously accelerated. The results have generated a militarism that is beyond the reach of democratic processes both in the United States and abroad. For this reason, activists who oppose the Iraq War and U.S. militarism generally and those promoting global economic and environmental justice must develop a common agenda.

Introduction
Though often unseen, U.S. military policy has frequently been influenced by the economic needs of national elites and major corporations. But the role of economic and trade policy on military action and strategy today is occurring in a new context. The large transnational corporations that have successfully pushed the “free trade” regime on much of the world are in need of new forms of military support in order to maintain and enlarge their sphere of influence. As a result, U.S. military strategy has shifted to focus on areas of the world that resist the dominant “free trade” doctrine. U.S. military planners and policymakers are in the process of phasing out the Cold War era strategy that made use of large standing armed forces in strategically located military bases around the world combined with a balance of nuclear terror and the selective clandestine overthrow of “unfriendly” governments.

In place of these Cold War era strategies, U.S. policy makers have defined a new military strategy based upon the notion of regime change through “preventive” warfare. The U.S. military is also moving toward a smaller more mobile strike force in which more and more soldiers are being trained as elite special operations forces (special ops). The United States government is rapidly eliminating traditional civilian control over intelligence (the traditional command of the CIA and FBI) and centralizing all intelligence under the control of the White House and the Pentagon. Under the Bush administration, the military is rapidly developing security alliances with trading partners such as Canada and Mexico that bring their security and military apparatus under the control of the U.S. military, the U.S. National Security Council and the U.S. centralized intelligence apparatus.

These changes are a response to three kinds of problems generated by policies and programs that the Bush administration calls “free trade.” These programs, however, involve much more than trade. The first President Bush more aptly called them a “new world order.” But instead of order, the policies are resulting in chaos. One problem produced by the new world order is that people in many nations resist the programs because of the pain they inflict. Secondly, some nations have the ability to opt out of new world order programs. They then become part of a “globalization gap” that transnational corporations and the governments that serve them wish to eliminate. Finally the new world order has weakened nation states, that has led to a globalization of resistance both in the form of peaceful multi-state civil society alliances as well as stateless terrorist organizations and cells.

“Free Trade’s” Evolution into a New World Order
Free trade as an economic theory and policy means simply eliminating barriers to trade among nations. The policies of the new world order are far more than that. The distinction between free trade and a new world order is critical to understanding of why the onset of this new world order has generated a new set of military priorities. An understanding of the distinction is best derived by looking at their evolution.

The era prior to the new world order began at the end of World War II when the economic and military power of the U.S. was challenged only by the Soviet Union. The U.S. and the Soviet Union found themselves in competition for spheres of economic and political influence in the so-called “Third World” of underdeveloped nations that had been colonies of the European powers. Both the U.S. and the Soviets sought the resources of these nations to pursue the economic development goals of their own elites. This was the basis of the Cold War.

The Cold War finally ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the U.S. loss of the Vietnam War in 1975 and economic crises throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s left open questions about the viability of world capitalism and the U.S. model. Initial inquiries included high-level discussions among industrialized nations between 1972 and 1977. Written reports of these discussions by such organizations as the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) and the Tri-Lateral Commission called for a reorganization of the existing economic order. The strategy that evolved sought to cheapen the costs of labor, but other kinds of production costs were also targeted. These included the cost of raw materials and other inputs into the production process; the cost of environmental controls and cleanup; and costs associated with the demands for worker and human rights. The second element of the strategy was to increase the mobility of capital, goods, and services. Mobility aimed to produce goods and services in a more flexible way and with greater efficiency (meaning less cost for each item produced). Mobility included both the ability to produce things in different geographical locations and to move from one kind of economic activity into another at low costs.1

A real life test case for the new model was first implemented in Chile in 1973 in the aftermath of a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet and aided by the Nixon administration through the CIA. University of Chicago-trained economists, under the tutelage of Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman, developed Pinochet’s post-coup economic program. It included tight money policies to end inflation, drastic reductions in government spending, currency devaluation, privatization of public enterprise, and the opening of markets for goods and capital to foreign investors. But the Chilean experiment caused tremendous human suffering and was only implemented by a brutal dictator literally at gunpoint. Generalizing the Chilean example on a world scale was not feasible. So the new world order evolved in fits and starts—some deliberate and others more random—from a variety of directions.

