The Progressive Response
Volume 8, Number 18
July 14, 2004
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
| Foreign Policy In Focus | |
The Progressive Response (PR) is produced weekly by the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) as part of its Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) project. FPIF, a "Think Tank Without Walls," is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." FPIF is joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at http://www.fpif.org/, or email <feedback@fpif.org> to share your thoughts with us.
John Gershman, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) (online at www.irc-online.org) and co-director of FPIF. He can be contacted at <john@irc-online.org>.
Table of Contents
I. Updates and Out-Takes
RISK-TRANSFER MILITARISM AND THE LEGITIMACY OF WAR AFTER IRAQ
By Martin ShawTHE INFLUENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT ON U.S. MIDDLE EAST POLICY
By Stephen ZunesTEAR DOWN THAT WALL, MR. SHARON
By Ian WilliamsDIVIDE AND CONQUER AS IMPERIAL RULES
By Conn Hallinan‘THE GEORGE BUSH OF AFRICA’: PRETORIA CHOOSES SUBIMPERIALISM
By Patrick BondAFTER A DECADE OF DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA—A NEW GENERATION OF STRUGGLE
By Andre Banks and Devanne BrookinsALL UNQUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: UNIFYING EUROPE NOT LINING UP BEHIND THE U.S.
By Norman BirnbaumA DELUGE OF BAD ADVICE AND STATISTICS
By Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)
II. Letters and Comments
I. Updates and Out-Takes
RISK-TRANSFER MILITARISM AND THE LEGITIMACY OF WAR AFTER IRAQ
By Martin Shaw
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new special report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0406militarism.html.)
A renaissance of warfare is one of the most striking features of the early twenty-first century. War, it seems, is not the prerogative of international criminals, but the first resort of the righteous. After September 11, 2001, it was widely believed that might could indeed enforce right: President George W. Bush was quick to proclaim his response to the terrorist massacre a “war” rather than a law-enforcement operation. Indeed the Global War on Terrorism (GWoT) quickly became an overarching framework for all politics and any military action, in the eyes of its supporters. And initially, at least, it had widespread support: as Polly Toynbee, one of Britain’s foremost liberal commentators, put it during the campaign in Afghanistan, “bombing works.” The confidence in this position, especially but not only in the United States, involves a striking reversal of the pacifistic sentiments that largely prevailed in Western democracies during much of the last century. It is a veritable relegitimation of war. And yet after the Iraq War of 2003, this confidence has been weakened and some of the support for the GWoT has slipped away: most obviously because of the thinness of its manifest rationale, Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”; but also, this paper will argue, because of the contradictions of the new Western way of war, which I characterize as one of risk-transfer.
I write of the relegitimation of war because warfare had been comprehensively—if obviously not finally—delegitimized during the course of the twentieth century. In 1914-18, the trenches of Flanders gave us the paradigm of “senseless slaughter” that helped frame a “structure of feeling” about war that remained influential throughout the century. So the new resort to war in 1939-45 in Western democracies was heavier-hearted, accompanied by less jingoism, and motivated as much by anti-fascism as by nationalism. True, this did seem to many like a good war, a perception that has been greatly accentuated in more recent times by the misrepresentation of the war almost as a crusade to halt the Holocaust. But this increasingly appeared very much as an exception. The threat of nuclear extermination created an overwhelming perception, during most of the second half of the twentieth century, that major war was to be prevented at almost all costs. Vietnam reinforced the anti-war structure of feeling by showing how even the limited kind of war that could be fought despite nuclear weapons would also involve senseless slaughter. The importance of this experience was that it affected the most powerful Western state, the only one (apart perhaps from Britain and France) in which the use of war was not already delegitimized by the horrors of 1939-45.
The twenty-first century relegitimation of war is not an entirely new phenomenon. One element of it derives from a similar source as the understanding of the second World War as “good.” This is the role of war, or at least of organized military force, in halting genocide and other violence against civilians. This new “positive” was already emerging at the time of the last great peace movement in Europe, the campaign against nuclear weapons in the 1980s. At that time, however, the examples of good war came from Third World states like Vietnam (in Cambodia) and Tanzania (in Uganda). More recently, of course, this has come to be called “humanitarian intervention” and has become a declared aim of much Western-sponsored military action. This was always, however, only one strand of the new Western willingness to resort to war. Margaret Thatcher pioneered a different mode, 20 years ago in the Falklands, and with the end of the Cold War the United States also began to fight real wars with success again. The first President Bush “kicked the Vietnam syndrome” in the Gulf War of 1991 and NATO successfully concluded its first ever war over Kosovo in 1999.
