5.6.04
In 'Historical Materialism' 11.3--Simon Bromley writes...
Reflections on 'Empire', Imperialism, and United States Hegemony
UPDATED 20 June
(((((((I was reading Historical Materialism today and was pleased to find this piece by Simon Bromley. I was planning on putting up an encapsulation of Hardt and Negri's 'Empire' up on the blog (and i still may)...but Bromley does such an excellent job here. It might take me while to get it all up. Since I've now read it, I think it should be asap. Here you go. Enjoy. ps, sorry about the lack of indentions...i will make sure it looks better by the end of it. it's a pretty long piece by blog-length standards. i'm extremely adament abt putting it up, though. l.)))))))
I. 'Empire' and America
Antiono Negri's and Michael Hardt's Empire poses a challenge to thinking about the changing nature of political power in the international capitalist system, the role of sovereign statehood in that order and, particularly, the character of American power. The key theses of Empire are simply stated: first, the global order of capital is regulated by a new logic and structure of rule, a new form of sovereignty; and, second, this logic and structure of rule is glued together by the society of the spectacle, in which power resides ultimately in the multitude.
'Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers'.^1 While US 'hegemony over the global use of force' stands at the top of the pyramid of the 'global constitution' that governs this order,
'Empire', then, involves a hierarchy of power within the capitalist world but this is anchored in a 'global constitution', rather than in direct imperial control of some political-territorial units over others. Whereas imperialism was associated with an extension of political control from one territory to another - 'imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries'^3 - Empire is an essentially deterritorialised field of economic and cultural relationships.
This is 'Empire' as seen in the mirror of Rome, and as found in both the pre-Roman culture of ancient Greece and the post-Roman culture of Christian Europe, as a hierarchy of polities that guarantees a universal order based on shared identities, values and interests, in which one power, the hegemonic power, is raised above others, not so much by force as by force of example, or as exemplar. It is the notion of Empire as, in Dominic Lieven's terms, 'first and foremost, a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of its era'.^4 It is Empire as aform of rule over many territories and peoples that works by incorporation, associeted with an economic and cultural order that proclaims itself the basis of a universal civilisation. The novelty of Hardt's and Negri's characterisation is the insistence that this Empire is now universal and that its power is no longer anchored in a fixed, territorial centre, since power - the glue of the 'global constitution' - is primarily cultural, not political.
Where in the world is America?
There is, then, already a tension in this account, never properly explored let alone resolved, between the recognition that the United States exercises 'hegemony over the global use of force' and the wider idea of a universal empire. The United States certainly claims an exceptional role in world affairs, uniquely defining its national interest as more or less synonymous with that of the international community tout ensemble. Its liberal advocates concur: 'America's national interest...offers the closest match there is to a world interest'.^5 The formation of the United States was a result of the networks of trade, people, conquest, settlement and ideas that circulated in the Atlantic economy, linking north-west Europe, the Americas and Africa, during the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. After the independence of thirteen colonies from Britain in the American Revolution of 1776, the subsequent development of the United States was, in part, an indirect continuation of that process - both globalising and imperial - of European expansion into the non-European world.
At the same time, however, US expansion was also defined as anti-colonial rather than colonial, republican rather than monarchical, the New World rather than the old European order. Unlike the major European states, the United States became a major power more or less without formal empire. Rather, independence cleared the way for westward expansion and settlement and 'the whole internal history of United States imperialism was one vast process of territorial seizure and occupation'.^6 As John Adams, the second President of the new Republic (1797-1801), had expressed it in 1774, the purpose of American independence was to pursue the formation of an 'independent American empire'.
It is only by presenting this 'internal colonialism' as an expansion into uninhabited or freely alienated lands that the American ideology of 'exceptionalism' could take root. But, among the overwhelmingly European majority of the population, such an idea did strike a deep chord. This ideology of exceptionalism encompasses two sets of ideas: first, that the United States is uniquely fortunate in having escaped the patterns of historical development characteristic of the old world order in Europe and in being able to create anew a society based on security, liberty and justice; and, second, that it is an exemplary power, representing a model that is universally applicable to the rest of mankind. In this way, the United has been able to present its national interest as simulataneously unique and universal, as entirely consistent with a form of cosmopolitan internationalism.
The consolidation of the sovereignty of the Union after the Civil War and the development of the national market, based on federal transfers of land to private ownershipt, laid the basis for the later development of a mass society: the US pioneered the culture of mass consumption as well as the consumption of mass culture, both of which were based in mass production, or what foreigners simply called 'Americanism'. The age of mass destruction followed shortly after, as the United States pioneered the combination of the mass production of high-explosives and massive increases in the mobility of means of their delivery. This is what a 'superpower' originally meant, defined by William Fox as 'great power pluse great mobility of power'.^7
Substantial elements of this model proved to be transferable to other capitalist countries. This meant that the leading economy in the world became a pole of attraction for others, as Perry Anderson, folling Antonio Gramsci, has recently emphasised.^8 It was this generalisation of the US model, its partial replication outside the United States, that gave its unique ideology of exceptionalism - the only national interest that presents itself as a universal, cosmopolitan interest - such a powerful grip.
In a highly prescient analysis of 'Americanism and Fordism' in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci asked 'whether America, through the implacable weight of its economic production (and therefore indirectly), will compel or is already compelling Europe to overturn its excessively antiquated economic and social basis'.^9 Gramsci's conclusion was that this was indeed the case, but that it represented 'an organic extension and an intensification of European civilization, to say, just as the United States itself was, in part, a product of European capitalist imperialism, of colonial settlement in the Americas, so European capitalism was now being reshaped by the more advanced economic order in America. Gramsci also saw clearly that Americanism was not simply a new mode of mass production and mass consumption but also a new form of social structure and state:
At the time he was writing, Gramsci observed the beginnings of Americanism in Europe - in Berlin and Milan, less so in Paris, he thought - but this was to become a much more important development after the Second World War. Thus was Americanism reproduced outside the territory of the United States.
In an essay seeking to place American history in a wider world context, Charles Bright and Michael Meyer describe the consequences after 1945 as follows:
Hence, Bright and Meyer's question, 'Where in the World Is America?', has two parts: first, what is the position of the (territorial) United States in the international system, and second, where - and with what effect - is Americanism in the rest of the world? The idea I want to explore by asking these questions is that American power in the round is based on both these Americas. Or rather, that the key to US power is the relation between these two sense of American power.
The American constitutional project (coming up soon ...tobe cont...)
Hardt and Negri generally present the historical development of the United States as one in which 'a new principle of sovereignty is affirmed, different from the European one: liberty is made sovereign and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and continuous process of expansion'.^13 In relation to this project, Native and African Americans represent externally and internally subordinated peoples. Recognition of this prompts a further thought. 'Perhaps what we have present as exceptions to the development of imperial sovereignty', they write, 'should instead be linked together as a real tendency, an alternative within the history of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, perhaps the root of these imperialist practices should be traced back to the very origins of the country, to black slavery and the genocidal wars against the Native Americans'.^14
This seems to me, in some ways, correct. From the time of the proto-liberal thought of Thomas Hobbes, through to the more expansive notions of rights and self-government in John Locke, to the comments of John Stuart Mill on the rights of intervention of 'civilised' peoples against 'barbarians', liberalism has been entirely consistent as a theory of liberty and empire.^15 Natural law, from a divinely ordained external standard into the idea of subjective natural rights, universal rights that are duplicated in every individual and which no one can rationally deny to another. The natural law was understood as the basis of a universal moral theory.
These individual rights - broadly to seek peace and uphold agreements - can be alienated to a collective body, thereby effecting a transition from the universal order of morality among rights-bearing individuals to the inevitably particular and legal order of a given state. Hobbes remains the commanding theorist of this idiom. The basis of political authority is thereby conceptualised in effectively secular terms, in terms of autonomous individuals, rights-bearing agents, who transfer some of their rights to the state, in order that the latter may protect their remaining freedoms. The legitimacy of the state is thereby rendered congtingent on law conforming to the private morality of rights-bearing, property-owning individuals.
Within Europe, these ideas constituted a powerful liberal attack on the arbitrary power of rulers whose claim to legitimacy was either religious or absolutist. However, societies that did not uphold these rights in this way were, according to these theorists, in a sense pre-political. Considered as individuals, their people were entitled to the same moral considerations as was everyone else, but they had no legal-political status as peoples. Even as JOhn Stuart Mill wrote, in his essay, 'A Few Words on Non-Intervention' (1859), that:
By the means, liberal thinkers sought to reconcile notions of individual rights, limited government and the rule of law with capitalist colonial expansion and settlement in foreign lands. These ideas represented an important shift in the ruling mores and discources of empire. In contrast to conquest empires of feudal aristocracies based on force and religious conversion, trading empires would be based on wealth and common interests - what the English in the eighteenth century liked to call 'empires of liberty'. This shift was accompanied by the enlightenments's 'powerful celebration of the civilizing and humanizing power of commerce'.^17 'Civilisation', rather than evangelisation, thus became the official discourse of the European empires. And to be civil was to be someone who new correctly how to interpret the natural law - nowadays extended to include the full panoply of free markets, liberal democracy and human rights. Empire, in turn, could increadingly be represented as a comonwealth of 'free' peoples enjoying indicidual liberties under the rule of law.
Hardt and Negri say, 'the contemporary idea of Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal U.S. constitutional project'.^18 I think that there is a large element of truth in this, even if that project had its origins in the prior expansion of seventeenth- and eighteenth century European, and especially Enlgish, society. But this does not mean that the process has no centre. In fact, it has a hierarchy of centres located in an increasingly co-ordinated set of territorial states, that is, compulsory apparatuses of political power, in which the power of the United States plays a complex and ambiguous role, sometimes directing collective forms of empowerment to mutual advantage, sometimes using its coercive power to deter and compel adversaries, and sometimes using both to engineer an imperialist creation of new forms of capitalism.
Today, the borders of capitalist states are, at least in the more open, liberal economies, no longer 'fixed boundaries or barriers' to the flows, but this mobility of capital across borders presupposes the definition, regulation and enforcement of rights of contract and rights to property, and much else besides, within and, crucially, among many territorially ordered centres of power, that is, states. It is the increasingly liberal codification of these rights and contracts within a growing number of capitialist states, and, perhaps even more importantly, the co-ordinated processes of aligning one such jurisdiction with another and others, which makes possible the very global mobility of capital that Hardt and Negri seek to emphasise.
This is, I will argue, a form of liberal imperialism with deep roots, and a more or less continuous presence, in the history of capitalist development since the late seventeenth century; it is motored by the economic dynamics of the restless expansion of capitalism, and by the competitive and co-ordinated states-system, which provides its political armature. What glues this system together is less Guy Debord's spectacle than the common verities of the material order; and, acting on behalf of this, in the last instance (and sometimes it now seems in the first instance), the coercively deployed political power of the United States.
II. Imperialism
Empire, according to Hardt and Negri, is to be contrasted with imperialism, the latter being defined in terms of the ‘extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries’, that is, in terms of its political form, rather than in terms of its economic mechanisms. By defining imperialism in political-territorial terms, Hardt and Negri, in effect, concede much of the liberal self-understanding of a world of independent states. Empire represents a global expansion of the US constitutional project, but America is not imperialist.
Of course, capitalist imperialism (often) involved ‘an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries’; but, even where it did so, it was also an economic process, which established relations of economic domination – ‘specifically, the formal or informal control over local economic resources in a manner advantageous to the metropolitan power, and at the expense of the local economy’.^19 Indeed, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out, ‘capitalist imperialism eventually became almost entirely a matter of economic domination, in which market imperatives, manipulated by the dominant capitalist powers, were made to do the work no longer done by imperial states or colonial settlers’.^20 Capitalist imperialism, on this understanding, is a set of coercive power relations established between different parts of the world economy, such that one region benefits at the expense of another. Its central mechanisms are economic and involve the ability of one region to manipulate market imperatives to its advantage. These economic mechanisms – operating by means of control over trade, investment or labour migration – may or may not involve the extension of political-military control by one polity over another.
Radical-liberal and classical-Marxist thinkers shared this essentially economic understanding of imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which derived from attempts to understand the character of the European capitalist empires, specifically the character of the relations between the metropolitan centres and colonial peripheries. In this modern usage, the primary reference of ‘imperialism’ was to the ‘political and cultural domination, and the economic exploitation, of the colonial periphery by the metropolitan state and nation’.^21 While liberal and Marxist critics of imperialism were all agreed that relations between the metropoles and the peripheries were exploitative, of equal concern for the classical-Marxist debate was the nature of the competitive relationships between the rival national imperialisms that, in combination and effect, dominated the non-European world until the era of decolonialisation.
This question had not escaped radical-liberal theorists and it was, in fact, Hobson who first drew attention to the distinction, which was to play a key role in subsequent Marxist debates, between what he called ‘Imperialsm’ and ‘Informal Empire’. As Giovanni Arrighi explains, the distinction between Imperialism and Informal Empire was as follows:
This fundamental distinction was to reappear in the form of Bukharin’s and Lenin’s notion of interimperial rivalries, that is, rival national Imperialisms, and Kautsky’s idea of ultra-imperialism, that is, a concert of Informal Empires, the possibility of which was noted by Hobson, who – somewhat confusingly – referred to it as ‘inter-imperialism’. In fact, these opposing characterizations – Lenin on the one side and Kautsy on the other – contained two fundamentally different views of international order in a capitalist world. In an interimperialist world, one imperialism gains at the expense of another, even as both exploit the periphery; in an ultra-imperialist world, each gains by co-operating with the other, even if the sharing of the gains is uneven.
As it developed in classical Marxism, the importance of this debate was that the theory of imperialism aimed to provide an explanation of world politics and not just accounts of metropolitan exploitation of the periphery, for they were as much concerned with the relations between and among the leading capitalist countries as they were with the effect of capitalist expansion, forcible or otherwise, into the periphery. The later attempt to read the character of capitalist development in toto through its effects on peripheral formations was, as Bill Warren, memorably pointed out, an inversion of the central purpose of Marxist thinking.^23
Coercion, co-ordination and power
The central analytical question at stake here is this: What is the relation between the co-ordinated liberal capitalist order, on the one hand, and the hierarchy of power among its constituent states, on the other? Now that the Communist challenge to capitalism has folded and the limits of the social-democratic additions to liberal capitalism have been revealed, the relationship between the collective empowerment of states and capital, which is a product of a co-ordinated liberal international order, and the patterns of economic domination and subordination among states is, arguably, the central question of intercapitalist relations. Is US economic hegemony a wasting asset as the original theorists of hegemonic stability supposed? And, if so, what are the implications of this? Or, can, US military hegemony compensate for, or even restore, its loss of economic dominance?
In order to address these questions, we need to recognize that the uneven distribution of economic and military resources across the world of capitalist states underpins relations of power of two fundamentally different kinds. In the first place, there is what I will call distributive or coercive power. This is the notion of power implicit in realist balance-of-power (and hegemonic stability) thinking and in the Marxist literature on interimperial rivalries and superimperialism. Distributive power is the capacity of one party to get another to comply with its goals, power relations are hierarchical relations of super- and sub-orderination: there is a given distribution of power in which some have more at the expense of others having less, and power operates by imposing costs on others (or by means of a credible threat to do so).
And, secondly, there is what I will call collective power. This is the notion of power implicit in the idea that states have common interests that can be advanced by forms of co-operation. Collective power is a property of a group of co-operating actors, in which the total ability to effect favourable outcomes is increased, over and above that which could be achieved by each acting independently. Collective power works, not by imposing costs on some, but by producing gains for all. This is the notion of power implicit in the idea that hegemony is a pole of attraction, that there are benefits in co-ordinating multiple poles of capitalist power, and that international order is basically ultra-imperialist. (These two forms of power are often difficult to disentangle for two reasons: first and most straightforwardly, the gains from collective empowerment are often distributed unequally based on different bargaining power; and, second, what looks like a voluntary exercise of collective power may, in fact, represent a response to an anterior – and perhaps hidden – exercise of distributive power.)
The distinction between distributive and collective power is not to be confused with that between military and economic means of exercising power. There is, of course, a sense in which military means of exercising power are always distributive for some, since they involve imposing costs on others (or at least a credible threat to do so), but military means can be turned to collective account, at least for some against others. This is precisely how US military power functioned during the Cold War as far as its capitalist allies were concerned. Economic power need not be distributive for any in a wide class of cases.
(coming next....SKIPPING the following, putting last part, then I will fill in the remaining parts afterwards...)
Following sections will be skipped:
III. The character of US hegemony
IV. US power and the liberal-capitalist international order
V. Expanding the capitalist world: the US-Russia-China triangle
VI. Policing the periphery
The ‘war on terrorism’, declared by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the attacks on America of 11 September 2001, is shorthand for a complex set of problems that defy easy summery. Many analysts took issue with the use of the word ‘war’, because the perpetrators of the acts were not states but part of a transnational network, a cellular structure that crossed a number of territories on a clandestine basis, and because there was no obvious way in which the war aims could be specified and measured. Like many other critics, the military historian, Michael Howard, argued that the attacks should be treated as a criminal matter and that the appropriate response was one of international policing and judicial process. Other commentators saw the actions of al-Qua’ida as an example of an ‘asymmetrical conflict’, that is, a power of the contending forces. President Bush’s response seemed determined, if anything, to increase this asymmetry, thereby prompting fear that it would only serve to generate yet more conflict in the future. What could be gained, these various critics asked, by a military campaign by the most powerful state in the world against one of the very weakest? This was not so much the clash of civilizations predicted by Samuel Huntington as a clash of barbarisms.^51
The immediate background to the rise of al-Qua’ida was the civil war in Afghanistan. The rise to power of the pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in 1978 provoked a civil war as significant elements of the Muslim society resisted its secularizing and socialist measures. The decision of the United States to arm the mujahidin was taken, according to President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in the summer of 1979 in order to ‘induce a Soviet military intervention’. Brzezinski later said that: ‘The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border [24 December 1979], I wrote to President Carter, saying: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War”’.^52 Moreover, when the USSR finally withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, on condition that the West and Pakistan stop supporting the mujahidin, the Reagan Administration illegally continued such support. After years more civil war, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia created and financed the Taliban and supported their conquest of power between 1994-6.