Dramatic changes were seen in industrialized nations as transportation, telecommunication, and process technologies were developed making it possible for the production process of a single product to be broken up into smaller pieces in different locations. This marked a distinct shift from mass production on the assembly lines of single factories to more flexible production techniques in which a number of parts of the production of a single product could occur in different locations. This shift included not only technological changes, but also an all-out attack on organized labor and massive deindustrialization in many industrialized nations. The objective of both the attack on labor and deindustrialization was to promote what economists called “flexible labor markets.” The point of flexible labor markets is to gain “efficiency” through cutting labor costs. The combination of the attack on organized labor and deindustrialization enabled industrialized nations as a whole to eliminate many high-wage jobs, reduce costly benefits such as health care and pensions, eliminate many work rules involving safety and health, and remove barriers to the use of part-time and temporary labor.

There was, of course, resistance on the part of organized industrial workers in the industrialized nations. These nations also had in place regulations—won by labor movements in the past—that forced corporations to adhere to basic environmental laws and labor rights. Furthermore, the need for cheap raw materials and expanded markets meant that production costs could not be lowered if production was confined to individual nations. Thus, a globalization of flexible production was needed. This required new mechanisms to open up all nations to meet the needs of global corporations based in the industrialized world.

A key to meeting this need was the global expansion of credit. There was no grand plan as real time events compelled President Richard Nixon to take steps that made the formation of the new world order that we have today possible. The first step came between 1971 and 1973 when Nixon took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard and instituted flexible exchange rates. With flexible rates, the dollar became a commodity for international commerce, resulting in a world awash with dollars. Using these dollars, international banks went on a lending spree, targeting new loans at the developing world. The U.S. and other industrialized nations accelerated this trend in the private markets as they used government loans to buy political influence in the context of the Cold War. As a result, debt owed by developing nations rose from $100 billion in 1973 to over $900 billion by 1984. Beginning in 1982, developing nations showed signs that many of these debts were not sustainable and global financial collapse loomed.

It was at this point that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—two institutions heavily influenced by the U.S. and set up to aid the European recovery effort and to promote U.S. economic interests after World War II—began to focus increasingly on the developing world. The IMF was key to this shift. It offered “bridge” loans to nations who could not repay their debts. These loans were then used to make payments on the earlier loans. Nations accepting these IMF loans were required to implement economic policies dictated by the IMF. The conditions placed on these loans looked very similar to those in Pinochet’s Chile. Tight money, public spending cuts, and currency devaluation were prescribed to stabilize economies. Once these so-called “shock therapies” were implemented, structural adjustment programs were prescribed. They included a shift from domestic food production to goods that could be exported. In addition economies were opened to unrestricted foreign direct investment that established a manufacturing sector of goods for export. Most structural adjustment programs also opened economies to more speculative financial investment and also included privatization of public services and enterprise. Later the World Bank began to give long-term development loans and began including similar conditions to those of the IMF.

The IMF and World Bank programs were refined, expanded, and institutionalized through a series of bilateral and multilateral “free trade” agreements. Key among these were the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 1989, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U.S., Canada and Mexico in 1994 and the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. Other efforts at institutionalization through “free trade” agreements (FTAs) continue to this day including the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) that includes authority for FTA’s with 35 African nations, bilateral FTAs in the Middle East including Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Bahrain and Oman. These FTAs form the base of a proposed NAFTA-like agreement with the entire Middle East region known as the U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA).

