Three-and-a-half years ago (May 2003) several of us
contributed articles relating to the just-completed
investment of Iraq. It might be interesting to assess where those
interpretations stand today. But first, a word of
preamble… (If you're au
courant regarding the "Project for the New
American Century," you might want to skim this next-
page-and-a-half, which re-plows furrowed ground.)
During the 44 years of the "Cold
War" (1947-1991), the U. S., as the paraclete of the
"Free World", acted both overtly
(The Korean War, the Viet Nam War) and covertly (The Bay of Pigs,
the anti-Soviet arming of the Afghan mujahideen) to thwart the
spread of communism. During that period, the U. S. would have
obeyed no rules but its own, so it may have come naturally that
in 1992, with U. S. foreign policy
"drifting", the U. S. Secretary of
Defense, Dick Cheney, and two of his employees, Dr. Paul
Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, came up with their audacious,
idealistic, and visionary plan, "Defense
Policy Guidance". To recap:
"Defense Policy Guidance"
proposed that the U. S. would
(1) seek to remain the world's sole surviving
superpower, allowing no other country to grow strong enough to
challenge our superpower status;
(2) install representative republics throughout the world (which
would presumably then be friendly to us); and
(3) become the world's policeman, beefing up
our defense budget, and creating a set of permanent
"forward operating bases" around
the world.
A draft copy of "Defense Guidance
Policy" was leaked to the New York Times,
whereupon Senator Joseph Biden, Secretary of State James Baker,
and Foreign Policy Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski prevailed upon
SecDef Dick Cheney to withdraw the plan (which he did). In their
eyes, the plan called for global control.
In 1997, the plan's authors updated and
re-issued the plan under the rubric
"Project for the New American
Century" (PNAC). The PNAC sets forth the
"Main military missions" necessary
to "preserve Pax Americana" and a
"unipolar 21st
century". By now, the players had expanded to include
Richard Armitage, Ellen Bork (wife of unconfirmed Supreme Court
nominee, Robert Bork), Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Zahmay Khalilzad
(our current ambassador to Iraq), Lewis Libby, Richard Perle,
Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.
The men and women who supported this concept considered
themselves to be "realistic
idealists", shooting for a comity of independent
nations in which the United States would be assured of safe
haven. Their lodestar (which, I guess, would also be my own) was
that democratic governments (insuring individual rights that
protect the minority from the majority) are what the world wants
and needs. They cited the paradigm of the conversion of Germany
and Japan to democracies after World War II, and
Reagan's tough stance vis-à-vis the U.
S. S. R. that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as
examples of successful republic-incubation interventions.
In 1998, following "perceived Iraqi
unwillingness to co-operate with UN inspectors",
several members of the group wrote President Clinton, asking him
to invade Iraq and finish the job of removing Saddam Hussein from
power. During the 1991Gulf War, the reason given by Dick Cheney
for not continuing into Baghdad and deposing Saddam was that
Saddam was holding together the Shi'ites, the
Sunnis, and the Kurds, at gunpoint in an effort to weld together
a modern, secular nation. Also, Iraq was a counterweight to
oil-rich Iran. If Saddam were removed, it
wasn't clear what would happen (though
it's clear enough by now).
As you probably know, Iraq consists of the autonomous, peaceful,
prosperous Kurdish enclave Kurdistan (with its own flag
and government) in the oil-rich north, an oil-poor Sunni area in
the middle, and an oil-rich Shi'ite demesne in
the south. And as you also probably know, the
Shi'ites are the underprivileged 10% minority
in the Arab world except in Iran, where they are
dominant"¦ one people divided by a common
faith. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, and under him, the Sunni Iraqi
minority played the wicked stepmother to the
Shi'ite's Cinderella. But
now that the Sunnis and the Shi'ites are
voting blocs in a republic where the Shi'ites
hold a 2:1 majority, the tables are turned.
What you might not know is what I learned a few minutes ago: that
Iraq is a actually patchwork quilt of intermingled Sunnis,
Shi'ites, and Kurds along the general axis of
the Tigris-Euphrates river, and that it's in
this half of Iraq that the internecine warfare is taking place.
