[A-List] US imperialism: Henry Liu's analysis

[Michael Keaney]

>From Cold War to Holy War
By Henry C K Liu
Asia Times, 13 May 2003

Barely a decade after the end of the Cold War between the two superpowers,
the world has entered decidedly into an age of Holy War between the sole
remaining superpower and minor states deemed by it as rogue.

The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, billed as part of a "war on
terrorism", were essentially the remote unleashing of overwhelming military
power on defenseless minor states. One unique characteristic about this new
Holy War is that it seems to be open ended, that while major combats have
ended, or never even took place, victory remains not at hand in the near
future. In fact, the US itself refers to these one-sided military operations
as "battles in an on-going war on terrorism". That of course is the nature
of religious wars. Another unique aspect is that while many governments
around the world opposed or at least disapproved of US unilateral use of
force, none came to the aid of the victim states.

The war against Iraq was not about oil, or about keeping oil denominated in
dollars. These objectives, while not trivial, can be achieved by means other
than war. The war was about eliminating the will of any state to defy US
global intentions, which neo-conservatives define as faith-based benign
hegemony. It was above all a warning of similar fate to all who would be
foolish enough to follow the footsteps of the Taliban or Saddam Hussein and
stand in the path of America's march toward its strategic objective of
establishing a world order based on US imperium through preemptive war.

Taken at face value, the war as explained by the White House is part of a US
strategy to spread democracy, to safeguard freedom and to reinstate popular
control of national resources and destiny around the world. Americans
generally understand democracy to mean a representative form of government
based on majority rule with minority rights, administered by elected
officials of fixed terms, with separation of powers between the executive,
legislative and judiciary branches, and the institution of peaceful change
of administrations through general elections. The American notion of freedom
focuses on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association
and freedom to disagree with and oppose government policies through legal
means. Associated with these political freedoms are institutions of free
enterprise and free markets. Any nation deemed deficient in any of these
characteristics is fair game for regime change through the application of
overwhelming military superpower, unless it possesses credible counterattack
deterrence.

The Bush administration's neo-conservative view of terrorism is that it has
become the major threat to US national security. This view is understandable
since the September 11, 2001 attacks. Less understandable is its assertion
that terrorism is caused by a lack of democracy and freedom associated with
domestic oppression, and not by neo-imperialism and the poverty it creates.
Curiously, the US domestic recipe for fighting terrorism requires the
suspension of civil liberty. Furthermore, terrorists are deemed to be
enemies of democracy and freedom.

Thus only half the objective of a preemptive war has to do with the
elimination of weapons of mass destruction from the control of "rogue
states", the other half has to do with the forceful spread of democracy and
freedom around the globe to strike at the root of terrorism. The grand
strategy of US neo-conservatism is to bring the full force of US superpower
to bear on the crusade to spread democracy and freedom around the world,
through regime changes by military force if necessary.

Unilateralism is justified by moral imperialism. Just as neo-liberal
globalization of free trade sweeps aside economic nationalism,
neo-conservative globalization of democratization and liberation aims to
sweep aside national sovereign and a world order that has operated since the
Peace of Westphalia of 1648.

Notwithstanding that such views on terrorism may be simplistic and
misguided, that others, including many Americans as well as previous US
administrations, view terrorism as last resort reaction from the
disfranchised, the persecuted, the defenseless, the exploited and the
desperate poor, the political objectives of the war on terrorism as
enunciated by the Bush administration cannot be accomplished by military
operations alone. President George W Bush himself acknowledged as much when
he announced on May 1 that while the military phases in both Afghanistan and
Iraq have essentially been completed, the war on terrorism is expected to be
long and challenging. Winning the peace is much more complex than
overthrowing governments by force.

The US, to make the war on terrorism legitimate, must now deliver democracy,
freedom and self-determination to the Iraqi people on their terms, a task
that cannot be done with precision cruise missiles and bunker busting bombs
released at long distance by remote control. It is a tall order that the US
will find almost impossible to fulfill, due to its own internal
contradiction. Democracy is compromised when the US occupation authority
serves notice that "there is no way" a Shi'ite theocracy would be tolerated
in the new Iraq, even when 60 percent of the population are Shi'ites, nor
that the Iraqi Communists Party would be allowed to participate in the
formation of the new Iraqi regime.