While often overlooked in today’s politically charged climate, the U.S. generated global economic policies are not solely the work of the present Bush administration. It was the Clinton administration that mustered up the political muscle to push through both NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. And the U.S. heavily influenced the IMF, World Bank, and other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) to impose structural adjustment programs throughout much of the world. In short, the factors defining today’s new world order and the resulting new militarism were generated by both Republican and Democratic administrations going back to the 1980s.

The New World Order and the New Militarism
There are at least three reasons why the new world order has generated a new kind of militarism. First, the process of stabilizing weak economies and draining the economy for debt service payments is extremely painful to the majority of the population. Thus the IMF “shock therapies” and ongoing subjugation of entire countries to structural adjustment programs and/or “free trade agreements” have generated resistance. In many cases local governments have put down uprisings or political opposition movements with considerable brutality and have needed ongoing military aide to stay in power. U.S. support of dictatorships in Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and the effort to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the same period are early examples. Ongoing joint security agreements with Mexico are more recent and correspond with popular opposition to NAFTA including the armed revolt of the Zapatistas that began in 1994. In Venezuela in 1989 there was a major revolt after IMF imposed measures doubled the price of food and transportation.

A second military implication of new world order policies is that some nations, like Venezuela and most of the nations in the Middle East region can use their oil resources to resist “free trade” policies. This removes oil, a key resource that contributes to the cost of production, from the influence of new world order policies. It also offers oil rich nations a way to stay out of IMF clutches and to resist the relentless effort to force them into trade agreements with the U.S. A recent Pentagon study points out that over the past 12 years nearly all military actions have been in nations that are “fighting against or losing to globalization.” It concludes that nations outside the sphere of influence of the new world order economic policies “are likely a problem for the United States.”2

Finally, the new world order tends to weaken nation-states as economic policies are increasingly determined outside of domestic political processes. This has led to a globalization of resistance to new world order programs and policies because people lack access to the political process that formed and implemented them. Resistance has taken several forms. One is the emergence of an international civil society movement that is capable to mobilizing militant multinational demonstrations all over the world, posing alternatives to the new world order, and coordinating a variety of peaceful actions such as legal challenges to particular rules or efforts to elect candidates in different nations who will oppose new world order initiatives.

Another form of the globalization of resistance includes armed groups such as al-Qaida that have no allegiance to any government. In nations that have embraced new world order programs such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, the U.S. has supported repressive regimes that have helped spawn groups like al-Qaida. Those nations who have resisted such as Iraq and Iran have experienced either overt or covert U.S. efforts to implement regime change. Yet, the destruction of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq have failed to stem the violence. Adding to the instability in the region are the additional factors of: oil, the relative independence of oil rich nations from the new global rules, and the relentless effort of U.S. government policy to bring the region under its control.

The globalization of information and arms dealing combined with weak nation-states and sections of the world ravaged by World Bank and IMF sponsored “shock therapies” have proven to be a deadly stew. Altogether the globalization of violent resistance to the new world order and the U.S. political and military response to it, contributed to the conditions that resulted in the attacks of 9-11.

The Face of the New Militarism
The military and intelligence apparatus that evolved in the context of the Cold War cannot meet the new security challenges created by the new world order. In a world of highly mobile economic activity in a global economy with weakened nation states and a globalized opposition, a new militarism is developing.

The massive U.S. military-industrial complex, as President Dwight Eisenhower called it, was built up during the Cold War. It has been slow to change in response to new conditions. The economic policies that generated the violent side of the globalization of resistance were developed over the last 35 years and are the work of both major U.S. political parities. Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton all played a role in shaping the policies that constitute a new world order. None of these presidents hesitated to use military force to put down crises that their policies generated. But it was during the Presidency of George W. Bush that the most disastrous blowback from the new world order came on September, 11, 2001. And this enabled the Bush administration to accelerate and expand the military dimensions of the new world order programs. The implication for the future is that changing administrations is not apt to change the directions of the new militarism unless a new administration is also willing to repudiate new world order policies and begin anew.

The 2002 National Security Strategy: The Pentagon Takes on “Trade”
While elements of the new militarism were developed by future Bush administration officials back in 1992, they were publicly presented as a response to the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a decade later. On September 22, 2002 the White House released its National Security Strategy for the United States. In many ways it was an early effort to justify the Iraq War before it began. But it also telegraphed changes going on within the Department of Defense as well as various intelligence agencies. The 2002 National Security Strategy has nine sections that emphasize the following themes:

The need for dramatic changes in military strategy and U.S. security strategy generally;
Replacing the Cold War containment strategy with a doctrine of pre-emptive military action;
The need to form a variety of alliances to better cover the entire world;
“Free markets and free trade” are key priorities in the U.S. notion of national security.
On the need for changes in strategy, the 2002 National Security Strategy notes:

“In a globalized world, events beyond America’s borders have a greater impact inside them…The major institutions of American national security were designed in a different era to meet different requirements. All of them must be transformed… Innovation within the armed forces will rest on experimentation with new approaches to warfare, strengthening joint operations, exploiting U.S. intelligence advantages, and taking full advantage of science and technology.”

A central premise of the new strategy involves the use of the pre-emptive strike. This was clearly an early effort to begin the justification for what would be done about five months later with the invasion of Iraq. Here, in part is what the strategy laid out:

“In the Cold War, especially following the Cuban missile crisis, we faced a generally status quo, risk-averse adversary. Deterrence was an effective defense. But deterrence based only upon the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks, gambling with the lives of their people and the wealth of their nations…For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of preemption on the existence of an imminent threat—most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies and air forces preparing to attack...We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.” (author’s emphasis)

The adaptation of the concept of imminent threat, as the attack on Iraq would show, expanded preemption to military action to prevent possible future wars.
It was also recognized that waging war in both Afghanistan and Iraq while searching the world for terrorist cells and networks such as al-Qaida would stretch military and intelligence resources within the U.S. Thus the 2002 document also articulated a policy to draw other nations into our military strategy:

“In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the conviction that all nations have important responsibilities. Nations that enjoy freedom must actively fight terror.”

This was most clearly developed for the Western Hemisphere:

“In the Western Hemisphere we have formed flexible coalitions with countries that share our priorities, particularly Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Chile, and Colombia. Together we will promote a truly democratic hemisphere where our integration advances security, prosperity, opportunity and hope. We will work with regional institutions, such as the Summit of the Americas process, the Organization of American States (OAS), the Defense Ministerial of the Americas for the benefit of the entire hemisphere.”

Here the strategy links the institutions promoting “free trade” (Summit of the Americas and OAS) with the Defense Ministerial—an association of the military and intelligence apparatus for all of the nations in the hemisphere.

Finally, and perhaps most surprising, the 2002 National Security Strategy links the need for changes in national defense strategy, the doctrine of pre-emptive military strikes, and the need to form new military alliances among “free trade” partners to the need to expand free trade rules and institutions throughout the world:

“Free markets and free trade are key priorities of our national security strategy...(We will) ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade. A strong world economy enhances our national security by advancing prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world…Even if government aid increases, most money for development must come from trade, domestic capital and foreign investment. An effective strategy must try to expand these flows....”

Energy is cited as a key priority for trade and investment throughout the National Security Strategy report. Future energy needs of the U.S. are used as a justification for expanding “free markets and free trade.” Other trade priorities included in the U.S. security strategy were pursuing the Doha Round talks on expanding the scope and membership of the World Trade Organization, completing negotiations and implementing the Free Trade Area of the Americas, moving ahead with more bi-lateral trade agreements including the Central American Free Trade Agreement, gaining “fast track” (trade promotion authority) in Congress for new trade initiatives, and implementing the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act.

The Pentagon and Free Trade
Linking national defense and intelligence approaches to globalization and “free trade” policies was elaborated in considerable detail in a presentation to a forum of the leaders of a number of the largest transnational corporations sponsored by the conservative Washington-based policy institute, the Heritage Foundation, in June, 2003. Illustrating the close ties between conservatives and the Pentagon, Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who was then the Director of the Department of Defense’s Office of Defense Transformation, the planning wing of the Pentagon, delivered the remarks.3

Cebrowski argued that the current period of globalization requires military transformation that goes beyond the old concept of “security equals defense” to a concept he terms a “transaction strategy.” A transaction strategy means anticipating security problems and taking actions to prevent these problems from occurring. Prevention, for Cebrowski, includes using all available tools such as foreign policy, economic policy, military strategy and tactics, and weapon sales and military training.
Cebrowski emphasized that “new rules that govern global capitalism” are behind the need for this new military strategy. Quite revealing in this regard is his conception that there has emerged a “functioning core of globalization” in which nations and peoples are connected through a growing and developing set of rules. But there is also what he calls a “non functioning gap of globalization” where certain nations are disconnected from the rest of the world:

“Disconnectedness is now one of the great danger signals around the world. It is an indicator of where the Department of Defense might be spending more and more of its time.”

To illustrate the point, Cebrowski prepared a map on which he plotted all U.S. military interventions between 1990 and 2002. Nearly all U.S. military responses since 1990 have been in those nations that are part of the globalization gap. He concludes:

“If you are fighting against or losing to globalization, you are likely a problem for the U.S.”

Cebrowski’s presentation at the Heritage Foundation was an early and highly detailed outline of the Bush administration’s view of the military implications of the new world order era.

National Security Strategy Redux
More recent documents, the 2006 National Security Strategy, the 2005 National Defense Strategy and the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, reaffirm the direction suggested by Cebrowski and the first National Security Strategy document.

The new documents, however, do offer some reflection on the current state of the Iraq War and offer some slightly different formulations. The highlights include:

The “war against terrorism” will be a long and protracted struggle;
The “war against terrorism” can be won by promoting “democracy” throughout the world;
A central tenet of democracy is free markets and free trade; and,
The military component of the “war against terrorism” must be shared by democratic nations.
Bush’s cover letter for the 2006 National Security Strategy indicates some of the change in rational for fighting a “long war” when he outlines the “two pillars” of his current strategy:

“Our national security strategy is founded upon two pillars: The first pillar is promoting freedom, justice and human dignity—working to end tyranny, to promote effective democracies, and to extend prosperity through free and fair trade and wise development policies…The second pillar of our strategy is confronting the challenges of our time by leading a growing community of democracies…Many of the problems we face… reach across borders. Effective multinational efforts are essential to solve these problems.”

The document goes on to state that effective democracies have market economies and that even if a government is popularly elected, it is not truly democratic unless it has “economic freedom.” It reaffirms a statement made in the 2002 strategy:

“To expand economic liberty and prosperity, the United States promotes free and fair trade, open markets, a stable financial system (and) the integration of the global economy....”

The link is clearly made between “democracy” and new world order rules. Among accomplishments since 2002, the document points to the initiation of the ultimately failed Doha round of negotiations for the expansion of the World Trade Organization and its leadership in bringing in new members including Saudi Arabia. It points to progress with a variety of Free Trade Agreements including CAFTA and the beginning of MEFTA. Bilateral agreements with Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco and Oman are seen as the foundation of expansion of MEFTA. An Asian initiative (ASEAN) is also cited as an accomplishment—one that is grounded in an free trade agreement with Singapore and negotiations with Malaysia. It also cites initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa using the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

The strategy goes on to project a program to bring more nations into the new world order program. These include an effort to:

Gain market reforms in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Vietnam so they can become members of the WTO;
Advance MEFTA by implementing trade accords with Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates;
Pursue trade agreements in Africa focusing on Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland as well as in Asia with Thailand, Republic of Korea and Malaysia and continuing to work closely with China;
Build on NAFTA, CAFTA, and the accord with Chile by concluding agreements with Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Panama; and,
Further reform the IFI’s that will encourage (or force) other nations to accept the opening of the world to the free flow of capital and free trade.
The “second pillar” of the National Security Strategy, is called “transformational diplomacy.” This notion of diplomacy means more direct involvement in the internal affairs of other nations. It specifically addresses the need to use U.S. resources to build: “the security and law enforcement structures that are often the prerequisite for restoring order and ensuring success.”

