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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 19, 2007 7:37:08 PM PDT
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Subject: A Prescient View, from 2003, of the Coup d'Etat We're
Still Afraid to Recognize
Axis of One <Evil>:
The ‘Unipolarist’ Agenda
by Gary Dorrien
This article appeared in March 8, 2003 in The Christian Century
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2681
Copyright by The Christan Century Foundation; used by permission.
Current articles and subscription information can be found at
www.christiancentury.org.
Many critics of the U.S. plans for going to war in Iraq point to
oil as a motive. If that is true, it is worrisome indeed. But the
policymakers who have long demanded this war are more concerned
with ideological and strategic considerations than economic factors.
The Bush administration is loaded with policymakers who have long
maintained that the U.S. should use its economic and military power
to remake the world in the image of Western capitalism. While
holding office they cannot say that, but they did say it when they
were not in office and they are closely allied with people who are
saying it plainly.
After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, a number of hardline
anticommunists began arguing that the U.S. must use its military
and economic power to remake the world and put down Americas
remaining enemies. They declared that the "unipolarist moment" had
arrived: the U.S. needed to use its overwhelming military and
economic power to create a new Pax Americana.
Not all hardliners went along with this transition. A few of them
defected from the cause, notably Edward Luttwak and Michael Lind;
and some rediscovered their realism, such as Irving Kristol and
Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kristol characteristically opined that "no
civilized person in his right mind wants to govern Iraq."
But a version of the unipolarist ideology was adopted by some key
figures: Elliott Abrams, John B. Bolton, William F. Buckley Jr.,
Stephen Cambone, Richard Cheney, Angelo Codevilla, Eliot Cohen,
Devon Gaffney Cross, Eric Edelman, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney,
Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan, Robert A. Kagan, Robert Kagan,
Lawrence F. Kaplan, Robert Kaplan, Charles Krauthammer, William
Kristol, I. Lewis Libby, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard
Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld, Ben
Wattenberg, James Woolsey, Dov Zakheim.
In his article "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World,"
Charles Krauthammer spelled out the unipolarist idea: "America’s
purpose should be to steer the world away from its coming multi-
polar future toward a qualitatively new outcome -- a unipolar
world." Elsewhere he explained that unipolarism refers to "a single
pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex
of the industrial West."
The term didn’t catch on, but the idea was seized upon by hawkish
conservatives and neoconservatives. Ben Wattenberg urged nervous
politicians not to be shy about asserting American superiority; "We
are the first universal nation. ‘First’ as in the first one,
‘first’ as in ‘number one.’ And ‘universal’ within our borders and
globally." Because the United States is uniquely universal, he
reasoned, it has a unique right to impose its will on other
countries on behalf of an American-style world order.
With a lighter touch, Wattenberg declared, "A unipolar world is a
good thing, so long as America is the uni."
Joshua Muravchik put it this way: "For our nation, this is the
opportunity of a lifetime. Our failure to exert every possible
effort to secure [a new world order] would be unforgivable. If we
succeed, we will have forged a Pax Americana unlike any previous
peace, one of harmony, not of conquest. Then the 21st century will
he the American century by virtue of the triumph of the humane idea
born in the American experiment.’
These comments were made in the early 1990s, when there was
[already] a debate about unipolarism within the first Bush
administration. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney quietly
commissioned a new strategic plan. Paul Wolfowitz (undersecretary
for defense policy), Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff) and Eric
Edelman (Cheney’s senior foreign-policy adviser) outlined a policy
of U.S. global domination.
Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell countered with
a case for a more moderate realism that was backed by Secretary of
State George Schultz and National Security Adviser Brent
Scowcroft. Though Cheney leaned toward Wolfowitz’s strategy, the
realists held the upper hand in George H. W. Bush’s administration.
Cheney’s attempt to create a new big-picture strategy was derailed
by the Persian Gulf war and the leaking of Wolfowitz’s plan <of
world conquest> to the press, and the unipolarists despaired of
Bush’s lack of ideological vision. A few of them supported Bill
Clinton in 1992, largely because Clinton campaigned that year as a
globalist Democrat.
But most of the Pax Americanists stayed in the Republican Party,
and Clinton soon disappointed them <with the handling of Kosovo>.
In 1997, a group of unipolarists led by Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz,
Elliott Abrams, Eliot Cohen, Frank Gaffney, Donald Kagan, Norman
Podhoretz and Donald Rumsfeld founded the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), which issued a statement of principles
that called for an aggressive American policy of global
domination. This group forged an alliance with [Bush's son] George
W., who carried a personal grudge against Saddam Hussein and who
turned out to be a strident unilateralist and debunker of
humanitarian nation-building.
