Sparsely, Sage and Timely
George ‘Custer’ Bush
By David V. Mitchell
Marshall’s Allen Scott, a native of Tasmania, was in Australia earlier this fall working on a house, and when he tore up some old linoleum, he found the floor underneath covered with old editions of The Mercury, a newspaper published in Hobart, Australia. How times do change.
Oldtimers will recall that on July 22, 1946, Jewish terrorists led by Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion (later admired by Americans as two of Israel’s more-enlightened prime ministers) helped direct the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 92 people and injuring 58 others.
Naturally, the bombing drew international outcries, and the lead story on Page 1 of the Aug. 5, 1946, Mercury sounded as if it could have been written yesterday (with only a couple of changes). The story, which was headlined: "Jewish Terror Leaders Escape Net, Tel Aviv Hunt," began: "Terrorists responsible for the King David Hotel outrage in Jerusalem escaped the intensive dragnet put out by British Army and Palestine police in Tel Aviv last week. Within 24 hours after the withdrawal of the British troops, the secret radio, ‘Voice of Israel,’ was back on the air again, declaring that the Jewish underground was unbroken."
I point this out not to justify terrorism by anyone but merely to note how fleeting the political world’s sense of "outrage" really is.
Perhaps the most amazing politics I’ve seen since the Nixon Administration is Bush the younger’s Administration. First, the US Supreme Court, with one of its justices married to a campaign manager for Bush, steals the election from Al Gore.
Now it’s come to light that the administration’s plans to go to war in the Middle East were drafted well before Bush took office and more than a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.
As stories in London’s Sunday Herald and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently revealed, the cadre around Bush more than two years ago dreamed up a scheme for the American military to become "the cavalry on the new American frontier." In short, the Bush Administration is knowingly setting out to play George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
To quote Sunday Herald writer Neil Mackay, "A secret blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure ‘regime change’ even before he took power in January 2001."
For 400 years, the ancient Romans maintained peace throughout much of the Western World, an era called the Pax Romana, and apparently administration officials have long dreamed of creating a "global Pax Americana."
A document outlining this "American grand strategy" was written in September 2000 for a neo-conservative think-tank called Project for the New American Century. The authors, as reporter Mackay notes, were "Dick Cheney (now vice president), Donald Rumsfeld (defense secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), George W. Bush’s younger brother Jeb, and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff)."
Talk about chutzpah! The document, which is called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources for a New Century, says the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
As for Iraq, it notes, "The United States has for decades sought to play a more-permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
Reporter Mackay added that the September 2000 document "pinpoints North Korea, Libya, Syria, and Iran as dangerous regimes and says their existence justifies the creation of a ‘worldwide command-and-control system.’"
As Jay Bookman, the deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution observes, immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack, Bush trotted out a defense policy nearly identical to the 2000 New Century report.
"In essence, [the Bush policy] lays out a plan for permanent US military and economic domination of every region on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of our global military presence....
"The cost of such a global commitment would be enormous. In 2000, we spent $281 billion on our military, which was more than the next 11 nations combined. By 2003, our expenditures will have risen to $378 billion."
Backers of the Bush policy acknowledge all this military spending by the US will probably encourage our allies to cut back on their own military spending so that – unlike the US – they can take care of domestic needs, such as healthcare. Responding to this inequity, professor Donald Kagan of Yale, a co-chairman of the New Century report blasély observed, "If [our allies] want a free ride, and they probably will, we can’t stop that."
Professor Kagan’s remarks, in fact, reveal the amount of fantasy in Bush Administration policy. "You saw the movie High Noon?" he asks. "We’re Gary Cooper."
Absurd as it sounds, the Bush Administration – no less than the Reagan Administration – thinks more like Hollywood actors than international statesmen. We now have a foreign policy that – in the words of one of its authors – resembles a 1952 film fantasy! Doesn’t the Bush Administration realize that defeating real adversaries is never as simple as in the movies? In real life, Sioux warriors led by Chief Sitting Bull were on June 25, 1873, able to kill five companies (265 members) of the US cavalry – primarily because their leader, General Custer, had become too cavalier about warfare.