Empires Apart (71 page)

Terror remains a controversial weapon in the American imperial armoury; simple military might is a different matter. For most of their histories military force has been a key part of Russian and American foreign policy. Without it neither nation would have expanded its borders to anything like their current dimensions; neither would have gained an empire. Since US marines invaded Libya in 1805 American troops have on average intervened somewhere abroad more than once a year. War was also an inherent part of the ideology of autocracy; autocracy developed as warlords promised protection and glory to their followers. America was born in revolutionary struggle, and war was an inherent part of the young nation's ideology as it fought to impose democracy on a land populated by heathen ‘savages' or inferior ‘latinos'. As democracy evolved
this militaristic emphasis diminished; in an age of human rights the crude application of military might became less acceptable.

Between the two world wars America rarely needed to flex its military muscle. The Second World War changed that, and a new philosophy emerged in which people could be killed in the name of human rights. The war had been necessary, it was argued, to stop the horrors of the concentration camps – although in fact nobody had declared war for that purpose. Wars could be justified to prevent greater evils.

War is always horrific, but in the twentieth century a mirage of sanitised atrocity-free conflict appeared in which ‘the west' played by Geneva Convention rules. Such perceptions are once again distorted by the prisms of ideology. For example, on 8 November 2004 US forces attacked the city of Fallujah in Iraq. One of their main objectives was the town's main hospital, which they said had been used by insurgents. The hospital had been treating a stream of civilians injured in earlier US attacks, and thus was a powerful propaganda weapon for the rebels. US officials announced that the hospital had been successfully captured; they denied insurgent claims of casualties during the attack and reported that many of the staff and patients taken prisoner were later released. Article 19 of Geneva Convention I signed in 1949 is unambiguous. ‘Fixed establishments and mobile medical units of the Medical Service may in no circumstances be attacked, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the Parties to the conflict. Should they fall into the hands of the adverse party, their personnel shall be free to pursue their duties.' Legally the US attack on Fallujah Hospital was a war crime. Few Americans would see it that way.

Today technology allows unseen men, women and children to be incinerated at the push of a button, and images of war on television screens segue into the banal world of video games. War a century ago seemed more horrific. In the First World War it was common for prisoners on both sides to be butchered, but by the Second World War Nazi Germany alone was the barbarian exception – utterly condemned by nations like France and the Netherlands, who then went on to commit appalling atrocities in
vain attempts to keep their colonies. In the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars similar atrocities were repeatedly carried out by the troops of the rival dictators. US forces carried out a few of their own. The Korean War had only just started when US Air Force pilots strafed South Korean refugees escaping on foot near No Gun Ri south-east of Seoul, killing around a hundred. The survivors took cover under a nearby railway bridge, where they were subject to three days of machine gun attacks from soldiers of the First Cavalry Division; over 300 civilians – men, women and children – died. More than 500 Vietnamese civilians were similarly massacred in the village of My Lai in 1968. There was no systematic barbarism like that practised by Russian troops in their conquest of eastern Germany, although in Korea US troops were ordered to fire on refugee columns if they even suspected an enemy presence, but nor were American troops the possessor of some moral superiority that made them behave in a more ‘democratic' manner: a message reinforced in Iraq.

Killing people in other countries – whether deliberate acts, accidental ‘collateral damage' or unauthorised abuse – is the inevitable corollary of imperial ideologies. Any nation, be it Britain, Russia or America, that gives itself the right to intervene militarily overseas implicitly accepts that innocents will suffer.

Today the Monroe doctrine, which laid down that the United States had the unique right to intervene in the affairs of countries in the western hemisphere, has been extended to cover the whole world. In the so-called Carter Doctrine enunciated on 23 January 1980 America's self-declared policing role was explicitly extended to the Middle East. President Carter declared that the flow of Gulf oil was a ‘vital interest' to the United States, and that as a consequence the US was empowered to use ‘any means including military force' to keep the oil flowing. Objectively the Carter Doctrine was a classic statement of America's imperial right to intervene in the affairs of other nations, but seen through the prism of his own ideology it certainly did not appear so to Carter himself. Indeed, writing in the
Los Angeles Times
in November 2005 he attacked the regime of Bush II for what he called its
‘revolutionary policies', under which ‘There are determined efforts by US leaders to exert American imperial dominance throughout the world.'

