Part One: The Crossroads in Iraq: Why the U.S. Went to War
Now that the mid-term
elections are over, the first order of business for the Bush
Administration, Congress, and the U.S. political establishment is
deciding what to do about Iraq. There is a growing consensus in their
ranks that the U.S. is at a critical “tipping point.” It could be
heading for a major strategic defeat-if not disaster-the implications
of which are potentially staggering in terms of U.S. global power (and
in reality the functioning and trajectory of U.S. society broadly). And
Bush’s “stay the course” posture must change.
It is not
clear exactly how the Bush regime will-or won’t-reconfigure its Iraq
strategy, and what mix of options it will pursue. What makes the issue
particularly vexing for them is the degree to which the disaster is
“embedded” in their objectives in Iraq and the region, the ways in
which their actions have created new contradictions for them, and how
things are threatening to spiral out of their control-or perhaps
already have. And there are rumblings that Bush is considering a “last
big push” with another 20,000 troops (UK Guardian, 11/16), underscoring what a decisive juncture this is.
So
to understand what the actual terms of this debate are-the choices
being considered, why they”re being considered, and their
implications-it is necessary to start from the overall framework these
imperial “deciders” are working in: Why did they invade Iraq in the
first place? What necessity drove this invasion and how did they feel
the war would address it? What then did the conquest and occupation of
Iraq call forth? What is at stake for the U.S. rulers in Iraq and how
deep are the strategic difficulties they face? In this light, what
options are before them and what choices are they weighing? Part 1 will
address the first two of these questions.
The Iraq War: Neither Incidental nor Capricious
Whether
Iraq turns out to be a mistake for the imperialists or not, their
decision to launch the war was neither incidental nor capricious. The
U.S. is an empire rooted in the exigencies of global capitalism or
imperialism-a system which demands the worldwide exploitation of
markets, resources and labor and the domination of vast stretches of
the globe; a system which gives rise to bitter global rivalries between
major powers.
Dominating the Middle East has been
crucial to the functioning and power of U.S. imperialism since World
War 2. The region is both the geopolitical nexus linking Europe, Asia
and Africa, and home to 60 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas.
Control of oil isn’t mainly an issue of domestic consumption and SUV’s.
Petroleum is the lifeblood of modern empire-a source of enormous
strategic power. It’s an essential economic input whose price impacts
production costs, profits, and competitive advantage. Oil is an
instrument of rivalry: controlling oil means exercising leverage over
those who depend on it and over the world economy as a whole. And it is
impossible to project military power globally without abundant supplies
of oil.
In his memoirs, former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger called “cheap and plentiful oil” the “basic premise” of
post-World War II Western prosperity. (Years of Upheaval, p.
862) Bush himself spoke to this logic when he recently warned
right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh that he was “deeply concerned
about”the United States leaving the Middle East” because it could leave
“extremists”in a position to use oil as a tool to blackmail the West.”
(11/10/06, posted at rawstory.com)
Primacy Begets Its Nemesis
By
the 1990s the global and regional environments the U.S. confronted had
changed radically. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 was a global
geopolitical earthquake. For decades the Soviet Union had been the
U.S.’s main imperialist rival and a major obstacle to many of its
larger ambitions, including in the Middle East. When it unraveled, the
U.S. no longer faced any power that could pose a serious challenge to
its hegemony-the “unipolar moment” as neocon strategists called it. But
the shattering of the Cold War order also brought a host of new
problems, including rapidly shifting global political and economic
trends, rising economic competition, and new challenges to U.S. control
of the oppressed countries. And overarching all this was the U.S.
rulers” need to seize the moment before their window of opportunity
closed, other power centers coalesced, and the various economic, social
and cultural tensions besetting them domestically overtook them.
In
the Middle East, the U.S.’s grandest ambitions would no longer be
checkmated by the looming presence of the Soviet Union on the region’s
northern flank. Yet, the U.S. also faced a tightening knot of problems,
which were fueling a growing and potentially destabilizing pole of
opposition to U.S. hegemony-Islamic fundamentalism.
Ironically,
the 1991 Persian Gulf war, a brutal assertion of U.S. might after
Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, exacerbated these tensions. Economically,
the war exacted a heavy toll, including in the Gulf states where
stagnating oil revenues, $55 billion paid to the U.S. for war costs,
and soaring population growth combined to produce budget deficits and a
staggering reduction in per capita incomes. The right-wing Johns
Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami noted, “Primacy begot its nemesis”
distress”settled on the region after Pax Americana’s swift war. All
around Iraq, the region was poorer: oil prices had slumped, and the war
had been expensive for the oil states that financed it.” (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2001)
Despite
its vast petroleum wealth, in 1999 the gross domestic product of the 22
Arab League states was less than Spain’s. The 280 million people living
in the Arab world earned on average less than one-seventh what people
living in industrialized countries did, and one in five lived on less
than $2 a day. 65 million were illiterate-two-thirds of them women.
