As
Bad As You Think
March 26, 2003
By Joseph Randazzo
Does it ever all seem like an illusion, a bad dream, a scene
from a David Lynch movie? Do world events have you wondering
about the End Times? Do images of fire and brimstone raining
down on humanity ever sneak into your fitful slumber? Rest
easy, fellow Americans, for you are not alone. This war and
this Administration are every bit as bad as you think -- and
probably worse.
One thing George W. Bush has made clear, from the moment
Al Gore was elected President, is that he was going to follow
his own agenda. Recall his first action in office, cutting
off aid to any African health center that dared whisper the
word "abortion," or, perhaps even more insidiously, family
planning. In a calculated nod to the fundamentalists with
the deep pockets on the Way-Right, Bush, with the stroke of
a pen, helped kill thousands more people. And this was his
first major initiative.
Recall now his first foray into military affairs. Months
after failing a pop-quiz during the campaign in which he was
asked to name the leaders of several "rogue nations," and
only weeks after taking office, Bush II lobbed some bombs
at a dictator very well-known to his family. On February 16,
2001, he ordered a military strike on five Iraqi radar-command
posts, the heaviest action against Saddam (and the closest
to Baghdad) since 1998, when Clinton launched "Operation Desert
Fox," the predication for Richard Butler to pull UN weapons
inspectors out of Iraq. The next day Bush, speaking from Mexico
(where he had hoped to initiate closer ties with that country's
new president) called the strikes "routine." It was self-defense,
in response to increased air attacks from Iraqi forces on
British and American jets patrolling the "No-Fly Zones". (Just
as a reminder: the "No-fly Zones" are a total Anglo-American
creation, never supported by the UN, and quite possibly in
violation of international law). The US had been enforcing
them for years, but these new strikes by Bush targeted spots
outside the No-Fly Zones, setting an ominous precedent.
Bush's adventure was viewed as risky then, at a time when
"international support ha[d] crumbled for the decade-old sanctions
against Iraq, as well as the US-British enforced no-fly zones,"
according to news reports the day after the strikes. Some
called it reckless, callous, the act of a cowboy looking to
finish what his father started. These are easy and often comforting
accusations, but I fear the truth is much worse; I fear the
truth is closer to what former UN weapons inspector Timothy
McCarthy, who thought the first-strikes were a good idea,
told the Boston Globe. "This is the first salvo in
the battle for Iraq," he said [emphasis mine]. "I think
we're going to have a lot of movement one way or the other
on this," McCarthy concluded, seven months before 9-11.
The signs should have been obvious from the start. Bush filled
his cabinet with oilmen, corporate slugs, conservative sycophants,
and warmongers. He installed a Bible-thumping fanatic as Attorney
General; he chose a former general as his top diplomat, the
Secretary of State; his Vice President, of course, was the
multi-millionaire ex-Defense-Secretary-CEO of a major oil
industry company with hands in military construction and contracting;
another blast from the past took the helm at the Defense Department;
and positions of lower profile were handed to neo-conservatives
from yesteryear bent on a romantic dream of Pax Americana:
Paul Wolfowitz at Defense, Richard Pearle suckling at the
Pentagon's teat, I. Lewis Libby and Eric Edelman as advisers
to the VP, and, of course, Zalmay Khalilzad as a special envoy
to Afghanistan. With his merry band of warriors (about two
of whom actually spent any time in the armed services), Bush
was about to close one chapter on American policy, and open
a new one. For he was the Anointed One, God's child, sent
to Washington to complete a long-running mission in power,
moved by the Divine Hand toward the throne of an American
Empire, and life was good.
Bush scoffed at the world community from the very beginning
when he chose John Negroponte as the US ambassador to the
United Nations. Negroponte oversaw the violence in Honduras
as ambassador to that country when America was exercising
its Monroe Doctrine rights in the 1980s. Now he was representing
all of America before the world body. Bush rejected the Kyoto
Protocols, signed by nearly 200 countries, on the premise
of American exceptionism (i.e. if it's good for the environment,
it's bad for business, and the buck, after all, stops here).
Then there was his obsession with drilling in the Alaskan
wild, long before oil-rich terrorists were on anybody's minds.
