Of all countries during the post-World War II period, including the authoritarian Soviet Union, the United States has been, by far, the most aggressive nation on the planet with its military.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia recently bluntly lashed out at U.S. foreign policy. At an international security conference with U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in attendance, referring to U.S. actions in the international arena, Putin said, “Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations — military force.” He asserted that U.S. military interventions, which he termed “unilateral” and “illegitimate,” also “have not been able to resolve any matters at all,” and have generated only more instability and peril, especially in the Middle East. He concluded that, “Primarily the United States has overstepped its national borders, and in every area.” In addition to profligate U.S. military threats and actions, he also criticized the United States for building an “offensive” missile defense, expanding the NATO alliance to the borders of Russia, and supporting groups trying to overthrow their governments in the Russian historic sphere of influence.
Since the speech, Putin has been excoriated in the U.S. press. As usual, such intense vitriol is reserved for people who bring up inconvenient truths about U.S. policy. Of course, Putin didn’t say anything that was untrue, and that’s the reason for the intense anger in the United States.
Americans have never been very good at looking at their government in the mirror. They see the cogent and pithy words of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison about our system of government and reach the conclusion that the United States can do no wrong in the international arena because it has one of the world’s best systems at home. Yet the two have nothing to do with each other.
This unquestioning attitude when dealing with other countries I label the “Tarzan foreign policy,” which assumes “we good, you bad.” In other words, in this distorted mental framework, aggressive U.S. actions would not be tolerated if another country did them.
For example, if the usual chest thumping of “patriotic” U.S. citizens and policy makers is discarded, and things are more dispassionately analyzed, one might be unsettled by the fact that Saddam Hussein had a better reason for invading Kuwait than the United States did for invading Iraq. Although I’m in no way endorsing Saddam’s brutal invasion of that small Arab country, at least he had some tangible reason for doing so: The Kuwaitis were stealing Iraqi oil by slant drilling deposits across the Iraq-Kuwait border.
But in the case of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, before the invasion, the Bush administration was told by the international weapons inspectors that they could find no weapons of mass destruction. In addition, the Bush administration deceived the U.S. public and manipulated intelligence to attempt to link Saddam with the 9/11 attacks. If you accept with a straight face the administration’s stated objective of democratizing Iraq and the Middle East — only emphasized when the other two justifications failed to materialize — the goal was undermined by U.S. actions after the invasion and very well might have been achieved without war. Initially, after the invasion, a true democracy wasn’t the administration’s first choice in Iraq. Instead, the thinking was that a system of caucuses — in which the United States and the U.S. appointed Iraqi Governing Council would nominate the participants — was favored. Only massive protests ordered by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Islamic cleric for the country’s majority Shi’a, forced the administration to accept general elections. Even if the main U.S. goal was to get rid of the despotic Saddam, according to Bob Woodward in his book Plan of Attack, Saddam made some indirect feelers through the son of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak to go into exile. Bush, however, wanted war and did not pursue this behind-the-scenes appeal.
So if these weren’t the reasons for the Iraq War, then it must have been to help Israel, to settle old scores with Saddam, or to ensure that cheap oil continues to flow to the U.S. economy. None of these petty reasons qualify as defending U.S. vital interests. The last one comes the closest, but many economists note that the international oil market actually works and that oil producing countries, which don’t have much else to export, need to sell the oil as much as the United States needs to buy it. Spending all those hundreds of billions to defend something that doesn’t need defending makes no sense. On a moral level, using the U.S. military to grab oil suspiciously seems similar to what the Imperial Japanese did to start World War II in the Pacific — after the United States cut off oil exports to that nation.
But what about the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan? An argument can be made that the United States had to invade to neutralize bin Laden and take out the Taliban regime that was sheltering him. As usual, such foreign adventures rarely turn out the way they are supposed to. The United States achieved the latter, but not the former, because it shifted many key military and intelligence resources to the coming invasion of Iraq. Also, instead of leaving after deposing the Taliban, the United States has stayed around to “nation-build,” which historically has never worked, and acts as a lightning rod for a Taliban resurgence. Even if one buys into the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions (a dubious proposition), continued foreign occupation was bound to trigger indigenous resistance. In Afghanistan, the typical mission creep is so bad that the Bush administration is now trying to eradicate the opium trade to win points back home — thus pushing Afghan drug lords to finance the Taliban.
