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- <p class="subhed"> </p>
- <h2>Repetition</h2>
-
- Anyone who wants to write about the constitutional crisis unfolding in
- the United States today faces a peculiar problem at the outset. There is
- a large body of observations that at one and the same time have been
- made too often and yet not often enough--too often because they have
- been repeated to the point of tedium for a minority ready to listen but
- not often enough because the general public has yet to consider them
- seriously enough. The problem for a self-respecting writer is that the
- act of writing almost in its nature promises something new. Repetition
- is not really writing but propaganda--not illumination for the mind but
- a mental beating. Here are some examples of the sort of observations I
- have in mind, at once over-familiar and unheard:
- President George W. Bush sent American troops into Iraq to find weapons
- of mass destruction, but they weren't there.
- He said that Saddam Hussein's regime had given help to Al Qaeda, but it
- had not.
- He therefore took the nation to war on the basis of falsehoods.
- His Administration says that the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere has
- been the work of a few bad apples in the military, whereas in fact
- abuses were sanctioned at the highest levels of the executive branch in
- secret memos.
- His Administration lambastes leakers, but its own officials illegally
- leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in order to
- politically discredit her husband.
- He flatly stated to the public that all wiretaps of Americans were
- ordered pursuant to court warrants, whereas in fact he was authorizing
- and repeatedly reauthorizing warrantless wiretaps.
- These wiretaps violated a specific law of Congress forbidding them.
- His Administration has asserted a right to imprison Americans as
- well as foreigners indefinitely without the habeas corpus hearings
- required by law.
- Wars of aggression, torture, domestic spying and arbitrary arrest are
- the hallmarks of dictatorship, yet Congress, run by the President's
- party, has refused to conduct full investigations into either the false
- WMD claims, or the abuses and torture, or the warrantless wiretaps, or
- the imprisonment without habeas corpus.
- When Congress passed a bill forbidding torture and the President signed
- it, he added a "signing statement" implying a right to disregard its
- provisions when they conflicted with his interpretation of his powers.
- The President's secret legal memos justifying the abuses and torture are
- based on a conception of the powers of the executive that gives him
- carte blanche to disregard specific statutes as well as international
- law in the exercise of self-granted powers to the Commander in Chief
- nowhere mentioned in the Constitution.
- If accepted, these claims would fundamentally alter the structure of the
- American government, upsetting the system of checks and balances and
- nullifying fundamental liberties, including Fourth Amendment guarantees
- against unreasonable searches and seizures and guarantees of due
- process. As such, they embody apparent failures of the President to
- carry out his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of
- the United States."
- <!--pagebreak-->
- <p class="subhed"> </p>
- <h2>Opposing One-Party Government</h2>
-
- The need to repeat these familiar points, as I have just done (while
- also begging the indulgence of the reader, as I do), is itself a symptom
- of the crisis. The same concentration of governmental and other power in
- the hands of a single party that led to the abuses stands in the way of
- action to address them. The result is a problem of political sanitation.
- The garbage heaps up in the public square, visible to all and stinking
- to high heaven, but no garbage truck arrives to take it away. The
- lawbreaking is exposed, but no legislative body responds. The damning
- facts pour out, and protests are made, but little is done. Then comes
- the urge to repeat.
- The dilemma is reflected in microcosm in the news media, especially
- television--a process particularly on display in the failure to
- challenge the Administration's deceptive rationale for the Iraq War. The
- reasons for severe doubt were, at the very least, available before the
- war, and they were expounded in many places. More truthful, contrary
- voices could and did speak up, especially on the Internet, the freest of
- today's media. But they were not widely heard. They were drowned out by
- the dominant voices in the mainstream, acceding to the deceptions of
- power and their variations and derivatives. All over the world,
- autocratic-minded rulers, from Italy's former Prime Minister Silvio
- Berlusconi to Russia's President Vladimir Putin, have learned that de
- facto control of the political content of television is perhaps the most
- important lever of power in our day. They have learned that it does not
- matter politically if 15 or even 25 percent of the public is well
- informed as long the majority remains in the dark. The problem has not
- been censorship but something very nearly censorship's opposite: the
- deafening noise of the official megaphone and its echoes--not the
- suppression of truth, still spoken and heard in a narrow circle, but a
- profusion of lies and half lies; not too little speech but too much. If
- you whisper something to your friend in the front row of a rock concert,
- you have not been censored, but neither will you be heard.
