November 30, 2007
Fourth World Journal, Volume 7, Number 2, November 2007
Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has actively
pursued a foreign policy inimical to the national
interests of the United States. To paraphrase Pat Buchanan
Acting on such beliefs, Washington adopted a Marxist attitude toward countries, cultures, and economies. Including its own. All are viewed as anachronisms; treated as obstacles to the spread of American democracy and free markets worldwide. Therefore, they must be revolutionized, standardized, and anesthetized. Each must be made non-national in form, capitalist in content. The affinity with Marxism extends to promoting the withering away of the state. Political borders, including those of the United States, are being abolished through free trade agreements, while the sovereign powers of states are being expropriated by international bureaucracies. All are preconditions for what Washington calls globalization, which mirroring Soviet foreign policy advocates that a powerful ideological state imposes a single political and economic order on the rest of the world. Capitalism replaced socialism as that ideal order and the United States supplanted the Soviet Union as the historic agent of change. Both attempts only unleashed political and economic havoc upon the world.
Contrary to assurances from Washington, outsourcing, privatization, and free markets restructured global economies for the benefit of the few, not the many. As a result noted Joseph E. Stiglitz, former Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, in The Overselling of Globalization:[PDF] "globalization has been accompanied by increased instability; close to a hundred countries have had crises in the past three decades. Globalization created economic volatility, and those at the bottom of the income distribution in poor countries often suffer the most."
The United States was not immune from this volatility and has experienced an economic blowback. By encouraging the relocation of U.S. manufacturing abroad Washington's policies have deindustrialized the U.S. economy. As a result of such relocations, coupled with outsourcing of U.S. jobs and the flood of illegal aliens into the domestic job market, more and more U.S. workers are being made redundant. In some sectors, overtime pay is being abolished. Unions are being busted. Pension contracts are being broken. Income disparity is widening. The Social Security System faces financial crisis. The health care system is going bankrupt. The education system is failing more and more families. Social safety nets established after the Great Depression are being cut. The national debt is ballooning and exceeds the amount of U.S. dollars in circulation. The middle class, on which representative government rests, is being crushed under the weight of wars, taxes, and institutionalized corruption. And things are only getting worse for Americans.
As Dr. Stiglitz observed
"some of the more ardent advocates of globalization advance a position not far different from social Darwinism; tough luck for the cultures that cannot survive in the face of the forces of globalization; they should be left to die, and the quicker the death the better".
This belief is shared by Washington. For it, the only "cultures" that count are those of transnational corporations. And cultures that "should be left to die" include America's. Proposals, at this point trial balloons, are advanced on merging the United States with Mexico and Canada in a North American Union and replacing the U.S. dollar with a new currency, called the amero. Laws and treaties are being selectively enforced. The U.S. Constitution is being shredded. Habeas corpus? Property rights? They have effectively been abolished. Freedom of speech is attacked. Dissent is criminalized. Freedom of assembly proscribed. Freedom of religion is guilt by association. Transparency and accountability in government are ignored. To all intents and purposes, the separations of powers, and checks and balances on government have been annulled. Under deregulation, health, safety, labor, and environmental laws are being eviscerated. This deconstruction of classical Western political liberalism, foundation of U.S. liberties, is what Washington is aggressively exporting to the rest of the world under the name of globalization.
To advance this process, the U.S. government resorts to wars, sanctions, and color-coded revolutions to topple uncooperative governments—Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Lebanon—and dismember inconvenient states—the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Serbia.
In doing so, Washington ignores the potential political blowback. It is oblivious to how its tactic of dismembering states can also be applied to a number of U.S. allies—Brazil, Canada, Chile, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, and the U.K.—or even to the United States, itself, in the case of the Aztlan movement.
It is now targeting Saudi Arabia and Iran for regime change and dismemberment even though this could destabilize the world's oil markets and trigger a worldwide recession. Under the pretext these interventions are to liberate Muslims, especially Muslim women, from the oppressive rule of Islamic fundamentalists, Washington seeks to control the oil and politics of both countries by exploiting religious and ethnic secessionist movements in each.
On July 10, 2002, Richard Perle, then Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, sponsored a presentation by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand Corporation analyst and former executive editor of Lyndon LaRouche's 'Executive Intelligence Review', who called for the U.S. to seize the oil wells in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province and proclaim that region an independent state.
