FPIF Discussion Paper
May 2003

Terminating the Bush Juggernaut

By Jeremy Brecher
Jeremy Brecher is a historian and the author of 12 books including Strike! and Globalization from Below and a regular contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). The author thanks all those who have commented on various drafts of this paper, and especially John Humphries. An electronic version of this paper is available at http://www.fpif.org/papers/juggernaut/index.html .

1. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam, 1956).
2. The National Security Strategy of the United States, September 20, 2002.
3. Patrick E. Tyler, "A New Power in the Streets," New York Times, February 16, 2003.
4. For a succinct overview of modern U.S. foreign policy see Gabriel Kolko, Another Century of War (New York: The New Press, 2002).
5. In 1992, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had the Pentagon prepare a report envisioning a future in which the U.S. could, and should, prevent any other nation or alliance from becoming a great power. The document was leaked and then disavowed. Zalmay Khalilzad, a member of Cheney's team and now President Bush's envoy to the Iraqi opposition, subsequently wrote that it is a "vital U.S. interest" to "preclude the rise of another global rival for the indefinite future"--meaning the U.S. should be "willing to use force if necessary for the purpose." Nicholas Lemann, "The Next World Order," The New Yorker, April 1, 2002. The pressure toward unilateralism was influencing U.S. policy even in the Clinton era.
6. Lemann.
7. The National Security Strategy of the United States.
8. Noam Chomsky, "Imperial Ambition, an interview with Noam Chomsky," Monthly Review, May, 2003.
9. quoted in Paul Reynolds, "New reality of American power," BBC News online, April 19, 2003.
10. U.S. Diplomat John Brady Kiesling Letter of Resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, February 27, 2003, on http://truthout.org/.
11. Quoted in Jim Lobe, "Costs of war by far outweigh benefits," Asia Times, March 21, 2003.
12. For U.S. bribing and bullying for support of the attack on Iraq, see Sarah Anderson, Phyllis Bennis, and John Cavanagh, Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced? (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, February 26, 2003).
13. Shashi Tharoor, UN Under Secretary General for Communications and Public Information, quoted in "The UN's Relevance," The Nation, March 31, 2003, p. 3.
14. "The UN's Relevance," The Nation, March 31, 2003, p. 3. As Columbia University historian Anders Stephanson wrote, in the 1990s "there was an enormous expansion of law or lawlike procedure on an international scale." Anders Stephanson, "Messianic unilateralism threatens all," Newsday, March 26, 2003.
15. Dean Baker, "Bursting Bubbles," In These Times, May 9, 2003.
16. Niall Ferguson, "True Cost of Hegemony: Huge Debt," New York Times, Week in Review, April 20, 2003. Ferguson is the author of Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and The Lessons for Global Power. Those holding large amounts of U.S. debt also include wealthy investors from Asia and the Middle East.
17. For the split in NATO, see Gabriel Kolko, "The Age of Unilateral War: Iraq, the United States and the End of the European Coalition," http://www.commondreams.org/.
18. Michael Lind, "The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War," New Statesman, April 7, 2003. Lind is the author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.
19. Editorial, "The War at Home," New York Times, April 20, 2003.
20. This possibility has led to considerable wishful thinking on the part of "Old Europe." Newt Gingrich's April 2003 attack on the U.S. State Department appeared to be aimed at eliminating even the future possibility of such a shift.
21. Michael Lind, "The Weird Men." Israel and Slovakia were the principal exceptions.
22. Steve Sailer, "Questions for postwar polls," UPI, April 8, 2003.
23. Vast amounts of material from the movement have appeared on the Internet. For a report on the movement in several countries see The Nation, April 14, 2003. The various Independent Media Centers provided extensive coverage in countries around the world.
24. An editorial in the New Left Review asserted that the protesters "were united only by the desire to prevent the imperialist invasion," but the great majority appear also to have based this desire at least in part on a commitment to global norms and international law and to have shared a desire that the UN and the international community, however vaguely defined, act in concert to stop the invasion. See Tariq Ali, "Re-Colonizing Iraq," New Left Review 21, May June 2003, p. 7.
25. Jennifer Lee, "How Protesters Mobilized So Many and So Nimbly," New York Times, February 23, 2003.
26. An example of such an initiative is the Focus on the Global South sign-on statement, "International Demands Regarding the Invasion, Occupation, and 'Reconstruction' of Iraq," http://www.focusweb.org/.
