Understanding the Hawks: Part I
Philosophical and Geopolitical Roots
by Jesse
Lee, May 8, 2003, published in OpEdNews.Com
The terms “neoconservative” and “hawk” have been thrown
around very loosely and sporadically over the past year and a half, most
often with no exploration into who these hawks are, or what they believe.
The right has attempted to ignore this discussion, preferring to
harp on such dubious issues as chemical weapons and liberation, and the
left has either allowed itself to be sucked into these discussions or
dismissed the hawks as blood-thirsty war profiteers without any serious
analysis of their ideas. To
understand the true motives of this administration, it is necessary to
understand the psychology of the hawks within it.
The philosophy of the neoconservative movement is best laid out in
the platform of the Project For a New American Century.
Its membership has included some of the most brilliant
defense-minded political thinkers in Washington, notably Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Perle, and a host of other administration officials. Their premise is a stark, real-politik assessment of world
power distribution, stating that America, as lone super-power, is only
forfeiting its rightful position as uninhibited hegemon whenever it
subjects itself to multilateral institutions and authority (the best
articulation of this philosophy might be Robert Kagan’s Power
and Weakness). There is
no doubt that this is, in fact, true.
Any government with a semblance of democracy will display a
tendency to hinder the strongest the most, and protect the weakest the
most. It would even be fair to say, I believe, that democracy
itself represents an overcoming of the strong few by the collective
strength of the weaker many. In
this sense, the neocons are quite right when they say that institutions
such as the UN are attempting to constrain the US, and that the Clinton
era of multilateralism was a series of concessions to lesser international
powers.
The thinkers of the Project For a New American Century believe that
were it not for the obstacles of such useless institutions as the UN, the
US would be free to dictate the world as it sees fit.
This would mean, primarily, creating a world with absolute optimum
benefit to American economic interests.
But, they also believe, again rightly in some cases and in some
sense, that an American world dictatorship would be better than the
regimes under which much of the world lives.
Iraq is, of course, the foremost example of this idea.
There is no question that America is occupying Iraq right now, and
that it is already enacting a neocolonial agenda.
I believe that privately, although never publicly, most of the
neoconservatives who have supported, designed, and manufactured this war
would admit that; but they would also argue that such neocolonialism is
better for the Iraqi people than was Saddam Hussein.
There has been much debate over that most vital question of oil:
will it go to the Iraqi people, or will American oil companies keep the
profit? The answer is that
both will happen, and both parties will profit as they never did under
Saddam Hussein. Most experts
estimate that Iraq is operating at only about half of its potential
output. These untapped fields
represent billions of dollars per day, and when we consider the fact that
the Iraqi people saw very little of what money there was under Saddam’s
sanctioned regime, there is no doubt that there will be enough profit to
give the Iraqis a larger share than they have ever seen while also making
American companies rich and guaranteeing constant supplies to American
industry.
This is the seduction of the corporate mentality and the corporate
empire, which are at the root of the neoconservative outlook even more
than militarism. In America,
corporations have been successfully and for the most part rightfully
vilified. What the left
has refused to accept, however, is that our entire country and culture has
been reduced to suckling at the corporate tit.
The corporate world has taken over so thoroughly that there is
virtually no other way to prosper. Internationally,
countries see their smaller-scale domestic industries drowned out by
hyper-efficient, mass-produced, government- subsidized goods from the
West, even as the terms of trade for their own “raw materials” sink
dismally (a pound of coffee fetches about 1/10 or 1/20 of what it did
twenty years ago in real terms, while manufactured goods in which the West
have a monopoly have continued to see inflation in their prices and
value). If a nation looks to
the West for aid, it knows it will only come on the condition that all
trade barriers will be eliminated and the floodgates opened to Western
products. Domestically, the
vast majority of America is utterly dependent upon corporations to earn
their daily bread (to say nothing of television, Hollywood, and all major
news outlets, which are all sponsored almost in full by large
corporations). The
neoconservative world outlook wishes to take this relationship to the next
level, creating an arrangement in which America will serve as the
corporate employer and therefore as authority, and the rest of the world
will serve as employees. Other
nations can either take the job and perhaps earn enough to buy some crumbs
for dinner, or they can reject the job, resist, and perish.
I cannot say that I can contemplate that morality of mutual benefit
through dependency without disgust, but one can see how it might serve as
moral rationalization for a hard-line corporate mind.
The image of a “Colossus straddling the globe” has been evoked
by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz on separate occasions, and I think that it is a
fair symbol to associate with the neoconservative school of thought.
America’s power is almost infinite in that we could destroy the
entire planet several times over with our nuclear arsenal, we could win a
non-nuclear war with virtually any nation or group of nations, and most of
the countries in the world have become utterly dependent on American
markets. The road to world
domination does seem virtually unobstructed should the US will it so.
A Brief Critique
To read Robert Kagan’s Power
and Weakness is to read an almost direct translation of Nietzsche’s the
Genealogy of Morals into American foreign policy. It places value almost exclusively in power and strength, and
displays an utter contempt for egalitarianism.
Kagan, like Nietzsche, is in many ways compelling, but I, as well
as the founders of this country, as well as most of the citizens of the
United States have decided in the end that we do value democracy,
humanism, and the recognition of the rights and dignity of all men- weak
or strong. Neither Kagan nor
any other neoconservative has explained why we should have a Nietzschean
foreign policy and a Judeo-Christian/ equal rights domestic policy.
It is an epic irony that while Bush enforces a hard-line Christian
right agenda at home, he enforces a Nietzschean agenda abroad.
(Only slightly more ironic is the allegiance of Christianity and
corporate greed that has existed in the Republican Party for decades).
Kagan also ignores the virtues of democracy, particularly the
legitimacy of a democratic government and the security that a set of laws,
equally applied to all, provides.
Most of us will also take exception, although we will not be
surprised, at the fact that this school of thought has a solid contempt
for the populous. The
propaganda campaign launched before the war in Iraq demonstrated nothing
better than it did this administration’s condescension and disdain for
the common citizen, viewing him not as constituent whom they should
represent, but rather as an uninformed voter who must be manipulated and
intimidated into casting his vote and support as the administration
wished. Even the
congressmen who were elected to be informed, to contribute, and to
criticize have been systematically intimidated, abused, and averted.
To the elitists of the Project For a New American Century, the
propaganda campaign was a system of noble lies, but most of us want our
country back. In the end,
these thinkers have had their parallels in the imperial circles of
Britain and Germany, and it is only natural for a nation poised for
domination to produce such minds, but for our part we must recognize
them for what they are and force them to debate openly. go
to part 2
Jesse Lee is a recent graduate
of Trinity College in Hartford with a degree in Political Science and
Philosophy. He works as a paralegal in Washington, D.C. where he was
born and raised. He also volunteers with MoveOn and The Education for
Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC). He encourages your comments at kirkout79@hotmail.com.
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