Number 166 July 26, 2002

This Week:

Quote of the Week
Freedom, Power, and the WAT?!
The Bush Doctrine: Something Old, Something New

Greetings,

I was born on the day that Senator Joseph McCarthy accused the U.S. Army of being riddled with Communists. Now I've lived long enough to experience the phenomenon known in my parent's day as "McCarthyism. Should it now be called "Ashcroftism?"

But, on a positive note... Those of us old enough to remember the resignation of Richard Nixon should take heart from the emerging evidence of Mr. Bush's involvement in the various corporate scandals that seem to be popping up all over. Recall that Nixon did not get in trouble when he bombed Cambodia and engineered the overthrow of the elected Allende government in Chile. Yet, as soon as he was found to have stepped on the toes of other powerful people in Washington—the affair we have come to call "Watergate"—his political fate was sealed.

I am hopeful that a similar destiny may await George W. Bush. His massive crimes against international peace and against our own Constitution don't seem to pose much of a threat to his regime, but perhaps his corporate escapades will come to be perceived by his fellow plutocrats as a genuine threat to the power of their class. If so, perhaps Gore Vidal's prediction that Mr. Bush "will leave office the most unpopular president in history" will prove prophetic. Call me a dreamer...

I will now be taking a week or two off. The next issue of Nygaard Notes will be out whenever I get back to work, most likely the 9th or the 16th of August.

See you then,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

"[T]o those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends."

-- U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee, December 6, 2001


Freedom, Power, and the WAT?!

The official line on the September 11th attacks is that the perpetrators "hate our freedom." At first I thought that was a bad guess—wouldn't they have attacked the Statue of Liberty?—but the more I think about it, the more accurate it seems. However, it's only accurate if one understands the encoded meanings of "our" and "freedom" within the peculiar propaganda system of the United States.

As I pointed out last week, the "us" to which elite U.S. planners frequently refer has long meant themselves, separate from and often opposed to the U.S. public. That's the meaning of the "our" in "our freedom" that the September 11th perpetrators were supposedly attacking.

Now let's look at "freedom." In any power hierarchy, the idea of "freedom" means quite different things to those on the bottom than it does to those on the top. The "freedom" that is so dear to U.S. elites is not some big-hearted and egalitarian ideal. They're talking about their own freedom to use their massive power in any way they choose. To the rest of us, "power" might mean the ability to limit the freedom that "they" have to use their power over us. (A lot of conflict arises from these competing desires for "freedom," but I'll leave that for another issue of Nygaard Notes.)

Within the United States, U.S. elites want to be "free" of such things as entitlement programs, like Social Security or welfare, which place a claim on some of the nation's wealth that they believe should rightly be theirs. For the same reason, they hate regulations, and the income tax. Here is their idea of "freedom:" they want to be totally free to keep their money, and the power that comes with it.

Outside of the U.S., the Bush Doctrine sums up the idea of the "freedom" that "we" want to protect, which is the right of the U.S. to attack anyone, anywhere, anytime, without proof. Similarly, such things as treaties and international institutions like the U.N. are objectionable because they often take into account the wishes of the less powerful nations, and in doing so place limits on the "freedom" of the U.S. to use its power. U.S. leaders are quite explicit about this in their arguments against such things as the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto environmental treaty, the Convention Against Torture (the enforcement of which they attempted to block just this week) , and so forth.

There are many aspects of the War Against Terrorism (the WAT?!) that seem to be poorly designed for the task of reducing terror, and that's because it's not the task for which they have been designed. The real agenda of our leaders now, as during the "First Cold War," is pursuit of the unlimited freedom of U.S. planners to expand their dominance, both domestically and globally. For "them," the language and the laws of the WAT?! are no more than a convenient box in which to package this pre-existing agenda of power and the "freedom" needed to carry it out. And the job of we citizens is to unite behind that agenda. Or not.

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The Bush Doctrine: Something Old, Something New

It's enlightening to watch the response in the mass media to the so-called Bush Doctrine (BD), which is popularly (if incompletely, as I showed last week) understood to be a doctrine of attacking our enemies before they attack us. This is called "preemption." One of the things to be seen in the coverage of the BD is the difference between a "liberal" press and an honest one.

The Washington Post intoned on June 16th that "The Bush Doctrine of preemption goes well beyond the established bounds of anticipatory self-defense..." The Milwaukee Journal worried that it "would be a rather dramatic departure from national tradition." A couple of weeks ago the Boston Globe said the BD "marks a significant break from the US posture of the latter half of the 20th century that was...more cautious and defensive."

If you look at the press in other countries, the language is somewhat stronger. Commenting on the BD's danger to the idea of international law, the London Guardian said that "The US president is hijacking the anti-terrorist agenda and crashing it into the most sacred skyscraper in New York: the headquarters of the UN." The Ottawa (Canada) Citizen called the BD a "self-confident, even arrogant, bellicosity." The Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, condemned Bush's "insistence that military strategy must be turned on its head in response to September 11." The Herald pointed out that "Traditionally, democratic nations have gone to war or staged other military action only when a serious threat has been identified, proven beyond reasonable doubt, and where negotiations have failed. Only Israel, among democracies, has adopted a strategy of pre-emptive intervention, with questionable results."