To top all, even while pushing for the -- as Gore Vidal calls
it -- Ronald Reagan Memorial Nuclear Space Shield, a missile
defense system based upon fuzzy math, Bush cast aside a decades-old
pact intended to curb the proliferation of weapons of mass
distraction, er, destruction. In rejecting the 1974
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, Bush sent a blaring message
to our old rival and to the rest of the world that the time
for cooperation was decidedly over. The globe was America's
now. Bush called the treaty out-dated, a relic from another
age -- an age, presumably, when the US wasn't the undisputed
Heavy Weight Champion of the World. And he laid it all out,
in the months following 9-11, when he declared, much to the
shock and awe of the public, Iran, Iraq, and North Korea to
be an Axis of Evil.
It seemed rash and clumsy then, but in retrospect, it begins
to look all too calculated. With the benefit of hindsight,
Bush & Co.'s early actions seem like a concerted effort to
dismantle global safeguards in preparation for something rather
large and extraordinary; something that had been planned for
some time.
Our story begins, perhaps, in 1948. Fresh off victory in
World War II, America emerged as the pre-eminent superpower.
With only the USSR to challenge our supremacy, foreign policy
would have to take on a new and aggressive posture. George
Kennan, a prominent State Department official, offered this
(now oft-quoted) top-secret memo to the policy makers of the
day:
"The US has about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3%
of its population. In this situation we cannot fail to be
the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the
coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which
will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without
positive detriment to our national security. To do so we
will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming,
and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere
on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive
ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and
world benefaction. We should cease to talk about such vague
and unreal objectives as human rights, the raising of living
standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when
we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans the
better."
Kennan was referring specifically to the US role in East
Asia, but it spoke to a larger scheme, and would apply to
any region where America had interests. There has been nothing
in the record of American foreign policy since then to indicate
that policy makers didn't take Kennan's advice. Intervention
in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Greece, Cyprus, Chile, El
Salvador, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Panama, Columbia, Iraq,
Iran and more have played out with exactly these sentiments
in mind.
In the 1970s, our eyes were set on the Mideast. Political
upheavals in the region had hurt the world oil market, and
it was becoming clear that the US role there had to change.
Under Carter, the country adopted a more aggressive stance,
declaring the Gulf zone a priority vital to national interest.
With the world's oil supply now projected to run dry in 50
years, the US has no choice but to protect its interests,
to keep its hand on the spigot. That was clear then; long-term
goals were about more than lowering the price at the pump.
They were about tightening America's grip on a vastly powerful
resource, as the final world order began to take shape.
In the 1980s Reagan put pressure on the OPEC states and the
region, often under the guise of the Soviet threat. We helped
arm and train the mujahideen warriors (including, of course,
Osama bin Laden) to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
and we supported Saddam Hussein to ward off fundamentalism
in Iran. We firmed alliances with Turkey, Egypt, and Israel,
furthering a stronghold in the region. We armed Saudi Arabia
to the teeth, all the while ignoring an impressive list of
human rights abuses and outright atrocities by our friends
and allies.
Flash forward to the first Bush Administration. Arab states
in the oil rich Gulf were beginning to hedge on their friendship
with the US. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait, and everything changed.
After Gulf I we had military presence in Saudi Arabia and
Kuwait, and increased arms sales to Bahrain, Qatar, and the
United Arab Emirates. Our dominance over the region, necessitated
by the need for access to oil and oil-power, was growing.
The disintegration of the USSR saw the US emerge as a sort
of hyper-power, unrivaled in the imposition of its will. It
was under this backdrop that Bush I's cronies mapped out a
strategy for seizing global dominance in the years ahead.
It's called "Defense Planning Guidance" (described well in
the October, 2002 issue of Harper's Magazine) and it
was signed by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, though
it was authored by Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and others
who recognized the new role now available to the US. Powell
summed it up best when he told Congress the US would have
to "deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging
the United States on the world stage." The plan calls for
a strategy to "prevent any hostile power from dominating a
region," through means including preemptive strikes -- now
an official US policy, erroneously dubbed the Bush Doctrine.
