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A Way Out: Iraq
(and the ‘War on Terror’) after Bush
-
To the People
of the United States
(with Special Salute to Bill Maher)
Abstract. Since the elections of
November 2006, the relevant organs of state have been under intense
constitutional pressure to bring about an end to the Iraqi affair. But the
operation is proving to be more of a challenge than was originally
anticipated. Here, we propose that the reason for this is that for the
Americans to depart successfully, they must be confident that they have
left a functioning state behind; and that the only option they have at their disposal should they decide to
act along these lines is the restoration of the status quo ante. We then illustrate how two obstacles may or
must prevent this scenario from becoming a reality in the foreseeable
future - and by this we mean beyond, probably a ‘couple’ of years beyond
2011. The first obstacle is obviously that it would seem improbable that
Restoration could ever be sold to the population back home. The second
obstruction is that, after 5 years of occupation, the only conceivable
backbone for any possible functioning state of Iraq, the Arab Sunni community,
has been broken. Our estimates are that at least 90% of four million
refugees and of civilian deaths (one million is the projection accepted now
by most serious analysts) belong to Sunni Arabs, who numbered approximately
5.5 million in 2003. Also, the only conceivable regime capable of making a
state of Iraq
operational, the laic and authoritarian Baathist rule, could be destroyed
beyond repair (‘De-Baathification’). So unless a solution to these problems
are found - and as of now, the sense we have is that they have not even
begun to show up on the radar screen of those who’s job it is to address
them -, no evacuation will occur. A
question now emerges: why was Iraq invaded in the first place, if
the end results where such that, four million refugees and one million
civilian deaths later, the outsiders would have no option but to put back
in place the Baathist dictatorship, but would then be unable to accomplish
this because it’s natural base, the Sunni Arab community, had just been
dismantled by them? We then make an argument according to which the
invasion is not to be understood in terms of any military or economic
objectives (and was certainly not the product of a ‘neo-conservative
conspiracy’), but was given the green light in order to quench an
insatiable thirst for Arab (and Muslim) blood which overtook the United
States as a result of 9\11. Now that the Americans are mired in the blood
in question and demonstrate a desire to move on, no politician seems to
have the courage to say publicly that life is not that simple. The state of
Iraq is the cornerstone of the geopolitical equilibrium of the Middle-East:
if the soldiers depart without leaving behind a state, it is likely that
the region will ignite in a way which will be comparable to none other than
16th century Europe (a series of civil wars superimposed upon a series of
interstate wars, each one stirring each other up), and with all that this
implies for the oil industry. In the advent of such a scenario, there would
be no ceiling on the price of a barrel. We conclude this essay by
nonetheless maintaining a sense of optimism. We do this by reviewing the
foundations of Pax Americana.
This Pax Americana, which was
formed after the demise of the Soviet Union, resides in a de facto situation where states are
rescued from their most fundamental national ‘security’ problems (this term
is being used here in its traditional sense - the military) by Uncle Sam
(including Russia, China, Pakistan, Iran, the ‘rogue’ states, the ‘failed’
states, the ‘Axis of Evil’, everybody concerned), to the greater benefit of
all. If the objective now is to neutralise al-Qaeda (utter destruction
being impossible), then it should be perfectly conceivable that a deal with
the states of the world, which are indebted to Washington for much more
than is commonly believed, would be in reach, and would see the operation
successfully transferred into the hands of some capable police
organization. But in order to arrive at that point, Iraq will
have to be successfully reintegrated into the global state system.
Introduction: on a collective madness
October, 2008. It appears as if the outbreak of the financial crisis has made the
Iraqi question disappear from the radar screen of public attention. Well,
it hasn’t disappeared nor has it gotten any simpler. The story out of
Washington concerning this particular issue goes as such: the U.S.,
‘allied’ and Armed forces of the ‘democratically elected government of the
sovereign people of Iraq’ (in all, about 350,000 men and women in uniform),
are fighting an epic battle against ‘5,000 to 10,000 terrorists’ which are
systematically putting their efforts in check. After having had their
efforts thwarted for the most part of the past few years, the said
‘sovereign’ people and its ‘generous friends’ from abroad are finally
turning the situation around on the ground, thanks to the enlightened
strategy named ‘surge’ put forward by the no less than enlightened Bush
administration. In fact, things are going so well that ‘negotiations’
between the said administration and its Iraqi ‘counterpart’ have produced a
tentative ‘deal’ that could, if specific conditions are met, see
‘coalition’ troops leave by 2011 (Sofa). But, as the story goes, it is much
too early to rejoice, because the ‘5,000 to 10,000 terrorists’ remain a
formidable enemy. That’s why the president and his staff still never miss
an opportunity to assure their constituents that they will ‘stay the
course’ until the ‘job is done’. What is this ‘job’ they are referring to
exactly? It’s impossible to give a clear answer to the question, because
the members of the administration have never ceased to change their opinion
on the subject. For example, they spoke at first about getting rid of the
‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ they believed were in Iraq, then they spoke
about establishing ‘democracy, a constitutional government and the rule of
law’; now, at the end of their mandate, they say that they would not have
been unhappy to have settled for a ‘stable Iraq’. But, among other things,
what do they mean by a ‘stable Iraq’? And what are the
conditions for it to take shape? Will the ‘5,000 to 10,000 terrorists’
finally be defeated? What’s the plan? Who’s in charge? This, the story does
not reveal, at least not yet.
What strikes us most here is not
the absurdity of the discourse as such, its Post-Modern style (or is it
Surrealism? Dadaism? What is it?), but is the fact that it has and still is
encountering no opposition worthy of the name. For example, one might have
expected that, in this year of a presidential election, the candidates
would have seized the moment to prove to their constituents that they are
fit for the job they claim to deserve by giving the actual administration
the ride they ought to get on the subject, but they have yet to do so. For
now at least, it seems that senator McCain - who sometimes claims the
‘surge’ is of his own making - has decided to abdicate all responsibility
on the matter, choosing instead to make a mockery of it: on the one hand,
he says loud and clear that he will never bend to the irresponsible and
inconsequent populace demanding an immediate withdrawal and that he will
fight the 5,000 to 10,000 terrorists ‘to the death’ even if that implies
that the American soldiers remain in Iraq until the ‘end of Time’; however,
on the other hand, he whispers almost inaudibly (but still) that his
position could change very rapidly, depending upon the final shape of a
‘definition of victory’ he’s currently working on (victory in Iraq achieved
by linguists - with the help of pollsters? -, instead of the Armed forces!
That’s the best one we’ve heard in a long time). The senator of Illinois,
for his part, has at least - in our opinion - succeeded in keeping his
dignity here, but, when the day is done, he has no more beef to show for
than his opponent does: he says that he’s prepared to start the evacuation
process as soon as he takes office - meaning that he will surrender to the
‘5,000 to 10,000 terrorists’ (or, put differently, that he has no problem
with the prospect of seeing the 150,000 U.S. soldiers go under the yoke of
these ‘terrorists’) -; but adds on the other hand, echoing word for word
the preoccupations of the current administration, that this is conditional on the effect this
measure will have on the ‘stability’ of the region (i.e. not only of Iraq,
but of the whole Middle-East, and, by extension, the rest of the world -
oil). Here again, what is to be understood by ‘stability’? He has yet to
clarify this matter, which implies that, for the moment at least, his
position is surprisingly similar to the one of his opponent, although
articulated differently. In fact, if we could use a metaphor to illustrate
this, we would say that the senator in question, on this subject at least,
makes us think of Ryan Howard striking out: a whole lot of air is being
displaced, but no contact is being made. Another example of the free pass
the Bush administration has had regarding this problem which sucks up the
Nation’s wealth and blood (and let’s not forget about the critically
injured, whose fate is sometimes worse than death) is the total absence of
the ‘news’ media complex in the debate: despite the fact that it’s a
multi-billion dollar business, it has yet, after five years, to answer a
single intelligent question on the subject. A third example of what we are
trying to define is the Passivity of the People. Among other things, the
Sovereign Has never seemed to Grasp that this ‘war’, which has cost over a
trillion dollars by now and counting, has and is still supported by money
coming from abroad - Chinese for the most part (nothing wrong with that, as
we are about to discover, but still) -; all at a time when the economy is
crumbling and is badly in need of what seems to be ever larger amounts of
public funds to keep it afloat. But the wealth, the product of the sweat of
America’s
working man and woman, is being diverted towards the ‘struggle’ against the
‘5,000 to 10,000 terrorists’. Now, we are conscious that the Highest
Authority in the land Has finally Made Its Voice heard by Electing last
November a fresh slate of representatives who are no friends of the current
administration, yet It Has not Pressured them to speak of the public
discontent in a manner which would have encroached upon the
administration’s narrative of the ‘war’, as a result of which these
representatives have adopted since their election what could be described
as a ‘waiting for Godot’ strategy, and got away with it. Finally, we would
also like to say that we are perfectly aware that the peace movement has
been able from the start to put at will 100,000 people or more on the
streets, yet it is our view that it has done so in pure waste, because it
did not combine with its show of force a discourse that could rival the one
put forward by the president and his colleagues. But nobody has done that,
and nobody still seems to be interested in doing that: the presidential
candidates prefer to show that they have a ‘great’ sense of humour or do
air displacing, members of Congress appear to be so busy watching time fly
that it seems they have no time left to do anything else, the ‘news’ media
seems to be perfectly happy in the state of serene cretinism in which it’s
been in for the past five years, the Sovereign is Asleep at the switch, and
the peace movement says it’s against the ‘war’ but does not know why.
So as of now, the main
perspective on the ground as seen from the viewpoint of the Bush
administration - no choice, there is no other - has not changed a bit,
despite all the rhetoric. The members of the ‘democratically elected
government of the sovereign people of Iraq’, the American political
personnel - diplomats, CIA, ‘security’ contractors, high command of the
Armed forces, etc. -, the foreign diplomatic corps and personnel, etc. (in
short, the whole apparatus of the occupation), are still being besieged in
central Baghdad in an area of the size of Soho, NY - the so called ‘Green
zone’ - by the ‘5,000 to 10,000 terrorists’, as they have been for the past
number of years. The Armed forces still must retreat every night to their
heavily fortified barracks, and when they go out the next day, they are
still again armed to the tooth, accompanied by tanks and a cell phone ready
to ring for air support in case a (or a band of ) ‘terrorist(s)’ is (are)
met. If the occupiers left tomorrow, the 20 million-plus ‘sovereign’ Iraqi
people would ipso facto fall to
the ‘5,000 to 10,000 terrorists’, and the members of their ‘democratically
elected’ government would be swept away like dead leaves in a high wind.
