by Tom Engelhardt
March 11, 2012
from
TomDispatch Website
|
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of
the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of
War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory
Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest
book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just been
published. |
When I was young, the Philadelphia Bulletin ran cartoon ads that usually
featured a man in trouble - dangling by his fingers, say, from an outdoor
clock. There would always be people all around him, but far too engrossed in
the daily paper to notice.
The tagline was:
“In Philadelphia, nearly everybody reads the
Bulletin.”
Those ads came to mind recently when President
Obama commented forcefully on war, American-style, in ways that were
remarkably radical. Although he was trying to ward off a threatened Israeli
preemptive air strike against Iran, his comments should have shocked
Americans - but just about nobody noticed.
I don’t mean, of course, that nobody noticed the president’s statements.
Quite the contrary:
they were headlined, chewed over in the
press and by pundits.
Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and
Newt Gingrich attacked them.
Fox News highlighted their restraint. (“Obama
calls for containing Iran, says ‘too much loose talk of war.’”)
The Huffington Post highlighted the support for
Israel they represented. (“Obama Defends Policies Toward Israel, Fends Off
Partisan Critiques.”) Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pushed back against
them in a potentially deadly U.S.-Israeli dance that might bring new chaos
to the Middle East. But somehow, amid all the headlines, commentary, and
analysis, few seemed to notice just what had really changed in our world.
The president had offered a new definition of “aggression” against this
country and a new war doctrine to go with it.
He would, he insisted, take the U.S. to war not
to stop another nation from attacking us or even threatening to do so, but
simply to stop it from building a nuclear weapon - and he would act even if
that country were incapable of targeting the United States. That should have
been news.
Consider the most startling of his statements: just before the arrival of
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington, the
president gave a 45-minute Oval Office interview to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey
Goldberg. A prominent pro-Israeli writer, Goldberg had produced an article
in the September issue of that magazine headlined “The Point of No Return.”
In it, based on interviews with "roughly 40
current and past Israeli decision makers about a military strike," he had
given an Israeli air attack on Iran a 50% chance of happening by this July.
From the recent interview, here are Obama’s key
lines:
“I think that the Israeli government
recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff. I
also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly
what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli
governments recognize that when the United States says it is
unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”
Later, he added this chilling note:
“I think it's fair to say that the last
three years, I've shown myself pretty clearly willing, when I believe it
is in the core national interest of the United States, to direct
military actions, even when they entail enormous risks.”
The next day, in a speech meant to stop “loose
talk about war” in front of a powerful pro-Israeli lobbying outfit, the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the president offered an
even stronger formula, worth quoting at length.
Speaking of seeing the consequences of his
decisions to use force “in the eyes of those I meet who’ve come back gravely
wounded,” he said:
“And for this reason, as part of my solemn
obligation to the American people, I will only use force when the time
and circumstances demand it... We all prefer to resolve this issue
diplomatically.
Having said that, Iran’s leaders should have
no doubt about the resolve of the United States - just as they should
not doubt Israel’s sovereign right to make its own decisions about what
is required to meet its security needs.
I have said that when it comes to preventing
Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, I will take no options off the
table, and I mean what I say. That includes all elements of American
power... and, yes, a military effort to be prepared for any contingency.
“Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of
containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear
weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my
presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to
defend the United States and its interests.”
An American president couldn’t come closer to
saying that, should American intelligence conclude the Iranians were
building a nuclear weapon, we would attack.
The next day, again addressing an
AIPAC
audience, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta set the president’s
commitment in stone:
“No greater threat exists to Israel, to the
entire region, and indeed to the United States, than a nuclear-armed
Iran... Military action is the last alternative if all else fails, but
make no mistake: When all else fails, we will act.”
The Power of
Precedents
To understand what’s truly new here, it’s necessary to back up a few years.
After all, precedent is a powerful thing and
these statements do have a single precedent in the atomic age (though not
one the president would profess to admire):
the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of
Iraq.
After all, one clearly stated reason for the
invasion was Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear program as well as one to
produce biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
In a series of speeches starting in August 2002, President
George W. Bush publicly accused the Iraqi dictator of having
an active nuclear program.
His vice president hit the news and public
affairs talk show circuit with a set of similar accusations, and his
secretary of state spoke of the danger of mushroom clouds rising over
American cities.
“We do know that [Saddam] is actively
pursuing a nuclear weapon... [W]e don't want the smoking gun to be a
mushroom cloud.”
At the same time, the Bush administration made
an effort - now long forgotten - to convince Congress that the United States
was in actual danger of an Iraqi WMD attack, possibly from anthrax, in the
immediate future.
President Bush suggested publicly that, with
unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), Saddam might have the ability to spray
East Coast cities with chemical or biological weapons. And Congress was
given fear-inducing classified private briefings on this.
Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, claimed that he
voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because,
"I was told not only that [Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them
through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of
transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland
here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern
seaboard."
Driving the need to produce evidence, however
fantastic or fabricated, of a possible threat to the U.S. was a radical new
twist on war-making 101.