While US neo-cons embrace the Straussian notion of the need for theocracy,
in direct contradiction of the US constitutional doctrine of separation of
church and state, they accept only Judeo-Christian theocracy. The Bush
faith-based foreign policy of one world under God is derived from its
domestic vision of "one nation under God", notwithstanding that in the
Supreme Court's 1961 Torcaso vs Watkins decision, Justice Hugo Black wrote
in a foot note: "Among religions in this country which do not teach what
would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God is Buddhism,
Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism, and others."

Neo-cons argue that the First Amendment's religion clauses were intended
only to prevent the establishment of a national church, and to keep the
state from interfering with the church, not to bar religious groups from
co-opting the government, notwithstanding Thomas Jefferson's claim that the
First Amendment had erected a "wall of separation between church and state".
The co-oopting of the US government by the religious right has launched a
new religious war, over which even the Pope, whose church has long since
retreated from the doctrine of Ceasaropapism, has expressed wariness. It
takes a theocracy to start a religious war.

On May 2, Bush, in what is generally billed as the beginning of his
political campaign for a second term, discussed national economic security
in a speech to the employees of the Ground Systems Division of United
Defense Industries in Santa Clara, California, a defense company that
produces military vehicles and technology that are being used by soldiers in
Iraq, including the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Hercules Recovery
Vehicle. It is not surprising that the president chose the defense sector as
a platform to discuss national economic security, given that the Bush White
House has reorganized national economic policy under the umbrella of
national security, and given that the defense sector is the only growth
sector in the stalled economy at this time, despite the fact that the US
defense budget is only about 3 percent of the GDP.

A day before, the president spoke to the American people from the deck of
the homeward bound USS Abraham Lincoln super-carrier off the California
coast, a political stunt that caused Senator Robert C Byrd to comment on the
Senate floor, "I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an
advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is
what I saw." The president declared that major combat operations in Iraq had
ended, and that the US and its allies had prevailed. The world has never
doubted that the US superpower would prevail over tiny Iraq, isolated and
emaciated by a decade of economic sanctions. Ironically, the fall of Iraq
sent a clear message around the world that in this age of superpower holy
war, national security lies in the possession of weapons of mass
destruction. The US is concerned with Saddam's team of 1,000 nuclear
scientists, whom defense officials called "nuclear mujahideen". These
scientists, the Defense Department fears, can restart Iraq's weapons program
once the crisis passed. Would any new government in Iraq have less reason to
possess nuclear weapons after what happened?

What was unexpected was the ease and speed with which the US achieved the
military phase of the invasion. Despite the fact that its prowess was never
fully tested on account of the enemy having failed to put up an expected
fight via asymmetrical urban warfare, the US military is nevertheless an
undeniably excellent fighting machine, one that any nation would be proud to
possess. That US forces suffered unprecedented light casualties, due also to
emphasis on protecting and rescuing soldiers in distress, is professionally
admirable. The morale of the troops has been as high as any commander can
wish. Whether this high morale can be sustained when troops are used as an
occupation police force in a hostile country is another question.

Invoking September 11 as America's lesson that vast oceans no longer protect
it from terrorism - the threat of the new era, the president said, "On that
day, 19 months ago, we also began a relentless worldwide campaign against
terrorists, those who hate freedom, in order to secure our homeland and to
make the world a more peaceful place." He referred to "the battle of
Afghanistan" and "the Iraqi theater" and declared that "Iraq and Afghanistan
are now free". With daily reports of guerrilla resistance and suicide
bombers inflicting US casualties and US soldiers firing on civilians
demonstrating against US occupation, such a sweeping declaration raises a
credibility gap. It is also arguable that terrorists hate freedom, rather
than foreign oppression.

