From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue May 18 2010 - 00:42:15 EDT
http://www.inteldaily.com/2010/05/the-american-art-of-war/
The American art of war
May 16, 2010
By Eric Walberg
(Intelligence Daily) — Three new publications from the leading radical
British press are the tip of a growing iceberg of passionate pleas for
sanity in international affairs. Most of us prefer to stick our heads in
the sand as the world goes to hell in a hand-basket, but there are works
that can fascinate and uplift, perhaps even inspire us to do something
before it is too late.
If what you need is a reference book for your own writing, with all the
gory details of just how disreputable the world’s hegemon is, The Crimes
of Empire by Carl Boggs is what you pull down from your shelf. He has
slogged through all the filth of “collateral damage”, “humanitarian
warfare”, “client-state outlawry”, “perpetual war”,
“biowarfare”, “space imperialism”, Guantanamo — the Orwellian
list is seemingly endless — to provide a litany of horrors that will
convince even the most sceptical of observers as to who is the real problem
in the world.
Not a pretty read, but a commendable labour on the author’s part.
More rivetting than Boggs’s list of the empire’s sins is the
justification for them, as revealed by such neocons as Robert Kagan, who
sees American force as necessary “to restrain the chaotic tendencies of a
Hobbesian world”, and who thus rejects any global restraints on US
flexibility. “Human rights intervention”, the latest buzzword to
condone imperial ventures — it once was called the “white man’s
burden” — is for use by the big guns against the little ones. But
Boggs’s list of crimes is proof in itself that the imperial project
actually creates “a comprehensive lawless whole”.
This belies the Dawkinsian claim of evolutionary improvement in society’s
“moral zeitgest”, which sees an upward trajectory from the slavery of
yore to racial, gender and political correctness today, as “proved” by
post-WWII multilateral treaties signed at the New York UN HQs or in Geneva.
The New World Order is based on “sovereignty of nations”, though Boggs
points out that some nations are more sovereign than others, undermining
the whole farce. The Kagans justify this as “US exceptionalism”. But a
sobre evaluation of today’s world reveals that Reagan’s “peace
through strength” is really nothing but medieval “might makes right”.
Anyone with even a smattering of US history can see that the Indian wars
and Manifest Destiny of the 18th and 19th centuries were based on the same
philosophy of “pre-emptive war” that solemn conferences on security
today spout in defence of the indefensible.
This makes for frustrating reading, though it pushes you to make sense of
the hypocrisy of world affairs, if nothing else. My own rule of thumb in
considering how to resolve social problems is that only when the
overwhelming majority wants something and are blessed with a charismatic
political leader (take your choice in today’s world — they are there)
does a real change for the better have a chance. This has nothing in common
with a Darwin/Dawkins rational/natural evolutionary process. It is more
like a Kuhnian revolutionary paradigm change, a combination of force
majeure and luck, once a point-of-no- return is reached.
Corollary: No number of treaties will make for a just and equitable world
order if one country overpowers all the others and seeks to impose its
will. Another corollary is that the only evolutionary “moral zeitgeist”
is the historic-economic order itself — in our case, capitalism — no
matter how the dominant “culture” portrays itself for mass consumption.
Hurt Locker may be a clever and gripping film by a talented woman director,
but it is nonetheless a chauvinistic apologia for a criminal war, with the
real victims largely airbrushed out of the picture so as to concentrate on
the occupiers’ angst. It does nothing to illuminate any possible “moral
zeitgeist”apart from the chilling reality of US imperialism itself.
Finally, what the mass of horrors Boggs documents implies is that the only
measure of human rights is “How many died?” If that is your rule of
thumb, then there can be not one iota of doubt that, despite all the pious
words of its leaders, the US is one of the worst offenders that the world
has ever witnessed. And that its allies — accomplices — are no less to
blame for illegal wars, war crimes, genocides. Thus the so-called pariahs
— Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba — for better or worse, are direct
products of US imperial actions, lumped together because they oppose the
hegemon. Whatever crimes they may commit pale in comparison to the
nobler-than-thou US. This is not to defend mistreatment of people anywhere,
but to put things in a just light, so that we can navigate the treacherous
tunnel we find ourselves globally rushing down.
