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Copyright, Bernard Chazelle, Princeton, December 2003

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/politics/bush-article.html

mail: [email protected]

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BUSH'S DESOLATE IMPERIUM

By Bernard Chazelle

Ah, the ease with which George W. Bush attracts superlatives!

Helen Thomas calls him "the worst president ever."

A kinder, gentler Jonathan Chait ranks him "among the worst

presidents in US history." No such restraint from

Paul Berman, who brands him "the worst president the US has ever had."

Nobel Laureate George Akerlof rates his government as the "worst ever."

Even Bushie du jour, Christopher Hitchens, calls the man

"unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent,

amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured,

extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently

quite proud of all these things." Only Fidel Castro, it would appear,

has had kind words for our 43rd President. "Hopefully, he is

not as stupid as he seems, nor as Mafia-like as his predecessors were."

Vain hopes. In a mere three years, President

Bush has compiled a record of disasters that Fidel could only envy.

While cutting taxes for the rich, starving out

federal programs for the poor, dismantling environmental protections,

riding roughshod over civil liberties, and running the largest budget

deficit in history, his administration has

pursued a "law of the jungle" brand of foreign policy

fueled by overt paranoia and an imperious sense of omnipotence.

Its shrill, threatening rhetoric, relentlessly echoed by

a gang of media goons, has coarsened public discourse and alienated

friends and allies.

At home, Bush has stoked the fears of a public

traumatized by 9/11 and encountered rare success preaching

an "us-against-them" Weltanschauung soaked in self-righteousness.

Dissent has been equated with lack of patriotism,

illegal detentions have gone unchallenged,

and racial profiling has been given new life.

In the run-up to the war, international disapproval

met with sophomoric tantrums ("freedom fries, anyone?")

and vindictive hissy fits (canceled exchange programs with

French high schools): hardly America's finest hour.

Abroad, the image of the United States has never been worse. Ever.

While the horrors of 9/11 prompted an unprecedented

outpouring of sympathy for the US worldwide, Bush squandered

it all away and morphed "America the Benevolent Giant"

into "America the Shrill Bully."

Bush's vision of a dog-eat-dog Hobbesian universe

in which the US plays by its own rules is repellent

to most nations. For all its shortcomings,

the rule of international law has vital resonance to many:

For Europeans it signifies the historical end of warfare as the preferred

means of resolving disputes; for their former colonies

it is a shield against the White Man's insufferable itch

to force his wisdom down their throats.

For weak nations it offers a deterrent against stronger neighbors.

For all it promises the dignity of being heard and treated as equals

on a global stage. International law

might well be the worst form of utopia except, that is, for all

others that have been tried.

It is overwhelmingly in America's interest to

embrace international law, encourage liberal

multilateralism, and leverage its formidable power through

international partnerships. The world's sole superpower

cannot go it alone. Perhaps it could fifty years ago. No longer.

Besides the direct causes--mostly globalization and the emergence of rival

economic blocs--there are two indirect factors behind

the "Gulliverisation" of the US giant:

The end of the Cold War has weakened its

power of coercion; its increased exposure to

terrorism has intensified its dependency

on the goodwill of others.

The Bush administration does not see it that way.

Its answer to terrorism and the threats of rogue nations

is a doctrine of preventive warfare

folded into an imperial ambition of global domination.

It is Wilsonianism run amok. President Bush is a latter-day crusader

on a mission to coerce everyone into freedom.

And what a better place to start the coercion

than the land that is home to the world's second largest oil reserves!

To drum up support for the invasion, Bush's mouthpieces served

a credulous public a steady diet of lies and exaggerations.

They hyped the threats to the hilt. More seriously,

they lied about their certainty, presenting as

rock-solid evidence what they knew were unproven

allegations rejected by many in the intelligence community.

The fake certitude--not the hype--was the lie.

US forces invaded Iraq to eliminate a threat that

proved to be entirely fictitious. The preventive warfare doctrine

could not have failed in more spectacular fashion.

Supporters of the war have a single, powerful line of defense:

"So what? A bloody dictatorship has been

overthrown! Got a problem with that?"

For its shaming effect, they will often throw in

the rhetorical question,

"Wasn't going after Hitler worth a little

sacrifice?" with its intended subtext, "I Churchill, you Chamberlain."

Saddam was a ghastly tyrant, but he was no Hitler.

He was a Caligula-like monster and

a second-tier dictator. The horrors he visited upon Iraq,

gruesome as they were, were no worse than those visited

on half a dozen nations in the last decade and not a patch

on, say, the Congolese conflict (3 million people killed in 4 years).

Absent the WMD justification, intervention in Iraq

was thus a moral choice rather than a moral imperative.

A decision had to be made that was based

on the totality of arguments, for and against,

and upheld the Hippocratic oath of foreign policy:

Do no harm.

What kind of mad surgeon would operate on a brain tumor

before assessing the odds of success and

gauging potential side effects?

Operating on the Saddam tumor had a number of predictable side effects:

massive loss of innocent lives (over two 9/11s and counting),

resentment of a proud people, precedent-setting in the violation

of international law, etc. What were the chances of success?

The experiences of the British in Mesopotamia,

the French in Algeria, and the Israelis in Lebanon

were hardly encouraging. Western incursions into

the Arab world have had an uncanny way of failing miserably.

One glimmer of hope, of course, was the sky-high

credibility of American good intentions. Oh, really?

Then, what was Bush's defense secretary doing in Baghdad back

in the eighties, giving succor to a Saddam on top

of his game busy gassing Iranians for breakfast?

And why did his father allow the tyrant to

murder 100,000 Kurds and Shi'ites in 1991?

And what about the twelve years of US-led sanctions

that enriched Saddam's cronies and raised the mortality

rates among Iraqi children under 5 to a staggering 13 percent?

One may forgive the Iraqis for being just a little

wary of America's new-found solicitude.

