Dissent in America

The First Amendment country, which was once blessed with thinkers who fearlessly questioned conventional wisdom, now has only a small band of people questioning its abuse of great power.

In the end Sparta's narrowness of spirit betrayed even her strength of soul. She descended to the sanctioning of any means to gain a Spartan aim.. Militarism absorbed her, and made her, once so honoured, the hated terror of her neighbours. When she fell, all the nations marvelled but none mourned.

- Will Durant, The Life of Greece, page 87.

SIXTY years after President Harry Truman proclaimed the so-called Truman Doctrine on March 12, 1947, James Carroll, a columnist in The Boston Globe, wrote: What must be criticised, and even dismantled, is nothing less than the national security state that Truman inaugurated in 1947. The habits of mind that defined American attitudes during the Cold War still provide consoling and profitable structures of meaning, even as dread of communism has been replaced by fear of terrorism. Thus, Trumans every nation must choose became Bushs you are with us or against us. Americas political paranoia still projects its worst fear onto the enemy, paradoxically strengthening its most paranoid elements. The monstrous dynamic feeds itself ( International Herald Tribune, March 13, 2007).

But the United States was then blessed with thinkers who questioned conventional wisdom, voiced their dissent fearlessly and with superb competence. There was the theologian and realist Reinhold Niebuhr, the scholar and political philosopher of realpolitik Prof. Hans J. Morgenthau, the diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan and the philosopher-journalist Walter Lippmann. In his brilliant work The lcarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, Peter Beinart remarks, If Niebuhr was realisms theologian, Morgenthau its political scientist and Lippmann its journalist, its greatest post-war practitioner was an introverted hypochondriac from Milwaukee named George Frost Kennan (page 98).

Dissent is in poor shape everywhere, dissent on the basics. We have fallen on sad days, and the U.S. is no exception. TV performers and writers have sprung up whose volubility is in direct proportion to their ignorance. Roger Cohen does not belong to this class, but neither does he belong to that class either. In a recent column entitled The need for U.S.-Iran talks, he advised the re-elected President Barack Obama to get beyond the conventional wisdom on Iran, think big, act bold, ignore the visceral Iran-haters and stop believing coercion alone is the answer.

It is doubtful whether Obama will act on this advice which is so very sound. Cohen asks: Is there any political space for them? During Obamas first term Republican machismo prevailed on many fronts. Demonisation of Iran was a never-ending source of rhetorical inspiration. Democrats were not far behind. Diplomacy is in urgent need of resurrection. It is becoming a lost art in an age of declamation. During a recent conversation, William Luers, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela and the director of The Iran Project, and Stephen Heintz, the President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, told me they avoid the phrase diplomatic solution in conversations about Iran on Capitol Hill. Instead they say political solution. Diplomacy just sounds too wimpy.

But, as they well know, diplomacy with Iran is needed. Diplomacy involves accepting that in order to get what you want you have to give something. The key question is: What do I want to get out of my rival and what do I have to give to get it? ( International Herald Tribune, November 13, 2012).

Cohen touches the main source of Americas failureits hubris and, in consequence, its disdain for democracy and preference for regime change. Men like Lippmann and James Reston read avidly. They did not rely on interviews alone as their inferiors of today do in the U.S. as well as elsewhere, not least in India. Cohen betrays his incompetence by praising Iran for its constructive role in the 2001 Bonn conference on Afghanistan. The praise is deserved as is the criticism that Irans role is too often forgotten.

But Cohens column would have had greater weight had he mentioned a fact of more direct relevance. Shoddy homework explains the omission. It is Irans far-reaching proposal to the U.S. via Swiss good offices, in May 2003 (for the text see Trita Parsi, The Treacherous Alliance, pages 341-342). It covered the entire spectrumterrorism, Iraq, Palestine, and so on. The entire region would have been at peace today had the proposal been accepted. But the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice scolded the Swiss Ambassador Tim Guldimann for his pains.

