ROLLING BACK HISTORY

Radical Society, Jul 2003 by Thornton, William H

IT TURNS OUT THAT 9/11 WAS MORE of a two-edged sword than most of us could have imagined at the time. No doubt the United States was rendered less exceptional, more of a "normal" nation. But normalization on the side of defensive vulnerability would be more than matched by abnormalization on the side of offensive reaction. Two ages were simultaneously inaugurated: one of ubiquitous insecurity, certainly, but also one of awesome unipolarity. America was at once the winner and loser in a much revised New World Order. There was no separating the two, since to be on top of the global heap was to be the prime target of global resistance.

The full price of U.S. paramountcy did not immediately sink in, for most countries were inclined to join America's post-9/11 war dance. This martial consensus signaled the end of the globalist "end of history" and the advent of a highly bellicose neoglobalism. International relations were taken off automatic pilot. In the relatively placid 1990s it had been assumed that peace and prosperity could be purchased in a neoliberal two-for-one sale. Despite the Gulf War and a host of lesser interventions, the belief had persisted that the New World Order was the natural state of things to come. Minor tuneups might be required, but no major overhauls were anticipated. Pockets of disorder were expected to fade away by economic attrition.

All that changed in a flash with 9/11. The 1990s turned out to have been at best a respite between two warring ages. It was made abundantly clear that order would not simply unfold; it would have to be imposed. In the White House this revelation was so far from bad news that the challenge was not smiling too broadly in front of the cameras. At home and abroad, security took full priority over all the things the administration wanted to dispose of anyway. Securitization also enhanced the comparative advantage of America's military supremacy-this at a time when its economic supremacy was flagging. That gain in hard power was not offset by any major loss in soft power, since America was still swimming with the global tide. Just to make a point, however, Washington let the fact be known that it could go it alone or even swim against the tide if need be. NATO responded to 9/11 by invoking for the first time a provision of its founding treaty that construes an attack on any member as an attack on all. But, as if to put multilateralism in moth balls, deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz curtly vetoed that collective action, saying that if the U.S. needed help it would ask fork.1

Of course, it had to do just that. In neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was much thought given to the aftermath of war. But Americans hardly register these glaring setbacks. Bush, Inc. found its salvation in the new security imperative. Before 9/11 the administration faced not only prolonged recession and declining public trust in capitalist institutions, but growing awareness of the President's habit of wading maladroitly in the corporate mire. The war of retribution against the Afghan Taliban helped get his public image out of the muck, but it ended-as the Gulf War had for his father-far too soon for reelection purposes. Worse yet, the chief culprit got away cold. This was no minor setback, since by most accounts the whole affair had been justified as a "get Osama" operation.

Another Islamic demon would have to be targeted without delay. The war on terrorism's "second front" in Southeast Asia held out the promise of being a real boon for 2004, in the sense of being almost interminable, but it would be hard keeping such a simmering engagement on the front pages. The solution advanced by neoconservative hawks such as Wolfowitz and Vice President Dick Cheney was a preemptive strike on Bush Senior's old nemesis, Saddam Hussein. Saddam was the perfect inflatable target, given his penchant for sword rattling and his petulant defiance of UN weapons inspections, as if he had much to hide. But to justify a full-scale invasion, two obligatory threats-which Wolfowitz conflated into one3-had to be fairly well established: that Saddam had an ample WMD stockpile and/or solid links with Osama's Al Qaeda network. Norman Mailer well describes the improbability of the latter: "Each...had to distrust the other. From Saddam's point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man, a religious zealot, that is to say a loose cannon... .To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious brute....The two were in competition as well. Each would look to control the future of the Muslim world."4

All credible intelligence services had their doubts concerning both White House allegations. This was not an insurmountable obstacle, however, since the necessary intelligence could be obtained by other means. If Enron could make billions through "creative accounting," the Bush administration could make war through creative intelligence. It was simply a matter of setting up new intelligence operations for this precise purpose. This was not without precedent. Proto-neocons, including Wolfowitz, had used this "B-team" device in 1976 when the CIA failed to deliver a sufficiently frightful estimate of Soviet military strength. Now a special intelligence operation was set up inside the Pentagon to counter the CIA's cautious assessments. And to bring the CIA itself around, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld began openly discussing the merits of positioning a special undersecretary for intelligence within the Defense Department.5 That did it. Saddam was soon being cast not only as a nationalistic butcher, which he was, but as the mother of all global hazards. The Bush administration got its perfect target: an enemy that could be dependably blown away, even as the real enemy, Al Qaeda, enjoyed the game from the sidelines.