***
Here in the Middle East, the US and its “client”, spoiled offspring or
whatever you want to call Israel have done nothing to lessen the Hobbesian
chaos; on the contrary, they are the source of it. This is the message that
Paul Rogers sets out calmly and compellingly in the third edition of Losing
Control, which has become a popular text for those trying to chart a way
through the darkness, and is much more a book to be read and to inspire
than Boggs, though it too has lots of useful nitty-gritty for aspiring
writers of contemporary politics and economics.
As a veteran peacenik, I found eloquent confirmation for what I and
millions of others intuit about the deadend approach of writers who
function within the dominant paradigm of international relations.
People’s eyes glaze over at the mention of “peace”. It’s a bit like
heaven: nice but boring. Rogers’s argument, however, is compelling and
his book readable. In the first edition, before 9/11, he presciently argued
that US-NATO military posturing and war-mongering in the face of the
growing rich-poor divide, environmental constraints and asymmetrical
warfare was self-defeating and would only accelerate the collapse of the
comfortable elite Western order.
A widely accepted argument, considered a truism, is that the US “won”
the Cold War, that NATO helped the West survive through a “necessary and
essentially safe process of maintaining very large military forces”, an
unpleasant but unavoidable balance of terror that ended with the collapse
of the “enemy”. Rogers deconstructs this fallacy, arguing that the Cold
War was “highly dangerous and inordinately wasteful”, that it created
“a momentum in the development of a range of military technologies that
has lasted well beyond the end of the Cold War itself”, making present
and future conflicts exponentially more devastating for victims and
destabilising for the world as a whole.
This professor of peace studies at Bradford University provides telling
examples from the North Ireland insurgency, which like the 9/11 attacks but
for most of the 20th century penetrated to the very heart of the nation —
the nation in this case being Britain. Ireland is still divided, but the
insurgency did not fail. Even after the cease-fire collapsed in 1996 with
the Canary Wharf bombing, “the British and Irish governments commenced a
new drive for peace within hours of the incident. A modern urban-industrial
state was certainly vulnerable to political violence, even though most of
the explosive devices used were home-made fertiliser bombs.”
Rogers appeals to progressive thinkers in Britain, hoping that the Thatcher
legacy of sabre-rattling elitism will eventually give way to an enlightened
policy of promoting real security, which means rejecting military force and
building a complex, multi-facetted foreign policy of economic assistance to
undermine the logic of insurgents and “terrorists”. It really boils
down to rich countries voluntarily giving up their (imperial) privileges in
the present world order, and effectively redistributing income through
proactive trade policies benefitting poor farmers and third world
producers, clamping down on huge international corporations, and
controlling the excesses the “market” gives rise to.
He has little faith that this will happen soon, but his strategy is a
compelling one: for one or more “north” countries to take the
initiative to break with the status quo and lead the way, working with the
more enlightened “south” political and intellectual leaders. A bono
fide truism in human affairs is the parable of the 99 monkeys: that at some
point — the “tipping point” — the actions of the few will lead to
rapid change, the Kuhnian paradigm shift. Regarding the world’s future,
this is what Rogers is staking his bets on.
Once we enter the shift period, the bits and pieces of peace- promotion of
the past — UN treaties, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the
anti-personnel landmine treaty, the Non- proliferation Treaty, various
STARTs — will gain a new lease on life, and lead to a truly multinational
drive towards a non- nuclear world and the conversion of arms industries to
environmental and other beneficial production, “part of a wider agenda of
actions to ensure a persistent programme of cooperative and sustainable
development”.
Rogers provides a check-list of the essential steps, and argues
compellingly that “There Is No Alternative”. When you are faced with
the daily horrors of the current world, in which the raging US bull flails
madly at one and all, dipping into Losing Control provides some solace.
Security can only mean common security, truly global security. It is an
elusive vision, but there are concrete steps we can take to work towards
it: TINA.