Thus, rather than an agenda to fight and win a “war against terrorism,” these two “pillars” of the National Security Strategy outline a program justifying the use of military force to promote and enforce free trade.

Trade and Integration Penetrates the Quadrennial Defense Review and the National Defense Strategy
The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, a Pentagon planning process that addresses the Pentagon’s strategy for the next 20 years toward force structure, force modernization, infrastructure, and budget based upon the National Defense Strategy (last updated in May 2005). Both documents—the strategy and defense review—state that they see the mission of the Department of Defense as fulfilling the larger National Security Strategy. Hence the activities of the Department of Defense should not be separated from the “two pillars” of the National Security Strategy.

Both the strategy and review repeat the theme that we are in a long protracted struggle that is scattered throughout the world, and that defense strategy must include the objective of spreading “democracy” throughout the world and preventing non democratic nations from gaining weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists. In addition to these points, they emphasize the need to form military alliances to implement the military strategies they embrace. The 2005 Defense Strategy makes this very clear:

“Our strategic objectives are not attainable without the support and assistance of capable partners at home and abroad. Abroad the United States is transforming its security relationships and we are seeking to improve those of our partners…We want to increase our partners’ capabilities and their ability to operate together with U.S. forces.”

The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) goes on to develop the theme of joint security with partners in broader terms and calls on Congress to give them greater authority and flexibility to pursue this objective further:

“Future joint forces will increasingly use host-nation facilities with only a modest supporting U.S. presence, decreasing the need for traditional overseas main operating bases with large infrastructures and reducing exposure to asymmetric threats.”

“Unity of effort requires that strategies, plans and operations be closely coordinated with partners. Authorities, procedures and practices must permit the seamless integration of Federal, state and local capabilities at home and among allies, partners and non-governmental organizations abroad... The Department (of Defense) recommends that the United States continue to work with its allies to develop approaches, consistent with their domestic laws and applicable international law to disrupt and defeat transnational threats before they mature.” (author’s emphasis)

Applicable international law could well include trade agreements and conditions on loans made by the International Financial Institutions.

The QDR goes on to recommend to Congress that the Department of Defense be given “considerably greater flexibility” in the U.S. Government’s ability to partner directly with nations fighting terrorists. This includes “training, equipping and advising their security forces to generate stability and security within their own borders.” The document argues that “greater flexibility [to do the above] is urgently needed.” This includes not only working with the armed forces of other nations but with local law enforcement agencies and doing this in coordination with the U.S. State Department. It concludes this recommendation by linking it back to the theme of protracted war and the need to “expand democracy” that was emphasized in the National Security Strategy. It calls for authority to train foreign military and police in the United States apparently without much Congressional oversight.

The QDR also recommends that the military expand its Special Operations Forces (SOF)—making much of the U.S. military “SOF-like” as suggested in the perspective of Admiral Cebrowski. An SOF military with a perspective of pre-emptive strikes and a long “Global War on Terrorism” means that they foresee an ongoing need to move military operations rapidly from one part of the world to another. To meet that need the U.S. military will be highly mobile, using mobile weapons and logistics systems and Special Operations forces to move quickly in and out of targeted areas while relying on an expanded intelligence capability and joint operations with “partners,” nations who are allied with the U.S. economically through international agreements on trade and investment.

