IT'S THE EMPIRE, STUPID
A moron in the White House?
Is George W. Bush just a little, er, slow? Just because Hollywood flake
Martin Sheen says he is doesn't mean it ain't so. The BBC reports that Sheen,
a longtime Clinton camp follower – who plays the presidential role in that TV
series about the White House of a liberal's dreamworld, The West Wing –
opined that "George W Bush is like a bad comic working the crowd, a moron, if
you'll pardon the expression." Leaving aside the utter absurdity of every
third-rate thespian in the hills of Hollywood pontificating on the political
and cultural issues of the day – never mind us taking them seriously – Sheen
may have a point. I suspected this when I read the headline in a front page
International Herald Tribune piece: "Bush Vows He'll Never 'Overextend' U.S.
Forces"!
DON'T BET THE RANCH
What, one wonders, does he think we are now? A full decade after the end of
the cold war, the United States maintains over eight hundred Defense
Department facilities located overseas, from listening posts to major
military bases. American troops still occupy Japan over half a century after
the end of World War II. In Europe, too, the legacy of that war, and the
superpower standoff that followed it, has yet to recede into the mists of
history: American troops are not only patrolling the Balkans but are still
occupying Germany, as if on eternal guard duty against the ghost of Hitler
should he rise from his unmarked grave. In Central and South America, the
"drug war" has meant that American soldiers – "advisors" all – have
penetrated deep into the jungles of Colombia, Peru, and beyond, armed with an
all-purpose ready-made rationale for intervention anywhere. If the President
pledges the end of "overdeployment," is he really promising to pull back from
the radical over-extension begun in the late 1940s? Will American troops be
coming home from Asia, Europe, and the Middle East? Don't hold your breath.
READ HIS LIPS: NO NEW DEPLOYMENTS
American troops, the President told soldiers of the Third Infantry Division
at Fort Stewart, Georgia, were "overdeployed and underpaid." While the latter
could be taken care of by Congress, only the President could ensure that the
former promise would be kept, and Dubya gave his solemn word: "When we send
you into harm's way," US forces will have "a clear mission, with clear
goals." And there was more good news: Bush promised them $1.4 billion in pay
raises and $4.3 billion for improved housing and healthcare benefits. "If our
military is to attract the best of America, we owe you the best," he said, to
sustained applause. What was striking about the tone and content of this
speech, and was noted in the IHT headline, was that foreign leaders looking
for some clue as to the shape of a new activism in US foreign policy had no
reason for encouragement: in particular, the bit about overdeployment did not
bode well for our overseas satraps, who depend on US military aid and
economic largess for their very survival. Bush praised the troops as the
embodiment of our readiness to "project American power," but the President's
speechwriters were careful to qualify that with "wherever America's interests
are threatened."
ONLY ON MONDAY
Yes, on Monday, the President was a foreign policy "realist," with definite
"isolationist" tendencies. There was even a touch of the old "humility" line
he gave out during the presidential debates, and this same note was struck
when he asked the assembled soldiers to bow their heads and pray for "those
still missing after the tragic accident involving one of our naval submarines
and a Japanese fishing vessel off the coast of Hawaii. Please join me in a
moment of silence for those missing, their families, and our friends, the
people of Japan." Ah, but on Tuesday, speaking at Norfolk Naval Air Station,
in Virginia, it was an entirely different story.
DUBYA GOES TRUMANESQUE
Instead of reiterating his promise that US armed forces will no longer be
"overdeployed," and holding out goodies for the grunts, the President's
speech to the assembled NATO-crats at Norfolk was basically a hymn to NATO
expansion and the "transatlantic" "unity" to be ushered in by Star Wars
technology. Citing Harry Truman on NATO's founding, the President reaffirmed
the interventionist dogma of collective security, which globalizes every
local conflict, as the foundation stone of US foreign policy. "None of us
alone can assure the continuance of freedom," said Truman, and "this is still
true today," averred the President. "Our challenges have changed, and NATO is
changing and growing to meet them," he declared, "but the purpose of NATO
remains permanent." While the enemy is was organized to defeat has long since
defeated itself, NATO, we are told, will not join the Warsaw Pact on the
dustbin of history. A defensive alliance against a vanquished enemy can
either disband, or else become an alliance designed to take the offensive,
and Bush segues into this theme in his very next sentence: "As we have seen
in the Balkans, together, united, we can detour the designs of aggression,
and spare the continent from the effects of ethnic hatreds."
