Theme : Bush

The Perils of Pax Americana

The imminent U.S. war against Iraq is part of the Bush regime's dangerous desire to recast the world

by Gabriel Kolko

Is a Pax Americana attainable and can Washington create a world that conforms to its ideals? Policies virtually identical to President George Bush's National Security Strategy paper of last September, with its ambitious military, economic, and political goals, have been produced since the late 1940s.

Bush's advocacy of "pre-emptive" action is hardly original; the U.S. has attempted to define the contours of politics in every part of the world for the past half-century.

It employed its alliances, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), justifying their interventions as preventing the spread of Soviet influence or Communism, although they often were intended to forestall any political changes Washington deemed unacceptable.

The imminent American war against Iraq is part of the Bush administration's desire to recast the world.

A 150-page, 20- to 30-year "Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism" is now in its final stages and will become official policy. Washington will call upon its traditional allies, Canada included, to join "coalitions of the willing," but it will insist on defining their missions.

The war in Iraq is only the beginning, and the fundamental issue confronting Ottawa is whether the U.S. should be encouraged to pursue this dangerous, vainglorious route.

The threat of American retaliation contained Soviet power, and two highly respected U. S. experts argue in the January issue of Foreign Policy magazine that it also deterred Saddam Hussein after 1991.

Whatever its time-consuming faults, the U.N. verification system has worked and Iraq is simply not the threat that the U.S. now alleges it to be.

The political and social outcome of America's interventions cannot be predicted.

Vietnam was the longest war in American history and ended in defeat. In Iran after 1953, as well as in Central America, its allies were in power for decades.

Many it aided subsequently became its enemies, as in the case of Saddam in the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-87 or the fundamentalist Muslim mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

While it was successful in many cases, the world is more precarious than it has been in decades.

After Iraq, Washington will confront North Korea, perhaps Pakistan — the worst nuclear bomb proliferator — and do whatever is necessary, to combat its elusive, ill-defined enemies.

Some of Pakistan's key scientists are Islamic fanatics and it has transferred nuclear bomb technology to North Korea, which is far more powerful than Iraq.

The Bush administration has other nations in the "axis of evil" it plans to confront after Iraq, and while this is a dangerous recipe for intervention it will also produce more invitations to its allies — Canada included — to join future quixotic adventures.

The war in Afghanistan has destabilized Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The comprehensive December, 2002 Pew Report on public opinion in 42 nations revealed that anti-Americanism has grown in at least 19 countries since 2000.

France, Germany, Russia, and Turkey oppose a war against Iraq now and the White House has profoundly worsened its relations with them.

In South Korea and Pakistan, anti-Americanism has caused the politics of those nations to change dramatically.

Many of the U.S.' traditional allies today fear its belligerent unilateralism as much as terrorism. Even a majority of Americans favor more time to find an alternative to war, and it overwhelmingly opposes a war without U.N. sanction.

America can never attain the global order it desires. The world since 1990 has become much more fissiparous economically and politically. More nations have weapons of mass destruction.

But terrorism is fed by the necessity of the weak to find vulnerabilities in the very strong; it is relatively very cheap, and the religious fanaticism that encourages it has flourished in the misery and ignorance that prevails in the Third World. Terrorism will not disappear.

CIA and other officials have futilely attempted since the late 1940s to make U. S. policies adapt to reality when facts disprove conventional wisdom. Quite conservative former American senior foreign policy leaders and military men have publicly deplored a war against Iraq, and a significant minority of its serving generals regard war there as unnecessary folly.

Things go wrong for every great nation whose ambitions exceed its power and reality, and the U.S. is no exception.

The U.S. has always had global priorities, but Europe was invariably ranked as the most important. Protracted wars in Korea and Vietnam confirmed that America has often lost control of these priorities and that by attempting too much it not merely accomplishes far less but also destabilizes crucial areas.

A half-century after the fighting ended, it still retains 37,000 troops in South Korea and an extremely dangerous security situation exists.

The United States now confronts a similar dilemma in the Persian Gulf, and the political, human, and economic stakes are awesome and could preoccupy the world for years to come.

Will the geopolitical consequences of making war against Iraq far outweigh the world's realization that the Pentagon still retains "credible" military power and that the Bush administration is ready to employ it?

What will the Turks do if the Kurds in Iraq proclaim de facto independence? How long must American troops occupy Iraq?

Osama bin Laden and his key Al Qaeda aides are still free, and Afghanistan remains highly unstable. What if Iran becomes strategically dominant in the oil-rich Gulf, the inevitable outcome of a war against Iraq?

And will American military victory in Iraq have any bearing on the war against terrorism, not the least because Al Qaeda detests Saddam's secularism?

There have always been limits to American power, and the question today is when and how the U.S. will acknowledge this reality.

If Canada stays out of the Iraq war it will not only serve its own vital interests but also those of its vainglorious neighbor.

Gabriel Kolko, research professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, is author, most recently, of Another Century Of War? (The New Press, 2002).

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