Now the Bush administration, sounding like a broken record, asks again for
‘patience’: the ‘surge works’ and the ‘war’ is in the process of being
‘won’; it’s just that it will still take a ‘little time’. But as for
ourselves, we are afraid that the ‘surge’ is just another gimmick invented
by politicians ending their mandates to hand over to their successors a
problem they have absolutely no clue of how to solve (as for the senator of
Arizona, his pro ‘surge’ stand seems to be nothing more and nothing less
than a part of his election campaign strategy). The most frightening thing
here, in our opinion, is not that the government of the most powerful
country in the world all but admits that it simply does not know what to do
anymore about Iraq, but the fact that nobody or organized entity among this
nation of 300 million-plus also does seem to have any idea about how to
handle the hot potato, neither the presidential candidates, nor Congress,
nor the ‘news’ media, nor the People, nor the peace movement. So notwithstanding
the financial collapse, we believe that the problem is certainly worth the
attention. In the following pages, we will try to sort it out.
Beforehand, we think that it’s
absolutely essential for you to realize that since the events of 2001, you
have systematically shot, bombed, imprisoned, tortured (ok, ‘abused’ if you
insist - but isn’t it the same thing?), or ostracized people at home or
abroad who dared not agree with you, or worse, people you suspected were
not in agreement with you. But did
you, do you only know what your thoughts consist of? Evidently not,
judging by the Iraq
example. So how can you in your conscience even consider harming others who
you suspect of not being in agreement with you, or even ask anybody to
agree with you, when you don’t even have your mind? Don’t you agree that,
before cutting people down, you should at least first figure out why you do
it? Hence, as a first step of this discussion, we would ask you to
praise the Lord. We insist you do that because on the outskirts of the terras incognitas we are about to
cross the threshold, anger and all the firepower in the world will be of no
use at all, as modesty will enable to make the painful admissions required
to have an idea of what went wrong, and what can be done about it. This
being said, we are certain that most of you will agree that the first thing
that meets the eye when one contemplates the big picture in its entirety is
not the irrepressible ‘5,000 to 10,000 terrorists’ but your conditioning,
your own brain that accepts as true the proposition according to which
these folks (provided that they exist), do all the things the president and
his staff say they do. More precisely, we are sure that most of you will
agree that only a madman/woman can accept the idea that 5,000 to 10,000
people have been able to put in check for five full years the deadliest
killing machine history has ever known (the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and
Marines), the ‘allied’ contingents, a ‘sovereign’ people of 20
millions-plus with its ‘democratically elected government’, police and
Armed forces, for if it was really the case, these ‘5,000 to 10,000’ ought to be
referred to as ‘gods and goddesses’, not ‘terrorists’. Only a lunatic could
do that, but most of you accept it, since not even one person among you
seems to question this version of events. Does this mean that you have all
become like that? No, or at least no more or no less that the rest of us.
Indeed, it is obvious that the problem is not in relation to individual
insanity, but rather with collective insanity; the difference being that
the first may be addressed through medical treatment, as the second seems
to have everything to do with the widespread and unconditional acceptance
of a blatantly demented narrative. It is our belief then that if a
narrative more grounded in the principles of sane reason can be pieced
together, understood at its true value, and accepted by a critical mass of
citizenry, the collective malady will recede, for the greater benefit of
all. Consequently, the direction of this discussion will follow as such.
To frame a
narrative, one must first put forward a ‘method’, i.e. general principles
of thought to which the discussion must respond. Here, we propose the
‘philosophical’ approach, and by that we mean a little logic and a heavy
dose of common sense and pragmatism (this way of proceeding will justify
itself crystal clear later on). Second, one must define an objective. What
would be the practical use of a narrative of the Iraq ‘war’ that would not
constitute an insult to sane reason? Of course, there would be many, but in
these times where public funds seem to be most needed on other fronts, a
better bang for your buck would certainly be one of the most obvious.
Some of
you might be intrigued by who we are. To this, we would like to indicate
that we already addressed the matter in ‘Introduction to the Pax Americana
Files’ (a text posted on this site in May 2007 - from now on ‘Intro’), and
that we wont say more. But again, to help dispel from the start any
misunderstandings, let’s just say that we are from Canada, which means that we are
natural friends (for our part, we have no choice), and that your best
interests cannot but to be to our best interests. Remember the adage
according to which ‘when America
gets the cold, the neighbor of the North catches pneumonia’? Well, we think
it is apt, but not strong enough. In our opinion, a better metaphor to
illustrate the unique relationship our two countries entertain would be:
‘If the United States
decided to jump off a bridge one day, Canada would have no other
choice but to follow’. Now, we don’t mean by this that you are about to
jump (although the evacuation of Iraq will be a problematic
operation, make no mistake about it): we just want to make sure that there
is no doubts in your minds about the purity of our intentions. Some of you
will perhaps not agree with what will follow, some of you will be shocked,
some of you will put our ‘method’ to the question, some of you will say
that it’s we who are nuts, etc. All of this is fair and fine. But we want
it to be understood once and for all that our good faith cannot be questioned. So let’s proceed.
I
The Trap
Approaching the problem of the American adventures in
Iraq is no easy task, because the only account of it, i.e. the one put
forth by the administration which shall officially be the subject of
history next month, is a dense, one could say impenetrable web of sophisms,
questionable logic, dubious reasoning, half truths, outright lies (remember
the justifications for going to ‘war’?), etc. What makes this narrative
iron clad is not its intellectual merits (we repeat, does someone really
believes, among other things, that ‘5,000 to 10,000’ persons, be
they ‘terrorists’, can still, after five years of ‘battle’ - and a year of
‘surge’-, force 150,000 U.S. soldiers and their armored vehicles to retreat
every night to their fortified barracks?), but the fact that it’s been
unconditionally accepted as ‘Truth’ by Americans, so much so that the
presidential candidates themselves have had no other choice but to quote
from its wording, or ‘conceptual infrastructure’, so to speak, instead of
tearing it apart, as they should normally have done. Hence we, who wish to
put together another narrative of the ‘war’, one that is more in line with
the principles of sane reason, have no other choice but to start from
scratch. But in this scary ocean of darkness, however, there is a bright
spot, a beacon of light, a ‘fact’ that is ‘real’, concrete as cement and
beyond debate: it’s the Willingness Expressed by the American People as a
result of the congressional elections of 2006 to Put an end to this
episode. The version of events, the narrative, which has been ‘making
sense’ of the ‘war’ since its beginnings is not put to the test itself;
it’s just that the Boss Has Decided He Wanted out, which implies that
sooner or later, His representatives will have no other choice but either
to acquiesce, or come up with a very good explanation as to why it can’t be
done, and submit it again to the High and Mighty. Now we have a point of
departure, a corner stone planted in firm soil onto which can be built a
new edifice, in the sense that even the most gifted spin doctor cannot deny
that the fact has no other meaning: the Sovereign, to Whom one cannot
disobey (or face the consequences), Wants out. Period. This being agreed
upon, what must be done now is to predict what potential shapes Iraqi
politics may take if the occupation comes to an end tomorrow, and to see
which scenario is acceptable from the point of view of American national
security - we repeat, our two countries share interests that are almost
identical, if not totally identical (if you jump, we follow), so we are
perfectly at ease to speak freely about the subject.
The position of the outgoing administration on the
question of post-occupation Iraqi politics is in perfect logical sequence
to what could be observed above, and can be articulated in this way: the
‘surge’ has succeeded in reigning in ‘terrorism’ and accelerating the
process of ‘national reconciliation’: in a time frame which is still
impossible to predict accurately, the ‘democratically elected government’
will take over the country and the foreign contingents shall leave. Again,
this is nothing but an abuse of linguistic terminology designed to save
face and assist the administration to end its mandate without being
embarrassed. As for the presidential candidates, either they endorse the
hoax (McCain) or they retreat from confronting it directly (‘Mr. Change’),
for it seems that, in the present context, in which no one questions the
Bush administration’s perspective of the ‘war’, to do otherwise would
result in a free-for-all in which there would be no way for them to know if
it would help or ruin their bid for presidency, and so they sail with the
current. This being understood, it is very true that the level of violence
has sharply decreased recently, but this is because the locals know you are
on your way out. If you would only dare to open your eyes, you would see
that there are public reports confirming again and again that since the
congressional elections of 2006 and, above all, since the launching of
operation ‘surge’, the soldiers on the ground, the Army’s high command and
the diplomats have not stopped repeating it to the Iraqis they meet every
day. These, understandably, have received the message loud and clear, and
have thus begun instructing their followers to save their energies for the
struggle which will start the day the pullout will be completed. What
struggle? To make a long story short, let’s say that the survival of the
Iraqi state will depend on the outcome. Why bother, might you ask? To make
a long story short again, you must understand that the state of Iraq is the
product of geopolitics. In a region criss crossed by ethnic and sectarian
diversity, it was originally carved out on the map by the British Foreign
Office for the purpose of being the linchpin by which the region would hold
together; and, up to a certain point, all went according to plan since. If
the state of Iraq disappeared tomorrow, this would mean that the borders of
the quasi totality of the thirteen states of the region would have to be
redesigned, which would in turn ignite an inferno in which a series of
interstate wars would be superimposed on a series of civil wars, all of
them stirring each other up, a hell on earth with no end in sight that
would only compare to none other than XVIth century Europe. But why should
one care, might you ask again? Well, we are sure that you are aware that a
significant fraction of oil burned in the United States comes from that
part of the world. Hence, we are in agreement that if the region goes up in
smoke, we may assume that the oil business will be severely disrupted,
which will in turn cause the price of that commodity to skyrocket so high
that what could be observed in the first half of the year 2008 will appear
like the good old days. In short, the message is simply that if the
occupational forces are the only thing that can keep intact the state of
Iraq, and if the state of Iraq is the only thing that can make the
Middle-East hold together, then an evacuation may not be possible (unless
you are prepared to pay 200$ or event 500$ or more for a barrel of oil,
with all that implies for your already badly bruised economy). But why,
might you ask, should the existence of the said state of Iraq be put into question if we
leave? Won’t the ‘democratically elected government’ simply take over? Well
again, at risk of repeating ourselves a third time, you must first realize
that after five years of occupation, the authority of the said ‘government’
still does not go further than your soldier’s bayonets - that being the
‘territory’ of the size of Soho in central Baghdad previously mentioned, to
which must be added the soldier’s barracks, which, needless to say, amounts
to none - and, second, that the ‘surge’ has changed absolutely nothing in
this regard. As the objective is to leave as soon as possible, any
consideration for the plan of evacuation must disregard this scenario right
from the start: when the soldiers leave, they will take back with them the
‘democratically elected government’. Where does that leave us? In the first
months of last year, perfectly aware that the congressional elections of
November 06 signified the beginning of the end of America’s adventures in the Fertile Crescent, we tried to forecast the
consequences of an end to the occupational regime, and by that we meant the
departure of all ‘coalition’
soldiers. We concluded that evacuation was highly improbable, if not
downright impossible, for the outsiders would have left behind them a state
of chaos that would have sucked up in the whole Middle-East state system,
which would in turn have driven the price of oil up in outer space. We also
came to the conclusion that evacuation in the short-term was unlikely
because no one, not only in the administration, but also in Congress and,
generally speaking, in the wider United States, seemed to have
any notion of the impact of the implementation of such a measure on
national security. Evacuation required a vision, but the equation was so
complex that no person alive seemed to have the capability to put together
such a plan. In consequence, we predicted that the Bush administration, for
the remainder of its mandate, would do all it could to conceal the problem
from public opinion, and would meet no resistance in doing so from the
‘new’ Congress, despite the rumors of impeachment that were present at the
time: the objective for both the president and Congress, we said, would be
to ‘buy time’ until the presidential elections of November 08, so that the
responsibilities of cleaning up the mess could be dumped squarely on the
next president’s shoulders (see ‘Intro’). Today, time has proven that we
were right: the heat of the pressure cooker of public opinion has not
ceased to rise since, the politicians have hinted that they are aware of
this in the sense that there are more and more (anxious) references in
their speeches about their concerns for ‘stability’ and a ‘stable state of
Iraq’, for example, but none have dared to expand on the subject yet. Is it
because they are conscious that they don’t understand the full implications
of what is expected from them, despite the tremendous amount of money and
resources they have at their disposal? Or is it because they understand
perfectly well, but lack the courage to tell to their constituents what’s
in store should they stay firm in their desire to repatriate the troops? As
for ourselves, we think that it’s time to leave them to their business and
that we go on with our’s. So let’s recall for the last time the essentials
of the problem: you want out of Iraq fast, and by that you mean
not by 1%, you mean not by 25%, you mean not by 50%, you mean not by 80%,
you mean what you mean, and that is out soon. You want to put a complete end to the Iraq
‘war’ because you are tired of borrowing a quarter of a trillion dollars a
year from the Chinese and others for the sole purpose of having your
soldiers killed or disabled. You also want a complete withdrawal because
you think that, if it is absolutely necessary to obtain funds from abroad
so your taxes are not to be raised, the money would be much better spent if
used to support the economy, which seems to be badly in need of ever
gigantic amount of funds to prevent it from sinking. Since a clear majority
of you have held firm to this resolution for two years and show no sign
that you are about to change your mind, your representatives have adapted
accordingly, for it is a sine qua nun
condition for them either to remain in post, or to get elected. But in this
specific instance, however, both these actual or would be representatives
have remained surprisingly vague about the ‘how’ and the ‘when’ of the
implementation of the measure you wish would have already happened. Why?
It’s very easy to understand.
* * *
Any plan of evacuation worthy
of the name must be concerned first and foremost with the question as to
whether an Iraqi state will be left standing should a pullout occur. If the
answer is yes, the operation will be possible indeed; if the answer is no,
it will have to be given a long and hard second look. That’s the issue to
which the Bush administration is confronted with since the congressional
elections of 2008, and that’s the issue to which the next president will be
confronted with as soon as he takes office. Now, two scenarios emerge as
the only credible ones when one contemplates the problem from this
perspective, which could be termed as ‘Islamization’ (or
‘Fundamentalization’) first, and Restoration second. The first would see
the establishment of some form of theocracy; the second would be witnessing
the resurrection of the secular dictatorship of the Baath party (yes, the
party of Saddam). The Fundamentalization of Iraq might appear from the
onset to be a bona fide option,
in the sense that it seems in all likelihood to contain all the ingredients
for the repetition of a familiar spectacle already seen in Afghanistan or
Somalia: thousands of local ‘warlords’ and other kinds of pocket chieftains
will immediately fill the vacuum caused by the departure of the invaders
and proclaim themselves virtual monarchs within the couple of hundred
square feet under their effective control, until the People, the Sovereign,
the highest authority in the land, Tired and Disgusted with these
individuals, and in the absence of any other alternative, will not Oppose
the capture of power by a radical religious group having entries in all
fragments and sub-fragments of the shattered society, and thus capable of
restoring the authority of the state so that it can perform at least
minimally the tasks only a state can perform (punishment of crime, building
and maintaining of public utility infrastructures, supporting the national
economy, etc). Of course, you would be infuriated by this because it would
mean that you would have spent your blood and money only to advance the
cause you were supposed to be fighting, but at least there will be a
standing state of Iraq
when you’re gone. But the more one scrutinizes this potential outcome,
however, the more one realizes that its advent will not guarantee the
integrity of the state, but will rather preside over its destruction. The
very simple reason for this is that there is not one brand of Islam in Iraq
but two, whose disciples are to each other what were those of Loyola to
those of Calvin (for example) when religious discord turned Europe upside
down for a good century and a half. We don’t say that their differences
cannot be resolved or accommodated over time, all we say is that if these
fanatics were left to themselves right now or in any frame of time in the foreseeable
future, a civil war would follow that would be so vicious, so bitter, so
intense, so passionately reckless, that it would cause the Iraqi state to
implode. Now, if you add the Kurds to the equation, who are Sunnis but are
to their Arab fellow citizens what French Catholics are to German
Catholics, to use an example that everybody will understand, you have then
all the ingredients for a Big Bang to occur that will shatter in tiny bits
not only Iraq, but the totality of the Middle-East state system. The fire
will be so strong and so well fed, that there will be no choice either but
to re-invade to extinguish it - but this time, it will have to be the whole
region -, or to wait until it burns itself out. How much will an operation
of this sort cost in lives and hard currency? Will the Chinese be willing
to bail you out again or will you have to raise your taxes to pay for it?
Should you decide not to budge, what will happen to the oil industry? And
what shall the cost of a barrel of oil be should this scenario become
reality? Of course, the obvious antidote to this nightmare would be to
leave behind a secular party that would have representatives in all (or
most) parts of the political body, and whose aim would be to reign in
religious discord while maintaining the integrity of the state. This would
only make sense, but the problem here is that such a political formation
does not exist at this moment in Iraq. In fact, there was one,
the Baath party, the party of Saddam, but it was ‘outlawed’ by a decision
of your government at the very minute it came in. ‘The hell with it’, you
might say? ‘Let’s restore this organization to power and let’s go home!’ It
is true that if a majority of Americans would wish this to happen and stay
firm over time in this resolution, no government would be able to oppose it
for long, because it will either be voted out of office or impeached. But
there’s a catch here, fellow North Americans. The Baath can only be Arab
Sunni based, because they, a minority, are more cohesive as a group; as the
more numerous Shiites are too divided to do anything but to fight among
themselves (there seems to be almost as many political factions among the
‘Shi’as’ as there are Ayatollahs and other lesser religious leaders). In
other words, the foundation of an operational Baath can only reside in an
alliance led by the secular Sunni Arabs on the one hand backed by their
Shiite compatriots on the other; who would be unable to prevail by
themselves for they are no match for the Ayatollahs (and others) in their
own community, but who could have considerable clout if included in a
broader, multiethnic alliance dedicated to the service of a higher end (a
Sovereign and functioning state of Iraq, for example). The core of the
problem resides here: the Sunni Arabs resisted occupation from day one and
were literally wiped out as a group. In the same order of ideas, two
serious attempts to estimate civilian casualties since the beginning of the
‘war’ were made to this day: one, published in 2005 in The Lancet, put the amount at a half
a million deaths, but was publicly dismissed because of a so-called ‘flawed
methodology’(Tony Blair); the second, given in the beginning of 2008 by the
Coalition for a Just Foreign Policy,
was not, to our knowledge, rejected by any government involved in the
occupation, and arrived at the number of 1.2 million. Now, we are sure that
you will be very sceptical about this number, since it’s not ‘in the news’,
and we would accept that objection, because we know you genuinely believe
that what you see or hear on TV is ‘true’. But another way to have an idea
of the extent of civilian casualties since 2003, however, is by taking into
account the number of refugees the ‘conflict’ has produced, and here, there
can be no doubt, because the amount has been acknowledged by your
representatives as well as by the UN, and that number, ladies and
gentlemen, is four million, yes, four million (half at home, half abroad)!
Again, and apart from the ‘exact’ number in actual loss of life, one has to
take for granted that the quasi totality of these casualties, either in
terms of loss of life (whatever they may be) or displacement, were and are
Sunni Arab, for they are the ones who resisted: the Shiites, under strict
orders from their leaders (and also, understandably, from Teheran),
collaborated every inch of the way - save Al-Sadr, who still was pretty
docile after all -, and were thus spared. So if you take into account that
the Sunni Arab community numbered more or less 5.5 million in 2003 and do
the math, you have the big picture (g…….). But wait, it ain’t over. One of
the goals proclaimed by your government for the aggression and subsequent
occupation of Iraq,
one of the pillars of the legitimacy of the enterprise according to it, was
‘De-Baathification’, this meaning the eradication and utter destruction of
the Baath party. Solely judging by the professionalism shown by your
soldiers since the beginning of this affair, we can be sure that in this
specific case, the ‘job’ was, if not done to perfection, at least well
executed. All of this might seem a little complicated, if not obscure, but
it is not, as it can be explained in a few simple words. You wish you could
escape from Iraq
at this time if you could, only never to come back again, but to do that, you
would need to be absolutely sure that you would leave behind a state.
However, after five years of occupation, the only conceivable backbone of
that state, the Sunni Arab community, is broken, and its only conceivable
‘head’ (so to speak), the Baath party, is decapitated. In a nutshell:
whether you like it or not, you are not going anywhere until a solution to
this problem is found.
But
again, where does that leave us? On the surface, nowhere, because the same
monotonous and sick spectacle repeats itself every day, as it has been for
the past five years: the soldiers go out of their barracks in the morning
and cruise through Arab Sunni territory; sometimes, they get shot at,
sometimes, they explode on IEDs, sometimes, they meet somebody wearing a
dynamite belt which detonates on their arrival, etc: in all cases, they
return fire and kill everyone around, and if something still moves, air
support is called; at night, they return to where they left in the morning,
only to see their sleep (or life) sometimes interrupted by a round of
mortar (or two), and to wake up the next day only to do the exact same
thing that they did the day before. It is absolutely true, however, that
the level of resistance has sharply decreased in the last year and a half,
but those who do not cease to repeat it and draw on that fact to affirm
that ‘we are winning the war’ do not acknowledge that it can also be argued
that the opposition has softened because there is hardly anyone left to do
so. As usual, no one brings up this legitimate objection. Also, there was
talk at some point that the apparent weakening in the fighting was the
product of a mysterious ‘secret weapon’ that was ‘taking out’ almost by
magic any opposition, but, here again, one can be sure that this was just
another abuse of public opinion orchestrated by a moribund administration
desperate to see October end. Indeed, what needs to be done here is not to
kill more people, or more time, obviously, but to neutralize the idea, or,
more precisely, the ideas that will trigger the blowing apart of Iraq and
the Middle-East state system with it when your soldiers leave, and these
are the ones held by radical Sunni and Shiite religious leaders and their
followers, which constitute an overpowering majority in this part of the world.
That’s the task, but no one, again and again, from top to bottom of the
entire American society, seems to be aware of it, as it appears that, as it
has been for the last five years, they don’t have a perception of what they
are doing. But all of this is on the surface. If one looks closely behind
what meets the eye, however, one can see that, since the congressional
elections of 2006, nothing short of a paradigmatic shift, or if one
prefers, a revolution, has occurred in the Bush administration’s handling
of this affair. If any ‘secret weapon’ has been put into operation here,
it’s that these folks have finally started to use their brains. Of course,
as usual, public opinion and its ‘news’ media seem completely unaware of
this, although the phenomenon is happening openly. Up until then, the only
language spoken to the Sunni Arabs was the one of the rifle, but after the
said elections, things changed subtly, but radically in this regard. Two
sets of measures can clearly be discerned. First, diplomatic openings were made to the resistance, which
could not but have been articulated more or less along these lines: ‘you’d
better get organized, because we’re packing soon’. The other side,
understanding perfectly well this universal language, acted consequently.
