[Peace-discuss] How to stop the GWOT

[C. G. Estabrook]

Many of those disappointed by the defeat of John Kerry voted for him
because they were appalled at the invasion of Iraq -- and quite reasonably
feared that neocons and assorted "friends of Israel" would manipulate the
US into further wars in Iran or Syria -- or even do something equally
dangerous in northeast Asia.  In this view they were undeterred by the
fact that Kerry's attitude to the Iraq war was at least as belligerent as
Bush's; that he tried to outflank Bush on the Right in support for Israel
(the government, not the people); and that his foreign policy advisers
were people like Richard Clarke, whose objection to Bush's war on
terrorism was simply that he was killing the wrong Arabs -- we should have
killed more, and earlier, said Clarke.

Kerry's charge that Bush was neglecting the War on Terrorism in order to
launch a war on Iraq may be refuted by the second Bush administration, as
they prosecute both even more vigorously, killing Americans and many
others, and using the war to justify everything from a bad economy to the
suppression of liberty at home and abroad.  (Bush's choice for replacing
the departing Ashcroft as Attorney General is one of the architects of the
grossly illegal torture policy that characterized the first Bush
administration, not just at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.)

It's clear that the Global War on Terrorism, as the administration prefers
to style it, takes the place in contemporary American political mythology
once occupied by the crusade against Communism.  The Communist threat to
the US from the end of the Second World War to the collapse of the Soviet
Union was never what American propagandists said it was.  It is generally
acknowledged now that the Soviets never threatened the US and its
satellites militarily -- from 1945, when its exhausted army, which had
borne by far the bulk of the fighting against Germany, included mechanized
divisions drawn by horses, down through the 1980s, when the Soviet economy
never even reached half the size of that of the US.  The exception was the
possibility of a nuclear war -- which we now know the US came within an
ace of starting by its belligerence during the Cuban missile crisis: only
the good sense of a Russian submarine commander prevented a nuclear
exchange in November, 1962.

The real threat to the US from the USSR (and then China) was a model of
development that the US feared would be attractive in Europe and then in
the Third World.  But Communism was also a glorious excuse.  When the US
brought foreign countries to heel, making them safe for American business,
it was done we said to fight Communist subversion.  Similarly, when the
Soviets used force to retain their much smaller empire, as in Hungary in
1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, they said it was to stifle the threat of
the restoration of capitalism, plotted by the CIA.  The Cold War was
functional for both (really quite unequal) super-powers.

But the end of the Cold War left the US without a two-generation-old
excuse for imperialism.  In 1991, Colin Powell, then Chairman of US Joint
Chiefs of Staff, blurted out, "I'm running out of demons. I'm running out
of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung."  Then, like a neocon
godsend, came 9/11, and a whole new range of enemies opened up for
American propaganda: we could have a global war now not against communism,
but against terrorism.  Shortly after 9/11, war secretary Rumsfeld was
asked how we would know when we'd won such a war.  He replied that victory
would consist of convincing the American people that it would be a long
war.  The primary goal of this new and peculiar war was to form the mind
of the American populace, as anti-Communism had once done.

But of course there was an attack on 9/11.  What should have been done?
The answer was clear immediately, and it was set out by people including
the conservative military historian, Michael Howard, who said just after
9/11 that what was needed were "patient operations of police and
intelligence forces" -- "a police operation conducted under the auspices
of the UN on behalf of the international community as a whole, against a
criminal conspiracy, whose members should be hunted down and brought
before an international court."  His views were published in the
establishment journal Foreign Affairs (Jan 2002), but they were dismissed
along with many similar suggestions by the US government, which wanted to
launch invasions.  So, when the Taliban government of Afghanistan offered
to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden for trial, the US rejected the
offer and began bombing the country.  Bush was right to say (although he
denied it in the debates) that "I truly am not that concerned about [Osama
bin Laden]" -- the GWOT was the goal.

Given that the Global War on Terrorism and the War on Iraq, as they are
now being waged, are put-up jobs, what then should be done?  Their primary
purpose -- propagandizing the American people to support an imperial
agenda -- succeeded in the elections that the Bush people have had to face
-- barely in 2002 and more clearly in 2004 (in part owing to general
agreement on the propaganda account by the so-called opposition party). So
the first and most important task is to talk to those whom the GWOT is
actually aimed at -- the propagandized American populace, and particularly
Bush voters and non-voters.

	History's Verse

That task becomes all the clearer when we consider the situation thirty
years ago.  It is said to be a cardinal error to fight the last war, but
the end of America's last imperial adventure -- when the US killed more
than three million people in southeast Asia -- may have some lessons for
how to end the current one, despite the widely different circumstances.
History does not repeat itself, but as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme.

There were three principal reasons for the end of what we call (too
narrowly) the Vietnam War; [1] the brave resistance of the Vietnamese; [2]
the revolt of the conscript American expeditionary force in Vietnam (the
principal reason that the Bush administration will probably not bring back
the draft); and [3] the increasing revulsion among the American people at
the effect of the government's actions in Vietnam.  In the 1970s and '80s,
while the corporate media debated whether the US attack on South Vietnam
(our supposed ally) had been a good idea or not, polls indicated that
about 70 percent of the American population regarded the war in southeast
Asia not as a "mistake," but as "fundamentally wrong and immoral."

But it's important to recall that bringing to bear the American disgust
with the Vietnam War was not generally accomplished by changing
office-holders.  It's true that the architects of the war, the Democrats,
were defeated by a large majority in 1968 by a presidential candidate who
said he had a secret plan for ending the war, but four years later that
same man -- Richard Nixon, who clearly had not ended the war -- defeated
an explicitly anti-war candidate, George McGovern, by carrying every state
except Massachusetts (and the District of Columbia). It may be heartening
for those disappointed by the much narrower loss in 2004 to reflect that
the impeachment campaign against Nixon in his second term was seen by some
at the time as in part an expiation for the crimes committed in southeast
Asia, in spite of the fact that there was no explicit mention of them in
the articles of impeachment.

The Vietnam War ended in part because Americans came to realize that it
was not just a blunder but a crime, and the US government had to follow,
however unwillingly, the growth of that opinion among the populace -- who
after all were the main object of the government's propaganda campaign.
Those opposed to the Global War on Terrorism should not just talk to
themselves.  They must talk to the rest of America, especially the Bush
voters, as Nixon voters were once addressed by the anti-Vetnam War
movement.  The task as always is, as Shakespeare's Hotspur says, "O, while
you live, tell truth and shame the devil!"

  ==============================================================
  C. G. Estabrook
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
  office: 217.244.4105 mobile: 217.369.5471 home: 217.359.9466
  <www.newsfromneptune.com> <www.carlforcongress.org>
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