You're left wondering what became of those
insights when the U. S. invaded Iraq in 2003. It
doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out
what would happen if the Sunnis and the
Shi'ites were given an opportunity to even old
scores (especially if there were agents provocateur to
drop seed crystals into this steaming brew). Nor does it take a
>180 IQ to deduce what advantages might accrue to Iran if Iraq
were eliminated as the chess piece holding Iran in check. With
its oil wealth, Iran has been infiltrating Syria, converting
Syrian Sunnis to Shi'ites. Tiny Jordan and
Lebanon would be pawns in this game. Iraq's
Shi'ite population might be expected to fit in
naturally with Iran's
Shi'ite population. Although Iran
doesn't seem to want to open that
Pandora's Box, might Iran offer the Iraqi
Kurds an expanded Kurdistan? Could Iran convert some of the
oil-poor Sunnis to Shi'ites in Iraq as it has
in Syria? On the other hand, both Iran and Syria are concerned
that the fratricide between the Iraqi Sunnis and the Iraqi
Shi'ites might spill over into their lands.
Given the most favorable outcome, Iran might become the dominant
regional player, with the next firewall being Israel.
A recent article cites the labeling of Iran and Syria as an
"axis of evil" as one of President
Bush' five mistakes. That statement, combined
with the invasion of Iraq, contributed to a shift during the
elections two years ago in Iran from a moderating government to
its current right-wing regime. (A similar shift took place in
Pakistan in 2003, where there was a seismic shift from a secular
and moderate parliament to an Islamic majority.)
But back to the plot. During the 1990's, the
drafters of the PNAC crafted a potent political machine,
appealing to evangelical Christian, to defense contractors, and
to industry in general.
Just before the 2000 election, the PNACers issued an update
entitled, Rebuilding America's Defenses:
Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, further
detailing their plans if elected. The plan observed that what was
needed was another Pearl Harbor to motivate the American public
to support the PNAC and a military buildup.
Between 1992 and 2000, Saddam Hussein orchestrated an
assassination attempt upon ex-President Herbert Bush.
I've wondered what role that might have played
in the Bushes' backing of the invasion of
Iraq. (Perhaps different players had different motivations.)
During the 2000 election, as quietly as falling snow, a political
cabal with its own agenda hijacked the Republican Party and then
the U. S. agenda, all unbeknownst to us, the people. Whether we
favor the PNAC plan or whether we don't, it
seems to me that this coup
d'état revealed how easily our
government can be subverted. And for me, this is shocking. This
may have happened before, politics as usual, without most of us
being aware of it, but that doesn't make it
any less ominous.
To anticipate the rest of this assessment of our assessments,
everything we collectively published in 2003 still seems as
relevant as it did then. The difference is that by now, over half
the U. S. public agrees with us, whereas then, it probably
didn't. By now, it's
abundantly clear that the invasion of Iraq had been planned well
before 9/11, and had everything to do with the PNAC.
One major problem with the PNAC is that for all intents and
purposes, it was implemented on the sly. Although, to their
credit, the PNAC proponents made no secret of their plans, and
have published them on the http://www.newamericancentury.org/ website,
most people are still unaware that it exists, let alone that it
has formed the playbook for our current administration.
Consequently, it came as a sinister surprise to those of us who
had to "learn it on the street"
rather than hearing from more conventional sources.
And this raises a mystery: why have there been no illuminations
of the "Project for the New American
Century" in the media or on the part of
politicians? By now, references to America's
new imperialism and to the
"neocons" are legion, but they all
assume that the reader is conversant with these topics. In my
experience, these references whiz right by the average reader. So
where was our immune system: the media?
The problem that struck me most, first, about this
"audacious, idealistic, and visionary
plan" is the effect it would seem to me to have had
upon foreign leaders. Even if the PNAC's
idealistic leaders were as pure as the driven snow, what would
the condottiere who implemented the plan do with it? Would they
say to the idealists, "Thank you very much for
assembling these reins of power. Now we'll
take over. You run along and play." What would happen
in 20 years? 50 years? Would foreign leaders want to kiss the
ring of the almighty United States? Who would control this
juggernaut? Where are the checks and balances? Once you build and
sell the nation such a political machine, it becomes an
attractive target for whoever can commandeer it.
"If you build it, they will
come."
New Arms Races?
In my view, this bold and visionary plan would trigger (and has
triggered) a new international arms race. Given CIA renditions,
assassinations (President Bush reinstated CIA assassination
policies in 2005 after a 32-year hiatus), U. S. armed
interventions, and now, full-scale invasions in violation of
international law, you wonder if some might be so uncouth as to
consider - unfairly, I'm sure
- the U. S. to be the
world's leading terrorist nation. Surely not!
The abrogation of the SALT II Treaty, coupled with U. S.
announcements that we would develop tactical nuclear weapons and
nuclear "bunker busters", and that we
plan to use nuclear weapons against third-world nations that
displease us must have triggered a nuclear arms race. Added to
that is our shift from a belligerent to an accommodative stance
once we found out that North Korea had nuclear weapons, our
endorsement and nuclear partnership with India when we perceived
it to be in our interests to boost India against China, and our
whole-hearted endorsement of Israel's nuclear
weapons developed in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, and you can see why a nuclear arms race has developed
among some third-world countries.
