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A very
interesting, informative study by Noam Chomsky
and a must to
read
NOAM CHOMSKY STRIPTEASES
US/ANGLO/ZIONIST NEOCOLONIALISM
Doctrines And Visions:
Who Is To Run The World, And
How?
by Noam
Chomsky
www.zmag.org
A high-ranking official of one of the world's leading humanitarian
and relief organizations:
"After several frustrating months in Baghdad, he said he had never
seen such a combination of "arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence"
-- referring not to the military, but to the civilians who run the
Pentagon."
"The latest in-depth
polls in
Iraq - before the recent revelations about torture -- found that
among Iraqi Arabs, the US is regarded as an "occupying force" rather
than a "liberating force" by 12 to 1,
and increasing".
"The UN was informed that it could be "relevant" if it authorized
what Washington would do anyway, or else it could become a debating
society."
We have just
passed the first anniversary of the President's declaration of
victory in Iraq. I won't speak about what is happening on the
ground. There is more than enough information about that, and we can
draw our own conclusions. I will just mention one aspect of
it: What has happened to Iraqis? About that, we know little, because
it is not investigated. Some surprise has recently been
voiced in the British press about this gap in our knowledge. That's
a misunderstanding. It is quite general practice. Thus we do not
know within millions how many people died in the course of the US
wars in Indochina. Information and concern are so slight that in the
only careful study I have found, the mean estimate of Vietnamese who
died is 100,000, about 5% of the official figure and probably 2-3%
of the actual figure. Virtually no one knows that victims of the
US chemical warfare that began in 1962 are estimated at about
600,000, still dying, or that it was recently discovered that the
use of devastating carcinogens was at twice the announced rate,
and at levels incomparably beyond anything tolerated within
the industrial societies -- all in South Vietnam; the North was
spared this particular atrocity.
As a thought
experiment, we might ask how we would react if Germans estimated
deaths in the Holocaust at 2-300,000 and had little knowledge or
interest about the modalities of the slaughter.
There is one
exception to lack of information about casualties in Indochina.
There have been very intensive efforts from the start to reveal, or
very often simply to invent, atrocities that could be attributed to
the Khmer Rouge. Post-KR literature on the topic is substantial,
ranging from astonishingly low estimates of KR crimes in the curious
1980 CIA demographic study, when evidence had become available about
the peaking of atrocities at the end, to far higher and more
credible estimates by serious and extensive scholarship. One can
hardly fail to observe that the single exception to the rule
involves crimes that are doctrinally useful.
Turning to
Iraq,
information is as usual slight, but not entirely lacking. A
study by the London-based health organization MEDACT last November,
scarcely mentioned in the US, gave a rough estimate of between
22,000-55,000 Iraqi dead, and also reported rising maternal
mortality rates, near doubling of acute malnutrition, and an
increase in water-borne diseases and vaccine-preventable diseases.
"The most important thing that comes out of [the study] is that the
data are not available," Dr. Victor Sidel commented. He is a noted
US health authority, past president of International Physicians for
the Prevention of Nuclear War and an adviser to the study. Two
months ago, a fact-finding mission by the Belgian NGO Medical Aid
for the Third World found that even the devastating effects of the
US-UK sanctions have not been overcome, including their veto of
medicines, and that infant mortality is apparently increasing and
general health declining because of deteriorating living conditions:
lack of access to food, potable water, or medical aid and hospitals,
and a sharp decline in purchasing power - largely the result of the
remarkable failures of what should have been one of the easiest
military occupations ever. "It has been one of the most
extraordinary failures in history," the veteran British
correspondent Patrick Cockburn observed, quite
plausibly.
The best
explanation I have heard was from , who has had extensive experience
in some of the most awful places in the world.
After several frustrating months
in
Baghdad, he
said he had never seen such a combination of "arrogance, ignorance,
and incompetence" -- referring not to the military, but to the
civilians who run the Pentagon.
In Iraq
they have succeeded in achieving pretty much what they did in the
international arena: quickly turning the US into the most feared and
often hated country in the world.
The latest in-depth polls in
Iraq - before
the recent revelations about torture -- found that among Iraqi
Arabs, the US is regarded as an "occupying force" rather than a
"liberating force" by 12 to 1,
and increasing.
If we count also Kurds, who have their own distinct aspirations and
hopes, the figures are still overwhelming: 88% of all Iraqis
according to one recent poll,
also pre-Abu Ghraib.
Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz and associates have even succeeded in turning the
young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, previously a marginal figure, into the
second most popular leader in Iraq, right below Grand Ayatollah Ali
Sistani, with 1/3 of the population "strongly supporting" him and
another third "somewhat supporting" him.
Other Western polls find support
for the occupying forces in single digits, and the same for the
Governing Council they appointed.
But I will put
Iraq aside, and turn to the "new imperial grand strategy" that was
to be set in motion with the conquest of Iraq,
and the doctrines and visions that underlie it.
The
phrase "new imperial grand strategy" is not mine. It has a much more
interesting source: the leading establishment journal, Foreign
Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The invasion of Iraq was
virtually announced in Sept 2002, along with the Bush
Administration's National Security Strategy, which declared the
intention to dominate the world for the indefinite future and to
destroy any potential challenge to US domination.
