Imperial Designs: Resisting the Permanent War

Imperial Designs: Resisting the Permanent War

by Gary Dorrien

Parfet Distinguished Professor

Kalamazoo College

April 9, 2003

For three weeks we have been watching our country kill people and destroy things in Iraq, and today we witnessed the breaking of Saddam's vicious grip on that country. And so today, more than ever, we need to ask, What is this war about? And what will the United States do with its victory?

We are told that this war is necessary to defeat the kind of terrorism that "changed everything" for Americans on 9/11. But Iraq has no proven connection to international terrorism; we cannot diminish terrorism against the United States by incinerating Arab countries and causing most of the world to despise the United States; and if the architects of this war get their way, it will lead to further wars.

The Bush administration is loaded with officials who advocate an ideology of world dominion that its founders call "unipolarism." These officials have no intention of stopping with Iraq; some of them have demanded a war against Iraq since the mid-1990s; and they fervently believe that the U.S. must use its immense military and economic power to create an American-dominated world order. To understand how the ideology of Pax Americana became the foreign policy of the United States, we need to recall some Cold War history.

In 1947 the intellectual godfather of American neoconservatism, former Trotskyist James Burnham, argued in his book The Struggle for the World that World War III had already begun and that the United States could not win this war--the Cold War against Communism--if it did not adopt an aggressive ideology of its own. America's foreign policy establishment was dominated by liberal internationalists and realists who shunned ideological warfare, Burnham argued. What was needed was an assertive American ideology that proclaimed the superiority of the American system, the need to fight against Communism everywhere in the world, and the need to establish American military bases in every region of the world. In the 1950s a new kind of American conservatism, one that emphasized geopolitics, military expansion, and anti-communist ideology, based itself on these claims.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the neoconservatives built a powerful intellectual movement and won numerous top-level positions in the Reagan administration. Repeatedly they insisted that the Soviet Union was superior to the United States in nuclear capability, military strength, political efficiency, and ideological effectiveness. Often they warned that democracies have great disadvantages in competing with totalitarian regimes for world power. Some of them blasted Reagan for negotiating with the Soviets, and as a group, they were the last believers that Communism works. Thus the neoconservatives were not well prepared in the early 1990s for the disintegration of the Soviet Union. I wrote my book The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology during this period, when some of my subjects were suffering from severe intellectual shock. In conducting my interviews for the book, I found it almost embarrassing to ask them, "What happened to the towering, world-conquering colossus described in your writings?"

But most of the neoconservatives quickly recovered, and that is my point. While the Soviet Union unraveled and then disintegrated, some neoconservatives opted for realism or liberal internationalism, but most of them opted for a new ideology of American domination. They argued that the "unipolarist moment" had arrived. More than ever, the United States needed to use its immense military and economic power to America's maximal advantage. A major neoconservative leader, Norman Podhoretz, told me that younger neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Charles Krauthammer should lead the way; they had the youth and ambition to launch a new crusade and defend it from its critics. Krauthammer coined the term "unipolarism" to describe the movement's ideology, and though the term didn't catch on, the idea was seized upon by nationalistic unilateralists, democratic globalists, foreign policy hawks who needed a rationale for increased military spending, and old-style imperialists.

Not all the neoconservatives went along with this transition. A few of them defected from the cause, notably Edward Luttwak and Michael Lind; and some rediscovered their realism, such as Irving Kristol and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Kristol characteristically opined that "no civilized person in his right mind wants to govern Iraq." But the key players made the transition to unipolarism: Elliot Abrams, John R. Bolton, William F. Buckley, Jr., Stephen Cambone, Dick Cheney, Angelo Codevilla, Eliot Cohen, Devon Cross, Eric Edelman, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, Lawrence F. Kaplan, Robert Kaplan, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, I. Lewis Libby, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Donald Rumsfeld, Ben Wattenberg, James Woolsey. In his article "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," Krauthammer spelled out the unipolarist idea: "America's purpose should be to steer the world away from its coming multipolar future toward a qualitatively new outcome--a unipolar world" shaped by American power.

