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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (65997)	1/14/2003 3:16:21 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

The Dilemma of Sustaining an American Empire By Anatol Lieven Originally published in the Financial Times, January 2, 2003 American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy Andrew J. Bacevich Harvard University Press 2002, $29.95 Since September 11 2001 and the expansion of US military power that followed, Americans have begun to feel more comfortable with the idea of their country as an empire - something that previously most would have fervently denied. Talk of America as the "new Rome" is common on comment pages. At the same time, Americans have always been anxious to believe that theirs is a new kind of empire and uniquely beneficial. In the words of Elihu Root, secretary of war, "the American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order and of peace and happiness". Root was speaking in 1899 but one could imagine his words in the mouth of George W. Bush. As a result of this belief in American exceptionalism and singular benignity, the US foreign policy and security establishment is not very good at drawing lessons from the experience of former empires. Andrew J. Bacevich, a distinguished former US officer, addresses this deficiency with striking success. He debunks the notion that the US has been historically averse to using armed force to expand its power and spread its values - with that power and those values usually seen as identical. But empires come in different forms and US power is exerted not by direct rule but by indirect influence backed up by military force when necessary. As Bacevich points out in a chapter entitled "Gunboats and Gurkhas", this follows one old imperial tradition. Like America today, most of the European empires of the past at least began by trying to run empires on the cheap. This was especially true after the rise of mass democratic politics in 19th- century Europe, when it became politically impossible to send conscripts to die in far-off campaigns in places their families had never heard of. For Bacevich, America's cruise missiles and stealth bombers are the contemporary equivalent of 19th-century gunboats. The other way of saving money and avoiding domestic protest is to use not your own troops but native auxiliaries such as the Gurkhas. As Bacevich points out, this is essentially the strategy the US followed in the former Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan, with the Croatian forces, the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army and Afghan Northern Alliance. The question is whether the US can go on fighting wars in this way, or will have to employ its own troops in long-running wars of conquest and occupation; and, if the latter, whether the American people will tolerate it. Beyond this lies a wider question: whether the US can go on exercising hegemony by indirect means, or will be inexorably drawn into the business of direct imperial rule. For up to now, one of the reasons there has been so little real opposition to US hegemony in most of the world is precisely that this hegemony is distant and indirect. Crucially, the US has no actual territorial claims on any other country, though it may sometimes back secessionist movements. This is of great importance in deflecting mass hostility. Of course, radical Islamists detest even indirect US hegemony; but for the great majority of Arabs, the really infuriating thing about the US is its close identification with Israel, which is in direct occupation of Arab land and in a position of direct military rule over an Arab population. At first sight, it looks probable that the US can go on running an indirect empire at small cost in casualties. In fact, thanks to the level of protection enjoyed by modern US soldiers, a staggering disproportion has developed between military casualties and those suffered by civilians in terrorist attacks. And while such attacks may in the long run sap the will of the American people to intervene elsewhere in the world, for a long time to come they seem more likely to whip them into demands for revenge. Nonetheless, two things should be kept in mind. The first is that while contemporary US warfare may be cheap in American lives, it is certainly not cheap in American money. If the US economy were to suffer a really steep downturn, the Bush administration's present combination of massive tax cuts and massive military spending would be unsustainable. The other problem is that indirect empires require client states and, as the British found in the 19th century, this relationship is difficult to sustain over time. The demands placed on the client regime by the imperial power may be so great that it collapses. The empire can then either withdraw completely or step in and rule the country directly. This is the US dilemma that is slowly germinating in Afghanistan - and is likely to burst into the open in the aftermath of a war with Iraq. The reviewer is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 1779 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036 202-483-7600 Fax: 202-483-1840 info@ceip.org

To: JohnM who wrote (65997)	1/14/2003 3:48:13 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush Doesn't Want Good News The White House craves a fight with Iraq, the facts be damned. By Robert Scheer Columnist The Los Angeles Times January 14, 2003 Headlines tell us that United Nations arms inspectors have failed to find a "smoking gun" in their ongoing, unimpeded search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Yet the Bush administration, like a peeved child, has treated what should be good news as nothing more than rain on its war parade. President Bush wants his war, and the inveterate hawks in his administration simply spin the glaring lack of evidence into further proof of Saddam Hussein's dangerous chicanery. This week, it was Richard Perle, a top defense advisor, telling the BBC that inspectors had no chance of finding the alleged weapons and that if they aren't discovered "there will be military action." It's truly frightening when facts don't matter as a nation prepares for war. Once the bombing begins, any search for truth will end. Now is the time to question a pattern of egregious distortion of the facts on the part of a White House that apparently feels it needs a war to retain its fading popularity. The most dangerous of these distortions is the administration claim that it has evidence Iraq is close to developing nuclear weapons. Remember, for example, those aluminum tubes we heard so much about as the president beat the drums of war? "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons," Bush told us. Surely his advisors must have had at least an inkling that, as an International Atomic Energy Agency report stated, they were the wrong kind of tubes for producing nuclear weapons materials. The IAEA report also states clearly that Iraq would find it very difficult to develop a nuclear weapons program while inspectors were present. "I hope the U.S. does not know anything we do not know," IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei told Time magazine in an interview published Sunday. "If they do, they should tell us. If they are talking about indigenous capability, Iraq is far away from that. If Iraq has imported material hidden, then you're talking about six months or a year. But that's a big if." One assumes that as part of his education, Bush heard the tale of the boy who cried wolf. Not only is the credibility of the United States jeopardized by false alarms, but in U.S. dealings with Iraq they undermine international efforts to accurately monitor the proliferation of nuclear weapons by subjecting the standards of international science, as represented by the U.N. inspectors, to the parochial requirements of our national politics. Nuclear bombs remain far and away the most serious weapons of mass destruction, in a ghoulish category all their own. Even a regional nuclear war, say, between enemies Pakistan and India, would threaten the planet. Pakistan's weapons and delivery system were developed in cooperation with North Korea, which our intelligence agencies believe has two nuclear bombs and the ability to make more soon. If North Korea further develops its nuclear capacity and continues to market that technology abroad, it will move us in the direction of a conflagration. Yet, to the U.S. administration's credit, and rendering even more irrational the obsession with going to war with Iraq, Bush now wants to find a diplomatic solution with Pyongyang. Of course, it does not look wise in hindsight that upon taking office, Bush abruptly broke off historic U.S.-North Korea talks. Politics make strange bedfellows, however, and we now seem on the verge of making concessions to North Korea's leader -- Kim Jong Il, whom our president previously called a loathsome "pygmy" -- to make it easier to go to war with Baghdad. Iraq remains Bush's fixation. But it is critically in the interest of the world's immediate and future security that any war-making be forestalled until the work of the arms professionals is complete. In fact, our one clear ally on the Iraq adventure, Britain, is now endorsing this position of patience. Prime Minister Tony Blair argued over the weekend that U.N. inspectors be granted the "time and space" to complete their job. So let's give the inspectors the year they say they need. A member of Blair's Cabinet pleaded, "I think all the people of Britain have a duty to keep our country firmly on the U.N. route, so that we stop the U.S. maybe going to war too early." And who but an intemperate child would want to go to war "too early"? latimes.com