The UN was informed that it could be "relevant" if it authorized
what
Washington
would do anyway, or else it could become a debating society.
as Administration moderate Colin Powell instructed them. The
invasion of
Iraq was to be the first test of the new doctrine announced in the
NSS, "the petri dish in which this experiment in pre-emptive policy
grew," the New York Times reported as the experiment was declared a
grand success a year ago.
The doctrine
and its implementation in Iraq
elicited unprecedented protest around the world, including the
foreign policy elite at home. In Foreign Affairs, the "new imperial
grand strategy" was immediately criticized as a threat to the world
and to the US. Elite criticism was remarkably broad, but on narrow
grounds: the principle is not wrong, but the style and
implementation are dangerous, a threat to US interests. The basic
thrust of the criticism was captured by Madeleine Albright, also in
Foreign Affairs. She pointed out that every President has a similar
doctrine, but keeps it in his back pocket, to be used when
necessary. It is a
serious error to smash people in face with it, and to implement it
in brazen defiance even of allies, let alone rest of world.
That is simply
foolish, another illustration of the dangerous combination of
"arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence."
Albright of
course knew that Clinton had a similar doctrine. As UN Ambassador,
she had reiterated to the Security Council President Clinton's
message to them that the US will act "multilaterally when possible
but unilaterally when necessary." And later as Clinton's Secretary
of State, she surely knew that the White House had spelled out the
meaning in messages to Congress declaring the right to "unilateral
use of military power" to defend vital interests, which include
"ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and
strategic resources," without even the pretexts that Bush and Blair
devised. Taken literally, the Clinton doctrine is more expansive
than Bush's NSS, but it was issued quietly, not in a manner designed
to arouse hostility, and the same was true of its implementation.
And as Albright correctly pointed out, the doctrine has a long
tradition in the US - elsewhere as well, including precedents that
one might prefer not to think about.
Despite the
precedents, the new imperial grand strategy was understood to be
highly significant. Henry Kissinger described it as a
"revolutionary" doctrine, which tears to shreds the international
order established in the 17th century Westphalian system, and of
course the UN Charter and modern international law, not worth
mentioning. The revolutionary new approach is correct, Kissinger
felt, but he also cautioned about style and implementation. And he
added a crucial qualification: it must not be "universalized." The
right of aggression at will (dropping euphemisms) is to be reserved
to the US, perhaps delegated to selected clients. We must forcefully
reject the most elementary of moral truisms: That we apply to
ourselves the same standards we apply to others.
Others
criticized the doctrine and its first test on sharply different
grounds. One was Arthur Schlesinger, perhaps the most respected
living American historian.
As the first bombs fell on
Baghdad, he
recalled the words of FDR when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on "a date
which will live in infamy." Now it is Americans who live in infamy,
Schlesinger wrote, as their government follows the course of
imperial Japan.
He added that Bush and his planners had succeeded in converting a
"global wave of sympathy" for the US
to "a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism." A
year later, it was much worse, international polls revealed.
In the region with the longest
experience with
US policies,
opposition to Bush reached 87% among the most pro-US elements, Latin
American elites: 98% in Brazil and almost as high in Mexico. Again,
an impressive achievement.
As also
anticipated, the war increased the threat of terror. Middle East
specialists who moniter attitudes in the Muslim world were
astonished by the revival of the appeal of "global jihadi Islam,"
which had been in decline.
Recruitment for al-Qaeda networks
increased. Iraq, which had no ties to terror before, became a
"terrorist haven" (Harvard terrorism specialist Jessica Stern),
also suffering its first suicide attacks since the 13th century.
Suicide attacks for 2003 reached their highest level in modern
times. The year ended with a terror alert in the US of
unprecedented severity.
On the first
anniversary of the war, New York's
Grand Central Station was patrolled by heavily-armed police, a
reaction to the Madrid
bombing, the worst terrorist crime in Europe. A few days later,
Spain voted out the
government that had gone to war against the will of the overwhelming
majority, and by so doing, had won great praise
for its stellar role in the New Europe was the hope of the future;
Western commentators succeeded brilliantly in "not noticing" that
the criterion for membership in New Europe was willingness to
dismiss the popular will and follow orders from Crawford, Texas. A
year later,
Spain was
bitterly condemned for appeasing terror by calling for withdrawal of
Spanish troops from Iraq unless they were under UN authority.
Commentators failed to point out that this is essentially the
position of 70% of Americans, who call for the UN to take the lead
in security, economic reconstruction, and working with Iraqis to
establish a democratic government.
But such facts are scarcely known, and the issues are not on the
electoral agenda, another illustration of the reality of "democratic
credentials."
Top
There is a
curious performance underway right now among Western commentators,
who are solemnly debating whether the Bush administration downgraded
the "war on terror" in favor of its ambitions in Iraq. The only
surprising aspect of the revelations of former Bush administration
officials that provoked the debate is that anyone finds them
surprising - particularly right now, when it is so clear that by
invading Iraq the administration did just that: knowingly increased
the threat of terror to achieve their goals in Iraq.