Nuclear Armageddon?
In the meantime, we are still living half-an-hour away from
nuclear Armageddon. In 1991, when the Cold War ended, I heaved a
sigh of relief, and decided it was time to forget about mutual
assured destruction. But in point of fact, the threat is still
there, and in some ways, more sinister than it was during the
Cold War. Russia has an alleged 8,200 nuclear warheads, with
about 950 ICBM's to deliver them. The
(plausible?) perception of the U. S. as a rogue nation must have
caused the Russians to crank back into their ICBMs the
coordinates of U. S. cities and missile farms. There are fewer
than 300 cities in North America with populations of 50,000 or
more, all of which are said to be targets for nuclear warheads.
At the same time, the U. S. has an estimated 7,000 nuclear
warheads, with some of them loaded onto nuclear submarines,
presumably ready to vaporize Russian targets. It has been
estimated that 1,000 nuclear warheads exploded more or less
simultaneously would start enough fires and loft enough dust into
the atmosphere to bring on a nuclear winter, destroying
civilization, and perhaps, all higher life forms on this planet.
I'm under the impression that there are
nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems in some of the
former Soviet nations such as the Ukraine(?) and Kazakhstan(?) as
well. Further, Russian early warning systems are allegedly
becoming old and rickety. I've read the claim
that in 1996, Norway launched an Earth observation satellite that
initiated a Russian red alert. Boris Yeltsin was said to have
been 10 seconds away from a retaliatory strike when the all-clear
signal was sounded. In addition, there has been a leakage of
nuclear technology from the lightly funded, lightly guarded
arsenals of former Soviet satrapies.
A popular speculative topic in conjunction with the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence is the Fermi Paradox: if other
intelligent races exist in our galaxy, where are they? If I look
ahead, it would appear that it will become ever easier and
cheaper to destroy higher life forms on our planet, leading, in
the limit, to a time when even minor-league fringe groups could
annihilate humanity. Applying this to the galaxy as a whole, we
might conclude that technological civilizations self-destruct
when they develop the capability to readily do so.
Have a nice day!
Does Democracy Come Out of the Muzzle of a Gun?
Other concerns are that the "Project for
the New American Century" delivers democracy at
gunpoint. While the targets of this "gunpoint
diplomacy" are to be repressive regimes and
dictatorships, and the beneficiaries the people whom they
repress, it's not clear that the populations
themselves will trust democracies imposed by a Western Christian
nation like the United States. Invading one's
homeland to install a new and unfamiliar government from without
can trigger strong territorial imperatives.
Exporting Democracy Even As We Are Perceived To Be
Abandoning It At Home
Should I mention the incongruity of the U. S.'
exportation of democracy and human rights to other nations when
we are perceived to be curtailing our own democratic institutions
and human rights? Our own Supreme Court, after the appointment of
the most conservative Justices our Republican-controlled Congress
would accept, has ruled several of the abridgements of
detainees' rights to be unconstitutional.
The Meanings of "Democracy"
For op-ed writers in Lahore's Friday
Times, US-imposed "democracy"
means Walmart, MacDonalds, single-parent families, drug pushers,
gay marriage, and evangelical Christian missionaries. Third-world
nations tend to be old-fashioned, and aren't
eager to enjoy those modern liberties.
The Naïveté of the Project for the New American
Century
This plan for a "Pax Americana"
seems to me to be dangerously naive. The concept of the U. S.
becoming the superhero who installs democracies around the world
against the will of existing governments assumes that the U. S.
has the capability to do this. Modern nations would seem to
derive their powers not just from military supremacy but also
(and perhaps, more importantly) from such diverse strengths as
economics, education, personal probity, and an equitable
distribution of wealth. I have the impression that the PNACers
are approaching this as power politicians who are taking for
granted all the other capabilities that are needed for such a
grand vision. "When your only tool is a
hammer, everything looks like a nail." Poly Sci.
types would think in their idiosyncratic way, economists in
another way, and sociologists in yet another.
Seeking Guidance in the Rear-View Mirror
One recent article I read extolled the Roman extirpation of
Carthage as a scorched-earth model for present-day warfare, and
I've already mentioned the members of the Bush
Administration who suggested that Rome didn't
do so badly - that maybe a New Rome was the
proper future for the U. S. That would be fine if
we're willing to return to the technology, and
particularly to the military technology of the 2nd
century B. C. Otherwise, forget it. We live in era of potential
self-destruction as a species (a process that may already be in
train if runaway global warming takes place). This is the
21st century, and some strategies that were
permissible for our grandfathers are no longer permissible for us
(or at least, that's what I think).
