[Peace-discuss] A Fragile State

[C. G. Estabrook]

[This is a draft of a piece for a journal at Notre Dame.  I'd appreciate 
comments. --CGE]


A FRAGILE STATE

In the fall of 2006, the government of the United States is in the hands 
of a group of people desperate to increase the wealth and power of a 
tiny segment of American society.  They are willing to go to such 
lengths to secure those blessings to themselves and their posterity that 
they have become the most dangerous administration in American history. 
  Paradoxically, the danger is only heightened by the fragility of their 
government.  It has become so sclerotic and brittle that it threatens to 
shatter, with disastrous consequences for Americans and others 
throughout the world.

"Fragile state" is a term of art in US-dominated corporate 
globalization.  It refers to those states that US believes need to be 
brought to heel by the full application of the nostrums of the 
"Washington Consensus," a term coined during the administration of the 
elder Bush to refer to a set of anti-democratic policies designed to 
open countries in the Global South (and elsewhere) to investments from 
multinational companies, usually US-based.  In the 1990s these polices, 
under the name "neoliberalism" -- the policies are far older than the 
name -- became nothing less than "the most successful ideology in world 
history," in the words of the then-editor of the New Left Review, Perry 
Anderson.  "Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neo-liberalism 
as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe," he wrote in 
2000.  He might have added that the popular movement opposed to the 
US-led corporate domination of the world economy (inadequately termed 
"anti-globalization") correspondingly became the largest mass movement 
in human history.  That presented the administration of the second Bush 
with a serious problem.

Then came the "new Pearl Harbor" -- the crimes of September 11, 2001. 
"Everything changed after 9/11," said the Bush administration, 
hopefully.  At a press conference in December 1943, two years after the 
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt asserted 
that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced by “Dr. Win the War” -- i.e., 
government policies to oppose the Great Depression had to give way to 
the war emergency (spending for which in fact had the effect of curing 
the Depression).  But in 2001 the Bush administration had no policies to 
deal with economic distress at home or abroad -- just the opposite: 
their one accomplishment to date was the passage of a tax cut for the 
rich.  Nevertheless the "global war on terrorism" could be mobilized to 
counter the world-wide campaign against neoliberalism.

Asked how we would know when we'd won the global war on terrorism, US 
war secretary Rumsfeld replied, "We'll have won the war when we convince 
the American people that it will be a long war" -- indicating that the 
real purpose of the GWOT was to deal with the one enemy that the 
administration truly feared: the American people.

But neoliberal policies were designed to ensure the continuation of US 
dominance of the world economy, which had obtained since the US emerged 
from World War II as the only undamaged major country.  The World Bank 
was one of the principal instruments of that dominance, and it was to 
the headship of the Bank that the neocon architect of the Iraq phase of 
the GWOT, Paul Wolfowitz, was relegated after the occupation of Iraq 
went badly wrong, owing to US arrogance and brutality.  (Robert 
McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, was sent to the Bank in 1968 
in roughly similar circumstances.)

The joining of neocon foreign policy and neoliberal economics -- neither 
a vast departure from earlier US policies -- give a shape to the actions 
of the Bush administration, under the cover story of the war on 
terrorism.  The World Bank has recently claimed that the number of 
"fragile states" has soared since the invasion of Iraq, threatening 
"instability" and therefore requiring "reforms."  Only seventeen at the 
time of the invasion, the Bank claims that there are no less than 
twenty-six "fragile countries" -- including Afghanistan and Haiti, 
wretched victims of US aggression.  But Wolfowitz insists that 
"improving governance" in these fragile states is a condition for aid. 
(Even the British government, complacent collaborators in the war on 
terrorism -- has said that such an approach is "unbalanced" and that the 
Bank "should not make aid conditional on countries adopting certain 
economic policies.")

The revolt of the Global South against neocon and neoliberal policies -- 
essentially, violence and economic strangulation by the US -- was 
dramatized this September by the speech of Venezuelan President Hugo 
Chavez at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.

"The hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk 
the very survival of the human species," Chavez said.  The US government 
is trying "to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation 
and pillage of the peoples of the world," but "we cannot allow world 
dictatorship to be consolidated," he said.  "The rest of us are standing 
up, all those who are rising up against American imperialism, who are 
shouting for equality, for respect, for the sovereignty of nations."  To 
applause from the hall, Chavez insisted, "The government of the United 
States doesn’t want peace. It wants to exploit its system of 
exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war."

