At an American Bar Association's meeting on preparing for the terrorist threat, General Bruce Lawler, head of the Joint Task Force to coordinate military support for state governments, said that the threat was from foreigners who envy us. I asked him in the question period if our having killed or ruined their families might not give some more reason to hate Americans and make them much more dangerous than others who were just envious. He quickly backed down and said he was only repeating a statement of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Similarly, Washington's prestigious Center for Strategic and International Studies' major report, Defending America in the 21st Century, described the threat as coming from those who resent preeminent U.S power and/or disdain the West.
There's a reason for this silence about why many foreigners might want to do us harm. The bipartisan Washington establishment - newspapers, reporters, think tankers, soldiers, security forces, intelligence agencies, Congressmen and the military-industrial complex - thrives on war or preparations for war. They don't want Americans to learn and fear that there may be fatal costs to us for our actions abroad. Just as trade and business are the occupation of most of the nation, in Washington, war is the health of the state, to quote old libertarian, Randolph Bourne. Every war, be it a World War or a War on Drugs or on Poverty, spreads money and power in Washington.
The other reason for silence is that American foreign policy is based almost entirely upon domestic political concerns, with little thought or concern for long run consequences. NATO expansion was promised by Clinton during the last election just to gain Midwestern votes from Americans of Central European ancestry. When Madeleine Albright ordered the bombing of Serbia, neither she nor Clinton thought about how Russia would react. In fact knowledgeable Russian experts believe that NATO expansion and the bombing of Serbia were the turning point, after which Russia started arming China with its latest weaponry, helping Iran and Iraq, and moving back to nationalist policies. Russia's military budget has now nearly doubled (to $8 billion) from what it was before the attack. Similarly, with intervention in Colombia, there is no thought of the new, possibly deadly, combination of Arab terrorists willing to do suicide missions, and Colombian drug smugglers who know how to bribe or blackmail their way into smuggling any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into the U.S. The drug war in Colombia is, again, being fought to satisfy another domestic constituency, with no thought about possible wider consequences.
Equally, in fighting wars, Washington gives little thought to overall strategy. For example, when former Secretary of Defense Cheney was asked during the Gulf War, 11 years ago, about Washington's plans for Iraq after the war, he replied (honest man that he is): Well, I don't know, we haven't thought much about that. So now we spend tens of billions of dollars maintaining a massive military presence in the area and are making new enemies by the millions.
In short, one almost never hears in Washington from either Party that foreigners might have legitimate grievances against us. Half a million dead children in Iraq, Palestinian teenagers raging against American-supplied tanks, Serbs without electricity and running water or diseased or ruined and jobless from our bombing, assorted Moslems who blame America for their dictatorships and misery, Colombians with relatives killed by those aided by America. The list of potential enemies grows and grows. Even Basque terrorists now look at America as their enemy after President Bush, during his recent visit, casually promised to aid Spain's government with electronic surveillance. They all now have reason to do us harm, they all want America out of their countries, out of their faces, in street language. Itıs not rocket science.
Right now, we have training missions in 60 to 70 nations, usually teaching counterinsurgency. Even Albanian guerrillas have now been trained by U.S. Special Forces. The military likes training missions because they build relationships with foreign junior officers all over the world. The Pentagon seems to have a clear field to determine which nations it wants to work with. But many nations also have those who are resisting local governments' tyranny, who then see American forces as their enemies. American ambassadors, I was told in Peru last March, don't have authority over assorted semiautonomous agencies - mainly military, FBI and drug war personnel - and often don't even know what those agencies are doing in the nations where they are stationed.
But you'll rarely read this in the Washington press. Nor much about the human misery in Iraq, caused by Washington's blockade of supplies needed to rebuild electric, sanitation and agricultural irrigation stations bombed by America. Chlorine, needed to disinfect Iraq's water supply, and even pencils for school children are banned. Nor was there much reporting, after our bombing of the Danube River bridges, about the devastation of South Eastern Europe and Black Sea nations' barge trade, their major means of shipments to Western Europe. Most Americans would not have approved of these actions - had they known about them. As a New Republic writer put it, The American Monster is more like an elephant - bumbling rather than bloodthirsty, oblivious rather than fierce.
CIVIL DEFENSE
This missing element, not wanting Americans to think that there may be consequences to our killing foreigners, seriously affects civil defense. CATO published a long and excellent report, (No. 387, 11/27/00) Are We Prepared for Terrorism using Weapons of Mass Destruction? It warns that: