This article appeared in AToL
on December 14, 2005
That the US is now the world's sole remaining superpower is above
challenge. This status has affected the United States' approach to
formulating foreign and domestic policies in the post-Cold War era.
In foreign policy, the US has been operating on the basis that its
national values have been validated by triumph in the Cold War and that
its resultant sole-superpower status now earns it both the moral right
and the military means to spread such values over the whole world.
Resistance to such self-righteous values is now deem evil by US moral
imperialism, in need of elimination not by persuasion but by force.
This new approach has made the world less safe than it was during the
Cold War, the end of which briefly entertained a false hope for a new
age in which a world with only one superpower could thereafter live
without war, hot or cold. Instead, the world has been plunged into
successive holy wars of imperialistic moral conquest by the sole
remaining superpower, bringing escalating terrorist attacks on to the
US homeland. The impact on domestic policy from terrorist threats has
in turn been the wholesale suspension of civil liberties in the name of
homeland security.
Such holy wars of moral imperialism cannot be blamed entirely on
neo-conservatives in the second Bush administration. While the two wars
on Iraq were initiated by the two pere et cie Bush
administrations that sandwiched eight years of Clinton rule, the Bosnia
and Kosovo wars were the handiwork of Clinton administration
neo-liberals. The faith-based foreign policy of George W Bush echoes
the value-based interests of the foreign policy of Bill Clinton, such
as the grandiose aim of enlarging democracy by force around the world
and preventing mass starvation and ethnic genocide by spilling more
blood.
The Balkans adventure
The US under Clinton sent troops into Bosnia-Herzegovina with a host of
policy delusions, such as revitalizing an outmoded North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) to perpetuate European security dependence
on the US, ending a local war that could spill beyond the borders of
Croatia and Serbia, establishing a closer relationship with the Russian
military, demonstrating that the US was willing to use its super
military power to spread its national values overseas even though the
security of the US was not threatened and neutralizing domestic
criticism of amorality in a foreign policy based of realpolitik.
The wary US military demanded and received clear rules of engagement
toward these flamboyant political objectives, allowing soldiers who
were attacked, or threatened with attack, field authority to respond
with lethal force quickly and massively; exempting the military from
having to perform jobs of refugee resettlement, monitoring elections,
controlling civilian traffic, supplying food, clothing, fuel or other
basic needs to the civilian population; no hard time lines for moving
forces into Bosnia, hence allowing the military to enter slowly with
deliberation and in the safest possible way; committing to a clearly
defined departure date (December 1996) for military forces; limiting
the mission to peacekeeping and not peace enforcement and, if there
were major attacks on the Implementation Force, US forces would
withdraw; a solid understanding that "mission creep" would be firmly
resisted; provision of the best of the newest equipment to US forces on
the ground, in the air and on the sea, and the State Department
arrangement for military cooperation from neighboring states,
especially Hungary, Albania, Croatia and Serbia.
In fact, the US military served notice that it was the wrong tool for
achieving the administration's limited-war political objectives. It was
a perfectly appropriate position. The US military is arguably the best
in the world, best led, best equipped and best trained. But its
performance and morale are steadily eroded by assignments to missions
that are best handled by non-military means. When a well-oiled machine
is use inappropriately, both the machine and the task suffer. The
experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a nation that existed only in the
imagination of US ideologue policymakers, should have served as a clear
warning for Kosovo and Iraq. It was Bosnia that "animated our policy
towards Kosovo", Nicholas Burns, US ambassador to Greece, told Doug
Bandow, senior fellow at the conservative Cato Institute. Even though
the United States spent US$12 billion and occupied Bosnia for more than
three years, Clinton's arm-twisting Dayton scheme was a policy failure.
To this date, nationalist Serbs continue to dominate local politics and
refugees are not returning home. There is little home-grown economic
growth. The kind of democracy being introduced by the US "more
represents Boss Tweed than George Washington" as the US and its NATO
allies force Bosnians to live under a government that represents none
of them. Internecine local conflicts always have a longevity that
exceeds the US political attention span.
Bandow testified on March 10, 1999, before the House International
Relations Committee hearing on "The US Role in Kosovo" that the Clinton
administration attempted to impose "an artificial settlement in Kosovo
with little chance of genuine acceptance by either side". A US diplomat
in Belgrade was reported to have said: "If you're a Serb, hell yes, the
KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] is a terrorist organization." Even
moderate ethnic Albanians admit that the KLA had targeted Serb police
officers and other government employees, any Serbs viewed as abusing
Kosovars, as well as Albanian collaborators. Each cycle of violence
spawned more deadly violence. Belgrade understandably accused the US of
aiding and abetting terrorists in Kosovo directly but remotely from
Washington.
Intervention in Kosovo was even more perverse than in Bosnia. US
secretary of state Madeleine Albright warned: "We are not going to
stand by and watch the Serbian authorities do in Kosovo what they can
no longer get away with doing in Bosnia." She announced that the US
reserved the right to take unilateral action against the Serbian
government, saying, "We know what we need to know to believe we are
seeing ethnic cleansing all over again." Not only did the US and its
NATO allies have no workable plan behind their intervention of moral
imperialism, Washington's proposal for autonomy status satisfied no one
and required yet another interminable occupation, as the opposing sides
remained determined to continue fighting. The conflict in Kosovo is a
complex clash of mutually exclusive claims, a conflict between
political/cultural legitimacy principle and demographic principle,
which is aggravated by conflicting historical grievances.
For more than six years, the small Balkan province of Kosovo was the
victim of an ambitious but futile nation-building experiment by the US,
implemented by a United Nations mission exercising dictatorial
authority to implement democracy, backed by a NATO-led "peacekeeping"
force, in a region torn by decades of bitter, bloody ethnic clashes
between an ever more assertive Albanian majority and an isolated Serb
minority. Originally, nation-building referred to the efforts of newly
independent nations to mold former colonial territories carved up by
colonial powers without regard to ethnic or natural boundaries into
viable and coherent national entities. Nation-building has come to be
used by the US since the end of the Cold War in a completely different
context from its original meaning, with reference to what has been
succinctly described by James Dobbins, former special envoy for
Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, as "the use of armed
force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin an enduring transition
to democracy". Nation-building is lauded as "the inescapable
responsibility of the world's only superpower".
At the cost of about $1.3 billion a year, some 11,000 international
civil servants and police officers have been trying to nation-build by
constructing new make-believe ministries, an ineffectual parliament,
corrupt local councils, a demoralized bureaucracy, dysfunctional
courts, foreign-controlled customs and a militarized police force that
answers to foreign commands, as well as new media orchestrated to
spread pro-West propaganda. The region remains in economic depression
as the poorest part of the Balkans, and the least stable. Enmity
between the Serbs and Albanians continues to run deep. Estimates of
unemployment range from 30-70%. The regional government is bankrupt,
and the economy continues to shrink every year. Such are the gifts of
US moral imperialism. The same pathetic fiasco appears to be repeating
itself in "democratic" Iraq, which is expected to slide into civil war
as soon as US forces withdraw.
Nuclear power
Iraq's strategic error was its premature geopolitical neutrality. Had
Iraq placed itself under the protection of a nuclear power prior to
achieving its own independent nuclear capability, it would not have
been invaded by anyone. The tragedy of Iraq was not that a weak
non-nuclear power was invaded arbitrarily by the sole superpower, but
that the world order of sovereign states failed structurally to
preserve the sanctity of sovereignty. Other nuclear powers in the
system failed to preserve the principle of sovereignty by protecting a
helpless, small non-nuclear state from naked aggression on flimsy
pretext by the sole nuclear superpower.
