All the Friedmanesque nonsense about American exceptionalism makes me want to lose my lunch. Wilsonian internationalism, liberal or neoconservative, has always had a santimonious missionary tone about American superiority that automatically makes it suspect in my eyes — particularly when it has so often been hypocritically employed to excuse our worst impulses.
Should we stop genocide and ethnic cleansing? Yes. Should we not support authoritarian dictators on behalf of greedy American busnessmen? Yes. Should we work within international institutions to create global consensus on civilized behavior? Of course. Should we lead by example? If only we would.
Should we invade foreign countries and forcefully impose American style democratic capitalism because it is the best of all possible worlds and nothing could be finer?
American values never had, and never will have, an “exceptional” role in the history of the world, any more than Islamic values did during the great conquests that constructed the Caliphate, any more than Roman values did under Caesar, Augustus, and the others, and so on. America’s dominance of the world is a contingency of history, not proof of the rightness of our ideals. Sure, democracy is a lot better style of governance than a theocracy or a Roman Empire. But the US didn’t invent democracy and was only one of several countries and cultures that helped spread it. And today, it is inarguable that other democratic countries have fairer election systems and that other democratic countries treat both their individual citizens and their businesses in many ways that even the most gung-ho America lover would envy. And it is arguable – indeed it is a very common argument – that American economic rule is any better than any other country’s for the citizens of a third world country whose economy we dominate. The number of monstrous dictators this country has accommodated, and still does, is shocking.
Manifest Destiny and other ideas helped justify American expansionism. Today, it has resurfaced in debates about America’s “exceptionalism” and as part of the “mission” of the neo cons. As I’ll show in other posts, about Woodrow Wilson and others, it is also highly influential in one strain of American political liberalism. To say the least, in a world which has overwhelmingly rejected Bush’s overt attempts to impose an American empire through military force -and which will certainly continue to resist such attempts in many different ways- America will need to drive a stake through its narcissistic fantasy that it is “special” and its values are, or should be, everyone’s. Aside from the fact that it is patently ridiculous to believe America is exceptional, there lie monsters (example: the embarassing absence of the important nations of Europe from the Coalition of the Willing).
To recognize that the US is simply one more country that is sometimes great, sometimes mediocre, and sometimes horrible shouldn’t diminish anyone’s love of country. In my case, if anything, it increased it. Suddenly, the phony impression I had of a bromide, perfect America was replaced by wonderment at the sheer scale of this country’s achievement, both for good and ill. Suddenly, America became real. Because “destiny” is bogus teleology. But America’s interactions with its world and the challenges of doing that well while honoring America’s boundaries are profoundly exciting.
Exactly. We Americans benefit hugely from the great riches and opportunity that this (mostly stolen) land gave a bunch of immigrants cast off from all over the planet, and there is much to be proud of in what we managed to achieve. But, it is completely absurd to look at this country and not be able to see that we are a long, long way from perfection and that there is much we can learn from others, from history and ourselves. We aren’t exceptional and we don’t have to be.
The line between good and evil is within each human being, they are not characteristics of nationality or tribe. We don’t have a monopoly on either one and neither does anyone else.
Kevin Drum discusses Clark’s views on Iraq and points to this post by Phil Carter in which he says that he’s impressed with Clark’s vision but sees a necessity for Clark to get specific on strategy and tactics, and frets that it will be extremely difficult for him to implement his vision in any case.
Kevin doesn’t think specifics are necessary because he is more interested in the candidates’ instincts and judgements, and I happen to think that fixing the problem will be surprisingly easier once Bush is defeated, particularly if the campaign has been waged in open opposition to the Bush Doctrine.
But if Carter wants some specifics, I’ve got his specifics for him, right here.
Clark appeared on the newshour last Thursday and discussed this and more at some length:
MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let’s turn to Iraq. More attacks today. There have been horrific attacks this week. If you became president tomorrow, what would you do to restore some sort of security there?
WESLEY CLARK: Well, the first thing I would do is get the big picture right. And what you’ve got is a regional dynamic in which both Syria and Iran are working consciously against the United States in the region because they believe that this administration intends to handle them next.
So that a U.S. success, however it’s defined in Iraq, means that then the United States is free to put more pressure on them. So they don’t want us to have that success so the regional dynamic needs to be worked inside Iraq. We would go immediately back to Kofi Annan at the United Nations and say let’s talk again about what the United Nations or an international organization could do. I would remove that occupying power, that authority there. I’d put it under the United Nations or an international organization. I would ask the Iraqi governing council to take more responsibility for governing Iraq.
