[PEN-L:32594] Re: Re: the ObL theory of international relations

[Bill Lear <rael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, November 27, 2002 at 08:35:37 (+0000) Chris Burford writes:
>...
>>Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'
>
>We really ought to be able to discuss this without fear of any suspcion we
>are sympathising with terrorism. But unless there is a culture of
>discussion around this, each contributor may fear they stand out.

I was going to pen a response to Osama, starting with "Osama you
ignorant slut", but I decided to post Gabriel Kolko's take on modern
problems for comparison.


Bill


CounterPunch
November 26, 2002

Another Century of War?
by GABRIEL KOLKO

     Editors Note: Gabriel Kolko is one of our favorite writers and
the foremost historian of modern warfare. Here at CounterPunch we are
honored to publish this excerpt from his vitally important new book
Another Century of War?.  [AC / JSC]

     A foreign policy that is both immoral and unsuccessful is not
simply stupid, it is increasingly dangerous to those who practice or
favor it. That is the predicament that the United States now
confronts.

     Communism no longer exists, American military power has never
been greater, but the U.S. has never been so insecure and its people
more vulnerable. After fifty years of interventions in the affairs of
dozens of nations on every continent, interventions that varied from
training police and armies to supplying them with lethal equipment and
advisers to teach them how to use it, after two major wars involving
its own manpower for years, America's sustained, intense, and costly
efforts have only culminated in greater risks to itself. There is more
instability and violence in the world than ever, and now it has
finally reached its own shores--and its political leaders have
declared it will continue. By any criterion, above all the security of
its own citizens, the U.S.' international policies, whether military
or political, have produced consummate failures. It is neither
realistic nor ethical. It is a shambles of confusions and
contradictions, pious, superficial morality combined with cynical
adventurism, all of which has undermined, not strengthened, the safety
of the American people and left a world more dangerous than ever.

     It is not accurate, nor is it consolation, to argue as many do
that without an activist foreign policy and military policy the
present world situation could have been worse or that communism would
have triumphed in many more places. Many of the CIA's analysts always
perceived the Soviet Union's actions as essentially defensive, and
that it was ready to grasp opportunities that posed no obvious dangers
to it but unwilling to take great risks. As Marxists they believed
that history was predestined to favor them, and that adventurism was
unnecessary--"infantile," to use Lenin's description. But communism
was a reflection rather than the cause of the severe disorder in
international affairs that produced two incredibly destructive world
wars, a result of deeper and older problems, and those who led the
USSR gradually ceased to have the conviction essential to perpetuate
the original Leninist beliefs and systemic legacies. As a ruling
system, it has disappeared in Europe and virtually disintegrated in
Asia, peacefully and by its own leaders' volition--and not by force of
American arms.

     The fear of communism which justified vast military expenses and
mobilized NATO and America's allies is now gone, but the qualitative
importance of this fundamental transformation has not led to any
equivalent or appropriate changes in Washington's perceptions, much
less spending. It can no longer define its enemies clearly, where they
live or how they will behave, and it is unwilling to confront the
analytic problems that the immense changes in world affairs since 1989
have created. The U.S.' most symbolic sites--Wall Street and the
Pentagon--have been devastatingly attacked, and it is now plain, as
the government itself has predicted for several years, that the
country itself is highly vulnerable. Bin Laden's network replaced
"rogue states" for a time, but essentially American strategy continues
to flounder: it prepared for nuclear and mechanized war in Europe but
fought only in Asia, where it was stalemated and lost two major
conflicts. It encouraged and funded wars by Iraq against Iran and
against the Soviets in Afghanistan only to have to fight the very
people it once believed were merely its proxies. It has confronted
innumerable surprises in Latin America and Africa--to mention but a
few of its policy failures--and it has precious little control in both
those continents. The U.S.' ambitions in the century that is just
beginning far exceed its military, political, and moral resources for
attaining them, and if it does not acknowledge the limits of its
power--which it should have done much earlier--it will continue to
embark on quixotic adventures in every corner of the worldand
experience more terrorism on its own shores.

     The U.S. has more military equipment than ever, and since 1950
Pentagon spending has become one of the traditional and indispensable
foundations of American prosperity. There is no indication whatsoever
that it will decline. But there are no technological quick-fixes to
political problems. Solutions are political, which requires another
mentality and a great deal more wisdom, including a readiness to make
compromises and, above all, stay out of the affairs of nations, or
they will not succeed. Worse yet, its reliance on weapons and force
has exacerbated or created far more problems for the U.S. than it has
solved. After September 11 there can be no doubt that arms have not
brought security to America. It is not only to the world's interest
that the America adapt to the realities of the twenty-first century.
What is new is that it is now, more than ever, to the interest of the
American people themselves. It is imperative that the U.S. also
acknowledge the very limits of its power--limits that are inherent in
its own military illusions and in the very nature of a world that is
far too big and complex for any country to even dream of managing.

