[Peace-discuss] An honest account…

[Morton K. Brussel]

 From ZNet.


ZNet Commentary
Last Sunday: Liberal icons and the problem of bipartisan empire- 
building March 06, 2007
By Robert Jensen

In a political culture defined by a centrist-to-reactionary political  
spectrum, Paul Wellstone was a breath of fresh air when he brought  
his progressive politics to the U.S. Senate in 1991. His death in  
2002 robbed the country of a humane voice on the national political  
stage.

I lived for a time in Minnesota and followed Wellstone's career  
closely. The last time I saw him speak was December 1998 when I was  
part of a peace group that conducted a sit-in at his office to  
protest his support for a U.S. attack on Iraq and force a meeting to  
challenge the former anti-war activist's hawkish turn. Yes, that's  
right -- a group sat in at Wellstone's St. Paul office when he  
supported Bill Clinton's illegal 1998 cruise missile attack on Iraq,  
which was the culmination of a brutal and belligerent U.S. policy  
during that Democratic administration.

It might seem odd to recall such a small part of contemporary history  
when the United States is mired in a full-scale occupation of Iraq,  
but there's an important lesson in this little bit of history -- one  
that's is often difficult for many liberals and Democrats to face:

Illegal and immoral U.S. aggression is, and always has been, a  
bipartisan affair. Democrats and liberals are responsible for their  
share of the death, destruction, and misery caused by U.S. empire- 
building along with Republicans and conservatives. I mention the  
Wellstone incident not to suggest he and George W. Bush are equally  
culpable, but to make the point that even politicians with  
Wellstone's progressive politics can be twisted by the pathology of  
power and privilege.

Precisely because we face such crucial policy choices in Iraq, the  
Middle East, and the world, we must remember that while W. and the  
neocons are a problem, they are not the problem. Sweep this  
particular gang of thugs and thieves out of office, and
  what? A kindler-and-gentler imperial policy designed by Democrats  
is still an imperial policy, and imperial policies always have the  
same result: The suffering of millions -- others that are too often  
invisible to us -- in support of policies that protect the affluence of
  us.

Name a politician at the national level today who has even come close  
to acknowledging that painful reality. Go ahead, think about it for a  
minute -- I can wait.

I'm reminded of a meeting that a group of Austin activists had with  
our congressman, liberal Democrat Lloyd Doggett, as part of a  
national grassroots organizing effort in the late 1990s to end the  
punishing embargo on Iraq that the Clinton administration imposed for  
eight long years. Those economic sanctions were killing an estimated  
5,000 Iraqi children a month, and it's likely that as many as a  
million people died during the Clinton years as a result of this  
aspect of the U.S. policy of dominating the politics of the region.  
We asked Doggett -- who had courageously spoken out against U.S.  
aggression in the past -- to challenge this policy of his Democratic  
leadership, which he declined to do. One of us mentioned our  
opposition to this in the context of a larger critique of U.S.  
empire. Doggett's response: "That was never my analysis."


In other words, even though the United States has been pursuing  
imperial policies since it was founded -- first on the continent it  
eventually conquered and later around the world -- that wasn't his  
analysis. In other words, his analysis was apparently to deny the  
reality of how the United States became the most powerful nation- 
state in the history of the world. In other words, his analysis  
required obscuring difficult truths, which might be called a
  I'll leave that sentence for you to complete.

Again, my purpose in pointing this out is not to suggest that there  
is no difference in the policies of Doggett and Bush, but rather to  
point out the disease at the heart of conventional politics in the  
United States: The willingness to lie about the history and  
contemporary policies that have made us the most affluent society in  
the history of the world.

The political elites of the United States of America are united in  
their acceptance of these historical fabrications and contemporary  
obfuscations. Whatever their particular policy proposals, they all  
lie about the nature of the system that has produced U.S. power and  
affluence. They all invoke mythical notions of the fundamental  
decency of the United States. And because of that, they all are part  
of the problem.

Here's a gentle corrective: People can be decent, and many in the  
United States -- just as everywhere in the world -- are incredibly  
decent, but no imperial nation-state has ever had any fundamental  
decency. The rich First World nations of this world got rich through  
violence and theft. That doesn't mean there's nothing positive about  
the U.S. system, but is simply a reminder that if we start with a  
lie, we end up telling lots of lies and doing lots of damage.

