“Beware of war as an organizing principle of society. It should be a source of alarm, not pride, that the United States is drawing such cohesive sustenance from the war in Iraq.” These are words — from the latest column of the Boston Globe‘s James Carroll — that we need to hear. And here’s another simple formulation, from a column by Jonathan Schell in last week’s Nation magazine (reproduced in full below with the kind permission of that magazine): “So far, the American military giant has proved to be a political pygmy.” It turns out, that what we’ve achieved, says Schell, is “regime removal,” not regime change.
If you want to consider the truth of that statement, just take a look at Jonathan Steel’s report from yesterday’s Guardian, This occupation is a disaster. The US must leave – and fast. In addition to a fast-rising “resentment over colonization,” also recorded by many other reporters, even the basics of regime change were overlooked:
“The Pentagon’s failure to plan for the ‘day after’ adds to the anger. Making the time-honoured mistake of re-fighting the last war, the only preparations they made were for food [as in Afghanistan].
“Washington did not seem to know Iraq was different. The one thing people are not short of is food, thanks to the monthly rations of basics such as rice, sugar, cooking oil, tea and flour that every Iraqi receives, regardless of income. In a sanctions-damaged economy, 60% rely on the state-run programme and on the eve of war Saddam Hussein sensibly issued up to five months rations in one go.
“Instead of concentrating on food aid, the US ought to have prepared teams of water and power engineers, as well as flown in extra troops to prevent the postwar looting that breaks out in every country when regimes collapse (there should have been no surprise here)”
And the lack of an authority willing to surrender, Steel points out, offered us no more legitimacy for an occupation than we had for the invasion itself.
Or consider Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen’s grim Washington Post account, Officials Argue for Fast U.S. Exit from Iraq, on the almost immediate rise of postwar squabbling within the Bush administration about how — and how — long to “stay” in Iraq. As the actual state of the Iraqi oil infrastructure (whose offices and equipment in the Kirkut area were, by the way, thoroughly looted and trashed) sinks in and questions arise about where in the world the money the turning Iraq back into a habitable land is going to come from, the nature of this moment of conquest is already up for grabs. Here’s just a taste:
“Washington did not seem to know Iraq was different. The one thing people are not short of is food, thanks to the monthly rations of basics such as rice, sugar, cooking oil, tea and flour that every Iraqi receives, regardless of income. In a sanctions-damaged economy, 60% rely on the state-run programme and on the eve of war Saddam Hussein sensibly issued up to five months rations in one go.
“Instead of concentrating on food aid, the US ought to have prepared teams of water and power engineers, as well as flown in extra troops to prevent the postwar looting that breaks out in every country when regimes collapse (there should have been no surprise here)”
And the lack of an authority willing to surrender, Steel points out, offered us no more legitimacy for an occupation than we had for the invasion itself.
Or consider Jonathan Weisman and Mike Allen’s grim Washington Post account, Officials Argue for Fast U.S. Exit from Iraq, on the almost immediate rise of postwar squabbling within the Bush administration about how — and how — long to “stay” in Iraq. As the actual state of the Iraqi oil infrastructure (whose offices and equipment in the Kirkut area were, by the way, thoroughly looted and trashed) sinks in and questions arise about where in the world the money the turning Iraq back into a habitable land is going to come from, the nature of this moment of conquest is already up for grabs. Here’s just a taste:
“White House aides stress that Iraq is not a destitute country, like Afghanistan. Besides its oil reserves, the second-largest in the world, it has an extensive transportation, water, electricity and telecommunications infrastructure, an educated population and a recent history of entrepreneurship and relative affluence.
“Pentagon officials take a very different tack, emphasizing that Iraqis have grown accustomed to intermittent electric power, unreliable and decrepit water and sewerage systems, and a terribly inefficient state-run economy.“From those disparate assessments, however, flow the same conclusion: Not much needs to be done to improve the average Iraqi’s lot.
“And that supports the goal of a quick exit.”
By the way, given the kind of strip-mining of American society that’s now underway, it may not be so many years before officials in Washington can start making similar statements about what we’ve “grown accustomed to.” It’s worth considering whether we may prove that rarity among empires — one that offers no significant imperial benefits to those living in the imperial heartland.