     Mankind cannot endure another century of war, because future wars
will be far more destructive, to civilians as well as soldiers.

The Dangers of Mindless Action

     Nations have differing interests and ways of perceiving them. The
U.S. itself was belligerently unilateralist in the period before the
September 11 and changed briefly only to meet the grave emergency that
event imposed upon it. It has created "coalitions" which are ephemeral
and transient marriages of convenience, essentially discarded NATO as
the pillar of its European policy, and managed only to show that the
United States is a fickle, unreliable partner. It is obviously
quixotic if not dangerous to talk of coalitions when nations are
unstable and perhaps even their rulers are in flux. It has already
probably destabilized Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the brief process
of making war in Afghanistan, and in years to come it will confront
the consequences of having done so in these far more important
countries.

     But the world is more violent and wracked by war and insecure
than ever, and many American officials now nostalgically admit that
the international system was far more predictable and safer when the
USSR existed, precisely because, in the last analysis, it acted
prudently. This assurance is largely misplaced, since many of the
greatest problems that the world confronted after 1945 were quite
independent of communism and they persist even today, but it is also
true that Moscow discouraged potentially dangerous confrontations to
the extent that it could do so. The CIA told the government to expect
the Soviets to behave cautiously in the last analysis, but its
estimates were often ignored or disputed by military
services--especially the Air Force--that wanted to justify more
spending.

     Indeed, the CIA and other official agencies gave successive
presidents ample and accurate warnings of the risks they faced in
Vietnam and elsewhere, and they ignored much of them. Whatever
rationality is built into the foreign affairs apparatus simply has had
little or no impact in guiding policy makers since 1950. There was far
less clarity among those who guided American foreign policy than there
could have been, and those in charge were oblivious of either the
consequences or even the goals of their actions. For them action
itself was the name of the game, and the world has paid for it. This
essentially paranoid mentality failed to anticipate the collapse of
the USSR and is still operational because high budgets cannot be
justified without dismal political prognostications, fear, and
mysteries. Such thinking is unable to go beyond simplistic
explanations or to comprehend causes or understand historical
processes and social dynamics of countless nations. Now there is a
paranoid view of Islam; the focus is off China temporarily but it is
the same vision.

     There is, in a word, far less understanding at the top than
successive leaders have claimed, and domestic politics and short-term
factors play a much greater role than they will ever admit. The world
and now the American people cannot afford U.S. foreign policy's
opportunistic and ad hoc character, its wavering between the immoral
and amoral in practice but which official speech writers portray as
rational and principled. In reality, it has neither coherence nor
useful principles but often responds to one failure and crisis after
another--and these are usually of its own making. Even given its
unrealistic ambitions, it has lost control of its priorities, which
all nations must have. We can never forget that the two men who the
U.S. has most demonized over the past two decades, Saddam Hussein and
Osama bin Laden, both collaborated for years with the U.S.; Washington
believed their causes were identical and put vast sums at their
disposal. There is no greater proof of confusion and ineptness on
America's part, and rather than leading the world in a better
direction it has usually inflicted incalculable harm wherever it has
intervened. Its leaders have been addicted to intervening for its own
sake, to save the nation's "credibility," preventing an alleged vacuum
of power, or its self-appointed role as the enforcer of regional or
global order (which it usually equates with the freedom of American
businessmen to make money). The U.S. has refused to accept a much more
modest and far less ambitious definition of its national interests,
one that is also realistic.

     All of its policies in the Middle East have been contradictory
and counterproductive. The U.S.' support for Israel is the single most
important but scarcely the only cause of the September 11 trauma and
the potentially fundamental political destabilization, ranging from
the Persian Gulf to South Asia, that its intervention in Afghanistan
has triggered. But it has repeatedly seen its most ambitious
diplomatic and military efforts produce disasters instead. Its
strategy of "triangulating" China and the Soviet Union, essentially to
achieve a victory in Vietnam, backfired and accelerated its calamitous
loss there. Then there is Guatemala in 1953, Chile in 1973, Angola in
1975, and countless other places where its habitual penchant for
activism and intervention produced acute disorders, deaths, and only
perpetuated and usually aggravated many nations' difficulties.

