-Caveat Lector- Observer | With a friend like this...With a friend like this... America divides to control. It's a policy that could make even Bush's best friend Blair an antagonist
Nick Cohen Sunday April 7, 2002 The Observer http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,680100,00.html I don't need to be the seventh son of a seventh son to foresee that Tony Blair won't get Bush alone in his ranch today and ask the President to tell him, statesmano a statesmano, why America intervenes in the Middle East. The question is superfluous because the answer is too obvious to waste breath on. America sustains fundamentalist monarchs because it wants their oil. American policy is neo-colonialism to the left-wingers, and what any great power must do to protect an essential resource to conservative realists. Support for Israel, which has no oil and is the enemy of oil producing Arabs, confuses this simple reasoning. But it can be explained away as an aberration created by the enormous influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington. The big picture stays unclouded. Why is America attacked? Why will it march Britain into a needless war with Iraq? It's the oil, stupid. Anyone with half a brain knows that. As so often with realpolitik, the knowing arguments of Left and Right have no basis in real politics. America gets most of its oil from the Americas - Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and the USA itself. Only a quarter comes from the Persian Gulf. If it found supplies elsewhere - in Russia, for example - or contained its profligate burning of energy, the US would have little need to worry about the Middle East. It won't pull out because Washington wants to 'discourage' the 'advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership', while maintaining a military dominance capable of 'deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'. The quotes don't come from a babbling conspiracy theorist but from the Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance, which set out American strategy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A draft was leaked to the New York Times in 1992. Pentagon bureaucrats were appalled because, in their marvellous jargon, it hadn't been 'scrubbed'. What they mean was candid language for private consumption hadn't been swabbed away and replaced with a coating of euphemisms, carefully constituted to avoid any phrase which might stick in the reader's mind. The leak explained the thinking of a part of the Washington establishment with brutal clarity. If America didn't 'stabilise' - to use a verb which seems particularly inapt at the moment - the Middle East, Europe, Japan and China, which have a far greater dependence on Gulf oil, would move in and protect their interests. Although their interventions wouldn't necessarily bother America, in the long term they would grow into powers which would challenge its authority. Walter Russell Mead, a foreign-policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, explained the doctrine. 'We do not get that large a percentage of our oil from the Middle East... And one of the reasons that we are sort of assuming this role of policeman of the Middle East has more to do with making Japan and some other countries feel that their oil flow is assured... so that they don't then feel more need to create a great power, armed forces, and security doctrine, and you don't start getting a lot of great powers with conflicting interests sending their militaries all over the world.' America's friends are potential enemies. They must be in a state of dependence and seek solutions to their problems in Washington. Thus Europe was, rightly, castigated for its failure to stop Slobodan Milosevic's goons murdering and raping their way across the Balkans. Yet when Blair and Jacques Chirac proposed a European army which could operate independently, they were regarded with deep suspicion by Republicans and many Democrats, along with the American-controlled chunk of the British press in Wapping and Canary Wharf. Defense Planning Guidance was disowned after the New York Times printed its embarrassingly frank conclusions. Yet interest in it survives, not least because the prospectus for the American empire had impressive supporters. It was written by Paul Wolfowitz for Bush's father. Wolfowitz is now one of the leaders of the Pentagon hawks. Dick Cheney fought for it to be adopted as official policy in the early 1990s, and he is now Bush junior's vice-president. Their work from a decade ago keeps coming up when American foreign-policy intellectuals try to explain why US military bases circle the globe. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in January, Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, two security wonks, said it was the key to understanding why the Pentagon wanted military power which was greater than that of all the forces of all possible competitors put together. Wolfowitz's supporters believed that solutions to conflicts weren't necessarily in America's interests, they wrote. If North Korea, which somehow has been dragged into the fight against al-Qaeda, and South Korea reunited, US troops would pull out of the peninsula and Japan might feel the need to become militarily self-sufficient. Accordingly, 'the best situation is the status quo in Korea, which allows for US forces to be stationed there indefinitely.' Nicholas Lemann, a journalist on the New Yorker, chipped in with a description of how a senior Republican recently handed him a copy of Wolfowitz's report when asked what ideas were guiding Bush's administration. So what? ask Bush supporters. The US is a benign power. Worrying about its dominance is knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Much anti-Americanism is actually far worse than knee-jerk. Like anti-Semitism it is the 'socialism of fools'. Religious fundamentalists are against America because it represents modernity. We've no right to feel superior. I guess many Observer readers, myself included, wouldn't like to have their prejudices about McDonald's - no worse than any other supplier of industrial food - or Monsanto - not a shred of evidence that its GM crops endanger health - subjected to forensic cross-examination by a half-decent barrister. What we resent is the deplorable, but democratic, success of junk culture and junk food, and of a political system which seems to be run by corrupt imbeciles. But the deployment of 'anti-Americanism' as an insult which brands anyone who opposes Bush and his British sidekick as racist doesn't work. The same logic which Defense Planning Guidance uses to imagine a world where America can be the only grown-up also allows double standards which have destroyed the moral authority America held after 11 September. How can America (and Britain) declare war against Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction when the US won't accept any controls on its nuclear, chemical or biological weapons? How can the US call Saddam Hussein a war criminal, when it won't accept the jurisdiction of an international criminal court? The tensions America's anarchic unilateralism creates are at their greatest among the world's élite. European leaders have few problems with globalisation, but can't stomach Bush unilaterally imposing steel tariffs which make a nonsense of the very 'free' market America and Europe instruct the Third World to embrace. They have all but begged America to be allowed a junior role in the 'war' against terrorism. Their rejection puts them, somewhat to everyone's surprise, temporarily on the same side as the mass of the world's poor. The greatest worry a friend of America should have is how its insistence that it can leave no part of the world alone has created anti-Americanism not only in Muslim countries but in regions such as Latin America where bin Laden's theology means nothing. If you dream that everyone might be your enemy, one day they may become just that. 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