One question is, as with Afghanistan, will the people of our imperial domains have to settle for a world in rubble — and sooner or later will we? This is not necessarily what the conquered — or rather “liberated” anywhere have in mind. Take a piece in today’s Guardian, Owen Bowcott’s, Us Troubleshooter Fails to Impress on Iraqi support for an American occupation:
“In a sign of growing distrust, one of America’s closer allies in the Iraqi opposition, Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, told Dubai’s al-Arabiyah television yesterday that the US had no political role in Iraq.
“‘We do not accept a foreigner heading an Iraqi government,’ he said. ‘This government has to be a coalition, an interim one and an Iraqi one. It would also be in charge of paving the way for holding democratic elections in order to form a founding council that would draft a formula for future Iraqi rule.’“The only opposition leader who openly backs the presence of American troops is Ahmad Chalabi, founder of the US-financed Iraqi National Congress. He believes it will be two years before a new constitution is adopted and elections are held.”
But the deeper issue is not just our quick conquest and ill-prepared occupation of Iraq but what in the world the world is to do about the single great, militarized empire left on a disruptively dangerous earth. From unbridled power arises the urge to dominate. Three of my favorite columnists — Carroll, Schell, and the Guardian‘s George Monbiot — struggle with this below, asking in their own fashions what must be done to stop imperial America. Can it be transformed — like one of those morphing figures in some action movie — back into anything like the creature it once was — or at least we dreamed that it was? On this the opinion polls of the moment give little reason for optimism. (By the way, for those of you interested in a touchingly modest column from the always eloquent Ruth Rosen of the San Francisco Chronicle about some of the more personal confusions this war has brought up here in these United States, take a look at Every Soldier, Someone’s Child. Tom
A nation lost
By James Carroll
The Boston Globe
April 22, 2003EVEN BEFORE conclusions can be drawn about the war in Iraq (Saddam? Weapons of mass destruction? Iraqi stability? Cost to civilians? Syria?) a home front consensus is jelling around a radical revision of America’s meaning in the world.
Centered on coercive unilateralism, the new doctrine assumes that the United States not only stands apart from other countries but above them. The primitive tribalism of boys at football games — ”We’re number one!” — has been transformed into an axiom of strategy. Military force has replaced democratic idealism as the main source of US influence.
Formerly conceived of as essentially defensive, US armed services are now unapologetically on the offense. Aggression is prevention. Diplomacy is reduced to making the case for impending war and then putting the best face on war’s denouement….
To read more Carroll click here
Letter from Ground Zero
by Jonathan Schell
The Nation Magazine
May 5, 2003In the past 200 years, all of the earth’s great territorial empires,
whether dynastic or colonial, or both, have been destroyed. The list
includes the Russian empire of the czars; the Austro-Hungarian Empire
of the Habsburgs; the German empire of the Hohenzollerns, the Ottoman
Empire, the Napoleonic Empire, the overseas empires of Holland,
England, France, Belgium, Italy and Japan, Hitler’s “thousand-year
Reich” and the Soviet empire. They were brought down by a force that,
to the indignation and astonishment of the imperialists, turned out
to be irresistible: the resolve of peoples, no matter how few they
were or how poor, to govern themselves.With its takeover of Iraq, the United States is attempting to reverse
this universal historical verdict. It is seeking to reinvent the
imperial tradition and reintroduce imperial rule–and on a global
scale–for the twenty-first century. Some elements, like the danger
of weapons of mass destruction, are new. Yet any student of
imperialism will be struck by the similarities between the old style
of imperialism and the new: the gigantic disparity between the
technical and military might of the conquerors and the conquered; the
inextricable combination of rapacious commercial interest and
geopolitical ambition and design; the distortion and erosion of
domestic constitutions by the immense military establishments, overt
and covert, required for foreign domination; the use of one colony as
a stepping stone to seize others or pressure them into compliance
with the imperial agenda; the appeal to jingoism on the home front.
