[Mb-civic] Washington?s alarming foreign policy

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

via Ed Pearl

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2042/

In These Times    March 31, 2005

Wake Up!

Washington’s alarming foreign policy

By Chalmers Johnson

The Sorrows of Empire : Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic
[The American Empire Project] By Chalmers Johnson Metropolitan Books •
$25.00

The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the city of
Ravenna. During the prime of the Roman Republic, roughly the last two
centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting the heartland
of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial armies. An ancient
Roman law made it treason for any general to cross the Rubicon and enter
Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar, Rome’s most
brilliant and successful general, stopped with his army at the Rubicon,
contemplated what he was about to do, and then plunged south. The Republic
exploded in civil war, Caesar became dictator and then in 44 B.C. was
assassinated in the Roman Senate by politicians who saw themselves as
ridding the Republic of a tyrant. However, Caesar’s death generated even
more civil war, which ended in 27 B.C. when his grand nephew, Octavian,
took the title Augustus Caesar, abolished the Republic and established a
military dictatorship with himself as “emperor” for life. Thus ended the
great Roman experiment with democracy. Ever since, the phrase “to cross
the Rubicon” has been a metaphor for starting on a course of action from
which there is no turning back. It refers to the taking of an irrevocable
step.

I believe that on November 2, 2004, the United States crossed its own
Rubicon. Until last year’s presidential election, ordinary citizens could
claim that our foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq, was George
Bush’s doing and that we had not voted for him. In 2000, Bush lost the
popular vote and was appointed president by the Supreme Court. In 2004, he
garnered 3.5 million more votes than John Kerry. The result is that Bush’s
war changed into America’s war and his conduct of international relations
became our own.

This is important because it raises the question of whether restoring
sanity and prudence to American foreign policy is still possible. During
the Watergate scandal of the early ’70s, the president’s chief of staff,
H. R. Haldeman, once reproved White House counsel John Dean for speaking
too frankly to Congress about the felonies President Nixon had ordered.
“John,” he said, “once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s very hard
to get it back in.” This homely warning by a former advertising executive
who was to spend 18 months in prison for his own role in Watergate fairly
accurately describes the situation of the United States after the
reelection of George W. Bush.

James Weinstein, the founding editor of In These Times, recently posed for
me the question “How should U.S. foreign policy be changed so that the
United States can play a more positive role on the world stage?” For me,
this raises at least three different problems that are interrelated. The
first must be solved before we can address the second, and the second has
to be corrected before it even makes sense to take up the third.

Sinking the ship of state

First, the United States faces the imminent danger of bankruptcy, which,
if it occurs, will render all further discussion of foreign policy moot.
Within the next few months, the mother of all financial crises could ruin
us and turn us into a North American version of Argentina, once the
richest country in South America. To avoid this we must bring our massive
trade and fiscal deficits under control and signal to the rest of the
world that we understand elementary public finance and are not suicidally
indifferent to our mounting debts.

Second, our appalling international citizenship must be addressed. We
routinely flout well-established norms upon which the reciprocity of other
nations in their relations with us depends. This is a matter not so much
of reforming our policies as of reforming attitudes. If we ignore this,
changes in our actual foreign policies will not even be noticed by other
nations of the world. I have in mind things like the Army’s and the CIA’s
secret abduction and torture of people; the trigger-happy conduct of our
poorly trained and poorly led troops in places like Iraq and Afghanistan;
and our ideological bullying of other cultures because of our obsession
with abortion and our contempt for international law (particularly the
International Criminal Court) as illustrated by Bush’s nomination of John
R. “Bonkers” Bolton to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Third, if we can overcome our imminent financial crisis and our penchant
for boorish behavior abroad, we might then be able to reform our foreign
policies. Among the issues here are the slow-moving evolutionary changes
in the global balance of power that demand new approaches. The most
important evidence that our life as the “sole” superpower is going to be
exceedingly short is the fact that our monopoly of massive military power
is being upstaged by other forms of influence. Chief among these is
China’s extraordinary growth and our need to adjust to it.

Let me discuss each of these three problems in greater depth.

In 2004, the United States imported a record $617.7 billion more than it
exported, a 24.4 percent increase over 2003. The annual deficit with China
was $162 billion, the largest trade imbalance ever recorded by the United
States with a single country. Equally important, as of March 9, 2005, the
public debt of the United States was just over $7.7 trillion and climbing,
making us easily the world’s largest net debtor nation. Refusing to pay
for its profligate consumption patterns and military expenditures through
taxes on its own citizens, the United States is financing these outlays by
going into debt to Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and India.
This situation has become increasingly unstable, as the United States
requires capital imports of at least $2 billion per day to pay for its
governmental expenditures. Any decision by Asian central banks to move
significant parts of their foreign exchange reserves out of the dollar and
into the euro or other currencies in order to protect themselves from
dollar depreciation will likely produce a meltdown of the American
economy. On February 21, 2005, the Korean central bank, which has some
$200 billion in reserves, quietly announced that it intended to “diversify
the currencies in which it invests.” The dollar fell sharply and the U.S.
stock market (although subsequently recovering) recorded its largest
one-day fall in almost two years. This small incident is evidence of the
knife-edge on which we are poised.