Wattenberg urged nervous politicians not to be shy about asserting American superiority: "We are the first universal nation. 'First' as in the first one, 'first' as in 'number one.' And 'universal' within our borders and globally." Because the United States is uniquely universal, he reasoned, it has a unique right to impose its will on other countries on behalf of an American-style world order. With a lighter touch, Wattenberg declared, "A unipolar world is a good thing, if America is the uni." Muravchik put it plaintively: "For our nation, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. Our failure to exert every possible effort to secure [a new world order] would be unforgivable. If we succeed, we will have forged a Pax Americana unlike any previous peace, one of harmony, not of conquest. Then the twenty-first century will be the American century by virtue of the triumph of the humane idea born in the American experiment."

All of this was in the early 1990s, while the first Bush administration argued internally about unipolarism. In 1990, faced with demands for a sharp decrease in American military spending, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney commissioned Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and Eric Edelman to devise a new strategic plan for the United States. Wolfowitz outlined a global empire strategy consisting of unilateral military action, new military bases in areas of strategic and economic interest, and the preemptive use of force. But the first Bush administration was dominated by moderately conservative realists who spurned Wolfowitz's aggressive vision of global Americanism, and the Wolfowitz strategy sparked an embarrassing controversy for the Bush administration after it was leaked to the New York Times. The more traditional conservatism of Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft won the day, though Powell made important contributions to unipolarist ideology.

After Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, the unipolarists refined their strategic vision and regrouped organizationally. Under the leadership of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol, and Donald Kagan, the unipolarists launched a think tank in 1997--the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)--and subsequently forged an alliance with George W. Bush. In 1998, the PNAC unipolarists wrote a letter to President Clinton that called for a preemptive war against Iraq. Two months before the presidential election of 2000, the PNAC unipolarists issued a position paper that spelled out the particulars of a global empire strategy: repudiate the ABM treaty, build a global missile defense system, develop a strategic dominance of space, increase defense spending by $20 billion per year to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, establish permanent new forces in Southern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, and reinvent the U.S. military to meet expanded obligations throughout the world. When Bush won the presidency, the unipolarists came with him: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, John R. Bolton, Stephen Cambone, Eliot Cohen, Devon Cross, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis Libby, Daniel Pipes, and James Woolsey.

This time they had the upper hand. The Bush administration rejected the Kyoto Protocol, withdrew from the ABM Treaty, abrogated the Land Mine Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and denounced the International Criminal Court. On some issues the Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld/Perle group didn't get its way--they wanted military confrontation in the Middle East--but after the fiendish attacks of 9/11, they took control of Bush's foreign policy. Three days after 9/11, Wolfowitz declared at a press conference that the U.S. government was committed to "ending states who sponsor terrorism." That remark earned a public rebuke from Colin Powell, who countered that America's goal was to "end terrorism," not launch wars on sovereign states. But the differences between these objectives soon blurred in the administration's foreign policy.

Wolfowitz had argued for years that the U.S. should overthow Iraq; immediately after 9/11, he went to work on President Bush, repeatedly pressing for an invasion. He pressed so hard and persistently that Bush reportedly became irritated with him. The president worried that there was no connection between 9/11 and Iraq; Wolfowitz replied that even if that turned out to be true, overthrowing Saddam was the key to changing the political culture of the Middle East. Other unipolarists in the administration agreed with Wolfowitz, who cast the war on terrorism as a world-wide crusade. On September 20th, President Bush declared that any nation that sponsors, aids, or harbors terrorists is an enemy of the United States. One year later he declared the right of the United States to wage pre-emptive wars. The following month, Wolfowitz asserted: "This fight is a broad fight. It's a global fight...that must be pursued everywhere."