But even
without this dramatic demonstration of priorities, the conclusions
should be obvious. >From the point of view of government planners,
the ranking of priorities is entirely rational. Terror might kill
1000s of Americans; that much has been clear since the attempt by
US-trained jihadis to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. But
that is not very important in comparison with establishing the first
secure military bases in a dependent client state at the heart of
the world's major energy reserves - "a stupendous source of
strategic power" and an incomparable "material prize," as high
officials recognized in the 1940s, if not before. Zbigniew
Brzezinski writes that "America's security role in the region" - in
plain English, its military dominance - "gives it indirect but
politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies
that are also dependent on energy exports from the region." As
Brzezinski knows well, concern that Europe
and
Asia
might move on an independent course is the core problem of global
dominance today, and has been a prime concern for many years. Fifty
years ago, the leading planner George Kennan observed that control
of the stupendous source of strategic power gives the US "veto
power" over what rivals might do. Thirty years ago, Europe
celebrated the Year of Europe, in recognition of its recovery from
wartime destruction. Henry Kissinger gave a "Year of Europe"
address, in which he reminded his European underlings that their
responsibility is to tend to their "regional responsibilities"
within the "overall framework of order" managed by the US. The
problems are more severe today, extending to the dynamic Northeast
Asian region. Control of the Gulf and Central Asia therefore becomes
even more significant. The importance is enhanced by the expectation
that the Gulf will have an even more prominent role in world energy
production in decades to come. US-UK support for vicious
dictatorships in Central Asia, and the jockeying over where
pipelines will go and under whose supervision, are part of the same
renewed "great game."
Why, then,
should there be any surprise that terror should be downgraded in
favor of the invasion of Iraq? Or that Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney and
associates were pressuring the intelligence community to come up
with some shreds of evidence to justify invasion, Blair and Straw as
well: Iraqi links to terror, WMD, anything would do. It is rather
striking that as one after another pretext collapses, and the
leadership announces a new one, commentary follows dutifully along,
always conspicuously avoiding the obvious reason, which is virtually
unmentionable. Among Western intellectuals, that is; not in Iraq. US
polls in Baghdad found that a large majority assumed that the motive
for the invasion was to take control of Iraq's resources and
reorganize the Middle East in accord with US interests. It is not
unusual for those at the wrong end of the club to have a clearer
understanding of the world in which they live.
There are
plenty of other current illustrations of the fact, obvious enough to
Baghdadis, that terror is regarded as a minor issue in comparison
with ensuring that the Mideast is properly disciplined. There was a
revealing example just last week, when Bush imposed new sanctions on
Syria, implementing the Syria Accountability Act passed by Congress
in December, virtually a declaration of war unless Syria
follows US commands. Syria is on the official list of states
sponsoring terrorism, despite acknowledgment by the CIA that Syria
has not been involved in sponsoring terror for many years and has
been highly cooperative in providing important intelligence to
Washington
on al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups, and in other
anti-terrorist actions.
The gravity of
Washington's
concern over Syria's links to terror was revealed by Clinton ten
years ago, when he offered to remove Syria from the list of states
sponsoring terror if it agreed to US-Israeli peace terms. When Syria
insisted on recovering its conquered territory, it remained on the
list.
Had it been removed, that would have been the first time a country
was dropped from the list since 1982,
when the present incumbents in
Washington, in their Reaganite phase, removed Saddam from the list
so that they could provide him with a flow of badly needed aid while
he carried out his worst atrocities, joined by Britain and many
others - which again tells us something about
the attitude towards terror and state crimes, as does the fact that
Iraq was replaced on the list by Cuba, perhaps in recognition of the
fact that the US terrorist war against Cuba that has been underway
since the Kennedy years had reached a peak of ferocity just then.
None of this,
and much more like it, is supposed to tell us anything about the
"war on terror" that was declared by the Reagan administration in
1981, quickly becoming a murderous terrorist war, and re-declared
with much the same rhetoric 20 years later.
The
implementation of the Syria Accountability Act, passed near
unanimously, deprives the US of a major source of information about
radical Islamist terrorism in order to achieve the higher goal of
establishing in Syria a regime that will accept US-Israeli demands
- not an unusual pattern, though commentators continually find it
surprising no matter how strong the evidence and regular the
pattern, and no matter how rational the choices in terms of clear
and understandable planning priorities.
The
Syria Accountability Act
of last December tells us more about state priorities and prevailing
doctrines of the intellectual and moral culture, as international
affairs scholar Steven Zunes points out. Its core demand refers to
UN Security Council Resolution 520, calling for respect for the
sovereignty and territorial integrity of Lebanon, violated by Syria
because it still retains in Lebanon forces that were welcomed there
by the US and Israel in 1976 when their task was to carry out
massacres of Palestinians. Overlooked by the congressional
legislation, and news reporting and commentary, is the fact that
Resolution 520, passed in 1982, was explicitly directed against
Israel, not Syria, and also the fact that
while Israel violated this and
other Security Council resolutions regarding Lebanon for 22 years,
there was no call for any sanctions against Israel or for reduction
in the huge unconditional military and economic aid to Israel. The silence for 22 years
includes those who now signed the Act condemning
Syria for its
violation of the Security Council resolution ordering Israel to
leave Lebanon.
The principle
is very clear, Zunes writes: "Lebanese sovereignty must be defended
only if the occupying army is from a country the United States
opposes, but is dispensable if the country is a US
ally." The principle applies quite broadly in various
manifestations, not only in the US of course.
