We don't want to rule the world
The US public largely opposes America's foreign wars and economic meddling.
They need a voice in US foreign policy
By Mark Weisbrot
guardian.co.uk, 27 August 2009
Americans are famous for not paying much attention to the rest of the world,
and it is often said that foreign wars are the way that we learn geography.
But most often it is not the people who have little direct experience
outside their own country that are the problem, but rather the experts.
The latest polling data is making this clear once again, as a majority of
Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan, but the Obama administration is
escalating the war, and his military commanders may ask for even more troops
than the increase to 68,000 that the adminstration is planning by the end of
this year.
This gap between the average American and the foreign policy elite has been
around since the Vietnam war and long before. The gap is also large between
Democratic voters, three-quarters of whom oppose the war in Afghanistan, and
the politicians and thinktanks that represent them in the political arena. A
few decades ago there was a real voting base of cold war liberals - people
who were progressive on social and economic issues but rightwing on foreign
policy. That base has largely disappeared. Yet amazingly, the foreign policy
establishment - including most of the media - has managed to maintain this
political tendency as a very influential force.
The gap between the public and the foreign policy elite is not due to the
ignorance of the masses, as the elite would have it, but primarily to a
different set of interests and values. Very few foreign policy
decision-makers - just a handful of members of Congress, for example - have
sons or daughters who actually fight in the wars that they decide are "wars
of necessity". The tax burden for these wars is more affordable for most
foreign policy experts than it is for an American with median earnings. And
perhaps most importantly, the average American doesn't have the same
interest in trying to have the US rule the world.
For the foreign policy elite, the importance of running the world - as much
as it is possible - is taken as given. Walter Russell Mead is a senior
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the most influential
foreign policy organisations in the United States. He represents the more
liberal end of the political spectrum at the CFR. In a recent interview with
The Brazilian Economy, he argued that all countries must accept what he
called "the Anglo-American system". For him, the lessons of history show
that there is no alternative:
To me, there is one clear lesson: by joining the [Anglo-American] system
and becoming part of it, you can achieve far greater results, whether
measured by international power, state security or the prosperity of your
people. You actually do much better by co-operating than resisting.
While one can argue that Europe and Japan have done reasonably well as
subordinate partners to the US in the post-second world war era, the same
cannot be said for the majority of countries in the world. This is
especially true in the years since 1980, which have seen a sharp slowdown in
economic growth, and reduced progress in social indicators such as life
expectancy and infant mortality, in the vast majority of
low-and-middle-income countries.
The biggest exception is China - which succeeded by rejecting the
Anglo-American policy prescriptions and opted for state control of their
banking system, foreign exchange, foreign capital flows and a host of other
important economic decisions. China also remained outside the World Trade
Organisation until 2001, when they were economically strong enough to take
advantage of it. Resistance, it seems, is not always futile.
Foreign economic policy is even more removed from public input than foreign
policy in general, with unaccountable institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund, World Bank and WTO making decisions that affect the lives and
livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.
It is this one-step-further removal from public accountability - there are
no voters that these institutions have to answer to - that makes them so
attractive to the elite in rich countries. In the current economic downturn,
the IMF can use taxpayer dollars to bail out western European banks who made
imprudent loans in eastern Europe, something that the contributing
governments might not be able to get away with politically if it were done
directly.
Policies that primarily cause harm in other countries, such as the failed
macroeconomic and development policies that the IMF, World Bank and WTO have
pressured other countries to adopt, would not get as much support from the
public as they do from the elite. The average American has a moral sense
that seems lacking in policy discussions here in Washington, where it is the
custom to appear amoral, almost like an insect.
In 2006, when television newscasts were showing regular footage of Iraqis
killed and maimed by explosions, Americans were horrified, and opposition to
the war increased substantially. It is only by keeping the ugly reality of
our foreign occupations away from the public that our government can even
get enough support to keep funding them.
Conversely, where there are independent citizens' organisations that can
exert influence, some of the crimes involved in US foreign policy can be
successfully challenged. For example, the American Civil Liberties Union
waged a five-year battle that led to attorney general Eric Holder's decision
this week to appoint a special prosecutor to look into some of the instances
of torture and abuse of prisoners by the CIA.
But the powerful and rigid institutional arrangements of our foreign policy
establishment, the sloth and weakness among the intelligentsia, as well as
the corruption from the interests of military contractors, makes it an
uphill battle for common sense to prevail.
It is not that the American people are so backward and ignorant, or
bellicose. Rather the main problem is that the public has so little input
into foreign policy decisions. That is what must change if we are to get
away from the prospect of never-ending wars and conflicts, and from a
foreign policy that continues to be one of the greatest obstacles to social
and economic progress in the world.
***
From: Sid Shniad
National Security Archive Update: August 25, 2009
THE CIA TORTURE REPORT: WHAT WERE THEY HIDING?
A Side-by-side Comparison of the Bush and Obama Administration Releases
THE TORTURE ARCHIVE: 83,000 Pages Now Online, Full-text and Indexed:
http://www.nsarchive.org/torture_archive
For more information contact:
Tom Blanton: 202/994-7000
Washington, DC, August 25, 2009 - Today, the National Security Archive
posted a side-by-side comparison of two very different versions of a 2004
report on the CIA's "Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation
Activities" by Agency Inspector General John Helgerson. Yesterday, the Obama
administration released new portions of the report including considerably
more information about the use of torture and other illegal practices by CIA
interrogators than a version of the report declassified by the Bush
administration in 2008.
New revelations include:
* Details on "specific unauthorized or undocumented torture techniques,"
including the use of guns, drills, threats, smoke, extreme cold, stress
positions, "stiff brush and shackles," waterboarding, mock executions and
"hard takedown."
* A look at the legal reasoning behind the Agency's use of "enhanced
interrogation techniques" and the development of Agency guidance on capture,
detention and interrogation.
* A brief discussion of the history of the CIA interrogation program,
including the "resurgence of interest in teaching interrogation techniques"
in the early 1980s "as one of several methods to foster foreign liaison
relationships."
* The conclusion that, while CIA interrogations had produced useful
intelligence, the "effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in
eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained" is not
"so easily measured."
The National Security Archive also announced today the publication of the
Torture Archive -- more than 83,000 pages of primary source documents (and
thousands more to come) related to the detention and interrogation of
individuals by the United States, in connection with the conduct of
hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the broader context of the
"global war on terror." The goal of the Torture Archive is to become the
online institutional memory for essential evidence on torture in U.S.
policy.
With support from the Open Society Institute and the JEHT Foundation since
2006, this initial launch of the Torture Archive includes the complete set
of declassified Combatant Status Review Tribunal and Administrative Review
Board files from the Pentagon, and thousands of documents resulting from
FOIA litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Archive
and other plaintiffs. The Torture Archive will continue to add documents as
they are released through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation or
Executive discretion.
The National Security Archive: http://www.nsarchive.org
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