Many of the unipolarist leaders are now in the Bush administration, and the rest are more free to say what they think. Persistently, their talk is way beyond Iraq. Donald Kagan says that the way to stifle Arab criticism is to show that the U.S. will not hesitate to use overwhelming force against Arab governments. Angelo Codevilla says that the United States must overthrow the governments of Iraq, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority as soon as possible. Frank Gaffney says that the U.S. must overthrow Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinian Authority and that Bush needs to sweep away most of the longtime professionals in the State Department. Norman Podhoretz says that "we ought to 'kill' the regimes in Iraq, Syria, and the PLO," that the U.S. must overthrow Iran and Lebanon as soon as possible, and that Egypt and Saudi Arabia belong on the list of enemy targets. Michael Ledeen says, "once the tyrants in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia have been brought down, we will remain engaged." William F. Buckley, Jr. says that the U.S. is in a world war against all nations that shelter terrorists and that Iraq is merely a "manageable" opening target. Robert Kaplan remarks: "The real question is not whether the American military can topple Saddam's regime but whether the American public has the stomach for imperial involvement."

It has long been assumed in these circles that Iraq, Iran and North Korea constitute an "axis of evil," as President Bush called these nations last year, and last October, Wolfowitz singled out Indonesia, Pakistan, and Yemen as high-priority targets of the fight against terrorism. Much of the in-house debating among unipolarists concerns the ranking of Syria, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority on this list.

The unipolarist ideology, by whatever name, constitutes a fourth basic perspective in foreign policy doctrine. Liberal internationalists seek to secure world peace and stability by securing collective agreements from nation states to comply with international law; realists seek to ensure a balance of power among competing regimes; principled anti-interventionists renounce the use of military force for all reasons besides self-defense; unipolarism is essentially a nationalistic and militaristic version of the liberal internationalist vision of world democracy. To the unipolarists, America must not shrink from its moral and ideological obligation to establish a new Pax Americana, because the United States is the exemplar and guardian of the liberal democratic idea. No other nation has the means or stature to put tyrants in their place or uphold the rules of a liberal democratic world order. The unipolarists emphasize the categorical difference between classic imperialism, which ruled by direct conquest and the subjugation of populations, and aggressive American leadership, which advocates democracy and freedom, not empire.

Krauthammer has recently capsulized the argument: "The new unilateralism argues explicitly and unashamedly for maintaining unipolarity, for sustaining America's unrivaled dominance for the foreseeable future...The future of the unipolar era hinges on whether America is governed by those who wish to retain, augment and use unipolarity to advance not just American but global ends, or whether America is governed by those who wish to give it up--either by allowing unipolarity to decay as they retreat to Fortress America, or by passing on the burden by gradually transferring power to multilateral institutions as heirs to American hegemony. The challenge to unipolarity is not from the outside but from the inside. The choice is ours. To impiously quote Benjamin Franklin: History has given you an empire, if you will keep it."

The Pax Americanists who demanded the present war against Iraq believed that Iraqis would revolt against Saddam Hussein and welcome the American troops as liberators. They also believed that this time the United States would have to face up to the necessity of overthrowing Saddam's regime and overhauling the country's political system.

They were right that Iraq’s military is weak, unskilled, poorly maintained, and very badly led, but they were wrong about the unwillingness of Iraqis to resist the invaders, and thus much of the country is now utterly destroyed. Against those who warned that even oppressed Iraqis who hated Saddam would fight the invaders, the Bush administration based its war plan on the expectation of a quick victory that caused minimal destruction. Against the estimate of Army General Eric Shinseki that the postwar occupation would require several hundred thousand troops, Wolfowitz insisted that Shinseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark" and that no more than a hundred thousand troops would be needed.

Now that the occupation phase has nearly begun, Shinseki and Wolfowitz are still holding to these positions, with Shinseki pointing to the devastation and social turmoil of Iraq and Wolfowitz trying to hold down the cost of an extremely expensive venture. On the ground that the costs of the war and occupation are unknowable, administration officials have persistently refused to discuss such costs or build them into their already disastrous fiscal projections. They have also been reticient about their postwar plans for Iraq, in this case at least partly because they really don't know what they are going to do.