She had different plans. Were going to fix the Middle East just the way we fixed Europe after World War II, she confided to colleagues. Condoleezza Rice told Barbara Slavin that negotiating with Iran would run the risk of granting legitimacy to a government that does not deserve it (Barbara Slavin; Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies, pages 209 and 219, respectively).

Itinerant American academics, journalists and retired diplomats preach to Indians about conformism in India. You will seldom find them criticising their own country. Why is dissent confined to so few? That, of course, holds good for India as well. There is something utterly hypocritical about the belated American criticism of the attack on Iraq. It stems from the failure of its crime which ruined Iraq, not from a recognition of its criminality. The New York Times called it unilateral invasion. It might well write of consensual rape.

Afghanistan problem: Diplomacy shunned

Afghanistan has been laid waste precisely because diplomacy was shunned. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar begged for a dialogue before and after 9/11. The U.S. treated a horrible act of terrorism by a terrorist group, Al Qaeda, as an act of war by the state which was eagerly seeking a face-saving formula to get rid of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, researchers permanently based in Kandahar who have worked in Afghanistan since 2006, focus on the Taliban in their work of stupendous research whose title sums up its thesis accurately, An Enemy We created: The Myth of the Taliban / Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan, 1970-2010 (Hurst & Co., London; 538 pages). They cite chapter and verse for their assertions. Read their account of the post-9/11 deliberations within the Taliban. The conference of Islamic clergy took place at the Presidential Palace in Kabul on 19-20 September and was attended by around 1,000 Afghans and Pakistanis. It was initially meant to take just one day, but extended into a second when delegates failed to reach a conclusion by the end of the first. Mullah Mohammad Omar had called the ulemaa together to take the decision, by which he said he would abide. At the beginning of the session on the first day, a letter that he had written in Kandahar was read out:

Osama has denied his involvement. It is unfortunate that America does not listen to us and levels all sorts of charges and threatens military action. [] We have held talks inthe past with U.S. governments several times, and we are ready for more talks. [ If America] still wants to attack usand to destroy the Islamic government of Afghanistan, [it is up to] our respected religious scholars [to deliver a fatwa whether Muslims in Afghanistan and other countries should declare a holy war against the U.S.].

The letter carried an implied verdict. Mullah Mohammad Omar had made his own decision already and the sense of an international conspiracy against the Taliban during the preceding two years seemed to have been confirmed by the American statements that had followed the September 11 attacks. By 20 September, however, the ulemaa council had decided that bin Laden should leave the country and that they would no longer offer him sanctuary:

To avoid the current tumult, and also to allay future suspicions, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Clergy recommends to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to persuade Osama bin Laden to leave Afghanistan whenever possible. [] The ulemaa [] voice their sadness over American deaths and hope America does not attack Afghanistan. [] If infidels invade an Islamic country and that country does not have the ability to defend itself, it becomes the binding obligation of all the worlds Muslims to declare a holy war.

Muttaqi, talking to journalists after the announcement, made clear that bin Laden would be given some time to leave: It will take time. You know that Osama bin Laden has a lot of opponents. It cant be that he goes out on the street and catches a taxi to go to another roundabout.

This was announced in Kabul as well as in Pakistan through the Talibans ambassador, Mullah Zaeef. Zaeef stated that Mullah Mohammad Omar had also approved the decision of the ulemaa council and would abide by it (page 224). If the U.S. had responded to Omars overtures in significant terms, the war and its consequences would have been averted, even if it is granted that bin Laden and Omar were elusive. Obama is poorly equipped to cope with them. He rushed to solve the Afghan problem no sooner than he became President in January 2009, accepted General David Petraeus advice on surge of the U.S. forces there and is now struggling to get them out.

Make no mistake about the risks of dissent in that First Amendment country. Dissent on the fundamentals invites punishment. William Pfaff wrote a column for the International Herald Tribune for 25 years (1978-2003) and is easily one of the most incisive analysts of world affairs. His columns on the invasion of Iraq prompted the IHTs new owners, the New York Times Company, to decide no longer to publish his article on issues of Americas foreign policy and foreign relations. The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of Americas Foreign Policy is his ninth book.

