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Pluto Press - Saul Landau

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189 pages

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Description

This book is a scathing account of George W. Bush's America before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Saul Landau delves into the erosion of civil liberties and the proliferation of empire under the guise of pre-empting the scourge of terrorism. He reveals how Bush protects 'his' terrorists - those who perpetrate violence against Cuba, and to whom he owes his presidency. He also examines how Bush has appointed former officials to high level posts in his cabinet despite their membership in a conspiracy to sell weapons of mass destruction to Iran in the 1980s.

In 'declassifying' Bush's Empire, Landau dissects a post 9/11 world where deference to patriotism obliterates debate in Congress and the media. How can the notion of empire happily co-exist with the notion of a republic? In times like these, as dissenting voices are stifled and the public are denied access to the facts about their own security, Landau shows how democracy itself is under threat. He asks whether the already fragile world economy can survive in the new 'security' culture of the post-9/11 world.
Acknowledgements

Foreword: By George McGovern

Introduction: Before The Era Of Insecurity

Part I: Leaving The Republic Behind

Part II: The Empire Strikes Back

Part III: Between Iraq And A Hard Place: The Oily Empire Stomps Through The Middle East

Part IV: Latin America: The Imperial Economic Model, Obedience And Terrorism

The Imperial Economic Model

1. Corporate Globalization At Work In Mexico

2. Double Standards On Terrorism

Part V: Cuba- The Last Hold Out

Part VI: The Move To War

Final Thoughts: Stop Shopping, Looking In The Mirror And Worrying About Your Spare Tires And Cellulite And Make Your Own History

Endnotes

Index

Sujets

International Relations

Political Science

Histoire

USA

United States of America

General officer

Theory

General

États-Unis

History

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 octobre 2003
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849642071
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Pre-Emptive Empire

A Guide to Bush’s Kingdom

Saul Landau

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2003 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

www.plutobooks.com

The right of Saul Landau to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 2140 2 hardback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Landau, Saul. The pre-emptive empire : a guide to Bush’s kingdom / Saul Landau. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–2140–2 (hardback) 1. United States––Foreign relations––2001– 2. United States––Military policy. 3. United States––Politics and government––2001– 4. Bush, George W. (George Walker), 1946– 5. War on Terrorism, 2001– I. Title. E902.L36 2003 973.931––dc21

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester, England Printed and bound in the United States of America by Phoenix Color Corp.

2003011373

Acknowledgements Foreword:George McGovern

Contents

Introduction: Before the Era of Insecurity

Part I: Leaving the Republic Behind

Who is George W. Bush and Who Made Him President? The Bushes as Prizzis Later in January ... Clinton’s Farewell Address (Rejected by Some White House Staffer) Why Bush Bombed Baghdad

Part II: The Empire Strikes Back

September 11, 2001 First Post-9/11 Reflections on Government ‘Logic’ The Trivialized Logic of Our Time Failure Equals Bigger Budget, More Power: The Domestic Shift of Empire The Birth of the Department of Perpetual Anxiety Election Sorrows and Cold Analysis: Democrats Blew It Again but US Elections Have Little to Do with Democracy Bush Appoints Kissinger to Head Warren Commission on 9/11— Instead of Investigating Him for Terrorism The Bush Vision and the Culture of Power

Part III: Between Iraq and a Hard Place: The Oily Empire Stomps Through the Middle East

Face Facts: Israel is Losing a War and Her Ethics Israeli Orthodox Missionaries Recruit in Peru

Part IV: Latin America: The Imperial Economic Model, Obedience and Terrorism

Capitalism Waves the Flag and the Rules Argentina Got IMF’d Chile’s Ultra-Lite Socialist Model

vii viii

11 12 14 15 17

21 22 24

26 29

35 40

48 52

58 62 65

The Pre-Emptive Empire

Lies, Truth, Trivia and Transcendent Issues in Monterrey Vicente Fox Deserves the Flat Tire of the Year Award A Report on NAFTA and the State of the Maquilas The Environment and the Maquilas Breeding Crows Lessons from the Bay of Pigs US Double Standards on Terrorists ‘The Coup that Lacked Professionalism!’ the Expert Said

Part V: Cuba—The Last Hold Out

Religion, Revolution, Mobilization and Assassination: 43 Years After Echeverria A Cuban Diary: Part I A Cuban Diary: Part II

Part VI: The Move to War

Five Days in Iraq—Before the War The Chicken Hawks’ War Countering Amnesia: The Iraq Ploy and Resemblances to the Start of the Cold War Bush to Lead Coalition of the Willing—to be Bribed and Intimidated—and the Warmongering You Can’t Run an Empire by Republican Rules The Threats of Empire—Mexico, Watch Out! Technological Massacre in Iraq Also Leaves the UN in Critical Condition Iraq War: A Policy of Christian and Jewish Fundamentalism; Worse Lies Ahead