Semantics - The Tyranny of Words
As I sit here writing this, I'm struck with
the fuzziness of the meanings of the words I'm
bandying about. When we talk about newtons, meters, and joules,
we can communicate unambiguously, but when we use the word
"democracy",
there's no such precision. Does
"democracy" refer to an Athenian
democracy in which all decisions are made by majority vote? If
so, modern nations are orders of magnitude too large to permit
such governing machinery. I suppose, if I thought about it, I
might define "democracy" to mean
governments in which the public elects a congress or parliament
which then promulgates laws intended for the common good.
Democracies also typically have an executive branch and a
judicial branch, providing for a separation of powers. The
citizens of the state are considered to be parties to a binding
contract with the state that assures them of certain legal
protections from one another, and from the powers of the state.
Or at least, that's how I might define a
democracy. Like most words, I've learned my
definition of "democracy" from
context rather than by looking it up in a dictionary. But you
might define it slightly differently, and therein lies the rub:
when I talk about "democracy", I
have one concept in mind, and when you talk about
"democracy", you might think in
terms of a somewhat different concept. Meanwhile, neither of us
knows that the other isn't quite on the same
wavelength. And so it goes. For example, when I use the word
"renditions" above,
I'm using a term that I've
inferred from context, and have never looked up in a dictionary.
I interpret it to mean a kidnapping by the CIA, followed by
imprisonment in a secret detention center (concentration camp?)
somewhere around the world.
("Rendition" is evidently a
euphemism coined by the CIA because it sounds better than
"kidnapping" and sneaking the
victim out of the country", which is what it really
is). But this particular definition of
"rendition" is in this useage
another application of the term that is too new to appear in my
dictionaries, and I really don't have a
precise definition for it, much less a commonly defined
definition upon which we can all agree.
Labels - the Tyranny of
Abstractions
One of the taproots of our human powers is our ability to
generate and manipulate abstractions. We attach labels to vastly
complicated and variegated entities, and then proceed to
manipulate these symbols as though they truly represented their
referents. The ultimate abstraction might be
"the universe". For example, I
label someone "Sunni" or
"Shi'ite", and
then proceed to operate as though there were two categories:
"Sunni" and
"Shi'ite". In
reality, these are usually human beings who are trying to live
their lives caring for their families, and who can just as easily
be "Sunni atheists" as
"Sunni
zealots"… like my brother-in-law,
who says he's a Methodist atheist. In short,
there's a spectrum of religious involvement.
Most people don't lead lives that are
primarily devoted to religion, and labeling someone this way may
shift emphasis from the important issues in their lives to
something that's incidental. Labeling someone
Jewish tells us absolutely nothing about what that person is
like, or about what's important to, or about
him or her.
Of course, this problem arises with everything
I'm writing here: I'm
attaching labels such as "Pax
Americana" to something complex and variegated whose
definition I've acquired through osmosis.
I think the same thing may have happened with the PNACers. They
want to introduce "democracy"
around the globe. But this entails premeditated invasions and the
wholesale killing of innocent
"enemies" - other
people's children, along with their family
members. Thanks to the power of abstraction, chicken hawks can
order the maiming and death of innocent children without ever
having to listen to their screams. (Hey,
you've got to accept some collateral damage to
impose a new political order.) Now, we're
faced with the deaths of 160,000, or 2/3rds of a million Iraqis
(take your pick) in the name of bringing Western democracy to
that country. The idea that the survivors of this carnage will
view the United States with gratitude and acceptance
is… well, fill in the blank____.
Iraq has become a "darkling plain where
ignorant armies clash by night"
(…"nor all the
Prez' horses nor all the
Prez' men can put Humpty-Dumpty together
again.").
Many of the prime movers who formulated the
"Project for the New American
Century", such as Richard Perle, have now disavowed
the invasion of Iraq because of the wonderfully incompetent way
that the Bush Administration has implemented it. But
I'm wondering if it wasn't
the invasion of Iraq itself that has led us into our quagmire, in
keeping with the 1991 decision to avoid investing Baghdad. I
guess historians will sort this out.
I think that the hawks on both sides who try to egg on the rest
of us to fight each other ought to be forced to fight each other
in the flesh. It would be interesting to see just how eager they
themselves would be if they had to hazard their own lives. (You
may have noticed that the Islamic leaders who are exhorting young
Muslims to sacrifice themselves as suicide bombers so that they
can go immediately to Paradise, aren't
volunteering as suicide bombers themselves. If the rewards are
all that great, why aren't the leaders leading
the way?)
