Preventive war 'the supreme crime'
Iraq: invasion that will live in infamy
10/08/2003
- Opinión
SEPTEMBER 2002 was marked by three events of considerable
importance, closely related. The United States, the most powerful
state in history, announced a new national security strategy
asserting that it will maintain global hegemony permanently. Any
challenge will be blocked by force, the dimension in which the US
reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums began to beat to
mobilise the population for an invasion of Iraq. And the campaign
opened for the mid-term congressional elections, which would
determine whether the administration would be able to carry
forward its radical international and domestic agenda.
The new "imperial grand strategy", as it was termed at once by
John Ikenberry writing in the leading establishment journal,
presents the US as "a revisionist state seeking to parlay its
momentary advantages into a world order in which it runs the
show", a unipolar world in which "no state or coalition could
ever challenge it as global leader, protector, and enforcer" (1).
These policies are fraught with danger even for the US itself,
Ikenberry warned, joining many others in the foreign policy
elite.
What is to be protected is US power and the interests it
represents, not the world, which vigorously opposed the concept.
Within a few months studies revealed that fear of the US had
reached remarkable heights, along with distrust of the political
leadership. An international Gallup poll in December, which was
barely noticed in the US, found almost no support for
Washington's announced plans for a war in Iraq carried out
unilaterally by America and its allies - in effect, the US-United
Kingdom coalition.
Washington told the United Nations that it could be relevant by
endorsing US plans, or it could be a debating society. The US had
the "sovereign right to take military action", the
administration's moderate Colin Powell told the World Economic
Forum, which also vigorously opposed the war plans: "When we feel
strongly about something we will lead, even if no one is
following us" (2).
President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair
underscored their contempt for international law and institutions
at their Azores summit meeting on the eve of the invasion. They
issued an ultimatum, not to Iraq, but to the Security Council:
capitulate, or we will invade without your meaningless seal of
approval. And we will do so whether or not Saddam Hussein and his
family leave the country (3). The crucial principle is that the
US must effectively rule Iraq.
President Bush declared that the US "has the sovereign authority
to use force in assuring its own national security", threatened
by Iraq with or without Saddam, according to the Bush doctrine.
The US will be happy to establish an Arab facade, to borrow the
term of the British during their days in the sun, while US power
is firmly implanted at the heart of the world's major energy-
producing region. Formal democracy will be fine, but only if it
is of a submissive kind accepted in the US's backyard, at least
if history and current practice are any guide.
The grand strategy authorises the US to carry out preventive war:
preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-
emptive war might be, they do not hold for preventive war,
particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current
enthusiasts: the use of military force to eliminate an invented
or imagined threat, so that even the term "preventive" is too
charitable. Preventive war is, very simply, the supreme crime
that was condemned at Nuremberg.
That was understood by those with some concern for their country.
As the US invaded Iraq, the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote
that Bush's grand strategy was "alarmingly similar to the policy
that imperial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor, on a
date which, as an earlier American president [Franklin D
Roosevelt] said it would, lives in infamy". It was no surprise,
added Schlesinger, that "the global wave of sympathy that
engulfed the US after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of
hatred of American arrogance and militarism" and the belief that
Bush was "a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein" (4).
For the political leadership, mostly recycled from the more
reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush Senior administrations,
the global wave of hatred is not a particular problem. They want
to be feared, not loved. It is natural for the Secretary of
Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to quote the words of Chicago gangster
Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than
with a kind word alone." They understand just as well as their
establishment critics that their actions increase the risk of
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terror.
But that too is not a major problem. Far higher in the scale of
their priorities are the goals of establishing global hegemony
and implementing their domestic agenda, which is to dismantle the
progressive achievements that have been won by popular struggle
over the past century, and to institutionalise their radical
changes so that recovering the achievements will be no easy task.
It is not enough for a hegemonic power to declare an official
policy. It must establish it as a new norm of international law
by exemplary action. Distinguished commentators may then explain
that the law is a flexible living instrument, so that the new
norm is now available as a guide to action. It is understood that
only those with the guns can establish norms and modify
international law.
The selected target must meet several conditions. It must be
defenceless, important enough to be worth the trouble, an
imminent threat to our survival and an ultimate evil. Iraq
qualified on all counts. The first two conditions are obvious.