President Bush saw no contradiction

in preaching democracy in Iraq while forging

new alliances with odious dictatorships in Central Asia,

(Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan),

or in threatening Iran while coddling

corrupt autocracies and cesspools of terrorism

(Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan).

Bush is planting today the seeds of tomorrow's invasions.

A recovered alcoholic, he has finally found an addiction

that we can all enjoy together: perpetual war.

Hypocrisy comes laced with hair-raising incompetence.

The Bush administration deluded itself

about a painless war of liberation that would pay for itself.

Much has been said already about postwar ineptitude,

leading to radical policy shifts every few weeks.

(Today's tuesday, so we must be trying to empower the Shi'ites.)

For an example of incompetence that would

be laughable were it not so tragic, consider

Bush's gift of $43 million to the Taliban a mere six months before 9/11.

Hey, what's wrong with a little Faustian deal

when there is a war on drugs to be fought?

(No doubt the families of 9/11 victims would nod in agreement.)

The president's folly will come crashing

into the great Law of Unintended Consequences.

This is the law that gave us Saddam, Khomeini, and Osama.

Which is not to be confused with the Law of Intended Consequences,

which gave us Pinochet, the Shah, the Greek Colonels,

and Mobutu. Propping up nasty regimes in order to fight

nastier ones (say, the Soviets) was always a dicey logic

but a logic nevertheless. It is different today.

Let us be clear. The war on terror was fully legitimized by 9/11; indeed,

most of the world lined up behind the US campaign in Afghanistan.

But Iraq is another story: an unprovoked aggression

couched in a mendacious narrative of self-defense;

a war of domination over a strategic region

folded into a starry-eyed project of democratization;

an encouragement to dictators everywhere to

follow the lead of North Korea and get their nukes

as soon as possible. Who can doubt that the incessant humiliation

of Iraqis is fanning the flames of terror?

Has it occurred to Bush that he might have become

bin Laden's unwitting recruiting

sergeant, his useful idiot in the White House?

At least Bush meant well--one hears. Did he? Good intentions are cheap.

As La Rochefoucauld said: "We all have enough

strength to bear other people's woes." How not to see callousness,

instead, in the spectacle of privileged old men calling

for a "little sacrifice" from the comfort of their conservative perches?

Whose sacrifice? Not theirs, that much we know. The Bushies would

rather cut down veterans' benefits--$21 billion reduction over

10 years--than give up their cherished tax cuts.

No, the lucky ones slated for sacrifice are the GIs bogged

down in Iraq and the likes of Ali Abbas, the boy who lost

his entire family and his two arms in a US bombing raid over Baghdad.

This war will prove a calamity for everyone, except, of course,

for little Ali, who will eternally bless his luck that

President Bush liberated him from the tyranny of his parents,

his siblings, and his limbs.

The war had one positive consequence--removing Saddam from power--and

will have countless adverse ones. But the case against it is not in

the numbers. It lies in the near-certain prediction that

the world will be worse off for it.

As CIA veteran Milt Bearden reminded us

recently (with only slight historical license),

in the 20C "no nation that launched a war against

another sovereign nation ever won. And every nationalist-based insurgency

against a foreign occupation ultimately succeeded."

Why should the 21C be any different? Bush is building a world of

mistrust and desolation that will not be easily mended. A fresh

new wave of anti-Americanism is sweeping the planet today.

No one should rejoice in this, for America matters and its

estrangement is good for no one. This grave setback in

international relations will be Bush's lasting legacy.

Once "the worst president ever" retires to his ranch in Crawford,

the world will be left to pick up the pieces of a broken trust.

A Personal Note:

The debate has been divisive and emotional. For someone like

me--hardly a knee-jerk pacifist, having supported military interventions

in Somalia, Liberia, the Congo, and Afghanistan--the case against

the war in Iraq is not an easy one. I will show in this article that,

upon careful consideration of the evidence, the case for war collapses,

both on principle and on practical grounds. The invasion was a huge

miscalculation whose adverse consequences will greatly outweigh

any potential benefit. My opponents will retort that I condone wife beating.

This "gotcha" argument is irresistible. Even I, not one to concede an inch

to the other side, am sensitive to it. Indeed, it is not a pleasant thought

that, had I had my way, Saddam would still be presiding over Iraq's misfortunes.

My anti-war position is based purely on moral and political cost-benefit

considerations. If that is too crass, how else should one go about it?

Unfortunately, I have not seen any serious counterargument.

I believe that the irresistibility of the gotcha line

is the reason why. It has been the black hole of pro-war thinking.

The endless pro-invasion screeds that fill the pages of The Weekly Standard

and National Review offer, in lieu of reasoning, little more than

wishful thinking and intellectual sleight-of-hand. Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly

and their Clear Channel/Fox News cohorts are entertaining buffoons

who get paid to talk, not to think. Meanwhile, the intellectual

heavyweights on the right have been too giddy with power to go to the effort

of being intelligent.

If I have missed a serious pro-war argumentation that is not based on

the empty WMD/terror threats, I am quite certain that the Bush people

have missed it, too. All too often, the debate has been a sterile clash

of unreasoned assertions. The pro-war camp has never dealt satisfactorily

with a large number of questions (addressed in this article). For example,

even if one is willing to suspend disbelief and picture a US-led

democracy in Iraq, is one also to trust that, were the regime to be

anti-American (a virtual certainty), the US would sheepishly acquiesce?

Who in the world can believe such a thing?

The fatuity of much of the pro-war rhetoric gives me no comfort.

As we all know, conservatives who cannot make it in the world of ideas

settle for the next best thing, which is to run the country.

Tom Lehrer may end up having the last word:

"Though he may have won all the battles / We had all the good songs."

I do not think so. As a US citizen, I will do what I have

to do at the ballot box on November 2, 2004.

May this article inspire the American voters among

you to do the same and return the man from Crawford to his ranch.

