The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

3

TOWARD THE NEW ROME

It’s the same old dream—world domination.

IAN FLEMING,

Doctor No (1958)

In the American political tradition, “empire” has normally been a term of opprobrium. President Ronald Reagan famously used it to demonize the Soviet Union, which he labeled an “evil empire.” Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly since the attacks of September 2001, however, the idea of empire has gained traction here. As Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations, describes the change, “In all of American public life there is [now] hardly a single prominent figure who finds fault with the notion of the United States remaining the world’s sole military superpower until the end of time.”¹ Not since the jingoists of the Spanish-American War have so many Americans openly called for abandoning even a semblance of constitutional and democratic foreign policy and endorsed imperialism. Now, as then, the imperialists divide into two groups—those who advocate unconstrained, unilateral American domination of the world (couched sometimes in terms of following in the footsteps of the British Empire) and those who call for an imperialism devoted to “humanitarian” objectives.

Typical of the former is the widely read Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, he celebrated the “success” of the American bombing campaign in Afghanistan with an article entitled “Victory Changes Everything.” “The elementary truth,” he wrote, “that seems to elude the experts again and again—Gulf war, Afghan war, next war—is that power is its own reward. Victory changes everything, psychology above all. The psychology in the region [Central Asia] is now one of fear and deep respect for American power. Now is the time to use it to deter, defeat, or destroy the other regimes in the area that are host to radical Islamic terrorism.”² But even six months before the president declared “war on terrorism,” Krauthammer asserted: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to re-shape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”³

Many among the commentator class agree with Krauthammer. Robert D. Kaplan believes that the United States must not only take on the role of successor to the British Empire but that we must be devious and secretive about it. “Covert means are more discreet and cheaper than declared war and large-scale mobilization.... There will be less and less time for democratic consulation, whether with Congress or with the U.N.”⁴ Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, who thinks that the United States is “the gyroscope of world order,” is fearful that the American public, if left to its own preferences in a post-Cold War world, would demobilize as it has done in the past and return the country to its time-honored constitutional norms and restraints on executive power. To prevent that from occurring, Mead advocates open imperialism to fill the void left by the Cold War.⁵

Few of these writers like to dwell on what, concretely, the United States has done in the past and will have to continue to do to maintain its empire. From the moment we turned Japan and South Korea into political satellites in the late 1940s, the United States has paid off client regimes, either directly or through rigged trade, to keep them docile and loyal. We have taught state terrorism to thousands of Latin American military and police officials at the army’s School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. We have utilized the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Monetary Fund to bring about “regime changes” via coups, assassinations, or economic destabilizations and have bombed or invaded countries that have openly broken with or opposed our hegemony. The civilian costs of these Cold War operations were high. To take just one example, the militarists whom the United States assisted in coming to power in Indonesia in 1965 slaughtered at least half a million of their people, claiming they were supporters of the Communist Party. Our embassy supplied the Indonesian army with lists of people it thought should be executed.⁶

In Latin America, the United States implemented a policy that was the mirror image of the former USSR’s “Brezhnev Doctrine,” which called for Soviet military forces to intervene against any socialist country that tried to opt out of the Soviet bloc, as Czechoslovakia did in 1968. On December 20, 1989, George H. W. Bush sent 26,000 troops, including U.S. Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and the Eighty-second Airborne Division, into Panama to depose the local leader, Manuel Noriega, a former ally and CIA “asset” who had ceased to follow Washington’s orders. In the course of bombing Panama City, the American military killed 3,000 to 4,000 Panamanian civilians. (No one knows for sure exactly how many and no one in the United States has ever cared to find out.) Eyewitnesses and several independent humanitarian groups reported widespread atrocities, including the murder of unarmed civilians, the shoveling of their bodies into mass graves, and the burning to the ground of the old workers’ barrio of El Chorrillo. It was evidently Bush’s intent to decimate the Panamanian army, the main force backing Noriega, and to ensure that even after sovereignty over the Panama Canal was returned to Panama, that country would remain within the American orbit. The cover story for “Operation Just Cause” was that Noriega dealt in recreational drugs bound for the American market.

This demonstration of power occurred only a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Gorbachev had already renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine in a speech the year before at the United Nations. When, on Christmas Eve 1989, Jack F. Matlock, the ambassador to Moscow, met with Deputy Foreign Minister I. P. Aboimov to sound him out about Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, Aboimov told him, “We stand against any interference in the domestic affairs of other states and we intend to pursue this line firmly and without deviations. Thus, the American side may consider that ‘the Brezhnev Doctrine’ is now theirs as our gift.”⁷

Actions like the invasion of Panama are intrinsic to imperialist behavior. When the historical record is considered, American foreign policy over the past half century may not prove to be particularly exceptional or evil, but the gap between what the government has been doing and the explanations it has given to the public continues to widen. Our imperialists like to assert that they are merely bringing a measure of “stability” to the world. For them, dirty hands belong to older empires, not to our own and—if they see us as following in British footsteps—not to our predecessor’s either. Max Boot, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal, for example, believes, “We are an attractive empire.... Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”⁸ It is unclear whether Boot is indifferent to the ruthless and bloody repression that stood behind the British Empire or has simply never heard of events like the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, in which the British army slaughtered Punjabis until it ran out of ammunition; or the use of the Andaman Islands as a camp for political prisoners, complete with torture and forced labor; or the bombing and machine-gunning of, and the occasional use of poison gas against, rebellious Iraqis after Britain seized Mesopotamia from Turkey following World War I; or the decision to partition India, which led to the wholesale slaughter of Hindus and Muslims and to a bloody fifty-year-old war over Kashmir. If this was enlightened foreign administration, one hesitates to imagine what unenlightened imperialism might have looked like.