For the third, it suffices to repeat the orations of Bush, Blair,
and their colleagues: the dictator "is assembling the world's
most dangerous weapons [in order to] dominate, intimidate or
attack"; and he "has already used them on whole villages leaving
thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or transfigured. If
this is not evil then evil has no meaning." Bush's eloquent
denunciation surely rings true. And those who contributed to
enhancing evil should certainly not enjoy impunity: among them,
the speaker of these lofty words and his current associates, and
all those who joined them in the years when they were supporting
that man of ultimate evil, Saddam Hussein, long after he had
committed these terrible crimes, and after the first war with
Iraq. Supported him because of our duty to help US exporters, the
Bush Senior administration explained.
It is impressive to see how easy it is for political leaders,
while recounting Saddam the monster's worst crimes, to suppress
the crucial words "with our help, because we don't care about
such matters". Support shifted to denunciation as soon as their
friend Saddam committed his first authentic crime, which was
disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding) orders, by invading
Kuwait. Punishment was severe - for his subjects. The tyrant
escaped unscathed, and was further strengthened by the sanctions
regime then imposed by his former allies.
Also easy to suppress are the reasons why the US returned to
support Saddam immediately after the Gulf war, as he crushed
rebellions that might have overthrown him. The chief diplomatic
correspondent of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, explained
that the best of all worlds for the US would be "an iron-fisted
Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein", but since that goal seemed
unattainable, we would have to be satisfied with second best (5).
The rebels failed because the US and its allies held the
"strikingly unanimous view [that] whatever the sins of the Iraqi
leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his
country's stability than did those who have suffered his
repression" (6).
All of this was suppressed in the commentary on the mass graves
of the victims of the US- authorised paroxysm of terror of Saddam
Hussein, which commentary was offered as a justification for the
war on "moral grounds". It was all known in 1991, but ignored for
reasons of state.
A reluctant US population had to be whipped to a proper mood of
war fever. From September grim warnings were issued about the
dire threat that Saddam posed to the US and his links to al-
Qaida, with broad hints that he had been involved in the 9/11
attacks. Many of the charges that had been "dangled in front of
[the media] failed the laugh test," commented the editor of the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "but the more ridiculous [they
were,] the more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing
of them a test of patriotism" (7). The propaganda assault had its
effects. Within weeks, a majority of Americans came to regard
Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the US. Soon almost half
believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 terror. Support for the
war correlated with these beliefs. The propaganda campaign was
just enough to give the administration a bare majority in the
mid-term elections, as voters put aside their immediate concerns
and huddled under the umbrella of power in fear of a demonic
enemy.
The brilliant success of public diplomacy was revealed when Bush,
in the words of one commentator, "provided a powerful Reaganesque
finale to a six-week war on the deck of the aircraft carrier
Abraham Lincoln on 1 May". This reference is presumably to
President Ronald Reagan's proud declaration that America was
"standing tall" after conquering Grenada, the nutmeg capital of
the world, in 1983, preventing the Russians from using it to bomb
the US. Bush, as Reagan's mimic, was free to declare - without
concern for sceptical comment at home - that he had won a
"victory in a war on terror [by having] removed an ally of al-
Qaida" (8). It has been immaterial that no credible evidence was
provided for the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and his
bitter enemy Osama bin Laden and that the charge was dismissed by
competent observers. Also immaterial was the only known
connection between the victory and terror: the invasion appears
to have been "a huge setback in the war on terror" by sharply
increasing al-Qaida recruitment, as US officials concede (9).
The Wall Street Journal recognised that Bush's carefully staged
aircraft carrier extravaganza "marks the beginning of his 2004
re-election campaign" which the White House hopes "will be built
as much as possible around national-security themes". The
electoral campaign will focus on "the battle of Iraq, not the
war", chief Republican political strategist Karl Rove explained :
the war must continue, if only to control the population at home
(10).
Before the 2002 elections Rove had instructed party activists to
stress security issues, diverting attention from unpopular
Republican domestic policies. All of this is second-nature to the
re cycled Reaganites now in office. That is how they held on to
political power during their first tenure in office. They
regularly pushed the panic button to avoid public opposition to
the policies that had left Reagan as the most disliked living
president by 1992, by which time he may have ranked even lower
than Richard Nixon.
Despite its narrow successes, the intensive propaganda campaign
left the public unswayed in fundamental respects. Most continue
to prefer UN rather than US leadership in international crises,
and by two to one prefer that the UN, rather than the US, should
direct reconstruction in Iraq (11).
