BUSH POLICIES: Change or Continuity, Historians Against the War Conference 

Comments by Joan Hoff, Montana State University, Bozeman, Saturday, February 18, 2006, 1:30 p.m. 

				LANGUAGE AND ECONOMICS
	On the surface these are four quite different papers, but they do fit into two reconcilable schools of historical methodology. The ones by Anita Durkin and Walter Hixson both analyze language and culture as it conveys symbolic and metaphorical meanings about U.S. foreign policy, while those by Paul Atwood and James Carter are basically factual, narrative accounts about dissimilar events: the economic and financial machinations influencing the American entrance into the Second World War, and evidence showing the corruption and fraud that prevailed during the construction of an infrastructure to support the build-up of over half-a-million U.S. troops in Vietnam under LBJ–a pattern that seems to be repeating itself in Iraq. 
	However, they are complimentary in the sense that the first set stresses how language has reinforced underlying and continuous moral or other cultural features of American national identity, and the second set serves as materialist examples of how a primarily white, male business and financial elite consistently following these moral and cultural myths took the United States into a two-front war in 1941 and engaged in unimaginable waste and corruption in state building in both Vietnam and Iraq. 
	I’m going to discuss the two theoretical papers first. Durkin has an immediate purpose or goal for analyzing the symbolic rationale for both Gulf Wars because she wants activists to challenge the  universal morality and pseudo religious language employed by Bush Sr and Bush Jr. While she notes that Bush Sr used the Munich appeasement analogy and compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler, she does not mention that so did Bush Jr. and that most Cold Warriors had also consistently misused references to Munich and comparisons to Hitler. The practice did not stop after the Cold War ended. Most recently, post-September 11 war hawks misleadingly touted the appeasement of Hitler at Munich as the equivalent of protracted disarmament arrangements with Iraq despite the illogic and hypocrisy involved in comparing Saddam Hussein with Hitler. The Iraqi dictator had not invaded, nor was he capable of invading, other of the countries of the Middle East in 2003, let alone of constituting an imminent threat to the United States. In 2005 Bush Jr even threw in Yalta for good measure as an example of appeasement.1
	So both Bushes employed pre-Cold War metaphors and analogies to justifying their respective invasions of Iraq. While I agree with Durkin that the first Bush based his view of universal morality and freedom on either the rule of law or existence of international law, I am not convinced that the second Bush forsook his father’s commitment to the idea of universal morality by substituting Christian religious terminology in his pronouncements. Instead, I think his support for universal morality and freedom simply shifted from international or rule of law language to religious statements. 
	In his first term George W. Bush began equating the nation and himself with God only gradually because initially he made more statements about evil doers and smoking terrorists out of their caves with the idea of spreading freedom and liberty even though he did claim that God was on the side of freedom and justice and not fear and cruelty. (p. 16) But a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq Bush’s rhetorical religiosity began to prevail.  “We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence,” he proclaimed in his 2003 State of the Union address, “yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.” Then a little over a year later on April 13, 2004, Americans heard him say: “So long as I am president, I will press for freedom . . . . I have this strong belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country’s gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman in the world.”  As Durkin points out Bush also referred in his 2003 State of Union address that America’s “calling, as a blessed country, [was] to make this world better.” Later in the third 2004 presidential debate he reiterated: “I believe that God wants everybody to be free. That’s what I believe. And that’s one part of my foreign policy . . . . And so my principles that I make decisions on are a part of me. And religion is a part of me.”2  
	Long before George W. Bush American presidents had thought of the United States as “blessed” with God on its side–as Hixson’s paper makes clear. From its inception religious and political leaders nourished and perpetuated a mythical view of America as an exceptional nation with God always on its side or as John Winthrop more modestly put it: as “the city set on the hill” with the "eies of all people uppon us."3 The New World’s physical isolation from other continents augmented this self-created myth of  “moral exceptionalism” and ultimately led to the idea that the United States had sovereignty over the Western Hemisphere and could always protect itself from the evils of the rest of the world if it had to. President Woodrow Wilson would later refer to the sanctity and physical separation and superiority of the United States as its “self-possession,” meaning he believed that whatever America touched; that is, embraced–whether it be justice, democracy, freedom, or self-government, it “made holy” because it operated out of a sense of disinterest and universal service to the world. Such beneficent selflessness arose from the fact that the United States, according to Wilson, had no “reason to fear that from any quarter our independence or the integrity of our territory”could be threatened.4  I do not doubt that Bush conflates himself and the nation with God, but so did Wilson. 
