Gerald Ford

US Middle East expert Juan Cole, favourably compares former President Gerald Ford - who has passed away - to the current administration in the White House.

One of the few rays of hope coming out of the last few years is the possibility that the ruthless, imperialistic nature of western power has now been decisively revealed, and that it will henceforth be recognised and dealt with as such by those who had previously mistaken it for something else (i.e. the virtuous force it pretends to be).

The flipside of this is the danger that the tactical changes made by the current set of imperial managers have been so dramatic that the differences between them and their predecessors may be taken to be qualitative, or more substantive than they actually are. By extension, future administrations that can successfully present themselves as substantively different from the present one will be free to carry on the standard imperial pattern, with the recognition of the reality of what’s happening put safely back in the box (step forward Barak Obama?).

Gerald Ford appears to have been a sensible and pragmatic, rather than a reckless and ideological imperialist. Since these differences affect policy, they’re non-trivial. But the commonalities are non-trivial as well, so I make these observations to augment rather than contradict what Juan says in the post linked to above.

Ford signed off on and materially supported the Indonesian invasion of East Timor - commencing immediately after his 1975 visit to Jakarta - which went on to wipe out about a quarter of the East Timorese population.

The Suharto regime had committed, ten years earlier, what the CIA described as “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century” when it exterminated hundreds of thousands of opponents upon coming to power. Given the record, the potential human cost of backing the invasion of East Timor will have been very clear to Ford. But the national security threat posed to the US by less than a million East Timorese peasants was obviously an urgent danger which he felt compelled to address.

With respect to the Middle East policies Juan focuses on, it appears that Ford was prepared to take a tougher line with Israel. But a tougher line in the interests of living up to basic moral obligations or in terms of managing an imperial alliance? The former seems to me to be the more important consideration (though both are of course relevant topics of academic interest for us).

Juan quotes Newsweek saying that Arab states were expressing a “willingness to accept the existence of the state of Israel if it withdrew from all occupied Arab territories”.

Yet despite this opening, the Ford administration, according to the Facts on File quotes Juan gives, “was attempting to block anti-Israeli resolutions before the Security Council” and had promised Tel Aviv that it would “oppose any attempt by the U.N. Security Council to impose a peace settlement in the Middle East”. These “anti-Israel” impositions presumably consisted of the demand that Israel return to its 67 borders, which everyone knows, still, is the only basis for meaningful peace (and justice). That blocking of a peaceful and just settlement continues to this day. How much bloodshed and misery could have been avoided if Ford’s White House had taken a different path?

All powers are ruthless and all compensate by projecting a virtuous self-image. And while the US is no different, its own self-image is a particularly seductive one, to the point where current crimes can be readily seen as a fall from grace, rather than as part of a long established pattern. The differences between Ford and Bush II are real enough, but they have their limits.