Month: November 2012

Grover Norquist in Foreign Affairs railing against the suggestion that taxes be raised:

Despite these strict [constitutional] limits, the U.S. federal government has grown enormously in size, cost, and power over the last two centuries, mostly as a result of the country’s engagement in successive wars. With each conflict, Washington increased its spending and powers of taxation under the false flag of temporary necessity and appeals to patriotism. After each war, the government refused to return to its previous size and level of power.

Norquist’s evolution to out-and-out advocate of deep defense cuts and military restraint is pleasant. It hasn’t yet been reflected in the mantras of the Republican Party, but there is potential for it to puncture the doctrinaire opposition to defense cuts.

The election is today. Invariably thrown around at these times are platitudes about our great nation and the people’s decision giving divine mandate to the victor. In the fog of this rhetoric it’s difficult to remember that the election is really about ushering in four more years of power for a coalition with already far too much influence over the direction of the country. Whoever wins, the victory won’t be for the American people, but rather for the state and its allied rent-seekers.

Understanding this difference is most important where it is most often forgotten: in the realm of foreign policy. “Under democracy, the rulers constantly urge the subjects to identify themselves with the state, to forget that “they” (the rulers) are not “we” (the ruled) and even to believe that the two groups are one and the same,” economist Robert Higgs writes in the introduction to his latest book, Delusions of power.

Every day in academia, in media, in the blogosphere, and around dinner tables Americans talk about foreign policy and almost always articulate it in terms that presume this false equivalence Higgs talks about.  Americans are duped into thinking that when the rulers talk about facing national security threats, they are literally talking about keeping the population safe from foreign threats to their lives and immediate security.

Putting more than a minute’s thought into this is enough to penetrate its underlying fiction. Does any body really believe that Jon and Jane Doe in Springfield America-town were actually saved from destruction and destitution by a virtually 15-year-long war in Vietnam which killed almost 60,000 US soldiers and millions of Vietnamese?

“In this country, the powers that be have unfortunately achieved considerable success in indoctrinating the public with this myth,” Higgs writes, “which helps explain why so many people have handed over themselves and their children to serve as cannon fodder in the rulers’ endless, unnecessary wars.”

The secret wars America fights are even more enlightening in this respect, because these are the wars that the national security state is determined to fight, but knows the motivations can’t be packaged and sold to the American people to make them actually believe their safety is at risk. Who can really say that Jon and Jane were personally threatened when the CIA decided to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 and install a more preferred dictator? Who in America would otherwise have been existentially threatened if Reagan had not helped foment a savage civil war and support massive human rights abuses by proxy to undermine the Sandinistas in Nicaragua?

Consider the Carter Doctrine – literally the cornerstone of US foreign policy in the Middle East, which has not changed fundamentally since its induction in Carter’s State of the Union speech in January 1980. In that speech, Carter uttered the fateful words that would inform Washington’s perception of the Middle East for decades to come: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Now, is maintaing US “control of the Persian Gulf region” by force and coercion really indispensable for the safety of Jon and Jane? Sure, they need oil and gas to heat their homes and drive to work, but why should the government need to “secure” that particular commodity?

It is not for the sake of Jon and Jane that the United States Government establishes military bases, props up obedient dictatorships, and goes to war in the Middle East. They are not safer and their wallets are emptier because of these policies. It is for the sake of the supremacy of the government – the rulers – that these policies are imposed. Iran, the greatest bogeyman in the establishment’s lexicon, threatens their interests, their dominance in the most strategically important region in the world. Jon and Jane, quite obviously, have nothing to fear from Iran.

“National security interests” are just that: interests of the national security state, not of the people. Just being able to recognize this can change one’s entire understanding of war, politics, elections, and the real threat to their security.

Joshua Landis – who was consistently against US intervention in Syria before he was for sending in heavy weapons to rebels – writes that the Obama administration’s latest effort to set up a new council of Syrian opposition leaders to organize the country towards regime change and to serve as part of a post-Assad interim government “seems doomed.”

Washington’s Plan A, which was to create the SNC, went down in dust. By all accounts, Clinton cannot even stand to hear the name, SNC, uttered any longer.