Whereas nuclear-arms control and non-proliferation during the Cold War
were complementary regimes to prevent a world-destroying nuclear
exchange between two superpowers, such regimes since the dissolution of
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have been modified by the US
agenda of depriving an "axis of evil" of an effective nuclear
deterrence against US military coercion. The invasion and occupation of
Iraq were based on a pretext of eliminating the proven existence of
weapons of mass destruction, not just suspected programs to produce
such weapons. The fact that no such weapons were found after the
invasion was dismissed as immaterial. The issue was that Iraq could be
logically expected to require nuclear weapons and could have had such
weapons if it had not been invaded. "Better safe than sorry" was the
modus operandi of indiscriminate preemption, notwithstanding that the
logic to require nuclear weapons on the part of small nations is
traceable to a belligerent US militaristic policy of preemption.
US nuclear-arms policy echoes century-old US societal values toward gun
ownership. Extremists on the US political spectrum regularly argue that
guns do not kill people; evil people, or criminals, kill people. Thus
anyone the US considers unfit to claim the natural right to own guns
must first be labeled evil. Extending the same logic, nuclear weapons
do not kill; evil governments do. This peculiarly American rationale
extends to US posture on nuclear proliferation. World safety is not
threatened by US possession of nuclear weapons because US values by
definition are righteous. The United States now possesses 10,300
warheads, 20 times the total number possessed by all the other six
nuclear powers besides Russia. While the US has reduced its arsenal of
warheads from 150,000 to 10,300, the TNT tonnage of destruction power
with bigger warheads still commands the equivalent of 120,000-130,000
Hiroshima-sized bombs. The US nuclear arsenal is designed not merely
for massive destruction to win a war, but total destruction of all
opponents to rid the world of evil.
A 1998 study ("Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear
Weapons Since 1940" by Stephen Schwartz) ranks US nuclear-weapons
spending against all other federal government spending from 1940-96, as
documented by the Office of Management and Budget. During this period,
the US spent nearly $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and
weapons-related programs in constant 1996 dollars. Non-nuclear-related
national defense totaled $13.2 trillion. Social Security, at $7.9
trillion, is not government spending per se but funds collected from
payroll taxes and redistributed to older citizens or placed in the
trust fund. Nuclear-weaponry spending over this 56-year period exceeded
the combined total federal spending for education; training,
employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and
environment protection; general science, space, and technology;
community and regional development (including disaster relief); law
enforcement; and energy production and regulation (including nuclear
energy). Such non-military spending is the center of US core values,
and the influence of the US would have been enhanced with better
funding. On average, the United States has spent $98 billion a year on
nuclear weapons, or $1.40 per capita per day, while more than 20% of
the world's people live on less than $1 per day.
By investing its $162 billion trade surplus (2004) with the US in US
sovereign debt, China alone provides enough credit to finance the US
nuclear arsenal which someday may be used against China, a
card-carrying evil nation on account of its being communist.
The US has steadfastly refused to adopt a no-first-use commitment on
nuclear weapons. Yet it presumes the God-given right to attack any
nation with the suspected intention to develop nuclear arms.
Non-proliferation has been distorted by US machination into a
counterproductive regime. The US policy of indiscriminate preemption
now encourages all nations to try to achieve nuclear capability as soon
as possible, for the danger of attack from the US resides in the window
of the defenseless vulnerability between planned acquisition and actual
possession, as only non-nuclear nations are at risk from US superpower
conventional forces with counterstrike immunity to the US itself,
except via terrorist attacks.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace estimates that Israel
now possesses between 100 and 170 nuclear warheads, but Israel is a
client state of the US and thus enjoys immunity from non-proliferation
sanctions. With Iraq and Libya disarmed of official nuclear-weapon
intentions, the Arab world now is nuclear-free, at least temporarily,
but the Middle East is not, with as many as 170 nuclear warheads in the
Israeli arsenal. Nuclear-arms-control scholastics dictates that nuclear
deterrence only works with parity between antagonists. While the
Arab-Israeli conflict remains basically unresolved, the absence of
nuclear weapons on the Arab side is highly destabilizing to regional
peace through the doctrine of deterrence. Peace is the inevitable
victim of power imbalance.
The fact is that all weapons of mass destruction are inherently evil,
regardless of who owns them. And the nation that uses weapons of mass
destruction first is evil beyond redemption. For the sole superpower
that has used such weapons twice with the flimsiest excuses and has
since jealously guarded its right to first use against all others to
deny the right of allegedly evil target nations to possess nuclear
weapons is hypocrisy of the highest order.
Arms control as an international regime is the enemy of disarmament.
Non-proliferation is a selective regime than applies only to
non-nuclear nations. The world is not safe unless and until universal
nuclear disarmament comes into full effect.
The award of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Atomic
Energy Agency and its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, whom the Bush
administration had recently tried but failed to remove from his post,
is an indication of the disconnect between US nuclear policy and world
opinion. ElBaradei expressed pre-invasion skepticism over the
non-proliferation pretext of US invasion of Iraq and he has declined to
support the US claim that Iran is secretly implementing a program to
produce nuclear weapons. Echoing world opinion, ElBaradei said: "The
Prize recognizes the role of multilateralism in resolving all of the
challenges we are facing today. It will strengthen my resolve and that
of my colleagues to continue to speak truth to power." He might have
said "superpower".
Crusades, then and now
Basic to US national values are individual freedom and democracy, which
the US now aims to spread around the world even though the current
manifestation of such values is hardly recognizable from their original
form. These values are not abstract concepts with natural universality.
The US view of freedom and its version of democracy are deeply and
fundamentally rooted in its unique historical conditions, which are far
from universally shared. The global propagation of such values amounts
to nothing more than moral imperialism. And the authority to decide
which sovereign nation in the world order of sovereign nations is evil
has not been granted to the US by any global democratic process. Such
awesome authority has been usurped by the US on the basis of military
and economic power, and is not accepted by others around the world,
especially those who have been arbitrarily accused of being evil.
No one outside of the US voted for the US president to represent them.
A sizable number of the world's citizens consider the US president evil
by the nature of US policies. As a universal principle of democracy,
the critics of the United States have as much right to their opinion as
US policymakers have about the morality of other nations. The US
invasion of Iraq was not sanctioned by world public opinion or even by
the United Nations. The US forgets that the world organization is
called "United Nations", not "United Nation" led by a superpower, the
way the US federal government often forgets that the name of the
country is "United States", not "United State" led by a strongman. In
fact, US unilateralism and intolerance of legitimate dissent are the
reasons there is rising anti-US reaction around the world.
The US is now pursuing a foreign policy that harks back to the medieval
rite of trial by ordeal based on the principle of might is right. This
militarized strategy of imposing US national values on alien societies
by force is rationalized by the empty promise of permanent peace, since
nations of similar values are supposed to be less likely to resort to
armed conflict to settle their differences. This view has not been
validated by actual events.
Throughout history, nations of similar faith and values have gone to
war against one another not over ideological differences, but to engage
in power struggles and to settle territorial or economic disputes, even
after an external common enemy has been identified. The Christian
Crusades against Islamic lands were clear examples. Even with Islam
identified as a common enemy, the Crusades failed to unit the European
Christians, who continued to war among themselves. The current US
crusade to make the world safe for freedom and democracy in its own
image is a dangerous delusion of grandeur. Like all crusades in the
past, this one will also cause great destruction and misery for no
redeeming purpose.
