Jeannie brought up some interesting thoughts and questions in an earlier post that has gotten buried, and I think it best to share our conversation with the Canuck's crowd. She said: "I like and respect individual Americans very much but
I really don’t understand the US government’s policies. Why the US always says
that it is threatened by other countries no matter how far away the country is,
as if anything happens in every corner of the world would have something related with it. And the funniest thing to me is that it often announces its non-recognition of another country’s election, say the latest Byelorussian election. It
is a complete interference to another country’s internal affairs. Has anybody in the world ever declared that Bush is an illegal president? "
Well, anyone who knows me at all knows that I am not in the business of defending George W. Bush. I have certainly declared that he was an illegitimate president, if not illegal. He was, in fact, appointed and not elected president in the
2000 election when the right wing US Supreme Court voted on party lines to give
Bush the contested election without a full re-count. As you may know, his opponent, Al Gore got more popular votes than Bush. So US democracy is not exactly
perfect, and Bush is the best proof of that one could possibly imagine.
Unfortunately, foreign policy is mainly the province of the president in the American system, so foreign policy is often seen as a very cumbersome see-saw, changing back and forth every time the parties change, so it can be hard to generalize about foreign policy. But it is fair to say that US foreign policy tends to
be aggressive in defending and promoting US interests around the world whether a
Republican or a Democrat is president.
The seminal event that created the activist foreign policy is directly related to the American defense of China in the 1930s and ‘40s – the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor bringing the US into World War II. As Japan’s increasingly
brutal attacks against China unfolded, the US applied greater pressure on Japan
leading to an embargo of oil and steel that could have crippled Japan’s war machine. Since that time Americans were on guard against unpleasant surprises arising from faraway places and our Cold War foreign policy reflected this. That this concern rose to the level of paranoia became clear in the case the Vietnam War. The US had virtually no interests in Vietnam but she spent vast sums of money and 54,000 soldiers in an ultimately losing cause based on the pathetically stupid “domino theory”. The ‘domino theory” claimed that if Vietnam fell to
the Communists that the whole of Asia would soon follow, then South America until America was surrounded by blood-thirsty Communists. It was said that “if we
don’t fight the Communists in Vietnam now, we’ll be fighting them in California later” – a clear connection to the Asian threat of a generation earlier. It
wasn’t until Nixon implicitly recognized that Communism was not a monolithic global threat and the US reached out diplomatically to China that the US could withdraw from Vietnam.
Still, the post – World War II foreign policy was a long litany of intervention
and covert action against perceived threats around the world – Korea, Iran, Cuba, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua… We saw Soviet inspired Communist enemies behind every bush and this paranoid fear lead to aggressive preemptive actions. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, the US habit of intervention only slowed slightly with interventions in the Balkans and the Middle East. Then, right when it seemed possible that we might take a break from being the world’s policeman, the 9/11 attacks occurred, validating the wildest of conspiratorial ideas. This cleared the way for the neo-conservative clique in the Bush administration to activate their long-standing plans to attack Iraq and establish a permanent military presence in the critical, oil rich Middle East. If only US foreign
policy were a computer game of world domination, the attraction of an attack on
Iraq is pretty obvious. Saddam Hussein was a very nasty and unpopular guy to be sure, but Iraq was a very ripe and juicy fruit (the second largest oil reserves in the world) with a weak army and inconsequential air force that was mainly dismantled by the 1991 Gulf War. With the American populace already predisposed
to xenophobia (the fear of outsiders) after a generation of Cold War propaganda
and a spectacular assault on the heart of America live on TV, they were fully primed to accept even the transparent nonsense and lies produced by the Bush administration. So it was, with the gullibility of the majority of the American people believing that the Bible toting Bush surely wouldn’t take political advantage of the tragedy of 9/11, Congress voted overwhelmingly to give Bush a blank check for his business friendly military adventure in Iraq. It seems clear that the ideologically driven but pathetically naïve Bush political hacks actually
believed that Iraq’s petroleum resources could be divided up by US oil companies and its infrastructure contracted out to vice president Cheney’s Halliburton
companies while the grateful and obedient Iraqis waved American flags and cheered the liberating soldiers. I suppose the world can be grateful that the great
ambitions of leaders like Bush with delusions of grandeur and divine favor are rarely matched by their competence. But the tragedy to the thousands of victims
on both sides of this horrible example of a super-power lead by a devious fool cannot be over-estimated.
Even though it is clear that the Iraq adventure will end in disaster for the US
and Iraq, the world cannot relax in the idea that a lesson was learned. As long
as the paranoia of the American people is continuously fed by commercial TV news showing blood, gore and violence every night, paranoid aggression in US foreign policy will be an easy sale to the public. For those interested in a very rich and insightful understanding of the relationship between the unreasonable fears of the American people and its foreign policy, I highly recommend the film “Bowling for Columbine” by director Michael Moore.