Henry C K Liu
Part 2: The Bush vision
Fri Dec 12 02:44:23 2003
64.140.158.8

Part 2: The Bush vision
By Henry C K Liu
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EK20Ak05.html

Part 1: The Philippines revisited

United States President George W Bush has built his new policy of world democratic revolution on the assumption that democracy in foreign lands would automatically welcome US imperialism in the name of capitalistic free trade. In the Middle East, in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the native land of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001, or even Egypt, democracy, if allowed to be practiced as a free political process that reflects popular opinion and historical conditions, will likely be problematic to US regional and global interests, which includes its and its allies' dependence on low-cost imported oil. The US has repeatedly tried to topple democratically elected governments, the latest example being the Bush White House's efforts to engineer a coup in Venezuela.

In his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy this month, Bush paid homage to former US president Ronald Reagan and his 1980s Westminster Abbey invocations of freedom's allegedly unstoppable momentum against Soviet communism. All through the Cold War, while both camps claimed to defend freedom and their own version of democracy, such noble values were in short supply in practice not just in the Soviet bloc, but also, as Bush acknowledged, in the so-called free world.

The Reagan administration was as much surprised by the sudden implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as anyone else, notwithstanding its manipulative exploitation of dissidents and democratic opposition movements in the Soviet Union and across Central and Eastern Europe, turning them from national-liberation movements into Cold War agents to serve US geopolitical interests. Many of these dissidents, hailed as heroic freedom fighters during the Cold War, were promptly forgotten by Washington as soon as the Cold War ended. Others became terrorists against their former supporters, drawing on skills taught by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Washington's willingness to outspend Moscow on nuclear and conventional arms and to maintain strong North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) capabilities were the key factors in bankrupting the Soviet Union, not US democracy.

Defending global US interests in the name of democracy, however conveniently defined, in countries already democratic is hard enough, but it is a cakewalk compared with trying to create new democratic nations, through invasion and occupation, in societies culturally hierarchical, with little democratic heritage in the Western mode. Bush now declares a theme of freedom through peace: "A global nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union ended peacefully, as did the Soviet Union. The nations of Europe are moving toward unity, not dividing into armed camps and descending into genocide." Yet in the next breath, he declares a theme of imposing freedom through war: "Every nation has learned, or should have learned, an important lesson: Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for and standing for, and the advance of freedom leads to peace."

Freedom is worth fighting for and dying for to nationalist freedom fighters, not to expeditionary troops in foreign lands in the absence of an opposing army. Freedom dies with foreign occupation and peace is shattered by war. The historical fact is that the US won the Cold War not through invasion or occupation, or nuclear holocaust, but through a long-term test of economic endurance by bankrupting the USSR in an exorbitant arms race. Since no country is seriously interested in engaging in a new arms race with the US, freedom is now redefined by Bush as freedom to impose US will on a new world order.

Bush also admitted to a historic failure in US policy. Over the past 60 years, the US has sought geopolitical stability through anti-communist regimes that did not set liberty as a priority. But since September 11, Bush has repeatedly chosen security over freedom, adopting the same garrison-state mentality that pushed the Soviet Union toward self-destruction. To support its war in Afghanistan, the US set up military bases in Central Asia the same way it allied with undemocratic anti-communist regimes in its strategy of containment during the Cold War. The US has orchestrated a worldwide crackdown on terrorism with a strategy that promises to swell the ranks of terrorists further.

Bush stressed that he was not prescribing any set formula for democracy for the Middle East, which must be home-grown. Yet the US has treated freedom fighters either as US operatives against other governments or as deadly enemies against the US. Most Arabs view US promotion of democracy as hypocrisy for its endorsement of Israel's wholesale abuse of Palestinian rights.

Bush's speech reflected the "transformationalist" agenda embraced by Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, who in August set out US ambitions to remake the Middle East along neo-conservatives lines by using US military power to advance democracy and free markets. It is a policy for political transformation of Arab countries deemed vital to victory in the "war on terrorism".