Of course, the siege of the ‘Green zone’ and the pressure on the
infrastructure of the occupation was not relinquished one bit, yet the
Sunni Arabs accepted to build an army in cooperation with the Americans
(that’s the much heralded ‘Sunni Awakening’). This fighting force, composed
in good part by the boys and girls that have become men and woman in the
concentration camps during the years of 2007 and 2008, is said to be 90’000
strong now. If it were true - for our part, we do not think it’s a lie this
time - it seems safe to predict that this prolific and resilient people
will be able to put 150’000 soldiers in the field by 2010, which will be
more than enough not only to hold their own, but also to challenge the
other groups for the control of the state when crunch time arrives.
However, these soldiers cannot aim at imposing al-Qaeda’s agenda (the
imposition throughout the state of strict Sunni orthodoxy), because the
other groups will simply never bend to that: if, for example, the future
regime tried to reduce the Shiites to the same deplorable conditions that
they are subjected to in Saudi Arabia, there will be a war of attrition:
Iran will not accept this and will step in, the Kurds will at some point
seize the moment and proclaim their independence and then Turkey will step
in, and so on and so forth, until the spiral is out of control. The Sunni Arab army must not be an
ethnic militia: it must, when it’s strong enough, not to destroy, but be
able to convert and then absorb enough members of other groups so it
can become a truly genuine Iraqi army. This can only be done by persuasion,
by convincing enough of the members of the other groups that, in a free and
liberated Iraq,
no citizen will be victimized for the motive of religion. Now, there is
only one way to proceed to achieve this, one: it is to deny religion any
say in the affairs of state and to be willing to use authoritarian methods
to uphold that principle. Here comes into effect the second measure taken by the Bush
administration. In January of this year, the - Shiite - ‘democratically
elected government of the sovereign people of Iraq’ gave birth - kicking and
screaming - to a new ‘De-Baathification’ law. Dictated in fact all the way
from Washington by the same people who provided us with a another
definition of ‘torture’ and who are currently working on a definition of
‘victory’, this piece of ‘legislation’ redefines the meaning of
‘De-Baathification’: from there on, civil service would be fully open to
the ex-Baathists; a portion of them would be given their old job back; and
the ‘law democratically voted in’, among other things, would give to the
retirees their pension back. Here again, all of this might appear out of
reach for the common man, but this isn’t the case. It’s simply that the Bush
administration, itself under a dictate (the congressional elections of
2006) from its hierarchical superior, the sovereign People of the United States,
has started the procedure that should permit the troops to leave in what is
expected to be a not too distant future. In a complete reversal of policy,
the administration in question has started to pick up the remains of the
only conceivable backbone of a functioning Iraqi state, the Sunni Arab
community, which was shattered repeatedly, and have tried to piece them
back together. Meanwhile, they have begun preparing for the restoration of
the only conceivable regime capable of producing a functioning Iraqi state,
the laic and authoritarian Baathist regime. Now that’s what you can call a
complete180 degree.
But
unless proven otherwise, you are still prisoners of the trap you’ve made
with your bare hands and have thrown yourself into with such reckless
abandon. How can a community that took such a beating for so long suddenly
rise up from its ashes and place upon its shoulders the burden of
maintaining the integrity of the state? What is the real extent of the loss
of civilian life among Iraq’s
Arab Sunnis? And how many members of the Baath party are still alive? In short, is evacuation only physically possible? As for
ourselves, we are prepared to believe it is, for we gave proof of this
above. But is it really the case? Or has the Bush administration only
pretended that it was working on it just to buy enough time to hand over
the impossible task to the next administration (impossible, since civilian
casualties among the Sunni Arab community could be far worse than anyone
could imagine, and that the Baath in Iraq as a political force could simply
be destroyed beyond repair)? These are the questions to which only the
administration knows the answers. However, since it has decided it would
not reveal them, and since the only entity that could force it to do so,
the Sovereign, appears for Himself to Have Decided that He would not Ask
questions worthy of the name on the matter, we are thrown back into
darkness. Until time allows for some clarity on this subject, it seems it
would definitely not be useless now, from our point of view, to ask the
following question: why was Iraq
invaded in the first place? We are convinced that the treatment of this
problem cannot but in itself further our understanding of the situation,
and thus assist us towards achieving our objectives.
II The Great Constitutional Meltdown
The Bush administration has changed its
mind so many times and in such a contradictory fashion when asked the
question as to why it decided to invade Iraq in the first place, that we
prefer to wait until more research is done on the subject to speak up on
it. Besides, two opposing theories present themselves. Of course, there are
many variants to these, but we believe that each can be reduced to the
following: the first says that the reason behind the invasion was to gain
‘control’ over Iraqi oil; the other argues that it was rather the direct
consequence of a ‘neo-conservative conspiracy’. Both contain elements of
truth but, when all is said and done, they are completely inadequate: the
first constitutes at best a truism; the second amounts more to a fairy tale
than anything else. Let’s review them for a moment.
No
one will dispute the fact that if it were not for their oil deposits, the
Middle-East and Iraq would be as important to you (and to the rest of the
world) as are Lichtenstein, the Central African Republic, Paraguay or
Bangladesh, to name just a few. No one will contest the fact that if it
were not for oil, the reasons for invading Iraq
would have been as good as those for invading Trinidad and Tobago. No one
will challenge that senator McCain, when he said that he was prepared to
stay in Iraq until the ‘end of Time’, really meant ‘for 30 to 40 years’,
i.e. until there’s nothing left to pump out of Middle-Eastern soil. The
problem with this way of proceeding is the concept of ‘control’ and, more
precisely, with the intent that is imputed to the Bush administration to
have attacked in order to seize ‘control’ over Iraq’s oil. For our part, we
think it is fair to say that the U.S. and its ‘allies’ of the ‘developed
world’, or the ‘West’, if you prefer, already had ‘control’ not only over
Iraqi oil, but also over what is produced in the region - and in the entire
world that is called ‘underdeveloped’, for that matter -, in the sense that
the quasi totality of the economic activity and surplus value generated by
the exploitation of the said commodity, from production to shipping and
from transformation to consumption, was already at the hands of U.S. and
other ‘western’ interests. And Iraq was no exception to the
rule. More ‘control’ - unless, again, a new definition to the term is found
- implied downright invasion and occupation in order to seize the annuity
that this country was receiving for selling its carbohydrates; but if it
was to be so, it is never explained why Iraq should have been invaded in
the first place more than, say, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates.
Because of the ‘regime’, might you answer? We would be in total agreement,
but then you would be obliged to recognize that the problem, although it
has everything to do with oil as such, has nothing to do with ‘control’
over oil, but rather with the ‘regime’, or, perhaps more precisely, with
the manner in which the ‘regime’ spent the pension it received from selling
oil. Which brings us to our second theory. Here, it is said that the Bush
administration was infested with idealists named ‘neo-conservatives’, who
thought that ‘regime change’ in Iraq was the only way to establish a
genuine peace in the region. These ‘neo-cons’ argued that the
‘democratization’ of Saddam Hussein’s country was to be the first step in
the preparation of a wider ‘democratic peace’ in the Middle-East, and they
successfully ‘manipulated’ to that end the rest of the administration and
the Americans altogether. This approach, very popular outside of the United States,
is indeed misguided over a certain number of points. Among them is that
‘regime change’ was not imposed through the back door by some
inconsequential members of the Bush administration having a hidden agenda,
but was in fact the policy of the state since 1998, when president Clinton
and Congress decided it would be so. All of this was done in public, by
representatives whose crushing majority did not fit the description of
‘neo-conservatism’ (new definition, anyone?). Also, the line of conduct
adopted by the Clinton
administration towards this was to make the ‘regime’ crumble from within,
and the Bush administration, after it was elected, did not move away from
it. Now, we have no problem with the belief that certain individuals, like
Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and their followers, for example, might have
supported the idea of invasion (although were is the script? Where is the
plan of attack? The writings we have examined show nothing else than what Clinton advocated -
‘regime change’ brought about from within -, the only difference being that
they are written in a more aggressive tone). But even if it was really the
case, however, these individuals were being pinned down by those
pragmatists who were holding real power and pulling all the strings, whose
names are Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice and Bush. Why? This little
masterpiece of sane reasoning will help to explain:
‘If you’re going to go in and try to topple Saddam
Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad.
Once you’ve got to Baghdad,
it’s not clear what you do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government
you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going
to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts
toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?
How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the
United States
military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to
stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what
happens when we leave?’ (Quotation
courtesy of Steve E. Miller, professor at the MIT. For the complete
reference, see the bibliography of ‘Intro’).
These words of wisdom were spoken in 1991
by none other than Dick Cheney, yes! ladies and gentleman, Dick ‘Ceterum censeo Saddamus esse delendam’
Cheney himself, then Secretary of Defence in the administration of Bush the
elder - and sometimes referred to as a ‘neo-con’ in the literature
mentioned above -, in response to the said ‘neo-conservatives’ and other
people of the sort who thought that the First Gulf War had ended
prematurely. We hope there is no doubt in your mind now as to why the
invasion was flatly rejected right from the start by the prominent members
of both major parties, and why it stayed that way all through the 90’s and
continuing into the beginnings of the new millennium. There was no question
of going to Baghdad,
because nobody new what would need to be done next. We also hope that you
will agree that the problem here lies not in the fact that certain
individuals who were in the administration of Bush son and who might have
answered to the criterions of ‘neo-conservatism’ could have advocated the
idea of going to Baghdad - they had a right to their opinion -, but with
the fact that Cheney and friends, and, for that matter, Congress, who did
not want to hear about any invasion before, suddenly became at the same
time the most fanatic partisans of it. Have all these people held secret
their ‘neo-conservative’ ideology for all these years and decided, out of
the blue, without notice, that it was time to drop the mask? Let’s get
serious for a minute. Something very grave happened, something
extraordinary, something so shocking, so terrible, that it is that that
incited them to change their mind. But what? 9/11, might you say? We would
be of the same opinion, but then again, you would now have to explain how
in the world you had to go to Baghdad as a response more than you would
have had to go to Ryad, Aden, Cairo, Aman, Dubai, Islamabad, or even Mexico
(as senator Kerry pointed out during the presidential campaign of 2004),
for example. No Iraqi citizen was involved in these events, and no link
could be established between them and Iraq’s government. Of course, a
link was ‘discovered’ soon afterwards, but it is now attested that this ‘discovery’
was just one in a series of deceptions organized by the Bush administration
that were to follow. Moreover, if the proper connections were to be made
with al-Qaeda, a radical religious organization, the most basic of common
sense dictated that you enrolled in the fight against it all the Arab
secular regimes possible, for 9/11 was also directed at them. Instead, you went to Baghdad,
destroyed the Baath, uprooted it’s natural base, the Arab Sunni community,
as a result of which the bulk of your Armed forces are trapped there and
condemned to rot without any possibility of getting out in the foreseeable
future, as al-Qaeda is now turning the situation around in Afghanistan (and
Pakistan) with the help of its Taliban friends; has virtually seized power
in Egypt and Jordan through its Salafist friends; and is in the process of
driving the Ethiopians out of Somalia in cooperation with its friends of
the ‘Islamic Courts’. Fundamentalism, which was on the rise before the
invasion, that’s understood, has simply become irresistible after it:
today, there is no secular regime in the Arab and Islamic world that does
not feel the ground shake under its feet. If one looks at the results and
only the results, the conclusion cannot be but formal: for five years now,
the Bush administration has spent American blood and resources only to
advance Bin Laden’s objectives, and the worst part is that there seems to
be no end in sight to this vicious cycle. So the question remains, and it’s
a good one: what was the rationale
for going to Baghdad
as retaliation for 9/11? We are afraid that the explanation we are
about to propose rests entirely on metaphysics. We are nonetheless
convinced that it is far superior to anything that has been put forward on
the subject yet. It reads as such.