Two months before the presidential election of 2000, the PNAC
unipolarists issued a position paper titled "Rebuilding America’s
Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century" that
spelled out the particulars of a global empire strategy: repudiate
the ABM treaty, build a global missile defense system, increase
defense spending by $20 billion per year to 3.8 percent of gross
domestic product, and reinvent the U.S. military to meet expanded
obligations throughout the world. When Bush won the presidency, the
Pax Americanists (notably Bolton, Cambone, Cheney, Cohen, Cross,
Feith, Libby, Perle, Pipes, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Woolsey) won
numerous positions in his administration.
In the early months of Bush 43, as the current administration is
called by insiders, Powell resisted the aggressive unilateralism of
Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Donald Kagan, who co-chaired the
PNAC position paper on defense policy, contends that before 9/11,
the unipolarists were losing the argument in the Bush
administration. After 9/11, however, the unipolarist view of the
world blended with the fight against terrorism.
On September 14, Wolfowitz declared at a press conference that the
U.S. government was committed to "ending states who sponsor
terrorism." That remark earned a public rebuke from Powell, who
countered that America’s goal was to "end terrorism," not launch
wars on sovereign states. The differences between these objectives
soon blurred in the Bush administration’s rhetoric about the war on
terrorism, however. On September 20, Bush declared that any nation
that sponsors, aids or harbors terrorists is an enemy of the U.S.
One year later, he issued a remarkable document titled "National
Security Strategy of the United States of America," which declared
the right of the U.S. to wage preemptive wars on rogue states. The
following month, Wolfowitz asserted: "This fight is a broad fight.
It’s a global fight. . . . The war on terrorism is a global war,
and one that must be pursued everywhere."
To keep track of what the unipolarists are thinking, one has to pay
close attention to those who didn’t take jobs in the Bush
administration. Wolfowitz and Perle were sharp polemicists before
they took the positions as, respectively, deputy defense secretary
and chair of the Pentagon’s defense policy board. In office they
speak mostly bureaucratise. Among their ideological allies in the
private sector, the talk goes way beyond Iraq. The unipolarists
are pressing Bush not to back away from the implications of his
speeches and policy statements.
Boston University professor of international relations Angelo
Codevilla argues that America’s world war against terrorism must
begin by overthrowing Iraq, Syria and the Palestinian Authority;
eminent conservative William F. Buckley Jr. asserts that the U.S.
is in a world war against all nations that shelter terrorists and
that Iraq is merely a "manageable" opening target; Frank Gaffney,
who heads the Center for Security Policy, maintains that the United
States must take the fight to Iran and the Palestinians and that
Bush needs to sweep away most of the longtime professionals in the
State Department and the CIA: neoconservative Norman Podhoretz
believes that "we ought to kill" the PLO and the regimes in Iraq
and Syria, that the United States must overthrow Iran and Lebanon
as soon as possible, and that Egypt and Saudi Arabia belong on the
list of enemy regimes; Yale classicist Donald Kagan admonishes that
the "Arab street" only makes anti-American noise when America shies
away from using its military power.
It has long been assumed in unipolarist circles that Iraq, Iran and
North Korea constitute an "axis of evil," as Bush called these
nations last fall. Wolfowitz singled out Indonesia, Pakistan and
Yemen as high-priority targets of the fight against terrorism.
Much of the in-house debate among unipolarists concerns the ranking
of Syria, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority on this list.
One of the most prominent advocates of permanent war is Robert
Kaplan, who combines a fervent militarism with a Samuel Huntington-
style "clash of civilizations" realism. Kaplan goes very near the
heart of the matter when he says: "The real question is not whether
the American military can topple Saddam’s regime but whether the
American public has the stomach for imperial involvement of a kind
we have not known since the United States occupied Germany and Japan."
The unipolarist ideology by whatever name, adds a fourth party to
the foreign-policy debate, which has otherwise involved 1) liberal
internationalists, who seek world peace and stability by securing
collective agreements from nation states to comply with
international law; 2) realists, who seek to ensure a balance of
power among competing regimes; and 3) principled anti-
interventionists, who renounce the use of military force for all
reasons besides self-defense. Unipolarism is essentially a
nationalistic and militaristic version of the liberal
internationalist vision of world democracy.
To the unipolarists, America must not shrink from its moral and
ideological obligation to establish a new Pax Americana, because it
is the exemplar and guardian of the liberal democratic idea. No
other nation has the means or stature to put tyrants in their place
or uphold the rules of a liberal democratic world order. The
unipolarists emphasize the categorical difference between classic
imperialism, which ruled by direct conquest and the subjugation of
populations, and aggressive American leadership, which advocates
democracy and freedom, not empire.
