"The U.S.-made World Crisis and the Greens"

By John F. Foran, Jr.

This is work in progress analyzing the current crisis in a way that tries to draw out some of its implications for the Green Party.

The world presently faces one of its most acute crises in the memory of anyone now living. This is hardly a controversial statement, but it is a surprising state of affairs from the point of view of September 10, 2001, or November 1, 2000. The coming to power of the Bush administration through a fraudulent electoral victory set the tone for what can now be seen as one of the most dangerous moments for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Brazil, North and South Korea, or Israel/Palestine -- among many others -- and the planet's population as a whole, not to mention the people of this country. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 permitted the imposition of an extremist, aggressive foreign policy (even by U.S. standards) aimed at making and unmaking governments in the Middle East and potentially far beyond. The policy is not only dangerous for the world's citizens but it is also risky for U.S. and other elites, the project of neoliberal globalization that enlightened transnational capitalists are engaged in, and, as is becoming increasingly apparent, for the Bush administration itself

This is in addition to the existing and increasingly acute evils of world poverty and hunger, ecological suicide, social and state violence against women and populations of color, the erosion of welfare states and democratic rights, and other pressing problems of the age of U.S.-led corporate globalization

The central questions of our time may well be: How did this state of affairs come to pass? Where is it heading? And, most importantly, what can be done about it?

My position is that we need more ample and supple conceptual tools to make sense of current U.S. policy -- its historical roots, covert goals, overt strategies, unforeseen and uncontrollable consequences, and its inevitable contradictions. We should entertain the hypothesis that it represents a break with the past, or at the very least, an extreme version of a continuity, one that is qualitatively different and more dangerous. This is a policy with an obvious economic motive, but also possessing political, cultural, social psychological, gendered, and racialized dimensions. If this is so, we need to develop a sociology of U.S. foreign policy that can attend to these layered causes and bring some of their interconnections into view.

So what was the war about then? I, along with many other critical analysts of U.S. foreign policy, think it was driven by a plan to assert U.S. control and hegemony on the world scene. Hegemony -- a search for domination based in part on the consent of the majority -- is precisely one of those objects that requires the sort of multi-sided analysis I have just called for -- it cannot be reduced to an economic, or a geo-strategic, foundation alone. In the case at hand, its roots go back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a revolution which deposed the shah of Iran, the United States' strongest ally ever in the Middle East (besides Israel, of course). In the 1980s, the Reagan administration sought a pretext to undo or "roll-back" the negative consequences of this event, and to reassert U.S. dominance in a situation of economic decline vis-à-vis Europe and East Asia. The U.S. covertly supported both Iraq and Iran in their bloody war against each other during the 1980s, and afterwards continued its pattern of quiet but significant amounts of economic and military support for Saddam Hussain right up to his invasion and occupation of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

As was the case more recently, the first Bush administration gave the public various justifications for its actions during the course of the 1990-91 crisis: that it was there to defend freedom and democracy (but there was little of either in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia) or to defend the "American way of life," a rather vague but perhaps effective appeal.

At the time, the Christic Institute, headed by Daniel Sheehan, proposed what seemed to many a highly conspiratorial alternative explanation. And ere we enter the weird realm of the déjà vu, for back in 1991 the Christic Institute published a paper arguing that the hidden aims of Operation Desert Storm included the following: to re-establish U.S. hegemony in the Gulf and assure access to cheap oil; to assert U.S. leadership in the world; to militarize society and avoid a cut in defense spending; and to divert attention away from the domestic problems of recession and unemployment (a list that seems strikingly relevant today). When Saddam misplayed his hand, based on past U.S. support, and went too far, annexing all of Kuwait, this provided an excellent opportunity for the first Bush government to project the Reagan roll-back onto the crisis. Thus the U.S. rushed into war, gave sanctions little time to take effect, and bought the support of key votes in the United Nations to authorize a military attack. The U.S. may not have known what Saddam would do, but they both indirectly encouraged the invasion, and were almost immediately prepared to counter it with massive force, with devastating consequences for the people of Iraq in military and civilian casualties in the war itself, the failure to support the uprising (besides Israel) by Kurdish and Shi'ite opponents of the regime at the war's end, and the sanctions and genocidal health epidemic that followed throughout the 1990s.

