THE HORROR OF BUSH'S CHILDISH FOREIGN POLICY
Hi Pat,
I just love it when I hear that important truths and important articles like Arianna's are getting shared. Thanks so much. We do all need to wake up. I was aghast this past Saturday when leafleting in downtown Bend. There was a substantial portion of the passersby who were proud to be apathetic and uninformed. God Help America.
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Here's an important article from Dissent Magazine. It is a chilling discussion of the naive and imperialistic "National Security Strategy of the United States of America"
Please consider getting this circulated as well:
dissentmagazine.org
Acting Alone by David Bromwich
Unilateralism is a weak name for the foreign policy sketched in "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America"-a document released by the White House in September 2002 and discussed inadequately in the press. The strong name for it is imperialism. We will be hearing more about that as Europeans come to assess the actions of the Bush administration in the light of this thirty-one-page manifesto. The document, prefaced by a signed three-page letter from George W. Bush, is in large measure a tissue of quotations and paraphrases of the president's speeches, and it has been clear for some time that the speeches are written by a clever and versatile team. The well-engineered bursts of pulpit eloquence are cemented by think-tank platitudes of a humbler workmanship, so that the total impression is at once bright and dull, commanding and crude. Even so, the National Security Strategy document bears looking into. This is the source that the Bush administration wants Americans to consult in order to understand the aims that guide our international actions. Each of its nine numbered sections is headed by a quotation from George W. Bush, and when you combine their effect with the world-definitive posture of the cover letter, you are aware of a deference to the personality of a leader that makes this production, by the standards of constitutional democracy, unusual. Practical wisdom in the face of terror comes to be identified with the always apposite words of a single man.
The first section gives an overview of the contents, the second a rhetorical portrait of the United States as the champion of human dignity. Four subsequent sections (3, 4, 5, and 8) are exclusively concerned with the attack part of defense. The football coach's apothegm, "The best defense is a good offense," is quoted. Defense proper, of the "homeland" in particular, turns out to be the subject of section 9, while two interpolated sections (6 and 7) deal with economic assistance, the imperative of the "free flow" of money and goods to build "the infrastructure of democracy" in the poorer countries of the world. As the document proceeds, it becomes clear that the National Security Strategy takes for its domain all of international relations and foreign policy. Everything the United States could conceivably do in the world is now to be subsumed under the heading of a national defense that is itself an extension of homeland security.
The president's letter opens by pointing out the difference between the twentieth century and the twenty-first. The "great struggles of the twentieth century" were those "between liberty and totalitarianism." Liberty won; and this has become generally known. "People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children-male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor." The simplicity of the thought is captured by the locution "people everywhere"-a phrase with roots in advertising. People everywhere want a good product. But the sense here slides perilously between two distinct facts. People everywhere may have a germ of the idea that they would like to see men and women treated equally and given the same educational opportunities. That does not mean that all people, in every part of the world, if asked whether they believe in the equality of women, would now answer yes. The underlying sense of the assertion is that the North Atlantic commercial democracies have discovered what people everywhere will finally realize themselves to have wanted all along. But this idealism is undercut by an equivocation. America will seek "to create a balance of power that favors human freedom." Slowly, then: as the balance of power favors freedom for more people, those people will discover how desirable freedom is. A moderate downturn weighing in late to balance the latest pounding directive is a recurrent rhythm of the document.
In the twenty-first century, the enemies of freedom are secretly hostile or stateless persons who seek to obtain weapons of mass destruction. "As a matter of common sense and self-defense," the president's letter declares, "America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed." The last five words are crucial. We reserve the right to attack any country whose power is growing ominously, and the more so if it acts as a haven for such persons. Here is a central clue to the doctrine of "regime change" that now seems likely to extend beyond Iraq. But can such a policy be strictly military in its bearings? The president's letter admits the inadequacy of that approach when it says near the end: "Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders." So we ought to do something to alleviate poverty, in line with our fight against terror, provided the free flow of investment capital is permitted in the countries we assist. "The United States will stand beside any nation determined to build a better future by seeking the rewards of liberty for its people. Free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of poverty." Readers with a short memory may simply credit this. The truth is that free markets and money-flows did no such thing for Indonesia or for Russia or for all of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, those methods had the opposite effect: money departed faster than it came, and left behind a gutted society.
Section 2, the real preamble of the document, recalls the American commitment to universal values associated with human dignity. We must defend liberty and justice "because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere." That seems a vital point for American civic education; and the authors might have added more without fear of contradiction. We trust those who agree with us about these things more than we trust those who do not. But there is a vast difference between knowing that a principle is right and knowing that one has a right to establish that principle by force. The sweep of the document assumes that once we recognize the application of a principle to "all people everywhere," we have a warrant to do whatever must be done to enforce its acceptance. Such violent paternalism will always exist in tension with the principle of liberty. The document goes on, by its very phrasing, to give an illustration of the danger: "No nation owns these aspirations [to liberty and justice], no nation is exempt from them" [emphasis added]-as if acknowledgment of the aspiration were a burden lesser peoples might well shirk. Combine this assurance with the stress on the flow of money and goods from the more to the less powerful, and you gain a sense of how the architects of American national security in the twenty-first century are hoping to inherit the mantle of the architects of the British Empire in the nineteenth. The conservatism of British imperial policy held it wiser not to take on the tutelage of the whole world at once. The abstention may have come from prudence and elitist arrogance-thin motives compared to the robustness of the National Strategy document-but just possibly that prudence added half a century to the life of the empire. An acceptance of backward nations as backward, an agreement not to make them "progressive" and aggrandize the empire by money-flows and sudden fortunes, was one of the traits that distinguished British from, say, Belgian imperialism. If we Americans mean to give up that form of prudence or humility, the reason must be that we find ourselves so glutted with power that we have no further use for caution.
