Editor’s Note: Rahul Mahajan is a founding member of the NoWar Collective and serves on the National Board of Peace Action, National Committee of the National Network to End the War against Iraq and the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice. He publishes a daily political analysis on his weblog and has written two books: Full Spectrum Dominance: US Power in Iraq and Beyond and The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism. His articles have appeared in Z Magazine, and .
PA: Your recent book is called Full Spectrum Dominance: US Power in Iraq and Beyond. Can you explain the term “full spectrum dominance”?
RM: The phrase comes from a military planning document called Global Vision 2020. It lays out the military’s plans for the year 2020 in which they are supposed to achieve dominance over the full spectrum of military operations – land, sea, air, space and information. Those are considered the range of military areas and, of course, the achievement of full dominance over those is part of the achievement of full political dominance of the United States. So that was the thought in my mind when I was writing the book. But when you look at Bush administration policy even over a wider spectrum, you could characterize their entire domestic agenda, their entire way of looking at electoral politics, in addition to their approach to international affairs and institutions as basically a ploy for full spectrum dominance by a newly emergent, newly resurgent radical right wing.
PA: Can you give examples of how Bush’s domestic agenda relates to the concept of full spectrum dominance?
RM: Let’s take, for example, the idea of compassionate conservatism. That is to say taking away the social functions of welfare and whatever safety net there is from the government and put it in the hands of religious institutions and eventually radical right-wing religious institutions. Take the way they have assaulted the basic infrastructure of democracy, which is the vote and the counting of the vote on the one hand through the massive disfranchisement of people they don’t want to vote, which they did both in 2000 and 2002 in Florida, and through the replacement of the ballots with electronic voting machines which are mostly owned by a small number of right-wing corporations. Amazingly enough there is no way to check the vote counting algorithm because many of those corporations say that their algorithms are proprietary and thus the government doesn’t have the right to check to make sure that citizens’ votes are accurately counted.
Those are just two examples. There is also the dominance over the media, which I think has been much talked about as well.
PA: Bush based the justification for war primarily on the presence of WMD in Iraq and the threat that Iraq posed. Now that they haven’t found any, he is back tracking and even blaming others for intelligence failures. Can you comment on that?
RM: It’s not just Bush. John Kerry’s brilliant reaction to this development was to call for George Tenet to be fired, which is like saying, as some people are saying in Britain, that when Tony Blair lies about weapons of mass destruction, the head of the BBC should be fired. There has always been a number of justifications for the war, shifting and evolving according to the immediate political exigencies. There was the fact that Iraq has to be attacked because they’re plotting with Al Qaeda to destroy us. When there was no evidence of that forthcoming, it shifted to weapons of mass destruction and the so-called enforcement of UN resolutions even though the UN resolution 1441 was being enforced when the US decided to terminate that and start the war. Through it all, and not made explicitly by the administration for a long time, but one that is easy to fall back on is this idea that this was the liberation of Iraq, that Saddam Hussein obviously is an evil dictator and therefore this war would be better for the people of Iraq. This argument was the one that Richard Perle and some of the other neo-conservatives wanted to lead with only. They didn’t want to talk about WMD largely because they didn’t want to talk about the UN at all. They didn’t want to give any color of sanctity to any international law. Instead they wanted to say that there are evildoers in the world and that the US is the only power with the beneficence and the power to protect people from those evildoers. Of course, all of those justifications fall apart when you look at the facts. Although, sad to say, very few people are looking at the so-called liberation in a serious way.
PA: People in the peace movement were saying all along that there was no evidence of a connection to Al Qaeda and there is little to suggest WMD, etc. We had some experts to back us up on that, but we have no CIA. Yet, we were correct. Why is it important that we were correct, and what does it say about our voice and ability to be heard?
RM: I should add also that many people in the peace movement said that even if by some chance Iraq has small quantities of WMD – and it was clear if it did it was in small quantities – that said nothing about the question of any threat from Iraq. The idea that Iraq was going to attack the US was ludicrous. It never has obviously, and it never manifested the slightest intention of doing so. It would know very clearly what the results of such an attack would be. Even Richard Perle and David Frum, in their recent book, An End to Evil, do admit that no country including Iraq would engage in an assault on the US. Even if they’d given WMD to some terrorist group, then they would have known that retribution would come down on them because war on Iraq was all the talk for a year or so.
These things were pointed out. Some of them were simply common sense: the kind of argument that anyone should have understood, and probably would have if things weren’t drowned in a ceaseless barrage of rhetoric from the administration. A lot of it was yes most of us who are not close to the levers of power do not have independent sources of information about who was doing what on the ground in Iraq at any time. But a lot of this information was open source and available to the public.
By far the best sources on Iraq’s WMD program were the UN weapons inspectors. They not only did their investigations, they wrote reports. Even after they were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998, there was the so-called Report. If you read that document carefully you would see immediately that most of what the administration has been saying ever since is a bunch of lies. Yes, they did admit that there were some discrepancies in accounting, but they also said clearly that there was no evidence of any real weapons programs and it was pretty much certain that there was no nuclear program. A lot of that stuff was available out in the public domain and peace activists were putting it together and reporting on it. So now it’s very clear: we were absolutely right and they were wrong. And the simple reason for it was not that we had access to superior intelligence or analysis, but that we were interested in finding out the truth and they were interested in lying about it to conceal their real motives for going to war with Iraq.
