Essay by Norman Birnbaum,
Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center and
an advisor to the Progressive Caucus of the US Congress (June 2004)
After Iraq
Washington 29 May Whatever happens in the next few months, those American citizens with undiminished critical capacities will find it difficult to deny that the war in Iraq has been lost. What was supposed to be the liberation of the Iraqui people has become a war in which the chief task of the occupation force is to defend itself against enemies the American generals often cannot even identify---and certainly not defeat. The battle of Fallujah ended when Baathite officers and Sunni resisters were given control of the city by a US general initially acting on his own to save the lives of his troops. The battle for theShiite holy city in the south, Nadjaf, as I write, was temporarily interrupted for a local cease fire negotiated with the Iman whom the US forces were suppposed to arrest or kill on sight. The protests of those who insist that the war be carried to unequivocal victory have not moved President Bush to direct his commanders to resume full scale operations. Indeed, the scandal of torture apart, the most striking event of the past month has been the increasingly audible expression of dissent in the armed forces and the foreign policy bureaucracy, the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department. Sometimes speaking in their own name (especially true of commanders in the field), sometimes anonymously, significant numbers of those directly involved in the execution of policy have criticised the strategy and tactics of the entire venture. Some have supplied data and documents to the press, as some newspapers and television programs slowly abandon the reluctance to criticize the government which made the phrase “a free press” seem, since the White House decided on war, utterly empty. Even the Congress and the Senate, whose members (with the conspicuous exceptions of a number of legislators who were then either systematically ignored or savagely derided in the press ) had fled from their constitutional duty to control and question the President, are beginning to show signs of life.
No doubt, the publication of the photographs of the torture inflicted upon Iraquis by American troops has had a catalyzing effect, shaming a good many citizens. Equally important, however, has been the Iraqui resistance---which demonstrated, if demonstration were needed, that the power of the US definitely did not extend to the streets of Iraq’s cities. That may be a lesson which will be noted, and acted upon, elsewhere in the world’s slums. That is, precisely, the fear of those who urge the President that he must continue, whatever the cost. The public, at first in agreement with this position, now is moving away from it. The torture photos, and the lost battles in the Iraqui streets, follow an episode which attracted a great deal of attention. Ted Koppel, the commentator whose program Nightline is a fixture of evening television, decided to show the photographs and read the names of the soldiers killed in the war. The government had attempted to sanitize the war by refusing to allow photos to be taken of the arrival of the coffins of the dead, or of the thousands of wounded at military hospitals. President Bush conspicuously refrained from attending the funeral of anyone killed in the war. That thousands, very possibly tens of thousands of Iraquis have died in the war, interests the Churches and the groups which speak for the secular conscience of the nation---an active minority, but a minority. That the government has deliberately attempted to minimize the sufferings of ordinary American families has offended the most unreflectively patriotic of Americans, increasing numbers of whom are beginning to sense that their pride in the nation, their trust in the integrity of its officials, have been abused.
The nation remains bitterly divided. The President’s faithful servants in the media, and the large number of Republican Congressmen and Senators who consider their political fate linked to his, have reacted to the increase in criticism by intensifying their campaign of denigration of his critics. They are charged with aiding the enemy, with betraying our own troops, by raising questions about the conduct of the war. The nation’s vast reservoirs of authoritarianism and chauvinism have been drawn upon by the educated cynics making White House strategy. However, some Republicans (Senators Hagel, Lugar McCain, and Warner for instance) have taken their duties to their electorates to mean that it is their duty to criticize the White House. The surpassing arrogance of Secretary Rumsfeld has dismayed those who months ago were praising his resolution and skill.
