Corrupt? Who, the Europeans?
Aw, geddouddahere!
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Posted on 04/06/2002 8:01:37 PM PST by Jean S
America divides to control. It's a policy that could make even Bush's best friend Blair an antagonist
I don't need to be the seventh son of a seventh son to foresee that Tony Blair won't get Bush alone in his ranch today and ask the President to tell him, statesmano a statesmano, why America intervenes in the Middle East. The question is superfluous because the answer is too obvious to waste breath on. America sustains fundamentalist monarchs because it wants their oil. American policy is neo-colonialism to the left-wingers, and what any great power must do to protect an essential resource to conservative realists.
Support for Israel, which has no oil and is the enemy of oil producing Arabs, confuses this simple reasoning. But it can be explained away as an aberration created by the enormous influence of the Jewish lobby in Washington. The big picture stays unclouded. Why is America attacked? Why will it march Britain into a needless war with Iraq? It's the oil, stupid. Anyone with half a brain knows that.
As so often with realpolitik, the knowing arguments of Left and Right have no basis in real politics. America gets most of its oil from the Americas - Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and the USA itself. Only a quarter comes from the Persian Gulf. If it found supplies elsewhere - in Russia, for example - or contained its profligate burning of energy, the US would have little need to worry about the Middle East. It won't pull out because Washington wants to 'discourage' the 'advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership', while maintaining a military dominance capable of 'deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'.
The quotes don't come from a babbling conspiracy theorist but from the Pentagon's Defense Planning Guidance, which set out American strategy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A draft was leaked to the New York Times in 1992. Pentagon bureaucrats were appalled because, in their marvellous jargon, it hadn't been 'scrubbed'. What they mean was candid language for private consumption hadn't been swabbed away and replaced with a coating of euphemisms, carefully constituted to avoid any phrase which might stick in the reader's mind. The leak explained the thinking of a part of the Washington establishment with brutal clarity. If America didn't 'stabilise' - to use a verb which seems particularly inapt at the moment - the Middle East, Europe, Japan and China, which have a far greater dependence on Gulf oil, would move in and protect their interests. Although their interventions wouldn't necessarily bother America, in the long term they would grow into powers which would challenge its authority.
Walter Russell Mead, a foreign-policy analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, explained the doctrine. 'We do not get that large a percentage of our oil from the Middle East... And one of the reasons that we are sort of assuming this role of policeman of the Middle East has more to do with making Japan and some other countries feel that their oil flow is assured... so that they don't then feel more need to create a great power, armed forces, and security doctrine, and you don't start getting a lot of great powers with conflicting interests sending their militaries all over the world.'
America's friends are potential enemies. They must be in a state of dependence and seek solutions to their problems in Washington. Thus Europe was, rightly, castigated for its failure to stop Slobodan Milosevic's goons murdering and raping their way across the Balkans. Yet when Blair and Jacques Chirac proposed a European army which could operate independently, they were regarded with deep suspicion by Republicans and many Democrats, along with the American-controlled chunk of the British press in Wapping and Canary Wharf.
Defense Planning Guidance was disowned after the New York Times printed its embarrassingly frank conclusions. Yet interest in it survives, not least because the prospectus for the American empire had impressive supporters. It was written by Paul Wolfowitz for Bush's father. Wolfowitz is now one of the leaders of the Pentagon hawks. Dick Cheney fought for it to be adopted as official policy in the early 1990s, and he is now Bush junior's vice-president. Their work from a decade ago keeps coming up when American foreign-policy intellectuals try to explain why US military bases circle the globe.
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in January, Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, two security wonks, said it was the key to understanding why the Pentagon wanted military power which was greater than that of all the forces of all possible competitors put together. Wolfowitz's supporters believed that solutions to conflicts weren't necessarily in America's interests, they wrote. If North Korea, which somehow has been dragged into the fight against al-Qaeda, and South Korea reunited, US troops would pull out of the peninsula and Japan might feel the need to become militarily self-sufficient. Accordingly, 'the best situation is the status quo in Korea, which allows for US forces to be stationed there indefinitely.' Nicholas Lemann, a journalist on the New Yorker, chipped in with a description of how a senior Republican recently handed him a copy of Wolfowitz's report when asked what ideas were guiding Bush's administration.
So what? ask Bush supporters. The US is a benign power. Worrying about its dominance is knee-jerk anti-Americanism. Much anti-Americanism is actually far worse than knee-jerk. Like anti-Semitism it is the 'socialism of fools'. Religious fundamentalists are against America because it represents modernity. We've no right to feel superior. I guess many Observer readers, myself included, wouldn't like to have their prejudices about McDonald's - no worse than any other supplier of industrial food - or Monsanto - not a shred of evidence that its GM crops endanger health - subjected to forensic cross-examination by a half-decent barrister. What we resent is the deplorable, but democratic, success of junk culture and junk food, and of a political system which seems to be run by corrupt imbeciles.