He belongs to the small but brave band of Americans who question their countrys abuse of great power and the expansive role it seeks for itself in the world. The American conception of Manifest Destiny, originally seen as transcontinental expansion, has been recast since the time of Woodrow Wilson as the creation of a world order that is nominally pluralistic but under ultimate American leadershipwhich, it is taken for granted, would be welcome to nearly all. A programme to bring the world to democracy reflects a large consensus of views in the American professional foreign and political communities today.

The U.S. and militarism

Militarism which ruined Sparta is a direct result of that outlook. Since the Cold Wars end to 9/11 there were no specific military threats to North America or NATO Europe of any gravity. The Yugoslav wars posed no threat beyond the Balkans. Terrorist attacks do not jeopardise national existence. Ever since 2001 the only significant threats have been virtual (a nuclear Iran, the fear of terrorist mass-destruction weapons, the nightmare of a new global caliphate ruled by financial Arabs). Militarism is the domination of the military in society, an undue deference to military demands, and an emphasis on military considerations, spirit, ideals, and scales of value, in the lives of states. It has meant also the imposition of heavy burdens on a people for military purposes, to the neglect of welfare and culture, and the waste of a nations best manpower in unproductive army service. I quote the definition of the distinguished modern historian of militarism (civilian and military, as he notes) Alfred Vagts (1892-1986).

This did not begin with Woodrow Wilson but he was its most eloquent exponent. Now it has assumed the proportion of a mental ailment that afflicts most. Americans today conduct a colossally militarised but morally nugatory global mission supported by apparent majorities of the political, intellectual, and academic elites of the nation. It has lacked from the very beginning an attainable goal. It cannot succeed. George W. Bush is quoted by Bob Woodward as having said that American strategy was to create chaos, to create vacuum in his enemies countries. This was very unwise. The United States risks becoming such a strategys ultimate victim.

This has led inevitably to two grave and perilous consequences. One is amassment of presidential power overriding legislative and judicial power. The other is the rise of corporate power. It participates subtly in the making and execution of foreign and military policy. The war against terror, in an era of privatised governmental functions, has been enormously profitable to many American corporations. It is reported by the Pentagon that in the second quarter of 2009 the number of private security contractors working in Iraq for the American military rose by 23 per cent, and in Afghanistan by 29 per cent, so that private contractors, which is to say private American business, now provides half the American armed force and military activity in those countries, constituting a privatisation of war and transformation of it into a profit centre for corporate enterprise that is without precedent. This augments the enormous scale of American government spending today on past and future armaments, including hyper-technological weaponry of scarcely any imaginable utility short of a future invasion of the United States from Mars.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War had the U.S. setting out to seek new enemies. Nationalism has grown in the U.S., but it opposes that sentiment elsewhere. The global enemy identified in Washington has nearly always proven actually to be nationalism. In the expedient guise of Marxism (in Southeast Asia or Latin America) or instances of radical and xenophobic (that is, nationalistic) Islamic religious radicalism (the case today). The American intervention as a result fails to suppress the supposed enemy, and the United States itself assumes the role of aggressive foreign threat to the national independence of the nation which is the subject of American attention. Defeat is built into such a policy. J.K. Galbraith once remarked that a major feature of our foreign policy is its institutional rigidity, which holds it on course even when it is visibly wrong. That, of course, is very true of another aspiring great powers great foreign policy, India.

To think that the U.S. was once led by a man called George W. Bush. In spring 2009 a friend of the retired President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, confided to a journalist friend preparing a book on Chiracs presidency that in 2003, just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Mr Chirac was twice telephoned by President Bush, urging France to join the invasion because the world had arrived at the era prefigured by Gog and Magog, signifying the arrival of a great war in which all Gods enemies would be destroyed and the Last Days of Divine Judgement arrive. Mr Bush seemed convinced that his war on Iraq was this prophesied war, and tried to so convince Chirac. The French President was sufficiently disturbed by Bushs state of mind to consult a theologian at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland for his opinion. The theologian told him that Gog is a mysterious figure from the land of Magog, of controversial Biblical significance, mentioned in the book of Genesis and again in Ezekiel and Revelation, taken by some to represent the nations of the world who are enemies of Israel at the end-time. The French President decided to keep the nature of these telephone conversations to himself so long as he (and, as it happened, Mr Bush) remained in office.

