KUFM / KGPR
T. M. Power
The Logic of Bush’s Push to War
Over the last two weeks the cadence of President Bush’s war drum has gotten ever more insistent while the logic of that war has gotten only more and more muddled as critical questions from both Americans and our allies and friends around the world have had to be dodged with new distractions.
Before, in our names, missiles are launched, bombs dropped and people killed, it is important to be brutally honest about what our leaders are actually up to.
We are not going to war because Iraq is ruled by a brutal dictator and aggressive megalomaniac. Saddam Hussein has always been that, even when he was our ally. Chief hawk, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was President Reagan’s envoy to the butcher of Baghdad at the very time he was using weapons of mass destruction against Iran and his own people. It was with our aid that Hussein was able to proceed with his chemical and biological weapons programs. American support for this cruel dictator lasted into the presidency of George W. Bush’s father when Hussein surprised his American handlers by invading Kuwait, triggering the Gulf War. The very people who are now saying we have to get rid of Saddam because he is a brutal dictator are the people who supported him in the past because he was a brutal dictator, but our brutal dictator.
It
is also clear that we are not going to war in order to bring democracy
to the Middle East. In the past we did not try to bring democracy to
Iraq. Our propping up of the Shah of Iran was not aimed at bringing democracy
to Iran either. We have strongly support for the feudal and authoritarian
monarchy in Saudi Arabia. President
Musharraf of Pakistan, our ally in the Afghan war gained power through a
military coup and continues to hold that power through his control of the army.
He and his colleagues supported the Taliban and al-Qaeda until American pressure after the September
11th attacks forced him to change allegiances. In Central Asia we
are working with some of the most hideous relics of the old Soviet Union simply
because they are willing to allow us to station troops in their countries and
use their airports. Then, of course, there are the state-less
Palestinians. There is not a shred of
evidence that the pursuit of democracy has had anything to do with our Middle
East policies.
There is no secret
about why we are going to war against Iraq. The hawks within the Bush
Administration announced their foreign policy vision before September 11th.
It is to take advantage of the unusual historical position in which the United
States finds itself to firmly establish our unfettered military and economic
dominance in the world. This requires us, they insist, to periodically
demonstrate that we are the only active military force on the planet by using
massive military force to punish nations that challenge our interests. Periodic
preemptive military strikes are needed to wring reluctant cooperation from the
nations of the world and head off any nascent challenges to our preeminence.
Of course, we have to
be careful just who we choose to make an example of. We cannot attack
North Korea on China’s and Russia’s borders, with South Korea and Japan in
position to suffer serious collateral damage. But it is crucial, Bush’s hawks
tell us, that we show that we are willing to actively use our military might.
With Iraq the hawks
have a weak country surrounded by nations that often have been hostile to us.
In addition the region surrounding Iraq is strategically important primarily because
of its oil resources. A successful war and occupation of Iraq will allow the
US, with Israel’s assistance, to thoroughly dominate the Mideast and its oil
resources despite the incipient political turmoil in Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Jordan, and Iran. It will be our
sphere of influence, or so the hawks hope.
For those of us whose
vision of what the United States is all about does not include a worldwide
American empire, this strategy has got to be frightening. Nations cannot maintain such empires without
significant costs. The British buried
their dead around the globe for a good part of two centuries as they pursued an
empire on which the sun never set. If we do not want our children, our
grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, continuously fighting the angry poor
of the world while we live paranoid lives at home constantly watching our backs
to fend off desperate terrorist attacks, we need to emphatically reject this
new imperial vision of America’s future now.
This has nothing to do with turning our backs on the rest of the world or letting nasty, brutish, dictators like Saddam Hussein off the hook for the crimes they have committed. It has to do with working collectively and productively with the nations of the world to contain and quarantine such regimes. In a globalized world where terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda can operate in many different nations, including our own, without active government support, the need for such cooperation among all of the nations of the world is even more important. But active cooperation with many different nations comes from respect for differences and recognition of shared interests, not brute force and domination. The United State could be using is current military and economic strength to promote exactly that type of international cooperation. Instead the hawks in control of the Bush Administration seem committed to the temporary glories of empire and military domination along with all of the violence and bloodshed that such imperial ambitions always bring.
Only the citizens of this great nation can say no to that bloody path.