IMPERIAL MADNESS

The Bush administration interpreted the tragedy of 9/11 as a clarion

call to move hard power to the center of US foreign policy.

Classical American hegemony, characterized by its ability

to enforce an international order and a willingness to abide by it,

was to give way to an "imperial ambition."

This transformation did not spring up out of a sudden rethinking

of US national security post 9/11. Rather, the terrorist attacks triggered

into action a plan long in the making, of which the invasion of Iraq

was Step 1. Bob Woodward reports that on 9/12, with no knowledge about

the hijackers, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

called for a US attack on Iraq at a cabinet meeting [1].

No one in the room registered much surprise.

Why would they? They all knew that Rumsfeld had co-signed an

open letter to President Clinton in January 1998 that

read in part,

We urge you to... turn your Administration's attention

to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power [2].

Iraq was the first domino to topple. Others would follow, opening

up a new era of US global domination. This project, now at the heart

of Bush's foreign policy, is the brainchild of the PNAC,

the leading neoconservative think-tank. (Neoconservatism is a misnomer:

The godfather of the movement explains why [3].) It is laid out in

various documents such as "Rebuilding America's Defenses" [4]. Briefly,

the neocons dream of spreading democracy around the world by enforcing

a Pax Americana that is strong enough militarily to deter any future

challenge and discourage rival coalitions. Neocons present a

coherent, if utterly unrealistic, vision of an American hyperpower

that has broken all ties with namby-pamby Carterism and Kissinger-style

realpolitik, and is hell-bent on sharing with the world

the benefits of its moral superiority. Democracy by force, if you will.

It is both highly principled and highly dangerous. Indeed, neocons can

sometimes sound like little Mussolinis in training.

We are an awesome revolutionary force. Creative destruction is

our middle name. We tear down the old order every day...

Seeing America undo old conventions, they [our enemies] fear us,

for they do not wish to be undone...

We wage total war because we fight in the name of an

idea... Stability is for those older, burnt-out countries,

not for the American dynamo

(Michael A. Ledeen, Freedom Chair holder at the

American Enterprise Institute [5]).

Other times, they are merely auditioning for the part

of the megalomaniac villain in the latest James Bond movie.

The maximum amount of force can and should be used as quickly

as possible for psychological impact--to demonstrate that the

empire cannot be challenged with impunity... [W]e are in the business

of bringing down hostile governments and creating governments

favorable to us

(Harvard Professor Stephen P. Rosen [6]).

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some

small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just

to show the world we mean business (Michael A. Ledeen [7]).

[The US should] recognize obligations only when it's in our interest

(Under Secretary of State John R. Bolton [8]).

As Georgetown Professor John Ikenberry argues [9], the radical

shift in American power from hegemonic to imperial requires

that the "US break from the postwar norms and institutions

of the international order and arrogate to itself the global role of

setting standards." Unconstrained by international law,

Bush's America is thereby entitled to play by the rules of its own making

while challenging the right of others to do likewise.

Which is fine by the neocons, because America is good and the rest

of world, mostly, is not. In a case of paranoiac exceptionalism,

the Bush administration has signaled its opposition to

the Land Mine Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,

the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the International Criminal Court Treaty,

the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Biological Warfare Treaty.

Rejection of all things multilateral is a cornerstone of

the Bush doctrine. It is a grotesque magnification

of the traditional Republican leeriness toward international obligations.

Indifferent to the fact that the United Nations, imperfect though it may be,

is the only forum where the world's poorest nations have a voice,

Pat Buchanan (no Bushie he) fired the opening salvo:

"Should We Evict the UN?" It has treated America and New York City

like doormats long enough. [10]

Though Buchanan may represent only a fringe isolationist brand of

right-wing thinking, his paranoia has been loudly echoed

by Bush doctrine devotees.

Here are two typical rants heard on the eve of the war.

One is by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer,

a former psychiatrist who studied paranoia and now practices it:

... in the Iraq crisis, the United Nations will sink once again

into irrelevance. This time it will not recover. And the world

will be better off for it. [11]

The other one is by Former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle,

far and away the most eloquent French-basher to own a summer house in France:

Thank God for the death of the UN. [12]

This uniquely American fondness for dissing the UN is quite extraordinary.

It is the height of hypocrisy, for no country has had its interests

served better by the UN than the United States. And the arrogance.

Remember the American sneering over the rights of

Angola, Cameroon, and Guinea to use their rotations on

the Security Council to pass judgment about Iraq.

(No such sneering when senators from the microscopic states

of Rhode Island or Delaware threaten to block a piece of legislation

on Capitol Hill.) As Dag Hammarskjold famously said,

The UN was not created to take humanity to heaven

but to save it from hell.

The United Nations is imperfect because it mirrors the world, with its

mix of democracies and tyrannies. But it is the only forum where

humanity speaks as a whole. Except for a few well-publicized disasters

(Rwanda, Bosnia), the UN has been remarkably effective.

With an annual peacekeeping budget that is inferior to those of the

NYC Fire and Police departments, the UN has brought peace and democracy

in recent years to East Timor, Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia,

and Mozambique [13]. It has helped the US in Afghanistan and Haiti.

American detractors are quick to point to the Rwanda

genocide, which the UN shamefully sat out. They invariably omit

to mention who blocked the Security Council from getting involved:

the United States.

There are many problems with America's new imperial aspiration,

none more serious than its inherent unsustainability.

A convergence of cultural, economic, military, diplomatic, and dependency

factors will doom this ambition. In fact it will die a quick death.

Briefly, here is why. First, there is the biological argument:

Imperium is not in America's DNA. Why would a land of immigrants

develop an "emigrating" vocation to occupy foreign lands?

Expatriation is unlikely ever to become the ticket for career

advancement it was in the days of the Raj. It takes a vivid

imagination to picture legions of American educators, administrators,

engineers, and businessmen willing to relocate

to far-flung lands whose languages they don't speak,

whose cultures they ignore, whose foods they detest, and

whose anti-American sentiments they can only look forward to.

