[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Street / Serve the Superpower / Apr 04

[Morton K.Brussel]

I admire Paul Street's commentaries. Maybe you will too. MKB

Begin forwarded message:

> From: ZNet Commentaries <sysop at zmag.org>
> Date: April 4, 2004 9:15:35 AM CDT
> To: brussel at uiuc.edu
> Subject: Street / Serve the Superpower / Apr 04
>
> This is being resent due to error codes that snuck into the prior 
> mailing -- this should be okay.
>
> Today's commentary:
> http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2004-04/04street.cfm
>
> ==================================
>
> ZNet Commentary
> Serve the Superpower April 04, 2004
> By Paul  Street
>
> The left should respond to the Richard A. Clarke revelations with 
> guarded praise and trenchant criticism. Praise: because Clarke, Bush’s 
> former counter-terrorism czar has removed the veil a bit further from 
> the reckless nature of United States (U.S.) policy under George W. 
> Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condaleeza 
> Rice.
>
> Clarke’s testimony to the 9/11 commission and his recently published 
> book-length expose, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on 
> Terror (New York, NY: Free Press, 2004), provide insider evidence that 
> "mainstream" media cannot easily ignore for a number of arguments that 
> left (and other) intellectuals and activists have been making for some 
> time:
>
> - The Bush administration has done much less than it could have to 
> protect Americans from extremist Islamic terrorism before and since 
> 9/11
>
> - The invasion and occupation of Iraq has exacerbated and expanded 
> that terrorist threat and deeply alienated the world opinion from the 
> U.S.
>
> - By invading Iraq, the Bush Team has behaved precisely as Osama 
> bin-Laden hoped and predicted, turning 9/11 into the pretext for a 
> major "crusader" intervention that has fanned the flames of fanatical 
> Islamic fundamentalism
>
> - The occupation of Iraq has been poorly planned and conducted, with 
> terrible consequences for U.S. soldiers and their loved ones
>
> - The White House has mercilessly manipulated public opinion and fears 
> in the wake of 9/11, falsely linking the jetliner attacks and al Qaeda 
> to Iraq to justify an invasion that many of Bush’s staff had hoped to 
> carry out since well before Bush’s inauguration.
>
> - The U.S. presidency is dominated by dangerous right-wing ideologues 
> and headed by an intellectually lazy, narrow-minded man.
>
> - The Bush administration’s enormous tax cuts for the already 
> super-wealthy have cost the U.S. government critical resources that 
> might have been used to effectively combat terrorist threats at home 
> and abroad.
>
> Trenchant criticism: because Clarke leaves out huge parts of the story 
> of American policy in the Middle East, something that puts severe 
> limits on the extent to which his critique can inspire efforts to heal 
> the global rifts that gives rise to the terrorist threats that so 
> concern him. There is next to nothing in Against All Enemies, for 
> example, about America’s long history of sponsoring corrupt and 
> authoritarian Arab regimes and fundamentalist, anti-modernist forces 
> in the Middle East - a significant omission.
>
> In the Arab world, Gilbert Achcar has noted, the U.S. has been "doubly 
> responsible" for "the resurgence of anti-Western Islamic 
> fundamentalism" during the last 50 years. It "contributed directly to 
> propagating Islamic fundamentalism," supporting such groups as the 
> Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda against the specter of socialism, 
> represented by Gamel Abdel Nasser.
>
> At the same time, by "helping to defeat and crush the Left and 
> progressive nationalism throughout the Islamic world," the U.S. has 
> "freed up the space for political Islam as the only ideological and 
> organizational expression of popular resentment. Popular resentment, 
> like nature, abhors a vacuum.
>
> The resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism," Achcar notes, "is not the 
> culturally inevitable form of radicalization in Muslim countries; 
> until recently most people in Muslim countries spurned the ideology. 
> It won out only be default, after its competition" - progressive 
> secular and popular nationalism -- "was eliminated by their common 
> adversary," the United States (Gilbert Achcar, The Clash of 
> Barbarisms: Sept 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (New 
> York, NY: Monthly Review, 2003).
>
> This dark American role reflects the simple imperial fact that 
> post-WWII U.S. policymakers have always been and remain primarily 
> interested in the control of the Arab world's stupendous oil 
> resources. Since the Arab majority has never has no special 
> self-hating desire to grant the U.S. such control, democracy has never 
> been a serious U.S. goal in the in the Middle East.
>
> There was nothing mysterious, of course, about the sources of Arab 
> bitterness towards the United States from the early 1990s through 
> 9/11, a period when Clarke claims to have been obsessed with the 
> threat posed by Osama bin-Laden and his ilk. Al Qaeda and others spoke 
> reasonably well for broad Arab opinion by hammering repeatedly on 
> three very specific U.S. policies:
>
> (1) the determination to keep American troops in the Saudi kingdom; 
> (2) the imposition of economic sanctions on Iraq, a vicious policy 
> that killed half a million Iraqi children and strengthened the 
> domestic power of Saddam Hussein (secular dictator seen by al Qaeda as 
> an "Infidel" butcher); (3) U.S. support for Israel’s brutal 
> Palestinian policy. The second policy (economic sanctions) is never 
> mentioned in Against All Enemies and the other two are referred to 
> only briefly and indirectly.
>
> Unable and/or unwilling to acknowledge the little problem of American 
> imperialism, Clark is left with little of substance to say about "why 
> they hate us." Indeed, he follows the White House in expressing 
> abhorrence at the mysterious (for him) anti-Americanism of Middle 
> Eastern "misfits," who strike out blindly at "freedom" and 
> "democracy."He understands that Bush’s invasion of Iraq heightens Arab 
> bitterness against the U.S. but he is largely clueless (publicly at 
