[NYTr] Bush's Response to 9/11 Deadlier Than the Attacks Themselves

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Juan Cole recommended this essay in his column yesterday -NYTr]

TomDispatch via Alternet - Oct 24, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65838/

Bush's Response to 9/11 Was Deadlier Than the Attacks Themselves

By Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com

Introduction note by Tom Dispatch editor Tom Engelhardt.

They came in as unreformed Cold Warriors, only lacking a cold war --
and looking for an enemy: a Russia to roll back even further; rogue
states like Saddam's rickety dictatorship to smash. They were still in
the old fight, eager to make sure that the "Evil Empire," already long
down for the count, would remain prostrate forever; eager to ensure
that any new evil empire like, say, China's would never be able to
stand tall enough to be a challenge. They saw opportunities to move
into areas previously beyond the reach of American imperial power like
the former SSRs of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, which just
happened to be sitting on potentially fabulous undeveloped energy
fields; or farther into the even more fabulously energy-rich Middle
East, where Saddam's Iraq, planted atop the planet's third largest
reserves of petroleum, seemed so ready for a fall -- with other states
in the region visibly not far behind.

It looked like it would be a coming-out party for one -- the debutante
ball of the season. It would be, in fact, like the Cold War without the
Soviet Union. What a blast! And they could still put their energies
into their fabulously expensive, ever-misfiring anti-missile system, a
subject they regularly focused on from January 2000 until September 10,
2001.

They were Cold Warriors in search of an enemy -- just not the one they
got. When the Clintonistas, on their way out of the White House, warned
them about al Qaeda, they paid next to no attention. Non-state actors
were for wusses. When the CIA carefully presented the President with a
one-page, knock-your-socks-off warning on August 6, 2001 that had the
screaming headline, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.," they
ignored it. Bush and his top officials were, as it happened, strangely
adrift until September 11, 2001; then, they were panicked and terrified
-- until they realized that their moment had come to hijack the plane
of state; so they clambered aboard, and like the Cold Warriors they
were, went after Saddam.

Chalmers Johnson was himself once a Cold Warrior. Unlike the top
officials of the Bush administration, however, he retained a remarkably
flexible mind. He also had a striking ability to see the world as it
actually was -- and a prescient vision of what was to come. He wrote
the near-prophetic and now-classic book, Blowback, published well
before the attacks of 9/11, and then followed it up with an anatomy of
the U.S. military's empire of bases, The Sorrows of Empire, and
finally, to end his Blowback Trilogy, a vivid recipe for American
catastrophe, Nemesis: The Fall of the American Republic. All three are
simply indispensable volumes in any reasonable post-9/11 library. Here
is his latest consideration of that disastrous moment and its
consequences as part of a series of book reviews he is periodically
writing for Tomdispatch.

                           ***

A Guide for the Perplexed: Intellectual Fallacies of the War on Terror

By Chalmers Johnson

This essay is a review of The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless
Response to Terror by Stephen Holmes (Cambridge University Press, 367
pp., $30).]

There are many books entitled "A Guide for the Perplexed," including
Moses Maimonides' 12th century treatise on Jewish law and E. F.
Schumacher's 1977 book on how to think about science. Book titles
cannot be copyrighted. A Guide for the Perplexed might therefore be a
better title for Stephen Holmes' new book than the one he chose, The
Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror. In his perhaps
overly clever conception, the matador is the terrorist leadership of al
Qaeda, taunting a maddened United States into an ultimately fatal
reaction. But do not let the title stop you from reading the book.
Holmes has written a powerful and philosophically erudite survey of
what we think we understand about the 9/11 attacks -- and how and why
the United States has magnified many times over the initial damage
caused by the terrorists.

Stephen Holmes is a law professor at New York University. In The
Matador's Cape, he sets out to forge an understanding -- in an
intellectual and historical sense, not as a matter of journalism or of
partisan politics -- of the Iraq war, which he calls "one of the worst
(and least comprehensible) blunders in the history of American foreign
policy" (p. 230). His modus operandi is to survey in depth
approximately a dozen influential books on post-Cold War international
politics to see what light they shed on America's missteps. I will
touch briefly on the books he chooses for dissection, highlighting his
essential thoughts on each of them.

