60 years of faulty logic

>
>
> By James Carroll | March 12, 2007
>
> SIXTY YEARS AGO today, Harry Truman went before a joint session of
> Congress
> to announce what became known as the Truman Doctrine. "At the present
> moment
> in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways
> of life." With that, an era of bipolarity was inaugurated, dividing the
> world between forces of good and evil.
>
> The speech amounted, as one of Truman's advisers characterized it, to a
> declaration of religious war. In the transcendent struggle between Moscow
> and Washington, "nonalignment" was not an option. Truman declared that the
> United States would actively support "free" people anywhere who were
> resisting either internal or external threats to that freedom. The "free
> world" was born, but so, eventually, were disastrous wars in Korea and
> Vietnam.
>
> The occasion of Truman's pronouncement was his decision to militarily
> support one side in the civil war in Greece, and with that, the deadly
> precedent of American intervention in foreign civil wars was set. Fear of
> communism became a driving force of politics and a justification for vast
> military expenditures.
>
> Nine days after announcing the Truman Doctrine, the president issued an
> executive order mandating loyalty oaths and security checks for federal
> employees, the start of the domestic red scare. The "paranoid style" of
> American life, in Richard Hofstadter's phrase, was set.
>
> That style lives. Democrats are lining up to attack the Bush
> administration's catastrophe in Iraq -- not because that war was wrong to
> start with, but because it has turned out so badly. The administration,
> meanwhile, has repudiated its go-it-alone militarism in favor of nascent
> diplomatic initiatives with North Korea, Syria, and Iran -- not because
> the
> virtues of diplomacy are suddenly so evident, but because everything else
> it
> tried led to disaster. Bush's failures are prompting important shifts,
> both
> by his critics and advisers. But no one is asking basic questions about
> the
> assumptions on which US policies have been based for 60 years.
>
> More than adjustments in tactics and strategy are needed. What must be
> criticized, and even dismantled, is nothing less than the national
> security
> state that Truman inaugurated on this date in 1947. The habits of mind
> that
> defined American attitudes during the Cold War still provide consoling and
> profitable structures of meaning, even as dread of communism has been
> replaced by fear of terrorism. Thus, Truman's "every nation must choose "
> became Bush's "You are with us or against us." America's political
> paranoia
> still projects its worst fears onto the enemy, paradoxically strengthening
> its most paranoid elements. The monstrous dynamic feeds itself.
>
> The United States has obviously, and accidentally, been reinforcing the
> most
> belligerent elements in Iran and North Korea, but it is also doing so in
> Russia and China. Last week, for example, alarms went off in Washington
> with
> the news that China is increasing its military spending by nearly 18
> percent
> this year, bringing its officially acknowledged military budget to $45
> billion. Yet who was raising questions about massive American military
> sales
> (including missiles) to Taiwan, whose defense build up stimulates
> Beijing's?
> Speaking of budgets, who questions the recently unveiled Pentagon total
> for
> 2008 of more than $620 billion? (Under Bill Clinton, the defense budget
> went
> from $260 billion to about $300 billion.) Even allowing for Iraq and
> Afghanistan, how can such an astronomical figure be justified?
>
> When the United States announces plans to station elements of its missile
> defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, why are Russian
> complaints
> dismissed as evidence of Vladimir Putin's megalomania? On this date in
> 1999,
> Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO, in
> violation
> of American assurances to Moscow that NATO would not move east from the
> unified Germany. Now NATO looks further east still, toward Georgia and
> Ukraine. And Putin is the paranoid?
>
> Last week, the Bush administration announced plans for the first new
> nuclear
> weapon in more than 20 years, a program of ultimately replacing all
> American
> warheads. So much for the nuclear elimination toward which the United
> States
> is legally bound to work by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
> Washington
> simultaneously assured Russia and China that this renewal of the nuclear
> arsenal was no cause for them to feel threatened. Hello? Russia and China
> have no choice but to follow the US lead, inevitably gearing up another
> arms
> race. It is 1947 all over again. A precious opportunity to turn the world
> away from nuclear weapons, and away from war, is once more being
> squandered
> -- by America. And what candidate running for president makes anything of
> this?
>
> James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.