From Chapter 5
The Script: Domestic
The Reagan years saw a continuation of the relatively poor economic performance of the 1970s. Growth overwhelmingly benefited the very rich, unlike the "golden age" of the fifties and sixties, when it was evenly spread across the population. During the Reagan-Bush years real wages stagnated or declined along with benefits; working hours increased; and employers were given free rein to ignore protection for labor organizing. The policies were, naturally, unpopular. As the Bush I administration reached its final days, Reagan was ranked alongside Nixon as the least popular living ex-president.12
It is not easy, under such conditions, to maintain political power. Only one good method is known: inspire fear. That tactic was employed throughout the Reagan-Bush years, as the leadership conjured up one devil after another to frighten the populace into obedience.
The threats to Americans during the first war on terror were immense. By November 1981, Libyan hit men were roaming the streets of Washington to assassinate the president, who courageously faced down the scoundrel Qaddafi. From the first moment, the administration recognized Libya to be a defenseless punching bag, and therefore set up confrontations in which many Libyans could be killed, hoping for a Libyan response that could be exploited to induce fear.
Before Americans could breathe a sigh of relief over the president's lucky escape from the Libyan hit men, Qaddafi was on the march again, this time invading Sudan across 600 miles of desert, with the air forces of the US and its allies standing by helplessly. Qadaffi also allegedly concocted a plot to overthrow the government of Sudan so subtle that Sudanese and Egyptian intelligence knew nothing about it, as discovered by the few US reporters who took the trouble to investigate. The subsequent US show of force enabled Secretary of State Shultz to announce that Qaddafi "is back in his box where he belongs" because Reagan acted "quickly and decisively," demonstrating "the strength of the cowboy" that so entranced worshipful intellectuals (Paul Johnson, in this case). The episode was quickly relegated to oblivion once its purposes had been served.13
Just as the early Libyan threats subsided, another even more dangerous one appeared: an air base in Grenada that the Russians could use to bomb us. Fortunately, our leader came to the rescue in the nick of time. After turning down offers for peaceful settlement on US terms, Washington landed 6,000 elite forces, who were able to overcome the resistance of a few dozen lightly armed, middle-aged Cuban construction workers, and we were at last "standing tall," the gallant cowboy in the White House proclaimed.14
But the threats were not over. Soon Nicaraguans were looming on the horizon, only two days' driving time from Harlingen, Texas, waving their copies of Mein Kampf. Fortunately, the commander in chief, recalling Churchill's stand against the Nazis, refused to surrender and was able to fend off the threatening hordes, even though they were being supplied by Qaddafi in his campaign to "expel America from the world."15
As the White House sought to mobilize congressional support for an intensified attack on Nicaragua in 1986, the Libyan threat was conjured up again with deadly US provocations in the Gulf of Sidra, followed by the bombing of Libya on prime-time TV, killing dozens, on no credible pretext. The official stance was that Article 51 of the UN Charter accords us the right to use violence "in self-defense against future attack." That was perhaps the first explicit formulation of the doctrine of "preventive war," and the end of any hopes of a world of order and law, if taken at all seriously. And it was. New York Times legal analyst Anthony Lewis praised the Reagan administration for relying "on a legal argument that violence against the perpetrators of repeated violence is justified as an act of selfdefense. " Imagine the consequences if others were powerful enough to adopt the Reagan-Lewis doctrine.16
So matters continued through the decade. The European tourist industry went into periodic decline, as Americans were too frightened to travel to European cities because they might be attacked by crazed Arabs or other demons. Grave threats were concocted at home as well. Crime in the US is not very different from other industrial countries. Fear of crime, however, is much higher. The same is true of drugs: a problem in other societies, an imminent danger to our very existence in the US. It is easy for political leaders to use the media to whip up fear of these and other menaces. Campaigns are mounted periodically, when required by domestic political needs. Bush I's racist Willie Horton escapade in the 1988 election campaign is a famous example.
The September 1989 redeclaration of the "drug war" was another striking illustration. In the face of substantial evidence to the contrary, the administration dramatically proclaimed that Hispanic narcotraffickers were a menace to our society. Officials could be confident that the tactic would succeed, as explained by journalist and editor Hodding Carter, former assistant secretary of state in the Carter administration. It's a "lead-pipe cinch," he wrote, that "the mass media in America have an overwhelming tendency to jump up and down and bark in concert whenever the White House—any White House—snaps its fingers."
The campaign was a grand success—apart from affecting drug use. Fear of drugs instantly shot to the lead of public concerns. The stage was set for escalating the campaign to remove superfluous people from city streets to the new prisons that were rapidly being built; and to go on to Operation Just Cause, the glorious invasion of Panama on grounds of Noriega's involvement with drug trafficking, among other reasons. At the same time, the Bush administration was threatening Thailand with severe sanctions if it placed barriers on import of a far more lethal US-produced substance, tobacco. But all this passed in silence.
In the case of Panama, too, there was a knockdown legal argument for invasion. UN ambassador Thomas Pickering instructed the Security Council that Article 51 of the UN Charter "provides for the use of armed force to defend a country, to defend our interests and our people," and to prevent "its territory from being used to smuggle drugs into the US"—in this case, by reinstating the white elite of bankers and businessmen, many of whom were themselves suspected of narcotrafficking and money laundering and who soon lived up to their reputation, US government agencies reported.17
Throughout, the legal arguments keep to a principle enunciated by the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban: in "determining the legal basis" for some intended action, "one might work backward from the action one wished to take to find a legal justification."18
The script has been followed fairly closely as much the same elements gained a hold on political power in the 2000 election. In 1981 they had combined a vast increase in military spending with tax cuts, calculating "that growing hysteria over the ensuing deficit would create powerful pressures to cut federal [social] spending, and thus, perhaps, enable the Administration to accomplish its goal of rolling back the New Deal." Bush II followed the pattern with tax cuts overwhelmingly benefiting the very rich, and "the biggest surge in federal spending in twenty years,"19 largely military, hence indirectly high-tech industry.
