Unleashed by Sept 11: Free at Last for a Global Power Play

Unleashed by Sept 11: Free at Last for a Global Power Play

15 March 2002

George W. Bush's speech on Monday, on the half-year anniversary of the World Trade Towers and Pentagon attacks, provided a more coherent statement than we had yet had on the policy he is following.

The policy's objective and limits nonetheless remain unclear, which adds to the impression that Washington's new working assumption is the reverse of the Orwellian postulate that "war is peace." For the United States now, or at least for the Bush administration, peace is war.

The president again raised the stakes by insisting upon the danger of "terror on a catastrophic scale" if America's enemies are not defeated, whoever and wherever they are. He declared that the rout of Al Qaeda and Taliban forces means little without a new and "sustained campaign to deny sanctuary to terrorists" in the Philippines, Yemen, Georgia, Indonesia, Somalia and unspecified elsewheres.

Elsewhere obviously starts in Iraq, which has no established connection with Al Qaeda but whose president, Saddam Hussein, has given two Bush administrations ample motive for hatred and revenge.

However, there, as with Somalia, where the U.S. Army has accounts to settle, the means to be employed remain a problem, even if the United States were prepared to commit mass ground forces of its own. Saudi Arabia is no longer ready to accommodate an American ground buildup, and the Arab world generally is hostile to the United States' responsibility in Israel's war to crush not only Palestinian terrorism but Palestinian national aspiration.

In justification of the largest American military budget since the Reagan administration, Bush warned of new, unprecedented and seemingly everlasting risks, although he cited only the familiar threat of "rogue nation" attack, which has been political currency in Washington for years.

Nothing that has happened during the past six months in Iraq or North Korea makes either place more dangerous to the United States than it was before, which is to say not very dangerous. The scenario that explains what interest North Korea has in lobbing a primitive nuclear weapon, contained in a primitive missile, into Alaska (or, by missing it, into the Canadian Arctic) has yet to be written.

During the past six months, investigations in the United States and the detention of thousands of foreigners have not, so far as is known, produced a single "sleeper" cell or agent of Al Qaeda.

The two principal suspects held in the United States appear to be Richard Reid, the Briton with the shoe bomb, and a Frenchman of North African origin thought to have been one of the original group responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Investigations by authorities in Europe, where Islamic extremist terrorism has been a police preoccupation for a number of years, have been more successful. Connections have been discovered between individuals in Spain, Belgium, Italy, Germany and France and organizations or individuals believed close to Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden has disappeared, possibly killed in Afghanistan, his followers there defeated and dispersed. Those of his people now held in cages at Guantánamo do not seem to have yielded exploitable intelligence about the international ramifications of what Washington insists is a "catastrophic" threat.

To meet this threat, the U.S. government has proposed a $48 billion increase in defense expenditures, largely in strategic weapons systems (including missile defense and three advanced fighter aircraft systems). A new series of nuclear weapons for contingency first-strike use against identified non-nuclear states is sought.

Washington proposes to lower its nuclear-use threshold and to warehouse rather than destroy nuclear weapons removed from inventory, thereby jeopardizing arms reduction agreements with Russia and alarming China and Washington's allies.

The United States has effectively suspended habeas corpus for non-U.S. citizens, and for the prisoners it is holding in Cuba and Afghanistan, for whom it also denies prisoner-of-war status. It claims the right to seize persons of whatever nationality, hold them indefinitely or have them transferred, sometimes in defiance of local law or court rulings, to third countries whose intelligence services, linked to the CIA, function outside American legal constraints. That is to say, they can torture them.

None of this really fits together. The action-reaction proportions are all wrong.

This administration is making use of the Sept. 11 tragedy to do what the neoconservative right has wanted for a long time, which is to renounce inconvenient treaties, junk arms control, build and test nuclear weapons, attack Saddam Hussein and abandon multilateralism, cooperation with international organizations and compromise with allies, all in order to aggrandize American international power and deal expediently with those who challenge it.

The bin Laden threat has been exaggerated to justify extravagant military spending and suppress the inconveniences caused to national leadership by the rule of law and international convention and treaty.

It undoubtedly sounds cynical to say this. That is nothing by comparison with this administration's cynicism in actually doing it.

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