     There are many serious questions in the world that must be solved
if there is to be much greater stability and peace: poverty,
illiteracy, human rights, and the like. It was a convenient
simplification for the Bush Administration to blame al-Qaeda and
"terrorism" for the world's insecurities and to pretend that resolving
this challenge would lay to rest many, if not all the others,
everywhere. It will not. Moreover, America's military power is
irrelevant for meeting virtually all of these issues, much less
terrorism, and it was sheer opportunism for Washington to convey the
impression that this was the major issue the U.S. now confronts. It is
not. There are still countless unresolved problems in Latin America,
Africa, and Asia that it is incapable of answering because it is
wedded to approaches and institutions that have failed until now and
will continue to do so in the future. There is no substitute for
political and economic strategies that solve these real challenges
rather than worry about what American businessmen and bankers think is
to their interest. But since 1946 no administration has thought and
acted this way, and instead they have relied on military power to
intervene countless times in various places to preserve status quos
that perpetuate those economic and social conditions that lead to
violence and terrorism.

     Whatever its original intention, America's commitment of time and
effort is essentially open-ended wherever it intervenes. It may last a
short time, and often does, but complications can cause it to spend
far more resources and time than it originally anticipated, causing it
in the name of its "credibility" or some other doctrines the
government's publicists concoct, to get into situations which are
disastrous and which in the end produce defeats for which the U.S. is
much worse off. Vietnam is the leading example of this. Should it
confront the forty or even more nations that now have terrorist
networks then it will in one manner or another intervene everywhere,
but especially Africa and the Middle East, and such commitments will
be open-ended and unpredictable in terms of the time and effort each
requires.

     This lack of control leads America's leaders to a lack of
coherence and a loss of priorities, because when wars begin their
eventual consequences and outcome can never be predicted. This was
true long before the U.S. became the preeminent global power and it is
still the case. Events over the past year have confirmed that
destabilization and friends becoming enemies--and via versa--are the
rule in warfare and grand geopolitics, and to be expected. America's
interventions since 1947 have usually not succeeded by the criteria it
originally defined, and its security at the beginning of the
twenty-first century is much more imperiled than it was fifty years
ago.

     The U.S. has more determined and probably more numerous enemies
today than ever, and many of those who hate it are ready and able to
inflict death and destruction on its shores. Its interventions often
triumphed in the purely military sense, which is all the Pentagon
worries about, but they have been political failures in all too many
cases and led to yet more interventions. Its virtually instinctive
activist mentality has led it to leap into situations where it often
had no interests, much less durable solutions, and where it has
repeatedly created disasters and enduring enmities. America has power
without wisdom, and cannot recognize the limits of arms despite its
repeated experiences. The result has been folly, and hatred, which is
a recipe for disasters. September 11 confirmed that. The war has come
home.

     The United States can no longer afford procrastination or to
commit more errors, much less pursue the ad hoc, immoral opportunism,
confusion, and loss of priorities that has guided Washington for a
half-century. It cannot throw money at the Pentagon as if more weapons
solve rather than aggravate political problems. It has been adrift for
decades and refused to admit that its interventions have failed to
resolve--and usually exacerbated-- most, if not all, of the challenges
Washington justified for almost fifty years to send men, machines, or
money and equipment to every corner of the world. Its readiness to
pursue activist military and foreign policies has, if anything,
intensified most of the world's problems by encouraging--and giving
the essential material means--to tyrants and officers who satisfy
America's definitions of its own interests. They comprise those who
resist essential social and economic changes and those whose
adventurism had much better be discouraged. We see today in the
Persian Gulf and Afghanistan how such ambitions have failed, probably
catastrophically, but on a smaller scale there are countless other
places where U.S. intervention has left festering problems that are
returning to haunt and endanger it.

     But by purely non-ideological, rational criteria U.S. foreign
policies have failed even if they have made the world more prosperous
for its own businessmen and investors and their local cronies. The
American people now paying the price in lives lost and permanent
insecurity--and they will have to accept the turbulent existence that
the president after September 11 promised.

     At the present juncture of history, wars are at least as likely
as any time over the past century. The end of Soviet hegemony in East
Europe and Moscow's restraining influence elsewhere is only one
factor, albeit of great importance. The proliferation of nuclear
technology and other means of mass destruction have made large parts
of the world much more dangerous, but highly destructive local wars
with conventional weapons in Africa, the Balkans, Middle East, and
elsewhere have only multiplied since the 1960s. Europe, especially
Germany, and Japan are far stronger and more independent than at any
time since 1945, and China's burgeoning economy has given it a vastly
more important role in Asia.