Holmes' choice of books is interesting. Many of the authors he focuses
on are American conservatives or neoconservatives, which is reasonable
since they are the ones who caused the debacle. He avoids progressive
or left wing writers, and none of his choices are from Metropolitan
Books' American Empire Project. (Disclosure: This review was written
before I read Holmes' review of my own book Nemesis: The Last Days of
the American Republic in the October 29 issue of The Nation.)

He concludes: "Despite a slew of carefully researched and insightful
books on the subject, the reason why the United States responded to the
al Qaeda attack by invading Iraq remains to some extent an enigma" (p.
3). Nonetheless, his critiques of the books he has chosen are so well
done and fair that they constitute one of the best introductions to the
subject. They also have the advantage in several cases of making it
unnecessary to read the original.

Holmes interrogates his subjects cleverly. His main questions and the
key books he dissects for each of them are:

* Did Islamic religious extremism cause 9/11? Here he supplies his own
independent analysis and conclusion (to which I turn below).

* Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence,
as exemplified in Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and
Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 2003)? While not persuaded by
Kagan's portrayal of the United States as "Mars" and Europe as "Venus,"
Holmes takes Kagan's book as illustrative of neoconservative thought on
the use of force in international politics: "Far from guaranteeing an
unbiased and clear-eyed view of the terrorist threat, as Kagan
contends, American military superiority has irredeemably skewed the
country's view of the enemy on the horizon, drawing the United States,
with appalling consequences, into a gratuitous, cruel, and unwinnable
conflict in the Middle East" (p. 72).

* How was the war lost, as analyzed in Cobra II: The Inside Story of
the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard
Trainor (Pantheon, 2006)? Holmes regards this book by Gordon, the
military correspondent of the New York Times, and Trainor, a retired
Marine Corps lieutenant general, as the best treatment of the military
aspects of the disaster, down to and including U.S. envoy L. Paul
Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi military. I would argue that Fiasco
(Penguin 2006) by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks is more
comprehensive, clearer-eyed, and more critical.

* How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and
reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security
nightmare? Here Holmes considers James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The
History of Bush's War Cabinet (Viking, 2004). One of Mann's more
original insights is that the neocons in the Bush administration were
so bewitched by Cold War thinking that they were simply incapable of
grasping the new realities of the post-Cold War world. "In Iraq, alas,
the lack of a major military rival excited some aging hard-liners into
toppling a regime that they did not have the slightest clue how to
replace.... We have only begun to witness the long-term consequences of
their ghastly misuse of unaccountable power" (p. 106).

* What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration, as captured in Michael
Mann's Incoherent Empire (Verso, 2003)? According to Holmes, Mann's
work "repays close study, even by readers who will not find its
perspective altogether congenial or convincing." He argues that perhaps
Mann's most important contribution, even if somewhat mechanically put,
is to stress the element of bureaucratic politics in Cheney's and
Rumsfeld's manipulation of the neophyte Bush: "The outcome of inter-
and intra-agency battles in Washington, D.C., allotted disproportionate
influence to the fatally blurred understanding of the terrorist threat
shared by a few highly placed and shrewd bureaucratic infighters.
Rumsfeld and Cheney controlled the military; and when they were given
the opportunity to rank the country's priorities in the war on terror,
they assigned paramount importance to those specific threats that could
be countered effectively only by the government agency over which they
happened to preside" (p. 107).

* Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War,
as argued by an old cold warrior, Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster,
1996)? It is not clear why Holmes included Huntington's eleven-year-old
treatise on "Allah made them do it" in his collection of books on
post-Cold War international politics except as an act of obeisance to
establishmentarian -- and especially Council-on-Foreign-Relations --
thinking. Holmes regards Huntington's work as a "false template" and
calls it misleading. Well before 9/11, many critics of Huntington's
concept of "civilization" had pointed out that there is insufficient
homogeneity in Christianity, Islam, or the other great religions for
any of them to replace the position vacated by the Soviet Union. As
Holmes remarks, Huntington "finds homogeneity because he is looking for
homogeneity" (p. 136).

