Last night I watched The New American Century, a documentary about the neoconservative movement and its influence on American foreign policy. There are things in the film I didn’t agree with—for example, its assumption that September 11 was an “inside job”—but it got me thinking.
Leo Strauss, grandfather of the neoconservative movement, felt that modern life is vulgar and trivial. Moral relativism had made America soft, and we were on the road to decadence and decline. To combat this, we needed to be united by a common enemy, even an imaginary one, to give us a sense of purpose in the fight of good against evil. This enemy was at first the Soviet empire, but after its decline, a new enemy was needed to justify American dominance of the entire world. Ultimately “radical Islam” was chosen.
Michael Ledeen, a key neoconservative theorist, feels that “creative destruction” is the force of progress, and traditions are mere obstacles to be swept away. He feels that Italian fascism was “revolutionary,” though it was betrayed by Mussolini who suppressed its “youthful creativity and virility.” Fortunately, the U.S. is now in a position to play the same role, one in which economic and cultural structures are continually smashed so as to build them anew.
Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity…. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. […] They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.
This is how the Manichean worldview drifts into nihilism. “The end of history” or “the end of ideology” really means the triumph of a particular history, a particular ideology, in which all others have disappeared from view. This is absolutist and also nihilist. It must not be forgotten, however, that such dreams depend for their realization on the availability of cheap energy to fuel the machine of infinite progress—so they are ultimately dreams of conquest.
Halliburton was reimbursed for all its expenses in Iraq, and rewarded with a profit in proportion to the money they spent. They were actually encouaged to destroy their own equipment, and did so, so they could spend more and earn more. They burned trucks when they got a flat tire, and bought new ones. They deliberately ordered the wrong item so they could throw it away and order again. This is “creative destruction” in the extreme, and it was applied to Iraqi society as well, as recounted in “Baghdad Year Zero” by Naomi Klein.
A country of 25 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez-faire economics, a utopia such as the world had never seen…. They came to imagine the invasion of Iraq as a kind of Rapture: where the rest of the world saw death, they saw birth—a country redeemed through violence, cleansed by fire. Iraq wasn’t being destroyed by cruise missiles, cluster bombs, chaos, and looting; it was being born again.
The Iraqi invasion was a utopian-libertarian-nihilist project, and it resulted in mass death. Faced with what was done to the Iraqi people in the name of the radical ideology of “creative destruction,” cynicism is a feeble response. Indignation is needed—or more than indignation, justice. Only bringing those responsible to justice will restore the principle that despite illusions of infinite power, we are all accountable for our the effects of our actions on other people. But too many crimes will go unpunished in this case.
We live in a world run by others, for their own private interest. Obama may have won the Nobel Peace Prize simply for being there, but whether he likes it or not, he is the new face of an old system. He may help to restore a sense of realism to the debate, by reminding us that actions should be measured by their effects on other people’s lives, but until the principle of justice is restored, nothing will change. Brushing the past under the carpet as he wants to do—sending it to the memory hole and moving on from there—is a moral failure.
Something about the last few years has got me rethinking the globalist project. Back in the 1990s, when I was working for a biotechnology company in San Francisco, I witnessed the internet startup bubble firsthand. It seemed that everyone I knew was caught up in this fever, in which people still in their twenties were living lifestyles fueled by emerging technologies, designer drugs and high-priced fashion. I was aware at the time that it couldn’t last, but in this optimistic context I was largely dismissive of the critics of globalization. Globalism then seemed to me like a good thing: capitalism was the motor of human development, and economic opportunity was spreading as far away as Indonesia and Brazil. Even if people making gym shoes or motherboards in the Third World were being exploited by American standards, I felt it was still better than anything they had known before. “A rising tide lifts all boats” was the word of the day.
Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and America’s preparations for a “long war” of revenge and conquest. There was heady talk by neoconservatives about America as the new Rome, and a New American Century. When I participated along with tens of thousands of my fellow San Franciscans in mass demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, I felt I was standing up for a better vision of how the world could be, and America’s role in it. In my own mind I was defending the globalist project, and the humanistic vision of the Clinton–Gore years, against the us-versus-them mentality we were coming to know under Bush–Cheney. It didn’t have to be this way, I felt. Surely all people of the world wanted the same thing: democracy, economic prosperity, dignity for themselves and their families. So why couldn’t we build this together? There were good capitalists and bad capitalists, I argued: those who felt that limited resources were something to be fought over and controlled, and those who created new technologies that enlarged the sphere of human possibility. America in the recent past had been a model of this new way. The neoconservatives and their wars of empire were betraying this vision.
