After a surge of presidential popularity following 9-11, polls revealed increasing discontent with the social and economic policies of the administration. If there was to be any hope of maintaining political power, the Bush forces were virtually compelled to adopt what Anatol Lieven calls “the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism,”22 a strategy which is second nature to them in any event, having worked so well during their first twelve years in office.
The strategy was outlined by Karl Rove, the chief political adviser: republicans must “go to the country on the issue of national security” in November 2002, because voters “trust the republican party for protecting America.” Similarly, he explained, Bush will have to be portrayed as a wartime leader for the 2004 presidential campaign. “As long as domestic issues were dominating news coverage and political battles over the summer, Bush and his republicans lost ground,” the chief international analyst for UPI pointed out. But the “imminent threat” of Iraq was conjured up just in time, in September 2002. Recognizing its vulnerability on domestic issues, “the administration is campaigning to sustain and increase its power on a policy of international adventurism, new radical preemptive military strategies, and a hunger for a politically convenient and perfectly timed confrontation with Iraq.”23 For the midterm electoral campaign, the tactic worked—just. Even though voters “believe that republicans are more concerned about large corporations than about ordinary Americans,” they trust the republicans on security. 24 In September, the national security strategy was announced. Manufactured fear provided enough of a popular base for the invasion of Iraq, instituting the new norm of aggressive war at will, and afforded the administration enough of a hold on political power so that it could proceed with a harsh and unpopular domestic agenda. Again, the script of the first tenure in power is being followed closely, though now with greater fervor, fewer external constraints, and considerably greater threats to peace.
INSIGNIFICANT RISKS
The war with Iraq was undertaken with the recognition that it might well lead to proliferation of WMD and terror, risks considered insignificant compared with the prospect of gaining control over Iraq, firmly establishing the norm of preventive war, and strengthening the hold on domestic power.Evidence as to how seriously real security threats ranked on the priority list was provided immediately after the announcement of the imperial grand strategy on September 17, 2002. The administration at once publicly “abandoned an international effort to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention against germ warfare,” advising allies that further discussions would have to be delayed for four years. 25 As noted, in mid-October it was learned that during an earlier episode of playing with fire, the world was brought ominously close to nuclear war. Ten days later, on October 23, the UN Disarmament Committee adopted two crucial resolutions. The first called for stronger measures to prevent the militarization of space and thereby to “avert a grave danger for international peace and security.” The second reaffirmed the 1925 Geneva Protocol “prohibiting the use of poisonous gases and bacteriological methods of warfare.” Both passed unanimously, with two abstentions: the US and Israel. US abstention amounts to a double veto, banning the events from reporting and history. In the mainstream media, there was no mention of these failed attempts by the rest of the world to prevent serious threats to survival.The meager press coverage of the startling revelations at the Havana retrospective in October 2002 had little to say about the highly topical issues of international terrorism and forceful regime change, or about the Iraq connection, which was very much in the minds of the participants. On their way to Havana, they had surely read the letter sent by CIA director George Tenet to the senate intelligence committee chair, senator Bob Graham, reporting that although there was little likelihood that Saddam would initiate a terrorist operation with conventional weapons or any chemical or biological weapons he might have, the probability would rise to “pretty high” in the event of US attack. The FBI also reported concerns “that a war with Iraq could trigger new domestic terrorism risks,” as did the head of homeland security. The leading international military-intelligence journal and allied intelligence agencies drew the same conclusions, adding the further observation that a US attack could “globalize anti-American and anti-western sentiment. Attacking Iraq would intensify Islamic terrorism, not reduce it”: “a war in Iraq threatens to fuel unrest and create new terrorist threats, European security and police officials are warning their governments,” recruiting young people “to the ever-growing anti-US stand.” 26 Concurring, Richard Betts, a specialist on surprise attack and nuclear blackmail, wrote that in the event of a US invasion “Saddam will have no reason to withhold his best parting shot—which could be the use of WMD inside the US”—that is, activating networks already in place. “The odds may be low,” he observed. Those who have any concern for the safety and security of the US and other likely targets would not dismiss the odds as negligible.27
