Here we are, just past our Independence Day, past that moment in memory when the United States was, by active example, a "beacon of freedom" to the world, past the moment in memory when, as Barbara Ehrenreich reminded us in the New York Times on July 4, the signers of the Declaration of Independence penned their names to the following line (Their George and Ours): "And for the support of this declaration ... we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."
She adds: "Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that 'the constitution is not a suicide pact'. In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that. By signing [Thomas] Jefferson's text, the signers of the Declaration were putting their lives on the line ... If the rebel American militias were beaten on the battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged as traitors. They signed anyway, thereby stating to the world that there is something worth more than life, and that is liberty."
Now, let's leap a couple of centuries-plus and consider another group of Americans who signed on to what's looking more and more like an inadvertent (political) suicide pact. Our media wash over us like some mind-cleansing drug, so today, in the shambles of Bush administration Iraq policy, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, just beyond the "transition to Iraqi rule", it's difficult to recall what life was like back when the press was simply a lapdog; CBS's Dan Rather was burbling, "George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where"; war was a swift, smiting blow (when was the last time you heard the phrase "shock and awe"?), and we were about to be anointed as the New Rome.
It's hard to remember that we were then ruled by the greatest, and most arrogant, gamblers in our history, men (and a single woman) ready to roll the dice any old time on the fate of the Earth. In the wake of every crumbling pseudo-explanation for the war in Iraq, it's hard to remember just how sweeping their vision actually was or what they had in mind when, not so long after September 11, 2001, they loaded some high-tech Hummer (regular cars being far too retro for them) with explosives and drove out into the world looking for something to blow up. Now that the strategists among them are in decline and the "realists", long left in the lurch, are wheeling and dealing in Iraq and Washington, it's hard to recall the Utopian (or dystopian) fantasies they were so intent on imposing on what turned out to be a surprisingly recalcitrant world.
For the nostalgia buffs among you, the increasingly lonely Vice President Dick Cheney, who not so long ago imagined himself to be the co-ruler of our energy planet, continues to hoof it around the country reiterating charges of al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein ties on a "best of 2001-02" Bush administration top-10 tour. But even the man who prided himself on never cracking, no less cracking a smile, has had his public bad moments and temper squalls - and all without a duck, quail or pheasant in sight to knock out of the skies.
In a bow to the Veep's oldies-but-badies routine, let's try, for a moment, to recall the strategic thinking that lay behind the shock-and-awe campaign seen around the world: from the start, of course, this was an energy administration. After all, how many national security advisers in our history have had an oil tanker named after them? How many vice presidents ran a giant energy company deeply entangled with the US military? The fact is, when it came to energy, like a group of vulgar Marxists with oil on the brain, most of them saw the world quite naturally in terms of energy flows, just the way a doctor might see blood flows as the body's essence.
They identified an "arc of instability" that stretched east-west from the former Yugoslavia to the borders of China and southward into Africa. (It was sometimes also said to include the Andean parts of Latin America.) This "arc", covering significant parts of what once was called the Third World, took in most of the planet's prime, or prospective, oil lands. Even before September 11 in this vast region, some of which had dropped out of the former Soviet empire, the administration of President George W Bush began to plant, or expand, US military bases. The heart of these oil lands lay in the Middle East, a region with - in better times - the world's five leading oil producers.
Post-September 11, the top strategists of this administration followed their president happily into the "war on terror", the wilder among them imagining it as World War IV, the equivalent of, if not World War II, at least the Cold War, and so engendering dreams of another half-century twilit struggle to victory. Endless years of war would release them to act exactly as they pleased. The president (and his speechwriters), dreaming "good war" dreams from his movie-made childhood, then elevated a pathetic "axis of evil" (Iran, Iraq and North Korea, none of which previously knew of their close relationship) to the role of the Axis Powers (Germany, Japan, Italy) in World War II; and so, with an enemy of nation-states in hand, far more worthy of a world at war than Osama bin Laden and small groups of fanatic Islamists, they announced a policy of global supremacy not over terrorists, but over all the other nations of our planet, swearing that no future bloc of powers would be allowed to interfere with our benevolent hegemony over the Earth - and of preventive war. We would reserve the right to take out anybody we even thought might sooner or later in some way or another challenge us. A list of up to 60 states believed to "harbor" terrorists was also drawn up. This was a list for a lifetime. And finally, declaring weapons of mass destruction evil, they made it our job to decide who exactly shouldn't have them and to bolster our own nuclear forces to prepare for a series of what author Jonathan Schell has called "anti-proliferation wars". With this trio of policies in their foreign-policy quiver, they looked around for some action.
Of course, the neo-con strategists of this administration had long been spoiling for, planning for, and dreaming of a second American Gulf War that would take down former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime. (Just a peek at the wonderfully named Project for the New American Century website, where they proudly posted their wares, will give you a sense of this.) Assessing the satanic trio that made up the axis of evil - a fierce and desperate despotism with a sizable air force but no fuel to get pilots aloft to practice flying planes; an increasingly embattled and unpopular but combative semi-theocracy; and a country sitting on the world's second-largest oil reserves, strung out by three failed wars, 12 years of economic sanctions and periodic bombings, and run by a detested, brutal, increasingly out-of-touch regime with a military that was just a ghost of its former self - they naturally chose the third. It was a grudge rematch to begin with; it looked like a snap (there was little question that Saddam's army, crushed in our first Gulf War, wouldn't last long in a second one); and the assaults of September 11, 2001, had made it a far more sellable commodity (hence the endless administration linkages of Iraq and al-Qaeda).
Nothing could be worse than Saddam, so Iraq's crushed people would prove both pliable and grateful for their "liberation". (You remember that "cakewalk", and all those flowers to be strewn in our path by joyous Shi'ites.) In return for a Saddam-less life, they would, of course, let us proceed apace with our plans. In an over-armed region, we would drastically downsize their army so that they would need our protection forever, build a string of permanent bases to the tune of billions of dollars (in part to replace those being mothballed in Saudi Arabia), and install a government run by Ahmad Chalabi, the sweet-talking exile with so much useful intelligence so close at hand, who was so deeply beloved by the neo-cons in the Pentagon and the Veep's office. He would be our satrap in a formally democratic Iraq. It was all so obvious.
And then, of course, there was all that oil. In our desperately over-determined world where the multiple explanation is the only explanation, the point of all this was never simply to take Iraq's oil, though the neo-cons did think it would be most useful in reconstructing and running the country on the cheap, as Pentagon Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made quite clear numerous times and still claims. In a world of rising oil desire and potentially limited oil resources, the point was to find ourselves ensconced militarily at the very heart of the Middle East, controlling the taps to the energy veins of the globe, and to do so before any of those future blocs of irritated countries could form to challenge us.
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