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TechnoratiThe Illusion of Saving Nations From Themselves
The Bush government was elected in 2000 on a platform including vigorous opposition to the United States Army's doing "nation-building." Swedes, Danes, the European Union, and NGOs did nation-building. The United States Army was a fighting army.
This was the principle on which the new U.S. volunteer army was formed after Vietnam. It is the explanation why, after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, the army looked on, bemused, while the people of Baghdad hesitantly, and then enthusiastically, tore down the phone and power wires, dug up the copper pipes, and destroyed the power generators of the city infrastructure, looting their own capital city of everything that had value and could be sold.
U.S. commanders, asked to protect at least the National Archaeological Museum, and the arts museums and universities, politely replied to curators, professors and concerned citizens, "sorry, Sir (or M'am), we don't do that sort of thing." We only protect ourselves and the oil ministry.
What a difference a 5-year-long military disaster can make! It now has cleared the way for another and opposite disaster. In the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says that "it is absolutely clear that [the United States] will be involved in nation building for years to come. Democratic state building is now an urgent component of our national interest."
In the U.S. Army "a new generation of military leaders [is being trained] for stabilization and counter-insurgency missions" for decades to come, part of "our long-term partnerships with Afghanistan and Iraq,...our new relationships in Central Asia, and our long-standing partnerships in the Persian Gulf, providing a solid geostrategic foundation for the generational work ahead."
This means American efforts to place and/or maintain in power, by military means when necessary, pro-American governments that will cooperate in an area-wide American policy of suppressing fundamentalist Islamic movements, and combating Palestine liberation groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah, hostile to the United States as well as Israel, or committed to the idea of anti-Western jihad. That's not the way the secretary of state phrased it; she talks about nation-building and creating democracy. But that is what she was saying.
One might have thought that a decade of laying waste to Vietnam and Cambodia in order to accomplish "democratic state-building" would have taught the eminently practical lesson that the United States cannot democratic-state-build for anyone else. It is not even a total success in doing it at home.
It is a rule in the life of modern nations that nationalism trumps all else. If the government in Saigon, or a government in Baghdad or Kabul, cannot, even with appropriate foreign material assistance, establish and maintain order within its own frontiers and by its own means, armed legions of foreign democracy-teachers, state-builders, and winners of hearts and mind cannot do it for them.
As the British soldier-- and state-builder in Bosnia -- Paddy Ashdown said recently, the time it takes for a liberation army to turn into an occupation army is very short. The transformation is already well-advanced, if not complete, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
In denial of that fact, the Bush administration has ordered reorganization and retraining of American military and political expeditionary forces so as to continue to build nations and democracy, by means of armed intervention and military occupation, for many more years in unlucky Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries (and who knows wherever else).
It is an axiom of history that no government put in place by foreign troops, or needing to be maintained in place by them against internal opposition, can be considered a legitimate government.
The Taliban in Afghanistan are not the Russian army, overrunning Afghanistan with tanks and helicopters, or an invading British colonial army. If they were, the problem would be simple. They are Afghans, members of the 40-million strong Pathan (or Pushtoon) people, who make up the largest part of the Afghan population. If other Pathans, inside Afghanistan, who are not religious fundamentalists, and the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks who make up the rest of the country's population, do not wish to be ruled by Pathan religious reactionaries, they should not need 60 thousand NATO and U.S. troops to defend them. If they will not defend themselves, there is nothing the foreigners can do to save them from their countrymen.
The same is true of the Iraqis. The only foreign army that has invaded Iraq is the American army. The Iraq government is resisting long-term American extraterritorial presence in the country, and Iraqis are increasingly pressing the United States to get out. They are finding that the Pentagon and the White House have actually been planning to stay indefinitely (for 100 years?). This automatically will sooner or later produce popular uprising against military occupation.
Then what will an Obama or McCain administration do? They might order the troops to pull out. They will be accused of surrendering America to forces of evil.
Or they might order the army and Marines to do again what was done to Falluja. They could forget about democracy and nation-building.
In the present (post-political-campaign) stage of American foreign policy thinking, and under mounting pressure from AIPAC for military solutions in the region, all of this deserves more reflection than it is receiving.
William Pfaff is a globally respected political commentator and author on international relations, contemporary history and U.S. policy. He is published in five countries and his column is syndicated by Tribune Media Services.
© 2008 by Tribune Media Services International. All Rights Reserved.
19 Comments so far
Show AllWilliam Pfaff is one of the best.
T H O M A S _ M O R E,
Lets see if I got this correct. For USA, we have:
___ THOU SHALT NOT _M U R D E R_,
Except that's exactly what the forces of evil do to us, while we can continue:
___ THOU SHALT (gloriously in mine name ) _ K I L L _,
So we not only go to heaven, kill all of the bad guys, but we instantiate even greater godly powers -- while causing every counter action by the other to send them to hell ( and steal their "god" blind )
I'm so glad that we're the "good" guys!