Americans' idea of living with the enemy is to move to Paris.

Georgetown Professor Charles A. Kupchan

has argued that the European Union, with an economy

the size of America's, will be increasingly inclined to check

its unbridled power [14]. The combined GDP of Northeast Asia

already exceeds, and soon will eclipse, that of the United States.

Both the US trade and budget deficits are astronomical.

Annual foreign purchases of US assets exceed the budget of

the Pentagon. (Picture this: all GIs on foreign payroll.)

For all the talk of hyperpower, the US share of the world

economy is roughly half of what it was in 1950.

Bush's unilateralism is likely to catalyze the coalition

of rival forces; precisely what it sought to prevent.

At least America has the bayonets!

Its military superiority is, indeed, overwhelming

and likely to remain so for at least a generation.

Its battlefield dominance over any potential enemy

is something of which Queen Victoria could only have dreamed.

With this comes the power to punish and conquer; and do little else.

On the terrorist front, coordinated intelligence and police action

have proven far more effective than brute force.

Similarly, for all of America's vaunted military power, Osama

is still on the lam (as of this writing) and in Afghanistan

little more than Kabul is under control.

Not to speak of Iraq, where the world's only superpower

is proving unable to stabilize a nation of 25 million

that has been crippled by twelve years of economic sanctions.

As Talleyrand once observed to Napoleon: "You can do anything

with a bayonet, Sire, except sit on it."

While military strength has been oversold, diplomacy has suffered

from neglect. Actually, ineptitude might be a better word.

Casting aspersions on the United Nations while bribing and

threatening its weaker members backfired miserably and dashed

American hopes for a resolution authorizing war.

Insulting and intimidating recalcitrant friends and allies,

a signature move from the Bush playbook, proved spectacularly

counterproductive. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's

exhortation, "Punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia,"

served only the purpose of showing America's inability

to do even just that. After Bush was spotted at the "irrelevant"

UN in Fall 2003, hat in hand, it was the Europeans' turn to ponder

whether to punish, ignore, or forgive America.

Bad habits die hard. Berating Turkey's democratic leaders for not

listening more closely to their generals was a throwback to

the Cold War, when a friendly government was defined as

a military junta that took its orders from Washington.

Over 95 percent of Turks opposed the war; and yet

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had the audacity

to blame the Turkish military for not playing "the strong leadership role"

that was expected of it (codeword for "putting a gun to the head of

democratically elected Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan").

Mind you that Wolfowitz was then the loudest democracy promoter

in neocon circles. Perhaps the decibels were needed to cover up

the hum of insincerity.

America is the mightiest nation the world has ever known;

vastly more powerful than Britain at the zenith of its empire.

Is it really?

If power is measured not in weaponry counts but,

more usefully, in the ability to achieve one's objectives,

America can only envy British power. Indeed, President Bush

needs the cooperation of the world far more than Queen Victoria

ever did. Fewer and fewer countries even bother to listen to

US diktats any more. (If you are not convinced, read up on

the pathetic results of the US campaign to cut off aid to states

supporting the International Criminal Court.)

This year's events proved that Turkey has learned to say no.

With the end of the Cold War, France and Germany are terminally beyond US

retaliatory reach--you can tell from the invectives:

always a sure sign of weakness. In the war on terror,

the US desperately needs the cooperation of such heavyweights as

Pakistan, Indonesia, and India. As for China, it is simply

too big to be bossed around. Add to this the interdependencies created

by globalization, and the picture of a latter-day Gulliver tied down

by Lilliputs begins to emerge. As the deputy director of the

French Institute for International Relations, Dominique Moisi, puts it,

... nothing in the world can be done without the United States.

And the multiplicity of actors means that there is very little

the United States can achieve alone. [15]

The dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Joseph S. Nye Jr,

is right on target when he identifies soft power, ie,

"the ability to get what you want by attracting

and persuading others to adopt your goals,"

as a key component of any successful US foreign policy [16].

This echoes Kissinger's dictum that the test of history for

the United States will be its ability to convert its power

into international consensus.

Bush's foreign policy has been a high-octane mix of

bellicosity and diplomatic ineptitude.

It has also been remarkably "un-American."

The United States has always been better at persuasion than coercion.

Attraction for its ideas and values, not its military strength,

has been the root of its success.

Tolerance, generosity, freedom, courage, energy, and optimism

are the vocabulary of America's greatness.

Paranoia, selfishness, and fear are not.

GIVE WAR A CHANCE

On the heels of the Afghan campaign, a UN-sanctioned invasion

that drew its legitimacy from the Taliban's harboring of al Qaeda,

the Bush administration shifted its priorities to effect

regime change in Iraq. On March 20, 2003, with no UN support and

widespread opposition worldwide, a US-led coalition attacked Iraq.

On May 1, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces

proudly donned a flight suit in San Diego harbor,

bravely landed on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln

thirty miles offshore, and triumphantly declared the end of major

combat operations. Bush had won the war.

On September 21, 2003, in a public forum at the New School,

Paul Wolfowitz restated the three official reasons for the invasion [17]:

Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD);

his connection to international terrorism;

and the moral imperative of replacing a brutal dictatorship

by a civil democracy that would serve as a model for the Middle East.

Other motives were suggested in the media. One of them, straight

out of Comedy Central, was the desire to "save the UN."

Yeah, so deep was Bush's affection toward the world body that he would

go to war to save it from irrelevance. Never mind

the anticipatory obituaries of the UN gleefuly prepared

by Bush's neocon courtiers right before the war.

The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman

had another theory: therapeutic violence.

The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that

after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world.

Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine.

But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could... [18]

For the United States to act on a threat preemptively (or, in the case

of Iraq, preventively) required a new national security doctrine.

Aware of this, on September 20, 2002, the Bush administration

articulated the need to act against "emerging threats

before they are fully formed" in its new National Security Strategy [19].