Obamas limitations

Barack Obama is a highly intelligent man, but his limitations are as conspicuous as his qualities, as Pfaff notes. Wholly lacking military experience, preoccupied by the world economic crisis and his legislative campaign for health care reform, Mr Obama already had accepted the interpretation of the Afghanistan and Pakistan situation generally held in Washington and the press. Indeed, his campaign advisers had proposed a considerably exaggerated version of the dominant Washington scenario, emphasising the risk of Pakistans nuclear weapon falling into terrorist hands and seemingly deaf to the risk of powerful Pakistani popular as well as official reactions against U.S. interference in the countrys affairs. For example, Bruce Riedel, Armageddon in Islamabad, National Interest, Washington, July-August 2009. Riedel forecast a terrorist threat to nuclear-armed Pakistan that would be felt around the globe. Riedel, formerly of the CIA, was an adviser to the Obama campaign and is now at the Brookings Institution.

Remember Obamas achievements so far. The re-set in relations with Russia came unstuck. In November 2011 he addressed the Australian Parliament and used the occasion to issue a challenge to China. Libya was laid waste. Syria has been mishandled, and while Obama has no leverage on Israel, he issues threats to Iran. Nor are relations with Europe any better for his policies.

Dissent focusses on these issues, but the destructive passion which drives the U.S. is largely overlooked. Two other dissenters deserve note. One is Prof. Andrew J. Bacevich, the author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2006) and Washington Rules: Americas Path to Permanent War (2010). His thesis is bluntly stated. Crediting the United States with a great liberating tradition distorts the past and obscures the actual motive force behind American politics and U.S. foreign policy. It transforms history into a morality tale, thereby providing a rationale for dodging serious moral analysis. To insist that the liberation of others has never been more than an ancillary motive of U.S. policy is not cynicism; it is a prerequisite to self-understanding. If the young United States had a mission, it was not to liberate but to expand.

How was expansion achieved? On this point, the historical record leaves no room for debate by any means necessary. Depending on the circumstances, the United States relied on diplomacy, hard bargaining, bluster, chicanery, intimidation, or naked coercion. We infiltrated land belonging to our neighbours and then brazenly proclaimed it our own. We harassed, filibustered. And, when the situation called for it, launched full-scale invasions. We engaged in ethnic cleansing. At times, we insisted that treaties be considered sacrosanct. On other occasions, we blithely jettisoned solemn agreements that had outlived their usefulness. As the methods employed varied, so too did the rationales offered to justify action.

Obama is no different. He says, The mission of the United States is to provide global leadership grounded in the understanding that the world shares a common security and a common humanity.

Bacevichs comments are as apt as his exposure of the dominant scholar is instructive. In this way, ideology serves as a device for sharply narrowing the range of policy debate. Dissent, where it exists, seldom penetrates the centres of powers in Washington. Principled dissenters, whether paleoconservatives or libertarians, pacifists or neo-agrarians, remain on the political fringes, dismissed as either mean-spirited (that is, unable to appreciate the lofty motives that inform U.S. policy) or simply naive (that is, oblivious to the implacable evil that the United States is called upon to confront).

The ideology of national security persists not because it expresses empirically demonstrable truths but because it serves the interests of those who created the national security state and those who still benefit from its continued existencethe very people who are most responsible for the increasingly maladroit character of U.S. Policy.