A side
observation: by 2-1, the US population favors an Israel
Accountability Act, holding Israel
accountable for development of WMD and human rights abuses in the
occupied territories. That, however, is not on the agenda, or
apparently even reported.
There are many
other illustrations of the clear but imperceptible priorities. To
mention one, the Treasury Department has a bureau (OFAC, Office of
Foreign Assets Control) that is assigned the task of investigating
suspicious financial transfers, a crucial component of the "war on
terror." OFAC has 120 employees. A few weeks ago, OFAC informed
Congress that four are dedicated to tracking the finances of Osama
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, while almost two dozen are dedicated
to enforcing the embargo against Cuba - incidentally, declared
illegal by every relevant international organization, even the
usually compliant Organization of American States. From 1990 to
2003, OFAC informed Congress, there were 93 terrorism-related
investigations with $9000 in fines; and 11,000 Cuba-related
investigations with $8 million in fines. No interest was aroused
among those now pondering the puzzling question of whether the Bush
administration -- and its predecessors -- downgraded the war on
terror in favor of other priorities.
Why should the
Treasury Department devote vastly more energy to strangling Cuba
than to the war on terror? The US is a uniquely open society; we
therefore have quite a lot of information about state planning. The
basic reasons were explained in secret documents 40 years ago, when
the Kennedy administration sought to bring "the terrors of the
earth" to Cuba, as Arthur Schlesinger recounted in his biography of
Robert Kennedy, who ran the terror operations as his highest
priority. State Department planners warned that the "very existence"
of the Castro regime is "successful defiance" of US policies going
back 150 years, to the Monroe Doctrine; no Russians, but intolerable
defiance of the master of the hemisphere. Furthermore, this
successful defiance encourages others, who might be infected by the
"Castro idea of taking matters into their own hands," Schlesinger
had warned incoming President Kennedy, summarizing the report of the
President's Latin American mission. These dangers are particularly
grave, Schlesinger elaborated, when "the distribution of land and
other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes
… and the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the
Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent
living." The whole system of domination might unravel if the idea of
taking matters into one's own hands spreads its evil tentacles.
Successful
defiance remains intolerable, ranked far higher as a priority than
combating terror, just another illustration of principles that are
well-established, internally rational, clear enough to the victims,
but not perceptible to the agents. The clamor about revelations of
Bush administration priorities, and the current 9-11 hearings in
Washington,
are just further illustrations of this curious inability to perceive
the obvious, even to entertain it as a possibility.
Turning to
terror, there is a broad consensus among specialists on how to
reduce the threat - keeping now to the subcategory that is
doctrinally admissible: their terror against us - and also on how to
incite further terrorist atrocities, which sooner or later may
become truly horrendous. It is just a matter of time before terror
and WMD are linked, as has been anticipated in technical literature
well before 9/11.
The Iraq
invasion is typical: violence quite commonly incites a violent
response. Serious investigations of al-Qaeda and bin Laden reveal
that they were virtually unknown until Clinton bombed Sudan and
Afghanistan in 1998. The bombings led to a sharp increase in
support, recruitment, and financing for networks of the al-Qaeda
type (al-Qaeda is not really an organization), turned bin Laden into
a major figure, and forged closer relations between bin Laden and
the Taliban, previously cool or hostile.
We can, if we
like, learn something more about Western civilization by the
reaction to the bombing in Sudan, which led to tens of thousands of
deaths according to the few credible estimates, a humanitarian
catastrophe that was predicted at once by the director of Human
Rights Watch. As usual, investigation is sparse, and interest
non-existent. The reaction might be different if a terrorist attack
destroyed the major source of pharmaceutical supplies in the US,
England, Israel, or some other place that matters - which would have
been far less serious, since supplies could easily be replenished in
a rich country. That is not at all unusual. Again, those at wrong
end of the clubs tend to see world rather differently, arousing fury
among the guardians of civilized values.
After
Clinton's bombings in 1998, the next major contribution to the
growth of al-Qaeda and the prominence of bin Laden was the bombing
of Afghanistan, with no credible pretext, as later quietly conceded.
That led to a sharp increase in recruitment and enthusiasm for "the
cosmic struggle between good and evil," the rhetoric shared by bin
Laden and President Bush's speech-writers (I presume bin Laden
writes his own orations).
I have been
virtually paraphrasing the most careful and detailed study of al-Qaeda,
the very important book by British journalist Jason Burke. Reviewing
many examples, he concludes that that "Every use of force is another
small victory for bin Laden." The general conclusion is widely
shared: among others, by former heads of Israeli military
intelligence and the General Security Services (Shabak), in their
own context.
There are new
illustrations almost daily. The raising of Moqtada al-Sadr to
prominence is an illustration. A still more instructive one is the
recent horrors in Fallujah. The Marine invasion, killing 100s, was a
reaction to the murder of four American security contractors.