But the deployment of 'anti-Americanism' as an insult which brands anyone who opposes Bush and his British sidekick as racist doesn't work. The same logic which Defense Planning Guidance uses to imagine a world where America can be the only grown-up also allows double standards which have destroyed the moral authority America held after 11 September. How can America (and Britain) declare war against Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction when the US won't accept any controls on its nuclear, chemical or biological weapons? How can the US call Saddam Hussein a war criminal, when it won't accept the jurisdiction of an international criminal court?
The tensions America's anarchic unilateralism creates are at their greatest among the world's élite. European leaders have few problems with globalisation, but can't stomach Bush unilaterally imposing steel tariffs which make a nonsense of the very 'free' market America and Europe instruct the Third World to embrace. They have all but begged America to be allowed a junior role in the 'war' against terrorism. Their rejection puts them, somewhat to everyone's surprise, temporarily on the same side as the mass of the world's poor. The greatest worry a friend of America should have is how its insistence that it can leave no part of the world alone has created anti-Americanism not only in Muslim countries but in regions such as Latin America where bin Laden's theology means nothing. If you dream that everyone might be your enemy, one day they may become just that.
Excuse me, did a European just call the American political system "corrupt?" What a joke!
Corrupt? Who, the Europeans?
Aw, geddouddahere!
Be Seeing You,
Chris
What an ass. This "junk food culture" is what fuels the world's technology and underlying economies. Little things called computers, software and the Internet… When it comes to political corruption the Europeans are only out done, maybe, by a few South American and/or African governments.
As for a British person complaining about American food, that is the height of hypocrisy…
British fine food is an oxymoron.
Yeah -- at America's "insistence" we bailed out the Brits twice in the last century, have financed the world out of financial chaos, and prevented Communism from overrunning Europe and the rest of the world.
Let's put it this way -- the Euros are like a bratty careless teenage kid who begs their parents to drive the family car again, but forgets what happened to the car the two previous times. Note to Cohen: The U.S. will hold on to the keys -- now go to your room before you get spanked.
And who might those nations be? Not the moribund Eurotrash just counting that days till 18 month paid leaves and 6 week vacations.
Like the Roman empire; in 100 years their servants, by breeding like stoats, will outnumber them and destroy them. And they will probably blame the Jews.
Was it Bush's Inaugural or State-ofThe-Union where he emphasized the need for humility in American foreign relations. Seems as though most Freepers do not ascribe to that notion - "Screw 'em" wins the day here in Freeperland.
BS. I have no doubt that were we to instill the same sorts of Public Servant types that run our own nation, they'd be far MORE easy to deal with than thuggish murderers, radicals or fatass royalty.
It's just that there's enough money to be made that it clouds the judgment of many who actually believe this is the case. I fail to see how there's a net gain to this nation's "vital interests" or the "business of the people" by bulldozing our way in to be the Little Red Hen ... only to end up redistributing all but the short end of the loaf.
As a "trickle-down" effect, it's surely no more difficult to yank the chains of the 'merican People at the gas pump as it is for the Fed to alternately delight or frighten the whole damned nation with their arbitrary control of our Interest Points.
The really great thing about having the left bitch and moan about how "it's all about the oil" -- particularly at times like these -- is that the right can turn around and say with all due seriousness: "Indeed it is and when you grow up someday you'll understand how much more vital is oil halfway around the world than that in Alaska or off the shores of California that we've let the environmental lobby or the Most Dramatic Oil Spill of All Time move just out of our reach."
And the really great thing about having the Right so correct (for the most part) about the vital nature of energy is that THEY BELIEVE THEMSELVES -- for all the right reasons -- that it's all about the oil!
Here kitty, kitty ...
We believe in free people everywhere, which is why we support the English and the Isrealies at such a level. Neither of those countries have our system, but they have the closest around so we support them.
We dominate oil because it is fungible, we believe in domacracy and know that abundant energy helps grow it. We do not stiffle competition, otherwise there would be no Hondas, Toyotas, no NEC, Panasonic, h*ll no Mercedes, BMW either, after all we kicked both Germany and Japan, and could have left them there.
Oh one last thing, this European Court Thing (ICC I think)This is the biggest affront to Sovereignty ever conceived. Let the Euros make a Euro court if they want we have one thank you. If they ever take one of our people into it we might have to send troops to get him out.
More properly, the question is, "How much American blood will be spilt as the price for hubris?"
I strongly disagree.
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