The Empire Backfires
> http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18105
>

> With its doctrine of 'preventive war,' the Bush administration has loosed
a principle of international chaos and brute force on the world. As the
first anniversary of the Iraq War approaches, the full costs of the Bush
Doctrine are truly being felt.

******************

The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now,
we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing
celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers
would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's
large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and
dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and
Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the
economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle
East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would
be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes.


Instead, 530 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military
and civilian, have died; some $149 billion has been expended; no weapons of
mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and
water are sometime things; America's former well-wishers, the Shiites, are
impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and
Iraq as whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson
in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century. And yet, all this
is only part of the cost of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. To weigh
the full cost, one must look not just at the war itself but away from it, at
the progress of the larger policy it served, at things that have been done
elsewhere - some far from Iraq or deep in the past - and, perhaps above all,
at things that have been left undone

Nuclear Fingerprints


While American troops were dying in Baghdad and Falluja and Samarra, Buhary
Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman, was busy making centrifuge parts
in Malaysia and selling them to Libya and Iran and possibly other countries.
The centrifuges are used for producing bomb-grade uranium. Tahir's project
was part of a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of the
Pakistani atomic bomb. This particular father stole most of the makings of
his nuclear offspring from companies in Europe, where he worked during the
1980s. In the 1990s, the thief became a middleman - a fence - immensely
enriching himself in the process. In fairness to Khan, we should add that
almost everyone who has been involved in developing atomic bombs since 1945
has been either a thief or a borrower. Stalin purloined a bomb design from
the United States, courtesy of the German scientist Klaus Fuchs, who worked
on the Manhattan Project. China got help from Russia until the Sino-Soviet
split put an end to it. Pakistan got secret help from China in the early
1980s. And now it turns out that Khan, among many, many other Pakistanis,
almost certainly including the highest members of the government, has been
helping Libya, Iran, North Korea and probably others obtain the bomb. That's
apparently how Chinese designs - some still in Chinese - were found in Libya
when its quixotic leader, Muammar Qaddafi, recently agreed to surrender his
country's nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The rest of the designs were in English. Were Klaus Fuchs's fingerprints on
them? Only figuratively, because they were "copies of copies of copies," an
official said. But such is the nature of proliferation. It is mainly a
transfer of information from one mind to another. Copying is all there is to
it.

Sometimes, a bit of hardware needs to be transferred, which is where Tahir
came in. Indeed, at least seven countries are already known to have been
involved in the Pakistani effort, which Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the
IAEA, called a "Wal-Mart" of nuclear technology and an American official
called "one-stop shopping" for nuclear weapons. Khan even printed a brochure
with his picture on it listing all the components of nuclear weapons that
bomb-hungry customers could buy from him. "What Pakistan has done," the
expert on nuclear proliferation George Perkovich, of the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, has rightly said, "is the most threatening activity
of nuclear proliferation in history. It's impossible to overstate how
damaging this is."

Another word for this process of copying would be globalization.
Proliferation is merely globalization of weapons of mass destruction. The
kinship of the two is illustrated by other details of Tahir's story. The Sri
Lankan first wanted to build his centrifuges in Turkey, but then decided
that Malaysia had certain advantages. It had recently been seeking to make
itself into a convenient place for Muslims from all over the world to do
high-tech business. Controls were lax, as befits an export platform. "It's
easy, quick, efficient. Do your business and disappear fast, in and out,"
Karim Raslan, a Malaysian columnist and social commentator, recently told
Alan Sipress of the Washington Post. Probably that was why extreme Islamist
organizations, including Al Qaeda operatives, had often chosen to meet
there. Global terrorism is a kind of globalization, too. The linkup of such
terrorism and the world market for nuclear weapons is a specter that haunts
the world of the 21st century.