The change in mood is most evident in the response of the Democrats. It has been a staple of Republican discourse ever since the Cold War began that the Democrats were advocates of withdrawal in the face of challenges to the nation. The Democrats, however, initiated the Cold War, constructed NATO, fought the war in Korea and the one in Vietnam, sponsored successful coups d’etat in Brazil, Greece, Indonesia and Iran (and
carried out the ignoble Bay of Pigs invasion planned under Eisenhower.) Many of them
opposed Nixon, Ford and Kissinger when they attempted to develop arms control agreements and a structure of co-existence with the Soviet Union. No matter, psychosexual imagery has been employed, continuously, to portray them as weak. President Reagan once declared that “we are standing tall again.” Given the very evident potency anxieties of many American males, we can conclude that the anatomical reference was dual. “McGovernism” is the Republican phrase used to describe Democratic weakness, ever since George McGovern ran against Nixon in 1972 as the advocate of total withdrawal from Vietnam. McGovern himself was a wartime hero, a bomber commander who survived some of the most dangerous missions of the European theater. The Democrats by no means presented a united front against these calumnies. Insistence that the party must distance itself from laxity in defending the nation has been a mode of debate within the party since the end of the war. It was closely related to the Democrats’ defensiveness about the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and with
the campaign of persecution of any form of social criticism and political dissent as “Communist” at the beginning of the Cold War. The Soviet Union having disappeared, the Islamists are now the enemy---and debates about how to deal with them, astonishingly, reproduce those of the past about the Cold War in a very different international context. Perhaps that is an elliptical way of saying that the US and its elites are so self-absorbed, so historically narcissistic, that the real world beyond our borders means less to them than their own ideological battles. Still, the Democrats are now increasingly vocal in their criticism of the war.
The political figure struggling with all of these contradictions is John Kerry. Ideally placed to oppose a President who (like the Vice President) arranged not to serve in Vietnam, the hero of that war has been strangely muted. He voted for the war in the Senate, as did most Democrats---like them, he was afraid of being branded as “unpatriotic.” Since then, he has been unable to develop a clear line of attack. He criticizes the President’s incompetence, and declares that he would repair our broken alliances. In calling for NATO to assume responsibilities in Iraq, however, he echoes the White House—which cannot intellectually and psychologically deal with the fact of the rejection of the war by the European public and major European governments. A source of Kerry’s dilemma is the dependence of the Democrats on the Israel lobby for votes in California and New York, and for a good deal of its funding. Kerry has endorsed Sharon—lest he be thought to advocate “even handedness” in the Mideast, language unacceptable to the Israel lobby even when it is patently hypocritical. The Israel government considers, correctly, that an American retreat from Iraq would be a severe defeat for its American supporters and for Israel itself. That is another reason why the candidate---at some risk to his credibility and capacity to mobilize many who might vote for him---is presently unable to advance serious proposals for extricating the US from the chaos in Iraq. There is, to be sure, another argument. Kerry may be allowing Bush to
pursue the path of political self-destruction in Iraq, leaving to others (former Vice President Gore and Senator Kennedy) frontal attacks on the President. That would free Kerry to take advantage in the last campaign months (September and October) of the situation of a weakened President. Perhaps---but in the meantime, the political pedagogy one expects of a politician with aspirations to leadership is conspicuous mostly by its absence. Put in another way, the opposition party, however different its rhetoric, shares with the Republicans the view that the US has the duty and the right (the usual phrase in American language is “responsibility”) to dominate the world---even if much of the world thinks (and acts) otherwise. It is within these limits that Kerry has been telling the voters that as President, he would return the nation to cooperation with other nations in general and the European allies in particular.
So much for the surface of our history at this moment. Is it possible, however, to look beneath the surface to discern more profound movements? Has the American nation learned anything from the moral and political catastrophe into which its President, encouraged by the initial cheers of his fellow citizens, led it? Is the nation at this stage of its history, indeed, capable of learning? What follows, for the future, from the answers we can give to these questions?
Let us begin with the reasons given by the President and his supporters for going to war.
Their flagrant lies about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the no less scandalous untruths about the connections between the Baathist regime and Islamist terror groups, are perfectly explicable. The Deputy Secretary of Defense, Dr. Wolfowitz, himself explained that they were convenient assertions. When at the beginning of the Cold War, President Truman sought Congressional advice on how to convince the public that military remobilization and funds for the reconstruction of Europe were necessary, he was advised by the Republican foreign policy figure, Senator Vandenberg: “Scare the hell out of them, Harry.” The present President views himself as in possession of a higher truth, in comparison with which minor falsehoods are just that, minor. To give concrete content to his conception of an American mission to redeem a fallen world, the President required a geopolitical map.
