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Pro-U.S. Pundits Should Get Real |
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by Peter Scowen
(No verified email address) |
20 Apr 2003
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Since the end of World War II, American foreign policy has almost never been about spreading democracy or the liberation of suffering people. |
What the hell is happening to right-wing thinkers?
Once a group that prided itself on its unerring ability to see the world exactly as it is, free of self-delusion and naïve hope, they have gone all sentimental and idealistic — exactly the characteristics they so despise in left wingers.
You know what is meant by left wingers, of course. These are people who, as Robert Fulford recently wrote in the National Post, embrace "Utopian ideas that everyone would like to believe in and most of us would embrace if they were not so foolish."
He was referring to the Utopian idea that an international body such as the United Nations can be effective in maintaining world peace, and to the Utopian notion that nations should not invade other nations unilaterally — "unilaterally" being defined in this case as acting against the wishes of one's traditional allies but with the backing of opportunistic hucksters running barely operational gangster states, plus Tony Blair and the Solomon Islands.
Multilateralism and diplomacy are the foolish fantasies of people living in a dream world, according to clear-sighted Fulford.
The British right-wing publication The Spectator made a similar claim in its April 12 issue.
One correspondent wrote that European nations that do not accept America's self-given right to invade any country it and it alone decides is a threat are doing so because of "a mixture of hypocrisy and delusion" and because of "fashionable" left-wing ideas about George W. Bush's reputation as an idiot. Again, the left is cast as being wilfully blind to the reality around it.
And that "reality" is this: International security cannot survive international co-operation.
No, what the world needs is one all-powerful nation on a permanent war footing willing and able to send its troops around the globe to liberate people suffering under repressive regimes, and to dispatch terrorists with metallic bolts of lightning thrown from an invincible force in the sky.
Fulford wrote that the world is now divided into two camps: those who recognize that "America has become the only nation with sufficient power to do what must be done — curb or destroy dictators, encourage democracy, make terrorism unbearably hard for terrorists and their managers" — and "anti-American bigots" who "consider the new American style an abomination and call them bullies."
The Spectator, which clearly steals all its ideas from the National Post, wrote that "the U.S.A. is the only country that has the capability to defend and expand the liberal democratic world."
Bush made the same point in a speech at a Boeing plant in St. Louis on Tuesday, telling the workers who help create America's invulnerable air superiority that the U.S. military will "maintain every advantage in weaponry and technology and intelligence."
Like it or not, America will, for years to come, dominate the politics of every region of the world with its firepower. And this is where the right goes all mushy on us.
It is Utopian in the worst sense to believe that the world is better off when a single, overtly aggressive nation becomes militarily unstoppable, as long as that nation happens to be the United States of America and not, for instance, England or Germany.
Fulford wrote that Americans, "as they use their power abroad, will use it on the side of democracy." He believes these reluctant invaders will be unable, because of their nature, to create "an imperial caste of administrators and soldiers."
A Spectator columnist wrote that simply seeing a fledgling American-created democracy next door in Iraq will inspire Syrians and Iranians "to attempt a similar enterprise in their own countries."
In short, absolute American dominance will spread democracy worldwide and be tempered by an altruism that America's supporters believe is innate to the United States.
Someone needs to bring these mushy idealists down to Earth.
Since the end of World War II, American foreign policy has almost never been about spreading democracy or the liberation of suffering people.
It has often not even been about fighting communism. Since 1945, a disturbingly large portion of American actions overseas have been inspired solely by political or commercial self-interest, even if they have been dressed up as nobler pursuits.
The CIA planned and executed a coup in Iran in 1953 to preserve British and American control of the country's oil.
The grotesque attack on democracy in Chile in the 1960s and '70s, also at the hands of the CIA, was done on behalf of American corporations fearful of seeing Chilean resources fall under the control of Chileans.
The arming and training of Contra terrorists to overthrow the democratically elected Nicaraguan government in the 1980s was done at the behest of a president, Ronald Reagan, who wanted to send the world a message by reasserting America's might.
The same base desires were cruelly at play in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in the 1980s and have also informed America's inaction in the face of multiple slaughters in Africa.
Nor is it true that Americans don't have a taste for imperialism. The long-suffering residents of Okinawa and the displaced native people of Diego Garcia are living contradictions to any claim that Americans are "unwilling to make their foreign dependencies into homes."
The people of Seoul, Korea, have had to live for decades with an American military base in the very center of their city, effectively making them a human shield against any attack on the base (the U.S. military this month finally agreed to move out of what in Toronto would be the equivalent of a six-block radius with the intersection of Yonge and Bloor as its center point).
The Americans have not left Qatar, Bahrain or Kuwait, and have no intention of doing so.
And the U.S. henceforth will have permanent bases in Iraq that will be operated by military lifers who will very much resemble the British colonels of India.
Well, a country can change, the mushy right-wing sentimentalists will say.
Possible but unlikely, given that the administration and advisory orbit of George W. Bush are riddled with reactionary ideologues who gleefully participated in the repression of innocent civilians in the past: Elliott Abrams, for instance, who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the CIA-backed Contras and their campaign of terror in Nicaragua (he was pardoned by George H. W. Bush in 1991); or the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, who, as ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s, ignored the disappearance of hundreds in that country at the hands of a CIA-trained death squad.
No, the United States can provide little or no evidence that its absolute military dominance of the planet will be beneficial to anyone but itself and its ideological allies. There is no rational reason to believe we are headed into what has been called a "magnificently revolutionary" period.
There is reason to wish we were, of course, but wishful thinking is the domain of the deluded.
There is no excuse for the otherwise reliably unsentimental right wing to suddenly get all misty-eyed about the prospects of a kinder, gentler aggressor spreading peace around the globe because that's just the kind of guys they are.
Absolute power, Americans are saying, gives them the right to bomb whomever they want.
Absolute power also does other things, of course, a long-proven axiom ignored by the new breed of bleeding-heart conservatives.
They should pull themselves together.
Peter Scowen is the author of "Rogue Nation: The America The Rest Of The World Knows (McClelland & Stewart). He is also the Star's Arts & Entertainment editor.
Copyright 1996-2003. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited |
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