The Irony of Manifest Destiny

by William Pfaff

  George W. Bush’s declaration, following the 9/11 attacks, of a global “war against terror” produced mass alarm among many Americans, who, rather than being fired up with an anger reinforced with confidence, were goaded by morbid and irrational fear into a national mobilization against “terror” characterized by duct-tape-sealed apartments non-sensically stockpiled with survival supplies in Manhattan, Washington, and elsewhere in the country. Official measures ensued, reorganizing bureaucracies, curtailing civil liberties, and reorienting the mission of the all-volunteer army (and its Reserve and the National Guard) that was initially recruited from the American working and lower-middle classes, largely excluded from the profligate prosperity of their governing betters. (This new army’s social composition reduced the moderating political influence exercised by the citizen-soldiers and mobilized reserve officers of previous American wars.) In the period following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the military force was treated in the manner of European colonial armies, increasingly recruited from noncitizens and from candidates for immigration, who were virtually treated as cannon fodder in its rhythm of redeployments and forced—“Stop-Loss”—prolongations of enlistment engagements, resembling military impressment . This treatment was unknown in the citizen armies of the Korean, Vietnam, and world wars. While enlisted “for the duration” in the world wars, American citizen armies, because of egalitarian conscription, were numerous enough that most soldiers did not have to be forced into murderously repetitive deployments.

  The Bush “war against terror” was a product of ignorance and political confusion—and probable mendacity, in its claim that the Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein bore part responsibility for the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Without evidence, such other Muslim radical groups as the Palestinian Fatah and even the integrist Hamas and Hizbollah—Muslim social revolutionaries, as well as militant movements resisting Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories—and anti-American and anti-Israeli Middle Eastern groups generally, were held to share in the guilt. From the start, this official and popular conception of America’s enemy was extended to radicalism, political extremism, and misrule of many kinds in the non-Western world, all presumed to nourish hatred for the United States because, as President Bush said, “such people hate our freedom.”

  Pursuing the leadership of al Qaeda and of other radical Muslim groups, and overturning the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, was not enough. Under neoconservative and Israeli influence at the beginning of 2003, Washington set about effecting a radical strategic realignment of the entire region. A “Greater Middle East” was to be constructed, reaching into Central Asia to include Afghanistan as well as Pakistan, with the invasion of Iraq only the first step. This policy was unaffected by the subsequent discovery that Saddam Hussein’s government possessed no weapons of mass destruction and had no connection with al Qaeda.

  The neoconservative ambition to create a permanent American alliance with Israel to dominate the Middle East was already informally a reality but not a success. The “Defense of the Realm” and “New American Century” initiatives in the two countries rested on the assertion that Arabs only understand force. It turned out to be the Israelis and Americans who only understood force, and while the Arabs ignored (or glorified) their losses, Israel suffered politico-military defeats without Washington’s intervention. Hizbollah attacks compelled Israel to withdraw from its twenty-two-year occupation of a “security zone” in southern Lebanon. Hizbollah gained further influence from its subsequent resistance to a second Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Hamas was strengthened by Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of Jewish colonies from Gaza. Israel’s attack on the Gazans in 2009 produced no advance toward peace with the Arabs. Israel’s moral standing was diminished, particularly in Western Europe, by the UN-mandated Goldstone Report. Another new, if not “greater,” Middle East was simultaneously if inadvertently created by these American and Israeli measures, which elevated Iran to a position of major Islamic power in the Middle East, and strengthened Hamas and Hizbollah. Subsequently, the Obama government’s extension of the Afghan war into Pakistan (and potentially beyond), using drones and special operations forces, has at this writing worsened America’s position.

  The common Western assumption about history is that it moves toward an intelligible conclusion, a belief derived from Western religious eschatology. The Enlightenment rejection of religion resulted in an effort to discover autonomous ethical “rules” and a secular pattern in history, leading toward historicist theories, a “belief in … speculative systems of history for which there is no objective evidence,” which, as the philosopher Karl Popper says, have tended to offer a foundation upon which dangerous political ideologies and movements are built . It is essential to add that they also invite organized violence to make themselves come true.