The first Bush administration used military force to send the message that it headed the world's most powerful nation in this one -- military -- sense. The hope was that economic and political dominance would follow from this. But the Gulf War of 1990-91 didn't reverse the economic or political decline of the U.S. vis-à-vis the advanced industrial world. Nor did it have the desired "demonstration effect." Saddam Hussein wasn't intimidated. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda didn't get the message. Kim Jong Il's North Korea concluded that the only way to defend his country against U.S. designs was to develop a credible nuclear deterrent. Some genuine progressives -- such as Lula in Brazil -- began to articulate alternatives to neoliberal globalization. By 2002, historic U.S. allies such as France and Germany were very publicly disagreeing with the new Bush administration before it launched its war, and much of global capital -- the new transnational elite of corporations, banks, and organizations such as the WTO -- has watched with immense concern as well.

Let's backtrack a few years. The second Bush administration stole the elections of 2000 and came to power abetted by what was, in effect, a coup by the Supreme Court. A small, ultra-conservative group of strategic thinkers associated with PNAC -- the Project for a New American Century -- then stole the foreign policy of the Republican Party in pursuit of a future in which "the U.S. blocks any other competitor nation from challenging its dominance as the world's single great power" (http://www.newamericancentury.org). Most of the intellectual authors of this vision are now well known to us: administration figures Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith; political figures such as Jeb Bush, Dan Quayle, and Newt Gingrich; and such "intellectual adornments" (Ali 2003) as Francis Fukuyama, Henry Kissinger, Zalmay Khalilzad, Kenneth Pollack, William Kristol, and Robert Kagan. What eventually came to be known as the "Bush doctrine" has three main elements: 1) to achieve the capacity to strike any future threat in a pre-emptive manner, without international support if need be; 2) to actively pursue regime change in the same way, and 3) to open world markets for U.S. exploitation, starting with the Middle East's oil producers.

The terrorist attacks of September 11 -- like Saddam's invasion of Kuwait a decade earlier -- provided the administration with an opportunity to project its new but still unstated foreign policy agenda onto the crisis. There is substantial evidence that plans to attack Iraq predated September 11 (Lobe 2003). Indeed, it's now well known that Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Kristol, and Kagan were among the signatories of a 1998 letter to then president Bill Clinton that the U.S. should attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussain. The attacks of September 11 conveniently allowed the administration to deal with the confusion brought to U.S. policy by the end of the Cold War, for now new enemies could be constantly found or created in the Muslim world and elsewhere; they could be attacked in wars that can be won (if only on the battlefield); this would justify an ever more massive military budget; and all of this blocks any move toward a less militarized society. In fact, it has allowed the large steps toward an authoritarian police state taken by Attorney General John Ashcroft and the so-called Patriot Act, suggesting that war -- to further extend Clausewitz's dictum that it is a continuation of politics -- is also an extension of domestic politics. Nor let us forget Tariq Ali's (2003: 18) apt aphorism: "Economics, after all, is only a concentrated form of politics, and war a continuation of both by other means." If the first Gulf War, then, was based on a project of international hegemony through roll-back, the March 2003 Gulf War followed the same lines in a more extreme direction: a project of imperial hegemony through unilateral pre-emptive war abroad and manipulation of public opinion coupled with a climate designed to demonize dissent at home.

And what is the administration's real goal domestically? Let us speculate: militarization of society and economy, a terror state, the erosion of democracy at home and abroad, an ideological and frontal assault on the global justice movement, all in the name of a highly elusive pursuit of global economic, political, and moral paramountcy. The contradictions are numerous and leap readily to mind: alienation of the transnational corporations and elites already mentioned; further loss of global economic advantage as the U.S. runs the risk of economic collapse under the burden of debt and the specter of deflation; the possibility of U.S. and world recession becoming a global depression. In sum, the policy increases the risk of a rather acute crisis of global capitalism.

