MG: >>It reminded me that, at bottom,what what we and everyone else around the world seem to be weighing is whether the bipartisan consensus around US foreign policy has fundamentally changed from multilateralism, with NATO and the UN seen as important instruments, to unilateralism, along the lines spelled out in the Project for a New American Century and the 2002 National Security Strategy document.>>
The Democrats got to complicating and then dismissing multilateralism first with their trade policies, which were sort of souped up Reagan II and Pops Bush combined with the AFL-CIO.
Ideologues in the Clinton administration thought that free trade meant a US-dominated, manipulated WTO along with a unilaterally set monetary policy, and justified it along the lines of: gee, with the trade deficits the US has with E. Asia, who is the free trader here (with the begged question there being, free trade on the US side =huge trade deficits). 'Sound' finance, monetary and trade policies were anything, overall, the Dow and the NASDAQ assimilated as 'good news' justifying still further more inflation of the US's stock bubbles (which still exist to this day).
The DLC Dems got around to dismissing multilateralism in non-trade foreign policy because of the involvement in the Balkans. Their hegemonic view of the use of military in foreign policy basically followed this order: US and US interests first, then US and US interests in a US-dominated NATO, then the rest was negotiable (e.g., what to get from the EU, from the UN, etc.).
The Europeans have stepped back from US-dominated post-war multilateralism after they got a taste of what the so-called bipartisan leadership of the US had already handed E. Asia on trade and monetary policies. In essence, those who set policies that gave Asia its Asian crisis of 1997-8 turned towards countries like Germany, asking them to harmonize with the 'dynamism' and 'flexibility' of the US.
The current 'crisis' over where to help the US militarily intervene is just an offshoot of what was already going on under Clintons I-II. Basically, the US couldn't get NATO to dive into its Iraq occupation adventure because of core EU (France, Germany) influence on NATO.
>>If you see the so-called "Bush doctrine" of preventive war as something more than that, as a "bipartisan doctrine", then of course it makes little sense to support Kerry over Bush since both will pursue the same foreign policy. >>
[Please note, not disagreeing with MG here, who doesn't hold the view here, but is posing it for the sake of discussion.] As I said, the bipartisan break here isn't over the use of force or preventive war or regime change policies. It's over whether or not to commit the US military--namely CentCom--to a large-scale, long-term occupation of Iraq. Afterall, the US-Iraq conflict has been going on for well over a decade now, with no end in sight. That took bipartisanship! One selling point for an occupation of a rather beaten-down country like Iraq is it makes a great realistic training area for the combat arms 'schools' (armour, armoured cavalry, mechanized infantry, air cavalry, etc.) of the US military. From now on, all careerists in the US military, right down to middle enlisted ranks, will have to show Iraq and Afghanistan on their personnel records in order to qualify for 'qualitative retention' (even as most lower rank enlisted won't have to be turfed out and will leave gladly). The John Kerries of the 21st century are cutting their combat teeth right now, even as we discuss on the internet.
>>My own view is that a Gore or Kerry administration wouldn't have invaded Iraq, especially in open defiance of the UN and its closest allies, but would have continued its policy of containment through continued economic pressure supplemented by periodic air strikes against Iraq's military and strategic infrastructure, and attempts to topple the regime from within using proxies. That's how US foreign policy traditionally operates.>>
I don't think the DLC Dems could give a toss about the UN right now, and they were already at odds with the EU core over trade and monetary policies--and the Balkans, too (though everyone agreed, Serbia should be vitiated).
Basically, the bipartisan consensus was that the long era of somewhat lower-level but continuous warfare against Iraq should come to an end, and even the Europeans (and E. Asia as well) were looking for a way out of this picture, where US unilaterally set trade and development policy for the US's designated pariah states of the ME--Iraq and Iran.
So Bush and the federal contractor tribe of the Republican party offered it. In the post-9-11 political landscape, no one in power was really prepared to do much to oppose the Bush regime or CentCom. My own thinking is that a Gore-Lieberman regime would have been pushed into escalating the conflict against Iraq by the usual warwhores of the Dem and Repug parties (e.g, McCain, Biden, Lieberman himself, etc.), especially had Gore been president during the 9-11 attack.
