Ed wrote:
A
good book on neo-con origins, connections and rise to power is "America Alone"
by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, Cambridge, 2004.
Here is more backstory history about the
neoconservative movement, possibly in decline, unless you consider the steps
taken to assure permanency. Interesting and provocative commentary,
although motive is only implied.
Much like the arguments about the pros and
cons of globalization, if one ignores the enduring bond of local culture and
community, the advances of technology will be exploited and/or
fail.
Shock,
awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons
Iraq has shown the
hubris of a geostrategy that welds the philosophy of the Leviathan to military
and technological power
Richard
Drayton, The Guardian UK, Wednesday, December 28,
2005
The tragic irony of the 21st century is
that just as faith in technology collapsed on the world's stock markets in
2000, it came to power in the White House and Pentagon. For the Project for a
New American Century's ambition of "full-spectrum dominance" - in which its
country could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars" - was
a monster borne up by the high tide of techno euphoria of the
1990s.
Ex-hippies talked of a wired age of
Aquarius. The fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of the internet, we were
told, had ushered in Adam Smith's dream of overflowing abundance, expanding
liberty and perpetual peace. Fukuyama speculated that history was over,
leaving us just to hoard and spend. Technology meant a new paradigm of
constant growth without inflation or recession.
But
darker dreams surfaced in America's military universities. The theorists of
the "revolution in military affairs" predicted that technology would lead to
easy and perpetual US dominance of the world. Lieutenant
Colonel Ralph Peters
advised on "future warfare" at the Army War College - prophesying in 1997 a
coming "age of constant conflict". Thomas
Barnett
at the Naval War College assisted Vice-Admiral
Cebrowski
in developing "network-centric warfare". General
John Jumper
of the air force predicted a planet easily mastered from air and space.
American forces would win everywhere because they enjoyed what was unashamedly
called the "God's-eye" view of satellites and GPS: the "global information
grid". This
hegemony would be welcomed as the cutting edge of human progress. Or at worst,
the military geeks candidly explained, US power would simply terrify others
into submitting to the stars and stripes.
Shock
and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance -
a key strategic document published in 1996 - aimed to understand how to
destroy the "will to resist before, during and after battle". For
Harlan
Ullman
of the National Defence University, its main author, the perfect example was
the atom bomb at Hiroshima. But with or without such a weapon, one could
create an illusion of unending strength and ruthlessness. Or one could deprive
an enemy of the ability to communicate, observe and interact - a macro version
of the sensory deprivation used on individuals - so as to create a "feeling of
impotence". And one must always inflict brutal reprisals against those who
resist. An alternative was the "decay and default" model, whereby a nation's
will to resist collapsed through the "imposition of social
breakdown".
All
of this came to be applied in Iraq in 2003, and not merely in the March
bombardment called "shock and awe". It has been usual to explain the chaos and
looting in Baghdad, the destruction of infrastructure, ministries, museums and
the national library and archives, as caused by a failure of Rumsfeld's
planning. But the
evidence is this was at least in part a mask for the destruction of the
collective memory and modern state of a key Arab nation, and the manufacture
of disorder to create a hunger for the occupier's
supervision.
As the Süddeutsche Zeitung
reported in May 2003, US troops broke the locks of museums, ministries and
universities and told looters: "Go in Ali Baba, it's all
yours!"
For
the American imperial strategists invested deeply in the belief that through
spreading terror they could take power. Neoconservatives such as Paul
Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and the recently indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
learned from Leo
Strauss
that a strong and wise minority of humans had to rule over the weak majority
through deception and fear, rather than persuasion or compromise. They read
Le
Bon
and Freud on the relationship of crowds to authority. But most of all they
loved Hobbes's
Leviathan.
While Hobbes saw authority as free men's chosen solution to the imperfections
of anarchy, his 21st century heirs seek to create the fear that led to
submission. And technology would make it possible and
beautiful.
On
the logo of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, the motto is Scientia est potentia - knowledge is
power . The IAO promised "total information awareness", an all-seeing eye
spilling out a death-ray gaze over Eurasia. Congressional pressure led the IAO
to close, but technospeak, half-digested political theory and megalomania
still riddle US thinking. Barnett, in The
Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action,
calls for a "systems administrator" force to be dispatched with the military,
to "process" conquered countries. The G8 and a few others are the "Kantian
core", writes Barnett, warming over the former Blair adviser Robert Cooper's
poisonous guff from 2002; their job is to export their economy and politics by
force to the unlucky "Hobbesian gap". Imperialism
is imagined as an industrial technique to remake societies and cultures, with
technology giving sanction to those who intervene.
The
Afghanistan war of 2001 taught the wrong lessons. The US assumed this was the
model of how a small, special forces-dominated campaign, using local proxies
and calling in gunships or airstrikes, would sweep away opposition. But all
Afghanistan showed was how an outside power could intervene in a finely
balanced civil war. The one-eyed Mullah Omar's great escape on his motorbike
was a warning that the God's-eye view can miss the human
detail.
The
problem for the US today is that Leviathan has shot his wad. Iraq revealed the
hubris of the imperial geostrategy. One small nation can tie down a
superpower. Air and space supremacy do not give command on the ground. People
can't be terrorised into identification with America. The US has proved able
to destroy massively - but not create, or even control. Afghanistan and Iraq
lie in ruins, yet the occupiers cower behind concrete
mountains.
The
spin machine is on full tilt to represent Iraq as a success. Peters, in
New
Glory: Expanding America's Supremacy,
asserts: "Our country is a force for good without precedent"; and Barnett, in
Blueprint,
says: "The US military is a force for global good that ... has no equal." Both
offer ambitious plans for how the US is going to remake the third world in its
image. There is a violent hysteria to the boasts. The narcissism of a decade
earlier has given way to an extrovert rage at those who have resisted
America's will since 2001. Both urge utter ruthlessness in crushing
resistance. In November 2004, Peters told Fox News that in Falluja "the best
outcome, frankly, is if they're all killed".
But
he directs his real fury at France and Germany: "A haggard Circe, Europe
dulled our senses and fooled us into believing in her attractions. But the
dugs are dry in Germany and France. They deluded us into prolonging the affair
long after our attentions should have turned to ... India, South Africa,
Brazil."
While
a good Kleinian therapist may be able to help Peters work through his weaning
trauma, only America can cure its post 9/11 mixture of paranoia and
megalomania. But Britain - and other allied states - can help. The US needs to
discover, like a child that does not know its limits, that there is a world
outside its body and desires, beyond even the reach of its toys, that suffers
too.
Dr
Richard Drayton, a senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, is the
author of Nature's Government, a study of science, technology and imperialism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1674403,00.html