Hegemony + even the thinly concealed (and hotly denied) imperial version of Bush and team -- of course, requires consent. This is perhaps the major contradiction at the heart of the Bush administration's goals. In Iraq itself, many parties and groups have called for a broad-based conference to elect a transitional government, only to be rebuffed by chief U.S. administrator Paul Bremer, who formed instead a pliant advisory council in late July 2003 to provide the thinnest veneer of legitimacy for U.S. occupation and rule (Milne 2003). One of the leaders of the Shi'ite community, Abdul Karim al-Enzi, commented succinctly within weeks of the war's end: "Democracy means choosing what people want, not what the West wants" (quoted in Smith 2003). Denied the fruits of democracy and self-determination, the armed guerrilla resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq will only grow, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism. These words were written in June 2003.

In my view, then, the recent war was rooted in the loss of U.S. dominance in the Middle East over the past twenty years and the U.S. decline as an economic power despite winning the Cold War, and an attempt to roll back the effects of all this through the assertion of military power, even without international or domestic support.

I would like to suggest that rather than the policy of strength it appears to be, this is actually a policy based on a sense of desperation and confusion in the face of a world that is rapidly changing, and reflects the underlying crisis and loss of confidence by a portion of the U.S. political elite in its position in that world. Some of this desperation and confusion is now coming more plainly into view as things really aren't going well in Iraq. Yet, this risky, madcap strategy by a small gang of very right-wing intellectuals endangers the whole world, and requires our utmost attention until it is reversed, a topic to which I hope we return before the afternoon is over.

The policy also has roots in the projects and desires of this extremist wing within the Republican Party + whose deepest motivations for a policy that seems so irrational require that we bring further conceptual tools to bear. I would contend that social psychology, feminist studies, and critical race studies offer important insights into the deeply fundamentalist roots of U.S. foreign policy and its ingredients of Orwellian thought, patriarchy, racism, and Orientalism (and speaking of Orientalism, I should like to dedicate this essay to the late Edward Said , who modeled so well for us the activist-scholarship that is needed today).

The Orwellianism is poignantly captured by Wendell Berry's characterization of the National Security Strategy paper of 2002, with its eerie echoes of PNAC's foundational statements: "This document affirms peace; it also affirms peace as the justification of war and war as the means of peace and thus perpetuates a hallowed absurdity.... One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears" (2003: 5-6). Equal measures of a sense of old-fashioned if unstated "civilizing mission" and "white man's burden" mix easily with a late capitalist triumphalism among U.S. policy-makers. The easy blending of racism and Orientalism is seen in the implicit discourse of Iraq as a "sick society" in the popular press of the U.K and U.S. and the use of this as a justification for the delay of democratization in Iraq. This has its reflection on the ground, as in the telling remarks of a U.S. soldier: "The Iraqis are a sick people and we are the chemotherapy. I am starting to hate this country. Wait till I get hold of a friggin' Iraqi. No I won't get hold of one. I'll just kill him" (from the Sunday Times, as quoted in Ali 2003: 14-5).

In a February 2003 journal entry that is worth quoting at length, writer Wallace Shawn has tried to evoke the social psychology of the administration in terms that capture the patriarchal and racist culture it bathes in, raising the question of whose leaders are sick:

"Why are we being so ridiculously polite? It's as if there were some sort of gentleman's agreement that prevents people from stating the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated and thrilled by the thought of war, by the thought of the incredible power they will have over so many people, by the thought of the immensity of what they will do, by the scale, the massiveness of the bombing they're planning, the killing, the blood, the deaths, the horror....

"From the first days after the World Trade Center fell, you could see in their faces that, however scary it might be holding the jobs they held, however heavy the responsibility might be for steering the ship of state in such troubled times, they in fact were loving it. Those faces glowed. You could see that special look that people always have when they've just been seized by that most purposeless of all things, a sense of purpose. This, combined with a lust for blood, makes for particularly dangerous leaders, so totally driven by their desire for violence that they're almost incapable of hearing anyone else's pleas for compromise or for peace....

