CCDS FORUM & DISCUSSION BOARD

NAME: Harry Targ
EMAIL: Targ@polsci.purdue.edu
DATE: 01/15/2007

TITLE: Bush Continues Neocon Agenda of War and More War

Sending more troops into harms way is so very troubling to most Americans. A whole generation of young people have grown up viewing or experiencing death and destruction in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. Much of it has its roots in United States foreign policy. And the United States now is taking another step to escalate that violence as if killing more so-called terrorists will be the solution to the quagmire Bush created in the first place.

Many analysts correctly see U.S. Gulf policy as driven by the political economy and geopolitics of oil. Awarding defense contracts to multinational corporations such as Halliburton is also part of the story behind policy. Parallel to and intimately connected to the pursuit of profit, control of oil, and power, is the ideology of the Bush team. To put it bluntly, the Bush Administration has used 9/11 to articulate its imperial vision. While American foreign policy has been driven by markets, investment opportunities, cheap labor, and access to vital natural resources for over a century, policymakers have usually felt constrained by countervailing power necessitating the use of diplomacy to cajole allies and enemies alike to act in ways that serve U.S. interests. In other words, while United States foreign policy has always been shaped by the drive for profit and power, in practice it has often been forced to act in pragmatic ways.

This administration is different. It is willing to use pre-emptive force, to subvert governments with impunity, to publicly order friends and foes alike to do as we say, and to hold up vital sources of funding to countries in desperate need to insure that they embrace our values. Worst of all, it is willing to use indiscriminant violence, primarily against peoples of the Global South. (The historical treatment of Native Americans is a rough historical parallel.)

Perhaps the most disturbing part of President Bush’s speech to the nation on Wednesday January 10 was his full embrace and articulation of the imperial ideology of his neoconservative advisers. His thinking has not changed one bit despite the overwhelming opposition to this war expressed by the American people in the November election and in poll after poll, the near unanimous opposition to this war in every country around the world, significant criticism of the war from current and retired military officers, and even in growing defections from support among his fellow Republicans.

Despite all that has happened since 9/11, March, 2003, and November 2006, President Bush still says that “the challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict.” No for him “it is the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” There are two sides; “freedom and moderation” and the other side extremists “who kill the innocent” and “have declared their intention to destroy our way of life.”

For Bush and Cheney and their neo-conservative associates there is the claim that the United States, with its vast military power, has the right and responsibility to create a world in its image and to serve its purposes. No nation or people can stand in the way. This means killing more Iraqis, building for war against Iran and Syria, and using military force at will against targets in Somalia, the Kurdish territory in Iraq and virtually everywhere else. A political pundit in the camp with the neoconservatives on most issues, Pat Buchanan, put it well on cable television after the president’s speech when he declared that the United States empire will go down to defeat the way the British empire did. The human tragedy is that hundreds of thousands of people may die in the process.

President Bush’s speech on January 10, 2007 makes the case for mobilizing the progressive majority more imperative than ever. As in the Vietnam era, resistance to U.S. imperialism abroad coupled with an emerging mass movement of concerned citizens at home forced the Johnson and Nixon administrations to move away from war, albeit after enormous violence against the Vietnamese people. The American people in November, 2006 said “no” to war and despite Bush’s plea for support on January 10 the American people still say “no.”

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