Republicans, however, will be happy to know that George W. Bush should not be solely blamed for this aggressive U.S. foreign policy. Although he did ensnare the United States into significant quagmires on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States’ modern-day interventionist foreign policy dates back to the Democratic Truman administration after World War II. Of all countries during the post-war period, including the authoritarian Soviet Union, the United States has been, by far, the most aggressive nation on the planet with its military. Even during the Cold War, of the two superpowers, the United States was the first-among-equals and took advantage of it to intervene militarily in all parts of the world. The United States used the fight against communism to advance its imperial tentacles into backwater countries, such as Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, etc.
At the international security conference, the suave Secretary of Defense Gates dismissed Putin’s unanswered specific charges on U.S. missile defense in Europe, the expansion of a hostile NATO alliance to Russia’s borders, and U.S. meddling in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence by saying that the United States felt that “one Cold War was quite enough.” Yet Putin was right that the United States is pursuing another Cold War, this time an unstated one, against both Russia and China.
In his most astute criticism of the lone superpower’s foreign policy, Putin noted that the power amassed by a global power “destroys it from within.” Alluding to the aggressive, militaristic U.S. foreign policy, Putin noted correctly that, “it has nothing in common with democracy, of course.” Surprisingly, Putin, a domestic autocrat himself, seems to see what the U.S. founders knew, but what the occupants of the post–World War II imperial presidency have not been able to fathom. During the Roman Republic, the concentration of power associated with a militarized foreign policy led to the disintegration of the republic itself. The same thing is happening in the United States now. Thus, to safeguard one of the greatest domestic systems in the world, U.S. citizens and policy makers should drop the Tarzan foreign policy and return to the founders’ policy of minimal interference in the affairs of other nations.
ieland@independent.org
http://www.independent.org
Read more articles by Ivan Eland
This may well be the most vile and incoherent screed I have ever read.
The author accepts every word that came from the mouth of the tyrannical Russian 'president' (and former KGB gangster), then goes on to re-write the last 60 years of world history to fit into his and his commie co-horts own hateful view of the United States and Western freedom.
Does he criticize the Russians for invading Afghanistan to enforce its tyrannical hegemony over the country? No, he critcizes the U.S. for invading it in response to an attack on our country that incinerated 3000 innocent American citizens!
Does he criticize the Russians for proliferating nuclear technology to rogue regimes like Iran? No, he attacks the U.S. for taking the prudent, rational step of deploying a missile defense shield to protect our allies and interests form the results of such proliferation. This nonsense is akin to accusing a cop of being provocative for wearing his bullet resistant vest on patrol!
He criticizes the U.S. policy of diplomatically supporting emerging democracies in Eastern Europe, where people want to enjoy the fruits of self-governance, while supporting the Russian stranglehold on people in its "historic sphere of influence."
He criticizes the use of U.S. force to help defend free peoples while countering Russia's attempt at achieving global dominance in places such as Korea and Vietnam while ostensibly supporting their complicity in such conflicts.
He attacks the expansion of the defensive treaty among the free nations of the West, which he calls the "hostile NATO alliance," while remaining silent about Russias attempts to expand its"sphere of influence" into South and Central America (including putting offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba!)
He blasts the U.S. for the long overdue continuation of the war with Iraq in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, while ignoring the following: attacks on the U.S. military by Iraqi forces in the region for the previous 12 years; the active WMD program Saddam maintained (with or without stockpiles) which would have eventually moved into the production and deployment phase after the sanctions collapsed - with Russian and French complicity; the documented connections of the regime to numerous international terrorist organizations; the mass graves being filled by the tyrant in the Cradle of Civilization;
The fact is, the war in Iraq is but one battle in the continuing struggle between the free West (even if the U.S. is one of the precious few countries willing to defend it) and the barbaric ideology represented by the Bin Laden's and Husseins of the world.
A man who represents an organization called the 'Center on Peace and Liberty' of all people should know that neither is of any use without the other and that both must be, from time to time, defended.
Comment by Jeff Osonitsch | February 14, 2007
I have a problem with this kind of criticism coming from Putin. It's entirely hypocritical based on the problems his own country has. For one thing it does not enforce laws against criminals of computer based crimes at all. Maybe if Ghandi was alive and leveled this kind of criticism then I would pay attention. Ghandi would scoff at your use of the word Imperialism to describe US foreign policy when the US has seized no land like Great Britain used to in his time. Your entire article smells of sensationalism. No doubt that US foreign policy should be criticized but not to that degree. It doesn't deserve it.
Comment by Bryansix | February 14, 2007
"Since the speech, Putin has been excoriated in the U.S. press. As usual, such intense vitriol is reserved for people who bring up inconvenient truths about U.S. policy. Of course, Putin didn’t say anything that was untrue, and that’s the reason for the intense anger in the United States."