Japan possesses the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, which at
the end of January 2005 stood at around $841 billion. But China also sits
on a $609.9 billion pile of U.S. cash, earned from its trade surpluses
with us. Meanwhile, the American government insults China in every way it
can, particularly over the status of China’s breakaway province, the
island of Taiwan. The distinguished economic analyst William Greider
recently noted, “Any profligate debtor who insults his banker is unwise,
to put it mildly. 
 American leadership has 
 become increasingly
delusional—I mean that literally—and blind to the adverse balance of power
accumulating against it.”

These deficits and dependencies represent unusual economic statistics for
a country with imperial pretensions. In the 19th century, the British
Empire ran huge current account surpluses, which allowed it to ignore the
economic consequences of disastrous imperialist ventures like the Boer
War. On the eve of the First World War, Britain had a surplus amounting to
7 percent of its GDP. America’s current account deficit is close to 6
percent of our GDP.


In order to regain any foreign confidence in the sanity of our government
and the soundness of our policies, we need, at once, to reverse President
George W. Bush’s tax cuts, including those on capital gains and estates
(the rich are so well off they’ll hardly notice it), radically reduce our
military expenditures, and stop subsidizing agribusinesses and the
military-industrial complex. Only a few years ago the United States
enjoyed substantial federal surpluses and was making inroads into its
public debt. If we can regain fiscal solvency, the savers of Asia will
probably continue to finance our indebtedness. If we do not, we risk a
fear-driven flight from the dollar by all our financiers, collapse of our
stock exchange and global recession for a couple of years—from which the
rest of the world will ultimately emerge. But by then we who no longer
produce much of anything valuable will have become a banana republic.
Debate over our foreign policy will become irrelevant. We will have become
dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Ugly Americans

Meanwhile, the bad manners of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their
band of neoconservative fanatics from the American Enterprise Institute
dominate the conduct of American foreign policy. It is simply unacceptable
that after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal Congress has so far failed to
launch an investigation into those in the executive branch who condoned
it. It is equally unacceptable that the president’s chief apologist for
the official but secret use of torture is now the attorney general, that
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not resign, and that the seventh
investigation of the military by the military (this time headed by Vice
Admiral Albert Church III) again whitewashed all officers and blamed only
a few unlucky enlisted personnel on the night shift in one cellblock of
Abu Ghraib prison. Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate and a veteran of
23 years of service as an army officer, says in his book The New American
Militarism of these dishonorable incidents: “The Abu Ghraib debacle showed
American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as
professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills.” Until this is
corrected, a president and secretary of state bloviating about freedom and
democracy is received by the rest of the world as mere window-dressing.

Foreign policy analysts devote considerable attention to the concept of
“credibility”—whether or not a nation is trustworthy. There are several
ways to lose one’s credibility. One is to politicize intelligence, as Bush
and Vice President Dick Cheney did in preparing for their preventive war
against Iraq. Today, only a fool would take at face value something said
by the CIA or our other secret intelligence services. China has already
informed us that it does not believe our intelligence on North Korea, and
our European allies have said the same thing about our apocalyptic
estimates on Iran.

Similarly, our bloated military establishment routinely makes
pronouncements that are untrue. The scene of a bevy of generals and
admirals—replete with campaign ribbons marching up and over their left
shoulders—baldly lying to congressional committees is familiar to any
viewer of our network newscasts.


For example, on February 3, 1998, Marine pilots were goofing off in a
military jet and cut the cables of a ski lift in northern Italy, plunging
20 individuals to their deaths. The Marine Corps did everything in its
power to avoid responsibility for the disaster, then brought the pilots
back to the States for court-martial, dismissed the case as an accident
and exonerated the pilots. The Italians haven’t forgotten either the
incident or how the United States treated an ally. On March 4, 2005,
American soldiers opened fire on a civilian car en route to Baghdad
airport, killing a high-ranking Italian intelligence officer and wounding
the journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been released by kidnappers.
The U.S. military immediately started its cover-up, claiming that the car
was speeding, that the soldiers had warned it with lights and warning
shots and that the Italians had given no prior notice of the trip. Sgrena
has contradicted everything our military said. The White House has called
it a “horrific accident,” but whatever the explanation, we have once again
made one of our closest European allies look like dupes for cooperating
with us.