* What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on
terror, as seen by Samantha Power in "A Problem from Hell": America and
the Age of Genocide (Basic, 2002). As Holmes acknowledges, "The
humanitarian interventionists rose to a superficial prominence in the
1990s largely because of a vacuum in U.S. foreign-policy thinking after
the end of the Cold War. ... Their influence was small, however, and
after 9/11, that influence vanished altogether." He nonetheless takes
up the anti-genocide activists because he suspects that, by making a
rhetorically powerful case for casting aside existing decision-making
rules and protocols, they may have emboldened the Bush administration
to follow suit and fight the "evil" of terrorism outside the
Constitution and the law. The idea that Power was an influence on
Cheney and Rumsfeld may seem a stretch -- they were, after all, doing
what they had always wanted to do -- but Holmes' argument that "a savvy
prowar party may successfully employ humanitarian talk both to gull the
wider public and to silence potential critics on the liberal side" (p.
157) is worth considering.

* How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of
the Iraq war, as illustrated by Paul Berman in Power and the Idealists
(Soft Skull Press, 2005)? Wildly overstating his influence, Holmes
writes, Berman, a regular columnist for The New Republic, "first tried
to convince us that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, far from being a
tribal war over scarce land and water, is part of the wider spiritual
war between liberalism and apocalyptic irrationalism, not worth
distinguishing too sharply from the conflict between America and al
Qaeda. He then attempted to show that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin
Laden represented two 'branches' of an essentially homogeneous
extremism" (p. 181). Berman, Holmes points out, conflated
anti-terrorism with anti-fascism in order to provide a foundation for
the neologism "Islamo-fascism." His chief reason for including Berman
is that Holmes wants to address the views of religious fundamentalists
in their support of the war on terrorism.

* How did democratization at the point of an assault rifle become
America's mission in the world, as seen by the apostate neoconservative
Francis Fukuyama in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and
the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2006)? Holmes is
interested in Fukuyama, the neoconservatives' perennial sophomore,
because he offers an insider's insights into the chimerical neocon
"democratization" project for the Middle East.

Fukuyama argues that democracy is the most effective antidote to the
kind of Islamic radicalism that hit the United States on September 11,
2001. He contends that the root of Islamic rebellion is to be found in
the savage and effective repression of protestors -- many of whom have
been driven into exile -- in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and
Pakistan. Terrorism is not the enemy, merely a tactic Islamic radicals
have found exceptionally effective. Holmes writes of Fukuyama's
argument, "[T]o recognize that America's fundamental problem is Islamic
radicalism, and that terrorism is only a symptom, is to invite a
political solution. Promoting democracy is just such a political
solution" (p. 209).

The problem, of course, is that not even the neocons are united on
promoting democracy; and, even if they were, they do not know how to go
about it. Fukuyama himself pleads for "a dramatic demilitarization of
American foreign policy and a re-emphasis on other types of policy
instruments." The Pentagon, in addition to its other deficiencies, is
poorly positioned and incorrectly staffed to foster democratic
transitions.

* Why is the contemporary American antiwar movement so anemic, as seen
through the lens of history by Geoffrey Stone in Perilous Times: Free
Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism
(W. W. Norton, 2004)? Holmes has nothing but praise for Stone's history
of expanded executive discretion in wartime. A key question raised by
Stone is why the American public has not been more concerned with what
happened in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison and in the wholesale destruction
of the Sunni city of Fallujah. As Holmes sees it, the Bush
administration, at least in this one area, was adept at subverting
public protest. Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam
conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic
questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft,
create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a
false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

* How did the embracing of American unilateralism elevate the Office of
the Secretary of Defense over the Department of State, as put into
perspective by John Ikenberry in After Victory: Institutions, Strategic
Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton
University Press, 2001)? This book is Holmes' oddest choice -- a dated
history from an establishmentarian point of view of the international
institutions created by the United States after World War II, including
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and NATO, all of which
Ikenberry, a prominent academic specialist in international relations,
applauds. Holmes agrees that, during the Cold War, the United States
ruled largely through indirection, using seemingly impartial
international institutions, and eliciting the cooperation of other
nations. He laments the failure to follow this proven formula in the
post-9/11 era, which led to the eclipse of the State Department by the
Defense Department, an institution hopelessly ill-suited for diplomatic
and nation-building missions.

