Norman Solomon: War Made Easy.

[reprehensor]

Solomon has a new book on the way, and it looks good!

War Made Easy

Chapter 1 PDF

America Is a Fair and Noble Superpower

News outlets may feature arguments about the wisdom of going to war in a particular place at a specific time, but these are usually differences over tactics and priorities. While the administration’s upper echelons might be fiercely criticized as ideologues, bunglers, myopic policy wonks, or dissembling politicians, the media assumption largely remains that Washington has laudable motivations. Unlike certain countries that object to U.S. military actions, Uncle Sam does not march to the beat of crass ulterior motives, or so the conventional wisdom goes; the grave matters of foreign policy and war are not mainly about American self-interest, much less about corporate interests. While there are enormous geopolitical advantages to be gained and massive profits to be made as consequences of exercising Pentagon muscle, the media discourse customarily excludes drawing attention to such dynamics as major factors in deployment of the country’s armed forces.

The nation’s biggest newsmagazine closed 1999 with a forwardlooking headline on its back page: “A Second American Century?” Providing some answers was Time columnist Charles Krauthammer. “The world at the turn of the 21st century is not multipolar but unipolar,” he wrote. “America bestrides the world like a colossus.” Readers were encouraged to perceive that as a very good situation. “The main reason for the absence of a serious challenge to American hegemony is that it is so benign,” Krauthammer went on. “It does not extract tribute. It does not seek military occupation. It is not interested in acquiring territory.” Krauthammer certainly recognized that foreign rivals were restless. (“The world is stirring.”) Yet the outlook was favorable: “None have the power to challenge America now. The unipolar moment will surely last for at least a generation.”

Many other media outlets were also buoyant. “There’s every reason to think the upcoming 100 years will prove to be yet another American century,” according to Fortune magazine.2 On 1999’s last telecast of the CBS program Sunday Morning, a confident pronouncement came from Harold Evans, editor of U.S. News & World Report as well as the New York Daily News: “I would be prepared to say it will be another American century.”3 The preparations were far more than just rhetorical. In 1997 some prominent superhawks—including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz—had founded an organization they chose to call the Project for a New American Century. The subsequent foreign policy of President George W. Bush proved to be a global breakthrough for the project.

While assertions of American benevolence have been never-ending, the first years of the twenty-first century brought some variations in the mantra depicting the U.S. government as beloved the world over (except for some malcontents). One of the punditocracy’s leading hawks with intellectual plumage, Charles Krauthammer, reiterated in late spring 2001: “We run a uniquely benign imperium. This is not mere self-congratulation; it is a fact manifest in the way others welcome our power.”4 But the results of global surveys rendered such claims increasingly laughable. A year after the invasion of Iraq, “discontent with America and its policies has intensified rather than diminished,” said an international study released in March 2004 by the Pew Research Center, which reported that “perceptions of American unilateralism remain widespread in European and Muslim nations, and the war in Iraq has undermined America’s credibility abroad.”5 The very war that had been promoted, in part, as necessary for maintaining American “credibility” was, in fact, severely damaging it.

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[SteppingRazor]

1. I love his use of "dissemble"

in his very first sentence. Subtle.