THE
MAIN DANGER
Opposition
research – that is what we do here at Antiwar.com,
on a daily basis, and so our main task can be reduced to
a simple exhortation: "Know thy enemy!" But who are
our enemies? It is a question that boils down to: who and/or
what is the main danger to the peace of the world?
THE
ICARUS SYNDROME
If
the sheer
number and variety of military adventures is the standard
to be used, then surely the US government is the first and
foremost candidate for the job. And in the last decade of
the twentieth century the pace and ferocity of these interventions
has surely accelerated: under Clinton alone, the US lashed
out at the Serbs and the Iraqis, the Haitians and the Somalis,
the Afghans and the Sudanese, and threatened to intervene
on numerous occasions. Well, we don't know the exact number
of such threats, but then threatening has become the leitmotif
of American foreign policy in the post-cold war world. These
days, the brazen belligerence of the US goes way beyond
arrogance and all the way to hubris,
the old Greek conception of a pride so overweening that
it literally begs to be toppled, like Icarus
felled for daring to approach the sun.
GARRETT'S
PROPHECY
What
underscores the essential tragedy that is human history
is that the fate which awaits us was foreseen in its entirety,
at the midpoint of the last century and the beginning of
the cold war era. If you do a computer
search for references to the Old
Right author Garet
Garrett, you'll come up with dozens of links to various
columns of mine. I return to him again and again because
his words, written at the dawn of the cold war, ring prophetic
in the post-cold war world. At the end of his lyrical and
wry account of The
American Story (Chicago: Regnery, 1955), long since
sadly out of print, Garrett posed the question we now face:
"How
now, thou American, frustrated crusader, do you know where
you are?
"Is
it security you want? There is no security at the top of
the world.
"To
thine own self a liberator, to the world an alarming portent,
do you know where you are going from here?
".
. . Be that as it may, how now do you project yourself?
Will you go on crashing the barriers of time and space?
And when you can travel so fast that you arrive ahead of
your own sound, what will you bring to the world at that
speed? Not peace. Peace would be happy to fly no faster
than a dove."
AN
AMERICAN GULLIVER
Long
since become an alarming portent on account of the hyperactive
interventionism of the past ten years, the US stands astride
the world, a global Gulliver
lording it over the Lilliputians.
But at the apogee of its power, the US is subject to the
irony of world hegemony – increased vulnerability.
Garrett was dead on right: there is indeed no security at
the top of the world. So marked is this increased danger
to the people and territory of the continental US that both
major political parties have now signed on to some version
of a Missile Defense System, the so-called "Star Wars" program
that will shoot down missiles with computer-guided laser
beams. Donald
Rumsfeld, Dubya's designated defense secretary, is a
big
fan of this favorite conservative hobbyhorse –
a boondoggle made possible by what the foreign policy analyst
Chalmers
Johnson calls the principle of "blowback."
BOOK
OF THE YEAR
"Blowback"
is the geopolitical equivalent of the natural law that for
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, a
kind of dialectical chain-reaction that leads inevitably
to a blow-up, an explosion – or, in the case of the
old Soviet Union, another kind of empire, an implosion,
a crisis in which the center did not (could not) hold. In
Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire –
surely the
best foreign policy book of the year – Johnson,
president of the Japan Policy
Research Institute, compares the US-initiated and supported
suppression of the 1980 Kwang-ju
rebellion in South Korea to the 1956 Soviet intervention
in Hungary, making the case that the same internal contradictions
that beset the Kremlin apply to the US – and in spades.
Furthermore, Johnson makes the vital point that while the
majority of Americans suffer the consequences of our foreign
policy in, for just one example, the rising tide of terrorism,
the reason for such an irrational policy is that some profit
by it. As Johnson puts it:
"Many
may, as a start, find it hard to believe that our place
in the world even adds up to an empire. But only when we
come to see our country as both profiting from and trapped
within the structures of an empire of its own making will
it be possible for us to explain a great many elements of
the world that otherwise perplex us."
WHEN
WILL THE BUBBLE BURST?
Johnson's
analysis of the ultimate form of economic blowback, a kind
of worldwide economic meltdown brought on by the distorting
effect of the policy of American hegemonism, is of particular
interest to conservative critics of globalism. Johnson's
important thesis is that the policy of American imperialism
had a distorting effect on the world economy, and implanted
in it a fatal flaw. It disturbed and diverted the normal
evolution of developing nations, making them economically
dependent on their political and especially their military
relationship with the US. He also mounts an interesting
and effective attack on the "free trade" panacea pushed
by Republican politicians and ostensible free-marketeers.