The president went on to say that the US has adopted "a new policy" for the Middle East and singled out, as countries that must change, not just traditional US adversaries such as Syria and Iran, but allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The president's vision was an attempt to fuse US ambitions in the Islamic world - new benign, secular governments in Iraq and Afghanistan; an Arab-Israeli peace based on roadmap diplomacy; as well as political and economic openings in a wide swath of Islamic countries from North Africa to South Asia - with the wider rubric of promoting democracy around the world, including socialist China. Bush pledged a new momentum to foster broad change comparable to the end of communism in Eastern Europe, implying a long-range agenda to dismember China in the name of self-determination of national minorities.

In keeping with the Trotskyite pedigree of US neo-conservatism that has assumed the role of presidential tutor, Bush, the simple student, is committing the US to nothing less than a Trotskyite world revolution of democracy and free markets, instead of a Stalinist strategy of capitalism in one country. Unfortunately, freedom cannot come in the form of guided missiles delivered by Black Hawk helicopters and democracy in distant lands cannot be created from fielding candidates nominated by Washington, notwithstanding Trotsky's historic role as father of the Red Army.

"The United States has adopted a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results," Bush vowed. The president used postwar Germany and Japan as examples to prove his point. Even though both Germany and Japan had strong democratic traditions prior to being taken over by fascist parties after World War I, the early election returns in both countries after World War II so favored socialist candidates that US occupation authorities quickly had to release fascist war prisoners from jail and back them with funds and political support to save both Japan and West Germany from democratically elected leftist governments. In Japan, the US kept the Emperor despite his less-than-titular role in the planning and persecution of the war. There was no regime change in Japan as in Bush's aim for the "axis of evil".

In their book Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold, Sterling and Peggy Seagrave detailed how the US government sought to exonerate the emperor and his imperial relatives from any responsibility for the war. By 1948, it was seeking to restore the wartime ruling class to positions of power (Japan's wartime minister of munitions, Nobusuke Kishi, for example, was prime minister from 1957-60). The US keeps many of its archives concerned with postwar Japan highly classified, in violation of its own laws. John Foster Dulles, president Harry Truman's special envoy to Japan charged with ending the occupation, wrote the peace treaty of 1951 in such a way that most former prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian victims of Japan are prevented from obtaining any form of compensation from either the Japanese government, which confiscated their wealth, or private Japanese corporations, which profited from their slave labor. He did so in perfect secrecy and forced the other Allies to accept his draft (except for China and Russia, which did not sign).

Almost as soon as the war was over, US forces began to discover stupendous caches of Japanese war treasure. General Douglas MacArthur, in charge of the occupation, reported finding "great hoards of gold, silver, precious stones, foreign postage stamps, engraving plates and ... currency not legal in Japan". Leaving uninvestigated, by US policy, the official theft perpetrated by the Japanese occupation authorities in China, US occupation officials, in the name of law and order, nevertheless arrested underworld boss Yoshio Kodama, who had worked in China during the war, selling opium and supervising the collection and shipment to Japan of strategic industrial metals such as tungsten, titanium and platinum. Japan was by far the largest opium procurer in Asia throughout the first half of the 20th century, initially in its colony of Korea and then in Manchuria, which it seized in 1931. Kodama returned to Japan after the war immensely rich. Before going to prison he transferred most of his booty to Ichiro Hatoyama and Ichiro Kono, conservative politicians who used the proceeds to finance the newly created Liberal Party, precursor of the Liberal Democratic Party that has ruled Japan almost uninterruptedly since 1949. When Kodama was released from prison, also in 1949, he went to work for the CIA and later became the chief agent in Japan for the Lockheed Aircraft Co, bribing and blackmailing politicians to buy the Lockheed F-104 fighter and the L-1011 airliner. With his stolen wealth, underworld ties and history as a supporter of militarism, Kodama became one of the godfathers of pro-American one-party rule in Japan.

He was not alone in his war profiteering. One of the Seagraves' more controversial contentions is that the looting of Asia took place under the supervision of the imperial household. This contradicts the American fiction that the emperor was a pacifist and a mere figurehead observer of the war. The Seagraves convincingly argue that after Japan's full-scale invasion of China on July 7, 1937, Emperor Hirohito appointed one of his brothers, Prince Chichibu, to head a secret organization called Kin No Yuri (Golden Lily) whose function was to ensure that contraband was properly accounted for and not diverted by military officers or other insiders, such as Kodama, for their own enrichment. Putting an imperial prince in charge was a guarantee that everyone, even the most senior commanders, would follow orders and that the emperor personally would become immensely rich.

