The Real Costs of the War on Iran and the Continuities of American History
Kabir Rao – Navigating the Nuclear Age
The involvement of the United States across the Global South or, in older parlance, the Third World, has a long and tragic history. Its encounters with Third World Countries have generally involved the practice of imperialism and the rhetoric of democracy, freedom, and development. A quick survey of American foreign policy since 1945 would not merely suggest that America’s interventions have narrowed the democratic possibilities and blocked the popular aspirations of these societies; it would also point to interventions as the most frequent concerns of United States foreign policy.
Some of the more extreme and protracted cases of American involvement, as in Vietnam, have manifested domestically as well. From a strengthening of the national security apparatus to the emergence of massive dissent in universities and streets, to the exposure of internal elite politics (as in the case of Watergate and the Iran-Contra affair), there has been an organic link between policy abroad and events at home.
That American history is dotted with foreign interventions suggests a continuity of outlook towards the rest of the world. Outsiders like us shuttle between choice and compulsion to search for an explanation as to this often bewildering and always painful fact. Those commanding the fort may helplessly state “We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate,” as President Johnson proclaimed in 1965.[1] Some may point to the powerful pressures of interest groups within Washington, like the Israel lobby, as has become popular currency today. Others in the historical and economic professions may situate it in the development of monopoly capitalism and the service of large multinational corporations. However, it is hard for peoples on the receiving end of American power to look at America’s strategic, economic, and political achievements, and not believe that there is an ultimate design, a certain force of will behind the American hand in the Third World.
The war against Iran strikes us as the latest episode in a very bloody history. In it, we sense the same motivating thrusts which defined American involvement in Indochina, Korea, Greece, and countless other interventions. Yet we also sense that like the interventions of old, this one brings with it an accumulation of past imperial adventures and the specificities of this particular encounter. Hence, the dialectic between continuity and change provokes our imaginations, inducing both cynicism and hope.
Political Culture and Foreign Policy
The strongest support for American foreign policy has come when its ideology and practice have been in harmony with some dominant features of American political culture. A corporate ideology has therefore required legitimizing myths to construct a popular consensus. A policy which responds to the interests of a few but needs the support of the many must invoke a people’s sense of mission and fear. It must additionally appear unique. The history of modern imperialism has seen the British carry the white man’s burden, the French their mission civilisatrice, and America has stood watch over the world’s freedom. Each has had a force of evil threatening it; the yellow, the black, and the red perils.
In feeling a sense of power, America is not unique. It is congenial to any people. The exercise of this sense requires a noble cause and a mortal enemy to become morally acceptable. The United States after 1945 discovered and was able to refine a combination of the doctrine of necessity and moral responsibility to produce a compelling ideology which had at its heart conspiratorial communism. This same combination was manifest in the legitimizing principles of George W. Bush’s war on terror and the neoconservative drive for “regime change.” The form had merely changed from communism to radical fundamentalism. From Truman and Acheson to Kissinger and Nixon to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, there has been a dual sense of America’s reluctance to assume stewardship of the world and the difficulty of shirking its historical responsibility of defending itself against an existential threat.
This globalist, destiny-driven outlook feeds on what Edward McNall Burns once described as America’s “extraordinary” conception of mission. In part, it is a product of the widely held belief in America’s exceptionalism and its perfection as a political model. William Seward, a contemporary of Lincoln, contended that if America were weakened mankind’s hopes would be “disappointed,” and all progress would be “indefinitely postponed,” for it was the “ark of safety in which are deposited the hopes of the world” and the “key to progress of freedom and civilization.” Despite the significant breaks which mark Donald Trump’s time in office, he follows his ancestors in repeating and exploiting this theme.
William Appleman Williams attributed the Americans’ “intense consciousness of uniqueness” to the “colonial achievement of founding and consolidating a society on the edge of a vast wilderness; the deep religious convictions and intensity of the early settlers; the secular pride in having purified the tradition of the ‘Rights of Free Englishmen’; the country’s rapid economic growth; and the Founding Fathers’ awareness that by establishing a Republic in such a large state, they had carried out a theoretical breakthrough.”[2] That America occupied a central role in the two largest-scale wars in history, the second of which enjoyed massive American support, merely bolstered this sense of exceptionalism.
Moreover, a belief in the efficacy of violence has been an important aspect of the historical outlook and socialization of Americans. One may find the roots of this in the relative success with which the indigenous populations of the Americas were subjugated and annihilated. The thematic consistency of films on American colonization makes an invisible, elemental enemy of the native and a dramatic, emotional, and human group of white pioneers. Indians came in hordes, and fell in stylized movements which served to amuse moviegoing crowds. Efficiency and superior technology in the service of a mission overcomes the Indian; violence is seen as an instrument of national purpose, with culturally and racially alien groups being perceived as inferior and expendable. It was the Japanese who suffered the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnamese against whom crimes against humanity were committed, Afghans, Arabs, and South Asians who suffered the brunt of the war on terror. When reinforced by racism, the belief in the efficacy of violence augments interventionist tendencies and brutalizes the resulting conflict beyond human and legal limits. With modern technology at one’s disposal, it is much easier to sweep the tensions of human encounters under the rug. This partly explains why the bombing of a school in Minab recently did not invoke nearly as much outrage as the massacre in My Lai. These factors also produce a tendency to miscalculate the will and tenacity of the presumably inferior people, as the United States has had to learn (to little avail) the hard way in Korea, Indochina, Iraq, and today in Iran.
The Ghosts of the Cold War
The dominant elements of the American foreign policy establishment have also suffered from a frankly conservative impulse. One manifestation of this is that in their outlook towards the rest of the world they have consistently viewed politics through inherited and often homegrown images rather than through the objective conditions of particular societies. Hence, the “fall of China” was to global communism, not to nationalist Chinese rebels who adopted communist ideology as a vehicle of liberation; the war in Indochina was to prevent the dominoes from falling, as was the case in Chile; the coup in Iran was out of fear of Soviet influence, and so on. Because of the extent of American power and its will and capacity to intervene in areas of strategic interest, local changes, domestic revolutions, were held hostage to American illusions….
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Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize lecture; 2005
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