So while the last century’s pacific lessons still seemed powerful, the ground was well prepared for President George W. Bush to pronounce his “war against terrorism,” and with the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the trend is now the other way. A series of almost unprecedented successes in the use of arms, by the most powerful forces on the planet, threatens to give warfare a strong new momentum. There is however a growing awareness of the contradictions of this development—no longer opposed mainly by those who confuse it with earlier manifestations of Western military power—although the troubling consequences that it could bring to world society in the coming decades are weakly understood.
Martin Shaw is a Professor of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex. This paper is based on an earlier article, “Risk-Transfer militarism, small massacres and the historic legitimacy of war,” International Relations, Volume 16 (3), 343-60, 2002. Extensively rewritten in the light of Iraq, the present paper has appeared online on www.theglobalsite.ac.uk and is to be published in Paul Eden and Thérèse O'Donnell, eds, 11 September 2001: A Turning Point in International and Domestic Law? (Ardsley, New York: Transnational Publishers, 2004). He has recently completed a book on “risk-transfer war” and its contradictions, which Polity Press will publish at the beginning of 2005. (Reprinted with author's permission, all rights reserved.)
THE INFLUENCE OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT ON U.S. MIDDLE EAST POLICY
By Stephen Zunes
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new special report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0406christian.html.)
In recent years a politicized and right-wing Protestant fundamentalist movement has emerged as a major factor in U.S. support for the policies of the rightist Likud government in Israel. To understand this influence, it is important to recognize that the rise of the religious right as a political force in the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon that emerged as part of a calculated strategy by leading right-wingers in the Republican Party who—while not fundamentalist Christians themselves—recognized the need to enlist the support of this key segment of the American population in order to achieve political power.
Traditionally, American fundamentalist Protestants were not particularly active in national politics, long seen as worldly and corrupt. This changed in the late 1970s as part of a calculated effort by conservative republican operatives who recognized that as long as the Republican Party was primarily identified with militaristic foreign policies and economic proposals that favored the wealthy, it would remain a minority party. Over the previous five decades, Republicans had won only four out of 12 presidential elections and had controlled Congress for only two of its 24 sessions.
By mobilizing rightist religious leaders and adopting conservative positions on highly-charged social issues such as women’s rights, abortion, sex education, and homosexuality, republican strategists were able to bring millions of fundamentalist Christians—who as a result of their lower-than-average income were not otherwise inclined to vote republican—into their party. Through such organizations as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the GOP promoted a right-wing political agenda through radio and television broadcasts as well as from the pulpit. Since capturing this pivotal constituency, republicans have won four out of six presidential races, have dominated the Senate for seven out of 12 sessions, and have controlled the House of Representatives for the past decade.
As a result of being politically wooed, those who identify with the religious right are now more likely than the average American to vote and to be politically active. The Christian Right constitutes nearly one out of seven American voters and determines the agenda of the Republican Party in about half of the states, particularly in the South and Midwest. A top republican staffer noted: “Christian conservatives have proved to be the political base for most republicans. Many of these guys, especially the leadership, are real believers in this stuff, and so are their constituents.”
Ultimately, Washington’s championing of Israel—like its approval of other repressive governments—is part of a strategic calculation rather than simply ethnic politics. When a choice must be made, geopolitical considerations outweigh ethnic loyalties. For example, for nearly a quarter of century, the United States supported the brutal occupation of East Timor by Indonesia and to this day supports the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara, despite the absence of powerful Indonesian-American or Moroccan-American ethnic lobbying forces. The United States was able to get away with its support for occupations by Indonesia and Morocco due to their relative obscurity. This is certainly not the case with Israel and Palestine. (Interestingly, even though the East Timor situation involved a predominantly Muslim country conquering, occupying, and terrorizing a predominantly Christian country, virtually no protests arose from the Islamaphobic Christian Right.)
The Christian Right has long been a favorite target for the Democratic Party, particularly its liberal wing, since most Americans are profoundly disturbed by fundamentalists of any kind influencing policies of a government with a centuries-old tradition of separating church and state. Yet the positions of most liberal democrats in Congress regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are far closer to those of the reactionary Christian Coalition than to those of the moderate National Council of Churches, far closer to the rightist Rev. Pat Robertson than to the leftist Rev. William Sloan Coffin, far closer to the ultraconservative Moral Majority than to the liberal Churches for Middle East Peace, and far closer to the fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention than to any of the mainline Protestant churches. Rather than accusing these erstwhile liberals of being captives of the Jewish lobby—a charge that inevitably leads to the countercharge of anti-Semitism—those who support justice for the Palestinians should instead reproach congressional democrats for falling captive to the Christian Right. Such a rebuke would be no less accurate and would likely enhance the ability of those who support peace, justice, and the rule of law to highlight the profound immorality of congressional sanction for the Israeli occupation.