The emperor also posted Prince Tsuneyoshi Takeda, a first cousin, to the staff of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria and later as his personal liaison officer to the Saigon headquarters of General Count Hisaichi Terauchi, to supervise looting and ensure that the proceeds were shipped to Japan in areas under Terauchi's control. Although assigned to Saigon, Takeda worked almost exclusively in the Philippines as second in command to Chichibu. Hirohito named Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, his uncle, to be deputy commander of the Central China Area Army, in which capacity he commanded the final assault on Nanking, the Chinese capital, between December 2 and December 6, 1937, and allegedly gave the order to "kill all captives". The Japanese removed some 6,000 tons of gold from the Chinese government treasury. All three princes were graduates of the military academy and all three survived the war with no consequences.

On orders from Washington, the gold from several Golden Lily vaults in the Philippines was trucked to warehouses at the US bases. According to the Seagraves, financial experts from the newly formed CIA used a Philippine operative by the name of Santa Romana to deposit the gold in 176 reliable banks in 42 different countries to keep the identity of the true owners secret. Once the gold was in their vaults, the banks would issue certificates that are even more negotiable than the dollar, being backed by gold itself. With this rich source of cash, the CIA set up slush funds to influence politics in Japan, Greece, Italy, Britain, Australia and many other places around the world. For example, money from what was called the M-Fund (named after Major-General William Marquat of MacArthur's staff) was secretly employed to pay for Japan's initial rearmament after the outbreak of the Korean War, since the Japanese Diet refused to appropriate money for the purpose on the ground it was unconstitutional. So much for Japanese democracy ordained by Washington.

Going on to Baghdad
Even moderate Arabs were reported to have greeted the Bush speech with scorn, noting that he did not mention the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory or his still-unexplained decision to wage undeclared war on Iraq. They felt that Bush was simply shoring up domestic acceptance of his troubled Iraq policy and his stalled global "war on terrorism" with high-sounding principles to improve his chances of re-election next November.

Bush's speech reflected the view of neo-conservative policy wonks in his administration that a strong unilateral foreign policy based on extremist ideology and backed by overwhelming force is right for the US as the world's sole superpower. Yet democracy is merely a political process toward a number of possible alternative social orders, not a religious attainment in itself. Its desirability is measured by the effect the democratic process has on people's lives and welfare and on peace in the world. A decision to wage war does not make it acceptable simply because it is democratically derived. Democracy can fail, and has done so in the past, as in cases of the democratic election of leaders turned dictators.

Democracy cannot be imposed on a people by armed invasion and occupation, nor can it operate without real freedom of the press, free from control by the moneyed class. Many wars have been fought among countries with democratic governments in the West. The British Empire rationalized its existence behind the mask of British democracy. Democracy in the Third World will not necessarily support imperialism or capitalism, except in those locations already thoroughly victimized by the cultural hegemony of imperialism. It is also highly questionable whether political democracy is possible without economic democracy. Freedom from want precedes all other forms of freedom.

Bush's faith in the ability of the US to extirpate tyranny and implant freedom in the Middle East departs from well-established US policy, which did not always profess belief in the region's democratic potential, as Robert Blecher, professor of history at the University of Richmond, observed in his essay "Intellectuals, Democracy and American Empire" last March. Blecher pointed out that at the time of the 1991 Gulf War, Mideast experts in the US such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes supported the first Bush administration's position that the US should not aim to democratize the Middle East.

Colin Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the administration of president George Bush Sr, told a press briefing in 1992: "Saddam Hussein is a terrible person; he is a threat to his own people. I think his people would be better off with a different leader, but there is this sort of romantic notion that if Saddam Hussein got hit by a bus tomorrow, some Jeffersonian democrat is waiting in the wings to hold popular elections. You're going to get - guess what - probably another Saddam Hussein. It will take a little while for them to paint the pictures all over the walls again but there should be no illusions about th

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