Big Brother Bush
"Suicidal Saddam", and the
Homegrown Threat To Liberal Democracy
by Paul Street
Beyond Democratic Constraint?
It is hard to avoid the chilling conclusion that the corporate
plutocrats and arch-imperialists in and around the Bush administration
do not think they are required to speak or act with even moderate
respect for the political intelligence and/or relevance of the
citizenry. They believe that basic rules of evidence and democracy,
which require justifications and debate rather than simply edicts from
policymakers, offer little if any constraint on their actions and
pronouncements. They think they have achieved something like the status
of Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984. Big Brother never had to make
real sense to his population, which was in no position to respond to the
absurdity of his nonsensical pronouncements - War is Peace, Love is
Hate, etc. - or to his constant manipulation of history to fit the
current party line.
How else to explain the veritable flood of preposterous pronouncements
and contradictory policies flowing with regularity out of the Bush
administration?:
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- The claim that it is in the interest of the American people to enact massive tax cuts for the rich that will do nothing to stimulate a sluggish wealth-top-heavy economy and will combine with massive "defense" expenditures to deepen the federal deficit and undercut desperately needed social expenditures
- The claim that jetliner attacks carried out with box-cutters illustrates the need to spend untold billions on a fantastic and unworkable high-tech missile defense shield
- The claim of the existence of a global "Axis of Evil" comprising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, three states with little basis (beyond common demonization by Uncle Sam) for mutual alliance and considerable difference and enmity between them
- The truly fantastic claim that the Iraqi regime is a threat to send unmanned airplanes carrying chemical and biological weapons to the US
- The claim to be seriously concerned about the human rights of Iraqi and other world citizens while the White House aggressively supports governments that inflict massive terror on subject and occupied peoples, including Columbia, Israel, Turkey, China and many others
- The claim to be concerned for "democracy" and "freedom" around the world while deepening relationships with numerous authoritarian states in the name of the War on Terrorism and using 9-11 as a pretext to roll back cherished civil liberties at home
- The claim to champion democracy while openly embracing the short lived oligarchic coup conducted last April against the popular elected and constitutional Chavez government of Venezuela – a state too friendly to the poor for the White House tastes
- The claim to be grievously offended by the use of "special preferences" (race-based affirmative action at the University of Michigan) in college admissions even while Bush refuses to criticize the aristocratic legacy system that provided the only possible basis for his admission to Yale
The list of Bush absurdities along these lines goes on and on.
Spinning Divergent Responses to "Evil Axis" Others
Perhaps the most relevant Big lie currently rolling out of the White
House spin factory relates to the nature and objectives of the Iraqi
government. Here we have the neo-Stalinist North Korean regime of Kim
Jung Il announcing its determination to significantly expand an already
existing stock of nuclear weapons. A million North Korean troops have
been placed on alert, ready to do battle with jackbooted enemies from
what North Korean state television calls "the citadels of imperialism."
And here we have Iraq, still reeling from the first Persian Gulf "war"
(a one-sided assault by world history's most powerful military state)
and a subsequent decade of deadly US-led sanctions. The second nation
poses no serious military threat to its own neighbors, much less the
West. United Nations inspectors under Bush's sneering glare are hard
pressed to find significant evidence that significant "weapons of mass
destruction" are being manufactured and/or stored in the land of Saddam
Hussein. They are reduced to reporting the discovery of empty
containers, hardly a refutation of former chief UN weapons inspector
Scott Ritter, a former American military intelligence officer, who
insists that Iraq has been effectively disarmed.
Bush's response to the first threat is to put it on the back burner,
promising diplomacy and negotiation, oiled by reassuring words that
America does not seek to attack or invade. The White House response to
the second situation is a full front-burner preparation of its awesome
air-, land-, sea- and space-based military machine for another bloody
assault on Iraq, followed by occupation and "reconstruction."
How does the Bush administration explain such divergent responses to
"Evil Axis" perfidy, especially when the threat posed by North Korea
would appear to be so much greater? Kim Jong Il, the Bush administration
tells us, is a "rational actor," subject to constraint and deterrence.
He can be argued with and persuaded. He is possessed of common sense and
realism, a special instinct for survival and a sense of limits.
But Saddam, the White House insists, is no such animal. He is hopelessly
reckless, driven and brutal. He simply cannot be deterred from acting on
his bizarre and sinister determination to use weapons of mass
destruction. If we let a lunatic like Saddam get nuclear weapons, the
argument runs, it is certain that he will use them against us and our
allies, either directly or by "handing them off" to al Qaeda or some
other like-minded group. The likelihood that such an action would lead
to his total annihilation is irrelevant, we are told. The failure to
launch a preemptive war against this madman, we are instructed, will be
written in mushroom clouds over our cities.
The proof, the White House argues, for this judgement is found in the
record of Saddam's thoroughly irrational, even "insane" past behavior.
That historical record includes his attacks on Iran (1980) and Kuwait
(1990), resulting in millions of Iraqi deaths, and the use of chemical
weapons against "his own people" (the Kurds of northern Iraq) and
Iranian soldiers.
The Real Saddam: Sinister, Yes; Suicidal, No
It's a transparently manipulative and false historical argument whose
primary purpose is to frighten the American people into war. A related
goal is to divert the citizenry from the terrible shortcomings of
domestic White House policies that exacerbate the growing social and
economic insecurity of the population while distributing wealth and
power upward.
The historical facts are clear. When Saddam started a war with Iran in
1980, he did so because that nation faced a very real and serious threat
from a zealous revolutionary nation (Iran) that was aggressively
pursuing hegemony throughout the Middle East. He fought a strictly
limited war seeking a large protective swath of expanded border
territory. He never pursued the conquest of Iran or the overthrow of its
revolutionary leader Ayatolla Khomeni. His war was fought with the
reasonable and realized expectation that other nations, including the
United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and France, would offer considerable
financial, diplomatic and technical support to stem the spread of Iran's
Islamic revolution.