Government deficits require "fiscal discipline," which translates into cutbacks for services for the general population. The administration's own economists estimate the bills that the government will be unable to pay at $44 trillion. Their study was to be included in the annual budget report published in February 2003 but was removed, perhaps because it forecast that closing the gap would require a huge tax increase and Bush was trying to ram through another tax reduction, again benefiting mainly the rich. "President Bush is working overtime to deepen our fiscal trap," economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Jeffrey Sachs observe, reporting the enormous anticipated fiscal gap. Among the results, they contend, will be "massive cuts in future Social Security and Medicare benefits." White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer agreed with the $44 trillion estimate and implicitly conceded the accuracy of the analysis as well: "There is no question that Social Security and Medicare are going to present [future] generations with a crushing debt burden unless policymakers work seriously to reform those programs"—which does not mean funding them by progressive taxation. The problem is deepened by the serious financial crisis of states and cities.20
The editors of the staid Financial Times are only "stating the obvious," economist Paul Krugman comments, when they write that the "more extreme Republicans" with their hands on the controls seem to want a fiscal train wreck that "offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing [cuts on social programs] through the back door." Slated for demolition, Krugman contends, are Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, but the same may be true for the whole range of programs of the past century that were developed to protect the population from the ravages of private power.21
Eliminating social programs has goals that go well beyond concentration of wealth and power. Social Security, public schools, and other such deviations from the "right way" that US military power is to impose on the world, as frankly declared, are based on evil doctrines, among them the pernicious belief that we should care, as a community, whether the disabled widow on the other side of town can make it through the day, or the child next door should have a chance for a decent future. These evil doctrines derive from the principle of sympathy that was taken to be the core of human nature by Adam Smith and David Hume, a principle that must be driven from the mind. Privatization has other benefits. If working people depend on the stock market for their pensions, health care, and other means of survival, they have a stake in undermining their own interests: opposing wage increases, health and safety regulations, and other measures that might cut into profits that flow to the benefactors on whom they must rely, in a manner reminiscent of feudalism.
After a surge of presidential popularity following 9-11, polls revealed increasing discontent with the social and economic policies of the administration. If there was to be any hope of maintaining political power, the Bush forces were virtually compelled to adopt what Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism,"2222 a strategy which is second nature to them in any event, having worked so well during their first twelve years in office.
The strategy was outlined by Karl Rove, the chief political adviser: Republicans must "go to the country on the issue of national security" in November 2002, because voters "trust the Republican Party" for "protecting America." Similarly, he explained, Bush will have to be portrayed as a wartime leader for the 2004 presidential campaign. "As long as domestic issues were dominating news coverage and political battles over the summer. Bush and his Republicans lost ground," the chief international analyst for UPI pointed out. But the "imminent threat" of Iraq was conjured up just in time, in September 2002. Recognizing its vulnerability on domestic issues, "the administration is campaigning to sustain and increase its power on a policy of international adventurism, new radical preemptive military strategies, and a hunger for a politically convenient and perfectly timed confrontation with Iraq."23
For the midterm electoral campaign, the tactic worked—just. Even though voters "believe that Republicans are more concerned about large corporations than about ordinary Americans," they trust the Republicans on national security.24
In September, the National Security Strategy was announced.
Manufactured fear provided enough of a popular base for the invasion of Iraq, instituting the new norm of aggressive war at will, and afforded the administration enough of a hold on political power so that it could proceed with a harsh and unpopular domestic agenda. Again, the script of the first tenure in power is being followed closely, though now with greater fervor, fewer external constraints, and considerably greater threats to peace (116-121).
Notes for Chapter 5
...
12. See Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Right Turn (Hill & Wang, 1986), Michael Meeropol, Surrender (Michigan, 2003). See also my Turning the Tide, chapter 5, and my Year 501, chapter 11. On economic consequences, see State of Working America studies by the Economic Policy Institute; and Edward Wolff, Top Heavy (New Press, 1996).
13. On Libya's role in Reaganite demonology, see my Pirates and Emperors, Old and New, chapter 3; Stephen Shalom, Imperial Alibis (South End, 1992), chapter 7.
14. See my Necessary Illusions, pp. 176-80.
15. See pp. 96-97.
16. Anthony Lewis, New York Times, 17 April 1986.
17. Hodding Carter, Wall Street Journal, 14 September 1989; Thomas Pickering quoted by AP, 20 December 1989. For a detailed review, see my Deterring Democracy, chapters 5 and 6, and Shalom, Imperial Alibis, chapter 8.
18. Cited in Irene Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield (Columbia, 1977), p. 256.
19. Ferguson and Rogers, Right Turn, p. 122. Jackie Calmes and John D. McKinnon, Wall Street Journal, 11 November 2002.
20. Peronet Despeignes, Financial Times, 29 May 2003. Kotlikoff and Sachs, Boston Globe, 19 May 2003. Fleischer, Financial Times, 30 May 2003.
21. Paul Krugman, New York Times, 27 May 2003.
22. Anatol Lieven, London Review of Books, 3 October 2002.
23. Martin Sierf, American Conservative, 4 November 2002.
24. Donald Green and Eric Schickler, New York Times, 12 November 2002.
He's not easy to dismiss, is Mr. Chomsky.
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