Worse I fear by far than this obscene war – just yesterday the world was treated to hearing a mother’s tale of seeing her two daughters, ages 15 & 12, decapitated by U.S. firepower as it ripped through their vehicle that failed to heed what may have been an unclear warning to stop at a “U.S. checkpoint” – will be the “peace” that follows.

 

The words of Constantine Cavafy’s famous 1904 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” have been ringing in my ears a lot these past few months, especially its final lines:

 

Και τώρα τι θα γένουμε χωρίς βαρβάρους.
Οι άνθρωποι αυτοί ήσαν μια κάποια λύσις.

 

The presence of “barbarians” during the long Cold War were indeed a kind of solution. I think we are only now beginning to understand what we lost when the old Soviet Union collapsed, driven into bankruptcy through military overspending, internal corruption & its lack of democracy. We no longer have any check on the power of the American state, no countervailing force whatsoever, so we are going to see just how completely absolute power corrupts. It’s an awesome & terrifying prospect.

 

Consider the present circumstances:

 

§         We have an unelected president whose appointment came at the hands of a Supreme Court whose crucial “black seat” was itself gained a few years back through perjury. Bush’s appointment could not have occurred without the electoral vandalism of the Green Party.

§         The Republicans control both houses of Congress and the Democratic Party, for the most part, seems incapable of standing up to Bush: three of the “major” senatorial candidates for the presidential nomination, Kerry, Lieberman & Edwards, all support the U.S. invasion.

§         The authority of the United Nations, an institution designed in large part by the U.S. & whose Security Council rules are largely fixed so that the victors of World War II continue, nearly 60 years after the fact, to have a veto over all major policy, has been seriously eroded, perhaps permanently.

§         U.S. relations with other nations, from the members of NATO to the members of OPEC, are seriously strained.

§         The sitting attorney general is a man openly hostile to the Bill of Rights.

§         Over 600 prisoners from the war in Afghanistan are being held in Guantanamo precisely as a means of keeping them away from any of the legal protections that might – only might – be afforded them under either federal law or the Geneva Convention. At least another 44 people are being held largely incommunicado as “material witnesses” in the United States.

§         The Republican Congress has curtailed a woman’s right to control her own body – a decision to knowingly kill some women.

§         The Supreme Court is weighing the issue of overturning any form of affirmative action & is considering whether or not to overturn the Miranda decision’s protections against self-incrimination.

§         And Admiral Poindexter wants to read your email.

The list of outrages is rather endless – and there is a serious possibility that before too terribly long we may look back on this as the “good old days.”

 

The best explication of U.S. foreign policy that I’ve read to date is Joseph Cirincione’s “Origins of Regime Change in Iraq,” a report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It suggests that what we all fear – that Iraq is simply the first in what is apt to become a chain of U.S. “interventions” as it seeks to remake the world to its liking – is in fact the underlying dynamic behind this war. Cirincione, a one-time congressional aide to Tom Ridge & no leftist, identifies the origin of U.S. policy in the dissatisfaction of some neocons in the first Bush administration, most notably Paul Wolfowitz, then under-secretary of defense for policy, with the outcome of the 1991 Iraq war. In 1992, Wolfowitz redrafted a 46 page classified policy paper on U.S. priorities entitled “Defense Planning Guidance.” DPG as the document is known is the mission or values statement for the Defense Department & a version still exists today. In 1992, at the tail end of the first Bush administration, Wolfowitz penned a draft that:

 

§         Argued that the world’s last remaining superpower needed to exercise its unique geopolitical advantages for its own interest

§         Claimed that the U.S. had a right to act internationally in a unilateral fashion – a position largely foreign to the first 42 presidents

§         Called for addressing specific threats, mentioning both Iraq and North Korea

§         Sought to ensure, as a major goal, “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil”

This last point headed a list of key sources of potential conflict, even before the presence of “weapons of mass destruction.” When the New York Times & Washington Post reported the radical nature of the Wolfowitz draft, the White House ordered then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to rewrite the document.

 

The Wolfowitz DPG precedes by eight years the report by the Project for a New American Century, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which has sometimes been described as evidence that the plan to “finish what we started” in Iraq was not a consequence of the September 11^th attacks nor related to the so-called War on Terror. However, even if the attack on the Pentagon & World Trade Center was the “trigger event” that caused the old DPG to be put into action, it has little more to do with the plan itself than does Bush’s argument, one of several briefly advanced then later abandoned in the run-up to the invasion, that the United States was threatening war in order to protect the integrity of the United Nations.

 

If Cirincione is correct, the question is not whether the United States will proceed to attack Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba or any other nation that stands in its way, but rather when, at what pace & in which order. It is a foreign policy not without precedent in the history of the world – the major difference between, say, Germany’s attempt at global domination in the 1940s and this latest effort at empire was Germany’s presumption that it needed to conquer everything all at once. The Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Bush version of this same fantasy is methodologically more patient, cherry picking regional “bad guys” (Hussein is a perfect choice, having alienated himself from his neighbors), establishing a “presence” from which to govern while turning the local administration over to a client regime.

 

Historically, every attempt at empire has eventually failed. The costs, both economically & in human terms, are too high. The “governed,” as France, Germany & others have already demonstrated, refuse to give consent. This process can still be slowed, if not entirely reversed, simply by electing almost anyone else to the presidency in 2004. But if the people of the United States do not put a halt to this process, the fate of far more than just this nation appears grim indeed.