Al-Qua’ida was created during this Western, Saudi and Pakistani backed operation to finance and organize the mujahidin’s resistance to Communism in Afghanistan and to recruit (mainly Arab) Muslims from abroad to fight in that cause. Once the Taliban came to power in Kabul (1996), they formed a close alliance with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qua’ida organization – indeed, in some respects, al-Qua-ida was the military arm of the Taliban.^53 However, while the Saudis had been willing to provide support for the fight against the PDPA, they were not prepared to accede to demands for a strict Islamism of the Saudi state and, in particular, the demand that the ‘infidel’ and ‘crusader’ armies – that is, the United States – withdraw from the Arabian peninsula. This would have amounted to a transfer of control of the Saudi state from the monarchy to Islamist forces. And so, after helping to evict the Soviets from Afghanistan, al-Qua’ida turned their attention to their erstwhile Western backers who were also engaged in the military support of the monarchical regime in Saudi Arabia. The result was explosive, as Fred Halliday explains:
Three elements therefore came together: a reassertion of the most traditional strands in Islamic thinking, a brutalization and militarization of the Islamic groups themselves, and a free-floating transnational army of fighters drawing support from Pakistan, the Arab world, south-east Asia and Chechnya with its base in Afghanistan. In the context of the greater west Asian crisis, and the revolt against the states of the region, as well as their western backers, there now emerged an organized militant challenge.^54
Asymmetric conflict
The term ‘ asymmetric conflict’ originally came to prominence during the Vietnam War to refer to the way in which the militarily weaker party seeks to take the conflict to public opinion in the enemy’s homeland, as an attempt to undermine its will to prosecute the war. It was an adjunct to the theory to the theory of guerilla war, which also relied on an asymmetry: between forces able to move and mix among the rural population and urban-based combatants (local and foreign). As such, it is one very plausible reason why the United States, the dominant military part to that conflict, lost. The most likely rationale of the 11 September attacks is that they too were an attempt to undermine the adversary’s will, only this time the will of the United States to support the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and, perhaps, Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians. Whereas the Vietnamese appealed to international and American public opinion in the name of a universally acknowledged value – that of a national right to self-determination – al’Qua’ida’s strategy was essentially negative, to instill fear, and its positive appeal extended to only a minority of the world’s Muslims. For the Vietnamese, an appeal to norms of justice embodied in international public reason was a weapon of the weak; for al-Qua’ida, terrorism was the weapon.
By its very nature, asymmetric conflict is extremely hard to deter. In particular, violent asymmetric conflict carried out by clandestine adversaries is almost impossible to deter. The operation of the balance of power and the logic of deterrence presuppose conflicts of interest as well as a common recognition of certain shared objectives – namely, survival. The logic of deterrence is, says Thomas Schelling, ‘as inapplicable to a situation of pure and complete antagonism of interest as it is to the case of pure and complete common interest’.^55 Faced with an adversary that has an absolute hostility, that is prepared to risk all, deterrence is largely irrelevant. As Gilbert Achcar has argued, in this situation, ‘the causes of “absolute hostility” must be reduced or eliminated, in such a way that a “common interest” emerges as a possibility’.^56
One way of reducing the hostility of al-Qua’ida would have been to address the issues that provoked its hostility in the first place, broadly US foreign policy in the Middle East and, in particular, its military support to the regime in Saudi Arabia. Another response was to try to eliminate al-Qua’ida. If the asymmetry of US power was producing absolute antagonists that could not be deterred, then why not use that power to destroy the adversary, even before it attacked, and engineer a new situation capable of producing some minimal common interests? This is the doctrine of pre-emption, which said that, rather than wait for a recognized casus belli (as in the case of Afghanistan), the United States would act to remove potential threats before they materialized. In fact, some in Washington came to believe that both the destruction of the enemy and addressing the issues that provoked the hostility could be achieved by the same means.
Since al-Qua’ida was, in effect, the military arm of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, the latter was directly implicated in the attacks of 11 September. The precondition for treating the attacks as a criminal matter – that the stae from which the attackers operated was prepared to uphold international law – arguably did not obtain. In any case, this was no part of Washington’s agenda and, in truth, there was precious little international support for such a strategy. Nor were the war aims of the United States unlimited. They may not have been wholly clear, but destroying al-Qua’ida’s ability to operate inside a state that itself repudiated all international responsibilities was not especially opaque. And, although the war against al-Qua’ida was not fully successful, there is little doubt that its capacity for organized activity was dramatically curtailed by its eviction from Afghanistan; the Taliban government that had existed in symbiosis with al-Qua’ida and allowed its territory to be established in Kabul that had some chance of ending the long-running Afghan presence in resource-rich Central Asia. There are no guarantees that any of this will prove durable, but, from the point of view of the United States, it is hard to see that it is a worse situation than that which existed prior to 11 September 2001. In that sense, those who questioned whether it was a war that could be won were on shaky ground: it was a war and a major battle was won.
Recasting influence in Central Asia
Perhaps because they feared antagonizing the United States after the events of 11 September, or perhaps because they wanted a free hand with their own problems – in Chechnya and with Uighur separatists – Russia and China extended considerable co-operation to the US military operation in Afghanistan. Although pushed by the Central Asian states, especially by Uzbekistan, Russia acceded to a temporary US military presence in the region, allowed the use of its airspace, shared intelligence, and supported the Northern Alliance, while China was active in persuading its ally Pakistan to work with the Americans. As a report written for the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College has pointed out, since recognizing the Central Asian states in 1991:
Expanding U.S. military engagement with Central Asian states has been viewed as a key mechanism to promote their integration into Western political-military institutions, encourage civilian control over militaries, and institutionalize co-operative relations with the United States military, while dissuading other regional powers – especially Russia, China, and Iran – from seeking to dominate the region.^57
After 11 September 2001, however, the balance tilted dramatically in Washington’s favour, as China saw Russia and Pakistan and India all develop closer ties with Washington, and Russia took a conciliatory line (including on the December 2002 decision of the United States to withdraw from the ABM treaty) to an increased US role in return, it would appear, for little beyond a silence over events in Chechnya. In this respect, Russian (and Chinese) opposition to the subsequent war against Iraq marked a limit to how far such acquiescence would go.
The doctrine of pre-emption
In fact, what caused most concern among the United States’s rivals (and many of its allies), in relation to the ‘war on terrorism’, was not the war in Afghanistan, despite the by-passing of NATO, but the subsequent mobilization against Iraq and the new doctrine at work in US foreign policy, that of pre-emption. Moreover, the doctrine appeared to receive a more or less open-ended remit as it was to apply not just to terrorist networks and those who harboured them but also to ‘rogue’ states, that is, states that the United States deemed unfit to possess weapons of mass destruction. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, President Bush pulled these originally distinct ideas – that of ‘international terrorism’ and ‘rogue states’ – together and spoke of an ‘axis of evil’, a symbiotic alliance of transitional networks of terror and states with access to, or aspirations for, weapons of mass destruction.
Many argued that the United States was, in intention and effect, embarking on exactly what the historian Charles Beard had cautioned against when he spoke of a ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’, a charge resurrected by Gore Vidal.^58 Ellen Meiksins Wood offered a Marxist (or, better, Hobbesian) gloss on this, suggesting that the purpose of such a response was to declare war on all states that dared to challenge the US-dominated international order, a declaration of ‘infinite war’, in which US imperialism would discipline other states in the system: ‘It is this endless possibility of war that imperial capital needs in order to sustain its hegemony over the global system of multiple states’.^59 The ides here seems to be that, as the economic components of US superimperialism, or US hegemony, decline, so the balance of rule shifts in a more coercive direction.
At the centre of this analysis of American policy is the claim that the war against Iraq represented a shift from containment and deterrence to a doctrine of pre-emption, and that pre-emption was aimed at producing a general disciplinary effect over rival powers tempted to challenge the imperial order. Along with the war in Afghanistan, this seemed to open an entirely new chapter in post-war international relations. Such accusations have been a standard criticism of the interventionist strand of liberal imperialism in US foreign policy. The realist thinker Kenneth Waltz, for example, argued that interventionist liberals do not reject the balance of power, ‘they think it can be superseded’, and cautioned that this policy must ‘if implemented, lead to unlimited war for unlimited ends’.^60 ‘The state that would act on the interventionist theory’, Waltz pointed out, ‘must set itself up as both judge and executor in the affairs of nations’.^61
Now, it is certainly true that, after 11 September 2001, the question for the United States was whether continued deterrence of Iraq made better sense than pre-emption. (However, ‘regime change’ in Iraq had been Washington’s policy since 1998.) But it is perhaps not surprising that the United States believed that what was done in Afghanistan could also be done in Iraq, for all the differences between the two cases. Strategically, the only real difference was that the action in Afghanistan could be presented as a defensive response, whereas that in Iraq was clearly pre-emptive. Important though this difference may be, the underlying retionale was, I believe, broadly similar: namely, state- or nation-building.
Between the end of the Gulf War of 1991 and 11 September 2001, US policy towards Iraq had been one of containment and deterrence. This was based on two principles: UN-monitored disarmament and economic sanctions. By the late 1990s, these had stalled and demonstrably failed to achieve their objectives. (The Russians and Serbs, for example, had been active in rebuilding Iraq’s air defences; the French and Russian governments were more concerned with commercial links to Baghdad than completeing the disarmament process and there was growing internation criticism of the disastrous effects of sanctions, as implemented by Saddam Hussein, on the civilian population of Iraq.) In order to see why pre-emption was in some ways an attractive alternative, it is necessary to situate Iraq in relation to the broader role of the United States in the Middle East.
Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, US policy in the Middle East had been based on a series of contradictory commitments that increasingly undermined its ability to play a directive role. Its hegemony has increasingly relied on its military power. Yet, the lesson of the Iranian Revolution was that this was an unsustainable strategy in the long-run. Prior tot he second US-led war against Iraq (March/April 2003), its policy in the Middle East comprised hostile relations with Iran, a failed attempt to disarm Iraq (because of a collapse of support from Russia and France on the Security Council) and support for Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states that was generating considerable opposition among many Arab Muslims (remember that most of the 11 September hijackers came from Saudi Arabia), to say nothing of its support for the hard-line policies of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. There was, in short, precious little basis on which the United States could construct even a minimal set of common interests with the region.
A new start in Iraq, however, might provide the beginnings of a strategy for dealing with what Walliday has called the ‘west Asian crisis’, a series of crises affecting the region that encompasses the Arab states of the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The new logic of US policy thus became pre-emption, in order to establish common interests, by means of ‘nation-building’. The United States was extremely reluctant to admit this, and made strenuous efforts to garner multilateral support for it, but its overwhelming military power gave it the confidence to regard pre-emption as favourable to a messy combination of containment and deterrence. Reconstituting states that are able to operate successfully within, rather than against, the prevailing capitalist order or co-ordinated sovereignty was the prize. If Saddam could be removed from Iraq, US troops could be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, thereby putting pressure on, but also giving space for, the monarchy to address its domestic opposition; Syria and Iran could be pressured into withdrawing support from radical Palestinian factions that undermined the ability of the “moderate” leadership to commit meaningfully to peaceful negotiations with Israel; and a new round of the Palestinian-Israeli ‘peace process’ could begin.
The alternative, as viewed from Washington, was a continuation of hit-and-run guerrilla tactics against terrorist cells as and when they could be found; economically ruinous and otherwise ineffective sanctions, and a policy ofo dual containment—of Iraq and Iran—that had already lost the determined support of key Security Council members and, in the case of Iran, lost the support of the European Union and even the United States’s closest imperial ally, the United Kingdom; continued support by Syria and Iran for radical Palestinian elements and a general disaffection across the Arab, and increasingly the Islamic, world. In this context, Iraq presented a golden opportunity. What made this particular region of crisis a candidate for this approach was, of course, its strategic and resource significance: the oil and gas resources of the Middle East and Central Asia are a vital economic interest for the dominant capitalist powers (and increasingly for China and India too). And what made the new approach something more than a reckless gamble was the overwhelming military preponderance of the United States after the end of the Cold War.
(much more coming soon on this section…to be cont…)
UPDATED 20 June
(((((((I was reading Historical Materialism today and was pleased to find this piece by Simon Bromley. I was planning on putting up an encapsulation of Hardt and Negri's 'Empire' up on the blog (and i still may)...but Bromley does such an excellent job here. It might take me while to get it all up. Since I've now read it, I think it should be asap. Here you go. Enjoy. ps, sorry about the lack of indentions...i will make sure it looks better by the end of it. it's a pretty long piece by blog-length standards. i'm extremely adament abt putting it up, though. l.)))))))
I. 'Empire' and America
Antiono Negri's and Michael Hardt's Empire poses a challenge to thinking about the changing nature of political power in the international capitalist system, the role of sovereign statehood in that order and, particularly, the character of American power. The key theses of Empire are simply stated: first, the global order of capital is regulated by a new logic and structure of rule, a new form of sovereignty; and, second, this logic and structure of rule is glued together by the society of the spectacle, in which power resides ultimately in the multitude.
'Empire establishes no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers'.^1 While US 'hegemony over the global use of force' stands at the top of the pyramid of the 'global constitution' that governs this order,
the glue that holds together the diverse functions and bodies of the hybrid constitution is what Guy Debord called the spectacle, an integrated and diffuse apparatus of images and ideas that produces and regulates public discourse and opinion.^2
'Empire', then, involves a hierarchy of power within the capitalist world but this is anchored in a 'global constitution', rather than in direct imperial control of some political-territorial units over others. Whereas imperialism was associated with an extension of political control from one territory to another - 'imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries'^3 - Empire is an essentially deterritorialised field of economic and cultural relationships.
This is 'Empire' as seen in the mirror of Rome, and as found in both the pre-Roman culture of ancient Greece and the post-Roman culture of Christian Europe, as a hierarchy of polities that guarantees a universal order based on shared identities, values and interests, in which one power, the hegemonic power, is raised above others, not so much by force as by force of example, or as exemplar. It is the notion of Empire as, in Dominic Lieven's terms, 'first and foremost, a very great power that has left its mark on the international relations of its era'.^4 It is Empire as aform of rule over many territories and peoples that works by incorporation, associeted with an economic and cultural order that proclaims itself the basis of a universal civilisation. The novelty of Hardt's and Negri's characterisation is the insistence that this Empire is now universal and that its power is no longer anchored in a fixed, territorial centre, since power - the glue of the 'global constitution' - is primarily cultural, not political.
Where in the world is America?
There is, then, already a tension in this account, never properly explored let alone resolved, between the recognition that the United States exercises 'hegemony over the global use of force' and the wider idea of a universal empire. The United States certainly claims an exceptional role in world affairs, uniquely defining its national interest as more or less synonymous with that of the international community tout ensemble. Its liberal advocates concur: 'America's national interest...offers the closest match there is to a world interest'.^5 The formation of the United States was a result of the networks of trade, people, conquest, settlement and ideas that circulated in the Atlantic economy, linking north-west Europe, the Americas and Africa, during the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. After the independence of thirteen colonies from Britain in the American Revolution of 1776, the subsequent development of the United States was, in part, an indirect continuation of that process - both globalising and imperial - of European expansion into the non-European world.
At the same time, however, US expansion was also defined as anti-colonial rather than colonial, republican rather than monarchical, the New World rather than the old European order. Unlike the major European states, the United States became a major power more or less without formal empire. Rather, independence cleared the way for westward expansion and settlement and 'the whole internal history of United States imperialism was one vast process of territorial seizure and occupation'.^6 As John Adams, the second President of the new Republic (1797-1801), had expressed it in 1774, the purpose of American independence was to pursue the formation of an 'independent American empire'.
It is only by presenting this 'internal colonialism' as an expansion into uninhabited or freely alienated lands that the American ideology of 'exceptionalism' could take root. But, among the overwhelmingly European majority of the population, such an idea did strike a deep chord. This ideology of exceptionalism encompasses two sets of ideas: first, that the United States is uniquely fortunate in having escaped the patterns of historical development characteristic of the old world order in Europe and in being able to create anew a society based on security, liberty and justice; and, second, that it is an exemplary power, representing a model that is universally applicable to the rest of mankind. In this way, the United has been able to present its national interest as simulataneously unique and universal, as entirely consistent with a form of cosmopolitan internationalism.
The consolidation of the sovereignty of the Union after the Civil War and the development of the national market, based on federal transfers of land to private ownershipt, laid the basis for the later development of a mass society: the US pioneered the culture of mass consumption as well as the consumption of mass culture, both of which were based in mass production, or what foreigners simply called 'Americanism'. The age of mass destruction followed shortly after, as the United States pioneered the combination of the mass production of high-explosives and massive increases in the mobility of means of their delivery. This is what a 'superpower' originally meant, defined by William Fox as 'great power pluse great mobility of power'.^7
Substantial elements of this model proved to be transferable to other capitalist countries. This meant that the leading economy in the world became a pole of attraction for others, as Perry Anderson, folling Antonio Gramsci, has recently emphasised.^8 It was this generalisation of the US model, its partial replication outside the United States, that gave its unique ideology of exceptionalism - the only national interest that presents itself as a universal, cosmopolitan interest - such a powerful grip.