The good news here is that some very powerful people—i.e. elite journalists—are uncomfortable with the crudity of the Bush power grab, a.k.a. The Bush Doctrine. The bad news is that so many journalists appear to believe that the Bush Doctrine is something new in U.S. history.

It's not just journalists, either. Scholars like Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis have been heard to say things in public, like "The fact is, there is almost no precedent in American diplomatic or military history for preemption." It is a testimonial to the propaganda system, first of all, that these people apparently believe this stuff, and secondly, that they stand largely uncontradicted when they publish such nonsense. So, allow me to contradict them.

Imperialism, Old and New

While there are a few aspects of the current Doctrine that could be considered "new," the willingness of the U.S. to disdain negotiations and unilaterally attack other nations without establishing proof of an imminent threat is at least as old as the U.S. ascension to superpower status (see last week's Notes: "Fully Cognizant of the Threats"). If only the Glasgow Herald were correct when it stated that there has been a tradition of nations basing their military actions on proven and unresolvable threats to their security! Alas, there are any number of examples of the U.S. intervening in the internal politics of another country over the past 55 years (and before) without "proof"of any military threat to our security.

A telling four-paragraph Associated Press report was published on January 28th, inadvertently illustrating the real role of the U.S. military since World War II. Entitled "Cheney Backs Idea of Domestic Command," the story reported that the Vice President thought that the creation of "a military command to coordinate the defense of North America would be ‘a good idea.'" The U.S., the report went on, already has regional commanders who "are responsible for Europe, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and South Asia, but there is none for U.S. forces in the United States and Canada." (What, no command to protect us from the teeming hordes massing in Antarctica?!)

The fact that the U.S. government has for decades had in place an elaborate military structure that is "responsible" for every part of the world in which we do significant business—except our "homeland"—tells us a number of things. The important one for our purposes today is that the U.S. has long been prepared to intervene around the world. Anyone who has been paying attention knows that we have not only been prepared to intervene, but in fact have often done so.

Our interventions have often been military. Recent examples would include the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, Libya in 1986, and Panama in 1989). Even nominally "multi-lateral" military actions, such as the attack on Iraq in 1991, could possibly have been avoided had the U.S. not refused to pursue a negotiated solution in favor of military force.

More often U.S. interventions have been covert actions, or sometimes proxy wars, aimed at accomplishing U.S. goals with minimal threat to U.S. lives (and the political trouble that such a threat would bring). Think of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Indonesia, Haiti, Angola, even Afghanistan during the 1980s, among many other examples.

In none of these cases could the U.S. seriously be argued to be acting in "anticipatory self-defense," since none of these countries posed a credible military threat to the United States. Instead, in each case the real "threat" to U.S. power was the threat of a nation choosing to assert its independence from U.S. power. This has long been sufficient to move U.S. planners to attack, supplying appropriate justification as needed. In the Dominican Republic and Grenada we were "saving American lives," in Haiti we were "restoring order," in Panama we were "fighting drugs." The official justifications change with the times, the pattern of intervention does not.

[Those interested in the sordid history may wish to read William Blum's excellent 2000 book, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower." Or, on-line, you can read a partial list of U.S. interventions around the globe at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/US_Interventions_WBlumZ.html.]

The only area in which the United States could be said to have been "cautious and defensive" in the past 50 years is in regard to the Soviet Union. Here the U.S. was genuinely reluctant to engage, for a variety of good reasons, mostly Soviet power. And the existence of another nation that posed the possibility of threatening U.S. domination of the globe did force the U.S. to pick its (remote) targets somewhat more carefully than it seems willing to do now. But those targets were still quite numerous (see above), and the Bush Doctrine seems designed to tell the world that, whatever the limits to U.S. power may have been in the past, they're gone now.

What is New About the Bush Doctrine?

The only thing that is "new" about the Bush Doctrine is that the public discourse is now so narrow and controlled that there no longer has to be even the pretense of proof of a threat, or any attempt at negotiation, before sending in the U.S. military. And that's the real meaning of the Bush Doctrine: We are the now the world's only superpower, one that will not tolerate any foreign OR domestic challenge to our supremacy. Pre-Bush, any other nation's defiance had to be met in the U.S. with a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the American public to support the eventual attack. What the Bush Doctrine says is that there is no longer any need for propaganda—we'll just do as we please and dare anyone to try and stop us. That's an important change, and the only people who can really affect that reality are we here in the United States.

So, in the "liberal" media—such as the ones cited at the beginning of this essay, and I would add the NY Times and most of the other major U.S. newspapers—the United States is and always has been a benevolent force for good in the world. According to the "liberal" press, it is only now, under the "right-wing" Bush administration, that we are straying from the path of righteousness, which is referred to as a "dramatic departure from national tradition" and "a significant break from the US posture of the latter half of the 20th century."

This is why I keep saying that it is useless and dangerous to use the terms "left" and "right" when analyzing U.S. policy. The U.S. history of empire-building—the history which has given rise to many of the problems we are dealing with today—did not begin on September 11th, nor is the story one of "bad" Republicans on a rampage being opposed by "good" Democrats. Those who are willing and able to see that both traditional "liberals" and traditional "conservatives" have supported the imperialist agenda for decades can allow themselves to begin the serious work of creating a whole new social and cooperative system, one that goes far beyond anything the individualist and competitive Republicans and Democrats will ever offer.

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