  In the case of the theory, common to liberals as well as many conservatives, of universal progress toward democracy, the presumption made is that the seeming self-evident superiority of democracy makes it the natural end point of history. A foreign policy of military intervention to speed progress toward this inevitable outcome logically follows. Liberalism in its American sense nearly always sees the increasing complexity and interdependence of modern society, and the advance of technology, science, and human knowledge, as evidence of positive change in the moral (and political) nature of humans—an assumption for which there is no evidence. As the philosopher John Gray has written: “No discernable fact or trend has ever supported the belief that humanity will someday accept one form of government—Communism, or ‘democratic capitalism,’ say—as alone legitimate … Presupposing as they do a teleological view of history that cannot be stated in empirical terms, all such theories are religious narratives translated into secular language.”8

  Various systems of historical interpretation (“challenge and response,” “stages of economic development leading to take-off”) or dominant tendencies in man’s nature (love of freedom, material ambition, competitive struggle, power-seeking, ego, altruism) have been postulated as causing societies to behave as they do. These beliefs are sometimes influenced by modern systems of economic analysis that claim scientific objectivity and predictive power, or were until the great and generally unpredicted financial crisis that began in 2008 discredited—possibly for good, although that remains to be seen—certain naive economic dogmas of infallible market efficiency and unvarying rational choice by economic actors.

  A large part of the American foreign policy community has committed itself to the unproven and unprovable theory that democracy is the “strong” force in history and will eventually win out over all others. This is convenient, reassuring, and highly gratifying to its proponents—or would be, if it were true.9 By now, many have discovered that democracy is not the natural (or “default”) condition of society, but is produced in certain political and social circumstances by values derived from historical experience, and by philosophical reasoning and argument. Or so it has occurred in modern history. In antiquity, Athens, usually considered to have been the most perfect example of “direct” democracy, where citizens gathered at the Agora to make decisions, excluded women and slaves as noncitizens (which presumably would actually make the modern New England Town Meeting the more perfect democracy). Democracy is not created by free elections but by a society’s general willingness to accept majority rule, defend minority rights, and accept the nonlethal settlement of political differences. It requires that the powerful submit to civil law and respect the separation of public from private property, freedom of speech, and a free press.

  Finally, the ideology of ultimate democratic inevitability ordinarily makes the argument that democracy should be promoted because democracies are innately peaceful. This might seem a common-sense judgment derived from the observation that people do not like conflict and war. It is less easily defended than many think, as the United States fails to disengage from the consequences of its wars “of choice” in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the
small wars being indirectly waged in Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere in East Africa, Yemen, and other countries are included, this makes up a formidable array of wars with states or societies that have done no direct harm to the United States, or for that matter, Israel. The Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis—and Pakistanis and the rest—were supposed to be liberated, not ruined.

  In the not distant past, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung made many destructive decisions because they conformed to ideology and therefore were “objectively” correct, but actually such decisions were the product of what the dictator wished to be true. For example: Stalin’s apparent confidence that Hitler would never turn from the Western front to attack Russia, and his consequent failure to prepare for it; Hitler’s orders, after Stalingrad, directed to phantom armies; and Mao’s ruinous faith in the potential of backyard blast furnaces to manufacture steel.

  The American faith that global military struggle with terrorism (identified as Evil), despotism, failed states, and other disorders—with a new and recent emphasis on suppressing addictive drug production and the drug trade—will eventually be solved by American support for democracy is an ideology of self-deception that continues to enjoy the (rather bewildered but seemingly convinced) support of the American public as well as that of the American political class. Since the Second World War, political solutions to foreign policy problems have consistently been sought through military intervention. When the Soviet Union’s collapse removed the only external deterrent to U.S. military power, American forces could have been reduced and recalibrated to fit a world of lessened military threat . Instead, the country’s military apparatus and the scope of its operations were vastly extended, at the expense of the civilian agencies of American foreign policy, a phenomenon eloquently described by the Washington journalist Dana Priest.*

  The process began with the Pentagon’s progressive division of the world into “regional commands” under separate American military staffs and headquarters, launching the development of an international system of military bases that continues to be extended today to a currently reported total of some one thousand bases outside the continental United States. This system now includes major development of U.S. Pacific Ocean island bases (some disingenuously designated “environmental protected zones”) and an effort to increase the number of bases held and operated in cooperation with allied—or, more accurately, client—countries in Latin America and in Africa. Each regional command controls “main operating bases” (MOB) abroad, which in turn support fully manned “forward operating sites,” usually including ground forces and an air base. Beyond them, “cooperative security locations” are established, not always permanently manned by Americans but shared with the forces of allies or clients.

  The Vicenza base now being expanded in northern Italy and the newly built Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, as well as bases in Bosnia, Iraq and under construction in Afghanistan (some the size of small towns), are usually of disputed permanence, legal status, and even nomenclature (known as “enduring” bases in Iraq rather than “permanent” ones). The acquisition of bases in Iraq (to replace the bases in Saudi Arabia that the Saudi government forced the United States to close in 2003 and Iranian bases lost because of the Iranian revolution in 1979) was an underlying motive for the American invasion of Iraq. Their future role caused much difficulty in the “status of forces” negotiations with the Malaki government in Baghdad in 2008, according to which American forces promised to make a staged departure of “combat troops” from Iraq.