Krauthammer has recently capsulized the argument: "The future of
the unipolar era hinges on whether America will be governed by
those who wish to retain, augment and use unipolarity to advance
not just American but 'GLOBAL' ends, or whether America is governed
by those who wish to give it up -- either by allowing unipolarity
to decay ... by gradually transferring power to multilateral
institutions [instead of] American hegemony. The challenge is not
from the outside but from the inside. The choice is ours. To quote
Benjamin Franklin: "History has given you an empire, if you will
keep it,"
The unipolarists may be granted their semantic insistence that this
kind of "imperialism" deserves to be called something else -- [they
claim] they do not aspire to occupy any particular land without the
consent of its people. But the U.S. makes a mockery of its
democratic ideals when it bullies other nations to serve U.S.
interests and pretends that its bullying deserves to be called
justice or idealism.
And it is ridiculous for American unipolarists to insist that any
conceivable American occupation of Iraq, North Korea, Iran or Syria
in the wake of the carnage and killing of war will be welcomed as a
liberation by the majorities of these countries populations.
The U.S. spends as much on defense as the next nations combined.
When military spending by U.S. allies is excluded, the United
States is spending nearly twice as much on "defense" as the rest of
the world combined. American troops are stationed in 75 countries;
each branch of the armed services has its own air force; and in the
next year we may learn if the U.S. can pull off what it has been
preparing to do since the end of the Cold War -- fight two regional
wars at the same time.
After 9/11, most Americans are quite happy to spend more on warfare
than the next 15 nations combined. They trust in the assurance of
our leaders that if we overwhelm our enemies and kill enough of
them, we will be safe.
A true realism would distinguish between international police
action to curb terrorism and wars of aggression against governments
and their civilian populations. Realism tells us that there will
always be bad leaders who have to be coped with and contained. But
a war fought for the reasons that we are being given leads
inevitably and necessarily to more wars, exactly as its unipolarist
advocates insist. We cannot diminish terrorism by incinerating
Muslim nations and causing most of the world to despise the U.S.
Even if it lasts only three weeks, this war could be a terrible
disaster in moral, political and economic terms. We are being led
to war against Iraq by people who know very well that this war will
lead to further wars and that even a $380 billion defense budget
barely begins to pay for the first war. The economic costs of
unilateral war, occupation and reconstruction will be staggering.
Bush administration officials admit that they have no idea how much
the war against Iraq will cost -- their current estimates range
from $50 billion to $200 billion. On February 5, Rumsfeld informed
the House Armed Services Committee that the military buildup
against Iraq has already cost $2.1 billion and that further costs
of the war will require a separate spending bill.
Pro-war liberals like Peter Beinart. Jonathan Chait and Senator
Joseph Lieberman contend that the United States will rebuild Iraq
after destroying it. They overlook the fact that Afghanistan is
still waiting for an economic infusion, and in the case of Iraq,
the U.S. will be bombing, destroying, killing, occupying and
rebuilding nearly by itself.
President Bush and his key advisers show little concern about the
costs of the war and the occupation, because occupation is a
necessary means to their goal of "a transformed Middle East" and an
American-dominated world. Since they can’t say that, they have
stumbled in explaining why the U.S. must go to war. They began by
claiming that we have to overthrow Saddam because he is building a
nuclear bomb. That didn’t pan out, so they switched to the claim
that he is connected to terrorism. That didn’t pan out either, so
they switched to the possession of weapons of mass destruction.
They found no hard evidence of that either, so now Americans are
being called to war because of Saddam’s lack of cooperation with
inspectors.
Significantly, the Bush administration turned to Powell to make its
case for going to war on this basis. Americans remain skittish
about the unilateralist militarism of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
Powell’s insistence on winning a United Nations Security Council
mandate for war may well deliver the political goods that the
unipolarists could not win on their own
I assume that Saddam possesses biological and chemical weapons,
like other thugs of his kind, and that the United States, working
through the United Nations, has just cause to pressure his regime
to disarm. But Saddam was not chosen as America’s first target of
preemptive war because he poses an immediate threat to the U.S.
He was chosen because he is [weak, unlike] North Korea or China,
and because his regime is the key to what the unipolarists call "a
transformed Middle East" -- one that serves U.S. economic and
security interests and renounces hostility to Israel.
The Pax Americanists are determined to establish a major American
military presence in the Middle East: they dream of toppling every
regime in that region. Unipolarists often refer to this process as
"draining the swamp." At the moment it is prudent for them to
focus their mass-media attention on the present war, not the
permanent war, but they take the permanent [state of] war for granted.
President Bush is fond of declaring that America invades and fights
only to liberate, never to conquer. I do not doubt that he is
sincere in perceiving himself and his country in this way, for this
self-perception is widely held in the U.S. Many Americans actually
believe that we should be welcomed as liberators whenever we invade
another country. For decades Americans felt safe from the problems
and dangers of other countries, often while being oblivious to the
suffering that we caused in the world.
On 9/11 we lost the former illusion, but our leaders are invoking
that experience to reinforce our hubris and our obliviousness to
the consequences of our actions.
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