"The Arrogance of Power: Bush's Global Crusade and Its Calamities"
afsc.org
Joseph Gerson
Nantucket Unitarian Universalist Church
April 14, 2002
Friends, I am grateful for the opportunity to join you this morning and to begin to see and learn something of that portion of paradise called Nantucket.
It is also a special pleasure to return to a Unitarian church. One Sunday thirty-five years ago. I was profoundly moved and inspired by what I encountered at the 16th St. Church Unitarian in Washington. There, a visiting minister from the German Free Church described and elaborated on the German catastrophes of the 20th century to help U.S. Americans understand the nature and consequences of the Vietnam War. Still etched in my mind is his description of young Germans marching off to war with their belt buckles and the nation's rhetoric telling them that God was on their side. And he reminded the congregation that 25 years later, under the myths and lies of German victimization and superiority, the Third Reich committed crimes beyond comprehension, along the way laying waste to a continent, and to their nation.
My parents had taught me that the lessons of the European holocaust were "never again to anyone," that one must "never participate in the rimes of silence", and that there is a clear relationship between intellectual honesty on the one hand, and human freedom and security on the other. That German minister, whose name I cannot recall, served not only as my teacher, but as a powerful example of how to live with integrity, courage, and love. Something unexpected for a Jew of my generation.
Before turning to The Arrogance of Power that defines the Bush Administration and its global military agenda, I need to point to some of its immediate consequences - the extraordinarily dangerous straits in which we find ourselves With those of us on the mainland, you suffered the losses of friends and family on September 11. Some of you may have friends and family in the military who have since been sent to fight in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia, Georgia or Colombia or who are preparing for the invasion of Baghdad. With the atomic scientists advancing the hands of their dooms day clock, we know that we are no more immune today to the dangers of nuclear war than we were in the Cold War aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. An Arab oil embargo, resulting from the material and diplomatic support the White House and Congress have given Israel, will devastate your economy as surely as it will wreak turmoil across the industrialized world. And, with the United States' already gargantuan military budget about to be increased by $100 billion since September 11, our security is being jeopardized by further jeopardizing children who live in poverty and with hunger, by the losses of medical care, educational opportunities, and opportunities to invest in the nation's infrastructure.
For those of us who are Jewish, there is another level of criminal tragedy to face as yet another government that claims to act on our behalf, is at war to destroy another people. As the Sharon government savages Palestinian communities, brutalizes its people, and creates a new generation seeking revenge for their suffering and humiliations, it is further jeopardizing Israeli security, endangering Israel's existence, reawakening anti-Semitism, and bringing us all to the bring of regional war with global consequences.
As we watch this war and tragedy unfold, we cannot but be reminded that the Bush Administration's "War on Terrorism" is in so many ways modeled after Israel's failed campaigns of military conquest, subjugation and occupation. And, in what the Bush Administration seems finally to be telling Israel - that it cannot achieve peace and security through war - I hear the echo of what the world has been telling the U.S. since September 11.
While this is, obviously, a new and extraordinarily dangerous time, it is not without its precedents. Condolezzia Rice tells us that this period is analogous to the years 1945, 46, and 47, when Washington,. with Stalin's help, created the Cold War. Some here will remember the name George Kennan, author of the Cold War containment doctrine. In 1948, while serving as the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department had this advice for President Truman:
"We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity... The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts."
This, three years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and half a century after an estimated half million people lost their lives as the U.S. turned to classical imperialism with the conquests of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam.
In 1966, as Lyndon Johnson was escalating Washington's neo-colonial war against the people and political forces of Indochina, Senator William Fulbright, then Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee , honoring democratic traditions of dissent, the expectations of our constitutional form of government, and most importantly the human imperative and national interest, publicly broke with the Administration. In his book, The Arrogance of Power, which provided an extended version of his critique of Johnson's war and its dangers, Fulbright wrote that "power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor. The Senator warned that the United States "may be drifting into commitments which, though generous and benevolent in intent, are so far-reaching as to exceed even America's great capacities." Naming the syndrome that would ultimately claim the lives of more than three million Vietnamese civilians and shatter a generation of U.S. lives, Fulbright explained that the arrogance of power is "a psychological need that nations seem to have in order to prove that they are bigger, better, or stronger than other nations", that "Implicit in this drive is the assumption…that force is the ultimate proof of superiority - that when a nation shows that it has the stronger army, it is also proving that it has better people, better institutions, better principles, and, in general, a better civilization."