In a highly prescient analysis of 'Americanism and Fordism' in his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci asked 'whether America, through the implacable weight of its economic production (and therefore indirectly), will compel or is already compelling Europe to overturn its excessively antiquated economic and social basis'.^9 Gramsci's conclusion was that this was indeed the case, but that it represented 'an organic extension and an intensification of European civilization, to say, just as the United States itself was, in part, a product of European capitalist imperialism, of colonial settlement in the Americas, so European capitalism was now being reshaped by the more advanced economic order in America. Gramsci also saw clearly that Americanism was not simply a new mode of mass production and mass consumption but also a new form of social structure and state:
Americanism requires a particular environment, a particular social structure (or at least a determined intention to create it) and a certain type of State. The State is the liberal State, not in the sense of free-trade liberalism or of effective political liberaty, but in the more fundamental sense of free initiative and of economic individualism which, with its own means, on the level of 'civil society', through historical development, itself arrives at a regime of industrial concentration and monopoly.^11
At the time he was writing, Gramsci observed the beginnings of Americanism in Europe - in Berlin and Milan, less so in Paris, he thought - but this was to become a much more important development after the Second World War. Thus was Americanism reproduced outside the territory of the United States.
In an essay seeking to place American history in a wider world context, Charles Bright and Michael Meyer describe the consequences after 1945 as follows:
The postwar American sovereign, built on territories of production, had created vectors along which elements of the U.S. state and American civil society could move off into the world and benifit form the permanent projections of American power overseas...The tools of control - military (the alliance systems and violence), economic (dollar aid and investments), political (the leverage and sanctions of a superpower), and ideological (the image of the United States as leader of the free world) - were tremendously, and the ideological imaginary of the territories of production, with its emphasis on material progress and democracy, proved extraordinarily attractive.^12
Hence, Bright and Meyer's question, 'Where in the World Is America?', has two parts: first, what is the position of the (territorial) United States in the international system, and second, where - and with what effect - is Americanism in the rest of the world? The idea I want to explore by asking these questions is that American power in the round is based on both these Americas. Or rather, that the key to US power is the relation between these two sense of American power.
The American constitutional project (coming up soon ...tobe cont...)
Hardt and Negri generally present the historical development of the United States as one in which 'a new principle of sovereignty is affirmed, different from the European one: liberty is made sovereign and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and continuous process of expansion'.^13 In relation to this project, Native and African Americans represent externally and internally subordinated peoples. Recognition of this prompts a further thought. 'Perhaps what we have present as exceptions to the development of imperial sovereignty', they write, 'should instead be linked together as a real tendency, an alternative within the history of the U.S. Constitution. In other words, perhaps the root of these imperialist practices should be traced back to the very origins of the country, to black slavery and the genocidal wars against the Native Americans'.^14
This seems to me, in some ways, correct. From the time of the proto-liberal thought of Thomas Hobbes, through to the more expansive notions of rights and self-government in John Locke, to the comments of John Stuart Mill on the rights of intervention of 'civilised' peoples against 'barbarians', liberalism has been entirely consistent as a theory of liberty and empire.^15 Natural law, from a divinely ordained external standard into the idea of subjective natural rights, universal rights that are duplicated in every individual and which no one can rationally deny to another. The natural law was understood as the basis of a universal moral theory.
These individual rights - broadly to seek peace and uphold agreements - can be alienated to a collective body, thereby effecting a transition from the universal order of morality among rights-bearing individuals to the inevitably particular and legal order of a given state. Hobbes remains the commanding theorist of this idiom. The basis of political authority is thereby conceptualised in effectively secular terms, in terms of autonomous individuals, rights-bearing agents, who transfer some of their rights to the state, in order that the latter may protect their remaining freedoms. The legitimacy of the state is thereby rendered congtingent on law conforming to the private morality of rights-bearing, property-owning individuals.
Within Europe, these ideas constituted a powerful liberal attack on the arbitrary power of rulers whose claim to legitimacy was either religious or absolutist. However, societies that did not uphold these rights in this way were, according to these theorists, in a sense pre-political. Considered as individuals, their people were entitled to the same moral considerations as was everyone else, but they had no legal-political status as peoples. Even as JOhn Stuart Mill wrote, in his essay, 'A Few Words on Non-Intervention' (1859), that:
barbarians have no rights as a nation, except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one. The only moral laws for the relation between a civilized and a barbarous government, are the universal rules of morality between man and man.^16
By the means, liberal thinkers sought to reconcile notions of individual rights, limited government and the rule of law with capitalist colonial expansion and settlement in foreign lands. These ideas represented an important shift in the ruling mores and discources of empire. In contrast to conquest empires of feudal aristocracies based on force and religious conversion, trading empires would be based on wealth and common interests - what the English in the eighteenth century liked to call 'empires of liberty'. This shift was accompanied by the enlightenments's 'powerful celebration of the civilizing and humanizing power of commerce'.^17 'Civilisation', rather than evangelisation, thus became the official discourse of the European empires. And to be civil was to be someone who new correctly how to interpret the natural law - nowadays extended to include the full panoply of free markets, liberal democracy and human rights. Empire, in turn, could increadingly be represented as a comonwealth of 'free' peoples enjoying indicidual liberties under the rule of law.
Hardt and Negri say, 'the contemporary idea of Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal U.S. constitutional project'.^18 I think that there is a large element of truth in this, even if that project had its origins in the prior expansion of seventeenth- and eighteenth century European, and especially Enlgish, society. But this does not mean that the process has no centre. In fact, it has a hierarchy of centres located in an increasingly co-ordinated set of territorial states, that is, compulsory apparatuses of political power, in which the power of the United States plays a complex and ambiguous role, sometimes directing collective forms of empowerment to mutual advantage, sometimes using its coercive power to deter and compel adversaries, and sometimes using both to engineer an imperialist creation of new forms of capitalism.
Today, the borders of capitalist states are, at least in the more open, liberal economies, no longer 'fixed boundaries or barriers' to the flows, but this mobility of capital across borders presupposes the definition, regulation and enforcement of rights of contract and rights to property, and much else besides, within and, crucially, among many territorially ordered centres of power, that is, states. It is the increasingly liberal codification of these rights and contracts within a growing number of capitialist states, and, perhaps even more importantly, the co-ordinated processes of aligning one such jurisdiction with another and others, which makes possible the very global mobility of capital that Hardt and Negri seek to emphasise.
This is, I will argue, a form of liberal imperialism with deep roots, and a more or less continuous presence, in the history of capitalist development since the late seventeenth century; it is motored by the economic dynamics of the restless expansion of capitalism, and by the competitive and co-ordinated states-system, which provides its political armature. What glues this system together is less Guy Debord's spectacle than the common verities of the material order; and, acting on behalf of this, in the last instance (and sometimes it now seems in the first instance), the coercively deployed political power of the United States.
II. Imperialism
Empire, according to Hardt and Negri, is to be contrasted with imperialism, the latter being defined in terms of the ‘extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries’, that is, in terms of its political form, rather than in terms of its economic mechanisms. By defining imperialism in political-territorial terms, Hardt and Negri, in effect, concede much of the liberal self-understanding of a world of independent states. Empire represents a global expansion of the US constitutional project, but America is not imperialist.
Of course, capitalist imperialism (often) involved ‘an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries’; but, even where it did so, it was also an economic process, which established relations of economic domination – ‘specifically, the formal or informal control over local economic resources in a manner advantageous to the metropolitan power, and at the expense of the local economy’.^19 Indeed, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has pointed out, ‘capitalist imperialism eventually became almost entirely a matter of economic domination, in which market imperatives, manipulated by the dominant capitalist powers, were made to do the work no longer done by imperial states or colonial settlers’.^20 Capitalist imperialism, on this understanding, is a set of coercive power relations established between different parts of the world economy, such that one region benefits at the expense of another. Its central mechanisms are economic and involve the ability of one region to manipulate market imperatives to its advantage. These economic mechanisms – operating by means of control over trade, investment or labour migration – may or may not involve the extension of political-military control by one polity over another.
Radical-liberal and classical-Marxist thinkers shared this essentially economic understanding of imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which derived from attempts to understand the character of the European capitalist empires, specifically the character of the relations between the metropolitan centres and colonial peripheries. In this modern usage, the primary reference of ‘imperialism’ was to the ‘political and cultural domination, and the economic exploitation, of the colonial periphery by the metropolitan state and nation’.^21 While liberal and Marxist critics of imperialism were all agreed that relations between the metropoles and the peripheries were exploitative, of equal concern for the classical-Marxist debate was the nature of the competitive relationships between the rival national imperialisms that, in combination and effect, dominated the non-European world until the era of decolonialisation.
This question had not escaped radical-liberal theorists and it was, in fact, Hobson who first drew attention to the distinction, which was to play a key role in subsequent Marxist debates, between what he called ‘Imperialsm’ and ‘Informal Empire’. As Giovanni Arrighi explains, the distinction between Imperialism and Informal Empire was as follows:
At least in principle…two quite distinct types of rivalry were involved. In the case of Imperialism, rivalry affected political relations among states and was expressed in the arms race and the drive to territorial expansion; whereas in the case of Informal Empire, it concerned economic relations among individual of different nationality and was expressed in the international division of labour. Thus Imperialism signified political conflict among nations, Informal Empire economic interdependence between them.^22
This fundamental distinction was to reappear in the form of Bukharin’s and Lenin’s notion of interimperial rivalries, that is, rival national Imperialisms, and Kautsky’s idea of ultra-imperialism, that is, a concert of Informal Empires, the possibility of which was noted by Hobson, who – somewhat confusingly – referred to it as ‘inter-imperialism’. In fact, these opposing characterizations – Lenin on the one side and Kautsy on the other – contained two fundamentally different views of international order in a capitalist world. In an interimperialist world, one imperialism gains at the expense of another, even as both exploit the periphery; in an ultra-imperialist world, each gains by co-operating with the other, even if the sharing of the gains is uneven.
As it developed in classical Marxism, the importance of this debate was that the theory of imperialism aimed to provide an explanation of world politics and not just accounts of metropolitan exploitation of the periphery, for they were as much concerned with the relations between and among the leading capitalist countries as they were with the effect of capitalist expansion, forcible or otherwise, into the periphery. The later attempt to read the character of capitalist development in toto through its effects on peripheral formations was, as Bill Warren, memorably pointed out, an inversion of the central purpose of Marxist thinking.^23
Coercion, co-ordination and power
The central analytical question at stake here is this: What is the relation between the co-ordinated liberal capitalist order, on the one hand, and the hierarchy of power among its constituent states, on the other? Now that the Communist challenge to capitalism has folded and the limits of the social-democratic additions to liberal capitalism have been revealed, the relationship between the collective empowerment of states and capital, which is a product of a co-ordinated liberal international order, and the patterns of economic domination and subordination among states is, arguably, the central question of intercapitalist relations. Is US economic hegemony a wasting asset as the original theorists of hegemonic stability supposed? And, if so, what are the implications of this? Or, can, US military hegemony compensate for, or even restore, its loss of economic dominance?
In order to address these questions, we need to recognize that the uneven distribution of economic and military resources across the world of capitalist states underpins relations of power of two fundamentally different kinds. In the first place, there is what I will call distributive or coercive power. This is the notion of power implicit in realist balance-of-power (and hegemonic stability) thinking and in the Marxist literature on interimperial rivalries and superimperialism. Distributive power is the capacity of one party to get another to comply with its goals, power relations are hierarchical relations of super- and sub-orderination: there is a given distribution of power in which some have more at the expense of others having less, and power operates by imposing costs on others (or by means of a credible threat to do so).
And, secondly, there is what I will call collective power. This is the notion of power implicit in the idea that states have common interests that can be advanced by forms of co-operation. Collective power is a property of a group of co-operating actors, in which the total ability to effect favourable outcomes is increased, over and above that which could be achieved by each acting independently. Collective power works, not by imposing costs on some, but by producing gains for all. This is the notion of power implicit in the idea that hegemony is a pole of attraction, that there are benefits in co-ordinating multiple poles of capitalist power, and that international order is basically ultra-imperialist. (These two forms of power are often difficult to disentangle for two reasons: first and most straightforwardly, the gains from collective empowerment are often distributed unequally based on different bargaining power; and, second, what looks like a voluntary exercise of collective power may, in fact, represent a response to an anterior – and perhaps hidden – exercise of distributive power.)
The distinction between distributive and collective power is not to be confused with that between military and economic means of exercising power. There is, of course, a sense in which military means of exercising power are always distributive for some, since they involve imposing costs on others (or at least a credible threat to do so), but military means can be turned to collective account, at least for some against others. This is precisely how US military power functioned during the Cold War as far as its capitalist allies were concerned. Economic power need not be distributive for any in a wide class of cases.
(coming next....SKIPPING the following, putting last part, then I will fill in the remaining parts afterwards...)
Following sections will be skipped:
The relations between economic and military power
The Cold War and superimperialism
Imperialism after the Cold War
III. The character of US hegemony
Co-ordination in an ultra-imperialist order
Economic multipolarity
Military unipolarity
IV. US power and the liberal-capitalist international order
Breaking with NATO?
V. Expanding the capitalist world: the US-Russia-China triangle
China and Russia
Strategic 'partners' or 'competitors'
VI. Policing the periphery
The ‘war on terrorism’, declared by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the attacks on America of 11 September 2001, is shorthand for a complex set of problems that defy easy summery. Many analysts took issue with the use of the word ‘war’, because the perpetrators of the acts were not states but part of a transnational network, a cellular structure that crossed a number of territories on a clandestine basis, and because there was no obvious way in which the war aims could be specified and measured. Like many other critics, the military historian, Michael Howard, argued that the attacks should be treated as a criminal matter and that the appropriate response was one of international policing and judicial process. Other commentators saw the actions of al-Qua’ida as an example of an ‘asymmetrical conflict’, that is, a power of the contending forces. President Bush’s response seemed determined, if anything, to increase this asymmetry, thereby prompting fear that it would only serve to generate yet more conflict in the future. What could be gained, these various critics asked, by a military campaign by the most powerful state in the world against one of the very weakest? This was not so much the clash of civilizations predicted by Samuel Huntington as a clash of barbarisms.^51
The immediate background to the rise of al-Qua’ida was the civil war in Afghanistan. The rise to power of the pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) in 1978 provoked a civil war as significant elements of the Muslim society resisted its secularizing and socialist measures. The decision of the United States to arm the mujahidin was taken, according to President Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in the summer of 1979 in order to ‘induce a Soviet military intervention’. Brzezinski later said that: ‘The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border [24 December 1979], I wrote to President Carter, saying: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War”’.^52 Moreover, when the USSR finally withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, on condition that the West and Pakistan stop supporting the mujahidin, the Reagan Administration illegally continued such support. After years more civil war, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia created and financed the Taliban and supported their conquest of power between 1994-6.
Al-Qua’ida was created during this Western, Saudi and Pakistani backed operation to finance and organize the mujahidin’s resistance to Communism in Afghanistan and to recruit (mainly Arab) Muslims from abroad to fight in that cause. Once the Taliban came to power in Kabul (1996), they formed a close alliance with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qua’ida organization – indeed, in some respects, al-Qua-ida was the military arm of the Taliban.^53 However, while the Saudis had been willing to provide support for the fight against the PDPA, they were not prepared to accede to demands for a strict Islamism of the Saudi state and, in particular, the demand that the ‘infidel’ and ‘crusader’ armies – that is, the United States – withdraw from the Arabian peninsula. This would have amounted to a transfer of control of the Saudi state from the monarchy to Islamist forces. And so, after helping to evict the Soviets from Afghanistan, al-Qua’ida turned their attention to their erstwhile Western backers who were also engaged in the military support of the monarchical regime in Saudi Arabia. The result was explosive, as Fred Halliday explains:
Three elements therefore came together: a reassertion of the most traditional strands in Islamic thinking, a brutalization and militarization of the Islamic groups themselves, and a free-floating transnational army of fighters drawing support from Pakistan, the Arab world, south-east Asia and Chechnya with its base in Afghanistan. In the context of the greater west Asian crisis, and the revolt against the states of the region, as well as their western backers, there now emerged an organized militant challenge.^54
Asymmetric conflict
The term ‘ asymmetric conflict’ originally came to prominence during the Vietnam War to refer to the way in which the militarily weaker party seeks to take the conflict to public opinion in the enemy’s homeland, as an attempt to undermine its will to prosecute the war. It was an adjunct to the theory to the theory of guerilla war, which also relied on an asymmetry: between forces able to move and mix among the rural population and urban-based combatants (local and foreign). As such, it is one very plausible reason why the United States, the dominant military part to that conflict, lost. The most likely rationale of the 11 September attacks is that they too were an attempt to undermine the adversary’s will, only this time the will of the United States to support the monarchy in Saudi Arabia and, perhaps, Israel in its dispute with the Palestinians. Whereas the Vietnamese appealed to international and American public opinion in the name of a universally acknowledged value – that of a national right to self-determination – al’Qua’ida’s strategy was essentially negative, to instill fear, and its positive appeal extended to only a minority of the world’s Muslims. For the Vietnamese, an appeal to norms of justice embodied in international public reason was a weapon of the weak; for al-Qua’ida, terrorism was the weapon.
