COMMENTARY: 'A shadow is falling across the American Republic' (Tony Judt)
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- Written by Henry Adams
Tony Judt, director of New York University's Remarque Institute, is a leading critic of what he calls here the emerging "new world order," and this essay is important from two points of view. -- First, it is important as a reflection upon the present status of the problem of international humanitarian intervention. -- Second, it is an important statement about the current state of the American Republic. -- On the first subject, INTERNATIONAL INTERVENTION, Judt is among those who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, but who also supported the 1999 U.S.-led war on Serbia, and is here concerned to find principles that can distinguish the two cases. -- The difficulties are great when one takes institutions and history seriously, as any approach to these problems must: "International law -- like the U.N. itself -- was conceived in a world of sovereign states, a world where wars broke out between countries, peace was duly brokered among states, and a major concern of the post-World War II settlement was to guarantee the inviolability of borders and sovereignty," writes Judt. "Today's wars typically happen within states. The distinctions between peace-making and peacekeeping -- between intervention, assistance, and coercion -- are unclear, as are the rights of the conflicting parties and the circumstances under which foreign agencies may resort to force. In this confusing new world, well-meaning Western diplomats and observers have sometimes proven unable to distinguish between warring states -- operating under conventional diplomatic norms -- and locally powerful criminal tyrants, such as the leaders of Sudan. Negotiation with the latter all too often amounts to collaboration and even complicity. As for the United Nations . . . not only is it helpless to prevent criminal behavior, but by its obsession with remaining 'impartial' and protecting its own people it can sometimes abet and facilitate mass murder." -- This leads to difficult dilemmas: "When private charities and the U.N.'s own high commissioner for refugees help transport, settle, house, and feed forcibly displaced peoples -- whether in the south Balkans or the eastern Congo or the Middle East -- are they furnishing desperately needed aid or facilitating someone else's project of ethnic cleansing? All too often the answer is: both." -- On the key issue of the U.N., Judt argues that the "problem with the United Nations, however, is neither inefficiency nor corruption nor a shortage of 'legitimacy.' It is weakness." -- But there is another, deeper problem: "In a world where the violation by governments of their own subjects' rights has become the leading motive for armed intervention, the U.N. Charter's emphasis upon the inviolability of sovereign states presents a conundrum." -- The record of the U.N. is not, in fact, one of unmitigated failure: "Its greatest success has been to convince democrats and tyrants alike of the need to at least appear legitimate by securing or invoking U.N. approval as a fig leaf for their actions." -- It is clear that in the world today there is "a yearning for an international system governed by the rule of law." -- In world-historical terms, the tragedy of the George W. Bush administration is that it represents the assertion of a will, backed by military force capable of enforcing this intention, to reject this widespread global aspiration, one that is shared and actively desired by the majority of the contemporary world's adult population, including here in the United States. -- That this contravention of humanity's desire has been accomplished in the name of a nation whose public opinion is also opposed to it is demonstrated by the fact that "democracy" and "security" are the only justifications it can find to seduce in neo-Orwellian fashion the citizenry (and many of its agents) into believing, or being able plausibly to pretend to believe, that the U.S. government, too, aspires to "an international system governed by the rule of law." -- Judt sums up well this neo-Orwellianism in one paragraph: "In March 2005 the U.S. National Defense Strategy openly stated that 'our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.' At least that makes clear who and what we regard as our enemies. Yet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could declare in the very same month, on March 14, 2005, that 'too few in the world . . . know of the value we place on international institutions and the rule of law.' Indeed." -- These questions, of course, bring us to Judt's second subject, THE FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTER OF THE UNITED STATES AS A NATION, as the 229th year of the Republic draws to a close. -- Americans, even American historians, seem to be forgetting, writes Judt -- and this is no doubt why he published his essay to coincide with the Fourth of July 2005 -- that "for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die." -- On this subject, Judt becomes eloquent in the short third part of his essay, writing: "It is a mistake to suppose that institutions alone will save a republic from the abuses of power to which empire inevitably leads. It is not institutions that make or break republics, it is men. And in the United States today, the men (and women) of the country's political class have failed. Congress appears helpless to impede the concentration of power in the executive branch; indeed, with few exceptions it has contributed actively and even enthusiastically to the process. -- The judiciary is little better. . . . [T]here seems little to be hoped from the Democratic Party. . . . The American people have a touching faith in the invulnerability of their republic. It would not occur to most of them even to contemplate the possibility that their country might fall into the hands of a meretricious oligarchy . . . . -- [T]here is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies; for a ruling class that pursues divisive social goals under the guise of national 'values'; for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance. Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not 'democracy.' -- [M]uch of the world no longer sees the U.S. as a force for good. It does the wrong things and has the wrong friends. During the cold war, to be sure, the U.S. also supported many unsavory regimes. But back then there was a certain logic to its choices: Washington propped up anti-Communist dictators in pursuit of an anti-Communist cold war: raison d'état. Today we align ourselves with the world's most brutal, terrorizing tyrants in a war ostensibly against brutal terror and tyranny. We are peddling a simulacrum of democracy from an armored truck at fifty miles per hour and calling it freedom. This is a step too far. The world is losing faith in America. -- That . . . is not good news. For there is a fundamental truth at the core of the neocon case: the well-being of the United States of America is of inestimable importance to the health of the whole world. If the U.S. hollows out, and becomes a vast military shell without democratic soul or substance, no good can come of it. . . . If the U.S. ceases to be credible as a force for good, the world will not come to a stop. Others will still protest and undertake good works in the hope of American support. But the world will become that much safer for tyrants and crooksat home and abroad. -- For the U.S. isn't credible today: its reputation and standing are at their lowest point in history and will not soon recover. And there is no substitute on the horizon: the Europeans will not rise to the challenge. . . . The cold war is indeed behind us, but so too is the post-cold war moment of hope. The international anarchy so painstakingly averted by two generations of enlightened American statesmen may soon engulf us again. . . . I see a bad moon rising." ...