The intellectual heritage of America’s neoconservative triumphalists is a complex amalgam of the military imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealistic imperialism of Woodrow Wilson. Most neocons have their roots on the left, not on the right. A number of them came out of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. During the first thirty years of the Cold War, they adopted an anticommunist liberalism, which during the Reagan administration led them to embrace militarism and right-wing imperialism. These neocon defense intellectuals espouse preventive war, modeled on Israel’s 1981 raid on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, but they are simultaneously enthusiasts for the forcible spread of democracy, or at least so they claim in their propaganda. One of their apologists, Max Boot, calls neocon foreign policy “hard Wilsonianism.”⁹ Their crowning achievement thus far was the 2003 war against Iraq, which the United States devastated in a one-sided military assault and then occupied. As the historian Paul Kennedy observes, Iraq had Western-style democracy thrust upon it through “an odd combination of Wilsonian idealism and Reaganite muscularity.”¹⁰

Another group of American ideologues might be called humanitarian imperialists. They are globalist liberals, direct descendants of Woodrow Wilson. They believe in “making the world safe for democracy” and in the idea, endorsed by former President Bill Clinton, that the United States has history on its side. (Thus, just before his 1998 trip to Beijing, Clinton chastised China, the world’s oldest continuously extant civilization, for languishing on “the wrong side of history.”) These soft imperialists prefer to use the term imperialism with a prettifying modifier—they advocate “postmodern imperialism,” “imperialism lite,” “neoimperialism,” “liberal imperialism,” and above all the “right of humanitarian intervention.”¹¹ As genuine Wilsonians, they advocate, for example, self-determination for people such as the Palestinians, whereas the neocons have a record of indifference to their plight.

Sebastian Mallaby, an editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post, is a typical exponent of such liberal imperialism. “The rich world increasingly realizes that its interests are threatened by chaos,” he writes, “and that it lacks the tools to fix the problem.”¹² To deal with the danger of “failed states,” he thinks “an imperial America” should fill the global gap. “The question is not whether the United States will seek to fill the void created by the demise of European empires but whether it will acknowledge that this is what it is doing.” At no point does he mention that European (as well as American and Japanese) imperialism was a root cause of today’s failed states in what used to be called the Third World. Mallaby proposes, among other things, that the United States create a new American-dominated “international” organization modeled after the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to “fill the security void that empires left.”

The complex issue at the heart of liberal imperialism is “humanitarian intervention.” (The neocon triumphalists, generally speaking, are uninterested in anything with the adjective humanitarian attached to it.) The idea behind the term is: a powerful nation may violate another nation’s sovereignty and even forcibly displace its administration in order to stop or prevent gross violations of human rights, ethnic cleansings, genocide, state terrorism, the operations of “death squads,” or large-scale military reprisals against civilians. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, cochaired by a former foreign minister of Australia, refers to such actions as “the responsibility to protect” and offers detailed conditions that, in its view, must be met for such intrusions ever to be justified.¹³ These include that serious and irreparable harm to human beings is actually occurring or is imminent, that the use of military force is a last resort, that the military force employed is appropriate in scale, and that there are reasonable prospects for success.

Since the early 1990s, the United States has claimed such humanitarian motivations in a series of armed intrusions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Humanitarian intervention was not originally raised as a factor in our invasion of Afghanistan. After we got there, however, the Bush administration claimed that one of our concerns was the harsh treatment of Afghan women under Taliban rule. This was not an issue, however, that had interested American leaders during the 1980s when they lavishly armed and supported the forces that became the Taliban. During those years, the United States and many of its allies failed to recognize their “responsibilities” to Rwandans, Chiapans, Chechens, Tibetans, Kashmiris, East Timorese, and Palestinians.

No one denies that, in extreme cases, foreign intervention to save innocent lives may be required. The issue is who gets to declare that a military intervention is humanitarian. The International Commission thinks that only the United Nations Security Council should authorize and legalize such activities, whatever the rationale; a self-declaration of humanitarian intervention like that of the United States in Somalia or Serbia thus becomes an act of imperialism. Positing a new, unilateral “responsibility to protect” that is to be the sole responsibility of the world’s last great power and then assuming it only when that superpower finds it convenient to do so may actually worsen relations among nations.

Since the September 11, 2001, attacks, our government no longer appears to want Security Council authorization for its foreign wars (if it ever did) and does not seem to think it needs it. President Bush’s speech at the United Nations on September 12, 2002, was more ultimatum than request: if the United Nations was not going to act against Iraq, then the United States would do so alone. On March 19, 2003, facing an almost certain veto and probably an outright majoritarian defeat if he had sought Security Council authorization for a war with Iraq, Bush made good on that threat and launched the war himself. Imperialism means, among other things, unilateralism in the decision making and actions of a nation, regardless of any humanitarian or other motives it may put forward. “The Rule of Power or the Rule of Law,” a major study by two nonprofit research organizations, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, analyzed the U.S. response to eight major international agreements, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. “The United States has violated, compromised, or acted to undermine in some crucial way every treaty that we have studied in detail,” says Nicole Deller, coauthor of the report.¹⁴ The United States “not only refuses to participate in newly created legal mechanisms, it fails to live up to obligations undertaken in treaties that it has ratified.”

According to the report, the United States is “drifting away from regarding treaties as an essential element in global security to a more opportunistic stand of abiding by treaties only when it is convenient.” Its attempt to undermine the International Criminal Court (ICC), the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, is a vivid example of its unilateralist motives. On December 31, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed the treaty that created the court, originally drafted during multilateral talks in Rome in July 1998 and subsequently signed and ratified by all of America’s closest democratic allies. But the administration of the younger George Bush, fearing that someday American high officials might find themselves called before the court (though “safeguards” in the treaty make this an unlikely prospect), not only refused to submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification but, in an unprecedented move, retroactively “unsigned” it. As journalist David Moberg has written, “U.S. rejection of the court is thus mainly a symbolic statement that America is not accountable to anyone .... Bush wants the United States to serve as the world’s investigator, policeman, prosecutor, judge, and executioner. This is an imperial ideal, not an assertion of sovereignty.”¹⁵ The administration simultaneously claimed itself no longer bound by the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which requires signatory nations to refrain from taking steps to undermine treaties they sign, even if they do not ratify them. As with the treaty for the ICC, the United States had signed but not ratified the Vienna agreement.

