ABUL KALAAM shows how the present American policy is based on expansionism, unipolarity and abuse of powers granted by US constitution.
From the late 19th century, the United States has pursued an aggressive policy of expansionism to extend its political and economic influence around the globe. It was the most unlikely turn that a colony took after its cherished desire of establishing a society of equals on the basis of justice and equal opportunity. In essence, the so-called globalisation slogan, as Zbigniew Brzezinsky put it, was “in its essence meant global interdependence.” But by the time Brzezinski’s The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership appeared, the neo-cons, especially US Vice President Dick Cheney and his coterie, had already determined the direction of the US foreign policy towards global dominance. Years ago they had totally rejected the idea of a multi-polar world, even “bi-polarity.”
This December marks the anniversaries of two of the most important documents of the US ruling class’ imperialist policy. These documents epitomise the American imperialists’ paternalistic worldview, which they used to maintain the political and economic interests of the United States, and to expropriate the markets, raw materials and labour of the peoples of not only the western hemisphere but of the entire world. The Monroe Doctrine of December 2, 1823 and the Roosevelt Corollary to it of December 6, 1904, are the bedrocks of the US expansionism and interventions which have caused so much misery, death and impoverishment for millions across the world in the last two hundred years.
The Monroe Doctrine was created to project the United States’ sphere of influence into the Americas and fill the void left by Spain. It was also due to the upstart nation’s fear of Latin American colonisation by powerful European imperialists. The first application of the doctrine was the “internal imperialism” against the indigenous peoples of North America. The US obliterated entire civilizations in the US move westward. Hundreds of thousands of square miles belonging to Mexico were “acquired” as well.
A succession of presidents invoked the Monroe Doctrine in the annexations of Texas, California, Oregon, and fended off European interest in the Yucatan and Mexico. It was also used as the justification for the building of Panama canal to control world shipping and commerce.
THE ROOSEVELT COROLLARY
In 1902, Venezuela could no longer placate the demands of European bankers and pay back its debt. The British, Italian and German navies blockaded its coastal fortifications. Theodore Roosevelt became fixated on the prospects of re-colonisation of the southern hemisphere, and in 1903, he matched the European threat with a threat of its own, warning the combatants that Admiral Dewey’s fleet would intervene. The European navies immediately withdrew.
Roosevelt’s Corollary became an amendment to the Monroe Doctrine and launched the era of the U.S. infamous “big stick” or “big brother policy” and opened the bloody history of U.S. involvement on a grand scale around the world.
Though it has gone through many ideological contortions including “dollar diplomacy”, the “good neighbour” policy, the “Reagan Doctrine” and most recently, the “Bush Doctrine”, the content has remained the same. Some of the mechanisms of control include the IMF and World Bank, NAFTA, CAFTA, and now the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. It is clear from the above how the Monroe Doctrine has been used to dominate the cultures, political lives, and economies of the world, all the while integrating the natural resources, as well as productive and financial structures into a system of capital accumulation for the benefit of U.S. hegemony.
From 1798 to 1993, the U.S. used its armed forces to intervene in other countries 234 times and in last 15 years we have seen major incursions in Yugoslavia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
ISLAMISTS THREAT AS A JUSTIFICATION
Following the cold war, Americans went through a period of some uncertainty about what their foreign policy should be. A cause around which the country could be mobilised was lacking. Issues of nuclear proliferation, rogue nations such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and “failed” mission in Somalia were not good enough to develop against a background of anxiety about the growing hostility of the Islamists toward the US. Samuel P. Huntington’s argument that a war between Islam and the western civilizations is on its way followed by the September 11 event brought the uncertainty to an end. The Bush administration instantly launched its open-ended “War on Terror,” which despite President Bush’s denial has turned into an all out war on Muslims and Islam. The “war between the two clashing civilizations” – Islamic militants taken as representative of much of Islam and the United States as the champion of the West – was unconditionally accepted as a global cause by its traditional allies.