IS HE DUMB, OR JUST PLAIN STUPID?
Before Election Day, 2000, candidate Bush said as little as possible on
Kosovo: when pressed, the Bushies mumbled something that certainly sounded
encouraging to some conservative Republican opponents of Clinton's
"humanitarian" war. Remember all that pre-election talk from Condolezza Rice
about how we might even start withdrawing US troops from the Balkans? It was
a feint, of course, as I warned in this column on several occasions, and now
this is confirmed by the President's reaffirmation of our Balkan role, not
only our commitment to NATO but to what he believes to be the essential
justice of Clinton's war. Anyone who believes that US intervention has spared
Kosovo and environs the effects of accelerated ethnic hatreds is either not
paying attention or else is willfully blind. Of course, there is a third
possible explanation, and this again raises the question with which I opened
this column: Is Dubya a moron, or not?
DUBYA'S VERBAL AMBIDEXTERITY
In spite of all appearances to the contrary, I think not. Instead, our new
President seems like a canny politician, one who knows how to talk out of
both sides of his mouth – often at the same time. In speaking to the grunts
assembled at Fort Stewart – whom, he acknowledged, were among the most
deployed in the nation – Bush the rah-rah nationalist invoked America's
national interests, but when addressing the assembled princes of NATO, and
the grand-high mucka-mucks of the "defense" establishment, he affected quite
a different tone: not only far less humble and plainspoken, as might be
expected, but affected with an undertone of grandiosity. Our interests are no
longer national: that was yesterday. Today, in Bush's phrase, they are
"transatlantic." In other words: Don't worry, we won't withdraw from the
Balkans. Far from it, we mean to expand NATO and expand our presence – and
influence – on the continent. In asserting that "our unity is essential for
peace in the world," Bush addressed the princes of NATO like a feudal king
addressing his noble vassals: "Nothing," he declared, "must ever divide us."
Nothing? Not culture, not history, not differing economic and political
arrangements, nor clashing national interests?
A BLAST FROM THE PAST
Rome is permanent. Nothing must divide us. So Octavian might have addressed
his centurions in a similar ceremony a thousand years ago, solemnly
proclaiming the essential unity of the Roman Empire – just before it went
into permanent decline.
AN AUDIBLE SIGH
The President had a few reassuring words for the armaments industry, whose
hopes for a Bush-driven boom went into a tailspin after it was announced that
there would be a general review of all military expenditures before any
additions were made to the new military budget: the sigh of relief could be
heard from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. The President also made mention of
terrorism in the form of vague "new threats" that seem to involve the landing
of nuclear-tipped messages-in-a-bottle on American shores. But the climax of
the speech came at its end, when he reiterated the glories of NATO
THE TRANSATLANTIC PERSUASION
"Our NATO allies have brought their own character and courage to the defense
of liberty," said Bush (II). "We're cast together in a story of shared
struggle and shared victory." NATO's war against the former Yugoslavia was no
defense of liberty, but a criminal aggression, and in that there is only a
shared shame, one that millions of Americans – especially those who form the
base of the President's party – felt as they watched Clinton rain down
hellfire on the Serbians from 30,000 ft. But now that a Republican President
is safely in office, it is safe for him to come out of the closet, so to
speak, in one sense, as a Balkan hawk whose foreign policy will turn out to
be even more Euro-centric (in the worst sense) than the Clintonistas: and, in
another sense, as an unapologetic "transatlanticist," or what used to be
called an "Angophile." By that I don't mean fans of Eastenders, but the upper
classes of the Eastern seaboard who have always felt closer to London than,
say, Chicago, and points West. As the Brits and the rest of the Europeans
looked on approvingly, our President cast back in history to uncover the
colonial roots of the "transatlantic" persuasion:
"Here, where three ships from England once passed on their way to Jamestown,
we carry on the alliance that joined the old world and the new. We're allies
and we are friends. As long as we stand together, power will always be on the
side of peace and freedom."