Mainstream experts agreed that an attack by the most powerful military force in history against a defenseless enemy might well stimulate the quest for revenge or deterrence. Prominent international relations scholars have pointed out that potential targets of US adventurism “know that the US can be held at bay only by deterrence,” primarily by WMD. In this way, “American policies stimulate the vertical proliferation of nuclear weapons and promote their spreading from one country to another.” The same policies stimulate terrorism: “Unsurprisingly, weak states and disaffected people lash out at the US as the agent or symbol of their suffering,” and if no efforts are made to address their grievances, they are likely to react with the means available to them, including terror. US intelligence added that the “deepening economic stagnation” caused by Washington’s version of globalization was likely to have similar effects.28 These warnings were not new. It had been recognized for some time that the industrial powers were likely to lose their virtual monopoly of violence, retaining only an enormous preponderance. Well before 9-11, technical studies had concluded that “a well-planned operation to smuggle WMD into the US would have at least a 90 percent probability of success.” This has become “America’s achilles’ heel” a study with that title concluded, reviewing the many options available to terrorists. The council on foreign relations task force study adds others. The imminence of the danger was evident after the 1993 attempt to blow up the world trade center, which, with better planning, might have killed tens of thousands of people, the WTC engineers reported. 29 It was also anticipated that an attack on Iraq might stimulate proliferation in more direct ways. Terrorism specialist Daniel Benjamin observed that an invasion might cause “the greatest proliferation disaster in history.” Saddam Hussein had proven himself to be a brutal tyrant, but a rational one.30 If he had chemical and biological weapons, they were kept under tight control and “subjected to a proper chain of command.” He would surely not put them in the hands of the Osama bin Ladens of the world, a terrible threat to Saddam himself. But under attack, Iraqi society might collapse, and with it the controls over WMD, which might be offered to the huge “market for unconventional weapons”—a nightmare scenario from every point of view.
This prewar establishment critique had a number of important features. First, it echoed concerns in the same circles about the posture of a “rogue superpower” that much of the world regards as the greatest threat to world peace and “the single greatest external threat to their societies.” Second, it encompassed an unusually broad spectrum of voices: the comments cited above come from US and world intelligence agencies; the world’s leading military journal; the January 2003 issues of the two major national foreign policy journals; an unusual publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; some of the most respected specialists on international affairs, terrorism, and strategic analysis; and even the “wizards of Davos” who dominate the world’s economy. Whatever one thinks of their judgments, it would not be easy to find a historical precedent for such a critique of a planned war, just as there was no precedent at all for popular opposition to a war prior to its being officially launched.Third, though this critique originated in the establishment, it was ignored. The administration made no effort to counter it, indeed hardly seemed to notice it, which makes sense. From a propaganda point of view, the most powerful state in history needs no justification or serious argument for its actions: declaration of noble intent should suffice. Just as the UN is informed that it can be “relevant” and authorize what we are going to do or suffer the consequences, so the world should be put on notice that the hegemonic power bears no burden of proof for its resort to violence, or any other action. It would be a derogation of authority to acknowledge, let alone refute, “critical noises” (to borrow McGeorge Bundy’s derisive phrase). The critics are right that the superpower stance might lead to self-destruction, but such concerns have commonly not been a high priority of leaders. In the present case, the administration was surely aware, even without warnings from respected authorities, that its planned war against Iraq and other related actions were likely to increase the risks of proliferation of WMD and terror against the US and its allies. But evidently it assigns low priority to such threats compared with other goals. Furthermore, though planners of course do not welcome the proliferation of WMD and terrorism, they know that they can exploit such developments for their own purposes, both global and domestic. Even the fear they elicit throughout the world is quite acceptable: they are not trying to be loved, but obeyed, and if this is achieved by fear, that is fine—another contribution to “maintaining credibility.”As for the goals, senior Middle East correspondent and analyst Youssef Ibrahim was no doubt oversimplifying when he identified them as “bolstering the president’s popularity” for short-term political gain and “turning a ‘friendly Iraq’ into a private American oil pumping station.”31 But there is good reason to believe that his observations at least point in the right direction. Maintaining a hold on political power and enhancing US control of the world’s primary energy sources are major steps toward the twin goals that have been declared with considerable clarity: to institutionalize a radical restructuring of domestic society that will roll back the progressive reforms of a century, and to establish an imperial grand strategy of permanent world domination. Compared with such ends, the risks may well seem insignificant.
