REVIEWS:
“STRANGE LIBERATORS: Militarism, Mayhem, And The Pursuit Of Profit”
By
Gregory Elich, Llumina Press,
US, 2006.
$US25.95 review by Jeremy Agar
Peace Researcher 34 – July 2007
Gregory Elich wastes no time getting to the
point. His opening sentence reads: “US policy is directed at creating
conditions that favour the maximisation of corporate profit”. And then,
introducing a chapter called “The War On Terror”, he begins: “Because the US has not succeeded in planting ‘democracy’ and
‘freedom’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, it
is assumed that the invasions failed to meet their objectives. But the
democratic facade of the Administration’s rhetoric was always meant only to
mask the real goals of the intervention, which had nothing to do with
terrorism, freedom or the needs of the Iraqi and Afghan peoples, and everything
to do with corporate profit and the projection of US power into key geographic
regions”.
An Unremitting Assault
On US Foreign Policy
Elich’s book is an unremitting assault on
American foreign policy, which he accuses of being violent and immoral. His
thesis is important. Can the case be made? Yes. And with the Iraq quagmire bogging ever stickier and the Bush
Administration appearing to be preparing for an assault on Iran, it
couldn’t be more timely. Elich touches on Iraq, but mainly to give a context
for his main theme, which is that the mess is merely the latest in a series,
and no-one in these pages is about to disagree. He thinks that Washington has a long
track record of messing up the world. Again, you can sympathise with Elich’s
frustration that America
has commonly been seen as the good guy when it has never acted for other than
destructive motives. So Elich wants us to look beyond today’s headlines to see
afresh other regimes which the US has demonised, places where the US made
successful cases for a bit of regime change. These axes of evil are still
tagged as villainous, but, argues Elich, they’re all good guys, victims of
American propaganda.
We are offered four examples, Yugoslavia, Croatia,
Zimbabwe and North Korea,
the “hard cases” as Michael Parenti dubs them in his Introduction. Elich wants
to convince us that the misery inflicted on these places is as much an American
responsibility as the bombs that smashed Baghdad
- or Hanoi.
It’s a powerful notion, an argument that Elich buttresses with hundreds of
facts. But it’s unconvincing. Worse, it’s misguided.
Parenti, himself an incisive critic of American
adventurism, notes that his Government has long been up to no good. He lists,
accurately, some of Uncle Sam’s myriad wars, intrigues and invasions. He
suggests, plausibly, that America
has often got away with outrageous misfortunes because its allies were all too
willing to kneel in our pews, eyes averted. As Parenti puts it, American aims
have been served by our willingness to make “genuflections to the dominant
ideology”. That is now less true. In the bad old Cold War days, American
imperialism could do no wrong, but in February 2007, when the Australian Prime Minister,
John Howard, berated US Senator Barack Obama, a Democratic candidate for
President and critic of Bushite Middle East policy, with aiding and abetting
the terrorist enemy, he came across as ludicrous, an anachronism.
With Bush’s reputation in tatters, we’re ready
for a good old scorching diatribe. In November 2006, indeed, I reviewed three
books* about the “War On Terror”, a selection of the many available. All played
variations on the same theme as Elich, all successfully. Yet Elich doesn’t come
close. It’s not as though he doesn’t have evidence. So what went wrong? *
Jeremy’s reviews of those three books are in Peace Researcher 33, November
2006, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/prcont33.html.
Ed.
In one sense Elich has an opposite problem to
the conspiracy theorists, the sensationalists with a big, provocative idea,
something really counter intuitive, and absolutely no evidence. Elich has
nothing but evidence, but it’s all in the form of tiny accumulations. He’s a
detective foraging for as yet random samples, a sleuth who tracks down
mysterious strangers, then, surveying the many clues, pronounces the case
closed. But he’s too eager for a conviction, so he doesn’t look for anything
that might point somewhere else. Because he’s inventing the proof as he goes
along, he feels free to decide the indictment after the event. Is it murder,
burglary, rape? We’ll let you know when we’ve had a look. There must have been a
crime because everyone knows he’s guilty.
Sometimes you can have too many facts so that
you can’t see the wood for the trees. Elich is right to remind us that America sees
its interests as global, and it is not likely that its various agents overlook
any part of the world. He is right to assume that an imperial need, a strategic
overview, motivates America’s various agents - Government officials, the
Central Intelligence Agency, investors - whether working cohesively or
disparately to get up to dirty tricks. But Elich’s method does not discriminate
between overarching needs and immediate actions, or between the vital need and
the opportunist gambit. It allows no context and no scale. We see the beast’s
claws and teeth, but we don’t see its lair or its pack.
My Enemy’s Enemy Might
Not Be My Friend
In his rush to judgement Elich doesn’t check
the other unsavoury witnesses in the court. He should consider that some of
them might be lying. Some of them might also be guilty. The enemy of my enemy
might not be my friend. Desperate to secure a guilty verdict on the ringleader,
Elich brushes aside all doubt. Discussing Zimbabwe,
for example, Elich pots a century or so of African history, noting the many
cynical US - and UK
- manoeuvres, big and small, relevant and irrelevant, and concludes that ...
there’s nothing wrong with Robert Mugabe. The poor guy has been waging a
crusade for truth and justice against the insuperable weight of history. How
does Elich know this? He knows it because the State Department doesn’t like
Mugabe (because he has no interest in moral accuracy, and needs them only to
develop the prosecution case against America, the British are left ignored in
the dock, neither convicted nor acquitted).
Neither, in this kangaroo court, is there
anything wrong with those two innocent victims, the Dear Leader and the Beloved
Leader. North Korea
merits our deepest sympathy, your honour. Just look at that smirking villain in
the dock, with the stars and stripes on his top hat. It’s true enough that the
whole Korean trauma, and the country’s very division, is a product of Cold War
American intrigue, but 50 years later none of the several powers who take an
interest in the area is looking good.
The former Yugoslavia
is another at least slightly nuanced catastrophe. Elich’s defence of Serbia has
slivers of sense, and thus more merit than his attempt to establish the
blamelessness of the murderous North Korean and Zimbabwean regimes, but that is
not to say that its overthrown leader, the late Slobodan Milosevic was on the
side of the angels. It’s a recognition that virtually all the participants
deserve condemnation for the chaos of the Balkans.
Elich’s claim, that a US attempt to
force neo-liberalism on the planet is its one big idea, is one that’s borne out
by available evidence, so it’s a pity that he fails to prove it. Like the
conspiracists, Elich starts with a conclusion and then seeks to confirm it.
Unlike them, he at least deals with real data. He lacks, however, perspective.
Without prior assumptions about American motivations, a reader would wonder why
US
behaviour has been so unremittingly unpleasant. Imperialism is a big concept.
Its equal connection to the former Yugoslavia,
North Korea, Croatia, Zimbabwe
and Iraq
is not self-evident. Another unfortunate habit Elich shares with the
conspiracists is his determination to shock. It’s a quality that earns him
kudos in cyberspace, where a surprising claim is sometimes the same thing as a
valid claim. “Strange Liberators” is the sort of book that does a disservice to
the progressive cause because it confirms the claim of the John Howards of the
world that we’re loony. No, Elich, your fellow Americans are a more subtle lot
than you admit. They’re probably not all equally culpable. Certainly there are
differences between, say, Bush and Bill Clinton that a more discriminating
critique could have revealed. Not everything America does is totally bad and not
everything its enemies do is noble, pure and good. If it wants to be
discerning, analysis needs to see both the wood and the trees. And it’s a
useful assumption that within the forest there’s all manner of life.