By its very nature, asymmetric conflict is extremely hard to deter. In particular, violent asymmetric conflict carried out by clandestine adversaries is almost impossible to deter. The operation of the balance of power and the logic of deterrence presuppose conflicts of interest as well as a common recognition of certain shared objectives – namely, survival. The logic of deterrence is, says Thomas Schelling, ‘as inapplicable to a situation of pure and complete antagonism of interest as it is to the case of pure and complete common interest’.^55 Faced with an adversary that has an absolute hostility, that is prepared to risk all, deterrence is largely irrelevant. As Gilbert Achcar has argued, in this situation, ‘the causes of “absolute hostility” must be reduced or eliminated, in such a way that a “common interest” emerges as a possibility’.^56
One way of reducing the hostility of al-Qua’ida would have been to address the issues that provoked its hostility in the first place, broadly US foreign policy in the Middle East and, in particular, its military support to the regime in Saudi Arabia. Another response was to try to eliminate al-Qua’ida. If the asymmetry of US power was producing absolute antagonists that could not be deterred, then why not use that power to destroy the adversary, even before it attacked, and engineer a new situation capable of producing some minimal common interests? This is the doctrine of pre-emption, which said that, rather than wait for a recognized casus belli (as in the case of Afghanistan), the United States would act to remove potential threats before they materialized. In fact, some in Washington came to believe that both the destruction of the enemy and addressing the issues that provoked the hostility could be achieved by the same means.
Since al-Qua’ida was, in effect, the military arm of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, the latter was directly implicated in the attacks of 11 September. The precondition for treating the attacks as a criminal matter – that the stae from which the attackers operated was prepared to uphold international law – arguably did not obtain. In any case, this was no part of Washington’s agenda and, in truth, there was precious little international support for such a strategy. Nor were the war aims of the United States unlimited. They may not have been wholly clear, but destroying al-Qua’ida’s ability to operate inside a state that itself repudiated all international responsibilities was not especially opaque. And, although the war against al-Qua’ida was not fully successful, there is little doubt that its capacity for organized activity was dramatically curtailed by its eviction from Afghanistan; the Taliban government that had existed in symbiosis with al-Qua’ida and allowed its territory to be established in Kabul that had some chance of ending the long-running Afghan presence in resource-rich Central Asia. There are no guarantees that any of this will prove durable, but, from the point of view of the United States, it is hard to see that it is a worse situation than that which existed prior to 11 September 2001. In that sense, those who questioned whether it was a war that could be won were on shaky ground: it was a war and a major battle was won.
Recasting influence in Central Asia
Perhaps because they feared antagonizing the United States after the events of 11 September, or perhaps because they wanted a free hand with their own problems – in Chechnya and with Uighur separatists – Russia and China extended considerable co-operation to the US military operation in Afghanistan. Although pushed by the Central Asian states, especially by Uzbekistan, Russia acceded to a temporary US military presence in the region, allowed the use of its airspace, shared intelligence, and supported the Northern Alliance, while China was active in persuading its ally Pakistan to work with the Americans. As a report written for the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College has pointed out, since recognizing the Central Asian states in 1991:
Expanding U.S. military engagement with Central Asian states has been viewed as a key mechanism to promote their integration into Western political-military institutions, encourage civilian control over militaries, and institutionalize co-operative relations with the United States military, while dissuading other regional powers – especially Russia, China, and Iran – from seeking to dominate the region.^57
After 11 September 2001, however, the balance tilted dramatically in Washington’s favour, as China saw Russia and Pakistan and India all develop closer ties with Washington, and Russia took a conciliatory line (including on the December 2002 decision of the United States to withdraw from the ABM treaty) to an increased US role in return, it would appear, for little beyond a silence over events in Chechnya. In this respect, Russian (and Chinese) opposition to the subsequent war against Iraq marked a limit to how far such acquiescence would go.
The doctrine of pre-emption
In fact, what caused most concern among the United States’s rivals (and many of its allies), in relation to the ‘war on terrorism’, was not the war in Afghanistan, despite the by-passing of NATO, but the subsequent mobilization against Iraq and the new doctrine at work in US foreign policy, that of pre-emption. Moreover, the doctrine appeared to receive a more or less open-ended remit as it was to apply not just to terrorist networks and those who harboured them but also to ‘rogue’ states, that is, states that the United States deemed unfit to possess weapons of mass destruction. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, President Bush pulled these originally distinct ideas – that of ‘international terrorism’ and ‘rogue states’ – together and spoke of an ‘axis of evil’, a symbiotic alliance of transitional networks of terror and states with access to, or aspirations for, weapons of mass destruction.
Many argued that the United States was, in intention and effect, embarking on exactly what the historian Charles Beard had cautioned against when he spoke of a ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’, a charge resurrected by Gore Vidal.^58 Ellen Meiksins Wood offered a Marxist (or, better, Hobbesian) gloss on this, suggesting that the purpose of such a response was to declare war on all states that dared to challenge the US-dominated international order, a declaration of ‘infinite war’, in which US imperialism would discipline other states in the system: ‘It is this endless possibility of war that imperial capital needs in order to sustain its hegemony over the global system of multiple states’.^59 The ides here seems to be that, as the economic components of US superimperialism, or US hegemony, decline, so the balance of rule shifts in a more coercive direction.
At the centre of this analysis of American policy is the claim that the war against Iraq represented a shift from containment and deterrence to a doctrine of pre-emption, and that pre-emption was aimed at producing a general disciplinary effect over rival powers tempted to challenge the imperial order. Along with the war in Afghanistan, this seemed to open an entirely new chapter in post-war international relations. Such accusations have been a standard criticism of the interventionist strand of liberal imperialism in US foreign policy. The realist thinker Kenneth Waltz, for example, argued that interventionist liberals do not reject the balance of power, ‘they think it can be superseded’, and cautioned that this policy must ‘if implemented, lead to unlimited war for unlimited ends’.^60 ‘The state that would act on the interventionist theory’, Waltz pointed out, ‘must set itself up as both judge and executor in the affairs of nations’.^61
Now, it is certainly true that, after 11 September 2001, the question for the United States was whether continued deterrence of Iraq made better sense than pre-emption. (However, ‘regime change’ in Iraq had been Washington’s policy since 1998.) But it is perhaps not surprising that the United States believed that what was done in Afghanistan could also be done in Iraq, for all the differences between the two cases. Strategically, the only real difference was that the action in Afghanistan could be presented as a defensive response, whereas that in Iraq was clearly pre-emptive. Important though this difference may be, the underlying retionale was, I believe, broadly similar: namely, state- or nation-building.
Between the end of the Gulf War of 1991 and 11 September 2001, US policy towards Iraq had been one of containment and deterrence. This was based on two principles: UN-monitored disarmament and economic sanctions. By the late 1990s, these had stalled and demonstrably failed to achieve their objectives. (The Russians and Serbs, for example, had been active in rebuilding Iraq’s air defences; the French and Russian governments were more concerned with commercial links to Baghdad than completeing the disarmament process and there was growing internation criticism of the disastrous effects of sanctions, as implemented by Saddam Hussein, on the civilian population of Iraq.) In order to see why pre-emption was in some ways an attractive alternative, it is necessary to situate Iraq in relation to the broader role of the United States in the Middle East.
Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, US policy in the Middle East had been based on a series of contradictory commitments that increasingly undermined its ability to play a directive role. Its hegemony has increasingly relied on its military power. Yet, the lesson of the Iranian Revolution was that this was an unsustainable strategy in the long-run. Prior tot he second US-led war against Iraq (March/April 2003), its policy in the Middle East comprised hostile relations with Iran, a failed attempt to disarm Iraq (because of a collapse of support from Russia and France on the Security Council) and support for Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states that was generating considerable opposition among many Arab Muslims (remember that most of the 11 September hijackers came from Saudi Arabia), to say nothing of its support for the hard-line policies of Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. There was, in short, precious little basis on which the United States could construct even a minimal set of common interests with the region.
A new start in Iraq, however, might provide the beginnings of a strategy for dealing with what Walliday has called the ‘west Asian crisis’, a series of crises affecting the region that encompasses the Arab states of the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The new logic of US policy thus became pre-emption, in order to establish common interests, by means of ‘nation-building’. The United States was extremely reluctant to admit this, and made strenuous efforts to garner multilateral support for it, but its overwhelming military power gave it the confidence to regard pre-emption as favourable to a messy combination of containment and deterrence. Reconstituting states that are able to operate successfully within, rather than against, the prevailing capitalist order or co-ordinated sovereignty was the prize. If Saddam could be removed from Iraq, US troops could be withdrawn from Saudi Arabia, thereby putting pressure on, but also giving space for, the monarchy to address its domestic opposition; Syria and Iran could be pressured into withdrawing support from radical Palestinian factions that undermined the ability of the “moderate” leadership to commit meaningfully to peaceful negotiations with Israel; and a new round of the Palestinian-Israeli ‘peace process’ could begin.
The alternative, as viewed from Washington, was a continuation of hit-and-run guerrilla tactics against terrorist cells as and when they could be found; economically ruinous and otherwise ineffective sanctions, and a policy ofo dual containment—of Iraq and Iran—that had already lost the determined support of key Security Council members and, in the case of Iran, lost the support of the European Union and even the United States’s closest imperial ally, the United Kingdom; continued support by Syria and Iran for radical Palestinian elements and a general disaffection across the Arab, and increasingly the Islamic, world. In this context, Iraq presented a golden opportunity. What made this particular region of crisis a candidate for this approach was, of course, its strategic and resource significance: the oil and gas resources of the Middle East and Central Asia are a vital economic interest for the dominant capitalist powers (and increasingly for China and India too). And what made the new approach something more than a reckless gamble was the overwhelming military preponderance of the United States after the end of the Cold War.
(much more coming soon on this section…to be cont…)
1.6.04
The Texas Two-Step Acceptance: President Al-Yawer
In the last hour, the Presidency of Iraq was accepted by Pachachi (for a moment according to the three Bs, BBC, Bremer, & Brahimi), declined by Pachachi, and then deferred by Pachachi to Al-Yawer. Does it matter if the American APPOINTED GC got their wish? No it doesn't. How funny is this? Compounding the illegitimacy of the new interim government and the weakness of Brahimi is the entirely confused two-step acceptance of a largely ceremonial role of President of Iraq.
G'night!
l to the l
ps: It does matter a bit that there is somebody critical of US motives and methods as president. Does it offer more legitimacy to the interim government? Perhaps...but a finite and very limited amount.
G'night!
l to the l
ps: It does matter a bit that there is somebody critical of US motives and methods as president. Does it offer more legitimacy to the interim government? Perhaps...but a finite and very limited amount.
President who?
President Pachachi...kind of has a ring to it. Like a pop song title. My new favorite album happens to be Trans Am - "Liberation". Check it out. (thanks SA.!!!) Trans Am needs to make a post-album single called "President Pachachi" and "See I.A." (See Iyad Allawi)!!!
Confusion reigns...so, let me get this straight. Bremer and CPA authorities practically threaten to veto the American appointed GC choice, Ghazi Yawer, in favor of Adnan Pachachi. Who now, in my eyes...and in the eyes of many Iraqis, has lost any credibility for him tail-wagging behind the CPA's guise...or simply is unknown to a large portion of the population. And now, America has affectively bypassed the UN once more. Brahimi is clearly Bremer's puppet now. He has no power whatsoever. The interim government is sure to be illegitimate now. Allawi and Pachachi...who's next, Chalabi as VP? ...even after stealing American taxpayers money, 33-100 million (depending who you ask) since 1991 and being tried, convicted, and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison IN Jordan of all places because of the Petra Bank embezzlement affair. The same person that a certain "Rumsfeld protege" said, "Ahmed Chalabi is like the prophet Muhammad. At first, people doubted him but they came to realize the wisdom of his ways" (according to the Christian Science Monitor) We enter the absurd yet again. And all in all, none of this confusion surprises me.
Al-Yawer dared to criticize the US for being 100% responsible for the lack of security in Iraq now. The message: if you don't like what the US does, you are not legitimate. The opposite will come true as with most occupations throughout history. WOW...incredible. This "handover" on 30 June is truly going to become a silly affair. Empire reigns over Iraq with 130,000 troops and a bunch of stooge-collaborators. I actually thought collaboration could be made clean again at one point...now, I know this is an impossibility. The CIA is happier with Allawi. It won't make things much safer unfortunately. And that is what their goal needs to be--to create security ...in Iraq. But perhaps they don't want a stable Iraq. Ever thought about that? Well, I have for far too long.
Be sure to check out our good friend with the wonderful new blog from--an iraqi intellectual at UC-Berkeley--Abbas Kadhim Calling it Like it Is!!! Thank you for stepping to the plate in such a clear and concise manner Abbas! U rock.
L to the L,
all up in your shit like hell smells...lets imagine what that is like.
peeeeeee-ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!
ps
and imagine what iraqis think abt such an illegitimate form of the coming "interim government". has sistani been neutralized? will elections ever be held? or will it also be impossible in 2005 because of lack of stability? is that what this administration wants? an alibi to continue the occupation? that's what it could possibly be shaping up to be.
wake up dude...don't let internationalism be sidelined!!! doublespeak and lies cannot tame iraq and iraqis. this thing is going to get way out of hand. it is so plain to see that now. Saddam Part II coming right up! ...in other words, iraqis will be eating from the same shit with a different smell.
there's still time to act for peace and stability. assure the census is created with integrity and that elections take place on time. only then will credibility be true...
-l.
Confusion reigns...so, let me get this straight. Bremer and CPA authorities practically threaten to veto the American appointed GC choice, Ghazi Yawer, in favor of Adnan Pachachi. Who now, in my eyes...and in the eyes of many Iraqis, has lost any credibility for him tail-wagging behind the CPA's guise...or simply is unknown to a large portion of the population. And now, America has affectively bypassed the UN once more. Brahimi is clearly Bremer's puppet now. He has no power whatsoever. The interim government is sure to be illegitimate now. Allawi and Pachachi...who's next, Chalabi as VP? ...even after stealing American taxpayers money, 33-100 million (depending who you ask) since 1991 and being tried, convicted, and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison IN Jordan of all places because of the Petra Bank embezzlement affair. The same person that a certain "Rumsfeld protege" said, "Ahmed Chalabi is like the prophet Muhammad. At first, people doubted him but they came to realize the wisdom of his ways" (according to the Christian Science Monitor) We enter the absurd yet again. And all in all, none of this confusion surprises me.
Al-Yawer dared to criticize the US for being 100% responsible for the lack of security in Iraq now. The message: if you don't like what the US does, you are not legitimate. The opposite will come true as with most occupations throughout history. WOW...incredible. This "handover" on 30 June is truly going to become a silly affair. Empire reigns over Iraq with 130,000 troops and a bunch of stooge-collaborators. I actually thought collaboration could be made clean again at one point...now, I know this is an impossibility. The CIA is happier with Allawi. It won't make things much safer unfortunately. And that is what their goal needs to be--to create security ...in Iraq. But perhaps they don't want a stable Iraq. Ever thought about that? Well, I have for far too long.
Be sure to check out our good friend with the wonderful new blog from--an iraqi intellectual at UC-Berkeley--Abbas Kadhim Calling it Like it Is!!! Thank you for stepping to the plate in such a clear and concise manner Abbas! U rock.
L to the L,
all up in your shit like hell smells...lets imagine what that is like.
peeeeeee-ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!
ps
and imagine what iraqis think abt such an illegitimate form of the coming "interim government". has sistani been neutralized? will elections ever be held? or will it also be impossible in 2005 because of lack of stability? is that what this administration wants? an alibi to continue the occupation? that's what it could possibly be shaping up to be.
wake up dude...don't let internationalism be sidelined!!! doublespeak and lies cannot tame iraq and iraqis. this thing is going to get way out of hand. it is so plain to see that now. Saddam Part II coming right up! ...in other words, iraqis will be eating from the same shit with a different smell.
there's still time to act for peace and stability. assure the census is created with integrity and that elections take place on time. only then will credibility be true...
-l.
On the "new Iraqi government" and the Viability of American Moral Authority
SaMe ShIt, DiFfErEnT sMeLl
..and so, they bring in a criminal to scare the shit out of Iraqis? The INA, a less scandal-ridden organization than the INC ?
and the US realizes that they "temporarily" need this solution to tame the situation in preparation for the election this coming november (and less importantly and symbolically hollow to the extreme...the "transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30"). I wonder if Dynacorp will guard Allawi like they guard Karzai.
I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as Iraq as a sovereign state when a private company guards the supposed leader. And that's precisely what is happening in Afghanistan.
Now, lets see the Iraqi version. Just to be clear and redundant for effect...if Allawi--a person that was an exile whom real Iraqis don't know, and that was chosen by the american appointed governing council-- is guarded by non-Iraqis, then it would logically be a clear indicator displaying there isn't an iota of sovereignty in Iraq. I'm not even touching on the fact that there will most probably be an enormous American military presence in Iraq (130,000+) for at least 5 years, but most probably much longer.
A democracy or an Iraqi tilt towards it in its most ideal form may be considered by many to be a worthy cause. But now that there have been no weapons found and no qaeda connection, the liberation theme is an especially convenient excuse (or political side-stepping) for the Bush Administration to continue to neo-con-job the world.
As long as there is no accountability at the highest levels for such debacles as the prison physical and sexual abuse, there will be no viability of american moral authority in Iraq and the region. Specifically, creating 20 scapegoat soldiers will not help Iraq tilt toward anything but another US string-pulled puppet dictatorship. And sadly, this has been the policy and the sort of thinking that led to the current nightmare scenario. Now these methods have just been amped up a bit. You reap what you sow...don't ya? And I'm sure terrorists couldn't have asked for more than this unjustifiable war and occupation to thicken their ranks. Is this the product of orwellian "doublespeak" or just direct lies to the people of the world and the constituents that can change the figure-head of state in the upcoming election? Will changing bush into kerry matter for iraq? Probably not that much...but it would assuredly be an improvement upon the sketched-out times we live in now.
psst, book i'm looking forward to...Slavoj Zizek's "Iraq the borrowed kettle" should be out SOON!!!
