Post by Moses on Feb 19, 2005 0:10:37 GMT -5
U.S. Preoccupied with Southwest Asia
The official rationale of Bush foreign policy (aka "the War on Terror") is simultaneously crystal clear and highly, even ridiculously unclear. To the minds most inclined to find satisfaction in simple concepts, the war is between Good and Evil, conducted by a very good president against whomever God instructs him to smite in this world filled with evil-doers. The administration encourages this conception, especially in its Christian fundamentalist base. The U.S. government official will sometimes even articulate this mindset (which the French early on labeled simplisme or "simple-ism") to foreign counterparts; Wolfowitz shocked the Europeans in February 2002 when, asked what the administration meant by the term "axis of evil," that Bush had just uttered in his state of the union address, merely responded: "Countries must make a choice." Bush, echoing Matthew 12:30, had declared, "You're either for us or against us." So the War on Terror is a war of good Christian America against all opposition, which is evil. Wolfowitz is not a Christian fundamentalist and does not think in such terms himself, but the Bush administration uses the religious language and simple concepts to explain and exalt its policies.
To some, the War on Terror is a war on Islam. Many Americans are highly influenced by Christian evangelicals like Franklin Graham, who calls Islam a "very wicked and evil religion" with a different god than that of Christianity. Gen. William Boykin, holding a senior Defense Department post, has addressed church gatherings and asserted not only that Bush was chosen by God but that the Muslim god is not his god, and that U.S. forces confront Satan in the Iraqi resistance. On the one hand, Bush has stated all along that he regards Islam as a religion of peace, and that the war is not against Islam. He has expressed perplexity that Muslims would actually think that. He may in fact privately share Graham's views. Franklin's father Billy, best known of U.S. evangelists, met Dubya in 1985 and according to the president's official bio helped wean him from alcoholism in 1986.
So when pious Muslims around the world learn that the president of the United States' religious mentor, who raised him up from sin, believes their religion "wicked and evil" you can imagine why they'd actually think he's anti-Muslim. (Ask yourself why the president, educated at Yale, where he performed poorly, and Harvard, where one professor recalls him saying people were poor because they were lazy and that the Civil Rights Movement was communist, would be perplexed. The professor in question, Yoshi Tsurumi, has also recalled that Bush would say things in class and thereafter deny ever saying them. It may be that this president can say insulting things once, then forget or deny them, or just smirk and wonder why the hell it should matter.) Meanwhile there are within the administration some true Islamophobes, such as neocon Elliott Abrams, the Reagan-era official convicted of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra and now in charge of promoting democracy around the world.
To the dispassionate reporter or academic trying to analyze administrative motives, the war is often interpreted as primarily one against "Islamist" extremism, in the aftermath of al-Qaeda's attack on the U.S. But this is a hard category to define, and to distinguish from mere Islamic fundamentalism, which is prevalent in many places, as is Christian fundamentalism. The U.S. continues to work with lots of Islamic fundamentalists, and indeed, it has often maintained closer ties with regimes that promote fundamentalism, such as Saudi Arabia or the new Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, than those that enforce secularism, like Syria or Saddam's Iraq. The CIA happily recruited Muslim extremists from all over the world to wage jihad against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Plainly the administration would like to see a sort of Islamic reformation that would reduce anti-American feelings in the Muslim world, but officials must realize that the U.S. was generally admired by that world before Washington set out on its "war on terror." A Zogby International poll, released June 11, 2002, showed that in nine Muslim countries the most admired foreign country was the U.S. That was before the U.S. conquered two Muslim countries, killing tens of thousands, embraced Sharon as "a man of peace," isolated Arafat, endorsed an Israeli strike against Syria, tortured Muslims in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, threatened Iran, sought to oust ElBaradei as IAEA head, etc. Intelligence reports now state baldly that U.S. actions are fomenting more and more Muslim hostility.
The current targets most closely in the crosshairs are Syria, a secular nation, and officially Shiite Iran. The U.S. alleges that both harbor Islamic terrorists. Specifically, they harbor members of Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hizbollah. The first two of these are Palestinian organizations whose beef is with Israel, not the U.S., while the latter is a major Lebanese political party that in its early years attacked U.S. troops only when they set up camp on Lebanese soil. 9-11 has been used to legitimate efforts at "regime change" in Syria and Iran, partly on the grounds that they have ties with these Islamic "terror" groups, even though the latter are quite different from al-Qaeda and had no connection to the 9-11 attacks. Iran stands accused of al-Qaeda links, but the accusation smacks of disinformation. Anyway the "war on terror" could be viewed as essentially an effort to eradicate organizations violently hostile to Israel, to topple regimes that harbor them, and to prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon. It that sense it's presented as a war on "Islamist terrorism."