One postwar option is to keep Iraq centralized and authoritarian, throttling the country's democratic forces. Another is to break the country into Sunni, Shia, and Kurd entities, perhaps with a tripartite power-sharing leadership at the top. Another is to build a Western-style democracy with national elections. Though one might suppose from President Bush's rhetorical glosses on the subject that the U.S. will support the third option, one might be wrong.

Because of its oil, Iraq will not be treated as shabbily as Afghanistan, which the Bush administration has betrayed by refusing to pay for postwar reconstruction. In Iraq the United States will take control, pour enormous sums into the country's physical and political rebuilding, and cope with the kind of problems that Israel has experienced as an occupying power in Lebanon and Palestine. On this much the unipolarists agree about how to assert American power in the Middle East; otherwise their ideological and temperamental divisions are showing.

Many of the Pax Americanists are hyper-nationalists who emphasize military power and geopolitics, give short shrift to diplomacy, and care mostly (or solely) about the economic and security interests of the United States and Israel. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Cheney, and Perle belong to this group, though Wolfowitz shows more interest in democracy-building and other political factors; Rumsfeld's disregard for nation-building is notorious. This group is the dominant force in the Bush administration and the unipolarist movement.

A second group of unipolarists is more concerned about diplomacy and securing the support of the United Nations, and it regards itself as being more realistic than the ideologues of the first and third groups. The second group gives lip-service to world democracy, when required, but it fears that democracy-building in a place like Iraq would be dangerous and wasteful. In current debates, Powell, Henry Kissinger, and most State Department officials, especially the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, belong to this group.

A third group of Pax Americanists, the more liberally-oriented democratic globalists, contend that exporting democracy should be one of the central purposes of American foreign policy and that the U.S. should commit itself to the very expensive and ambitious task of building American-style democracies throughout the Middle East. This group views itself as being more principled and idealistic than the hyper-nationalists and realists; prominent democratic globalists include Peter Beinart, Joshua Muravchik, and Lawrence F. Kaplan.

Though Powell fits awkwardly into the unipolarist movement, he remains a key player within it. In the first Bush administration, Powell resisted Wolfowitz's call for a strategy of global empire, and in the current administration he has played a leading role in resisting the aggressive unilateralism of Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. But Powell also played a major role in taking the U.S. into war with Iraq, and in the first Bush administration he made significant contributions to unipolarist ideology. As Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he insisted that the top priority of the U.S. military was to maintain America's status as an unrivalled superpower. Appearing before the House Armed Services Committee in 1992, Powell declared, "I want the United States to be the bully on the block." He reasoned that if the U.S. maintained overwhelming military power, it would get its way in the world most of the time through intimidation and economic incentives alone; and when the U.S. had to fight, it would smash the enemy with overpowering force, not get bogged down in Vietnam-like quagmires. The world must be taught, Powell asserted, that "there is no future in trying to challenge the armed forces of the United States." Toward this end, Powell provided the rationale for the U.S. to maintain its Cold War defense budget after the Cold War was over: that the U.S. had to be ready to fight two regional wars at the same time.

Though many unipolarists disparage Powell's diplomatic side, they share and are virtually defined by his insistence on maintaining and using overwhelming power. The Powell Doctrine is about the projection and use of overpowering might, and the unipolarists are very taken with American power, though Rumsfeld believes that the Powell Doctrine does not sufficiently use the new war-fighting technology. The New Republic editorializes: "We are staggeringly huge. The century that has just passed was not the American century. This is the American century, and everybody knows it, and everybody loves it or hates it." The unipolarists want us to love the dream and reality of American empire. To believe in America is to believe that what is good for America is good for the world. Power often corrupts, the New Republic allows, but it can also be ennobling when it serves high-minded ends: "The notion that American power has never been so employed and can never be so employed is a sinister lie, and a counsel of despair to the hurting regions of the world. In many of its uses, American power has been the indispensable instrument of the ideal of freedom--which is a universal ideal, not an American ideal; a universal ideal that it has been an American privilege to serve."