     The world is more complex and dangerous than during the Cold War,
and the decentralization of military and political power, and the
obduracy of the United States' ambitions to guide the destinies of a
virtually unlimited number of nations is a highly inflammable mixture
of factors. The U.S. has become what Establishment pillar Samuel P.
Huntington aptly calls the only "rogue superpower," full of dual
standards and hypocrisy in its pretensions to be "the indispensable
nation," as he quotes Madeleine K. Albright, committed to advancing
"universal values"--as another State Department official he cites put
it. 1 America repeatedly has sought to impose those values and
policies that conform to its definitions and interests on nations and
international organizations. This has led it, on the one hand, to
lofty proclamations and, on the other, to protecting American
corporate interests, buttressing tyrants, selling or giving arms to
nations that have rebellious populations or grievances against
neighboring states, and unilaterally bullying its allies as well as
weaker enemies. September 11 proves it is no longer immune to the
destructive consequences of these designs. It must change
fundamentally or pay a frightful, ever-mounting price. That price is a
function both of its foreign policies and the spread and intensity of
weapons of mass destruction. There are a sufficient number of people,
quite independent of states, who are ready to use the latter.

     All factors considered--the breakup of Yugoslavia, events in
Africa and the Middle East, to name but a few--wars, both civil or
between states, remain the principal (but scarcely the only) challenge
facing much of humanity in the twenty-first century. The numerous
ecological disasters affecting all dimensions of the environment are
equally insidious, because of their relentless but gradual development
and the unwillingness of the crucial nations--above all the United
States--to adopt measures essential for reversing its damage. In many
vital regards, the challenges facing humanity have never been so
complex and threatening, and there is not the slightest reason for
complacency or optimism as a result of the end of the Cold War.

     It is an essential precondition of stemming, much less reversing,
the accumulated deterioration of world affairs that the U.S. end its
self-appointed global mission of regulating all problems, wherever,
whenever, or however it wishes to do so. There are countless ethical
and other reasons to cease meddling everywhere. It has no more right
or capacity to do so than any state over the past century, whatever
they called themselves. But September 11 confirmed, if any was needed,
that it has failed abysmally to bring peace and security to the world
but instead has managed to be increasingly hated, placing itself in
profound and mortal danger. But an additional reason for ending its
role as a rogue superpower and promiscuous, cynical interventionism is
pragmatic: it has been spectacularly unsuccessful even on its own
terms, it is squandering vast economic resources, and it now places
the physical security of Americans on their own soil in danger.
Paramount are the obligations that politicians have to their own
citizens, and to cease the damage the U.S. causes abroad is also to
fulfill their responsibilities to their own people. Neither the
American population nor its political leaders are likely to agree to
such far-reaching changes in foreign policy, and there is not the
slightest sign at this point that voters will call them to account,
but more events of the order of the September 11 calamity or the
anthrax scare may produce a learning process--and eventual changes.

     Communism and fascism were products of the grave errors in the
international order and affairs of states that the First World War
created, and the Soviet system disintegrated after sixty years because
it was the aberrant consequence of a destructive and abnormal war. But
radicalized, suicidal Islamists are, to a great extent, the outcome of
a half-century of America's interference in the Middle East and Muslim
world, and its repeated grave errors, however different the context or
times, have produced their own abnormal, negative reactions. It is
under these conditions and with these threats that our century has
begun. There are yet other crises incubating. Above all, the
destructive potential of weaponry has increased exponentially and many
more people and nations have access to it, and even what would once
have been considered small foreign policy problems now have
potentially far greater consequences. It all augers very badly.

     There will be serious problems throughout much of the world even
if the U.S. abstains from interference and tailors its actions to fit
this troubled reality. Internecine civil conflicts will continue, as
well as wars between states armed with a growing variety of much more
destructive weapons supplied by outside powers, of which the U.S.
remains, by far, the leader. Many of them have independent roots, but
the arguments for America staying out of them should be dictated by
both principles and experiences.

     But the way America's leaders are running the nation's foreign
policy is not creating peace or security at home or stability abroad.
The reverse is the case: its interventions have been
counterproductive. Everyone--Americans and those people who are the
objects of their efforts--would be far better off if the U.S. did
nothing, closed its bases overseas and withdrew its fleets everywhere,
and allowed the rest of world to find its own way without American
weapons and troops. Communism is dead, and Europe and Japan are
powerful and can take care of their own affairs as they think best.
There is every reason for the U.S. to adapt to these facts, but to
continue as it has over the past half-century is to admit it has the
vainglorious but irrational ambition to run the world.

     It cannot. It has failed in the past and it will fail in this
century, and attempting to do so will inflict wars and turmoil on many
nations as well as on its own people.



Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is
the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and
Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?.