April 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Bush and Cheney's Global War, and What We Can Do

Joseph Gerson is the Director of Programs and of the Peace and Economic Security Program of the American Friends Service Committee in New England.

Dependent as many of us are on the mass media, it can be a challenge these days to see things clearly and to maintain a global perspective. However, even the New York Times tells us that Chinese leaders are wondering aloud about the sanity of those in power in Washington. Like many others I met during recent travels in Europe and Japan, the Chinese know that the Bush Administration's military over-reach will have disastrous consequences.

"Arrangement" for the 21st Century

The Empire was struck, and the Empire is striking back. Vengeance and war, not justice and security, are the order of the day. At the popular level, the September 11 attacks have plunged the people of this country into confusion and a dangerous identity crisis. For the first time in almost 200 years, the two great oceans were not vast enough to protect US Americans from attack. The Bush Administration is using this confusion and disorientation, and the United States' enormous military and economic power, to create a New New World Order to guarantee US dominance far into the 21st century.

This restructuring of the global disorder predated September 11. Last spring, our elusive National CEO, Dick Cheney, told The New Yorker 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." Even then, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others were modeling themselves after Captain Alfred T. Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt, who charted the way to global empire at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Now, we have the Bush Doctrine that nations are either "with us or against us." Those who question US ambitions or policies face devastating military attack.

However, the war thus far has been less successful than Secretary Rumsfeld has been reporting: Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar apparently remain at large; thousands of innocent Afghans have been killed as a result of the US war; the same US-supported "warlords" of old who oppressed women, built their power on the drug trade, and plunged Afghanistan into civil war, are now competing for power and threatening renewed civil war. Even the New York Times tells us that in broad areas of Afghanistan the Taliban remains far more popular than the United States' corrupt clients, and that we are about to be on the receiving end of a new wave of Afghan heroin. And, as the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl and the India-Pakistan confrontation testify, the forces the US has nurtured and unleashed in nuclear Pakistan could yet prove disastrous.

The world is not blind to what the US is attempting, nor to its hypocrisy. Other nations have long been aware of Washington's support for repressive dictators, its use of terrorism, its refusal to ratify or fully implement nuclear arms control treaties, and its contempt for international law. Few are fooled by Washington's rhetoric of threatening to enforce a "regime change" in Iraq in the name of nuclear non-proliferation.

Like John Foster Dulles' either/or approach to the Cold War, the Bush Doctrine makes clear that nations that question US ambitions will face devastating military attack. Beneath Bush's rhetoric, diplomacy, threats, and current two-front war, is the commitment to impose "the arrangement [for] the twenty-first century." Deputy Secretary of War Wolfowitz says Bush's war has been successful because it inspires fear among the world's nations.

Just as McCarthyism was an essential element in mobilizing and disciplining the home front for the Cold War, Bush and Company have launched a domestic campaign that verges on the first stages of fascism. John Ashcroft, the chief US law enforcement officer, has warned that criticism "gives ammunition to America's enemies..." Essential elements of our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and government are under assault. Just as no middle ground is to be permitted internationally, the administration wants to crush critical thinking and democratic dissent at home.

War for Oil

The New New World Disorder is also based on oil, the jugular vein of the world's economies. Remember, the US has threatened to initiate nuclear war at least eight times to preserve its privileged control of the world's oil reserves. The US elite was sobered by the fact that most of the September 11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia. It may well have been part of Osama bin Laden's objective to drive a wedge between the US and the Saudi monarchy in order to free Arabia of US military bases and the corrupt Saudi regime. Washington is now using Russia and its vast oil reserves against Saudi Arabia; by increasing and diversifying its oil producing dependencies, Washington is teaching the Saudis that they too are expendable.

Oil politics are also at the root of our government's obsession with Iraq. Washington saw its 1991 Desert Storm victory as the conquest of the entire Arab world. Saddam Hussein's continued refusal to quietly accept US dominance jeopardizes US privileged access to the region's oil. Thus the Bush Administration has made its decision to topple the Iraqi government, using "all the means at our disposal." These are serious words from a nuclear power.

The Afghan war has also been about the vast oil reserves around the Caspian Sea and Central Asia. The hope of building a pipeline from Turkestan, through Afghanistan, to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean, free of Russian and Iranian influence, played a powerful role in US support for the Taliban's rise to power and Washington's tolerance of its brutal excesses. With its new network of bases in Central Asia nations ruled by post-Soviet dictators, the US has created a military infrastructure to control the region's oil reserves--while simultaneously encircling China.

