By Jack A. Smith
Even as President Bush plans to extend his military adventures to various other countries, winning the so-called war on terrorism is not his primary objective. It is but a means to attain the principal goal of regaining GOP control of the Senate, increasing the Republican majority in the House, electing more conservative governors next November, and, above all, getting himself reelected in 2004.
Wars favor the party in power and no president has been turned out of office during wartime. This is a big reason why the White House has insisted from the beginning that the vaguely defined, open-ended war on terrorism will last for many years, at least spanning Bush’s dream of realizing the two-term presidency denied his father. And it’s why -- if the extreme war hawks in the president’s entourage can arrange it -- there will be a war on Iraq starting later in the year, closer to the elections.
George Bush amassed some stunning victories for the right-wing in his first year in office -- the huge tax-cut for the rich, breaking the ABM treaty, scuttling the Kyoto accords to reduce global warming, carrying his counterattack upon a relatively small band of fundamentalist terrorists to a number of nations innocent of involvement in the events of Sept. 11, and gaining approval from a pliant Congress for his scandalous $48 billion hike in Pentagon spending, while cutting social programs for working people. Now he advocates using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations and appears to have approved a first-strike policy, without complaint from a subservient Democratic opposition. Just imagine what a conservative ideologue like Bush could accomplish in eight years of rule with both the Senate and the House in his pocket and a fearful majority of the American people viewing him as their bulwark against an evil hoard of bearded lunatics boxcutting their way through our amber fields of grain.
We remain skeptical of conspiracy theories suggesting government complicity in Sept. 11, but objectively speaking, Osama bin Laden has become the deus ex machina for the ultra-conservative cause in America. On Sept. 10, a bumbling Bush (with an approval rating hovering just above 50% after winning office with a minority of votes in a tainted election) was stumbling toward a failing, one-term presidency. By Sept. 12, Bush was the iron-willed Commander in Chief as the nation -- including almost every Democratic politician and the entire corporate media -- was rallying ‘round the presidential pennant, cheering the administration’s every jingoist excess.
The Republicans owe an enormous debt to the alchemist “Evil One,” who transmuted a pampered inheritor of the family crown into a warrior-king virtually taking meals upon his battleshield like Tiberus, when he wasn’t dining at $20,000-a-plate Republican fund-raisers. Bin Laden, of course, has lately been relegated to obscurity by the White House propaganda corps because directing public attention to his continual reluctance to be captured or to die (an annoying trait shared with the great majority of Al Qaeda’s leadership and most of its international network), would subvert Washington’s crowing over the Pentagon’s great victory against poor, bedraggled Afghanistan.
So far, no leading Democrat politician has expressed opposition to the war on terrorism. The most extreme critique of Bush’s handling of the war by a top Democrat came from Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle when he declared recently that “I don't think it would do anybody any good to second-guess what has been done to date. I think it has been successful.... But I think the jury's still out about future success.... Clearly, we've got to find [Taliban leader] Muhammad Omar, we've got to find Osama bin Laden, and we've got to find other key leaders of the Al Qaeda network, or we will have failed.... Before we make commitments in resources, I think we need to have a clearer understanding of what the direction will be."
Even this hesitant, obscure comment elicited verbal massive retaliation from Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, who blustered, “How dare Senator Daschle criticize President Bush while we are fighting our war on terrorism, especially when we have troops in the field? He should not be trying to divide our country while we are united." And there you have the Republican soundbite for the midterm elections, assuming the White House succeeds in maintaining the country in a state of war, as planned. Only a handful of Democrat politicians are going to brave this kind of rhetoric.
The GOP’s main objective in November is to retake the Senate, where just one more Republican will compensate for last year’s apostasy by Sen. Jim Jeffords, who metamorphosed from Republican to Independent in response to political bullying from the White House. Next on the Republican agenda is to at least keep their 11-seat lead in the first congressional elections after a presidential contest, when the opposition party usually picks up seats. If just six seats change hands, the Democrats will control the House. At this stage, according to the polls, the trend is toward the Republicans, mainly because of President Bush’s relatively high ratings since the Sept. 11 attacks on Washington’s and New York.
Suppose the Democrats do manage to gain control both Houses of Congress. There are political differences between the two establishment parties, of course, but in regard to geopolitical objectives the Democrats not only favor the war on terrorism but support its camouflaged, though far more important, corollary -- the projection of U.S. military power from the Middle East deep into heretofore off-limits Central Asia as part of Washington’s grand design to exercise hegemony throughout the globe. At best a Democratic Congress might insist upon being consulted on major decisions and to even have a say about what country to attack next, but not much more. True, the Democrats may not be as fanatical as the right-wing about launching a war against Iraq, but President Clinton massively bombed this destitute society in 1998, worked to destabilize the country in order to replace the Baghdad government with U.S. puppets, and continued the sanctions which killed many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children on his eight-year watch. And if it’s not going to be Iraq for the Democrats, they can always find another Yugoslavia upon which to let slip the dogs of war.
Neither of the two major parties has even hinted that the dreadful events of last September had a cause other than the “inexplicable” and “evil” mentality of bin Laden and his fundamentalist recruits. Regardless of which party controls Congress or the White House, neither is prepared to initiate policies to obviate the main causes of the desperation that spawns modern terrorism. In the Middle East, such causes include over a half-century of U.S. maneuvers to dominate the region and its extraordinary oil wealth by means of armed force and subversion; support for reactionary Arab regimes against the interests of their populations; the harassment or destruction of governments which showed an interest in progressive reform and independence from U.S. dictates; the prevention of a balanced solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict; economic sanctions leading to 1.5 million civilian deaths in Iraq; and the intrusion of military bases throughout the region. Until the U.S. political system terminates the imperial deeds that have contributed greatly to the rise of terrorism, Washington like the Bourbons will have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from a history that continues to repeat itself.
No progressive person wants to see Congress and the White House in the hands of the right-wing as a result of the next elections. But in terms of foreign and military policy in particular, including the present war and the historic factors responsible for Sept. 11, the difference between the Republicans of the right and Democrats of the center is essentially insignificant. Bush will wage war mainly against oppressed and exploited people to get re-elected, and Democrats will support that war in hopes of defeating him. The only real winner in such a contest is war -- and, of course, the big corporations, financial houses, arms manufacturers, globalizers of inequality, Wall St. brokers, energy conglomerates, media empires, multi-millionaire families and their lackeys in the political game who profit enormously when other peoples halfway ‘round the world are subject repeatedly to our rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air.