Final Thoughts:Stop Shopping, Looking in the Mirror and Worrying About Your Spare Tires and Cellulite and Make Your Own History

Notes Bibliography Books Web sites Index

67 72 74 79 82 85 87 93

103 107 110

120 129

132

137 141 146

150

155

161

165 171 171 172 173

Acknowledgements

I owe a debt to my colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam for having educated me and stimulated my brain for 30 plus years. They are extraor-dinarily wonderful people and places. The atmosphere provided by the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and especially by President Bob Suzuki, Dean Barbara Way and Vice-President Michael Berman allowed me the space and freedom to write—and do other things intellectual as well. My colleagues at Cal Poly also provided me with stimulating political conversation and support. The gutsy Francisco Aruca inspired me to write about some of the themes in the book for hisProgreso Weeklyweb site—a voice of reason from Cubans in Miami.ZNETandCounterpunch, outstanding web magazines, have published my essays and encouraged me to write. Two people stand out as special in the production of this book. Farrah Hassen, my student assistant, critically read the essays, did valuable research and all the necessary detail work. She is the absolute best. Rebecca Switzer offered her critical eye and caught some of my errors in thinking, writing and formulating. She is a great editor and also a source of inspiration. I owe all mistakes in the book to my own limitations and not to other people who tried their best to help me.

vii

Foreword

George McGovern

Saul Landau has always been a passionate patriot of the highest order. In all the years I have known him as a friend and admired him as a literary and political analyst, he has consistently sought to identify those policies and priorities that would best serve the interests of both the American people and the world’s citizens. A fearless critic of policies that contradict the US’s founding and enduring national ideals, he is an equally vigorous advocate of common sense reform in the liberal tradition of Tom Paine and Jefferson or the conservatism of a John Quincy Adams or an Edmund Burke. A steady stream of provocative essays, lectures, media programs, and films have poured from his independent and creative mind for many years. No one has ever experienced a conversation with Saul Landau without noticing his dancing eyes, his glad heart and his never failing search for the reality of things. The Preemptive Empireembraces all of these qualities. You will read of his growing conviction that George W. Bush, a congenial young man and the son of a wealthy, somewhat aristocratic family, has been taken over by an extreme right-wing cabal far removed from the mainstream of American society. In the author’s view, the advisers who now have the President’s ear represent neither of America’s two great political traditions—liberalism that traces its heritage to Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, or the conservatism of Hamilton, Adams, Taft and Eisenhower. Rather, writes Landau, the policies and priorities emanating from the Bush White House are the fruits of extremist, hard-line, rightist dreams— sometimes irresponsible dreams that neither Jefferson nor Hamilton, Roosevelt or Eisenhower, would recognize as sound public policy at home or abroad. The author—a widely experienced student and observer of poor Third World countries—believes the globalization policies of the last two decades haven been especially harsh in their impact both on American workers and their counterparts in the developing world. American workers have lost their jobs as corporations seeking low-wage labor and no strict environmental requirements have moved their plants to Third World countries. But when Saul Landau went to Mexico to visit with the workers hired there by run-away American corporations, he found workers employed under miserable conditions and at ruinously low wages. Some of the factories were preparing

viii

Foreword

to move to China where they would pay even lower wages to a newly converted peasant workforce. A long-time student of US–Cuba relations and a frequent visitor to Cuba, the author discusses what he believes to be the irrational and self-defeating nature of the US government’s policies toward Cuba since 1960. The reader is going to enjoy the stimulating, alternative policies proposed in this book. Saul Landau has always approached every subject of interest with two questions: What is the problem? What is the solution? This book is faithful to that time-tested equation.

Introduction: Before the Era of Insecurity

In this book, I offer extended journal excerpts as contemporary history. I chronicle and analyse some key events and ideas that have arisen in this watershed period of the US Empire, before and after the 9/11 attacks. By sharing with readers my immediate reflections, I hope to provide a prism through which readers can view the recent past as part of their present. I also refer to the more distant past as a constant reference point. After 9/11, as much of the world recoiled in shock, the US media began to televise a stupefying loop of images of the infamous day, interrupted by information bites provided by the US government. It offered the most trite of historical contexts for the events. In the newspaper editorials and TV and radio commentaries, the pundits tended to suggest courses for immediate action as if terrorism had no antecedents. The President should immediately avenge the dirty deeds! Few commented on the causes of the attacks or the significance of the President and Vice President going into hiding at that dramatic moment. Instead, TV news directors endlessly repeated the sci-fi-like pictures of the burning Tower One and the plane flying into Tower Two. Then came images of the Pentagon aflame. Citizens stared, mesmerized by the sight of the impossible, and shook their heads in disbelief. TV directed the public to divide the images into good and evil. Rudolph Giuliani, the Mayor of New York, took charge as a hero at the site of the catastrophe as Bush began to emerge from his two-day trance. For most of the country, the virtual had become the real. Yet, the mass media did nothing to channel the population toward dialogue, much less reflection on the events themselves. Instead, TV elicited sympathy for the dead, praise for the heroes and scorn for the villains. (Viewers saw the avengers and the rescuers as the good guys and the swarthy males wearing kefiyason their heads as the black hats.) In this way our media (I include here White House and State Department press secretaries) would conduct the post-traumatic orchestra. Few commentators asked: what did these fiends want? Some leftists talked conspiracy, including a role for the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. I sighed in despair. I thought of the people I knew inside the national security gates of the US and British governments, the opportunists