"There is nothing either good or bad,
but thinking makes it so"
---- Shakespeare
Namaste « Presence »
« We must be the change we wish to see in the world » — Gandhi
« There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed » — Gandhi
« We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself » — ML King
All the mechanix and psychodynamics of conquest, empire, racism, violence, tyranny, etc, flow from our youthful primitiveness as a sepcies.
Of course, we are not so youthful as a species as to lack humanist sages, wise philosophers, and higher life imagers such as Confucius, Jesus, Gandhi, and many more, whose knowing could transform the world.
But in our largely unchanged, inner primitiveness, we still tend to ignore our sages. In fact, we still tend to prefer killing them.
How are we to change this inner fear of the best within us?
Can we change it?
And if not, is it really even in most of us?
Hellodarling:
I applaud you for countering that falsehood that starts this article. It should be countered, strongly, every time that false statement is made.
The rest of the article is worth reading, however.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL. Bottom line.
Siouxrose, the commadment is actually "Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder" Thats from the original Hebrew. Somewhere between the Latin translation and the old English translatioon it got changed.
PFAFF knows, I would imagine, that all these campaigns that use words like democratization and bringing prosperity to others are just PR for what, to dress up the historical record? It's always naked imperialism, state theft granted cover by a network of false legitimizers, of late including our right wing owned major media. It's tragic in irony that those who count themselvs as religious--and all 3 patriarchal religions are guilty on this point--can justify the Middle East war. To me this demonstrates the failure of religion if it can't cross "team boundaries" to merely get one thing right by consensus: THOU SHALT NOT KILL. Bottom line.
Four to five years ago, William Lind (a military historian), solved the problem of getting out of Iraq. He said he asked WWBD? (what would Bismarck do?) The answer was to pay bribes to the Iraqi gov't to demand that we leave. Maybe now we can save some money.
So how do we get rid of AIPAC?
Mentioned in the article, remember?
This was not an 'army of liberation'. It was an 'army of colonization'.
Iraq is now, and will remain for the foreseeable future a 'protectorate'... just like Puerto Rico.
And using that as an example, we know what the Iraqi people could expect in the way of treatment. Derision, abuse, exploitation and lower class employment, working for the American middle and upper classes, all while enduring the erosion of their culture and a tidal wave of CIA backed and imported drugs.
I cannot understand why anyone would base anything on what Condoleezza Rice said or says. Thats the blind leading the blind.
Rockerbabe1 June 30th, 2008 2:26 pm
" I wouldn't trust the chickenhawks now running our government to take out the garbage on a regular basis, let along manage mine or someone else's business."
Obviously someone with intelligence!
curmudgeon99 June 30th, 2008 12:22 pm
Who can we get to 'liberate' us?
I was hoping you knew.
"The Bush government was elected in 2000"
another article NOT WORTH READING due to immediate error.
why, when an election is stolen, do people continue to call it an election?
Is that the same thing as saving women from themselves (and their desire to make their own decisions about reproduction?) No one will ever care as much about you as you do yourself; same goes for nations. AND, who says the US knows best, especially with all the culture and historical differences. We, as a nation have a short to non-existant historical memory and often can't tell the forest from the trees. Anyway, I wouldn't trust the chickenhawks now running our government to take out the garbage on a regular basis, let along manage mine or someone else's business.
"Maybe we can find comfort in the knowledge that the US will most likely go completely broke before it is able to fulfill Condi's and the other fascists favorite fantasies."
Hear, Hear! How ironic for the Bushes, Cheneys and Rices of this country that the one true and only god in this nation - MONEY - will ultimately be the instrument that causes the Empire's undoing. Foreign nations and their banks will not keep financing the latest continuing version of the Biggest Wet Dream in human history: the idea that one nation can completely rule the world. We have been, and will be, unable to pull it off, just as every pompous, strutting jackass before us has ultimately failed. The last thing Americans will see before they drive their Dodge Armadas over the cliff, 400 feet straight down to a fiery explosion that will rival anything ever seen in a Hollywood movie, is a smirking George Wanker Bush dressed in a Napoleon costume, right hand tucked inside his vest, waving goodbye.
Maybe we can find comfort in the knowledge that the US will most likely go completely broke before it is able to fulfill Condi's and the other fascists favorite fantasies.
Or, as Malalai Joya, the Afghan Member of Parliament in her twenties put it:
I think that no nation can donate liberation to another nation. Liberation is not money to be donated; it should be achieved in a country by the people themselves. The ongoing developments in Afghanistan and Iraq prove this claim. People of other countries only can give us a helping hand and support.
I'm afraid we'll have to liberate ourselves - the place to start is to completely reject both major political parties 100%. We need to get up off our behinds and do the actual work - we have to become an alternative media that increases it's audience beyond preaching to the converted. We have to form trust, compassion, bravery, diligence, and find unique ways to get our messages out there.
We can not even do a small amount of 'nation building' in our own country...consider New Orleans and the gulf coast states. And just how are we supposed to pay for nation building when our own infrastructure is collapsing?
Who can we get to 'liberate' us?
So nobody can save us from ourselves either?