* Why do we battle lawlessness with lawlessness (for example, by
torturing prisoners) and concentrate extra-Constitutional authority in
the hands of the president, as expounded by John Yoo in The Powers of
War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11
(University of Chicago Press, 2005)? In this final section, Holmes puts
on his hat as the law professor he is and takes on George Bush's and
Alberto Gonzales' in-house legal counsel, the University of California,
Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who authored the "torture memos" for
them, denied the legality of the Geneva Conventions, and elaborated a
grandiose view of the President's war-making power. Holmes wonders,
"Why would an aspiring legal scholar labor for years to develop and
defend a historical thesis that is manifestly untrue? What is the point
and what is the payoff? That is the principal mystery of Yoo's singular
book. Characteristic of The Powers of War and Peace is the anemic
relations between the evidence adduced and the inferences drawn" (p.
291).

Holmes then points out that Yoo is a prominent member of the Federalist
Society, an association of conservative Republican lawyers who claim to
be committed to recovering the original understanding of the
Constitution and which includes several Republican appointees to the
current Supreme Court. His conclusion on Yoo and his fellow neocons is
devastating: "[I]f the misbegotten Iraq war proves anything, it is the
foolhardiness of allowing an autistic clique that reads its own
newspapers and watches its own cable news channel to decide, without
outsider input, where to expend American blood and treasure -- that is,
to decide which looming threats to stress and which to downplay or
ignore" (p. 301).

Is Islam the Culprit or Merely a Distraction?

In addition to these broad themes, Holmes investigates hidden agendas
and their distorting effects on rational policy-making. Some of these
are: Cheney's desire to expand executive power and weaken Congressional
oversight; Rumsfeld's schemes to field-test his theory that in modern
warfare speed is more important than mass; the plans by some of
Cheney's and Rumsfeld's advisers to improve the security situation of
Israel; the administration's desire to create a new set of permanent
U.S. military bases in the Middle East to protect the U.S. oil supply
in case of a collapse of the Saudi monarchy; and the desire to invade
Iraq and thereby avoid putting all the blame for 9/11 on al Qaeda --
because to do so would have involved admitting administration
negligence and incompetence during the first nine months of 2001 and,
even worse, that Clinton was right in warning Bush and his top
officials that the main security threat to the United States was a
potential al Qaeda attack or attacks.

This is not the place to attempt a comprehensive review of Holmes'
detailed critiques. For that, one should buy and read his book. Let me
instead dwell on three themes that I think illustrate his insight and
originality.

Holmes rejects any direct connection between Islamic religious
extremism and the 9/11 attacks, although he recognizes that Islamic
vilification of the United States and other Western powers is often
expressed in apocalyptically religious language. "Emphasizing religious
extremism as the motivation for the [9/11] plot, whatever it reveals,"
he argues, "...terminates inquiry prematurely, encouraging us to view
the attack ahistorically as an expression of 'radical Salafism,' a
fundamentalist movement within Islam that allegedly drives its
adherents to homicidal violence against infidels" (p. 2). This
approach, he points out, is distinctly tautological: "Appeals to social
norms or a culture of martyrdom are not very helpful.... They are
tantamount to saying that suicidal terrorism is caused by a proclivity
to suicidal terrorism" (p. 20).

