Why Americans Must End America's Self-Generating Wars な ぜアメリカ
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Volume 10 | Issue 36 | Number 2 | Article ID 3819 | Aug 28, 2012 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars な ぜアメリカ人はアメリカが自ら引き起こす戦争をやめるべきか Peter Dale Scott French translation isavailable ; produces more terrorists than it eliminates. German translation isavailable ; And it has become inextricably combined with Spanish translation isavailable ; America’s earlier self-generating and hopelessly unwinnable war, the so-called War Italian translation isavailable on Drugs. The most urgent political challenge to the The two self-generating wars have in effect world today is how to prevent the so-called become one. By launching a War on Drugs in “pax Americana” from progressively Colombia and Mexico, America has contributed degenerating, like the 19th-century so-called to a parastate of organized terror in Colombia “pax Britannica” before it, into major global (the so-called AUC, United Self-Defense Forces warfare. I say “so-called,” because each “pax,” of Colombia) and an even bloodier reign of in its final stages, became less and less terror in Mexico (with 50,000 killed in the last peaceful, less and less orderly, more and more six years).1 By launching a War on Terror in a naked imposition of belligerent competitive Afghanistan in 2001, America has contributed power based on inequality. to a doubling of opium production there, To define this prevention of war as anmaking Afghanistan now the source of 90 achievable goal may sound pretentious. But the percent of the world’s heroin and most of the 2 necessary steps to be taken are above all world’s hashish. achievable here at home in America. And what is needed is not some radical and untested new Americans should be aware of the overall policy, but a much-needed realisticpattern that drug production repeatedly rises reassessment and progressive scaling back of where America intervenes militarily – two discredited policies that are themselves Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 60s, Colombia new, and demonstrably counterproductive. and Afghanistan since then. (Opium cultivation also increased in Iraq after the 2003 US 3 I am referring above all to America’s so-called invasion.) And the opposite is also true: where War on Terror. American politics, both foreign America ceases to intervene militarily, notably and domestic, are being increasingly deformed in Southeast Asia since the 1970s, drug by a war on terrorism that is counter-production declines.4 productive, actually increasing the number of perpetrators and victims of terrorist attacks. It Both of America’s self-generating wars are is also profoundly dishonest, in thatlucrative to the private interests that lobby for Washington’s policies actually contribute to the their continuance.5 At the same time, both of funding and arming of the jihadists that it these self-generating wars contribute to nominally opposes. increasing insecurity and destabilization in America and in the world. Above all the War on Terror is a self-generating war, because, as many experts have warned, it Thus, by a paradoxical dialectic, America’s New 1 10 | 36 | 2 APJ | JF World Order degenerates progressively into a scale a heyday for banks, financial New World Disorder. And at home the services, and securities, a sharp seemingly indomitable national security state, rise in the portion of income beset by the problems of poverty, income coming from investment, and a disparity, and drugs, becomes, progressively, a stunning percentage of income and national insecurity state and one gripped by assets going to the top 1 percent.7 political gridlock. The purpose of this paper is to argue, using the The dangers of increasing income and wealth analogy of British errors in the late 19th disparity in Britain were easily recognized at century, for a progressive return to a more the time, including by the young politician 8 stable and just international order, by a series Winston Churchill. But only a few noticed the of concrete steps, some of them incremental. penetrating analysis by John A. Hobson in his Using the decline of Britain as an example, I book Imperialism (1902), that an untrammeled hope to demonstrate that the solution cannot search for profit that directed capital abroad be expected from the current party political created a demand for an oversized defense system, but must come from people outside establishment to protect it, leading in turn to that system. wider and wilder use abroad of Britain’s armies. Hobson defined the imperialism of his The Follies of the Late 19th Century Pax time, which he dated from about 1870, as “a Britannica debasement … of genuine nationalism, by attempts to overflow its natural banks and The final errors of British imperial leaders are absorb the near or distant territory of reluctant particularly instructive for our predicament and inassimilable peoples.”9 today. In both cases power in excess of defense needs led to more and more unjust, and The