GO GIT IT,
Liminal
..and so, they bring in a criminal to scare the shit out of Iraqis? The INA, a less scandal-ridden organization than the INC ?
and the US realizes that they "temporarily" need this solution to tame the situation in preparation for the election this coming november (and less importantly and symbolically hollow to the extreme...the "transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30"). I wonder if Dynacorp will guard Allawi like they guard Karzai.
I'm sorry, but there is no such thing as Iraq as a sovereign state when a private company guards the supposed leader. And that's precisely what is happening in Afghanistan.
Now, lets see the Iraqi version. Just to be clear and redundant for effect...if Allawi--a person that was an exile whom real Iraqis don't know, and that was chosen by the american appointed governing council-- is guarded by non-Iraqis, then it would logically be a clear indicator displaying there isn't an iota of sovereignty in Iraq. I'm not even touching on the fact that there will most probably be an enormous American military presence in Iraq (130,000+) for at least 5 years, but most probably much longer.
A democracy or an Iraqi tilt towards it in its most ideal form may be considered by many to be a worthy cause. But now that there have been no weapons found and no qaeda connection, the liberation theme is an especially convenient excuse (or political side-stepping) for the Bush Administration to continue to neo-con-job the world.
As long as there is no accountability at the highest levels for such debacles as the prison physical and sexual abuse, there will be no viability of american moral authority in Iraq and the region. Specifically, creating 20 scapegoat soldiers will not help Iraq tilt toward anything but another US string-pulled puppet dictatorship. And sadly, this has been the policy and the sort of thinking that led to the current nightmare scenario. Now these methods have just been amped up a bit. You reap what you sow...don't ya? And I'm sure terrorists couldn't have asked for more than this unjustifiable war and occupation to thicken their ranks. Is this the product of orwellian "doublespeak" or just direct lies to the people of the world and the constituents that can change the figure-head of state in the upcoming election? Will changing bush into kerry matter for iraq? Probably not that much...but it would assuredly be an improvement upon the sketched-out times we live in now.
psst, book i'm looking forward to...Slavoj Zizek's "Iraq the borrowed kettle" should be out SOON!!!
GO GIT IT,
Liminal
7.5.04
Making Explicit What Was Implicit
First, I fully endorse Juan Cole's latest comments in his "The Mideastization of the US, or : [Donald] Rumsfeld Must Resign." It's been a while since I've blogged. I've been away a bit...living my life. I felt that it was necessary that I listened once more. Too much has happened to begin commenting in full on the events since I last blogged. One important thing is that Americans are realising the body is breakable. What a horrific month. It is tragic and unnecessary that these soldiers AND Iraqis x 10 (including many many women and children) are dying as a result of a continued state of scattered inebriation to cultural and religious sensitivities and have in turn ruined almost all the good-will between Iraqis and soldiers that have occupied Iraq. I musn't speak the obvious. I hate preaching to the choir. A few words: Fallujah changed everything. Najaf & Karbala could be absolute disasters that lead to some terrible unknown. How big the mistake(s)that is (or are going to be) made by MORE US bombs and bullets going to be? is my question now. HOW BIG IS THE MISTAKE GOING TO BE? We'll find out. Bringing Guantanamo inside Iraq doesn't help anybody. (One must note that the initial release of the pictures was controlled by the current Administration/And isn't the keystone of any legitimate democracy a free and fair press?...these pictures and videos have been known about since Jan! Oh yeah, I forgot, this is an election year...duh! Playin with the media filters are ya Mr.Rove? What more could we expect from the renegade democratizers like those veiled in the protection of suspiciously sultry "in-the-interest-of-national security" shadows.) I believe most Iraqis across the spectrum of opinions would agree with the sentiment that Iraq should NOT become one huge Guantonamo Bay.
On that note, there is one common feeling in the near/middle east at the moment: OUTRAGE. The entire set of events that are being pushed into action is an outrage of gigantic proportions when taking a sober glance at the facts. The Gaza gamble chip, Iraq's situation (excluding the certain freedoms and positives, however few they may be, that have become seemingly meaningless), the complete lack of care for national security and world security when Joseph Wilson's covert CIA wife who was revealed by Bob Novak through Somebody. She dealt with the sensitive subject of great importance TO THIS ADMINISTRATION (yea right): preventing the proliferation of wmd. Well, it should be of great importance. Which makes this obvious libby/rove-job (--as in Scooter Libby and Karl Rove--)an outrage in and of itself that proves this was a war of choice ....I could go on and on.
There's so much more. Where could I possibly begin about the latest debacle of torture, abuse, and humiliation? I fear to venture into such matters. How despicable? Who is accountable? This American administration is risking more lives by having an odd number of low-ranking scapegoats...because simply, though the election is coming up and the American Audience factor is what should be most important to an incumbant president, NO IRAQI will BELIEVE that THIS DISGUSTING display of what America brought to Iraq is on a small scale. It is a system problem. Somebody big be losin' their job...or like I said, you're putting more troops at more and more risk. But I guess it matters less when you have all these renegade soldiers that aren't accountable to any court of law. Ah-HA! the rummy rationale!
Another matter, I was in Japan when the first hostages were taken. I was extremely upset during this incident. I could feel the Japanese people's intensity and concern. I am happy ..so happy they were released unharmed. I wanted to write an open letter to the Japanese people to tell them how honestly terrified I was. I am against these acts. Though, on a more somber reality, we must better understand Japanese economic investment in the American deficit (about Half of it, I'll get a couple sources on the exact figure) and dependence on middle eastern oil to understand the relationship between these two countries...and in turn, their relationship with the world community. I'm being implicit. But there is something definitely worth looking into in more detail.
And we must realize that when the US government complies and allows for Israel to use Gaza as a gambling chip in a very suspect plan that this action only inflames Arab resentment. I don't buy the whole "first step" [in the apparently new and enforced] roadmap. It is clear there is some terrible plan in place. And I fear the human consequences of what was made explicit that was formerly so implicit for most people in the world. Yes, maybe this shakes things up...but to what end? Intentions are both poisoned and clearly biased and will result in more cheap Arab blood and the blood of many others and possibly other times. The future, the unknown, is what is so frightening. Something stymies me beyond belief though. Does logic count in any of the planning? I'm very unsure about this at the moment. We are moving backwards. Unless there is some accountability, there will be no viability of American primacy.
(((Shout OUTS))))
I'm so so happy to see Raed has created his own blog. Thank you Raed! He's truly a voice among many new and regular bloggers that we must all respect and take into account. Thank you all for letting me listen.
and ihath, thanks. i'll be in touch soon.
Love, There's no time to sleep. We must reach it some how.
lim.
ps I also am beginning to realize that some people were actually reading my blog and the Agora. I usually write my blogs like emails...extremely spontaneous and poorly written, but with purpose (I think). Now I've fully realized this method in writing is untenable. I wish to take time and write better. I'm still adapting to the form. But now I realize the power and demand of solid and creative writing with blogging. Also, more hyperlinks to come...another vital matter.
psst... a big thank you to salam for the fascinating interview on hard talk, bbc. thankfully because i was out of the US I was able to see IT! wonderful...all iraqi bloggers/iraqis/iraqi-whatevers are in great debt to you.
pssstx2 i cannot put hyperlinks to anything in this post for some reason ...but i'll make sure to do this later. :) DONE (updated)
pssstx3 remember the name Stephen Cambone. he's rumsfeld, version 2.0...while somebody high up on the food chain MUST take the blow of accountability and lose their job(s) really soon, there's another protege (ie, wolfy would take rummy's place...so what if both went? then u've got douglas feith... then deep on the bench is Cambone?) to take that person's function and make practically the same decisions. anyway...
mah'ah salaam to all the beautiful habibis of the world...and strength to all the people of the world who need it to act righteously when exercising power.
On that note, there is one common feeling in the near/middle east at the moment: OUTRAGE. The entire set of events that are being pushed into action is an outrage of gigantic proportions when taking a sober glance at the facts. The Gaza gamble chip, Iraq's situation (excluding the certain freedoms and positives, however few they may be, that have become seemingly meaningless), the complete lack of care for national security and world security when Joseph Wilson's covert CIA wife who was revealed by Bob Novak through Somebody. She dealt with the sensitive subject of great importance TO THIS ADMINISTRATION (yea right): preventing the proliferation of wmd. Well, it should be of great importance. Which makes this obvious libby/rove-job (--as in Scooter Libby and Karl Rove--)an outrage in and of itself that proves this was a war of choice ....I could go on and on.
There's so much more. Where could I possibly begin about the latest debacle of torture, abuse, and humiliation? I fear to venture into such matters. How despicable? Who is accountable? This American administration is risking more lives by having an odd number of low-ranking scapegoats...because simply, though the election is coming up and the American Audience factor is what should be most important to an incumbant president, NO IRAQI will BELIEVE that THIS DISGUSTING display of what America brought to Iraq is on a small scale. It is a system problem. Somebody big be losin' their job...or like I said, you're putting more troops at more and more risk. But I guess it matters less when you have all these renegade soldiers that aren't accountable to any court of law. Ah-HA! the rummy rationale!
Another matter, I was in Japan when the first hostages were taken. I was extremely upset during this incident. I could feel the Japanese people's intensity and concern. I am happy ..so happy they were released unharmed. I wanted to write an open letter to the Japanese people to tell them how honestly terrified I was. I am against these acts. Though, on a more somber reality, we must better understand Japanese economic investment in the American deficit (about Half of it, I'll get a couple sources on the exact figure) and dependence on middle eastern oil to understand the relationship between these two countries...and in turn, their relationship with the world community. I'm being implicit. But there is something definitely worth looking into in more detail.
And we must realize that when the US government complies and allows for Israel to use Gaza as a gambling chip in a very suspect plan that this action only inflames Arab resentment. I don't buy the whole "first step" [in the apparently new and enforced] roadmap. It is clear there is some terrible plan in place. And I fear the human consequences of what was made explicit that was formerly so implicit for most people in the world. Yes, maybe this shakes things up...but to what end? Intentions are both poisoned and clearly biased and will result in more cheap Arab blood and the blood of many others and possibly other times. The future, the unknown, is what is so frightening. Something stymies me beyond belief though. Does logic count in any of the planning? I'm very unsure about this at the moment. We are moving backwards. Unless there is some accountability, there will be no viability of American primacy.
(((Shout OUTS))))
I'm so so happy to see Raed has created his own blog. Thank you Raed! He's truly a voice among many new and regular bloggers that we must all respect and take into account. Thank you all for letting me listen.
and ihath, thanks. i'll be in touch soon.
Love, There's no time to sleep. We must reach it some how.
lim.
ps I also am beginning to realize that some people were actually reading my blog and the Agora. I usually write my blogs like emails...extremely spontaneous and poorly written, but with purpose (I think). Now I've fully realized this method in writing is untenable. I wish to take time and write better. I'm still adapting to the form. But now I realize the power and demand of solid and creative writing with blogging. Also, more hyperlinks to come...another vital matter.
psst... a big thank you to salam for the fascinating interview on hard talk, bbc. thankfully because i was out of the US I was able to see IT! wonderful...all iraqi bloggers/iraqis/iraqi-whatevers are in great debt to you.
pssstx2 i cannot put hyperlinks to anything in this post for some reason ...but i'll make sure to do this later. :) DONE (updated)
pssstx3 remember the name Stephen Cambone. he's rumsfeld, version 2.0...while somebody high up on the food chain MUST take the blow of accountability and lose their job(s) really soon, there's another protege (ie, wolfy would take rummy's place...so what if both went? then u've got douglas feith... then deep on the bench is Cambone?) to take that person's function and make practically the same decisions. anyway...
mah'ah salaam to all the beautiful habibis of the world...and strength to all the people of the world who need it to act righteously when exercising power.
Approximately 30 Journalists Walk Out of Powell's "Suprise Visit"
18.3.04
From a Military Mindset of the current NSC Doctrine
Dictatorships are good for Democracies to get their dirty work done. Case: Pakistan ("non-Nato ally" in the war against terror) Case: Iraq (do you really want me to get into it?) Case: Uzbekistan ...there's a few. Congratulations for your help to make the world a safer place for Americans only.
Thanks for visiting General/Secretary of State Powell. What are you going to say? I wonder.
Peace brother,
lim.
Thanks for visiting General/Secretary of State Powell. What are you going to say? I wonder.
Peace brother,
lim.
Earhole Action
Check out the radio stations I've listed. Enjoy the music. I will put up alternate quality/type(.ram VS .mp3) of streaming when I get the chance.
Internet Archive TOO.
Coast to Coast
Lim. give you most
:)
Internet Archive TOO.
Coast to Coast
Lim. give you most
:)
16.3.04
Context change. (SH...)IT happens. A War of CHOICE CAN BE AVOIDED.
(SH...)IT happens all the time.
I love and honor all women. That's why I removed the previous FIRST picture. Not just because it offended one reader. And yes, I conceed, it changed the context.
It happens.
I love and honor all women. That's why I removed the previous FIRST picture. Not just because it offended one reader. And yes, I conceed, it changed the context.
It happens.
Rich Fake Turkeys
Job?
Thanks for the cool NEW stamps on the left! Wow...so much progress. I tell ya...
Chalabi & Saddam, a match made in prison? Perhaps they're exchanging advice? harhar
Just so you don't get any ideas. I wouldn't mind doing the above to the symbolic sob while enjoying relieving myself on Chalabi and his nephew especially since he treated my sister so badly and wrote a completely inept interim constitution. Go back to London and stay there. Please?
A slide show wouldn't be complete without a bombed home in the atypical Baghdad sandstorm...ahm, what a mesmerizing light. yea...ok. shut up lim.
And finally, a plea...or at least go away.
13.3.04
1 Story I was afraid to tell: My Cousin >THANK GOD< Missed Being A Casualty of the UN bombing by minutes BECAUSE Women have lost their RIGHTS in IRAQ
She needed an escort each day to work for Mr. de Mello. Ergo, with emphasis, she had to leave work a bit early each day with an escort because it was too dangerous for her without a male relative or friend to drive her home. So she was saved because she lost her rights. Does that blow your mind? It still blows my mind. The year anniversary is approaching...and so are many problems that many wish to ignore in these dynamic times. U tell me something good that is happening in Iraq and I can tell you 5-10 things bad that are happening as a direct result of this war without an end. Now, what we do is crucial to how the situation in Iraq and the world at-large either improves or deteriorates. God bless those in Spain that have suffered...God bless their families and friends too. Why? Did it have to be this way? And why do ridiculous and avoidable mistakes continue to be made? Do I have the right as an American and a deeply concerned Iraqi to ask these questions? We must speak out. We must tell our stories. Or else we are nothing...we fade away into history similar, in a way, like the Japanese at the Internment Camps. But they never had the chance to so quickly state their case and tell their stories. We are marginal and meaningless when divided. When united, our voice may be a beacon of light to empower Iraqis to actively seek a brighter future one day at a time...for security, for peace. So, to accomplish this we must be efficient and willing to sacrifice some time, some peice of mind, and take care of our loved ones at all costs necessary.
I was speaking with my dear brother today and he asked me what was the percentage of the population of Spain that were on the street protesting. We came up with a rough number of 15-25 percent, between 6-12 million people out of just over 40 million people. We both said we want and wish the same percentage of people to go out on to the streets in a non-violent manner and protest this war without an end, here, in the US. That would be roughly 40-75 million people. We laugh at each other in frustration. But then part each other with words of encouragement. And encouragement is all I shall ever offer anybody that will tell THEIR story. Make no mistake, my dear friends. Tell YOUR story. Furor scribendi!!! LOVE PEOPLE not places. DO NOT just love what you can GET OUT of people or places.
>>> Here's Robert Fisk's latest news report from Baghdad <<<
Focus: One year on - war without end
Saddam may be gone but peace has not come. Robert Fisk was in Baghdad when the tyrant was in his pomp and when the first bombs fell on 19 March 2003. His acclaimed reports revealed the suffering of the Iraqi people. Now, as the anniversary of the war approaches, he returns to a land riven by chaos, where liberation is a myth
14 March 2004
The surviving Iraqi employees of the United Nations fearfully changed the plates on their white, unmarked vehicles last week. From now on, there will be no "UN" next to the registration number. When I visited the headquarters of the Muslim Red Crescent society to talk to the lone representative of the Red Cross, the man at the desk fingered my business card and looked into my eyes with palpable fear - as if an Englishman was a potential suicide bomber.
At night, in my grubby hotel, I listen for gunfire and fear the attack which so many of the guests have been predicting for weeks. Will the bombers arrive at dinner-time when the South African and British mercenaries come clanking back from their "security duties", all Heckler and Koch automatics, silver pistols and black flak jackets, ready for their beers and cheap French vin rouge? Or at 6am, just after the fajr dawn prayers, their Islamic souls cleansed for self-immolation amid the infidels and crusaders? I count the minutes between 6am and 8am, the hours when they most often strike. I've lost count of the number of times my bedroom windows have rattled at breakfast-time.
When Haidar and Mohamed arrive to take me off to Mosul or Basra or Najaf, I feel relief. On the road south, we all wear kuffiah scarves round our heads now, two Iraqis and an Englishmen pretending to be tribal toughs to avoid the killers on Highway 8. We were driving down there at first light last week - ah, the relief to be away from my hotel at that hour of the morning - when the US presidential envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, came on the car radio. We were just approaching the spot where two American civilians working for the occupation authorities had been shot dead by men in Iraqi police uniform. The car radio crackled away. Things are improving in Iraq, Bremer told us. Haidar and Mohamed and I exchanged glances, eyes crinkling beneath our scarves. Then our car was filled with hollow laughter.