In the
days after 9/11, Vice President
Dick
Cheney proposed that even a 1% chance of an attack on the United States,
especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if
it were a certainty.
Journalist Ron Suskind dubbed it “the one percent
doctrine.” It may have been the rashest formula for
"preventive" or "aggressive" war offered in the modern era.
Of course, the fact that Saddam’s Iraq had no nuclear program, no biological
or chemical weapons, no functioning drones, and no way of reaching the East
Coast of the United States proved strike three for critics of the Bush
administration.
Missed was what was truly new in the invasion:
not just the 1% doctrine itself, but the
idea - a first on planet Earth - of going to war over the possibility
that another country might be in possession of nuclear or other weapons
of mass destruction.
Until then, such a concept hadn’t been in the
strategic vocabulary.
Quite the opposite:
in the Cold War years, nuclear weapons were
thought of as “deterrence” or, in the case of the two massively
nuclear-armed superpowers of that era, “mutually assured destruction”
(with its fabulously grim acronym
MAD).
Those weapons, that is, were considered
guarantors, however counter intuitively, against an outbreak of war. Their
possession was a kind of grisly assurance that your opponent wouldn’t attack
you, lest you both be destroyed.
In that spirit, between the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and the Iraqi invasion of March
2003, seven countries,
... all went nuclear without anybody suggesting
that they be attacked simply for possessing such weapons.
An eighth country - white-ruled South Africa -
actually assembled six nuclear weapons, and later became the only country to
de-nuclearize itself.
-
South Korea
-
Taiwan
-
Argentina
-
Brazil,
...all had incipient nuclear programs, though
none produced weapons.
Japan is today considered to be at a point the
Iranians have not yet reached:
“breakout capacity,” or the ability to build
a nuclear weapon relatively quickly if a decision to do so were made.
In 2006, North Korea set off its first nuclear
test and, within years, had become the ninth active nuclear power.
In other words, in 2003, the idea that the possession of nuclear weapons or
simply of an "active" nuclear program that might one day produce such
weapons was a casus belli represented something new.
And when it became clear that Saddam had no
nuclear program, no weapons of mass destruction at all, that explanation for
American war-making, for what Jonathan Schell once dubbed “disarmament wars”
- so visibly fraudulent - seemed to disappear into the dustbin of history.
War and the
Presidential “I”
Until now, that is.
Whether he meant to or not, in his latest version of Iran war policy
President Obama has built on the Bush precedent. His represents, however, an
even more extreme version, which should perhaps be labeled the 0% Doctrine.
In holding off an Israeli strike that may itself
be nothing but a bluff, he has defined a future Iranian decision to build a
nuclear weapon as a new form of aggression against the United States. We
would, as the president explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, be committing our
military power against Iran not to prevent an attack on the U.S. itself, but
a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
And by the way, note that he didn’t say,
“We don’t bluff.” His formulation was: “I
don’t bluff.” And that “I” should not be ignored.
The Bush administration promoted a cult of
presidential power, of (as they called it at the time) a “unitary
executive.”
No one in the White House uses such a term these
days, any more than they use the term “Global
War on Terror,” but if both terms have disappeared, the phenomena
they named have only intensified.
The Global War on Terror, with its burgeoning secret military, the elite
special operations forces, and its growing drone air force, controlled in
part by the CIA, should be thought of as the president’s private war.
In addition, as legal scholar Jonathan Turley
wrote recently, when it comes to drone assassinations (or “targeted
killings” as they are now more politely known), Attorney General Eric
Holder has just claimed for the president the,
“authority to kill any American if he
unilaterally determines them to be a threat to the nation.”
In doing so, added Turley,
“Obama has replaced the constitutional
protections afforded to citizens with a ‘trust me’ pledge.”
With terror in its crosshairs, war, in other
words, is increasingly becoming the president’s private preserve and strikes
on the enemy, however defined, a matter of his own private judgment.
It is no longer a matter of “we,” but of a presidential “I” when it comes to
unleashing attacks in what has become a global free fire zone for those
drones and special ops forces.
War, in other words, is increasingly lodged in
the Oval Office and a commander-in-chief executive.
As
the Libyan intervention suggested, like the
American people, Congress is, at best, an afterthought - even though this
Congress would rubber-stamp a presidential act of war against Iran without a
second thought.
The irony is that the president has propounded a war-making policy of
unprecedented extremity at a moment when there is no evidence that the
Iranians are pursuing a bomb - not yet at least. The “supreme leader” of
their theocratic state has termed the possession of nuclear weapons “a grave
sin” and U.S. national intelligence estimates have repeatedly concluded that
the Iranians are not, in fact, moving to build nuclear weapons.
If, however - and it’s a giant if - Iran
actually got the bomb, if a 10th country joined the nuclear club
(with others to follow), it would be bad news, and the world would be a
worse place for it, but not necessarily that greatly changed.
What could change the world in a radical way, however, is the 0% doctrine -
and the trend more generally to make war the personal prerogative of an
American president, while ceding to the U.S. military what was once the
province and power of diplomacy.