Thursday, January 22, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Local View: War is the ultimate crime

By Randall G. Shelden

The names mean nothing to me, of course, since I never met them during their lifetimes. Michael D. Acklin, 25 years old, from Louisville, Ky.; Genaro Acosta, 26, of Fair Oaks, Calif.; Jay Blessing, 23, of Tacoma, Wash.; Irving Medina, 22, of Middletown, N.Y.; Michael A. Diraimondo, 22, Simi Valley, Calif.; Kimberly A. Voelz, 27, of Carlisle, Pa.; Nathan W. Nakis, 19, of Corvallis, Ore.

The death toll has now passed the 500 mark since the start of the Iraq invasion. They died not to protect some vague notion of "freedom," nor to rid the world of the "terrorist threat," but to engage in "regime change," or was it "weapons of mass destruction," or was it because Saddam Hussein was linked to Osama, or--the reasons matter little at this point, for none of these reasons is valid.

The New York Times reported last November that troops will be in Iraq until March 2006. An average of 50 American soldiers have died each month since the start of this war; more than two each day. At this rate, by March 2006 about 1,900 will have died, and there will be who knows how many serious injuries (missing arms and legs, etc.), which too often is a fate worse than death.

A lot of people have compared this to Vietnam. I would agree only in part. At least in Vietnam we were able to see for ourselves some of the horrors of war. Today, with censorship of the news run amuck, we don't see it, not even the body bags that are shipped home. And about all we hear from our leaders are stupid statements like "stay the course," "bring 'em on" and "sometimes it is necessary to use violence to fight violent people." The war in Iraq is, of course, more than about oil, for it is part of what Noam Chomsky has appropriately termed the "Imperial Grand Strategy" (as noted in his latest book, Hegemony or Survival). This involves the "right" of the United States to engage in "preventive war" whenever it feels like it. Such a goal is to prevent any challenge to the "power, position and prestige of the United States."

Actually, these words were not uttered by Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other member of the Bush team, but by Dean Acheson in 1963. These general aims go back even further, to the early days of World War II, when high-level planners in Washington were putting together strategies to use after the war, specifically to engage in "an integrated policy to achieve military and economic supremacy for the United States."

One of the principle architects of such a "grand design" was George Kennan, who wrote a document known as "Policy Planning Study 23" in 1948 (once classified and thus kept from the public until recently). One part of the documents reads as follows: "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of the population. ... In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity." There will be no room for "sentimentality," Kennan writes, and we should dispense with such vague notions as "human rights" and democracy. But we should not tell the public what our goals are and instead shower them with "idealistic slogans."

Such ideas were already being developed during World War II by various "study groups" within the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations as they were developing plans for what they called the "Grand Arena" of the world that was to be subordinated to the needs of American corporations. What was this "Grand Arena"? Virtually the entire world, but especially the Middle East (with all its energy resources) and the Third World, which was to "fulfill the major function as a source of raw materials and a market" for capitalist societies, according to a 1949 State Department memo written by Kennan. The "Grand Arena" has evolved into the "Imperial Grand Strategy."

Instead of lofty notions like "freedom," this strategy aims to defend "vital interests" such as "ensuring uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources." Such a plan involves constructing a world system "open to U.S. economic penetration and political control, tolerating no rivals or threats," while at the same time blocking "any moves toward independent development" among nations we seek to control, as they attempt to take matters into their own hands by, among other things, seeking to take control of their own land and resources.

The soldiers mentioned above are merely the pawns in this dangerous game that threatens the very survival of the planet. The crime here is the ultimate crime, far more serious than those criminologists like myself tend to study and write about, and far more serious than those investigated by our local police. We are talking about crimes of the American state and corporate power for, as John Dewey once remarked, politics or government is but the "shadow cast upon society by big business." Yes, it is more than about oil. It is about our survival as a species.

Randall G. Shelden is a professor of criminal justice at UNLV.