Excellent article, with lots of weblink citationsWhy World War IV Can't SellBy John Brown
In a recent essay ("Are We in World War IV?") Tom Engelhardt commented quite rightly that "World War IV" has "become a commonplace trope of the imperial right." But he didn't mention one small matter -- the rest of our country, not to speak of the outside world, hasn't bought the neocons' efforts to justify the President's militaristic adventures abroad with crude we're-in-World War IV agitprop meant to mobilize Americans in support of the administration's foreign policy follies. That's why, in his second term, George W. Bush -- first and foremost a politician concerned about maintaining domestic support -- is talking ever less about waging a global war and ever more about democratizing the world.
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The current administration, perhaps more than any other in history, illustrates George Kennan's observation that "
ur actions in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political life dominated by vocal minorities." Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that the war in Iraq was begun essentially for domestic consumption (as White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. suggested to the New York Times in September 2002, when he famously said of Iraq war planning, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August"). While all the reasons behind this tragic, idiotic war -- which turned out far worse than the "mission-accomplished" White House ever expected -- may never be fully known, it can be said with a strong degree of assurance that it was sold to the American public, at least in part, in order to morph Bush II, not elected by popular vote and low in the polls early in his presidency, into a decisive "commander in chief" so that his party would win the upcoming congressional -- and then presidential -- elections.
The neocons -- including, in all fairness, those among them honest in their unclear convictions -- happened to be around the White House (of course, they made sure they would be) to provide justification for Bush's military actions after 9/11 with their Darwinian, dog-eat-dog, "us vs. them" view of the world. And so their "ideas" (made to sound slightly less harsh than WWIV in the phrase Global War on Terrorism) were cleared by Rove and other GOP politicos and used for a while by a domestically-driven White House to persuade American voters that the invasion of Iraq was an absolute necessity for the security of the country.
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So, after all the administration has done to ruin America's moral standing and image overseas -- "preemptive" military strikes that violate simple morality and the basic rules of war; searching in vain for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction; mindlessly rushing to implement "regime change" in a far-off Third-World country, an ill-planned effort that could result in the establishment of an anti-western theocracy harmful to American interests; brutally incarcerating "terrorists" with little, if any, respect for international law; arrogantly bashing "old Europe" just to show off all-American Manichean machismo; and insulting millions abroad by writing off their opinions -- Americans are now being told by Dubya and his gang what we've really been up to all this time across the oceans: We're democratizing the Middle East, and with great success thus far!
I don't believe a word of it.
More at
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2293
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