"In other words, the only thing you can really say about them is that like all of those who for fifty years have sat in offices in Washington and dreamed of killing millions of enemies with nuclear weapons and chemical weapons and biological weapons, these people are sick. They have an illness. And it's getting to the point where there may be no cure" (Shawn 2003: 26).

The great English critic John Berger notes the emotional undercurrent of fear and deception -- is it self-deception? -- behind policy-makers' hubris and lack of humanity:

"The victors, with their historically unprecedented superiority of weapons -- the victors who were bound to be victors -- appeared frightened...

"Day and night the partners of fear are anxiously preoccupied with telling themselves and their subordinates the right half-truths, half-truths that hope to change the world from what it is into something it is not. It takes about six half-truths to make a lie. As a result, these leaders become unfamiliar with reality, while continuing to dream about and, of course, to exercise power" (2003: 34-5).

Berger goes on to suggest the limits of this exercise of power, as well as the stakes: "Married to fear, deserted by the dead, they still wield incomparable power, both economic and military, and are terrifyingly dangerous. But in the long run, can their power survive? Ask the dead and the not-yet-born. I doubt it" (2003: 35).

Can we imagine, perhaps, a different approach to responding effectively to the challenges posed by al-Qaeda? Let us start by thinking about al-Qaeda neither as a state to fight a war with, not as a social movement to repress, but rather as a network, differing in structure and activity from more movement-like organizations such as Hamas and Hizbollah. All three are part of the larger web of Islamist movements of a variety of stripes that is far from uniformly "terrorist." This underscores the reality that al-Qaeda is not a state-like entity that can be fought in conventional military terms. What if we adopted something like the mirror opposite of current policies -- namely, not fighting the wars that Osama bin Laden wants the U.S. and the West to fight -- in Iraq, Syria, Iran -- and not taking a military approach at all, but rather one of careful international police work to apprehend a small criminal network (at least it was small before we occupied Iraq), plus deep social and economic development instead of military intervention in the Middle East? This would require an administration that does not inculcate an insidious culture of fear to buttress a racist political culture and an imperialist mentality, and a narrowing of civil liberties at home equating dissent with treason. This is patently impossible for the Bush administration (and hard for any foreseeable U.S. government). Here we should be reflecting on whether John Kerry will be much better. As Peter Ustinov has put it: "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich" (quoted by Berger 2003: 34). So this "war" will likely continue, as will the occupation of Iraq.

One of Bush's few ways out of his own political crisis is in fact to wage another war -- a risky but politically "rational" course that a desperate administration might take. Norman Mailer worries about an even more cynical scenario, one which points to the power of discourse in the present crisis, noting "the unhappy likelihood that Bush and Company are ready to be hit by a major terrorist attack. As well as any number of smaller ones. Either way, it will strengthen his hand. America will gather about him again. We can hear his words in advance: 'Good Americans died today. Innocent victims of evil had to shed their blood. But we will prevail. We are one with God.' Given such language, every loss is a win" (2003: 65).

Working against the inevitability of further pre-emptive wars are the questions already raised by the U.S.'s historic allies, and the worries that the silence of the world financial elite conceals. The truly unsolvable problem of ruling Iraq after the war, and the fact that no one has a viable plan for doing this, should be giving those making the current policy -- as it does the whole rest of the world -- some pause.

Part Two: The Greens and the Global Justice Movement

In the face of such real danger to the planet and its people, what should Greens do?

We might start with the observation that the neo-con dream of the U.S. becoming the world's sole power in the post-Cold War is increasingly being countered by the growing strength of "the other superpower" -- the global justice movement for peace, economic justice, and real equality bubbling up from below, so extraordinarily impressive world-wide and in the U.S. It showed that it has support all over the world on February 15, 2003 when millions of people came together in public. It struck another strong blow at the WTO's Ministerial Meetings in Cancun in September, and again at the FTAA deliberations in Miami in December. It celebrated its diversity and growing numbers at the World Social Forum last month in Mumbai, India.