Those who support justice for the Palestinians—or even simply the enforcement of basic international humanitarian law—must go beyond raising awareness of the issue to directly confronting those whose acquiescence facilitates current repressive attitudes. It will not be possible to counter the influence of the Christian Right in shaping American policies in the Middle East as long as otherwise socially-conscious Christian legislators and other progressive-minded elected officials are beholden to fundamentalist voting pressures. It is unlikely that these democrats and moderate republicans will change, however, until liberal-to-mainline churches mobilize their resources toward demanding justice as strongly as right-wing fundamentalists have mobilized their resources in support of repression.
(Stephen Zunes is an associate professor of politics and chair of the peace & justice studies program at the University of San Francisco. He serves as Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy In Focus project (www.fpif.org) and is the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003).)
For More Analysis from Foreign Policy In Focus, see:
The Evangelical Roots of American Unilateralism: The Christian Right’s Influence and How to Counter It
By Duane Oldfield (March 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/papers/2004evangelical.html
Why the U.S. Supports Israel
By Stephen Zunes (May 2002)
http://www.fpif.org/papers/usisrael.html
TEAR DOWN THAT WALL, MR. SHARON
By By Ian Williams
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0407wall.html.)
The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the legal consequences of the Israeli Wall in the Occupied Territories is a triumphant vindication of the Palestinian decision to get their case heard there, and of their long term strategy of underlining and restating their legal rights. In effect, the Court ruled against Israel and its patron, the U.S., on every point. It appears that even the Arab states and the Palestinians may not have been entirely prepared for such an unqualified victory.
The Court’s statement issued on July 9 was in response to the U.N. General Assembly’s request for its opinion on the Wall. It is interesting that most of the American media reports before and after the opinion sought to qualify the Court’s opinion as “non-binding,” and said that the U.S. and the EU opposed the decision to refer the question to them.
Few took time out to record that most EU states went on the record as saying that they themselves considered the Wall illegal, and abstained for fear that it would disrupt the “Road Map” although they failed to explain how it could disrupt an already well-macerated document. If the EU, in particular, does not welcome a Palestinian resort to the law and the courts rather than armed resistance, they really have to think through the logic of their positions!
Of course, an authoritative statement of international law, issued by a 14-1 majority (American Judge Thomas Buergenthal followed the national line) is non-binding only if you do not accept the applicability of international law. Buergenthal said the opinion did not take into account Israel’s need to protect itself against terrorism. This is, of course, complete nonsense. The Court considered this issue in some depth and length in its 56-page opinion—and concluded that if Israel wanted to build the wall on its side of the Green Line, it could do so entirely legally. However, it could not do so on illegally occupied territory.
In the sense that the Court did not award damages, and does not have bailiffs or police to enforce its decisions, its opinion may not be binding. But in the larger sense, the Court has definitively ruled that Israel is breaking international law, and that the states that subscribe to the various charters, conventions and treaties that constitute the law have a duty to enforce it. You could not get a more binding decision, not least since this opinion is being delivered to the General Assembly of the United Nations—with part of the opinion being that states party to the various conventions have a duty to enforce them on Israel!
It is worth remembering that even though the process is slow, it was such ICJ rulings that led to independence for Namibia and East Timor, so, just as the Israelis fear, there may well be tangible consequences when this decision is reported back to the United Nations.
(Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org) on U.N. and international affairs.)
For more analysis from Foreign Policy in Focus:
Of Resolutions and Rhetoric, of Promises and Performance
By Ian Williams (June 16, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406resolutions.html
Blackmail Efforts of the Bush Administration at the UN End in Failure This Time
By Ian Williams (June 3, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0406blackmail.html
Is the UN Back? The Bush Administration Seems to Rediscover the Virtues of the UN as it Seeks an Exit Strategy from Iraq
By Ian Williams (May 18, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405unback.html
Israeli Wall on Trial: Venue Shifts to the International Court of Justice
By Ian Williams (February 10, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402wall.html
DIVIDE AND CONQUER AS IMPERIAL RULES
By Conn Hallinan
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0407divide.html.)