Iraq, Militarism and the Corporate “Free Trade” Agenda
As the military and security strategy documents reviewed in this essay confirm, economic policies of the new world order are generating a transformation of the U.S. military to defeat the growing globalization of resistance and impose the new world order programs and policies everywhere. The most critical testing ground for this transformation today and the place where the military implications of the new world order are most evident is Iraq.

Antonia Juhasz’s book, The Bush Agenda, documents how the U.S. military imposed a complete transformation of the Iraqi economy following the U.S. occupation. This transformation included all of the features of new world order programs and policies. Two months prior to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration received a 107-page contract developed by the successor to the disgraced Arthur Anderson Consultants, Bearing Point Corporation. The $250 million contract, “Stimulating Economic Recovery, Reform, and Sustained Growth in Iraq,” contained a blueprint for the complete reconstruction of the Iraqi economy as well as a program of ongoing technical assistance for its implementation.

Hand in hand with Bearing Point Consultants Paul Bremer who ruled the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for 14 months, dissolved the Iraqi Constitution and virtually all laws that were contrary to the Bearing Point blueprint.

During Bremer’s reign he implemented 100 orders that included:

The privatization of 192 state owned enterprises (Order #1);

Complete liberalization of trade (Order 12);

Changed the progressive tax system to a flat tax (Order #37); and,

Opened the economy to unrestricted foreign investment and foreign ownership of banks (Orders #39 and 40).

The investment order allowed foreign corporations to take over the privatized services and any other enterprise and repatriate the profits without any restriction by a future Iraqi Government. Such laws are the centerpiece for virtually all new world order bilateral and multilateral agreements (Chapter 11 of NAFTA, for example). They offer a legal framework for the complete domination of the economy, including oil, by foreign corporations.
The laws imposed by Bremer and the CPA to implement the 100 orders were written into the new Iraqi constitution and thus make up the framework within which the current “Iraqi Government” must operate today. Essentially “free trade” and “democracy” have come to Iraq through invasion and
military occupation.

Implications and Conclusions
If U.S. militarism and its manifestations in the Iraq War and the “war on terrorism” are being driven by global rules that govern the flow of goods, services and capital around the world, then world peace depends on changing those rules and opposing efforts to expand and extend them. Ending U.S. occupation of Iraq, a key demand of the U.S. peace movement today, is critical to ending the conflict there. But it is not enough if the broader goal is a lasting peace. Here is where the movement opposing new world order programs and policies and promoting a global order that promotes economic and environmental justice comes in. As a start, the more traditional peace movement can join forces with economic and environmental justice forces by demanding that Bremer’s Orders be repealed, extending to the people of Iraq the right to economic self determination. In addition, a broad global peace movement needs to address the programs and polices that are pushing the world into violent conflict and driving the U.S. military.

While some U.S. activists are involved in peace organizing as well as economic and environmental justice work, these activities remain organizationally and strategically separate. What is needed instead is a unified movement that promotes economic and environmental justice while opposing the use of force to impose the economic and political agenda of the new world order. Because both U.S. economic and military strategies are global, it is also critical that we build alliances with progressive forces in those nations who are the object of both new world order programs and their military counterpart.

Directions for such a movement lie in the dualities within the new world order itself. The fact that the “free trade” programs of the new world order have created a “blow-back” that generates a perpetual war of preemptive strikes, an explosion of privacy invasion justified as intelligence gathering, an economy of increasingly shaky debt in which most of its resources go to war and destruction is a place for such a movement to begin. The positive face of the globalization of resistance is a worldwide movement of civil society that has argued for a different type of globalization; one that benefits the majority of citizens rather than a handful of corporate elites.

As more and more nations get drawn into the web of perpetual warfare as a result of the U.S. National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy, this global movement of civil society is likely to get even larger. And the fact that the new world order itself generates violence and militarism offers an opportunity to unite this global economic/environmental justice movement with a growing global peace movement.

