"I am extremely concerned about the shameful, almost total passivity of Congress during the period of preparations for our military attack on Iraq. . . . Congress’s inaction is a dangerous precedent in executive-legislative relations. In light of this precedent, future presidents will be tempted to seize virtually dictatorial powers under the title of commander in chief, and nothing in our history rules out the possibility of their yielding to that temptation. This seems to be the meaning of the recent crisis."
In my first essay on this topic, I presented an overview of the
entitled subject and considered the contemporary aspect of the topic in
some depth. In the second essay, I elaborated upon that overview
with pertinent historical details from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Now, in this final essay, I will continue my analysis by covering the main
developments, events, documents, and state proclamations or assertions
in the 20th and 21st centuries that — in practice— have essentially obliterated
the original U.S. Constitutional distinction between making and declaring
war. Clearly, since the beginning of the 20th century, U.S. policy
makers have ordered their military forces to engage in scores of military
interventions, conflicts, and wars without bothering to obtain a formal
declaration of war. This series of three essays has attempted to
explain why such actions have taken place and why waging war has become
very practical while formally declaring war has become quite impractical
for many key policy makers of America. As indicated in the first
two parts of "On Making vs. Declaring War," this is a situation fundamentally
impelled by the needs of a growing and consolidating economy which entered
its embryonic stage of monopoly capitalism around the period of the Spanish-Cuban-American
War of 1898.
After the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the need for foreign markets
by that consolidated and expanding economic system continued to grow.
As Andrew Carnegie had pointed out, the solution to truncating depressions
and to the problem of "generalized overproduction" in a system that had
a far greater capacity to produce goods than to absorb those goods in a
low wage, domestic market place (average daily manufacturing wage ranged
between the low of $1.32 and the high of $1.53 in the period 1872-1891)
was to keep production lines running "‘full’" while disposing, "‘even at
low foreign prices,’" the surplus product in foreign markets.
Quite obviously, such a situation required state policy makers who were
not only cognizant of the needs of such a system of production but who
would operate to insure the continued health of that particular economy.
For one, J. D. Rockefeller appreciated such people’s service so much that
he praised their assistance to his overseas interests with these words
in his autobiography: "One of our greatest helpers has been the State
Department in Washington. Our ambassadors and ministers and consuls
have aided to push our way into new markets to the utmost corners of the
world."
It is evident that early 20th century U.S. leaders, both inside and
outside of government, had come to realized, as Woodrow Wilson once observed,
that "‘The masters of the Government of the United States are the combined
capitalists and manufactures of the United States.’" And wise
policy makers had to be guided, as he bluntly said before becoming president,
by the fact that "‘Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer
insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow
him and the doors of the nation which are closed against him must be battered
down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers
of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the
process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful
corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.’" No
wonder that Wilson’s Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan praised
Wilson as the president who had "‘opened the door of all the weaker countries
to an invasion of American capital and American enterprise.’"
Bryan could have added that this accomplishment, at times, included an
invasion of U.S. military forces, for Wilson not only sent them into the
European war but also into Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic,
Cuba, and Russia.
Wilson’s interventionism, of course, was fostered by many factors
but looming large among them was the fact that the U.S. Gross National
Product had burgeoned by a percent of increase of slightly over 216% between
the period 1887-1891, and the period 1912-1916. Likewise, the
percent of increase for U.S. exports between 1900-1919 was slightly over
85.5%. Even more compelling was the fact that U.S. foreign
investment soared five fold between 1900-1914. Summarizing
these pressures, Wilson put it succinctly in his 1912 campaign for the
White House: "‘Our domestic markets no longer suffice, we need foreign
markets.’"
So, as historian Norman G. Levin Jr. has pointed out, President
Wilson went far beyond his predecessors in envisioning a global market
place that would ultimately be free of traditional imperialism and open
to U.S. manufacturers, investors, and exporters. Convinced that America’s
commercial abundance would not only profit U.S. business, but would raise
the world’s standard of living and enhance personal freedoms, Wilson called
for the world-wide creation of capitalist societies, open markets, free
trade, peaceful competition, constitutional governments with personal liberties,
and limited social mobility. His vision of establishing such "liberal
capitalism" largely anticipated the more sophisticated, integrated world
economy desired by the architects of America’s global dominance in the
post World War II era. Like many of those later U.S. policy makers,
Wilson tended to see the interest of all humankind as synonymous with the
interest of the U.S. And, like them, he did not acknowledge — at
least, not openly — that the U.S. "open door" policy and the superior productive
capacity of the U.S. could be a threat to the less productive, less industrial,
and less economically sophisticated nations of the world.
But, of course, the greater productivity of the U.S. economy
and the "open door" political demands of U.S. policy makers promoted more
than just a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship between high production
and low production societies. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries,
those factors have produced a state of economic subordination/dependency
and more than a little deindustrialization among the societies saddled
with both low production capacity and vastly unequal income and wealth
distribution patterns. Indeed, the greater productionism of the U.S.
and just five other industrial powers hit the peoples and cultures of Asia
(except Japan), Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East with a veritable
landslide of manufactured goods and dislocating technology. It virtually
steamrollered much of the handicraft production systems of India, French
Indochina, China, Africa, and Latin America into virtual oblivion.
Consider, for instance, that with its 13% share in 1913, and its 20.4%
share in 1929, the U.S. alone had a greater portion of the world’s total
exports of manufactured goods than did all the combined countries apart
from the U.S. and only five other industrialized nations. Displaying
an even deeper economic involvement in the world’s economy in the period
leading to the Great Depression, U.S. foreign investments jumped from a
6.3% share of the world’s total in 1914, to a 35.3% share in 1930.
Parenthetically, by 1960, the U.S. had a 59.1% share of the world’s total
foreign investments.
And, today, that process and its impact on the poor is continuing under
the guise of globalization and neoliberal economic policies pursued by
transnational corporations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the
World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO). However, as discovered
by Nobel Prize-winning economist and former director of research at the
World Bank Joseph Stiglitz, the three pillars of the "Washington Consensus"
(i.e., neoliberal policies of austerity, privatization, and market liberalization)
and globalization have not worked out well for "millions" of the world’s
poor. "Many," he writes, "have actually been made worse off, as they
have seen their jobs destroyed and their lives become more insecure.
They have felt increasingly powerless against forces beyond their control.
They have seen their democracies undermined, their cultures eroded."
To this sad commentary about the failure of "trickle down" economics and
its lack of economic development, Stiglitz adds this stinging indictment
of the results flowing from the coercive policies and practices of the
elite dominated institutions in which he had served: "Globalization,
as it has been advocated, often seems to replace the old dictatorships
of national elites with new dictatorships of international finance.
Countries are effectively told that if they don’t follow certain conditions,
the capital markets or the IMF will refuse to lend them money. They
are basically forced to give up part of their sovereignty, to let capricious
capital markets, including the speculators whose only concerns are short-term
rather than the long-term growth of the country and the improvement of
living standards, ‘discipline’ them, telling them what they should and
should not do."
Summing up this globalized process of benefiting the few
at the expense of the many, historian Chalmers Johnson describes the systemization
of the process that keeps so many societies in a state of dependency and
subordination to a few others: "Having deprived the Third World countries
of access to agricultural subsidies and crippled their ability to build
competitive industries, the WTO proceeded to prevent them from using the
foreign technology employed by the industrialized nations and to lock in
the monopoly profits of companies that owned patents on indispensable products
such as medicines. The Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights
Agreement (TRIPS), which instituted these barriers, proved to be a gold
mine for transnational corporations. Its purpose was to prevent developing
countries from copying or stealing proprietary technology in the same manner
the currently advanced countries had done in their processes of economic
growth. . . . It is a clear example of the rich nations kicking away
the ladder to keep poor nations from catching up." Writing
about the outcome of all this for many of the nation states of the world,
Johnson cites the findings of economist Oswaldo de Rivero to declare:
"What globalization has produced . . . is not NICs (newly industrialized
countries) but about 130 NNEs (nonviable national economies) or, even worse,
UCEs (ungovernable chaotic entities)."