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s recent revelations that the Israeli government is encouraging Kurdish separatism in Iraq, Iran, and Syria should ring a bell for anyone who has followed the long history of English imperial ambitions.
It is no surprise that the Israelis should be using the tactic of “divide and conquer,” the cornerstone policy of an empire that dominated virtually every continent on the globe save South America. The Jewish population of British-controlled Palestine was, after all, victim to exactly the same kind of ethnic manipulation that the Sharon government is presently attempting in Northern Iraq.
Following the absorption of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the British set about shoring up their rule by the tried and true strategy of pitting ethnic group against ethnic group, tribe against tribe, and religion against religion. When British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour issued his famous 1917 Declaration guaranteeing a “homeland” for the Jewish people in Palestine, he was less concerned with righting a two thousand year old wrong than creating divisions that would serve growing British interests in the Middle East.
Sir Ronald Storrs, the first Governor of Jerusalem, certainly had no illusions about what a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine meant for the British Empire: “It will form for England,” he said, “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”
Storrs’ analogy was no accident. Ireland was where the English invented the tactic of divide and conquer, and where the devastating effectiveness of using foreign settlers to drive a wedge between the colonial rulers and the colonized made it a template for worldwide imperial rule.
Divide and conquer was 19th and early 20th century colonialism’s single most successful tactic of domination. It was also a disaster, one which still echoes in civil wars and regional tensions across the globe. This latter lesson does not appear to be one the Israelis have paid much attention to. As a system of rule, division and privilege may work in the short run, but over time it engenders nothing but hatred. These polices, according to Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, foment “terror,” adding, “In tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interests.”
The policy also creates divisions among Israelis. Empires benefit only a few, and always at the expense of the majority. While the Sharon government spends $1.4 billion a year holding on to the territories, 27 percent of Israeli children are officially designated “poor,” social services have been cut, and the economy is in shambles.
By playing the Kurds against Syria and Iran, the Israelis may end up triggering a Turkish invasion of Kurdish Iraq, touching off a war that could engulf the entire region. That Israel would emerge from such a conflict unscathed is illusion.
Divide and conquer fails in the long run, but only after it inflicts stupendous damage, engendering hatreds that still convulse countries like Nigeria, India and Ireland. In the end it will fail to serve even the interests of the power that uses it. England kept Ireland divided for 800 years, but in the end, it lost.
The Israelis would do well to remember the Irish poet Patrick Pearse’s eulogy over the grave of the old Fenian revolutionary, Jeremian “Rossa” O’Donovan: “I say to my people’s masters, beware. Beware of the thing that is coming. Beware of the risen people who shall take what yea would not give.”
(Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus and a Lecturer in Journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.)
For more analysis from Foreign Policy In Focus:
Bush & Sharon: The Oil Connection
By Conn Hallinan (May 26, 2004)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405bushsharonoil.html
Rumsfeld’s New Model Army
By Conn Hallinan (November 4, 2003)
http://www.presentdanger.org/commentary/2003/0311transf.html
“Coin of Empire” Too Costly for Israelis, Palestinians, and U.S. Taxpayers
By Conn Hallinan (July 9, 2003)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0307coin.html
Road Map: Sharon & The Record
By Conn Hallinan (June 20, 2003)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0306sharon.html
‘THE GEORGE BUSH OF AFRICA’: PRETORIA CHOOSES SUBIMPERIALISM
By Patrick Bond
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new special report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0407bushafrica.html.)
The first week of July witnessed two important markers of Africa’s geopolitical trajectory. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at the African Union (AU) summit, the South African government took major steps to influence the organization, by winning contests to host its parliament and to dominate its peace/security division (the AU’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development is already located near Pretoria). Meanwhile, in Washington, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) publicly launched a US-Africa policy blueprint, requested by Colin Powell and the Congress.
The main controversy in Addis was a two-year old report on the Zimbabwean government’s systemic human rights abuses, which Robert Mugabe’s government dubiously denied having seen, although it had been circulating for four months. Harare’s delaying tactics won support from Pretoria’s foreign affairs minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, who a year earlier had pronounced, “We will never criticize Zimbabwe.” As the disappointed Catholic archbishop of Bulawayo, Pious Ncube, concluded of the AU delegates, “All they do is back each other up and drink tea.”