The emerging global civil society movement includes a number of non-governmental entities such as the World Social Forum, The (Western) Hemispheric Social Alliance, the Fifty Years is Enough Campaign, Jubilee South, and a variety of global associations concerned with human rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and environmental quality. There is considerable recognition internationally within these international formations that the programs of the new world order are imposing security alliances between the U.S. and governments under the new world order regime. In the Western Hemisphere this is known as “NAFTA Plus” and “Deep Integration.” Elsewhere the military implications of economic programs are less developed. But the fact of growing security alliances being linked to economic alliances such as NAFTA and WTO provides a natural point of contact between more traditional peace advocacy and economic justice.

The promotion of economic and environmental justice as part of a global peace initiative thus builds both on contradictions of the new world order initiatives and the ongoing work of organizations focusing on peace and those that prioritize economic and environmental justice. An important contribution of the latter organizations to this effort is the work that has been done on alternatives to the new world order programs and policies. Such alternatives offer a framework for a world free of the economic institutions that promote violence and warfare. A variety of international gatherings since the early 1990’s have produced international civil society protocols on the rights of women, indigenous people, human rights generally, and the environment. And these protocols have been adopted by groups with even broader economic/environmental justice agendas as part of their demands for alternative directions.

An important example in the Western Hemisphere is a program known as “Alternatives for the Americas.”4 This program started with the opposition to NAFTA in 1991 when Canadian, Mexican and U.S. civil society activists held meetings first in Seattle, U.S.A and later in Zacatecas, Mexico to discuss alternatives to the trade accord.

The original grouping that consisted of civil society networks from three nations has now grown to encompass all of the nations in the Western Hemisphere. And the group has developed a 111-page alternative that includes specific programs on human rights, the environment, sustainability, gender, labor, immigration, the role of government, education, communications, investment, finance, intellectual property rights, agriculture, market access, services, enforcement, and dispute resolution. These programs are all based on common principles agreed upon through ongoing discussion within the civil society networks of all nations. A summary of these principles states:

“Trade and investment should not be ends in themselves, but rather instruments for achieving just and sustainable development. Citizens must have the right to participate in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of hemispheric social and economic policies. Central goals of these policies should be to promote economic sovereignty, social welfare and reduced inequality at all levels.”

In February, 2006, at the World Social Forum meeting in Bamako, Mali, a group based in Africa issued what they called “The Bamako Appeal.”5 This marks the beginning of a parallel course of action to that of the Hemispheric Social Alliance that has begun a process to develop a similar program of alternatives on a world scale.

The approach taken by Venezuela to Latin American economic cooperation as seen with the Bolivarian Alternative to Free Trade or ALBA is an example of governments (Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia) attempting to put some of the principles of the Hemisperhic Alliance and Bamako into practice. In addition, alternative programs such as these can be the basis for coordinated action among civil society networks throughout the world that can combine forces with the growing global peace movement. In the U.S., for example, the program of the Hemispheric Social Alliance can be the litmus test (rather than party affiliation) for electoral candidates. Support or opposition to candidates can transcend national borders, as well, if this is based on some universal principles of economic, social, and environmental justice combined with world peace. Such an approach can move beyond the electoral arena to create multi-state alliances in opposition to negative actions of governments or transnational corporations or in support of positive programs that address the needs of ordinary people.

To the extent that such programs make any inroads at all, they can go a long way toward undermining the economic basis of the growing global militarism that new world order programs and policies generate. And they offer a program that can unite movements for peace, economic justice, and environmental quality.


Endnotes
1 The evolution of the new world order is presented in greater detail and with references in David Ranney, Global Decisions, Local Collisions: Urban Life in the New World Order (Temple University Press, 2003).

2 Arthur Cebrowski, “Planning a Revolution: Mapping the Pentagon’s Transformation,” Heritage Foundation WebMemo #292, June 12, 2003. See also, Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map (Putnam, 2004).

3 Cebrowski, op. cit.

4 Available at: http://www.asc-hsa.org/.

5 The Bamako Appeal has been reproduced in a number of places including: http//www.openspaceforum.net.