History and Journalism: Like Oil and Water

Things are precisely the same with Iraq, and here, too, I … originally had no moral qualms about the war. Saddam Hussein was a beast who had twice invaded his neighbors, had killed his own people with abandon and posed a threat -- and not just a theoretical one -- to Israel. If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war -- silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.

The Lingo of Vietnam
Richard Cohen
November 21, 2006,
Washington Post

In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting phase, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.

A 46-page document that has been circulating at the highest levels of the Pentagon for weeks, and which Defense Secretary Dick Cheney expects to release later this month, states that part of the American mission will be “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”

The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.

Rejecting Collective Approach

To perpetuate this role, the United States “must sufficiently account for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order,” the document states.

With its focus on this concept of benevolent domination by one power, the Pentagon document articulates the clearest rejection to date of collective internationalism, the strategy that emerged from World War II when the five victorious powers sought to form a United Nations that could mediate disputes and police outbreaks of violence.

Though the document is internal to the Pentagon and is not provided to Congress, its policy statements are developed in conjunction with the National Security Council and in consultation with the President or his senior national security advisers. Its drafting has been supervised by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s Under Secretary for Policy. Mr. Wolfowitz often represents the Pentagon on the Deputies Committee, which formulates policy in an interagency process dominated by the State and Defense Departments.
…
[T]he new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders “must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”
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[Other excerpts from Paul Wolfowitz’s draft:]
“[In East Asia:] To buttress the vital political and economic relationships we have along the Pacific rim, we must maintain our status as a military power of the first magnitude in the area.”
…
“In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region’s oil.”

US Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop a One-Superpower World
March 8, 1992
New York Times

As I have mentioned before, I find most political blogs a bore (and I don’t read any other kind.) But, I do think some are very valuable sources of information. Blogging is a free form art, and as such it is not constrained by the conventions of journalism. The weaknesses of the lack of an editor are, of course, weaker writing and greater inattention to facts. But the strengths are that bloggers can take a story about some current event and add a rich contextual background to it that journalism simply lacks. (Two examples, see www.BillMon.org for rich global context and Digby at Digbysblog.blogspot.com for rich American political context.)

Newspaper articles usually lack much, if any, historical context. This is especially evident in stories about Iraq, which is impossible to understand without knowing about the U.S.'s role in the country over the last 2.5 decades, the region for the last 6, and the British's invasion of Iraq 8 decades ago, which has a number of eerie parallels to today. What you usually get, and especially from the big U.S. papers, is a summary of events with a heavy dose of responses from U.S. politicians (or generals if the story is about a military affair.)

A related gripe is the lack of current contextualization. For example, there have been several articles in the news recently about Iran and India. Iran stories are filled with scary news about Iran’s inexorable march towards a nuclear bomb. Put aside for now that our own CIA has found no evidence of a nuclear weapons program, the IAEA hasn’t found one, and our best estimates put a nuclear bomb in Iran out at ten years. Iran’s current program is allowed under the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which they are a signatory. Nonetheless, a powerful group of men in our government, including VP Cheney, want to attack Iran very soon. Not to mention that Iran has made several offers to put all its weapons programs on the table in return for non-aggression pacts and regional peace with Israel and the U.S.’s only response was to complain about the manners of the Swiss diplomats that delivered the message.

Now, about India; the U.S. is helping India develop a nuclear weapon even though India is not a signatory to the NPT. U.S. officials justify this because India is a close ally. Somewhat behind the scenes, they mollify Pakistan, a country that shares long standing hostilities with India, by selling them high tech fighter jets at huge discounts. This, of course, is justified as part of the war on terror. (And the news stories about these arms sales make no mention of Iran and very little mention of India.) In other words, we are arming two countries that have been on the brink of war for years with incredibly high powered weaponry, and yet the biggest threat we face, according to our media and politicians, is Iran with its heretofore undetected nuclear weapons program.

Try finding newspaper articles about Iran or India that tie all of the above together. They may be out there, but I haven’t seen them. We justify violating treaties to arm one country with nuclear weapons and all but make war on another even though their existing program is allowed for under the existing international framework. The only difference is our current relationship with their governments. And because we never look further back than last week’s news, we seemingly can’t look past next week. In the 1970s, Iran was our ally in the Middle East, ruled by the brutal Shah whom we installed in 1953 after engineering a coup to overthrow the populist and popular Mossadegh. Mossadegh was guilty of trying to expropriate some of the profits from Iranian oil for Iranians from the British petroleum companies exploiting Iran’s natural resources. It was a classic case of colonialism. Fast forward another twenty years with the Shah in power. During the 1970s, the U.S. was trying to help Iran develop nuclear technology as it is doing with India now. In fact, Dick Cheney was one of the leading proponents then, just as he is a leading antagonist now. At the time, Cheney sounded like Ahmenijad today, claiming that it made economic sense for Iran to use nuclear energy for domestic consumption and sell oil on the international market. All that changed when the Shah was overthrown and the ayatollahs took over. See the obvious lesson here? If our foreign policy actions are based on who is our friend today instead of treaties, laws, coalitions, and frameworks, then what happens when our friend becomes our enemy in a blink of an eye? The nuclear genie does not go back into the bottle just because relations sour with the U.S. Doesn’t that make you nervous about helping India get the bomb?

To get at these questions, you need historical context. To think rationally about the news or world, you need to know some history. You also need to be able to connect the dots, because journalists are not going to do it for you. You need to know that we have an ever expanding arc of bases in the Middle East and Asian countries when reading a story about the U.S. making friendly overtures to dictators from places like Kazakhstan. Political journalism avoids historical context, and it rarely ties multiple stories (India, Iran, Pakistan) together in a coherent fashion. Editorialists can be even worse because they do not have the same standards that journalists do; editorialists can throw out uninformed opinions without any expectation of empirical argument to back it up. Sometimes, often, in fact, their opinions are contradicted by reality.

At one time, it was cost-prohibitive to include lengthy historical context in newspaper journalism. Physical space was a limitation; you can only fit so much print and advertising on a page and so many pages in a paper. In an electronic world, which is increasingly the medium people in the industrialized world use to read their news, physical space is no longer a constraint. (Although, the economic reality is that the media has an economic incentive to draw advertising revenue, but no clear incentive to produce highly informative and historically sensitive reports.)

Reading the paper is like getting to know how an amnesiac feels for a few minutes each day, and few capture this impression better than Richard Cohen with his tossing off of “silly arguments about oil or empire,” which are never relevant factors in American wars. Other irrelevancies to American foreign policy include the internal planning documents of the foreign policy establishment that express the written and private views of figures such as Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney… Which means that when they wrote that U.S. foreign policy is geared towards maintaining “the established political and economic order” of U.S. supremacy in the world and “preserving… access to [Middle Eastern] oil” using “sufficient military might to deter” any nations from “challenging American primacy” if necessary, they really meant we will make war for women’s rights, democracy, free speech and ponies. How “silly” of me to think otherwise.