Edward S. Herman
In
her August 1 speech before the Republican National Convention, Bush foreign
policy adviser Condoleezza Rice explained to the audience that Bush
"recognizes that the magnificent men and women of America’s armed forces
are not a global police force. They are not the world’s 911." On the
contrary, she said that in a Bush government these magnificent men and women
will not only defend our shores and skies from any threats, they will "go
forth to extend peace, prosperity and liberty beyond our blessed shores."
And the Republican platform calls for the active pursuit of a "rogue
removal" strategy to take out outlaws that the effete Clinton
administration has merely sought to contain ("Bush plans to undermine
‘rogue’ states," Financial Times, Aug. 2, 2000).
This
of course does a grave injustice to Clinton, who has used a full array of
boycotts, sanctions, civilian medical deprivation and starvation, bombing raids,
inspections, support of external dissidents, and inducements to the Iraq
military to overthrow the rogue leader Saddam Hussein. In Yugoslavia as well,
Clinton has used massive bombing, sanctions, intervention in support of
dissident parties, Tribunal condemnations of Milosevic, and putting a price on
Milosevic’s head as an inducement to dispatch the villain in another
multi-pronged rogue removal operation. The only thing Clinton hasn’t done is
invade with U.S. troops to dislodge these rogue state leaders.
It
is not at all clear that the Republicans in power will go beyond Clinton in
dealing with rogues, but they must differentiate themselves from him, especially
as they are obliged to justify their intention to greatly enlarge the already
immense military budget. They have to claim a plan for important "national
security" action that Clinton wasn’t already doing. It is awkward for the
Republicans that in the case of Iraq he has pursued with genocidal energy the
subversion process installed under Bush One. The anti- missile boondoggle is
aimed at that other great national security threat, North Korea, whose leaders
might someday in the far distant future have the power to commit national
suicide by sending off a missile across the ocean. The Republicans are eagerly
pushing that boondoggle, no doubt hoping that the possible rapprochement between
North and South Korea will not force them to look for a boondoggle rationale
elsewhere. But this boondoggle will not advance the cause of removing the rogue
state leadership.
According
to Condoleeza Rice, the need for a defense against missiles "at the
earliest possible date" results from the fact that rogue efforts to acquire
long-range missiles are aimed strictly at "blackmail." The rogues
couldn’t want missiles for "defense" as this peace-loving country
obviously seeks overwhelming military power and an anti-missile defense system
only because of our "special responsibilities to keep the peace"!
Could the Romans at the height of their imperial power have been more brazenly
and self-righteously self-serving?
Ms.
Rice implies that Clinton’s policy was only to provide a global "police
force" and "911," without any larger rationale. But Clinton’s
foreign policy has surely been designed for corporate service, and he has been
doing his subversion dirty work partly because he, like the Republicans, is
devoted to the U.S. "national interest" in creating a global system
hospitable to U.S. transnational corporations. But Clinton also feels the need
to lean over backwards to show that he and the Democrats are not
"soft" and will be at least as ready as the Republicans to beat up a
Grenada, Nicaragua, Iraq, etc., and to put the national (corporate) interest
first. The Republicans do not have to prove their patriotic willingness to bomb
and their devotion to a corporate interest they serve so undeviatingly; which is
why they sometimes have to extricate the country from wars in which the
Democrats are bogged down (Korea, Vietnam). On the other hand, the Republicans
are possibly closer to the military-industrial complex than the Democrats
(Lockheed’s head couldn’t contain his enthusiasm at the prospect of a Bush
presidency; Lynne Cheney is on his board of directors at $125,000 a year); they
have more intimate ties to the oil industry (Bush and Cheney both come right out
of the business); and the Republicans nurture a larger contingent of ideological
crazies than the Democrats (Rice is a Bush team "moderate," allegedly
fending off Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other hardline warriors). This
makes the contest over who is more prone to imperialistic excesses a close one.
But
it is notable how, with the end of the Soviet Union and its modest
"containment" of the United States, subversion of foreign enemies has
become more open and brazen. Clinton carried it pretty far, and the Republicans
are now saying that subversion is going to be official policy and will be
carried farther. There is still that small genuflection to "morality"
in describing the targets as "rogues," the follow-on to the
designation as "terrorist" states of several years back. But the right
to name a country as a "rogue" and then proceed to take systematic
action to displace the rulers and install new ones is now presented as entirely
reasonable. No questions have been raised in the U.S. media about the assertion
of this right and its relation to the supposed rule of law in international
affairs. The liberal Boston Globe editorially congratulates the Republicans for
their platform call for rogue removal ("Being Clear About Saddam,"
Aug. 8). For the loyal media, the effective law is what their leaders say and
do.
The
word "subversion" is of course not used to describe the Republican
plans in foreign policy. That is an old-fashioned term of the Cold War years,
like terrorism, that designated Soviet efforts to overthrow governments by KGB
disinformation and propaganda, economic destabilization by boycotts and
sanctions, buying politicians, and encouraging violence and assassinations.
These were precisely the tactics used by the CIA and other arms of the U.S.
security state in Latin America and globally, as described so compellingly by
former CIA operative Philip Agee in his book Inside the Company, but as the
mainstream media took for granted our natural right to subvert, an invidious
word like subversion was never applied to us. And it reamins out of service
today. (For an analysis of this natural right, and the forms of subversion used
by the U.S. in Latin America, see my Real Terror Network, 132-5.)
Another
reason why we don’t subvert is that all our efforts to deal with rogues are
based on our concern for our "national security," one of the most
elastic phrases in the English language. If a government that takes power in a
distant country threatens to tax a U.S. company more heavily, this is a national
security problem. By posing such a threat that government has demonstrated its
hostility and unreasonableness–it has done something to which we object, and it
has failed to recognize the neoliberal truth that such higher taxes are unsound,
etc. Of course, on this conception of national security, anybody who does not do
our precise bidding constitutes a national security threat and can reasonably be
called a rogue. This is obviously a perfect intellectual instrument of a policy
of aggressive imperialism.
Another
important feature of national security is that, like "Hoover’s law"–i.e.,
the smaller the number of Communists the greater their subversive threat–we
have a "National Security threat law," which says that the more
powerful this country and the greater its military superiority over others the
more fearsome and intolerable are any challenges to its desires abroad. This law
is a symptom of that sickness known as the "pitiful giant syndrome,"
which causes our military-political elite to fret and gnash their teeth at our
supposed helplessness in combating all these external menaces.
Possibly
there is in all this a trace of insincerity and a bit of calculated
rationalization for the desire to maintain superiority and to intervene freely
at our own discretion. But it may be an internalized truth for many. The
military-industrial complex certainly needs rationales for the growing military
budget, and threat inflation has a long history in the serial Cold War
"gaps" that weren’t there. The Bush Two gang have their work cut out
for them in justifying escalated military expenditures in the post-Soviet threat
era, but the mainstream media can always be relied on to help. And Bush Two’s
prospective unlimited service to Greed Inc. may make it necessary for our
"magnificent men and women" in the armed services to work over some of
those less magnificent men and women, victims of the "miracle of the
market," needing pacification at home, as well as abroad.