American Foreign Policy: Over, under, sideways and down

Sorry, a long one here. I have held onto this for a while because I think there are some important ideas in here but lack a pigeonhole for them

Dynamic of Destruction - Alan Kramer - Book Review - New York Times:

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler supposedly said on Aug. 22, 1939, as he prepared his henchmen for the savagery of race war and the slaughter of the Jews of Europe. In many ways, this link between the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis from 1941 to 1945 brings together the elements of Alan Kramer’s important book, “Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War.” Kramer believes that the two world wars may be regarded as a single four-decade trauma, and he argues that World War I was considerably more than simply a new industrial form of warfare that brutalized the modern world."

Destruction, Kramer says, became a deliberate policy in many, perhaps all, of the combatant countries. This made possible not only conscious hooliganism against great cultural monuments (like churches) but also the creation of an actual culture of violence. Kramer, an associate professor of history at Trinity College, Dublin, believes that as the fighting intensified, the combatants embraced the annihilation of soldiers and civilians as a military and political policy. “The thesis,” he writes, “is that there was a ‘dynamic of destruction’ which produced the most extensive cultural devastation and mass killing in Europe since the Thirty Years War.”

Combating Muslim Extremism

Imperial occupations under the pretext of fighting terrorism suck up scarce resources and multiply terrorism, and so are self-defeating. They benefit only the military-industrial complex and political elites pursuing American hegemony. The backlash is growing. Sympathy bombings deriving from Muslim distress at brutal US military actions against Iraqis have been undertaken in Madrid, London and Glasgow, and a handful of formerly secular Iraqi Sunnis have suddenly expressed interest in Al Qaeda.

Worse, the hypocritical Bush Administration has ties to Muslim terror groups. The US military, beholden to Iraqi Kurds for support, permits several thousand fighters of the PKK terrorist organization, which bombs people in Turkey, to make safe harbor in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Bush Administration has used against Tehran the expatriate Iranian Mujahedeen-e-Khalq terror network, on which Saddam Hussein bestowed a base in Iraq. Democrats have mysteriously declined to denounce these unsavory alliances.

Undebated Challenges

Like know-nothing nineteenth-century imperialists, the leading Republican candidates warn that Islamic radicals want to push the United States out of the Middle East. They have forgotten that in the twenty-first century a military presence abroad is no longer a reliable way to secure a great power's interests and may only create the very threat it seeks to avoid. It is not a coincidence that the greatest amount of Islamic terrorism stems from resistance to foreign military occupation or that the governments that feel most vulnerable to Islamic jihadism are those that have had a close association with the United States, or on whose soil the United States has left the heaviest footprint. Indeed, the tragedy of the Republican position is that it would suck us even more deeply into a "clash of civilizations" with a fringe Islamic movement while isolating us from other parts of the world that are just as or more important to American interests.

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As important, the Democrats seem to assume that the world so wants and needs American leadership that it is there for the taking. But as Anatol Lieven suggests, the overarching question facing American foreign policy is not how to restore leadership but how to adjust to an increasingly multipolar world that may be less open to any one power's primacy. Russia, China, India, South Korea, a host of South American countries and even the pro-American powers belonging to the European Union have all grown accustomed to a world in which the United States has been preoccupied with Iraq and in which they have had more freedom to shape the politics and economies of their regions. Much of the world has done just fine without active American leadership during this time and thus may not be as receptive to a reassertion of US leadership, as most of the Democratic candidates seem to suggest.