The fracturing of the Russian empire coincided with increased tensions in the Middle East and stepped up oil exploration around the Caspian. The United States found that its access to Middle Eastern oil was increasingly jeopardised but that new opportunities were arising in former Russian colonies like Azerbaijan and especially Kazakhstan. Just as the Second World War provided Roosevelt II with an opportunity to develop an alliance with Saudi Arabia, so the ‘war on terror' provided an opportunity to beef up US military presence in this area, a presence initiated in 1997, well before 9/11, with joint military exercises in Kazakhstan.

Possessing overwhelming military force remained a cornerstone of American foreign policy even after the collapse of the Soviet regime in Russia. The US navy currently has nearly 300 ships and half a million personnel, making it larger than the navies of the next seventeen nations put together. Its primary role is not to defend the homeland but to protect American imperial interests around the globe, a role that began with the attacks on Libya half a century after American Independence. American military forces are available to go where commercial priorities demand. For example, in 2003, despite tensions in the Middle East, it was announced that the aircraft carriers that had previously patrolled the Mediterranean would spend half their time off west Africa, reflecting increased US reliance on oil supplies from that region.

One of the clearest statements of current US policy was contained in a 1992 Defense Department draft entitled ‘Defense Planning Guidance'. This laid down that the primary objective of US foreign and military policy was to stop the development of any regional power that might threaten the global supremacy of the United States, including any ‘European-only security arrangements'. The United States must remain ‘the predominant outside power' in those regions like the Middle East and south-west Asia, whose resources the United States needed to exploit. When this document was leaked US senator Joseph Biden attacked it as an attempt to impose ‘Pax Americana' on the world. He was right, but
rather than being a sudden change in America's relationship with the rest of the world it was the logical continuation of the centuries-long spread of Pax Americana from its birthplace on the eastern coastline of North America. The Carter doctrine merely recognised an imperial imperative that American corporations had long anticipated.

US oil companies had been interested in the Middle East since the 1920s, grabbing stakes in the British-discovered Iraqi fields and establishing themselves in Saudi Arabia. During the Second World War America moved to consolidate its position at Britain's expense by ‘persuading' the beholden British government to share Iraq and Kuwait, while keeping Saudi Arabia to itself (and incidentally promising to leave Iran to Britain). The pressure to gain preferential access to oil pushed the US to intervene in ever more distant parts of the world. In 1992 Bush I intervened militarily in Somalia when the pro-American government was toppled and exclusive oil concessions held by four US oil corporations were threatened.

Military force and covert operations form one facet of the American way of empire-building. Far more important are other factors – economic, cultural and ideological. In the case of Russia, on the other hand, although ideology is what its proponents claimed was holding the Soviet empire together, the reality is that military force was by far the empire's most important glue. And it was the absence of other factors that ultimately signalled its collapse.

Russian and American territorial aggrandisement in the nineteenth century was made possible by military might. Lots of other factors played their parts but Chechens and Apaches, Moldovans and Mexicans succumbed to overwhelming military force. The crushing superiority of the US navy in the Spanish-American War and the pathetic inferiority of the Russian navy in the Russo-Japanese War were litmus tests of the state of the two empires. Militarily enfeebled, the Romanov regime headed for oblivion; militarily omnipotent, the regimes of Roosevelt I
and his successors walked softly along new paths confident that they were carrying a big stick.

The US stopped taking the land of others and embarked on a new form of corporate empire-building. In doing so it discovered that economic wealth created its own virtuous circle – the wealthier it became, the more its corporations could expand abroad and so the wealthier they became. Scale was as much an advantage to the nation as to the individual corporation. It seemed that the empire could thrive on dollars alone with no need for brute force. Russia never had that economic advantage. Its empire could only be held together by wielding a big stick. Stalin's Red Army provided that stick, but in the changing world – and changing metaphors – Stalin's successors discovered they needed guns
and
butter. Just as America was discovering that its economic interests in a post-war world needed the protection of secret police and US marines, so Russia discovered that secret police and military force alone could not sustain its empire.