Russia violated UN sanctions against Iraq, and is now doing the same with Iran, and is an agressor nation that murders dissident reporters within it's boundaries. What Putin says about the U.S. is irrelevant, and no one of any intelligence or good sense cares what he has to say.
This article is just anti-American sentiment wrapped in post-Iraq revisionist history.
Pre-war in Iraq, the inspectors didn't say anything about not finding weapons. They said they were refused entry to sites that they requested to see, were offen ushered into huge empty silos that looked scrubbed clean, and they could see the dirt trails of convoys disappearing in the distance. Every nation in the world agreed with the assessment that Iraq had WMDs, with France leading the way in insisting that the metal cylinders they found were perfect for centrifuges.
After the invasion, over 500 degraded WMDs, proving definitively that Saddam never complied with UN resolutions demanding that he destroy his weapons. We have General George Sada, the leading Iraqi general pre-war, letting us know that they sent the WMDs to Syria, which is confirmed by satelite photos. Your baseless claim about Bush lying us into the war is not only unteniable, it is false and easily disprovable.
Also false is the assertion that Bush tried to connect Saddam to 9/11. Bush connected al Quida to Saddam, which again, is 100% true (Saddam harbored the original WTC attacker for years and gave him a government stipend).
The quote that everyone uses to "prove that Bush lied about Saddam's connection to 9/11" is the following:
"In a post-9/11 world, we can no longer wait for threats to become imminent before we act on them."
Saying that we learned a lesson from 9/11 is not the same as saying that the current issue is linked to 9/11. This point of yours fails.
Oh, and the lame claim "nation building never works"…that's bunk. Post WWII, we stayed in Germany and Japan. We basically rebuilt Europe single handedly. Try again.
As for idiotic cries, the idea that we invaded Iraq for "cheap oil" is astounded in it's lack of grounding. Gas prices have (at their peak) tripled from their pre-9/11 prices. This claim, too, fails.
Finally, the foolish and altogether unfounded assertion that we are the most aggressive militaristic society in the post-war world…al i can say is What?
I guess maybe…if you ignore the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, North Vietnam, et. al. The Soviet Union swallowed up every country it could and brutally murdered anyone who dissented. Our goals in Vietnam, if anything, were not militaristic enough. In our quick retreat over a million South Vietnamese died.
I suppose I can slightly see your point, though, if I ignore all of the above and don't base my opinion on facts or reality.
Ridiculous.
Comment by WolvenBear | February 14, 2007
With Putin buying billions of gallons of Iraqi oil under the table and the president of the U.N. stealing from the Iraq Oil-For-Kickbacks, er, Oil-For-Food program, these criticisms of our policy there ring rather hollow. I'm sure the local junkie probably doesn't like it when the cops arrest his crack dealer either. If Putin wants to talk about imperialism and unilateral action, why don't we talk about the communist Russian expansion post-WWII into China, Korea, Cuba, South America and Africa. If he wants to talk about expanding alliances into Russian territory, let's talk about the Russian missile program in Cuba that nearly ignited a nuclear holocaust. Oh, that's right, I forgot, the U.S. has been the most aggressive country in the world militarily since WWII. Oops. Silly interventionists, imperialism is for Americans!
I love your logic. It was okay for Iraq to invade Kuwait because of alleged theft of Iraqi oil, but it's imperialistic for the United States to re-invade Iraq in what was a perfectly legal action under U.N. rules since Sadaam Hussein violated the U.N. agreement that ended Gulf War I. Your allegations make sense though in light of all the oil that we've been exporting out of Iraq since we invaded in 2003… right.
Thanks for the enlightenment, but Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" has got you by a good 30 years.
Comment by Patrick Mulligan | February 15, 2007
Mr. Eland may be correct. We did fight that war in Korea which prevented those in the north from turning it into the wasteland which has been created in the north. We're buying cars from South Korea while the North Koreans are starving.
Then there was that war in Vietnam. You know, the one the democrats started then lost because it's own voting base changed it's mind. Unfortunately, now all of Vietnam looks more like North Korea.
But there is a reason why the U.S., more than other nations has, rightly or wrongly, gone overseas in an effort to push along the cause of freedom for others. Many of those other nations were too ocupied with killing their own people to be looking elsewhere. Was it 20 or 40 million Chinese killed by Mao? Was it 10 or 20 million killed by Stalin? How many more millions have been murdered by their own governments in Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Ethiopia, etc., etc.?
It is certainly tragic that Iraqi residents here were able to convince us that those living in Iraq would welcome freedom if only Sadam were removed. Their success in doing so has certainly resulted in a high cost to us, from which Iraq has yet to profit.
Mike Brown
Comment by Mike Brown | February 18, 2007