The War and Its Aims


But aren't we supposed to be talking about the Iraq war on this anniversary
of its launch? We are, but wars have aims, and the declared aim of this one
was to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In his State
of the Union address in January 2002, the President articulated the threat
he would soon carry out in Iraq: "The United States of America will not
permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's
most destructive weapons." Later, he said we didn't want the next warning to
be "a mushroom cloud." Indeed, in testimony before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly ruled out
every other justification for the war. Asked about the other reasons, he
said, "The President has not linked authority to go to war to any of those
elements." When Senator John Kerry explained his vote for the resolution
authorizing the war, he cited the Powell testimony. Thus, not only Bush but
also the man likely to be his Democratic challenger in this year's election
justified war solely in the name of nonproliferation.

Proliferation, however, is not, as the President seemed to think, just a
rogue state or two seeking weapons of mass destruction; it is the entire
half-century-long process of globalization that stretches from Klaus Fuchs's
espionage to Tahir's nuclear arms bazaar and beyond. The war was a failure
in its own terms because weapons of mass destruction were absent in Iraq;
the war-policy failed because they were present and spreading in Pakistan.
For Bush's warning of a mushroom cloud over an American city, though false
with respect to Iraq, was indisputably well-founded in regard to Pakistan's
nuclear one-stop-shopping: The next warning stemming from this kind of
failure could indeed be a mushroom cloud.

The questions that now cry out to be answered are why did the United States,
standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves
groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride
(supplied, we now know, to Libya) and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a
variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty
warehouse of Iraq? What sort of nonproliferation policy could lead to
actions like these? How did the Bush Administration, in the name of
protecting the country from nuclear danger, wind up leaving the country wide
open to nuclear danger?

In answering these questions, it would be reassuring, in a way, to report
that the basic facts were discovered only after the war, but the truth is
otherwise. In the case of Iraq, it's now abundantly clear that some
combination of deception, self-deception and outright fraud (the exact
proportions of each are still under investigation) led to the manufacture of
a gross and avoidable falsehood. In the months before the war, most of the
governments of the world strenuously urged the United States not to go to
war on the basis of the flimsy and unconvincing evidence it was offering. In
the case of Pakistan, the question of how much the Administration knew
before the war has scarcely been asked, yet we know that the most serious
breach - the proliferation to North Korea - was reported and publicized
before the war.

It's important to recall the chronology of the Korean aspect of Pakistan's
proliferation. In January 2003, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker
that Pakistan had given North Korea extensive help with its nuclear program,
including its launch of a uranium enrichment process. In return, North Korea
was sending guided missiles to Pakistan. In June 2002, Hersh revealed, the
CIA had sent the White House a report on these developments. On October 3,
2002, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs James
Kelly confronted the North Koreans with the CIA information, and, according
to Kelly, North Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister, Kang Suk Ju, startled
him by responding, "Of course we have a nuclear program." (Since then, the
North Koreans have unconvincingly denied the existence of the uranium
enrichment program.)

Bush of course had already named the Pyongyang government as a member of the
"axis of evil." It had long been the policy of the United States that
nuclearization of North Korea was intolerable. However, the Administration
said nothing of the North Korean events to the Congress or the public. North
Korea, which now had openly embarked on nuclear armament, and was even
threatening to use nuclear weapons, was more dangerous than Saddam's Iraq.
Why tackle the lesser problem in Iraq, the members of Congress would have
had to ask themselves, while ignoring the greater one in North Korea? On
October 10, a week after the Kelly visit, the House of Representatives
passed the Iraq resolution, and the next day the Senate followed suit. Only
five days later, on October 16, did Bush's National Security Adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, reveal what was happening in North Korea.

In short, from June 2002, when the CIA delivered its report to the White
House, until October 16 - the period in which the nation's decision to go to
war in Iraq was made - the Administration knowingly withheld the news about
Korea and its Pakistan connection from the public. Even after the vote,
Secretary of State Colin Powell strangely insisted that the North Korean
situation was "not a crisis" but only "a difficulty." Nevertheless, he
extracted a pledge from Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf that the
nuclear technology shipments to North Korea would stop. (They did not.) In
March, information was circulating that both Pakistan and North Korea were
helping Iran to develop atomic weapons. (The North Korean and Iranian crises
are of course still brewing.)