> least) about the deep-rooted reasons for the emergence of that 
> bitterness in the first place.
>
> Equally curious in its absence from Clarke’s expose is the White 
> House’s 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS), the official 
> manifestation of the "Bush Doctrine." The NSS, released in September 
> 2002, formally announced a "new" international and military doctrine 
> for the United States. According to the Bush Doctrine, no government 
> or coalition or body of international law can challenge unilateral US 
> supremacy. Deterrence, the official policy of the US for more than 50 
> years, is irrelevant.
>
> In the new world order, the US is free to launch "pre-emptive" 
> assaults on any and all perceived enemy states, consistent with its 
> right to exercise total global dominance through unilateral action and 
> military superiority.
>
> This is notable deletion. Among the many factors that came together to 
> determine the invasion decision, one was certainly the Bush 
> administration’s determination that Iraq was an ideal stage on which 
> to display its ability to effectively rule the world on its own terms 
> by sheer preponderance of military force, without international moral 
> or legal constraint. The invasion of Iraq was meant to serve as a 
> critical demonstration project for the Bush Doctrine.
>
> This critical foreign policy doctrine is missing from Against All 
> Enemies because Clarke agrees with its provocative sentiments, just as 
> his support for the racist Israeli occupation state, the Saudi regime, 
> and U.S. torture of pre-invasion Iraq require him to leave out most of 
> "why they [came to] hate us" even before "we" undertook the one U.S. 
> Middle Eastern policy that Clarke considers worthy of extended 
> discussion.
>
> Not surprisingly, perhaps, Clarke embraces the savage bombing of 
> Afghanistan in the fall and winter of 2001 and 2002. The majority of 
> the world felt quite differently, supporting criminal investigation, 
> extradition and trial over rapid and deadly military attack on that 
> impoverished land.
>
> "Whether such diplomatic means could have succeeded is known only to 
> ideological extremists on both sides," notes Noam Chomsky, but 
> "tentative explorations of extradition by the Taliban were instantly 
> rebuffed by Washington, which also refused to provide evidence for its 
> accusations"(Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global 
> Dominance [New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2003, p. 199; see also 
> Rajul Mahajan The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism [New York, 
> NY; Monthly Review Press, 2002, pp. 30-51).
>
> The price of that instantaneous decision for imperial war over the 
> rule of law included the lives of thousands of innocent Afghani 
> noncombatants (their deaths written off as mere "collateral damage") - 
> something that has also fed the fires of fanatical Islamic 
> anti-Americanism. When it comes to Afghanistan, however, Clarke 
> out-Bush’s Bush, claiming that the White House’s assault on that 
> country after 9/11 was too "slow and small" (Against All Enemies, p. 
> 245).
>
> Consistent with this chilling judgment, the only victims of the 
> invasion of Iraq s that register in Against All Enemies are Americans 
> - the U.S. soldiers being killed and maimed today and the possible 
> future American victims of Islamic terror.
>
> By "the latest conservative estimate," John Pilger notes, the 
> U.S.-British invasion of Iraq has killed "between 21,000 and 55,000," 
> (John Pilger, interview by the Australian Broadcasting System, March 
> 11, www.zmag.org), considerably more than the nearly 600 U.S. soldiers 
> who have died in Iraq. The carnage inflicted on Iraqis, however, is 
> missing from Clarke’s expose, reflecting narcissistic parameters to 
> imperial compassion that speak volumes on why U.S. policy generates so 
> much hatred, fear, and concern within and beyond the Middle East.
>
> Near the end of his book, Clarke criticizes the Bush administration 
> for failing to create "a counterweight ideology to the al Qaeda, 
> fundamentalist, radical version of Islam. Bombs and bullets, handcuffs 
> and jail bars," Clarke argues, "will not address the source of that 
> ideological challenge. We must work with our Islamic friends to craft 
> an ideological and cultural response over many years, just as we 
> fought Communism for almost half a century in scores of countries, not 
> just with wars and weapons, but with a more powerful and attractive 
> ideology (p. 263)."
>
> But such an "ideological and cultural response" to Muslim fanaticism 
> is likely to be ineffective and even counter-productive if it is not 
> accompanied by America’s abandonment of its at-once imperialist and 
> anti-democratic/anti-modernist conduct and the development of the 
> capacity to recognize Arab victims of U.S. policy. Those kinds of 
> steps are far beyond the imagination of Clarke, for whom the ultimate 
> objective is to faithfully and effectively "serve the superpower,"as 
> he puts it in the preface to Against All Enemies
>
> It is unrealistic, perhaps, to expect anything more from a long-term 
> imperial functionary. Still, examples like Daniel Ellsburg and Phillip 
> Agee remind us that some U.S. policy defectors walk away from the 
> imperial system altogether, moving beyond specific policies to 
> criticism of the overall global and domestic power structures within 
> which those policies - smart or stupid but never noble - are 
> formulated.
>
> The vicious circle of global imperialism, terrorism, and 
> counter-terrorism will continue as long as those structures are 
> retained. The more we can tame the resulting barbarism, with the help 
> of people like Clarke, the better off we will be. At the end of the 
> historical day, however, we require more defectors who get it before 
> it’s too late: the world doesn’t need superpowers and empire of any 
> kind. It needs democracy, equality, and justice. Without these things, 
> beyond the parameters of the imperial imagination, there can never be 
> real and lasting peace.
>
>  Paul Street is an urban social policy researcher in Chicago, 
> Illinois. He can be reached at pstreet at cul-chicago.org.
>
>
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