Cuestiones
de América
American Tragedy
Jonathan Schell *
The decision to
go to war to overthrow the government of Iraq will bring unreckonable death and
suffering to that country, the surrounding region and, possibly, the United States.
It also marks a culmination in the rise within the United States of an immense
concentration of unaccountable power that poses the greatest threat to the
American constitutional system since the Watergate crisis. This transformation,
in turn, threatens to push the world into a new era of rivalry, confrontation
and war. The location of the new power is of course the presidency (whose
Augustan proportions make the “imperial” presidency of the cold war look like a
mere practice run). Its sinews are the awesome might of the American military
machine, which, since Congress's serial surrender of the constitutional power
to declare war, has passed wholly into the President's hands. Its main
political instrument is the Republican Party. Its financial wherewithal is the
corporate money that inundates the political realm. Its strategy at home is
restriction of civil liberties, deep secrecy, a makeover in its image of the
judiciary, subservience to corporate interests across the board and transfer of
personal wealth on a colossal scale from the average person to its wealthy
supporters. Its popular support stems from fear engendered by the attacks of
September 11--fear that has been manipulated to extend far beyond its proper
objects. Its overriding goal, barely concealed behind the banner of the war on
terrorism, is the accumulation of ever more power, whose supreme expression is
its naked ambition to establish hegemony over the earth.
The steps in
the rise of this power can be traced through international and domestic events.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and the cold war ended, the United States was
left in a position of global privilege, prestige and might that had no parallel
in history. The moment seemed a golden one for the American form of government,
liberal democracy. The American economic system was equally admired. In the
previous two decades, a long list of nations--in southern Europe, in Latin
America, in Asia--had chosen both systems, largely of their own free will. Even
more astonishing, most of the peoples under the rule of the collapsed Soviet
foe were making the same choice. The Soviet system had not only disintegrated;
it had discredited itself. No rival was in sight. There were good reasons, even
if one did not suppose that “the end of history” touted by Francis Fukuyama had
arrived, for hoping that these trends would continue. A basically consensual rather
than a coerced world seemed a real possibility.
Who could have
guessed that barely a decade later the United States, forsaking the very legal,
democratic traditions that were its most admired characteristics, would be
going to war to impose its will by force upon an alarmed, angry, frightened
world united against it? It's clear in retrospect that somewhere near the root
of the problem was the very existence of the unchallengeable American military
machine. In part, the imbalance with other nations was accidental. The machine
had been built up in the name of containing the considerable military forces of
the Soviet Union. When, against all expectation, the Soviet Union suddenly
disappeared like a bad dream, the American giant found itself towering alone
over the world. America likes to see itself as a force for good. Yet like all
unchecked, unbalanced power, such might had, as the founders of this country
knew so well, the potential to corrupt its possessors. The decade that followed
was a mixed picture in which the raw arrogance of power was tempered by a
lingering respect for the opinions of other nations and a search for common
ground in the name of humanitarian objectives. In the first Gulf War, the will
and the muscle to go to war were mainly American, but skillful diplomacy won
the support or acquiescence of most nations, and the cause--repelling an act of
aggression--won wide acceptance. In Kosovo, the United States acted without
explicit United Nations agreement, angering many nations, yet the action was
taken in the name of NATO, not merely the United States, and Serbian outrages
on the ground helped create a climate of support around the world. The turning
point, of course, came on September 11. Yet even then the United States gained
considerable support for its first act of “regime change”--overthrowing the
Taliban government of Afghanistan, which many understood as a measure of
self-defense in the aftermath of a horrifying attack upon the United States. It
was in the year that followed that the ambiguities of the 1990s were resolved
in favor of the coherent, radical new policy of dominance asserted through the
unilateral, pre-emptive use of force to overthrow other governments. The more
clearly the Administration stated this policy, the more the world rebelled.
The path
through domestic events to this same destination arguably begins with the
impeachment attempt against President Bill Clinton, in which the Republican
Party abused its majority power in Congress to try to knock a President of the
other party out of the executive branch. The attempt failed, but the
institutional siege on the presidency continued in the resolution of the freakishly
close vote in Florida in 2000. In a further abuse of government power--in this
case the judicial branch--the President was chosen by a vote not of the people
of the United States but of the Supreme Court. The message of Republicans at
the time in Congress and the Florida legislature was that if judges did not
produce the result they demanded, they would bring on a constitutional crisis
in the House of Representatives. A new conception of democracy was born:
Freedom is your right to support what we want. Otherwise, you are “irrelevant.”
You can vote, but you do not decide. “Unilateralism” was born in Florida.
The tragedy of
America in the post-cold war era is that we have proved unequal to the
responsibility that our own power placed upon us. Some of us became intoxicated
with it, imagining that we could rule the world. Others of us--the Democratic
Party, Congress, the judiciary, the news media--abdicated our obligation to
challenge, to check and to oppose, letting the power-hungry have their way. The
government of the United States went into opposition against its own founding
principles, leaving it to the rest of the world to take up our cause. The
French have been better Americans than we have. Because the Constitution,
though battered, is still intact, we may still have time and opportunity to
recoup. But for now, we will have to pay the price of our weakness. The costs
will be heavy, first of all for the people of Iraq but also for others,
including ourselves. The international order on which the common welfare,
including its ecological and economic welfare, depends has sustained severe
damage. The fight for “freedom” abroad is crippling freedom at home. The war to
stop proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has provoked that
very proliferation in North Korea and Iran. More ground has already been lost
in the field of proliferation than can be gained even by the most delirious
victory in Baghdad. Former friends of America have been turned into rivals or
foes. The United States may be about to win Iraq. It has already lost the
world.
* The Nation,
March 20, 2003.
Cuestiones de
América Nº 14, Abril - Mayo de 2003
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