Empire Notes

Notwithstanding the increasing rhetoric about the Bush administration’s democratic impulses in the Middle East, new plans are afoot that are anything but democratic.

One is the planned expansion of the so-called “war on terrorism.”

According to anonymous officials quoted in the Washington Post, “The Pentagon is promoting a global counterterrorism plan that would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there.” Says the Post, “The plan would weaken the long-standing ‘chief of mission’ authority under which the U.S. ambassador, as the president's top representative in a foreign country, decides whether to grant entry to U.S. government personnel based on political and diplomatic considerations.” One counterterrorism official is even quoted as saying, "This is a military order on a global scale, something that hasn't existed since World War II.”

As I wrote about previously, there is a growing understanding in the administration that both its Iraq and its "war on terrorism" policies have been resounding failures and concomitantly require a change of course. Around November, the Bush administration was on a cusp. Mainstream realists, like those in the Defense Science Board, basically implied that a dramatically more conciliatory course was necessary, in order to begin to address what is for the United States not just a problem of terrorism but of public opinion in the Middle East and indeed globally.

The Bush administration, naturally, picked the opposite course. That course, demonstrated openly in Iraq with the assault on Fallujah, is apparently being implemented covertly in numerous countries, including allied or neutral countries. Presumably, operations like the 2002 assassination of Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harithi in Yemen, would occur more frequently in the new paradigm; undoubtedly, torture and coercive methods will increase in scope.

The other developing phenomenon is Gleichschaltung. The German word for “consolidation,” this term is often used for Hitler's centralization of power in the years after being selected as Chancellor. One need not claim, however, that Bush is exactly the same as Hitler to use the term. This is happening with the administration as a whole and with the Pentagon in particular.

Ambassadors can sometimes be a bureaucratic obstacle to covert military missions, excepting, of course those named Negroponte. Thomas White, for example, caused major headaches for the U.S. government’s counterinsurgency in El Salvador. So why not eliminate them from the chain of command and implementation?

Seymour Hersh’s article on possible plans to attack Iran also had much to say on Pentagon plans to sideline the CIA almost completely. This is not because the CIA is a bunch of bunny-huggers, but because it has become a source of realist discontent with the neocons’ extremist foreign policy and even of attempted checks on said policy. For example, de-classified documents obtained by the site venezuelafoia.info reveal an interesting story. The CIA was well aware of plans afoot for a coup in Venezuela but had determined they would likely fail because of Chavez’s base of support. It considered support for a coup to be criminally adventurist because it wouldn’t work and the administration would end up with a black eye. At the same time, Otto Reich, who nominally reported to the Secretary of State but has a history of slipping the chain of command and going straight to the plotters at the top, was actually helping to organize and foment the coup.

The CIA turned out to be right and it was a black eye for the administration, but the coup imperiled the lives of many Venezuelans and surely anything that deters such adventures by the United States is all to the good.

This consolidation is not a trivial matter. Although the spectrum of political positions on foreign policy within the government is narrow, the spectrum of policy recommendations is wider. And, with an administration bent on proving it has to answer to no one, internally or externally and a relatively supine Congress, paradoxically, the government bureaucracy is one of the few sources of even the slightest democratic input into foreign policy decision-making.

Gleichschaltung is a much wider phenomenon, with even more visible developments on the domestic side. Whatever the issues of the day – Social Security, gay marriage, Iran – it is the deeper and continuing story of Bush’s second term.