Naturally, such a state of affairs requires a military presence, so,
as Wilson had observed, the flag follows the manufacturer. Thus,
in the 1920s, major detachments of U.S. armed forces were "stationed in
only three countries abroad," but during World War II, they were in 39
countries, and they were in 64 by 1966. It should be noted,
in passing, that as of the September 30, 2001 figures that he took from
the Pentagon’s "Base Structure Report," Johnson reports that the U.S. has
"some 725 foreign bases in thirty-eight countries." And, as
of today, these bases have been augmented by additional bases in the Middle
East and nearby countries. Currently the indications are that U.S.
overseas forces are being disbursed around the globe from larger concentrations
in various countries to smaller, more numerous, and more scattered bases.
These more numerous bases will contain several hundreds or thousands of
troopers instead of the tens of thousands of troops that, in the past,
were typically stationed in bases like those in Ramstein, Germany or on
bases in Okinawa, Japan. This new basing strategy is better designed
for "global intervention," and it has been termed "lily padding."
It is designed to create hundreds of smaller, "low-profile bases" that
can "act as temporary access-points for forward [based] operations" and
more rapid deployments of larger U.S. forces anywhere in the world.
Of course, like economic developments, this stage of ubiquitous
U.S. military bases has been part of a historical process.
Prior to the current U.S military presence around the world, the biggest
deployment of U.S. troops under Wilson’s administration came with his war
to make the world "safe for democracy," World War I. Unfortunately,
the results of the Great War — one of only two declared U.S. wars in a
century filled with undeclared U.S. wars and military interventions — did
not turn out to be as grandiose as Wilson’s rhetoric. With 30 million
dead, including 114,000 American soldiers, with the collapse of four
long-lived empires, and with the forces of traditional imperialism, neo-imperialism,
communism, and fascism extant, the stage was set for an even bloodier Second
World War (60 million killed). In 1920, the U.S. Senate, of course,
rejected Wilson’s call for U.S. membership in the League of Nations, and
the U.S. voters, having had enough of what writer Gore Vidal termed "great
men," elected a succession of "normalcy" inspired, hands-off, laissez-faire
type Republican presidents, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert
Hoover. Presumably turning inward — "isolationism" — after the debacle
of World War I, the real leaders of the U.S. did nothing of the sort.
The economy that they owned and controlled would not permit it. With
U.S. productivity rising by 72% in manufacturing and 41% in mining in the
period 1919-1929, and with U.S. foreign investment climbing by slightly
more than 4.3 fold, from $3.5 billion in 1914 to $15.2 billion in 1930,
powerful U.S. decision makers were well submerged in foreign markets prior
to the crash of 1929.
And, then, with the clobbering imposed by the Great Depression
and the virulent advent of fascist/militarist aggression in China, Africa,
and Europe, those U.S. economic forces of production were given an incredible
boost by the marshalling efforts of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.
As the Japanese invaded central China, conquered chunks of Southeast Asia
and seemed bent on either striking at the Soviet Union or driving the Western
imperialists out of Asia to build their so-called "co-prosperity sphere,"
some U.S. policy makers must have regretted the green light that earlier
had been given to Japanese imperialism by the Taft-Katsura agreement (July
29, 1905 — U.S. supported Japanese "suzerainty over Korea" in exchange
for the Japanese leaving the Philippines alone) and the Root-Takahira
agreement (November 30, 1908 — an open door in China for the "equal opportunity
for commerce and industry of all nations in that Empire").
Those quid pro quo agreements with the modernized Meiji regime were only
one part of a sort of "gentleman’s imperialism" that U.S. policy makers
practiced in the 20th century’s decades leading to World Wars I and II.
And that practice in Asia, along with U.S. business and policy makers’
actions in Latin America, in China, in the Middle East, and a total lack
of opposition to Italian and German fascism in the 1920s and 1930s contributed
to fascist aggression and their early triumphs. It emboldened the
future Axis powers. So Poland and Pearl Harbor came.
But while the Great Depression had brought Hitler and Japanese
fascist/ultra-militarists to power, it also had set off a chain of thinking
among U.S. policy makers, and those men carried Wilson’s earlier "open
door" imaginings to new heights. So, after declaring war on Japan,
Germany, and Italy, they conducted the war not simply to avenge Pearl Harbor
but also to establish an "open door" world, par excellence. Now,
in the very large, that goal has been explained best by historian Thomas
J. McCormick when he wrote that U.S. policy makers of the 1940s had the
catastrophe of the Great Depression very much in mind as they witnessed
huge chunks of Europe and Asia fall into the aggressive German and Japanese
spheres of control. And those conquests — with more on the horizon
— threaten to exclude or truncate British and American trade, investment,
and raw material access in such fundamental ways that "'the nightmare of
a closed world'" appeared to be at hand. U.S. policy makers,
including President Roosevelt, knew that, if England and the U.S. were
excluded from European and Asian markets, it would not only cripple much
of their profit making potential, but it might even threaten their respective
nation's future economic and socio-political stability. Quite simply,
the health of those capitalist systems, which the policy makers of England
and the U.S. were charged with maintaining, required an "open door" world
for trade, investment, extraction of raw materials, and markets.
As Roosevelt accurately summarized it, ‘"Freedom to trade is essential
to our economic life. We do not eat all the food we produce; we do
not burn all the oil we can pump; we do not use all the goods we can manufacture.
It would not be an American wall to keep Nazi goods out; it would be a
Nazi wall to keep us in’"
And given that pressing necessity, U.S. leaders "fought the war," wrote
McCormick, "not simply to vanquish their enemies, but to . . . insure that
the periphery in the Pacific rim, the Mediterranean basin, and Latin America
would be integrated, under American aegis, into a global market economy,
its resources equally open to all [industrial] core powers."
In other words, the 1940s and 1950s architects of U.S. global dominance
— such men as Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, George F. Kennan, Averell W. Harriman,
James V. Forrestal, Robert Murphy, Paul H. Nitze, and Harry Truman — aimed
at constructing a U.S.-led free market world based on economic internationalism
and maintained by a U.S.-led collective security apparatus. After
all, these policy makers had a clear mission to perform. It, as University
of Wisconsin professor Harvey Goldberg once lectured, was the conquest
of foreign markets for the most powerful U.S. economic interests and that
meant either putting or maintaining a group of U.S.-acceptable political
rulers over the people in those targeted areas. Naturally, those
political rulers were the ones who, it was expected, could maintain socio-political
control over their populations and, so, serve the more powerful U.S. economic
interests as clients. Of course, the world order that post World
War II U.S. policy makers undertook to build was meant to eschew the older
traditional forms of colonialism, autarchy, and economic nationalism.
Instead, those U.S. policy makers advocated an "open door" world in which
the economic principles of free trade and productionism would reign supreme.
As these policy makers saw it, if all societies operated according to the
economic dictates of comparative advantage and economies of scale, everyone
would be a winner. It was understood, however, that some — those
with advanced industrial economies and sophisticated, high profit producing
technologies like the U.S. — would be the bigger winners.
Known, now, by some historians as America's "hegemonic project," this
"project" turns the whole Cold War into a mere "subplot" of "a larger story."
And it means, as McCormick noted, that U.S. policy makers had to "manage"
virtually the whole world — Russia (previously the Soviet Union), England,
German, Japan, the Third World, and the American citizenry — if the
"project" were to be successful. Naturally, part of that "management"
required frequent and undeclared U.S. wars and military conflicts.
These, in fact, became so frequent that it was considered operationally
impractical to declare war, but not to wage it. At any rate, before
it became as fashionable as it is today, and as far back as 1959, the ground-breaking
American historian William Appleman Williams described what those U.S.
policy makers were doing in words that characterized a U.S., informal,
open door empire. Incidentally, such a free market, global order
still requires supportive policy makers who, today, may use a perpetual
war against terrorism to insure access to what they see as vital global
markets.
