American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  George H. W. Bush

  George H. W. Bush fervently embraced Cold War triumphalism. In his inaugural address, he declared, “We know what works: Freedom works. We know what’s right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state. For the first time . . . in perhaps all history—man does not have to invent a system by which to live.”

  Bush came to the presidency with extensive experience in government, but as vice president he had not been close to Reagan, nor had he exercised much influence on his administration. Until 1980, he had been in the moderate wing of the Republican Party, backing abortion rights, family planning, and the ERA. But by the time he sought the presidency in 1988, he had recast himself as a hard-line conservative, opposing abortion, pledging not to raise taxes (in spite of the huge deficit), supporting constitutional amendments requiring balanced budgets and allowing school prayer, and building ties to conservative Christian groups. Running against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, a bland technocrat whom he initially trailed in the polls, Bush ran an ugly, negative campaign. In a measure of how much liberalism had become delegitimized during the Reagan years, Bush’s main charge against Dukakis was simply that he was a liberal. The Republican campaign calculated that being labeled with the “L word,” as Bush called it, would have much the same effect that charges of communist sympathy once had. The Bush campaign did not stop there; it implicitly questioned Dukakis’s patriotism by harping on his veto of a bill that would have required teachers to lead their classes in the Pledge of Allegiance. It also hammered away at a Massachusetts prison furlough program that had released a murderer, Willie Horton, who then committed a rape, running sensational ads with racialized imagery (Horton was black) to raise white fears of African American violence.

  Bush won 54 percent of the popular vote and carried forty states. But the election did not represent a ringing endorsement of Reaganism or even a repudiation of liberalism. In the Democratic primaries, Jesse Jackson proved highly effective in advocating traditional liberal ideas about the need for state intervention to promote economic growth, help those in need, and end discrimination. He won primaries in seven states and caucuses in four before being bested by Dukakis, the most impressive performance in the country’s history by an African American candidate. (Among the primaries Jackson won were Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, states George Wallace won in the 1968 presidential election and, except for Georgia, Strom Thurmond carried in 1948, a measure of the extraordinary transformation of the South over the course of four decades.) In the general election, Dukakis proved to be a dismal campaigner, creating an opening for Bush’s far more professional (if at times sleazy) effort. Bush had no coattails, as the Democrats held on to their 55–45 majority in the Senate and made a net gain of two seats in the House, suggesting that with a stronger candidate the Democrats might have been able to win back the White House.

  At times it seemed as if Bush, like Fukuyama, believed that history had ended. Though he very much wanted to be president, having spent a decade in quest of the office, once in power there seemed to be little he wanted to change. The massive deficit he inherited from Reagan and Democratic control of Congress circumscribed his possibilities for new domestic initiatives, but in any case he did not have much of an agenda he hoped to push through. Rather, he saw himself as a steward for the status quo, particularly in domestic affairs. He lacked what he once derisively called “the vision thing.”

  Bush saw foreign policy rather than domestic affairs as the arena in which he would make his mark. Even there, he initially took a fairly passive stance, instituting a “pause” in Reagan’s headlong rush to improve Soviet-American relations. But Bush did share Reagan’s desire to relegitimize the use of force and maintain a massive military capacity.

  His chance came in Panama. Its leader, Manuel Noriega, had been a paid agent of the United States and assisted the Contra resupply operation. But to cover his bets and enrich himself, Noriega also built ties with Cuba and got heavily involved in arms and drug trafficking. As the Cold War wound down, he became expendable to the United States. In early 1988, the Justice Department indicted him on drug charges but had no way to extradite him. Tensions increased when Noriega nullified an election that would have pushed him out of power at a time when the Bush administration had begun working to replace Latin American dictatorships with democratic regimes. On December 16, 1989, Panamanian soldiers shot and killed an American soldier who had gotten lost, sought help, and then fled a gathering crowd. They also roughed up a Navy officer and his wife who witnessed the shooting. Almost immediately, the Bush administration put into action a plan it already had developed to oust the Panamanian strongman. On December 20, 27,000 American soldiers invaded Panama, supported by massive airpower. They quickly seized control of the country. Noriega evaded them for five days before taking refuge in the Vatican embassy. After a week, he surrendered and eventually was convicted in Florida of drug running, money laundering, and racketeering.

  The Panama invasion further eroded post-Vietnam public resistance to the use of force and gave a new sheen to the military, which used the brief war to display its technological prowess, including stealth aircraft and upgraded special forces. The success of the invasion (called “Operation Just Cause” in an apparent reaction to the sense that Vietnam had been seen by many people as anything but) helped reduce resistance to the use of force within the military itself, which had grown reluctant after Vietnam to take on missions with uncertain chances of success and lacking clear support from the public and the political establishment.