A year ago, there were no problems on Highway 8. The monstrous old tyrant Saddam had seen to that. If robbers had been looting and raping north of Basra since the 1991 Gulf War, Baghdad was law-and-order land. There the looting and raping was done by the government, not the people. Now it's the other way round. I still have a souvenir of my last pre-war flight into Baghdad, my baggage tag on the last Royal Jordanian aircraft into pre-invasion Iraq, the very final airliner to touch down in the dictatorship. "Saddam Hussein International Airport," it says. We passengers were fleeced as usual at the terminal. Ten dollars to immigration, $20 to the man who checked my computer, $40 to the guy who accepted the paper from the man who had taken the $20, and another $20 to the soldiers at the gate.
It was raining outside and our tyres hissed on the highway, but Baghdad was illuminated like a Christmas tree. The mosques were floodlit, the Iraqi police cars dozing beneath the palm trees, the foliage rich and sweet-smelling under the street lamps. Didn't they know, I kept asking myself? Didn't they realise what was coming?
I remember the last night before war. I had gone to buy toilet rolls and bandages, observing a soldier in uniform carrying his young son on his shoulders. Last leave, I thought. Did Iraqi soldiers write poems like Sassoon and Owen? Or was it just Saddam's infantile novels that they read on their way to the front? In the pharmacy, I joked with the chemist that he was kind to sell me bandages when the RAF might be bombing him within hours.
"Yes," he said. "I rather think they will."
We all had our "minders" then, Saddam's lads from the corrupt old ministry of information whose job was to steer us away from the paths of political unrighteousness and towards the sclerotic anti-American street demonstrations and the interminable press conferences of junior ministers. But after a while, once their own bosses had been paid off, we paid the minders too, bought them from their government allegiance until they were taking us where we wanted to go, even into the firestorm of America's armour, the Iraqi army dead bouncing in the back of the pick-ups in front of us.
The first bombs struck 20 miles from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed expert on terrorism, now works and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.
The illusions with which the Americans and British went to war seem more awesome now than they did at the time. Saddam, the man the British and Americans loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (pet dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked), had already degenerated into senility, writing epic novels in his many palaces while his crippled son Uday drank and whored and tortured his way around Baghdad; a classic Middle East tale from the city of a thousand and one nights but hardly the target for the world's only superpower.
As the American 101st Infantry Division approached Baghdad, one of the last editions of the Baathist newspapers carried a telling photograph on its back page. A uniformed, tired, fat Saddam stood in the centre, on his left his smartly dressed son Qusay but on his right Uday, his eyes dilated, shirt out of his trousers, a pistol butt above his belt, the beloved son gone to seed and drugs. Who would ever fight to the death for these triple pillars of the Arab world?
Yet Saddam thought he could win; that destiny - a dangerous ally for all "strongmen" - would somehow lay low the Americans. It was always fascinating to listen to Mohamed al-Sahaf, the information minister, predicting America's doom. It was not just Iraqi patriots who would destroy the great armies invading Iraq; the heat would burn them; the desert would consume them; the snakes and rabid dogs would eat their bodies. Not since the Caliphate had such curses been called down upon an invader. Was it not Tariq Aziz who warned Washington in 1990 that 18 million Iraqis could not be defeated by a computer? And then the computer won. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had a remarkably parallel set of nightmares and dreams, encouraged by the right-wing, neo-conservative, pro-Israeli American Vulcans, who did so much to bring about this catastrophe and who - now that everything is falling to pieces - are working so hard to minimise their pre-war ideological importance. To them Saddam was the all-powerful, evil state terrorist whose non-existent weapons of mass destruction and equally non-existent connections to the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington must be laid low.
Liberation, Democracy, a New Middle East. There was no end to the ambitions of the conquerors. I remember how anyone who attempted to debunk this dangerous nonsense would be set upon. Try to explain the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, and you were anti-American. Warn readers about the crazed alliance of right-wingers behind President Bush and you were anti-Semites. Report on the savagery visited upon Iraqi civilians during the Anglo-American air bombardment and you were anti-British, pro-Saddam, sleeping with the enemy. When Blair's first "dossier" was published - most of it, anyway, was old material on Saddam's human rights abuses, not weapons of mass destruction - the beast's weapons capability was already hedged around with "mights" and "coulds" and "possiblys". When a day after Baghdad's "liberation" I wrote in The Independent that the "war of resistance" was about to begin, I could have papered my bathroom wall with the letters of abuse I received. Letters like those no longer arrive.
But such venom usually accompanies broken dreams. Saddam thought he was fighting the Crusaders. Bush and Blair played equally childish games, dressing themselves up as Churchill, abusing their domestic enemies as Chamberlain and fitting Saddam into Hitler's uniform. I remember the sense of shock when I was watching Iraq's literally fading television screen and heard the first news of an Iraqi suicide bomber attacking US troops - during the invasion. It was a young soldier, a married man, who had driven his car bomb at the Americans near Nasiriyah. Never before had an Iraqi committed suicide in battle like this - not even in the Somme-like mud of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Then two women drove their car into the Americans in southern Iraq. This was astonishing.
The Americans dismissed it all. They were cowardly attacks which only showed the desperation of the regime, journalists were told. But those three Iraqis were not working for the regime. Even the Baathists were forced to admit that these attacks were unique and solely instigated by the soldier and the two women themselves.
What did this mean? Of course, we did not pause to ask. Then a new myth was created. The Iraqi army had melted away, abandoned Baghdad, changed into jeans and T-shirts and slunk off in cowardly disgrace. Baghdad was no Stalingrad. Yet that was to alter, dangerously, the narrative of Baghdad's last days. There was a fearful battle along Highway 1 on the western bank of the Tigris where Saddam's guerrillas fought off an American tank column for 36 hours, the US tanks spraying shellfire down a motorway until every vehicle - military and civilian - was a smouldering wreck. I walked the highway as the last shots were still being fired by snipers, peering into cars packed with the blackened corpses of men, women, children. Carpets and blankets had been thrown over several piles of the dead. In the back of one car lay a young, naked woman, her perfect features blackened by fire, her husband or father still sitting at the steering wheel, his legs severed below the knees. Sure, the Iraqi military had mixed themselves up amid the civilians; so in the end the Americans had fired at all of them. It was a massacre. Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?
What do we remember most now about those few terrible weeks a year ago? In war, all day you try to stay alive and all night you lie awake because the roar and explosion of aircraft and bombs are too loud for sleep. And then you have to stay awake and alive all next day. Is it any surprise that there comes a moment - when a man holds out to you what you think is half a loaf of bread and which turns out to be half a baby - that anger is the only integrity left? Cluster bombs are our creation. And I recall with a kind of raw amazement how, as American gunfire was swishing across the Tigris, I somehow reached the emergency room of Baghdad's biggest hospital and had to slosh through lakes of blood amid beds of screaming men, one of whom was on fire, another shrieking for his mother. Upstairs was a man on a soaked hospital trolley with a head wound that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the floor.
For days, we in the city had seen the news tapes of Basra and Nasiriyah after "liberation". We had seen the looting and pillage there, benignly watched over by the British and Americans. We knew what would happen when the fighting stopped in Baghdad. And sure enough, a medieval army of looters followed the Americans into the city, burning offices, banks, archives, museums, Koranic libraries, destroying not just the structure of government but the identity of Iraq. The looters were disorganised but thorough, venal but poor. The arsonists came in buses with obvious pre-arranged targets, did not touch the contents of that which they destroyed. They were paid.
By whom? If by Saddam, then why - once the Americans were in Baghdad - did they not just pocket the money and go home? If they were paid post-burning, who paid them?
Of course, we found the mass graves, the hecatombs of Saddam's years of internal viciousness - for many of which the Western powers were his allies - and we photographed the tens of thousands of corpses, most of whom had been buried in the desert sand after the West failed to support the Kurdish and Shia uprisings. The "liberation" had come, as their grieving relatives never stopped telling us, a little late. About 20 years late, to be precise. Into this chaos and lawlessness, we arrived. Dissent was not to be tolerated among the victors. When I pointed out in The Independent that the "liberators" were "a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq", I was denounced by one of the BBC's commentators. See how the people love us, the Westerners cried - much as Saddam used to say when he took his fawning acolytes on visits to the people of Baghdad. There would be elections, constitutions, governing councils, money ... there was no end to the promises made to this tribal society called Iraq. Then in came the big American contractors and the conglomerates and the thousands of mercenaries, British, American, South African, Chilean - many of the last were soldiers under Pinochet - Nepalese and Filipino.
And when the inevitable war against the occupiers began, we - the occupying powers and, alas, most of the journalists - invented a new narrative to escape punishment for our invasion. Our enemies were Saddam's "diehards", Baathist "remnants", regime "dead-enders". Then the occupation forces killed Uday and Qusay and pulled Saddam from his hole in the ground and the resistance grew fiercer. So our enemies were now both "remnants" and "foreign fighters" - al-Qa'ida - since ordinary Iraqis could not be in the resistance. We had to believe this. For had Iraqis joined the guerrillas, how could we explain that they didn't love their "liberators"?
At first, journalists were encouraged to explain that the insurgents came only from a few Sunni cities, "previously loyal to Saddam". Then the resistance was supposedly confined to Iraq's "Sunni triangle", but as the attacks leached north and south to Nasiriyah, Karbala, Mosul and Kirkuk, it turned into an octagon. Again, journalists were told about "foreign fighters" - a failure to grasp the fact that 120,000 of the foreign fighters in Iraq were wearing American uniform.
Still there was no end to the mendacity of the occupation's "success". True, schools were rebuilt - and, shame upon the Iraqis involved, often looted a second time - and hospitals restored and students returned to college. But oil output figures were massaged and exaggerated and attacks on the Americans falsified. At first, the occupying power only reported guerrilla attacks in which soldiers were killed or wounded. Then, when no one could hide the 60 or so assaults every night, the troops themselves were ordered not to make formal reports on bombings or attacks which caused no casualties. But by the war's first anniversary, every foreigner was a target.
In the meantime, the suicide bomber came into his own. The Turkish embassy, the Jordanian embassy, the United Nations, police stations across the land - 600 new Iraqi cops slaughtered in less than four months - and then the great shrines of Najaf and Karbala. The Americans and British warned of the dangers of civil war - so did the journalists, of course - although no Iraqi had ever been heard to utter any demand for conflict with their fellow citizens. Who actually wanted this "civil war"? Why would the Sunnis - a minority in the country - allow al-Qa'ida to bring this about when they could not defeat the occupying power without at least passive Shia support?
While I was writing this report, my phone rang and a voice asked me if I would meet a man downstairs, a middle-aged Iraqi and a teacher at Cardiff College who had recently returned to Iraq, only to realise the state of fear and pain in which his country now existed. His mother, he said, had just raised a million Iraqi dinars to pay a ransom for a local woman whose daughter and daughter-in-law were kidnapped by armed men in Baghdad in January. The two girls had just called from Yemen where they had been sold into slavery. Another of his neighbours had just received her 17-year-old son after paying $5,000 to gunmen in the Karada area of Baghdad. Two days ago - it is Friday as I am writing this - kidnappers grabbed another child, this time in Mansour, and are now demanding $200,000 for his life. A close relative of my visitor - and remember this is just one man's experience out of a population of 26 million Iraqis - had also just survived a bloody attack on his car outside Karbala. Driving south after winning a contract to run a garage in the city, he and his 11 companions in their AKEA vehicle were last week overtaken by men firing pistols at the car. One man died - he had 30 bullets in his body - and the relative, swamped in the blood of his friends, was the only man unwounded.
Not surprisingly, the occupation authorities decline to keep statistics on the number of Iraqis who have died since the "liberation" - or during the invasion, for that matter - and prefer to talk about the "handover of sovereignty" from one American-appointed group of Iraqis to another, and to the constitution which is only temporary and may well fall apart before real elections are held - if they are held - next year. If we could have foreseen all this - if we could have been patient and waited for the UN arms inspectors to finish their job rather than go to war and plead for patience later, when our own inspectors couldn't find those oh so terrible weapons - would we have gone so blithely to war a year ago?
For that war has not ended. There has been no "end of major combat operations", just an invasion and an occupation that merged seamlessly into a long and ferocious war for liberation from the "liberators". Just as the British invaded Iraq in 1917, proclaiming their determination to bring Iraqis liberation from their tyrants - General Maude used those very words - so we have repeated this grim narrative today. The British who died in the subsequent Iraqi war of resistance lie now in the North Gate Cemetery on the edge of Baghdad, an enduring if largely neglected symbol of the folly of our occupation.
I was speaking with my dear brother today and he asked me what was the percentage of the population of Spain that were on the street protesting. We came up with a rough number of 15-25 percent, between 6-12 million people out of just over 40 million people. We both said we want and wish the same percentage of people to go out on to the streets in a non-violent manner and protest this war without an end, here, in the US. That would be roughly 40-75 million people. We laugh at each other in frustration. But then part each other with words of encouragement. And encouragement is all I shall ever offer anybody that will tell THEIR story. Make no mistake, my dear friends. Tell YOUR story. Furor scribendi!!! LOVE PEOPLE not places. DO NOT just love what you can GET OUT of people or places.
>>> Here's Robert Fisk's latest news report from Baghdad <<<
Focus: One year on - war without end
Saddam may be gone but peace has not come. Robert Fisk was in Baghdad when the tyrant was in his pomp and when the first bombs fell on 19 March 2003. His acclaimed reports revealed the suffering of the Iraqi people. Now, as the anniversary of the war approaches, he returns to a land riven by chaos, where liberation is a myth
14 March 2004
The surviving Iraqi employees of the United Nations fearfully changed the plates on their white, unmarked vehicles last week. From now on, there will be no "UN" next to the registration number. When I visited the headquarters of the Muslim Red Crescent society to talk to the lone representative of the Red Cross, the man at the desk fingered my business card and looked into my eyes with palpable fear - as if an Englishman was a potential suicide bomber.
At night, in my grubby hotel, I listen for gunfire and fear the attack which so many of the guests have been predicting for weeks. Will the bombers arrive at dinner-time when the South African and British mercenaries come clanking back from their "security duties", all Heckler and Koch automatics, silver pistols and black flak jackets, ready for their beers and cheap French vin rouge? Or at 6am, just after the fajr dawn prayers, their Islamic souls cleansed for self-immolation amid the infidels and crusaders? I count the minutes between 6am and 8am, the hours when they most often strike. I've lost count of the number of times my bedroom windows have rattled at breakfast-time.
When Haidar and Mohamed arrive to take me off to Mosul or Basra or Najaf, I feel relief. On the road south, we all wear kuffiah scarves round our heads now, two Iraqis and an Englishmen pretending to be tribal toughs to avoid the killers on Highway 8. We were driving down there at first light last week - ah, the relief to be away from my hotel at that hour of the morning - when the US presidential envoy to Iraq, Paul Bremer, came on the car radio. We were just approaching the spot where two American civilians working for the occupation authorities had been shot dead by men in Iraqi police uniform. The car radio crackled away. Things are improving in Iraq, Bremer told us. Haidar and Mohamed and I exchanged glances, eyes crinkling beneath our scarves. Then our car was filled with hollow laughter.
A year ago, there were no problems on Highway 8. The monstrous old tyrant Saddam had seen to that. If robbers had been looting and raping north of Basra since the 1991 Gulf War, Baghdad was law-and-order land. There the looting and raping was done by the government, not the people. Now it's the other way round. I still have a souvenir of my last pre-war flight into Baghdad, my baggage tag on the last Royal Jordanian aircraft into pre-invasion Iraq, the very final airliner to touch down in the dictatorship. "Saddam Hussein International Airport," it says. We passengers were fleeced as usual at the terminal. Ten dollars to immigration, $20 to the man who checked my computer, $40 to the guy who accepted the paper from the man who had taken the $20, and another $20 to the soldiers at the gate.
It was raining outside and our tyres hissed on the highway, but Baghdad was illuminated like a Christmas tree. The mosques were floodlit, the Iraqi police cars dozing beneath the palm trees, the foliage rich and sweet-smelling under the street lamps. Didn't they know, I kept asking myself? Didn't they realise what was coming?
I remember the last night before war. I had gone to buy toilet rolls and bandages, observing a soldier in uniform carrying his young son on his shoulders. Last leave, I thought. Did Iraqi soldiers write poems like Sassoon and Owen? Or was it just Saddam's infantile novels that they read on their way to the front? In the pharmacy, I joked with the chemist that he was kind to sell me bandages when the RAF might be bombing him within hours.
"Yes," he said. "I rather think they will."
We all had our "minders" then, Saddam's lads from the corrupt old ministry of information whose job was to steer us away from the paths of political unrighteousness and towards the sclerotic anti-American street demonstrations and the interminable press conferences of junior ministers. But after a while, once their own bosses had been paid off, we paid the minders too, bought them from their government allegiance until they were taking us where we wanted to go, even into the firestorm of America's armour, the Iraqi army dead bouncing in the back of the pick-ups in front of us.
The first bombs struck 20 miles from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed expert on terrorism, now works and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American Raj.
The illusions with which the Americans and British went to war seem more awesome now than they did at the time. Saddam, the man the British and Americans loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (pet dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked), had already degenerated into senility, writing epic novels in his many palaces while his crippled son Uday drank and whored and tortured his way around Baghdad; a classic Middle East tale from the city of a thousand and one nights but hardly the target for the world's only superpower.
As the American 101st Infantry Division approached Baghdad, one of the last editions of the Baathist newspapers carried a telling photograph on its back page. A uniformed, tired, fat Saddam stood in the centre, on his left his smartly dressed son Qusay but on his right Uday, his eyes dilated, shirt out of his trousers, a pistol butt above his belt, the beloved son gone to seed and drugs. Who would ever fight to the death for these triple pillars of the Arab world?