27. See next section.
28. See Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Globalization from Below (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), especially Chapter 4, "Handling Contradictions in the Movement."
29. A worthwhile contribution is the new "News Without Borders Empire Watch" news service. Visit http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/newswithoutborders
30. See "'World's Other Superpower' Plots Its Next Moves," http://www.focusweb.org/.
31. Sarah Anderson, Phyllis Bennis, and John Cavanagh, Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced? (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, February 26, 2003).
32. For a devastating critique of ways that countries failed to oppose the U.S. attack on Iraq, see Tariq Ali, "Re-Colonizing Iraq." In contrast to the present piece, he concludes "it is futile to look to the United Nations or Euroland, let alone Russia or China, for any serious obstacle to American designs in the Middle East." p. 17. See also Tariq Ali's later article "Business as usual," The Guardian, May 24, 2003, which includes the same passage but adds a biting commentary on the Security Council resolution on post-war Iraq.
33. Gloria Galloway, "U.S. ambassador chides Canada," Globe and Mail, March 25, 2003.
34. Al Santoli, editor of the China Reform Monitor, published by the American Foreign Policy Council, quoted in Jason P. Taverner, "International Opinion; Iraq War Has Devastated U.S. Standing," Republicons.org, April 9, 2003.
35. Gareth Harding, "Four anti-war states to create EU army," UPI, April 29, 2003. The primary significance of this act is to reduce EU dependence on the United States. No one imagines that containment of the U.S. can take a military form. On the contrary, a policy of and capacity for "state-supported nonviolence" would do much more to help the EU achieve its goals than any form of military power projection.
    The complexities of inter-European relations regarding policy toward the U.S., such as the disagreement between Britain and the Continental powers, the alleged divisions between "Old Europe" and "New Europe," and the genuine concern of Eastern European countries about the dominance of Germany and France within the EU, are beyond the scope of this paper.
36. Fran O'Sullivan, "Coalition of the Unwilling as Clark meets Chirac," New Zealand Herald, April 30, 2003.
37. Robert Kagan, author of Of Paradise and Power, quoted in Richard Bernstein, "Nations Seek World Order Centered on U.N., Not U.S.," New York Times, February 19, 2003.
38. An example of planning for nonviolent intervention, in this case in Sri Lanka, is provided at http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/.
39. For example, France announced at the Security Council on April 22, 2003 that it would accept suspension of Iraq sanctions, apparently without prior consultation with Russia and Germany. The strategy of suspension may have been correct, but it looked at first like a break in the united front and a submission to U.S. demands. This could have been avoided if the question had been discussed first and a joint position developed. Too much going-it-alone will break up the coalition.
40. The military alliance that defeated the Nazis was an alliance of imperialist powers. The popular political and civil society groups that participated in the struggle against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s often subordinated themselves to one or another government that had its own imperialist agenda. This led to periodic divisions in the opposition to fascism and eventually in the subsumption of most anti-fascist forces under the domination of one or the other of the "sides" in the cold war. Today's global peace movement needs to avoid this mistake by maintaining its own internationalism and its independence from governments, even while it is encouraging governments to cooperate with each other for collective security.
41. The National Security Strategy of the United States.
42. Simon Tisdall argues that other countries must "change themselves" to "avoid the vassalage that lies implicit in Iraq's cautionary tale." For the EU and the other main regional groupings this means "far greater integration through pooled sovereignty, common defence, economic, monetary and foreign policy, and supernational elected presidents... the prospective end of the nation state as the prime political entity, at least for all but symbolic and cultural purposes." Simon Tisdall, "What Europe has to do to avoid becoming a U.S. vassal: A multipolar world is the third way between resistance and domination." The Guardian, May 5, 2003. Tisdall's advocacy of greater independence through greater integration is valuable. But the Bush administration is likely to oppose any moves that increase the independence of less great powers, so that such a "multipolar" strategy is bound eventually to require collective forms of resistance as the alternative to vassalage.
43. "Evincing or arising from weakness of spirit and want of courage." Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. In the build-up to World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt is said to have urged his interventionist critics to attack his ambiguous policy more forthrightly, telling one of them, "Why don't you call it pusillanimous--that's a good word!"
44. Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced?
