Who Rules the World? (7 page)

Alexander expresses only contempt for the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation methods: “The use of torture by the US,” he believes, not only elicits no useful information but “has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11.” From hundreds of interrogations, Alexander discovered that foreign fighters came to Iraq in reaction to the abuses at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, and that they and their domestic allies turned to suicide bombing and other terrorist acts for the same reasons.
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There is also mounting evidence that the torture methods Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld encouraged created terrorists. One carefully studied case is that of Abdallah al-Ajmi, who was locked up in Guantánamo on the charge of “engaging in two or three fire fights with the Northern Alliance.” He ended up in Afghanistan after having failed to reach Chechnya to fight against the Russians. After four years of brutal treatment in Guantánamo, he was returned to Kuwait. He later found his way to Iraq and, in March 2008, drove a bomb-laden truck into an Iraqi military compound, killing himself and thirteen Iraqi soldiers—“the single most heinous act of violence committed by a former Guantanamo detainee,” according to the
Washington Post
, and according to his lawyer, the direct result of his abusive imprisonment.
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All much as a reasonable person would expect.

UNEXCEPTIONAL AMERICANS

Another standard pretext for torture is the context: the “war on terror” that Bush declared after 9/11. A crime that rendered traditional international law “quaint” and “obsolete”—so George W. Bush was advised by his legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, later appointed attorney general. The doctrine has been widely reiterated in one form or another in commentary and analysis.
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The 9/11 attack was doubtless unique in many respects. One is where the guns were pointing: typically it is in the opposite direction. In fact, it was the first attack of any consequence on the national territory of the United States since the British burned down Washington, DC, in 1814.

The reigning doctrine of the country is sometimes called “American exceptionalism.” It is nothing of the sort; it is probably close to universal among imperial powers. France hailed its “civilizing mission” in its colonies while the French minister of war called for “exterminating the indigenous population” of Algeria. Britain’s nobility was a “novelty in the world,” John Stuart Mill declared, while urging that this angelic power delay no longer in completing its liberation of India. Mill’s classic essay on humanitarian intervention was written shortly after the public revelation of Britain’s horrifying atrocities in suppressing the 1857 Indian rebellion. The conquest of the rest of India was in large part an effort to gain a monopoly in the opium trade for Britain’s huge narcotrafficking enterprise, by far the largest in world history and designed primarily to compel China to accept Britain’s manufactured goods.
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Similarly, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Japanese militarists in the 1930s who were bringing an “earthly paradise” to China under benign Japanese tutelage as they carried out the Rape of Nanking and their “burn all, loot all, kill all” campaigns in rural northern China. History is replete with similar glorious episodes.
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As long as such “exceptionalist” theses remain firmly implanted, however, the occasional revelations of the “abuse of history” can backfire, serving only to efface terrible crimes. In South Vietnam, for instance, the My Lai massacre was a mere footnote to the vastly greater atrocities of Washington’s post–Tet Offensive pacification programs, ignored while indignation in this country was largely focused on this single crime.

Watergate was doubtless criminal, but the furor over it displaced incomparably worse crimes at home and abroad, including the FBI-organized assassination of black organizer Fred Hampton as part of the infamous COINTELPRO repression and the bombing of Cambodia, to mention just two egregious examples. Torture is hideous enough; the invasion of Iraq was a far worse crime. Quite commonly, selective atrocities have this function.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

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The Invisible Hand of Power

The democratic uprising in the Arab world has been a spectacular display of courage, dedication, and commitment by popular forces—coinciding, fortuitously, with a remarkable uprising of tens of thousands in support of working people and democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, and other U.S. cities. If the trajectories of revolt in Cairo and Madison intersected, however, they were headed in opposite directions: in Cairo toward gaining elementary rights denied by the Egyptian dictatorship, in Madison toward defending rights that had been won in long and hard struggles and are now under severe attack.

Each is a microcosm of tendencies in global society, following varied courses. There are sure to be far-reaching consequences of what is taking place both in the decaying industrial heartland of the richest and most powerful country in human history and in what President Dwight Eisenhower called “the most strategically important area in the world”—“a stupendous source of strategic power” and “probably the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment,” in the words of the State Department in the 1940s, a prize that the United States intended to keep for itself and its allies in the unfolding new world order of that day.
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Despite all the changes since, there is every reason to suppose that today’s policymakers basically adhere to the judgment of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s influential adviser Adolf A. Berle that control of the incomparable energy reserves of the Middle East would yield “substantial control of the world.”
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And correspondingly, they believe that loss of control would threaten the project of American global dominance that was clearly articulated during World War II and that has been sustained in the face of major changes in world order since that day.

From the outset of the war, in 1939, Washington anticipated that it would end with the United States in a position of overwhelming power. High-level State Department officials and foreign policy specialists met through the wartime years to lay out plans for the postwar world. They delineated a “Grand Area” that the United States was to dominate, including the western hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, with its Middle East energy resources. As Russia began to grind down Nazi armies after Stalingrad, the Grand Area goals extended to as much of Eurasia as possible—at least its economic core, in Western Europe. Within the Grand Area, the United States would maintain “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy,” while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs.
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These careful wartime plans were soon implemented.