***
Paul Atwood’s War and Empire is a stimulating revisionist romp through
American history, though I found the first two chapters too depressing —
the deception and betrayal of the innocent natives and their ruthless
massacre by greedy settlers is just too close to the tragedy of the
Palestinians for comfort. I got hooked with the post-1776 integration of
the “revolutionaries” into the corrupt world of international intrigue,
and became fascinated with how US history has been a circus, if a nasty
one, ever since, at times aping European revolutionaries and at other times
the glamorous aristocracy. The hodge-podge that calls itself American
culture today is a mix of all this, and its shallowness is no surprise.
War and Empire is based on the author’s history lectures at the
University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he regularly asks students why
the US entered any of its many wars and is greeted by quizzical looks and a
vacuous “Freedom? National security?”, blissfully unaware of “the
centrality of war to the creation and evolution of the US”. The decline
in literacy standards depresses Atwood; one of his students earnestly
explained to him that “communists employed ‘Asian Orange’ herbicides
on American troops” in Vietnam.
The author shows how in the 19th century the drive for suffrage was feared
by the Hamiltonian elite as a threat to the goal of creating “an
industrial society with centralised banking and control of money”, and
made expansion necessary to Democrats and Federalists alike “to provide
the growing white population with at least a small stake of property in the
new system”. When the shores of the Pacific were reached, this meant
building a navy to reach across the Pacific and later the Atlantic,
dabbling in Europe’s follies, to feed the hungry capitalist beast and
keep the dogs of populism at bay. There is no room in this gruesome march
of death for the paper ideals that the “founding fathers” penned. The
“permanent war” of today has its genesis in the “permanent war” of
yesterday.
Atwood turns up many fascinating tidbits. Arab regimes beware: as early as
1805 the American consul in Tunis asked permission from the (supposedly
anti-imperialist) Jefferson to overthrow its ruler and replace him with one
more inclined to US interests, thereby out-Hamiltoning his elitist federal
rivals.
The presidency is a veritable rogues’ gallery. Andrew Jackson, who killed
at least one adversary in his wild youth and was an unapologetic racist to
the end, is still unsurpassed as the most bellicose president in US
history, having made his name invading the Spanish colony of Florida in
pursuit of escaped slaves and pesky natives, doing President Monroe’s
dirty work for him. He became Florida’s first governor and went on to win
the presidency, benefiting from the extension of the vote to all white
males — an appropriate role model for Jeb and George Bush. To the horror
of the elite, he scuttled the central bank created by Madison, fighting the
bankers’ plans for a centralised industrial state with them in control,
and allowed local and state banks to issue money, the last such American-
style Don Quixote.
The US has always enjoyed playing European rivals off against each other,
using the Napoleonic wars as an opportunity to snatch colonies from both
England and France, all the while smuggling goods to both sides. Finally
the US Congress declared war against England, the War of 1812, which
American history books insist — falsely — that they won. The attempts
to annex Canada and Florida failed and the White House was burned to the
ground. The most obvious results were the “Star-spangled banner” and
the unifying role the war played for the still anarchic settler-state.
No American hero emerges untarnished. Even the saintly Walt Whitman
cheer-led probably the most sordid of America’s wars — Polk’s
invasion of poor Mexico: “Yes! Mexico must be chastised. America knows
how to crush as well as expand!”
The hallowed Civil War was not at all about abolishing slavery, but a
direct result of the insatiable hunger for more land, about keeping the
increasingly unwieldy and fractious union together, about whether or not
the North or South should prevail in extending their economic systems
westward. Lincoln’s famous emancipation proclamation was issued only in
1863, two years after the start of this suicidal conflagration, and only
because the North, despite its overwhelming advantages, was losing and
needed to inspire its own blacks to join in the slaughter. They did, and
they turned the tide, though there was no “emancipation” for them or
their southern brothers, but only the Ku Klux Klan, segregation, lynching,
debt servitude, and a legacy of racism still alive and well.
Draping itself hypocritically in anti-slavery rhetoric, Britain watched
smugly as its obstreperous ex-colony tore itself apart over which elite
would have its way. The weaker America was, the better for the British
empire. The tragedy is hard to fathom: the death toll is still unsurpassed
in (white) America’s history at 600,000 dead vs WWII’s 400,000, the
South was devastated, the phenomenon of “soldier’s heart”
(post-traumatic stress disorder) was widespread, with tens of thousands of
soldiers homeless and psychologically or physically incapacitated, reduced
to begging as there was no social support system.