US PLACE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
Every country has a mythical “story” it tells itself about its place in the contemporary world. We are familiar enough with the American story, beginning with the City on a Hill and progressing through Manifest Destiny toward Woodrow Wilson’s conviction that we are “to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty… It was of this that we dreamed at our birth.”
The current version of the story says that this exalted US destiny is fatefully challenged by the Islamist terrorists and by Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Something close to Huntington’s war of civilizations has begun. National mobilisation has already taken place. Years of struggle lie ahead.
The delusion of “divinely assigned destiny to lead the world by the nose” has made the “isolation” of the United States from the rest of the world total. The fact is that its claim about the threat of Islamic terrorism seems to the rest of the world grossly exaggerated, and the US reaction, as Brzezinsky himself argues, dangerously disproportionate.
Most advanced societies have already had, or have, their wars with “terrorism”: the British with the IRA, the Spanish with the Basque separatist ETA, the Germans, Italians, and Japanese with their Red Brigades, the French with Algerians, Greeks, Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians with their own varieties of extremists.
America’s principal allies should no longer believe its claim of “Islam as the global threat to the world” story. They have tried to believe in it for the last six years, and have been courteous about it even while scepticism grew about Iraq. They are alarmed about what has happened to the United States under the Bush administration, and see no good coming from it. The reaction of the rest of the world is often to marvel at the Americans’ inability to appreciate that the source of the problem lies in how the United States has conducted itself since September 2001. They find this changed United States rather menacing.
Even Francis Fukuyama, a recovering neoconservative, in his recent book acknowledged that American economic and political policies today rest on an unearned claim to privilege, the American “belief in American exceptionalism that most non-Americans simply find not credible.”
A claim by any nation to pre-eminent political virtue is a claim to power, a demand that other countries yield to what Washington asserts as universal interests. Since 1989, when the end of the cold war left the United States the “sole superpower,” much has been made of this, with discussion of a benevolent (or even inevitable) American world hegemony or empire – a Pax Americana in succession to the Pax Britannica. While such ideas have not been explicit in official discourse, they seem all but universally assumed, in one or another form, in policy and political circles.
The most coherent and plausible official articulation of such reasoning was offered by Condoleezza Rice, the then national security adviser of President Bush. In the summer of 2003, speaking in London at the annual meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, she said that “the time had come to discard the system of balance of power among sovereign states established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.” The Westphalian settlement ended the wars of religion by establishing the principles of religious tolerance and absolute state sovereignty. The UN is a faulty embodiment of international authority because it is an indiscriminate assembly of all the governments of the world, and should, Rice argued, be replaced as the ultimate world authority by an alliance or coalition of the democracies.
Rice also told the institute’s members that the time had come to reject ideas of multi-polarity and balance of power in international relations. This was a reference to French and other arguments in favour of an international system in which a number of states or groups of states (like the EU) act autonomously, serving as counterweights to American power. It followed the controversy earlier that year over the UN Security Council’s failure to authorise the US invasion of Iraq. In the past, she said, balance of power may have “sustained the absence of war” but did not promote an enduring peace. “Multi-polarity,” she continued, “is a theory of rivalry; of competing interests – and at its worst, competing values. We have tried this before. It led to the Great War….”
A recent editorial in the New York Times (December 31, 2007) should be an eye-opener for any intelligent reader: “There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behaviour. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the [US] Constitution, the rule of law and human decency…This sort of lawless behaviour has become standard practice [in the US] since Sept. 11, 2001.”
Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.
In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq…We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorising the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.
We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions – and both American and international law – to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review. Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.
The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat – and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.
Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.
In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners – some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports – to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.
These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more – so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.
We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honourably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.”
This belief that the United States has a unique historical mission is so absurd that it is not open to any logical refutation. An American policy that rests on a self-indulgent fiction must be expected to come to a bad end.