Our government became so paranoid on the subject of the ICC that it attempted to bar former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke from even testifying in the war crimes trial of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic before the special U.N. tribunal on war crimes in the Hague. The State Department claimed it feared setting a precedent for cooperation with an international criminal court with jurisdiction over individuals, given that the ICC treaty had been successfully ratified by a sufficient number of nations and had come into being despite American opposition.¹⁶

On March 11, 2003, the ICC began formal operations in The Hague considering charges of war crimes committed after July 1, 2002. Anticipating that development, both houses of Congress passed the American Services Members’ Protection Act, which would, in effect, allow the United States to use military force to free any American citizen held by the court. Dutch politicians, longtime American allies, mystified and outraged by what they saw as senseless grandstanding, sardonically referred to the legislation as the “Hague Invasion Act.”¹⁷

The Bush administration claims it fears “capricious” prosecutions of its officials and military officers by an international prosecutor over whom it has no control, even though the Treaty of Rome contains many safeguards against arbitrary prosecutions, including the right of any nation to precedence over the ICC in trying its own citizens for war crimes. If the United States resists the establishment of a court that can prosecute individuals for war crimes, it is precisely because its global imperialist activities almost inevitably involve the commission of such crimes. The United States is the sole country the old World Court (which can try only nations, not individuals) ever condemned for terrorism—owing to the Reagan administration’s covert action to destabilize and destroy the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in 1984.

The administration has always claimed that its opposition to the ICC is rooted in its desire to shield ordinary servicemen and low-ranking officers from war crimes charges, but its real concern clearly has been that the court might try to prosecute President Bush or other prominent civilian and military leaders. Remembering well the impact of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation of former President Bill Clinton for his sexual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, the administration fears that were an international prosecutor to open a public investigation into the acts of President Bush, it might have a deleterious political impact, even if it never led to an indictment.¹⁸

These fears are, in some ways, not that far-fetched. After all, General Wesley Clark, commander of the NATO air war against Serbia, is as liable under the Geneva Convention of 1949 for not stopping the illegal bombing of water-treatment plants, hospitals, and schools, which killed almost 2,000 civilians, as Dragan Obrenovic, the Bosnian Serb general who commanded the assault on Srebrenica in July 1995 and subsequently was turned over to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for trial. Prosecutors in Chile, Argentina, Spain, and France would like to put former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on trial for his support and sponsorship of the military dictatorships of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador while, in the 1970s, they were killing, torturing, and “disappearing” their own citizens and those of neighboring lands.¹⁹

Similarly, the newly independent nation of East Timor would like to ask Kissinger under oath what he meant when, the day before Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of the former Portuguese territory began, he seemed to give the green light to Indonesian strongman General Suharto. On December 6, 1975, on their way home from a visit to Beijing, President Gerald R. Ford and Kissinger stopped off in Jakarta for a meeting with Suharto. The general told them of his plans to seize the territory against the will of its inhabitants and incorporate it into Indonesia. Even though the Indonesian army was equipped in part with American weaponry, and the use of such arms for domestic purposes is illegal under U.S. law, Kissinger said, “It is important that whatever you do succeed quickly” and asked whether the Indonesians anticipated a “long guerrilla war.” General Ali Murtopo, one of the architects of the seizure, replied that “the whole business will be settled in three weeks.”²⁰ The Indonesian army went on to kill some 200,000 East Timorese.

The administration has not only tried to undercut treaties it finds inconvenient but refused to engage in normal diplomacy with its allies to make such treaties more acceptable. Thus, administration representatives simply walked away from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming that tried to rein in carbon dioxide emissions, claiming that the economic costs were too high. (The United States generates far more such emissions than any other country.) All of the United States’s democratic allies continued to work on the treaty despite the boycott. On July 23, 2001, in Bonn, Germany, a compromise was reached on the severity of the cuts in emissions advanced industrial nations would have to make and on the penalties to be imposed if they do not, resulting in a legally binding treaty endorsed by more than 180 nations. The modified Kyoto Protocol is hardly perfect, but it is a start toward the reduction of greenhouse gases.

Similarly, the United States and Israel walked out of the United Nations conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa, in August and September 2001. The nations that stayed on eventually voted down Syrian demands that language accusing Israel of racism be included. In the conference’s final statement, they also produced an apology for slavery as a “crime against humanity” but did so without language that would have made slave-holding nations liable for reparations. Given the history of slavery in the United States and the degree to which the final document was adjusted to accommodate American concerns, the walkout seemed a display of imperial petulance—or yet another message that “we” do not need “you” to run this world.

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many domestic and foreign observers expressed hopes that the United States would abandon its imperial unilateralism in recognition that its war against terrorism—or at least its efforts to control the financing of terrorism—required allies and a massive, coordinated international effort.²¹ But this hope proved illusory. In the months after 9/11, the Bush administration unilaterally denied rights normally accorded prisoners of war to the fighters it had seized in Afghanistan and was holding at “Camp X-Ray,” a complex of open-air wire cages on the old American military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.²² It unilaterally declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea to be “rogue states” that constituted an “axis of evil” and reserved the right preemptively to destroy any or all of them or, in fact, any other nation deemed potentially hostile that maintained or planned to acquire “weapons of mass destruction”—nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. At the same time, the United States endorsed the development of new and more “usable” nuclear weapons of its own and dramatically expanded the circumstances in which the Pentagon would consider “going nuclear” in a future conflict, all this in open violation of its pledge under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to make an “unequivocal undertaking” to eliminate its nuclear arsenal.²³ The Bush administration has similarly exempted itself from a treaty prohibiting the manufacture of biological weapons because it might have to open “private” pharmaceutical plants to international inspectors.