	How important is it then that Bush Jr has changed the source of legitimacy for the American invasion of Iraq from international law and universal morality to religion? I think that it represents a difference of degree rather than kind. But I agree with Durkin that shifting the rationale for the war against Iraq (and the war on terrorism in general) from a “principled commitment” to a “divine mandate” did much to initially silence mainstream debate. (p. 19) 
	However, I don’t think that leftists or progressives can reclaim religion and morality to argue against the immorality of a pre-emptive war and the existence of U.S. standing armies all over the world. It seems to me this would constitute entering into a word game that we cannot win or have long since lost. Instead, I think that we should chuck the terminology of religion and morality and start to argue for and demand ethical and efficient (competent) behavior on the part of the United States and its leaders. After all, the country prides itself on being competent and efficient, yet the blatant incompetence exhibited by the administration over Katrina has increased suspicions among average Americans that the administration may be incompetently carrying out its operation in Iraq. 
	We must also claim ethical behavior (and the demand for competency) as truly patriotic and not above the law as moral behavior and incompetency so often are. I am not making a moral argument in asking whether the United States sold its soul as it conducted its foreign policy in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II. Morality is largely a personal guide for private behavior and it often involves self-sacrifice. Hence, the term has almost always been misused when applied to any country’s foreign policy, despite numerous books and speeches on the subject promoting U.S. diplomacy in excessively moralistic overtones. Ideally even personal moral choice should not involve blind adherence to values considered absolute because this represents simple compliance or conformity. Instead, personal morality represents a conscious individual choice to believe in values that are relative and to act on them anyway because they are freely chosen.5 The reason that individual or personal moralistic absolutism is both dangerous and inappropriate when applied to the country’s foreign relations is that it “exempts America from self-criticism or from addressing the grievances others have with respect to [U.S.] policies, [and] such [moralistic] sentiments imply a repudiation of dialogue and negotiation.” Moralistic absolutism also leads to non-negotiable demands–the anathema of diplomacy which, even more than politics, is the art of compromise. From the president on down most segments of American society–government officials, religious groups, and mainstream media--have egregiously misused the words moral and morality since September 11. Woodrow Wilson gave new life to this rhetorical device, and it flourished exponentially during the Cold War. Now it has now reached a crescendo level because of the war on terrorism. Regardless of the time period in which it is used, such careless public rhetoric does not recognize that if “there can be no compromise with the forces of evil, there can be no reasonable restraint on the forces of good.”6
	The careless yet incessant infusion of moralism into discussions about U.S. foreign policy also disguises the distinct possibility that in the course of carrying out covert and overt Cold War interventions based on an ever-widening perception of threats to its ubiquitous security interests, the United States began to lose its ethical and democratic compass.
	I don’t believe that a nation can adopt overtime the tactics of the enemy in public or private and walk away ethically unscathed. To pretend that such tactics were not repeatedly and successfully implemented during the Cold War only compounds the conundrum in which the country finds itself now that it has declared a never-ending war against terrorism beginning with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Because the United States all too often assumed the methods of enemy while professing to uphold Wilsonian democratic and humanitarian principles, it no longer seems to recognize any limits on its power as its leaders and media glory in the hitherto taboo topic of empire-building, all the while insisting that it is being forced to take up this imperial burden.7 This represents the worst use of Wilsonian rhetoric to mask naked imperialism.
