Delusions and Cowardice in an Age of U.S. Hegemony
Press Action
Friday, May 21, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand05202004/
By Mark Hand
The U.S. government is committing great atrocities in Iraq. Its occupation forces in Afghanistan continue to engage in mass killings and brutality. It has military forces stationed in dozens of countries around the world. It supports tyrannical governments and boasts an impressive lineup of client states, including Israel, which recently ratcheted up its program of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
How could any American who opposes these activities and policies ever support a U.S. politician who favors them? Such support would be comparable to a German with social democratic sympathies intentionally overlooking Hitler’s aggressive wars of conquest (they were wars of national defense, in Nazi parlance) because he or she welcomed the German leader’s ability to rebuild the German economy and provide leisure programs for the masses.
While the Nazis did not insist on complete control of every sphere of German public life, Hitler and his inner circle did require complete allegiance to the regime’s expansionist policies. Resistance to the Nazis’ military and racial policies was not tolerated, and thousands of regime opponents, including communists and socialists, were killed in response to their opposition to the German state’s policies.
In today’s United States, we still have the freedom to express our opposition to the government’s militarism and aggressive expansionist policies. We don’t have to feign an apolitical attitude or express our loyalty to the two-party state in order to keep the government off our backs. Given this level of freedom, why are so many peace-loving Americans pledging their support to John Kerry, a devoted believer in a radically expansionist and belligerent U.S. foreign policy? Why are so many liberal and left-leaning Americans ignoring the elephant in the room — Kerry’s support for the Iraq occupation and aggressive wars of conquest — whenever electoral politics are discussed?
In 1930s Germany, there existed a great consensus among the responsible political class (after the communists and socialists had been purged) in support of the Nazi regime’s backing of Franco in Spain as well as the German army’s invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland. In 1940, the German elite supported (with great encouragement from the state, of course) the regime’s invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. They welcomed Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece as well as the regime’s conquest of portions of North Africa.
After the defeat of the Nazis and the Axis powers, however, a virtual unanimity emerged around the world in the belief that Germany’s military takeover of these lands was an abomination on many grounds, including both moral and legal.
And yet history’s never-ending cycle of conquest by a leading global power-of-the-day continues unabated today. By listening to the speeches of Republican and Democratic politicians in Washington, including the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president, one discovers a great consensus in favor of the U.S. government’s horrible crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world. This uniformity of opinion on foreign policy occurs in Washington even though there’s no concentration camp or firing squad awaiting someone who dares to dissent.
In a future era, following the dismantling of the U.S. empire, when the bulk of the world’s population no longer has the American bully to fear, it’s a good bet that international opinion will overwhelmingly regard the U.S. foreign policy record as an abomination.
In the meantime, though, the rest of the world is likely to follow the lead of the American public and cower in the shadow of the U.S. monster state. If not for such a fear factor, we certainly would have heard by now news about the creation of an international coalition to free Iraq.
It’s been more than a year since the control of Iraq fell into the hands of foreigners, certainly enough time for a group of self-righteous, law-abiding nations (an oxymoron? perhaps) of the world to amass a humanitarian military force capable of giving the neo-imperialist fanatics in Washington second thoughts about their takeover of Iraq.
But there’s still no word about a group of nations convening to ponder strategies for expelling the U.S. military, together with its British, Italian and lesser axis partners, from Iraq. This lack of action contrasts with the 1990-1991 period when a U.S.-led international coalition quickly formed to evict the Iraqi military from Kuwait. Granted, the 1991 military operation was conducted in the interest of keeping oil produced on the Arabian peninsula accessible and available at affordable prices for Americans and other industrialized nations, not with the singular goal of freeing inhabitants of Kuwait from an army of Iraqis led by a dictator angry about the Kuwaiti monarchy refusing Iraqi pleas to forgive at least a portion of its $14 billion in Iran-Iraq War debt. But let’s set aside this backstory about oil and war financing and accept for a moment that the principal reason for the 1991 Persian Gulf War might have been simply to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Granting this version of events as historical precedent, the question that requires an answer today is, will the international community unite to expel the foreign occupiers from Iraq?
The 1991 military operation in Kuwait is not a perfect model. The Americans took a wrong turn when they decided that forcing the Iraqis out of Kuwait would not suffice. Instead, following Turkey Shoot I, the United States embarked on 12 years of additional missile strikes inside Iraq’s borders and a national quarantine highlighted by a United Nations-sponsored sanctions regime.
Fifty years earlier, the Soviet Union, along with the Americans, the British and some regional resistance forces, fought the idealistic German government (and its lesser partners), which had invaded the national territories mentioned above with the goal of exporting German ingenuity and morality throughout these conquered lands.
And now, in the post-Cold War era, we have a colossus of a nation state, so self-possessed and armed to the teeth, chomping at the bit to convince all deviant nations to fall into line or else face the wrath of a military juggernaut. (Some may contend that aggressive wars of conquest are necessary today to make up for the U.S. state’s excessive military spending just as wars were necessary for the Germans in the late 1930s.) The U.S. government apparently has struck more fear into an indifferent international community with its bravado than it has in the nation of people, abused by years of sanctions and dictatorship, who are bearing the brunt of the current U.S.-led terror campaign. So far, the Iraqi people have faced massive casualties and yet have refused to surrender.
The deepening quagmire in Iraq could translate into opportunity for nations interested in lending support to the Iraqis against the U.S.-led occupation force. The U.S. government’s decision to redeploy more than 3,500 of its soldiers, along with a large amount of military machinery, from South Korea to Iraq indicates that the U.S. government is attempting to cope with a diminished capacity to police its worldwide assets.
Starting in early April, when the resistance to the U.S.-led occupation intensified, regime leaders in Damascus and Tehran probably were breathing easier. The likelihood that the U.S. military would wage an all-out assault on Syria and Iran was decreasing inversely with the growing resistance in Iraq. The reduced threat level may give these so-called rogue states an opportunity to fortify their military arsenals in order to develop at least a basic deterrent in case the United States (or Israel) does in fact decide to pursue regime change in the future.
The risks of helping the Iraqis resist the U.S.-led occupation apparently outweigh the rewards. The Germans and the French know how to talk semi-coherently against U.S. unilateralism in Iraq, but when the Iraqis desperately could use some multilateral assistance to ward off the U.S.-led onslaught, Old Europe is nowhere to be found.
Just as the monarchies and dictatorships of the Middle East have developed an absolute fear of the awesome military power of Israel (backed by its U.S. sponsor), the ruling elite in Europe would never think of disrespecting the Americans by providing aid to the Iraqi resistance movement, given the extremely harsh response they’d receive from Washington and the fact that their interests are not dissimilar to those of the U.S. elite. With not a single nation-state willing to stand on their side and with antiwar Americans proving miserable failures at monkeywrenching their nation’s military machine, it looks like the Iraqis will be forced to endure the brutal assault on their nation all by themselves.
Mark Hand is editor of Press Action.