Responsibility for those brutal murders was claimed by a new
organization calling itself "Brigades of Martyr Ahmed Yassin." They
were avenging the murder of the quadriplegic cleric Sheikh Yassin,
along with half a dozen bystanders, as he left a Mosque in Gaza a
week earlier. That was reported as an Israeli assassination, but
inaccurately. Sheikh Yassin was killed by a US helicopter, flown by
an Israeli pilot. Israel
does not produce helicopters. The US
sends them with the understanding that they will be used for such
purposes, not defense, as they have been, regularly. Some of the
circumstances, well documented but systematically evaded, are quite
remarkable. In the preceding 6 months, "targeted assassinations" had
killed about 50 suspects and 80-90 passersby. None of this enter the
annals of state terrorism, by virtue of agency: the US is exempt
from any such charge, by definition, and its clients inherit the
immunity, particularly in joint actions.
A crucial condition of the
intellectual and moral culture is that the powerful are granted the
right to make the rules. These are important
principles of world order, rather as in the Mafia, to which the
international order has more than a passing resemblance.
Tracing the
chain of violence in this case, we find that it leads directly from
the US-Israeli assassination of Sheikh Yassin to the conflagration
in Iraq. That was known right away, but was virtually silenced in
media; in the US at least, where media coverage is carefully
studied.
Apologists for state terror will object that the chain of violence
does not begin with the Yassin assassination. True, but irrelevant.
And tracing the chain beyond yields even uglier conclusions.
There is also
a broad specialist consensus on how to reduce threat of terror. It
is two-pronged. Terrorists see themselves as a vanguard, seeking to
mobilize others, welcoming a violent reaction that will serve their
cause. The proper reaction to criminal acts is police work, which
has been quite successful: in Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and
elsewhere. Much more important is the broad constituency whom the
terrorists seek to mobilize, people who may hate and fear them, but
nevertheless see them as fighting for cause that is right and just.
Here the proper response is to pay attention to their grievances,
which are often legitimate and should be addressed irrespective of
any connection to terror.
There are many
illustrations. England and Northern Ireland, to take a recent case.
As long as London's response to IRA terror was violence, terror and
support for it increased. When, finally, some attention began to be
paid to legitimate grievances, it declined. Belfast is not utopia,
but it is a far better place than it was a decade ago. Incidentally,
IRA terror was funded
in the
US, right
where I live in fact. FBI counterterror experts were aware of this,
but did not interfere,
and believe
that it would not have been possible to do so, though now such
measures are demanded of Saudi Arabia, and are apparently being
carried out with some success. As usual, "possibility" depends on
whose ox is being gored.
Violence can succeed. There are many examples of that too. The fate
of the indigenous population of the US is a dramatic example - also
ignored or denied, often in startling ways, a typical reaction to
one's own crimes.
Top
Violence can
succeed, but at tremendous cost. It can also provoke greater
violence in response, and often does. Inciting terror is not the
most ominous current example.
Two months
ago, Russia carried out its largest military exercises in two
decades, displaying new and more sophisticated WMD, targeting the US.
Russian political and military leaders made it clear that this was a
direct response to Bush administration actions and programs, exactly
as had been predicted. One prime example that they stressed was US
development of low-yield nuclear weapons - "bunker busters,"
so-called. Russian strategic analysts know as well as their American
counterparts that these weapons can target command bunkers hidden in
mountains that control Russian nuclear arsenals. Washington's
insistence on using space for offensive military purposes is another
major concern.
US analysts
suspect that Russia is duplicating US development of a hypersonic
Cruise Vehicle, which can orbit the earth and re-enter the
atmosphere suddenly, launching devastating attacks anywhere without
warning. US analysts also estimate that Russian military
expenditures may have tripled in the Bush-Putin years.
Russia has
adopted the Bush doctrine of "preemptive attack" - meaning
aggression at will - the "revolutionary" new doctrine that impressed
Kissinger. They are also relying on automated response systems,
which, in the past, have come within minutes of launching a nuclear
strike, barely aborted by human intervention. By now the systems
have deteriorated, with the collapse of the Russian economy under
the market fanaticism of the last years.
US systems
allow 3 minutes for human judgment after computers warn of a missile
attack - reported to be a daily occurrence. Then comes a 30 second
presidential briefing. Pentagon analysts have found serious design
flaws in computer security systems, which could allow terrorist
hackers to break in and simulate a launch. It is "an accident
waiting to happen," one leading US strategic analyst warns - Bruce
Blair, head of Center for Defense Information. Russian systems are
far less reliable.
The dangers
are being consciously escalated by the threat and use of violence -
and now we are considering real threats to survival.
The Bush
administration announced that it will deploy the first elements of a
missile defense system in Alaska in the summer of 2004, in time for
the presidential elections. These plans have been criticized because
they are obviously timed for partisan political purposes, use
untested technology at huge expense, and probably won't work. All of
that may be correct, but there is a more serious criticism: the
systems might work, or at least look as though they might work. In
the logic of nuclear war, what counts is perception, not reality,
and planners have to make worse case analyses. It is understood on
all sides that "missile defense" is an offensive weapon, which
provides freedom for aggression, including a first nuclear strike.
That is pretty much agreed by US analysts and potential targets, who
even use the same words: a missile defense system is not just "a
shield," but also "a sword."
Recently
released documents reveal how the US
reacted to a small ABM system deployed around Moscow in
1968. The US at once targeted the system and radar installations
with nuclear weapons. Current US plans are expected to provoke a
similar Russian response, though now it is all on a much larger
scale. China is expected to react the same way, maybe even more so,
since a missile defense system would undermine the credibility of
its currently very limited deterrent. That may have a ripple effect: India
will react to expansion of China's
offensive strategic weapons, Pakistan to India's expansion, and
perhaps on beyond. Those prospects are discussed and are of real
concern.