The presence of United States armed forces in 130 countries
means that our foreign policy managers p have plenty of maps. The importance of Iraq is obvious. Saudi Arabia has been increasingly inhospitable to the presence of US forces, and the smaller Persian Gulf states are too small. The Afghan campaign provided a welcome rationale for stationing US troops in a number of Central Asian nations (none of them, of course, conspicuous for their devotion to democracy, human rights, or government free of corruption). Turkey is, from the viewpoint of our imperial managers, excessively independent and cannot therefore serve as a major base. Israel provides Haifa as a naval base and facilities and landing rights upon request, but the costs of
stationing large contingents of American troops there would be considerable (exposure to attack, for instance, and the possibility that the Israelis in combination with their
political allies in the US would attempt to set conditions for their deployment.) Iraq’s
very central geographical location in the Mideast, between the Mediterranean and Central Asia, is obvious. Iraq some decades earlier was given US aid and support in its failed war on Iran: using a more pliable Iraq regime to counter Iran is one of the advantages promised by a successful invasion. George Bush Senior did not come to the aid of the Shiites when they rose against the defeated Saddam Hussein in 1991 and were slaughtered under the eyes of the American army: a Shiite success would have given Iran too much influence in Iraq.
It is in this geopolitical context that the familiar argument about the American need to secure permanent access to reserves of oil makes sense. Iraq as an American satellite state would not only have plenty of oil itself, it would make our domination in the entire region cheaper and more effective. No doubt, the US could reduce the size of its automobiles, invest in public transport, develop more energy efficient technologies and so reduce its dependence on oil. The American interest in the oil reserves of the Mideast (and of other parts of the world) is not exclusively concerned with domestic needs. It also has to do with the possibility of influencing, if not controlling, the access to oil of others—not least, the Europeans with their insistence on geopolitical independence of the US. Meanwhile, a large and continuous presence of US armed forces in the
Mideast and Central Asia, as well as political influence in countries like Georgia and Kazakhistan, establishes American power east and south of Russia, and west of China.
Our planners are, clearly, looking ahead.
That much said, the fact that the attack of 11 September was followed by the decision to attack Iraq suggests another and no less important motive. A successful attack on Iraq and the establishment there of a client regime was intended as a lesson to all who were tempted in one or another way to defy the United States. It is significant that the possibility of destroying the Baathist regime and then leaving immediately was apparently not considered seriously. Our global strategy in the Bush version does not envisage occasional moves from a fortress America---but the consolidation of an empire abroad to reduce the need to convert the US into a fortress. That the attack of 11 September proved the fortress to be very vulnerable to the new sort of asymmetrical conflict did not lead to serious reflection but to responses more appropriate to the Cold War and the international conflicts that preceded it in the twentieth century. The concentration of attention on Iraq brought a secondary gain. It diverted attention from the
near total failure of the project for regime change in Afghanistan (and the protection given to Bin Laden by his many friends in the Pakistan state apparatus). The new Afghan government’s writ does not extend much beyond the security perimeter around the President in Kabul.Rule by local and regional warlords, the continuation of the oppression of women, and of course the cultivation of large amounts of poppy for the international drug trade marks the rest of the country. The occasional irruptions of American forces searching for Al Quaida and Taliban elements (almost invariably, at considerable human cost to local populations) emphasizes, if emphasis is needed, the futility of the Afghan campaign. It is surprising that the Europeans have allowed themselves to be drawn into a situation in which they pay a large share of the economic, military and political costs---but have disproportionately little control of policy.
The Afghanistan failure is a striking commentary on one of the proclaimed ends of the Iraq campaign, the spread of democracy to the Mideast and the Muslim world, generally.
It does not much historical knowledge to recognize that democracy has specific preconditions which make treating it as a commodity for export a very dubious idea. It does not take much knowledge of the Mideast, and of the Muslim world generally, to
realize that it is plagued not by some immanent and intrinsic incompatibility between Islam and democracy---but by economic underdevelopment, the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, and authoritarian and corrupt regimes which (as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan and Indonesia) have been strongly supported by successive US governments.