In sum, the glaring contradiction between the policy of "regime change" for
already-disarmed Iraq and regime-support for proliferating Pakistan was not
a postwar discovery; it was fully visible before the war. The Nation enjoys
no access to intelligence files, yet in an article arguing the case against
the war, this author was able to comment that an "objective ranking of
nuclear proliferators in order of menace" would put "Pakistan first," North
Korea second, Iran third, and Iraq only fourth - and to note the curiosity
that "the Bush Administration ranks them, of course, in exactly the reverse
order, placing Iraq, which it plans to attack, first, and Pakistan, which it
befriends and coddles, nowhere on the list." Was nonproliferation, then, as
irrelevant to the Administration's aims in Iraq as catching terrorists? Or
was protecting the nation and the world against weapons of mass destruction
merely deployed as a smokescreen to conceal other purposes? And if so, what
were they?

A New Leviathan


The answers seem to lie in the larger architecture of the Bush foreign
policy, or Bush Doctrine. Its aim, which many have properly been called
imperial, is to establish lasting American hegemony over the entire globe,
and its ultimate means is to overthrow regimes of which the United States
disapproves, pre-emptively if necessary. The Bush Doctrine indeed represents
more than a revolution in American policy; if successful, it would amount to
an overturn of the existing international order. In the new, imperial order,
the United States would be first among nations, and force would be first
among its means of domination. Other, weaker nations would be invited to
take their place in shifting coalitions to support goals of America's
choosing. The United States would be so strong, the President has suggested,
that other countries would simply drop out of the business of military
competition, "thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras
pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace."
Much as, in the early modern period, when nation-states were being born,
absolutist kings, the masters of overwhelming military force within their
countries, in effect said, "There is now a new thing called a nation; a
nation must be orderly; we kings, we sovereigns, will assert a monopoly over
the use of force, and thus supply that order," so now the United States
seemed to be saying, "There now is a thing called globalization; the global
sphere must be orderly; we, the sole superpower, will monopolize force
throughout the globe, and thus supply international order."

And so, even as the Bush Administration proclaimed US military superiority,
it pulled the country out of the world's major peaceful initiatives to deal
with global problems - withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol to check global
warming and from the International Criminal Court, and sabotaging a protocol
that would have given teeth to the biological weapons convention. When the S
ecurity Council would not agree to American decisions on war and peace, it
became "irrelevant"; when NATO allies balked, they became "old Europe."
Admittedly, these existing international treaties and institutions were not
a full-fledged cooperative system; rather, they were promising foundations
for such a system. In any case, the Administration wanted none of it.

Richard Perle, who until recently served on the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board, seemed to speak for the Administration in an article he wrote for the
Guardian the day after the Iraq war was launched. He wrote, "The chatterbox
on the Hudson [sic] will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of
the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it
will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual
wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law
administered by international institutions."

In this larger plan to establish American hegemony, the Iraq war had an
indispensable role. If the world was to be orderly, then proliferation must
be stopped; if force was the solution to proliferation, then pre-emption was
necessary (to avoid that mushroom cloud); if pre-emption was necessary, then
regime change was necessary (so the offending government could never build
the banned weapons again); and if all this was necessary, then Iraq was the
one country in the world where it all could be demonstrated. Neither North
Korea nor Iran offered an opportunity to teach these lessons - the first
because it was capable of responding with a major war, even nuclear war, and
the second because even the Administration could see that US invasion would
be met with fierce popular resistance. It's thus no accident that the peril
of weapons of mass destruction was the sole justification in the two legal
documents by which the Administration sought to legitimize the war - HJR 114
and Security Council Resolution 1441. Nor is it an accident that the
proliferation threat played the same role in the domestic political campaign
for the war - by forging the supposed link between the "war on terror" and
nuclear danger. In short, absent the new idea that proliferation was best
stopped by pre-emptive use of force, the new American empire would have been
unsalable, to the American people or to Congress. Iraq was the foundation
stone of the bid for global empire.