The Pre-Emptive Empire

who didn’t have the imagination to hatch such a diabolical plot but who after the events saw the inherent possibilities of expanding their own power and influence. Some of those scheming bureaucrats viewed 9/11 as the chance to adorn the most trivial of their departments’ issues with the sacred drapes of ‘national security,’ which they quickly hung over the windows of routine policies and procedures. They also took advantage of the vacuum of oversight during the traumatic post-9/11 days. Who would monitor them while the President directed all government energy to meet the crisis? A silent and unseen panic seemed to vibrate through the public, a kind of national anxiety attack encouraged by official pronouncements of impending danger. As the media predictably embellished all potentially bloody and explosive stories, the ambience of the heightened ‘security’ state reverberated through the halls of Congress. Without significant debate, the members, more panicked than the public, passed the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (October 25, 2001), aka the USA Patriot Act, enabling non-elected officials to assume increased bureaucratic control through the tightening of immigration procedures, the legalization of intrusion into personal privacy, including the probing of social organizations and their bank accounts, and the invasion of telephone and computer messaging. Within months, bureau-cracies had created their near perfect world, one of permanent emergency in which the CIA, FBI and the newly created Homeland Security Department could escalate their anxiety–security game. Yes, real terrorists destroyed buildings and thousands of people, but the very agencies that failed to prevent the 9/11 acts successfully covered their intelligence lapse by evoking fear. The mysterious and evil Al-Qaeda plotters, government officials repeated, would return. The citizenry now had to contain a fear of epic proportions in addition to already mounting anxieties caused by economic recession, such as concerns over job and healthcare 1 security. Then came the anthrax scare, which also baffled the FBI. In Washington DC, as veteran observers have learned, nothing succeeds like failure. Incompetent agencies, already unwieldy in size and with top-heavy hierarchies and inflated budgets, now possessed even larger budgets and were managed by the same lethargic, but more powerful, insiders. And the money, as all Washington insiders know, must get spent before the end of the fiscal year. Most important, since Congress and the courts had agreed, the citizens could no longer claim certain inalienable rights. The media, which feeds anxiety to the public as its own means of reproducing itself, loved the emergency atmosphere, but appeared indifferent to the citizens’ loss of rights.

Introduction: Before the Era of Insecurity

Its message to the panicky public: ‘You better watch TV or you might miss something vital in the daily hysteria about terrorism!’ Security had become incompatible with liberty. But this conclusion did not make headlines. The quotidian salvo of bloody and trivial stories makes concentration hard, the obvious obscure. Indeed, one can read daily newspapers from small towns or major metropolitan areas and watch and listen to the network and local news without ever hearing the obvious fact: a small group of fanatic Muslims successfully attacked the greatest empire in the history of the world. But Americans presume they live in a republic. The dictionary defines ‘republic’ as the antonym of ‘empire.’ The imperial government availed itself of the confusion and offered a transcendent message to cover the fact that it no longer even wore republican clothes: revenge!

EMPIRE VERSUS REPUBLIC: THE POLITICALLY UNCONSCIOUS AMERICAN

‘The brilliance of the American political system for 200 years lies in its giving the rich a license to steal from the poor and making them think they voted for it.’—Gore Vidal at a 1995 Washington DC dinner party at Marcus Raskin’s house

This book addresses the Empire in its most aggressive stage as it extends itself widely in the name of fighting terrorism and spreading democracy. It also focuses on the American public who have never thought of themselves as imperialists; nor have they acknowledged—except for an elite few—that they have benefited from their government’s two centuries of expansionist policies. In 2003, as California’s 34 million inhabitants wring their hands 2 in despair over a $35 billion budget deficit, hardly any of them know that in 2002 the economy generated by China’s 1.2 plus billion people had 3 finally equaled the size of California’s. Likewise, despite an avalanche of daily statistics from the media, the informed citizen has difficulty getting a clear explanation about who gets what from the trillion plus dollars in the national budget. Yet, with the advent of Internet access, industrious researchers can discover in seconds that the filthy rich will get even filthier and richer when the President, selected by the Republican dominated Supreme Court, rams his ten-year 4 $1.35 trillion tax-cut bill through Congress. If you listen to AM Talk Radio or glance at the headlines you will not get that story. Nor will reading the lead paragraphs or watching the anchors and reporters on the nightly news lead citizens to awareness. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ still dictates news priorities. When a rare piece of investigative reporting does appear, say unearthing a covert operation or a major business scandal, the