[Texgreen] Interesting take on the big picture

[Roger Baker]

<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK22Ak05.html>

Middle East
  Nov 22, 2007
	
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
The Bush administration conquers Washington
By John Brown

As I write, on a cloudy Washington afternoon, my "Bush's Last Day  
Countdown Keychain" tells me there are 433 days, 11 hours, 50 minutes  
and 41.3 seconds left before our 43rd president leaves office. Like  
other citizens concerned about the fate of the republic, I wonder  
what the George W Bush legacy will be.

Many commentators have written about how the domestic politics of  
this administration have left the United States more divided than  
ever; or perhaps the unsettled illegal immigration issue is what Bush  
will be most remembered for - with an unfinished barrier across the  
US-Mexican border as the main monument to his eight years in office.

To some concerned with foreign affairs, the Bush era will be  
remembered most for the acceleration of America's putative march to  
empire. Advocates of such a view highlight the exorbitant sums the US  
has sunk into its land bases in the Middle East and Afghanistan, its  
massive sea power, and its all-volunteer professional army; the  
inordinately expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter being  
evidence that the US is engaged in a ruthless effort to control the  
world's oil resources); the threats of possible military action  
against Iran (interpreted as a desire to control the Middle East in  
collaboration with Israel); the growing tensions with Russia, as well  
as the urge to maintain and expand its foothold in former Soviet  
areas in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (seen as a reflection of  
America's determination to remain the global hegemon); the increasing  
frictions with China (proof that the US will not tolerate a  
competitor in Asia); the constant disagreements with the Europeans (a  
reminder on our part that we - not they - are the boss).

Indeed, there is little doubt that the military, economic and  
cultural impact of the United States continues to be enormous.  
Calling this global footprint "imperial" is certainly tempting. But  
for a nation to be an empire, its leaders must have a plan or vision  
for how to deal with the rest of the world - as, arguably, Theodore  
Roosevelt and his entourage did with their "large policy" for  
American overseas dominance. Some historians cite these schemes as  
the beginning of an American-style empire that led to "the American  
century", a period that now seems so long ago and so far away. (Are  
we not now, in fact, living in the Anti-American Century?)

Bush and visions of empire

The immense (but declining) global power of the United States  
notwithstanding, the conceptual baggage required to engage in truly  
imperial ambitions has simply not been a part of the Bush  
administration's mindset. This remains so despite its assembly-line- 
style production of countless "national security" reports on a vast  
range of global security matters - committee-written, unreadable  
documents marked by a total lack of intellectual coherence or clear  
direction. These can, if anything, be seen as a collective "cover-up"  
for the administration's obvious lack of thought beyond the here-and- 
now.

To be sure, no imperial plan is ever perfectly framed or implemented  
(as Roosevelt himself realized), but the Bush administration's  
version of such now appears to have been remarkably without rhyme or  
reason - on, in fact, an automatic pilot, driven by a self- 
aggrandizing Pentagon budgetary process and "priorities" strikingly  
determined by shifting domestic politics (what Congressional district  
or crony corporation had put in the best, or most influential, bid  
for a base, military-style activity, or war-production plant).

True, our generals remain engaged in the fearsome-sounding "war on  
terror" by order of the White House - but this has proven a helter- 
skelter example of global confusion, regularly renamed by an  
administration clueless about what its "war" really is.

Put another way, the Bush administration was never able to define,  
shape, or direct in an "imperial" fashion the powerful forces,  
negative and positive, stemming from various segments of American  
society that do so much to determine the destiny of our planet. (This  
may have been inevitable, given the contentious nature of American  
democracy.)

As for the once-dynamic duo who characterized much of this  
administration - Vice President Dick Cheney and secretary of defense  
Donald Rumsfeld (and those clustered around their "offices") - the  
only "empire" that really counted for them was the parochial world of  
Washington, DC, with its lobbyists, bureaucrats, politicians and  
assorted supporting think-tankers, all absorbed in their petty turf- 
wars about who among them would get government money for their  
minions and projects, overseas or at home.

This was the narcissistic province that the vice president and  
secretary of defense had the urge to dominate with their "unitary  
executive", "wartime" commander-in-chief presidency and the foreign  
wars that made it all possible. Developments outside the US, however,  
mattered largely to the extent that they helped in the aggrandizement  
of their own power, their fiefdoms, and those of their cronies, on  
the banks of the Potomac.