One of the things we want to do is we want to avoid the emergence in Iraq of more intense sect feelings. You have the Kurds in the North. They’re armed; they kept their army. They’re very concerned if the Turks were to come in. They’re prepared if anything should go wrong in the rest of Iraq, they’re prepared to say, okay, we have got our independent Kurdistan. You have the Shia in the South. They’ve never gotten really organized and they’re not… they have not been traditionally as radicalized as the Iranian Shia population has, but they’re organizing. There’s a 500,000 man army of god in Baghdad. There’s others and there’s jostling for position and there’s been some assassinations and assassination attempts in there. If that goes the wrong way, we could have real violence in Iraq.
MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let’s go back to something you just said, though. Are you saying that the coalition authority that Paul Bremer heads now, you would transfer that authority to the U.N.?
WESLEY CLARK: Yes, I would.
MARGARET WARNER: Would you retain U.S. authority over the military aspect?
WESLEY CLARK: Yes, you must do that. The United Nations cannot do the military piece, but I believe that you can put the United Nations or you can form an international organization as we did in the case of Bosnia to do the political development and the economic development, and you can take Halliburton out of the expanded nation building role it has and let it do what it normally does which is provide some of the logistics back up for the American troops.
MARGARET WARNER: All right. But are you saying you would do this because you think then that would encourage foreign countries to send serious numbers of troops to help?
WESLEY CLARK: I think you do it for three reasons. First, because it takes the United States off the blame line in the eyes of the Iraqi people and especially in the Islamic world. So now it’s not a U.S. occupation. It’s a lot of the different nations who are simply there trying to help because remember it’s not only the international authority but you make the Iraqi governing council immediately take more responsibility. Then number two, I think it improves your chance of getting more significant, more immediate grant economic assistance. Number three, I do think it makes it more likely you’ll get more substantial numbers of foreign troops.
MARGARET WARNER: President Bush said in his press conference Tuesday, we’re not leaving, quote unquote, until Iraq is stable. Are you suggesting that the U.S. would ever leave militarily before the situation was stable?
WESLEY CLARK: I think we have to be very careful about leaving. We don’t want to leave prematurely. We don’t want Iraq to fall apart, but there is a window in there in which we’ve got the optimum chance for stabilizing and after which if we don’t handle things right, it could go downhill and be counterproductive for us.
MARGARET WARNER: So when you say, as you said in the debate Sunday night, you said you want the president… let me get the exact words…you’re waiting for the president, to quote, have a strategy to get out. What is your strategy to get out?
WESLEY CLARK: Well, what I do is first of all I’ve just described it. I put the international authority in. I reduce the influence of the U.S. occupying authority. I put the Iraqi governing council more in charge. I work for the constitution of the Iraqis in the long term. I keep the U.S. in charge of the security situation. I build up the Iraqi security forces. And I would… I do it all the same way we did it, let’s say, in the Balkans. We put out a matrix. You said here’s your political. Here’s your economic. Here’s your military. Here’s what you’re going to do this month, that month, so forth. Here’s where you want to be. Here’s your objectives. Here’s how much it’s going to cost. Show it to the American people.
MARGARET WARNER: Here’s what I’m trying to get at. Do you agree, for instance, with the Bush administration that until the Iraqis have a constitution and a government elected under that constitution that they can’t run the show themselves?
WESLEY CLARK: No, I don’t agree that they’ve got to have a constitution. I mean it took the United States of America seven years after its independence to get a constitution finished. I mean, we started with the Articles of Confederation. So they may work for a long time on a constitution. We don’t want to be there running the show in Iraq for seven years.
There are a couple of interesting things in this. First, in the big picture, I think he has pinpointed one of the biggest mistakes of this war in his remarks about Iran and Syria.
The most obvious example of the immature intellectual psychology of the neocons was the absurd idea that the “shock and awe” of this invasion would force the other countries in the region to cower and capitulate for fear of being next. ( Indeed, their reliance on swaggering trash talk and threats reminds me of no one so much as Saddam himself.) This was always a case where leashing our power — showing cool, controlled international leadership would have been far more effective in keeping terrorists and potential nuclear powers on their guard than impetuously unleashing it for spurious reasons and thereby proving for all to see that we are not the omnipotent colossos that our superpower status implied we were.
America looks much weaker, not stronger, in the eyes of our enemies than we did two years ago when we invaded Afghanistan.