This is the song of American unipolarism in its idealistic voice; on occasion President Bush sings this way, to the consternation of his State Department. Like President Bush, the New Republic democratic globalists exhort that there is nothing contradictory about being a liberal superpower, if the U.S. is that superpower: "It is not a contradiction, it is a consummation...We still believe in progress, and so we still believe in America." In Iraq, the democratic globalists want the U.S. to organize a brief occupation, strengthen its relationship with Ahmed Chalibi and the dissident groups belonging to the Iraqi National Congress, make a deep purge of Saddam’s regime and army, and build a democratic society with national elections. To them, the models for a democratic Iraq are Japan and Germany after World War II.

But Iraq is more like Yugoslavia than Japan. Yugoslavia and Iraq were cobbled together from multiple states of the defeated Austrian and Ottoman empires after World War I. Even a decade of American occupation in Iraq might simply delay the wars of secession and ethnic conflict that are inevitable there. The ruling Sunnis make up only 17 percent of the population, and Sunni tribalism is utterly brutal, having produced Saddam Hussein. The Kurds make up 23 percent of the population, and they want their own country, together with the Turkish Kurds. Sixty percent of the country is Shiite, and while Iraqi Shiites have an edgy relationship with the Persian Shiites of Iran--Iraq's most hated enemy--they are nonetheless linked ideologically and religiously. The Iraqi Shiites have bitterly opposed Saddam and the United States, and in Lebanon, the Shiite "party of God," Hezbollah, has urged Arabs to fight the Americans as the greater of two evils. All of this stands in the way of the democratic globalists' call for a brief U.S. occupation, as does their demand for a deep purge of Saddam’s regime and army.

Thus the democratic globalist strategy terrifies the U.S. State Department and virtually all Arab leaders, because it delivers Iraq to the country's Shiite majority or a coalition of Shiites and Kurds, and it raises the prospect of popular revolutions throughout the Arab world. Saudi Arabia is governed by a corrupt Wahabi Sunni monarchy that oppresses a ten percent Shiite minority; Syria is governed by a minority Alawite regime that oppresses a 74 percent Sunni population, and which, politically, belongs to the same Baath Party that has ruled Iraq; Bahrain is governed by a Sunni regime that rules over a 70 percent Shia majority. In a region where anti-Americanism is intensifying among popular majorities, the U.S. State Department does not share the democratic globalist vision of what American power should do in the Middle East. It also wants a stronger role for the United Nations in postwar Iraq than other administration officials will allow. Though some key players, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, want the United Nations to play a major role in managing the postwar politics of Iraq, most of the Bush administration unipolarists are determined to restrict the U.N. role to humanitarian assistance.

For the past decade the State Department and CIA have been feuding with the Iraqi National Congress. State Department officials have made disparaging remarks about INC leaders and have refused to support INC initiatives. They don’t trust Chalabi, who was found guilty of bank fraud by a Jordanian court in 1992 after the collapse of Petra Bank, which he founded; Chalabi was sentenced, in absentia, to twenty-two years in prison. State Department officials also believe that Chalabi is too much of a dandy, and an outsider, to be credible as a political leader in postwar Iraq; he has not lived in Iraq since 1956. More importantly, the State Department does not want to create a powerful ally of the Iranian government (which rules out genuine national democracy), and it opposes a federal structure with regional autonomy (which rules out the former Lebanon model). Diplomats prize stability, and Powell has declared that stability in the Middle East will not be aided by allowing Iraq to be “fragmented into separate Sunni, Shia, and Kurd political entities."

This is the pertinent background to recent stories about feuds within the Bush administration. In lengthy articles on March 31st and April 1st, the Washington Post reported that bitter fights are taking place between Pentagon leaders and the State Department. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are insisting that America should pursue its interests unilaterally and give a marginal role to the United Nations, while Powell and his deputies are urging that macho confrontation cannot be the basis of America's relationship to the world. The Pentagon wanted to install James Woolsey as head of the Iraqi information agency, but the White House noted that the former head of the CIA might not be the best person for this job. The Post reports that the realpolitikers of the first Bush administration--Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and Lawrence Eagleburger—have warned President Bush that his reliance on Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Perle is damaging America's international image and the long-term interests of the Republican party. On April 1st, the New York Times carried a similar story on the rise of opposition within the Republican party to the unipolarist agenda.

