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The
Pretense of Strategy
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The
Pretense of Strategy
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The new American secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, likes to say that the United States needs a brand new approach to the use of military force. He stresses that the Cold War is over and that a leaner, less expensive high-tech military, plus a go-it-alone American national missile defense, is needed for the kinds of challenges that face the world’s self-proclaimed "indispensable nation" in the twenty-first century. Does he mean it? Rumsfeld himself is almost a Hollywood caricature of an old Cold Warrior. He was secretary of defense twenty-seven years ago and his return to high public office in the administration of George W. Bush resembles nothing so much as the 1982 resurrection of Yuri Andropov to succeed Brezhnev. Andropov, too, was supposed to give the aging Soviet empire a fresh look, even though, like Rumsfeld, he represented the most conservative forces in the regime. So far, the actual foreign policy actions of the Bush administration-particularly the unilateral decision to bomb Saddam Hussein’s Iraq- suggest not a fresh approach but a loss of prudence and a risky indifference to the opinions of other nations. The attack on Iraq makes no sense. If the issue is Saddam’s possible development of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, what is needed is an immediate return to U.N.-supervised inspections to find and dispose of them. But the United States has virtually discredited this most important approach to nonproliferation when it secretly infiltrated CIA covert operators onto the United Nations teams of post-Gulf War weapons inspectors in Iraq. President Bush said that his purpose in the recent bombing was to force Saddam to honor the commitments he made following his 1991 military defeat in "Desert Storm." But he and his team of old secretaries of defense (Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) and a retired general (Colin Powell) must know that the policies toward Iraq then put into place have been discredited and that many American allies (Egypt, France) and independent powers (Russia, China) demand that they be abandoned. The whole world is asking for a [following word is italicized] new, unified approach to Iraq, but this certainly did not include unilateral Anglo-American bombing. It is estimated that from the Gulf War of 1991 through 1998, the U.S.-sponsored blockade of Saddam Hussein has helped contribute to the deaths of an estimated half million Iraqi civilians due to disease, malnutrition, and inadequate medical care. Former president Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, took pride in the thought that this blockade was "unprecedented for its severity in the whole of world history." By the time Bush replaced Clinton, this draconian blockade had still not brought down Saddam Hussein, the single-minded goal of American policy in the area, but it had ensured that surviving Iraqis will hold long-lasting grudges against the American government and its citizens. Particularly in light of the new "Intifada" against Israel, unsanctioned and unprovoked American attacks against Iraq without overwhelming allied backing will only produce more recruits for terrorism and further alienate the nations that are usually sympathetic to the United States. Why then did the United States launch this risky and counterproductive assault? The context of American domestic politics offers the most important clues. George W. Bush lost the American presidential election both in terms of the overall vote and the actual vote in the state of Florida. He was nonetheless appointed to office by the narrowest possible majority of conservative Supreme Court justices who, with some apparent justification, concluded that the public wanted an end to the farce of the misadministered election. To say that Bush’s government lacks full legitimacy is to put it mildly. Probably the best thing going for Bush is that his opponent, Albert Gore, came across as lackluster and incapable of inspiring confidence in his ability to move beyond the false starts and dead-ends of Clinton policies. In terms of knowledge of the world, George W. is certainly the most inexperienced American president since the 1920s. He is acquainted with virtually no foreign leaders (except for Ariel Sharon, whom he met once on one of his three trips outside the U.S.) and is equally unknown to them. Bush the younger comes from a background of privilege-easy access to elite universities, where he spent most of his time drinking with his chums-and insider business deals that made him wealthy without working. His experience of a term-and-a-half as governor of Texas is palpably inadequate for attempting to forge a foreign policy for a narcissistic, inward-looking, deeply parochial nation that believes its wealth and power are both deserved. Thus far his main solution to these difficulties has been to make it hard for critics to attack him by decorating Washington with ethnically sensitive appointments. Bush has so far named to White House and cabinet positions prominent conservative women, Afro-American men and women, Hispanic-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and Japanese-Americans. They may or may not be any good, but it will be hard, if not impossible, to fire any of them. Equally important, Bush himself is as much part of the window-dressing as his appointments. His presentation of himself in public is calculated to disarm his critics. He comes across as theatrical rather than political-folksy, dressed in Texas cowboy hats and boots, speaking a little basic Spanish, and giving the people around him nonsensical nicknames. The new president is actually a ventriloquist’s doll. The unseen ventriloquists are former high officials of his father’s administration, whom he named to office because their experience supposedly compensated for his not having any and because that is what his father wanted him to do. These officials include Cheney and Powell as well as Condolezza Rice, a former official on Bush senior’s White House staff. Her uniquely irrelevant qualification to be National Security Adviser to the new president is that she is a Soviet specialist-that is, a Cold Warrior devoted to the Kremlinological study of a country that disintegrated a decade ago. All of these people, including their patron, George Bush [the following word is in italics] pere, have been seething with anger that Saddam Hussein survived the blitzkrieg they mounted against him in 1991. They are also fearful that their main claim to fame, victory in the war with Iraq, will not stand up to historical and comparative analysis as a successful use of force in order to achieve political ends. One of the main purposes of the new administration in foreign policy is to ensure that revisionist historians do not have their way with former President Bush’s war against Iraq. The occurrence of Gulf War syndrome, the use of depleted uranium ammunition, the slaughter of Iraqi prisoners by Gen. Barry McCaffrey’s 24th Infantry Division after the war had ended, and Saddam’s continuing unvanquished status in Baghdad have already made the Gulf War look less like the textbook-perfect exercise that Gen. Colin Powell likes to think it was. George W. Bush inherited his position from his father, and he seems to have an almost medieval devotion to honoring and enhancing his father’s legacy. The father-son hugging and kissing on January 20 that followed George W.’s swearing in as president was, to this television viewer, more than somewhat alarming. The air raid on Baghdad was George W.’s first presidential present to daddy of many more likely to come. It was comparable to the gift the president’s brother, Jeb, gave his elder brother during the presidential election. As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush found ways to rig the election in his state and to ensure that its administrators were Republican loyalists so that the outcome, no matter how implausibly close, would inevitably favor his brother. This is a close-knit family. What remains to be seen is whether, like so many Mafia dons laying claim to their territory, the Bush clan plans to launch any more risky military ventures in order to burnish their capo’s image. Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a tax-exempt nonprofit educational and research organization located in California, and the author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Copyright
Der Spiegel. Reprinted with permission. |