Scoundrels and Outlaws

By Tom Barry, Foreign Policy in Focus. Posted February 28, 2002.

It is the time of scoundrels and outlaws.

Not since the 1950s has the political rhetoric about the fight between American good and foreign-bred evil reached such a feverish pitch. As in the 1950s, much of this is fear-mongering and sabre-rattling designed to spur American popular support for the military-industrial complex, as well as to quash progressive dissent at home. The scoundrels in Washington are playing on the fear of terrorism to advance their own ideological agenda at home and abroad.

America clearly needs new measures to protect itself against terrorist attacks -- such as better intelligence and increased international cooperation to track down terrorist networks -- but this imperative has been leveraged into a broader agenda. This includes missile defense, dramatic increases in the military budget, assertions of U.S. military supremacy around the globe, reduced public access to government documents, and an outright dismissal of the constraints of international law and multilateralism. The “national security state” doctrine foisted on our third world partners during the cold war has been resurrected, and in the wake of the terrorist attacks is being applied to politics in America itself.

Bush’s global affairs agenda has left progressive citizen groups battered, dejected, and indignant. Meanwhile, the Democrats are playing it safe, standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Bush on foreign policy, according to Rep. Richard Gephardt.

In expanding the response to the September 11 attacks to include an array of new foreign policy and military initiatives, the Bush administration has shifted the post-9/11 focus from going after the perpetrators of the attacks to a new grand strategy to assert U.S. dominance. They -- from Wolfowitz to Powell -- are still calling it anti-terrorism, but it’s really about the U.S. right to patrol the globe. We’re globo-cop -- at least in places where the administration deems that U.S. interests are at stake.

Increasingly, exploiting popular support for the war against the Islamist terrorists, the administration has used national security as prop for other agendas -- thereby trivializing the real need to address terrorist threats. During the Super Bowl, the administration told Americans that smoking marijuana was the equivalent of supporting terrorists. Seeing an opportunity to solidify support in agricultural states, President Bush told the Cattlemen’s Beef Association that agricultural subsidies were necessary because crop and cattle production was a national security issue. “The nation has got to eat,” Bush told the cattlemen. “It's in our national security interests that we be able to feed ourselves. Thank goodness, we don't have to rely on somebody else's meat to make sure our people are healthy and well-fed." He then goes on to promote increased agricultural subsidies to foster increased U.S. exports of cheap U.S. meat and grains -- that have the effect of undermining the food security of importing nations.

It is scoundrel time in Washington, as the administration shamelessly exploits post-September 11 patriotism to advance a foreign policy that is unapologetically unilateralist and militaristic. In the process, the administration has trampled civil liberties at home, given authoritarian regimes abroad free rein to clamp down on dissidents, and created a global security framework increasingly characterized by confrontation, brinksmanship, and name-calling.

President Bush would have us believe that we are engaged in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. But it’s more a clash of scoundrels and outlaws.

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