The CSIS report on “Rising US Interests in Africa” emphasizes seven interventions: Sudan, whose oil is craved by Washington; Africa’s decrepit capital markets, which could “jump start” Bush’s gimmicky Millennium Challenge Account; energy, especially the “massive future earnings by Nigeria and Angola, among other key West African oil producers”; wildlife conservation; “counter-terrorism” efforts, which include “a Muslim outreach initiative”; peace operations, which can be transferred to African troops thanks to new G8 funding; and AIDS, whose treatment is feared by pharmaceutical corporations because it will require generic drugs. In all but Sudan, South African cooperation will be crucial for the new U.S. imperial agenda.
This is a good time to assess Washington-Pretoria relations. In May, post-apartheid South Africa turned 10 years old. Delight can legitimately be expressed by internationalists and anti-racists, including progressive US activists who supported the African National Congress (ANC) and pressed the U.S. Congress and Reagan/Bush administrations to impose sanctions during the crucial 1980s.
The White House and State Department were, of course, weak and compromised when opposing apartheid, even during its death-throes, in the wake of many decades of explicit support. A reminder of the “constructive engagement” legacy was provided by Reagan’s death in June, based on Chester Crocker’s own 1980 assessment of his mandate as Assistant Secretary of State for Africa: “The only thing Ronald Reagan knows about South Africa is that he’s on the side of the whites.” However, political amnesia was recommended by South Africa’s president Thabo Mbeki, who traveled from the Sea Island, Georgia G8 Summit to the funeral and remarked to National Public Radio, “For those of us who were part of the struggle against apartheid, it was actually during Reagan’s presidency [that] the United States government started dealing with the ANC.” (The CIA cooperated with the Pretoria regime against the ANC, throughout the Reagan era.)
(FPIF policy analyst Patrick Bond teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and has authored two recent books: Against Global Apartheid: South Africa meets the World Bank, IMF and International Finance, Zed Books, 2003; and Talk Left, Walk Right: South Africa’s Frustrated Global Reforms, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2004, http://www.unpress.co.za//showbook.asp?id=581.)
AFTER A DECADE OF DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA—A NEW GENERATION OF STRUGGLE
By Andre Banks and Devanne Brookins
(Editor’s Note: Excperted from a new commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0407struggle.html.)
It took U.S. activists decades of campaigning against the apartheid regime in South Africa to arrive at strategies that, when combined with a commitment to transnational relationships, changed more than individual attitudes. This anti-apartheid movement changed the balance of power in the U.S., the future of South Africa, and lives on both sides of the Atlantic. Ten years later, the threat of moving backward is quite real and the stakes are even higher. In place of an apartheid state we now face a Global Apartheid that demands a U.S. movement at its best and most effective.
Apartheid was destined to fail, as it sought to establish itself amidst a growing desire for self-determination in colonial Africa. The 1960s confirmed this destiny as the French and the British began releasing their colonies in West and Southern Africa. The architects of apartheid continued to move against the grain and made political decisions to entrench the system and further divide the country along racial lines, preserving the best resources including access to education, land, and the country’s mineral wealth for their own purposes and exploiting the black majority for cheap labor.
The 1960s also marked an important era in the struggle for equality and civil rights in the United States, with the establishment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 resulting in increased representation in Congress. These events were significant to the anti-apartheid struggle, as African-Americans gained legal and political rights and sought to bring the anti-apartheid struggle to the forefront of their domestic agenda. What followed was one of the most significant and effective mobilization campaigns in history that peaked in the 1980s gaining unprecedented media, political and international attention, and achieving its ultimate goal in the early nineties with the end of apartheid and the first free and fair elections in South Africa.
Perhaps the single most significant factor in the defeat of apartheid was the intermingling of internal resistance and external pressure. International organizations and the grassroots corporate and congressional campaigns in the U.S. challenged the private sector through shareholder resolutions and divestment campaigns. They took on the U.S. government, ultimately passing sanctions against the rogue apartheid regime over Reagan’s veto, by mobilizing support on Capitol Hill and in Congressional districts across the country. Domestic and international forces joining together proved too much for the Afrikaner elite and forced one of the most poignant transitions to democracy in this century.
But why was the struggle against apartheid so successful in the U.S., which has traditionally pursued a separate and unequal foreign policy relationship with Africa? The answer resides in the ability of black Americans to mobilize broad-based national campaigns that forced social and political change.
(FPIF policy analysts Andre Banks and Devanne Brookins coauthored this piece. Devanne Brookins currently works as Africa Program Associate at Global Rights (formerly the International Human Rights Law Group) with a programmatic focus on Burundi, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo (http://www.globalrights.org) and Andre Banks is an Assistant Director of the Africa’s Right to Health Campaign at Africa Action, the nation’s oldest organization focused on African affairs (http://www.africaaction.org).)