Global terrorism shares common operational tactics, but the strategic
political aims of terrorism in every country threatened by it are
unique, as are the conditions that bring them about. There is no common
goal or solution for global terrorism. All terrorisms have localized
causes and localized solutions; only the tactics are universal.
The historical Crusades were a long series of expeditionary military
campaigns with a religious pretext sanctioned by the popes that took
place during the 11th through 13th centuries. They began as Catholic
endeavors to capture from the Muslims holy Jerusalem, which the
Christians had never controlled politically in their entire history,
even during Jesus' triumphant entry into the city almost two millennia
ago. The Crusades developed into extensive territorial wars devoid of
Christian morals.
The Crusades gave birth to nationalism in Europe that subsequently
plunged the world into the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars of
the 20th century. They allowed the papacy to consolidate its systematic
dominion over the then known world. They demoralized the Crusaders
rather than saving the souls of those against whom they crusaded. They
changed Christian Europe more than the Islamic Middle East. They
weakened Christianity more than Islam.
George W Bush's new crusade against Islamic terrorism may also change
the US more than the rest of the world, and not toward more freedom and
democracy. When his crusade against evil finally ends, Hamiltonian
capitalism, like feudalism of the old Crusades, may well subside if not
disappear from the US, and a new Jeffersonian economic democracy
aspired to by the founders of the nation may see a revival.
The Crusades failed in all three of their geopolitical objectives. The
European Christians failed to win the Holy Land. They also failed to
check the global advance of Islam. They failed to heal the schism
between the East and the West in the Christian world by focusing on a
common foe. Eastern Orthodox Christians saw the Crusades as attacks
also on them by the Western Church of Rome, especially after the sack
of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. Despite the fact that they
also belonged to Western Christianity, countries in Central Europe were
the most skeptical about the idea of Crusades. Many cities in Hungary
were sacked by passing Crusader armies. Poland and Hungary were
subjected to conquest from the Teutonic Crusaders. It is likely that
the US "war on terrorism" will also fail in all its geopolitical
objectives.
There is symmetry between crusade and jihad. In the Islamic world, the
term "jihad" has positive connotations that include a much broader
meaning of general personal and spiritual struggle, while the term
"crusade" has negative connotations of institutional aggression. In
truth, the Crusaders committed atrocities not just against Muslims but
also against Jews and even other Christians. The saintly objectives of
the Crusades were transformed into causes of great evil. As a school of
practical religion and morals, the Crusades were no doubt disastrous
for most of the Crusaders. The campaigns were attended by all the usual
demoralizing influences of war and the long sojourn of armies in enemy
territory. The occupation of Iraq is having the same demoralizing
effect on the US military.
The vices of the crusading camps were a source of deep shame in Europe,
as the obscene abuses of the US occupation forces in Iraq are a source
of shame in the US. Popes lamented them. Like Robert McNamara, who
almost single-handedly led the US into a quagmire of fantasy escalation
to win an unwinnable war in Vietnam and later confessed his errors and
regrets in public long after retirement, Bernard of Clairvaux
(1090-1153) exposed the evils of the Crusades long after he preached in
favor of a Second Crusade. At Easter 1146 at Vezelay, Bernard preached
his sermon in front of King Louis VII of France, who became inspired to
take up the cross and spent the years 1147-49 conducting the Second
Crusade. Many writers have since set forth the fatal mistake of those
who were eager to make a conquest of the earthly Jerusalem while
forgetful of the City of God as annunciated by Saint Augustine. "Many
wended their way to the holy city, unmindful that our Jerusalem is not
here." So wrote the English writer Walter Map (c 1104-c 1210) after
Saladin's victories in 1187. Similarly, it is a travesty of truth to
claim that democracy can be born of a regime change forced on any
nation by a foreign power. The bogus democratic governments that the US
sets up in conquered lands are the most effective arguments against
democracy.
The schism between the East and the West was widened by the insolent
action of the crusading popes in establishing Latin patriarchates in
the East and their consent to the establishment of the Latin empire
over Constantinople. The institutional memory of the indignities heaped
upon Greek emperors and ecclesiastics has not faded completely even
now. Another evil of the Crusades was the deepening of the contempt and
hatred in the minds of the Mohammedans for the doctrines of
Christianity. The savagery of the Christian crusading soldiers, their
unscrupulous treatment of alien property, and the bitter rancor in the
crusading camps were a disgraceful spectacle that left a lasting and
bitter image for the peoples of the East.
While the Crusades were still in progress, conscientious objection was
made in Western Europe that they were not followed by spiritual fruits,
but that on the contrary, the Saracens, who had invaded France in the
8th century and occupied Sicily from the 9th to the 11th century, had
been converted to blasphemy rather than to the true faith. The cronyism
and profiteering that now permeate the reconstruction of Iraq make
mockery of free markets and democratic processes. The systemic
persecution of Islamic clerics by the US occupation in Iraq and
elsewhere will leave a gulf of hate between Muslims and Christians for
generations to come.
The Crusades gave occasion for the rapid development of the system of
papal indulgences, which became a dogma of the medieval theologians.
The practice, once begun by Urban II at the very outset of the
movement, was extended further and further until indulgence for sins
was promised not only for the warrior who took up arms against the
Saracens in the East, but for those who were willing to fight against
Christian heretics in Western Europe. Indulgences became a part of the
very heart of the sacrament of penance, and did incalculable damage to
the moral sense of Christendom. To this evil was added the exorbitant
taxation levied by the popes and their emissaries. Matthew of Paris, an
English historian and a monk of St Albans, in his Chronica majora complained
of this extortion for the expenses of the Crusades as a stain upon that
holy cause. Similarly, the financial drain from the "war on terrorism"
acts as a cancer in the US economy and forces supply-side theologians
to accept fiscal deficits as patriotic dogma while drastically cutting
social programs at home to reduce government spending.
The spell of ignorance and narrow prejudice that separates
civilizations can only be broken with extended peaceful interaction.
Peace alone will open a new horizon of thought, and within that
horizon, institutions and aspiration of a new civilization of diversity
would be nurtured from reason and human commonality. The modernity that
liberated the West from its dark ages, which some Western scholars
accuse the Muslim world of lacking, was in no small way inspired by
exposure to Eastern cultures. After the lapse of six centuries and
more, the Crusades still have their stirring negative lessons of wisdom
and warning that the Bush team and subsequent US leadership would do
well to examine.
War games
This mentality of superpower moral imperialism is not unique to the
United States. History is a long parade of such collective
self-righteous human afflictions. The US is merely the latest
manifestation. Yet there are some aspects of US moral imperialism that
are unique.
The US was born of a secessionist movement from an emerging British
Empire. The national psyche of the young nation was molded from a
deliberate rejection of the societal values of the Old World. The idea
of a United States was inspired by new ideals of liberty, individualism
and anti-statism. The new society was the child of 18th-century
liberalism with the promise of a new world that was expected to be free
of feudal hierarchy and superstition. In that sense, the evolution of
the US into another old-style superpower in the super-statist mode is a
momentous disappointment in history, rather than the end of history.
The US has failed the promise of a New World in a new age. It has
evolved into a superpower in military force wrapped around an
underdeveloped society in moral strength. The threat to the founding
ideals of the United States from the "war on terrorism" is greater than
that from terrorism itself.