Sound familiar?
In the early days of the Cold War we had the doctrine of massive retaliation, John Foster Dulles' either/or diplomacy, the creation of NATO and the U.S.-Japan military alliance. During the Vietnam War we had carpet bombing, the destruction of villages "in order to save them", defoliation with agent orange that continues to take its toll of Vietnamese and U.S. lives, and multiple nuclear threats. Now we have an era of U.S. Empire based on unilateralism, the abrogation of treaties, "Full Spectrum Dominance", the Bush Doctrine, the so-called "war on terrorism," and the promise that this war, which could involve as many as eight nations, will not end in our lifetimes. It is not without reason that, since September 11, thoughtful analysts have been reminding us of the miscalculations that made it possible for a terrorist attack in Sarajevo to trigger a World War.
There is, in fact, increasing concern on both sides of the Atlantic that Washington's unilateralism and arrogance could lead to a schism between the U.S. and Europe. Last summer a senior European diplomat told me that the United States had too much power, something that reminded him of Germany in the 1930s. This past week, after listing the many things he loves about the United States on the op ed page of the New York Times, the British scholar Timothy Garton Ash explained that he is "worried about" the U.S. "role in the world." "The fundamental problem" he wrote, "is that America today has too much power for anyone's good, including its own. It has that matchless, global soft power in all of our heads. In economic power its only rival is the European Union. In military power it has no rival. Its military expenditure is greater than that of the next eight largest military powers combined. Not since Rome has a single power enjoyed such superiority - but the Roman colossus only bestrode one part of the world."
I recently participated in conferences in Brussels and Tokyo. As I heard it, many in Europe and Asia believe that the U.S. has gone mad. Yes, they have properly joined the U.S. in seeking out and arresting terrorists. But, as we can read in the New York Times, some European and Asian leaders have been wondering aloud about the sanity of those in power in Washington. Like the US peace movement, they see the September 11 attacks as despicable crimes, but they are also clear that war is not the answer, and that, as the Germans, Italians, British, Japanese have done over the past two decades, legal means, respect for constitutional government, diplomacy, intelligence cooperation, police work, and diplomacy are the surest means of ending terrorism and restoring security. Look for example at the Lockerbie trial and at the recent Al Queda arrests in Pakistan.
Much of the rest of the world stands aghast as the U.S. has killed an estimated 4,000 Afghan civilians, embraced dictators as allies, and used the trauma surrounding the 9-11 attacks as diplomat cover to walk away from the ABM treaty, to pursue nuclear dominance and to monopolize the militarization of space. The gap between the United States and much of the rest of the world is growing as we watch the oceans and our climates warm, while the U.S. rejects the Kyoto protocol and thus further endangers future generations. Europeans, Asians, and Arabs are confused as Washington funds and fights wars for oil in Central Asia and the Middle East while simultaneously adopting an energy policy that sidelines conservation and stokes the consumption of fossil fuels. The U.S. is almost alone as it threatens war, even nuclear war, against Iraq because of Baghdad's reported biological weapons program just months after the Bush Administration sabotaged negotiations for a biological warfare treaty and the release of the Pentagon's frightening nuclear posture review that calls for a "surge" in U.S. production new nuclear weapons.
There is also a dissenting global perspective on the Bush Administration's new McCarthyism. In Hong Kong, there is concern that Washington is weakening the role and rule of law in China. They understand what it means when the chief law enforcement officer, in our case Attorney General Ashcroft, publicly warns that criticism "gives ammunition to [the nation's] enemies…" The British and European press fears that democracy itself is at risk here, as they learn of secret arrests and imprisonment of more than 1,000 people, racially profiled "invitations" for thousands of people to be "interviewed" by the police, the assault on academic freedom, wire tapping, proposals to covertly place police in religious institutions and organizations, and the secret military tribunals to which as many as 20 million people in this country are now vulnerable. They are clear that Washington's arrogance of power and reckless global war is leading to assaults on critical thinking and democratic dissent.
[When I was in Brussels, I was deeply moved when Helmut Schmid, painfully described what he and other European parliamentarians were subjected to in the days immediately following the September 11 attacks. They were in Washington for annual meetings with Administration officials and members of Congress, when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked. Mr. Schmid described how terrible he felt as he watched the Pentagon burning across the Potomac. But, his pain turned to anger as he described the demeaning ultimatums delivered to his delegation by the Bush Administration and some members of Congress when their meetings resumed two days after the attacks. This would be, they were told, a global war, and their options would be limited to backing Washington's war or becoming its enemies.]