- The one major breach in the monopoly has been made by the Supreme Court,
- especially in its decision in <i>Hamdan v. Rumsfeld</i> requiring application
- of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to
- detainees. The decision's reasoning, if it carries the day in practice,
- would roll back many of the usurpations by the executive, which has
- already claimed that it will apply the Geneva Conventions to prisoners
- in US custody (though there is doubt what this will mean) and will seek
- a constitutional opinion by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
- court on its wiretapping. When the Supreme Court speaks, it is more than
- repetition. It is effective action.
- Yet in the last analysis, the outcome of the contest will be decided in
- the political arena, where public opinion and, ultimately, voters are
- the decision-makers. It's notable that the reaction to the Supreme
- Court's decision in <i>Hamdan</i> by one Republican Congressional leader was to
- accuse Democrats who applauded the decision of wanting "special
- privileges for terrorists."
- One-party monopoly of power is not the only inhibiting factor. Any
- oppositionist who is honest will keep in mind that a majority, however
- narrow, of Americans voted that one party into power in a series of
- elections. Especially important was the presidential election of 2004,
- when many, though not all, of the abuses were already known. (And then
- the election itself was subject to grave abuses, especially in Ohio.)
- The weight and meaning of that majority does not disappear because it
- was demonstrably misinformed about key matters of war and peace. It's
- one thing to oppose an illegitimate concentration of power in the name
- of a repressed majority, another to oppose power backed and legitimated
- by a majority. In the first case, it will be enough to speak truth to
- power; in the second, the main need is to speak truth to one's fellow
- citizens. As the end is restoring democratic process, so the means
- should be democratic. It's true that since 2004 the President's positive
- ratings in the polls have plummeted, but there is no guarantee that this
- shift in opinion will translate into Republican defeats in the
- forthcoming Congressional election, and a renewal of Republican
- majorities in both houses of Congress would add another stamp of
- approval to the Bush policies, however misguided.
- The mechanisms inhibiting opposition to state power, especially when
- backed by electoral majorities, are not something new. Even in the
- freest countries there is at all times a conventional wisdom, which may
- wander more or less far from reality. Sometimes it strays into a
- fantasyland. Then marginal voices (which of course are not correct
- merely because they are marginal) have a special responsibility to speak
- up, and sometimes they shift the mainstream--as happened, for instance,
- in the 1960s regarding the Vietnam War and legal segregation. For the
- better part of a century, segregation fit squarely within the banks of
- the American mainstream. Then it didn't.
- <!--pagebreak-->
- <p class="subhed"> </p>
- <h2>A Persistent Pathology</h2>
-
- As the mere mention of Vietnam suggests, the repetition dilemma also has
- causes that go deeper into the past. I embarked on journalism in 1966 as
- a reporter in Vietnam. The experience led, naturally and seamlessly, to
- a decade of writing about the war, the opposition to the war and,
- finally, when the war "came home," to the constitutional crisis of the
- Nixon years and its resolution via Nixon's resignation under threat of
- impeachment. The war and the impeachment were connected at every point.
- It wasn't just that Nixon's wiretapping was directed against Daniel
- Ellsberg, war critic and leaker of the Vietnam-era Pentagon Papers; or
- that the "plumbers" outfit that carried out the Watergate break-in was
- founded to spy on, disrupt and attack war critics; or that Nixon's
- persistence in trying to win the war even as he withdrew American
- troops from it drove him into the paranoia that led him to draw up an
- "enemies list" and sponsor subversions of the electoral process--it was
- that his entire go-it-alone, imperial conception of the presidency
- originated in his pursuit of his war policy in secrecy and without
- Congressional involvement.