The US military has performed professionally and is deserving of
recognition. The same cannot be said of the political rationale behind its
deployment. Throughout history, the misuse of the military for dubious
political causes has led to the downfall of governments and empires. It
would not be surprising if the Democrats would separate pride in the
military's professionalism from the political folly of its deployment to
support the flawed grand strategy adopted by a Republican administration
captured by neo-conservatism.

About the state of the US economy, the president acknowledged that
unemployment is now at 6 percent, which he claimed should serve as a clear
signal to the US Congress a bold economic recovery package is needed so
people can find work. "We need robust tax relief so our fellow citizens can
find a job," the president said in his Santa Clara speech. The original $726
billion tax package over 10 years Bush sent to the Congress is now pared
down to $550 billion and it may be cut further in the Senate by those who
are worried that the growing budget deficit will lead to higher interest
rates that will stall any hope of recovery. Administration economists say
that the tax cut will create 1 million new jobs by the year 2004, when Bush
will face a second term election. A million new jobs would still leave 7.8
million people unemployed.

Historically, the Republican Party prided itself as not being a foreign war
party. It was formed in 1856 by anti-slavery activists and individuals who
believed that government should grant western lands to settlers free of
charge. Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White House
in 1860. The word democracy does not appear in the Republican Oath, a
statement of Republican philosophy published by the Republican National
Committee. As the party of prosperity, the GOP benefited from the boom of
the 1920s. The Great Depression destroyed the Republican majority. After
years of taking credit for prosperity, the GOP found itself branded as the
party of depression after the economic collapse in 1929. By the late 1930s,
Republicans in Congress sided with those who hoped to avoid involvement in
any future European war. Most Republicans were isolationists who supported
the neutrality laws and voted against increased defense appropriations.
Their isolationism was supported by some prominent Democrats, including
Joseph P Kennedy, ambassador to England, father of J F Kennedy. By the end
of World War II, most Senate Republicans, led by Arthur H Vandenberg of
Michigan, had repudiated isolationism out of realist pragmatism, but foreign
war remained not a Republican theme.

The surprising loss in the 1948 election to Harry S Truman, a Democrat,
again showed how desperately Republicans, out of power for two decades,
needed fresh issues. They soon found one in the hysterical charge that
communists had infiltrated the Democrat-controlled federal government. In
1950, Senator Joseph R McCarthy of Wisconsin charged that the State
Department under the Democrat administrations had been infested with
communists, which among other things "lost" China to communism, as if China
were America's to lose. Although McCarthy failed to prove his wild
accusations, in the process of ruining many lives, Congressional
investigations gave Republicans their best issue since the pre-Depression
era.

Robert McNamara, defense secretary under Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson,
attributed the Vietnam debacle to the thorough purge of China experts by
McCarthyism. He wrote, "The irony of this gap - Asian experts - was that it
existed largely because the top East Asian and China experts in the State
Department - John Patton Davies Jr, John Stewart Service and John Carter
Vincent - had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without
men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we - certainly
I - badly misread China's objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to
imply a drive for regional hegemony."

There are clear signs that the Bush administration also badly misread Arab
political culture and the root cause of terrorism, mostly as a result of
experts on Arabism who did not tote the neo-con pro-Israel line having been
purged from all US policy establishments. Bernard Lewis, who describes the
separation of church and state as a Western disease, and Fouad Ajami are the
neo-cons' favored Middle East experts who see the Arab World as ripe for
liberation from itself into modernity by the West. The president is not
being well served by the neo-cons around him, nor is the peerless US
military being used to fight for a good and viable cause.

A split between conservative and moderate Republicans flared into the open
during the Korea War. The conservatives, led by Senator Robert A Taft of
Ohio, continued to oppose the New Deal. Moderates questioned whether this
ideological fixation could win the presidency, and they looked to World War
II hero General Dwight D Eisenhower to carry their standard in 1952. The
popular Eisenhower soundly defeated Adlai Stevenson, liberal governor of
Illinois, one of the great figures in US politics, taking 39 states by
promising to end the Korean War. Republicans also won control of Congress by
a narrow margin. Ironically, the war hero won the election on a pledge to
end war.

