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News :: Miscellaneous |
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The Pentagon, Not Congress or the President, Calls the Shots |
Current rating: 0 |
by William Pfaff, IHT
(No verified email address) |
08 Aug 2001
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In a democracy, the military is subordinate to civilian authority.
If this situation is reversed, a nation is usually sliding toward facism.
It is quite possible that the United States already meets this definition.
ML |
PARIS - The State Department\'s policy planning director calls the Bush administration\'s foreign policy approach \"à la carte multilateralism.\"
The president and his advisers are said to think that treaties are old-fashioned. Current treaties will be reviewed to determine which of them the United States will continue to observe.
Behind this there seems an ideological hostility to international law, evident for some time among members of what used to be called the extreme right, but which, under Mr. Bush\'s presidency, has moved into the Republican mainstream.
This hostility has complicated sources in the American sense of national virtue and mission. But in practice, it comes down to a belief that treaties and international law threaten the United States because they limit its sovereign freedom.
Law substitutes international for national norms, and while Republican Washington is all for economic globalism, so long as it opens markets to American investment and trade, it is viscerally hostile to anything that constrains America\'s political or military options.
\"A la carte multilateralism\" thus looks uncannily like unilateralism, and is deeply influenced, moreover, by the Pentagon. Nearly all the international agreements that Mr. Bush opposes, or wants to repudiate, concern military matters.
First are the Anti-Ballistic Missile and Comprehensive Test Ban treaties, whose abolition or renegotiation would open the way to a defensive missile system, and almost certainly to the militarization of space.
Treaties already rejected concern a permanent international war crimes tribunal, a ban on land mines, restraint of the trade in small arms and bacteriological weapons inspections. The military objects to them all.
Mr. Bush campaigned saying that he would reform the military, meaning a thoroughgoing and overdue review of structures and strategy. So far, it looks as if the reform will fail.
He has proposed a 7 percent increase in military spending. The armed forces and their backers in Congress reportedly want at least twice that. If they do not get it, Mr. Bush will be attacked as the man who let America\'s post-Cold War preeminence slip away.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is said to want a shift in strategic priority from Europe and the Mediterranean to Asia, with development of new instruments and structures for long-range power projection, and less dependence on foreign bases.
This spring, he negotiated with the joint chiefs of staff to establish a set of \"strategic guidelines\" to govern reform. (Note that he \"negotiated\" these, even though he represents constitutional civilian authority over U.S. forces.)
The Rumsfeld guidelines were said to drop the old concept that the United States should be able to fight two major wars simultaneously. One war at a time was deemed sufficient. The new assignments given the military were nonetheless interpreted by the services as requiring even more money than the administration offered.
The Pentagon\'s unassailable power in Congress, and the electoral dependence of Congress upon military spending, means that it is all but impossible to change the military by cutting obsolete functions, missions or equipment.
In the spring issue of the New York quarterly World Policy Journal, William Hartung recalls that when President Dwight Eisenhower drafted his final address to the nation in 1961, he warned against \"the military-industrial-congressional complex.\" He took out the reference to Congress in the final draft of this famous speech because he decided that it was unfitting for a president to criticize Congress.
But Congress is the key to the problem. Over the past half-century the Pentagon has salted military installations or manufacturers into almost every congressional district. Voters profit from the military contracts and jobs. The military gets from Congress what it wants, and often more than it wants.
The Bush effort to reform the Pentagon may offer the last chance for reform, but Congress will decide whether the effort succeeds. The military is already the most powerful institution in American government, in practice largely unaccountable to the executive branch. Now the armed forces are setting the limits of American foreign policy.
The United States is not yet 18th-century Prussia, when the military owned the state, but the threat is more serious than most Americans realize.
Published on Monday, August 6, 2001 in the International Herald Tribune
Copyright © 2001 the International Herald Tribune |
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http://www.iht.com/frontpage.html
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