But the US policies are being rejected, in theory and practice, said 
Chavez.  "The end of history was a totally false assumption, and the 
same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the 
capitalist neoliberal world.  It has been shown, this system, to 
generate mere poverty.  Who believes in it now?"  He asserted that "a 
new, strong movement has been born, a movement of the South. We are men 
and women of the South."

In fact the US mechanisms of control, violence and economic 
strangulation, are both weakening.  The US attempt to overthrow Chavez 
in 2002 failed -- after fifty years of successful US coups in Latin 
America -- because of a popular uprising in Venezuela.  At the beginning 
of the twenty-first century, it has become clear that Latin America's 
dedication to democracy is a good bit stronger that that of the US. 
What the US could once accomplish easily -- the making and unmaking of 
governments, from Guatemala to Iran -- it seems no longer able to do. 
The resistance that Chavez describes is growing.

 From the UN podium Chavez brandished a book by Noam Chomsky, Hegemony 
or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance -- and the book 
immediately shot to the top of sales charts, in the US and elsewhere. 
(Chomsky had already had a recent best-seller in his little book of 
interviews entitled 9-11, which gave an account of world politics in 
2001, sharply at odds with that found in the US media: at least some 
Americans distrusted the official story.)

In the book that Chavez recommended, Chomsky argues that in their 
pursuit of hegemony -- what Henry Kissinger a generation ago called the 
"overall framework of order managed by the US" -- both Republican and 
Democrat administrations act in ways that increase the likelihood of 
nuclear war and environmental disaster, that threaten nothing less than 
the survival of humanity; hence the title, Hegemony or Survival -- the 
US government is posing an alternative to the world.

In a more recent book, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and The Assault 
on Democracy (2006), Chomsky takes up Gar Alperovitz' argument that "the 
American ‘system’ as a whole is in real trouble — that it is heading in 
a direction that spells the end of its historic values [of] equality, 
liberty and meaningful democracy."  For Chomsky, "The 'system' is coming 
to have some of the features of failed states ... They are unable or 
unwilling to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even 
destruction. They regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or 
international law, hence free to carry out aggression and violence. And 
if they have democratic forms, they suffer from a serious 'democratic 
deficit' that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real 
substance."

To take the last characteristic first, "The 'democratic deficit' was 
illustrated clearly by the 2004 elections ... Colin Powell informed the 
press that 'President George W. Bush has won a mandate from the American 
people to continue pursuing his "aggressive" foreign policy.'  That is 
far from true. It is also very far from what the population believes. 
After the elections, Gallup asked whether Bush 'should emphasize 
programs that both parties support,' or whether he 'has a mandate to 
advance the Republican Party’s agenda,' as Powell and others claimed — 
and 63 per cent chose the former option; 29 per cent the latter.  The 
elections conferred no mandate for anything, in fact, they barely took 
place, in any serious sense of the term 'election.'"

Secondly, "Throughout the Cold War years, the framework of 'defense 
against Communist aggression' was available to mobilize domestic support 
for countless interventions abroad. Then at last the communist-menace 
device began to wear thin ... The government also faced domestic 
problems, notably the civilizing effects of the activism of the 1960s, 
which had many consequences, among them less willingness to tolerate the 
resort to violence ... new devices were needed. The Reaganites declared 
their worldwide campaign to destroy 'the evil scourge of terrorism,' 
particularly state-backed international terrorism ... Later came 
President Bush’s 'axis of evil' that we must destroy in self-defense, 
following the will of the Lord as transmitted to his humble servant — 
meanwhile escalating the threat of terror and nuclear proliferation." 
Immediately after 9/11, historian Arno Mayer observed that since 1947, 
"America has been the chief perpetrator of ‘pre-emptive’ state terror" 
and innumerable other ‘rogue’ actions," causing immense harm, "always in 
the name of democracy, liberty and justice."

Finally, the US government -- in the centerpiece of the Bush 
administration, the global war on terrorism -- displays the primary 
characteristic of a failed state: it is "unable or unwilling to protect 
its citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction."