I moved to Morocco in 2003 and lived there for three years because I wanted to experience life on the other side of the Islamic–Western divide, but just as importantly, on the other side of the divide between rich and poor nations. I thought a good deal at the time about democratic ideals, because it was clear to me that my Moroccan friends were hoping for changes in their country that would help it to become a society in which basic rights were protected, government was transparent and accountable to the people, and development was pursued in the common interest. I spoke often with my friends about the principles enshrined in the American Constitution, such as a government of checks and balances, the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the right not to be held without charges, and of course the rights of freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. I admired my friends’ ambition to build a more free and transparent society, and I insisted that these principles were the essential foundation of any such project.
At the same time, however, the internet was bringing me news almost daily of how America had betrayed its own principles in the name of the “global war on terror” and imperial ambition. Wiretapping without a warrant, a global network of secret prisons, torture, kidnapping of suspected terrorists, assassinations with robot aircraft, funding of death squads and militias, use of white phosphorus on civilians, and the mother of all war crimes, the illegal war itself: it seemed that nothing was off limits to the power-mad, fiercely ideological war profiteers in Washington. My only consolation was that eventually democracy would prevail, the abuses would be turned back, sanity would be restored, and the Constitution would return to force. Perhaps even justice would be done, and the war criminals would be held accountable for their crimes. All it would take would be an election in which the basic decency of the American people reasserted itself, putting in place an administration committed to doing the right thing.
I was back in the U.S. for the 2008 presidential election, and the nearly two years of political maneuvering that preceded it. Progressives, those who seek justice and equality for all people and oppose the idea of American empire, were looking for a candidate, and many thought they had found him in Barack Obama. But even though Obama had opposed the invasion of Iraq before it even began, he did so on pragmatic, not idealistic grounds. “I’m not opposed to all wars,” he said. “I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Another early warning sign was when he went before AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and spoke of how he had walked on the streets of an Israeli town and found it to be like “a suburb in America.” I liked what he said about regimes like Iran and Cuba—that we should not be afraid to sit down with them, without preconditions, to discuss our differences—and I liked the way he seemed to understand the aspirations of young people in poor countries to improve their lives in ways that Americans take for granted. But in the same foreign policy speech where he spoke of “reaching out to all those living disconnected lives of despair in the world’s forgotten corners,” Obama called for “building a 21st century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” His rhetoric was quick to defend the idea that America has a unique mission in the world—a “beacon of hope” that shines on the huddled masses—and this mission, though couched in humanistic terms of “recognizing the inherent equality and worth of all people,” still justified American intervention in the affairs of every nation, through military means if necessary.
Even before becoming president, Obama presented a plan to expand America’s fighting force by 90,000—and while he supported military withdrawal from Iraq, it was only to refocus our efforts on what he saw as the “right battlefields in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Meanwhile, foreign policy scholar Chalmers Johnson had written a scathing critique of American empire in the form of three books, Blowback, Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis, in which he reminded us of the amazing fact that America has military bases in no less than 130 foreign nations—a network built up to contain the Soviet empire during the Cold War, but in no way diminished since then. What are we still doing there? Johnson asked. To what end? Obama’s project was not to dismantle this network, but in fact to strengthen it, to make it more intelligent and effective, extending American influence even further. For Obama, humanism and dialogue were simply tools in the toolbox of American empire, ones the Bush administration had neglected. I supported Obama through lack of a better choice—of course, electing a president who wants to diminish American power is impossible—but I periodically wondered if my fellow progressives were naive in assuming he was one of us. Since the election, Obama’s willingness to continue many of the worst Bush-era policies—military courts for suspected terrorists, attacks by robot aircraft that inevitably kill civilians, use of the U.N. veto to defend Israeli aggression, and so on—has confirmed my doubts.
Just before the election, the American empire suffered a huge, self-inflicted blow in the form of an economic collapse brought on by uncontrolled speculation by the nation’s largest banks. Obama’s level-headed response to this helped get him elected—he proposed stimulus spending to create jobs, aid to struggling homeowners, regulation of global markets, and long-term reforms in the fields of education, energy and health care—and in this, at least, I was proud to support him. He seemed to understand that American and indeed global development were at risk if they were left in the hands of speculators and profiteers. He seemed ready to use the power of the state—the people’s power—to protect the common good against corporate interests in ways not seen in a generation. Clinton had been a tinkerer, I felt, albeit an effective one—Obama would reform the system from top to bottom. He had a bold, integrated vision, and the moment was ripe for a profound transformation. He would lay the foundation for a new progressive era, much as Roosevelt had done in the Great Depression.