Instead, he suggests, "The mobilizing ideology behind 9/11 was not
Islam, or even Islamic fundamentalism, but rather a specific narrative
of blame" (p. 63). He insists on putting the focus on the actual
perpetrators, the 19 men who executed the attacks in New York and
Washington -- 15 Saudi Arabians, two citizens of the United Arab
Emirates, one Egyptian, and one Lebanese. None of them was particularly
religious. Three were living together in Hamburg, Germany, where they
did appear to have become more interested in Islam than they had been
in their home countries. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the group, age 33
on 9/11, had Egyptian and German degrees in architecture and city
planning and became highly politicized in favor of the Palestinian
cause against Zionism only after he went abroad.

Holmes notes, "According to the classic study of resentment, [Friedrich
Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887)] 'every sufferer
instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; more specifically, an
agent, a "guilty" agent who is susceptible of pain -- in short, some
living being or other on whom he can vent his feelings directly or in
effigy, under some pretext or other.' If suffering is seen as natural
or uncaused it will be coded as misfortune instead of injustice, and it
will produce resignation rather than rebellion. The most efficient way
to incite, therefore, is to indict" (p. 64).

The role of bin Laden was, and remains, to provide such a hyperbolic
indictment -- one that men like Atta would never have heard back in
authoritarian Egypt but that came through loud and clear in their
German exile. Bin Laden demonized the United States, accusing it of
genocide against Muslims and repeatedly contending that the presence of
U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia ever since the first Gulf War in 1991 was a
far graver offense than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, even though
that had led to the death of one million Afghans and had sent five
million more into exile.

The fact that the 9/11 plot involved the attackers' own
self-destruction suggests possible irrationality on their part, but
Holmes argues that this was actually part of the specific narrative of
blame. Americans feel contempt for Muslims and ascribe little or no
value to Muslim lives. Therefore, to be captured after a terrorist
attack involved a high likelihood that the Americans would torture the
perpetrator. Suicide took care of that worry (and provided several
other advantages discussed below).

The United States as "Sole Remaining Superpower"

Another subject about which Holmes is strikingly original is the subtle
way in which the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the United
States' self-promotion as the sole remaining superpower clouded our
vision and virtually guaranteed the catastrophe that ensued in Iraq.
"Because Americans.... have sunk so much of their national treasure
into a military establishment fit to deter and perhaps fight an enemy
that has now disappeared," he argues, "they have an almost irresistible
inclination to exaggerate the centrality of rogue states, excellent
targets for military destruction, [above] the overall terrorist threat.
They overestimate war (which never unfolds as expected) and
underestimate diplomacy and persuasion as instruments of American
power" (pp. 71-72).

Holmes draws several interesting implications from this American
overinvestment in Cold-War-type military power. One is that the very
nature of the 9/11 attacks undermined crucial axioms of American
national security doctrine. In a much more significant way than in the
1993 attack on the World Trade Center, a non-state actor on the
international stage successfully attacked the United States, contrary
to a well-established belief in Pentagon circles that only states have
the capability of menacing us militarily. Equally alarming, by
employing a strategy requiring their own deaths, the terrorists ensured
that deterrence no longer held sway. Overwhelming military might cannot
deter non-state actors who accept that they will die in their attacks
on others. The day after 9/11, American leaders in Washington D.C.
suddenly felt unprotected and defenseless against a new threat they
only imperfectly understood. They responded in various ways.

One was to recast what had happened in terms of Cold-War thinking. "To
repress feelings of defenselessness associated with an unfamiliar
threat, the decision makers' gaze slid uncontrollably away from al
Qaeda and fixated on a recognizable threat that was unquestionably
susceptible to being broken into bits" (p.312). Holmes calls this
fusion of bin Laden and Saddam Hussein a "mental alchemy, the
'reconceiving' of an impalpable enemy as a palpable enemy." He endorses
James Mann's thesis that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz,
and others did not change the underlying principles guiding American
foreign policy in response to the 9/11 attacks; that, in fact, they did
the exact opposite: "[T]he Bush administration has managed foreign
affairs so ineptly because it has been reflexively implementing
out-of-date formulas in a radically changed security environment" (p.
106).