	Instead, national ethics consists of public rules and cultural standards governing the conduct of countries and is usually embodied in custom, law, and policy. At the global level ethics now consists of customary and formal international law as propounded by UN resolutions and covenants, the World Court, various war crimes tribunals and, most recently embodied in the International Criminal Court which the United State has refused to join. At the domestic level in the United States and many other Western nations it consists of common law jurisprudence, which Blackstone called “the principal and most perfect branch of ethics.” For nations which purport to honor the rule of law and classical Enlightenment definitions of civilization this means there are recognized fair and equitable ways for countries to conduct themselves at home and abroad. 
	If we began to advocate ethical behavior such an argument would put us back in the 
realm of international law and cooperation and place the focus on evaluating the results of this and previous wars in a way that morality and religion cannot. It would also allow us to re-evaluate and explain to average Americans past unethical behavior on the part of the United States (by which we won the Cold War) in the hope that we will not repeat such behavior. Instead of trying to take back morality and religion (and the flag according to a new book by Todd Gitlin), I think that we should talk about ethics and efficiency to counter the way in which Bush and his neo-con advisers have confounded virtue with viciousness and lack of veracity to cover their incompetence–a feat unparalleled in the history of U.S. diplomacy.
	According to the paper by Walter Hixson the use of morality, pseudo-religious concepts, and linguistic gymnastics have consistently been present and behind the “divinely sanctioned national greatness” (p. 25) at the heart of our cultural identity as a nation from the early colonial period when the Puritans began to advance “civilization” against “savages” and the environment to create a New World that they believed was foreordained by God. (p. 21) In particular Hixson advocates a “cultural approach to understanding national identity” in order to “transcend the conceptual dead end of ‘American exceptionalism.’” (p. 9) 
	 Hixson correctly underscores that the continuity in America’s hegemonic drive for world power has been characterized by “external violence focusing on a never-ending series of enemies [and wars].”  The United States is not just addicted to oil as Bush has recently pointed out, but according to Hixson we are “addicted to war” (p. 3) and not simply when faced with what Melvyn Leffler has called, “heightened threat perception.” (p.1) But I am not sure that his persuasively argued paper demonstrating “the remarkable war-like continuity of U.S. foreign policy flowing from a distinctive national culture” (p. 9) is not just a more complicated way of talking about American exceptionalism and what I have called the country’s practice of independent or unilateral internationalism.8 
	I am also not so sure that other nations have not created national identities just as culturally distinctive based on their own myths and lies as the United States has done. Ernest Renan pointed out in the early 1880s that historical lies are at the heart of any sense of nationhood, and that serious historical research often yield results that are at odds with founding myths at the core of any country’s nationalism and national identity.9 Historians did not have to wait for  deconstructionists to invent the terms “usable past” or “imagined community” to recognize and understand the mythology behind the creation of nation states. So I am not as convinced as Hixson that Bercovitz’s myth of America’s pursuit of an unattainable “errand into the wilderness . . . . through the technique of the Biblical jeremiad, a ritualized denunciation of sin with an attendant call for redemption,” (p. 22) represents “an ideological consensus unmatched in any other modern culture” or is “unsurpassed by any other modern nation.” (p. 23) It seems to me that any other modern nation at the height of its imperial and/or colonial  power and hegemonic dreams, beginning with England, also created, fostered, and perfected an ideological consensus based on its own peculiar cultural myths.10 
	To their credit, both Durkin and Hixson want to change (raise) public debate by recognizing the link between foreign policy and language. As Hixson points out, if the jargon of postmodernism can be cast aside and its insights conveyed in understandable ways making “history more accessible and meaningful,” there is the possibility that “what passes for public debate on foreign policy within the United States” can be elevated. (Hixson, pp. 3-4) But is seems to me that the best time for doing this would have been in the initial post-Cold War decade of the 1990s. September 11 and the invasion of Iraq have greatly diminished the chances for such an enlightened debate to occur–except at conferences like this. Moreover, countries seldom question their patriotic cultural myths in time of war. 