We -- and I include myself in this movement -- will gather again on March 20,2004 -- the one-year "anniversary" of the invasion of Iraq -- in many countries, and here at home in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, Boston, but also in Eureka, San Jose, Fresno, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Riverside, and San Diego; in Buffalo, Charlotte, Portland, Pittsburgh, Providence, Atlanta, Dallas, Santa Fe, Seattle, Milwaukee, Detroit, Des Moines, Lincoln, Jackson, New Orleans, Augusta, and Baltimore (this list is from the A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) website: http://www.internationalanswer.org; you can also go to http://www.unitedforpeace.org).

We need to be patient and creative, stay together and make allies, and much more. If we do all this, and with the help of many others, then the next war is not inevitable. Indeed, the defeat of the Bush administration becomes very much a possibility. And I am quite interested in discussing how people think about this, in terms of the coming election and the roles of Democrats, Greens, and oppositional social movements in them.

The central question facing the Greens is: How can we do our part in the struggle from below for global justice? The Green Party is a magnificent source of ideas, and of hope.

It is a party of action and an agent of deep social change, and we need to live up to that in a responsible way. The good news for those who want the defeat of Bush at all costs + and that indeed follows as a necessity from the analysis I have offered here -- is that there is a healthy and fairly vigorous debate going on at every level of the Green Party, at least here in California, about the ways to both accomplish this and to strengthen and build the party.

Greens need to find constructive ways of mounting a decisive critique of the Bush administration in the months to come, a critique that soon will no longer be heard in the corporate media, as Dennis Kucinich follows Howard Dean out of the race for the Democratic nomination. John Kerry is not going to make anything like that critique, and he is not banking on it being necessary for Bush's defeat; indeed, he can't really think in its terms. But in a close election -- and by all accounts that is what we are in for again -- this critique and the voters it might bring to the polls on November 2 -- could well prove decisive. Before we blame the Greens for the Democrats losing another election, let's ask what the Democrats need to do to attract the several million people who supported Nader in 2000. Let's not blame anyone, or better put, let's act in ways that avoid the need for blame after the results are in.

The end of the Cold War has an upside for progressive movements that activists are increasingly aware of. Let's construct alternative institutions, foreign policies, coalitions, ideas. Let us defeat this administration electorally, culturally, and in social movements on a global scale. We need to be patient and creative, stay together and make allies, and fight hard and wisely in 2004, but also far beyond.

Another world is possible, as the global justice movement likes to say. Or as the Zapatistas put it, "We want a world in which many worlds fit." We should dream the dream of stopping war and starting a real revolution, the democratic revolution that will turn things right-side up in this country and make it possible for the rest of the world to move forward toward solving some real problems. Nothing is inevitable if we take action. Let us resolve to decide together the ways to do this.

Works cited

Ali, Tariq (2003) "Recolonizing Iraq," New Left Review 21 (May/June), 5-19.

Berger, John (2003) "Fear Eats the Soul," The Nation (May 12), 33-35.

Berry, Wendell (2003) "A Citizen's Response to the National A Security Strategy of the United States," Orion (March/April), available at http://www.oriononline.org

Christic Institute (1991) "Covert Operations, the Persian Gulf War and the `New World Order'," policy paper. Washington, D.C.: Christic Institute.

Foran, John (2003) "Sociology and the U.S.-made World Crisis." In Political Power and Social Theory.

Lobe, Jim (2003) "Faulty Connection." http://www.TomPaine.com (July 15, 2003).

Mailer, Norman (2003) Why Are We at War? New York: Random House.

Milne, Seumas (2003) "The Right to Resist," The Guardian (June 19).

Shawn, Wallace (2003) "Fragments From a Diary," The Nation (March 31), 25-27.

Smith, Daniel USA (2003) "Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire," Foreign Policy in Focus (June 2003), online at http://www.fpif.org