From George Washington through Andrew Jackson and Dwight Eisenhower to Colin Powell American political life has been leavened with generals providing a different and purportedly action-orientated perspective from that of the political apparatchiks. In Russia since the death of Stalin this leavening has been added by secret policemen, culminating with Vladimir Putin. After Beria was arrested and shot, power in Russia passed to party men who through sycophancy and luck had survived Stalin's perpetual purges. In 1982 the crown passed to someone different. Yuri Andropov had headed the KGB and masterminded its continuing crackdown on dissidents. Where many in the FBI seemed to see reds under every bed, Andropov imagined Zionists under his. He was convinced there was an international Zionist conspiracy against the Soviet Union and devoted great effort to rooting it out. But like Beria he recognised that the Soviet economy had to change if the empire was to survive. Andropov moved power away from central planners to local managers, introduced incentive schemes for workers and attacked some of the corruption of the Brezhnev era that preceded him. His reign was
another of those great might-have-beens of Russian history, but kidney disease did for him what bullets had done for Beria. The party gerontocracy then tried to stifle change by placing one of their own on the ‘throne' but he soon died, and there came the final break with Stalinism.

It is said that corporate chief executives are best judged by the quality of the appointments they make. Andropov's most significant contribution to world history was his appointment to the inner circle of the man who arguably would produce the most massive change in Russian society since Peter the Great, greater even than the changes effected by Lenin – who had merely replaced one autocracy with another. In the summer of 1967 Yuri Andropov celebrated his promotion to head the KGB by holidaying at a spa near Stavrapol in the Caucasus. There he met a local party official who would become his protégé and who, thanks largely to Andropov's unstinting support, would eventually join him in the Kremlin: Mikhail Gorbachev.

When Gorbachev came to power in 1985 even he had no idea of how much the empire he was about to rule would be transformed. He recognised that wholesale economic modernisation was essential, but the far-reaching implications of his reforms were not at all apparent. Every aspect of Russian society needed restructuring (what he called
perestroika
), particularly its industrial base, but that could not be achieved without an unheard-of degree of honesty. For new economic policies to be developed and implemented there needed to be honest debate, for incentives to work there needed to be honest evaluation of performance, for corruption to be weeded out there needed to be honest admission of its existence. For
perestroika
to work there had to be openness:
glasnost
. Gorbachev understood that his reforms required objective reporting of what was happening in the country, but
glasnost
implied not just open reporting but open debate. For the first time political decisions, from top to bottom, were to be subject to scrutiny. It was then a small step from ‘scrutiny' to ‘critical scrutiny'. Intentionally or not Gorbachev was inviting open dissent.

A good way of understanding any society is to look at how it treats dissent. Under Lenin and Stalin dissent simply had no place, and
dissidents of any sort were ruthlessly eradicated. After Stalin's death a few radical voices started to emerge. Intellectuals, writers and artists wrote open letters, circulated clandestine literature (samizdat) and occasionally staged demonstrations. They were joined by nationalists in various parts of the empire and by Christians, Jews and Muslims whose beliefs had survived nearly four decades of state atheism. Fundamentally, however, the repression inherent in autocracy continued, and the initial thaw of Khruschev's ‘de-Stalinisation' did not last long – especially after the tanks rolled into Prague in the spring of 1968. The gulags continued, and thousands of dissidents were imprisoned there or in mental institutions. The names of most of these men and women have already been forgotten and their stories remain untold. Only a few of the more famous were able to make their voices heard. One such celebrity was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who had seen active service in the Second World War and had twice been decorated. Towards the end of the war Solzhenitsyn was arrested for criticising Stalin to a friend. He was sentenced to eight years in the gulags after which he was permanently exiled to Kazakhstan, where he became a schoolteacher. He would have remained in Kazakh obscurity had he not written to a well-connected magazine editor, who approached Khrushchev with the manuscript of
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, a searing indictment of the gulag system. Khrushchev approved publication, and the book caused a sensation inside the Soviet Union as much as outside. The hardliners in the Kremlin were horrified. Solzhenitsyn's subsequent efforts were banned, and after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature he was exiled from his own country.