When I was in Europe in late January, it was already apparent that Washington's war in Afghanistan was not going well, and that as the mimicked U.S. militarism India and Israel were leading the world to the brink of nuclear war. They believed that the Bush Administration's military over reach would be disastrous. Many there and in Asia have been waiting for this wave of militarism to shatter in failure and to build from what then emerges.
Having followed developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan since Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CIA lured the Soviet Union into its disastrous war there, I've been thinking in recent weeks about Pete Seeger's description of U.S. moving ever deeper into the "Big Muddy" of the Vietnam war. With our attention focused increasingly on Palestine and Israel, it is easy to forget that the brutal and counter-productive war in Afghanistan has been less successful, and therefore that much more dangerous, than Secretary Rumsfeld has been reporting. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar apparently remain at large. Thousands of innocent Afghans have been killed as a result of the U.S. war -- creating new generations of people who hate the U.S. The same U.S. supported War Lords of old who oppressed women, built their power on the drug trade, and plunged Afghanistan into civil war, are again competing for power and threatening renewed civil war. President Karzai is increasingly referred to as the "mayor of Kabul." And, even the New York Times tells us that the Taliban remains far more popular than the Karzai-war lord government across broad swaths of Afghanistan.
I was on a panel at Harvard several weeks ago with recently retired senior diplomats and the president of CARE, all of whom agreed that at least 30,000 foreign "peacekeeping" troops will be required if there is to be a chance of restoring stability and security to that long tortured nation. But you certainly don't see the world's nations flocking to save Afghanistan. Moreover, with the toppling of the Taliban, Afghanistan's desperately poor farmers have resumed planting opium poppies, and we are about to be on the receiving end of a disastrous new wave of Afghan heroin. [And, as the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl and the India-Pakistan confrontation testify, the forces the U.S. has nurtured and unleashed in nuclear Pakistan could yet prove disastrous.]
What, besides the national shock and anger over the September 11 attacks, the existence of suicidal terrorists, the ignorance of many of our nation's leaders (many of whom are proud not to own a passport); Machiavellian calculations, manifest destiny, the poverty of Realpolitik, and the demands of the U.S. military-industrial-complex explain our current crisis?
Fulbright had it right: the arrogance of power: the confusion of power with virtue...
The Bush Administration has acted out of political expediency and to create what our national, if elusive, C.E.O. Dick Cheney described last spring, well before 9-11, as "the arrangement [for] the twenty-first century" that would assure that "the United States will continue to be the dominant political, economic and military power in the world." Think about the word "dominant" and what it means for the rest of humanity to be "dominated."
The war against Al Queda and the Taliban differs more in technology than in purpose from what we might have expected from Genghis Khan or the British empire at its height. The empire was shown to be vulnerable, and the empire striking back, terrorizing all who would even think about challenging its power. Perhaps more importantly, the 9-11 attacks provided the Bush Administration the political opening to attempt to impose its will militarily on a global scale, to massively increase military spending and weapons acquisition, to advance its right-wing domestic agenda, and to exercise an arrogance of power that was beyond our imaginations.
Stephen Hadley, one of Condolezzia Rice's senior deputies reports that, not unlike the elder Bush's New World Order, this Bush Administration seeks "a whole new world", U.S. global domination based ultimately on its nuclear and high-tech arsenals.
No strangers to the exercise of power, the Bush Administration harnessed the sympathy, fear, disorientation, and anger that followed the 9-11 attacks to, as Colin Powell put it, "set the reset button" on U.S. foreign and military policies. September 11 provided the Bush Administration the political and diplomatic cover to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, to increase the U.S. military budget to $400 billion - more than the world's 25 next largest military spenders - combined! To breach the Vietnam Syndrome, to subvert the central role human rights have played in U.S. foreign policy, to consolidate what were incipient alliances with Russia and India, and to expand the global network of U.S. foreign military bases. Do I sound like one of Spiro Agnew or William Saffire's "nattering nabobs of negativism?"