Clark points out in the interview that in the case of Iran and Syria we made a grave error in how we dealt with them after we toppled Saddam. In the embarrassing high fiving euphoria of our preordained military victory (over a 4th rate dictatorship we’d systematically weakened for 12 years) we let the neocon hawks loose in the region to threaten Syria and Iran even more forcefully than we had before. In doing so, we’ve given them reason to become more aggressive in these early days than they otherwise might have. It was stupid and useless. Had we shut the likes of John Bolton’s pie hole for him, we might have been able to keep the Syrians and the Iranians at least off balance and wondering. Instead, we threw down the gauntlet and gave them every reason to get involved from the get-go.
The other thing he said that intrigued me was this:
…you can take Halliburton out of the expanded nation building role it has and let it do what it normally does which is provide some of the logistics back up for the American troops.
What did he mean by that? Is this a reference to the military privatization issue or is there more to it? I think the Halliburton thing is a good campaign issue — it’s one of those one word symbols that, I think, can speak to the working class voters who might swing our way. (Edwards has some good rhetoric on this.) I’d be very interested in what specifically Clark was talking about because the idea of privatizing the military by giving billions to Halliburton cuts right into the patriotic, pro-military image of the GOP.
As for Clark’s ability to implement his policy prescriptions, as I’ve said, I think it will be possible for anyone other than Bush to get more international cooperation (which Clark, of all those in the race, knows full well can be like herding cats) and I agree that it is the single most important key to getting the Iraq situation on track. As long as it’s America vs Arabs, we are fucked.
Clark is very well equipped to deal with the challenges presented by a fractious international coalition. Indeed he may be the most qualified American in the country to do that as President and Commander in Chief of the military.
Increasingly, this proclivity on the part of President Bush to avoid the normal duty of a commander-in-chief to honor dead soldiers is causing rising irritation among some veterans and their families who have noticed what appears to be a historically anomalous slight.
“This country has a lot of history where commanders visit wounded soldiers and commanders talked to families of deceased soldiers and commanders attend funerals. It’s just one of these understood traditions,” says Seth Pollack, an 8-year veteran who served in the First Armored Division in both the first Gulf War and the Bosnia operation. “At the company level, the division level … the general tradition is to honor the soldier, and the way you honor these soldiers is to have high-ranking officials attend the funeral. For the President not to have attended any is simply disrespectful.”
Repeated questions on the matter posed to the White House over the past week earned only a series of “We’ll call you back” and “Let me get back to you on that” comments from press officer Jimmy Orr.
This issue of Bush pissing off the military is potent. It goes all the way from the officer corp that loathes Rumsfeld’s highhanded ways to the grunts who feel jerked around and disrespected. It’s hard to say how deep this runs.
It appears to be a frustrating conundrum for Rove. This is a constituency of real importance to the GOP, but they are trying to to portray the war as going swimmingly, so they can’t acknowledge the death and carnage — and sacrifice — being inflicted on American troops. It’s quite a problem for a President whose success has depended entirely upon his Commander in Chief status.
Rove has succesfully kept the religious right from straying off the reservation (with the help of talk radio and cable news) but there is some evidence (anonymous ex-Delta force officers notwithstanding) that the military — and the large swath of American culture that identifies with it — might actually be in play. It’s something to keep our eye on.
This article in Mother Jones by Tom Englehardt offers one of the most thorough surveys of non kool-aid influenced commentary (including his own) on Iraq that I’ve yet read.
For instance, on the resistence’s strategy:
At some level, complex as Iraq itself may be, the messages being delivered by a growing resistance movement possibly united only by its anti-imperial, anti-occupation views seem not so complicated. And they are sending us a message. As Habib of Baghdad University commented, “‘They are picking targets for their media value,’ he said, noting that the [al-Rashid] hotel is well known as the Baghdad residence of many civilian members of the American-led coalition, as well as some senior U.S. military officers.” That makes sense to me. It may be that our leaders are living in their own tiny world, bounded by an imperial utopia on one side and a fearful descent into the Vietnam “quagmire” on the other, but the resisters in Iraq are living with the rest of us in a far larger world, however uncomfortably we all share it.
As was clear from al-Qaeda’s September 11th attacks, we all, whether in LA, Washington, Baghdad, or Kabul watch the same movies — this is one thing globalization means. It used to be that Americans worried about how “violence” in the movies and on television was affecting American children. Now, if you show a dirigible going into a football stadium, a kidnapped train loaded with explosives, a bus wired to a bomb, or… it’s likely to be a global learning experience. And whether in the Bekaa Valley, the Sunni Triangle, or New York, everyone knows when prime time is and what TV news cameras are attracted to.
