[Peace-discuss] It Didn't Start with the Neocons

[C. G. Estabrook]

[A shorter version of the following was submitted to the publici. 
Comments welcome.  --CGE]


	IT DIDN'T START WITH THE NEOCONS

It's generally known that the regime of war and torture that the Bush 
administration has visited upon the Middle East was planned and 
supported by a group of American intellectuals known collectively as 
neoconservatives.  The name is merely a label, not a description: there 
is nothing remotely conservative about this gang of statist 
reactionaries.  But it is important to realize that their views are not 
different in kind from those entertained by the shapers of American 
foreign policy for generations.  The neocon position was simply at an 
extreme end of the (rather narrow) spectrum of American policy options, 
all of which were animated by the same basic principles -- such as the 
necessity for the US to control Middle East energy resources.

It is often pointed out that the war policy followed by the current 
administration had been set out in detail by the neocons in the 1990s, 
well before the disputed election of 2000 and the attacks of 11 
September 2001.  "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," 
a notorious neocon report prepared for the Israeli right wing in 1996, 
recommended the inculcation of "Western values" [sic] in the Middle 
East, in fact an aggressive new policy of advancing right-wing Zionism. 
  Summing up a decade's agitation, the neocon Project for a New American 
Century published a report just before the 2000 election that conceded 
that their wished-for "process of transformation, even if it brings 
revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some 
catastrophic and catalyzing event -— like a new Pearl Harbor."  When it 
arrived on 9-11, they capitalized on it.  If their advice was 
treasonous, they took Patrick Henry's advice and made the most of it.

In part owing to the guidance of the neocons, the Bush administration is 
probably the most dangerous in American history -- not just because they 
are particularly stupid and vicious, although they probably are -- but 
because circumstances have given them, at least momentarily, a 
relatively free hand in international affairs:

     --the fall of the Soviet Union, although undoubtedly an advance for 
true socialism, reduced the hindrances to the use of American military 
power after 1991; and

     --the criminal attacks of 9-11-2001 provided an unparalleled excuse 
for the exercise of American state terror, even though US actions in 
ostensible response to those attacks, notably the invasion of Iraq, bore 
little or no relation to them.  (One leading neocon in the Pentagon 
proposed just after 9-11 that the US should bomb South America or 
Southeast Asia as "a surprise to the terrorists.")

Add to those respectively negative and positive encouragements for an 
aggressive American foreign policy what seems to be an increased 
American willingness to use nuclear weapons, as well as policies that 
have the predictable effect of encouraging the spread of nuclear 
weapons.  The world could hardly fail to notice that the Bush 
administration refrained from attacking one member (North Korea) of the 
"axis of evil," its official hate-objects, which had developed a nuclear 
weapon, while savaging another (Iraq), which had not, despite hysterical 
American charges; meanwhile they contemplated attacking the third (Iran) 
before it could develop such a weapon.  The conclusion was obvious: the 
possession of nuclear weapons is a necessary defense against American 
aggression.


The Useful Threat: the Soviets and After


The fall of the Soviet Union, occurring at the end of the first Bush 
administration, was not however an unmixed blessing for the US 
government.  It made undeniable what had been merely obvious before –- 
the ascendancy of American military power.  Despite generations of 
hysterical US government fear-mongering about Soviet threats -- in 1947, 
when the Truman administration was considering how to sell to the 
American public a policy of a permanent wartime economy coupled with 
aggressive interventions abroad, Senator Arthur Vandenberg told the 
president to "scare hell out of the American people" -- the Soviet Union 
never presented an authentic military threat to the US, or even to 
western Europe, with the single if substantial exception of the nuclear 
stand-off.  From the Churchill-Stalin agreements in the fall of 1944, 
each side generally observed the demarcation of its sphere of influence 
-- until the US violated its promise at the time of the unification of 
Germany and extended NATO to the Russian border.  With an economy no 
more than a third the size of that of the US, the USSR produced an 
equivalent military as a defense against the world-dominating role that 
the US took on after World War II.

The situation was quite plain to American policy-makers in those days. 
State Department analyst George Kennan wrote in 1948, "We have about 50% 
of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population ... In this 
situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our 
real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships 
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity ... To do 
so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; 
and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our 
immediate national objectives ... We should cease to talk about vague 
and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the 
living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we 
are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are 
then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."  Of course, the 
idealistic slogans could be saved for selling the policy to the US 
populace, but policy-makers shouldn't be distracted by them.

The Cold War was in fact quite functional for both the US and the USSR. 
  Each could use the threat of the other to keep its own clients in 
line.  When the Carter and Reagan administrations killed tens of 
thousands of people in Central America, it was to stop communism; when 
the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was to prevent the CIA from 
restoring capitalism.  But the disappearance of the USSR made such 
excuses, always vacuous, now impossible.  The naïve and pliable Colin 
Powell reported that, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 
USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev said to him, "General, I am sorry ... 
you will have to find a new enemy”; Powell "jokingly" responded that he 
didn’t want to find a new enemy -- and give up all his troops, funding 
of $300 billion a year, and an anti-communist crusade that had been 
trumpeted for thirty years.