BLUEPRINT FOR EMPIRE
To carry on the "alliance" that joined the old world and the new is to
recreate, in effect, the old British Empire – a project for which this speech
is practically a blueprint. With a greatly-expanded NATO at its core, this
new Anglo-American Imperium will stretch at least from American shores to the
Russo-Polish border: indeed, if some have their way, NATO's eastern frontier
will extend practically to the Urals, eventually spilling over into the
Caucasus. This is the ultimate dream of the NATO-crats, and it is a vision of
empire all but endorsed by Bush (II) in the first weeks of his
administration. Setting the tone for his foreign policy, the double-talking
leitmotif of this administration is becoming firmly established. Less than 24
hours after commiserating with the troops for their being "overdeployed," and
promising them a better deal, the President is not only announcing the
permanence of NATO but also endorsing the chief foreign policy
disaster of his predecessor – the same interventionist policy that led to the
dangerous increase in American troop deployments to begin with.
HACKWORTH ON HISTORY
It is interesting to speculate on the motives for such a Janus-faced approach
– the radically different themes of the Fort Stewart and Norfolk addresses.
One of my favorite Internet columnists, Colonel David Hackworth, throws some
light on this. Writing in WorldNetDaily – and his column alone is good reason
to pay a visit to that consistently interesting site – Hackworth opines that
gung-ho military types often fail to see the long-range consequences of their
impulsive actions.
"Besides failing to compute the long-term effects of actions, American
military leaders seldom have learned from the past. History shows they've
repeatedly made the same mistakes. Stuff that turned sour in World War II
also went wrong in Vietnam – and the screw-ups that went down there were
replayed again in Somalia. Despite all the Lessons Learned pamphlets, the
studies and the history books, the record shows there's little institutional
memory in the US armed forces."
A MODEST PROPOSAL
Hackworth proposes adding a "Consequence/Lessons Learned officer" to every
commanding officer's staff. We have special officers who handle
administration, intelligence, operations, logistics, and civil affairs. Why
not have someone "to advise the boss of both the consequences of his or her
intended act or policy and any relevant history lessons from the past several
hundred years where we waded through the same or similar minefields"?
A SUBVERSIVE IDEA
This is a wonderful idea – wonderfully subversive, that is, which is why it
will never ever be implemented. For this would create a whole class of
officers who would act as an automatic brake on the gung-ho imperialist
impulses of their civilian masters, a major sector of the US military whose
job it would be to point to the bleached bones of past empires – the
Russians, the Brits, the Romans, the fabled domain of Alexander – as a lesson
and a warning. What Hackworth is proposing, if ever put into practice, would
turn the US military a virtual hotbed of "isolationism" – of peace activism
– and this the War Party will never permit. What is interesting, however, is
the expression of such a proposal from a military man, a retired soldier now
an author and columnist widely read as the voice of the "grunts." His general
hostility to the world-saving, romantic gestures so beloved by civilians
points to an amusingly ironic development. Growing anti-interventionist
sentiment in the military is yet another feature of the post-cold war world
that was hardly foreseen, but is now quite acutely sensed by this
administration. (Thus the rhetoric against "overdeployment").
PUTTING ON THE BRAKES
As war clouds gather in the Middle East, Hackworth raises the specter of
American involvement, and asks us whether there needs to be some
institutional method by which we can avoid the quagmires of the past:
Vietnam, Somalia, etc. Of course, this institutional brake is the will of the
armed forces themselves: their willingness to fight wars of conquest far from
home. This willingness is now increasingly coming into question – and I would
even go so further.
AN ISLAND OF VIRTUE
I would go so far as to say that, while the rest of society seems sunk in the