Don’t think that only Americans saw that banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln that the President now denies was created by his own people. (Strange, don’t you think, that he waited so many months to disavow it?) They know that the brag — “Mission Accomplished” — was his, however much he wiggles now. (See Bush Steps Away from Victory Banner, the New York Times)
The message of the most recent attacks in Iraq seems clear enough: Mission unaccomplished, get out! It’s hardly more complicated than that. Get out of your hotel. Get out of your headquarters. Get out of the NGO business. Get out of town. All of you. No distinctions. No free passes. And we don’t give a damn what you think of us! No one is going to be safe in proximity to the occupation, its forces and its administrators. No one involved in the “reconstruction” of Iraq is going to be safe. And no one who works with the Americans, foreign or Iraqi, is safe either.
The message clearly goes something like that. And with it goes a genuine political strategy. The United States is to be isolated as an occupying power, cut off from allies or helpers of any sort. Reconstruction is to be undermined and made ever more expensive, while the occupation authorities are to be provoked into acts that will only create more opposition. That this strategy is being carried out, as far as we know, without the benefit of an enunciated political ideology or issued statements of intent, that it is being carried out by people ready to die in cars packed with explosives and others hiding bombs at the sides of roads, that it is relatively indiscriminate (there’s a message in that, too – don’t even walk near those people) and cruel doesn’t make it less a message or a strategy of resistance.
In fact, as Robert Fisk, reporter for the British Independent, pointed out in a new piece (included below), the message should be unbearably familiar to us: “You’re either with us or you’re against us.”
There’s more on political rhetoric, the Vietnam analogy, Wolfowitz’s clownish tours, the emerging anti war movement, military morale, the WMD search and more.
We know a lot of this stuff, but it’s amazing to see it all in one place. What a fucking mess.
It’s an interesting project, and a thought provoking quiz. Obviously, people need to do a little self-assessment about foreign policy. The old divisions just aren’t applicable anymore and it’s part of the reason why the Democrats have had a hard time fashioning a cogent policy in the face of Bush’s bizarre embrace of aggressive neoconservatism.
Announcement:
Lauching Nov. 1: e-thePeople’s American Choices
American Choices is an interactive self-assessment that helps users
understand today’s foreign policy debates. By taking a 12-question
survey,users get a sophisticated but accessible analysis of their stand on
foreign policy issues, and how it compares with that of others.
We believe that American Choices can help people cut through the highly charged foreign policy debate, and contribute to making our collective discussion less polarized and more informed. Our goal is to get 100,000 people to consider our foreign policy options through American Choices by the end of November. With your help we can do this through online media alone.
…
American Choices was developed in conjunction with the MacNeil/Lehrer
Newshour and By The People. It is available free of charge thanks to
a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
I don’t write a whole lot about economics because there are so many smart people in Blogovia who know a lot more about it than I do. But, I do wonder about these numbers they are touting every week and every quarter.
Perhaps I’m being paranoid in thinking that if the entire Wall Street establishment could be hoodwinked by a Texas snake oil hustler into believing that Enron was creating a completely new market that was too complicated for their their pretty little heads to understand, then maybe somebody could be cooking the books a teensy, weensy bit with these economic numbers. Or at least selling them dishonestly. (Nah. They couldn’t get away with that.)
The Angry Bear, one of those smart guys, shows how “the BLS has magically discovered a way for jobless claims to drop week after week, without the number of jobless claims ever actually falling.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Alternatively, they could just hang a sign saying “Mission Accomplished.” That’s a good one, too.
It makes me wonder about these rather, shall we say, grandiose productivity and GDP stats. I mean, c’mon. Are people really working that much harder and more efficiently, all of a sudden? Everybody I know spends every spare minute on line, talking on the phone or bitching about how they haven’t had a raise in 2 years. hmmmmm.
Atrios says it’s no secret that the red-faced, spitting motormouth that Chris Matthews plays on TV is different from the real guy. It may be that a small percentage of insiders know that, but I doubt most of his viewers do.
Speaking at Brown University this week, the “Hardball” player told students that the White House’s rationale for invading Iraq was “totally dishonest” and that the Veep “is behind it all. The whole neo-conservative power vortex, it all goes through his office. He has become the chief executive …It’s scary.”
Cheney and the neo-cons saw in George W. Bush “a man who never read any books, who didn’t think too deeply, and they gave him something to think about for the first time in his life,” Matthews said, according to Rhode Island’s Woonsocket Call.
Now why do you suppose that Matthews has conveniently neglected to share this particular view on his show?
This is why they are called mediawhores. It is not just an fun epithet, thrown around to insult them. It is an accurate metaphor for what they do. They sell themselves for access and ratings.
Chris had better buy himself a new teddy, though, because it’s going to take some special attention to smooth over
this unfortunate little revelation that he does what he does for money, not love. His pimp had to bring him back into line.