On 9/11, while the towers
collapsed, an emotional tsunami overwhelmed the USA. As a result, a vast number
of Americans were taken up with an uncontrollable fever of rage, which then
manifested itself concretely as an agenda to kill Arabs, to make them ‘pay’
for what had happened. The members of the Bush administration, as everyone
else, were caught up squarely flat footed in these events, but it did not
take long for these pragmatists to grasp the consequences: the American
People had regressed to the state of a gigantic mob screaming for
retribution. In spite of the destabilizing confusion which resulted from
the backlash of popular fury, two rational options emerged. The first was
an appeal for calm and a request for time in order to comprehend the
situation and then find an appropriate response to the perpetrators of the
outrage; the second was simply to ride the wave. The subsequent invasion of
Afghanistan,
which was necessary, provided a much needed delay. But the operation, so to
speak, happened much too quickly. When all appeared to be over (the Taliban
overthrown and al-Qaeda on the run), the polls clearly showed that the ire
that so disturbed the Nation’s psyche on 9/11 had not dissipated at all.
For the members of the administration, the moment of Truth had arrived:
either they tried to reassure and say that there was no need for another
war because everything was now under control, in which case they were in
all likelihood certain to become easy prey at the hands of more demagogic
adversaries of their own or the other party; or either they gave in to the
overwhelming desire to ‘get even’, which would in all probability ensure
them of a virtual lock on power for a very long time. The decision must
have been harrowing, but in the end, the democratic nature of their tenure
determined their choice: in fact, they did not really have a choice: they had to ride the wave. But such a
course of action was not a clear cut option, because the highjackers all
came from countries that were ‘allies’ of the United States. It is then that Iraq
began to be singled out to serve as the scapegoat for al-Qaeda’s strikes on
the East Coast. Moreover, wasn’t ‘regime change’ the policy of the state?
And wasn’t Iraq
close to suffocation because of the international economic embargo? Under
these circumstances, invasion was indeed a ‘slam dunk case’, so that
country was offered up in sacrifice to the Beast. Of course, the members of
the administration knew that the operation contained elements of
uncertainty (see above), but the conditions were such that they now had to
choose between Baghdad and Washington and, understandably, they
chose the latter. The rest is known (all we might add would be to make
certain that what we are trying to illustrate is not to be confused with a
conspiracy theory: from 9/11 up until after the congressional elections of
2006, we think that the Bush administration only did what the Sovereign
Wanted it to do; so there’s no conspiracy, because one can only conspire if
one goes knowingly against the Wish of the Sovereign. We also think that
our conclusions tend to demonstrate that it is possible to second guess the
said administration now, but impossible to throw the accusation of
conspiracy at them: they simply and scrupulously obeyed orders from their
hierarchical superior).
Surely, such was the rationale
behind the invasion, a move which simply did not make sense from any
military or economic perspective, but is perfectly understandable if
perceived to have been dictated by internal political necessities, more
precisely to quench the seemingly insatiable thirst for ‘Arab’ blood
present in America
resulting from 9/11. Despite the usual bunk about ‘democracy, humans
rights, the rule of law, constitutional governments’ and what have you,
soldiers were sent there for the sole purpose of killing Arabs and to make
them suffer, and soldiers being none other than ordinary Americans, they
went for it with gusto. You could argue at this stage that this cannot have
been the case, because the American Constitution, with its system of
‘checks and balances’, is able to obstruct the progression of any political
entity, be it the presidency, whose behaviour could endanger the security
of the state, or harm it in anyway conceivable. In this case, if the decision
to invade did not make sense militarily, for example, the high command of
the Armed forces and other persons to whom such matters are relevant would
have blown the whistle, and the administration, under pressure from the
other organs of state, would have been forced to retreat. Hence, the
decision to invade cannot but have been motivated by other causes. In other
instances, we would have had no choice but to agree with you, for the
reason that we believe it is true that your ‘Constitution’ ordinarily performs
as just described, but in that specific case, we would say that it did not,
because this ‘system’ of government (shall it be said ‘constitutional
government’?) is nothing more than what could be described as ‘democracy
containing democracy’: if democracy ceases to contain democracy, there is
no system of ‘checks and balances’ anymore and anything can then happen,
good or bad. In other words, it is true that, by virtue of the Will of the
People, the management of the state is broken in many pieces: first at the
federal, state and municipal level, second at the executive, legislative
and judicial level for the federal and state level. Yes, all who have part
in this process must be selected by the People (the Sovereign) by way of
elections (save the members of the Supreme Court, who are named by the
president, but as this too is the product of the Will of the People, it
isn’t a big deal - and could be abrogated in a click). Yes, it is not
uncommon that these individuals (we mean those who are chosen to administer
the affairs of state, or, if you prefer, to ‘govern’), even if they belong
to the same party, can have mandates that differ significantly, first
because they might have been elected at different points in time where the
‘order of the day’ differed widely, and second because they may have come
from geographical areas where problems are specific to these given regions
or districts, etc., so much so that the distinction between Democrats and
Republicans can sometimes be obfuscated, the best example of this probably
owing to the fact that presidents have sometimes had great difficulty
selling their proposals to members of Congress within their own party.
Under these conditions, which can rightly be described as ‘normal times’,
we agree that the system of ‘checks and balances’ is indeed intrinsic to
the process, but it is only possible because democracy stands in the way of
democracy, in the sense, as we just saw, that representatives are invested
with a wide variety of mandates that draw from a wide spectrum of interests
and aspirations, and which they have no choice but to defend or face the
prospect of being replaced when the time comes to face their constituents.
And since most of them do hold their own, the highly regarded ‘system’
usually works wonders, as obstruction stands at every corner. In this
context, even passing good legislation is a hard sell, so bad legislation
is almost never heard of. But one must realize, however, that this pattern
can no longer be observed when a majority of opinion among the People
agrees on a particular agenda, and when the said agreement among the said
majority of opinion is sustained over time. When these conditions are
reunited, the representatives do not behave differently than they usually
do in the sense that they have no choice but to satisfy their constituent’s
desires; it’s just that, this time, they all pull in the same direction
instead of fighting among each other, and when that happens, nothing can stand in their way.
These instances, needless to say, have been rare in the history of the United States
(they can be counted on the fingers of one hand), and have been documented
by Bruce Ackerman, professor of Law at Harvard (See We, the People, first published in 1991). For our part, we are
convinced that the Iraq
affair saw a repetition of this kind of scenario. Judge for yourself. The
high command of the Armed forces and numerous other competent minds on
military affairs did express
themselves on the prospect of attacking Iraq, and they overwhelmingly and
in many occasions vehemently took a stand against it, but those who were
within reach of the administration either saw their careers terminated or
were intimidated into shutting up, as the others (retired or
self-sufficient) were simply ignored, marginalized, not only by the
administration, but by all the other agencies of government, as well as the
vast majority of Americans. When the time came for Congress to defeat or
endorse the policy of aggression, those who voted against it instantly
became political fodder (with the notable exception of you know who, which
confirms the rule). All over the country, citizens who did not share the
hunger for revenge were intimidated into silence or too saw their careers
destroyed. It did not take much time for the symptoms of the collective
malady to reach the light of day: in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bill
‘the cowards are not those who crash airplanes into buildings but those who
lob cruise missiles into people’s homes from 2’000 miles away’ Maher saw
his late night show on ABC taken off the air because of public anger over
his apparent indifference over what had taken place. Maher, a man earning
his living by practicing black humour, but who would otherwise not hurt a
fly, did not see that even in a country where the treatment of the affairs
of state is moderated by a ‘system’ of ‘constitutional checks and balances’
and other ‘Legal’ dispositions like ‘freedom of expression’, it can be
extremely dangerous to be ‘politically incorrect’ with regard to the
Feelings of the Sovereign, for the obvious reason that, although He is not
the creator of the Constitution (the framers were), the status of the
document as the ‘highest law in the land’ rests entirely on His Will to
Enforce this principle, which implies that He Is Bound by the said document
only if and when He so Desires. Moreover, citizens who publicly took
position against the Iraq project were bullied into submission though a
wide variety of means, ranging from the ever efficient menace of
termination of career up to outright death threats, documented cases
involving public figures such as Tim Robbins, Sean Penn and other
inoffensive persons such as the ‘Dixie Chicks’ being just the tip of the
iceberg. In the essay cited above, Bruce Ackerman argues convincingly that
in previous instances, the outcome of the Sovereign’s Burst into the
affairs of state had positive effects. We believe that one has no choice
but to agree with the professor on history (the results speak by
themselves, that’s undisputable), but our question concerns the present
(and destiny), and can be enunciated as such: what if it was really the
case that the all Mighty and Powerful Had Decided to Take matters into His
own Hands after 9/11, but only to Pull the country in the wrong direction?
Do you still have doubts? Look at yourself in the mirror! What were your
feelings towards the ‘Arabs’ after 9/11? What were your neighbours, friends
and family thinking on the same day? Are you in denial? Then what did you
do when it turned out that the reasons to go to Baghdad brought forward by
the Bush administration were fraudulent (the Niger ‘uranium connexion’,
Saddam 30 days away from having his ‘arsenal of WMD ready to strike’, the
‘links’ between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi Baath, etc. - and the arm twisting
at the CIA to provide ‘backing’ for the fairy tale)? You kept your mouth
shut (2003)! What did you do when proof of widespread atrocities committed
by your soldiers came out in the open (Abu Graib, among others)? First, you
putted pressure on your representatives not to release the massive amount
of graphic material they had in their possession under the pretext it would
be an ‘unpatriotic’ thing to do (so the most horrible images of the carnage
haven’t been disclosed and are kept locked in some DC underground bunker);
and second, as a reward for their good conduct, you re-elected them (2004)!
