This article is the second in a series on the first major shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. It reviews Washington’s slowness in recognizing the consequences of the new international balance of class forces that resulted from the end of the Cold War and in making adjustments to respond to them. The first article, explaining the origins of the U.S. government’s policy of “containment” of the Soviet bloc and its allies during the last half of the 20th century, appeared last week (see “Why was Cold War perceived as ‘cold’?” in April 17 Militant).

For about a decade after the end of the Cold War, with the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Washington acted as if it had less need to wage war. During Congressional hearings on the Pentagon’s 2007 budget, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that in the post-Cold War drawdown, U.S. military spending dropped to 4.8 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). By comparison, it had averaged around 10 percent of GDP during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, he said.

Under the senior Bush and Clinton administrations, military spending was cut nearly a third—by $135 billion. Contrary to liberal mythology, the “peace dividend” did not free up funds for education, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other social programs. Spending on each of those was reduced during the eight years of the Clinton presidency. Talk of the “peace dividend” occurred simultaneously with the U.S. rulers’ first major assault on the social wage of working people: the elimination of “welfare as we know it,” pioneered by William Clinton.

Instead, reductions in war spending were used to help hold down interest rates, prop up a “strong” dollar, and line the pockets of wealthy bondholders. The U.S. billionaires hoped to avoid having to make cuts so deep in social benefits as to risk a social explosion.

It took the U.S. rulers about 10 years to get over the denial of the so-called peace dividend period and to implement a shift in their foreign policy under the banner of fighting the “war on terrorism.”

Evidence had mounted over a decade and a half that the center of wars imperialism would fight would be in the Middle East and central Asia. But Washington was slow to recognize the pattern in a string of attacks on U.S. installations and their implications. These included: the 1983 car-bombing in Beirut of a U.S. Marines barracks that killed 241 soldiers; 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; 1996 truck-bombing on the Khobar towers, a residence for U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia; 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.  
 
Break with ‘cut and run’
Looking back on these events in a Sept. 6, 2004, speech, Vice President Richard Cheney said the so-called Bush Doctrine was a break from the course followed for a quarter century—under Democrats and Republicans—of responding to “terrorist” attacks as matters to be dealt with through police actions seeking to put individuals in prison.

Reagan withdrew U.S. troops from Lebanon a few months after the 1983 bombing attack in Beirut. Many individuals accused in the other attacks were arrested, tried, and sentenced to death or long imprisonments.

“What were the consequences of these attacks?” asked Cheney in an August 2004 speech in Missouri. Not much. “We fired off a few cruise missiles once. Basically they struck us with impunity and got away with it.”

Cheney said the Bush Doctrine means that any government or individual deemed to be protecting “terrorists” will be targeted, and Washington will not wait for another attack but will take “preemptive” military action.  
 
1998: A turning point
A turning point in U.S. ruling class circles over the need to make a radical shift in the direction of foreign policy came well before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Conservative magazines like William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, and his Project for the New American Century, a conservative foundation, and think tanks such as the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation advocated an “aggressive” foreign policy to reshape the Middle East by overthrowing, if necessary, governments in the region seen as a threat to U.S. imperialist interests.

As early as 1997, a cover story in the Weekly Standard proclaimed, “Saddam Must Go.” While Kristol and others, known as “neoconservatives,” were among those who pioneered this push, the course toward regime change in Iraq predominated among most in the ruling class and became official government policy soon. Early next year, the Weekly Standard featured a letter signed by 18 prominent bourgeois figures urging the Clinton administration to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Eight of the letter’s signers would later join the Bush administration in top positions, among them Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassadors today to the United Nations and to Iraq, respectively, and Richard Armitage, who served as deputy secretary of state between 2001 and 2005.

In a Feb. 18, 1998, speech to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Clinton said that aggressive action was needed to ensure that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein is not allowed “to develop his program of weapons of mass destruction.”

Later that year top Democratic congressmen such as John Kerry, Patrick Leahy, and Christopher Dodd cosponsored a resolution with Republicans like Chuck Hagel that urged the president “to take all necessary and appropriate actions to respond to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.”

In his last years in office, Clinton laid the basis—through steps such as accelerating “ missile defense” and laying the groundwork for use of the military inside the United States—for the more radical changes in the organization of the U.S. armed forces implemented under his successor.

“Regime change” in Iraq soon became official government policy. On Oct. 31, 1998, Clinton singed into law the “Iraq Liberation Act,” which said: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.”

Government officials under Clinton made it clear how that was to be done, even after George W. Bush took over in the White House. “The United States has no choice left but to invade Iraq itself and eliminate the current regime,” wrote Kenneth Pollack in the March/April 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs, one year before the U.S. invasion. Pollack was Director for Gulf Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council the last two years of the Clinton White House.

By that time, September 11 had provided most of the U.S. rulers, liberal and conservative, with the rationalization for the assault on Iraq and the broader “war on terrorism.”

The process of transforming the U.S. military to carry out the new foreign policy course was accelerated by 9/11. This “transformation,” as the Pentagon dubbed it, and what the U.S. rulers recently described as a “long war” to safeguard their interests for decades to come was outlined in three articles earlier this year. (See “Pentagon: Washington faces ‘long war’,” “Pentagon renews focus on Africa, Latin America, and China,” and “Transformation of U.S. military hasn’t failed, it has advanced,” in the March 13, March 20, and April 3 issues, respectively.)  
 
 
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