The reasons for this moral failure are complex. Yet much has to do with
the experiential void on the real horrors of war on the part of the US
public. The US had been exempt from the destructiveness of war on its
homeland until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the
exception of the War of 1812.
Pearl Harbor was a precision attack on a US military base on an
overseas island territory. At the time of its attack, Hawaii was not
yet a state, but a colony with a less odious label. Most Americans then
viewed Hawaii as not much different than the Philippines, a US colonial
outpost in the Pacific. The Japanese attack brought on a response to
damaged national pride that led directly to US participation in World
War II not because the survival of the United States had been
threatened by a Germany at war in Europe, but because US military
assets in a US overseas island colony were attacked and destroyed by a
Japan that had viewed a US oil embargo against it as an overt act of
war that left Japan with less than three months of oil supply.
The Japanese militarists had wrongly calculated that US losses of
Pacific naval assets in the Pearl Harbor attack would force the United
States to accept a Japanese sphere of influence in Asia until it could
rebuild its Pacific Fleet, at which time Japan could reach naval parity
with the US. Had the Japanese delayed the Pearl Harbor attack by a
year, the history of Europe might have been very different, as Britain
might not have survived German aggression without direct US
intervention. Or if the technology of war had extended the distance of
force projection to overcome the oceans to neutralize the safe-haven
protection of the US mainland, World War II might have turned out
differently, without uninterrupted US war productivity.
Today, the US is no longer a natural safe haven from attacks of all
kinds protected by two oceans. Yet US policies continue to act as if
such vulnerability does not exist and that the United States can handle
any threats to its national survival.
The fact that US civilian experience of war has been limited largely to
movies that depict death and displacement of foreign civilians and
widespread destruction of cities on foreign lands tends to reinforce
the fantasy in the United States that the missionary spread of
righteousness US values by military means can be a risk-free endeavor.
US soldiers went to war overseas in the secure milieu of a military
institution and experienced war as a highly structured game, much like
the game of professional football or hockey, albeit massively more
bloody. The war dead came home in sanitized flag-draped coffins and the
survivors came home well scrubbed in fresh uniforms to partake in
victory parades on Memorial Day. Docudramas on battles of the previous
wars are played on television as entertainment, in locales that are
exotic beyond the realm of discourse.
Hollywood celebrated the mujahideen as freedom fighters against Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan in an endless supply of B-movies. When the
Soviets left Afghanistan in disarray in 1989, the communist government
remained in power in Kabul, but soon regional factions led by local
mujahideen supported by the US began fighting one another trying to
replace it. In 1992, the government in Kabul fled, and a terrible fight
between different warlords destroyed most of the city. This continued
also when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996.
The Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers
to fight in the Balkans. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the
US Congress' Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the
war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah
International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. Michael Moran,
MSNBC's international editor, wrote on August 24, 1998, that "at the
CIA, 'blowback' is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an
operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new
public enemy No 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact
that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves
again the old adage: reap what you sow." The US did not turn against
the Taliban until bin Laden went to Afghanistan. Clinton sent a missile
to try to kill him.
The disastrous Battle of Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, has been
memorialized in the hit action movie Black Hawk Down as a
tribune to battlefield bravery and camaraderie. There was an unspoken
assumption that bombs only fell on people who speak strange languages
and cities with exotic architecture. Accordingly, US society as a whole
felt safe enough to construct a social fabric that views government as
an intrusion, collective efforts as a violation of individualism, with
a naive faith that most problems can be better solved by market forces
and those that cannot, voluntarism can handle well enough.
The forgotten war
The War of 1812 was a forgotten war for good reasons. That war was the
only war fought on US soil, in the course of which Washington, DC, was
sacked by British forces. That is a reality that the United States does
not want its citizens to remember, lest such memories fan pacifism. The
immediate origins of the war were foreign seizure of US ships, insults
and injuries to US seamen by the British navy, and British interference
on rapid western expansion of the US frontier.
British outrages at sea took two distinct forms. One was the seizure
and forced sale of US merchant ships and their cargoes for allegedly
violating the British blockade of Europe. Although France had declared
a counter-blockade of the British Isles and had also seized US ships,
England was the chief offender because its navy had greater command of
the seas. The second, more insulting outrage was the capture of men
from US vessels for forced service in the Royal Navy. The pretext for
impressment was the search for British deserters who, the British
claimed, had taken employment on US vessels. The British seized 1,000
US ships, the French about 500. Between 1803 and1812, British captains
took more than 10,000 US citizens to man British ships.
As with the Iraq war of 2003, the US entered the War of 1812 with
confused objectives and divided domestic loyalties and finally had to
made peace without settling any of the issues that had originally
induced the nation to go to war. Yet unlike the holy wars of the past
decade, the War of 1812 had its roots in upholding the nation's right
to international commerce amid great-power conflicts.
Beginning in 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte's Continental System clashed with
the 1807 British Orders in Council, establishing embargoes that made
international trade precarious. The maritime war between Britain and
France was a great opportunity for neutral trade. Exports from the US
rose from $20 million in 1790 to $140 million by 1807. The outbreak of
war in Europe in 1793 saw the British government gradually enforcing
increasingly rigorous policies toward neutral trade. To counter British
naval superiority, France had opened its colonial ports, which had been
closed before the war, to neutral trade. Britain pledged to put an end
to all neutral trade. The US held that if a ship was neutral, the goods
on board were also neutral, hence the slogan "Free ships make free
goods." Britain on the other hand followed its Rule of 1756, a policy
the US had accepted as part of Jay's Treaty of 1795, which held that
neutrals could not in wartime engage in trade that had been prohibited
during peacetime.
As the US after World War II has since done, restricting trade was a
policy that Britain had long used to destroy an enemy's commerce. Once
war was declared on post-revolutionary France, Britain again undertook
a maritime war against French commerce. The renewal of the trade war
after the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens put the whole of the
carrying trade to Europe into the hands of neutrals. Britain decided to
end this trade with blockades and ever more rigorous orders in council.
Orders in council issued on May 16, 1806, known as the "Fox Blockade",
put the coast of Europe from the Elbe in Germany to Brest in France, a
distance of almost 1,300 kilometers, in a state of blockade. In
response Napoleon, in his Berlin Decree of November 21, 1806, declared
the British Isles in "a state of blockade, forbade all correspondence
or trade with England, defined all articles of English manufacture or
produce as contraband, and the property of all British subjects as the
lawful prize of war". Britain retaliated with more stringent orders in
council. The orders of January 7, 1807, prohibited coastal trade with
France and its allies. Those of November banned neutrals from trading
with ports from which British ships were prohibited; only by going
through a British port, and paying duties and obtaining a license,
could a neutral trade with an open European port. British prime
minister Spencer Perceval (1809-12) explained, "The object of the
orders in council was not to destroy the trade of the Continent, but to
force the Continent to trade with us."
From 1803-07 the British seized 528 US-flagged ships, while the French
seized 206 between 1803 and the end of 1806. Maritime trade for
neutrals was profitable but increasingly dangerous.
The US under president Thomas Jefferson responded to these restrictions
on trade by passing the Embargo Act of December 1807, prohibiting US
ships from trading with Europe and banning the importation of
manufactured goods from Britain. The embargo was repealed in March 1809
and replaced by a Non-Intercourse Act, opening trade with all but
France, Britain and their colonies. "Our lot happens to have been cast
in an age when two nations to whom circumstances have given a temporary
superiority over others, the one by land, the other by sea," Jefferson
commented. "Degrading themselves thus from the character of lawful
societies into lawless bands of robbers and pirates, they are abusing
their brief ascendancy by desolating the world with blood and rapine.