After all, today, as in the past, that free market, capitalist
world, as McCormick has written, "could only be achieved if political and
military power was organized globally. . . . Only then could there
be a . . . free flow of capital, goods, currencies, people, values and
ideas necessary to make international capitalism viable." Unfortunately,
for those mid-20th century U.S. policy makers’ post-war plans, the large
communist states of the Soviet Union and China as well as the many Third
World peoples fighting for their self-determination and social liberation
threw a monkey wrench into the U.S. design. But that was not the
only problem that the U.S. policy makers faced because leaders in Britain
and France desperately wanted to resurrect or to continue holding their
spheres of influence and closed empires. And that aim constituted
a huge obstacle to the American design. It had to be dealt with.
So, during and in the aftermath of World War II, U.S. policy makers
conducted a largely unreported and almost subterranean battle with their
Western allies over control of the colonial resources and markets in the
colonial empires and the spheres of influence of Britain and France.
This battle — guided, on the U.S. part, by its longstanding strategy of
creating an "open door" access for U.S. business interests in all parts
of the globe — was manifest in such actions and events as the American
1941 to 1944 effort, spearheaded by State Department diplomat Robert Murphy,
to strike deals with the Vichy French over French held North Africa and
inside France behind the back of the Free French forces led by General
Charles de Gaulle. It was discernable in the successful
U.S. policy makers’ 1944-1946 effort in the newly liberated Italy to displace
British influence by supporting the Ivanoe Banomi government against the
British attempt to install a pro-British government led by King Victor
Emmanuel and Prime Minister Pietro Badaglio while simultaneously containing
and crushing the communist and socialist led Italian partisan movement,
and, later, in deposing the Ferruccio Parri left-coalition government.
It was much more visible in the U.S. policy makers’ successful strategy
to crack into the oyster of the enclosed British empire known as the sterling
bloc.
That strategy was on dramatic display after President Harry S. Truman
had put the economic screws to the newly elected British Labor government
by unilaterally cutting off all U.S. lend lease supplies to England on
August 21, 1945. Following that action, British negotiators were
forced to go to Washington with their hats in their hands to bargain for
a $3.8 billion loan which they got at a 2% interest rate.
But, more importantly, the American policy makers also got all that they
wanted and that, effectively, was virtually the whole British empire.
After all, in order for the British to get the 1946 U.S. loan, they had
to give up all import restrictions in all parts of the British empire,
and they had to end the principle of non-convertibility which meant that
they could no longer stipulate that all of the huge amounts of foreign
currencies that had been built up in various parts of the British Commonwealth
during the Second World War had to be exchanged only for pound sterling.
Explaining what this Washington loan agreement really meant for the British
empire and U.S. post war objectives, Lord L. S. Amery, an old British Tory
and one who had been in on empire building for most of his life, put it
bluntly. Note well, that this guy was intimately involved with the
Washington loan agreement, and, given his personal history, he, as professor
Goldberg once said, could "smell imperialism" when it walked into the room.
Here, from Amery’s revealing 1946 book, The Washington Loan Agreement,
is his summary of the meaning of those crucial loan agreements: "The
object of American policy is . . . to set up . . . money and money power
outside national control as the dominate factor in [the] world economy.
. . . We have been forced to pledge ourselves to a commercial scheme which
is to deprive us . . . of any effective control of our own home market."
Then, with amazing prescience, he spelled out the American strategy and
goal: "I rather like the robust buccaneering spirit of modern American
economic imperialism. Only . . . it is against the British Empire
. . . The British Empire is the oyster which the loan is to prise open.
Each part of it . . . is to be swallowed separately, to become a field
for American industrial exploitation, a tributary of American finance,
and, in the end, an American dependency." In Amery’s description
of what had occurred in Washington, there was almost a half admiration
for what the Americans had pulled off, but, still, one can almost hear
him weeping as he observes that they were doing it to the British empire.
At approximately the same time that these events were transpiring,
the "number two person in the U.S. embassy in Moscow from 1944 to 1946,"
professional diplomat George F. Kennan, fired off his analysis of the emerging
U.S.-Soviet antagonism in early 1946. It became famously known as
the "Long Telegram." Yet, while it diagnosed the nature of the antagonism
between "West" and "East," it did not offer any prescription for dealing
with it. The main point of the Long Telegram was to describe the
Soviet Union’s leaders and communist system as being "‘committed fanatically
to the belief that with the US there can be no modus vivendi’" and that
those leaders believe "‘that it is desirable and necessary that the internal
harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed,
the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is
to be secure.’" In his Long Telegram, Kennan stressed the importance
of educating (or, more accurately, orienting) the U.S. public to this point
of view, and, once he returned to Washington in 1947, he contributed mightily
to that effort. His starting point was based on the assumption that
the communist ideology and institutional structures of the Soviet Union
rendered it inherently expansionistic. Consequently, the U.S. must
counter — on a global scale — that intrinsic, aggressive impulse with "long-term,
patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."
As for the global dimension of this containment policy, Kennan argued that
"the Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the western world
is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application
of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political
points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy."
So, from 1945-1991, the Cold War — with some bloody hot ones thrown in
— came.
Even before Kennan’s pronouncement appeared in print, leading U.S.
policy makers were attempting to prevent the communist-led Vietminh movement
in Vietnam from moving into the vacuum of collapsed Japanese and French
power at the end of World War II. The U.S. position on French
Indochina had evolved from President Roosevelt’s French anti-colonialism
in 1943-1944 — the U.S. had also lent some OSS military assistance to the
Vietminh’s struggle against the Japanese occupiers in mid-summer 1945
— to one of accepting a restoration of French rule over Vietnam as the
best of the options in keeping with larger U.S. global objectives.
Already, near the end of July 1945, U.S. policy makers had opted for a
reinstallation of French rule over Vietnam in their Potsdam agreement.
And, just to cover all the bases, that action was followed by President
Truman’s August 14, 1945, General Order #1 which granted to General Douglas
MacArthur, the Allied Supreme commander in the Pacific, the power to designate
which of the groups to whom the Japanese were to surrender their occupied
territories everywhere in Asia. In short, by attempting to
determine the political complexion of Asia in such a way, the American
policy makers were fully inserting themselves into the politics of Asia
and casting a gigantic American umbrella over the entire region.
So, armed with the Potsdam agreement and Truman’s sweeping General Order
#1, the U.S. policy makers made sure that the Japanese turnover of Vietnam
went to the French — inserting British/French and Nationalist Chinese troops
into the newly liberated Vietnam in September 1945 — and they fruitlessly
tried to exclude the battle toughened Vietminh from the scene.
And, yet, the other side of that U.S. policy maker support for an anti-communist
French return to Vietnam was their opposition to a French neo-colonialism
that might close the door on U.S. access to Vietnam’s resources and markets.
A U.S. State Department memorandum, "American Interests in Southeast Asia,"
of March 26, 1945, neatly stated the overarching U.S. goal, "‘The economic
interests of the United States . . . demand not only free access and trade
in Southeast Asia, but also a rising standard of living there. This
would increase the market for our products in the area, and markets are
one of our primary interests in the postwar world.’" Thus,
while the U.S. policy makers went nearly all-out in supporting the French
against their Vietminh foes in the French Indochina War from 1946 to 1954,
they were persistently uncomfortable with any sign that the French intended
a recolonization of Vietnam that might threaten to truncate U.S. economic
interests. So, when, in 1950, U.S. policy makers extended U.S. recognition
to the French puppet Bao Dai regime in Vietnam, they were not only supplying
the French war effort against the Vietminh, but they were putting ever
more pressure on the French to grant the Bao Dai regime more sovereign
powers. In such a way, U.S. policy makers hoped to simultaneously
exclude the Vietminh and pry wider open that French semi-closed door in
Vietnam.