Depth and Complexity of Knowledge
I have just read an article observing that the incoming Speaker
of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is going to have to engage a
different group of political consultants now that she has become
the Speaker of the House. These
"handlers" will insure that she
doesn't make the mistake she did in backing
Jack Murtha to be the House majority leader. Apparently, politics
has become so complex that politicians have to hire political
experts to perform the jobs for which they were hired.
Furthermore, I realize that in dealing with any issue such as the
war in Iraq or the relationship between the Israelis and the
Palestinians, there are depths and subtleties of which I
haven't a hint. Those of us who are brighter
than average may know more than average, but
we're still babes in the woods when it comes
to expertise in all fields. (It may take some future AI to pull
together all the perspectives.)
After the Year-2000 Presidential
Election…
My reason for reviewing this early post-election history is to
underscore the wild and, as we now know, incompetent steps taken
by the new Bush Administration not just in foreign policy but in
other areas of government as well.
After the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of President Bush on
the Florida election, I said to myself that it was time to
support our new president. After all, the vote was very close.
The country had exercised the legal apparatus designed to resolve
such close elections, and it was time to consider the decision of
the referee to be final (though it was a bit disconcerting to
read that business leaders were staging a once-in-a-lifetime
blowout to celebrate this coming era of corporate fiscal
unaccountability).
Among of the first developments after the inauguration of our new
president were news releases out of Washington warning of the
growing military threat from China. China? Maybe some day there
would be a military threat from China, but you had to be pretty
hard up for enemies to begin grooming China for the role.
Then in February 2001 President Bush announced that we needed to
subsidize the construction of coal-fired electrical power
stations because of our energy crisis. Energy crisis? There had
been brownouts in California during the summer of 2000, but they
were alleged to be a result of mismanagement. (It later
transpired that they were engineered by Enron to jack up the
prices of Enron's electricity.)
Next, President Bush cut the Department of
Energy's solar research budget in half five
months into the fiscal year! Part of their money must already
have been spent. It must have decimated them.
Following this, President Bush rejected the Kyoto Treaty. (Please
see the companion article "Global Warming
Update" posted earlier.) He announced that this was
because it would cost U. S. industry extra money to implement
Kyoto. Here we are, one of the richest nations on Earth. We
helped craft the Kyoto Treaty, and we expected third-world
nations to sign and implement it, but we
weren't willing to participate because the
global corporations that contributed to our
politicians' campaign funds were too greedy
and short-sighted… short-sighted because
there would be a burgeoning global market for renewable energy
equipment.
After that, he renounced the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty II.
I told myself that he must have access to the
nation's leading experts to help guide him in
these decisions and that there must have been cogent, hidden
reasons why they deemed these moves to be wise. But then it
occurred to me: it isn't only a matter of what
hidden justifications the U. S. might have. What kind of messages
was our government sending to the world? This should trigger (I
thought) a nuclear arms proliferation race.
It was at that point that I went from mild unease to serious
alarm.
In concert with these high-profile moves, the new administration
was doing umbrage in divers and sundry other less-visible arenas
such as environmental protection, SEC rules and regulations,
giving oil companies drilling rights in our nature preserves, and
allowing the consolidation of media outlets.
At first, the media seemed unresponsive to these derelictions,
but by summer, 2001, they were on the scent.
Meanwhile, there were some alarming quotations coming from
members of the new administration. One was the statement that,
"We make our own realities here in this
administration". Another a statement was that Rome
didn't do so badly. Maybe we needed a
modern-day Roman Empire. A third was that the policy manual for
the new government was Nicolo Machiavelli's
"The Prince".
And then came 9/11 and the War on Terror.
The first "War on…
" was Lyndon Johnson's War
on Poverty. I don't think it made a serious
dent in poverty, but it must have been well-received politically
because ten years later, President Nixon announced his
"War on Cancer", followed by the
Reagans' "War on
Drugs".
Within an hour or two after the second plane had crashed into the
World Trade Center, President Bush/Karl Rove announced that we
would declare war on terror, and that it would probably last
fifty years. President Bush then sought and got temporary
wartime emergency powers to last for the next 50
years - in other words, a permanent
suspension of our constitutional rights. (In 2051, are our
grandchildren going to approach whoever is leading us then and
say, "Please, sir, the War on Terror is over.
May we have our constitutional rights back?")
(To be continued in a later posting)
Posts
