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/CONT/

"That's why American nationalism isn't narrow or parochial. It doesn't 
believe in closing our borders or fearing the global economy. It does 
believe in resisting group rights and multiculturalism and other 
tendencies that weaken our attachment to our common principles. It 
embraces a neo-Reaganite foreign policy of national strength and moral 
assertiveness abroad.  

"This American understanding of greatness is friendly to private 
property, prosperity and progress. And it isn't unfriendly to government, 
properly understood. After all, as Lincoln reminds us, it is 'through this 
free government which we have enjoyed' that Americans have secured 
'an open field and a fair chance' for our 'understanding, enterprise, and 
intelligence'. Free government - limited but energetic - is not the enemy. 
It can be used, in the spirit of Henry Clay and Teddy Roosevelt, to 
enhance competition and opportunity. In sum, national-greatness 
conservatism does not despise government."  

Thus the foundation of the Age of Holy War had been laid a good five 
years before terrorism changed America on September 11. This Holy 
War is based on US exceptionism, unilateralism and the spread of 
American values. It is the American version of the Augustian and 
Napoleonic empires, which unlike the British empire that kept arms-length 
tolerance for local culture, justified its imperialism on the spread 
of superior universal values. Neo-conservatism rejects the long tradition 
of American attachment to multiculturalism. It also reverses America's 
tradition of being apologetic for its power. Pushing beyond Teddy 
Roosevelt's "manifest destiny" with "speak softly but carry
a big stick", 
the neo-cons advocate an American missionary empire with loud 
shouting and hitting with a big stick.  

Lawrence F Kaplan, a senior editor at the New Republic, and William 
Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, co-authors of the forthcoming 
book, The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission, 
described George W Bush, in the Wall Street Journal on January 29, as 
"Neither a Realist Nor a Liberal, W Is a Liberator" who holds a 
fundamentally different world view from previous administrations. To 
them, self-declared "realists" believe that foreign policy should be 
grounded in vital interests - oil wells, strategic chokepoints and most
of all, regional stability. They prefer order over liberty. It was in
Iraq that the first Bush team's realist foreign policy philosophy
manifested itself most clearly. Once Kuwait was liberated, the senior
Bush team redirected its energies toward ensuring Iraqi "stability"
- even if it had to be enforced by Saddam.  

Kaplan and Kristol criticized Clinton's Iraq policy as reflecting very 
different assumptions about America's role in the world, a world view 
that reduced a complex and dangerous world environment to a simple 
narrative of material progress and moral improvement. According to the 
Clinton administration's scorecard, it was not the integrity of 
containment or even the value of keeping Saddam disarmed that 
mattered. Far more important was the imperative of avoiding war. 
As Henry Kissinger, the master of realpolitik, said: "Peace, too, 
is a moral imperative."  

Kaplan and Kristol see realists and liberals as approaching the world 
from different directions, but when it comes to Iraq, both ended up in the 
same place: generating excuses for inaction. Bush, by contrast, does 
not speak of merely containing or disarming Iraq. He intends to liberate 
Iraq by force, and create democracy in a land that for decades has 
known only dictatorship. Moreover, he insists that these principles apply 
to American foreign policy more broadly. A century of fighting dictators 
has finally alerted US policy makers to the fact that the character of 
regimes determines their conduct abroad - their willingness to resort to 
aggression, their determination to acquire weapons of mass destruction, 
and their relationships with terrorist groups.  

The neo-con commentators concluded, "Hence, the Bush strategy 
enshrines 'regime change' - the insistence that when it comes to dealing 
with tyrannical regimes like Iraq, Iran, and, yes, North Korea, the US 
should seek transformation, not coexistence, as a primary aim of US 
foreign policy. As such, it commits the US to the task of maintaining 
and enforcing a decent world order. Just as it was with the Bush team's 
predecessors, Iraq will be the first major test of this administration's 
strategy. It will not be the last."  

The last sentence lingers in the mind of all the world's governments. 
Since September 11, Bush has declared repeatedly, "If you are not with 
us, you are against us." There is no co-existence, no neutrality and no 
non-alignment. Be part of the American system or be destroyed.  

What if the new US task of enforcing a new world order comes up 
against a power with nuclear deterrent or other forms of weapons of 
mass destruction? In this respect, the failure of other great nuclear 
powers to intervene in the US invasion of Iraq, to preserve the existing 
world order of nation states, can be viewed as a new Munich that will 
lead to another global conflict.  

Anticipating World War IV, Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of 
Commentary Magazine, writing in February, 2002: How To Win World 
War IV - the Cold War being World War III - characterized the first Gulf 
War as "an act of military and political coitus interruptus". Podhoretz 
observed that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear 
sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels that there was a 
purpose behind his election all along: as a born-again Christian, he 
believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from 
the world. The president himself defined it from the start in very broad 
terms. Our aim was not merely to capture or kill Osama bin Laden and 
wipe out the al-Qaeda terrorists under his direct leadership in 
Afghanistan. The governments that gave terrorists help of any kind - 
sanctuary, money, arms, diplomatic and logistical support, training 
facilities - would either join us in getting rid of them or would also 
be regarded as in a state of war with the US. Bush was unequivocal. These 
governments, he repeated over and over again, were either with us in the 
war against terrorism, or they were against us: there was to be no 
middle or neutral ground.  

In defining the war and the enemy in such terms, the president, 
seconded by both major political parties and a vast majority of the 
American people, was acknowledging the rightness of those who had 
been stubbornly insisting against the skeptical and the craven alike that 
terrorism posed a serious threat and that it could not be fought by the 
police and the courts. Perhaps most important of all was the corollary of 
such an analysis: that, with rare exceptions, terrorists were not 
individual psychotics acting on their own but agents of organizations 
that depended on the sponsorship of various governments. Thus the war 
on terrorism is essentially a war against hostile governments. Bush, 
with about 90 percent of the people and a nearly unanimous Congress 
behind him for a war against terrorism, had more than enough political 
support to act on his own, without permission from anyone, or any other 
government.  

But if the coalition was unnecessary both from a political and from a 
military point of view, and if the inclusion within it of states harboring 
terrorists undermined and obfuscated the moral clarity of the war we 
were determined to wage, why did the administration devote so much 
energy to assembling it?  

Podhoretz's explanation is that getting a minimal endorsement from as 
many predominantly Muslim states as possible helped create the 
impression that the war was not against Islam but against terrorism. 
The aim is to begin a transformation of the Middle East that could 
provide many benefits to the populations of an unfree region. That will, 
in the end, make Americans infinitely more secure at home.  

Thus the failure of the oceans to protect the US from external threat now 
compels the US to attack all around the world who are not with it in its 
war on terrorism. It is conceivable that the US can prevail over all other 
national governments militarily, but it is pure fantasy that the US can 
spread US-styled democracy and freedom all over the world, even with a 
new 100-year war. Or that true democracy and freedom around the 
world would support US national interests. A healthy dose of realism 
and multiculturalism will save the world from impending self destruction 
by superpower theocracy. Either way, it spells the end of the age of 
superpower because military power, as demonstrated in Afghanistan 
and Iraq, causes more problems than it solves.  

Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.


Source: Information Clearinghouse ...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3355.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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