Against such a banditti, war had become less ruinous than peace, for
then peace was a war on one side only." It is an attitude that Islamic
terrorism shares today about the US.
Jefferson's embargo was especially unpopular in New England, where
merchants preferred the national indignities of impressment to the
halting of overseas commerce. (Corporate America today is similarly
showing signs of increasing unhappiness with confrontational US foreign
policies.) This discontent contributed to the calling of the Hartford
Convention during the War of 1812 to consider the sentiments of New
England.
Prior to the war, New England Federalists had opposed the Embargo Act
of 1807 and other trade-restricting government measures. Many of them
continued to oppose the government after fighting had begun. The
Federalist Party was the first anti-war party in the history of the
United States. Although manufacturing fostered by trade restriction on
manufactured imports, together with contraband trade, brought wealth to
the region, the War of 1812, and its expenses became steadily more
repugnant to the New Englanders. The Federalist leaders encouraged
disaffection over government policy. The New England states refused to
surrender their militia to national service, especially when New
England was threatened with invasion by Napoleon in 1814. The federal
war loan of 1814 got almost no support in New England, despite war
prosperity there. Federalist extremists, such as John Lowell and
Timothy Pickering, contemplated a separate peace between New England
and Great Britain.
Finally, in October 1814, the Massachusetts legislature issued a call
to the other New England states for a conference in Hartford,
Connecticut. Representatives were sent by the state legislatures of
Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island; other delegates from New
Hampshire and Vermont were popularly chosen by the Federalists. The
meetings were held in secret. George Cabot, the head of the
Massachusetts delegation and a moderate Federalist, presided. The
proposal to secede from the Union was discussed and rejected, the
grievances of New England were reviewed, and such matters as the use of
the militia by federal authorities were thrashed out. The final report
issued on January 5, 1815, arraigned president James Madison's
administration and the war and proposed several constitutional
amendments that would redress what the New Englanders considered the
unfair advantage given to the south under the constitution.
Only the news of Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans and of the
Treaty of Ghent ending the war made the recommendations of the
convention a dead letter. The Hartford Convention continued the view of
states' rights as the refuge of sectional groups, and it sealed the
destruction of the Federalist Party, which never regained its lost
prestige. Concern for states' rights and thoughts of secession were not
exclusive or original to the south. Unpopular and unsuccessful wars can
topple governments and break up nations.
The War of 1812 was supported by a group of young
Democratic-Republicans known as the "War Hawks", led by House Speaker
Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Calhoun of South Carolina. Clay was the
leader of the American System in opposition to British-dominated
globalized free trade. He was the original anti-globalization
politician. The War Hawks advocated going to war against Britain for a
variety of reasons, mostly related to the interference of the Royal
Navy in US shipping, which the War Hawks believed hurt the US economy
and injured US prestige. War Hawks from the western states also
believed that the British were encouraging native Americans on the
frontier to attack US settlements, and so they called for an invasion
of British North America (Canada) and pushing Britain off the continent
once and for all. To Canadians, the war was clearly a case of naked US
aggression, much as the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq is viewed
today by many around the world.
On June 1, 1812, Madison gave a speech in Congress, recounting US
grievances against Britain, after which the House of Representatives
quickly voted 79-49 to declare war, and after much debate, the Senate
also voted for war, 19-13. President Madison's use of economic pressure
to force England to repeal its blockade in fact succeeded. The revival
of the Non-Intercourse Act against Britain, prohibiting all trade with
England and its colonies, coincided with a poor grain harvest in
England and with a growing need of US provisions to supply the British
troops fighting the French in Spain. As a result, on June 16, 1812, the
British foreign minister announced that the blockade would be relaxed
on US shipping. Had there been a trans-Atlantic cable, war might have
been averted. The conflict formally began on June 18 when Madison
signed the measure into law.
This was the first time that the new US nation had declared war on
another nation, and the congressional vote would prove to be the
closest vote to declare war in US history. None of the 39 Federalists
in Congress voted in favor of the war; critics of war would
subsequently refer to it as "Mr Madison's War". The slogans such as
LBJ's War, Clinton's War and Bush's War are signs of deep division in
US politics that steadily eats away national unity.
The War of 1812 was sideshow of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe; the main
event of 1812 was Napoleon's invasion of Russia. The low point came on
August 19, 1814, when a force of some 4,000 British troops under
Major-General Robert Ross landed on the Patuxent River and marched on
Washington, DC. At the Battle of Bladensburg, five days later, Ross
easily dispersed 5,000 US militia, naval gunners, and regulars hastily
gathered together to defend the capital. The British then entered
Washington, burned the Capitol, the White House and other public
buildings, and returned to their ships. Britain, the then superpower,
learning from the disastrous Revolutionary War, realized that military
occupation was not a viable policy.
The war created a new sense of nationalism in both Canada and the
United States. The successful defense of the Canadian provinces against
US invasion ultimately ensured the survival of Canada as a distinct
nation, and the end of the war marked the decline of a long-standing
desire of the US to see the British Empire expelled from North America.
Peace between the US and British North America also meant that native
Americans could no longer use conflicts between the two powers to
defend native lands against the expansion of white settlement.
The war progressed through three distinct stages. In the first, lasting
until the spring of 1813, England was so hard-pressed in Europe that it
could spare neither men nor ships in any great number for the conflict
in North America. The United States was free to take the initiative, to
invade Canada, and to send out cruisers and privateers against enemy
shipping. During the second stage, lasting from early 1813 to the
beginning of 1814, England was able to establish a tight blockade but
still could not materially reinforce the troops in Canada. In this
stage the US Army, having gained experience, won its first successes.
The third stage, in 1814, was marked by the constant arrival in North
America of British regulars and naval reinforcements, which enabled the
enemy to raid the North American coast almost at will and to take the
offensive in several quarters. At the same time, in this final stage of
the war, US forces fought their best fights and won their most
brilliant victories. It is a law of conflict that forces defending the
homeland command decisive advantage over invading forces. That
advantage was neutralized in Iraq by the infiltration of the Iraqi high
command by US special operations.
According to Office of the Chief of Military History of the US Army,
British Major-General Sir Edward Pakenham was sent to America to take
command of the expedition. On Christmas Day 1814, Pakenham arrived at
the mouth of the Mississippi to find his troops disposed on a narrow
isthmus below New Orleans between the Mississippi River and a cypress
swamp. They had landed two weeks earlier at a shallow lagoon some 16km
east of New Orleans and had already fought one engagement. In this
encounter, on December 23, General Jackson, who had taken command of
the defenses on December 1, almost succeeded in cutting off an advance
detachment of 2,000 British, but after a three-hour fight in which
casualties on both sides were heavy, he was compelled to retire behind
fortifications covering New Orleans.
The news of the peace settlement at Ghent on Christmas Eve, followed
two weeks later by Jackson's triumph in New Orleans, allowed the war as
a whole to be popularly regarded in the US as a great victory. Yet at
best it was a draw. US strategy had centered on the conquest of Canada
and the harassment of British shipping; but the land campaign failed,
and during most of the war the navy was bottled up behind a tight
British blockade of the North American coast. Ironically, while Jackson
won the Battle of New Orleans against the British in a demonstration of
US resolve, some two centuries later, President Bush lost the Battle of
New Orleans to a hurricane in a demonstration of US vulnerability.