From evidence of this sort, the late Flora Lewis, longtime New York Times analyst of international relations, concluded that “the U.S. is turning its back on any global rules.” She was concerned particularly by our attempt to subvert an international agreement to limit the world trade in small arms. In July 2001, John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, had declared that the United States intended to thwart any agreement that might constrict the right of its citizens to possess guns.²⁴ Professor Michael Glennon, a specialist in international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, concludes that the Bush administration’s unilateralism and its refusal to be bound by Security Council resolutions means that “the [U.N.] Charter provisions governing the use of force are simply no longer regarded as binding international law.... The Charter has, tragically, gone the way of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact which purported to outlaw war and was signed by every major belligerent in World War II.”²⁵

“In half a year [since 9/11], we have reinvented ourselves as the most belligerent people on earth. How did this happen?” asks Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. “Because the September attacks were the first massive violence suffered in the continental United States since the Civil War,” he answers, “they left us uncertain and afraid. But elsewhere in the world, the devastations of war are all too common. To us they remain abstract. September memories, in fact, underscore how the horrors of modern warfare have never touched the cities of America. That is the only reason we can reorganize U.S. force projection around robot strikes, strategic bombing, and even usable nuclear weapons. All of this represents a failure of the American imagination to grasp the real effect on real people of such assaults. We wage war without knowing war.”²⁶

As late as 1874, well after the Civil War, our country’s standing army had an authorized strength of only 16,000 soldiers, and the military was considerably less important to most Americans than, say, the post office. In those days, an American did not need a passport or governmental permission to travel abroad. When immigrants arrived they were tested only for infectious diseases and did not have to report to anyone. No drugs were prohibited. Tariffs were the main source of revenue for the federal government; there was no income tax.²⁷

A century and a quarter later the U.S. Army has 480,000 members, the navy 375,000, the air force 359,000, and the marines 175,000, for a total of 1,389,000 men and women on active duty. The payroll for these uniformed personnel in 2003 was $27.1 billion for the active army, $22 billion each for the navy and air force, and $8.6 billion for the marines. Today, the federal government can tap into and listen to all citizens’ phone calls, faxes, and e-mail transmissions if it chooses to. It has begun to incarcerate native-born and naturalized citizens as well as immigrants and travelers in military prisons without bringing charges against them. The president alone decides who is an “illegal belligerent,” a term the Bush administration introduced, and there is no appeal from his decision. Much of the defense budget and all intelligence agency budgets are secret. These are all signs of militarism and of the creation of a national security state.

One unusual aspect of American militarism in the twenty-first century is that the government has elaborate plans to exert world dominance not merely through a vast military machine on this planet but through the control of space. The first hint of such aspirations could be found in the aerial bombardment of Serbia from March 24 until June 3, 1999. Pilots, including some in B-2 stealth bombers whose bomb runs took them from Missouri to the Balkans and back, flew more than 38,000 sorties over Serbia. In the course of this campaign only two aircraft were shot down and not a single American combat casualty occurred. General Richard B. Myers, then head of the U.S. Space Command, commented that Kosovo was “a space-enabled war,” “a new benchmark” for the future. Military satellites and a space-based global positioning system had allowed U.S. aircraft to launch more or less precise bombing and guided-missile attacks that kept soldiers and airmen far from danger. In August 2001, President George W. Bush named Myers to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the first officer from such a background to be entrusted with the nation’s highest military post.²⁸

The next space-enabled war followed less than a month after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The Americans began high-altitude bombing of Afghanistan, a country already so devastated by over two decades of war that the dislodging of the repressive Taliban regime proved relatively easy. Despite Pentagon reports of only occasional “collateral damage,” the United States killed at least as many civilians in Afghanistan as the terrorist attacks had killed at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.²⁹ Nonetheless, the military claimed a great victory, with almost no American casualties, and further vindication for its new high-tech, space-based mode of war making.

In 2001, President Bush appointed Peter Teets, former chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin, undersecretary of the air force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), in budgetary terms our largest intelligence agency. At the eighteenth annual National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in April 2002, Teets was joined by General Ed Eberhardt, General Myers’s successor at the Space Command, in underscoring the message that the United States can control the world through a planned domination of space and that it intends to ensure that domination.

Teets and Eberhardt emphasized the role of space in the victory over the Taliban, arguing that satellites were heavily used in the war and that they “allowed for extremely precise bombing by fighters and unmanned aerial vehicles in Afghanistan.”³⁰ Eberhardt asserted that the provision of broadband services from space was as important to soldiers as providing them with intelligence. “We in Space Command provided [General] Tommy Franks [commander in Afghanistan] seven times the bandwidth that was provided to [General] Norman Schwarzkopf, and an individual soldier had 322 times the bandwidth that was available in Desert Storm.” Jeff Harris, a former director of the NRO and now an executive of Lockheed’s Space Systems Company, told the convention, “The U.S. must now act regularly in a preemptive and proactive way around the globe, using space-based resources for local skirmishes.... The U.S. military should make all potential adversaries unquestionably afraid of U.S. capabilities.” Undersecretary Teets derided any talk of cooperation with NATO or the United Nations or other forms of “burden-sharing” or “multilateralism.” The United States, he said, should be proud of its unilateral capabilities and should exploit “our space supremacy, our space dominance, to achieve warfighting success.”³¹ More than anything else, it is this cybertech military prowess that is fueling a rethinking of the entire military establishment and its missions.³²

Even prior to the Afghan war, a group of right-wing “defense intellectuals” had started to advocate a comprehensive new strategy for global domination. Many had served in earlier Republican administrations and most of them were again given high appointive positions when George W. Bush became president. They focused on plans for the next decade or two in much the same way that Captain Alfred T. Mahan of the navy, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt had emphasized sea power, Pacific bases, and a two-ocean navy at the end of the nineteenth century. Rarely taking the public into their confidence, the members of this new clique were masters of media manipulation, something they acknowledged they had “learned” as a result of bitter experience during the Vietnam War. The terrorist incidents of 2001, much like the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898, gave a tremendous boost to their private agenda. It mobilized popular sentiment and patriotism behind military initiatives that might otherwise have elicited serious mainstream doubts and protests.

The determination to militarize outer space and dominate the globe from orbiting battle stations armed with an array of weapons includes high-energy lasers that could be directed toward any target on earth or against other nations’ satellites. The Space Command’s policy statement, “Vision for 2020,” argues that “the globalization of the world economy will continue, with a widening gulf between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” and that the Pentagon’s mission is therefore to “dominate the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investments” in an increasingly dangerous and implicitly anti-American world. One crucial goal of policy should be “denying other countries access to space.”³³

Such an aggressive attempt to ensure unilateral military hegemony requires that this country abandon all arms control agreements and constraints, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which placed limits on the militarization of space, since space is inherently global. (Satellites do not remain within national boundaries.) The logic behind the weaponization of space is an ancient one implicit in virtually all imperialist projects—the need to protect some territory or capability whose vulnerability has been exaggerated and where alternatives to military options have not even been considered. The U.S. claim is that it has become militarily dependent on satellite communications and espionage and that an adversary could gain an advantage by deploying antisatellite weapons to disrupt these signals. Much as Britain at the end of the nineteenth century had to make colonies of Egypt and South Africa in order, so it said, to protect the sea approaches to its imperial enclave in India, and then had to conquer Sudan and the upper Nile to protect Egypt and much of sub-Saharan Africa to protect South Africa, the United States now argues that it must totally dominate space to protect its new, casualty-free war-fighting technologies.