It was always recognized that Europe might choose to follow an independent course; the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was partially intended to counter this threat. As soon as the official pretext for NATO dissolved in 1989, it was expanded to the east, in violation of verbal pledges to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It has since become a U.S.-run intervention force with far-ranging scope, as spelled out by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who informed a NATO conference that “NATO troops have to guard pipelines that transport oil and gas that is directed for the West,” and more generally protect sea routes used by tankers and other “crucial infrastructure” of the energy system.
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Grand Area doctrines license military intervention at will. That conclusion was articulated clearly by the Clinton administration, which declared that the United States has the right to use military force to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources,” and must maintain huge military forces “forward deployed” in Europe and Asia “in order to shape people’s opinions about us” and “to shape events that will affect our livelihood and our security.”
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The same principles governed the invasion of Iraq. As the United States’ failure to impose its will in Iraq was becoming unmistakable, the actual goals of the invasion could no longer be concealed behind pretty rhetoric. In November 2007, the White House issued a “declaration of principles” demanding that U.S. forces must remain indefinitely in Iraq and committing Iraq to privilege American investors.
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Two months later, President Bush informed Congress that he would reject legislation that might limit the permanent stationing of U.S. forces in Iraq or “United States control of the oil resources of Iraq”—demands that the United States had to abandon shortly after in the face of Iraqi resistance.
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In Tunisia and Egypt, the popular uprisings of 2011 have won impressive victories, but as the Carnegie Endowment reported, while names have changed, the regimes remain: “A change in ruling elites and system of governance is still a distant goal.”
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The report discusses internal barriers to democracy, but ignores the external ones, which as always are significant.

The United States and its Western allies are sure to do whatever they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world. To understand why, it is only necessary to look at the studies of Arab opinion conducted by U.S. polling agencies. Though barely reported, they are certainly known to planners. They reveal that by overwhelming majorities, Arabs regard the United States and Israel as the major threats they face: the United States is so regarded by 90 percent of Egyptians and by over 75 percent of the inhabitants of the region generally. By way of contrast, 10 percent of Arabs regard Iran as a threat. Opposition to U.S. policy is so strong that a majority believes security would be improved if Iran had nuclear weapons—in Egypt, 80 percent.
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Other figures are similar. If public opinion were to influence policy, the United States not only would not control the region but would be expelled from it, along with its allies, undermining fundamental principles of global dominance.

THE MUASHER DOCTRINE

Support for democracy is the province of ideologists and propagandists. In the real world, elite dislike of democracy is the norm. The evidence is overwhelming that democracy is supported only insofar as it contributes to social and economic objectives, a conclusion reluctantly conceded by the more serious scholarship.

Elite contempt for democracy was revealed dramatically in the reaction to the WikiLeaks exposures. Those that received the most attention, with euphoric commentary, were cables reporting that Arabs support the U.S. stand on Iran. The reference was to the ruling dictators of Arab nations; the attitude of the public went unmentioned.

The operative principle was described by Marwan Muasher, former Jordanian official and later director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment: “The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control. With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground.”
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Adopting that principle, if the dictators support us, what else could matter?

The Muasher doctrine is rational and venerable. To mention just one case that is highly relevant today, in internal discussions in 1958, President Eisenhower expressed concern about “the campaign of hatred” against us in the Arab world, not by governments, but by the people. The National Security Council (NSC) explained to Eisenhower that there is a perception in the Arab world that the United States supports dictatorships and blocks democracy and development so as to ensure control over the resources of the region. Furthermore, the perception is basically accurate, the NSC concluded, and that is exactly what we should be doing, relying on the Muasher doctrine. Pentagon studies conducted after 9/11 confirmed that the same perception holds today.
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It is normal for the victors to consign history to the trash can and for victims to take it seriously. Perhaps a few brief observations on this important matter may be useful. Today is not the first occasion when Egypt and the United States are facing similar problems and moving in opposite directions. That was also true in the early nineteenth century.

Economic historians have argued that Egypt was well placed to undertake rapid economic development at the same time that the United States was in this period.
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Both had rich agriculture, including cotton, the fuel of the early industrial revolution—though unlike Egypt, the United States had to develop cotton production and a workforce through conquest, extermination, and slavery, with consequences that are evident now in the reservations for the survivors and the prisons that have rapidly expanded since the Reagan years to house the superfluous population left by deindustrialization.

One fundamental difference between the two nations was that the United States had gained independence and was therefore free to ignore the prescriptions of economic theory, delivered at the time by Adam Smith in terms rather like those preached to developing societies today. Smith urged the liberated colonies to produce primary products for export and to import superior British manufactured goods, and certainly not to attempt to monopolize crucial goods, particularly cotton. Any other path, Smith warned, “would retard instead of accelerating the further increase in the value of their annual produce, and would obstruct instead of promoting the progress of their country towards real wealth and greatness.”
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Having gained their independence, the colonies simply dismissed his advice and followed England’s own course of independent state-guided development, with high tariffs to protect industry from British exports (first textiles, later steel and others), and adopted numerous other devices to accelerate industrial development. The independent republic also sought to gain a monopoly over cotton so as to “place all other nations at our feet,” particularly the British enemy, as the Jacksonian presidents announced when conquering Texas and half of Mexico.
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