So, let's tell the truth, not only about our political opponents but  
about our alleged allies. Let's tell the truth about the so-called  
"human rights" president, Jimmy Carter, a man who has accomplished  
some good things since leaving office and lately has been brave in  
standing up to critics who denounce him for telling part of the truth  
about the Israel/Palestine conflict (the part that ignores his own  
contributions while in office to the entrenchment of Israeli power  
and control, and hence to contemporary policy failures).

But Jimmy Carter as president -- the person he was when he held power  
-- was a person who backed the brutal rule of the Shah of Iran and,  
after the Iranian people has overthrown that dictatorship, allowed  
the shah to come to the United States. Carter continued to support  
and arm the military dictatorship of Indonesia through the worst of  
the genocidal atrocities in its illegal occupation of East Timor. Not  
exactly human-rights kinds of policies.

Nor was a concern for human rights in evidence in Carter's policy  
toward El Salvador. By coincidence, yesterday (February 17) was the  
27th anniversary of a letter that Archbishop Oscar Romero wrote to  
Carter, pleading with him to support human rights by ending U.S.  
funding and arms transfers to the authoritarian government of El  
Salvador. Romero wrote to Carter that "instead of favoring greater  
justice and peace in El Salvador, your government's contribution will  
undoubtedly sharpen the injustice and the repression inflicted on the  
organized people, whose struggle has often been for respect for their  
most basic human rights." Carter's response was to continue support  
for the brutal military dictatorship that put guns in the hands of  
death squads, including one that would assassinate Romero a month later.

And then there is the famous "Carter Doctrine" proclaimed in his 1980  
State of the Union address, in which he made "absolutely clear" his  
position on the oil-rich region: "An attempt by any outside force to  
gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an  
assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and  
such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including  
military force."

In other words: Control over the flow of Middle East oil must remain  
in U.S. hands. Hmm, does that seem familiar? There was, of course, no  
outside force attempting to gain control of the region. But plenty of  
forces within the region -- then and now -- have wanted to break  
decades of U.S. domination, and those forces have been the real  
targets of the doctrine of Carter, and every other post-WWII  
president before and since. While the primary responsibility for the  
mess we have created in Iraq should be laid on the doorstep of Bush  
and the neocons, there's a lot of responsibility left to go around.

Let me be clear one more time: I am not saying that there is no  
difference between Paul Wellstone, Lloyd Doggett, Jimmy Carter on one  
hand, and George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell on the other.  
There is, and sometimes those differences make a difference.

But ask yourself: Are the victims of these bipartisan policies around  
the world likely to be so concerned about the differences? When Lloyd  
Doggett and many other Democrats in Congress were supporting  
Clinton's sanctions policy -- fully aware that children in Iraq were  
dying by the thousands due to a lack of clean water, medical  
supplies, and adequate nutrition -- should we have expected those  
children to be grateful that the Democrats had a better record on the  
minimum wage? When Jimmy Carter shipped weapons for death squads in  
El Salvador, should the campesinos murdered with those weapons have  
been grateful that Carter wasn't as reactionary as the Reagan gang  
that would come next?

Yes, Paul Wellstone was in many ways an inspirational progressive  
figure at a time of right-wing backlash, and he often was politically  
courageous. But if we ignore the ways that politicians -- even the  
best of them -- can come to accept the illusions of the powerful that  
so often lead to pathological delusions and disastrous policies, how  
can a peace-and-justice movement hope to hold power accountable?

I'm not arguing for a holier-than-thou purism on all doctrine at all  
times; we have to be strategic in offering support to politicians  
with whom we inevitably will have some disagreements. Instead, I'm  
arguing for an honest assessment of politicians, and of ourselves. If  
we are willing to excuse so quickly the pro-imperial policies of our  
so-called progressive leaders, might that be in part because we  
haven't broken with the imperial mindset ourselves?

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan crumble under the weight of this  
imperial madness, we owe it to the people there not only to critique  
the policies of the psychotically self-righteous madmen of the Bush  
administration, and not only to point out that the current Democratic  
leadership is too timid in its opposition to these wars. We owe it to  
Iraqis and Afghans -- and to all the people living in places that our  
empire targets -- to critique the allegedly more humane and liberal  
face of empire.

If we look in the mirror, whose face is that?


  [Remarks to the fourth "Last Sunday" community gathering in Austin,  
TX, February 18, 2007. http://thirdcoastactivist.org/lastsunday.html ]

  Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas  
at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource  
Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org . His latest book is Getting  
Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007).  
Jensen is also the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism,  
and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim  
Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books); and Writing Dissent:  
Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang).  
He can be reached at rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles can  
be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.