But lest the Muslim should suppose that Bush is only picking on them, the administration targets "evil" North Korea and Cuba, and might in theory expand the terror war to target any of the "terror sponsoring" nations or "international terrorist organizations" on its lists. The latter include everybody from Irish nationalists to Tamil separatists to communist parties. The "terror war" concept, like most simple concepts, is flexible. Nevertheless it seems clear to me that the game plan is to gain strategic control over all of Southwest Asia, a region that produces 70% of the world's oil. Having done that, the U.S. could face Europe, Japan and China well into this century from a position of greatly enhanced strength, controlling the flow of oil and maintaining a vast network of military bases from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. Some believe this necessarily for the continued primacy of the U.S. economy in the face of global competition.
This, I think, is the real essence of the "war on terror." It reflects the needs of the military- industrial complex, and if it has the additional advantage of providing a final solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict (by defeating anti-Israel "terror" and generating Israel-friendly Muslim regimes) this will please them as well as the other props of the Bush administration, the neocons and the Christian fundamentalist right. The first of this triad may feel a certain necessity to pursue the Project for a New American Century scenario (regime change in Iraq, Iran, Syria) but differ from the neocons on the matter of urgency. One sees this in the Weekly Standard's repeated calls for Rumsfeld's resignation and for a dramatic increase in the size of the U.S. military over the next few years. You see it too in the PNAC's veiled call for a draft. The ideologically-driven neocons want to seize the time, and have the whole conquest done during the second Bush administration, no matter how creatively messy. Others in the administration seem inclined to proceed more slowly, projecting hostility to the targeted nations while declaring, as Condoleezza Rice recently did, that attacks are not on the agenda.
In any case, the "war on terror" is practically speaking primarily a war to transform Southwest Asia or what the neocons like to call "the Greater Middle East." The inclusion of North Korea in the "axis of evil" in Bush's shocking 2002 state of the union address was probably an effort to obfuscate this fact and make the evolving terror war, then in its initial stage, seem less specifically aimed at the Muslim world. The attention of the administration is, I believe, quite concentrated on Middle Eastern real estate.
The official rationale of Bush foreign policy (aka "the War on Terror") is simultaneously crystal clear and highly, even ridiculously unclear. To the minds most inclined to find satisfaction in simple concepts, the war is between Good and Evil, conducted by a very good president against whomever God instructs him to smite in this world filled with evil-doers. The administration encourages this conception, especially in its Christian fundamentalist base. The U.S. government official will sometimes even articulate this mindset (which the French early on labeled simplisme or "simple-ism") to foreign counterparts; Wolfowitz shocked the Europeans in February 2002 when, asked what the administration meant by the term "axis of evil," that Bush had just uttered in his state of the union address, merely responded: "Countries must make a choice." Bush, echoing Matthew 12:30, had declared, "You're either for us or against us." So the War on Terror is a war of good Christian America against all opposition, which is evil. Wolfowitz is not a Christian fundamentalist and does not think in such terms himself, but the Bush administration uses the religious language and simple concepts to explain and exalt its policies.
To some, the War on Terror is a war on Islam. Many Americans are highly influenced by Christian evangelicals like Franklin Graham, who calls Islam a "very wicked and evil religion" with a different god than that of Christianity. Gen. William Boykin, holding a senior Defense Department post, has addressed church gatherings and asserted not only that Bush was chosen by God but that the Muslim god is not his god, and that U.S. forces confront Satan in the Iraqi resistance. On the one hand, Bush has stated all along that he regards Islam as a religion of peace, and that the war is not against Islam. He has expressed perplexity that Muslims would actually think that. He may in fact privately share Graham's views. Franklin's father Billy, best known of U.S. evangelists, met Dubya in 1985 and according to the president's official bio helped wean him from alcoholism in 1986.
So when pious Muslims around the world learn that the president of the United States' religious mentor, who raised him up from sin, believes their religion "wicked and evil" you can imagine why they'd actually think he's anti-Muslim. (Ask yourself why the president, educated at Yale, where he performed poorly, and Harvard, where one professor recalls him saying people were poor because they were lazy and that the Civil Rights Movement was communist, would be perplexed. The professor in question, Yoshi Tsurumi, has also recalled that Bush would say things in class and thereafter deny ever saying them. It may be that this president can say insulting things once, then forget or deny them, or just smirk and wonder why the hell it should matter.) Meanwhile there are within the administration some true Islamophobes, such as neocon Elliott Abrams, the Reagan-era official convicted of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra and now in charge of promoting democracy around the world.