Unintended consequences also played a role, Holmes argues: "If
conservative Congressmen had not blocked [Pennsylvania Governor] Tom
Ridge's nomination as Defense Secretary [in 2000] for the ludicrously
immaterial reason that he was wobbly on abortion, then the
Cheney-Rumsfeld group, including Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, would
have been in no position to hijack the administration's reaction to
9/11" (pp. 93-94). Rumsfeld enthusiastically endorsed Bush's
description of his "new" policies as a "war" because the Office of the
Secretary of Defense then became the lead agency in designing and
carrying out America's response.

There was little or no countervailing influence. "By sheer chance,"
Holmes writes, "Rice and Powell -- no doubt orderly managers -- have
pedestrian minds and perhaps deferential personalities. Neither
provided a gripping and persuasive vision of the United States' role in
the world that might have counteracted the megalomania of the
neoconservatives, and neither was capable of outfoxing the hard-liners
in an interagency power struggle" (p. 94).

The costs of equating al Qaeda with Iraq and of concentrating on a
military response were high. "It meant that some of the troops sent to
Iraq in the first wave believed, disgracefully, that they were avenging
the 3,000 dead from September 11.... Cruel and arbitrary behavior by
some U.S. forces helped stoke the violent insurgency that followed" (p.
307).

American confusion about the nature of the enemy -- rogue state vs.
non-state terrorist organization -- produced two different
counterstrategies, both of which almost certainly made the situation
worse. First, by focusing on a rogue state (Iraq), rather than on a
non-state actor (al Qaeda), the Pentagon drew attention to what it came
to call the "hand-off scenario" in which a nuclear-armed rogue state
might hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists who would use
them against the U.S. To counter this threat, the Pentagon developed a
strategy of preventive war against rogue states with the objective of
bringing about regime change in them. The only way to prevent nuclear
proliferation to terrorist groups -- so the argument went -- was to
forcibly democratize Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes, some of
which had long been allied with the United States.

The other strategy was a return to what seemed like a form of
deterrence: a "scare the Muslims" campaign. This involved a resort to
massive "shock and awe" bombing raids on Baghdad with the intent of
demonstrating the futility of defying the United States.

By reacting to the threat of modern terrorism with an attack on a
substitute target -- without even bothering to calculate the enormous
potential costs involved -- the Pentagon greatly overestimated what
military force could achieve. Both the regime-change and
overawe-the-Muslims approaches carried with them potentially
devastating unintended consequences -- particularly if any of the
premises, such as about who possessed WMD, were wrong. Overly abstract
ideas were substituted for empirical knowledge of, and logical
responses to, an enemy's capabilities. Thus, insurgencies in Iraq and
Afghanistan, two devastated, poor countries, have managed to fight one
of the most powerful American expeditionary forces in history to a
virtual standstill. In short, "America's bellicose response to the 9/11
provocation was not only dishonorable and unethical, given the cruel
suffering it has inflicted on thousands of innocents, but also
imprudent in the extreme because it was bound to produce as much hatred
as fear, as much burning desire for reprisal as quaking paralysis and
docility. Some of the sickening effects are unfolding before our eyes.
That even more malevolent consequences remain in store is a grim
possibility not to be wished away" (p. 10).

Complicity of the Left in American Imperialism

Holmes is also interesting on why the American Left has been so
ineffectual in countering the efforts of Washington's pro-war party.
Deeply guilt-ridden over the Clinton administration's failure to stop
the genocide in Rwanda and frustrated by the constraints of
international law and United Nations procedures, some influential
progressives in America had already advocated a preemptive and
unilateralist turn in American foreign policy that the Bush
administration hijacked. Human rights activists had heavily promoted
intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo to halt ethnic cleansing -- and doing
so without any international sanction whatsoever. Some of them became
as enthusiastic about using the American armed forces to achieve
limited foreign policy goals as many neocons. Even U.S. ambassador to
the U.N. Madeleine Albright made herself notorious with her 1993
wisecrack to then Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell: "What's the point
of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we
can't use it?"