If it favored neither side, the War of 1812 at least taught the United
States several lessons. Artillery contributed to US successes at
Chippewa, Sackett's Harbor, Norfolk, the siege of Fort Erie, and New
Orleans. The war also boosted the reputation of the Corps of Engineers,
a branch that owed its efficiency chiefly to the Military Academy.
Academy graduates completed the fortifications at Fort Erie, built Fort
Meigs, planned the harbor defenses of Norfolk and New York, and
directed the fortifications at Plattsburg. Almost two centuries later,
the Corps of Engineers failed to defend New Orleans from Hurricane
Katrina because of budget cuts. If larger numbers of infantrymen had
been as well trained as the artillerymen and engineers, the course of
the War of 1812 might have been entirely different and Canada might
have become a part of the US.
Sea power played a fundamental role in the war. The militia performed
as well as the regular army. The defeats and humiliations of the
regular forces during the first years of the war matched those of the
militia, just as in a later period the Kentucky volunteers at the
Thames and the Maryland militia before Baltimore proved that the state
citizen soldier could perform well. The keys to the militiamen's
performance, of course, were training and leadership, the two areas
over which the national government had little control. The militia,
occasionally competent, was never dependable, and in the nationalistic
period that followed the war when the exploits of the regulars were
justly celebrated, an ardent young secretary of war, John Calhoun,
would be able to convince Congress and the nation that the first line
of defense should be a standing national army. The US has since moved
toward an all-volunteer army exempting the rich and the educated from
military service and from harm's way in foreign wars. Decisions on war
now are made by those whose children would not have to fight. Actual
battles are now fought by those who are grossly under-represented in
the US system of representative democracy. Little wonder that US policy
has become warlike.
The War of 1812 was fought over trade and territory. It was a
comparatively rational war with potential winners and losers measurable
by success in economic interests. The "war on terrorism" is a holy war
against evil. There are no winners in a holy war, for one man's
holiness can be another man's evil. In the interconnected world of the
21st century, no nation can wage war with immunity on its homeland. A
global "war on terror" cannot be waged with a homeland safe haven. The
US public who fervently support foreign wars need to understand that
such support is not like cheerleading at a football game. Foreign wars
now come with serious bloody consequences at home that they were
hitherto only familiar with on the television screen. What happened to
Baghdad can happen to New York or Chicago, and the dead bodies can be
those of US citizens.
The 'global war on extremism'
In an item titled "Calling Islamism the enemy", on January 29, 2004,
Daniel Pipes, founder and director of Project for the New American
Century and son of Professor Richard Pipes, Harvard historian of Russia
and communism, wrote in his weblog:
David E Kaplan of US News and World
Report who wrote The Saudi Connection: "Nearly four years after
[September 11, 2001], officials have finally figured out who the enemy
is. The White House's new counter-terrorism strategy, now being
revamped at the National Security Council, will focus more sharply on
Islamic extremism, not terrorism. One important sign of the change:
policymakers are ready to abandon their shorthand for the conflict -
GWOT, or the global war on terrorism. The likely new name is simply WOE
- the war on extremism. The reason, explains a senior national-security
official: 'Terrorism is the method rather than the enemy.'" (Sometimes, it's just all in the name, US
News & World Report, June 6, 2005) In this context, the term
"global war on extremism (GWOE)" appears first to have been mentioned
in print on March 18, 2005, by Henry C K Liu in Asia Times, with
reference to the Pentagon's 2005 Third Quadrennial Review.
A month after my aforementioned GWOE article in Asia Times Online
(Militarism and the war on drugs, Part 5 of the World Order, Failed States and Terrorism
series), Jim Hoagland, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote in the
Washington Post ("A shifting focus on terrorism", April 24):
A new look for President Bush's global
war on terrorism sits atop Condoleezza Rice's early to-do list at the
State Department. Expect fairly soon some useful new handles on the
problem and a more coherent overall strategy to guide the struggle that
the bureaucracy abbreviates as GWOT … Although greatly reduced since
Rice replaced Colin Powell at Foggy Bottom, wrangling between the
departments of State and Defense continues - this time over operational
details of the National Security Policy Directive that is being pulled
together for what some policymakers are starting to call the global war
on extremism (GWOE). Moreover, the snippets of the internal debate that
have emerged do not make it clear that the administration will
acknowledge the politically sensitive objective of rolling up the
religious networks that produce and support the global jihadists of the
Wahhabi, or Salafi, sect of Islam. If not, the Bush team will fight on
with one hand tied behind its back.
Those caveats, however, should not obscure the importance of the
refocusing and redefining exercise going on behind closed doors at the
White House. In the election campaign and inaugural period, official
Washington lost focus on the war on terrorism and, to a lesser extent,
on the closely related battle for democracy in Iraq.
A Pentagon concept paper that sought to spell out new ways of looking
at the war on terrorism languished at the White House for a year. The
failure of the administration to move urgently to name a new ambassador
to Iraq signaled the loss of US political and diplomatic momentum after
the January 30 elections there.
But now sitting in the cabinet, Rice has pumped new energy and
discipline into a fractious system that languished when she was Bush's
national security adviser. She moved quickly to establish clearer
definitions and responsibilities for her department in the struggle to
eradicate al-Qaeda, the [Abu Musab al-]Zarqawi gang in Iraq and other
jihadists.
That means defining other departments' responsibilities as well. In
Bush's first term, bitter disputes - based in personality clashes and a
settling of old scores as much as in substance - would have handicapped
such an exercise.
But internal strife has largely subsided since the departure of Powell
and his powerful deputy, Richard Armitage, who skillfully provided
background information on the shortcomings of perceived enemies at the
Pentagon and elsewhere to congressional and other allies. Here's an
interesting coincidence: Armitage was a mentor to virtually all of the
State Department personnel whose cases of mistreatment by UN
ambassador-designate John Bolton were cited in Senate hearings last
week, and Powell has pointedly declined to support Bolton.
The essential question the review faces is put this way in a private
musing by one cabinet officer: How does the United States, which is
good at fighting countries we are at war with, fight a war against
extremists in countries we are friends with? (Hello? Saudi Arabia? You
still on the line?)
The policy directive is set to delineate three essential tasks in GWOE:
the Department of Homeland Security keeps the lead in defending US
territory against terrorist attack; the State Department will be in
charge of counter-ideology against Islamic extremism, tasked with
broadening and greatly strengthening the weak "public diplomacy"
campaign of the first Bush term; and the Pentagon will destroy or
disrupt "networks" of terrorism, wherever they exist.
The daunting task of defending against disaster
Defending US territory against massive terrorist attacks is an
impossible task. The United States relies on the automobile for mass
movement. Traffic engineers know that each lane of traffic on an
expressway can accommodate about 500 vehicles per hour at a speed of 65
miles per hour (105 km/h). The speed decreases as the volume of traffic
increases. At peak volume of 800 vehicles, the speed slows to 15 mph
(24 km/h). Beyond 800 vehicles per lane, traffic jams develop to reduce
both the speed and volume abruptly toward zero. It is a fact every
motorist has learned from personal experience. To evacuate 2 million
people from a city such as Houston at the average density of three
persons per car adds up to 700,000 cars all moving in one direction to
flee from impending disaster on four lanes of interstate highway
traveling at 105 km/h would take 350 hours, or 15 days of 24-hour
continuous traffic flow, assuming gas stations along the way can supply
the needed fuel. It is obvious that massive evacuation is not a
workable option against threats of imminent massive destruction,
notwithstanding all the planning of the Department of Homeland
Security. The experience of recent hurricanes highlighted the
vulnerability of the US urban system. The chaotic evacuations of New
Orleans and Houston have prompted local officials across the country to
take a new look at plans for emptying their cities in response to a
large-scale natural disaster or a terrorist attack.
