A Riveting American Drama
Why is the USA in the Quagmire That It is in Today?
The Answer Lies in Domestic Politics, Cowboy
Diplomacy and Greed
Published on Monday, September 29, 2003 by the Statesman of Kolkata / India
by Huck Gutman
commondreams.org
With a presidential election 13 months away, President
George W Bush is facing large difficulties. The problems
facing the USA and its citizenry are momentous; taken
in their entirety, they suggest that the USA's power and
affluence may well have peaked, crested, in the last decade
of the 20th century. And, to a public accustomed to living in
a nation which is not only a superpower but
also the globe's most dynamic economic engine,
this is unwelcome news.
It is not yet time, of course, to write off the USA as the world's
sole superpower. But then, few could have predicted in, say, 1985
that the Soviet Union would shortly move from superpower status
to - to whatever Russia, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, and
the other former republics are today.
The example of the USSR is not merely coincidental. There,
stress lines revealed by an endless and unwinnable war in Afghanistan
led to ultimate fracture. The Soviets thought that Afghanistan
was simply a matter of military assertion - and lost not only a war,
but also their socialist "union" to fragmented nationhood.
Advanced nations seem particularly vulnerable to wars of attrition.
Perhaps the French did not know this when they embarked upon
their military adventurism in Vietnam and Algeria, but they learned
it soon enough. Americans thought they could do what the
French could not, and so intervened in Vietnam and eventually
became an occupying force - and lost a war for the first time in their
history.
Today, Bush's invasion of Iraq has led the American nation
into what is looking more and more like a quagmire. Already, the count
of Americans who have died in Iraq since Bush declared victory while
aboard an aircraft carrier (his arms aloft, clad in a military
flight suit) is greater than those who died in the war whose
conclusion he celebrated. If anything characterizes the difficult situation,
it is the daily reports of US, Iraqi, and UN casualties. In economic terms,
Bush recently, in a reserved manner pronouncedly
different from his normal combative assertiveness, addressed the
nation on television to deliver news he could no longer keep
secret: The cost of the Iraq adventure, in the coming year alone,
would be $87 billion. Most Americans seem aghast at the
expense. Seemingly, Iraqis are equally unhappy with a plan which
would extend US rule and presence into a distant future. Finally,
the cold reception accorded to Bush's recent speech on Iraq at the
United Nations reveals that it may be a long time before he finds
major international support for US efforts to resolve the situation.
A quagmire, indeed, sapping US finances and the US military,
angering not only the Iraqis but many in the family of nations - and
with no end in sight.
How did the USA get into this calamitous misadventure?
Why did Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice ignore
recent history and embark upon a war in Asia?
The answers lie in domestic politics, cowboy diplomacy, and greed.
The President "elected" by a decision of the nation's highest
court rather than a mandate from the voters was relatively unpopular
until the catastrophe of 11 September, when the terrorist
attack on the World Trade Center in New York mobilized the
American public to support its commander-in-chief. There was
widespread US and international support for a military action
against Afghanistan, where Al-Qaida, the force behind the 11
September attacks, was based. Bush's domestic popularity
ratings soared toward an unheard-of 90 per cent.
So, a year later, Bush's political advisors told him that the best
way to sustain his popularity - which he used to push through
massive cuts in taxes for his wealthy supporters, and to pass
legislation seriously curtailing civil liberties - would be to fight and
win another war. In victory, there is always a flush of political benefit.
The image of a strong president, his advisors believed, would
enable him to cruise to reelection in the 2004 presidential contest.
There was also a confluence between these political concerns
and a strange, minority view of US international relations. Rumsfeld
and Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz argued that ever
since the USA pulled out of Vietnam, America has been afraid to
use its troops elsewhere. (With good reason, as history has shown.)
What is the sense of having the world's best-equipped and
strongest army, they argued, if you don't use it? What the world
needs, they claimed - it pains me to write this, it sounds so smug
and stupid - is a good demonstration that America is the military power
in the world. For The Bush administration, continued US
dominance would be assured by letting nations everywhere know
that US military might would be used to keep them in line. That
was the underlying motive behind the NEW US doctrine of preemptive war.
So, ignoring both history and those who pointed out it was easier
to invade a country than to withdraw from it, the Bush
administration mobilized for war. They convinced the
nation - contrary to fact - that Iraq was involved in the events of 11
September. Even today, 60 per cent of Americans believe the canard
that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al-Qaida's attack on the
World Trade Center. (Thus the irony so clearly visible to others in the
world is lost on most Americans: the single most significant
result of the US war to attack the "axis of evil" has been to create,
in Iraq, a center for terrorists and a new rallying cry for their
cause.)
Contrary to what Messrs Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz expected, the war
in Iraq has had several incontrovertible results Instead of
demonstrating the breadth of US military power, the war has
shown how US forces can be stretched thin by a single and localized
conflict. Instead of showing the strength of the USA's military,
the war has revealed how susceptible a well-equipped army is to
urban guerrilla tactics. Instead of uniting the world against
terrorism, the war in Iraq has turned a large number of nations against a
USA which turned to preemptive war to advance the partisan
interests of its chief executive.