 	Hixson does note at the end of his paper two important ironies of American diplomacy and political economy. First, elite diplomatic formulators have successfully employed a the myth-ridden national consensus to secure generation after generation popular support for what is basically a “militant and undemocratic foreign policy” based on “resort[ing] to war on a consistent basis.”(pp. 3, 26). Second, he notes that in a capitalist society “manufactured or spontaneous consent” results in both the “bourgeoisie and even the working class unwittingly consent [ing] to their own disempowerment.” (p. 27). 
	While Hixson does not dwell on the economic drive behind U.S. foreign policy, the two papers by James Carter and Paul Atwood take up the question of capitalism and demonstrate in spades the materialist underbelly of U.S. diplomacy. The facts and figures in both papers  more than prove their economic interpretations.  
	Atwood’s paper clearly shows how politicians, businessmen, financiers, and policy makers defined American economic security and made its protection a basic reason for entering a two-front war since neither Germany nor Japan posed a military threat to the continental United States. (p. 2) The so-called “good war did not have such good origins or motivation and, as Howard Zinn pointed out at the opening session of this conference, there are no “good wars.” Atwood also convincingly suggests that the economic and financial reconstruction of former enemies, such as Germany and Japan, was to make them “junior partners in ‘America Inc., sharing in the benefits of a global economy while thwarting the opposition of communists and economic nationalists.” Since postwar economic gain and greed could not be openly talked about the Truman administration chose to create national hysteria over the threat of the spread of communism and to reorient postwar U.S. foreign policy by hastily militarizing the Cold War. (pp. 9-10)  So before and after World War II the United States portrayed itself as an innocent victim that never went to war without provocation and that only wanted to make the world better for everyone after wars. (p.1) 
	My only quarrel with Atwood is that he doesn’t do enough with to distinguish the influence of American oil interests in determining the economic squeeze on Japan from the more Euro-centered views of eastern Washington and Wall Street financiers. (pp. 3-4). And there is little evidence that FDR knew about the bureaucratic decision to institute a complete embargo of oil and steel products to Japan in the fall of 1941,11 as Atwood implies in his paper. 
	Carter focuses on Vietnam more than Iran in his paper because all the facts and figures are not yet in on the current reconstruction of that country. And I must say, as depressing it was to read the other three papers about the seemingly uncontrollable cultural and materialist forces driving U.S. diplomacy, this one really deserves the prize for being relentlessly depressing. I found the economic figures on the private fraud during the state building effort in Vietnam a most appalling picture of rampant greed. I also never really knew before the meaning of  “cost-plus-award-fee” and its relationship to the awarding  no-bid contracts by the government.(p. 8) That the American government relies more and more “upon  private corporations to meet its foreign policy objectives,” (p. 1) is made so self-evident that Eisenhower’s warning against the growth of a military industrial complex takes on meaning almost beyond comprehension. (pp. 37-38) 
according to Carter, preparation for war is now and will remain the life blood of U.S. national and job security. (p. 40). He also makes an important point about privatization; that is; the outsourcing, of standard military operations and traditional military personnel to the private sector calls into question whether public trust can any longer be placed in military operations. (p. 37) The same privatization comparison resulting in criticism and lack of public trust can also be made of the government’s recent mishandling of the Katrina disaster. 
	My only question with Carter’s paper has to do with the distinction he makes between state and nation building in Iraq and South Vietnam. The latter was created as an artificially half-nation  after World War II, and Iraq had been created following World War I as post-colonial monster made up of three quarreling religious and different cultural groups–more tribal than national. Whether either South Vietnam or Iraq existed as nations in the modern, western sense before the United States destroyed their state infrastructures in order to rebuild them, I think remains open to question. No amount of state reconstruction can make a non-nation, a nation. 
	All in all however, these four papers are the most thought-provoking I have read in a long time and they show more continuity than change in Bush’s foreign policy except for the vicious virtuousness with which it is being pursued. 
ENDNOTES