- And now, thirty years later, we find ourselves facing an uncannily
- similar combination of misconceived war abroad and constitutional crisis
- at home. Again a global crusade (then it was the cold war, now it is the
- "war on terror") has given birth to a disastrous war (then Vietnam, now
- Iraq); again a President has responded by breaking the law; and again it
- falls to citizens, journalists, judges, justices and others to trace the
- connections between the overreaching abroad and the overreaching at
- home. In consequence, not only are we condemned to repeat ourselves for
- the duration of the current crisis but a remarkable number of those
- repetitions are already repetitions of what was said thirty years ago.
- Consider, for instance, the following passage from a speech called "The
- Price of Empire," by the great dissenter against the Vietnam War Senator
- William Fulbright.
- <p class="blockquote">Before the Second World War our world role was a potential role; we were
- important in the world for what we could do with our power, for the
- leadership we might provide, for the example we might set. Now the
- choices are almost gone: we are almost the world's self-appointed
- policeman; we are almost the world defender of the status quo. We are
- well on our way to becoming a traditional great power--an imperial
- nation if you will--engaged in the exercise of power for its own sake,
- exercising it to the limit of our capacity and beyond, filling every
- vacuum and extending the American "presence" to the farthest reaches of
- the earth. And, as with the great empires of the past, as the power
- grows, it is becoming an end in itself, separated except by ritual
- incantation from its initial motives, governed, it would seem, by its
- own mystique, power without philosophy or purpose. That describes what
- we have almost become....</p>
- Is there a single word--with the possible exception of "almost" at the
- end of the paragraph--that fails to apply to the country's situation
- today? Or consider this passage from Fulbright's <i>The Arrogance of Power</i>
- with the Iraq venture in mind:
- <p class="blockquote">Traditional rulers, institutions, and ways of life have crumbled under
- the fatal impact of American wealth and power but they have not been
- replaced by new institutions and new ways of life, nor has their
- breakdown ushered in an era of democracy and development.</p>
- Recalling these and other passages from Fulbright and other critics of
- the Vietnam era, one is again tempted to wonder why we should bother to
- say once more what has already been said so well so many times before.
- Perhaps we should just quote rather than repeat--cite, not write.
- Of course, people like to point out that Iraq is not Vietnam. They are
- right insofar as those two countries are concerned. For instance,
- today's anarchic Iraq, a formerly unified country now on or over the
- edge of civil war, is wholly different from yesterday's resolute
- Vietnam, divided into north and south but implacably bent on unity and
- independence from foreign rule. And of course the two eras could
- scarcely be more different. Most important, the collapse of the Soviet
- Union has effectuated a full-scale revolution in the international
- order. The number of the world's superpowers has been cut back from two
- to one, China has become an economic powerhouse, market economics have
- spread across the planet, the industrial age has been pushed aside by
- the information age, global warming has commenced and rock music has
- been replaced by rap. Yet in the face of all this, American policies
- have shown an astonishing sameness, and this is what is disturbing. In
- our world of racing change, only the pathologies of American power seem
- to remain constant. Why?
- <!--pagebreak-->
- <p class="subhed"> </p>
- <h2>The Pitiful, Helpless Giant</h2>
-
- Perhaps a clue can be found in the famous speech that Senator Joseph
- McCarthy gave in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950. This was the
- occasion on which he announced his specious list of Communists in the
- State Department, launching what soon was called McCarthyism. He also
- shared some thoughts on America's place in the world. The allied victory
- in World War II had occurred only five years before. No nation
- approached the United States in wealth, power or global influence. Yet
- McCarthy's words were a dirge for lost American greatness. He said, "At
- war's end we were physically the strongest nation on earth and, at least
- potentially, the most powerful intellectually and morally. Ours could
- have been the honor of being a beacon in the desert of
- destruction, a shining living proof that civilization was not
- yet ready to destroy itself. Unfortunately, we have failed miserably and
- tragically to arise to the opportunity." On the contrary, McCarthy
- strikingly added, "we find ourselves in a position of impotency."
- By what actions had the United States thrown away greatness? McCarthy
- blamed not mighty forces without but traitors within, to whom he
- assigned an almost magical power to sap the strength of the country.
- America's putative decline occurred "not because our only powerful
- potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of
- the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this
- nation." And, he raved on in a later speech, "we believe that men high
- in this Government are concerting to deliver us to disaster. This must
- be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense
- as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A
- conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its
- principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest
- men."