The advocacy of anticipatory self-defense is nothing short of a revolution

in US foreign policy. Yale History Professor John L. Gaddis calls it

"the most important reformulation of US grand strategy

in over half-a-century." Recent presidents considered--and swiftly

rejected--preemptive attacks, following Truman's advice that

"you don't prevent anything by war... except peace."

The doctrine flies in the face of international and US law.

As Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman points out [20],

[The US Constitution] declares that

treaties approved by the Senate are the "supreme Law

of the Land" and it explicitly requires the president to

"take care that the laws be faithfully executed."

The UN Charter is a solemn treaty overwhelmingly ratified

by the Senate in the aftermath of World War II.

It just so happens that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits

preemptive (let alone preventive) strikes, except in cases of

immediate self-defense. For this reason, Condi Rice's National

Security Strategy required at the very least new legislation

from Capitol Hill. Instead, the US Congress turned a blind eye

and swallowed the Strategy wholesale.

Aside from legal considerations, what are the practical

ramifications of the Strategy? It is obviously a major destabilizing factor

for dueling countries, eg, India vs Pakistan or China vs Taiwan.

If X feels threatened by Y, it might be tempted by the use of

preemptive self-defense. This alone might cause Y to feel threatened

by X and, in turn, consider a preemptive strike on X.

But, of course, this would only add to X's original mistrust,

thus fueling a self-reinforcing feedback loop of mutual suspicion.

The Strategy also encourages dictatorships everywhere to

follow the North Korea model and speed up the development

of nuclear weapons in order to deter a US invasion.

As Ackerman reminds us, the limited doctrine of self-defense enshrined

in traditional law goes back to the Nuremberg trials, whose main focus was

not, as is commonly believed, the prosecution of genocide

but the condemnation of aggressive wars. The classic case of preventive

warfare is Pearl Harbor. Japan was under a US-imposed oil embargo in 1941

and felt threatened. Was it thus justified in attacking the United States?

The UN Charter says no. The National Security Strategy says yes.

No one disputes the intuitive appeal of preemption:

Hit 'em before they hit you. But how sure are you they have it in for you?

What if you attack them because of a threat of WMD only to discover

later that they have no such weapons? (Not that this would ever happen

to us, of course.) Bush's solution to this conundrum--and to the

Pearl Harbor paradox--is the sort of exceptionalism that does not

even pass the laugh-test. It goes like this. The risks of error are, indeed,

high enough that preemption should be the exclusive right of

the good guys (that's us). The National Security Strategy

puts it more delicately [19]:

... nations [should not] use preemption as a pretext for aggression.

Translation: We preempt; you don't. Mercifully, the document reassures

the world that we can be trusted to preempt in moderation.

The United States will not use force in all cases to

preempt emerging threats.

Why not in all cases? Why such lily-livered restraint?

Really, who writes this sort of thing: an assembly of fifth-graders?

University of Chicago History Professor Bruce Cumings is kinder:

"[the logic] would flunk even a freshman class."

Which brings us back to Iraq. The Strategy had no legal value,

so what did the law say? International lawyers are unanimous [21]:

The war was illegal. In no way did UN Resolution 1441 [36]

or any of its predecessors give legal authority for an attack on Iraq.

Those who disagree are about as numerous as the WMD buried

in Saddam's backyard.

Legalism, shmegalism! Didn't Tony Blair speak of WMD deployments

on 45 minutes' notice? Didn't Condi Rice famously suggest that the

smoking gun might come in the shape of a mushroom cloud?

Don't talk to us about legalism!

CONJURING UP THREATS

Hyperventilating Tony and Condi blowing hot air again.

The WMD argument has been shattered. After months of scouring

the country for WMD at a cost of $300 million, the 1,400-strong

Iraq Survey Group has come up empty-handed.

With this appalling fiasco, Bush has unwittingly validated

the work of Hans Blix's UN weapons inspection team, which his

cabinet had gleefully ridiculed before the war.

One could almost feel sorry for the president.

Iraq may well have been one of only two countries

on earth entirely free of WMD; and that is the one he chose to invade!

I guess the Vatican was lucky.

Intelligence analysts and Iraqi defectors warned the administration

of the existence of WMD but their evidence never rose above the level

of hearsay and wishful thinking. CIA and State remained so unconvinced

that the Defense Department decided to set up its own

intelligence shop (separate from DIA), the Office of Special Plans.

According to The New Yorker's Seymour M. Hersh (the reporter who

broke the My Lai story), Special Plans cherry-picked intelligence

to support Cheney and Rumsfeld's case for war [22].

None of the alarming evidence these intelligence amateurs

gathered convinced anyone at the CIA. It did convince the president,

however. With CIA Director George Tenet still fighting for his job

after his fine performance on 9/11, traditional intelligence

agencies rolled over and let the (neo)con artists at Special Plans

run the show. Yet Bush could not say he had not heard divergent opinions:

[UN Sanctions] have worked. He [Saddam] has not developed any

significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction

(Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2/24/01).

I don't think that Iraq is especially eager in the biological

and chemical area to produce such weapons for storage

(Former UNSCOM chief, Rolf Ekeus, 3/00).

When I left Iraq in 1998... the [nuclear] infrastructure and

facilities had been 100% eliminated. There's no debate about that.

All of their instruments and facilities had been destroyed. The

weapons design facility had been destroyed. The production equipment

had been hunted down and destroyed

(Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, 9/02).

Britain compiled a "dossier" that led Tony Blair to declare the

level of threat "serious and current." And yet his own chief of staff,

Jonathan Powell, wrote in an email:

The dossier does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an

imminent threat. [23]

According to Ha'aretz columnist Gideon Levy, Israel's previous director

of Military Intelligence, Amos Malka, declared in Fall 2002 that "he was

more concerned about traffic accidents" in Israel than WMD in Iraq [24].

