Dawn of Imperial America
In the New World Order as seen through the eyes of George W. Bush, everyone has the right to be like Americans
RICHARD GWYN
"The aim of this strategy is to help make the world not just safer but better."
U.S. National Security Strategy, Sept. 19, 2002.
"We have about 60 per cent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population. Our real task in the coming period (will be) to maintain this position of disparity. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction ... the day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered then by idealistic slogans the better."
George Kennan, head of U.S. State Department Planning, Feb 24, 1948.
Idealism vs. imperialism. Realpolitik vs. humanitarianism. Trying to make the whole world a better place or — as predicted long ago by George Kennan, the brilliant diplomat who authored the doctrine of "containing" the Soviet Union that determined U.S. policy throughout the Cold War — doing everything needed from kicking ass to spin-doctoring so that Americans can continue gorging themselves on the world's goodies.
On the eve of a U.S. attack on Iraq — an attack, that's to say, on a small Third World country by the military master of the universe — it may seem hopelessly naive to suggest any alternative is in prospect but imperialism, national self-interest and a lot of ass kicking, softened, as in the 33-page National Security Strategy document, by occasional genuflections toward worthy concepts like "multilateralism."
Although not equal in weight and in plausibility, those alternatives, or at the very least some mix of them, nevertheless constitute the principal elements of the New World Order that is taking shape at the start of the 21st century.
Call it President George W. Bush's version of the "vision" thing that his presidential father so conspicuously lacked.
There's the formal version, contained in the strategy document. Mostly, it's about unilateralism and military power.
But it also proclaims: "People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children, male and female ... these values of freedom are right and true for every person in every society."
Everyone has the right to be like Americans, it would seem.
There's the informal version, contained in comments by Bush to author and Watergate journalism hero, Bob Woodward, for his recently published Bush At War about Washington behind the scenes during the first three months after 9/11.
In his interviews with Woodward, Bush kept returning to the notion of spreading democracy and freedom, first in Iraq, then throughout the Middle East.
"They tell me we don't need to move too fast," said Bush. "I just don't buy that. Either you believe in freedom, and want to — and worry about the human condition, or you don't."
This would be "nation-building," which Bush once scorned on a massive scale.
Cynics will put it all down to public relations. And they may well be right.
Bush's great political appeal, though, is that he says what he thinks and that he usually means what he says.
And in these passages he sounds strangely like the late president Woodrow Wilson, or, in modern times, former president, now Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jimmy Carter. (Except that unlike those two idealists, Bush's vice-president is hawk-eyed Dick Cheney and his defence secretary is rock-hard Donald Rumsfeld.)
The test of the direction the Bush administration will take won't involve the decision whether to invade Iraq, a decision due to be taken formally fairly soon in the New Year. That's because that decision has already been taken.
Whether Saddam Hussein actually has any weapons of mass destruction has always been largely irrelevant, except in public relations terms.
All that has ever mattered has been "regime change," either by a U.S. invasion or by a lucky bullet by a dissident Iraqi general.
To leave Saddam in power after United Nations inspectors had removed all his weapons of mass destruction (or after failing to find any) would leave Bush looking like that old duffer the Duke of York, who marched his 10,000 troops up a hill and then marched them down again.
Worse, by far, once Iraq was free of toxic weapons, the U.N. sanctions would have to be lifted. Saddam would have survived, looking like a winner.
Barring that lucky bullet, an invasion thus is inevitable.
It's what happens after Iraq's invasion and conquest, and also after the installation of a puppet government, that may define the character of, at the very least, international politics for the first couple of decades of the 21st century.
The Americans will be welcomed by Iraqis, "as liberators, not as occupiers," presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer has said.
That kind of euphoria isn't likely to last long.
Outside Iraq, there's bound to be an explosion of rage — fuelled by humiliation — in the Arab and Muslim "street."
Anyway, Bush's record as a liberator is thin to the point of invisibility, from doing nothing to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to doing nothing to promote democracy and human rights even in a Middle Eastern "colony" like Kuwait.
As for Afghanistan, already half-forgotten, it will vanish from Washington's radar screen the instant GIs reach Baghdad.
Fleischer's expectations, though, are quite widely shared in Washington.