Eisenhower's personal popularity did not carry over to the GOP as a party.
Eisenhower continued Truman's foreign policy of containment of communist
expansion, but not Truman's readiness to deploy US troops overseas.
Domestically, he tried to hold the line on government expenditures, which
satisfied neither GOP conservatives who wanted sharp cutbacks nor special
interest groups that wanted more government contracts and subsidies. In
1956, he won a rematch against Stevenson, taking 58 percent of the popular
vote. But the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress.

The 1960 election was the closest of the century. Democratic senator John F
Kennedy defeated vice president Richard M Nixon, who actually won the
popular vote if Alabama had been counted properly. Ballot fraud in Illinois
has since been been established as the reason Kennedy won the electoral
vote. Nixon gracefully accepted the results of a fraudulent election,
declining to file a contest, thus avoiding a constitutional crisis. Al Gore
was less graceful in 2000 and the decision was left to a pro-Republican
Supreme Court.

A split between conservatives and liberals again weakened the GOP during the
1960s. Governor Nelson A Rockefeller of New York emerged as the spokesman
for party liberals and Senator Barry M Goldwater of Arizona as leader of the
conservatives. A narrowly based presidential campaign by Goldwater produced
a stunning defeat for the GOP in 1964. Goldwater took only six states and 38
percent of the popular vote. But his ideology won control of the Republican
Party.

Nixon led a unified Republican party to a narrow victory in the 1968 race
against a Democratic ticket weakened by a split on the race issue between
liberal Democrat Hubert H Humphrey and racist George C Wallace, who split to
run as an American Independent candidate. Taking only 43 percent of the
popular vote, Nixon was the first new president since 1848 to take office
with both houses of Congress controlled by the opposition party. Nixon won
in part by promising to end the Vietnam War.

Nixon won re-election by a lopsided margin in 1972 on the strength of his
historic opening to China and his policy of detente with the USSR, but he
was forced to resign in 1974 over the threat of impeachment in the wake of
the Watergate affair, succeeded by Vice President Gerald R Ford. Republicans
lost control of the White House in 1976, when Ford was defeated by Democrat
Jimmy Carter.

Economic stagflation under Carter and American hostages held by Iran led to
a Republican landslide in 1980. The Republican team of Ronald Reagan and
George Bush seizing on Carter's spiritual crisis, ridiculing his "malaise
speech", and promising to reduce federal spending, cut taxes, and strengthen
defense, won 51 percent of the popular vote and 489 electoral votes. The
Republicans gained 12 seats in the Senate, giving them control of that body
for the first time since 1954.

In the 1984 presidential elections, the Reagan-Bush ticket won
overwhelmingly, carrying all the states except Democratic candidate Walter
Mondale's home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia, while
amassing 59 percent of the popular vote and 523 electoral votes. The
Republicans retained control of the Senate but did not gain a majority in
the House. Reaganomics produced the largest budget deficit and highest level
of national debt in history. In 1985, the Plaza Accord pushed the exchange
value of the dollar down against the yen to stem the rising trade deficit.
As a result, in the midterm elections of 1986, the Republicans lost not only
control of the Senate but also more ground in the House. This pattern was
repeated in 1988. Although Vice President George Bush and his running mate,
Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, won the presidential election for the
Republicans with 53 percent of the popular vote, the party lost ground in
both houses of Congress. While Bush took 40 states and scored a 426-to-11
win in electoral votes, the Republicans lost five seats in the House and one
in the Senate.

In 1992, despite victory in the first Gulf War, the election turned out to
be a referendum on the economy, and voters expressed their concerns in a
stunning defeat of incumbent Bush by Democrat Bill Clinton of Arkansas. The
gradual erosion in Republican party strength in Congress allowed the
Democrats to control both branches of government for the first time in 12
years. Bush received only 38 percent of the popular vote and 155 electoral
votes. The Republicans retained the same number of seats in the Senate and
gained nine seats in the House. It was under Clinton that the concept of
dollar hegemony took hold, allowing a rising trade deficit to be financed by
a capital account surplus, making possible the notion that a strong dollar
is in the US national interest.