And instead of securing new business for US corporations
(consider Iraq's vast oil reserves, consider the selection of Halliburton -
the corporation formerly headed by Vice-President Cheney - as the lead
contractor in "rebuilding" Iraq), the war in Iraq has
highlighted the USA's economic difficulties. Especially because
that $87 billion to defend and rebuild Iraq has to come from
somewhere.
It won't come from American taxpayers. Bush has pushed through
Congress not one but two of the largest tax cuts in US history,
with the result that even without its Iraq expenses the government
faces the largest deficits in its history. And Bush can't rescind
the tax cuts - to be scrupulous, he could but he won't - because the
bulk of those cuts went to the wealthiest Americans, the
people who funded George Bush's last campaign and will fund his next.
This is a president who would never ask, could never ask,
his wealthy friends to share in any financial burden.
So the $87 billion will enlarge the deficit even after it is partly
offset by cuts in domestic social spending. Therein lies a huge
problem for Bush.
Most Americans cannot understand why the USA should rebuild
Iraq when the US economy itself needs rebuilding. In the past
three years, the USA has lost over 3 million decently paying
manufacturing jobs, a staggering number when one considers that it
amounts to well over 15 per cent of the manufacturing jobs in the nation.
Unemployment is rising, and underemployment is rising as
well.
The great British economist John Maynard Keynes transformed
government policies everywhere by showing how government
spending creates jobs. When those who get jobs because of
this spending in turn use their wages to buy food and clothes and
cars, their purchase of goods and services stimulates further job
creation, and further spending. This phenomenon is known as the
multiplier effect, and impels governments everywhere - from capitalist
to socialist - to justify deficit spending even when, especially
when, economic times are difficult.
The loss of manufacturing jobs creates a reverse multiplier effect:
when workers no longer receive wages for making steel or textiles
or automobile parts, there will be workers in other sectors whose jobs
become more precarious precisely because there are now
fewer people with the money to spend on computers, clothes and cars.
Yet, in the face of this massive job loss and its reverse multiplier
effect, the Bush administration is committed to creating new jobs
not in the USA, but in Iraq. With breathtaking simplicity, it is to
be new sewers for Baghdad, but not for Chicago. The administration
plans to provide health care for Iraqis, but not for the one out
of three Americans who either has no health insurance or has
inadequate insurance. Likewise, and in apparent disregard of the
larger interests of a majority of US voters, the current
administration in Washington is proposing no programs to employ
the unemployed, upgrade the education of the underclass, or
renew infrastructure. This willful disregard of domestic reconstruction
is not just because of the $87 billion to be committed to Iraq:
there is a huge reduction of government revenue in place - largely those
tax cuts to the President's wealthy supporters - which will
create a budgetary shortfall, according to the government's
Congressional Budget Office, of $6 trillion over the next 10 years.
The twin problems of the war and the economy signal many difficulties
for Bush. He will deal with them differently as President and
as candidate.
As President, he will deal with the twin difficulties through an
ostrich-like strategy of hiding his head in the sand: he will ignore the
problems and change the subject. He will tell the nation its greatest
danger is not economic disintegration, but that some people
want to allow homosexuals to marry. He may find a new
small war - President Reagan once invaded that military power, Grenada,
and later, finding the strategy successful, the first President Bush,
the current incumbent's father, invaded that other armed giant,
Panama - which can be quickly and easily won, with lots of
television coverage to celebrate missiles exploding and soldiers
marching victoriously into small cities. He may even suggest that
a minority - blacks or people of color, Jews, Muslims, immigrants
- is responsible for the American nation's problems, although his
method for doing so would probably come in veiled form as, for
instance, in a proposal to eliminate affirmative action hiring, or
a dire warning about the need for protection against the terrorists in
the USA's midst.
As candidate President Bush will, of course, avail himself of this
same diversionary strategy. But his main bulwark will be money.
Bush will raise more campaign funding than any candidate in US history,
far more than his opponent. (Campaign financing is the
dark basement of the US political system. Americans legalize
bribes by calling them "campaign contributions", arguing that such
contributions are merely an extension of free speech. But large contributions
are not free speech: they are merely a legal way to
buy access and influence.) Unpleasant as it is to report, the candidate
with the most money can buy elections, especially because
money allows candidates to saturate television with feel-good advertisements
touting the candidate and also attack ads that tear
down his opponent.
There is a growing feeling in the American nation that not all is going
well, either in the international-military arena or in the US
economy. Will that translate into votes against Bush, or will his
deep pockets, filled with checks from campaign contributors,
enable him to shift focus from that malaise and thereby win re-election?
A Riveting drama has begun whose resolution is not clear.
Huck Gutman is Professor of English at the University of Vermont.
He is former Fulbright Visiting Professor of English at Calcutta
University.
Copyright 2003 The Statesman |
