The Sorrows of Empire (14 page)

Even prior to the Afghan war, a group of right-wing “defense intellectuals” had started to advocate a comprehensive new strategy for global domination. Many had served in earlier Republican administrations and most of them were again given high appointive positions when George W. Bush became president. They focused on plans for the next decade or two in much the same way that Captain Alfred T. Mahan of the navy, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt had emphasized sea power, Pacific bases, and a two-ocean navy at the end of the nineteenth century. Rarely taking the public into their confidence, the members of this new clique were masters of media
manipulation, something they acknowledged they had “learned” as a result of bitter experience during the Vietnam War. The terrorist incidents of 2001, much like the sinking of the battleship
Maine
in 1898, gave a tremendous boost to their private agenda. It mobilized popular sentiment and patriotism behind military initiatives that might otherwise have elicited serious mainstream doubts and protests.

The determination to militarize outer space and dominate the globe from orbiting battle stations armed with an array of weapons includes high-energy lasers that could be directed toward any target on earth or against other nations’ satellites. The Space Command’s policy statement, “Vision for 2020,” argues that “the globalization of the world economy will continue, with a widening gulf between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” and that the Pentagon’s mission is therefore to “dominate the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investments” in an increasingly dangerous and implicitly anti-American world. One crucial goal of policy should be “denying other countries access to space.”
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Such an aggressive attempt to ensure unilateral military hegemony requires that this country abandon all arms control agreements and constraints, including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which placed limits on the militarization of space, since space is inherently global. (Satellites do not remain within national boundaries.) The logic behind the weaponization of space is an ancient one implicit in virtually all imperialist projects—the need to protect some territory or capability whose vulnerability has been exaggerated and where alternatives to military options have not even been considered. The U.S. claim is that it has become militarily dependent on satellite communications and espionage and that an adversary could gain an advantage by deploying antisatellite weapons to disrupt these signals. Much as Britain at the end of the nineteenth century had to make colonies of Egypt and South Africa in order, so it said, to protect the sea approaches to its imperial enclave in India, and then had to conquer Sudan and the upper Nile to protect Egypt and much of sub-Saharan Africa to protect South Africa, the United States now argues that it must totally dominate space to protect its new, casualty-free war-fighting technologies.

But this kind of logic—comparable to the “domino theory” in the Vietnam War—leads to an endless progression of places and commitments that must be protected, resulting inevitably in imperial overstretch, bankruptcy, and popular disaffection, precisely the maladies that plagued Edwardian Britain. Such strategic planning also tends to produce unintended consequences in the form of unjustifiably brutal wars of imperial conquest, such as Britain’s against the Boer settlers of South Africa. The Boer War, which lasted from 1899 to 1902, resulted in the deaths of 22,000 British soldiers. In the course of defeating the settlers, who took to guerrilla warfare against their stronger enemy, the British built the world’s first concentration camps, where at least 28,000 Boer civilians (mostly women and children) and between 14,000 and 20,000 Bushmen, Zulus, and assorted other tribal peoples died.
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Deaths in the camps amounted to about 10 percent of the Boer population. The root cause of all this mayhem was not the need to defend India but the urge to dominate globally—in short, imperialism and militarism. Alternative ways to achieve the same objectives—or a decision to abandon those objectives as not worth it—were never seriously considered.

In the contemporary clique of imperialists the main proponents of the militarization of space are Donald Rumsfeld (b. 1932), an old cold warrior and secretary of defense in the Ford administration (1975-77), who was brought back to the Pentagon by George Bush the younger a quarter century later, and Vice President Dick Cheney (b. 1941), President Ford’s chief of staff and Bush
pére’s
secretary of defense (1989-93). Immediately prior to becoming secretary of defense in 2001, Rumsfeld chaired the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, whose final report concludes, “It is in the U.S. national interest to ... use the nation’s potential in space to support its domestic, economic, diplomatic, and national security objectives; develop and deploy the means to deter and defend against hostile acts directed at U.S. space assets and against the uses of space hostile to U.S. interests.”
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Rumsfeld and Cheney have received analytical support from within the Pentagon in the person of Andrew W. Marshall (b. 1921), a former Rand Corporation “thinker about the unthinkable,” who has specialized
for many years in promoting a “revolution in military affairs,” meaning advanced forms of warfare utilizing cybertechnology. Rumsfeld immediately put Marshall in charge of producing a blueprint for the Pentagon’s future—and launched a full-scale campaign advocating a new space-based, high-tech grand strategy for transforming the military and securing global dominance for decades to come.
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In a classic replay of paranoid imperialist thinking, American generals now warn about the country’s dependence on satellites and the danger of a “space Pearl Harbor.” To avoid this imagined catastrophe, militarists argue, the United States must seize and dominate space as soon as possible. In 2003, the United States created its first military unit intended to defend communications, weather, navigation, and missile-warning satellites from potential “enemy” attacks against ground stations or in space. This is the 614th Space Intelligence Squadron, based at Vandenburg Air Force Base in California. “All smart bombs and smart weapons are controlled by the GPS (global positioning system),” says Major Kurt Gaudette, director of operations for the new squadron. “If those don’t work, we don’t have any smart bombs anymore. So it’s critical that those assets stay up there and are safe.”
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As a key part of this program, the United States must not only put significant resources into developing “killer” satellites to keep other nations from “inhabiting” space but also build defenses, ultimately space-based ones, against other countries’ ballistic missiles. This latter program, the open face of the more secretive project to militarize space, has been the subject of a great deal of presidential and political grandstanding. During 2001, advocating ballistic missile defenses became the primary way for our leaders to show their commitment to “unilateralism,” a powerful demonstration of which was the president’s decision on December 13, 2001, to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union. He took this action well before the United States had developed any kind of antiballistic missile defenses, much less tested and deployed them, and despite open opposition by Russia, China, and the leading NATO nations.

