Mother Jones Daily: War Watch
May 12, 2003
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Occupation Watch: 
Weapons Watch: 
The Great Game If Washington's true aim is empire-building, it may be time to revisit a quarter century of American wars.
Asleep at the Atomic Wheel
Washington seems to be strangely of two minds when it comes to questions of nuclear proliferation: One standard for the US, another for the rest of the world. 
The Great Game
Now that we're again discussing the United States as an empire, a question comes to mind: How new is all this anyway?
Certainly, we're acting in a way and on a global scale that is staggering; certainly, our imperial basing system has now penetrated areas, like the various 'stans of Central Asia, that were out of bounds in the two-superpower world of the Cold War. But then, we've been fighting these small, colonial-style, lopsided wars with remarkable regularity in the post-Vietnam era. Each of them has had an explanation (or in the case of Iraq maybe ten of them) and, depending on who you are, any of those explanations -- "humanitarian intervention," "the war against terrorism," bringing democracy and liberation (or even simply 'regime change') to some benighted land -- may have made sense to you. But taken together they call out for a different set of questions, for a different framework.
In fact, most of them even taken individually, but in a larger context, call out for another way of looking at matters. For instance, let's say for the sake of argument that we are indeed bringing democracy to Iraq, which I imagine the Iraqis might indeed appreciate. Well, as Toronto Star columnist Haroon Siddiqui points out, both before and after this war to bring democracy to Iraq the Bush administration has juggled bases and military allies in a great arc of lands stretching from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, and "the singular feature of all those new allies is that they are weak states. Most are undemocratic, if not repressive." So the American gift of democracy in Iraq, should it someday appear, will be part of a larger "gift" of support for a whole shelf full of undemocratic and repressive regimes.
I wouldn't mind seeing someone revisit our wars of the last quarter century en masse from our invasion of the island of Grenada through our second Iraq War. For instance, one now forgotten but fascinating little war of ours (they're never so little, of course, for the recipients) was our invasion of Panama, which in a sense might be considered our first Iraq war. Like Saddam, Noriega, the man who ruled Panama was a former "asset" and onetime ally, who was repositioned as an evil-doer (though he was no more evil when we opposed him than when we supported him). Then, of course, young Bush's father committed "regime change" (though without the term) by sending in the air force and having our troops invade Panama City.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman, one of the first mainstream opinion writers to suggest early in the prewar period that war in Iraq would be a matter of empire-building returns to the subject to consider what kind of "half-hearted" empire we are -- or rather how uninformed Americans really are about the imperial stakes their leaders are playing for. (And it's true that I, too, will be curious to see where exactly the money, not to speak of the will, to "reconstruct" Iraq will ever come from, given an occupation which still doesn't seem to have been able to restore minimal telephone service in Baghdad weeks after the war.)
The Bush administration may be half-hearted about its promises (and about what it cares to tell the American people about our imperial aims), but militarily, in terms of bases and control, it's clearly been playing the "Great Game," so familiar to British imperialists, for all it's been worth. Of course the Brits thought they were playing in Central Asia against the Russians. But who are we shadow-boxing against? Could it be against the people, that "other superpower" of history (as Jonathan Schell and others including myself have suggested), who may have swept empires and tyrannies galore aside in recent history, but have yet to operate at a supra-national level? (This is what, by the way, made the pre-war global demonstrations, like the antiglobalism movement, so new and important.)
On Foreign Policy in Focus, Conn Hallinan suggests that -- as our government moves quietly into alliance with India -- we may, at least in part, be shadowboxing against the country our neocons fear as the next superpower: China. This is an intriguing thought, and it fits with much right-wing writing and strategizing in the period before the Sept. 11 attacks.
But I wonder as well whether the greatest imperial changes haven't been taking place not abroad but at home -- a subject on which far less of interest has been written. Sheldon Wolin has a piece in The Nation which is worth looking at -- although as with a number of other pieces in this period, I find the comparisons to Nazism, however muted, simply to be over-the-top. They obscure what's actually happening here and, given the Holocaust, unavoidably ring the wrong bells. But take a look for yourself because his warning about the changes in the American polity is worth heeding.
Asleep at the Atomic Wheel
In recent months, our press has been filled to the brim with pieces about weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear weapons in particular. The Iranian program to build such weapons was front-page news just today; the North Korean program has been on front pages for weeks; and the Iraqi program that wasn't quite ... well, you know. I thought, though, it might be worth highlighting the sorts of nuclear pieces that we don't tend to see as much of, starting with a horrifying report from Jalal Ghazi of Pacific News Service on the looting of the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, the headquarters of Saddam Hussein's former nuclear program. You would have thought, given the explanations the Bush administration offered us for our second Iraq war, that one set of places certain to be quickly seized and tightly guarded would have been those well-known and much visited nuclear facilities, but guess again...
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Then, while our military was asleep at the Iraqi nuclear wheel, the most recent issue of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists details just how asleep our Nuclear Regulatory Commission (and implicitly our whole new homeland security bureaucracy) has been at the domestic nuclear-plant wheel. Or rather, to emphasize the positive, while we've allegedly gone abroad to stop terrorists from bringing the sorts of radioactive materials that may now be missing from Tuwaitha here, at home the NRC has been preparing each of our nuclear power plants, functionally a pre-emplaced dirty bomb, for a terrorist assault by three (possibly now five) five terrorists armed with nothing more serious than rifles. Planes or boats... not in your lifetime, it seems.
At least, as James Sterngold of the San Francisco Chronicle recently pointed out, our men in research and development are never asleep at the wheel. Quite the opposite, they're driving full speed through the long, dark night, responding to our nuclear-proliferating planet, it turns out, with plans for whole new realms of nuclear weapons -- and all that needs to happen is for Congress to repeal one teeny-weeny, nasty little amendment that's been on the books for a while and... but read on.
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute.
