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News: Globalisation & social justice
Intellectuals, democracy and empire02 May 2003Robert Blecher traces the war's intellectual boosters. As the Bush administration struggled to find a justification for launching an attack on Iraq, churning out sketchy intelligence reports about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda, Washington wordsmiths produced their own grist for the war mill: the prospect of a democratic pax americana in the Middle East. The importance of the pundits' contribution to the war machine should not be underestimated. As the task of swaying public opinion grew more difficult, rhetoric around freedom and democracy has become ever more central.
In the weeks after September 11, 2001, George W Bush did not talk of remaking the Middle East. But in successive State of the Union addresses, commencement speeches, press conferences and televised appeals to the nation, Bush showed increasing faith in the ability of the US to extirpate tyranny and implant freedom in this agonized region. Presidents did not always profess belief in the region's democratic potential, nor did the intellectuals who served them. At the time of the 1991 Gulf war, shapers of public opinion such as Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes toed the first Bush administration's line that Washington should not aim to democratise the Middle East. But by the leadup to the junior Bush's war on Iraq, the same thinkers and pundits had reoriented their policy prescriptions, in many cases directly contradicting their writings of a decade ago. Employing their prodigious skills to trumpet the golden age of democracy, they have set aside their former convictions to serve power. The push for American Empire has arisen from the convergence of diverse ideological streams. Reaganite neo-conservatives such as William Kristol and Robert Kagan leveraged the language of national security to ally themselves with unreconstructed Cold Warriors like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Yet given the lukewarm popular support for the war in Iraq, the march to war could not have succeeded without the assistance of Establishment academics and journalists such as Fouad Ajami and Thomas Friedman, whose mainstream credentials legitimised the administration's agenda among those who otherwise might have been opposed. Rooted in the language of national security and democracy, American Empire has been enabled by a convergence - not the congruence - of political agendas. Neo-conservatives, traditional conservatives and plain old-fashioned liberals have formed a coalition of Iraq hawks whose spilling of ink has been but a pale precursor to the spilling of Iraqi blood.
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