[A-List] A Rational Perspective on Our Present Crises

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

by  Gabriel Kolko

ZNet Commentary (April 07 2007)


It is understandable that intelligent people should be preoccupied with the
crises reported in the daily press, but they are best comprehended in their
historical context.  That context, and the crucial causes and motives guiding
American foreign policy since 1950, are crucial to understanding the often
bewildering and multidimensional events since the year 2000. George W Bush and
his cronies have done incalculable damage and committed terrible follies, but it
is a fundamental error to assume that he is somehow original and the genesis of
our present crisis.

It is much riskier to focus on particulars as if they have no precedents or are
not part of an older, longer historical pattern.  Indeed, a major fault of many
assessments of US actions abroad is precisely such a disregard for the
circumstances that led to them and their historical framework.

The world has changed with increasing speed over the last half-century, and
there have been more wars and upheavals over the past decade than any time since
1945.  Given the weaponry now available and the growing political and diplomatic
instability that has accompanied the demise of Communism, this is the most
dangerous period in mankind's entire history. It is also the period of greatest
changes in the balance of world forces, with the decentralization of not only
powerful weapons but the reemergence of nationalist, ethnic, and religious
factors.  The breakup of the USSR and Communism was only partially the cause.

How global military, political, economic and other variables interact is very
often unpredictable, to which one must add the domestic politics and public
moods within crucial nations - of which the US is most important. World affairs
are not only complex but also full of surprises - not only for us but also for
those in Washington and elsewhere who aspire to control the destiny of humanity.

Contradictions and errors have been the principal characteristic of all
ambitious nations, leading to wars that are not only far bloodier and longer
than anticipated but also produce such unwanted political and social
consequences as revolution or its opposite, reaction.  The emergence of
communism and fascism, and the sequence of wars over the past century, was
merely confirmation of the fact that once fighting begins, human values and
institutions - all the forces that create social stability - go awry.

George W Bush inherited conventional wisdom regarding the world mission and
universal interests that guide American policies on the world scene.  The same
ambitions have often been shared by leaders of other powers who believe that
wars serve as effective, controllable instruments of national goals.  What Bush
did do, however, was intensify the most dangerous traits always inherent in
American institutions and beliefs since 1945.  He scarcely expected to get
bogged down in the affairs of the Middle East, making Iran the strategically
most important power in the entire region.  Still less did he imagine that
America's war would rip apart the existing fragile political arrangements and
boundaries so that the specter of civil wars and bloodshed along sectarian and
ethnic lines in the entire Middle East that may last for years to come. 
President John F Kennedy and his successors earlier had also expected that their
involvement in Vietnam would be limited and short.

But once the shooting begins - and America's "credibility" is at stake -
priorities are decided for it where there is combat.  Moreover, what is crucial
is that its pretensions and ambitions have often led to very different parts of
the globe - and the US often loses control over the military and political
results of its many interventions.   The world has always been very large and
very complex, and it is becoming more so; the US may eventually adjust to that
reality. But it has refused to do so in the past as well as the present.

Both Presidents George H W Bush - the incumbent president's father - and Bill
Clinton radically altered the justifications for the United States' global
foreign policy after Communism disappeared.  The second Bush claims there is "a
decisive ideological struggle" against Islamic fundamentalism and "terrorism",
and it is the main rationale for wars the US is now fighting in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and may perhaps also fight elsewhere. But his predecessors concocted
variations of these themes based on fear and anxiety in large part to justify
massive military spending after the demise of the USSR, and the US' "preemptive"
interventions have been a rationale for American interventions for many decades.

Yet while an alleged Islamic threat took Communism's place throughout the 1990s,
it did so in an often contrived fashion that made exceptions for America's
important alliances with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and other orthodox Muslim
states.  But Islam has existed for centuries, it has changed very little if at
all, and the US often utilized fundamentalist religion in Iran, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere after 1950 as an antidote to fight godless Communism.  What was
crucial was that the US needed a threat and alleged danger to legitimize to its
own population its global role and readiness to intervene everywhere. This
justification causes it to spend almost as much on its military machine as the
entire rest of the world combined.

We must never forget that the origins of most of the world's problems go back
many centuries and involve religion, boundaries, demography, nationalism - the
list of causes of war and human misery is very long.  The United States has
scarcely been the cause of most of them.  But even granted that international
politics has been violent and quite irrational far, far longer, after the Second
World War the American role was decisive in most places on the globe. Had
Washington behaved differently after 1945 then many of today's international
crises would be very different also.  In short, the "American problem" after the
Second World War became synonymous with the world's problem; virtually
everything important involving change is now contingent on it.

The US since 1945 has poured fuel on the fire of atavism and irrationality, and
it has blocked efforts to solve the domestic problems of countless nations in
ways that were often quite sensible and equitable.  It is worth contemplating
what might have happened had it minded its own affairs and avoided making
matters - good, bad, or neither - far worse, but especially preventing needed
social and economic reforms.  I have devoted one book to its interventions in
the Third World alone, another on the Vietnam War, and dealt with yet many other
cases elsewhere. There are also innumerable excellent detailed works that go
much further.

The Middle East is currently the leading crisis facing the US and the world. 
President Woodrow Wilson predicted in 1919 that if the peace made after the war
were not just "there will follow not mere conflict but cataclysm".  The
territorial settlements imposed on the Middle East after 1918 were entirely
capricious, unjust, and arranged by the great powers with scant regard for local
conditions or desires.  An astonishing ignorance prevailed among most of the
crucial decision-makers, not just the Americans. The reemergence of Islamic
ideologies, the rise of secular nationalism in the region, Zionism and the
seemingly intractable Arab-Jewish conflict, and much else is a result, to a
crucial extent, of the role of outside foreign intervention.

The Second World War was further vindication of Wilson's fears, and today we are
experiencing the irrationality of the settlements that followed the First World
War in the Middle East. The vast region's nations and borders were created
arbitrarily; in no area was the potential for chaos - the contested boundaries,
the creation of a Jewish homeland, and much else - greater than this inherently
volatile region.  For there are no "natural" nations and boundaries in the
Middle East and by attacking Iraq the US has reopened a potential for chaos and
disorder in the entire vast region which surpasses, by far, both in size and
economic importance the potential for instability which existed in Indochina,
Brazil, or anyplace else where it mucked around.  For while there were plenty of
illusions in many other areas, in fact the turmoil the US is now creating in the
Middle East is unprecedented. It could have been far different had the US not
tried to control the fate of this region at all.

Communism is all but dead but the world's sufferings have, if anything,
increased with the disappearance of what was the justification for the Cold War. 
The resources that the US and mankind might have devoted to making peace and
meeting rational human needs and desires have instead gone to preparing for and
making war.  Today we confront the indefinite prospect of war and human
suffering on a vast scale - but this has also been the case for at least the
past half-century.


http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-04/07kolko.cfm


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