earlier British empire could be said by a frequently counter-productive, expansions of British historian in 1883 to have been influence. My account in the following“acquired in a fit of absence of mind," but this paragraphs is one-sidedly negative, ignoring could not be said of Cecil Rhodes’s advances in positive achievements abroad in the areas of Africa. Maldistribution of wealth was an initial health and education. But the consolidation of cause of British expansion, and also an British power led to the impoverishment abroad inevitable consequence of it. Much of Hobson’s of previously wealthy countries like India, and book attacked western exploitation of the Third 10 also of British workers at home.6 World, especially in Africa and Asia. He thus echoed Thucydides description of A main reason for the latter was, as Kevin Phillips has demonstrated, the increasing outward flight of British investment capital and how Athens was undone by the productive capacity: overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America’s follies Thus did Britain slip into in Vietnam and Iraq [and Britain’s circumstances akin to those of the in Afghanistan and the Transvaal]. United States in the 1980s and Thucydides attributed the rise of most of the 1990s – slumping this folly to the rapid change in nonsupervisory wage levels and Athens after the death of Pericles, declining basic industries on one and in particular to the rise of a hand, and at the other end of the rapacious oligarchy.11 2 10 | 36 | 2 APJ | JF Both the apogee of the British empire and the leaders moved to the right, leading (for start of its decline can be dated to the 1850s. In example) to Gladstone’s bombardment of that decade London instituted direct control Alexandria in 1882 to recover the debts owed over India, displacing the nakedly exploitative by the Egyptians to private British investors. East India Company. Reading Hobson’s economic analysis in the light of Thucydides, we can focus on the moral factor of emergent hubristic greed (pleonexia) fostered by unrestrained British power. In 1886 the discovery of colossal gold deposits in the nominally independent Boer Republic of the Transvaal attracted the attention of Cecil Rhodes, already wealthy from South African diamonds and mining concessions he had acquired by deceit in Matabeleland. Rhodes now saw an opportunity to acquire goldfields in the Transvaal as well, by overthrowing the Boer government with the support of the uitlanders or foreigners who had flocked to the Transvaal. The British empire during the Victorian Era But in the same decade Britain sided with France’s nakedly expansionist Napoleon III (and the decadent Ottoman empire) in his ambitions against Russia’s status in the Holy Land. Although Britain was victorious in that war, historians have since judged that victory to be a chief cause of the breakdown in the balance of power that had prevailed in Europe since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Thus the legacy of the war for Britain was a more modernized and efficient army, together with a more insecure and unstable world. (Historians may in future come to judge that NATO’s Libyan venture of 2011 played a similar role in ending the era of U.S.-Russian détente.) The Crimean War also saw the emergence of perhaps the world’s first significant antiwar movement in Britain, even though that movement is often remembered chiefly for its role in ending the active political roles of its main leaders, John Cobden and John Bright.12 In the short run, Britain’s governments and French caricature of Rhodes, showing him 3 10 | 36 | 2 APJ | JF trapped in Kimberley during the Boer War, corporations rather than an individual) led to seen emerging from tower clutching state violence and/or war as a matter of public papers with champagne bottle behind his policy. And the outcomes enriched and collar. strengthened private corporations in what I have called the American war machine, thus undermining those institutions representing the In 1895, after direct plotting with thepublic interest. uitlanders failed, Rhodes, in his capacity as Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony, My main point is that the progressive build-up sponsored an invasion of Transvaal with the so- of the British navy and armies provoked, called Jameson Raid, a mixed band of Mounted predictably, a responsive build-up from other Police and mercenary volunteers. The raid was powers, particularly France and Germany; and not only a failure, but a scandal: Rhodes was this ultimately made World War I (and its forced to resign as Prime Minister and his sequel, World War II) all but inevitable. In brother went to jail. The details of the Jameson retrospect it is easy to see that the arms build- raid and resulting Boer War are too complex to up contributed, disastrously, not to security but be recounted here; but the end result was that to more and more perilous insecurity, after the Boer War the goldfields fell largely dangerous not just to the imperial powers into the hands of Rhodes.