Section 3 quotes the president's speech of September 14, 2001, on the need "to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." A seasoned former White House operative, Pat Buchanan, noticed several months ago what mainstream columnists have passed over in silence, namely that the Bush administration was committed to war against Iraq as soon as the president spoke his formula about the "axis of evil." That was an example of policy by speech-writing-a phenomenon peculiar to this administration, and yet common in it. Go back now to the phrase about our need "to rid the world of evil." There already, on September 14, 2001, was a signal example of policy by speech-writing, done with so small a touch as the omission of the definite article before evil. An alternative phrase must have offered itself and been rejected: "to rid the world of this evil." After all, the particular evil of a terrorist network such as al-Qaeda is large enough and dreadful enough to make its eradication a tremendous work of blended might and resolve. But omission of the definite article makes the evil of al-Qaeda identical with evil itself. Crush it, the grammar now asserts, and you will rid the world of all evil. Many of the president's followers are religious, with an apocalyptic tinge to their piety: a consideration that cannot have been far from view when the writer cut out a word and turned up the heat.
To rid the world of evil itself. If that is the task we are embarked on, it follows that we need only act well against the terrorists for evil to cease to be one of the conditions of life. This is not a contingent and political but an absolute and metaphysical statement, a promise of salvation such as only religions, until now, have dared to make and only the gods of religions have been supposed to keep. The present generation of terrorists in many ways resemble a kind of man the world has known for a long time. They seem to think about their crimes as Macbeth thought about his: "that but this blow/ Might be the be-all and the end-all-here,/ But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,/ We'd jump the life to come." The inference from the president's "rid the world of evil" must be that such ambitious men will cease to exist-that once our battle is finished, no more such men will be born. But how can he know? Do we believe ourselves launched on a quest that when complete will have scoured human nature of its imperfections forever?
Section 3, the most substantive of the document, speaks of the necessity for "direct and continuous action using all the elements of our national and international power." This declaration is accompanied by an all-important phrase: "we will not hesitate to act alone." Why do individuals hesitate to act alone? They do so for the same reason that nations may hesitate: because the approval and sometimes the commitment of others may serve as a check against insanity. Whole communities may go mad as well as individuals-the twentieth century affords examples of that in Germany in the 1930s, and in China in the 1960s. People under the dominion of a passion that animates everyone, a fear that compels action and reaction in a single circuit, may collectively lose their grip on reason. Out of passion and zeal combined, they surrender the ability to do anything but temporarily quell the terror that holds them stunned and holds them together. It is for this reason, one wants to say, that a community that has the time to think ought to hesitate before acting alone. Yet before one can confront the document on this point, the argument shifts its ground. After the absolute assertion of a duty to act alone on behalf of all mankind, section 4 reverts to a moderate tone. We are informed that when "states falter" the United States will act to "restore stability."
Section 5 introduces the problem of nations that seek to obtain weapons of mass destruction. This was obviously written with Iraq in mind, and it repeats the Bush administration's recent charges. The leaders of such nations "brutalize their own people and squander their national resources for the personal gain of the rulers"; they "reject basic human values and hate the United States and everything for which it stands." There follows a justification of preemptive war: "The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction-and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively." Given the depth of the uncertainty here described, what can be the meaning of "if necessary"? From every innocent person you kill, a new enemy may grow-a friend or relative of the victim or an appalled and angry witness. This irreducible axiom of moral psychology, which must never be forgotten, the document works very hard to make its readers forget.
With section 6, we find ourselves in the conventional domain of capitalist utopian thought. Free markets will "ignite a new era of economic growth." Those markets will put out their own fires, however, and bring-stability. For "improving stability in emerging markets is also a key to global economic growth." On this view of human nature and society, improving stability is synonymous with planting governments friendly to foreign investors. "International flows of investment capital are needed to expand the productive potential of these economies. These flows allow emerging markets and developing countries to make investments that raise living standards and reduce poverty." Again, the recent history of Indonesia would make a different point. Closer to home, so would Argentina. But the invocation of money flows is not a science touchable by facts; we are on hallowed ground, in the presence of Our Lady of the Market. Free trade is accordingly described as a "concept" that arose independently of financial practice, "a moral principle even before it became a pillar of economics." The truth is that the morality of free trade came with, not before, the practice of free trade in the nineteenth century, but an error of a hundred years cannot unsettle this trance of revelation where the good, the profitable, our self-interest, and our love of humankind all dovetail in a seamless artifice. The oddest detail of this section is an afterthought about "the environment," tucked in at the lower end of a column of journalist-bullets. "We will incorporate labor and environmental concerns into U.S. trade negotiations." The document goes on to summarize G.W. Bush's proposal for the redefinition of poisonous gasses. "America's greenhouse gas emissions," he declared in the course of defending his rejection of the Kyoto accord, would be reduced "relative to the size of our economy" (emphasis added). The economy comes before life and before breath. Eight drops of poison in an economy of two hundred is, relatively, an improvement on five drops of poison in an economy of one hundred.