What did you do when the number of refugees the ‘war’ made became to be
openly acknowledged in your ‘news’ media and by your government? You
ignored it (2005 up until this very moment)! You cannot deny: all along,
polls and electoral outcomes were formal: your representatives only did what you (well, at least a solid
60% among you) expected them to do.
It’s only when you had had enough, that’s when you had drank so much Arab blood
that you stared to puke, that the hate began to recede, i.e. that the
opposition to the ‘war’ had sufficient popular backing to influence the
policy of the state (the ‘constitutional dictate’ of November 2006). This
approach also permits us to understand other issues which would otherwise
have remained a puzzle. Among them is the decision to disband the Iraqi
army in the first stages of the occupation: if one accepts our
propositions, then one cannot but agree that this move made plenty of
sense: what would have been the use of the Baathist multiethnic army in the
upcoming process of ‘liberation’ of Iraq? Also, Donald Rumsfeld in
particular was severely criticised for having sent inadequate forces, but
here again, we think there is a case to be made that ‘Rummy’ knew very well
what he was doing: the expeditionary force was amply sufficient for what it
was to accomplish. So why was Iraq invaded in the first
place? We are convinced that it had nothing to do with ‘control’ over oil
or with a so called ‘neo-conservative conspiracy’, but was rather decided as retaliation for 9/11. The decision
had no military and no economic objective: it is to be understood in terms
of internal American politics, more precisely with the need to quench the
thirst for Arab blood that became widespread throughout the USA
after the 9/11. Since those sentiments were so influential and so prevalent
among the population, there was no way counter them, hence all opposition
to the project was reduced to silence. Yes, the peace movement did put
100’000 people in the streets on some occasions, but was that, in itself,
supposed to stop a nation of 300 million that had an obsession that lasted
for five years? So history went its course.
* * *
Perhaps
the most significant point that this perspective may enable us to
understand in this complex issue is Bin Laden’s strategy. One must
acknowledge that this individual is first and foremost a (Sunni) religious
fanatic and, as such, that his primary objective is to establish a strict
(Sunni) orthodoxy everywhere possible. In the beginning, the main obstacle
he faced was that he did not have the means of realizing his ambitions.
There he was, sitting in a cave with nothing else but a few followers: how
would the grandiose dreams to be realized? It must not have taken long for
them to find out that the only way they would succeed would be if they
could make others work for them. But who? It is then that you, the People
of the United States of
America, began to be singled out: if
they could make you sufficiently enraged that you started chasing them
around and manufacture a critical mass of carnage while doing so, then
there was a chance for success. In other words, they had to initiate what
could be called a ‘cycle of madness’, whose orbit could bring about an
outcome they desired. So, as a first
phase, they bombed an embassy here and a ship there, but to little
effect and to practically zero recognition. Obviously, more was to be done
if the little band was to be taken seriously. But what? They had no
weapons, no army, and no capabilities whatsoever; in fact, reality was
cruel to them: to the exception of their beards, they had nothing at all.
It is then that the idea which led to 9/11 must have begun to emerge. All
it took were a couple of fanatics armed with table cutlery and you came to
believe firmly that they wanted to destroy you and, more importantly, that
they had the capability to do
so. As a result, al-Qaeda became as big of a threat in your mind as the late
USSR
was. Once that was done, it was time for the second phase of the operation, which consisted basically of
finding a comfortable cave, sitting back, relaxing and watching time fly.
The script was already forged. You would go ballistic and invade a certain
number of countries in the Muslim world. Since these countries also had no
weapons to mention of themselves (well, nothing that could compare to what
you had in store), it would be certain that the massive casualties
inflicted would impact on innocent civilians. It would also be a certainty
that a good number of the relatives of those killed as a result of the
onslaught would go ballistic as well, which would result in retaliation.
But since they too had no weapons to speak of, the only thing they would
have at their disposal in this endeavour would be their faith, a faith of
the same intensity as the one of Christians or Jews of past times, who
accepted death with joy in the name of religion. Also, it would be
guaranteed that the members of the Umma who would not be the subject to
invasion as such would not miss a thing of what would happen in the
‘slaughter zones’, thanks to these new means of mass communication that are
al-Jazzira, al-Arabyia, the Internet, etc. The market was so huge it was
hallucinating: 150 million Arabs, a billion Muslims, all having to rely on
their faith to make them put up with the hideous spectacle. So it can be
said that it went as such and still does, the bottom line being that it is
you who pay with your money and blood to promote the agenda of the
adversary.
Reflecting with the intent of
seeing how the cycle of madness can be broken is certainly worth a last
chapter.
III What is Pax Americana?
To be
continued (chapters II and III of the text which can be downloaded here by
clicking on ‘télécharger’ constitute a bona
fide introduction to what will follow).
Introduction
to the Pax Americana Files
A Word dedicated in all Humility
and with all due Respect to the responsible Citizens who intend to exercise
their Right to Vote in the next presidential Election
April
30, 2007. In
spite of that smoke screen called ‘surge’, it is a secret only to the naive
or those whose reasoning is based on false premises that what can be called
‘Operation Out of Baghdad’ is well underway. It was initiated by the
highest authority of the land, one that no one, be he President, or no
interest group, be it the ‘military-industrial complex’, can disobey: the
People. The process is slow because the Sovereign, in the United States, in
compliance with the Law first imagined and written down by the ‘Founding
Fathers’ and then ratified by Himself, the Constitution we say, must
proceed ‘orderly’ if He wishes to make Himself understood. First, a
majority of Citizens must agree on a manner to approach a given set of
circumstances - or on a solution to bring to a particular problem, or
whichever way one wishes to put it -, second, this agreement among this
particular majority of Citizens must be sustained. Through the
electoral process and subsequent capture of the concerned governmental
institutions, the system of ‘checks and balances’ is then short-circuited
to the necessary extent and the given majority sooner or later prevails.
These cases, needless to say, are of extreme rarity. Usually, democratic majorities
evaporate almost instantly, so that representatives elected at a given
moment with a ‘clear’ mandate, as soon as they come to office, have to
fight with other representatives elected at other given moments on no less
‘clearer’, but different mandates (because handed out in different
circumstances), all of them, as time evolves, seeing their legitimacy and
clout undermined by the arrival of other representatives better grounded on
the issues of the day (who remembers a year ago ? Who remembers three or
four years ago ? On September 11/01, who remembered the day before ?). This
is not to say that nothing ever gets done in the United States. Simply, we
mean that in the ‘normal’ course of American politics, change is extremely
slow to come about, because the Sovereign, the Supreme Authority, the most
capable agent indeed in relation with this matter, is usually of no - or
very little - effect, as He simply annuls Himself by Himself by way of His
own inconsistency - this is the core of the ‘Father’s’doctrine, what makes
the rest hang together. But again, we must specify that we don’t want to
imply either that the People is of no importance in U.S. politics; in fact,
we affirm the exact opposite. The point we are trying to make is simply
that by virtue of this way of proceeding, the Sovereign makes it very hard
on Himself to act, because He generally tends to show a tendency, when He
is in His ‘right’ frame of mind, to be versatile, mobile, variable,
indecisive, etc. But the situation we are witnessing is without a doubt
different, most certainly ‘abnormal’, as it now appears obvious that the
congressional elections of November 2006 were no flashes in the pan. The
Sovereign wants out, and He will vote His way and harass the concerned
organs of government until this is done. Americans are on their way out of
Iraq, that is a certainty, the only unknown that remains being the time
when the pull out will be complete. This moment seems to be approaching
with lightning speed as Congress, under intense public pressure, pressure
that grows by the day, is on the course of passing a Bill that would
require the soldiers to leave by 2008. In this context, the President’s
menace to veto any such measure carries risks only to himself, because he,
in the United States, who runs contrary to the People’s intention is sooner
or later crushed. Still, we doubt very much that the plans of evacuation
currently being studied will go past the stage of discussion, not because
of the President’s apparent hostility (a President can be impeached - and
in the actual frame of things, this one is in great danger of that), but
because of the extraordinary situation a retreat would call into existence,
a situation which complexity has yet to be understood by anyone in all its
implications, especially in relation with national security. In short, it
is obvious that the representatives have received loud and clear the
message of their Master - the President included -, but we believe that
they won’t deliver anytime soon on what is expected from them, not because
they don’t have the power to do so (the ‘Big Boss’ has spoken, there is now
no other interpretation possible here), but simply because they don’t want
to take responsibility for the enactment of a measure whose fall out
promises to be so uncertain. Rather, these representatives are seemingly
‘buying time’, with what appears to be two objectives in mind: first, they
test the resolve of the People’s mood, second, in the case that sentiment
proves durable, they ensure that the next presidential election will be
fought squarely over the issue of the return of the soldiers - a
presidential Veto, should it ever be put to use, shall only be understood
in terms of these ‘delaying tactics’. Why such cautiousness ? Maybe an
overview of the problem facing these representatives will help to
understand how treacherous it is. So let’s then try now to put us in their
shoes - and in those of the next President, there should be no doubts about
this.
The idea here is to banish any sort of wishful thinking and attempt
to forecast as accurately as possible the shape that Iraqi politics will
take after all foreign troops will have left. This understood, if one bases
one’s reasoning on the assumption that the State will survive the end of
Occupation, two credible scenarios seem to arise naturally, which could be
referred to as ‘Restoration’ on the one hand, and ‘Islamization’ on the
other. The first case would see a return to the status quo ante,
i.e. a re-establishment of the Baath party with all its prerogatives. The second
would be witness to a sequence of events already seen in Afghanistan or
Somalia: swarms of ‘warlords’ would immediately re-cover the country, each
and every single one of these creatures making their arbitrary rule
absolute within the couple of hundred square feet where their authority
would hold, until the People, exhausted, would give way to a strong
fundamentalist government having entries in all fragments and sub-fragments
of the political body, and thus capable of imposing by force the basic principles
of life in society (punishment as it should be of murder, rape, theft,
etc.; garbage collection; maintenance and construction of public utility
infrastructures - hospitals, schools, roads, etc. -, etc). But as soon as
one starts to examine this second scenario more closely, however, one
rapidly realizes that it is simply not credible. It is not because there is
not one brand of Islam in Iraq but two, whose disciples are as compatible
with each other as were those of Loyola and Calvin, to name just this
example. This can be seen everyday: the country has been conquered and
demolished beyond recognition; the population has been decimated or has
fled; the Nation has been under the yoke of foreign occupiers for four full
years now, and they keep on fighting and killing each other for syllogisms,
as if nothing else worthy of their attention existed. As if it were not
enough, deep divisions can be observed among members of a same confession
(especially among Shiites). No, the idea of an Islamic-fundamentalist
government here is rigorously antinomic with the notion of a State that is one
and functional. For the State of Iraq to survive Occupation, it must
be taken over by a secular party which plunges roots in all
religious communities (i.e. also Christian and others). Now, in the real
world, there are not ten formations of the sort in Iraq, there are not
four, there are not two, there is one, and its name is ‘Baath’.