Not discussed,
in the US at least, is the threat from West Asia. Israel's nuclear
capacities, supplemented with other WMD, are regarded as "dangerous
in the extreme" by the former head of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM),
Gen. Lee Butler, not only because of the threat they pose but also
because they stimulate proliferation in response. The Bush
administration is now enhancing that threat. Israeli military
analysts allege that its air and armored forces are larger and
technologically more advanced than those of any NATO power (apart
from the US),
not because this small country is powerful in itself, but because it
serves virtually as an offshore US military
base and high tech center.
The US is now sending Israel over
100 of its most advanced jet bombers, F16I's, advertised very
clearly as capable of flying to Iran and back, and as an updated
version of the F16s that Israel used to bomb Iraq's nuclear reactor
in 1981.
It was known at once that the
bombed reactor had no real capacity to produce nuclear weapons.
Later evidence from Iraqi scientists who fled to the West revealed
that the Israeli bombing had not retarded Saddam's nuclear weapons
program, but had initiated it, in the familiar cycle of violence.
The Israeli press now
also reports (only in Hebrew) that the
US
is sending the Israeli air force "`special' weapons." Iranian
intelligence, to whose ears these reports are presumably directed,
are likely to make a worst case analysis, assuming that these may be
nuclear warheads for Israeli bombers.
Perhaps these very
visible moves are intended to incite some Iranian action that will
be pretext for an attack, perhaps just to rattle the leadership,
contributing to internal conflict and chaos. Whatever the goal, the
likely consequences are not attractive.
The collapse
of the pretexts for invading Iraq
is familiar. But insufficient attention has been paid to the most
important consequence of the collapse of the Bush-Blair pretexts:
lowering the bars for aggression. The need to establish ties to
terror was quietly dropped. More significantly,
the Bush administration - Powell,
Rice, and others -- now declare the right to attack a country even
if it has no WMD or programs to develop them, but has the "intent
and ability" to do so. Just about every country has the "ability" to
develop WMD, and intent is in the eye of the beholder. It follows
that virtually anyone is declared to be subject to devastating
attack without pretext.
There is one
particle of (apparent) evidence remaining in support of the
invasion: it did depose Saddam Hussein, an outcome that can be
welcomed without hypocrisy by those who strenuously opposed US-UK
support for him through his worst crimes, including the crushing of
the Shi'ite rebellion that might have overthrown him in 1991, for
reasons that were frankly explained in the national press at the
time, but are now kept from the public eye.
The end of
Saddam's rule was one of two welcome "regime changes." The other was
the formal end of the sanctions regime, which killed hundreds of
thousands of people, devastated Iraq's civilian society,
strengthened the tyrant, and compelled the population to rely on him
for survival. It is for these reasons that the respected
international diplomats who administered the UN "oil for food"
programs, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in protest
over what Halliday called the "genocidal" sanctions regime. They are
the Westerners who knew Iraq best, having had access to regular
information from investigators throughout the country. Though
sanctions were administered by the UN, their cruel and savage
character was dictated by the US
and its British subordinate. Ending this regime is a very positive
aspect of the invasion. But that could have been done without an
invasion.
Halliday and
von Sponeck had argued that if sanctions had been re-directed to
preventing weapons programs, then the population of Iraq might well
have been able to send Saddam Hussein to the same fate as other
murderous gangsters supported by the current incumbents in
Washington and their British allies: Ceausescu, Suharto, Marcos,
Duvalier, Chun, Mobutu.... - an impressive list, some of them
comparable to Saddam, to which new names are being added daily by
the same Western leaders. If so, both murderous regimes could have
been ended without invasion. Postwar inquiries, such as those of
Washington's
Iraq Survey Group headed by David Kay, add weight to these beliefs
by revealing how shaky Saddam's control of the country was in the
last few years.
We may have
our own subjective judgments about the matter, but they are
irrelevant. Unless the population is given the opportunity to
overthrow a brutal tyrant, as they did in the case of other members
of the Rogue's Gallery supported by the US and UK, there is no
justification for resort to outside force to do so. These
considerations alone suffice to eliminate the particle of truth that
might support the new doctrines contrived after the collapse of the
official pretexts. There are other reasons as well, some discussed
in the introduction to the 2004 annual report of Human Rights Watch
by executive-director Kenneth Roth.
Returning to
the improved doctrine of invasion without pretext, capabilities to
carry out the plans are being enhanced by new military programs. One
major program, announced shortly after the release of the NSS, is
intended to advance from "control of space" for military purposes -
the Clinton program - to "ownership of space," meaning "instant
engagement anywhere in world." This implementation of the NSS puts
any part of the world at risk of instant destruction, thanks to
sophisticated global surveillance and lethal weaponry in space.
The world's
intelligence agencies can read the AIR FORCE SPACE COMMAND STRATEGIC
MASTER PLAN, from which I've been quoting, as easily as I can. And
they will draw appropriate conclusions, increasing the risk to all
of us. We should recall that history -- including recent history --
offers many examples of leaders consciously enhancing very serious
threats in pursuit of narrow power interests. By now, however, the
stakes are much higher.