The power elite

These are the men, along with a few women, who comprise the self-selecting, self-perpetuating camarilla that, since World War II, has shaped (and perverted) national security policy. In a famous book published over a half century ago, the sociologist C. Wright Mills took a stab at describing this power elite. His depiction of an interlocking corporate, political, and military directorate remains valid today, although one might amend it to acknowledge the role played by insider journalists and policy intellectuals who serve as propagandists, gatekeepers and packagers of the latest conventional wisdom. Although analysts employed by the RAND Corporation or the Hudson Institute may not themselves qualify as full-fledged members of the national security elite, they facilitate its functioning. Much the same can be said about columnists who write for The New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Weekly Standard, the research fellows busily organising study groups at the Council on Foreign Relations or the American Enterprise Institute, and the policy-oriented academics who inhabit institutions like Harvards Kennedy School of Government or Princetons Wilson School.

To say that a power elite directs the affairs of state is not to suggest the existence of some dark conspiracy. It is simply to acknowledge the way Washington actually works. Especially on matters related to national security, policymaking has become oligarchic rather than democratic. The policymaking process is not open but closed, with the voices of privileged insiders carrying unimaginably greater weight than those of the unwashed masses. Dont you recognise this Cabal in New Delhi as well? Some of its members effortlessly identify themselves with changing and ideologically different governments. The Establishment continues mysteriously its wondrous ways to perform.

Washington Rules

What exactly are Bacevichs Washington Rules? This book aims to take stock of conventional wisdom in its most influential and enduring form, namely the package of assumptions, habits, and precepts that have defined the tradition of statecraft to which the United States has adhered since the end of World War IIthe era of global dominance now drawing to a close. The post-war tradition combines two components, each one so deeply embedded in the American collective consciousness as to have all but disappeared from view.

The first component specifies norms according to which the international order ought to work and charges the United States with responsibility for enforcing those norms. Call this the American credo. In the simplest terms, the credo summons the United Statesand the United States aloneto lead, save, liberate, and ultimately transform the world. With regard to means, that tradition has emphasised activism over example, hard power over soft, and coercion (often styled negotiating from a position of strength) over suasion. Above all, the exercise of global leadership as prescribed by the credo obliges the United States to maintain military capabilities staggeringly in excess of those required for self-defence. During the Cold War, Americans worried ceaselessly about falling behind the Russians, even though the Pentagon consistently maintained a position of overall primacy. Once the Soviet threat disappeared, mere primacy no longer sufficed. With barely a whisper of national debate, unambiguous and perpetual global military supremacy emerged as an essential predicate to global leadership.

It is the trinity of global military presence, based on forces for global power projection, to meet threats by a policy of global interventionism. This consensus has remained intact from Truman to Obama. It defines the rules to which Washington adheres; it determines the precepts by which Washington rules. Obama is a faithful adherent of the Washington Rules. The book provides a detailed account of how the Rules are being enforced.

One must acknowledge that, however small or ineffective, there has always existed in the U.S. a tradition of vibrant dissent. These two books by Bacevich are part of the American Empire Project. It needs to be publicised. The American Empire Project is a response to the changes that have occurred in Americas strategic thinking as well as in its military and economic posture. Empire, long considered an offense against Americas democratic heritage, now threatens to define the relationship between our country and the rest of the world. The American Empire Project publishes books that question this development, examine the origins of U.S. imperial aspirations, analyse their ramifications at home and abroad, and discuss alternatives to this dangerous trend. The project was conceived by Tom Engelhardt and Steve Fraser, editors who are themselves historians and writers. Published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, its titles include Hegemony or Survival and Failed States by Noam Chomsky, The Blowback Trilogy by Chalmers Johnson, The Limits of Power by Andrew Bacevich, Crusade by James Carroll, Blood and Oil by Michael Klare, Dilemmas of Domination by Walden Bello, Devils Game by Robert Dreyfuss, A Question of Torture by Alfred McCoy, A Peoples History of American Empire by Howard Zinn, The Complex by Nick Turse, and Empires Workshop by Greg Grandin.

Looming tragedy

Another dissenter of note is Prof. Peter Beinart. His book The lcarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris created a sensation. The American story is as old as the Greeks. Hubris leads to tragedy and Americas decline, which has just about begun, holds within it seeds of a looming tragedy.