As we all know now, the terrorist threat from Iraq was equally

nonexistent (today, of course, thanks to Bush, it is a different story).

A review of the prewar intelligence revealed an astonishing

level of doubt and uncertainty. The Nation's David Corn has revealed that

these doubts were acknowledged by no less than a former deputy CIA director,

the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House intelligence

committee, the chief weapons hunter, and the chairman of the Senate

intelligence committee [25]. And yet Bush had no compunction about saying:

You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when

you talk about the war on terror

(George W. Bush, 09/02 [26].

We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in

bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases... Alliance with terrorists

could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving

any fingerprints (George W. Bush, 10/7/03 [27]).

It worked. In August 2003, up to 82% of Americans believed that Saddam

provided assistance to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, and 69% of them

found it likely that Saddam was "personally involved" in 9/11 [28].

(All those Elvis sightings are beginning to make sense, aren't they?)

Was it the trauma of 9/11 that allowed such brainwashing to take place

in a vacuum of media criticism? What happened to the proud institutions that

gave us the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate investigations?

Why such abject subservience of the national media to the powers

in Washington? Why such spinelessness? A story for another day.

The obvious question: Why would the Bush administration choose

to humiliate Blix and his team, cherry-pick intelligence, hype the

threat of WMD, and dream up imaginary Saddam-al Qaeda links?

The Rumsfeld outburst mentioned earlier holds the answer.

Regime change in Iraq was high on the neocon agenda throughout the nineties.

After 9/11 Bush was sold on the idea. The first indication that he would

take us to war regardless of the outcome of any future weapons inspections

came in March 2002 [29]. Referring to Saddam, Bush bellowed to a group

of senators: "We're taking him out!" Dispelling any doubt about

the president's intentions, Cheney reiterated the same message shortly after.

The decision having been made, the only job left was to sell it to the public.

Since remaking the Middle East to conform to Bush's imperial dreams was likely

to sell as briskly as an Edsel, the White House decided to

play to 9/11 anxieties instead; hence, the WMD threat, terror links, etc.

The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with

the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one

issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons

of mass destruction, as the core reason (Paul Wolfowitz [30].

Britain's insistence in Fall 2002 on going to the UN and getting

Resolution 1441 passed was welcome by the US as a convenient way of appearing

conciliatory while buying time for a military assault not yet ready for launch.

Richard Perle has recently revealed that a last-ditch attempt by Iraqi officials

to avoid military confrontation in March 2003 was rebuffed by the US [31.

Nothing was to stand in the way of war.

Not only was Bush determined to go to war regardless of the sideshow

at the UN, he literally rushed into it. The evidence is abundant

and incontrovertible. The UN weapons inspection team reported progress

and protested its dismissal in March 2003. With hindsight it did

an excellent job in not finding what did not exist.

A British draft of a UN resolution authorizing war

was certain to garner at least 10 votes (enough to pass),

thus leaving France with the dreaded option of vetoing it.

As Clinton's former Assistant Secretary of State James P. Rubin

explains [32],

Merely offering several more weeks would likely have yielded

ten votes for the British resolution, but Bush refused.

Rubin also refutes the canard that France forced

Bush into war by its uncompromising refusal to entertain

a military outcome.

... Chirac would have gone along with the use of force

if a nine-month schedule had been set at the beginning.

Nine extra months? You must surely be joking! Now that we know how

close we came to nuclear annihilation at the hands of Saddam,

blessed be Bush's soul for ignoring Chirac's craven advice...

The White House's burning desire to attack Iraq required a new language

of certitude and foreboding. Public support for the war might not

have survived a candid presentation of the available intelligence, based

as it was on conflicting reports, dubious testimonies by Iraqi defectors,

plagiarized PhD theses, forged documentation of uranium sales,

misidentification of aluminum tubes, etc. The lack of any smoking gun

did not help either. Faced with this conundrum, the White House pulled out

all the stops and launched what may go down in history as the most egregious,

guileful, sedulous, systematic campaign of lies ever orchestrated

by a US administration. There we have it, the hype, the fabricated trepidation,

the faked certainty of the uncertain:

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has

weapons of mass destruction (Dick Cheney, 8/26/02).

There is no doubt that [Saddam] has chemical weapons stocks

(Colin Powell, 9/8/02).

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments

leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to

possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised

(George W. Bush, 3/17/03).

Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information

that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical

particularly... (Former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, 3/21/03).

There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses

weapons of mass destruction,

(Head of US Central Command Gen. Tommy Franks, 3/22/03).

I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass

destruction (Defense Policy Board member, Kenneth Adelman, 3/23/03).

I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction

there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting

it just now (Colin Powell, 5/4/03).

I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of

weapons of mass destruction (Tony Blair, 5/29/03).

Never in the field of human conflict

was so much bunk served by so few to so many.

While no terrorist link between Saddam and Osama has been established,

unfortunately the same cannot be said of the US government and the Taliban.

This is the story of an intrepid Texan congressman named

Charlie Wilson and a belly-dancer, former Miss World contender,

named Joanne Herring, convincing the US government to

arm the Afghan Mujahideen with Stinger anti-aircraft missiles

to help them defeat the Russians [33].

The sequel, entitled "freedom fighter today, terrorist tomorrow," is

about the most spectacular case of blowback the US has ever suffered,

featuring a certain Osama bin Laden in the role of the

snake that we thought was a pet.

Meanwhile, Bush's obsession with Saddam led him to drop the ball

in Afghanistan and move the war on terror to the back burner.

Another story, less well known but just as riveting,

is the Bush administration's bestowing $43 million

on the Taliban just a few months before 9/11.

Those nasty hand choppers might be reviled for their

enslavement of women, their theocratic subjugation of men,

their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and their virulent

brand of anti-Americanism. But, you see, the Taliban frown on drugs

as much as Bush fancied them in his youth; and they are just so much

better at drug law enforcement than our own DEA

(they do chop hands after all). So, what more natural than

for Colin Powell to declare in May 2001 that the US would reward

their efficiency by becoming the single largest sponsor of the Taliban?