The president and his diplomats

To make some sense of all this, let's start at the top. With his  
utter lack of experience in foreign affairs and complete lack of  
curiosity about the outside world (with the possible exception of  
Mexico), Bush was incapable of having a global vision himself,  
imperial or otherwise. In the words of commentator William Pfaff,  
"Bush is happy deciding, even though he knows nothing."

The president's major foreign-policy decision - to invade Iraq - was  
certainly not based on any understanding of the global implications  
of what he was doing (including, conceivably, expanding an empire).  
It was taken for reasons that still remain unclear, but may have  
ranged from his tortuous relationship with his father to his desire  
to portray himself as a decisive commander-in-chief to the American  
electorate. Perhaps, to use his words, the former cheerleader frat  
boy just wanted to "kick ass" overseas to show the media, voters and  
possibly even himself that he was doing something other than sitting  
in the Oval Office preaching the virtues of compassionate conservatism.

Kicking ass - playing cowboys and Indians with the world, as little  
boys once did on playroom floors or in backyards - has remarkably  
little to do, however, with anything that might once have been  
defined as imperial planning or the knowledge necessary to implement  
such plans.

For example, a year after his "axis of evil" State of the Union  
address, when informed by Iraqi exiles that there were both Sunnis  
and Shi'ites in their country, "emperor" Bush allegedly responded  
that he thought "the Iraqis were Muslims". (No way, after all, that  
you can tell those Indian tribes apart!) And what better summarizes  
Bush's preparation for putative empire building than the following  
nugget from the 2000 presidential campaign season, as related by  
Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times:

     When a writer for Glamour Magazine recently uttered the word  
"Taliban" - the regime in Afghanistan that follows an extreme and  
repressive version of Islamic law - during a verbal Rorschach test,  
Mr Bush could only shake his head in silence. It was only after the  
writer gave him a hint ("repression of women in Afghanistan") that Mr  
Bush replied, "Oh. I thought you said some band. The Taliban in  
Afghanistan! Absolutely. Repressive."

Given the tabula rasa in Bush's mind regarding the world outside "the  
homeland" (a word his administration has regrettably contributed to  
the American language), it is hardly surprising that he selected as  
his main foreign policy advisers two people with very limited global  
visions of their own: Condoleezza Rice as national security advisor  
and, as secretary of state, Colin Powell. (Rice herself admitted in  
2000 that as a "Europeanist, I've been pressed to understand parts of  
the world that have not been part of my scope"; and Powell's  
qualifications were based on his military savvy - and loyalty - not  
his geopolitical perspectives. The general, as Bill Keller of the New  
York Times reported in 2001, was "a problem solver, not a visionary".

As became clear after the horror of September 11, 2001 - a foreign  
policy failure of the first order, if ever there was one, that
no "empire" in its right mind would have allowed - Rice and Powell  
essentially became talking-point briefers on day-to-day events they  
had not foreseen and did not control.

Compare them to Henry Kissinger, who held each of their positions at  
some point in his White House career. A cynical maneuverer who may  
not have been to everyone's liking, he nonetheless worked in the  
realm of global strategy. In the way he attempted to play off the  
Soviet Union against China in relation to the Vietnam War, he was an  
imperial planner of the first order (if not always with the greatest  
success). Contrast his meaty books on Metternich and on nuclear  
weapons to the sole tome that Rice authored by herself - a bland  
monograph on the relationship between the Soviet Union and the  
Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983, excoriated by the scholarly American  
Historical Review in 1985. What her sad little historical "study"  
demonstrated, if anything at all, was that Rice was, from scratch,  
anything but a geopolitician of Soviet - or any other - affairs.

Had Rice and Powell been capable of a global imperial vision - or  
even of grasping essential global cause and effect - they doubtless  
would have advised their president that his much-desired Mesopotamian  
(mis)adventure was bound to be a bloody, costly imperial mess. With  
certain down-to-earth military smarts, Powell may have sensed this,  
but evidently he lacked the nerve (or was it intellectual  
inclination?) to ask the simple questions at White House meetings  
that would have been the key to any imperial decision-making process:  
"Why exactly are we doing this?" "Is it really in our interests to  
invade a Third-World country thousands of miles from our shores?" Or,  
put another way: "How does this invasion preserve or expand the  
American empire"?

All the president's men: Cheney and Rumsfeld

According to some commentators, when it came to the American  
ascendancy abroad, the real powers behind (or in) the White House  
were Cheney and Rumsfeld, who had been collaborators ever since the  
distant Ford administration. Some argue that they - and their neo-con  
poodle and second-in-command at the Defense Department, Paul  
Wolfowitz, as well assorted neo-cons once linked to the Likud party  
in Israel and the Christian right in the US - were the true framers  
of a Bush empire.