To Beinart the parallel is very close. Hubris is an affliction born from success and the U.S. has had a free run of global success for three-quarters of a century. Over the last one hundred years, no world power has come close to matching our run of good fortune. When your cities are bombed and your lands are plundered and your government is toppled and your empire dissolveswhich is what happened, in varying degrees, to Americas major competitors during the twentieth centuryyou have lots of problems, but hubris is no longer one of them. We, on the other hand, who did much of the bombing and toppling and dissolving, have as a result sometimes been tempted to believeto paraphrase the campaign slogan of a certain Texas governor turned presidentthat whatever Americans can dream, Americans can do. A rousing sentiment, but dangerous, the kind of thing that can get you into trouble with the gods.

American hubris

This book is about American hubris, American tragedy, and the search for American wisdom. Its about three moments in the last century when a group of leaders and thinkers found themselves in possession of wings. In each case, the Icarus generations flapped gently at first, unsure how much weight the contraptions could bear. But the contraptions worked marvellously and so people gradually forgot that they were mere human creations, finite and fragile.

The book is extremely well written and reflects the authors erudition. It is a censure of politicians as well as intellectuals. Hubris afflicts both; indeed, afflicts all. The diagnosis and the prescription must be quoted in extenso.

What America needs today is a jubilant undertaker, someone like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Regan who can bury the hubris of the past while convincing Americans that we are witnessing a wedding, not a funeral. The hubris of dominance, like the hubris of reason and the hubris of toughness before it, has crashed against realitys shoals. Woodrow Wilson could not make politics between nations resemble politics between Americans. Lyndon Johnson could not halt every communist advance. And we cannot make ourselves master of every important region on earth. We have learned that there are prices we cannot pay and burdens we cannot bear, and our adversaries have learned it, too. We must ruthlessly accommodate ourselves to a world that has shown, once again, that it is not putty in our hands.

For starters, that means remembering that we did not always believe we needed to dominate the world in order to live safely, profitably, and ethically in it. In the decade and a half after the Soviet empire fell, dominance came so easily that we began to see it as the normal order of things. We expanded NATO into East Germany, then into Eastern Europe, then onto former Soviet soil, while at the same time encircling Russia with military bases in a host of Central Asian countries that once flew the hammer and sickle. We established a virtual Monroe Doctrine in the Middle East, shutting out all outside military powers, and the Bush administration set about enforcing a Roosevelt Corollary, too, granting itself the right to take down unfriendly local regimes. In East Asia we waited expectantly for China to democratise or implode and thus follow Russia down the path to ideological and strategic submission. And we stopped thinking about Latin America much at all, since we took it as a virtual fact of nature that no foreign power would ever again challenge us in our backyard.

If the men and women who shape American foreign policy conduct this intellectual audit they will discover a sharp discontinuity between some of todays widely held assumptions and the assumptions of successful American policymakers in eras past. After 9/11, in the name of fighting terror, the Bush administration declared war or cold war on Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas, virtually every significant regime and militia in the greater Middle East that did not kiss or ring. And in its pursuit of regional dominance, it claimed that it was merely doing in the Muslim world what past generations had done in Europe and Asia. But thats not right. Franklin Roosevelt did not wage World War II so America could be the worlds sole superpower, or even Europes. He wanted Four Policemen; unipolarity was Hitlers goal. And FDR did not wage war against all the enemies of freedom. He allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler and Tojo. Similarly, during the cold war America did not take on the entire communist world, except for a period of hubristic intoxication that began with McCarthyism and culminated in Vietnam. In the late 1940s we made common cause with the communists in Belgrade, and in the 1970s and 80s we made common cause with the communists in Beijing, all to contain the communists we feared most, who resided in Moscow. George Kennan saw the purpose of containment as ensuring that no single power controlled the worlds centres of economic and military might, not ensuring that the single power was the United States.

When will thoughtful Indians conduct an audit of the foreign policy we have been conducting ever since we won independence from British Rule?