The sudden conversion of the sponsor of these regimes to advocacy of democracy
is certainly praiseworthy: there is in the Christian tradition the idea that Heaven rejoices in nothing so much as a sinner who is saved. Democracy came about in Europe and North America as a result of a good deal of conflict and revolutionary turbulence (the English and French Revolutions, the American Revolution and the Civil War, the Chartist Movement of 1831 and the continental revolutions of 1848) and spread only with difficulty and many regressions. The concept of democracy propounded by the present American government quite purposefully under estimates, indeed eliminates, the ideas of economic and social citizenship, of sovereignty over the economy, in favor of the sovereignty of the market. The original occupation planning for Iraq is now practically a dead letter, but the American design did envisage the selling off the nation’s assets (as occurred in the piratical version of capitalism which has nearly ruined Russia) to the highest bidders. Matters were so arranged that these would have been, inevitably, American firms.
The democratization argument has advantages for the proponents of limitless American power. Like the war on “terror”, it provides opportunities of unending duration for selective interventions abroad. The choice of the Arabic and Muslim nations is also evidence for the influence of the Israel lobby. If these nations are in such dire need of external assistance to right themselves, then Israel would be correct in its claim that their opposition to Israel is a response not to Israel’s behaviour but a intended to divert attention from their own problems. The difficulty is, even if there were no Israel lobby, the imperial party in the US would remain in command. Indeed, that party could at any time disembarrass itself of the Israel lobby by raising the issue of the dual loyalty of American Jews----forcing the supporters of Israel on the defensive. The disavowal of Chalibi, who was sponsored by the Israel lobby, may signify the opening of a campaign of this sort.
I come to the heart of the problem, the beliefs and habits (reinforced by privileges in a very unequal society) of our foreign policy elite. Recent scholarly discussion in the US has often depicted the unilateralism of Bush as an aberration, a rupture with the continuity of American foreign policy. That policy, it is argued, was a mixture of realism and idealism, strenuous use of American power and benign cooperation with other nations, resulting in a way which resembled nothing so much as a theoloigian’s image of God’s design for the world, in the continuous construction of an international order.
Bush’s unilateralism has indeed provoked debate, much of it stilled with the attack on Iraq as his critics took voluntary vows of silence, or signified their agreement with the President. What is remarkable is how little of the debate criticizes the view that the US is ordained by history, either profane or sacred, to function as the dominant nation in the world.
In The Washington Post of 29 May, an Iraqui woman demonstrating at Abu Ghraib prison for the release of her husband said : “We like the American people, but the problem is their government. They are just like us, without any power. We saw them carrying banners and having demonstrations against the war.” The lady no doubt lacks a doctorate in international relations, but she has intuited truths about the US which escape the Europeans who return from pious pilgrimages to Harvard and Stanford, the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations to echo the fictions of their hosts. Fifty percent of the American electorate participates in Presidential elections (forty percent in the mid-term Congressional ones.) We have the best universities in the world, attended by a very small fraction of each age cohort—and mediocre schools for the rest. One of the great achievements of our politically servile and intellectually bankrupt media has been to convince a population of immigrants, children and grand-children and descendants of immigrants, of veterans of military service abroad., of managers and employees of firms regularly doing business beyond our borders, of tourists, that other nations have no autonomous existence. They are viewed solely in relation to the immediate agenda of those who frame the conventionalized, and thin discussions of foreign policy which reach the public.
Drawing on both his knowledge of American history and his experience as an advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. a generation ago described the working of
What he termed The Imperial Presidency. If he was right then, his work is even more telling now. The usual assumption amongst those who bother to think about it at all is that the exigencies of modern diplomacy, the necessity for rapid decision making, the need to coordinate the armed forces, the diplomatic agencies and the intelligence services give our Presidents no choice. They have to centralize authority and power in their hands, or chaos will ensue.More, only the President can communicate the grand lines of policy to the people: the nation is vast, the society is complex, and particular interests and lobbies might otherwise run wild.. However, the Israel Lobby is not conspicuous for its reticence: Presidents for a long time have not dared to challenge it. True, Bush Senior and his Secretary of State did---but the Clinton administration reverted to obedience quickly enough. Under Bush, and his Republican predecessors, Reagan and Bush Senior, an alliance of traditionalist Catholics and Protestant Fundamentalists dictated American policy on women’s rights and family matters, and birth control, in international gremiums. The lobbies do run wild, if the President thinks of it as politically advantageous.