There is a suspicion, now widely shared abroad, that the United States has become a dogmatic and intolerant nation in its understanding of happiness. The evidence normally cited is that we reject the possibility that any country could come to be happy, united, prosperous, and at peace by a method somehow different from our own. Section 7, on foreign economic assistance, will go far to confirm that impression. The document cannot bear to offer a strategy for nation-building without first attacking the very idea of nation-building. For that purpose, it adapts the language that the Reagan administration once deployed against welfare: "throwing money at programs," they called it, and to that derisive certitude of American politics the Bush doctrine adds an international dimension. "Decades of massive development assistance have failed to spur economic growth in the poorest countries. Worse, development aid has often served to prop up failed policies, relieving the pressure for reform and perpetuating misery." The document takes seriously, on the other hand, the idea of foreign shareholders buying stock in a developing nation. Something called the "Millennium Challenge Account" has been set up for countries whose governments "rule justly, invest in their people, and encourage economic freedom." Presumably, no such grants will be forthcoming to countries that favor cooperative local enterprise over private foreign enterprise. The intended analogy here is the "matching grants" offered by charitable foundations to people or institutions that have once proved their ability to raise money on their own. Be hospitable to American business, says the investment corollary of the National Security Strategy, and we will give you the money to allow you to welcome more of our investments.
In keeping with the same program, the Bush administration here announces that it will sponsor a "comprehensive reform agenda" for enlarging the activity of the World Bank. The instrument is to be increased contributions to the bank's International Development Association. Oversight of all these interlocking funds will enable the United States to monitor results more closely, and "we will also challenge universities, nonprofits, and the private sector to match government efforts by using grants to support development projects that show results." The free-flow-of-capital message could scarcely be more blunt. We mean to run the world the way you run a business. But the eager authors are not yet satisfied, and they make the case double-sure with italics: "Open societies to commerce and investment." Most of the money for economic development, they explain, "must come from trade, domestic capital, and foreign investment. An effective strategy must try to expand these flows as well." The quasi-organic metaphor of "flows" is really a form of prayer-like the metaphor of growing the economy when nothing will grow on earth any more. And here is another afterthought: "Emphasize education." Who will deny that "literacy and learning are the foundation of democracy and development"? This turn of section 7 might be taken to imply that people need to be educated before they can say exactly how much foreign capital they want to conduct into their native economies. But the logic of the section has gone the other way: first we make the poorer nations as much like us as possible by the inundation of money and goods; then we teach them what they have chosen and why they must go on choosing it.
A halfhearted penultimate section, "Agendas for Cooperative Action with the Other Main Centers of Global Power," concerns the need to leave ourselves some scope anyway for multilateral action. NATO is offered as the leading example of an alliance that ought to be preserved. Russia and India are mentioned in a tone that is confident, bracing, congratulatory if slightly superior. An attitude as paternal, but rather less warming, appears in a paragraph on China. Its leaders "have not yet made the next series of fundamental choices about the character of their state. In pursuing advanced military capabilities that can threaten its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path"-our path, admittedly, but the right path for no other country in the twenty-first century. The authors bring back the unilateralist message flatly, to round out the document, but the unscheduled yet hardly avoidable thought of China has left an after-chill. In dealing with so vast a political and geographic entity and so substantial a portion of the human race, can we actually imagine that we ought not to hesitate before acting alone?
Section 9 concludes the document with a pledge by the United States "to dissuade future military competition"-a canny misuse of dissuade as a simple transitive verb with an impersonal object. Dissuade here means in fact preclude by the show of force. And the show may matter more, the document suggests, as we move farther from our own borders. "The presence of American forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of the U.S. commitments to allies and friends." The authors were well advised to cast that statement in a highly abstract form. It may require a mystical calculus to reckon how many troops are needed to perpetuate the symbolism in question on a cluster of bases like those the United States maintains in Okinawa. The forty-three thousand American soldiers now stationed on that island occupy the choicest one-fifth of the land, and school children pursue their studies under the roar of 26,000 flights of planes and helicopters a year: a landing or a takeoff about every ten minutes. Some unpleasant litigation in the 1990s, over incidents of rape, reckless driving and manslaughter, and the mass dumping of depleted uranium shells, suggests that gratitude is not the only common response to the symbol. But the idea that power could ever corrupt its possessor, or that it could be seen as corrupting, is not hinted at or properly to be inferred from a single detail of "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America." Defensive, ambitious, and self-contradictory as the document is, in the quality of its self-knowledge it is perhaps the most innocent statement of policy ever exhibited by a major power in the history of the world.
David Bromwich is the author of Politics by Other Means and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of On Liberty. |