In its arrogance and overconfidence, the Bush administration has managed
to convince the rest of the world that our government is incompetent. The
administration has not only tried to undercut treaties it finds
inconvenient but refuses to engage in normal diplomacy with its allies to
make such treaties more acceptable. Thus, administration representatives
simply walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming that
tried to rein in carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that the economic
costs were too high. (The United States generates far more such emissions
than any other country.) All of the United States’ democratic allies
continued to work on the treaty despite our boycott. On July 23, 2001, in
Bonn, Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in
emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the
penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally binding
treaty so far endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified Kyoto
Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the reduction of
greenhouse gases.

Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations
conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September
2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down Syrian demands that
language accusing Israel of racism be included. The conference’s final
statement produced an apology for slavery as a “crime against humanity”
but did so without making slaveholding nations liable for reparations.
Given the history of slavery in the United States and the degree to which
the final document was adjusted to accommodate American concerns, our
walkout seemed to be yet another display of imperial arrogance— a
bald-faced message that “we” do not need “you” to run this world.

Until the United States readopts the norms of civilized discourse among
nations, it can expect other nations—quietly and privately—to do
everything in their power to isolate and disengage from us.

Future reforms

If through some miracle we were able to restore fiscal rationality,
honesty and diplomacy to their rightful places in our government, then we
could turn to reforming our foreign policies. First and foremost, we
should get out of Iraq and demand that Congress never again fail to honor
article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution giving it the
exclusive power to go to war. After that, I believe the critical areas in
need of change are our policies toward Israel, imported oil, China and the
proliferation of nuclear weapons, although the environment and relations
with Latin America may be equally important.

Perhaps the most catastrophic error of the Bush administration was to
abandon the policies of all previous American administrations to seek an
equitable peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Bush instead
joined Ariel Sharon in his expropriation and ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians. As a result, the United States has lost all credibility,
influence and trust in the Islamic world. In July 2004, Zogby
International Surveys polled 3,300 Arabs in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
Lebanon, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. When asked whether
respondents had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of the United
States, the “unfavorables” ranged from 69 to 98 percent. In the year 2000
there were 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide, some 22 percent of the global
population; through our policies we have turned most of them against the
United States. We should resume at once the role of honest broker between
the Israelis and Palestinians that former President Clinton pioneered.

The United States imports about 3.8 billion barrels of oil a year, or
about 10.6 million barrels a day. These imports are at the highest levels
ever recorded and come increasingly from Persian Gulf countries. A cut-off
of Saudi Arabia’s ability or willingness to sell its oil to us would, at
the present time, constitute an economic catastrophe. By using currently
available automotive technologies as well as those being incorporated
today in new Toyota and Honda automobiles, we could end our entire
dependency on Persian Gulf oil. We should do that before we are forced to
do so.

China’s gross domestic product in 2004 grew at a rate of 9.5 percent,
easily the fastest among big countries. It is today the world’s sixth
largest economy with a GDP of $1.4 trillion. It has also become the
trading partner of choice for the developing world, absorbing huge amounts
of food, raw materials, machinery and computers. Can the United States
adjust peacefully to the reemergence of China—the world’s oldest,
continuously extant civilization—this time as a modern superpower? Or is
China’s ascendancy to be marked by yet another world war like those of the
last century? That is what is at stake. A rich, capitalist China is not a
threat to the United States and cooperation with it is our best guarantee
of military security in the Pacific.

Nothing is more threatening to our nation than spread of nuclear weapons.
We developed a good policy with the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
which with its 188 adherents is the most widely supported arms control
agreement ever enacted. Only India, Israel and Pakistan remained outside
its terms until January 10, 2003, when North Korea withdrew. Under the
treaty, the five nuclear-weapons states (the United States, Russia, China,
France and the United Kingdom) agree to undertake nuclear disarmament,
while the non-nuclear-weapons states agree not to develop or acquire such
weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is authorized to
inspect the non-nuclear-weapons states to ensure compliance. The Bush
administration has virtually ruined this international agreement by
attempting to denigrate the IAEA, by tolerating nuclear weapons in India,
Israel, and Pakistan while fomenting wars against Iraq, Iran and North
Korea, and by planning to develop new forms of nuclear weapons. Our policy
should be to return at once to this established system of controls.

Finally, the most important change we could make in American policy would
be to dismantle our imperial presidency and restore a balance among the
executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. The
massive and secret powers of the Department of Defense and the CIA have
subverted the republican structure of our democracy and left us exposed to
the real danger of a military takeover. Reviving our constitutional system
would do more than anything else to protect our peace and security.


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