What the Imperial Presidency has achieved is to drastically reduce, and even eliminate, the function of the Congress in foreign relations. When Bush decided upon attacking Iraq, he and his advisors did not spend much time worrying about convincing Congress: the presumption of Presidential supremacy in foreign affairs, even without the lasting effects of the attack of 11 September, sufficed. The few congressional and senatorial voices raised in doubt were just that, few---and a successor to the great critic of the Vietnam War ,William Fulbright, as Chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee), was nowhere to be seen. There are occasions and issues on which the Congress and Senate are heard. Democrats who wanted a more confrontation of the Soviet Union criticized Nixon and Ford, and Reagan came under attack because of the Iran-Contra scandal. In general, however, the legislature marches (or limps) behind the President. That does not prevent all kinds of interventions on specific issues (and in matters of the arms budget, attention to the distribution of funds in the members’ districts and states.) It does mean that with respect to the large outlines of policy, the legislature is quiet silent.
The same can be said of the media. The notion of “embedded” reporters, assigned to serve as in effect adjunct members of the American military in Iraq, ratified a previous situation of fact. In May, the New York Times published an unusual note of self-criticism: its reporters and editors, it declared, had been too credulous about “information” on Iraqui weapons of mass destruction supplied by an element in the government and Iraqui defectors pursuing their own interests. In fact, crticism of the Times for this lapse has been voiced by media critics for at least a year. As yet, we have no reports of a revival of the practise of the late forties and fifties, when the CIA obtained the consent of newspaper proprietors to insert agents on their staffs disguised as reporters.
What we can say is that there is little need for intelligence operatives giving instructions to journalists behind the scenes, when the journalists regard cooperation with government
as entirely normal. What is true of reporters is even more true of commentators. The debates concern how to manage our empire—not the imperial project as such.
There are practical incentives at work. For journalists, excessive curiousity about governmental failures and untruths may be professionally rewarding in one sense. In another, it may cost the good will of officials with whom the reporter must work for the indefinite future. (The White House press corps is expected to be so domesticated that major newspapers usually do not send their most experienced and talented reporters there.True, a Presidential sex scandal will mobilize investigative curiousity, but the ties between the Bush family and the Bin Ladens have been left to Michael Moore.) In foreign affairs, we often encounter unreflective identification with a conventionalized notion of the national interest. When the Bush government initiated a campaign of calumny directed at the French and German governments and peoples, our reporters in general descended to a shameful level of chauvinism and joined in, more rather than less enthusiastically.
The same pattern is evident amongst those who have functions in the broader foreign policy apparatus. Military officers and civil servants on active service are, of course, bound by narrow criteria of discretion and loyalty That by no means excludes considerable factional conflict within the apparatus, which not infrequently becomes public---as is happening now in arguments about responsibility for the Iraq disaster.
The Congressional and Senatorial staffs have as much freedom as their employers give them---usually, not very much and in no case are they entitled to express opinions different than those of their patrons.
No such visible constraints affect experts in the Washington centers of research, or professors of international relations at our elite universities, or executives in the scholarly foundations disbursing funds for research. They do impose a good deal of discretion upon themselves, presumably in the interest of remaining eligible for government appointment (that is, they do not wish to appear as iconoclasts or disturbingly independent) should their political patrons take office. That is why the historians of American diplomacy and foreign policy often sound, by comparison with many of their colleagues, like prophets in the wildernesso---when all they are doing is exercising a bit of academic detachment.
There is a very effective reason for the introversion of those concerned with foreign policy. There are no large mass organizations involved in these issues, despite the presence of effective (and sometimes sizeable) specific ethnic, ideological, and religious lobbies. That means that those challenging the conventional wisdom at any given moment may find themselves lost in political space, without support. The lobbies themselves, upon examination turn out to be administered from the top down, dependent upon voluntary contributions from members who do not, in the rule,
engage in much direct contact with one another or the public There is an exact parallel to our political parties, which are assemblages of interest groups and lobbies, led by small cadres of full time professionals---not membership organizations on the model of the European parties. In the circumstances, what is surprising (and a tribute to the vitality of our democracy) is that there is despite all of these obstacles a vocal foreign policy opposition, a grouping which seeks an end to American empire and another form of relationship to the world. Given the alarm with which positions of this sort are regarded (they are thought of in Washington as utopian in the best case and treasonous in the worst one), it is even more remarkable that these groups are present in the capital, occasionally are heard in national debate, if mutedly, and are not quite entirely separated from the more conventional segments of opinion. The campaign of Howard Dean for the Presidency as an anti-war candidate, using the Internet as a means of communication, fund raising and recruitment, is a striking example of what might be possible---even if the
established leaders of the party managed in extremis to defeat a candidate they feared they could not control.