The New York Times reports that from Los Angeles to Boston, from
Seattle to Miami, plans to relocate, house and feed potentially
hundreds of thousands of suddenly displaced people are impractical at
best and inoperative at worst. As the exodus from Houston during
Hurricane Rita demonstrated, in many places highways would clog
quickly, confusion would reign and police resources would be overtaxed.
New Orleans offered a different and more deadly example of what could
go wrong, as tens of thousands of people, many of them poor and lacking
private transportation, were left to fend for themselves in cities
without food, water, basic services or law enforcement.
Most major US cities have made preparations for localized emergencies
such as fires, floods or large toxic spills that might involve the
relocation of a few thousand or tens of thousands of people. Since the
September 11 attacks, cities have received billions of dollars from the
newly formed Department of Homeland Security to prepare for a major
terrorist attack. But few have prepared in detail for a doomsday
possibility like Hurricane Katrina, the storm that engulfed New Orleans
and left much of the city a wasteland that is likely to remain so for
months. Nor have they prepared workable plans to evacuate millions of
people with short or no notice, as the residents of the Gulf of Mexico
coast of Texas learned to their dismay. Officials in Texas are now
still struggling with how to manage the return of residents.
New York, more than most US cities, has the advantage of a sprawling
mass transportation system. Eight million people a day use the system,
and officials count on it to be useful in an emergency as well. That
could be vital, because city traffic, already a problem in an ordinary
rush hour, would pose a significant challenge. New York Police
Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the city has two general evacuation
plans, one for hurricanes and another for terrorist attacks. The plans
include the opening of hundreds of shelters, mostly in schools. But
officials acknowledge that many elements of an evacuation would have to
be improvised.
Los Angeles, the United States' second-most-populous city, sits atop a
spider web of earthquake faults, several of which could slip with
devastating consequences, leveling large parts of the city and touching
off widespread fires and explosions. But the city has no plan for
moving and sheltering the large number of people who would be made
homeless by such a disaster, officials concede.
Emergency-response planners acknowledge that no plans exist for moving
hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, of southern
Californians out of harm's way. San Francisco's evacuation plans depend
in large part on the two main bridges that connect the city with
Oakland to the east and Marin county to the north. Both are vulnerable
to a major earthquake, as is the Bay Area Rapid Transit tunnel beneath
the bay. The plans call for the use of fishing boats and ferries to get
people across the bay if other routes are blocked, a stopgap solution
at best.
Since Hurricane Katrina, New York officials have assured residents that
the city is prepared to handle the kind of evacuation that a major
hurricane would require. The city has plans to move people from areas
that are likely to flood, plans to open shelters and reception centers,
and plans to use public transportation to carry them there. If a huge
natural or man-made disaster ever struck Long Island, evacuating the
island is not an option. Stretching eastward 190 kilometers from the
mainland into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island and its nearly 3 million
residents have only a few highways or rail lines out - including the
infamously jammed Long Island Expressway - and all of them lead into
parts of New York City, which has its own evacuation problems. As a
result, most Long Islanders would be forced to deal with such a major
disaster by staying closer to home.
As all military strategists know, a sure way to lose a war is an
inoperative defense. Most Americans who follow football understand this
fact. The US is no longer the only party who can bring destruction to
the homeland of another country. On the basis of an inoperative
defense, the US "war on terrorism" cannot be won.
Goldwater and the politics of extremism
The glorification and legitimization of extremism
began with Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign when he
famously proclaimed in his acceptance speech in the Republican national
convention in the San Francisco Cow Palace: "Extremism in the defense
of liberty is no vice. [Applause] Let me remind you also that
moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." The narration from
Lyndon Johnson in the "daisy" ad showing a little girl counting flower
pedals followed by a nuclear countdown: "These are the stakes. To make
a world in which all of God's children can live or to go into the dark.
We must either love each other, or we must die," allowed Johnson to
pile up what was for that time the largest landslide in US history.
Goldwater delegates and the spectator galleries shouted down New York
governor Nelson Rockefeller with catcalls and boos when he tried to
speak against extremism. Hostile scrimmages erupted on the convention
floor, forcing Rockefeller to cut his speech short. Afterward, the
triumphant Goldwater conservatives rejected the defeated
Rockefeller-Scranton liberals despite the need for party unity. "Hell,
I don't want to talk to that son of a bitch," Goldwater growled when
Rockefeller called him to concede the nomination. Life magazine
bemoaned the "ugly tone" of the entire convention. The New York Times
called it a "disaster" for both the United States and the Republicans,
saying the Goldwater nomination could "reduce a once-great party to the
status of an ugly, angry, frustrated faction". The Rockefeller liberals
sat out the election and failed to regain control of the Republican
Party, a reality that exists to this day.
On the morning after his acceptance speech, Goldwater sought an
audience with General Dwight Eisenhower, who was straying again toward
rebellion over Goldwater's chief applause line. It was reported that,
echoing a widespread public outcry, Eisenhower demanded to know how
Goldwater could see "extremism" as good politics when it smacked of
kooks. Goldwater stammered through several ineffective replies before
trying a D-Day analogy. What he meant was that patriotism required
sacrifice, said Goldwater, and that General Eisenhower had been the
ultimate "extremist" for liberty when he sent the Allied troops across
the English Channel against Adolf Hitler. This interpretation
transformed Eisenhower's mood. "By golly, that makes real sense," he
said with his famous grin of relief that nearly matched Goldwater's.
Extremism became tied inseparably to militarism.
Goldwater extremism lost the election but gained solid control of the
Republican Party. Commentator Bill Moyers recalled Johnson saying that
he had delivered the south to Republicans "for your lifetime and mine",
which would turn the whole structure of politics on a fulcrum of race.
This new political landscape in the south has continued to morph toward
the Republican Party until the candidacies of Jimmy Carter and Bill
Clinton. Goldwater extremism was directed against communism with a
defense of race inequality. Today, the "war on terrorism" pitches US
militant extremism against Islamic extremism.
By shifting focus to "networks" rather than "terrorists", and to
"extremism" rather than "terrorism", the US departments of State and
Defense will broaden their operations to remold the tens of millions of
real and potential jihadists who believe, as Rand Corp analyst Brian
Jenkins recently put it, that "war is its own reward, a perpetual
condition until Judgment Day" and not a struggle with a finite end.
Jenkins cites the case of an Egyptian former jihadist who defected when
he understood that "life was better than paradise" gained through
murder and violence. Getting moderate Muslim leaders and nations to
convince their citizens of that proposition is now the centerpiece of
any strategy paper that comes out of the White House. Yet Muslims can
still remember Goldwater's denigration of moderation in the pursuit of
justice as not being a virtue. Islamic terrorists can cite Thomas
Jefferson about the US and its allies: "Degrading themselves thus from
the character of lawful societies into lawless bands of robbers and
pirates, they are abusing their brief ascendancy by desolating the
world with blood and rapine. Against such a banditti, war had become
less ruinous than peace, for then peace was a war on one side only."