The 1994 mid-term elections brought an equally dramatic reversal as the
Republican party gained control over both houses of Congress for the first
time since 1954. Most congressional Republican candidates had signed on to
Representative Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America", a list of
conservative proposals that shaped the congressional agenda under Republican
leadership in 1995. Both parties were focused primarily on domestic affairs.

Except in 1964, Republican presidential candidates since 1948 have taken
most of the votes cast in growing middle-class suburbs. Since 1952,
Republican presidential candidates have repeatedly captured at least three
of the 11 former Confederate states. Reagan's popularity among young voters
was reflected in a marked increase in Republican ranks after 1980. This
trend changed with the election of Clinton, a southern Democrat, who brought
many young voters into the Democratic party.

As with any political coalition, the Republican party has had difficulty
finding issues that unite rather than divide its followers. In 1968, Nixon
succeeded with appeals to the "silent majority" for "law and order." Despite
some success in presidential and congressional races since 1952, the
Republican party remains a minority in search of a majority. It was never
successful in attempt to include labor and minorities.

The Republican party originally built its political majority on state
organizations in the northeast and midwest. The two bases of power in these
areas were New York and Ohio. Twentieth-century GOP leaders have included
Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Evans Hughes, Thomas E Dewey and Nelson A
Rockefeller, all noted liberal governors of New York. Ohio produced five
Republican presidents: Rutherford B Hayes, James A Garfield, William
McKinley, William Howard Taft and Warren G Harding.

After being reduced to minority status in the 1930s, the Republican party
controlled a small number of largely rural states, such as Maine and Vermont
in New England and North Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska in the West. On the
local level, the strongest Republican organizations have been in rural and
suburban areas. The GOP generally has been unable to elect mayors in the
nation's big cities, except liberal New York City and conservative Los
Angeles.

The backbone of the Republican party was historically composed of eastern
businessmen and midwestern farmers. Big business was attracted by the
party's pro-business philosophy and farmers by Lincoln's successful effort
to preserve the Union. Emancipation and congressional reconstruction also
brought black voters into the party. By 1896, the GOP had a large following
among industrial workers in the nation's growing urban centers. During the
1930s, Republicans lost their grip on urban industrial states with the rise
of labor unions whose loyalty remained with the Democrats. The Rockefeller
liberal Republicans never captured the midwest because of the problematic
history of the Rockefeller oil monopoly in key states, like conservative
Ohio, liberal Minnesota and progressive Wisconsin.

After World War II, the Republican party found a new base of support in the
middle class suburbs that surrounded the country's metropolitan areas. This
has enabled the GOP to elect governors and US senators in states such as New
York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.

As a result of the Second Reconstruction, which began in the 1950s, the
Republican party has made increasing headway in the once solid south.
Opposition to civil rights for blacks led a number of southern whites to
bolt to the Democratic party, especially in presidential elections. Although
Democrats still win most state and local elections in the south, Republicans
have won a number of statewide elections in Virginia, Tennessee, North
Carolina and Texas. The GOP has had less success in the deep south, but in
1978, Mississippi elected its first Republican senator since Reconstruction.
However, even with its new supporters in the south and increasing electoral
victories, the GOP remains a minority party, trailing behind the Democratic
party in its following until Reagan.

Neo-conservatism, supported by its bedfellow neo-liberalism, is opposed in
current US politics by libertarians as well as the radical left. Charley
Reese, syndicated paleo-libertarian conservative columnist wrote on June 17
last year: "Where is George Bush's conservatism? He's taken another massive
step in nationalizing the education system, he's busted the budget, he shows
unwavering loyalty to the military-industrial complex, his foreign policy is
imperialistic, and he is expanding government at the expense of liberty ...
A conservative wishes to preserve the prosperity and health of both the land
and the people, not squander them in unnecessary wars ... Nor does American
business support a free economy. What it supports and what we have is
mercantilism. In its present form it retains its old core - a strong
centralized government that manages the economy, and a standing army to
protect corporate assets overseas. The Taliban was overthrown not because it
supported al-Qaeda but because it opposed an oil pipeline from the Caspian
Sea fields." While some aspects of these views can be better informed, the
general thrust does represent libertarian sentiments against
neo-conservatism.