45. See Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War (New York: Random House, 1968) pp.267ff. Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned "a world built around the United States as the nation with a special position among the great nations." p. 267.
46. Phyllis Bennis, "Going global: Building a movement against empire," Transnational Institute Fellows' Meeting, May 16-17, 2003. http://www.ips-dc.org/
47. Colum Lynch, "U.S. Blocking Criticism at U.N. Officials Fear Debate Provides Platform for Policy Foes," Washington Post, May 1, 2003.
48. "Resisting the Global Domination Project: An Interview with Prof. Richard Falk," April 18, 2003, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation website http://www.wagingpeace.org/.
49. "Petition for an Emergency United Nations Resolution on Iraq," http://www.uniting-for-peace.net/.
50. Colum Lynch.
51. This will require that the permanent Security Council members France, Russia, and China accept the strengthening of an arena in which they do not have veto power. The peace movement should demand that they do so if they wish to prove that they are not simply acting on their own imperial self-interest.
52. This involves differentiating sovereignty as self-government from national sovereignty as the right of any nation to be the arbiter of its right to attack another. Global opinion and the growth of international law have increasingly supported the authority of the UN to forbid aggression, but some countries, notably the U.S., have refused to accept that interpretation.
53. For additional proposals see the "Jakarta Peace Consensus" conference report at http://www.focusweb.org/.
54. Jim Lobe, "Poll Shows Public Supports Iraq War But Rejects Unilateralism and an Imperial Role for the U.S.," Foreign Policy in Focus, May 1, 2003. http://www.fpif.org/. The survey, on which all poll data in the following section is based unless otherwise indicated, was conducted April 18-22 with 865 randomly selected respondents by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.
55. Other polls give a similar picture. In an ABC/Washington Post poll released April 17, 2003, nearly 9 out of 10 Americans favored using diplomatic or economic pressure to resolve issues with Syria and North Korea. Barely over one-third said they would support going to war to remove either country's government. "Poll: Iraq Peacekeeping Worries Americans," Associated Press, April 18, 2003.
56. No doubt the common human tendency to modify perceptions to fit established preconceptions--to counter "cognitive dissonance"--also plays a role. If one's innocence is taken for granted, one's acts must be something other than crimes, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
57. http://www.citiesforpeace.org/
58. See, for example, David Cortright, "What do we do now: a peace agenda" and responses by Phyllis Bennis and John Cavanagh, Bill Fletcher Jr., and Medea Benjamin in The Nation, April 21, 2003.
59. There are ironies in taking the Anti-Imperialist League as a model. The League included many who accepted economic imperialism and only opposed its colonial form. Such an organization today might play a similar role in activating mainstream opponents of the Bush program who are not necessarily opposed to other forms of U.S. hegemony. Tariq Ali says an Anti-Imperialist League today should be global, but that "it is the U.S. component of such a front that would be crucial." "Re-Colonizing Iraq," New Left Review 21, May June 2003.
60. In 2003 the state legislature of Hawaii became the first to call for the repeal of the most egregious provisions of the USA Patriot Act. http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/sessioncurrent/bills/.
61. Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990).
62. "The War at Home," New York Times, April 20, 2003.
63. "At no point in modern American history has the civilian leadership of the nation's military establishment come under as much criticism from serving military officers as is the case now regarding the war in Iraq." Michael T. Klare, "The General's Revolt," http://www.thenation.com/.
64. Afshin Molavi, "Unilateralism has trumped diplomacy in U.S. administration," Al-Jazeera, April 19, 2003.
65. Such a "litmus test" could be backed by a candidate questionnaire or a petition in which signers pledge to support and work only for candidates who met the test.
66. Carl Davidson and Marilyn Katz, "Moving From Protest to Politics: Dumping Bush's Regime in 2004," posted at http://www.cofc.org/discussions/.
67. Steve Bloom, "Call for a Paradigm Shift on (and to) the Left Responding to Davidson and Katz on the 2004 Elections," Portside, May 7, 2003.
68. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam, 1956.)
69. Nonviolent Sanctions, vol. 1, no. 1, Summer 1989, published by The Albert Einstein Institution. See also Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).