The United States needs to recognize that the only effective weapon
against terrorism is the delivery of justice everywhere, which will
deprive terrorists of any stake in resorting to killing and
destruction.
When the game of nuclear terror was played between two superpowers, the
rules were clearly defined and the outcome rationally predictable
because calculation was based on state interests. When the game of mass
destructive terror is played between a superpower and terrorist groups,
the game becomes uncontrolled and wild, with no rules. What do the
followers of al-Qaeda want? They want foreign troops out of Saudi
Arabia. Such specific aims are a fundamental definition of the defense
of liberty, which, according to Goldwater, is no vice. The people of
the US would do no less to get foreign troops off US soil. The Crusades
were launched to get infidels off the Holy Land.
Terrorists are not extremists. Terrorists have specific limited aims
and strategies. Extremists want total solutions. A war against evil is
an extremist undertaking. A war to eliminate a particular evil
condition is not an extremist undertaking as it has limited objectives.
Extremism is a term used to describe either attitudes or actions
thought by critics to be hyperbolic and unwarranted, beyond what is
necessary for the problem. In terms of ideas, the term "extremism" is
often used to label political ideology that is far outside the societal
center or mainstream. In terms of actions, "extremism" is often used to
identify aggressive or violent methodologies used in an attempt not
just to right a political wrong, but to banish all that is wrong.
Political radicals are sometimes called extremists, although the term
"radical" originally meant to go to the root of a problem. In medicine,
a radical cure means invasive surgery. "Radical" is a somewhat less
negatively connoted self-label. In terms of the use of violence, the
terms "extremist" and "radical" are generally used to label those who
use violence against the will of the larger social body, rather than
those who believe in violence to enforce the will of the social body on
dissidents. State or policy power is never deemed radical. Revolutions
are by definition radical.
The terms "extremism" and "extremist" are almost always applied to
others. The terms connote using illegitimate means such as subterfuge
or violence to promote one's agenda beyond the realm of discourse. No
sect of Islam describes itself as "Islamic extremism", and no political
party calls itself "right-wing extremist" or "left-wing extremist".
Goldwater legitimized a politics of extremism that evolved into
neo-conservatism. In security parlance, to terminate with extreme
prejudice means to kill without reservation.
The idea that there is a philosophy of extremism is thought by some to
be suspect. Within sociology, several scholars who study (and are
critical of) extreme right-wing groups have objected to the term
"extremist", which was popularized by centrist sociologists in the
1960s and 1970s. The labeling of a person, group or action as
"extremist" is often a technique to further a political goal -
especially by governments seeking to defend the status quo, or
political centrists. Rather than labeling themselves "extremist", those
labeled such tend to see the need for extreme actions in a particular
situation, such as assassination of a foreign or domestic head of
state.
Extremism is a position defined by its distance from the mainstream of
the moment. History and the mainstream beliefs of a later time may see
a different picture. Market fundamentalism, like all other forms of
fundamentalism, can be viewed as an extremist doctrine. Benjamin
Franklin's admonition "We had better hang together or be hanged
separately" applies to all fundamentalists. There is no solution by
war. Peace is the only solution. The "war on extremism" needs to be
refocused as a war on all forms of fundamentalism, Christian, Islamist
and market. Remove extremists from both sides and let the moderates
negotiate a new peace.
A lost cause, and the loss of liberty
If the aim of the "global war on extremism" (GWOE) is to spread
democracy, then the war has already been lost because democracy in the
United States, the headquarters of the war machine to spread democracy,
appears to have been the first victim of such a war. Daniel Pipes wrote
in the New York Sun on December 28, 2004 ("Why the Japanese internment
still matters"):
For years, it has been my position that
the threat of radical Islam implies an imperative to focus security
measures on Muslims. If searching for rapists, one looks only at the
male population. Similarly, if searching for Islamists (adherents of
radical Islam), one looks at the Muslim population.
And so, I was encouraged by a just-released Cornell University opinion
survey that finds nearly half the US population agreeing with this
proposition. Specifically, 44% of Americans believe that government
authorities should direct special attention toward Muslims living in
America, either by registering their whereabouts, profiling them,
monitoring their mosques, or infiltrating their organizations ... the
bad news is the near-universal disapproval of this realism. Leftist and
Islamist organizations have so successfully intimidated public opinion
that polite society shies away from endorsing a focus on Muslims.
In America, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist
interpretation of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of ethnic
Japanese during World War II. Although more than 60 years past, these
events matter yet deeply today, permitting the victimization lobby, in
compensation for the supposed horrors of internment, to condemn in
advance any use of ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion in
formulating domestic security policy.
Denying that the treatment of ethnic Japanese resulted from legitimate
national-security concerns, this lobby has established that it resulted
solely from a combination of "wartime hysteria" and "racial prejudice".
As radical groups like the American Civil Liberties Union wield this
interpretation "like a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate", they
preempt efforts to build an effective defense against today's Islamist
enemy.
The apology for internment by Ronald Reagan in 1988, in addition to the
nearly $1.65 billion in reparations paid to former internees, was
premised on faulty scholarship ... especially in time of war,
governments should take into account nationality, ethnicity, and
religious affiliation in their homeland-security policies and engage
"threat profiling". These steps may entail bothersome or offensive
measures but they are preferable to "being incinerated at your office
desk by a flaming hijacked plane".
By the logic of Pipes, the US should have put the German-American
Eisenhower in an internment camp, since the key enemy in World War II
was Germany. But then white Americans are mostly above suspicion of
ethnic disloyalty. German-Americans are the largest ethnic group in the
US, with approximately 60 million Americans claiming German ancestry.
German-American loyalty to America's promise of freedom can be traced
back to the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless, during World War II, the
US government and many Americans viewed German-Americans and others of
"enemy ancestry" as potentially dangerous, particularly recent
immigrants. During that war, the US government interned 11,000 persons
of German ancestry out of a population of 120 million, while 120,000
Japanese-Americans were interned, comprising the entire
Japanese-American population on the west coast.
In World War II, the war to defend democracy, the US government used
many interrelated, constitutionally questionable methods to control
those of enemy ancestry, including internment, individual and group
exclusion from military zones, internee exchanges for US citizens held
in Germany, deportation, "alien enemy" registration requirements,
travel restrictions and property confiscation. The human cost of these
civil-liberties violations was high. Families were disrupted,
reputations destroyed, homes and belongings lost. Meanwhile, untold
numbers of German-Americans fought for freedom around the world,
including their ancestral homelands. Some were the immediate relatives
of those subject to oppressive restrictions on the home front. At least
2,000 Germans, German-Americans and Latin Americans were later
exchanged for Americans and Latin Americans held in Germany. Some
allege that internees were captured to use as exchange bait.
Of course, the loyalty of Jewish Americans was not above suspicion
during the Cold War and the Joseph McCarthy era, despite the shameful
in-group persecution of left-wing Jews by their conservative brothers.
Jews, of course, are less-than-honorable whites in the West. Should the
Holocaust that killed 6 million Jews be prevented from being used "like
a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate", to rid of world of evil
Islam?
Even in wartime, the US government should have exercised greater
vigilance to protect the liberties of those most vulnerable because of
their ethnic ties to enemy nations. Some were dangerous, but too many
were assumed guilty and never able to prove their innocence. A war to
spread democracy abroad cannot be fought, let alone won, by destroying
democracy at home. The protection of civil liberty cannot be selective.
The loss of liberty to one is the loss of liberty to all. That is the
most fatal vulnerability for the US as a democratic superpower.