Moderate Republicans are not the only ones who fear that the Bush unipolarists have become too powerful. The democratic globalists have provided political cover for the unipolarist cause, presenting it as a struggle for world democracy, but today they are alarmed that Bush administration rhetoric about democracy in Iraq is mere boilerplate. A federal structure with some degree of regional autonomy for the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds would be democratic, they urge, but a centralized unitary state is not. Democracy means coming to terms with Chalabi and the Shiite majority, not imposing a Sunni figurehead to provide political cover for a long-term American occupation. Lawrence F. Kaplan warns: "The battle over federalism versus unitary central government and an American military occupation combined with Iraqi democratic rule versus an all-out American occupation is a conflict about whether, not when, to democratize Iraq. For behind the State Department's hand-wringing lurks a narrow realpolitik, brought to us by the same Metternichs who in the name of 'stability' insisted that we not upset the Iraqi order a decade ago."

The democratic globalists fear that Bush 43 is preparing to repeat Bush 41’s betrayal of the democratic hope in Iraq, this time in the name of fighting for it. Administration officials are talking about democracy, but planning a long-term American occupation in which retired General Jay Garner heads the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the State Department fills the education and trade offices, and the Pentagon makes the remaining departmental appointments. The second Bush administration clearly doesn’t have its act together on the all-important question of what to build in Iraq, but to the extent that a clear picture exists, it consists of a strong central state under U.S. control that throttles the democratic oppositionist groups, gives a minimal role to the United Nations, relies on mid-ranking officials of Saddam's regime, and awards rebuilding contracts to U.S. companies. Focusing on the political parts of this prescription, Kaplan responds: "This would amount to a betrayal of the Iraqi people, the avowed purpose of the war, and this country's most cherished ideals."

"The avowed purpose of the war" is a phrase worth remembering. Even if American troops discover chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, the Bush administration will be forced by the circumstances of occupation and postwar turmoil to increasingly invoke its ultimate reason for invading and occupying Iraq--that the transformation of the Middle East required it. Saddam is a sadistic thug and totalitarian wannabe who gassed the Kurds in 1988, when he was an ally of the United States. His regime was despicably abusive toward its people, yet in this respect it was not much different from Syria, where the same party is in power; or Saudi Arabia, which has an atrocious human rights record; or North Korea, which has a huge army and the bomb. Saddam might have retained some mustard gas or anthrax, but the same thing is true of other governments that detest the United States.

President Bush and his officials have shown little concern about the costs of the war and the occupation, because to them, occupation is a necessary means to U.S. dominion over the Middle East. Since they couldn't say that, and they can't even agree on what it means, they stumbled in explaining why the United States had to go to war. They began by claiming that we had to overthrow Saddam because he was building a nuclear bomb. That didn't pan out, so they switched to the claim that he was connected to terrorism. That didn't pan out either, so they switched to the possession of weapons of mass destruction. They found no hard evidence of that either, so finally Americans were called to war because Saddam failed to cooperate with inspectors.

Today the United States spends as much on defense as the next fifteen nations combined. When military spending by U.S. allies is excluded, the United States is spending nearly twice as much on "defense" as the rest of the world combined. American troops are stationed in 75 countries; each branch of the armed services has its own air force; and in the next year we may learn if the U.S. can occupy Iraq and fight another war at the same time. After 9/11, most Americans are quite happy to spend more on warfare than the next fifteen nations combined. They trust in the assurance of our leaders that if we overwhelm our enemies and kill enough of them, we will be safe.

The realism that we need has to do something about that illusion. True realism distinguishes between international police action to curb terrorism and wars of aggression against governments and their civilian populations. Realism tells us that there will always be bad leaders that have to be coped with and contained. A war fought for the reasons that we are being given leads inevitably and necessarily to more wars, exactly as its advocates insist. Last week James Woolsey declared at U.C.L.A. that the war against Iraq marks the beginning of World War IV--he counts the Cold War as World War III--and that America must now fight against Syria, Iran, and Iranian-supported Hezbollah. Woolsey is a close friend of Wolfowitz's and is expected to play a major administrative role in the occupation of Iraq.