But this kind of logic—comparable to the “domino theory” in the Vietnam War—leads to an endless progression of places and commitments that must be protected, resulting inevitably in imperial overstretch, bankruptcy, and popular disaffection, precisely the maladies that plagued Edwardian Britain. Such strategic planning also tends to produce unintended consequences in the form of unjustifiably brutal wars of imperial conquest, such as Britain’s against the Boer settlers of South Africa. The Boer War, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, resulted in the deaths of 22,000 British soldiers. In the course of defeating the settlers, who took to guerrilla warfare against their stronger enemy, the British built the world’s first concentration camps, where at least 28,000 Boer civilians (mostly women and children) and between 14,000 and 20,000 Bushmen, Zulus, and assorted other tribal peoples died.³⁴ Deaths in the camps amounted to about 10 percent of the Boer population. The root cause of all this mayhem was not the need to defend India but the urge to dominate globally—in short, imperialism and militarism. Alternative ways to achieve the same objectives—or a decision to abandon those objectives as not worth it—were never seriously considered.

In the contemporary clique of imperialists the main proponents of the militarization of space are Donald Rumsfeld (b. 1932), an old cold warrior and secretary of defense in the Ford administration (1975-77), who was brought back to the Pentagon by George Bush the younger a quarter century later, and Vice President Dick Cheney (b. 1941), President Ford’s chief of staff and Bush pére’s secretary of defense (1989-93). Immediately prior to becoming secretary of defense in 2001, Rumsfeld chaired the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, whose final report concludes, “It is in the U.S. national interest to ... use the nation’s potential in space to support its domestic, economic, diplomatic, and national security objectives; develop and deploy the means to deter and defend against hostile acts directed at U.S. space assets and against the uses of space hostile to U.S. interests.”³⁵

Rumsfeld and Cheney have received analytical support from within the Pentagon in the person of Andrew W. Marshall (b. 1921), a former Rand Corporation “thinker about the unthinkable,” who has specialized for many years in promoting a “revolution in military affairs,” meaning advanced forms of warfare utilizing cybertechnology. Rumsfeld immediately put Marshall in charge of producing a blueprint for the Pentagon’s future—and launched a full-scale campaign advocating a new space-based, high-tech grand strategy for transforming the military and securing global dominance for decades to come.³⁶ In a classic replay of paranoid imperialist thinking, American generals now warn about the country’s dependence on satellites and the danger of a “space Pearl Harbor.” To avoid this imagined catastrophe, militarists argue, the United States must seize and dominate space as soon as possible. In 2003, the United States created its first military unit intended to defend communications, weather, navigation, and missile-warning satellites from potential “enemy” attacks against ground stations or in space. This is the 614th Space Intelligence Squadron, based at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. “All smart bombs and smart weapons are controlled by the GPS (global positioning system),” says Major Kurt Gaudette, director of operations for the new squadron. “If those don’t work, we don’t have any smart bombs anymore. So it’s critical that those assets stay up there and are safe.”³⁷

As a key part of this program, the United States must not only put significant resources into developing “killer” satellites to keep other nations from “inhabiting” space but also build defenses, ultimately space-based ones, against other countries’ ballistic missiles. This latter program, the open face of the more secretive project to militarize space, has been the subject of a great deal of presidential and political grandstanding. During 2001, advocating ballistic missile defenses became the primary way for our leaders to show their commitment to “unilateralism,” a powerful demonstration of which was the president’s decision on December 13, 2001, to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union. He took this action well before the United States had developed any kind of antiballistic missile defenses, much less tested and deployed them, and despite open opposition by Russia, China, and the leading NATO nations.

Not surprisingly, China suspects that ballistic missile defense (BMD) is actually a program aimed at neutralizing its minuscule nuclear deterrent, and most of America’s main allies implicitly agree and so have proved reluctant to go along with it, fearing that BMD will unleash a new arms race as challenged nuclear nations like China build more and better missiles to overwhelm such defenses. Nonetheless, the Bush administration is determined to go ahead with this unproven—in fact, still nonexistent—and highly destabilizing system, for which, given the patriotic mania that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress voted every last dollar the Pentagon requested.

In the process, the Bush administration has done everything in its power to classify and so hide official information on the high probability that the system will malfunction. For example, the Pentagon suppressed a report written in August 2000 by Philip E. Coyle, its own director of operational testing and evaluation, despite six different congressional requests for it. Among other things, Coyle documented how the command and control system for BMD is easily confused and has in the past caused a simulated launch of multiple interceptors against missiles that did not exist. As Representative John Tierney (D-Massachusetts) commented, “One immediate danger in these types of situations is that adversaries may interpret these launches as a hostile first strike and respond accordingly.”³⁸ Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has said that he wants a ballistic missile defense even if it has not been thoroughly tested and is admittedly not able to perform to specifications.