The collapse
of the pretexts for invasion led to another new doctrine: the war in
Iraq was inspired by the President's "messianic vision" - as it is
called in the elite liberal media -- to bring democracy to Iraq,
the
Middle East,
and the world. The President affirmed the vision in an address last
November.
The reaction
ranged from reverential awe to criticism, which praised the
"nobility" and "generosity" of the messianic vision but warned that
it may be beyond our means: too costly, the beneficiaries are too
backward, others may not share our nobility and altruism. That this
is the motive for the invasion is simply presupposed in news
reporting and commentary. The worshipful attitude extends to
England, where, for example, the Economist reports that "America's
mission" of turning Iraq into "an inspiring example [of democracy]
to its neighbors" is facing problems.
It is a useful
exercise to search for evidence that the invasion was inspired by
the messianic vision. One will discover that evidence reduces to the
fact that our leader proclaimed the doctrine, so there can plainly
be no question about veracity - even though we know perfectly well
that such professions of noble intent carry no information because
they are entirely predictable, including the worst monsters. And in
this case, unquestioning acceptance of the "vision" faces an added
difficulty: it is necessary to suppress the fact that the visionary
is thereby declaring himself to be a most impressive liar, since
when mobilizing the country for war the "single question" was
whether Iraq would disarm. If there is an exception to this reaction
of blind acceptance in mainstream reporting and commentary, I
haven't found it.
To be more
accurate, I did find one exception. A few days after the President
revealed his messianic vision to much awed acclaim, the
Washington Post published the results of a US-run poll in Baghdad,
in which people were asked why they thought the US invaded Iraq.
Some agreed with near-unanimous articulate opinion among the
invaders (including mainstream critics) that the goal was to bring
democracy: 1 percent. Five percent felt that the goal was to help
Iraqis. The opinions of most of the rest I have already mentioned:
the motive dismissed in polite circles as "conspiracy theory" or
some other intellectual equivalent of the four-letter words used by
the less elevated classes.
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The results of
the Baghdad poll were in fact more nuanced. About half felt that the
US wanted democracy, but only if it could maintain its influence
over the outcome. In brief, democracy is just fine, in fact
preferable if only to make us feel and look good, but only if you do
what we say. Iraqis, again, know us better than we choose to know
ourselves: choose, because evidence is ample, indeed overwhelming.
Just in the past few months there has been ample evidence on the
front pages, concerning noble "democracy enhancement" efforts in
Haiti and El Salvador. Once again, it takes consider discipline "not
to see" that the judgment of Baghdadis is very accurate in these
cases, once again, but there is no time to run through the details
here.
Iraqis,
however, do not have to know American history to draw conclusions
about the "messianic vision" that is driving US-UK policies, so we
are instructed. Their own history suffices. They are well aware that
Iraq was created by Britain with boundaries established to ensure
that
Britain,
not Turkey, would gain control of the oil of northern Iraq,
and that Iraq would be
effectively blocked from the sea by the British-run principality of
Kuwait, hence would be dependent. Iraq was granted "independence," a
"constitution," etc., but Iraqis did not have to await the release
of secret records to learn that the British intended to impose in Iraq
and elsewhere an "Arab facade" that would allow Britain
effectively to rule behind various "constitutional fictions." Nor
did they have to wait for the declassification of the US-UK records
of 1958 to learn that after Iraq broke out of the Anglo-American
condominium, in high-level joint discussions Britain agreed to give
nominal independence to Kuwait to stem the tide of independent
nationalism while reserving the right "ruthlessly to intervene" if
anything went wrong in this pillar of Britain's economy, while the
US reserved the same right for the really big prizes elsewhere in
the Gulf - all publicly available well before the first Gulf war,
and clearly quite relevant to the unfolding events, but
systematically avoided, apart from the margins.
Furthermore,
Iraqis can see what is happening before their eyes.
On the
diplomatic front, the US is constructing the biggest embassy in the
world. To underscore its goals, it appointed as Ambassador John
Negroponte, an interesting choice. The Wall Street Journal described
him (accurately) as a "Modern Proconsul," who learned his craft in
Honduras in the 1980s, during the Reaganite phase of the current
incumbents. There he was known as "the proconsul" as he presided
over the second largest embassy in Latin America and the largest CIA
station in the world - doubtless because Honduras was such a
centerpiece of world power. As proconsul, Negroponte's task was to
lie to Congress about state terror in Honduras so that the flow of
military aid would continue in violation of law, but more
importantly, to supervise the bases for the US mercenary army that
was attacking Nicaragua, devastating it, and leading to the US
becoming the only country in the world to have been condemned by the
World Court for international terrorism (technically, "unlawful use
of force"), backed by two Security Council resolutions, which the US
vetoed with Britain politely abstaining, then escalating the
international terrorist attack. So Negroponte is well-qualified to
run the world's largest embassy, and probably, again, its largest
CIA station - all to transfer full sovereignty to Iraqis. Proconsul
Negroponte is replacing the Pentagon's Paul Bremer, whom UN special
envoy Lakhdar Brahimi refers to affectionately as "the dictator" of
Iraq.