In
2003, in An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror,
That year another Neo-Con, Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and contributing editor of "The Weekly Standard" envisioned a similar fate for Saudi Arabia with the United States "occupying the Saudi's oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region."
Iran also became an official target for dismemberment in 2003. The Pentagon met with Mahmud Ali Chehregani, leader of Southern Azerbaijan National Awakeness Movement. While Mr. Chehregani resides in the United States his opposition movement operates in Iran. He advocates the secession of "southern" Azerbaijan from Iran and its unification with "northern" Azerbaijan, the former Soviet Republic. According to the Washington Times, "Mr. Chehregani said in an interview that his group was working with other Iranian ethnic minority groups — such as the Iranian Kurds, Baluchis, Turkmen and Arabs — to form a common political front that could challenge Teheran." It reported "Mr. Chehregani said he had more than 50 meetings with senators and congressman, State Department officials, the White House to further his cause."
In October 2005, the American Enterprise Institute, a Neo-Con think tank, convened a conference chaired by a prominent proponent of regime change, Michael Ledeen, entitled "A Case for Federalism?" It was repudiated by exiled Iranian opposition groups in the United States as a call for the dismemberment of Iran along ethnic lines.
That same year, responding to Mr. Chehregani's call to form a common political front, Iranian Arab, Azeri, Baluch, Kurdish, and Turkmen organizations assembled in London where they issued a manifesto calling on Teheran to restructure the state along the lines of ethnic federalism. The U.S. State Department then met with the Iranian secessionists to support their demands for autonomy, while continuing to condemn similar secessionist movements in neighboring Turkey, Georgia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
On February 23, 2006, the Financial Times reported the U.S. Marine Corps confirmed its intelligence unit was actively analyzing the potential military benefits ethnic secessionist movements in Iran could hold for U.S. foreign policy.
This was followed by the April 17, 2006 issue of The New Yorker which published the article by Pulitzer-awarding winning journalist, Seymour Hersh entitled "THE IRAN PLANS: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?" In it, Mr. Hersh wrote: "If the order were to be given for an attack, the American combat troops now operating in Iran would be in position to mark the critical targets with laser beams, to insure bombing accuracy and to minimize civilian casualties. As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast….The broader aim, the consultant said, is to 'encourage ethnic tensions' and undermine the regime."
Then came the publication of "Blood Borders" by Ralph Peters in the June 2006 issue of Armed Forces Journal. "Armed Forces Journal is the leading joint service monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community…providing essential review and analysis on key defense issues for over 140 years." Publication confers authority and respectability on the views presented. In "Blood Borders", the author champions national independence for Azeri, Baluchi, Kurds, Pushtuns, and Arab Shia. He advocates redrawing the borders of virtually every country in the Middle East, not just Saudi Arabia and Iran, and provides his readers with the following map of his Pax Americana for the Middle East.
Influenced by thinkers such as Murawiec, Perle, Boot, Ledeen, and Peters, U.S. foreign policy was radicalized. It now fosters perpetual wars to enhance U.S. power and profits. First there was Afghanistan, then Iraq and Somalia, and next is possibly Iran. The aim of globalization, therefore, is not democracy and free markets, but U.S. world hegemony. And the means to hegemony is coercion and subversion at home, as well as, overseas. But the policy isn't working well. Washington's actions in the Middle East have enraged Muslims and alienated much of the world. As a result, the post-911 support and good will of most of the international community has been lost. Washington is not winning its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its ability to unilaterally impose its will on other countries is evaporating. Overextended militarily, financially and psychologically, its empire is reaching the breaking point. And the rest of the world knows it.
Washington's foreign policy has become the very definition of "waste", "futility," and "self-destruction." As the fates of Athens and Rome attest, no republic that acquires an empire remains a republic. And the price citizens pay for an empire has always been the loss of their liberties. Washington's decision to protect the United States by waging imperial wars abroad confirms the wisdom of that great American philosopher, Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us!"
About the Author
(Joseph E. Fallon is a freelance writer/researcher who resides in Rye, New York. He lived in Egypt where he pursued his advanced degree in Middle East studies and has traveled to Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. He received his Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and is a member of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Harriman Institute, Columbia University.)