ALL UNQUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: UNIFYING EUROPE NOT LINING UP
BEHIND THE U.S.
By Norman Birnbaum
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new policy report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0406western.html.)
The founders of the modern American empire, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, believed that other nations would benefit from American moral superiority. Opposition to our imperial advance was evidence of envy or resentment, the thinking went. If ephemeral, it could be dismissed as a temporary aberration. Persistent, it showed that the miscreants deserved the severest punishment.
“Why do they hate us?” is not a new question. T.R. and Wilson, however, thought of the northern Europeans as first cousins if not siblings. The scholars of their generation, as useful to the powerful as their contemporary descendants, conveniently provided proof that democracy and good government came from the Germanic forests and the English countryside.
Today’s American elites are not all descendants of northern Europeans. Gonzales, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz have no distant ancestor who signed the Magna Carta. The Europe they confront had two terrible wars, revolutions and tyrannies, and then recovered to achieve economic prosperity, the welfare state and the creation of the European Union.
The citizens of the European Union, however, present a very special problem for the large number of Americans who think of the rest of the world in imperial ways. The Europeans have cast off their post-war dependence and insist on their autonomy. For a half century there were European neutralists (including Pope John the 23rd) and advocates of what seemed like a utopian vision of a united Europe. Remember DeGaulle and his project, “one Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals.”
The European Union’s frontiers are now a considerable part of the way there. When DeGaulle first spoke, the Iron Curtain was a couple of hours’ drive from Alsace.
European emancipation from American tutelage is impossible for our foreign policy makers to ignore. They cannot now plausibly dismiss Chirac, Schroeder and Zapatero as only making gestures in opposing the war in Iraq, although that was the standard line on the opinion pages a few months ago.
A refusal to take orders from the U.S. is a fundament of European politics: it isn’t a matter of tactical political gestures but of authenticity.
(Norman Birnbaum is Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center and a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. His most recent book is After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press.)
A DELUGE OF BAD ADVICE AND STATISTICS
By Colonel Daniel Smith, USA (Ret.)
(Editor’s Note: Excerpted from a new policy report available in full at http://www.fpif.org/papers/0406deluge.html.)
The cliché about bad news—“it never rains but it pours”—was in full view the week of June 20. And the forecast is for more of the same for the foreseeable future.
The proverbial torrents in question were the documents and statistics made public by the Bush administration as it tried to regain the initiative in all things relating to Iraq and the “war on terror.” News media calculated the White House alone had released a two-inch thick stack of papers, with other documents coming from the Justice Department and the Pentagon.
For weeks, the White House and the Pentagon had been fighting perceptions—stemming from revelations of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib—that they were intent on circumventing if not outright shredding international treaties and domestic U.S. statutes regarding interrogation techniques. But leaks to the media of parts of various documents, plus the publication of a meticulous Defense Department memo parsing the language of the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the Constitution, U.S. Army publications on interrogation techniques, and U.S. law, kept the issue on page one.
The issue came to a head when Attorney-General John Ashcroft, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 8, flatly refused to provide a copy of two memoranda originated by his department’s Office of Legal Counsel. A subsequent proposal by democrats on the Senate Armed Forces Committee to issue a subpoena for 23 documents was blocked by republicans, who drew up a list of “talking points” that included charges that “an out-of-control media and widespread hysteria” had compelled the administration “to reveal secret interrogation techniques just to prove our men and women in uniform aren’t torturers and murderers,” (Washington Post, June 24, 2004). Additional talking points claimed that revealing the techniques allowed would enable opponents to train to withstand their use and urged that members “remember who [U.S.] enemies are.” But the White House judged that the controversy would not abate as long as it continued to withhold documents.
(Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org), a retired U.S. army colonel, and a senior fellow on Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.)
II. Letters and Comments
Re: Thoughts On Cordesman's "Post-Conflict" Lessons From Iraq (http://www.fpif.org/papers/0406lessons.html)
This is a useful commentary on geopolitics today. However, there are other lessons to be learned. One is that the American people should never trust their government's reasons for acting, either in foreign or domestic affairs; they should always be skeptical of everything the government says. The government (i.e. the administration and its surrogates) has become a propaganda mill, manipulating public opinion for its own selfish needs. Another major lesson to be absorbed is that our government is not “of” or “for” the people; it is for maintaining itself and its supporters in power; it represents the military-corporate-...-elites. Perhaps, this has always been so, but every generation has to relearn the lesson.
--M. K. Brussel, brussel@uiuc.edu
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