The war on terror is a fraud.  That captures a deep and dangerous truth 
about the current US government and that of its chief client, Israel: 
they need war.  Imagine where the Bush administration would be (or even 
if there would be a second Bush administration) without the wars -- on 
Afghanistan, Iraq, and terror -- all predicated on the crimes of 9/11

Furthermore, the war on terror is a fraud in that the US government 
refuses to take the basic steps obviously necessary to protect Americans 
against attacks like those of September 11, 2001 -- the occurrence of 
which is real possibility.  (Ralph Nader pointed out that 9/11 would not 
have occurred if the government had required what he had suggested 
before the fact -- locked and secure cockpit doors.)

Thus there is still no complete checking of airline baggage for 
explosives, and the Congress actually removed money from the recent 
"defense" bill for the examination of cargo containers arriving in US 
ports.  (In a bit of gallows humor, a friend points that he has a 
fool-proof way of smugging a nuclear device into New York harbor: "Wrap 
it in a bale of marijuana," he says.)

The goal of Bush's foreign policy is not different in kind from that of 
earlier administrations.  It is the recklessness born of desperation 
that leads his administration to far more dangerous expedients than his 
predecessors.  President Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew 
Brzezinski, has frequently expressed the bipartisan consensus. "America 
has major strategic and economic interests in the Middle East that are 
dictated by the region's vast energy supplies," he wrote two years ago 
in The National Interest. "Not only does America benefit economically 
from the relatively low costs of Middle Eastern oil, but America's 
security role in the region gives it indirect but politically critical 
leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on 
energy exports from the region."

The Bush administration needs the threat of terror to justify its 
depredations in the Middle East.  That point is so obvious that many 
Americans have leapt to the conclusion -- clearly false, I think -- that 
Bush, Cheney et al. must have had something to do with the 9/11 attacks 
beforehand: the fit is too perfect.  But the real danger is that this 
administration is willing to let the threats continue, and not take 
effective action against them, because they need them as propagandistic 
justifications.

Now the Bush administration seems to be faced with a revolt from the 
very instruments of American hegemony since World War II: its spy 
agencies.  (Some suggest that a similar revolt was the cause of the fall 
of Richard Nixon; the Watergate affair, it is said, was the CIA's way of 
curbing Nixon at his mad extreme.) When Bush announced an end to the 
grossly illegal secret prisons that the CIA was running around the 
world, it was not because of a sudden access of virtue, but because the 
CIA agents were demanding legal indemnification against prosecution 
under the War Crimes Act of 1996 -- which became a possibility after the 
Supreme Court upheld (in spite of the opposition of Bush's appointees) 
the prohibitions against torture of the Geneva Accords.  And so we were 
treated to the horrific spectacle of an American president (or perhaps 
more accurately his vice-president) demanding from Congress the legal 
right to torture.

That debacle was quickly followed by the simultaneous leak -- six weeks 
before the 2006 elections -- to the New York Times, the Washington post, 
and the Los Angeles Times, of the central document produced by all 
sixteen [sic] US spy agencies together, the 2006 National Intelligence 
Estimate.  This NIE directly contradicted the fundamental claim on which 
the administration was basing its election campaign, that the war in 
Iraq, as the central front of the war on terror, was making Americans 
safer.  The leak was not an accident.

It is obvious whom the Bush administration is working for, but the point 
is brought out in one incident preserved in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 
911.  At a white-tie charity banquet during the 2000 election campaign, 
Bush -- thinking he is making a joke about the obviously moneyed 
assemblage -- refers to "the haves and have-mores" as "my base" -- half 
in jest, all in earnest.

At the end of Moore's film, he quotes some lines from a film of Orwell's 
1984, which may be paraphrased as follows: "It's not a matter of whether 
the war is not real, or if it is.  Victory is not possible. The war is 
not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society 
is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance ... The war is 
waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not 
the victory over either [terrorism, or Iraq,] but to keep the very 
structure of society intact. " But as Alperovitz points out, "The 
American ‘system’ as a whole is in real trouble..."

The fragilities of the Bush administration (eerily similar to the 
fragilities in Bush's own personality, some say) mean that they resemble 
an unsuccessful gambler who doubles his stake every time he loses.  But 
as the gambles become more extreme, the cost of failure rises -- with 
ultimate catastrophe not out of the question.  Now, with the thoroughly 
factitious "crisis" over Iran, the US and Israel threaten an attack that 
Pentagon war gamers have said leads in each of their iterations to the 
use of nuclear weapons...

The administration's fragility threatens that of the world.

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