THE WILD MEN IN THE WINGS
Establishment critics and the White House tended to focus on the same issues as the Security Council debates and the inspections: the Iraqi threat, WMD, and the subcategory of terror that enters the canon. None of the debates gave more than a passing nod to “democratization” or “liberation” or any other issues that lie beyond the potential threat to the US and its allies. There was little discussion, for example, of the possible effects of war on the population of Iraq, except among ‘the wild men in the wings,” to borrow the term used by McGeorge Bundy to refer to those who felt that more was involved in the Vietnam War than military success and its cost to the invaders. As Washington marched resolutely to war against Iraq, the wild men and women were again looking beyond the narrow question of the costs to themselves. With the Iraqi people at the edge of survival after a decade of destructive sanctions, international aid and medical agencies warned that a war might lead to a serious humanitarian catastrophe. Switzerland hosted a meeting of thirty countries to prepare for what might lie ahead. The US alone refused to attend. Participants, including the other four permanent security council members, "warned of devastating humanitarian consequences of a war.” Former assistant secretary of defense Kenneth Bacon, head of the Washington-based Refugees International, predicted that “a war will generate huge flows of refugees and a public health crisis.” Meanwhile, US plans for humanitarian relief in a postwar Iraq were criticized by international aid agencies as “short on detail, woefully lacking in money, and overly controlled by the military.” UN officials complained, “There is a studied lack of interest [in Washington] in a warning call we are trying to deliver to the people planning for war, about what its consequences might be.”32 Horrifying and brutal as Saddam Hussein’s regime was, he nevertheless did direct oil profits to internal development. “A tyrant, at the head of a regime that has turned violence into an instrument of state,” with a “hideous human rights record,” he nevertheless “had hoisted half the country’s population into the middle class, and Arabs the world over came to study at Iraqi universities.” 33 The 1991 war, involving the purposeful destruction of water, power, and sewage systems, took a terrible toll, and the sanctions regime imposed by the US and UK drove the country to the level of bare survival. 34 As one illustration, UNICEF’s 2003 Report on the State of the World’s Children states that “Iraq’s regression over the past decade is by far the most severe of the 193 countries surveyed,” with the child death rate increasing from 50 to 133 per 1,000 live births, placing Iraq below every country outside Africa apart from Cambodia and Afghanistan. Two hawkish military analysts observe that “economic sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called WMD throughout history,” over 500,000 according to conservative estimates. 35.
No westerners know Iraq better than Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the respected UN diplomats who were the chief UN humanitarian coordinators, with an international staff of hundreds of investigators traveling daily through the country. Both resigned in protest at what Halliday described as the “genocidal” character of the US-UK sanctions regime. Both reject claims that food and medicine were being withheld by the authorities. Their successor, Tun Myat, backed their view, describing the Iraqi system “as the best distribution system that he had ever seen in his life, as a World Food Program official.” The senior UN World Food Program official reported that the WFP had conducted more than a million inspections of the system and “uncovered no significant evidence of fraud or favoritism.” He added that there was “no way we could create something else that would work half as well” as the Iraqi system, which is “the most efficient in the world,” and that “the risk of a large-scale humanitarian crisis” would increase if anything happened to disrupt it. 36 As Halliday, von Sponeck, and others had pointed out for years, the sanctions devastated the population while strengthening Saddam Hussein and his clique, also increasing the dependency of the Iraqi people on the tyrant for their survival. Von Sponeck, who resigned in 2000, reported that the US and UK “systematically tried to prevent [him and Halliday] from briefing the security council because they didn’t want to hear what we had to say” about the savagery of the sanctions. 37 The US media apparently agree. Though the expert knowledge of the UN coordinators is without parallel, Americans have had to turn elsewhere to hear what they had to say, even at a moment of laser like fixation on Iraq. Discussion of the effects of the sanctions has been minimal and apologetic, the usual procedure with regard to the crimes of one’s own state.
Academic researcher Joy Gordon found that even the information that does reach the security council “is kept from public scrutiny,” though she learned enough, as have others, to reveal a shameful record of deliberate cruelty and efforts pursued “aggressively throughout the last decade to purposefully minimize the humanitarian goods that enter the country in the face of enormous human suffering, including massive increases in child mortality and widespread epidemics.” The US blocked water tankers from reaching Iraq on grounds so spurious that they were rejected by the UN arms experts, “this during a time when the major cause of child deaths was lack of access to clean drinking water, and when the country was in the midst of a drought.” Washington insisted that vaccines for infant diseases be withheld until it was compelled to back down in the face of vigorous protest by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, supported by European biological-weapons experts, who charged that the dual-use claims of the US were “flatly impossible.” 38