Providentially, the jihadists arrived on 9-11 to fill the gap.  But they 
didn’t come out of nowhere: They were in fact conjured by American 
policy running back to the immediate post-WWII administrations, 
Democratic and Republican alike.  Noam Chomsky points out that "after 
World War II, the US was by far the dominant world power, and control of 
Middle East energy reserves became a leading foreign policy goal, as it 
had been for its predecessors. In the 1940s, US planners recognized that 
(in their words) Gulf energy resources are 'a stupendous source of 
strategic power' and 'one of the greatest material prizes in world 
history.' Naturally, they intended to control it -- though for many 
years they did not make much use of it themselves, and in the future, 
according to US intelligence, the US itself will rely on more stable 
Atlantic Basin resources (West Africa and the Western hemisphere). 
Nevertheless, it remains a very high priority to control the Gulf 
resources, which are expected to provide 2/3 of world energy needs for 
some time to come. Quite apart from yielding 'profits beyond the dreams 
of avarice,' as one leading history of the oil industry puts the matter, 
the region still remains 'a stupendous source of strategic power,' a 
lever of world control. Control over Gulf energy reserves provides 'veto 
power' over the actions of rivals, as the leading planner George Kennan 
pointed out half a century ago. Europe and Asia understand very well, 
and have long been seeking independent access to energy resources. Much 
of the jockeying for power in the Middle East and Central Asia has to do 
with these issues. The populations of the region are regarded as 
incidental, as long as they are passive and obedient..."

Of course these populations can become a severe problem for US control. 
  "Domestic radicalism," whether of the left or right, if it threatens 
to wrest control of a country's energy resources from the West and 
employ them for the purposes of that country's populace, must be countered.


Modes of Control: Israel and Religion


For a generation after WWII, the US saw secular Arab nationalism as the 
most dangerous form of domestic radicalism in the Middle East, and it 
countered with two instrumentalities: Israel and religion.  In 1967 
Israel defeated Egypt's Nasser, the leader of international Arabism, and 
was adopted by the US as its chief client and Middle East watchdog.  To 
mop up secular Arab nationalism, the US and Israel encouraged the growth 
of Islamist movements, up to and including the Palestinian party Hamas, 
whose origins were funded by Israel to counter the secular Palestine 
Liberation Organization. The present struggle between Fatah and Hamas in 
the Occupied Territories is a direct result of the US adoption of the 
imperialist’s oldest maxim, "divide et impera" -- but with the division 
being accomplished by religion.

In pursuit of this policy, the Carter administration (1977-81), in the 
most expensive CIA operation in history, recruited fanatic Islamist 
fighters (eventually including Osama bin Laden) and sent them into 
Afghanistan to worry the Soviet Union -- before the Russian invasion of 
that country, according to Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew 
Brzezinski.  "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its 
Vietnam war," he said.  To the objection that the policy was worse than 
a crime, it was a blunder, Brzezinski replied, "What is most important 
to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet 
empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and 
the end of the cold war?"  The US was to discover that "some stirred-up 
Muslims" could trouble Americans as well.

When the Reagan administration (1981-89) came to power, they announced 
that they would replace President Carter's feckless "human rights" 
foreign policy with a new slogan: "war on terror."  Of course the terror 
that they had in mind -- recent popular uprisings in Latin America -- 
was still ascribed to the fell influence of international communism, but 
the new slogan was a recognition that the excuse was wearing thin, once 
Gorbachev became the Soviet leader.

The sudden departure of the USSR in 1991 was entirely unexpected by 
American policy makers.  In fact, one of the first appearances of the 
neocons in battle dress had been as "Team B" in the 1970s, an outside 
group (approved by Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush) 
who countered estimates by CIA intelligence officials known as Team A. 
They argued that the CIA was ignoring the aggressiveness of the Soviet 
Union and vastly underestimating its military power.  Of course they 
were wrong on both points, but that didn't matter: their views became 
the basis for the massive arms buildup that began under Carter and 
accelerated under Reagan.

The Bush-1 administration (1989-93) tried to fill the gap caused by the 
loss of the communist menace with narcoterrorism: they killed a lot of 
Panamanians to put a former CIA asset (and incidentally a head of state) 
into a Miami jail.  The Clinton administration (1993-2001), shown the 
way by Bush-1 in Somalia, where the killing of another thousand people 
by the US went unremarked (except for the propaganda movie Black Hawk 
Down), seized on "humanitarian intervention" to bring a recalcitrant 
Serbia, on the border between Europe and the Middle East, to heel in 
1999.  Democrats now try to contrast the Clinton administration with 
that of Bush Jr., but in fact the former showed the way for the latter. 
  And even if the estimates of almost three quarters of a million people 
dead in Iraq as a result of Bush's war are accurate, as they seem to be, 
it may still be the case that Clinton is responsible for more dead 
Iraqis.  The sanctions against Iraq imposed by the UN after the Gulf War 
of 1991 -- in fact administered by the US and the UK -- killed at least 
a half million children alone, according to the two UN administrators 
who resigned in protest of the "genocidal" US policies.


How We Live Now: Hegemony or Survival


Paradoxically, it took the first major engagement of the US military 
after the disappearance of the USSR -- the attack on the prostrate 
country of Iraq -- to reveal its severe limitations.  The defeat of the 
US occupation of Iraq -- the American writ now barely runs even in 
Baghdad, despite the "surge" -- was almost immediately replicated in the 
humiliation of US client Israel by the irregulars of the Lebanese 
Shi'ite Party of God.

But the present situation is extremely hazardous: a predator becomes 
more dangerous when wounded. The US government's trumped-up charges 
against Iran resemble a losing gambler's doubling of the stakes. The US 
has shown that it is willing to go to great lengths to prevent losing 
control of Middle East energy. As Iran flirts with Russia and China and 
hints that it will become part of an Asian energy grid, the US sees the 
fundamental principle of its long-term policy at risk.

As President Chavez pointed out at the United Nations, quoting Noam
Chomsky, the US rulers show themselves willing to risk even the survival
of the species in pursuit of global hegemony.  It's primarily the
responsibility of the American people to stop them.


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