Atwood’s diligent expose of the seamy side of America’s past reveals
striking parallels between US and Israeli history — the importance of war
and expansion, the genocide of the native people justified by racism and a
chauvinistic religion, the playing off of European powers against each
other, the arrogant nationalism that characterises both states, unconcern
for the resentment and hatred that their bellicose behaviour inspires. The
Truman Doctrine of 1947 — the updated version of the Monroe Doctrine —
acted to extend US dominance over the world, including the Middle East, and
was closely followed by the creation of Israel in 1948, with strong backing
by the Truman administration. A telling coincidence.
We all know that the pretext for the entry of the US into WWI was the
sinking of the Lusitania. But I never knew that this ocean liner was
carrying war materiel to England, that the German government warned
secretary of state Bryan that it would be sunk, that Bryan’s plea to
president Wilson to prevent Americans from embarking was overruled. Bryan
resigned and the rest is history — the terrible nightmare history of the
20th century. My immediate thought was “Eureka!” This is exactly the
way the US people were tricked into entering WWII, with Pearl Harbour the
perfect pretext. Atwood hints at but demurs from exploring the willful
refusal of the FDR to nip this well- known plan in the bud — no doubt
because his “Asian Orange”-spouting students would denounce him as a
mentally unbalanced traitor. Nor does he venture into the 9/11 literature
hypothesising US (and other) government involvement in our current “Pearl
Harbour”.
But that is not to detract from his cogent reasoning that the entry of the
US into both wars was to prevent the rising German behemoth from dominating
Europe and posing a threat to US imperial interests around the world. The
consensus in ruling circles was “for a more rationalised world system
open to American economic penetration. American entry to [WWI] would be
sold as making the world ’safe for democracy’.” He understands well
that current US wars have a similar logic — to reinforce US hegemony
around the world.
For those who bemoan that a once pristine America is now descending into an
Orwellian dictatorship with its infringements of the Constitution and
illegal wars, it is at least some comfort to recall that such moments in US
history abound. The Sedition Act of 1918 made any speech against the
government’s wartime policies illegal; the “Red Scare” following WWI
led to the creation of the FBI and allowed the deportation of thousands of
immigrants because of their political views. US troops assisted British,
Czech and Japanese in the invasion of Russia in 1917 to crush the communist
revolution, though Russia was already devastated, ensuring that the
revolution would be born in blood and war.
The Korean war was so unpopular that by the end 90 per cent of troops
hospitalised were from self-inflicted wounds. To soften up the Koreans, the
US Air Force carpet bombed the north’s dams and dikes — a direct
violation of the new Geneva Convention — until two months before an
exhausted North Korea finally agreed to an armistice in 1953, pressured by
the new post-Stalin Soviet leadership anxious to reduce East-West tensions,
fearing a nuclear war. “The West can and does vilify communist crimes.
But there is nothing in the communist record not matched by capitalist
societies in terms of crimes against humanity.”
For those who admire Jimmy Carter as the peacenik president, Atwood reminds
us that he extended the Monroe Doctrine with his own corollary: “Any
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 US.” But,
bless his heart, Carter fails to state the corollary to his corollary: that
the only threats to the Persian Gulf were and are the Kissingers and
Brzezinskis of US foreign policy. Atwood quotes Nixon and Ford’s witty
secretary of state during the post-1973 oil embargo: “Pick one of those
sheikhdoms, any of them, and overthrow the government there, as a lesson to
the Saudis.”
Atwood valiantly fights the “Disney version” of his nation’s past and
his work is to be commended. It’s hard to imagine how anyone who
acquaints himself with the basic truths of US history can come away
uncommitted to fighting its trajectory today. The US was born in war and
has thrived by the sword. And its actions are more than adequate
confirmation that, “War has never made the world safe for peace but only
for more war.”
Reviewed by Eric Walberg
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