James Woolsey, former head of the CIA, has said, "This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world."
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who is especially close to Bush, has talked about "a period of great opportunity to create a new balance of power in favour of freedom."
She's compared what could happen in the Middle East to what did happen after World War II in the form of the U.S.-led democratization of Germany and Japan.
Off the record, senior administration officials talk about how regime change in Iraq could be followed by regime change in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria (non-violent in these instances), with authoritarian regimes being replaced by democratic ones and with Islam going through a Reformation-style transformation into an acceptance of modernity and liberalism.
This isn't to say that any of this will actually happen.
It most certainly must be said that it reeks of hubris, indeed of the same kind of hubris that Americans once took with them into Vietnam — before they retreated in defeat and humiliation.
It can only be said that some influential people in Washington talk this way, including Bush. And that they may actually mean it, sort of.
Certainly, it's much safer to guess that the world will be shaped through much of the 21st century by unabashed and unapologetic American imperalism, with American interests — in everything from control of oil to access to everyone's markets — shaping everyone else's interests (those of Canada most definitely included).
Now that they're like Rome, the Americans would be doing as the Romans did.
The new global empire's abiding purpose thus will be to maintain the "disparity," in Kennan's phrase, between Americans and everyone else.
That this disparity is so wide makes it all the easier to maintain.
The obvious measure is military power: U.S. defence spending is larger than that of the next 15 nations combined. The disparity is as apparent in politics, in finance, in technology, in diplomacy.
It in fact exists in just about everything.
Of Nobel Prize winners in science, economics, medicine, 75 per cent are now American, or work there.
Of the world's top 10 research universities, all but one, Britain's Cambridge, are in the U.S.
American popular culture is the world's culture. The U.S. thus is as much a hyperpower in soft power as in the hard stuff.
No president would ever risk being remembered as the one who let any of that slip away from his people, least of all one surrounded, as is Bush, by confident neo-cons and by hard-eyed hawks (all of whom he chose).
>From rejecting the Kyoto environmental accord to embracing missile defence, the foreign policy rule in Washington has become, "If it's good for the U.S., noone else matters."
Besides possessing the power to perform like a global hegemon, the U.S. now has the need and the excuse to act in this way.
Islamic terrorists do not, in fact, threaten the U.S. as a nation-state, not in the way the Soviet Union once did.
But they do threaten individual Americans. Their ideological unilateralism thus justifies American military-political unilateralism in defence of its own citizens.
A subtle but significant reinforcing factor is that, as the British historian Niall Ferguson has written recently, "War has made a comeback as a legitimate tool (of politics)."
It matters that modern war doesn't cause a loss of lives, not of American ones anyway.
It matters that a new generation with no personal memories of war's horrors has come of age. (Also, that the peace movements are aging.)
In a recent book, former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges described war's attractions as "fill(ing) our spiritual void" and of giving societies a sense of collective purpose, because, once at war, "We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness," and therefore the opponents as evil.
Hence, Americans' refusal — in contrast to other people's, notably Canadians — to ever consider the causes of the terrorists' rage, as if this might take the edge off their own vengefulness.
All of which leaves precious little space for "altruism and world benefaction," or for trying to make the world better as well as safer.
Except that the notion of being "a light unto others" — of being missionaries — is embedded into the American psyche, and was from the U.S.' very beginning.
The same polls that show that a clear majority of Americans support war against Iraq, show that almost as large a majority want that war to be sanctioned by the U.N. and to be undertaken by a substantial multilateral coalition.
It matters critically that Bush, either out of personal conviction or to reassure his public, has felt the need both to work hard to get U.N. approval for his actions and to express a "vision thing" that would give an attack on Iraq some substantive moral purpose beyond attacking terrorists with whom, in fact, Iraq appears to have no connection.
America may be like Rome, but many Americans are not like Romans.
And Bush himself is more cowboy than Caesar.
Bush, it must be said, is no Woodrow Wilson, and he's no Jimmy Carter.
Even if he means what he sometimes says, his neo-cons and hawks may well prevent him from doing anything about it.
But he's the only U.S. president the world has got.
So here's hoping Bush means what he's sometimes been saying.
And hoping also that if a serious effort is actually made to democratize the Middle East, that it works.
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