- McCarthy seemed to look at the United States through a kind of double
- lens. At one moment the nation was a colossus, all-powerful, without
- peer or rival; at the next moment a midget, cringing in panic, delivered
- over to its enemies, "impotent." Like the genie in Aladdin's bottle, the
- United States seemed to be a kind of magical being, first filling the
- sky, able to grant any wish, but a second later stoppered and helpless
- in its container. Which it was to be depended not on any enemy, all of
- whom could easily be laid low if only America so chose, but on Americans
- at home, who prevented this unleashing of might. If Americans cowered,
- it supposedly was mainly before other Americans. Get them out of the
- way, and the United States could rule the globe. The right-wing
- intellectual James Burnham named the destination to which this kind of
- thinking led. "The reality," he wrote, "is that the only alternative to
- the communist World Empire is an American Empire, which will be, if not
- literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive
- world control."
- McCarthy's double vision of the United States must have resonated
- deeply, for it turned out to have remarkable staying power. Consider,
- for example, the following statement by the super-hawkish columnist
- Charles Krauthammer, penned fifty-one years later, in March 2001 (six
- months before September 11). Again we hear the King Kong-like
- chest-beating, even louder than before. For the end of the cold war,
- Krauthammer wrote, had made the United States "the dominant power in the
- world, more dominant than any since Rome." And so, just as McCarthy
- claimed in 1950, "America is in a position to reshape norms, alter
- expectations and create new realities." But again there is a problem.
- And it is the same one--the enemies within. Thus again comes the cry of
- frustration, the anxiety that this utopia, to be had for the taking,
- will melt away like a dream, that the genie will be stuffed back into
- its bottle. For the "challenge to unipolarity is not from the outside
- but from the inside. The choice is ours. To impiously paraphrase
- Benjamin Franklin: History has given you an empire, if you will keep
- it." The remedy? "Unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will."
- We find expressions of the same double vision--a kind of anxiety-ridden
- triumphalism--again and again in iconic phrases uttered in the
- half-century between McCarthy and Krauthammer. Walt Rostow, chair of the
- State Department's Policy Planning Council, articulated a version of it
- in 1964, on the verge of the Johnson Administration's escalation of the
- Vietnam War, when he spoke in a memo to Secretary of State Dean Rusk of
- "the real margin of influence...which flows from the simple fact that at
- this stage of history, we are the greatest power in the world--if only
- we behave like it." Madeleine Albright, then UN ambassador, gave voice
- to a similar frustration when she turned to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
- of Staff Colin Powell and asked, "What's the point of having this superb
- military you are always talking about if we can't use it?" But it was
- Richard Nixon who gave the double vision its quintessential expression
- when, in 1970, at the pinnacle of America's involvement in Vietnam, he
- stated, "If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation,
- the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the
- forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and
- free institutions throughout the world." For Nixon, as for McCarthy and
- Krauthammer, the principal danger was on the home front. As he said on
- another occasion, "It is not our power but our will and character that
- is being tested tonight. The question all Americans must ask and answer
- tonight is this: Does the richest and strongest nation in the history of
- the world have the character to meet a direct challenge by a group which
- rejects every effort to win a just peace?" And, even more explicitly,
- "Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the
- United States. Only Americans can do that."
- The question is how the United States could be a "giant" yet pitiful and
- helpless, the "richest and strongest" yet unable to have its way, in
- possession of the most superb military force in history yet unable to
- use it, the "greatest power the world had ever known" yet at the same
- time paralyzed. Why, if the United States has had no peer in wealth and
- weaponry, has it for more than a half-century been persistently,
- incurably complaining of weakness, paralysis, even impotence?
- <!--pagebreak-->
- <p class="subhed"> </p>
- <h2>'Losing' Country X</h2>
-
- McCarthy, of course, presented the "loss" of China as Exhibit A in his
- display of the deeds of his gallery of traitors. For example, in the
- Wheeling speech, he specifically mentioned John Service, of the State
- Department's China desk, and charged that he "sent official reports back
- to the State Department urging that we torpedo our ally Chiang Kai-shek
- and stating, in effect, that communism was the best hope of China." By
- such false accusations--including the spurious allegation about the
- Communists in the State Department--did McCarthy transpose the "lost"
- war in China to the domestic sphere, where the phantom saboteurs of
- American global hegemony were supposedly at work. Soon, the Communist
- tactic of the purge was adopted by the American government, with the
- result that many of those most knowledgeable about Asia, such as
- Service, were driven out of government.
