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Fraggin'

By Bill Shunas

If you're older than forty, your conception of American foreign policy was probably shaped by ideas about the Cold War and imperialism. You thought that the Soviet Union was out to take over the world and needed to be stopped. Or maybe you didn't. You thought the United States stood for freedom and liberty as it poked around in third-world countries. Or maybe you were wise to that. You recognized that there were two superpowers meddling in places around the world. Or maybe you thought one or the other was doing something righteous while other people thought of it as meddling. That was the framework of discussion in this country during the post-World War II era.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan became president, and a new concept was added. Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was "the Evil Empire." Now the conflict was elevated to a higher plane: good versus evil. He beat al-Qaeda to the punch and reintroduced the concept of holy war.

American leaders had previously spoken of the Soviet Union as a dictatorship or "the Red Menace," but that was for public consumption. Decisions were made according to realpolitik—what worked and what didn't, according to one's view of the world. The decisions weren't always the best, but they were based on the perceived situation. When the unwinnable war in Vietnam was unnecessarily prolonged, that wasn't done because of some ideology. It kept going because neither Johnson nor Nixon wanted to be the first president to lose a war, and they didn't want the United States to appear weak. Now along comes Reagan to introduce the idea that there is evil in the world and suggest that it is the reason to carry out policy in regards to the Soviet Union. Now we have people who act bad because they are bad. In retrospect, we can (ugh) appreciate Henry Kissinger.

At first Reagan's Evil Empire seemed like more of the rhetoric of the Cold War. Then a new and powerful force appeared on the political scene: the Christian Right. Reagan fed off them, and they fed off him. For them, the concept of evil was easily understood. Now, for many, there was another factor to consider in making policy. In addition to the politics and economics and military advantages and disadvantages, we had to think about who was possessed by the devil and his cohorts.

George I and Bill Clinton had geopolitical and imperialist reasons for the Gulf War and attacking Yugoslavia and Kosovo. Evil was put aside as a policy influence until George W. Bush ascended to the Oval Office. Here was a born-again Christian, a true believer, ready to fight evil ... which suddenly appeared on 9/11. Now he had an enemy: al-Qaeda and its evil leader—his mirror image—the former CIA trainee and recruiting agent, Osama bin Laden.

This mentality of good and evil (us and them, fight to the death) compounds the problems of foreign policy. A foreign policy based on imperialism is bad enough. Now we have the forces of righteousness, which don't look for a middle ground, which is the territory of diplomacy. In Iraq, for example, this limits the exit strategy; coming to an agreement with opposition nationalist forces might be a way out of that mess. They are, however, lumped together with fanatics such as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the evil enemy, so they must perish.

The problem is not only that we have God in our foreign policy, but we also have Bush's interpretation of God. George II is evidently reading-challenged. After all these years of reading the bible, he probably only got up to Ezekiel, from which he gets foreign policy instruction. Ezekiel is full of terror—bring pestilence, famine, and sword. Slay their sons and daughters and burn their houses. "Make them an object of terror," says the Lord of Ezekiel. Invade and subdue Iraq. Maybe Iran. Maybe Korea. Pestilence was brought to Iraq in the form of destroying their sanitation system, causing cholera and other waterborne diseases. And the sword also brought food shortages. We made the Lord of Ezekiel happy.

George II, for all his self-righteousness, is not a New Testament type of guy. There you find the story of Jesus. According to this yarn, if Jesus had any politics, he was about two-thirds anarchist and one-third socialist. He was a feed-the-people kind of guy. George II, on the other hand, is a feed-some-of-the-people kind of guy. He is out to reduce government programs of importance to the people: Social Security, Medicaid, Amtrak, homeless assistance grants, youth training programs and more. Only some of the people—the wealthy—get theirs, in tax-cut form.

On the morning that Bush left for his tour to sell his Social Security reform to the nation, he had a prayer breakfast in Washington. There he said that prayer is the great equalizer in America. I suppose that means that the wealthy and the poor, the well-fed and the hungry, the comfortably retired and the Social Security-dependent are all equal, and therefore the government need do nothing to feed the people like Jesus did. Bush wants to have it both ways. He sees the world as divided between good and evil. He wants to battle the evil he sees abroad, but to avoid doing good at home.

In reading his bible, Bush had an attack of attention-deficit disorder, and nothing sank in until he got to Revelations, where there was more self-righteous talk about good and evil and war and destruction. Now in addition to imperialism and the never-ending quest for oil, our foreign policy is also being determined by some vague moral notion. Or maybe fighting evil gives the perpetrators of war and US expansionism another excuse to be allowed to go forth and do what they want. For example, which one is General Wald: a fighter of evil or an imperialist in disguise? Listen to Wald (deputy commander of the US European Command), who was asked if the United States was prepared to help defend Nigeria's oil fields against ethnic violence. He replied, "Wherever there's evil, we want to go there and fight it." Is he really going after evil, or is it that anyone standing between us and oil is evil? Any action taken, for whatever reason, now has a new justification.