It is impossible for a feeling person to watch common citizens brutally crushed by a tyrant without wishing a benign force would intervene to stop the bloodshed. Is the U.S. military such a benign force? Many Americans assume that U.S. foreign policy, for all its flaws, still manages to represent their own good will toward others, their own respect for self-determination. But we should not forget that U.S. Middle Eastern policy is explicitly against self-determination in the region. The Carter Doctrine and Reagan Corollary to the Carter Doctrine state that we will intervene militarily should external or internal forces threaten U.S. hegemony in the region. The reason for this is explicitly stated as well--access to oil. Moreover, a glance at the effect of this policy over the last thirty years reveals increasing violence and instability rather than movement toward self-determination.
It is possible that circumstances in Libya represent an exception to this, that they present a rare opportunity in which U.S. self-interests (as conceived by the Washington establishment) happen to coincide with the interests of the opposition forces in Libya. If so, the case must be argued, not from a presumption that U.S. foreign policy supports self-determination but rather from the opposite perspective: that U.S. imperialism and lack of concern for the sovereign rights of nations does not prevent military intervention from being a net benefit for the people who suffer under Gaddafi. I will not attempt to answer this question, but I intend to argue forcefully that it is a question which must be asked. If we are considering inflicting death and suffering, we have an obligation to avoid indulging in wishful thinking.
First, I need to register a strong opinion. I do not believe U.S. interests are actually served by extending U.S. power imperially through military might. I grieve what might have been in the ME had the West not responded to hunger for modernization and democracy with exploitation and clandestine manipulation. We could have had true friends in the region, based on mutual respect and mutual values. We could be enjoying a blossoming of increasingly mature democracies. As it is, decades of cynical foreign policy has finally convinced even the educated classes that the U.S. does not represent the ideals embodied in our famous Declaration of Independence, most especially not in our foreign policy. Time after time we have come, not as liberators, but as conquering exploiters. Along the way, we have enabled the rise of fundamentalism in reaction to the neo-liberal policies the West has inflicted. This is my opinion. For the purposes of this diary, "U.S. interests" refer to those nationalist, or oligarchic interests as defined by the vast majority of USG officials since the 1950's, and especially since 1980.
The Carter Doctrine
In response to the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan, President Carter put forward the Carter Doctrine in his 1980 State of the Union Address. The Doctrine states that, because of the importance of oil, the U.S. will deploy military might to prevent any outside forces from gaining control of the region. Several months after the Carter Doctrine, the Reagan Corollary was appended, this to state that the U.S. would intervene militarily should developments internally within a sovereign state pose a threat to "stability" in the region. Few people seem to have noticed that the Reagan Corollary states an explicit intention to violate international laws under certain circumstances.
The Carter Doctrine [emphasis added]
The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two-thirds of the world's exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.
This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come. It demands collective efforts to meet this new threat to security in the Persian Gulf and in Southwest Asia. It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East and who are concerned with global peace and stability. And it demands consultation and close cooperation with countries in the area which might be threatened.
Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region.
Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.
Yes Virginia, it
is about oil.
Well, we can always hope that in its application of these foreign policy principles, the U.S. will refuse to stray from core principles, such principles as fundamental human rights including the right of self-determination. Recent behavior does not support this hope. The fact is, Machiavellian, anti-democratic behavior by the U.S. government is enabled by liberals who dreamily make unwarranted assumptions of U.S. good will, U.S. interest in helping the people of a region. It is possible to avoid cognitive dissonance by treating every child killed in a drone attack, every partnership with a drug lord or dictator, as a necessary exception, as collateral damage, as a departure from a generally benign policy. To do so, however, amounts to willful blindness both to practice and to theory.
Shocking disregard of democracy and national self-determination
The last sentence of the Carter Doctrine threatens use of military force. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Advisor, wrote the sentence and insisted that it be added. Brzezinski is still giving advice, including in his most recent book,The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives. It can no doubt be taken as representative of the kind of thought processes driving our ME policies. Please go to Amazon and read the first few reviews, then decide if you feel safe in assuming the architects of U.S. foreign policy are likely to behave in a way supportive of your worldview. The following paragraphs exemplify the arrogant disregard of the interests of the people which Brzezinski's book hammers relentlessly and shamelessly from beginning to end.