- As has often been pointed out, whether the United States "lost China"
- depends on whether you think the United States ever had it. The question
- has lasting importance because the alleged loss of one country or
- another--China, Laos, Vietnam, Chile, Iran, Nicaragua, Iraq--became a
- leitmotif of American politics, especially at election time. In each of
- these cases, the United States "possessed" the countries in question
- (and thus was in a position to "lose" them) only insofar as it somehow
- laid claim to control the destinies of peoples on a global basis, or, as
- Fulbright said, an imperial basis. But if there is one clear lesson that
- the history of recent empires has taught, it is that modern peoples have
- both the will and the capacity to reject imperial rule and assert
- control over their own destinies. Less interested in the contest between
- East and West than in running their own countries, they yearned for
- self-determination, and they achieved it. The British and French
- imperialists were forced to learn this lesson over the course of a
- century. The Soviet Union took a little longer, and itself collapsed in
- the process. The United States, determined in the period in question to
- act in an imperial fashion, has been the dunce in the class, and indeed
- under the current Administration has put forward imperial claims that
- dwarf those of imperial Britain at its height. It is only because, in
- country after country, the United States has attempted the impossible
- abroad that it has been led to blame people at home for the failure.
- Fortunately, American involvement in China in the 1940s was restricted
- to aid and advice, and virtually no fighting between Americans
- and Mao's forces occurred. Now that the price of the military
- intervention in Vietnam--a much smaller country--is known, we can only
- shudder to imagine what intervention in China would have cost. Perhaps
- one of the few positive things that can be said about the Vietnam
- disaster is that if the United States was determined to fight a
- counterinsurgency war, it was better to do it in Vietnam than in China.
- But even without intervention, the price of China's defection from the
- American camp was high. The causes of McCarthyism were manifold, but in
- a very real sense, what the country got instead of war with Mao was the
- "war" at home that was McCarthyism.
- The true causes of the Nationalist government's fall--its own
- incompetence and corruption, leading to wholesale loss of legitimacy in
- the eyes of its own people--were expunged from consciousness, and the
- lurid fantasy of State Department traitors and conspirators was
- concocted in their place. Then the delusion that Chiang could return
- from what then was called the island of Formosa (the Portuguese name for
- Taiwan) to retake the mainland was fostered by the China lobby. Delusion
- ran wild. Myths were created to take the place of unfaceable truths. The
- internal conspiracy to destroy the United States, said McCarthy, was
- supposedly headed by, of all people, Truman's Secretary of State, Gen.
- George Marshall. "It was Marshall, with Acheson and Vincent eagerly
- assisting," he said, "who created the China policy which, destroying
- China, robbed us of a great and friendly ally, a buffer against the
- Soviet imperialism with which we are now at war." And he added for good
- measure, "We have declined so precipitously in relation to the Soviet
- Union in the last six years. How much swifter may be our fall into
- disaster with Marshall at the helm?"
- <p class="subhed" style="margin-top: 27px;"> </p>
- <h2>Impotent Omnipotence</h2>
-
- Another event, scarcely more than a month before Mao declared the
- existence of the People's Republic of China, also fueled McCarthy's
- theme of thrown-away greatness. On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union
- tested its first atomic bomb--Joe-1, named after Joseph Stalin. At once,
- in an experience strangely parallel to the loss of China from America's
- sphere of interest, intoxicating dreams of atomic monopoly and the
- lasting military superiority that was thought to go with it shriveled
- up. Not superiority but stalemate was suddenly the outlook--not
- dominance but the stasis of the "balance of terror." The outlines of the
- new limitations soon took shape in the long, wearying, poorly understood
- and publicly disliked Korean War, in which America's atomic arsenal,
- whose use was considered but rejected, was no help. The theme of
- thwarted American greatness was sounded again, when Gen. Douglas
- MacArthur, who proposed using atomic weapons in Korea, announced, "There
- can be no substitute for victory," and was fired by Truman for
- insubordination. Meanwhile, a connection with the enemy within was
- discovered when Soviet spying on the Manhattan Project came to light.