Iraqis do not
have to read the Wall St. Journal to discover that "Behind the
Scenes, U.S. Tightens Grip on Iraq's Future," staffing Iraqi
ministries with US "advisers" and "hand-picked proxies" while
proconsul Bremer is "quietly building institutions that will give
the U.S. powerful levers for influencing nearly every important
decision the interim government will make," along with edicts "that
effectively take away virtually all the powers once held by several
ministries." Hence after Bush-Blair's "full sovereignty" is turned
over, "the new Iraqi government will have little control over its
armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable
to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit
U.S. approval"; and crucially, will cede "operational control" of
all Iraqi military forces to US commanders. Just to be on the safe
side, for the largely US-appointed interim administration that
replaces the US-appointed Governing Council, Washington
made sure that top military posts are in the hands of Kurdish
commanders, who have good reasons to support the US military
presence. To make doubly sure that Iraqis don't miss the point and
get funny ideas about "taking matters into their own hands,"
Negroponte's embassy will remain in a Saddam palace that is "seen by
many Iraqis as a symbol of Iraqi sovereignty." Investors can feel
confident that everything is on track.
To be fair, we
should recognize that the interim government that presents "the
opinions of Iraqis" to the world is not devoid of domestic support.
Recent polls reveal
that the prime minister Ayad Allawi has almost 5 percent support,
just below the president, with a 7 percent approval rating.
A current
article by the Diplomatic Editor of the Daily Telegraph has the
headline "Handover still on course." Its last paragraph reports that
"A senior British
official put it delicately: `the Iraqi government will be fully
sovereign, but in practice it will not exercise all its sovereign
functions'." Lord Curzon would nod sagely.
Speaking for the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz announced that there would
be a prolonged US troop presence and weak Iraqi army -- in order to
"nurture democracy."
Wolfowitz is greatly admired by the national liberal press as the
visionary leading the messianic mission to bring democracy. He is
the "idealist in chief" of the administration, according to senior
commentator David Ignatius, former editor of the International
Herald Tribune. He
also happens to have a unusually shocking record of visceral hatred
of democracy, which there is no time to review here;
easy to discover, but
concealed. Since the idealist in chief declares
that the Pentagon must remain in control to "nurture democracy," it
doesn't matter that according to Western-run polls, Iraqis
overwhelmingly want Iraqis to be in charge of security, as the US
command was forced to accept in Fallujah. Not all, it is true: 7
percent want US forces to be in control, and 5 percent the
US-appointed Governing Council, since disbanded; not, however,
Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi, who had no detectable support.
None of this
is relevant to the messianic vision.
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While watching US efforts to maintain control through diplomatic and
military measures, Iraqis can also see the modalities imposed by
dictator Bremer, in particular, his decrees opening up industry and
banking to effective US takeover (with Britain presumably thrown a
few crumbs),
along with a 15% flat tax that will leave Iraq among the least taxed
countries in the world, eliminating hope for desperately needed
social benefits and reconstruction of infrastructure. The plans were
immediately denounced by Iraqi business representatives, who charged
that they would be destroyed, apart from those who choose to be the
local agents of the foreigners who run the economy.
It is a well-established
conclusion of economic history that without economic sovereignty,
development is likely to be limited, and political independence can
hardly be more than a shadow.
There may be
fewer problems with Iraqi workers, despite their long tradition of
labor militancy. The
occupying army immediately took action to destroy unions, breaking
into offices and arresting leaders, blocking strikes, enforcing
Saddam's brutal anti-labor laws, and handing over concessions to
bitterly anti-union US businesses. Sooner or
later the US
union bureaucracy and the National Endowment for Democracy will
probably move in to "build democratic unions," replaying a dismal
record that is all too familiar elsewhere.
The
economic measures being imposed are also familiar. They played a
large part in creating today's "Third World" by imperial force,
while England and its offshoots, and the rest of Western Europe,
followed a radically different course, relying on a powerful state
and crucial state intervention in the economy,
as they still do -
most dramatically the US. The same is true of
Japan, the one part of the South that resisted colonization, and
developed.
It
is an open question whether Iraqis can be coerced into submitting to
the "messianic vision," with nominal sovereignty offered under
various "constitutional fictions."
For privileged Europeans and Americans, there is, however, a much
more pertinent question: Will they permit their governments to
"nurture democracy" in the style of "idealist in chief" Wolfowitz,
as throughout the traditional domains of their power and influence?
In part they have given an answer. The steadfast refusal of Iraqis
to accept the traditional "constitutional fictions" has compelled
Washington to yield step by step, with some assistance from "the
second superpower," as the New York Times described world public
opinion after the huge demonstrations of mid-February 2003, the
first time in the history of Europe and its offshoots that mass
protests against a war took place before it had even been officially
launched. That makes a difference. Had the problems of Fallujah, for
example, arisen in the 1960s, they would have been resolved by B-52s
and mass murder operations on the ground. Today, a more civilized
society will not tolerate such measures, providing at least some
space for the traditional victims to act to gain authentic
independence. It is even possible that the Bush administration may
have to abandon its original war plans, well understood by Iraqis,
though kept in the shadows in the societies of the occupiers.
Right at this
point crucial questions arise about the nature of industrial
democracy and its future - extremely important questions. The
survival of the species is at stake, literally. But that is for
another time.
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