(Arab Human Development Report 2002)
The Gulf War
spawned anti-America hatred across the region, hatred amplified over
the ensuing decade by U.S.-U.K. sanctions which killed at least 500,000
Iraqi children. Desert Storm emboldened Israel, which expanded its
illegal settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, land seizures, area
closures, house demolitions, detentions, and a constant diet of
violence and humiliation against the Palestinians.
By
2002, French journalist and diplomat Eric Rouleau concluded: “The
deterioration of the Arab-Israeli situation has started to threaten the
very stability of the Saudi state in a way many Westerners,
particularly Americans, had not anticipated”outsiders have
underestimated the anger roused in the Saudi population by the
suffering of the Palestinian people-and the fact that this suffering is
blamed less on Israel than on its American protector. Given the
privileged nature of relations between Washington and Riyadh, this
anger has also started to focus on the House of Saud itself.” (Foreign Affairs, July/August 2002)
Anger
also welled up within other U.S.-backed tyrannies-Egypt, Jordan, Turkey
and the Gulf states. Historian William Cleveland concluded that after
the 1991 war: “Popular disaffection with the ruling elites spread
throughout the region” It is difficult to recall a period prior to the
late 1990s when popular discontent was so widespread, when so many
authoritarian rulers in key states had held onto power for so long and
were simultaneously reaching the age when their rule must end, or when
a single outside power-the United States-exercised such exclusive
domination and aroused such deep-seated resentment.” (A History of the Modern Middle East, p. 525)
This
rage and dislocation are taking place when the region’s traditional
opposition forces-Arab nationalists and pro-Soviet communist parties
(which were often closely allied) were gravely weakened, had collapsed,
or (in the case of the PLO) had capitulated to imperialism. So
increasingly this oppositional void-both among the upper classes and
among the masses-was filled by Islamic fundamentalist trends. These
fundamentalist or Islamist trends were given powerful impetus by their
seizure of power in the 1979 Iranian revolution, and then later the
defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, followed by the Taliban
ascendancy. (Although the Taliban and the Iranian rulers had conflicts
with each other, taken together their rise strengthened the overall
pole of Islamic fundamentalism.) These trends are reactionary
representatives of the old order-both feudal and bourgeois. They don’t
fundamentally oppose foreign capital, but their interests clash in
various ways, and often sharply, with the U.S. and its regional
clients.
The growth of Islamic fundamentalism has been
stoked by the profound transformations wrought by global capitalism.
Millions of former peasants have been left adrift and cut off from
their traditional roots in the region’s impoverished and rapidly
growing urban shantytowns. Yet they have not been incorporated into a
new urban proletariat or middle class. There are also many from more
upwardly mobile strata who have been educated but cannot find jobs in
their home countries. Rooting itself in traditional social relations,
especially religion and the oppression of women, Islamic fundamentalism
has a certain backward-looking appeal to masses of different strata who
feel cut adrift and angry.
Through the 1990s the Islamic
fundamentalist pole gathered momentum and increasingly challenged the
U.S. setup, both directly and in challenging the traditional U.S.
client governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere. Within the
U.S. ruling class there arose a school of thought that demanded
decisive action to both recast the structures of U.S. domination in the
region and, as part of doing that, decisively put down the Islamic
fundamentalists.
War for Regional Transformation and Global Power
During
the 1990s, the U.S. tried to overthrow Saddam Hussein through coups and
sanctions, but failed. U.S. “credibility”-the perception of its
power-was undermined, while anti-U.S. anger was stoked by its assaults
on the Iraqi people. Making matters worse, the imperialist consensus on
enforcing sanctions was unraveling. Their collapse would have been a
serious political defeat which could have led to Hussein’s re-emergence
and opened new opportunities in the region for U.S. rivals (including
for Iraqi oil contracts).
Hussein was neither an Islamist
himself nor allied with bin Laden or other Islamists. But his survival
and refusal to totally kowtow to the U.S. contributed to an overall
dynamic of growing furor at the U.S. across the region which nurtured
Islamist opposition.
The Bush regime seized upon the
attacks of Sept. 11 to consolidate and launch a new global strategy via
the so-called “war on terror.” This became the opportunity to do what
was spoken to above-use American military power to forcibly recast the
region and defeat the Islamic fundamentalists, as part of creating an
unchallenged-and unchallengeable-empire.
For a
host of intersecting reasons, overthrowing Hussein was viewed as a
crucial initial step in this larger agenda. For one, the U.S. rulers
felt compelled following the Sept. 11 attacks to demonstrate “resolve.”