- Scientists had long known that there could be no "secret" of the
- bomb--that the relevant science was irretrievably available to all--and
- that the Soviet Union would be able to build one. The Soviet timetable
- had indeed been speeded up by the spying, but now it seemed to McCarthy
- and others that the domestic traitors were the prime agents of the
- sudden, apparent reversal of American fortune. (Truman sought to
- compensate for the loss of the atomic monopoly with his prompt decision
- to build the H-bomb.)
- The full implications of the ensuing nuclear standoff sank in slowly. As
- the Soviet Union gradually built up its arsenal, American strategic
- thinkers and policy-makers awakened to some unpleasant discoveries about
- nuclear arms. The bomb, too, had a distinctly genie-like quality of
- looking formidable at one instant but useless the next. Even in the days
- of American nuclear monopoly, between 1945 and the first Soviet
- explosion of 1949, nuclear weapons had proved a disappointing military
- instrument. Stalin had simply declared that nuclear weapons were for
- scaring people with "weak nerves," and acted accordingly. And once the
- monopoly was broken, no use of nuclear weapons could be planned without
- facing the prospect of retaliation. During the 1950s Dwight Eisenhower
- tried to squeeze what benefit he could out of the United States'
- lingering numerical nuclear superiority with his "massive retaliation"
- policy, but its prescription of threatening nuclear annihilation to gain
- advantage in far-flung local struggles was never quite believable,
- perhaps even by its practitioners. By the late 1950s a new generation of
- strategists was awakening to the full dimensions of a central paradox of
- the nuclear age: Possession of nuclear arsenals did not empower but
- rather paralyzed their owners. Henry Kissinger remarked, "The more
- powerful the weapons, the greater the reluctance to use them," and
- fretted about "how our power can give impetus to our policy rather than
- paralyze it."
- Here at the core of the riddle of American power in the nuclear age was
- the very image of the pitiful, helpless giant, a figure grown weak
- through the very excess of his strength. But the source of this
- weakness, which was very real, had nothing to do with any domestic
- cowards, not to speak of traitors, or any political event; it lay in the
- revolutionary consequences for all military power of the invention of
- nuclear arms, even if--with a hint of defensiveness, perhaps--the United
- States now called itself a "superpower." (The H-bomb was first called
- "the super.") Here was a barrier to the application of force that no
- cultivation of "will" could change or overcome. But the policy-makers
- did not accept the verdict of paralysis without a struggle. Within the
- precincts of high strategy, the "nuclear priesthood" mounted a
- sustained, complex intellectual insurrection against this
- distasteful reality of the nuclear age. Even in the face of the
- undoubted reality that if the arsenals were used, "mutual assured
- destruction" would result, they looked for room to maneuver. One line of
- attack was the "counterforce" strategy of targeting the
- nuclear forces rather than the society of the foe. The hope
- was to preserve the possibility of some kind of victory, or at least of
- relative military advantage, from the general ruin of nuclear war.
- Another line of attack was advocacy of "limited war," championed by
- Kissinger and others. The strategists reasoned that although
- "general war" might be unwinnable, limited war, of the kind just then
- brewing in Vietnam, could be fought and won. Perhaps not all war between
- nuclear adversaries had been paralyzed. Thus, the impotent omnipotence
- of the nuclear stalemate became one more paradoxical argument, in
- addition to those drummed into the public mind by McCarthy and his
- heirs, in favor of American engagement in counterinsurgency struggles.
- And this time the United States, unprotected by the prudence of a George
- Marshall, did go to war.
- The results are the ones we know. American military might was no more
- profitable when used against rebellious local populations in
- limited wars than it was in general, nuclear wars. This time, the
- lessons were learned, and for a while they stuck: Peoples, even of small
- countries, are powerful within their own borders; they have the means to
- resist foreign occupation successfully; military force will not lead
- them to change their minds; the issues are therefore essentially
- political, and in this contest, foreign invaders are fatally
- disadvantaged from the outset; if they are not willing to stay forever,
- they lose.
