Pax Americana Has Its Limits

President George Bush’s solemn address to the nation last Sunday was more telling about the difficulties in post-Saddam Iraq than his administration has been willing to accept or accede. His address was marked by the absence of his usual bravado that had accented his past policy statements on Iraq and the Middle East.

This time there was no mention of capturing Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden dead or alive, no mention of the refreshing waves of democracy permeating the Middle East (and the rest of the world) and of course no mention of the illusive Weapons of Mass Destruction.

He also did not say that post-war Iraq is a mess and that his much-touted Middle East Roadmap is in tatters. Neither did he say that America is paying a heavy toll in Iraq in the form of lost lives and run away expenditure.

Instead he asked us to be patient, sacrifice more and give an additional 87 billion dollars for our effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. Only 20 billion are earmarked for actual reconstruction. The bulk is to go for defense and intelligence.

The current Iraqi situation has the echoes of our involvement in Vietnam. While Iraq is not Vietnam it is turning into a quagmire. Our armed forces are spread thin around the world, a good half of them are bogged down in Iraq. The soldiers are unhappy about the extension of their tours of duty. They went there as liberators but somehow Iraqis do not consider them liberators. They have become the enemy.

Was all this unexpected?

Most people in this country with the sole exception of neo-conservatives, Republican right-wingers and their flag-waving ditto heads knew the ramifications of Iraqi misadventure and said so loudly and clearly. These voices of dissention came from all across the political spectrum. But they were summarily dismissed as liberal, anti-establishment and unpatriotic. The people who did not see the ramifications were either blinded by the force of their own hollow arguments or were hell-bent at invading Iraq anyway.

In a masterful deception the troika of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz, took the neophyte president down the treacherous road to Baghdad. It was, according to Paul Krugman of the New York Times ‘the mother of all time bait-and-switch operation’. Apparently these macho gun-slinging cowboys were more convincing to the president than the cautious and deliberate Secretary of State Colon Powell was.

Iraq (and Afghanistan) needs fixing and America cannot do it alone. President Bush’s decision to go to the United Nations is a step in the right direction and he ought to be complimented for this change of policy. Our European allies will come aboard to help us clean up the mess and to reconstruct Iraq once they are assured of a meaningful role in Iraq’s reconstruction and its future. Anything short of that would amount to using them as mop up squads.

Going alone in the world, as we found out, has its limits. At the present time the hawks in the administration appear to have been sidelined. That is good. But their overall mission of changing the world in the image of the United States remains in place.

Their vision of Pax Americana was outlined in a document prepared for them almost a year before 9/11.

Called Rebuilding America’s Defense, the document was prepared by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neo-conservative think tank. It envisions military control of the Gulf region, regime changes in Iraq, Syria and Iran, and also in China, domination and control of space, development of biological weapons ‘that can target specific genotypes (and) may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.’

The military action against Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the document, was a foregone conclusion irrespective of 9/11. In fact the PNAC document almost wished a terrorist attack on the US soil by saying,’ (transforming the US into) tomorrow’s dominant force is likely to be a long one in the absence of some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.’ That pretext presented itself a year later on 9/11.

Pax Americana is a romantic notion for many people in the conservative-neo-conservative wing of the Republican Party. However, as events in Iraq indicate, it is one thing to put a utopian vision on paper and quite another to pull it off. Somehow Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz et al blurred the line between a western drama and real life.

(S. Amjad Hussain is a clinical professor of surgery at the Medical College of Ohio and an op-ed columnist for the daily Blade of Toledo, Ohio.)