(p.40)
...To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.
(p.55)
Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America's status as a global power.
(p.194)
America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe's central arena. Hence, what happens to the distribution of power on the Eurasian continent will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and to America's historical legacy.
(p. 198)
That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America's primacy.
(p. 198)
The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.
"Vassal states"? "Decisive arbitration role"? "America's global primacy"? Doesn't sound too promising for the rebels in Libya, does it? Is there any reason to believe the the U.S. foreign policy is not still governed by such thinking? If so, there has been no announcement made of the fact, no Obama Doctrine.
Nation-building in Afghanistan
Let's look briefly at the example of Afghanistan. Aside from the almost forgotten purpose of finding Osama bin Laden, many liberals assume that U.S. policy there includes hopes for nation-building, for developing a democracy. Sure, Bush fell hopelessly short, but these were the goals. In fact, the U.S. has never stated this as a goal with the exception of politicians making vague non-policy pronouncements which make skillful use of the assumptions of people of good will. We all know the neo-cons who invaded Afghanistan consider the term "nation-building" to be anathema. In Afghanistan, they backed up this attitude in word and in deed.
Consider this, from Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid:
But, while Bosnia received $679 per capita, Kosovo $526, and East Timor $233, Afghanistan received only $57 per capita in the first two years after 2001. "In manpower and money this was the least resourced nation-building effort in our history," said James Dobbins. [of RAND]
snip
The real hindrance was still the CIA, which even in 2003 was deciding what projects other agencies should undertake on the basis of how those projects would affect the war on terrorism.
On exactly one occasion, Bush departed from script and spoke of a "Marshall Plan" for Afghanistan, promising to rebuild the government and the army and provide health and education services. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz jumped into damage control, pronouncing in no uncertain terms that the U.S. was not interested in helping the people of Afghanistan to rebuild. Bush never spoke that way again.
When CIA meddling failed to block nation-building, corruption did the job. So, who is going to rescue Libya? U.S. contractors?
The report [by the GAO] stated that while NGO CARE had built forty schools in 2004,... USAID contractors had built eight schools costing four times as much.
... Every Afghan in Kabul had a scandalous story to tell.
Different country, same story. I once heard an Iraqi say, "In Iraq, Americans are famous for corruption."
This brief glance does not convey the extent to which Rashid's detailed analysis reveals U.S. behavior in Afghanistan as doing more to undermine than to support the development of democracy. Are we to assume this changed overnight with the election of Obama? Has the CIA been pushed out of the policy arena? Has Congress or the administration cleaned up the corruption we can expect to accompany any implementation of a Libyan policy?
Andrew Bacevich
Did Obama bring change we can believe in? We can believe, but we would probably be wrong. Here is what Andrew Bacevich said to Bill Moyers during the 2008 presidential campaign. [emphasis added]
ANDREW BACEVICH: Parsing every word, every phrase, that either Senator Obama or Senator McCain utters, as if what they say is going to reveal some profound and important change that was going to come about if they happened to be elected. It's not going to happen.
BILL MOYERS: It's not going to happen because?
ANDREW BACEVICH: Not going to happen - it's not going to happen because the elements of continuity outweigh the elements of change. And it's not going to happen because, ultimately, we the American people, refuse to look in that mirror. And to see the extent to which the problems that we face really lie within.
Bacevich is no ideologue. He studied war at West Point, he lost his son to the Afghanistan War.
Back in 1980, I think, President Carter, in many respects when he declared the Carter Doctrine, and said that henceforth, the Persian Gulf had enormous strategic significance to the United States and the United States is not going to permit any other country to control that region of the world.
And that set in motion a set of actions that has produced the militarization of U.S. policy, ever deeper U.S. military involvement in the region, and in essence, has postponed that day of reckoning when we need to understand the imperative of having an energy policy, and trying to restore some semblance of energy independence.
snip
...They [presidents from Reagan through W. Bush] all have worked under the assumption that through the projection of power, or the threat to employ power, that we can fix the world. Fix the world in order to sustain this dysfunctional way of life that we have back here.
snip
... Above all, recognize that, when you go to war, it's unlikely there's a neat tidy solution. It's far more likely that the bill that the nation is going to pay in lives and in dollars is going to be a monumental one.
snip
What we should learn from history is that preventive war doesn't work. The Iraq War didn't work. And, therefore, we should abandon notions, such as the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. We should return to the just war tradition. Which sees force as something that is only used as a last resort. Which sees war as something that is justifiable for defensive purposes.