The Churches, or some of the Churches, constitute one cluster of oppositional groups.
The Roman Catholic Church comprises twenty five percent of the population and, with its old and new immigrants (Irish, Germans, Italians, Slavs on the one hand, Latinos on the other) and connections to a global church, has an obvious international sensibility. Its beliefs in the sacredness of community account for a critical attitude to the sovereignty of the market, and its commitment to the integrity of the person makes it a defender of human rights. It is true that the immigrant groups have often sought to compensate for their newcomer status by emphasizing their attachment to their new nation. Catholics , and not only those from nations under Communist rule, were stern proponents of the Cold War. A newer generation of bishops and theologians, raised in the tradition of Vatican II, has been a vocal critic of American imperialism—most recently, of the war in Iraq. It has been joined by the main body of American Protesantism, the National Council of Churches.
whose constituent churches represent two thirds of America/s Protestants. The Protestants, once devoted to foreign missionary works and the conversion (let us say of the Chinese) to Calvin and cleanliness, are now inistent that the US pursue policies to aid the Third World nations. Both major churches warn against excessive reliance on military force as a means of solving the world’s problems, including terrorism. Their views contrast starkly with the celebration of the nation’s intrinsic goodness, the declaration of its right to impose a moral order on the world (linked to a pathological fear of difference, in fact) expressed in Protestant Fundamentalism. It is the Fundamentalist public (about twenty percent of the nation) which avidly consumes an apocalyptic literature with
a singular reading of world history in which the US as the incarnation of absolute good struggles against enemies large and small but omnipresent: secularists at home, Muslims and others abroad, and of course, the decadent Europeans, long since (Aznar and Berlusconi and Blair excepted) alienated from their own Christian traditions. What was once a religious group extremely productive of demands for universal justice, American Jewry (some two percent of the population) , has experienced a notable constriction of its horizons----due primarily to its increasingly embittered and uncritical defense of the interests of Israel. Of course, in all of these cases, the theologians may propose; their parishioners dispose, and few of them inhabit life worlds entirely constructed by their churches.
Working alongside the church groups are entire sets of secular groups. Many are specialized in issues of civil and human and women’s rights, conflict resolution and arms limitation, developmental assistance to the Third World., the defense of the environment. The trade unions have been especially active in struggling for labor rights—and against the savagery of unrestricted capitalism. Many of these groups have been instrumental in exposing the many scandals entailed in American backing for (and active complicity with) authoritarian regimes of inexpugnable brutality. One difficulty is that no common denominator of a persistent and explicit kind unites these efforts. When they find congressional or public resonance, it is usually in terms of a particular complex of events---not an articulated struggle against the policies which render criminality and exploitation, the waste of resources and the crippling of human development inevitable.
There are exceptions in the person of some prominent members of the Congress and Senate (Senator Edward Kennedy comes to mind), the Black Congressional Caucus, the Progressive Caucus. The campaigns remain the work of determined minorities, often without much access to the public as a whole.
Is there, however,, an American public? With our low voting rates, complex and conflicting cultural alignments, and generalized privatization, the idea---rooted in an earlier phase of democracy---may no longer quite apply.Every approach to a specific problem, then, raises the general one: the American democratic deficit. Our citizenry seems unable to mobilize its common sense and intelligence, and its considerable critical capacities and scepticism of authority, in a sustained campaign to alter the distribution of power and wealth in the society. That is no less true in the sphere of foreign policy, where a self-renewing and self-serving elite claims to speak in the name of a people which has decidedly not chosen it. The present discussion of the colossal defeat
we are experiencing in Iraq shows the limits of the present possibilities of redress, much less change. We are a limitedly democratic empire, in considerable danger of institutionalizing authoritarianism. It is difficult,for the foreseeable future, to discern what will enable the nation to break out of its present chains.
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