As Newt Gingrich declared at the time, “bombing a few caves in
Afghanistan” wasn’t going to do it, but invading and conquering Iraq
would. But it was also seen very much in relation to reversing the
growth of Islamic fundamentalism. Henry Kissinger, now reportedly
advising Bush, argued before the war that “The overthrow of the Iraq
regime” would have potentially beneficent political consequences as
well: The so-called Arab street may conclude that the negative
consequences of jihad outweigh any potential benefits.” Afterward,
former CIA director James Schlesinger declared, “The outcome will alter
the strategic-and psychological-map of the Middle East”. Far less
credence will now be placed in the preachments of Osama bin Laden
regarding America’s weakness, its unwillingness to accept burdens, and
the ease of damaging its vulnerable economy.” (“Political Shock and
Awe,” Wall Street Journal, 4/17/03)
The Bush
regime calculated invading Iraq would weaken and intimidate Iraq’s
neighbors, finish off the Palestinian struggle, and strengthen Israel.
(In Spring 2003, in the first flush of U.S. victory, Iran reportedly
asked for negotiations with the U.S., including on its support for
Hezbollah, recognition of Israel, and its nuclear program. Cheney
apparently refused.) Occupying Iraq potentially gave the U.S. direct
control of the world’s second largest oil reserves while preventing
others from doing so, and placed its armed forces in the heart of the
Persian Gulf/Central Asia region and on Russia’s southern and China’s
western flanks.
Moreover, the invasion would supposedly
kick-start a broad regional transformation, opening up closed or
restrictive traditional societies to U.S.-led imperialist
globalization, building up the middle class and creating some bourgeois
democratic institutions. All this would meet the needs of U.S. capital,
while stabilizing unsteady and vulnerable clients (like Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, and Jordan) and cutting the ground out from under Islamic
fundamentalist movements.
These broad U.S. ambitions
reinforced the urgency of suppressing Islamic opposition. Such
transformations are potentially destabilizing (as the Shah of Iran
found out when such efforts helped trigger the 1979 revolution), and
cannot be undertaken at a moment of political instability and
widespread opposition. And the changes the U.S. aims for are precisely
those most hated by the Islamists.
The New Yorker‘s
Nicholas Lemann described how Bush officials envisioned the Iraq war
crippling the Islamic fundamentalist forces in the region:
“After
regime change, the United States would persuade Iran to end its nuclear
weapons program and its support for terrorists elsewhere in the Middle
East, especially Hezbollah. Syria, now surrounded by the pro-American
powers of Turkey, the reconfigured Iraq, Jordan, and Israel, and no
longer dependent on Saddam for oil, could be pressured to cooperate
with efforts to clean out Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. As Syria
moved to a more pro-American stand, so would its client state, Lebanon.
That would leave Hezbollah, which has its headquarters in Lebanon,
without state support. The Palestinian Authority, with most of its
regional allies stripped away, would have no choice but to renounce
terrorism categorically. Saudi Arabia would have much less sway over
the United States because it would no longer be America’s only major
source of oil and base of military operations in the region, and so it
might finally be persuaded to stop funding Hamas and Al Qaeda through
Islamic charities.” (“After Iraq,” 2/10/03)
Iraq was to
be turned into a model of such transformation and a platform for
further U.S. initiatives, military and political. Ironically, this was
not because Iraq was then a hotbed of Islamist resistance. Quite the
contrary; it was one of the most educated, secular countries in the
Middle East. This, plus its large middle class and great oil wealth
made the country seem like an ideal candidate for the U.S. agenda, and
a gateway to the whole region. Zalmay Khalilzad, now U.S. Ambassador to
Iraq, called conquering the country, “a key element in a long-term
strategy for the transformation of this region as a whole.”
So
for the U.S., Islamic fundamentalist forces were no longer useful
allies against Arab nationalism and the Soviet Union as had been the
case in the 1970s and ’80s. Instead they were now one of the main
obstacles standing in the way of U.S. needs and ambitions.
This,
not primarily fear of attacks on the U.S. itself, is why officials like
General John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, state
that if the rise of Islamic militancy is not halted, it could lead to a
third world war. (Reuters, 11/18/06)
Sweeping Ambitions Give Rise to Enormous Obstacles
The
objectives that drove the invasion of Iraq were deeply rooted in the
exigencies of U.S. global capitalism and its particular needs and
opportunities in the post-Soviet world and the Middle East. It was and
is a war undertaken to deal with real and sharp contradictions facing
the U.S. in its efforts to maintain and deepen its domination of the
Middle East. What makes the choices now facing the U.S. powers so
excruciating is that in many ways their enormous difficulties in Iraq
are tightly intertwined with and flow from their enormous objectives.
Yet their need to achieve these objectives also underscores how
difficult, if not impossible, it would be for the U.S. to simply leave
Iraq, and why defeat could have such profound reverberations.
Next: Quagmire