- <!--pagebreak-->
- <p class="subhed"> </p>
- <h2>The Decline of Power</h2>
-
- By the late 1970s adverse experience sufficient to illuminate the
- utterly novel historical situation of the United States in the late
- twentieth century was in hand. Undoubtedly, it had the biggest heap of
- weapons of any country. Without question, they were the most varied,
- sophisticated and effective in the world at their job of
- killing people and blowing things up. The question was what the United
- States could accomplish with this capacity. Certainly, if a
- conventional foe lacking nuclear arms arrayed itself in battle against
- the United States, it could be handily defeated. That was the mistake
- that Saddam Hussein made in 1990 when he sent his army out into the
- Kuwaiti desert, where it was pulverized from the air. But few wars in
- fact conformed to this conventional pattern any longer. Of far greater
- importance was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically
- been the most important--wars of imperial conquest and general,
- great-power wars, such as the First and Second World Wars. During the
- twentieth century the first kind had become hopeless "quagmires," owing
- to the aroused will of local peoples everywhere who, collectively, had
- put an end to the age of imperialism. The second were made
- unfightable and unwinnable by the nuclear revolution. It was
- these two limitations on the usefulness of military force, one acting at
- the base of the international system, the other at its apex, that
- delimited the superiority of the superpower. (The paradox of impotent
- omnipotence was even more pronounced for the other superpower, the
- Soviet Union, which actually disappeared.)
- Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources, would have
- been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph McCarthy
- wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was
- the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to
- empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of
- imperialism was over. Though it's hard to shed a tear, you might say
- that there was a certain unfairness in America's timing. All the
- ingredients of past empires were there--the wealth, the weapons, the
- power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States was
- not, could not be and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than
- Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a
- postimperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into
- a great empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and
- win wars against its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess
- nuclear arsenals. Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North
- Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States
- with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a
- great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power
- is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not
- so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it
- is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by
- the United States or anyone else--if conceived in terms of military
- force--has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States
- has become the fool of force--and the fool of history.
- In this larger context the repeated constitutional crises of the last
- half-century assume an altered aspect. The conventional understanding is
- that an excess of power abroad brings abuses at home. The classic
- citation is Rome, whose imperial forces, led by Julius Caesar, returning
- from foreign conquest, crossed the river Rubicon into the homeland and
- put an end to the republic. (Thus both the proponents of American empire
- and its detractors can cite Rome.) But that has not been the American
- story. Rome and would-be Rome are not the same. Empire and the fantasy
- of empire are not the same. It is rather the repeatedly failed bid for
- imperial sway that has corrupted. It was not triumph but loss--of China,
- of the atomic monopoly, among other developments--that precipitated the
- McCarthyite assault on liberty at home. It was persistent failure in the
- Vietnam War, already a decade old and deeply unpopular, that led an
- embattled, isolated, nearly demented Richard Nixon to draw up his
- enemies list, illegally spy on his domestic opposition, obstruct justice
- when his misdeeds became known, ramble drunkenly in the Oval Office
- about using nuclear weapons and ultimately mount an assault on the
- entire constitutional system of checks and balances. And it is today an
- unpopular President Bush, unable either to win the Iraq War or to
- extricate himself from it, who has launched his absolutist assault on
- the Constitution. Power corrupts, says the old saw. But is power the
- right word to use in the face of so much failure? The sometimes
- suggested alternate--that weakness corrupts--seems equally appropriate.
- In a manner of speaking perhaps both saws are true, for in terms of
- military might the United States is unrivaled, yet in terms of capacity
- to get things done with that might, it so often proves weak--even, at
- times, impotent, as McCarthy said. The pattern is not the old Roman one
- in which military conquest breeds arrogance and arrogance stokes
- ambition, which leads to usurpation at home. Rather, in the case of the
- United States, misunderstanding of its historical moment leads to
- misbegotten wars; misbegotten wars lead to military disaster; military
- disaster leads to domestic strife and scapegoating; domestic strife and
- scapegoating lead to usurpation, which triggers a constitutional crisis.
