This is rather long, but a good read.
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The Only Superbad Power
January 25, 2004
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
It is difficult to believe that George W. Bush has been in
the White House for only three years. It seems ages now
that we have been living in a new world, in which his
administration is closely identified with new passions, new
fears, new enemies. Sept. 11, of course, is the dominant
reason; it has effectively divided our life into a
''before'' and an ''after,'' pushing the 20th century with
its hot and cold wars, its thickets of nuclear missiles and
its arguments into a foggy past. George H. W. Bush and Bill
Clinton managed the immediate consequences of the collapse
of Communism, but they did so when the presumption was
still that the main threat to the world had been lifted,
when there seemed no pressing need to define a new,
post-Communist order.
For better or for worse, it was left to George W. Bush to
propose that new order, and it hasn't worked out the way
many had expected -- a world in which arsenals would be
sharply reduced and democracies would cooperate in
resolving conflicts, ensuring human rights and protecting
the environment. Instead, Bush and his team disdainfully
chucked out containment and deterrence and declared that
America had the right to ensure its security any way it
deemed proper, including pre-emptive war. The triumphant
America of the 21st century would use multilateral
institutions only when it suited American aims. Not only
that; guaranteeing its safety required that America impose
its democratic values, starting in the Middle East.
Someday Bush may be proven right, and a harmonious chain of
friendly democracies may stretch from Central Asia to the
Mediterranean. For the time being, the new American order
has generated a tsunami of anti-Americanism, with the
United States perceived in some quarters as a greater
threat to world peace than Al Qaeda. Deep fissures have
developed between the United States and its allies;
American policies have threatened to undermine Europe's
drive toward unity; Muslims around the globe have turned
against the United States; many leaders in Asia now look to
China for their economic and political security; and
Americans themselves have become polarized in their
attitude toward the rest of the world. The ''war on
terrorism'' has gotten mired in an anarchic Iraq;
Guantanamo has come to represent a willful violation of
civil rights; and tyrants have seized on the concept of
pre-emptive war to justify their own suppression of
opponents, now labeled terrorists.
Not unexpectedly, the rise of so contentious a new order,
and the man who so unexpectedly launched it, have hatched a
considerable library of condemnation, all the more as his
re-election campaign gets under way. Of the books reviewed
here, two -- America Unbound'' and ''Crisis on the Korean
Peninsula'' -- can be classified as reasonably evenhanded,
though the first is broadly critical of the Bush approach
and the second implicitly so. The others leave no doubt of
what they think, ranging from George Soros's declared hope
that his book will contribute to sweeping Bush out of
office to Robert Jay Lifton's image of a ''malignant
synergy'' between the United States and Al Qaeda ''when, in
their mutual zealotry, Islamist and American leaders seem
to act in concert.'' From across the Atlantic, Emmanuel
Todd contributes the wistful notion that the United States,
the true empire and axis of evil in his view, is already
near collapse. These are only a portion of a swelling
anti-Bush literature, for now only partly offset by equally
ardent pro-Bush books.
However we may feel about the new order, Ivo H. Daalder and
James M. Lindsay -- two veterans of the Clinton National
Security Council now at the Brookings Institution and the
Council on Foreign Relations respectively -- pronounce what
Bush has done as nothing less than a ''revolution.''
''America Unbound'' is the most ambitious and important
study in this batch, not least because the authors
painstakingly develop the provocative thesis that the
president is not the Dubya of cartoonists, a dim puppet of
a cabal of old-guard hawks and neocons, but the master
puppeteer himself. ''George W. Bush led his own
revolution,'' they declare.
That is quite an accolade for a prodigal patrician who
metamorphosed into a born-again Christian and Texan and
slipped into the White House as the standard-bearer of
Reaganites and neo-cons. Though in the beginning he
exhibited a disdain for international institutions and
treaties and took some tentative swipes at Russia, China
and the axis of evil, there was little to suggest that the
early Bush harbored an ambition to reshape the world, or
for that matter had much real interest in foreign affairs.