What we have seen since September 11 is what the current State Department Director of Planning Director, Richard Haas, tells us is a new strategic doctrine that he tells us is "as broad as Kennan's containment" doctrine. Tentatively named "the limits of sovereignty", it seeks to affirm U.S. unilateralism in ways that subvert the United Nations Charter and international law. Hass told Nicholas Lehmann of The New Yorker, that the doctrine provides that nations can intervene when other nations massacre their own people (for example Saddam Hussein's attack on the Kurds, or by extension of its illogic, when Israel invades the West Bank and Gaza, or the U.S. irradiates its people through the waste and fallout of the nuclear weapons production and testing cycle.) The doctrine also creates the new right of "preventive or preemptory, self-defense." This will apply, Haas tells us, when you think "its a questions of when, and not if, you're going to be attacked." Were this doctrine to be universalized, it would the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor or given President Bush's military threats against the "axis of evil," Iraqi, Iranian, or North Korean attack against the U.S.
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Marshall and their colleagues know at least some of their history. They are modeling themselves after people like Captain Alfred T. Mahan, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, and others who charted the U.S. path to global empire at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries through the creation of a great navy that could replace Britain as the ruler of the seas. This time the goal is to reinforce the Pentagon's "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine with new generations of high-tech and nuclear weapons and by monopolizing the militarization of space. They seek, as Space Command's Vision for 2020 Report states, is to "control" space to "dominate" earth. Much of this is being done in the name of so-called "missile defenses". The Rumsfeld-Marshall military doctrine seeks to guarantee that the U.S. has the "military capability to act at any time, anywhere, in defense of what it sees as its global interests." As one senior military officer put it, "We don't like a fair fight. We want to win, absolutely and on our terms." If that is not a dangerous expression of the arrogance of power, I don't know what is.
Long before most of us heard of Al Queda, Washington was shifting the focus of U.S. military planning and power from Europe to the Asia-Pacific region. Over the longer term, the mandarins of power in Washington see China, not Al Queda and Islamic fundamentalism, as their primary strategic concern. To prevent China challenging the U.S. Asia-Pacific hegemony, the Bush Administration is now racing to develop and deploy land, sea, air-based "Theater Missile Defenses" around China's periphery and in space, with so-called "national missile defenses" to come later. That this will only spark a new and dangerous nuclear arms race is apparently beyond Washington's short-term, thinking.
Oil also figures into full spectrum dominance. Years ago, former Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor described Middle east oil as "the jugular vein of [world] capitalism." Now, with the rise of the East Asian economies, Middle East and Central Asian oil is the jugular vein of the global economy. How important is oil? Remember that it was a precipitating factor in the first and second world wars and that the U.S. has threatened to initiate nuclear war at least eight times to preserve its privileged control of Middle East oil reserves.
Many in Washington were sobered by the fact that most of the September 11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. None were Afghans. This may well have been part of Osama Bin Laden's objective, to drive a wedge between the U.S. and the Saudi monarchy in order to free Arabia of U.S. military bases and the corrupt Saudi regime. And now we have Ariel Sharon picking up where Bin Laden left off. Washington's counter move has been to use Russia, now the world's leading producer of oil, against Saudi Arabia. Note that Bush and Company are hardly innocent bystanders in the ongoing Russia-OPEC price wars. (And, do we really think that the coup in Venezuela, one of the largest foreign suppliers of oil to the U.S. market, was unrelated to either oil or CIA machinations?)
With our armadas of SUV, the U.S. is once again the land of humungous automobiles, and the thinking in the White House seems to be that what is good for SUV's will be good for the President's reelection.
The Afghan war, actually a Central Asian war, has also been about the vast oil reserves around the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. It was, remember, the hope of building a pipeline from Turkestan, through Afghanistan, to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean, free of Russian and Iranian influence, that played a powerful role in U.S. support for the Taliban's rise to power and Washington's tolerance of its brutal excesses and for the people who became Al Queda. With its new network of bases in Central Asia nations ruled by post-Soviet dictators, the U.S. has created a military infrastructure to control the region's oil reserves while simultaneously encircling China.
Arrogance of power. I am sorry to say that the U.S. now goes to war so often, that we can speak of discernible patterns in the routine of U.S. warfighting. As the U.S. prepares to go to war, it threatens nuclear attack to ensure that those it is targeting will not be tempted to use chemical or biological weapons. Just as Bush the elder threatened nuclear attack before the 1991 war, this Bush Administration communicated similar threats to Al Queda and the Taliban. This approach, as we read in the New York and Los Angeles Times in early March, has been reified in the Bush Administration's Nuclear Posture Review.