BMD derives some legitimacy within Republican Party circles from former president Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of a strategic defense initiative (SDI), which had as its objective the building of a kind of protective electronic astrodome of rockets and lasers over the country, an idea that never proved technically feasible. Reagan undoubtedly thought of SDI as defensive, but both SDI and BMD are in truth offensive concepts. It may be good public relations for its current advocates to imply that BMD is meant only to defend us against what are now called rogue states, places like North Korea and Iran that have not acquiesced in American hegemony and might conceivably be able to produce missiles with an intercontinental range. But no one seriously believes that any nation, small or large, plans to commit suicide by launching anything as traceable as a nuclear missile against the United States. As neoconservative pundit Lawrence F. Kaplan puts it, “Missile defense isn’t really meant to protect America. It’s a tool for global dominance.”³⁹ Or, in the words of Jim Walsh, a research fellow in science and international affairs at Harvard, “missile defense is more missile than defense.”⁴⁰

If BMD were a genuine defensive strategy, it would be subject to the same problems as China’s Great Wall, which stopped neither Mongol nor Manchu invaders, or France’s Maginot Line, which was supposed to protect the country from a German invasion but failed spectacularly when the Germans simply went around it. Even in the unlikely event that our BMD proved technologically perfect, its very existence would immediately elicit plans to overwhelm it with more missiles than it had interceptors. But that matters little to those planning for our militarized future. For them, BMD is a reasonable cover for the extensive research program required to “weaponize” space, a good conduit for supplying extensive funding to key defense contractors; and finally, a way to complicate the decision making of any opponent who might threaten to “deter” the United States with a nuclear attack. BMD strategists conjecture that such an enemy would have to wonder whether its threat was credible in the face of missile defenses. As New York Times columnist Bill Keller puts it, military theorists “fear that any nation with a few nuclear weapons can do to us what we did to the Soviets—deter us from projecting our vastly superior conventional forces into the world.”⁴¹ The fact is, missile defense is not about defense. It is about offense, and it offers ample fuel for a new global nuclear arms race while ironically making the United States considerably less secure.

Not surprisingly, the 1998 commission that developed the plans for the present BMD system was headed by Donald Rumsfeld.⁴² One of its members, and a figure who typifies this group, was Paul Wolfowitz, who has a Ph.D. in political science but no experience of either war or the military. Wolfowitz has used his many positions in the Reagan and both Bush administrations to push for ever-greater military supremacy over all rivals, including our Cold War allies. In 1992, he argued that the objective of foreign policy should be “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” These regions, he suggested, included Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East—Africa and Latin America (which we already controlled) excepted, essentially the world. Just before returning to the Pentagon in 2001 as Rumsfeld’s deputy, Wolfowitz asserted that his earlier insistence on the need to establish a Pax Americana, although heavily criticized at the time, had become mainstream strategic thought.⁴³

Nowhere is this need more strongly felt (and yet more strenuously denied) than vis-á-vis China. Supporters of BMD insist that the system is in no way aimed at China. “We don’t think that they should really be concerned about missile defense,” commented John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. “It’s not directed against them. After all it is defensive.”⁴⁴ But defensive is precisely what it is not, and the status of Taiwan is at the heart of the BMD plan.

Since the Chinese civil war (1946-49) and the 1950 intervention of Chinese troops in the Korean War, the right wing of the Republican Party has never been able to accept that our wartime ally, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), was defeated by the Communists owing to its hopeless corruption and incompetence. After Chiang retreated with the remnants of his forces to the offshore island of Taiwan, the “China Lobby” pushed for the United States to defend him. It did so until 1971, when a majority vote by the United Nations General Assembly finally dislodged Taiwan from the seat reserved for China in the United Nations Charter. Even after the Carter administration belatedly recognized China in 1978, it continued to arm Taiwan. Congressional supporters of Taiwan have done everything in their power to commit the country to defending Taiwan militarily, even were it to invite Chinese military action by unilaterally declaring its independence.

Throughout the 1990s, official Washington reverberated with anti-Chinese statements, actions, and provocations. These included a May 25, 1999, report of the House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People’s Republic of China, headed by Representative Christopher Cox (R-California). The Cox Report asserted that espionage had enabled China to achieve a nuclear weapons capacity “on a par” with that of the United States. At the time, China had roughly twenty old, liquid-fueled, single-warhead intercontinental-range missiles, whereas the United States had about 7,150 strategic warheads deliverable against China via missiles, submarines, and bombers. The hysteria the Cox Report generated, however, contributed to a governmental witch-hunt against Wen-ho Lee, an American computer researcher of Taiwanese ancestry at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. Lee was accused of being a spy for mainland China and was freed after 277 days of brutal solitary confinement only when a federal judge threw out the government’s case and denounced the FBI and the Justice Department for harassing Lee, probably because the officials in charge of the case were racists.⁴⁵

In 2001, with the advent of the latest Bush administration, the Pentagon shifted much of its nuclear targeting from Russia to China. It also began regular high-level military talks with Taiwan over defense of the island, ordered a shift of army personnel and supplies to the Asia-Pacific region, and worked strenuously to promote the remilitarization of Japan. On April 1, 2001, a U.S. Navy EP-3E Aries II electronic spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter off Hainan Island. The American aircraft was on a mission to provoke Chinese radar defenses and then record the transmissions and procedures the Chinese used in sending up interceptors.⁴⁶ These flights were ordered by the commander in chief in the Pacific, one of the United States’s increasingly independent military proconsuls who are the de facto authors of foreign policy in their regions. While the Chinese jet went down and the pilot lost his life, the American plane landed safely on Hainan Island, and its crew of twenty-four spies were well treated by the Chinese authorities.

It soon became clear that China, after the United States and Britain now the third-largest recipient of direct foreign investment, was not interested in a confrontation. Many of its most important investors have their headquarters in the United States. But it could not instantly return the crew of the spy plane without risking powerful domestic criticism of obsequiousness in the face of provocation. It therefore delayed eleven days, until it received a pro forma American apology for causing the death of a Chinese pilot on the edge of China’s territorial air space and for making an unauthorized landing at a Chinese military airfield. Meanwhile, our media promptly labeled the crew “hostages,” encouraged their relatives to tie yellow ribbons around neighborhood trees, claimed that the president was doing “a first-rate job,” and endlessly criticized China for its “state-controlled media.” Washington carefully avoided mentioning that the United States enforces a 200-mile aircraft-intercept zone around the country, which stretches far beyond territorial waters.

On April 25, 2001, during an interview on national television, President Bush was asked whether he would ever use “the full force of the American military” against China for the sake of Taiwan. He responded, “Whatever it takes to help Taiwan defend herself.” Some American militarists argue that a missile defense would make this commitment credible by protecting American cities from any Chinese retaliatory attack. After 9/11, as America became preoccupied with al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq, China temporarily disappeared from the Pentagon’s radar screen. But during 2002-03 the issue of nuclear deterrence arose again in East Asia, not with reference to China but to North Korea.