Instead, since taking office, Obama’s reforms have been terribly cautious, and in many ways they aren’t reforms at all. His stimulus spending was the minimum necessary. His handling of the banking crisis has left all the old structures intact, and even the old practices. Wall Street is already designing new speculative products, such as life insurance policies resold in the form of securities—“the earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return.” Worse still, Obama’s signature issue of health care reform is shaping up as a huge giveaway to the private insurance industry, rather than forcing them to compete on equal terms with a robust public plan available to everyone, as he promised during the campaign. No wonder the populist right is throwing “tea parties” and talking revolution. They feel it’s business as usual in Washington, with handouts to the very forces—banks and insurance companies—that are squeezing every dime from their pockets. Even Obama’s most ardent supporters are beginning to have their doubts about all the compromising they’ve been forced to do. Obama is beginning to look like a tool of corporate interests—smoother and more thoughtful, no doubt, than Bush, but serving the same ends with greater intelligence. So in economic as well as foreign policy, Obama is reinforcing, rather than dismantling or reforming, the existing structures of exploitation.
Returning now to the globalist project, with which I began this article: I’ve conflated it here with American empire, but it is also the heir to earlier imperial projects, notably the British Empire of a century ago, and the European colonial project in general. In fact, “globalization” is nothing new. For centuries there has existed an international network of financing, trade and military might, designed to extract the resources of faraway lands for the benefit of a tiny elite. In the Clinton years, I persuaded myself that this project had turned democratic—indeed, for its century on the world stage, the American empire has promoted itself as the champion of democracy and opportunity for all peoples. But its record is far from that, and only the willful self-delusions of American public discourse blind us to that reality. From the military interventions in Latin America of the 1920s, to the CIA coups in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, to the support for dictators around the world in the 1970s, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today, America has continually and aggressively intervened in the affairs of foreign nations in the pursuit of its own interests—or more precisely, in the interests of its powerful elites. Obama has in no way deviated from that course. Indeed he affirms it, in two wars and countless “advisory” engagements around the world—and affirming it is a necessary condition for his being president.
We live in a world where power relationships are what matter, and no matter how much humanizing rhetoric we use, the fact remains that this is a bloody game. Directly or through its sponsorship of local forces, America has been responsible for millions of deaths on every continent since World War II. It’s not that the American empire is worse than any other, but precisely that it is no better. It is the nature of empires to work this way, and the current focus of imperial expansion is the Islamic world. What astonishes me is how it is possible for Americans to continue to believe in our civilizing mission as bringers of democracy and opportunity to faraway peoples, while our armies are spreading destruction in the service of corrupt regimes. Iraq was recently ranked as the most corrupt government in the Arab region, while Afghanistan is the second most corrupt in the entire world, after only Somalia. Meanwhile we provide exceptional support for the state of Israel, in the form of direct financing for whatever weapons they choose, while turning a blind eye to their program of ethnic cleansing in Palestine—even when the Goldstone Report on last year’s war in Gaza, accepted by all but eighteen of the world’s nations, accuses them of “direct attacks against civilians” and targeting “the people of Gaza as a whole.”
Whenever we read or think about these strategies of domination and conquest, we do so through the filter of our own supposed humanitarian intent. But how can such a logic stand up to scrutiny? The only way is to demonize our victims, taking away their humanity. Those weren’t women and children who died under our missiles at a wedding party, they were Al Qaeda or Taliban terrorists. If there were women and children involved, it was their fault for harboring terrorists. Israel used this same logic when fighting Hezbollah in 2006, and again when fighting Hamas in 2008. They aren’t really people like us—like “a suburb in America” as Obama said of the Israeli town he visited—they are dangerous, angry people, crazed by an ideology that values death over life. To defend our humanistic values against such a threat, we have no choice but to use the most severe measures. Our bombs and bullets are a reflection, not of our own inhumanity, but the inhumanity of our enemy. They made us this way!
