The Way to Peace
PAM's Statement on Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
"So let us not talk falsely now the hour is getting late"
-- Bob Dylan
The uniquely unilateralist Bush Administration and its allies seek to replace the Post-Cold War disorder with a New New World Order that will dominate the planet for at least the first decades of the 21st century through the use of force, terror, big stick diplomacy, and Cold War type alliances
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I was privileged to be one of two AFSC representatives to a late January
conference held in Brussels to launch a new European Network for Peace and
Human Rights. The conference brought together some 250 delegates from more
than 40 countries, many associated with the European anti-nuclear weapons
movement and left political parties across Europe.
As our country experiences the tiniest portion of what our nation has
visited upon others from Vietnam to Iran to Hiroshima to Colombia, Americans
have been in shock and understandably more than a little confused.
Predictably, this trauma has been cynically and radically exploited by the
Bush Administration, by its allies in the Republican AND Democratic Parties,
by the U.S. military-industrial-complex, and by racist authoritarians
throughout U.S. society.
This situation has been further compounded by the erosion of democratic
values, practices and structures - sacrificed on the altars of consumerism,
corporate penetration and domination of the dominant political parties, and
by our own religious fundamentalisms.
Empire:
It is painful to look at root causes. They can be found in the European
colonial origins of the U.S., in the creation of a continental and then an
international empire, and in the banalities of evil that so define our daily
environment. In a futile effort to avoid having to share influence with the
Soviet Union in East Asia, as the U.S. was forced to do in Europe, George
Kennan, the author of the Cold War containment strategy, named a major cause
of the current crisis in 1948 when he advised President Truman that: "We
have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 % of its
population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and
resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
relationships which will permit us to maintain this policy of disparity ...
The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power
concepts."
Toward these and other ends, the U.S. maintains and is now expanding a
global network of foreign military bases. In addition to those that it has
across Europe, there are more than a hundred U.S. bases and military
installations in Japan, a hundred in Korea, and elsewhere in places as
diverse as Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Bahrain, Diego Garcia and Saudi
Arabia. Few in the U.S. have any idea that these bases exist. And although
our Declaration of Independence is reprinted in newspapers across the
country every July 4, almost no one knows that among the causes for
declaring independence and going to war was the fact that King George III
kept "among us in times of peace" "Standing Armies" that committed
intolerable "abuses and usurpations" upon the colonists.
Empire is increasingly a part of the U.S. identity. Zbigniew Brzezinski of
the Trilateral Commission, and Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign
Relations write about it openly, and even the New York Times explains to its
readers that "There is talk of a new American empire, of a world that
presents the global superpower with a unique opportunity to exploit a
victory in Afghanistan...to force decisions in every capital...and to
rethink the principles around which nations cooperate."
Note the words "exploit the victory." They are accurate and help us to
understand the meanings and dimensions of the Bush Administration's "World
War." Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have manipulated the confusion
created by the September 11 attacks to redouble the Clinton Administration's
commitment to "full spectrum dominance" of the world. Last spring, our Prime
Minister and national CEO Richard Cheney informed the press that "the
arrangement [for] the twenty-first century is most assuredly being shaped
right now...the United States will continue to be the dominant political
economic and military power in the world." (It is interesting and tragic
how, when they hear these words, most Americans take them as an affirmation
of their place in the world and are unable to project their imaginations
into the meanings of the word "dominant", as if being dominated in the
nuclear and post-modern age were not a painful and life-threatening
experience.)
While our attention has been turned to "Afghanistan," the war in Colombia
has been escalating and the Bush Administration has refused to negotiate,
and, worse, is abrogating, nuclear arms control treaties. Democrats in
Congress, fearful that voters will think that they are not concerned about
"security," are joining Republicans in supporting a $70 billion increase in
military spending since September, including funding for the testing and
deployment of new first strike weapons - "missile defenses"- which provide
unimaginable subsidies and profits for U.S. high-tech and military
production corporations, and serve as the Trojan Horse for the weaponization
of space.
Clearly, these are not formulas for winning friends, but for sharpening
fear, deepening the cycles of violence and creating new generations of
terrorists and others who despise us. Rather than pursue policies leading to
common and human security and planetary ecological health, the U..S. is
becoming a pariah nation, "successful," as Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz says,
because it inspires fear among the world's nations.
The New New World Order
Secretary of State Colin Powell tells us that the indiscriminate attacks of
September 11, "hit the reset button" on U.S. foreign and military policy.
The changes The Bush Administration seeks to impose on the global
hierarchies and structures of power, as well as within the U.S. body politic
are no less ambitious than those of the first months and years of the Cold
War in the late 1940s. Reprising Bush the Elder's use of Saddam Hussein's
attack on Kuwait in 1990 to reconsolidate U.S. global dominance for the
Post-Cold War era, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld Administration is using its "war
against terrorism" to consolidate incipient alliances with Russia and India,
to disorient and diminish European Union and Chinese challenges to U.S.
regional hegemony, to expand the U.S.-Japan alliance, to discipline its
Saudi, Egyptian and other Arab clients, to deepen its military presence in
oil-rich Central Asia, to expand the U.S.-Japan alliance in order to
reconsolidate its domination of the "American Lake" (Pacific Ocean), and to
teach the lesson that no one should even think about challenging the United
States.
Even as the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Ashcroft Administration demonstrates a
consistent disregard for the truth, there are times that it should be taken
at its word. It has announced a new military doctrine which is entirely
consistent with U.S. Manifest Destiny culture and with Washington's
commitments to Full Spectrum Dominance. In the President's words, the
nations of the world are either "with us or against us." Those who are
"against us," who dare to challenge U.S. ambitions or policies, face the
targeting and destruction of their people and life-supporting
infrastructures. In his State of the Union speech, he threatened unilateral
first strike attacks against nations suspected of attempting to equalize the
imbalance of power by developing weapons of mass destruction of their own
and against those who "don't hold the values we hold dear true to your
heart."
Since September 11, we have witnessed a wounded empire striking back with a
ferocity reminiscent of Genghis Khan or Roman emperors. The brutal Afghan
Taliban has been replaced with brutal Afghan warlords at the cost of
thousands of innocent Afghan lives. The U.S. is again at war in the
Philippines, and Washington is threatening to take its deadly "Crusade" to
as many as sixty nations beginning either with Somalia, Yemen, or Indonesia,
or against what President Bush outrageously terms the "Evil Axis": Iran,
Iraq and North Korea.
We should be clear. This is a fundamental and fundamentally dangerous
turning point in history. The uniquely unilateralist Bush Administration and
its allies seek to replace the Post-Cold War disorder with a New New World
Order that will dominate the planet for at least the first decades of the
21st century through the use of force, terror, big stick diplomacy, and Cold
War type alliances.
In the 1940's we had "containment," the creation of the IMF, World Bank, UN,
NATO, U..S.-Japan alliance, NSC #68 and McCarthyism. Now we have the global
(including within the U.S.) "war on terrorism," and the promise that it will
not end in our lifetimes. We have the rhetoric of multilaterialism and
alliance building and the unvarnished reality of hegemonic unilateralism.
Joseph Gerson is Director of Programs, AFSC, Cambridge, MA
Back to Peace Talk Index, Spring, 2002