Even before the story broke in the press, the Natural Resources Defense Council concluded that the Bush Administration was "Faking Nuclear Restraint", seeking to "breakout" of the NPT regime. The NRDC had reported that "the administration's hostility to arms control, and its infatuation with nuclear weapons," are nearly unprecedented and that "Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald Reagan's first term has there been such an emphasis on nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strategy."
The NRDC and now the world's press report that "The Bush administration assumes that nuclear weapons will be part of U.S. military forces for the next 50 years" and "is planning…programs to sustain and modernize the existing force…" Further, the announced reductions in the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal are a sham. Yes, the Pentagon is planning to honor the START II Treaty and the agreement with Russia to reduce the number of "operationally deployed" nuclear weapons. BUT, with nuclear weapons that are not "operationally deployed" and those that are stockpiled, "the Bush administration is actually planning to retain the potential to deploy not 1,700 to 2,200 nuclear weapons, but as many as 15,000."
What has the world most concerned is the Bush Administration's plan to blur the distinction between nuclear and high-tech weapons, and to more fully integrate the "unthinkable" into U.S. war fighting practice. The Bush Administration policy is to prepare for "surge" production of new nuclear weapons. They plan to "design, develop, manufacture and certify new warheads", some of which will be designed to destroy "Hardened and Deeply Buried Targets", and "chemical and biological warfare sites." To facilitate this, the Pentagon is giving top priority to research for inserting existing nuclear warheads into new 5,000 pound bombs - perhaps in time for use against Iraq or North Korea. And, thinking somewhat longer term, the Bush Administration is also planning to reduce the time needed to resume nuclear weapons testing.
What, then, can be done?
Our first priority must be to end Sharon's war. In the first instance, we should be phoning, e-mailing, and faxing the White House urging that Colin Powell use all of Washington's diplomatic leverage to force an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. That would include, as Jimmy Carter's former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has forcefully written, the threat of cutting off military, economic and diplomatic aid to Israel. With Sharon and Netanyahu seeking to drive a wedge between the White House and Congress, we should be burning the wires to our Congressional representatives to the effect that ALL the killing must end, that world peace and U.S. national interests require Sharon to withdraw his forces and to move immediately to negotiations for a comprehensive and final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the basis of ALL United Nations Resolutions, and the Mitchell and Saudi peace plans.
President Bush needs both political encouragement and political cover - an exit strategy if you will - from the global war to which he has committed his Administration. In February, fifteen members of the House of Representatives reminded him that he had no legal authorization to extend his war beyond Afghanistan, and in early March Senators Daschle, Biden and Byrd finally remembered that we are supposed to be living in a constitutional democracy, and - seeking the national interest - were clear that the Bush Administration has some very important questions to answer. As we affirm the need for those responsible for the September 11 attacks to be legally brought to justice, we should begin demanding that Congress begin to hold hearings, much as Senator Fullbright did thirty-five years ago, to name the dangers for the U.S. public, to engage with the administration, and to provide it with the political cover needed to end the war.
We can remember Martin Luther King Junior's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in which he reminded us that "In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men [and women] are interdependent. The agony of the poor [and the oppressed] diminishes the rich [and the oppressors], and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich." The Realpolitik concept of "Common Security", with which the Cold War was ended, put it only somewhat differently: just as I cannot be secure if you are not, nations cannot be secure if their rivals are insecure. In the short term, this would mean addressing the Islamic world's four greatest grievances against the U.S. and the West: ending the Israeli dispossession of Palestinians, withdrawing U.S. military bases from Arabia, ending the murderous economic sanctions against Iraq, and addressing the long-running conflict in Kashmir. Thinking globally, it means drawing on Carter-era energy policies: stressing conservation and tilting the tax system to provide economic incentives for conversion from fossil fuel consumption to dependence on renewable sources of energy. It means supporting Bono and the anti-corporate globalization protesters who are calling for debt forgiveness, and with half the world's people struggling to survive on $2 a day or less, it means building global security through a New Marshall Plan, not through spending an extra trillion dollars on the military over the next decade.
Finally, I think it means fundamentally reconceptualizing our country's approach to the world. It means unilateralism, honoring the treaties we have negotiated with the world - including the NPT's demand for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization, and he replied, "It would be a good idea." If we survive the current catastrophe, it will be time to sign and ratify the Kyoto accord and to join the International Criminal Court. It is a time for repentance and taking our rightful, not an arrogant, place among the world's 190 nations |