Meanwhile, off in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean region, there
came an opportunity to open more important doors. So, on March 12,
1947, came the Truman Doctrine. And it, as the Americans prepared
to supplant the exhausted British in the Greek civil war, clearly announced
that, while other nations might think in terms of spheres of influence,
U.S. policy makers thought in terms of the whole world as their sphere.
Thus, Truman’s "emotional" announcement to go to the rescue of the British
and Greece took the form of contending that there was such a huge communist
menace in Greece (and beyond) that the U.S. must expand its Monroe Doctrine
so that it covered the whole globe. In its most significant
rhetoric, the Truman Doctrine asserted that the U.S. would "support free
peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or
by outside pressure." And it is very important to note that
these words meant that there did not have to be any evidence of "outside
pressure" to justify U.S. intervention into the societies of foreign nations.
Truman’s pronouncement was soon followed by Kennan’s tremendous hit
with the work that won him lasting fame and the establishment’s accolade
of being the "father of containment." The work was entitled "Sources
of Soviet Conduct," and it was signed by Kennan’s pseudonym of "X."
Following its publication, the containment strategy and the Truman Doctrine’s
Manichean view of the world were incorporated into what became the cornerstone
of all subsequent U.S., Cold War strategic thinking, National Security
Council memorandum 68 (NSC 68) in 1950. Describing the need
and method — military, economic, and political — for the "containment"
of communism, especially Soviet communism, NSC 68 laid out the arguments
and strategy for doing the job. And the job — protecting the
global perimeter of the "open door," free-market world needed by the U.S.
economy — required huge expenditures. Thus, one vital "purpose of
NSC 68," as Secretary of State Acheson bluntly explained, "was to so bludgeon
the mass mind of ‘top government’ . . . that the decision [for containment]
could be carried out." More importantly, he famously continued with
a statement that epitomizes the elite art of prevarication, "If we made
our points clearer than truth, we . . . could hardly do otherwise."
And, so, China, Korea, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Cambodia, Lebanon,
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and many others came.
Today, Acheson’s outlook, objective, and technique for gaining policy
approval by preying on people’s fears through the means of exaggeration
— as well as displaying certain policy makers’ extraordinary hubris — is
marvelously reflected in the September 2002 National Security Strategy
of the United States of America. That statement reads, in part:
"[W]e will not hesitate to act alone . . . to exercise our right of self-defense
by acting preemptively . . . and . . . compelling states to accept their
sovereign responsibilities . . . [O]ur best defense is a good offense.
. . .
To contend with . . . the many security challenges we face, the
United States will require bases and stations within and beyond Western
Europe and Northeast Asia . . . This broad portfolio of military capabilities
must also . . . ensure U.S. access to distant theaters, and . . . assets
in outer space . . . Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade
potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing,
or equaling, the power of the United States."
Simply stated, these goals are nothing less than the current U.S. policy
makers’ intention to militarily dominate the entire globe. But that
is neither new nor news anymore. What is new is the candor of the
rhetoric and the extremity of the means to obtain long-standing objectives.
By, within the context of a Manichaean view of the world, openly
preaching and implementing the doctrines of a "forward leaning" military
strategy (i.e., "‘anticipatory self-defense’"), unilateralism, and
preemptive war (more accurately termed preventative war), the George
W. Bush administration has made a quantum leap in the direction of making
perpetually undeclared war. In fact, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., historian
and former advisor to President John F. Kennedy, was so outraged at the
idea of making preventative war almost entirely on the basis of Executive
assertions about a presumed threat that he minced no words to write:
"‘The president has adopted a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that
is alarming similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl
Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would,
lives in infamy. Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is
we Americans who live in infamy.’" More detached in his verbiage
but no less outraged by the implications of the Bush II administration’s
doctrines and practices, scholar Richard Falk nails most of the wider meaning
behind the current administration’s military approach to the rest of the
world when he writes about the fundamental recklessness, even lawlessness,
of the Bush II "doctrine of pre-emption." He explains: "Pre-emption
. . . validates striking first . . . on the basis of a shadowy intentions,
alleged potential links to terrorist groups, supposed plans and projects
to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and anticipations of possible future
dangers. It is a doctrine without limits, without accountability
to the U.N. or international law, without any dependence on a collective
judgment of responsible governments and, what is worse, without any convincing
demonstration of practical necessity." And the undeclared Iraq
War of 2003 came.
And the coming of that war — hyped by distortions and exaggerated claims
about the Iraqi regime’s military capabilities and the immediacy of its
menacing intentions toward the U.S. people and their allies — reveals
the extent to which Congress has capitulated to militarism and to Executive
power after decades of huge military spending and similar Congressional
responses throughout the Cold War. In describing Congress’s "‘week
of shame’" (October 3-10, 2002), historian Chalmers Johnson notes that
"both houses voted to give [via resolution] the president open-ended authority
to wage war against Iraq (296 to 33 in the House and 77 to 23 in the Senate).
The president was given the unrestricted power to use any means, including
military force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq
whenever he — and he alone — deemed ‘appropriate.’ There was no [real]
debate. Congressional representatives were too politically cowed
even to address the issue." More poignantly and with a greater
sense of the historic danger that such a capitulation to Executive power
represented, Kennan wrote: "I am extremely concerned about the shameful,
almost total passivity of Congress during the period of preparations for
our military attack on Iraq. . . . Congress’s inaction is a dangerous
precedent in executive-legislative relations. In light of this precedent,
future presidents will be tempted to seize virtually dictatorial powers
under the title of commander in chief, and nothing in our history rules
out the possibility of their yielding to that temptation. This seems
to be the meaning of the recent crisis." After years of study,
Johnson has come to share Kennan’s grave concern for the future of the
American Republic, but he goes beyond him in his pessimism about the American
future if we continue on the present path. He writes more in despair
than outrage: "Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of
years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx. If
present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be
visited on the United States. Their cumulative impact guarantees
that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country
once outlined in our Constitution. First, there will be a state of
perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans. . . . Second,
there will be a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency
fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an ‘executive branch’
of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency.
Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly
be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation, and glorification
of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there will be bankruptcy."
But don’t worry, our leaders tell us. They are in control, and
we may safely surrender our democracy and sovereignty to them. Indeed,
one need only read Schlesinger’s 1973 book The Imperial Presidency to know
that the U.S. Congress has a long tradition of granting imperial war making
power to the Executive branch. And today’s U.S. policy makers are
part of a concomitant tradition of "open door" strategists who stretch
back more than a hundred years. Clearly, they are continuing that
"concerted effort to adopt the nineteenth century ["open door"] policy
to the expansive needs of a [twenty-first] century [post-]industrial America."
A vivid contemporary example of this devotion to the "open door" strategy
is found in the actions undertaken by the U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer
in Iraq. Operating through his authority and that of the U.S.-created
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), he has "‘ordered’ reforms that will
allow full foreign ownership of parts of the Iraqi economy" as well as
"permit investors to take their profits out of the country, with ‘no requirements
to reinvest the money in Iraq.’" In addition, the CPA imposed
a regressive flat tax on Iraqis. But, beyond that (it always goes a step
further), on September 19, 2003, according to analyst Naomi Klein, Bremer
issued "Order 39" to open the Iraqi economy to profit making private firms.
"It announced," she writes, "that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatized;
decreed that foreign firms can retain 100 percent ownership of Iraqi banks,
mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move 100 percent of their
profits out of Iraq. The Economist [naturally] declared the new rules
a ‘capitalist dream.’" In other words, Iraq has begun
to resemble a strip mine to be raked over by insider and outsider investors.