70. Charlotte Denny, "Britain backs U.S. in G7 row over kickstarting global economy," Guardian, February 24, 2003.
71. Mark Landler, "Euro Beginning to Flex Its Economic Muscles," New York Times, May 18, 2003.
72. Robert A. Pape, "The World Pushes Back," Boston Globe, March 23, 2003.
73. See "The Dollar, the Euro and War in Iraq," SANE Views, vol. 3, no. 3, January 30, 2003.
74. Mark Landler, "Euro Beginning to Flex Its Economic Muscles."
75. Examples of preparations to explore might include a joint float of currencies against the dollar; shifts of central bank reserves from dollars to euros; shift of trade invoices to euros; and regional alternatives to the IMF, as the Japanese proposed in the global financial crisis of the late 1990s. Effective defense measures may require changes in the policies governing the European central bank to allow more flexible response to the decline of the dollar and the U.S.' turn to a policy of competitive devaluation, aka "beggar thy neighbor."
76. See http://www.bethecause.org/boycott/. Under current conditions, the financial sanctions discussed below may have more economic impact than boycotts of goods, although the symbolic impact of the latter may be significant.
77. U.S. Treasury securities are held by individuals, mutual funds, money market funds, close-end funds, bank personal trusts and estates, banking institutions, insurance companies, and governments in the U.S. and abroad. See "Holders of Treasury Securities," The Bond Market Association.
78. Such a campaign raises the question of whether sanctions hurt ordinary people as well as policymakers. As Patrick Bond, a veteran of the South African anti-apartheid sanction campaign, commented, "The principle of solidarity always requires that there be some reflection of mass democratic discussion on an issue like sanctions whereby people who would be adversely affected get to make their opinions heard, so that you can go to the rest of the world (as did black South Africa) and say, hey, we've considered the short-term pain your sanctions against us will cause, but we want it anyhow so we can get long-term gain." (Personal communication, March 27, 2003) Those planning sanctions should confer with U.S. organizations regarding the effects of their actions on vulnerable people. While sanctions may have adverse impacts, current Bush administration domestic and foreign policies are having devastating impacts on the most vulnerable Americans that might justify considerable "short-term pain."
    More narrowly targeted economic sanctions might circumvent this issue. For example, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, which are closely tied to the Bush team and profit directly from its Iraq policy, can be targeted for divestment and for boycott of their "services" by local and national governments.
79. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put the best possible face on this action, portraying it as part of a regional restructuring of U.S. forces, but it is implausible that the U.S. would have abandoned its Sultan air base and other facilities on its own initiative.
80. Andrew F. Tully, "U.S.: Analysts Say War in Iraq Could Complicate War On Terrorism," Radio Free Europe, March 19, 2003.
81. Elizabeth Becker, "U.S. Unilateralism Worries Trade Officials," New York Times, March 17, 2003.
82. Elizabeth Becker.
83. Patrick E. Tyler and Felicity Barringer, "Annan Says U.S. Will Violate Charter if It Acts Without Approval," New York Times, March 11, 2003, p. A10.
84. Robert Verkaik, "UK troops may face war crimes charges," The Star, March 12, 2003.
85. Personal communication from Mike Davies <mfdavies@ntlworld.com>.
86. The strict limitations on self-defense as a justification for war were well established in international law long before the UN Charter. As Michael Byers, Associate Professor at Duke University Law School has explained, "customary law traditionally recognized a limited right of pre-emptive self-defense according to what are known as the 'Caroline criteria'. These date back to an incident in 1837, during a rebellion against British rule in Canada, when British troops attacked a ship (the Caroline) that was being used by private citizens in the U.S. to ferry supplies to the rebels. After a long diplomatic correspondence between the U.S. Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, and the British Foreign Office minister Lord Ashburton, a form of words was agreed to govern acts of anticipatory self-defense: there must be "a necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation" and the action taken must not be "unreasonable or excessive." "Iraq and the Bush Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Self-Defense," Crimes of War Project, http://www.crimesofwar.org/expert/bush-intro.html.
87. Phyllis Bennis, "Going global: Building a movement against empire," Transnational Institute Fellows' Meeting, May 16-17, 2003.

Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). ©2003. All rights reserved. Recommended Citation Jeremy Brecher, “Terminating the Bush Juggernaut,” (Silver City, NM & Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, May 2003). Web location: http://www.fpif.org/papers/juggernaut/index.html Production Information Writer: Jeremy Brecher Editor: John Gershman, IRC Layout: Tonya Cannariato, IRC

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