BOOK REVIEW: 'National security' as lethal ideology
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- Written by Hank Berger
One of the troubles with the U.S.'s ideology of national security, Corey Robin points out in a review of three recent books, is that it means whatever leaders want it to mean: "What, after all, is the national interest? . . . Peter Trubowitzs exhaustive study of the way Americans defined the national interest throughout the 20th century concluded that there is no single national interest. Analysts who assume that America has a discernible national interest whose defense should determine its relations with other nations are unable to explain the failure to achieve domestic consensus on international objectives. And this makes a good deal of sense: if an individual finds it difficult to determine her own interest, why should we expect a mass of individuals to do any better? . . . But if a people cannot decide on its collective interest, how can it know when that interest is threatened?" -- Of the essence is that "national security blurs the line between the possible and the actual." -- According to Robin, it emerges from Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command that what really motivated key figures in the Bush administration was "an idea of themselves as a brave and undaunted army of transgression." -- In his review of a collection of essays on torture (to which Robin himself contributed; is this not a conflict of interest that precludes reviewing?), Robin writes: "In what may be the most fantastic moment of an already fantastic discussion, several of the writers here -- even Henry Shue, an otherwise steadfast voice against torture -- imagine the public trial of the torturer as similar to that of the civil disobedient, who breaks the law in the name of a higher good, and throws himself on the mercy or judgment of the court." -- He concludes: "By now it should be clear why we use the word theater to denote the settings of both stagecraft and statecraft. Like the theater, national security is a house of illusions. Like actors, leaders are prone to a diva-like obsession, gazing in the mirror, wondering what the next days -- or centurys -- reviews will bring." ...
BOOK REVIEW: The US is perhaps the most powerful empire the world has known
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- Written by Henry Adams
Eric Foner of Columbia University reviews a new book about the history of empire in the North America from 1500 to 2000 by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton in the London Review of Books. -- The purpose of The Dominion of War, Foner writes, is to dismantle what [the authors] call the traditional grand narrative that portrays American history as the emergence and triumph of freedom in one nation, its spread across the continent, and its mission to liberate the oppressed peoples of the world. Long since abandoned, or at least severely modified, by professional historians, this vision remains alive and well in the popular imagination. -- Peace, it turns out, is almost un-American: War, [Anderson and Cayton] write, has been the major engine of change that defined American history and created the American empire. -- In the course of their lives, Americans hear a lot about good wars like the American Revolution and WWII, but what about the war against Britain of 1812, motivated in large part by the hope of conquering Canada and seizing land occupied by Indians east of the Mississippi; the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, in which the United States forcibly annexed one-third of the territory of its southern neighbor; and the Philippine War of 1899-1902, in which American troops fought a brutal struggle against insurgents who viewed them as occupiers, not liberators? -- And the American Revolution, supposedly fought for liberty, had a dark side, too: The battles of the Revolutionary War celebrated in history books -- Saratoga, Trenton, Yorktown -- were accompanied by a forgotten total war on the frontier that led to the devastation of entire Indian villages. Washington himself ordered that Indian communities in upstate New York be not merely overrun but destroyed. -- Eric Foner accepts the thesis of The Dominion of War, and at the conclusion of his review extends it, perhaps, too far, and in even darker directions: In the 2004 campaign, empire was the idea that dared not speak its name, he writes. Bush repudiated the word while pursuing the policy. Kerry offered, in effect, empire with a human face. By a small majority, the American people chose the unalloyed version. The question now is whether the rest of the world will consent to live as its subjects. -- But if empire was the idea that dared not speak its name in the campaign, in what sense can the American people be held to have chosen an unalloyed version of empire? ...