Yet Saddam thought he could win; that destiny - a dangerous ally for all "strongmen" - would somehow lay low the Americans. It was always fascinating to listen to Mohamed al-Sahaf, the information minister, predicting America's doom. It was not just Iraqi patriots who would destroy the great armies invading Iraq; the heat would burn them; the desert would consume them; the snakes and rabid dogs would eat their bodies. Not since the Caliphate had such curses been called down upon an invader. Was it not Tariq Aziz who warned Washington in 1990 that 18 million Iraqis could not be defeated by a computer? And then the computer won. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had a remarkably parallel set of nightmares and dreams, encouraged by the right-wing, neo-conservative, pro-Israeli American Vulcans, who did so much to bring about this catastrophe and who - now that everything is falling to pieces - are working so hard to minimise their pre-war ideological importance. To them Saddam was the all-powerful, evil state terrorist whose non-existent weapons of mass destruction and equally non-existent connections to the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington must be laid low.
Liberation, Democracy, a New Middle East. There was no end to the ambitions of the conquerors. I remember how anyone who attempted to debunk this dangerous nonsense would be set upon. Try to explain the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, and you were anti-American. Warn readers about the crazed alliance of right-wingers behind President Bush and you were anti-Semites. Report on the savagery visited upon Iraqi civilians during the Anglo-American air bombardment and you were anti-British, pro-Saddam, sleeping with the enemy. When Blair's first "dossier" was published - most of it, anyway, was old material on Saddam's human rights abuses, not weapons of mass destruction - the beast's weapons capability was already hedged around with "mights" and "coulds" and "possiblys". When a day after Baghdad's "liberation" I wrote in The Independent that the "war of resistance" was about to begin, I could have papered my bathroom wall with the letters of abuse I received. Letters like those no longer arrive.
But such venom usually accompanies broken dreams. Saddam thought he was fighting the Crusaders. Bush and Blair played equally childish games, dressing themselves up as Churchill, abusing their domestic enemies as Chamberlain and fitting Saddam into Hitler's uniform. I remember the sense of shock when I was watching Iraq's literally fading television screen and heard the first news of an Iraqi suicide bomber attacking US troops - during the invasion. It was a young soldier, a married man, who had driven his car bomb at the Americans near Nasiriyah. Never before had an Iraqi committed suicide in battle like this - not even in the Somme-like mud of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Then two women drove their car into the Americans in southern Iraq. This was astonishing.
The Americans dismissed it all. They were cowardly attacks which only showed the desperation of the regime, journalists were told. But those three Iraqis were not working for the regime. Even the Baathists were forced to admit that these attacks were unique and solely instigated by the soldier and the two women themselves.
What did this mean? Of course, we did not pause to ask. Then a new myth was created. The Iraqi army had melted away, abandoned Baghdad, changed into jeans and T-shirts and slunk off in cowardly disgrace. Baghdad was no Stalingrad. Yet that was to alter, dangerously, the narrative of Baghdad's last days. There was a fearful battle along Highway 1 on the western bank of the Tigris where Saddam's guerrillas fought off an American tank column for 36 hours, the US tanks spraying shellfire down a motorway until every vehicle - military and civilian - was a smouldering wreck. I walked the highway as the last shots were still being fired by snipers, peering into cars packed with the blackened corpses of men, women, children. Carpets and blankets had been thrown over several piles of the dead. In the back of one car lay a young, naked woman, her perfect features blackened by fire, her husband or father still sitting at the steering wheel, his legs severed below the knees. Sure, the Iraqi military had mixed themselves up amid the civilians; so in the end the Americans had fired at all of them. It was a massacre. Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?
What do we remember most now about those few terrible weeks a year ago? In war, all day you try to stay alive and all night you lie awake because the roar and explosion of aircraft and bombs are too loud for sleep. And then you have to stay awake and alive all next day. Is it any surprise that there comes a moment - when a man holds out to you what you think is half a loaf of bread and which turns out to be half a baby - that anger is the only integrity left? Cluster bombs are our creation. And I recall with a kind of raw amazement how, as American gunfire was swishing across the Tigris, I somehow reached the emergency room of Baghdad's biggest hospital and had to slosh through lakes of blood amid beds of screaming men, one of whom was on fire, another shrieking for his mother. Upstairs was a man on a soaked hospital trolley with a head wound that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood on to the floor.
For days, we in the city had seen the news tapes of Basra and Nasiriyah after "liberation". We had seen the looting and pillage there, benignly watched over by the British and Americans. We knew what would happen when the fighting stopped in Baghdad. And sure enough, a medieval army of looters followed the Americans into the city, burning offices, banks, archives, museums, Koranic libraries, destroying not just the structure of government but the identity of Iraq. The looters were disorganised but thorough, venal but poor. The arsonists came in buses with obvious pre-arranged targets, did not touch the contents of that which they destroyed. They were paid.
By whom? If by Saddam, then why - once the Americans were in Baghdad - did they not just pocket the money and go home? If they were paid post-burning, who paid them?
Of course, we found the mass graves, the hecatombs of Saddam's years of internal viciousness - for many of which the Western powers were his allies - and we photographed the tens of thousands of corpses, most of whom had been buried in the desert sand after the West failed to support the Kurdish and Shia uprisings. The "liberation" had come, as their grieving relatives never stopped telling us, a little late. About 20 years late, to be precise. Into this chaos and lawlessness, we arrived. Dissent was not to be tolerated among the victors. When I pointed out in The Independent that the "liberators" were "a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq", I was denounced by one of the BBC's commentators. See how the people love us, the Westerners cried - much as Saddam used to say when he took his fawning acolytes on visits to the people of Baghdad. There would be elections, constitutions, governing councils, money ... there was no end to the promises made to this tribal society called Iraq. Then in came the big American contractors and the conglomerates and the thousands of mercenaries, British, American, South African, Chilean - many of the last were soldiers under Pinochet - Nepalese and Filipino.
And when the inevitable war against the occupiers began, we - the occupying powers and, alas, most of the journalists - invented a new narrative to escape punishment for our invasion. Our enemies were Saddam's "diehards", Baathist "remnants", regime "dead-enders". Then the occupation forces killed Uday and Qusay and pulled Saddam from his hole in the ground and the resistance grew fiercer. So our enemies were now both "remnants" and "foreign fighters" - al-Qa'ida - since ordinary Iraqis could not be in the resistance. We had to believe this. For had Iraqis joined the guerrillas, how could we explain that they didn't love their "liberators"?
At first, journalists were encouraged to explain that the insurgents came only from a few Sunni cities, "previously loyal to Saddam". Then the resistance was supposedly confined to Iraq's "Sunni triangle", but as the attacks leached north and south to Nasiriyah, Karbala, Mosul and Kirkuk, it turned into an octagon. Again, journalists were told about "foreign fighters" - a failure to grasp the fact that 120,000 of the foreign fighters in Iraq were wearing American uniform.
Still there was no end to the mendacity of the occupation's "success". True, schools were rebuilt - and, shame upon the Iraqis involved, often looted a second time - and hospitals restored and students returned to college. But oil output figures were massaged and exaggerated and attacks on the Americans falsified. At first, the occupying power only reported guerrilla attacks in which soldiers were killed or wounded. Then, when no one could hide the 60 or so assaults every night, the troops themselves were ordered not to make formal reports on bombings or attacks which caused no casualties. But by the war's first anniversary, every foreigner was a target.
In the meantime, the suicide bomber came into his own. The Turkish embassy, the Jordanian embassy, the United Nations, police stations across the land - 600 new Iraqi cops slaughtered in less than four months - and then the great shrines of Najaf and Karbala. The Americans and British warned of the dangers of civil war - so did the journalists, of course - although no Iraqi had ever been heard to utter any demand for conflict with their fellow citizens. Who actually wanted this "civil war"? Why would the Sunnis - a minority in the country - allow al-Qa'ida to bring this about when they could not defeat the occupying power without at least passive Shia support?
While I was writing this report, my phone rang and a voice asked me if I would meet a man downstairs, a middle-aged Iraqi and a teacher at Cardiff College who had recently returned to Iraq, only to realise the state of fear and pain in which his country now existed. His mother, he said, had just raised a million Iraqi dinars to pay a ransom for a local woman whose daughter and daughter-in-law were kidnapped by armed men in Baghdad in January. The two girls had just called from Yemen where they had been sold into slavery. Another of his neighbours had just received her 17-year-old son after paying $5,000 to gunmen in the Karada area of Baghdad. Two days ago - it is Friday as I am writing this - kidnappers grabbed another child, this time in Mansour, and are now demanding $200,000 for his life. A close relative of my visitor - and remember this is just one man's experience out of a population of 26 million Iraqis - had also just survived a bloody attack on his car outside Karbala. Driving south after winning a contract to run a garage in the city, he and his 11 companions in their AKEA vehicle were last week overtaken by men firing pistols at the car. One man died - he had 30 bullets in his body - and the relative, swamped in the blood of his friends, was the only man unwounded.
Not surprisingly, the occupation authorities decline to keep statistics on the number of Iraqis who have died since the "liberation" - or during the invasion, for that matter - and prefer to talk about the "handover of sovereignty" from one American-appointed group of Iraqis to another, and to the constitution which is only temporary and may well fall apart before real elections are held - if they are held - next year. If we could have foreseen all this - if we could have been patient and waited for the UN arms inspectors to finish their job rather than go to war and plead for patience later, when our own inspectors couldn't find those oh so terrible weapons - would we have gone so blithely to war a year ago?
For that war has not ended. There has been no "end of major combat operations", just an invasion and an occupation that merged seamlessly into a long and ferocious war for liberation from the "liberators". Just as the British invaded Iraq in 1917, proclaiming their determination to bring Iraqis liberation from their tyrants - General Maude used those very words - so we have repeated this grim narrative today. The British who died in the subsequent Iraqi war of resistance lie now in the North Gate Cemetery on the edge of Baghdad, an enduring if largely neglected symbol of the folly of our occupation.
11.3.04
GRRRRR!!!! Prof Cole says it...I'm NOT in the MOOD to recreate, in my own words, the following. Because I've already addressed this on 2other BLOGS.
US Intelligence Follies: Why Haven't Cheney, Feith and Chalabi been Impeached? (click to get Prof Cole's original post)
While everyone is beating up on John Kerry for letting it slip he thinks the Bushies are crooked, we might ponder the sort of thing that might have led him to this impression.
It seems fairly obvious by now that the Bush administration likes being lied to. It is even paying for the privilege of being screwed over. This is sort of reverse crooked. It is to crookedness as sado-masochism is to sex. But there are grounds for suspicion of out and out crookedness, too. Reuters reports (as will all the major newspapers today) that the Defense Intelligence Agency is paying Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress $340,000 per month for "intelligence." The INC is the organization that lied to the US until it was blue in the face, falsely claiming it knew for sure that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and weapons. It supplied single-source reports from defectors that were full of tale tales.
Chalabi, who has gotten the US into a quagmire in Iraq, is completely unrepentant. "We're in Baghdad," he says. That makes all the lies all right. He even went so far, in a 60 Minutes interview, as to blame the US intelligence agencies for actually believing the cock and bull stories his people fed them. 'Don't they have fact checkers?' he seemed to say.
Most recently, Chalabi joined a 5-man Shiite dissident group that tried to derail the signing of the interim constitution. This is a man whose organization is getting $4 million a year from the US, and he was screwing Bremer and Bush over royally! It came out that in the 1970s the CIA had put King Hussein of Jordan on its payroll. But in comparison, he turns out to have been a cheap date, and a rather more reliable one than Chalabi. Although the Defense Intelligence Agency is saying that the Iraqi National Congress supplies it with good intelligence, I find it difficult to believe that you couldn't get even better intelligence in Iraq by having DIA agents on the ground just use the $4 million for local informants. You worry about the disinformation Chalabi may be supplying them with. Have any of his personal enemies been picked up?
This revelation follows testimony by CIA director George Tenet that he has had to run around asking high Bush administration officials like Dick Cheney to please not hype intelligence to make it say things that are not in evidence. It turns out that Cheney has been recommending the highly questionable Feith dossier on supposed pre-war links between Saddam and al-Qaeda to people. (Wanna bet Chalabi and his people supplied all those supposed anecdotes in the first place?).
And, it turns out that Feith's Office of Special Plans, a Neocon Pentagon operation linked to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's similar rogue office, briefed high White House officials without the presence or knowledge of George Tenet. What intelligence did it supply them? Why, red-hot reports directly from . . . the Iraqi National Congress.
It turns out further that Chalabi's nephew Salem works for the same Israel-based law firm as Doug Feith (when Doug is not in office), and has set up a Baghdad branch of it. All parties concerned deny influence-peddling, but if Doug Feith has any authority at all over the payment of $4 million a year to the uncle of the partner of his law firm, this smells bad.
More recently it transpires that Nour USA, run by Chalabi friend A. Huda Farouki, probably low-balled the Pentagon with a bid to provide military equipment to the new Iraqi army, which it won. The company had no experience with such provisioning, and its bid was denounced by competitors as unrealistically low. (In US government bidding, the lowest bid usually wins, but it has to be clear that the bid is realistic.) In this case, the Pentagon appears not to have visited the companies competing with Nour to explore their pricing, which is usually done. Poland and Spain were royally pissed off that their companies lost out to Nour USA, and they suspected cronyism. Finally the Pentagon cancelled the contract.
So, my question is, why isn't Ahmad Chalabi impeached? He was appointed to the Interim Governing Council by the United States government. He presumably serves at its pleasure. He has more or less openly admitted to providing it grossly inaccurate "intelligence." He is still being paid for intelligence provision, nevertheless. His nephew seems to be trading on a personal relationship with the Undersecretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith. His friend seems to be involved in sharp business practices with Pentagon contracts. And, he is still wanted in Jordan, where he was indicted over a decade ago for having embezzled $300 million from a bank he was running in Amman in the 1980s. Would a person around whom there were all these questions get appointed to a high government post in a democratic country that practiced the principle of accountability? If not, why should he be foisted on the poor Iraqi people?
And, why isn't Feith impeached? Why was he allowed to usurp Tenet's role? Why isn't Cheney impeached? Either they lied or they were so gullible that neither should still be in office.
Cheney's own dishonesty comes out in Ron Susskind's book, based on interviews and documents from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill. The anecdote is that Cheney wanted to go for a second gargantuan tax cut on his billionnaire buddies. Even W. balked, and asked whether it wasn't time to do something for the middle class. Cheney roared back, no! this is our due! we won the mid-term elections. Cheney didn't say, "A second tax cut will benefit the middle class." He doesn't care about the middle class. The "our" in "our due" is people making seven figures and up. Now, of course, the Bush administration keeps saying that its tax cuts on the super-wealthy are making us all rich. But then Alan Greenspan came along and revealed that the way they were going to be paid for was actually to cut social security payments for the middle and working classes. (Before social security, the elderly were the poorest group in America, and we are heading back that way under this administration).
The answer to the question about impeachment, of course, is that the Republicans control all three branches of government. In such a virtual one-party state, accountability goes out the window. One worries that that is the real lesson the new rulers of Iraq will take from their American mentors.
posted by Juan Cole at 3/11/2004 09:19:15 AM
While everyone is beating up on John Kerry for letting it slip he thinks the Bushies are crooked, we might ponder the sort of thing that might have led him to this impression.
It seems fairly obvious by now that the Bush administration likes being lied to. It is even paying for the privilege of being screwed over. This is sort of reverse crooked. It is to crookedness as sado-masochism is to sex. But there are grounds for suspicion of out and out crookedness, too. Reuters reports (as will all the major newspapers today) that the Defense Intelligence Agency is paying Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress $340,000 per month for "intelligence." The INC is the organization that lied to the US until it was blue in the face, falsely claiming it knew for sure that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction stockpiles and weapons. It supplied single-source reports from defectors that were full of tale tales.
Chalabi, who has gotten the US into a quagmire in Iraq, is completely unrepentant. "We're in Baghdad," he says. That makes all the lies all right. He even went so far, in a 60 Minutes interview, as to blame the US intelligence agencies for actually believing the cock and bull stories his people fed them. 'Don't they have fact checkers?' he seemed to say.
Most recently, Chalabi joined a 5-man Shiite dissident group that tried to derail the signing of the interim constitution. This is a man whose organization is getting $4 million a year from the US, and he was screwing Bremer and Bush over royally! It came out that in the 1970s the CIA had put King Hussein of Jordan on its payroll. But in comparison, he turns out to have been a cheap date, and a rather more reliable one than Chalabi. Although the Defense Intelligence Agency is saying that the Iraqi National Congress supplies it with good intelligence, I find it difficult to believe that you couldn't get even better intelligence in Iraq by having DIA agents on the ground just use the $4 million for local informants. You worry about the disinformation Chalabi may be supplying them with. Have any of his personal enemies been picked up?
This revelation follows testimony by CIA director George Tenet that he has had to run around asking high Bush administration officials like Dick Cheney to please not hype intelligence to make it say things that are not in evidence. It turns out that Cheney has been recommending the highly questionable Feith dossier on supposed pre-war links between Saddam and al-Qaeda to people. (Wanna bet Chalabi and his people supplied all those supposed anecdotes in the first place?).
And, it turns out that Feith's Office of Special Plans, a Neocon Pentagon operation linked to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's similar rogue office, briefed high White House officials without the presence or knowledge of George Tenet. What intelligence did it supply them? Why, red-hot reports directly from . . . the Iraqi National Congress.
It turns out further that Chalabi's nephew Salem works for the same Israel-based law firm as Doug Feith (when Doug is not in office), and has set up a Baghdad branch of it. All parties concerned deny influence-peddling, but if Doug Feith has any authority at all over the payment of $4 million a year to the uncle of the partner of his law firm, this smells bad.
