Re: Not psychological denial (was RE: [Futurework] Denial and Deception

[Keith Hudson]

At 05:54 26/06/2003 -0400, you wrote:
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Status: U
I'm in blue, below.
Ed
>>>>

I'm not sure whether you are going to remain in blue when you get this back, but here goes: 
 
(KH)
> America has been virulently anti-imperialist ever since its earliest years.
> It was reluctant to get into WWI, and just as reluctant to be involved in
> WWII, and might never have done so until Pearl Harbour happened. At the
> Bretton Wood monetary talks, America tried to strip Britain bare of its
> foreign possessions by withholding support for Keyne's proposals. America
> is the most insular and parochial of all the countries in the world
> (probably because until recently it has been one of the most
> self-sufficient). Only 9% of Americans have foreign visas; even more
> incredibly so have only 12% of its Senators! Bush has only been out of the
> country twice! This sort of mind-set doesn't make for imperialism. (In
> contrast, I'd lay a bet that every single one of our 600-odd MPs have been
> to America at least once and at least half-a-dozen more foreign countries.)

(EW)
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Not sure I would agree that America has been all that insular.  Historically, it has been very active in regions that it considers its own sphere of interest, most notably the Carribean and Central America.  And one mustn't forget its involvement in Korea, Vietnam and Somalia.  It's been more a case of not wanting to get into "someone else's fight" until there is clear evidence that its interests are at stake.
>>>>

I'd exempt Korea and Vietnam from the general theme we're discussing -- those were consequences of the Cold war. As regards the others, yes, America has interfered, but not from imperialist motives, but for cordon sanitaire reasons (much the same as China has done in its 'supervision' of countries along its southern flank through to Pakistan).

(KH)
> I don't know what Andrew Bacevich's credentials are, but I would rather lay
> my money on the opinion of Paul Kennedy (in "The Rise and Fall of the Great
> Powers" and "Preparing for the Twenty-first Century"). In these books he
> lays down two general propositions about great powers. One is that while
> they are in their fastest phase of economic growth they don't worry about
> imperialism because other countries fall over themselves in offering
> resources to them. (Britain only went fully imperialist when it was being
> rapidly overtaken economically by America and Germany.) The other is that
> once great powers are in economic decline, it is then and only then that
> they start to spend much more on armaments than ever before in order to
> protect their supplies and trade routes -- and this can continue for as
> long as two generations after their economic peak.

(EW)
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I read "Preparing for the 21st Century" some years ago and have read parts of "...Great Powers".  Bacevich, as I read him, is not being a theoretical historian.  What he has attempted to do is catalogue American behaviour and explore why and how it broke out of its insularity to become the dominant global power.  Whether it has reached an apex is a moot point.  The seeds of decline are certainly there in the administration's domestic policies, and the US had better be careful.  Decline is also relative to something else rising.  At this stage of history, this would not seem to be another nation state (though perhaps Europe) but an increasing ground level resistance to its foreign adventures (terror, militants killing US soldiers).
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Well . . . I'd suggest that Bacevish is observing what Kennedy has already suggestged -- that America is really in decline (let's say, its economy as a proportion of the world's GDP) and is now trying to compensate for its growing (unconscious) inferiority. 
 
(KH)
> Now America doesn't exactly fit Paul Kennedy's second proposition (mainly
> because, I suggest, because the Cold War interpolated a temporary hump into
> their armaments spending) but there are some close similarities. It appears
> now to be increasing its armaments spending again even though it hasn't any
> particular enemy. (I doubt very much much whether this would decline in the
> future even under a Democratic president.*) America now has over 200
> military bases around the world but they're to protect its various
> interests, not as the or the outposts of a new empire. America could easily
> be imperialist in the usual sense of the term. For example, it could take
> over large chunks of South America and/or Africa with scarcely any
> resistance worth speaking of if it wanted to.