The neo-conservative movement began to take shape long before September 11.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal on September 15, 1997, William Kristol
and David Brooks, editors of The Weekly Standard, mouthpiece of US
neo-conservatism, asked: "What Ails Conservatism?" It began: "The era of big
government may be over, but a new era of conservative governance hasn't yet
begun. Why the delay? Why isn't a victorious conservatism now reshaping the
American political landscape?

"A barrier to the success of today's conservatism is ... today's
conservatism. What's missing from today's American conservatism is America.
The left has always blamed America first. Conservatives once deplored this.
They defended America. And when they sought to improve America, they did so
by recalling Americans to their highest principles, and by calling them
forward to a grand destiny. What is missing from today's conservatism is the
appeal to American greatness.

"American nationalism - the nationalism of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay
and Teddy Roosevelt - has never been European blood-and-soil nationalism.
It's true that in the absence of a real appeal to national greatness, some
conservatives are tempted, a la Pat Buchanan, to turn to this European
tradition. But this can't and shouldn't work in America. Our nationalism is
that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what
Lincoln called "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times". Our
pride in settling the frontier, welcoming immigrants and advancing the cause
of freedom around the world is related to our dedication to our principles.

"That's why American nationalism isn't narrow or parochial. It doesn't
believe in closing our borders or fearing the global economy. It does
believe in resisting group rights and multiculturalism and other tendencies
that weaken our attachment to our common principles. It embraces a
neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral assertiveness
abroad.

"This American understanding of greatness is friendly to private property,
prosperity and progress. And it isn't unfriendly to government, properly
understood. After all, as Lincoln reminds us, it is 'through this free
government which we have enjoyed' that Americans have secured 'an open field
and a fair chance' for our 'understanding, enterprise, and intelligence'.
Free government - limited but energetic - is not the enemy. It can be used,
in the spirit of Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt, to enhance competition and
opportunity. In sum, national-greatness conservatism does not despise
government."

Thus the foundation of the Age of Holy War had been laid a good five years
before terrorism changed America on September 11. This Holy War is based on
US exceptionism, unilateralism and the spread of American values. It is the
American version of the Augustian and Napoleonic empires, which unlike the
British empire that kept arms-length tolerance for local culture, justified
its imperialism on the spread of superior universal values. Neo-conservatism
rejects the long tradition of American attachment to multiculturalism. It
also reverses America's tradition of being apologetic for its power. Pushing
beyond Teddy Roosevelt's "manifest destiny" with "speak softly but carry a
big stick", the neo-cons advocate an American missionary empire with loud
shouting and hitting with a big stick.

Lawrence F Kaplan, a senior editor at the New Republic, and William Kristol,
editor of the Weekly Standard, co-authors of the forthcoming book, The War
Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission, described George W Bush,
in the Wall Street Journal on January 29, as "Neither a Realist Nor a
Liberal, W Is a Liberator" who holds a fundamentally different world view
from previous administrations. To them, self-declared "realists" believe
that foreign policy should be grounded in vital interests - oil wells,
strategic chokepoints and most of all, regional stability. They prefer order
over liberty. It was in Iraq that the first Bush team's realist foreign
policy philosophy manifested itself most clearly. Once Kuwait was liberated,
the senior Bush team redirected its energies toward ensuring Iraqi
"stability" - even if it had to be enforced by Saddam.

Kaplan and Kristol criticized Clinton's Iraq policy as reflecting very
different assumptions about America's role in the world, a world view that
reduced a complex and dangerous world environment to a simple narrative of
material progress and moral improvement. According to the Clinton
administration's scorecard, it was not the integrity of containment or even
the value of keeping Saddam disarmed that mattered. Far more important was
the imperative of avoiding war. As Henry Kissinger, the master of
realpolitik, said: "Peace, too, is a moral imperative."