- Crises born of strength and success are different from crises born of
- failure. Fulbright warned of the corruption of imperial ambition and the
- arrogance of power. But we need also to speak of the corruption of
- imperial failure, the arrogance of anxiety.
- What the true greatness--or true power--of the United States is or can
- be for the world in our time is an absorbing question in pressing need
- of an answer. Our very conceptions of greatness and power--military,
- economic, political, moral--would need searching reconsideration.
- Those true powers--especially the economic--also have an "imperial"
- aspect, but that is another debate. An advantage of that debate is that
- it would be about things that are real. Jettisoning the mirage of
- military domination of the globe that has addled so many American brains
- for more than half a century and also shunning the panic-stricken fears
- of impotence that have accompanied the inevitable frustration of these
- delusions, the debate would take realistic stock of the
- nation's very considerable yet limited resources and ask what
- is being done with them, for good or ill, and what should be done.
- Perhaps it will still be possible to shoehorn the United States into a
- stretched definition of "empire," but it would look nothing like Britain
- or Rome. Or perhaps, as I believe, a United States rededicated to
- its constitutional traditions and embarked on a cooperative
- course with other nations would find that it possesses untapped reserves
- of political power, though it will take time for American prestige to
- recover from Bush's squandering of it.
- <p class="subhed" style="margin-top: 27px;"> </p>
- <h2>Restoring Illusion</h2>
-
- Until very recently those authentic questions went substantially
- unexplored outside scholarly journals, and the country instead busied
- itself repairing the imperial illusions so rudely dashed by the
- Vietnam War. Suppressing the lessons of the Chinese Revolution had been
- easy, since the United States had not fought in China. Getting over the
- lessons of Vietnam took longer. Many segments of American society, none
- more than the military, had learned them deeply and vowed "never again."
- (The poignancy of the generals' recent outspoken statement against the
- conduct of the war in Iraq lies precisely in the officers' chagrin that
- they did indeed let it happen again.) The lessons were formulated in
- military terms in the so-called Powell doctrine, requiring that before
- military action proceeded there must be a clear military--not
- political--objective, that there must be a commitment to the use of
- overwhelming force and that there must be an "exit strategy."
- Nevertheless, in other quarters the lessons were named a "Vietnam
- syndrome," an illness, and other explanations were brought forward. The
- lessons of Vietnam were not so much forgotten as vigorously suppressed,
- in the name of restoring the reputation of America's military
- power. Ronald Reagan said of the Vietnam military, "They came home
- without a victory not because they were defeated but because they were
- denied a chance to win." After the first Gulf War, President Bush
- crowed, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"
- The country was getting ready for the second Iraq War, which violated
- every tenet of the Powell doctrine.
- A parallel evolution was occurring in the constitutional domain. The
- lesson most of the country learned from Watergate and the forced
- resignation of Richard Nixon was that the imperial presidency had grown
- too strong. (In general, our imperial-minded Presidents have had much
- more success rolling back freedom at home than extending it abroad.)
- Dick Cheney, who had served as Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford,
- drew an opposite lesson--that the powers others called imperial were in
- fact the proper ones for the presidency and had been eviscerated by the
- opposition to Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. As he has put it,
- "Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam, both
- during the 1970s, served, I think, to erode the authority...the
- President needs to be effective, especially in the national security
- area." Taking the Nixon presidency as a model rather than a cautionary
- tale, he sees new usurpation as restoration. In doing so, he brings an
- old theme back in new guise--that American weakness in the world is
- caused by domestic opponents at home. In his view domestic
- subversion--this time of executive authority, not misguided imperial
- ambition--is the country's problem.
- Can this pattern be broken? Voices are already being heard advising that
- the opposition to the Iraq War and the failed vision it embodies should,
- with the next election in mind, now embrace a generalized new readiness
- to use force. But that way lies only a new chapter in the sorry history
- of the pitiful, helpless giant. The needed lesson is exactly the
- opposite--to learn or relearn, or perhaps we must say re-relearn, the
- lessons regarding the limitations on the use of force that have been
- taught and then rejected so many times in recent decades. Only then will
- we be able to stop repeating ourselves and, giving up dreams of imperial
- grandeur, start saying and doing something new.
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