In the pre-9-11 political landscape, the plans would have been to put together a much larger covert warfare operation and then try and cobble a force of 350,000 ground troops to invade Iraq. This was the case in the national security state, 1998-2001, and it was this set of policies (conflating the ongoing war against Iraq with Clinton's 'war on terror') that created the security environment that gave us 9-11.
Post-9-11, Bush and Co. sold the national security state on a quick 'surgical' removal of Saddam using an invasion, with plans for their Iraq settling into normalcy as a ME version of Germany or Japan (pumping oil eventually, to help pay for the US's more restrained occupation of it). They thought they could get it in 2-3 years. This is why I knew Bush was going to attack sooner rather than later--since the presidential election is this year, and he really felt he couldn't wait (oh, and what a distraction 9-11 and Afghanistan proved to be). They really thought they could split the Shia and the Sunni; they really thought they could break up Iraq into a majority of competing interests who would still support their plans; they really thought that the Iraqis were beaten down and helpless and mostly wanted peace, even if it meant US soldiers running around the country. As I said before, they believed their own bullshit, both the Repugs and the Dems, and the political core of the US military who run CentCom.
>>That's why I think the "bipartisan consensus" remains essentially multilateral, and that the PNAC and NSS documents -- and the doctrine of unilateral preventative wars they prescribe -- are products of the right wing of the Republican party, which narrowly came to power in 2000.>>
Multilateralism requires more than a bipartisan consensus. Which is where the paradox arises. The US can't impose multilateralism on other autonomous countries or groupings, like the EU. That would require a consensus amongst the rulers of these other entities, too. And it would have to be power sharing--including outside influences on things like US foreign policy, trade policy, budget policy, and currency/monetary policy. So multilateralism has now joined the long list of debased bullshit words, like human rights, democracy, peace, disarmament, the rule of law, etc. etc. The only thing left is for the Americans to try and force the people it rules to tell the Americans how much they are loved.
>>North Korea and Iran were supposed to be cowed into
disarming. Of course, it hasn't quite worked out that way.>>
This is, as I said before, the lesson of Vietnam. Iran doesn't have nukes; it is a huge country that the US military couldn't physically occupy. N. Korea might not have even one deployable nuke; it has formidable terrain, and a large standing military prepared to break down and fight insurgency style. So the non-invasionary tactics and strategies long deployed against Iraq would be the next steps in escalating such ongoing conflicts the US has going with these countries. The US could easily start bombing against Iran, especially if it felt Israel was going to start airraids against Iran as it has recently against Syria. N. Korea is a bit different, because it's actual weapon of mass destruction is the ability to wreck S. Korea and draw Japan, China and Russia into a regional conflict. (BTW, the US just re-deployed an Aegis class destroyer to the Japan Sea side of Honshu, at a port that does not usually serve as a base for the US Navy). The US strategy there continues to be to isolate and starve the country out. I don't see much difference between Clinton, the current Bush or Kerry's proposals (though this was supposed to be a huge difference in the so-called foreign policy debate). For the US establishment, Bush has actually done a better job of inflating the N. Korean threat in the media while stalling on talks. The previous presidency was shown for all its hypocrisy because it would cut deals with N. Korea, order Japan to help fulfill them, and then basically do nothing at all.
>>That Kerry's Iraq policy now seems indistinguishable from Bush's is not because both would have invaded Iraq, but because the bipartisan consensus decrees that a US withdrawal must not be perceived as a "defeat", something which can only be finessed by the involvement of the UN and an international peacekeeping force. The dilemma is that other countries and international agencies won't come in until the US guarantees their security, which I think explains the big push being planned against the Sunni triangle -- by both Kerry and Bush. >>
Involving the UN in any leadership way would be a major domestic defeat for a US president, especially a Democratic one. The planned push against the Sunni triangle can't quite happen as it is being explained in the media because many of the contested areas are where Sunni and Shia insurgents fight alongside each other, in unity and even operational coordination against the occupation. Even if Israeli or US propaganda is that Al Qaeda or Saddam holdouts run places like Fallujah, most of Iraq knows better. So, even if the Bush administration believes its own bullshit, we shouldn't start here. BTW, I would expect to see continued escalations of US operations in Iraq against the insurgency to see how it plays with the US voters. Well, haven't we already seen a lot of this since July. Hasn't much of the media coverage of Iraq tried to make it look like the US military was really winning against the insurgency? How many here bought into it? I hope not many.
F
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