It was 9/11, Daalder and Lindsay write, that provided the
catalyst for Bush to blend what could be called the
assertive nationalism of Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice;
the neoconservative vision of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard
Perle; and his own view, formed long before 9/11, that
success requires a clear resolve and the will to use power,
into a vision and a mission. That the mission could be
perceived as a pernicious new form of imperialism was
totally alien to Bush. America, he declared in Crawford in
August 2002, was ''the greatest force for good in
history.'' Conversely, those who assailed it were now
openly proclaimed as ''evil.''
Bush's views, Daalder and Lindsay say, came to rest on two
fundamental pillars. ''The first was that in a dangerous
world the best -- if not the only -- way to ensure
America's security was to shed the constraints imposed by
friends, allies and international institutions.'' The
second was that America ''should aggressively go abroad
searching for monsters to destroy.'' Never mind whether
Saddam Hussein -- or Yasir Arafat, Iran, Syria or North
Korea -- had anything to do with the fall of the twin
towers: they were the global evil America was ordained to
destroy.
It is inevitable that a foreign policy couched in biblical
symbols, eschewing subtleties and advanced by Texans,
oil-men, neocons and industrialists would be insufferable
to liberals, doves, internationalists and New Englanders
(conversely, remember what Bill Clinton did to
conservatives). One suspects that even the senior George
Bush occasionally looks out from his crag at Kennebunkport
on the policies of his firstborn with some misgiving.
Still, it is difficult to explain the level of loathing
that the junior Bush and his government have achieved among
otherwise rational liberals. The assaults in these books
range widely in theme and quality, and Bush's defenders are
likely, with some justification, to dismiss the more
strident writers as congenitally allergic to any
manifestation of American power. But the urgency with which
they sound the alarm requires attention. History is too
clear on what unconstrained power can lead to.
Among the books here, ''America Unbound'' deserves the
closest attention, as I have noted above. The research is
admirable, the arguments are well marshaled, and the
absence of stridency adds considerable authority to the
portrayal of Bush as a president whose ''worldview simply
made no allowance for others' doubting the purity of
American motives.'' Of the others, in the order of my
preference, ''The Sorrows of Empire,'' by Chalmers Johnson,
an Asia scholar and onetime consultant for the Central
Intelligence Agency who has become a fervent critic of
Washington's military policies, is an exhaustive --
sometimes exhausting -- study of the spread of American
military and economic control over the world. Johnson
produces voluminous research on the many United States
military and intelligence outposts unknown to most
Americans, and weaves a frightening picture of a
military-industrial complex grown into exactly the
powerful, secretive force that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned
against -- made more dangerous by an aggressive executive
branch, creating a state of perpetual war and economic
bankruptcy. His assessment is chilling: ''It is not at all
obvious which is a greater threat to the safety and
integrity of the citizens of the United States: the
possibility of a terrorist attack using weapons of mass
destruction or an out-of-control military intent on
displacing elected officials who stand in their way.''
''The Bubble of American Supremacy,'' by George Soros, the
billionaire investor with a foreign aid program of his own,
is a different exercise, more an extended essay than an
academic study. He proclaims at the outset that his purpose
is to do whatever he can to prevent Bush's re-election. In
a deliberate, didactic style, he indicts the administration
for hijacking 9/11 for its own ''radical foreign policy
agenda,'' and then concealing its true goals behind a
facade of freedom and democracy. ''When President Bush
says, as he does frequently, that 'freedom' will prevail,
in fact he means that America will prevail,'' Soros writes,
adding: ''I am rather sensitive to Orwellian doublespeak
because I grew up with it in Hungary, first under Nazi and
later Communist rule.''
Tariq Ali, a Pakistani-born novelist and writer who is an
editor of New Left Review in London, combines an often
compelling insider's perspective with a somewhat dated
diatribe on the ''triune evil'' of ''U.S. imperialism,
Zionism and Arab reaction.'' He depicts the American
occupation of Iraq as the latest misguided exercise of a
colonizing formula that ''has already wrecked much of Latin
America and the whole of Africa'': ''capitalist democracy =
privatization + 'civil society.' '' ''Bush in Babylon'' is
a curious little volume, drawing extensively on poetry and
personal recollections, with some valuable insights into
the sensitivities that explain why the occupying coalition
in Iraq is not being treated as a savior. Surmising, for
example, why American generals did nothing to protect the
cultural treasures of Baghdad, Ali writes: ''Having stirred
their soldiers to fight and destroy the 'ragheads,'
portrayed in briefings as uncivilized barbarians
responsible for 9/11, perhaps they were now fearful of
admitting that the 'ragheads' were a people with a
culture.''
Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist and writer,
perceives an ideologically driven administration locked in
an apocalyptic death-dance with Islamic radicals. A student
of apocalyptic behavior whose previous books deal with
Hiroshima, Nazi doctors and the Aum Shinrikyo cult in
Japan, Lifton alternates between informed passages on
extreme behavior and an often unconvincing application of
these theories to the Bush administration. At times,
''Superpower Syndrome'' descends into psychohistory-speak,
as in this riff on ''nuclearism,'' the embrace of the bomb
''as a source not only of transcendent power but of
life-sustaining security and peace, and in some cases as
close to a deity.''
As for the bomb, ''Crisis on the Korean Peninsula'' is
essentially an academic policy study on a troubling (some
say terrifying) question that the Bush White House has been
taking a hard line on -- North Korea and its nuclear
weapons -- stretched to the 200-odd pages required for a
book. The approach proposed by Michael O'Hanlon and Mike
Mochizuki, of the Brookings Institution and George
Washington University respectively, is a package in which
North Korea would surrender its nuclear weapons program in
exchange for large amounts of economic aid. Though it is
developed in considerable detail and sometimes intriguing,
it remains far from clear why North Korea would buy into
the deal.
I have saved a discussion of Emmanuel Todd's ''After the
Empire'' for last, not because I deem it least but because
it is the view of an outsider, and a highly troubling view
at that. I have been living in France for the past six
months, and I often wonder whether Americans are aware of
the depth of the dread and revulsion in which Bush's United
States is held by many foreigners. In Todd's study,
translated by C. Jon Delogu, a relentless condemnation of
everything American arises from an acute sense of betrayal.
A French historian and anthropologist trained at Cambridge
University in England and descended from Jews who were
refugees in America, Todd says he used to see the United
States as a model, as his ''subconscious safety net.'' Now,
he declares, it is solely a ''predator,'' living way beyond
its means, racking up video-game victories over defenseless
nations and undermining human rights. Nobody escapes Todd's
jilted fury -- not the American woman, ''a castrating,
threatening figure,'' and not American Jews, who have
''fallen into the disturbing, not to say neurotic, cult of
the Holocaust.'' Todd's solace is also his main thesis,
that American power is fast waning because of the country's
profligate spending: ''Let the present America expend what
remains of its energy, if that is what it wants to do, on
'war on terrorism' -- a substitute battle for the
perpetuation of a hegemony that it has already lost.'' This
is easy to dismiss as the rant of Old Europe (surprise:
Todd's book was a best seller in France). But that would
miss the point: his sense of betrayal is widely shared
around the world, even in places the White House likes to
portray as friends. Alas, I have heard too many people of
good will express profound disappointment with the United
States to reject Todd as an extreme or isolated voice.
Though I have lived abroad for many years and regard myself
as hardened to anti-Americanism, I confess I was taken
aback to have my country depicted, page after page, book
after book, as a dangerous empire in its last throes, as a
failure of democracy, as militaristic, violent, hegemonic,
evil, callous, arrogant, imperial and cruel. Daalder and
Lindsay may be constrained by an American sense of respect
for the White House, but they too proclaim Bush's foreign
policy fundamentally wrong. It is not only Bush's
''imperious style,'' they write; ''The deeper problem was
that the fundamental premise of the Bush revolution -- that
America's security rested on an America unbound -- was
mistaken.'' The more moving judgment comes from Soros, a
Jew from Hungary who lived through both German and Soviet
occupation: ''This is not the America I chose as my home.''
Serge Schmemann is the editorial page editor of The
International Herald Tribune.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/books/review/25SCHMEMT.html?ex=1075953033&ei=1&en=0dc5929185c03463
Iraq was a brilliant humanitarian gesture to the newly liberated Arabs free of the Turkish oppressors. Britannia ruled the waves in those days. The fact that the new Dreadnought and super Dreadnought class of battleship kicked **** out of the opposition in part because they were oil fired, and that Britain had no oil, but Iraq had lots, had of course nothing to do with the way we drew up the boundaries. 