True, American officials state at every opportunity that they do not
intend to “occupy” Iraq. But then the British in the nineteenth
century said the same thing. Two years before the liberal Prime
Minister William Gladstone ordered the conquest of Egypt he declared
that his heart’s desire was an “Egypt for the Egyptians.” The liberal
imperialist Lord Palmerston said in 1842 in defense of his gunboat
diplomacy, “It is, that commerce may go freely forth, leading
civilization with one hand, and peace with the other, to render
mankind happier, wiser, better.” When it came to rule, the British
preferred, wherever possible, not “direct rule” but a sort of covert
domination called “influence”or “indirect rule” or “paramountcy” (the
British were as richly inventive of euphemisms as the United States
is today). Then as now, imperialism, in the words of the great
anti-imperialist Ernest Hobson, was “floated on a sea of vague,
shifty, well-sounding phrases which are seldom tested by close
contact with fact.”It was one thing, however, for Europeans, in newfound possession of
modern tools of technical and organizational superiority, to
subjugate “backward” foreign peoples in 1700 or 1800 or 1900. But can
it be done again, in our century, in the wake of that project’s
universal rejection by the peoples of the earth? So far, the outlook
is unpromising. The United States vowed to bring about “regime
change” in Iraq. The phrase has rightly been criticized as an
outrageously mild euphemism–a vague, well-sounding, shifty phrase if
there ever was one–for an extremely violent act; but now it turns
out that the expression defined a deeper problem. If I am going to
change the oil in my car, I must, before I remove the old oil in the
crankcase, have new oil ready to put in. Otherwise, my car will
quickly overheat and break down on the road. This is roughly the
condition of Iraq two weeks after the destruction of its former
government. The United States, it turns out, forgot to bring a new
government with it when it set out from Kuwait to Baghdad. The troops
brought plenty of MREs (meals ready to eat) but no GRR (government
ready to rule). American forces had no intention of becoming a police
force, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told the press. Did the
Administration perhaps take its own slippery rhetoric about not
occupying Iraq too seriously? The result was a vacuum of authority
soon filled by nearly universal looting. Many Iraqis made clear their
hatred of the old regime and their joy at its disappearance; but it
appears that they had little more confidence in the invader. Finding
themselves caught between local misrule and foreign rule, did they
perhaps decide that they had a momentary opportunity to grab
something for themselves and set about sacking their own country? A
journalist, upon arriving in an Iraqi city, described it as
“prelooted.” Did the Iraqis, in anticipation of foreign exploitation,
“preloot” their whole country?The United States thus achieved Regime Removal but not the promised
Regime Change. There were, we can now see, no plans even to keep
order in Iraq, much less to administer it, or organize a government
there. The famous war plan was much discussed; the peace plan, it
appears, did not even exist.This became clear when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld referred to
the raging anarchy in Iraq as “untidy,” and America’s new viceroy in
Iraq, retired Gen. Jay Garner, newly arrived in the city of
Nasiriyah from the Hilton hotel in Kuwait, likened events to the
American constitutional convention of 1787, remarking rhetorically,
“I don’t think they had a love-in when they had Philadelphia.” Does
he really think that mayhem in Iraq, including the extinction of the
better part of the country’s cultural treasures, has any resemblance
to the deliberations by which Washington, Franklin and Madison
framed the Constitution of the United States? Is such a man fit to
run a country?So far, the American military giant has proved to be a political
pygmy. The Shiite cleric Abdel Majid al-Khoei, who was imported into
Iraq from London by the “coalition” forces, was promptly hacked to
death by local people. The gathering of Iraqis invited by the United
States to meet at a US military base has been boycotted by the
country’s most important political groups. In Mosul, American troops
have fired upon an angry mob, killing seven. “It’s a show of force,
but people don’t understand it,” a soldier in Mosul told the Times.
“They’re not grateful.”Before the war began, it was often said that winning the war would be
easy and winning the peace hard. And it was surely always clear even
to the war’s opponents that the United States could drive its tanks
from Kuwait to Baghdad, whereupon the regime of Saddam Hussein would
dissolve. Yet was it ever certain that what followed the conventional
engagements would be a peace? With every day that passes, “the peace”
looks more like another war.
The bottom dollar
There is only one way to check American power and that is to support the euro
George Monbiot
The Guardian
April 22, 2003The problem with American power is not that it’s American. Most states with the resources and opportunities the US possesses would have done far worse. The problem is that one nation, effectively unchecked by any other, can, if it chooses, now determine how the rest of the world will live. Eventually, unless we stop it, it will use this power. So far, it has merely tested its new muscles.
The presidential elections next year might prevent an immediate entanglement with another nation, but there is little doubt about the scope of the US government’s ambitions. Already, it has begun to execute a slow but comprehensive coup against the international order, destroying or undermining the institutions that might have sought to restrain it. On these pages two weeks ago, James Woolsey, an influential hawk and formerly the director of the CIA, argued for a war lasting for decades “to extend democracy” to the entire Arab and Muslim world.