This war will deliver an immense relief to many Iraqis who suffered under Saddam, but it will also create enormous problems for America's relationship to the rest of the world. We have been led to war against Iraq by people who know very well that this war leads to further wars and that even a $400 billion defense budget barely begins to pay for Iraq. The economic costs of unilateral war, occupation, and reconstruction will be staggering. The unipolarists have not calculated the economic and political costs of occupying Iraq, and in their eagerness to unleash horrific violence against a nation that has not attacked us they have set terrible precedents of disregarding international law.

I have long assumed that Saddam still possesses some chemical weapons, and I never doubted that he was evil enough to use them again, though former UNSCOMB inspector Scott Ritter insists that 95% of his capacity to use them was destroyed in the 1990's, and we have not found nor been attacked by any weapons of mass destruction. If he had them, as was claimed, it is very strange that he did not use them. But Saddam was not chosen as America's first target of preemptive war because he threatened the United States. He was chosen because he was too weak to have to be dealt with diplomatically, and because his regime was the key to the unipolarist vision of a Middle East transformed by American power.

To highlight the importance of unipolarist ideology in the Bush administration is not to claim that Wolfowitz and his colleagues have foisted some secret conspiracy upon the American public. Since 1990, the unipolarists have clearly, publicly, and emphatically argued for a global empire strategy. Though some of them are adept spinners in office, for the most part they are straightforward ideologues, and the Project for a New American Century is simply one of their organizational vehicles.

In the interest of inclusivity I have kept my religious feelings out of this talk, but I must at least acknowledge that my own motivation as a participant in the peace movement is primarily religious. From a Christian standpoint it is supposed to be nearly impossible to morally justify the murderous violence of war. The world worships power, but Jesus lived and taught the way of agape—the power of self-sacrificial divine love. To the early church the cross symbolized the fellow-suffering way of Christ, which contradicted the way of violence and domination.

It is painfully true that the Christian church did not sustain this meaning of the cross after the fourth century. To many people, the cross became a symbol of domination and persecution. Nonviolence is supposed to be constitutive in Christianity, yet in recent months I have been asked repeatedly to explain why so many church leaders, including the pope, have opposed the war. It isn’t what people expect. How very sad.

President Bush is fond of declaring that America invades and fights only to liberate, never to conquer. I do not doubt that he is sincere in perceiving himself and his country in this way, for this self-perception is widely held in the United States. The United States was founded on a genocidal conquest, but unlike nearly every country in Europe and the Middle East, the United States itself has never been occupied, and many Americans actually believe that we should be welcomed as liberators whenever we invade another country. For decades Americans felt safe from the problems and dangers of other countries, often while being oblivious to the suffering that we caused in the world. On 9/11 we lost the former illusion, but our leaders are invoking that experience to reinforce our hubris and obliviousness. This war has been and will be tremendously popular; President Bush will get a huge political windfall from it; and many Americans will feel safer. President Mubarak of Egypt offers a different perspective: Before the war there was one Osama bin Laden, Mubarak observes; now there will be a hundred.

The administration's decision to single out Iraq began with Wolfowitz, who convinced Bush that it didn't matter if Saddam had any real connection to international terrorism; his evil regime deserved to be overthrown in any case. But the Bush administration believes the same thing about Iran and North Korea, and in recent weeks it has elevated Syria to top-enemy status. The same arguments that rationalized a preemptive invasion of Iraq will be applied to other nations. Pope John Paul II calls this "the logic of war"; unipolarists call it "draining the swamp."

Because this is a permanent war, it is not too late for Americans to say, no, you are draining my country of its good name and its claim to the good will of other nations. I don't want my country, the country that I love, fighting wars of terror and destruction in the Middle East. I don't want my country to be dragged into wars that don't come remotely close to being a last resort. Not in my name do you create thousands of terrorists and wage a permanent war in the name of making America safe.