More recently it transpires that Nour USA, run by Chalabi friend A. Huda Farouki, probably low-balled the Pentagon with a bid to provide military equipment to the new Iraqi army, which it won. The company had no experience with such provisioning, and its bid was denounced by competitors as unrealistically low. (In US government bidding, the lowest bid usually wins, but it has to be clear that the bid is realistic.) In this case, the Pentagon appears not to have visited the companies competing with Nour to explore their pricing, which is usually done. Poland and Spain were royally pissed off that their companies lost out to Nour USA, and they suspected cronyism. Finally the Pentagon cancelled the contract.
So, my question is, why isn't Ahmad Chalabi impeached? He was appointed to the Interim Governing Council by the United States government. He presumably serves at its pleasure. He has more or less openly admitted to providing it grossly inaccurate "intelligence." He is still being paid for intelligence provision, nevertheless. His nephew seems to be trading on a personal relationship with the Undersecretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith. His friend seems to be involved in sharp business practices with Pentagon contracts. And, he is still wanted in Jordan, where he was indicted over a decade ago for having embezzled $300 million from a bank he was running in Amman in the 1980s. Would a person around whom there were all these questions get appointed to a high government post in a democratic country that practiced the principle of accountability? If not, why should he be foisted on the poor Iraqi people?
And, why isn't Feith impeached? Why was he allowed to usurp Tenet's role? Why isn't Cheney impeached? Either they lied or they were so gullible that neither should still be in office.
Cheney's own dishonesty comes out in Ron Susskind's book, based on interviews and documents from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill. The anecdote is that Cheney wanted to go for a second gargantuan tax cut on his billionnaire buddies. Even W. balked, and asked whether it wasn't time to do something for the middle class. Cheney roared back, no! this is our due! we won the mid-term elections. Cheney didn't say, "A second tax cut will benefit the middle class." He doesn't care about the middle class. The "our" in "our due" is people making seven figures and up. Now, of course, the Bush administration keeps saying that its tax cuts on the super-wealthy are making us all rich. But then Alan Greenspan came along and revealed that the way they were going to be paid for was actually to cut social security payments for the middle and working classes. (Before social security, the elderly were the poorest group in America, and we are heading back that way under this administration).
The answer to the question about impeachment, of course, is that the Republicans control all three branches of government. In such a virtual one-party state, accountability goes out the window. One worries that that is the real lesson the new rulers of Iraq will take from their American mentors.
posted by Juan Cole at 3/11/2004 09:19:15 AM
8.3.04
The Brzezinski Factor and Questions of Faith - Agora Crosspost
Zbigniew Brzezinski was the national security advisor for President Carter. That aside, the man wrote a compelling book called "The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives" that I recommend for anybody to check out. There are excerpts of it all over the place online. Google it. It verges upon prophecy at times. But it's intelligently written and ominous. Not to mention it was a book that was put on some sort of "watch-list" to see who would check it out of libraries in the US. A friend and I read this book in 1998...you could imagine, if you've read it, what I'm talking about when I say it is ominous. At the time, though, we photocopied the entire book because we didn't want our precccccious (heehee) US gov. to know we knew what was in it. You see, we were visionary revolutionaries or idealistic youths...either or. harhar matey! Or better yet, casting bad conotations aside, visionary youths. Now Brzezinski has contributed to the NY Times, tomorrow's edition, 8 March 2004 with a peice called, "The Wrong Way to Sell Democracy to the Arab World" It's worth a read...(click!)
Torshe, as for who did it?...who knows. confusion seems deliberately rampant. my gut tells me something smells funny, but my heart tells me that worse things may approach yet...and this is but a normal step in an already sick situation. I'm blunt mitil imm'i...what can i say. my brain...well, my brain is just filled with too much information regarding the incident. dissemination underway...brain working like the hourglass on the screen. i hate that.
and just to make this clear. i am a very spiritual person...but particular religion (systems) slow down my ability to render my thoughts discernable to others in a manageable, coherent, and dignified way...and, it's a matter of my age I think. I'm not mature enough to just say, "oh yea, the One God...He is Him...and All..." I say, for instance, why cant He be a She? Why does He have to have long hair and look like that? I must question everything....And so, right now, I'm a philosopher and I will remain one until I get "born-again", God speaks to me, or something like that...seriously. I'm being serious...religion makes things simple and more cumbersome at the same time. I greatly admire those with faith in any monotheistic religion...or any religion for that matter (that believes in good, honor, dignity, and things of this nature). My family are many of these wonderful people. But I'm too curious to resign to any particular religion. I do enjoy the Assyrian Orthodox mass that i grew up with...the remarkable chanting in Aramaic, Latin and Arabic, the traditions are so vivid and beautiful...what fabulous spectacles that send chills down my spine just thinking about! And finally, I do believe in something greater...and this always keeps hope alive in me. And that something greater cannot be articulated as a person living on earth. So, Bush, Cheney, Feith, Perle, Ken Lay, Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson, and even the Pope (pardon me to all the Catholics reading this)...NO, sorry. they are not greater than you or I. In the event God exists...(lets assume this)...He or She or It is everywhere. God touches everything...and He/She/It neither leaves a single soul behind....nor nothing out. I repeat, God is everywhere.
ominscience and omnipotence...is that what God is about or only part of what God is about? Answer me this. Isn't this too simple-minded? or is it just me? I know...big question that must meet many interpretations, but try to answer it as in exercise in your faith. And of course, I'll be most interested to hear your replies. Email me.
loveoverfear
small advice: celebrate difference! do not make it a point to divide peoples...brothers should NOT kill brothers as they did in Lebanon. We must avoid this type of situation at all costs.
L to the L
Torshe, as for who did it?...who knows. confusion seems deliberately rampant. my gut tells me something smells funny, but my heart tells me that worse things may approach yet...and this is but a normal step in an already sick situation. I'm blunt mitil imm'i...what can i say. my brain...well, my brain is just filled with too much information regarding the incident. dissemination underway...brain working like the hourglass on the screen. i hate that.
and just to make this clear. i am a very spiritual person...but particular religion (systems) slow down my ability to render my thoughts discernable to others in a manageable, coherent, and dignified way...and, it's a matter of my age I think. I'm not mature enough to just say, "oh yea, the One God...He is Him...and All..." I say, for instance, why cant He be a She? Why does He have to have long hair and look like that? I must question everything....And so, right now, I'm a philosopher and I will remain one until I get "born-again", God speaks to me, or something like that...seriously. I'm being serious...religion makes things simple and more cumbersome at the same time. I greatly admire those with faith in any monotheistic religion...or any religion for that matter (that believes in good, honor, dignity, and things of this nature). My family are many of these wonderful people. But I'm too curious to resign to any particular religion. I do enjoy the Assyrian Orthodox mass that i grew up with...the remarkable chanting in Aramaic, Latin and Arabic, the traditions are so vivid and beautiful...what fabulous spectacles that send chills down my spine just thinking about! And finally, I do believe in something greater...and this always keeps hope alive in me. And that something greater cannot be articulated as a person living on earth. So, Bush, Cheney, Feith, Perle, Ken Lay, Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson, and even the Pope (pardon me to all the Catholics reading this)...NO, sorry. they are not greater than you or I. In the event God exists...(lets assume this)...He or She or It is everywhere. God touches everything...and He/She/It neither leaves a single soul behind....nor nothing out. I repeat, God is everywhere.
ominscience and omnipotence...is that what God is about or only part of what God is about? Answer me this. Isn't this too simple-minded? or is it just me? I know...big question that must meet many interpretations, but try to answer it as in exercise in your faith. And of course, I'll be most interested to hear your replies. Email me.
loveoverfear
small advice: celebrate difference! do not make it a point to divide peoples...brothers should NOT kill brothers as they did in Lebanon. We must avoid this type of situation at all costs.
L to the L
7.3.04
What Makes Me Cringe
the whole chalabi/sistani alliance thing...if that's what you could call it. Honestly, I have NO IDEA what you would call it other than political maneuvering on the part of chalabi to restore some position of influence/leverage in the HOPEFULLY new and UNOCCUPIED FREE IRAQ. Boy, these bastids are frothing at the mouth...tearing peice by peice out of the Iraq we once knew...and the one they never knew. I SAY NO TO the 3 or 5 "presidents" system...and that's all for now.
Who or What could save the day now?
eufff ya eufff....
lim.
Who or What could save the day now?
eufff ya eufff....
lim.
6.3.04
OKAY OKAY, I'm the OVER-REACTOR...leave me alone.
Salam is fine.
And me...ha! I was writing, "God be with you" (to Salam)....me of all people. But, I was honestly scared...and when you see the terrible events unfold in the ever-over-dramatized manner as they were on Arab and Western media...well, you can't help but fear the worst and get really religious really fast.
Those of you who wrote...thank you. I'm sure Salam appreciates it. (I can't guarantee that tho! lol :) )
Sounds like Kerbala was an amazing experience...and my father tells me so many stories about that place....don't start me.
So all is well...I'll try to cross post this to Bakazay, but for now....Salam is fine. And we are thankful.
MANY WELL WISHES TO EV'BODY, AND BACK TO THE NITTY GRITTY IN A COUPLE WEEKS...
mA'AH iL sAAALAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM!
L TO THE L
SMELL THAT SMELL....oooo IT'S MOM'S COOKING. Yella, I'm hungry...ciao,
loveoverfear,
liminal
And me...ha! I was writing, "God be with you" (to Salam)....me of all people. But, I was honestly scared...and when you see the terrible events unfold in the ever-over-dramatized manner as they were on Arab and Western media...well, you can't help but fear the worst and get really religious really fast.
Those of you who wrote...thank you. I'm sure Salam appreciates it. (I can't guarantee that tho! lol :) )
Sounds like Kerbala was an amazing experience...and my father tells me so many stories about that place....don't start me.
So all is well...I'll try to cross post this to Bakazay, but for now....Salam is fine. And we are thankful.
MANY WELL WISHES TO EV'BODY, AND BACK TO THE NITTY GRITTY IN A COUPLE WEEKS...
mA'AH iL sAAALAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM!
L TO THE L
SMELL THAT SMELL....oooo IT'S MOM'S COOKING. Yella, I'm hungry...ciao,
loveoverfear,
liminal
4.3.04
This is not a laughing matter or a witty palindrome: Where is Salam?
Many in the Iraqi Blogosphere are extremely concerned about Salam, his family, and their whereabouts and well-being. Email me to pass along well-wishes to his friends in the Iraqi Blogosphere and to others that know him. Frankly, I'm freaked out about what has happened. The consequences of this horrific day have yet to resonate across Iraq and the region. And so, I hope Salam and his kin are safe and in good health. Because many of us knew, River and I...and many many others, according to a post he wrote that he would be making the trip to Karbala with his family. So...email me. I will later post these emails on this blog and the Agora. We want to know where Salam & his family are and how they are doing as soon as possible. Expect a cross-post on the Agora.
Ma'ah salaam,
Liminal
Ma'ah salaam,
Liminal
2.3.04
A Black Day
I write this as I hear and see what has happened. What a horrific, terrible, and black day. There is a long list of people that I feel are or could be responsible for this insanity. And included in this list are not just radical Sunnis, Baath "loyalists", Saddam loyalists, Al Qaeda, and Ansaar. In short, it's not just the usual suspects or alliance of suspects. This is completely unacceptable behavior and these acts must stop. And while I can complete that list for people, does it matter? does it matter if I tell people what I really think about this?
I urge you to not just accept what the current appointed leaders tell you. These people work off of logic. They logically assume (and explain to people) that this was done by Baathists loyal to Saddam and/or Al Qaeda. People like logic. I like logic. And it could be this logical: these were attacks done by Saddam loyalists. But these are illogical times. Remind yourselves it is convenient for them to say this over and over like robots with no actual care about Iraqis and the consequences of this day and events to come. Keep your ears peeled and thought pattern piqued. Also, read widely and the clues will build up. Iraqis have every right to be suspicious of the events conspiring. Especially when you consider the following things:
(I will complete this post later. Now, I am sad for all Iraqis. Let's be smart about this, or else we risk more violence.)
Can you sign a de facto interim constitution when you are in national mourning? I say, bad start...both literally and symbolically. (i'll explain, more fully, why i ask
this later.)
Until I finish the post, here are some words from Robert Fisk. He asks several important questions. Click here for the below article.
_________________________________________________
March 2, 2004
A Convenient Carnage
All This Talk of Civil War, Now This
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent
Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq.
Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though al-Qa'ida is a Sunni-only organisation. Yet for weeks, the American occupation authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even produced a letter said to have been written by an al-Qa'ida operative, advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists have enthusiastically taken up this theme. Civil war.
Somehow I don't believe it. No, I don't believe the Americans were behind yesterday's carnage despite the screams of accusation by the Iraqi survivors yesterday. But I do worry about the Iraqi exile groups who think that their own actions might produce what the Americans want: a fear of civil war so intense that Iraqis will go along with any plan the United States produces for Mesopotamia.
I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962, setting off bombs among France's Muslim Algerian community. I recall the desperate efforts of the French authorities to set Algerian Muslim against Algerian Muslim which led to half a million dead souls.
And I'm afraid I also think of Ireland and the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974, which, as the years go by, appear to have an ever closer link, via Protestant "loyalist" paramilitaries, to elements of British military security.
But the bombs in Karbala and Baghdad were clearly co-ordinated. The same brain worked behind them. Was it a Sunni brain? When the occupation authorities' spokesman suggested yesterday that it was the work of al-Qa'ida, he must have known what he was saying: that al-Qa'ida is a Sunni movement, that the victims were Shias.
It's not that I believe al-Qa'ida incapable of such a bloodbath. But I ask myself why the Americans are rubbing this Sunni-Shia thing so hard. Let's turn the glass round the other way. If a violent Sunni movement wished to evict the Americans from Iraq - and there is indeed a resistance movement fighting very cruelly to do just that - why would it want to turn the Shia population of Iraq, 60 per cent of Iraqis, against them? The last thing such a resistance would want is to have the majority of Iraqis against it.
So what about al-Qa'ida? Repeatedly, the Americans have told us that the suicide bombers were "foreigners". And so they may be. But can we have some identities, nationalities? The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has talked of the hundreds of "foreign" fighters crossing Saudi Arabia's "porous" borders.
The US press have dutifully repeated this. The Iraqi police keep announcing that they have found the bombers' passports, so can we have the numbers?
We are entering a dark and sinister period of Iraqi history. But an occupation authority which should regard civil war as the last prospect it ever wants to contemplate, keeps shouting "civil war" in our ears and I worry about that. Especially when the bombs make it real.
I urge you to not just accept what the current appointed leaders tell you. These people work off of logic. They logically assume (and explain to people) that this was done by Baathists loyal to Saddam and/or Al Qaeda. People like logic. I like logic. And it could be this logical: these were attacks done by Saddam loyalists. But these are illogical times. Remind yourselves it is convenient for them to say this over and over like robots with no actual care about Iraqis and the consequences of this day and events to come. Keep your ears peeled and thought pattern piqued. Also, read widely and the clues will build up. Iraqis have every right to be suspicious of the events conspiring. Especially when you consider the following things:
(I will complete this post later. Now, I am sad for all Iraqis. Let's be smart about this, or else we risk more violence.)
Can you sign a de facto interim constitution when you are in national mourning? I say, bad start...both literally and symbolically. (i'll explain, more fully, why i ask
this later.)
Until I finish the post, here are some words from Robert Fisk. He asks several important questions. Click here for the below article.
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March 2, 2004
A Convenient Carnage
All This Talk of Civil War, Now This
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent
Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq.
Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though al-Qa'ida is a Sunni-only organisation. Yet for weeks, the American occupation authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even produced a letter said to have been written by an al-Qa'ida operative, advocating a Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists have enthusiastically taken up this theme. Civil war.
Somehow I don't believe it. No, I don't believe the Americans were behind yesterday's carnage despite the screams of accusation by the Iraqi survivors yesterday. But I do worry about the Iraqi exile groups who think that their own actions might produce what the Americans want: a fear of civil war so intense that Iraqis will go along with any plan the United States produces for Mesopotamia.
I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962, setting off bombs among France's Muslim Algerian community. I recall the desperate efforts of the French authorities to set Algerian Muslim against Algerian Muslim which led to half a million dead souls.
And I'm afraid I also think of Ireland and the bombings in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974, which, as the years go by, appear to have an ever closer link, via Protestant "loyalist" paramilitaries, to elements of British military security.
But the bombs in Karbala and Baghdad were clearly co-ordinated. The same brain worked behind them. Was it a Sunni brain? When the occupation authorities' spokesman suggested yesterday that it was the work of al-Qa'ida, he must have known what he was saying: that al-Qa'ida is a Sunni movement, that the victims were Shias.
It's not that I believe al-Qa'ida incapable of such a bloodbath. But I ask myself why the Americans are rubbing this Sunni-Shia thing so hard. Let's turn the glass round the other way. If a violent Sunni movement wished to evict the Americans from Iraq - and there is indeed a resistance movement fighting very cruelly to do just that - why would it want to turn the Shia population of Iraq, 60 per cent of Iraqis, against them? The last thing such a resistance would want is to have the majority of Iraqis against it.
So what about al-Qa'ida? Repeatedly, the Americans have told us that the suicide bombers were "foreigners". And so they may be. But can we have some identities, nationalities? The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has talked of the hundreds of "foreign" fighters crossing Saudi Arabia's "porous" borders.
The US press have dutifully repeated this. The Iraqi police keep announcing that they have found the bombers' passports, so can we have the numbers?
We are entering a dark and sinister period of Iraqi history. But an occupation authority which should regard civil war as the last prospect it ever wants to contemplate, keeps shouting "civil war" in our ears and I worry about that. Especially when the bombs make it real.