Mon, Mar 05, 2012 page9

• Western leaders are hyping the Iranian threat out of ignorance

  The West wasted trillions in needless conflict with the USSR, instead of fighting social ills. Now we are being brainwashed into confrontation with Tehran

  • By Simon Jenkins / The Guardian, London
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  Were we wrong? I have lived through two global conflicts: the West against Russian communism and now the West against political Islam. The latter was caused by Western leaders exaggerating a threat from a tiny group of terrorists to win popularity in war. But the former? Surely the Cold War was a good war, a Manichean struggle between competing visions of how to order humanity. If not, then it must have been one of the great mistakes of all time, and a horrific waste of resources.

  Andrew Alexander gazes down from his column in the UK’s right-wing Daily Mail like a stern and scholarly heron. No one could possibly call him left-wing, let alone a pacifist appeaser. He has no illusions about the evil of former Russian leader Josef Stalin or former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), any more than he has about former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. However, he combines cussedness toward conventional wisdom with historical skepticism. In a sensational but little-noticed book, America and the Imperialism of Ignorance, he marches to the conclusion that most recent foreign policy has been based on systematic ignorance. We were duped — and still are.

  Alexander agrees with the now accepted thesis that after the World War II, Stalin and his successors never meant to invade Western Europe and overthrow US capitalism. As the historian Sir Michael Howard has written, “No serious historian any longer argues that Stalin ever had any intention of moving his forces outside the area he occupied in Eastern Europe.”

  Stalin’s obsession was with stopping any German renascence. He was a brutal psychopath, but, like most Russians, his fear was of encirclement. He sought buffer states and an Iron Curtain to guard his borders. His stance toward the West was not aggressive. He had neither the will nor the means to wider world dominance (while the US had both).

  The conventional answer to this was that NATO could never be sure. Rearmament, including nuclear weapons, was a sensible precaution: hope for the best, prepare for the worse. This also suited the macho tradition in US politics. Former US president Franklin D Roosevelt was succeeded by the hawkish Harry Truman, who would not listen to then-British prime minister Winston Churchill’s counseling of peace with Russia.

  Likewise in 1953, on Stalin’s death, the US rebuffed former Soviet premier Georgy Malenkov’s desire for reconciliation. The arrogant US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, goaded the Soviets into a nuclear arms race, bringing the West close to war with the Soviet Union under leader Nikita Khrushchev, and even during former US president Ronald Reagan’s madcap brinkmanship. Only former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s intelligence averted what might have been disaster.

  Although it is easy, in any arms race, to declare a plague on both houses, Alexander is in no doubt — the fault lay primarily in Washington. A succession of bombastic US leaders, chary even of traveling abroad, denied what their own intelligence was telling them — that Russia posed no threat to the West.

  The US duly kept on being a wartime military establishment of great political power, sustained in public by a hysterical McCarthyism and evoking an equally paranoid response from the Soviet Union. This in turn bolstered the US’ psychological need for a titanic foe to bind the Western alliance together. If no foe existed, then one had to be created.

  The Cold War consumed trillions of US dollars. Hundreds of thousands died in surrogate wars around the globe. The opportunity cost in poverty and disease, in growth foregone and democracy postponed, was awesome. The embattlement of Eastern Europe, like that of today’s Islamist states, retarded its passage into economic and political maturity. The Cold War was not a war of good against evil. It was ignorance so pernicious as to question “the integrity and basic intelligence” of those democratic institutions persuaded that they were under existential threat.

  Where Alexander goes for broke is in showing how this ignorance is ongoing. With the end of the Cold War, the West’s craving for an enemy has revived. For a decade after 1990, defense chiefs resorted to genocidal autocrats, drug lords and Balkan separatists to maintain their budgets, which duly dwindled. Then came Sept. 11, 2001 and a “clash of civilizations.” Former US president George W. Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair won elections. Bankers lent money to generals, and the military-industrial complex refloated on an ocean of myth and mendacity.

  The brainwashing was ubiquitous. No book, no argument, no evidence could dissuade any British Cabinet from the belief that only a giant armory stood between it and a communist takeover, and now stands against an Islamist Armageddon. Hence the need to keep nuclear-armed submarines at sea, somehow to deter an unnamed “terrorist state.” Likewise, five of the original six Republican candidate hopefuls for US president called for war with Iran for “posing a threat to the American people.” What threat?

  I believe Alexander is right to seek explanation not in the realpolitik of international relations, but in the motives of democratic leaders. America’s belief in itself as the “greatest superpower the world has ever seen” led former US president Lyndon B Johnson to impotent fury at being thrashed by “a raggedy-ass little country” — Vietnam. It led Washington lobbyists to protect defense spending, as Truman was advised, by “scaring the hell out of the American people.” Today, a similar self-delusion leads Washington and London to claim the right to drop bombs on anyone they find “unacceptable.”

  To this there is only one answer. Let no day pass without headbutting an ignorant politician, and kissing a skeptical historian.
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