Of course, the idea that this must be accomplished primarily through
the means of the military violence that has been and is now being perpetuated
is under challenge by some elements in U.S. leadership circles, but virtually
no one in those circles disputes the strategic need for an "open door"
to other people’s resources and markets. The means are debated, but
the goal remains the same. And, unless there are profound changes,
that will likely mean ongoing tension, conflict, and, sometimes, war whenever
any group or regime threatens to close the door or undertakes such substantial
socio-economic and political changes that the bulk of its domestic labor
and riches might be redistributed to the primary benefit of its own people
(or a smaller indigenous group) rather than to outside investors.
So, keeping a check on that potentiality — or the threatening example of
that potentiality — and putting a lid on possible social upheavals from
below requires U.S. military forces and recurrent U.S. interventionism.
No one has explained why this is so better or more bluntly than Thomas
L. Friedman. As a leading foreign affairs analyst and establishment
thinker for the New York Times, he put it this way when he urged the entrepreneurs
of Silicon Valley to pay their taxes for a gigantic, post Cold War military
machine to protect U.S. foreign markets. In March of 1999, he wrote:
"Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually
every country in the world. . . . [And] we are the biggest beneficiaries
and drivers of globalization. . . . That is why sustainable globalization
. . . requires . . . the active involvement of the United States. . . .
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald's
cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.
And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology
is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. .
. . The global system cannot hold together without an activist .
. . American foreign and defense policy. Without America on duty,
there will be no America Online."
And, so, the U.S. military-industrial complex and world-wide
military apparatus have the over-arching purpose of insuring the smooth
functioning of the kind of world economy that allows the wealthy few to
produce, trade, invest, extract raw materials, and make profits with as
few restrictions and constraints on their activities as possible.
These privileged people are those who disproportionately dominate and benefit
from transnational corporations, global financial and trade organizations,
and their influence over vital domestic and international institutions.
Now, while the people in this international elite only make up between
three and ten percent of humanity, — just 475 of the world's billionaires
have more wealth than half of humanity, or three billion people —
they come from the upper class of the entire global community. Indeed,
as of 1999, there were 44,000 transnational corporations — with 280,000
affiliates — that had major investors from that international class of
rich people. Given such international financing and investing,
as early as 1991 only 157 of the world's top 500 transnational corporations
were U.S. based, and some of their stock was undoubtedly owned by wealthy
stockholders from all over the world.
Such people, Americans included, follow mammon virtually wherever it
leads them. Economic analyst William Greider aptly summarized their
leading axiom when he wrote that the "principles of finance capital [and
multinational corporations] are maximizing return on capital without regard
to national identity or political or social consequences."
Thus, it is not surprising that Vance D. Coffman, the CEO of America’s
top defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, can be found explaining the virtues
of "offsets" (i.e., helping the leaders of other countries offset the expense
of buying expensive U.S. weapons systems by compensating them though the
device of granting them and their societies other lucrative business contracts,
jobs or technologies) to his stockholders. After stating that offsets
"will be a way of life for us in the long term," Coffman says, "I do think
that we can do business internationally and make ourselves and our technologies
available to other countries and thereby enlarge our business base as well."
Statistically, this type of compensation means that "offsets on major [overseas
U.S.] arms deals now routinely average between 50% and 100% of the value
of the original [weapons] sale." In the late 1990s, it also
meant that, after a time, the Lockheed Martin offsetting "coproduction
arrangements," which it established in connection with its major weapons
sales to Turkey and South Korea, churned out more F-16 fighter aircraft
in those countries than in U.S.-based Lockheed Martin factories.
More importantly, as military spending analyst William D. Hartung noted,
when just the "50% cost of average offsets" is added together with the
annualized average of $7.8 billion of government subsidies already going
to U.S. arms exporters, it means that the U.S. weapons contractors’ $12
billion in weapons sales in 1996 brought them a profit, but those sales
cost the overall U.S. domestic economy a net loss of $1 to $2 billion.
Beyond those startling figures, corporate globalization, led by the
U.S., continues apace. With the corporate mergers and acquisition
boom breaking "all records for both numbers and types of companies after
the 1960s," and with mergers jumping 78% in just the period of 1997-1998,
large scale national and transnational corporations are positioning themselves
to engage more extensively in global markets. Meanwhile, the
facts show that the foreign direct investment by developed core industrial
countries, like the U.S., in certain developing countries, like China,
have risen from $20 billion in 1990 to $120 billion in 1997.
In such a context of international capital flows and investment, General
Motors — one of the largest corporations in the world — owns 33% of Isuzu
and Ford owns 33% of Mazda while one of the premier American aircraft producers,
Boeing Company, now has 20%-23% of its values produced abroad.
In this era of corporate globalization and accelerating outsourcing, this
cross-border investing may suggest a future trend or pattern for all major
corporations and investors in the world. And, yet, the figures by
economist Timothy Taylor demonstrate that, in the late 1990s, "U.S. investors
[still] held 90 percent of their equity portfolios in U.S. stocks."
In fact, Taylor stated that "investors all over the world tend to stick
to their home market." And since national savings patterns
are "generally quite close to national investment" patterns, it appears
that the global financial market is not yet completely borderless.
These findings indicate that there is likely to be strong nationalist business
pressures that continue to dominate U.S. policy makers. And those
powerful U.S. investors, along with important people in the export trade,
mighty U.S.-based transnational corporations, and significant investors
in foreign raw materials and mineral markets, will demand U.S. military
support and protection on behalf of their special interests. Besides,
with daily global financial transactions — 98% "sheer speculation" and
only 2% in long-term trade or investment — moving between $1.5 and $2 trillion,
international capitalism, as a whole, requires military protection.
So, to buttress this post-modern, "open door" global order, Americans
beneath those in that upper tier of the top 1%-10% are incessantly propagandized
and taxed to acquire ever newer and ever more weaponry as well as
to pay for troop deployments and military actions around the world.
Some, sadly, are taxed in blood and life. Of course, underlying all
that has been stated so far is the fact that all this is a rational response
to the larger needs of an elite strata of U.S. society. And
McCormick clearly identified that underlying "national" interest and its
requirements when he wrote that the U.S. has become a "rentier [dominated]
nation." That means that "[t]here is a tendency to overinvest and
lend overseas and to live off dividends and interests (renting out one’s
money, hence rentier)." In such a nation, he notes, "The tendency
[of the wealthy] to overinvest abroad is compounded by the tendency to
overinvest in military production. Essential to the hegemonic power’s
capacity to act as a global policeman, military research and production
receive favorable treatment from the government in the form of state subsidized
higher profits." Clearly, unless Americans are among the few
upper class beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex or corporate
globalization, most of them are being horribly victimized by a steady stream
of undeclared wars and the costs which they entail for almost everyone.
And, yet, in this day and age, Americans would be wise to recall that
the U.S. Defense Department's own 1997 study has declared that "Historical
data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international
situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States."
Thus, as the recent Director of the conservative Cato Institute's Defense
Policy Studies sagely concluded: "There is a way to significantly
reduce the chances of an attack on the American home land by terrorists
using weapons of mass terror . . . [The U.S. must cease] provocative overseas
interventions . . . [and] should adopt a policy of military restraint.
That policy entails intervening only as a last resort." So,
there is another option. But it means that we must stop giving our
elite Executive branch policy makers a free hand in making wars.
In our democracy today, we need to renounce the maxim that guided John
Jay and seems to guide so many other decision makers in our country.
That maxim is that "‘the people who own the country ought to govern it.’"
No. No. Instead, let us assert anew that ours is a government
"of the people, by the people and for the people." And if we follow
that principle and if we stop, as Abraham Lincoln admonished us to do,
placing "our President where kings have always stood," we stand a
much better chance of not only avoiding the worst that may lie ahead but
of saving our Republic and of helping to enable real democracy and self-determination
everywhere on earth.
PAGE 8
PAGE 22
Notes On Making vs. Declaring War, III
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist
Papers, No. 69, New York: Mentor Books, [1787-1788] 1961, 417-418.
Hamilton’s emphasis.
George Kennan, Letter to the Editor. Washington Post,
March 25, 2003, p. A8, Sec. B.