The reliance on force over cooperation that was writ large in the imperial
plan was also writ small in the occupation of Iraq. How else to understand
the astonishing failure to make any preparation for the political, military,
policing and even technical challenges that would face American forces? If a
problem, large or small, had no military solution, this Administration
seemed incapable of even seeing it. The United States was as blind to the
politics of Iraq as it was to the politics of the world.

Thus, we don't have to suppose that the Bush officials were indifferent to
the spectacular dangers that Kahn's network posed to the safety of the
United States and the world or that the Iraqi resistance would pose to
American forces. We only have to suppose that they were simply unable to
recognize facts they had failed to acknowledge in their overarching vision
of a new imperial order. In both cases, ideology trumped reality.

The same pattern is manifest on an even larger scale. Just now, the peoples
of the world are embarked, some willingly and some not, on an arduous,
wrenching, perilous, mind-exhaustingly complicated process of learning how
to live as one indivisibly connected species on our one small, endangered
planet. Seen in a certain light, the Administration's imperial bid, if
successful, would amount to a kind of planetary coup d'état, in which the
world's dominant power takes charge of this process by virtue of its almost
freakishly superior military strength. Seen in another, less dramatic light,
the American imperial solution has interposed a huge, unnecessary roadblock
between the world and the Himalayan mountain range of urgent tasks that it
must accomplish no matter who is in charge: saving the planet from
overheating; inventing a humane, just, orderly, democratic, accountable
global economy; redressing mounting global inequality and poverty;
responding to human rights emergencies, including genocide; and, of course,
stopping proliferation as well as rolling back the existing arsenals of
nuclear arms. None of these exigencies can be met as long as the world and
its greatest power are engaged in a wrestling match over how to proceed.

Does the world want to indict and prosecute crimes against humanity? First,
it must decide whether the International Criminal Court will do the job or
entrust it to unprosecutable American forces. Do we want to reverse global
warming, and head off the extinction of the one-third of the world's species
that, according to a report published in Nature magazine, are at risk in the
next fifty years? First, the world's largest polluter has to be drawn into
the global talks. Do we want to save the world from weapons of mass
destruction? First, we have to decide whether we want to do it together
peacefully or permit the world's only superpower to attempt it by force of
arms.

No wonder, then, that the Administration, as reported by Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. in these pages, has mounted an assault on the scientific findings that
confirm these dangers to the world (see "The Junk Science of George W.
Bush"). The United States' destructive hyperactivity in Iraq cannot be
disentangled from its neglect of global warming. Here, too, ideology is the
enemy of fact, and empire is the nemesis of progress.

If the engine of a train suddenly goes off the rails, a wreck ensues. Such
is the war in Iraq, now one year old. At the same time, the train's journey
forward is canceled. Such is the current paralysis of the international
community. Only when the engine is back on the tracks and starts in the
right direction can either disaster be overcome. Only then will everyone be
able to even begin the return to the world's unfinished business

Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute
and the author of the recently published 'The Unconquerable World: Power,
Nonviolence, and the Will of the People'

***********************



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> -------------------------------------
> The Empire Backfires
> http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18105
>
> With its doctrine of 'preventive war,' the Bush administration has loosed
a principle of international chaos and brute force on the world. As the
first anniversary of the Iraq War approaches, the full costs of the Bush
Doctrine are truly being felt.
> -------------------------------------
>
> lllll
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> -<html><A HREF="http://members.aol.com/GhanaUnion/afrohero.html">Ancestor
Marcus Mosiah Garvey <i>(1887 - 1940)</i></A></html>
> llllllllll
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