  Panama eased the way for the Bush administration when it decided to launch a much larger military operation in reaction to Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein was Noriega writ large. Over the years, the United States had aided the Iraqi dictator when it served its purposes. During the Iran-Iraq War, the Reagan and Bush administrations had sold arms and provided credit to Iraq and opposed sanctions on Hussein’s regime for its repression of the Kurds, seeking to bolster what it saw as a useful check on Iranian power. But when on August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait, the Bush administration moved rapidly to force its withdrawal.

  In opposing Iraq, the administration and Bush himself pointed to Saddam’s brutality, the dictatorial nature of his regime, and claimed atrocities committed during its occupation of Kuwait (some of which were made up for the purpose). While the United States could rightly criticize the violation of the sovereignty of one nation by another, the wholly undemocratic nature of the Kuwaiti regime made it difficult to moralize the conflict. Oil, not evil, drove the Bush administration response. With its occupation of Kuwait, Iraq had come to control a huge share of world oil production. The Bush administration feared it might next try to take over Saudi Arabia, which would make it by far the most important player in the global oil economy. Following a well-established foreign policy axiom, Bush believed that allowing so much of the Middle Eastern oil reserves to fall into the hands of a regime not allied with the United States represented a threat to national security.

  Within days of the occupation of Kuwait, Bush began constructing an international coalition demanding Iraqi withdrawal. He won early support from the Soviet Union and key Arab nations, clearing the way for a UN Security Council resolution calling for sanctions against Iraq if it did not leave Kuwait. Bush also won permission from the Saudi king to allow the United States and its allies to amass troops in his country to protect it from an Iraqi invasion and provide a base for possible military action against Iraq. In the months that followed, as Saddam announced his intention to annex Kuwait, the Bush administration lined up a growing roster of allies in its campaign against the occupation. Ultimately, more than thirty countries contributed military forces (though many were just token units). The United States even got other nations to pay for
the military effort, with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates together paying nearly two-thirds of the cost and Germany, Japan, and Korea another quarter, making it—for its size—a cheap endeavor for the United States.

  In the fall of 1990, with Saddam showing no signs of retreat, the Bush administration moved toward military action. After Vietnam, military leaders had restructured the Army, assigning key functions to Reserve units, to ensure that civilian leaders could not order large-scale combat without a clear national commitment, symbolized by a Reserve call-up. By doing so, they hoped to avoid the kind of stealth escalation, without a clear, public decision-making process, that they believed had been one of the mistakes of Vietnam. Also, led by General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, top officers had become committed to the idea that the United States should go into battle only if it had an overwhelming superiority of force that ensured victory with few casualties.

  Bush proved willing to go to war on those terms. To bolster the coalition army in Saudi Arabia, he mobilized forty thousand reservists, the first call-up since the Tet offensive. In early November, he announced that he was increasing the U.S. force in Saudi Arabia from an already large 230,000 troops to a half million, roughly the size of the U.S. military in Vietnam at the height of the war. Later that month, he secured a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force by the U.S.-led coalition if Iraq did not leave Kuwait by January 15. Finally, to forestall the possibility that Congress might exert its authority under the War Powers Act, Bush asked for explicit congressional backing for sending the military into combat. Resolutions opposing war won strong minority support (getting forty-seven votes in the Senate), but after extended debate Bush got the authorization he sought. Determined to unleash the enormous fighting machine that had been assembled in Saudi Arabia, Bush spurned last-minute efforts by other countries, including France and the Soviet Union, to mediate the dispute while rejecting proposals from Iraq to leave Kuwait without accepting other U.S. conditions.

  On January 17, 1991, the U.S.-led coalition launched a massive air attack on Iraq. Network television cameras in Baghdad sent images of the nighttime bombardment live to viewers in the United States and around the world. The pummeling from the air of Iraq and Iraqi forces in Kuwait continued for thirty-eight days, as the United States and its allies unleashed just about every nonnuclear aerial weapon they had in their arsenals. Finally, with Iraqi troops still hunkered down in Kuwait, the coalition launched a ground assault. In just one hundred hours it forced the Iraqi army to retreat from Kuwait and all but decimated it in a rout of what had been the largest military in the Middle East. The coalition forces suffered only 240 deaths during the course of the war (including 148 Americans), while tens of thousands of Iraqis died.

  The New World Order

  The victory in the Gulf War seemed to validate George Bush’s assertion that a “new world order” had emerged from the end of the Cold War, in which the United States would take the lead, with the Soviet Union (before its dissolution) as a junior partner, in opposing aggression by any nation, ensuring global stability if need be by military force. In a radio address to U.S. troops at the end of the war, Bush declared, “The first test of the new world order has been passed.” “The specter of Vietnam,” he exulted, “has been buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula.”

  Bush proved to be half right. The triumph against Iraq bolstered those who advocated keeping a large, globally deployed military—including leaders of the armed services, the defense industry, and their ideological allies—though they had to struggle to make their case in the absence of an obvious enemy. Soon after the Gulf War, Colin Powell bemoaned, “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.” Yet even in the absence of enemies with anything like the resources of the United States, civilian leaders concurred with the military contention that the country should have the capacity to fight two large conventional wars at the same time. No serious discussion occurred of returning to a pre–World War II policy of maintaining only a small peacetime military or of dismantling the vast global network of American military facilities. The Bush administration did not even consider dissolving NATO once its original purpose of resisting Soviet aggression became meaningless. Military spending did decrease substantially but remained at a level far above pre–Cold War norms.

