{"id":73578,"date":"2016-05-16T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=73578"},"modified":"2016-05-15T16:54:19","modified_gmt":"2016-05-15T15:54:19","slug":"the-great-leap-backward-americas-illegal-wars-on-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/the-great-leap-backward-americas-illegal-wars-on-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Leap Backward: America\u2019s Illegal Wars on the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

13 May 2016 – <\/em>Can we face it in this election season? America is a weapons factory, the White House a war room, and the president the manager of the neoliberal conspiracy to recolonize the planet. It exports war and mass poverty. On the economic front, usurious neoliberalism; on the military front, illegal wars. These are the trenches of America\u2019s battle for world domination in the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

If not stopped, it will be a short century.<\/p>\n

\"war<\/a><\/p>\n

Since 1945, America\u2019s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World\u2019s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth\u2019s people. In the 19th<\/sup> century, America exterminated another kind of \u201cred menace,\u201d writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (\u201cIndian reservations\u201d), in the name of civilizing the \u201csavages.\u201d By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab\u2014internal imperialism\u2013 was over. There was a world to conquer, and America trained its exceptionally covetous eye on Cuba and the Philippines.<\/p>\n

American external imperialism was born.<\/p>\n

Then, something utterly dreadful happened in 1917\u2014a successful social revolution in Russia, the second major after the French in 1789, to try to redistribute the wealth of the few to the advantage of the many. The rulers of the world\u2014US, Britain, France and sundry acolytes\u2014put aside their differences and united to stem the awful threat of popular democracy rising and spreading. They invaded Russia, fomented a civil war, funding and arming the counter-revolutionary forces, failed, and tried again in 1939. But Hitler\u2019s war of extermination on the USSR ended in a spectacular victory for Moscow.<\/p>\n

For a while, after 1945, the US had to behave as a civilized country, formally. It claimed that the USSR had a barbarian, all-conquering ideology, rooted in terror, disappearances, murder, and torture. By contrast, the US was the shining city on the hill, the beacon of hope for a \u201cthe free world.\u201d Its shrine was the United Nations; its holy writ was international law; its first principle was the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations.<\/p>\n

All this was rubbish, of course. It was an apartheid society. It nuked Japan not once but twice, deliberately selecting civilian targets. It shielded from justice top Nazi criminals to absorb them as partners in intelligence structures. It conducted virtual \u201cshow trials\u201d against dissidents during the hysteria of the McCarthy congressional hearings, seeding the country with a harvest of fear. It waged a genocidal war on Vietnam to prevent independence and unification. It assassinated African independence leaders and bestowed fascist dictators on Latin America. It softly occupied Western Europe, tied it to itself through military \u201ccooperation\u201d in NATO, and it waged psy-op war on its opposition parties. Behind the civilized fa\u00e7ade was a ruthless effort to take out the Soviet Union and crush self-determination in the colonial world.<\/p>\n

By hook and by crook, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and America went berserk with triumphalism. Now, at last, the conquest of the world, interrupted in 1917, could resume. The global frontier reopened and America\u2019s identity would be regenerated through violence, which had delivered the American West to the European invaders in the 19th<\/sup> century. The benign mask dropped. Behind it came a rider on a pale horse. According to the ideologically exulted, history had ended, ideologies had died, and the messianic mission of the US to become the steward of God\u2019s property on earth could be fulfilled.<\/p>\n

The \u201ccivilizing mission\u201d was afoot.<\/p>\n

A cabal of neo-conservative policy wonks first sketched what I call the Great Leap Backward into lawlessness as a revival of the myth of the frontier in the 1990s. \u201cThe Plan for a New American Century\u201d (PNAC) envisaged the 21st<\/sup> century as a unilateralist drive to entrench American values globally\u2014what the PNAC ideologues call \u201cfreedom and democracy\u201d\u2014through preemptive wars and regime change. This frenzied delirium of US military domination turned into official foreign policy with the Bush Doctrine after 9\/11, but it was the Clinton administration\u2019s Doctrine of Humanitarian Warfare before 9\/11, that shut the door on the prohibition of aggressive wars by the UN Charter, remaking the map of the world into a borderless American hunting reserve by removing the principle of sovereignty and replacing it with \u201cright to protect\u201d (R2P)\u2014or humanitarian pretext for use of force.<\/p>\n

Clinton\u2019s doctrine was an act of supreme, even witty, exploitation of liberal principles and commitment to policies of human rights. It was how the liberal left was induced to embrace war and imperialism as the means of defending human rights. The Carnegie Endowment cooked up the doctrine in 1992. Its report, \u201cChanging Our Ways: America\u2019s Role in the New World,\u201d urged \u201ca new principle of international relations: the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.\u201d The report recommended that the US use NATO as the enforcer. It must be noted, too, that the principle of \u201chumanitarian war\u201d has no authority in international law. The Charter of the United Nations sought to outlaw war by making it impossible for unilateral interventions in the business of sovereign states by self-appointed guardians of human rights. The reason behind the proscription was not heartlessness but the consciousness that WW II had been the result of serial violations of sovereignty by Germany, Italy, and Japan\u2014by militarist imperialism, in other words.<\/p>\n