This line of thinking first appeared in the American psyche during the Indian Wars of the 19th century. It was an era of frank territorial expansion, or “Manifest Destiny” as it was called then—meaning that God had given America the right to occupy the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. To justify our massacre or subjugation of the people already living there, they were painted as savages who knew no scruples in war. They would slaughter our women and children if they could, so we had no choice but to slaughter theirs. They had no army or uniforms, so we were at war with an entire race. I am indebted to a recent article by Arthur Silber for pointing out that in America’s first war beyond its shores, this thinking and these tactics were translated to the world stage. In the Philippine–American War of 1899–1902, America seized the Spanish colony of the Philippines as its own, but the Filipinos fought bravely for their independence. Hundreds of thousands died in this conflict, and an American general gave the order to kill everyone over ten. This was justified with rhetoric familiar to us both from the Indian Wars, where most of the officer corps had gained their battlefield experience, and from the “global war on terror” today. “It is not civilized warfare,” said the Philadelphia Ledger, “but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality, and we are giving it to them.” Mark Twain, at the time America’s most celebrated writer, wrote an eloquent protest against this hypocrisy, but the war was popular with the American people. Later the same rhetoric was used against Germany in World War I, Japan in World War II, and in Vietnam, which American soldiers called “Indian Country.”
In 2004, neoconservative luminary Robert D. Kaplan wrote an article proclaiming that the whole world is now “Indian Country” and that Americans must be prepared to fight “dirty little struggles” against “small clusters of combatants hiding out in Third World slums, deserts and jungles.” We will encounter “warrior braves beside women and children, much like Fallujah.” Such thinking is now the common wisdom of America’s top generals like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, so the connection of the Indian Wars to the “global war on terror” is complete. America is engaged in nothing less than a war of imperial domination around the globe, which requires demonizing whatever popular, local forces may stand in our way. It is Manifest Destiny all over again, only this time on a global scale. American force has the right to assert itself wherever it pleases, because it America’s mission to bring light to the darkness. Unfortunately, whether he realizes it or not, this is the meaning of Obama’s “beacon of hope.”
The first thing to know about me is I was born in the wrong place. I should have been born somewhere where people are free and full of love. Instead I was born in a world where people play power games and fight for scraps. That word “scraps” explains the problem, I think. Instead of sharing a mountain and enjoying the whole mountain, which belongs to no one, each person wants a piece. One person sees he can make a nice little business selling soft drinks to the hikers there, and another doesn’t like that because it spoils the view from his veranda. So the power games begin. The once calm and happy mountain is divided into warring territories. In the world into which I was born, this pattern repeats itself at every level, from children competing to be their mothers’ favorite, through the power games of generals who kill millions to win an extra star.
It’s been this way, we are told, ever since there were people. Even animals do it, a war of survival in which the predator is the next victim. Even plants do it, with vines strangling a great oak to reach the sun. So it isn’t people’s fault, apparently. The universe is hard-wired this way, it seems. There isn’t really a place here for someone like me, who would be happy to live on air, water and sunlight, feet scarcely touching the ground. Instead, the world being what it is, I’ve been forced to make compromises—but as I’ve already said, it’s not my fault. In a world like this one, such compromises are inescapable. The whole mountain doesn’t exist—there are only scraps.
Poor miserable folk, foolish peoples, nations obstinate in evil and blind to good! You let the most beautiful and fair of your revenue be taken from under your eyes, you let your fields be ravaged, you let the possessions of your ancestors be stolen and stripped from your homes! You live in such a way that nothing is yours any longer. It seems that you would henceforth see it as a great blessing if you were left only half of your goods, your families, your lives. And all these harms, these misfortunes, this ruin, doesn’t come to you from enemies, but indeed from the enemy, the very one who you made what he is, the one for whom you go so courageously to war, and for whose grandeur you don’t hesitate to give up your lives. Yet this master has only two eyes, two hands, one body, and nothing more than the least of the inhabitants of our countless cities. All he has more than that, are the means you provide him with to destroy you. Where does he get those eyes to spy on you, if it isn’t from you? How does he have so many hands to strike you with, if you don’t lend them to him? Aren’t the feet with which he treads on your towns also yours? Does he have any power over you that isn’t your own? How would he dare to harass you, if you weren’t in agreement with with him? What evil could he do you, if you weren’t shelterers of the thief who plunders you, accomplices of the murderer who kills you, and traitors to yourselves? You plant your fields so he can lay them waste, you furnish and fill your houses to provide for his plunders, you raise your daughters in order to satisfy his pleasure, you feed your children so he can make soldiers of them in the best of cases, so he can lead them to war, to butchery, turning them into ministers of his covetousness and executors of his vengeance. You wear yourselves out in hardship so he can cosset himself with delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures. You weaken yourselves so he will be stronger, and hold you more tightly on a shorter leash. And from so many indignities that the beasts themselves would not put up with them if they felt them, you could free yourselves if you tried, not even to free yourselves, but only to want it.
Make up your minds to no longer serve, and you are free.
My thanks, not for the first time, to Yahia for bringing this text to my attention. The translation is my own.