Which brings us back to our first scenario. But still, even if the
surrealistic foresight of an aspiring President trying to persuade his/her
apprehended Constituents to put back in place the party of Saddam would
materialize (the spin would be that the establishment of a ‘new’ Baath,
i.e. with a ‘human face’ and led by a ‘moderate’ leader of the kind of the
Mubaraks or the Musharafs, would permit to safeguard at least minimally
U.S. national security, thus permitting evacuation), it remains to be seen
as to what happened to the members of the Baath party in the last few
years. In the Shiite areas, their fate is not hard to imagine: as soon as
the Americans ‘took over’ the country, they were probably almost all
rounded up and systematically put to death by the men of the Ayatollahs. In
the Sunni parts of the country, it all depends on the extent to which the
American policy of ‘de-baathification’ put in the works in the aftermath of
the Invasion was carried out. Therefore, as a first conclusion, it can be
said that the scenario of Restoration may also not be credible after all,
for there is most probably nothing left to restore anymore. So, let’s say
it cannot be entirely ruled out, but appears to be at best highly
improbable for the moment.
All
this to say that planning for evacuation on the premise that a
viable Iraqi State will be left behind might be mistaken, because there are
strong indications that the State in question could very well have ceased
to exist already. What would that imply for American security ? To be
frank, it’s anybody’s guess. What is certain for now is that at the moment
the last foreign soldier leaves, the civil war will spill over the whole
Middle Eastern State system, thus giving life to a gigantic security Black
Hole, a maelstrom whose power of suction will be of high intensity;
this right on the world’s most prolific oil producing region. The script by
which military chaos will insinuate (or engulf ?) itself is already
written. It will be function of three distinct stages. Stage I: the two
fault lines that fracture the Iraqi society today, which can be termed as
the ‘Shiite-Sunni divide’ on the one hand, and the ‘Arab-Kurd divide’ on
the other, will widen ever further at prodigious speed. Stage II: the
region will align itself accordingly. In the first case, the remains of the
Sunni community will be supported by Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf States (less Bahrain). They will face their Shiite compatriots, who
will be backed by Iran and, in one way or another, by their fellow
disciples of Ali of the Arabic Peninsula (example: the very sizable Saudi
Shiite minority makes its home in this country’s oil producing region). For
good measure, Syria, Turkey and Israel will also be protagonists, but as
what could named as ‘wild cards’. In the second case, the Kurds will face
the daunting task of confronting Turkey, Iran, Syria and what’s left of
Iraq’s Sunni community altogether, with virtually no hope of being assisted
by anyone. But they will stand up and fight. Stage III: the U.S. and the
other ‘great powers’ will continue to boast about the ‘superiority’ of
their ‘moral values’ but, simultaneously, won’t be able to refrain from
selling arms to the belligerents, and will thus watch with anxiety the
unfolding of events in their traditional ‘sphere of interest’ (the Arabian
Peninsula, Jordan, Iraq and Iran for Britain and the U.S.; Iran for Russia;
Iraq - and Turkey - for Germany; as France will as usual continue to cramp
on Germany while trying at the same time to collect a leftover here and
there). Past that point, as was already mentioned, rational forecasting is
no longer possible: at this very moment in time, the only prediction that
can be made is that the region on which America (and the world) depends in
great measure for its oil supply will be submitted in full to the laws of chance,
with all that implies for the oil business. In the absence of an
Iraqy state, nothing can be ruled out on that matter (a barrel at
100$? 200? Something else? Your guess, reader, is as good as anybody's). It is no wonder that American
representatives are doing everything they can not to acquiesce to the order
that was issued to them from high up: it could very well be that a plan of
evacuation worthy of the name has yet to be assembled.
So
let’s attempt to put the argument together again. The Supreme Authority in
the United States or, if one prefers, the Sovereign, who does not expresses
Himself in any other tense than the imperative and does not tolerate
disobedience, has, following the congressional elections of 2006, issued a
dictate which could be formulated as such: ‘It is now time to leave Iraq’.
What permits to be sure that the ‘Boss’ is taking sides on this issue is
not the mere outcome of elections as such - a rather commonplace event if
there ever was -, but the fact that the democratic majority which has
manifested itself on that occasion has gathered strength since instead of
disintegrating, as democratic majorities usually do almost as soon as they
come into existence. This means that all opposition to the Sovereign’s Will
is now at this very moment on the way to being choked out of political
life. The best example of this is that candidates for the next presidential
election who do not get the message are facing the prospect of having to
abandon the race because of their inability to raise the necessary amount
of funds, while their more receptive counterparts are awash in money.
Another good example is the recent turnaround of the Mass Media: deaf, mute
and blind not so long ago (i.e. when the war was ‘popular’), it slowly but
surely discovers it has abundance of eyes, ears and tongues at its disposal
(shall we say brains ?), and has started, four years later, to examine the
enterprise from a more critical angle, as a result of which the public
debate is now on the way of being purged of the ‘out of phase’ point of
view. As it unfolds, it can be predicted with certainty that the winner of
the next presidential election will be he/she (Democrat or Republican) who
will present what will appear to be the ‘best’ plan of withdrawal on the
day the Sovereign will make His decision, in November 2008 (‘best’, i.e. in
relation with national security). This understood, the said candidates
cannot but weigh two options in relation with this forthcoming mandate,
options that can be named ‘Restoration’ one the one hand, and ‘cut and run’
on the other. Provided there are still enough secularists alive in Iraq,
the return to the status quo ante appears to be an option on the
condition a ‘moderate’ dictator can be found, a ‘good tyrant’ of the kind
Americans seem to be enamoured so much that they are willing to forgive any
encroachment he may make on the ‘moral values’ they say they hold for
‘sacred’ (‘Democracy’, ‘Human Rights’, ‘Rule of Law’, etc). Of course,
Americans will also have to kiss goodbye many of the ‘laws voted in’ by the
previous ‘democratically elected’ government, like those that sell short
the country’s oil to the MNCs, for example (secularists are secularists,
not traitors). This, however, will permit to safeguard the integrity of the
State, which in turn will enable the region to hold together ‘by itself’
(in an atmosphere of ‘uneasy peace’ but still), thus leaving America free
to extract itself from the swamp and throw it’s full weight at Al-Quaeda,
finally. In addition, the debonair ‘strong man’, the ‘sympathetic autocrat’
- who will spare the Kurds -, will be the U.S.’s most effective and zealous
ally on the ‘war on terror’, because the opposition between secular Baath
and Islamic fundamentalism is not just circumstantial, as it is for the
U.S. for example (9/11), but visceral, completely and irremediably
antinomic. But, provided that there is still at least an embryo of
organized secularism in Iraq, that must be specified, the aspiring
presidential candidate will still have to find the words to explain to the
Nation that the thousands of deaths, the tens of thousands of critically
injured, the hundreds of billions of dollars sunk into the enterprise - not
to mention the 150’000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the astonishing quantity of
injured, the no less hallucinating number of refugees (four million, yes,
4’000’000, half at home, half abroad), etc. (according to the most recent
UN figures, which are generally accepted by students of this episode, but
which are deemed too low by most serious analysts) - were mere vain
sacrifices, and that an exit strategy, to be ‘successful’, has no choice
but to rely entirely on ‘the party of Saddam’. This, at least for the
moment, seems to be at best a long shot, but most surely an infallible
recipe for losing the election. So, we’re left with ‘cut and run’. At
first, this option might appear attractive for an aspiring representative
whose objective is to seduce the electorate, in the sense it seems to offer
plenty of room to juggle with the ‘moralistic’ approach, so prevalent since
the beginning of this affair. The spin would be of incommensurable ‘sex
appeal’ (this term being employed here in the meaning immortalized by Tony
Blair shortly before the Attack): ‘We came in with good intentions; we did
our best; it didn’t work out; too bad; farewell’. Then, when the civil war
breaks out, it will be possible at some point to dump the responsibilities
of the mass casualties inflicted on Iraqis by the Occupier (which are
denied to this day by Washington - ‘we don’t count the bodies we cut down’)
on some Ayatollah, to stamp the ‘G’ word on him, and, furthermore, why not,
to drop a couple of hundred thousand tons of depleted uranium explosives -
with ‘precision’, of course - as ‘punishment’ for such ‘flagrant
violations’ of the ‘Universal and Timeless moral principles’ (preferably on
the Shiites, who did not resist during the Occupation and were thus
generally spared, to ‘equalize’ the amount of devastation upon the two
communities). This line of action would indeed be very clever, ‘sexed-up’
all right, and in direct continuation of the spirit that led to the war in
the first place and presided over it for its whole duration. It will allow
to ‘save face’, to win the election, and also to secure some degree of
‘popularity’ afterwards. But then again, there are also strong indications
that the ultimate dividends such an approach will yield will only be, once
again, of those of the kind provided by Pyrrhic victories. In other words,
if the goal here is to ‘run’ in order to have free hands to go after
Al-Quaida, one can affirm without fear of being mistaken too much that the
U.S. won’t be able to venture very far. One obvious example of this is that
it can be certain that Bin Laden’s disciples will thrive as fish in water
if the evacuation proceeds without leaving behind a strong secular State,
let alone no State at all or, if one prefers, a civil war. In addition, it
will take a considerable amount of money and energy on the part of America
to prevent the twelve States of the region from being altogether sucked
into the Black Hole. One last example: it is impossible to predict how the
oil production and exports will be affected by the Swirl, so enough forces
will have to be kept at bay and ready, ‘just in case’ (but where ?). One
could go on like that for quite a time, but the moment to make a second
conclusion has arrived. It seems that the Sovereign, which one has no
choice but to obey or assume the consequences, has made up His mind. Sooner
or later, the pressure applied on the political institutions will become
unbearable, and Iraq will have to be evacuated. Period. As it stands out
today, it seems that the responsibilities to bring that about will fall on
the next President’s shoulders and, as it stands out today, the course of
action that this person will adopt on that occasion is still up in the air.
On the surface, two options seem available, that can be termed
‘Restoration’ first, and ‘cut and run’ second. The first, from a well
understood national security point of view, would seem the best one by far.