A White House spokesman tells us Matthews’ analysis is “disrespectful, totally false and irresponsible. Mr. Matthews has lost touch with reality. The President made the decision to go to war using the same facts as the previous administration and the United Nations, which judged Saddam Hussein as a threat to the region.”
But, Bush loves you Chris, he really does. Now, get back out there and sell your ass.
Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday.
The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president’s 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years.
…
Major contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the Bush administration without competitive bids, because agencies said competition would have taken too much time to meet urgent needs in both countries.
Except, in the case of Iraq, there was no urgent need to start the war in the first place and everybody knows it. If getting rid of the evil Saddam was the predominant reason for the war, as the current spin would have it, then the Iraqi people surely could have held out for a couple of months so that we could follow the law in awarding billions of dollars in contracts. There really was no rush, now was there?
There are a good many reasons why Bush and his think tank intellectual dreamers got us into this thing, from visions of Empire to revenge to breaking OPEC to kicking ass. But, this one really helps explain the ridiculous hurry. The corporations didn’t get their tax cuts in the first term, and if Karl wanted to raise the obscene amount of money it’s going to take to brainwash the public into believing that Lil Cap’n T-Ball isn’t as incompetent as he looks, he had to give these guys a taste.
There was no threat, imminent or otherwise, but we rushed into war destroying every international relationship that stood in our way and coincidentally, had to hand out 8 billion dollars worth of no bid contracts to George W. Bush’s top political contributors — because there was no time to fill out the paperwork.
Avedon Carol writes about liberal internationalists’ unwillingness to recognize that continuing to support Bush’s Iraq policy is actually harming the cause of Iraqi freedom. Even if you believe that they support the same goals, it is clear that they are untrustworthy and incompetent. Knee jerk anti-Saddam rhetoric aside, it’s becoming possible that the average Iraqi is beginning to wonder if he hasn’t been thrown out of the frying pan into the fire.
I don’t get it. It reminds me of those stories about the guy who uncorks the jinni and you know whatever the guy wishes for is going to be delivered in such a way that it’s the last thing he wants, but he wishes for it anyway. Like Godfrey Cambridge saying, “I wanna make ’em laugh,” and instead of turning into a great comedian it’s just that people laugh no matter what he says or does. So then he wants to be a serious actor and says, “I wanna make ’em cry,” and he dies in a traffic accident and they all cry. What you want is for Iraq to be a free democracy, and you say, “I wanna invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam.” And you don’t get the democracy or the freedom or any of that, you just get the invasion and Saddam out of power because that’s all you wished for. So now you wish for – what? For the Democrats to all fall in line and give George Bush whatever money he wants that he claims will go to the restoration of Iraq? Come on, you know you can’t just write this guy blank checks. If you’re not prepared to nail down those wishes in unmistakable terms so that what you want to happen will actually happen, maybe you just better stop making wishes.
I think that the Democrats have an excellent campaign argument to make here. When some FauxNews whore like Carl Cameron asks the “what would you do about Iraq,” the answer is really quite simple.
They should say that the central Iraq policy problem is George W. Bush. He can’t get essential international support because after the way he handled the run up to the war, with the insults and the lies, the rest of the world doesn’t trust him. He can’t run the occupation because he refused to listen to those, even in his own administration, who have experience in post war occupation and planned accordingly. He followed bad advice.
To solve the emerging problems in Iraq immediately, George W. Bush needs to fire his foreign policy advisors, every one of them, and go on a world tour designed to reestablish trust in America’s motives and intentions. He needs to repudiate the Bush Doctrine, which has fueled the notion that the US believes it has the sole power to launch preventive wars and resolves to do so whenever it chooses, based upon modern intelligence techniques that we have just proven are completely unreliable.
If he refuses to do those two things, the only answer is to replace George W. Bush. That one act alone will completely change the international dynamic and immediately increase the liklihood of a renewed international effort in Iraq with both financial and military support. The world doesn’t mistrust the United States, it mistrusts George W. Bush.
We have problem in Iraq because George W. Bush arrogantly and short-sightedly alienated the rest of the world. Unless George W. Bush personally rectifies that situation immediately, the only solution is to replace George W. Bush.
He thinks the world revolves around him and he’s right.
Update: Sometimes I think I’m channelling others and don’t even know it. Tristero discusses this same thing and links to Liberal Oasis who writes about it today as well. The consensus is that the answer to the question of what to do about Iraq is get rid of GWB so that America is trusted again by other countries and they will be willing to help us out of this mess that Bush and his cronies created.