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What The War is All About New Ecology Movement Dwellers in The Land Ecosteries Thinking The Unthinkable?
WHAT THE WAR IS ALL ABOUT
by
Kirkpatrick SaleThe author has written nine books, including Human Scale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution and The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy. He can be reached at: kirksale@counterpunch.org .This article first appeared in Fourth World Review Number 120 in April 2003.
WHAT'S IMPORTANT to know about this war we have unleashed is that it is not about oil, or about weapons of destruction, or Al Qaida, or Saddam Hussein - this war is about American global hegemony.You see, Bush has a dream - or, rather, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and that crowd has sold Bush a dream: it is the creation of a world in which all states will be what we call capitalistic (though not allowed ever to be as rich as the US) and what we call democratic (though the power elite doesn't have to change as long as it allows elections from time to time) and participate in a global economy on our terms.
This is what William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in a 1996 Foreign Affairs article called America's 'benevolent global hegemony' - and you know who is defining 'benevolent'. Benevolent… global… hegemony… and for those of you who skipped political science class, hegemony means leadership, control, power, dominance.
This has been the goal of the hard-right ever since the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1989, and when they came to power with George the First they tried to push it as hard as they could, going so far as to make a war against Iraq for invading a country they told him he could invade. But they never got George to buy it and he saw no reason to fight a messy war in the streets of Baghdad.
Then comes George the Second, who early on in office was essentially an isolationist - he was opposed to troops in Kosovo, he was against 'nation-building', he knew practically nothing of the world beyond the Dallas Cowboys and he had no notion of an American role in it. But he put into power the old crowd from George the First's days and made it even more prominent. They started work on him right from the start, but he was a slow learner and nothing much stuck - he didn't even want to have anything to do with the so-called peace process in Israel, and he didn't care much about recovering our spy plane when it was forced to land in China.
Then came 9/11, and suddenly everything changed:
Bush could see it all now. It wasn't just that there was a terrorist group based in Afghanistan that had brought the war to us. It wasn't just that the US was hated by a whole bunch of Arabs. This was, as he said, 'the presence of EVIL' - evil attacking the United States, which was GOOD. That struck a chord that his little Christian born- again heart could understand, and so he declared a war against evil - a war not against these terrorists but terrorism itself, everywhere in the world and for all time.
That was all the opening that the global hegemony people needed, and they were right there telling Bush that the war against evil also had to be fought against evil regimes - Iraq, say, Iran too, and throw in North Korea since we need one non- Muslim state - which he famously called 'the axis of evil', And that was no off-hand word - it came from the bottom of his inflamed fundamentalist Christian heart. As he said at another time, his task was to answer the attacks of 9/11 'and rid the world of evil'.
When George Bush was governor of Texas he would go to a church in Dallas run by a minister who had founded a movement called the Promise Keepers, a fundamentalist sect that pushed a doctrine it called 'dominionism'. Dominionism held that it was the duty of the forces of good, guided in their mission knowing God was on their side, to rescue the world from evil and establish the Kingdom of God everywhere, 'to restore the earth', as they put it, 'to God's control'. Bush clearly resonated with that idea.
And now here he was, actually able to put that dominionism into practice, with the largest and most powerful armies in the world, and none to prevent or challenge him. It was, as Bob Woodward reported in his latest book, a chance to cast 'his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's Master Plan'. But more: he could do it not just in the name of God but in the name of America, because America was good, and believed in God, and was rich and successful, and it would be its dominion that would be established in the world - a benevolent… Christian… American… global… hegemony.
Then Wolfowitz whispered 'Iraq' to Rumsfeld who whispered it to Cheney who whispered it to Bush, and it was suddenly so obvious. Let us begin the campaign to make the world safe for goodness with a war against that little mustachioed Arab Hitler.
So here we have it. That is why the whole thing seems so irrational, because it doesn't have anything to do with rational, realpolitical calculations. Bush doesn't care that there have been at least 175 wars since World War II, at the cost of perhaps 12 million lives, that have brought more misery than stability, or that the greatest user of weapons of mass destruction in history has been the United States, or that at least 10 nations other than Iraq actually have nuclear weapons.
He doesn't care that he lost the popular election by half-a-million votes, or that the Joint Chiefs actually opposed the war at first, or that 70% of Americans oppose a war with significant casualties, or that the only other world superpower - popular opinion - is totally against him.
Why should that distract him? He is on a holy, American mission.
And it won't stop with Iraq. You are forewarned.
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