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(EW)
According to Bacevich, what the US has attempted to do is make its military so diversified and so technologically superior that it can accomplish anything far better than any other power.  To a considerable degree, it has succeeded in this, though it still has problems with guys taking pot shots at its soldiers.  It has also tried to make its military more efficient.  Here, because of inter-service rivalries, it has not succeeded.  The army and the marines duplicate each other.  Each service has its air arm.  Etc.
>>>>

Well . . .  now you're touching on military matters. Here we have a situation which is probably novel in the whole history of warfare where the invasion was so easy by the virtue of overwhelming technical superiority and yet the occupation is becoming more difficult by the day and probably impossible within 12 months. The Americans and the British will only be able to venture forth in tanks. It will be like Northern Ireland for the past 30 years (where there is still no possible agreement on an acceptable form of government), only ten times more complex. I cannot see how the Americans can ever devise any sort of government acceptable to the Iraqis that doesn't involve either former senior Baathists or the ever present danger of a takeoever of control by the Shias that would put the women back into burqas and set the clock back 50 years. The only way that the Americans could obviate the type of religious control that presently obtains in Saudi Arabia and Iran (both with constitutions that give primacy to Sharia law) is if it invaded those countries, too, and instituted some form of Arab government that would be imposed for 50-100 years until at least one generation had grown up with and through a decent educational system and were then capable of operating some sort of reasonably representative government.

There is another tremendously intriging situation in the Middle East and it is this. As you'll know, some immensely large gas and oil contracts between Saudi Arabia and western oil companies have been negotiated for the past tow or three years. The Saudi royal family have been eager to sign the deal, but the Wahhabi clerics have been insisting that the oil companies take on a great number of other projects as well -in order to soak up part of the ever-growing number of young unemployed young men in SA. The oil companies refused to do so and the talks collapsed completely a couple of months ago.

Now then, you'd think that the same oil companies would fall over themselves to help the Americans get the Iraqi oilfields back into full production and also develop the 70-odd untapped oil fields. Not so. The reason is that the oil authority now being set up by the Americans might be deemed by a later UN resolution or an international court of law to be illegal. The oil corporations will have already paid once for the oil they extract; they may be instructed to re-pay the rightful owners (the Iraqi government). So they may have to pay twice. So the paradox is that the large oil corporations are actually on the side of tghe angels.

Bush and Co are in much deeper water -- or, rather oil -- than they could ever have imagined possible! The trouble is that they didn't use their imaginations at all and took no notice of the advikce of the State Department when they thought up their wheeze.

It looks to me that there are going to be all sorts of internal strife between different parts of the American government from now onwards. The State Department, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon and the Bush group -- never mind Congress and the American Supreme Court, never mind the oil corporations or the UN -- all seem to have their own pronounced views on the matter.

  
(KH)
> But even though America is hardly taking any practical steps at
> establishing an administration in Iraq, it's going to sit in Iraq's
> oil-fields with its tanks for a long, long time however! And it's going to
> keep its Special Forces ringed around Saudi Arabia, and to maintain large
> forces in Kuwait, too. Of this I'm sure. But it doesn't want to govern
> them, or lord it over the natives, as imperial powers did of old -- it's
> merely protecting its oil supplies, that's all!

(EW)
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Here I disagree.  Bacevich quite persuasively makes the case that Americans see their way of life and their way of doing things is the best thing that ever happened to the world.  Yes, they want their oil supplies and the hegemony this brings, but they also want the world, including the Iraqis and everyone else in the Middle East, to become globalized, peace loving mutations of themselves.  Why people are to stubborn to accept this is a source of genuine puzzlement to them.

Well, yes. Bacevich is quite right here. The Americans see their form of democracy as somehow God-given and perfect. I can't speak for the condition of American government but if it's deteriorating as fast as the British variety has been in the last few years, then there'll be precious little that's democratic about it before too long. (Mind you, I cannot see how our present electoral system can work for very mnuich longer anyway because most problems are becoming too complex for even political parties to decide about, never mind the electorate. Some other form of government in which decisions are taken by expert constituencies -- such as the modern Chinese mandarinate ystem -- might have to come about.) No governmental system in history survives forever, and there's no reson why our present form of "democracy" should be exempt from that rule.

(KH)
> (*When Clinton came over here last autumn to address a special Labour Party
> convention he told the delegates that, of course, they must support Bush's
> policy on Iraq. He didn't say why -- just that "of course" they must
> support him. I was a bit surprised at the time, but since then I understand
> why Clinton supported Bush -- because the real reasons are seen to be vital
> for his country's future.)

 (EW)
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Americans don't have to say why.  It simply follows that if it's American, it's the best thing there is.
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Well, maybe. But I got the impression that Blair invited him to the conference to strengthen Blair's credibility as he was gathering his courage to support Bush. So, although Clinton didn't speak at length about the possible forthcoming war (that would have been too clumsy) he sujpported it in a folksy sort of way that went over well with the trad union section of the conference.

Keith Hudson

Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England