Kaplan and Kristol see realists and liberals as approaching the world from
different directions, but when it comes to Iraq, both ended up in the same
place: generating excuses for inaction. Bush, by contrast, does not speak of
merely containing or disarming Iraq. He intends to liberate Iraq by force,
and create democracy in a land that for decades has known only dictatorship.
Moreover, he insists that these principles apply to American foreign policy
more broadly. A century of fighting dictators has finally alerted US policy
makers to the fact that the character of regimes determines their conduct
abroad - their willingness to resort to aggression, their determination to
acquire weapons of mass destruction, and their relationships with terrorist
groups.

The neo-con commentators concluded, "Hence, the Bush strategy enshrines
'regime change' - the insistence that when it comes to dealing with
tyrannical regimes like Iraq, Iran, and, yes, North Korea, the US should
seek transformation, not coexistence, as a primary aim of US foreign policy.
As such, it commits the US to the task of maintaining and enforcing a decent
world order. Just as it was with the Bush team's predecessors, Iraq will be
the first major test of this administration's strategy. It will not be the
last."

The last sentence lingers in the mind of all the world's governments. Since
September 11, Bush has declared repeatedly, "If you are not with us, you are
against us." There is no co-existence, no neutrality and no non-alignment.
Be part of the American system or be destroyed.

What if the new US task of enforcing a new world order comes up against a
power with nuclear deterrent or other forms of weapons of mass destruction?
In this respect, the failure of other great nuclear powers to intervene in
the US invasion of Iraq, to preserve the existing world order of nation
states, can be viewed as a new Munich that will lead to another global
conflict.

Anticipating World War IV, Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of Commentary
Magazine, writing in February, 2002: How To Win World War IV - the Cold War
being World War III - characterized the first Gulf War as "an act of
military and political coitus interruptus". Podhoretz observed that Bush,
who entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do
there, now feels that there was a purpose behind his election all along: as
a born-again Christian, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the
evil of terrorism from the world. The president himself defined it from the
start in very broad terms. Our aim was not merely to capture or kill Osama
bin Laden and wipe out the al-Qaeda terrorists under his direct leadership
in Afghanistan. The governments that gave terrorists help of any kind -
sanctuary, money, arms, diplomatic and logistical support, training
facilities - would either join us in getting rid of them or would also be
regarded as in a state of war with the US. Bush was unequivocal. These
governments, he repeated over and over again, were either with us in the war
against terrorism, or they were against us: there was to be no middle or
neutral ground.

In defining the war and the enemy in such terms, the president, seconded by
both major political parties and a vast majority of the American people, was
acknowledging the rightness of those who had been stubbornly insisting
against the skeptical and the craven alike that terrorism posed a serious
threat and that it could not be fought by the police and the courts. Perhaps
most important of all was the corollary of such an analysis: that, with rare
exceptions, terrorists were not individual psychotics acting on their own
but agents of organizations that depended on the sponsorship of various
governments. Thus the war on terrorism is essentially a war against hostile
governments. Bush, with about 90 percent of the people and a nearly
unanimous Congress behind him for a war against terrorism, had more than
enough political support to act on his own, without permission from anyone,
or any other government.

But if the coalition was unnecessary both from a political and from a
military point of view, and if the inclusion within it of states harboring
terrorists undermined and obfuscated the moral clarity of the war we were
determined to wage, why did the administration devote so much energy to
assembling it?

Podhoretz's explanation is that getting a minimal endorsement from as many
predominantly Muslim states as possible helped create the impression that
the war was not against Islam but against terrorism. The aim is to begin a
transformation of the Middle East that could provide many benefits to the
populations of an unfree region. That will, in the end, make Americans
infinitely more secure at home.

Thus the failure of the oceans to protect the US from external threat now
compels the US to attack all around the world who are not with it in its war
on terrorism. It is conceivable that the US can prevail over all other
national governments militarily, but it is pure fantasy that the US can
spread US-styled democracy and freedom all over the world, even with a new
100-year war. Or that true democracy and freedom around the world would
support US national interests. A healthy dose of realism and
multiculturalism will save the world from impending self destruction by
superpower theocracy. Either way, it spells the end of the age of superpower
because military power, as demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq, causes more
problems than it solves.