  Under current planning, such bases are to exercise strategic control of the Middle East through their satellite operating sites and “cooperative security locations.” The acquisition of seven new joint-use bases in Colombia, bringing half of Latin America into range of U.S. ground-force intervention, was announced in summer 2008, to much controversy and protest elsewhere in the region. The hegemonic implications and intentions of all this, which provides the military structure from which to conduct global interventions or indeed a third world war, are readily acknowledged in Washington and are motivated by what Washington considers internationally valid and progressive reasons.

  When the George W. Bush administration took office in 2001, one of its announced convictions was that American military forces did not exist to conduct what condescendingly was called “nation-building.” The American all-volunteer Army was a war-fighting force. Former Clinton administration secretary of state Madeleine Albright, at the time of the Kosovo war, said that the Eighty-second Airborne Division was not going to be deployed there “to walk little children to school.” Nongovernmental organizations, UN peacekeeper forces, or European armies did that sort of thing. The new Bush administration agreed.

  Seven years later, during the summer of 2008, as the Bush administration approached its end, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice conceded that the United States had been wrong. The Bush government now was convinced that nation-building would be the key to success in America’s program to bring democracy to Central and South Asia and to the Middle East. She wrote in Foreign Affairs that a complete reversal of course on this matter had become essential: “Democratic state-building is now an urgent component of our national interest … it is absolutely clear that we will be engaged in nation-building for years to come.” She said that this reflected “a uniquely American realism” that taught “it is America’s job to change the world, and in its own image.” (A uniquely American “realism” had also been cited by the administration in 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq in order to build democracy there, despite the warnings of many critics in the United States and in what Donald Rumsfeld derisively called “old Europe.”)

  Secretary Rice continued:

  We have never accepted that we are powerless to change the world. Indeed we have shown that by marrying American power and American values, we could help friends and allies expand the boundaries of what most thought realistic at the time … The democratization of Iraq and the democratization of the Middle East [are] linked … As Iraq emerges from its difficulties, the impact of its transformation is being felt in the rest of the region … Our long-term partnerships with Afghanistan and Iraq, to which we must remain deeply committed, our new relationships with Central Asia, and our long-standing partnerships in the Persian Gulf provide a solid geo-strategic foundation for the generational work ahead of helping to bring about a better, more democratic, and more prosperous Middle East.*

  She then described at considerable length the reconfiguration and retraining that had already begun to prepare the American armed forces, as well as the State Department and other civilian agencies, for the new duties of nation-building that would be theirs over generations to come, in order to “change the world” into one in America’s own image.

  This had been preceded earlier in the year by reports of reorganization in the diplomatic, development, and aid agencies of government to prepare new coordinated team programs to conduct physical reconstruction, economic development, and civic education in nations that in the future might need rescue from their condition as “failed states,” or reclassified from the category of “rogue states,” so as to become part of the new world in preparation. There were announcements of prenegotiated contracts with civilian corporations and contractors to prepare nation-building (or rebuilding) plans for nations that might become the objects of American attentions. These attracted little notice at the time, although this program now is operating in Afghanistan, preparing the infrastructure to what during 2009 was expected to become a very large civilian as well as military “nation-building” operation with accompanying military bases there (and possibly in Pakistan, in view of the mounting concern of the Obama administration with the supposed need for—or feasibility of—operations there). Few Americans in any case seemed to object to intervention in Middle Eastern, Asian, or African countries to build the foundations for new democratic states, hostile to fanaticism and the rise of terrorist movements, although most have second thoughts when these become wars.r />
  The new American nation-building strategy was presented as an integral part of a program for extending American military and political influence and peaceful development in troubled parts of the world, for which the Pentagon was the lead agency. In congressional testimony in May 2009, Robert M. Gates, Barack Obama’s secretary of defense and Republican holdover, confirmed that the new Democratic administration shared this view of the changed mission of America’s military forces. A few days later, at a fraught moment in what now was called the Af-Pak war, as Pakistani forces battled the Taliban to recover control of territory north of Islamabad, President Obama declared that America was not relying simply on military force but that he planned a “surge” of civilian development experts and reconstruction specialists into Afghanistan to rebuild the country.

  Earlier, in June 2008, before Mr. Obama’s election, the Defense Department had issued a new and unscheduled revision of its regularly published statements of National Defense Strategy. A new version of the National Strategy statement, authorized by the Obama government, is said to be in preparation for publication in 2010, although in view of the overall policy continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations it would seem unlikely to greatly differ from its predecessors published in 2005 and revised by Gates in 2008.* The existing 2008 document from Secretary Gates’s office provided in its introduction a useful summary of the assumptions of national policy as seen at the time by the military bureaucracy, and of the measures believed necessary to attain the country’s objectives.