  If the Gulf War chased away the “specter of Vietnam” and helped cement militarism as a central feature of post–Cold War America, the “new world order” that Bush saw being tested in Iraq proved little more than a turn of phrase. The end of the Cold War and the anti-Iraq coalition did not lead to the creation of a set of institutions to sustain a new global system equivalent to those created at the end of World War II, like the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank. Instead, the Gulf War moved the United States toward using its own armed forces, with the cover of enabling UN resolutions and modest military support from some allies, to take on what it decided were rogue states and terrorist movements. Well before Bush left office, the phrase “new world order” had become the subject of derision for its hollow, authoritarian-sounding pomposity (as well as the subject of paranoia among fringe rightists, who thought it signaled a plot to impose world government on the United States).

  Unlike Reagan, who at least rhetorically made the spread of freedom a principle objective of American foreign policy, Bush gave higher priority to maintaining stability. The Gulf War aimed at restoring the status quo ante, not spreading democracy to Iraq, or for that matter to Kuwait. When in June 1989 the Chinese government used its army to crush the pro-democracy student protest in Tiananmen Square, resulting in hundreds of deaths and mass imprisonment, the Bush administration took only mild measures in response and privately assured the Chinese leadership that it would not let the repression derail the growing economic and other ties between the countries. Like previous presidents (including Reagan), Bush saw the attractions of economic relations and a tacit anti-Soviet alliance with China as outweighing moral or ideological concerns.

  The Gulf War and the supposed new world order did not achieve the stability Bush sought, even in the region where it was fought. Anticipating the political and military problems that would come with an occupation of the country, Bush stuck to his pledge that the military would be used only to force Iraq out of Kuwait, not to conquer Iraq or overthrow Saddam. But the Bush administration expected that either the Iraqi military or a popular uprising would oust Saddam for bringing massive defeat to his country. Instead, Saddam maintained his grip on power and used his remaining military to suppress revolts that broke out by Shiites in the south of the country and Kurds in the north. Iraq remained an irritant to the United States for another decade, leading to a second, full-scale, far more costly war against it.

  The end of the Cold War lessened the fear and likelihood of full-scale nuclear war. But it did not bring an end to conflict or a universal acceptance of Western liberalism. While some former communist states adopted Western-style parliamentary democracy and capitalist property relations, in others authoritarian regimes took hold and state control over the economy remained extensive. The breakup of the Soviet bloc accelerated a worldwide trend toward nationalism, ethnic and religious strife, and intolerance. The decades of superpower rivalry left behind enormous stockpiles of arms that flowed into the hands of insurgent movements, criminal enterprises, and terrorists. Rather than a new world order, global disorder became normalized, as even relatively small groups, through low-tech terror tactics and guerrilla warfare, found that they could disrupt less developed and even advanced societies. Some of those groups, like the Islamic fundamentalists the United States had armed and aided in Afghanistan, would eventually make the United States itself their target.

  In the years that followed the Cold War, the world seemed as dangerous a place—or more so—for the United States and its citizens as it had when the Soviet-American co
nflict dominated global affairs. Rather than a sense of security and peace, the end of the Cold War ushered in a period of unsettledness, at home and abroad. The United States had an opportunity to redefine its priorities, its goals, its way of life, but as it turned out it had little interest in doing so.

  CHAPTER 18

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  Triangulation

  When Bill Clinton became president in 1993, he represented a generational break in national politics. The United States went from a leadership shaped by the experience of the Depression, the New Deal, and World War II to one shaped by postwar prosperity, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, counterculture, feminism, and the backlash against cultural change. Until Clinton, every president after Harry Truman had served in the military during World War II, with the exception of Jimmy Carter, who entered the Naval Academy during the war but graduated after it ended. By contrast, Clinton’s father, not Clinton himself, served in the World War II Army, before dying in a car crash while Clinton’s mother was pregnant with Bill.

  During the 1960s and 1970s, Clinton, like millions of baby boomers, embraced cultural and political departures from the past, even as he pursued traditional goals and ambitions. Fascinated by electoral politics from an early age, he began working in campaigns for liberal Democrats while still in college, first in his home state of Arkansas and then around the country, never entertaining the rejection of the electoral process like some of his more radical peers. But he did come to oppose the Vietnam War, helping organize a few antiwar demonstrations while a Rhodes Scholar in England. “Sympathetic to the zeitgeist,” as he later put it, he grew a beard and long hair and lived with Hillary Rodham, whom he met at Yale Law School, before they married. When they had a daughter, they named her Chelsea, having been enchanted by folksinger Judy Collins’s version of the Joni Mitchell song “Chelsea Morning.”