Taking Japan as the archetypal case in point, Johnson points
out that the lack of true "free trade" – trade reciprocity
– had a debilitating effect on both the Americans and
the Japanese. In the case of the former, it led to the deindustrialization
of the heartland: the deterioration of the steel, auto,
and other heavy industries created a "Rust Belt." The ranks
of American working class families were decimated. In Japan,
the result was a great deal of malinvestment. Japanese economic
planners manipulated the controls of their industrial policy
machine, and reduced interest rates to zero. The worldwide
economic "bubble" created by American and Japanese policy
planners burst around 1998, when the Japanese economy plunged
into recession. Johnson makes the important point that,
in trade negotiations with the Japanese, the Americans were
subject to the ultimate form of "blowback." US negotiators
were faced with the following agonizing choice: would the
US prefer that suddenly impoverished Japanese holders of
US government securities converted their assets to cash?
This would result in the bursting of the American bubble
and the beginning of a worldwide economic meltdown. In his
important book, Johnson presents the outlines of an alternative,
non-Marxist theory of American imperialism: "Marx and Lenin
were mistaken about the nature of imperialism," he writes.
"It is not the contradictions of capitalism that lead to
imperialism but imperialism that breeds some of the more
important contradictions of capitalism. When these contradictions
ripen, as they must, they create devastating economic crises."
PROFITEERS
OF EMPIRE
As
the US economy trembles on the brink of a new downturn,
with the steepness of the decline as yet to be determined,
Americans would do well to consider who benefits and who
loses as a result of our policy of imperial overstretch.
Who
profits from "Star Wars"? Who got
the contract for constructing US military facilities
in the Balkans? Who
profits as long as our unrelenting war on Iraq keeps
large quantities of oil off the world market? The answers
to these questions amount to a veritable rogues gallery
of bigtime Republican corporate contributors and supporters.
In view of this stark fact, any illusions conservative opponents
of intervention may have about the incoming administration
are bound to dissipate rather quickly. What will be notable
about the foreign policy pursued by Dubya's nest of "Vulcan"
advisors will be its continuity with that of the Clinton
era: militantly interventionist but far more focused on
two particular regions, namely the Middle East and Russia.
Like Clinton, George W. Bush will pursue NATO expansion,
incorporating the Baltics and perhaps even Romania and Bulgaria,
while continuing to intervene in the Caucasus on behalf
of the Georgians and Azerbaijanis against the alleged "threat"
of Russian revanchism. Of course, to even imply that this
interest in what may be the most oil-rich region of the
world has anything to do with the corporate connections
of certain prominent politicians and policymakers would
admit to belief in a "conspiracy theory," and is therefore
out of the question. What we can say, however, and get away
with, is that the old aphorism exhorting us to "follow the
money" is always advice well-taken.
BUYERS
AND SELLERS
Our
enemies, then, are the corporate and political interests
that profit from war, and preparations for war, materially
and in terms of extending their political power. Their political
satellites and intellectual henchmen, who make up the rank-and-file
of the War Party, are motivated by the perks and privileges
routinely accorded to all apologists for the political status
quo: not only financial support, but prestige as oracular
founts of the conventional wisdom – TV talking heads
who tell us what we think or ought to think of each and
every war of conquest even before it breaks out. In the
coming year, the profiteers of empire will be especially
busy selling the whole panoply of "good works" the US is
performing overseas, from Colombia – where we are ostensibly
fighting a "war on drugs" – to the Middle East, where
we are ostensibly fighting another bogey of the modern world,
"terrorism." Whether the American people are buying it is
another question.
COLOMBIA
AND CONTINUITY
The
new year brings the war drums beating louder than ever,
and, in spite of the hopes of many noninterventionist conservatives,
the new administration is already dancing to the beat. As
I pointed out in my
last column, secretary of state-to-be Colin Powell already
has Iraq in his sights, and the Caucasus is another likely
target. But the weak underbelly of the Bushian foreign policy
may turn out to be another ticking time-bomb that blows
before the next year is out. The recent
assassination of the former head of the Colombia "peace
commission," set up to arrive at a negotiated settlement
to Colombia's century-long civil war, does not bode well
for the future, to say the least. Here, again, we see the
theme of the essential continuity of American foreign policy:
the Colombian intervention was a program initiated by Clinton
and Al Gore that will be carried out to its logical conclusion
– full-scale US military intervention on a regional
scale – by their Republican successors. As in Vietnam,
the case of Colombia illustrates the old political adage
that Democrats like to start wars, while Republicans are
always stuck with finishing them. It is a role, however
self-defeating and debilitating politically, that the GOP
seems perfectly willing to play.