Beyond the explanations and descriptions offered in this series
of essays, it might be useful to clarify what is meant by the terminology
of "monopoly capitalism." Harry Magdoff did just that when he wrote:
"It is customary to think of competition and monopoly as direct opposites.
This is quite proper according to dictionary definitions. However
. . . the terms competition and monopoly are used [by some analysts] to
designate different phases of capitalist society. In neither of these
phases is there either pure competition or pure monopoly. Indeed
. . . competition exists within the monopoly phase. Competition is
between giants of the same industry (within and outside the nation) and
between industries" as well as between smaller firms. See Harry Magdoff,
The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy, New
York: Monthly Review, 1969, 64. In other words, the nature
of capitalism in its monopoly phase is that of an economic and political
system that is dominated by needs and imperatives of highly concentrated
and highly centralized, large-scale firms. Consider these statistics
from the turn of the 20th century as a mark of that rapidly centralizing
and consolidating capitalist system: Between 1897-1904, 5,300 U.S.
industrial firms were consolidated into just 318 firms who held 40% of
the manufacturing capacity of the country; see Howard Zinn, A People’s
History of the United States, 1492-Present, New York: Harper, 1995,
343. In 1900, just 1% of the U.S. population owned more than
wealth than the remaining 99%; see Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny,
New York: Random, 1952, 57. By 1914, John D. Rockefeller and
John P. Morgan sat on a combined total of 85 separate corporate boards
of directors in what is known as systemic interlocking directorates; see
Zinn, 252. During this period, International Harvester Corporation
(on whose board of directors sat J.P. Morgan) was protected by tariffs
against foreign competition and it produced 85% of all farm machinery in
the U.S.; see Zinn, 251. In 1900, J.P. Morgan controlled 50% of U.S.
railroad mileage; see Zinn, 250. Even earlier, in the 1880s, "small"
manufacturing firms had a net worth of under $2 million each and "large"
to "very large" companies were valued at $5 million to $10 million, but
"‘each of the country’s ten largest railroads had more than $100 million
of net worth and the largest of them [i.e., the Pennsylvania Railroad]
had over $200 million.’" See Morton J. Horwitz, Transformation of
American Law, 1870-1960, New York: Oxford UP, 1992, 95. In
1890, over 50% of the nation’s wealth was held by 1% of US families (up
from 29% in 1860); see Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political
History of the American Rich, New York: Broadway Books, 2002, 43.
According to Phillips, "by the 1890s the goliaths of U.S. business, railroading,
and finance had gained de facto control over many state legislatures, the
federal judiciary, and the U.S. Senate." See Phillips, xvi.
David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace,
the State, and American labor activism, 1865-1925, United Kingdom:
Cambridge UP, 1987, 69.
Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for
Informal Empire, 1893-1901, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990, 28.
Cited as McCormick, China Market.
John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events,
New York: Arno Press, [1908] 1973, 63.
Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, Sixth Edition, New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1995, 210.
Michael Parenti, Against Empire, San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 1995, 40.
Zinn, 353.
US Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United
States, Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1975, 231. The GNP figures were listed on table "Series
F 71-97" as $12.3 billion for the period 1887-1891, and $38.9 billion for
the period 1912-1916 ("Current Prices: 1869-1931").
Magdoff, 47.
William Woodruff, Impact of Western Man: A Study of Europe’s
role in the World Economy, 1750-1960, New York: St. Martin’s
Press, [1966] 1967, 150, 151, n. 21, 150, n. 1, 155, n.1. Woodruff’s
tables and notes list U.S. foreign investments as $700 million in 1900,
and $3.5 billion in 1914. Latin American historian Juan Gonzales,
noted that, as of 1914, nearly 50% of these U.S. foreign investments went
into Latin American countries. See Juan Gonzales, "Fifty Years of
Empty Promises," Columbia College Today, Vol. 27, No. 2, (December 2000),
27.
Zinn, 353.
Norman Gordon Levin, Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics:
America’s Response to War and Revolution, New York, Oxford UP, 1968, 13-19.
This citation covers all information in this paragraph.
Magdoff, 55. Those countries were identified as "Others,"
and their combined share of the world’s manufactured exports were 12.5%
in 1913, and 18.2% in 1929.
Ibid., 56.
Joesph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, New York:
W. W. Norton, 2002, 53, 248.
Ibid., 247.
Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy,
and the End of the Republic, New York: Henry Holt, 2004, 270-271.
Ibid., 262.
Magdoff, 42.
Johnson, 153, 154.
Eli Jellenc, "New Bases for a New Global Intervention Strategy,"
Defense Monitor, Vol. XXXII, No. 3 (July/August, 2003), 5, 7.
George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America: A Narrative
History, Vol. II, Sixth Brief Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004,
835.
Irvin Bernstein, Lean Years: A History of the American
Worker, 1920-1933, New York: Da Capo, 1988, 54.
Woodruff, 150, 151, n.21 and n. 23.
Source Documents at www.usd.edu/~sbucklin/primary/taftkatsura.htm.
Source Documents at www.usd.edu/~sbucklin/primary/roottakahira.htm.
Thomas J. McCormick, America's Half-Century: United States
Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After, Second Edition, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins U.P., [1989] 1995, 32. Cited as America’s.
Ibid., 32.
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., xiii.
Ibid.
Ibid., xiii-xiv. The U.S. policy makers who labored to
produce this particular global economic order, as McCormick states, were
economic internationalists who "viewed nationalism as the bane of the 20th
century — the underlying cause of both world wars, the Great Depression
of the 1930s, and the epic revolutions in Russia, China and Mexico."
See McCormick, America’s, xiii.
Following in the intellectual/scholarly footsteps of American
historian William Appleman Williams (The Contours of American History,
1951, 363-370; The Roots of the Modern American Empire, 1969, 377-379),
McCormick explains this point in the following concise manner: "[T]he
Open Door Policy . . . represented America’s basic response to the
. . . question of how to expand. Instead of closed doors, [it’s]
open markets; instead of political domination, [it’s] economic hegemony;
instead of large-scale colonialism, [it’s] informal empire. In short,
a most interesting hybrid of anti-colonialism and economic imperialism."
See McCormick, China Market, 128. With regard to Great Britain, McCormick
adds these pertinent remarks: "[T]he promulgation of the Hay [Open
Door] Doctrine did pass the scepter of open door champion from Great Britain
to the United States. . . . Now, as Britain’s power wavered . . . the United
States made a concerted effort to adopt the nineteenth-century policy to
the expansive needs of a twentieth-century industrial America." See
McCormick, China Market, 127.
Harvey Goldberg, Class lecture on "U.S. and Vichy France" in
Contemporary Societies. History. University of Wisconsin-Madison,
1974.
James E. Miller, United States and Italy, 1940-1950: The
Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization. Chapel Hill, NC: North
Carolina UP, 1986, 96, 98-101, 104-105, 113, 132, 135-137, 158-160.
After bringing the Parri government down, the U.S.-supported Alcide DeGasperi
government was established with massive amounts of U.S. aid flowing to
it. See Ibid., 208-210.
McCormick America’s, 55.
Ibid., 155.
Ibid., 55-56. My emphasis. Note well, that
the American negotiators with the British played some real hard ball in
getting the British to open up their markets throughout the British empire
as the main price for obtaining that loan. The Americans wanted into
that closed, British market area of the sterling block, and, early in 1946,
the British seemed to be using the principle of "non-convertibility" to
keep them out and to acquire the money that they could use to rebuild their
bankrupted economy after World War II. By employing the principle
of "non-convertibility" in all parts of the British empire, the British
were requiring that all the foreign currencies that had accumulated in
India, Australia, Egypt, and throughout the Commonwealth could only be
converted into a special form of pound sterling. This converted pound
sterling, of course, would be used to buy British goods and services, and,
so, help to put England back on her financial feet. But the Americans
cut off lend lease to the vulnerable, newly formed Labor government.