Plan B was to set up the US office in Istanbul to meet and take the measure of Syrian militia leaders and local coordinating committee directors. The militia leaders scared Washington and the CIA. The word got out that they were “penetrated” by al-Qaida and Salafi types.

And Plan C, Landis writes, “is now in the making,” as the State Department tries again to meddle in Syria to produce a post-Assad ruling coalition Washington approves of. But this effort seems doomed for failure too, not only like its two predecessors (see plans A and B), but like Washington’s past interventions in Syria aimed at choosing who would rule:

This effort is almost identical to US and British efforts of the 1950s to stop Syria from slipping into the hands of the USSR, Nasser and the leftist Baathists.

Eisenhower and Anthony Eden did everything they could in 1956 to force Syria’s urban elites to cooperate in a pro-Western coup, but to no avail. The two largest parties in parliament – the People’s Party of Aleppo and the National Party of Damascus refused to cooperate among themselves in order to avoid revolution .  Pro-Western Syrian politicians insulted and fought amongst themselves with such ferocity, that Western diplomats pulled their hair with despair as they sought to keep Syria from going “commie.”

When the coup failed, many of Syria’s leading pro-Western notables were accused of treason and fled the country. In 1957, the US sought to carry out another putsch, this time on its own. The “American coup”, as it was named, was no more successful. Some of the CIA operatives in charge of handling the Syrians are still alive. Additional Syrian politicians sympathetic to the West were forced to flee the country. Destabilized by Washington’s failed coup making, Syria announced the creation of the United Arab Republic only months later. Nasser become president and carried out wide-ranging land reform in order to destroyed the economic underpinnings of the urban notables that had allied with the West.

Today, Washington is again trying to rally the pro-Western elites of Syria into putting their shoulders to a common wheel with America. In 1957, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iraq cooperated in Washington’s efforts for regime change. Today Qatar replaces Iraq, but the line up of states helping the US in its “struggle for Syria” has hardly changed. Other aspects that have not changed are the infighting among Syria’s elites and the general resentment and distrust that Syrians share toward the US .

Another option is to recognize that Washington lacks both the ability and the right to tinker in the affairs of Syria. How many past failures have to bear this out for people to simply acknowledge the fact?

“Don’t treat China as an enemy. Otherwise you end up with an enemy in China.”

Those are the words of former Chinese diplomat Jia Xiudong. And they reflect the thinking in the Chinese government, as best we can tell. They don’t appreciate Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, a bellicose posture involving surging American militarism in the region and antagonizing Beijing in the hopes that US hegemony will be maintained.

China already feels squeezed by American militarism in its backyard. But it’s set to get much worse: a video report from former CNN journalist Mike Chinoy, a senior fellow at the US-China Institute at the University of Southern California, reveals that the Navy will aim to have “60 percent of its assets” in the Pacific Ocean.

“It will involve deploying six aircraft carriers, destroyers, littoral combat ships, submarines, and an increase in military exercises and port visits,” Chinoy says. This is not to mention putting additional American troops in countries like the Philippines and Australia and building new military bases at strategic points surrounding China.

Does this military surge have anything at all to do with defending the United States from attack, or any conceivable imminent threat for that matter? No, of course not. This is empire building of the first order. China’s rise threatens not the security of Americans, but the hegemony of Washington. China’s mere existence as anything other than a vassal state is the major transgression.

Here’s one attempt by an establishmentarian trying to describe the bellicose posture towards China in a polite, vacant way that avoids the unseemly geo-politics really at hand:

“The fundamental reality is we’re the two largest economies in the world for decades to come,” said Kenneth Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution. “We had better figure out how to make this work between the two of us.”

Only someone embedded in the state apparatus could possibly describe it this way: the economic rise of the American people and the Chinese people, otherwise recognizable as a positive, enriching experience, somehow requires the governments of both countries to butt heads. But in fact it’s true: market interactions where states are involved always entail coercion and hostility.

If the Chinese and American people were left to simply trade on their own, you can bet things would proceed peacefully – as they have throughout the past two decades as both economies became progressively more intertwined. For people, markets are mutually beneficial. All sides win. For states, markets are zero-sum. Peaceful, mutually beneficial interactions get turned into a casus belli.