Although Holmes tries not to overstate his case, he suspects that the
humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s -- at one point he speaks of
"human rights as imperial ideology" (p. 190) -- may have played at
least a small role in the public's acceptance of Bush's intervention in
Iraq. If so, it is hard to imagine a better example of the disasters
that good intentions can sometimes produce. The result in Iraq, in
turn, has more or less silenced calls from the Left for further
campaigns of military intervention for humanitarian purposes. The U.S.
is conspicuously not participating in the U.N. intervention in the
Darfur region of Sudan.

The Rule of Law

As a legal scholar, Holmes is committed to the rule of law. "[L]aw is
best understood," he writes, "not as a set of rigid rules but rather as
a set of institutional mechanisms and procedures designed to correct
the mistakes that even exceptionally talented executive officials are
bound to make and to facilitate midstream readjustments and course
corrections. If we understand law, constitutionalism, and due process
in this way, then it becomes obvious why the war on terrorism is bound
to fail when conducted, as it has been so far, against the rule of law
and outside the constitutional system of checks and balances" (p. 5).

This short-circuiting of normal constitutional procedures he sees as
probably the most consequential post-9/11 blunder of the Bush
administration. The President's repeated claims that he needs high
levels of secrecy and the ability to arbitrarily cancel established law
in order to move decisively against terrorists draw his utter contempt.
"By dismantling checks and balances, along the lines idealized and
celebrated by [John] Yoo, the administration has certainly gained
flexibility in the 'war on terror.' It has gained the flexibility, in
particular, to shoot first and aim afterward" (p. 301). Although such
an assumption of dictatorial powers has happened before during periods
of national emergency in the United States, Holmes is convinced that
the humanitarian interventionism of the 1990s helped anesthetize many
Americans to the implications of what the government was doing after
9/11.

Even now, with the Iraq War all but lost and public opinion having
turned decisively against the President, there is still a flabbiness in
mainstream criticism that reveals a major weakness in the conduct of
American foreign policy. For example, while many hawks and doves today
recognize that Rumsfeld mobilized too few forces to achieve his
military objectives in Iraq, they tend to concentrate on his rejection
of former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki's advice that he
needed a larger army of occupation. They almost totally ignore the true
national policy implications of Rumsfeld's failed leadership. Holmes
writes, "If Saddam Hussein had actually possessed the tons of chemical
and biological weapons that, in the president's talking points,
constituted the casus belli for the invasion, Rumsfeld's slimmed-down
force would have abetted the greatest proliferation disaster in world
history" (p. 82). He quotes Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor:
"Securing the WMD required sealing the country's borders and quickly
seizing control of the many suspected sites before they were raided by
profiteers, terrorists, and regime officials determined to carry on the
fight. The force that Rumsfeld eventually assembled, by contrast, was
too small to do any of this" (pp. 84-85). As a matter of fact, looters
did ransack the Iraqi nuclear research center at al Tuwaitha. No one
pointed out these flaws in the strategy until well after the invasion
had revealed that, luckily, Saddam had no WMD.

With this book, Stephen Holmes largely succeeds in elevating criticism
of contemporary American imperialism in the Middle East to a new level.
In my opinion, however, he underplays the roles of American imperialism
and militarism in exploiting the 9/11 crisis to serve vested interests
in the military-industrial complex, the petroleum industry, and the
military establishment. Holmes leaves the false impression that the
political system of the United States is capable of a successful course
correction. But, as Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American
Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, puts it: "None of the
Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise
of reviving the system of checks and balances.... The aim of the party
out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it,
not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain
them."

There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The
American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire
that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing
military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least
comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after
World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain
avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny
and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had
continued to try to dominate much of the world by force. To take up
these subjects, however, moves the discussion into largely unexplored
territory. For now, Holmes has done a wonderful job of clearing the
underbrush and preparing the way for the public to address this more or
less taboo subject.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of the bestselling Blowback Trilogy --
Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last
Days of the American Republic (2007).

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.