Not surprisingly, China suspects that ballistic missile defense (BMD) is actually a program aimed at neutralizing its minuscule nuclear deterrent,
and most of America’s main allies implicitly agree and so have proved reluctant to go along with it, fearing that BMD will unleash a new arms race as challenged nuclear nations like China build more and better missiles to overwhelm such defenses. Nonetheless, the Bush administration is determined to go ahead with this unproven—in fact, still nonexistent—and highly destabilizing system, for which, given the patriotic mania that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress voted every last dollar the Pentagon requested.

In the process, the Bush administration has done everything in its power to classify and so hide official information on the high probability that the system will malfunction. For example, the Pentagon suppressed a report written in August 2000 by Philip E. Coyle, its own director of operational testing and evaluation, despite six different congressional requests for it. Among other things, Coyle documented how the command and control system for BMD is easily confused and has in the past caused a simulated launch of multiple interceptors against missiles that did not exist. As Representative John Tierney (D-Massachusetts) commented, “One immediate danger in these types of situations is that adversaries may interpret these launches as a hostile first strike and respond accordingly.”
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Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has said that he wants a ballistic missile defense even if it has not been thoroughly tested and is admittedly not able to perform to specifications.

BMD derives some legitimacy within Republican Party circles from former president Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of a strategic defense initiative (SDI), which had as its objective the building of a kind of protective electronic astrodome of rockets and lasers over the country, an idea that never proved technically feasible. Reagan undoubtedly thought of SDI as defensive, but both SDI and BMD are in truth offensive concepts. It may be good public relations for its current advocates to imply that BMD is meant only to defend us against what are now called rogue states, places like North Korea and Iran that have not acquiesced in American hegemony and might conceivably be able to produce missiles with an intercontinental range. But no one seriously believes that any nation, small or large, plans to commit suicide by launching anything as traceable as a
nuclear missile against the United States. As neoconservative pundit Lawrence F. Kaplan puts it, “Missile defense isn’t really meant to protect America. It’s a tool for global dominance.”
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Or, in the words of Jim Walsh, a research fellow in science and international affairs at Harvard, “missile defense is more missile than defense.”
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If BMD were a genuine defensive strategy, it would be subject to the same problems as China’s Great Wall, which stopped neither Mongol nor Manchu invaders, or France’s Maginot Line, which was supposed to protect the country from a German invasion but failed spectacularly when the Germans simply went around it. Even in the unlikely event that our BMD proved technologically perfect, its very existence would immediately elicit plans to overwhelm it with more missiles than it had interceptors. But that matters little to those planning for our militarized future. For them, BMD is a reasonable cover for the extensive research program required to “weaponize” space, a good conduit for supplying extensive funding to key defense contractors; and finally, a way to complicate the decision making of any opponent who might threaten to “deter” the United States with a nuclear attack. BMD strategists conjecture that such an enemy would have to wonder whether its threat was credible in the face of missile defenses. As
New York Times
columnist Bill Keller puts it, military theorists “fear that any nation with a few nuclear weapons can do to us what we did to the Soviets—deter us from projecting our vastly superior conventional forces into the world.”
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The fact is, missile defense is not about defense. It is about offense, and it offers ample fuel for a new global nuclear arms race while ironically making the United States considerably less secure.

Not surprisingly, the 1998 commission that developed the plans for the present BMD system was headed by Donald Rumsfeld.
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One of its members, and a figure who typifies this group, was Paul Wolfowitz, who has a Ph.D. in political science but no experience of either war or the military. Wolfowitz has used his many positions in the Reagan and both Bush administrations to push for ever-greater military supremacy over all rivals, including our Cold War allies. In 1992, he argued that the objective of foreign policy should be “to prevent any hostile power from dominating
a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” These regions, he suggested, included Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East—Africa and Latin America (which we already controlled) excepted, essentially the world. Just before returning to the Pentagon in 2001 as Rumsfeld’s deputy, Wolfowitz asserted that his earlier insistence on the need to establish a Pax Americana, although heavily criticized at the time, had become mainstream strategic thought.
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Nowhere is this need more strongly felt (and yet more strenuously denied) than vis-á-vis China. Supporters of BMD insist that the system is in no way aimed at China. “We don’t think that they should really be concerned about missile defense,” commented John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. “It’s not directed against them. After all it is defensive.”
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But defensive is precisely what it is not, and the status of Taiwan is at the heart of the BMD plan.

Since the Chinese civil war (1946-49) and the 1950 intervention of Chinese troops in the Korean War, the right wing of the Republican Party has never been able to accept that our wartime ally, Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (Nationalist Party), was defeated by the Communists owing to its hopeless corruption and incompetence. After Chiang retreated with the remnants of his forces to the offshore island of Taiwan, the “China Lobby” pushed for the United States to defend him. It did so until 1971, when a majority vote by the United Nations General Assembly finally dislodged Taiwan from the seat reserved for China in the United Nations Charter. Even after the Carter administration belatedly recognized China in 1978, it continued to arm Taiwan. Congressional supporters of Taiwan have done everything in their power to commit the country to defending Taiwan militarily, even were it to invite Chinese military action by unilaterally declaring its independence.