28 March 2003
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Below is an article on the political origins of today's U.S. military policy. Technically speaking, historians have argued that the political economy of fascism requires an expansionist demension (i.e. military conquests). In this way, Franco's Spain and Pinochet's Chile were qualitatively different from Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, or Tojo's Japan. Similar repressive domestic policies of a police state apparatus were put into practice, but the political economies of the latter fully-fascist states were guided by military expansionist policies, with state commands, rather than free market competitions, directing the production of goods and services, which benefitted from swollen military and police budgets that guaranteed profits to investors in selected industries.
In the short term, these fascist political economies were profitable
and solved the unemployment problem. In the long term, of course,
they were suicidal for the nations that had adopted them.
Below, please read about the architects of America's post-cold-war military
policies, described in an unusual article, written by Steven Weisman and
published in the 24 March issue of the International Harold Tribune.
Sincerely,
F. Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
_____________________________________________
Doctrine of preemptive war has its roots in early 1990s
by Steven R. Weisman
Monday, March 24, 2003
copyright © 2003 The International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON. In January 1998, a lineup of conservative
policy advocates warned
President Bill Clinton in an open letter that
the "containment" of Iraq was a failure and
that removing Saddam Hussein from power "now
needs to become the aim of
American foreign policy."
Among the 18 signers were Donald Rumsfeld,
Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage and
Richard Perle, all former officials in Republican
administrations. At the time, the men
were affiliated with academic centers and
policy institutes, with no particular
expectation that they would, within five years,
be in a position to turn their ideas into
policy.
The second U.S.-led war in the Gulf represents
far more than simply a triumph for
Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Wolfowitz,
his deputy, or for Armitage, the
deputy secretary of state, and Perle, chairman
of the Defense Policy Board, a
Pentagon advisory panel, not to mention their
colleagues in the conservative press.
It also reflects, at least in the view of some,
the ascendance under President George
W. Bush of the conservatives' idea that chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons
programs of "rogue states" must be confronted
with preemptive action before an
imminent threat materializes.
The origins of the current war are, in fact,
rooted in a series of policy pronouncements
by these and other conservative intellectuals
that date from the early 1990s, after the
end of the Cold War and the inconclusive end
of the Gulf War in 1991, which left
Saddam in power.
During the Clinton years, when many of these
conservative intellectuals lost their
perches inside the government and Iraq faded
as a central foreign policy concern, they
kept alive the cause of deposing the Iraqi
leader in foreign policy magazines,
conferences and other political forums.
Then, when Bush began filling the top layers
of his administration, many of these
ardently anti-Saddam intellectuals returned
to power, including Douglas Feith, the
undersecretary of defense for policy, and
I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick
Cheney's chief of staff.
Even as they gained influence within the new
administration, however, it was not until
after Sept. 11, 2001, that they succeeded
in making Iraq Bush's top foreign policy
priority. It was then that the president came
to share their deep concern that Iraq might
give unconventional weapons to terrorist groups.
"Without Sept. 11, we never would have been
able to put Iraq at the top of our
agenda," a senior administration official
said. "It was only then that this president was
willing to worry about the unthinkable - that
the next attack could be with weapons of
mass destruction supplied by Saddam Hussein."
Not everyone around Bush is comfortable with
the Iraq war being seen as a symbol of
a new doctrine.
"The battle over the direction of American
policy will continue," said another senior
administration official, adding that the debate
about how to neutralize threats from Iran
and North Korea - the other two nations in
the "axis of evil" cited by Bush - would
begin even before the fighting in Iraq ended.
But ever since Bush and his team started talking
about the need to deal preemptively
with foreign threats, Secretary of State Colin
Powell and some others in the
administration have emphasized that such actions
are only a part of the large set of
options available to the United States.
Asked the other day whether the Iraq war reflected
a broader doctrine of preemptive
attacks on enemies, Powell replied, "No, no,
no." He said Iraq was being attacked
because it had violated its "international
obligations" under its 1991 surrender
agreement, which required the disclosure and
disarmament of its dangerous weapons.
In an interview, Powell said Friday that the
publicity over the doctrine of preemption,
enshrined in the administration's National
Security Strategy published last year,
overlooked the fact that preemption was only
one tool among many.
"I think it's a bit of an overstatement to
say that, now this one's pocketed, on to the
next place," Powell said.
The doctrine of preemption, especially with
respect to Iraq, has been floating around
conservative policy circles since at least
the presidency of Bush's father, when it was
embraced by conservative intellectuals like
Wolfowitz, then a policy aide to Cheney,
who was then defense secretary. In 1992, Cheney's
aides - including Wolfowitz, Libby
and Zalmay Khalilzad, the administration's
envoy to Iraq - prepared a document
known as the Defense Planning Guidance, which
argued that the United States should
be prepared to use force to prevent the spread
of nuclear weapons. The document
also suggested that the United States should
be "postured to act independently when
collective action cannot be orchestrated."
But when drafts of the document were
leaked, just as the first President Bush's
re-election campaign was heating up, it
embarrassed the administration as being too
hawkish and was shelved.
The principle of preemptive action was picked
up in 1996 in an influential article in the
journal Foreign Affairs by Robert Kagan and
William Kristol, the editor of The
Weekly Standard and the former chief of staff
to Vice President Dan Quayle, titled
"Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy."
Kristol and Kagan wrote that the 1990s under
Clinton were a time of passivity toward
the threat of terrorism comparable to that
of the 1970s, when Ronald Reagan felt the
same way about American attitudes toward the
threat of communism.
Kristol now notes that Clinton himself had
begun embracing many of the ideas of
preemptive action while still in office. In
a speech on Feb. 17, 1998, at the Pentagon,
Clinton said the United States "simply cannot
allow" Saddam to acquire nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons arsenals.
In a foreshadowing of what the younger Bush
president would say a few years later,
Clinton spoke of "an unholy axis" of terrorists
and the "outlaw nations" that harbor
them. At the end of 1998, Clinton authorized
bombing raids on Iraq, prompted by
Saddam's refusal to cooperate with weapons
inspectors.
Policy analysts inside and outside the administration
are now asking whether a
successful campaign in Iraq would encourage
the administration to apply the principle
of preemption to Iran and North Korea, both
of which are further along in their nuclear
weapons programs than Iraq. Administration
officials who advocate military preemption
say that such an approach will not necessarily
apply to those countries, in part because
North Korea could retaliate and because Iran,
even if there is a change in government,
will not be likely to abandon its nuclear
program. But there is little doubt that the fundamental
debate will continue.
"This is just the beginning," an administration
official said. "I would not rule out the
same sequence of events for Iran and North
Korea as for Iraq, but circumstances do
not compel you to end up in the same place."
************************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research at CEIMSA
Center for the Advanced Study of American
Institutions and Social Movements
http://www.u-grenoble3.fr/ciesimsa
University of Grenoble-3
France
Tel: 04.76.82.43.00