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American crusade 'blind nihilism'
Bruce Kent
Friday, 21 March 2003

BOB WOODWARD concludes his new book Bush at War by citing an alarming declaration by a group of American Special Forces and CIA paramilitary personnel in Afghanistan: "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defence of our great nation." This illustrates the blind nihilism of the American crusade against terrorism into which Australia has been manoeuvred by its Prime Minister.

Woodward's privileged access to the records of the Bush Administration has enabled him to document how this crusade was triggered by a conservative populist political leader with little understanding of international affairs who, like John Howard, wanted to divert attention from domestic problems and ward off impending electoral defeat by projecting himself as a "war" leader.

Bush's crucial contribution in the aftermath of September 11 was to transform a proportionate and specifically directed retaliatory action against the perpetrators of September 11 into an open-ended "war" against both terrorist groups of all descriptions and individuals and states who support them, either actively or passively.

According to Woodward, this "incredibly broad commitment" was proposed by Bush, with the assistance of his National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and his speech-writers, without consulting Vice-President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell or Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The President's notion of what amounted to a crusade against "evil" was quickly given a geopolitical cutting edge by hawkish advisers such as Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who would stop at nothing to make the world strategically "safe" for the United States and Israel.

"It's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable," Wolfowitz declared at a Pentagon press briefing, "but removing their sanctuaries, removing their support systems, (and) ending states who sponsor terrorism".

The nub of the Bush "doctrine", to which Australia's leaders subscribe - notwithstanding their lip-service to international law - is that the United States has an unfettered right to launch a pre-emptive war against any state it considers even an indirect threat to its national security.

This is the assumption underlying its war on Afghanistan and its invasion of Iraq. The American Administration's belated quest late last year for United Nations approval for its war against Saddam was prompted solely by its concern that popular uneasiness about its unilateralism might affect the outcome of the tightly contested congressional elections of November 2002.

Once his multilateralist charade had helped the Republicans to gain control of the Senate, Bush resumed his unilateralist course without genuine regard for the collective security system of the UN, which authorises military sanctions only in response to actual aggression or an imminent threat to peace.

Far from being part of a road map to peace, the unilateralist doctrine of pre-emptive war is a short cut to international anarchy.

Although the Bush Administration has adopted the Manichaean (good v evil) rhetoric of the Truman Doctrine that formalised the Cold War in 1947, its conduct of the "war" on terror differs profoundly from Truman's policies in the late 1940s.

Bush views the world primarily through the eyes of the Pentagon and seeks to preserve international order and guarantee American security by spending billions of dollars on a theatre missile-defence system designed to make his country into an impregnable fortress.

Truman, on the other hand, was deeply suspicious of the defence establishment, resisted increases in military expenditure, and struggled to head off a nuclear-arms race after Hiroshima by vesting control of the military facets of nuclear energy in an agency of the UN.

Whereas Bush has scant regard for the "striped pants" of the State Department, Truman worked closely with distinguished Secretaries of State such as Dean Acheson and George Marshall.

Those two are revered for engineering the reconstruction and pacification of Europe through the Marshall Plan, which was inspired by the perception that economic deprivation and injustice are the underlying sources of political extremism and international disorder.

An intervention of this type, which would be far more helpful to the Middle East than the mindless and provocative application of military force, is remote from the radar screens of the "beggar thy neighbour" Bush Administration, whose expenditure on foreign aid, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product, is currently somewhere between a tenth and a twentieth of that of the United States under Truman.

Under wiser, more generous and outward-looking leadership the American and Australian people have frequently demonstrated their capacity for constructive and humane international behaviour.

They are currently being led astray by opportunist politicians who, with the assistance of the majority of the media, have whipped up popular fears and played on patriotic feelings largely in order to secure their short-term political survival.

Bruce Kent is the author of The Spoils of War (Clarendon Press, Oxford). He is a Visiting Fellow in the National Europe Centre at the Australian National University, where he is completing a book on the origins of the Cold War entitled The Price of Peace.

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