Savor, and shudder at, Robert Scheer's prescient words in

the Los Angeles Times [34]:

The Taliban may suddenly be the dream regime of

our own drug war zealots, but in the end this alliance

will prove a costly failure. Our long sad history of

signing up dictators in the war on drugs demonstrates

the futility of building a foreign policy on a domestic obsession.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE US

No evidence of WMD. Ditto with terror links. Who cares?

Isn't Iraq better off now? If the pursuit of democracy in a land long

oppressed by tyrants is not a noble cause, then what is?

Time to give that noble cause a closer look. Wolfowitz advanced

three reasons for the war: The first two are shot; the third's the charm.

With Saddam gone and the US in control, democracy shall now spread

across the region like wildfire and the swamps of terror shall be drained.

Hallelujah! Of course, it is not too reassuring that

the prophets who today have "no doubt" about the bright future

of Iraq are the same geniuses who yesterday had "no doubt" about

the existence of WMD. The problems facing the US in Iraq are daunting:

Is Iraq viable as a single unified nation? How does one go redistributing

among tribal and religious groups power traditionally held by the 16% Sunni

minority while avoiding a civil war? These are a few in a long list

of urgent questions. To stabilize Iraq, let alone transform it

into a liberal democracy, would be a Herculean task

for the United Nations. For the US it is simply hopeless.

In the plains of Mesopotamia, America will always be the problem,

not the solution. The problem in question is foremost one of credibility.

In Iraq, the US has none.

For starters, Iraqis will remember that democracy was also promised

to Kuwait in 1991, and we all know how well that went.

The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, not a man given

to cynicism, smells a rat [35]:

... the prattle about creating a democratic model on the Tigris

is just a shrewd White House marketing attempt to bait and switch.

If what Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair was true and, indeed,

democracy and human rights were preeminent American concerns, then

why did the US before the war put no pressure on Saddam

to release political prisoners, allow inspections by ICRC officials,

or supply the UN with lists of missing individuals? If NATO could threaten

Milosevic over humanitarian considerations, why could the US not threaten

Saddam on the same grounds? UN Resolution 1441 addresses only the issue

of UNMOVIC and IAEA access to weapons sites in Iraq;

not a word about human rights in its decisions [36].

There is no merit to the argument that Russia and China might have

vetoed any UN resolution referring to human rights.

For one thing, neither of them vetoed Resolution 688, which addressed

the plight of the Kurds in 1991. But even if they did this time around, so what?

The United States showed that it was willing to bypass the UN anyway.

The issue of credibility goes far beyond missed opportunities, however.

There are the intentions and then there is the history,

the nefarious history of American involvement in Iraq.

First, the intentions.

Apart from the Bush doctrinaires, few have clamored

more loudly for a remaking of the Middle East along progressive lines

than liberal columnist Thomas Friedman. (The pro-war camp cuts right

through party lines.) His heartfelt longing for Iraqi democracy is unassailable;

at least on the off days when he is not calling for a dictatorship:

... the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi

junta without Saddam Hussein. [37]

That was in the aftermath of Desert Storm. In early 2003, while keeping

the welfare of Iraqis close to this heart, Friedman still displayed

his legendary knack for cutting through the smarmy sentimentality

of naive do-gooders.

... a war for oil? My short answer is yes. Any war we launch in Iraq

will certainly be--in part--about oil. To deny that is laughable. [38]

Refreshing straight talk brought to you 100% sarcasm-free: The man actually

approves. Now, why in the world would any Iraqi reading Friedman

doubt the purity of American intentions? And keep in mind that this is not

even one of those megalomaniac Bushies speaking but rather a pillar

of the liberal establishment.

Another chink in the intentional argument is the widely shared

belief that the US would never allow a democracy to take root

if it were anti-American. The reality must be faced:

A true democracy in Iraq today would almost certainly be anti-American.

Does anyone in Washington seriously believe that a US promise

not to mess with such an outcome would be taken seriously by

anyone in the region? Of course, not. Unfortunately,

Iraqi politicians know that, too; therefore, they would be less than impressed

by a reassurance of noninterference coming from someone

who they know full well does not even believe

that his own reassurance is credible. A dialogue of the deaf.

And now, as promised, the history. Sadly, the United States has had a hand

in virtually all of the calamities that have befallen Iraq in the last 40 years.

The CIA funded the 1963 coup that brought the Ba'ath party to power

and paved the way for Saddam's bloody takeover in 1979.

In late 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, then President Reagan's special Mideast envoy,

flew to Baghdad to assure Saddam of US support in the Iran-Iraq war

(Washington's favorite spectator war). In the mid-eighties, State Department

reports of Iraq's daily use of chemical weapons on Iranian troops did

nothing to dent Saddam's image in the White House as our bulwark against Iran,

the enemy du jour. That Iraq was a true ally was demonstrated

in May 1987, when an Iraqi attack on the USS Stark killed 37 American sailors.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger immediately threatened Iran

(no, this is not a typo), while the US quickly accepted an apology from Saddam.

In March 1988, Saddam's forces killed over 5,000 Kurdish civilians

by poison gas in Halabja. Repelled by this atrocity,

the US Senate passed sweeping sanctions against Iraq.

Reagan's fierce opposition killed the bill in the House.

For good measure, his administration granted Iraq 65 licenses for

dual-use technology exports in the weeks following the attack [39].

A year later, the White House provided Saddam with a billion-dollar loan [40].

Now, that's a friend for you.

Alas, the Washington-Baghdad lovefest did not last. On August 2, 1990,

Saddam foolishly sent his tanks rolling into Kuwait.

What gassing civilians, invading Iran, and slaughtering political

opponents could not do, Saddam's designs on Kuwaiti oil did.