When the occupying coalition army failed to discover WMD, the US
administration's stance shifted from absolute certainty that Iraq
possessed WMD to the position that the accusations were
"justified by the discovery of equipment that potentially could
be used to produce weapons" (12). Senior officials then suggested
a refinement in the concept of preventive war, to entitle the US
to attack a country that has "deadly weapons in mass quantities".
The revision "suggests that the administration will act against a
hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and ability
to develop WMD" (13). Lowering the criteria for a resort to force
is the most significant consequence of the collapse of the
proclaimed argument for the invasion.
Perhaps the most spectacular propaganda achievement was the
praising of Bush's vision to bring democracy to the Middle East
in the midst of an extraordinary display of hatred and contempt
for democracy. This was illustrated by the distinction that was
made by Washington between Old and New Europe, the former being
reviled and the latter hailed for its courage. The criterion was
sharp: Old Europe consists of governments that took the same
position over the war on Iraq as most of their populations; while
the heroes of New Europe followed orders from Crawford, Texas,
disregarding, in most cases, an even larger majority of citizens
who were against the war. Political commentators ranted about
disobedient Old Europe and its psychic maladies, while Congress
descended to low comedy.
At the liberal end of the spectrum, the former US ambassador to
the UN, Richard Holbrooke, stressed the "very important point"
that the population of the eight original members of New Europe
is larger than that of Old Europe, which proves that France and
Germany are "isolated". So it does, unless we succumb to the
radical-left heresy that the public might have some role in a
democracy. Thomas Friedman then urged that France be removed from
the permanent members of the Security Council, because it is "in
kindergarten, and does not play well with others". It follows
that the population of New Europe must still be in nursery
school, at least judging by the polls (14).
Turkey was a particularly instructive case. Its government
resisted the heavy pressure from the US to prove its democratic
credentials by following US orders and overruling 95% of its
population. Turkey did not cooperate. US commentators were
infuriated by this lesson in democracy, so much so that some even
reported Turkey's crimes against the Kurds in the 1990s,
previously a taboo topic because of the crucial US role in what
happened, although that was still carefully concealed in the
lamentations.
The crucial point was expressed by the deputy Secretary of
Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who condemned the Turkish military
because they "did not play the strong leadership role that we
would have expected" - that is they did not intervene to prevent
the Turkish government from honouring near-unanimous public
opinion. Turkey had therefore to step up and say, "We made a
mistake - let's figure out how we can be as helpful as possible
to the Americans" (15). Wolfowitz's stand was particularly
informative because he had been portrayed as the leading figure
in the administration's crusade to democratise the Middle East.
Anger at Old Europe has much deeper roots than just contempt for
democracy. The US has always regarded European unification with
some ambivalence. In his Year of Europe address 30 years ago,
Henry Kissinger advised Europeans to keep to their regional
responsibilities within the "overall framework of order managed
by the US". Europe must not pursue its own independent course,
based on its Franco-German industrial and financial heartland.
The US administration's concerns now extend as well to Northeast
Asia, the world's most dynamic economic region, with ample
resources and advanced industrial economies, a potentially
integrated region that might also flirt with challenging the
overall framework of world order, which is to be maintained
permanently, by force if necessary, Washington has declared.
* Noam Chomsky is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology
(1) John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, Sept.-Oct. 2002.
(2) Wall Street Journal, 27 January 2003.
(3) Michael Gordon, The New York Times, 18 March 2003.
(4) Los Angeles Times, 23 March 2003.
(5) The New York Times, 7 June 1991. Alan Cowell, The New York
Times, 11
April 1991.
(6) The New York Times, 4 June 2003.
(7) Linda Rothstein, editor, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July
2003.
(8) Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, 2 May 2003;
transcript, 2 May
2003.
(9) Jason Burke, The Observer, London 18 May 2003.
(10) Jeanne Cummings and Greg Hite, Wall Street Journal, 2 May
2003.
Francis Clines, The New York Times, 10 May 2003.
(11) Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of
Maryland,
April 18-22.
(12) Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 1 June 2003
(13) Guy Dinmore and James Harding, Financial Times, 3/4 May
2003.
(14) Lee Michael Katz, National Journal, 8 February 2003;
Friedman, The
New York Times, 9 February 2003.
(15) Marc Lacey, The New York Times, 7/8 May 2003.
Michael Albert
ZNet / Z Magazine
sysop@zmag.org
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