To the dispassionate reporter or academic trying to analyze administrative motives, the war is often interpreted as primarily one against "Islamist" extremism, in the aftermath of al-Qaeda's attack on the U.S. But this is a hard category to define, and to distinguish from mere Islamic fundamentalism, which is prevalent in many places, as is Christian fundamentalism. The U.S. continues to work with lots of Islamic fundamentalists, and indeed, it has often maintained closer ties with regimes that promote fundamentalism, such as Saudi Arabia or the new Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, than those that enforce secularism, like Syria or Saddam's Iraq. The CIA happily recruited Muslim extremists from all over the world to wage jihad against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Plainly the administration would like to see a sort of Islamic reformation that would reduce anti-American feelings in the Muslim world, but officials must realize that the U.S. was generally admired by that world before Washington set out on its "war on terror." A Zogby International poll, released June 11, 2002, showed that in nine Muslim countries the most admired foreign country was the U.S. That was before the U.S. conquered two Muslim countries, killing tens of thousands, embraced Sharon as "a man of peace," isolated Arafat, endorsed an Israeli strike against Syria, tortured Muslims in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, threatened Iran, sought to oust ElBaradei as IAEA head, etc. Intelligence reports now state baldly that U.S. actions are fomenting more and more Muslim hostility.
The current targets most closely in the crosshairs are Syria, a secular nation, and officially Shiite Iran. The U.S. alleges that both harbor Islamic terrorists. Specifically, they harbor members of Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hizbollah. The first two of these are Palestinian organizations whose beef is with Israel, not the U.S., while the latter is a major Lebanese political party that in its early years attacked U.S. troops only when they set up camp on Lebanese soil. 9-11 has been used to legitimate efforts at "regime change" in Syria and Iran, partly on the grounds that they have ties with these Islamic "terror" groups, even though the latter are quite different from al-Qaeda and had no connection to the 9-11 attacks. Iran stands accused of al-Qaeda links, but the accusation smacks of disinformation. Anyway the "war on terror" could be viewed as essentially an effort to eradicate organizations violently hostile to Israel, to topple regimes that harbor them, and to prevent Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon. It that sense it's presented as a war on "Islamist terrorism."
But lest the Muslim should suppose that Bush is only picking on them, the administration targets "evil" North Korea and Cuba, and might in theory expand the terror war to target any of the "terror sponsoring" nations or "international terrorist organizations" on its lists. The latter include everybody from Irish nationalists to Tamil separatists to communist parties. The "terror war" concept, like most simple concepts, is flexible. Nevertheless it seems clear to me that the game plan is to gain strategic control over all of Southwest Asia, a region that produces 70% of the world's oil. Having done that, the U.S. could face Europe, Japan and China well into this century from a position of greatly enhanced strength, controlling the flow of oil and maintaining a vast network of military bases from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. Some believe this necessarily for the continued primacy of the U.S. economy in the face of global competition.
This, I think, is the real essence of the "war on terror." It reflects the needs of the military- industrial complex, and if it has the additional advantage of providing a final solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict (by defeating anti-Israel "terror" and generating Israel-friendly Muslim regimes) this will please them as well as the other props of the Bush administration, the neocons and the Christian fundamentalist right. The first of this triad may feel a certain necessity to pursue the Project for a New American Century scenario (regime change in Iraq, Iran, Syria) but differ from the neocons on the matter of urgency. One sees this in the Weekly Standard's repeated calls for Rumsfeld's resignation and for a dramatic increase in the size of the U.S. military over the next few years. You see it too in the PNAC's veiled call for a draft. The ideologically-driven neocons want to seize the time, and have the whole conquest done during the second Bush administration, no matter how creatively messy. Others in the administration seem inclined to proceed more slowly, projecting hostility to the targeted nations while declaring, as Condoleezza Rice recently did, that attacks are not on the agenda.
In any case, the "war on terror" is practically speaking primarily a war to transform Southwest Asia or what the neocons like to call "the Greater Middle East." The inclusion of North Korea in the "axis of evil" in Bush's shocking 2002 state of the union address was probably an effort to obfuscate this fact and make the evolving terror war, then in its initial stage, seem less specifically aimed at the Muslim world. The attention of the administration is, I believe, quite concentrated on Middle Eastern real estate.