When Saddam invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, his goals were far
from reckless. He sought, after years of fruitless diplomacy, to punish
Kuwait for its refusal to write-off debts incurred in a war that
arguably protected that nation's oil fields from Iranian conquest. He
was also responding in arguably rational, Machiavellian ways to Kuwait's
insistence on deflating world oil prices, reducing Iraqi profits, by
producing beyond OPEC quotas. When he invaded, he weighed his options
carefully, concluding that he had definite reason to expect US approval,
thanks to a now famous communication from Bush I's Ambassador to Iraq -
April Glaspie. "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts," Glaspie
told Hussein, "like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Glaspie's
State Department had earlier told Saddam that it had "no special defense
or security commitments to Kuwait."
Saddam proceeded, in short, on the assumption of a "green light" from
Bush I. His invasion of Kuwait cannot be reasonably seen as proof of his
non-deterrable nature since the US never attempted deterrence.
When the US responded with a devastating air campaign, Saddam
communicated his willingness to retreat prior to the launching of a US
ground war. But Bush I refused this option, unacceptably insisting that
Saddam leave his military hardware behind in Kuwait. This impossible
demand set the stage for an American massacre of Iraqi troops that is
curiously deleted from the official record of "pathological" atrocities
in the Middle East.
During the Persian Gulf "war," which he curiously survived (contrary to
White House doctrine on his "suicidal" nature), Hussein never used
chemical or biological weapons against Israel, Saudi Arabia or the
coalition forces that were pounding his military. He knew that using
weapons of mass destruction would lead to his annihilation by the US.
Hussein was also deterred by US troop mobilizations from efforts to
change the inspection regime in 1994.
What about Saddam's use of chemical weapons against "his own people" (if
that's what we really want to call the minority Kurdish population he
has long terrorized) and Iranian soldiers during the 1980s? Those
actions certainly indicate Saddam's undeniable savagery, but they are
not proof of his reckless and suicidal immunity to deterrence for two
reasons. First, the people targeted were in no position to respond in
kind. Second, Saddam gassed Kurds and Iranians with the support and
assistance of the one country that happened and happens to possess the
world's largest stockpile of deterrent weapons chemical, nuclear and
biological. That would be the United States. During the 1980s, in fact,
the US assisted Saddam's biological weapons program by providing him
with American strains of anthrax, West Nile virus and botulinal toxin.
As for the nuclear threat allegedly posed by Saddam, there is no reason
to think that he is willing to invite a devastating nuclear assault on
Iraq and perhaps most significantly (for him) himself - the certain
result of starting a nuclear war in the region. Also preposterous is the
notion that Saddam would "handoff" nuclear weapons to historical blood
enemies in al Qaeda or other extremist Islamic terror networks. The Bush
administration's abject failure to prove that Iraq is cooperating with
al Qaeda is hardly surprising to any serious student of Middle Eastern
politics.
The Homegrown Threat to liberal Democracy
One does not have to be a radical critic of American imperialism to see
through the transparent Orwellian absurdity of the White House's line
about the Iraqi regime's non-deterrability. Even Thomas L. Friedman, the
openly imperialist and Arab-baiting foreign policy columnist of the New
York Times correctly noted today that Saddam is "a twisted dictator who
is deterrable through conventional means" and "loves life more than he
hates us." More substantively, the counter-argument to Bush's claims of
Saddam's reckless non-deterrability can be found in a recent article by
two leading mainstream academics in the establishment journal Foreign
Policy (John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, "An Unnecessary War,"
FP, January-February 2003). It can also be found, in greater detail, in
Carl Kaysen et al, War With Iraq: Costs, Consequences and Alternatives
(December 2002), produced by no less of a "respectable" organization
than the Committee on International Security Studies of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
What's missing in these very useful mainstream pieces is a broader
framework in which to place and thereby understand the nature of the
White House's deception. For that, we must consider the balance of
global petro-capitalist relations that provide the basis for America's
provocative presence in the Middle East in the first place. We should
also consider the numerous domestic failures from which White House
wishes to divert popular attention in the industrial world's most
unequal and incarceration-addicted nation - the "world's most prosperous
state," where more than 45 million people lack basic health insurance.
Also recommended is an essay titled "The Orwell Diversion" (1986),
written by the late Australian propaganda critic Alex Carey and included
in his 1997 book Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda
Versus Freedom and liberty. In that essay and elsewhere, Carey argued
that the most relevant long-term threat to liberal democracy has never
come from the state totalitarians of the Stalinist left or the fascist
right. It comes instead from the homegrown, big business-connected
"Respectable Right" that arose within the liberal-democratic societies
of the West (chiefly the US) largely to protect concentrated corporate
power against its natural homeland antagonist - the popular democratic
tradition.
More then fifteen years after Carey's essay, the Soviet Union has joined
Nazi Germany in history's proverbial dustbin and the last classic
1984-style regime (if such a thing has ever existed) bangs its little
nuclear drum for global food assistance in North Korea. Meanwhile, a
homegrown version of Big Brother stalks the corridors of domestic and
imperial power in Washington D.C., wearing the uniform of the
Respectable Right. He is deeply enabled by a corporate communications
and entertainment empire that combines Huxley with Orwell to muddy the
waters of popular perception in ways that modern red- and brown-fascist
state-totalitarians could only dream about. He is ineluctably if perhaps
unconsciously drawn to the wisdom of Orwell's chilling axiom: "Who
controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls
the past."
– Paul Street
Paul Street is a political essayist and social policy critic in Chicago, Illinois.
This piece was published on January 22, 2003
in Z-Mag
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