To be sure, Rumsfeld was an early member of the Project for the New  
American Century and no doubt had ideas - or perhaps simply fantasies  
masquerading as ideas - about a more aggressive use of American  
military strength throughout the world. Cheney's former position as  
chief executive officer of Halliburton and his connections with large  
corporations certainly made him the prime imperial candidate for  
considering global energy flows and eyeing Iraq as one vast oil field  
just waiting to be seized, one more country with must-have natural  
resources for the American imperium.

Even if the duo were eager indeed to expand US influence and  
resources overseas, as veterans of countless Washington partisan and  
personal battles, what really got their aged blood flowing was the  
sleazy, vindictive inside-the-Beltway world of Washington, DC.  
Rumsfeld's utter inability to focus on post-invasion planning in Iraq  
was in itself strong evidence that what happened there ("events"  
which he so often simply made up) was of secondary concern. Iraq - or  
success in that country - was indeed important but mainly to the  
extent that it heightened his profile as a monster player in Washington.

For both Cheney and Rumsfeld, it was the imperial capital, not the  
empire itself that really mattered. There, "war" would mean the  
loosing of a commander-in-chief presidency unchecked by Congress,  
courts, anything - which meant power in the only world that mattered  
to them. War in the provinces was their ticket to renewed prominence  
within DC's self-absorbed biosphere, a kind of lost space station far  
removed from Mother Earth, and a place where they had longstanding,  
unfinished accounts - both personal and political - to settle.

"Foreign policy," in other words, was an excuse for war in a far-off  
country that 63% of American youth between the ages of 18 and 24  
could not, according to a National Geographic survey, find on a map  
of the Middle East. That, in turn, would make both the vice president  
and secretary of defense (for a while) little Caesars in the only  
place that mattered, Washington, DC.

If Saddam and assorted terrorists were enemies, they weren't the ones  
who really mattered. In the realest war of all, the one on the banks  
of the Potomac, Cheney and Rumsfeld were, above all, targeting those  
symbols of American internationalism that they had grown to despise  
in their previous Washington stays - the State Department and the  
Central Intelligence Agency - perhaps because those organizations, at  
their best, aspired to see how the world looked at the United States,  
and not just how the United States could dismiss the world.

Just as Bush "kicked ass" in Iraq, so Cheney and Rumsfeld used Iraq  
to "kick ass" among the striped-pants weenies at Foggy Bottom and the  
eggheads in the intelligence community. (Consider Cheney's treatment  
of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who questioned the validity of the  
administration's claim about Saddam's search for uranium yellowcake  
in Niger in the late 1990s.)

In toppling Iraq, the "imperial" aim of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, their  
foreign policy "experts" and their acolytes was to raise the flag of  
their own power high above Washington, DC, while discrediting and  
humiliating those in the foreign-policy profession interested in the  
outside world for itself, those willing to consider how it related to  
actual US national interests, not fantasy ones, and who therefore  
dared to question the goals and intentions of the dynamic duo.

To see how Washington-centered this cast of characters actually was,  
just recall the secretary of defense's self-glorifying press  
conferences in his post-invasion heyday, when he played the strutting  
comedian. In that period, Rumsfeld, venerated by, among others, aging  
neo-con Midge Decter in a swooning biography, was the king of the  
heap and visibly loving every second of it.

Front-page headlines in the imperial capital were what counted, never  
the reality of Iraq - any more than it did when Bush strutted that  
aircraft-carrier deck in his military get-up for his "mission  
accomplished" moment, launching (against a picturesque backdrop of  
sailors and war) Campaign 2004 at home. Poor Iraq. It was the butt of  
the imperial joke, as was - for a while - the rest of the outside world.

Political theorist Benjamin Barber caught the Bush foreign-policy  
moment perfectly. The US, he wrote, made "foreign policy to indulge a  
host of domestic concerns and self-celebratory varieties of hide- 
bound insularity. The United States remains a hegemonic global  
superpower sporting the narrow outlook of mini-states like Monaco and  
Lichtenstein."

In the end, the Bush administration is likely to be remembered not  
for a failed imperialism, but a failed parochialism, an inability to  
perceive a world beyond the Washington of Cheney and Rumsfeld, beyond  
Bush's national security "homeland". That may be the president's  
ultimate legacy.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned from the  
State Department over the planned war in Iraq, compiles a near-daily  
Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review, available free by requesting  
it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com.

(Copyright 2007 John Brown.)

(Used by permission Tomdispatch)