Leaving behind a strong, grass roots, genuine Arabic secular party (at the
hands of a 'gentle despot', or why not a woman ? an Arab 'Iron Lady' - the
Baath only discriminates against religious fanaticism) would have six
distinct advantages. First, the integrity of the State would be preserved,
thus eliminating the probabilities of civil war. Second, as a result, a
collapse of the Middle East State system would be avoided (the region would
still be ‘tense’, that is agreed, but it would not catch fire). Third, as a
result, the probabilities of disruption of oil production and exports would
dramatically diminish. Fourth, as a result, the US, extracted from the
quagmire, could envisage with optimism its own restoration over global
leadership. Fifth, as a result, a true, effective, coordinated
international strategy could then be built around a clear objective
understood worldwide: the neutralization of Al-Quaida. Sixth, in the ‘new’
Baath party, America will have found its most zealous and reliable partner
in this endeavour, for there is no organized political force on the Planet
- U.S.A. included - more antagonistic, more allergic to all the brands and
sub-brands of Islamic fanaticism than this one. But this option, however,
could very well not be one, as it seems most likely that the current
administration and their Ayatollah friends appear to have made sure it
woundn’t. How many members of the Baath party are there still alive in Iraq
today ? That is the question. Hence, there are good probabilities that the
person whose mandate it will be to terminate the Occupation will have no
other choice than to ‘cut and run’. In the previous case, it could be seen
that Restoration would have permitted America to truly evacuate the region
and give it the latitude to retool its vast web of global alliances towards
the objective everybody agrees on in good faith: the neutralization
of Al-Quaeda. Here, we are afraid the U.S. will only ‘run’ into another
quagmire. Just consider the monumental urgencies that will have to be
treated in priority: the Iraqi civil war, the Middle East state
system meltdown and the subsequent inevitable perturbations of the
oil business. In this apocalyptic atmosphere, it will be very hard to
put in motion any semblance a of concrete coordinated international
strategy, because America, when it will sollicit help abroad, will still
again be subjected to the poison that ‘it should take care itself of the
mess it initiated in the first place’. As for Bin Laden, it seems pretty
safe to say that he will have a new lease on life, and that if he dies in
the upcomming period, there is a chance that it will be of laughter. So,
everything preceeding can be summarized as such: the Sovereign, most of the
time mute, has uttered a sentence, which could be said to be: ‘Quit Iraq,
now !’. Since disobedience is unimaginable over time in this case, that
will happen sooner or later, most probably under the next President’s
tenure. As things stand out now, it appears quite clear that the U.S. will
leave behind military chaos, and that the ‘twister’ will expand first to
the region (the two fractures), and then cause wider disruptions which are
simply impossible to forecast with any semblance of accuracy right now (the
‘oil factor’). The difficulty with this more than credible scenario is that
what shall become its driving force, military chaos that is, seems to be a
problem most Americans don’t even anticipate. If it would have been
otherwise, neither the Attack, nor the subsequent destruction of the Iraqi
State would have occurred (in that last case though, confirmation still
makes itself awaited). So, in a nutshell: the clock is ticking, evacuation
is just around the corner, but nobody seems to have a clue of what will
need to be done next.
It is
in this context that the research paper posted on this Internet site
justify its existence. It does not provide any ready-made prescription to
cure the ills of the day. Rather, it tackles head-on the problem of
military chaos and, in doing so, puts forward intellectual tools that may
help to understand its dynamics and allow it eventually to be dealt with.
As such, our main finding is that America’s encounters with military chaos
are not a new phenomena, but began right after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In these pages, we see how, on that occasion, the danger was infinitely
greater than the one that looms over today, because it was not a mere
region that was about to erupt, but the whole Eurasian continent. Moreover,
we see how the U.S. turned the tide of these troubled and potentially
disastrous circumstances not only to its advantage, but to the advantage
of the whole (the beauty, the aesthetics or, if one prefers, the
sublime of the thing lies there), and thus hit what could be called
a ‘diplomatic Grand Slam’. Here is shown with photographic precision how
this was done. First, we introduce the strategists who were the architects
of that masterful achievement. Second, we review and analyse a significant
fragment of the abundant and enlightened literature they produced on that
occasion, which, as far as we are concerned, only concede to the
‘Federalist Papers’ in terms of importance in the history of American
political litterature (we propose to call this literature the ‘Pax
Americana Files’). Finally, we witness the process by which the State
adopted the ideas of these theoreticians and put them into practice. In
other words, we say that the opposition between the U.S. and military chaos
might very well be at the core of what is called ‘Pax Americana’, its first
principle, or essence if you will. This Pax Americana, which can be said to
have established itself after the demise of Communism, can be divided into
two distinct periods, or ‘rounds’. The first one, which is studied here and
which can be determined by the time frame included between the fall of the
‘Eastern Block’ and 9/11, was a no contest, in the sense that the ‘Genie’
was successfully and swiftly bottled. The ‘second round’, which started
after 9/11, is still too close to call, but, based on our studies, there
are good reasons to be optimistic. For one, the students of war which
engineered America’s stellar performance after the collapse of the Soviet
Union are alive and well for what we know, some of them still even being
quite ‘young’. For two, we would assume that many of these proven clutch
hitters are ready, and indeed most eager to be called up once more to the
plate (Secretary of State or other). The difficulty here is that these
supremely gifted patriots have been critical from the start of the whole Iraq
operation - an opposition that sometimes borders on the vindictive - and we
fear that what they will say might be too harsh, or perhaps more justly,
too ‘realist’ for the Public to swallow (which means that the
representatives, if this is still the case, will remain ‘neutral’).
Therefore, a third conclusion can be put on the table here. America will
sooner or later evacuate Iraq, and it is most likely that it will leave
behind a state of military chaos that will most probably expand. To where ?
Nobody can tell at this stage. The point we are trying to get across is
that there is no shortage of students of the military in the United States
whose specialty it is to deal with the problem of chaos, and who have in
that regard brilliant track records. Nothing, however, will be possible
without the necessary amount of support among the population. So here, in
this ‘historical’ essay, is an inventory, a showcase of some of the
resources the Public has at Its disposal to help face the challenge that
will soon arise. It features the most powerful weapon of them all, the
brain; it shows that America has an abundant supply of this material; and
pledges it shall use it in full force. The results might be to the eyes of
some less ‘sexy’ than the bombing of Iran ‘back to the stone age’ or the
‘fallujahizing’ of Sadr City, for example, but we are convinced they will
be far more conclusive (given the nature of the ‘enemy’). It is in this
context, we repeat, that the reading of the pages posted on this site is of
some pertinence.
At
first, our intentions were different. This project was initially begun in
the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Like most students of the military -
Americans included -, we were reeling after the ‘unthinkable’ had happened,
and were trying to understand what was going on. We finally gave the
preliminary results of the investigation under the form of this paper in
April of 2003, as a draft for a Ph. D. Thesis (it was posted on the
Internet a year ago). Our objective then was to understand the true
strength of the American military machine, in the hope of shedding some
light on a simple question: ‘Where will it stop ?’. The originality of our
approach was that instead of counting tanks, planes, boats, ‘smart’
weapons, etc., and then conclude by being in awe in the face of such an
inexorable entity, as it seems to be done in many studies concerning this
particular field, we wanted to isolate and then put to the test the ideas,
or, if one prefers, the intellectual foundations on which rests the
Colossus, or, perhaps more precisely, we simply wished to locate its
driving force in order to try to determine where it was heading. In doing
so, we found, barring our way, the widely held belief that holds that the
hypertrophy of the American military machine in the contemporary world is
the result of a ‘conspiracy’ finding its origin in some dark corners of the
‘industrial-military complex and of the conservative (and neo imperialist)
right’. A fourth conclusion could be inserted here, stating that if there is
one thing that this paper does, it is to expose the myth for what it is.
This being said, our proposed hypothesis have still not been contradicted,
and we challenge anyone, not only in the U.S., but on the entire planet, to
put them to the test: the true strength of the U.S. war machine lies not
in its size or the level of sophistication of its weaponry, but in the aim
it serves. In a Sovietless world, it is the only force capable of reining
in global military chaos and, as such, it preserves not only U.S. national
interest, but also the common good. Should it be put to use to other
ends, there is every reason to believe that serious problems will arise,
problems that military might in itself will be unable to solve. In
the Post Soviet world, the only enemy worthy of this name the United States
faces is itself. That is why the original text has been left
untouched (save some minor corrections, stylistic for the most part, and
the fixing up of the eternal typing errors - and we sincerely apologize for
the unevenness of the footnotes, publishing on the Internet has its
limits), despite the sharp difference in ‘context’.
One
might wonder why this paper is paper written in French if its intention is
to touch the greater public. There are two reasons for this. First, we had
no intentions, in the beginning, of reaching to anyone but our apprehended
research director (and further, to the potential members of the Jury - an
ambitious enough task, as will surely agree any person who has had the
slightest degree of exposure to the Ph. D). Second, we sure initially
wrestled in the first moments with the prospect of communicating our
perception in today’s Lingua Franca, but it became almost instantly
crystal-clear that our command of written English was not up to par (this
is still the case, as the reader will surely agree). We believe we can
assemble a word (in this case, we tried our best), but not 100 pages or
more - at least not yet. Still, we figured that out of a Nation of
300’000’000, a potential market for readership was there. One might also
wonder why this paper is anonymous. The cause is simple. Due to illness,
the project had to be interrupted (November 2003). We are not prepared to
say more other than it is very serious and has to be treated in priority,
this meaning we’re out of business for now. In any case, it is our deep
conviction that the ‘name’ is of absolutely no importance towards the
understanding of the subject. What is to be emphasised here is the the Pax
Americana Files. These, we think, can be divided into two ‘chapters’.
The first is closed. It was written during the period going from the fall
of the Berlin Wall until 9/11, and a synthesis of it is at the disposal of
anyone who wishes to visit this Internet site (II and III). The second
chapter, which began after 9/11, is still in the process of being created.
Whenever we have the opportunity, we follow with great interest the
constitution of that fascinating literature, as it grows and builds itself
together every day. As a fifth conclusion, we would like to express our
belief that every single person who intends to vote in the upcoming
presidential election should have at least some minimal exposure to that
literature. Shall that occur, we garantee that the American People will be
nobody’s fool in this affair anymore (because, if we’re not mistaken, that
seems to be the core of the problem - we will maybe expand on that another
day). So as a last word, and for those who will be leaving us now, we
display here what in our eyes are some of the brightest features of this
‘second chapter’:
I. In the
aftermath of 9/11
Barry Posen.
«The Struggle against Terrorism: Strategy, Grand Strategy and Tactics», International
Security (IS), 26: 3 (2001-02).
Steven Walt.
«American Primacy: its Prospects and Pitfalls», Navy College War Review,
55: 2 (2002).
Steven Brooks
and William Wholforth, «American Primacy in Perspective», Foreign
Affairs (FA), 81: 4 (2002).
II. Reacting
to the Bush Doctrine and to the project of going to war with Iraq
John Ikenberry.
«America’s Imperial Ambitions», FA, 81: 5 (2002).
Steve E.
Miller. «Gambling on War: Force, Order and the Implications of attacking
Iraq», in Carl Kaisen et al., War with Iraq: Costs,
Consequenses and Alternatives, Cambridge: American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, 2002.
Joseph Nye Jr.
«The Limits of American Power», Political Science Quarterly, 117:4
(2002-03).
John
Mearsheimer and Steven Walt. «An Unnecessary War», Foreign Policy
(FP), Jan.-Feb. 2003.
John Mearsheimer
and Steven Walt. «Keeping Saddam in a Box», www.Harvard.edu
(reprinted from The New York Times, Feb. 2, 2003).
III. After
the Attack
Jack Snyder.
«Imperial Temptations», The National Interest (NI), 71: 2 (spring
2003).
Robert Jervis. «The Compulsive Empire», FP,
juil.-aug. 2003.
Joseph Nye Jr.
«US Power and Strategy after Iraq», FA, 82: 4 (2003).
Zbignew
Brzezinsky. «Hegemonic Quicksands», NI, 74: 1 (2003-04).
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