by marshall windmiller

John Kerry's Iraq

IS THERE ANYBODY who doesn't know by now that Sen. John F. Kerry voted for the resolution supporting the war in Iraq? When asked recently if he would have done it if he had known then what he knows now, he said he would, because "it's the right authority for a president to have."

Then on Sept. 6 in Cleveland, groping for sound-bite clarity, he said it was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." He has said he will try to bring the troops home during his first term as president. Four years?

Both Bush and Kerry are part of a consensus that's developing within the foreign-policy elite. It relates to two old words that were unmentionable 20 years ago but are now common in the journals and the editorial pages. The words are geopolitics and imperialism.

The term geopolitics was coined by a Swede, Rudolf Kjhellen, in 1899. He argued that international politics are totally determined by geography. The idea was picked up in the early 20th century by an Englishman, Sir Halford Mackinder.

Mackinder said that whoever controlled the "heartland," roughly western Siberia, would control the "World Island," that is, Eurasia, the vast land mass between the Pacific and the Atlantic. And whoever controlled the World Island would control the world.

In 1930 this theory was seized upon by a German intellectual, Karl Haushoffer, then director of the Institute of Geopolitics in Munich, Hitler's foreign-policy think tank. Haushoffer provided the intellectual basis for German expansion to the east. Because of this association with Naziism, the word and the idea became anathema in the democracies.

But recently it has had a revival among U.S. strategists, especially Zbigniew Brzezinski, consultant to Democrats and former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. In 1997 he embraced geopolitics in his book The Grand Chessboard.

Brzezinski said, "Any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by geostrategic design.... The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitrating role." The United States, he said, must "exercise global primacy." In other words, world domination.

One way to proceed is to occupy Iraq, construct permanent bases, and control the oil. Iraq can be a backup for the deployment of U.S. troops into Central Asia. They are already there in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan.

The Defense Department calls such bases "lily pads." The agile, rapid-response forces that will come out of the planned redeployment of troops from Europe can, like a frog, jump from these lily pads to any place in Eurasia.

There are now more than a dozen academic books and countless articles describing this process as imperialism or empire-building. Twenty years ago, only Communists were using this terminology to describe U.S. foreign policy. Now it's accepted as consensus among the dominant U.S. foreign-policy elites.

Kerry and his advisers are part of this consensus. He doesn't oppose the war, only the way it's been managed. It's fair to conclude that if he's elected, he's not likely to relinquish these geopolitical assets over which so much U.S. blood has already been shed.

Of course, to advance the geopolitical strategy, Iraq must be pacified and stabilized first. That's the major problem Kerry will inherit if he's elected. Bogged down in this deadly quagmire, he might finally regret he voted for the war in the first place.

Marshall Windmiller is professor emeritus of international relations at San Francisco State University.