The diehards of the Republican Party who have never been able to accept that China is not and never will be an American satellite have even greater trouble accepting a small, poverty-stricken, but resolutely defiant regime in North Korea. In his State of the Union address of January 29, 2002, the president famously included North Korea on his short list of countries the United States was thinking of preventively “taking out.” With the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, the “shock and awe” and bloody slaughter phase of the American “liberation” of Iraq came to an end. Our full armada of B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers, five carrier task forces in the Persian Gulf, innumerable surface ships and submarines armed with cruise missiles, and the command and control staffs who fought the war from air-conditioned tents in Qatar were released for redeployment. Flushed with success, they may well choose as their next target—if not the Middle East—North Korea. It seems likely that the North Koreans themselves are thinking along these same lines and believe that George Bush plans to order an attack on them. North Korea illustrates the kinds of explosive situations the United States, in its guise as a New Rome, creates for itself.

A little history may be in order. Back in 1994, the United States discovered that the Pyongyang regime was producing plutonium as a byproduct of an old Russian-designed reactor for generating electric power. A crisis over the possibility that North Korea might be able to turn out a few atomic bombs was resolved within the year by the oddly titled “Agreed Framework.” In return for Pyongyang’s pledge to mothball its old reactor and allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United States and its allies promised to build two new reactors that would not produce weapons-grade fissionable material and to open some form of diplomatic and economic relations with the isolated North. The United States also agreed to supply the North with fuel oil to replace the energy lost by shutting down the reactor (since the country has no independent sources of energy of any sort). For three years the Clinton administration stalled on implementing the agreement, hoping that the highly militarized North Korean regime, its people suffering from starvation, would simply collapse.

By the end of the decade this standoff had degenerated into stalemate. In June 2000, the president of South Korea, Kim Dae-jung, acting on his own initiative and without consulting the United States, undertook a historic journey of reconciliation to Pyongyang, trying to eradicate the last vestiges of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula. His visit produced a breakthrough, and for his efforts he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Even more important, President Kim’s initiative caught the imagination of his own people, much as Richard Nixon’s 1971 opening to China captured the imagination of millions of Americans.

South Korea has a population of forty-seven million, more than twice the North’s twenty-one million, and is twenty-five to thirty times richer than its desolate neighbor. The South’s willingness to help the North reflects a growing democratic and economic self-confidence. It is important to remember that South Korea is one of only three countries in East Asia (the others being the Philippines and Taiwan) to have achieved democracy from below. In South Korea and the Philippines, mass movements fought against oppressive dictators imposed and supported by the United States—General Chun Doo-hwan in Seoul and Ferdinand Marcos in Manila.

During 2000, relations between North and South Korea continued to improve, leading to an October visit to Pyongyang by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In the early days of the Bush administration, however, these favorable trends in Korea and in Washington came to a halt. On a visit to Washington in March 2001, Kim Dae-jung was rudely brushed off by Bush; the administration began to include North Korea in its increasingly bellicose statements.

In September 2002, when the Bush administration asserted in its National Security Strategy a right to wage “preventive war,” this rhetoric gained an almost immediate reality for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. As the United States began mobilizing a powerful invasion force on the borders of Iraq and then invaded, North Korea prepared to defend itself in the only way it thought the Americans could understand. It withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, expelled international inspectors, and restarted its old power reactor.

At first, the Bush administration’s response was muted. It was already launching one war. Another in Korea would have threatened the South Korean capital, Seoul, a city of 10.8 million within easy artillery range of the North. Among them were thousands of American troops stationed for decades near the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas as a “tripwire” against an attack from the North. This was meant to ensure, among other things, that, as the first casualties came in, the American people would have no choice but to back the war.

On the other hand, the men (and woman) of the Bush administration made no effort to back down from or soften their positions or offer to negotiate. Kim Jong-il’s regime thus reached the almost unavoidable conclusion that it was likely to be the next victim of a bully and began trying to “deter” the Americans. It insisted on a nonaggression treaty with the United States in return for shutting down its dangerous reactor and halting its nuclear weapons development program. At the same time, it offered to allow the expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to return to monitor its nuclear facilities.

After the United States invaded Iraq, North Korea pulled back from even this offer. On April 6, 2003, it announced that only by arming itself with a “tremendous military deterrent” could it guarantee its security. “The Iraqi war shows that to allow disarming through inspection does not help avert a war but rather sparks it.... This suggests that even the signing of a nonaggression treaty with the U.S. would not help avert a war.” Much like Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain, North Korea was now telling its citizens, “If you’ve got to go, take one with you.” The places it threatened to take with it were Seoul, some of the thirty-eight American bases on Okinawa, and as many Japanese cities as it could hit (though its nuclear-tipped missiles may not have the capability to reach as far as either Okinawa or the Japanese mainland). The South Koreans estimate that the North possesses 175 to 200 Rodong missiles with a range of 1,300 kilometers, capable of striking anywhere in Japan, and 650 to 800 intermediate-range Scud missiles targeted on South Korea and stored in underground facilities.⁴⁷

Over the previous two years, South Korean public opinion had shifted radically on the issue of North Korea. The prosperous and well-informed people of the South know that their fellow Koreans—hungry, desperate, oppressed, but well armed—are trapped by the ironies of the end of the Cold War and by the harshness of the Kim Jong-il regime but are also being pushed into an exceedingly dangerous corner by the Americans in their newly proclaimed role as the reigning global military colossus. The South no longer much fears the North—at least a North not pushed to extreme acts by Washington. It fears instead the enthusiasm for war emanating from Washington and the constant problems generated by the American troops based in South Korea over the past fifty years.