It also calls for a maintenance (and possible increase) of
military spending so the US would have the ability to engage
in conflict on two fronts simultaneously -- now echoed by
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. In their eyes, the thumb
of America was already planted firmly on its nose in regards
to that pesky international community, as the "DPG" also outlined
a strategy in which the military would use "ad-hoc assemblies,
often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted, and
in many cases carrying only general agreement over the objectives
to be accomplished". The US also reserved the right to "act
independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated,"
-- now echoed by everybody.
Cheney's plan was considered lunacy then, and it would have
been met with the same chorus today, especially given the
prominence of its penmen in the second Bush Administration.
Yet their minds, we can be sure, have not changed. By 2001,
America's global power was so disproportionate, the world
so dependent on US control of politics, economics, and military
might, that any flux would prove catastrophic. America had
to keep the helm. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and whoever
else turns the wheel in the American monster truck are well
aware of that, and their ambitions must surely have been the
same after the 2000 election as they were 10 years before.
Bush II had his agents in place to close the deal on American
dominance.
But there was a problem: Bush had no power. He was weak on
domestic issues, laughable on foreign policy, and disgracefully
out of touch with the progressive politics of the age. By
September 10, Democrats everywhere were taking victorious
drags off their cigars, licking their lips for 2004. Then
everything went to pot.
Given the broad powers historically granted Chief Executives
in times of war or national emergency, the horrific events
of that Tuesday seemed the next logical plot twist in our
narrative. How else could an illegitimate president with a
band of conservative madmen gain any sort of mandate to carry
out the Great Plan? It seems -- mind yourselves now -- almost
as if Bush & Co. were waiting for September 11 to happen.
The American public, dining on the dishes of the Media, that
great beast, seem to love epic morality plays that reassert
our role as arbiter, executioner, and general torch-carrier
of all that is good. Bush's propaganda that this was a "Crusade"
against those freedom-hating evildoers seemed just the thing
to sate our thirst after the Clinton years, which provided
only relative peace and prosperity. Yes, it would all be black
and white again, like the good old days of Brezhnev, Us and
Them, Good and Evil. Never mind the subtler and more responsible
examinations that dared link US foreign policy and a festering
pool of Islamic fundamentalism to that terrible day. No, this
was a challenge from God -- George W. Bush's God.
With a nation terrified, their threat level for the day given
in beautiful, cascading color codes, Bush has been able to
sweep domestic issues under the rug, Ashcroft has carte blanche
to dismantle the Constitution through the USA Patriot Act
(and perhaps under the upcoming "Patriot II"), and convicted
Iran-contra figure John Poindexter ("ah, gee, the gang's all
here!") is trying to launch his hysterically Orwellian Total
Information Awareness. Never before had such tragedy given
such a tragic figure - and such a tragic strategy - such undisputed
power.
Rather than retreat from the global chess match, as Bush
had promised in his early days in office, the "new reality"
of 9-11 allowed the US to declare a checkmate. Action in Afghanistan
established more military bases in former Soviet republics
like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, effectively isolating Russia
and surrounding the country with American troops. The open-ended
War on Terror (perhaps the first war declared on an emotion),
referred to by Bush, with an eerie smile, as a "different
kind of war," has gained the Pentagon huge increases in spending.
We've stepped up our military presence in Columbia, Georgia
and the Philippines. (We've also had to ignore other countries'
heavy-handed approaches to fighting terror, like Russia's
toward Chechnya.) At the same time America is slowly but surely
becoming a police state, with cameras and national guardsmen
everywhere, and intelligence agencies spying on their own
citizens.
Now, with bombs falling on Baghdad, the president sits in
the fortified White House, cordoned off for a block in every
direction, while the threat of terrorism grows at home. The
CIA, that most sneaky of pranksters, warned Congress last
year that Saddam Hussein posed no legitimate threat to the
US unless he was attacked. Rather than secure our safety,
this illegal war is likely only to threaten it.
But surely they don't plan to stop with Iraq. Sooner or later
Iran, Indonesia, North Korea, and even Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia -- in short, anywhere we're met with dissent
-- will be in the cross-hairs. As Bush & Co. plays out its
end game, the American people will be left to foot the bill,
in money and lives, as extremism and hatred for our country
is inflamed across the globe. One can only wonder what the
Administration with the big dreams has planned for us when
the next Day of Infamy dawns on American soil.
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