Nuclear Threats

On the nuclear front, we should note a pattern in recent US warfighting. As the US prepares to go to war, it threatens nuclear attack to ensure that those it is targeting will not be tempted to use chemical or biological weapons. Just as Bush the elder threatened nuclear attack before the 1991 war, this Bush Administration communicated similar threats to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. As we read in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times in early March, this approach, using nuclear threats to guarantee "escalation dominance," has been reified in the Bush Administration's Nuclear Posture Review.

Even before the story broke in the press, the Natural Resources Defense Council and others had concluded that the Bush Administration was "faking nuclear restraint." The NRDC had reported that "the administration's hostility to arms control, and its infatuation with nuclear weapons," are nearly unprecedented and that "Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald Reagan's first term has there been such an emphasis on nuclear weapons in US defense strategy... The Bush Administration assumes that nuclear weapons will be part of US military forces for the next 50 years." The announced reductions in the size of the US nuclear arsenal are a sham.

The most frightening aspect of the Bush Administration's nuclear war strategy is its plan to blur the distinction between nuclear and high-tech weapons, and to more fully integrate the "unthinkable" into US war fighting practice. In the past, the US has threatened to initiate nuclear war during more than twenty crises and wars, but with the Nuclear Posture Review, the threats will be far more explicit and immediate.

In short, the Bush Administration's goal is to ensure that no one even thinks about challenging US dominance.

What then must be done?

Our initial months of educating, holding vigils, writing to Congress--and all of those meetings!--have been critically important. We have reaffirmed and named the moral responses to the current catastrophe with the faith that, as in the past, our moral and practical vision would eventually begin to engage political realities and dynamics.

This is beginning to happen. Barbara Lee is no longer standing alone in Congress. Significant sectors of the US elite are beginning to signal that there are hard questions about the war in Afghanistan to be answered. They are telling us that they are more than a little nervous about the potentially catastrophic consequences of the Bush Administration's growing and still undefined global crusade, and about its assaults on constitutional democracy. In March, in their cautious ways, Senators Daschle, Byrd, and Biden shattered the illusion of unanimity in Washington, as they began to identify themselves with the majority of US Americans who value diplomacy, multilateralism, international law, and working through the United Nations.

As activists, organizers, and citizens, I think we should be focusing on five inter-related priorities. Others may have better lists.

• First, mobilize for April 20. Getting ourselves to the demonstration in Washington, DC or participating in coalition actions at home is very important. Even if the press opts to marginalize our actions, we need to do all that we can to make our movement visible to the powers that be, to people across the country, and to ourselves. The importance of breaking our sometimes self-imposed sense of isolation must not be underestimated.
• Second, touching peoples' hearts can be more important than winning their minds. It was a series of photographs that moved Martin Luther King and galvanized him to openly oppose the Indochina War. Amber and Ryan Amundson, together with other families who lost loved ones on September 11, have created an organization called September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, some whom have since traveled to Afghanistan to meet and provide support for families of civilians killed by US bombs.

  We should be doing all that we can to give these courageous women and men forums and platforms to speak. We should also be finding ways to bring forward the faces and stories of innocent immigrants who are being jailed, of Palestinians under siege, and of those of who are being racially profiled or who will be going without food, housing, medical care, and education because of the costs of Bush's militarism.

• Third is focusing on the "we." Here in the US, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, and economically insecure people are paying a greater and far more painful price than others. Sensitivity to these ugly realities and to alliance building, which means honoring human solidarity and building on the basis of humility and mutual respect, will be essential to building a powerful movement.
• Fourth, escalation of the war against Iraq must be prevented. Ten years ago, the US bombed that once-advanced nation "into the pre-industrial age," and the suffering inflicted by the sanctions since then is indescribable. A second major war against Iraq will be catastrophic for millions of innocent Iraqis, will increase Arab and Islamic rage against the United States, and could ignite a region-wide, potentially nuclear, Middle East war.
• Fifth, it is essential that we increase our efforts to make it safe for, or to force, members of Congress to oppose the Bush-Cheney global war. More than a few share our analysis but are afraid to speak out Our responsibility is to do the organizing in our communities and the laboring with them that will make it safe for them to come out, to force them to change their positions, and if necessary to vote them out of office.

The failures of the war in Afghanistan and the Bush Administration's Kissingerian embrace of some of the world's most repressive dictators provide us openings, but we do better to focus on the matter of will. There are no human forces more powerful than compassion and the will to freedom and human dignity. It is by devoting our full life force to our values, to our commitments to stop the killing and to create a more equitable, secure and sustainable world for ourselves and those who will follow us, that we may actually succeed.

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