Here, too, some history is needed of this peninsula where the past is seldom forgotten. Ever since the United States occupied the southern half of it in 1945 and created the “Republic of Korea,” it has maintained a strong military presence there. During 2002, the Department of Defense listed among its properties and personnel in South Korea 101 separate military installations manned by 37,605 American troops, 2,875 U.S. civilians working for the military, and 7,027 resident American dependents.⁴⁸ The installations include Osan Air Base, known as K-55 during the Korean War, which is the headquarters of the Seventh Air Force, and Kunsan Air Base on the west coast of the country, which is the main fighter base. Easily the most astonishing facility in South Korea, however, is the Yongsan Army Garrison. A monument to American cultural and historical insensitivity, it is located on the site of Japan’s old military headquarters, created in 1894 and a symbol of Japan’s hated occupation of Korea. Originally on the outskirts of old Seoul, it occupies 630 prime acres squarely in the center of the densely populated capital. It has been the headquarters for American military operations in Korea since 1945.⁴⁹

Today, Yongsan features the Dragon Hill Recreation Center, “the largest exchange in Korea with shopping arcade,” including half a dozen bars and restaurants, a state-of-the-art hotel (with different room rates for different ranks), a fitness center, and numerous other amenities. Dragon Hill is a vacation resort for American officers, servicemen and women, and their families located smack in downtown Seoul, and it is not open to Koreans. This facility has so irritated the Koreans that on April 9, 2003, the United States agreed to move it to some other location, probably to another base located in a remote area. It remains to be seen how expeditiously the U.S. Forces Korea command will actually implement this agreement.

Just forty miles north of the South Korean capital and twelve miles south of the Demilitarized Zone is Camp Casey, the most powerful, forward-deployed location of the army’s Second Infantry Division. It houses more than 6,300 troops, a large proportion of the American military personnel in Korea. Casey is a 19,000-acre domain of brick buildings and Quonset hut-like sheds that resembles nothing so much as a penitentiary. Private Kenneth Markle, easily the most notorious American in South Korea because in 1993 he raped and murdered a Korean woman, Kum E. Yoon, was based there. The strangling in 1996 of Lee Ki Sun, another Korean woman, over an argument about paying for sex, by Private Eric Munnich, a twenty-two-year-old soldier, took place in the nearby village of Tongduchon.

On June 13, 2002, a sixty-ton army tracked vehicle from Camp Casey rumbled down a narrow two-lane road through small villages a few miles north of Seoul. The two sergeants manning the vehicle failed to see two thirteen-year-old schoolgirls walking along the road on their way to a friend’s birthday party. Both girls were crushed to death. It is not clear whether the two soldiers were operating the vehicle as part of their official duties, whether they failed to see the girls because of equipment faultily mounted on their vehicle, or whether the vehicle’s internal communications system malfunctioned or just had not been plugged in properly.

The Korean government demanded that the sergeants be handed over to them to be tried in a Korean court for manslaughter. The United States refused, claiming that right under a status of forces agreement (SOFA) it forced on the country during the Korean War. Instead the men were tried in an American military court for “criminal negligence” and exonerated for the “accidental” deaths. No real prosecution evidence was introduced at the trial, and the men’s commanding officer, who was in Korea, was never called to testify on the soldiers’ training and supervision. Anti-American riots erupted throughout the South, first calling for the SOFA to be revised and later demanding that American forces get out of the country altogether.⁵⁰

On December 19, 2002, South Korea elected Roh Moo-hyun, a human rights lawyer, to succeed Kim Dae-jung as president. In his campaign, Roh pledged to continue Kim’s opening to the North and asked for changes in South Korea’s military relations with the United States. His incoming administration is said to have told Bush that South Korea would rather live with a nuclear North than join the United States in another war. On April 9, the day Baghdad fell, the Pentagon and the Roh government entered into negotiations over the future of U.S. forces in the Republic of Korea, and the American delegation suddenly showed extraordinary impatience to move the Second Infantry Division back from the Demilitarized Zone as quickly as possible. One source quoted Admiral Thomas B. Fargo, head of the Pacific Command, as saying, “I’d like to be out yesterday.”⁵¹

As it was no doubt meant to do, the American plan threw fear into both the official South and the southern public. The concern among the Republic of Korea’s citizens was that such a sudden redeployment of U.S. troops out of harm’s way would not only look to the North like preparations for a preemptive strike but might actually prove to be so. Equally ominous, the Bush administration sent B-1 and B-52 strategic bombers to Guam “in case they might be needed in Korea” and later announced that an undisclosed number of F-117 stealth fighter jets and F-15E Strike Eagles deployed to South Korea for recently concluded military exercises would remain in the country. The radar-evading F-117s would be highly suitable for attacking a broad variety of targets in the North, including the nuclear plant at Yongbyon. The last time F-117s were based in South Korea was in 1994, when the Clinton administration was also contemplating a “surgical strike” on the North. That crisis ended peacefully only when former President Jimmy Carter went to Pyongyang and opened direct negotiations with Kim Il-sung.

As might be expected, the Bush administration sees these developments on the Korean Peninsula as further evidence of the need for a ballistic missile defense—to protect against future nuclear-tipped North Korean Taepodong II missiles. But, in fact, even if such a system succeeded in shooting down a North Korean nuclear warhead, the fallout over South Korea or perhaps Japan and Okinawa might be almost as hazardous as a direct hit. The most serious outcome of this American-generated crisis has been to give great impetus to nuclear proliferation around the world. Smaller nations everywhere now believe that the only way to deter the United States from exercising its imperial will over them is to acquire a nuclear capability.⁵² Iraq’s problem, from this perspective, was that it really did not have any weapons of mass destruction.

North Korea remains a failed Communist regime with much of its population on the edge of starvation. It has been attempting, fitfully and with great trepidation, to come in from the cold in somewhat the same way China has so successfully over the past twenty years. As Kim Dae-jung understood, the United States and South Korea should be magnanimous winners instead of threatening a renewed use of force. No surrounding nation—not the Republic of Korea, or Japan, or China, or Russia—wants, or sees the need for, a renewed civil war on the Korean Peninsula.

The Bush administration is trying to soothe the South Koreans’ fears about a preventive war with talk of America’s “precision-guided missiles,” its commitment to avoiding civilian casualties, its superbly trained fighting forces, and its conviction that the North Koreans who survive our bombers will hail the Americans and South Koreans as liberators. But the South Koreans know better and are unlikely to go along with American ideas about the need for a preventive war. One certain legacy of the war in Iraq is that American political and military leaders can no longer be believed or trusted.