PA: One of the slogans that came up during the struggle to oppose the war was “Regime Change Begins at Home.” How is the Iraq issue going to play in presidential politics in the next few months?
RM: Certainly. Let me start by saying that although “Regime Change Begins at Home” is a great slogan, too many people are just taking it to mean that you need to vote, and you need to vote against Bush. Although getting Bush out of office would be a huge achievement, it’s very far from being regime change. We are bearing now the fruits of Iraq policy of the last 13 years. The Clinton administration’s policy in Iraq was regime change as well. Of course, in the larger scope of US imperial domination of the world it was very much there in past administrations as well. So I wouldn’t want to say that getting Bush out amounts to regime change.
But anyway, about the election, one has to understand that in most states, you have voters ranking issues in this order of importance: first comes healthcare, second comes jobs, third comes Iraq. Iraq is third, which is a huge leap for a foreign policy issue. But even so, I think that Iraq is the defining issue of this campaign. When Kerry was in the ascendancy and Dean seemed to be on his way out, the conventional wisdom was that this proved that Iraq isn’t really the issue and that in fact jobs and healthcare and, of course, electability – whatever that means – are the real issues. People missed the fact that this was a campaign between Democratic candidates. The election campaign will be against George Bush who has amassed a huge war chest and who, according to Karl Rove, plans to campaign fully on his war on terrorism, on the war on Iraq and on his new imperialist foreign policy. So the Democratic candidate has to be able to stand up to that and not just oppose Bush’s foreign policy but give concrete, intelligent and important reasons and go beyond saying, “Oh we should have the French sharing the burden, because we can’t afford to pay for the occupation of Iraq” or nonsensical things like that. Of course, reversing just a small portion of the tax cuts would enable us to easily pay for the war on Iraq. They have to go beyond that to a more substantive analysis. Any candidate who can’t do that, or doesn’t want to do that is going to be eaten alive by this barrage of propaganda, by the mobilization of a huge electoral machine and by a plan that has been in the works now for years to make sure this election is a totally polarizing one in which Bush goes for the brass ring.
PA: If the candidate isn’t able to distinguish himself, people will say what’s the difference?
RM: Yes. It should be said that under the whip of Dean’s early criticisms, which were mild and fudged, but still stood out because few people were willing to say that in those days before the war, some of the other candidates have moved a bit. John Edwards seemed to have nothing to say about the war. But Kerry started to stress his own foreign policy record in opposition to Reagan’s illegal wars in Central America and in a sort of muted that there’s a connection between being a Vietnam veteran and being part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. He was doing it probably to capture more of Dean’s voters to win the primaries and he’ll very likely swing back to a more mainstream Democratic approach in the election. If he does, he will certainly not be rewarded by the voters for appearing just like George Bush on the central issue of the day.
PA: Do you think that Dean’s fall from the top spot was an indication of a reaction by the Democratic leadership or was it just a bad public image?
RM: The Democratic leadership has been through a few phases. Early on they reacted virulently against Dean because of that. They wanted to continue with the horribly failed strategies of 2000 and 2002. Technically, the strategy of 2000 was a victory, but really Al Gore should have beaten George Bush by several points if he had gone even marginally more toward the left. Of course 2002 was a huge victory for the Republicans. The Democrats wanted to continue with those failed strategies, but along the way, Dean was building up an organization that has more reach than the Democratic Party leadership. You have to understand that the Democratic Party as an organization is kind of a hollow shell. It’s been gutted just as the Republican Party has been creating a huge massive energized grassroots base. So there was some hint of their coming to an accommodation with Dean. Then suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, starting with the capture of Saddam, all hell broke loose. Once again you had the coalescence of the mainstream, not just in the Party but also in large parts of the media, which went on a furious jag of attacking Dean.
PA: After all of the analysis, the big question is what do we do? What role can the peace movement play in influencing the outcome of this election?
RM: Very simply, I think that the peace movement, the whole issue of the war and the occupation has been really battered by all the focus on the election. To try to swim against all of that tide is not going to work. The peace movement has to make use of it. We’ve finally come to a time when issues like US imperialism, like the ongoing occupation of Iraq can be taken door to door. You couldn’t do this in the late 1990s when I started working against the sanctions. So I think the peace movement has to gear up for a massive public outreach campaign which focuses on how US imperialism and the occupation of Iraq tie in with people’s immediate concerns. The war is – it’s not an actual reason for cutting social spending – but it is being used as a rhetorical justification for it and it’s part of a unified political ideology put forward by this administration.
We have to try to make the details of the occupation – nobody is talking about what is really happening in Iraq. In all of Baghdad, a city of six million people, one-fourth of the population of Iraq, there is no reconstruction going on. Hospitals in Baghdad and many other parts of Iraq are worse off now and get fewer materials than they did under sanctions, according to doctors that work there. The sanctions weren’t lifted or removed, they were in every way intensified and made worse. These are things that the American people have no idea about. These are things that none of the political leaders are talking about. These are things that the anti-war movement has to get out to the public.