Then, in the 1946 loan negotiations, the American negotiators demanded,
as a condition of the loan, that the British end their efforts to retain
their closed empire and end the principle of non-convertibility.
L.S. Amery, The Washington Loan Agreement. London:
McDonald, 1946, vi-viii, xi.
Ernest R. May, ed. American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting
NSC 68. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993, 5.
Ibid. Kennan maintained that the Soviet leaders and communist
parties throughout the world would strive to: "‘a. To undermine
general political and strategic potential of major western powers. . .
. b. On unofficial plane particularly violent efforts . . . to weaken
power and influence of Western Powers on colonial backward, or dependent
peoples. . . . c. Where individual governments stand in path
of Soviet purposes pressure will be brought for their removal from office.
. . . d. In foreign countries Communists will, as a rule, work
toward destruction of all forms of personal independence, economic, political,
or moral. . . . e. Everything possible will be done to set
major Western Powers against each other. . . . f. In general,
all Soviet efforts on unofficial international plane will be negative and
destructive in character, designed to tear down sources of strength beyond
reach of Soviet control.’" See Ibid.
George F. Kennan, ("X"). "The Sources of Soviet Conduct,"
Foreign Affairs. 25 (July 1947): 575.
Ibid., 576.
Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War
II through Dienbienphu. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988, 69-70.
Ibid., 64-65. See also James S. Olson, and Randy Roberts.
Where the Domino Fell: America and Vietnam, 1945 to 1995. Third
Edition. St. James, NY: Brandywine P., 1999, 24.
Olson 24-26.
Gardner, 60, 61-62, 69-70. See also, Olson 25.
Harvey Goldberg, Class lecture on "French Imperialism in Vietnam"
in Contemporary Societies. History. University of Wisconsin-Madison,
1974.
Olson 26.
Gardner 66-72.
Ibid., 69, n. 51, 366. My emphasis.
Olson 38. By the end of 1953, the U.S. was supplying the
French Indochina war effort with $500 million annually, and, rising to
$1.1 billion in 1954, that military aid represented nearly 78 percent of
France’s war expenditures in 1954.
.
Gardner 77-78, 86-87, 115-116, 118, 139, 152, 153.
McCormick, America’s, 21, 75.
Ibid., 75.
Harry S. Truman, "Address before a joint session of Congress,"
March 12, 1947, American History Sources, 1946-Present, Brandywine Press
supplement, 3, online at HYPERLINK http://www.brandywinesources.com/1946-present/1947DOCTrumandoctrine.htm;
www.brandywinesources.com/1946-present/1947DOCTrumandoctrine.htm;
Internet.
Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," 566-582.
NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National
Security (April 14, 1950), A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s
Directive of January 31, 1950 (Marked "Top Secret" and dated, above the
table of contents, April 7, 1950). This document is located in May,
ed., American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68.
The almost 60 page NSC 68 was primarily authored, in 1950, by
43 year old Paul H. Nitze, under the supervision of Secretary of State
Dean Acheson. It was declassified from its "Top Secret" status only
in 1975. There is no analyst who has so acerbically highlighted some
of the essential meanings and features of NSC 68 better than author Noam
Chomsky. So, his extracts from it and his analysis of it are worth
quoting at length. He writes: "The `compulsion' of the
`slave state' [i.e., USSR] is to achieve `the complete subversion or forcible
destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society' in
every corner of the world that is not yet `subservient to and controlled
from the Kremlin.' Its `implacable purpose' is to `eliminate the
challenge of freedom' everywhere, gaining `total power over all men' in
the slave state itself and `absolute authority over the rest of the
world.' By its very nature, the slave state is `inescapably militant.'
Hence no accommodation or peaceful settlement is even thinkable.
We must therefore act to `foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet
system' and ‘hasten [its] decay' by all means short of war (which is too
dangerous for us). We must avoid diplomacy and negotiations [unless
the Soviet Union is substantially weakened] except as a device to placate
public opinion because any agreements ‘would reflect present realities
and would therefore be unacceptable, if not disastrous, to the United States
and the rest of the free world,’ though after the success of a ‘roll back’
strategy we may ‘negotiate a settlement with the Soviet Union (or a successor
state or states).’
The authors concede that the fiendish enemy is far weaker than its
adversaries in every relevant respect. This disparity confers further
advantages on the enemy: being so backward, it ‘can do more with
less,’ at once midget and superman. Our situation is thus truly desperate.
. . .
The innate evil of the slave state is highlighted by comparison with
the United States, a nation of almost unimaginable perfection. Its
‘fundamental purpose’ is ‘to `to assure the integrity and vitality of our
free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual,'
and to safeguard these values throughout the world. Our free society
is marked by `marvelous diversity,' `deep tolerance,' `lawfulness' . .
. [and] a commitment `to create and maintain an environment in which every
individual has the opportunity to realize his creative powers.' The
perfect society ‘does not fear, it welcomes, diversity’ and ‘derives its
strength from its hospitality even to antipathetic ideas,' as illustrated
by the McCarthyite hysteria of the day, perhaps. . . . ‘The essential tolerance
of our world outlook, our generous and constructive impulses, and the absence
of covetousness in our international relations are assets of potentially
enormous influence,' particularly among those who have been lucky enough
to experience these qualities at first hand, as in Latin America, which
has so benefited from ‘our long continuing endeavors to create and now
develop the Inter-American system. . . .’" (26, 27)
NSC 68 [then ironically] warns that we must overcome such weaknesses
in our society as the `excess of a permanently open mind,' `the excess
of tolerance,' and `dissent among us.' We must ‘distinguish between
the necessity for tolerance and the necessity for just suppression' [of
presumably subversive ideas]. . . . It is particularly important
to insulate our `labor unions, civic enterprises, schools, churches, and
all media for influencing opinion' from the `evil work' of the Kremlin."
(57-58). Such is how NSC 68 goes from praising the open society to
censoring its openness. See Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New.
New York: Columbia UP, 1994, 26, 27, 57-58.
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the
State Department. New York: W.W. Norton, 1969, 222, 374, 375.
"The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,"
September 2002, 6, 14, 29, 30. It must be stated that the George
W. Bush’s administration’s National Security Strategy does not stand alone
in its general goals, only in its greater candor. Among its many
antecedents there is the 1998-1999, bi-partisan Commission on National
Security/21st Century whose aim was to outline "a strategy for the United
States to ‘remain the principal military power in the world’ in the coming
century." Moreover, to insure a continued U.S. dominance on earth
and in space, this 1999 report concluded that "‘U.S. military spending
will have to rise dramatically.’" See James M. Cypher, "Return of
the Iron Triangle: The New Military Buildup," Dollars and Sense,
2002, 1, HYPERLINK http://www.dollarandsense.org/2002/cypher0102.htm
www.dollarandsense.org/2002/cypher0102.htm . Meanwhile, among professional
military people and strategists, the idea of obtaining global military
dominance is simply the natural extension of the basic military objective
of planning and striving for dominance on the battlefield and in war as
a whole. As for current U.S. military strategy, the antecedents for
the global military objective stated in the 2002 National Security Strategy
are found in the 1960s military doctrine of "flexible response," and, more
recently, in the military doctrine of "full spectrum dominance" embodied
in the Department of Defense's strategy documents entitled "Joint Vision
2010" and updated in "Joint Vision 2020." As detailed by these excerpts
from "Joint Vision 2020," "full spectrum dominance" is nothing short of
the military strategy for maintaining and enlarging U.S. interests in the
"open door" global, free market, capitalist system. In its words:
"The ultimate goal of our military force is to accomplish the objectives
directed by the National Command Authorities. For the joint force
of the future [i.e., Air Force, Navy, Army and Marine Corps], this goal
will be achieved through full spectrum dominance — the ability of US forces,
operating unilaterally or in combination with multinational and interagency
partners, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the
full range of military operations. . . . Additionally, given the global
nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain
its overseas present forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide
in order to achieve full spectrum dominance" because "the global interests
and responsibilities of the United States will endure, and there is no
indication that threats to those interests . . . will disappear."