This conversation with Moyers, from after Obama's election, is depressingly pertinent to war in Libya:
... And I think President Obama is probably the smartest guy to come down the pike, in terms of our politics in a long time. But I believe that his decision in December [2008] to escalate the war in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake, a squandered opportunity. That was his oppor- that was his chance. The Afghanistan decision was his chance to change course, when it comes to the fundamentals of US national security policy. And instead, he made in December, made the same decision with regard to Afghanistan as John McCain would have made, had we elected John McCain president.
And so, how could this incredibly smart guy have made that incredibly, in my view, stupid decision? I think that one of the explanations, I think, is that even though the president has styled himself as the man who's going to bring change and is going to change the way Washington works, the president surrounded himself with a national security team of very conventional and orthodox thinkers....
snip
Americans have come to believe quite deeply that the answers to the world's ills are found here. That the keys to life, liberty and happiness that we have embraced are not only applicable to Americans, but they're applicable to Afghans and they're applicable to Pakistanis and so on.
And we're simply not willing to acknowledge either the contradictions in our own way of life or the possibility that if you're an Afghan or a Pakistani, that you may just define happiness or fulfillment in a radically different way. And despite the fact that we confront failures like Vietnam, and I think I would also argue strongly like Iraq, we cling to this notion that we possess history's secrets. And of course, that's we're called upon to share them with others.
snip
What the Carter doctrine became was a rationale for militarizing US policy, not simply in the Persian Gulf, but more broadly across the Middle East. And if we look at the record of US interventionism since 1980, whether we begin with President Reagan's intervention in Lebanon that ended with the catastrophic Beirut bombing. Or up through the various wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and so on.
You know, if we if we look back over 30 years and say, "Okay, given the trillions of dollars invested, given the thousands of American lives lost, is that 30 year project stabilizing the greater Middle East? Is it is it contributing to American security? Is it is it is it enhancing American power in abundance? Or is it possible that the 30 year long effects are just the opposite?" And again, it seems to me you think about it for about three seconds. It becomes crystal clear that this military approach to trying to ensure stability, in fact, is creating ever more instability.
snip
...the militarization of our political class is far more advanced or far deeper I think than most of us appreciate.
Supporting the Opposition or Working for U.S. Goals?
So, is Libya an exception, a departure from decades of U.S. policy designed to prevent sovereign nations of the ME from enjoying control of their own territory free of U.S. influence? Are the Western forces coordinating with the Libyan opposition? It is difficult to answer this definitively. Perhaps the allies are doing their best, but history would suggest that they are acting with little respect for the opinions of those they would claim to liberate. Steve Clemons, at least, has argued that that Western forces could be more responsive to rebel needs.
(h/t joanneleon)
I am in Doha now at the 6th Al Jazeera Forum and have met officials of the Libyan Opposition Council -- including the person formally charged now with the foreign affairs portfolio. What is clear is that the Libyan opposition is still finding its legs and has a number of voices. it is true that some have called for a no-fly zone because they are worried about being rolled back and what support from any source. But the leadership of the Council has "not" called for a no-fly zone.
What the Council wants, as I currently understand things, are:
1. The US to immediately recognize the Libyan opposition as the legitimate government of Libya....
2. Arms, arms, arms -- or at least get out of the way of arms being delivered.... According to representatives and activists from Libya at this conference, the Opposition is forfeiting gains to Gaddafi because they are literally running out of ammunition and bullets....
3. Scramble and disrupt Gaddafi's communications system....
4. Cooperate on intelligence feeds on movements by Gaddafi's military and command staff.
I know these points are arguable. I don't pretend to have an answer. But I do ask that liberals, that Democrats, not allow their desperate wish to help the Libyan opposition make them blind to the stated purpose and practical limitations of U.S. military might.