The bell tolled for the UN and the old order in the 1999 Kosovo War. The bi-partisan effort to dismantle the architecture of the post war\u2019s legal order played out there. With the Kosovo War, the Clinton administration launched the first humanitarian war and set the precedent for waging war without Security Council clearance of many to follow by both Republican and Democrat administrations. The Clintonites who used NATO to bomb Serbia to protect ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from non-existing Serbian genocide may or may not have appreciated the fact that Hitler had used the pretext of R2P\u2014humanitarian intervention\u2014to launch WW II by claiming to protect German minorities in Poland, but they certainly knew that the monopoly on use of force rested with the UN\u2019s Security Council. This monopoly was secured after WW II precisely to prevent unilateral attacks on sovereign states through bogus claims of altruistic interventions, such as Hitler had championed and pursued. Ironically for critics of the Soviet leader, it was Stalin who insisted at the Yalta Conference that if the USSR were to join the United Nations a veto in the Security Council was a must to insure that any war would be a multilateral consensus and a multilateral action.<\/p>\n

As the Clintonites understood, the postwar legal authority for peacekeeping and the prevention of war entrusted to the UN Security Council posed a colossal obstacle to the pursuit of American world domination. For the vision of PNAC and the Carnegie Endowment to become reality, the United Nations, the guarantor of sovereignty, had to go. In the run-up to the Kosovo War, the Clintonites fatally and deliberately destabilized the United Nations, substituting the uncooperative UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali with the subservient NATO shill, Kofi Annan. Annan obligingly opined that in the matter of war and peace, UN Security Council resolutions were not the only way to skin a country\u2013 especially one chosen by the US for remaking, partitioning, or regime changing, a cynic might add.<\/p>\n

So now we live in a dangerous world. Once again, since the 1930s, the world is being stalked by an expansionist power answering to no law but its own unilateral, humanitarian vigilantism. The Kosovo precedent has spun out of control. Libya smolders in the ashes of NATO bombs, dropped to prevent \u201cgenocide\u201d; Syria fights for survival under attack by genocidal terrorist groups, armed, trained and funded by genocide preventers grouped in the NATO alliance and the Gulf partners; Afghanistan languishes in a permanent state of war, present ten thousand American troops which bomb hospitals to promote human rights; in Iraq, the humanitarians are back, after twenty-five years of humanitarian failure. And in Ukraine, Nazi patriots are promoting American democratic and humanitarian values by shelling Donbass daily. I hesitate to mention Africa, where humanitarian Special Forces are watering the fields where terrorists sprout like mushrooms after rain\u2014in Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, Kenya.<\/p>\n

Then there is Yemen, perhaps the most callous, vicious, and careless humanitarian crime of a litany of crimes against humanity in the Middle East. The US government has recently admitted deploying troops to Yemen. The Pentagon claims that the deployment will assist Saudi Arabia (\u201cthe Arab coalition\u201d) to fight al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula. Can a sentient being meet such a grotesque claim with anything but infernal laughter? Help Saudi Arabia to fight its own creature? Are we stupid yet?<\/p>\n

$4 trillion dollars later, spent on the War-on-Terror\/Humanitarian-R2P, the pattern of military destabilization of sovereign states proceeds apace, one recalcitrant, independent country at a time in the Middle East and North Africa. For the rest of the world, the surrender of sovereignty is sought by means of economic globalization through trade pacts\u2014TTP, TTIP, etc.\u2014that virtually abolish the constitution of states, including our own. Spearheading the economic effort to control the periphery and the entire world is the so-called \u201cWashington Consensus.\u201d<\/p>\n

It hugs the market-fundamentalist idea that global neoliberalism and core finance capital\u2019s economic control of the planet by means of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) is the option to poverty and social chaos.<\/p>\n

Neither military nor economic war on the sovereignty of nations has yielded anything close to a stable, prosperous, and peaceful world. It had delivered death, destruction, debt, market crises, tidal waves of refugees and displaced persons, and concentrated masses of wealth in a few but powerful hands. What the poet W.H. Auden called \u201cthe international wrong,\u201d which he named \u201cimperialism\u201d in his poem \u201cSeptember 1939,\u201d is the crisis that stares out of the mirror of the past into our faces, and it bodes war, war, and more war, for that is where imperialism drives.<\/p>\n

In this scenario, no potential presidential candidate\u2014even establishment-party dissenter\u2014who does not call for both<\/em>\u00a0the end of the bi-partisan \u201cWashington Consensus\u201d and<\/em>\u00a0the end of bipartisan militarist aggression can reverse the totality of the \u201cinternational wrong\u201d or stem the domestic descent into social brutalization. If none calls this foreign policy debacle \u201cimperialism,\u201d elections will be a sleepwalker\u2019s exercise. Nothing will change. Except, almost certainly, for the worse.<\/p>\n

_________________________________<\/a><\/p>\n

Luciana Bohne<\/em>\u00a0is co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and teaches at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. She can be reached at: lbohne@edinboro.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 counterpunch.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since 1945, America\u2019s Manifest Destiny, posing as the Free World\u2019s Crusade against the Red Menace, has claimed 20 to 30 million lives worldwide and bombed one-third of the earth\u2019s people. In the 19th century, America exterminated another kind of \u201cred menace,\u201d writing and shredding treaties, stealing lands, massacring, and herding Native populations into concentration camps (\u201cIndian reservations\u201d), in the name of civilizing the \u201csavages.\u201d By 1890, with the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee, the frontier land grab\u2014internal imperialism\u2013 was over. American external imperialism was born.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-militarism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}