See U.S. Department of Defense, General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Office of Primary Responsibility: Director
for Strategic Plans and Policy, J5; Strategy Division "Joint Vision
2020," Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, June 2000,
6, 1.
Jeffery Record, "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism," Strategic
Studies Institute," Carlisie, PA: Publications Office U.S.
Army War College, December 2003, 3, HYPERLINK http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding.htm
www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/2003/bounding/bounding.htm or http://www.carlisle.
army.mil/ssi/ .
Ibid., 32.
Record described the difference between preventive and preemptive
war by explaining that "according to the Defense Department’s official
definition of the term, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was a preventive war, which
traditionally has been indistinguishable from aggression, not a preemptive
attack, which in contrast to preventive war has international legal sanction
under strict conditions. Preemption is ‘an attack initiated on the
basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent.’
Preventive war is ‘a war initiated in the belied that military conflict,
while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater
risk.’" See Record, 49, n. 51 citing Joint Publication 1-02, "DOD
Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms," Washington, DC: Department
of Defense, April 12, 2002, 333, 336.
Johnson, 286.
Richard Falk, The New Bush Doctrine," The Nation, July 15, 2002,
1, HYPERLINK http://www.thenation.com/ www.thenation.
com/ docPrint.mhtml?i=20020715&s=falk.
Joseph Cirincione, Jessica T. Mathews, and George Perkovich,
"WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications," Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, 2004, 13-14, 47-61.
Johnson, 292.
George Kennan, Letter to the Editor. Washington Post,
March 25, 2003, p. A8, Sec. B.
Johnson, 285.
McCormick, China Market, 127.
"President Bush’s Remarks on Democracy in the Middle East:
What About Iraq?" Center for American Progress, November 2003,
HYPERLINK http://www.centerfor www.centerforamerican progess.org
.
See Naomi Klein, "Bring Halliburton Home," The Nation (November
24, 2003), 1, HYPERLINK http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?I=20031124&s=klein
www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?I=20031124&s=klein . Klein,
however, notes that these so-called "reforms" "clearly violate" the "Hague
Regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, both
ratified by the United States), as well as the U.S. Army’s own code of
war" because those documents state that an occupying power is only an "‘administrator
and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural
estates . . . [and] must safeguard the capital of these properties’" not
sell them. Likewise, she finds that "the U.S. Army’s Law of Land
Warfare states that ‘the occupant does not have the right of sale or unqualified
use of [nonmilitary] property’" See Ibid., 1, 2.
Thomas L. Friedman, "Manifesto for a Fast World: The American
Burden," New York Times Magazine, 28 March 1999, 42, 43, 84, 96,
97.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the term military-industrial
complex when he warned Americans to be on guard against its unwarranted
influence over the U.S. society in his 1961 "Farewell Address to the Nation."
He said, "The conjunction of immense military establishment and a large
arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence
– economic, political, and even spiritual – is felt in every city, every
State house, every office of the Federal government. . . . In the
councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex.
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will
persist. " See Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Farewell Address to the Nation,"
17 January 1961, American History Sources, 1946-Present, Brandywine Press
supplement, 2, online at HYPERLINK http://www.brandywinesources.com/1946-present/1951DOCEisenhower
www.brandywinesources.com/1946-present/1951DOC Eisenhower MIcomplex.htm;
Internet.
Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh with Thea Lee and the Institute
for Policy Studies, Field Guide to the Global Economy, New York, New Press,
2000, 53.
Ibid., 66.
William Greider, One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic
of Global Capitalism, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1997, 66.
Ibid., 25.
Vance D. Coffman, Interview in Lockheed Martin Today, March
1997, 2, www.lockheedmartin.com/files3/lmtoday/9703/coffman.html.
William D. Hartung, "Welfare for Weapons Dealers 1998:
The Hidden Cost of NATO Expansion," A Special Report by the Arms Trade
Center, World Policy Institute at the New School on Global Beat (March
1998), 30, www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/nato/ hartung030498.html. Cited
as Hartung, "Welfare: NATO Expansion."
William D. Hartung, "Welfare for Weapons Dealers: The
Hidden Costs of the Arms Trade," World Policy Papers (1995), 33, 34, www.cdi.org/ArmsTradeData
base/Arm…s_The_hidden_Costs_of_the_Arms_Trade.txt.
Hartung, "Welfare: NATO Expansion," 31-32.
Douglas Dowd, "Bankers and Globalization, Past and Present:
From Pinstriped Conservatism to 7/24 Speculation," Research Paper delivered
at conference entitled Reflections on the Social Impact of American Multinational
Corporations at University of Stendhal, Grenoble, France, January 11, 2002,
2, HYPERLINK http://www.vaivecchio.com/New www.vaivecchio.com/NewFiles/articles/
pastpreslo.html.
Anderson, 67.
Ibid., 17, 19. According to Field Guide to the Global Economy,
foreign direct investment is defined as "purchasing a lasting interest
in, and a degree of influence over the management of a business in another
country."
Greider, 182.
Ibid., 131.
Timothy Taylor, "The Truth about Globalization," The Public
Interest, 2, HYPERLINK http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article2.html
www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article2.html .
Ibid. Taylor listed the percent of home market equity
portfolios held by national investors in those portfolios as: Canadian
88%, Japanese as 94%, German and United Kingdom investors as about 80%.
See Taylor, 2.
Ibid.
Dowd, 2.
Relating this specifically to the military-industrial complex
and the national security state, defense analyst Robert Higgs, writes in
the conservative Cato Institute’s journal Policy Analysis: "Manipulation
of information is [not only] central to what modern governing elites do,
[but] on defense-related and foreign policy matters, the scope for information
management and opinion leadership by the national security elite is much
wider." Given that advantage, the military bass and their corporate counterparts
in the arms manufacturing business have used the best Madison Avenue advertising/propaganda
techniques "to get the customer [i.e., taxpayer] to buy something he or
she doesn’t need for a price he or she probably can’t afford." See
Robert Higgs, "U.S. Military Spending in the Cold War Era: Opportunity
Costs, Foreign Crises, and Domestic Constraints," Policy Analysis
no. 114 (November 30, 1998), 14, www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa114.html.
Theories and arguments about the U.S. capitalist state — who
controls it, for what purpose, and whose interest it serves — are voluminous
and endless. Still, they cluster around two basic and contrasting
theories about the way the U.S. political system functions. These
contrasting theories have been termed "elitist" and "pluralist."
And, while the argument over which one — or which variant of either — is
likely to rage forever, political scientist G. David Garson's conclusion
is the closest in reflecting the functioning reality of the current U.S.
political economy. Garson wrote: "If America is elitist, it
is elitist in a pluralistic way, or, if pluralist, then pluralist in a
way that benefits an elite. . . . [P]luralist theorists," he continues,
"obscure the manner in which government policies systematically favor a
business-based elite. America is," he flatly states, "an elitist
political economy." See G. David Garson, Group Theory of Politics,
Beverly Hills, A: Sage, 1978, 207.
McCormick, America’s, 6.
Ibid., 7.
Generally speaking, they are within the top 1%-10% of US households.
Department of Defense, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition
& Technology, "The Defense Science Board 1997 Summer Study Task force
on DoD Responses to Transnational Threats, Vol. I, Final Report, Washington,
D.C., October 1997, 15.
Ivan Eland, "Tilting at Windmills: Post-Cold War Military
Threats to U.S. Security," Policy Analysis, No. 332, February 8, 1999,
34, HYPERLINK http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-332es.html)
www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-332es.html .
Frank Monaghan, John Jay, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935,
323.
Abraham Lincoln to William H. Herndon, February 15, 1848.
Letter in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, editor Roy P. Basler, et
al, Vol. I, 451-452.