He had crossed the red line. With an eloquence to rival his son's, Bush Sr

declared three days later: "This will not stand. This will not stand,

this aggression against Kuwait." On January 16, 1991, his spokesman

Marlin Fitzwater proudly announced, "The liberation of Kuwait has begun."

To save anyone the embarrassment of taking the word liberation too seriously,

Secretary of State James Baker had this pithy line:

"It's about jobs, jobs, jobs!"

At the end of the conflict, the United States committed one of the most

shameful betrayals in modern times [41]. Bush Sr encouraged Kurdish

and Shi'ite uprisings, only to withdraw US support at the last moment

and allow Saddam to slaughter as many as 100,000 people.

Thomas Friedman had to see the "the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's

genocidal evil" to find justification for the war [18].

You mean to say, Mr. Friedman, you didn't know? You did not know that

Saddam did the bulk of his butchering while enjoying full US support.

To paraphrase FDR, Saddam was a son of a bitch, but he was our son of a bitch.

We created this monster. If you want to know who's to

blame for all this, we are (Stephen D. Bryen, TIME interview [42]).

Who is this Stephen Bryen to accuse the US of creating the monster

of Baghdad? Some anti-American pinko commie bastard? Actually,

Reagan's Deputy Under Secretary of Defense.

If that were not enough, America bestowed other gifts on poor Iraqi citizens,

no doubt cementing enduring gratitude. A 12-year regime of sanctions crippled

an impoverished nation while doing nothing to hurt Saddam or threaten

his grip on power. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization

reported that sanctions had caused the deaths of 567,000 children by 1995 [43].

UNICEF estimated that half a million children under the age of five had died

as a result of sanctions [44]. Even a skeptic such as Columbia

Professor Richard Garfield conceded a minimum of at least 150,000 excess

deaths among young children [45]. UNICEF senior representative in Iraq,

Anupama Rao Singh, reported on March 20, 2000 that mortality rates

for young children had more than doubled by 1994. (As Garfield pointed out,

not even World War II produced similar increases in child mortality.)

By 1999, 13 percent of all Iraqi children were dead before their 5th birthday,

mostly from contaminated water [46]. As John Pilger wrote in

The Guardian on March 4, 2000 [47],

Chlorine, that universal guardian of safe water, has been blocked

by the Sanctions Committee. In 1990, an Iraqi infant with dysentery

stood a one in 600 chance of dying. This is now one in 50.

In early 2001, over the strenuous objection of health agencies worldwide,

the Bush administration placed holds on $280 million worth of medical supplies

such as vaccines against infant hepatitis, tetanus, and diphtheria

for fear of dual use (a fear which biological weapons experts in Europe

scoffed at). Only in March 2001, when the Washington Post and Reuters

began to run stories about it, did the US relent and lift the holds. (Read

Joy Gordon's chilling account in Harper's Magazine for the gory details [46].)

Admittedly, the Clinton administration was no less shameful

in its defense of the status quo. Here is a classic exchange

on CBS's "60 Minutes" between Lesley Stahl and Secretary of State

Madeleine Albright (December 5, 1996):

Stahl:

We have heard that half a million children have

died. I mean, that's more children than died

in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Albright:

I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--

we think the price is worth it.

The US rebuffed repeated efforts by UN Security Council members to amend

the sanctions regime. If the proposed alternatives were found wanting,

wasn't it incumbent upon the US and the UK to find better ones?

They never even tried. At least not until 2001, when international

pressure became too strong and a "smart sanctions" initiative

(though barely less punitive) was introduced by the

British--only to be scuttled by the Russians [48].

The sanctions hurt the people of Iraq while strengthening

the grip of its ruling elite. Tellingly, Saddam's numerous palaces

survived years of US-British strikes.

The American position of keeping the status quo

while blaming Saddam for all of Iraq's woes and

doing nothing to hurt him was unconscionable. Few Iraqis will

forgive, let alone forget, their grievous, unnecessary suffering.

The purpose of this brief journey through the sorrowful

history of Iraq was not to criticize US policy (which, in fact,

deserves even more criticism than this account suggests). It was

to make the point that, whenever Bush talks about helping

Iraq, its citizens can only laugh; and then cry.

WHY DO THEY HATE US?

Iraq is only the tip of the iceberg. A recent Pew survey indicates that

a full 6% of Egyptians and 1% of Jordanians hold a favorable view

of the US: some gratitude from the second and fourth largest recipients

of US foreign aid! In Pakistan a whopping 2% of the public welcomes

the spread of American ideas and customs [49,50].

"Why do they hate us?" has been the post-9/11 question par excellence.

Its distinct resonance comes from its beguiling ambiguity.

Who are "they"? The terrorists? But then why didn't we hear the same

question after the Oklahoma City bombing? Perhaps "they" are the Muslims

or the Arabs or any of those scary, dark-skinned bogeymen who haunt

the imagery of right-wing radio talk shows.

"They" are mired in poverty and oppression and spend every waking hour

envying our wealth and freedoms. Or maybe only our wealth.

President Bush, an expert on both subjects,

assures us it is our freedoms they actually hate.

Being the devilishly witty man that he is, the freedom he

has in mind must surely be that of detaining Muslim teenagers

in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely without charge, in contravention

of basic international law.

Finer connoisseurs of human nature have suggested that Arab

anti-Americanism stems from a scapegoating campaign meant to

divert the people's attention from their own governments' failings.

Its motto: Praise your leader for all that is good;

blame America for all that is bad. After all, the scapegoat theory goes,

isn't US policy unabashedly, overwhelmingly, ridiculously pro-Muslim?

(Hint for those who are having trouble with this homework

exercise: Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo.) Were it not for decades of manipulation

at the hands of shameless leaders, the Arabs would know how good we are.

They would also know how stupid we are. For what else would you call

people who give billions in financial assistance to Arab leaders

only so that they can better whip their people into an anti-American frenzy?

Why didn't the scapegoat theorists tell us earlier&