What a global moment. The Iraq war is over and you can sense the major media turning elsewhere; you can also sense the public exhaustion with the subject. The problem is — not everyone is exhausted. In Washington, in the White House, in the Pentagon, in the various right-wing, inside-the-beltway think tanks that have fed the Busheviks their agenda thus far, nobody’s exhausted. The strategists are strategizing; the planners are planning, the military is re-organizing itself globally.
Yes, even to Bush planners, Iraq may look like a potential quagmire. The interesting conservative James Pinkerton asks in a Los Angeles Times op-ed (Victory in Iraq Shows Signs of Unraveling),
“Is President Bush’s victory in Iraq coming undone like a cheap cowboy boot? After a series of attacks on GIs, the American “peacekeepers” adopted the same modus operandi they used in Bosnia: Forces have been under orders to travel as little as possible. It’s especially critical to avoid casualties now, as body bags might upstage the administration’s declare-victory-and-let’s-cut-taxes blitz. Of course, the problem is that not much policing – let alone nation-building – gets done.
“Meanwhile, as the U.S. shuffles the bureaucratic players into their various boxes at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the Shiites are mobilizing. The multiple factions of Shiite Islam don’t agree on much, except that the United States should leave. In the past, colonialists kept the Shiites under control through a divide-and-conquer strategy. But for the U.S. to be so Machiavellian, it will need Americans who speak Arabic, and those are in short supply in Baghdad”
Today, as well, the LA Times carried the first piece I’ve seen since Robert Fisk wrote about the subject in the British Independent in the immediate postwar moments, suggesting that some of the looting and sabotage is part of Bath Party resistance to an occupation (Jim Fireman, Saboteurs Undermining Effort in Iraq, US Says). The details in the piece are chilling and so is this comment, “‘It’s like an insurgency,’ said Col. David Perkins, who commands the U.S. Army brigade that took Baghdad more than a month ago and has been trying to hunt down the regime’s remnants.”
If Iraq is an impending quagmire, Afghanistan may already have quagged out — see, for instance, Paul Knox’s How Not to Run a Country in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Remember our war to liberate Afghan women? Well, Knox reports,
“Mr. Karzai holds sway over very little territory outside Kabul, the capital. Even there, he has been forced to make concessions. He welcomed Sima Samar, the courageous physician who became a symbol of women’s resistance under the Taliban, into his government as women’s affairs minister. They traveled to Washington in January of 2002, for George W. Bush’s post-9/11 State of the Union address. But six months later, Mr. Karzai booted Dr. Samar out of the government at the insistence of Muslim leaders, after a false press report said she had rejected Islamic law. When The Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York visited Afghanistan last August, he found Dr. Samar under siege in her Kabul home, guarded by soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition…. [He concludes:] It seems the product of shallow strategic vision, spotty follow-through and an almost non-existent grasp of history. If this is Mr. Bush’s idea of how to run an empire, he has a bunch to learn.”
“Meanwhile, as the U.S. shuffles the bureaucratic players into their various boxes at the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the Shiites are mobilizing. The multiple factions of Shiite Islam don’t agree on much, except that the United States should leave. In the past, colonialists kept the Shiites under control through a divide-and-conquer strategy. But for the U.S. to be so Machiavellian, it will need Americans who speak Arabic, and those are in short supply in Baghdad”
Today, as well, the LA Times carried the first piece I’ve seen since Robert Fisk wrote about the subject in the British Independent in the immediate postwar moments, suggesting that some of the looting and sabotage is part of Bath Party resistance to an occupation (Jim Fireman, Saboteurs Undermining Effort in Iraq, US Says). The details in the piece are chilling and so is this comment, “‘It’s like an insurgency,’ said Col. David Perkins, who commands the U.S. Army brigade that took Baghdad more than a month ago and has been trying to hunt down the regime’s remnants.”
If Iraq is an impending quagmire, Afghanistan may already have quagged out — see, for instance, Paul Knox’s How Not to Run a Country in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Remember our war to liberate Afghan women? Well, Knox reports,
“Mr. Karzai holds sway over very little territory outside Kabul, the capital. Even there, he has been forced to make concessions. He welcomed Sima Samar, the courageous physician who became a symbol of women’s resistance under the Taliban, into his government as women’s affairs minister. They traveled to Washington in January of 2002, for George W. Bush’s post-9/11 State of the Union address. But six months later, Mr. Karzai booted Dr. Samar out of the government at the insistence of Muslim leaders, after a false press report said she had rejected Islamic law. When The Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York visited Afghanistan last August, he found Dr. Samar under siege in her Kabul home, guarded by soldiers from the U.S.-led coalition…. [He concludes:] It seems the product of shallow strategic vision, spotty follow-through and an almost non-existent grasp of history. If this is Mr. Bush’s idea of how to run an empire, he has a bunch to learn.”
I’ll tell you, by the way, what I haven’t seen — a single significant article in recent times on the return of Afghanistan as the drug-producing capital of the universe. (Drug war anyone?)
In the meanwhile, there’s another group of strategists out there thinking globally — Al Qaeda and its confederates. (Sometimes it seems like they might almost be exchanging thoughts with the strategists in Washington.) It turns out, for instance, that Al Qaeda (or associated groups) didn’t just bomb any compounds in Riyadh, or simply any compounds with westerners, they targeted the particular compound which held the offices of the Vinnell Corporation, one of these Pentagon backed rent-a-cop, rent-a-mercenary outfits, as Marian Wilkinsin of Australia’s The Age writes (Al Qaeda Hated Corporation):
“Al-Qaeda has a particular hatred for the US Vinnell Corporation because it trains the Saudi Arabian National Guard, the country’s internal security force and an integral part of the Saudi military forces. Vinnell, under contract to the US Army, employs about 800 people in Saudi Arabia including 300 Americans. Vinnell recently came under the financial control of giant US defence contractor Northrop.
“Vinnell’s relationship with Saudi Arabia over nearly three decades has been intriguing and controversial. For five years until 1997 it was owned by the Carlyle group, a defence and investment house close to the Bush family. Several former Republican cabinet ministers sat on Carlyle’s board…
“Indeed Vinnell’paved the way for co-operation between the United States and Saudi Arabia during the (first) Gulf War.’ It was this co-operation that infuriated Osama bin Laden.”
But, sticky feet and Al Qaeda attacks seem only to spur the Bush strategists onward. After all, unlike some of their liberal supporters, they really never conceived of the war in Iraq as an end in itself, but as the beginning of a push for domination at home and abroad on quite an awesome scale. In the decade-plus between the first and second Gulf Wars, the United States managed to nail down an arc of bases that now stretch from the former Yugoslavia quite literally to the western borders of China.
These garrisons are meant to lock in the oil lands of this earth — with, obviously, the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Palestinians still to be brought into line. But beyond that, beyond even the North Korean situation where, as Jim Lobe mentions below in a piece in the Asia Times, Washington hawks are still planning to “decapitate” the North Korean regime (and South Korea be damned), the Bush hawks (where did the phrase “chicken hawks” disappear to?) are scanning the horizon for future global competitors — and at the top of most of their lists is China, as it was well before September 11th. I’ve also included below two pieces (one by the prolific Lobe) from the valuable Foreign Policy in Focus website (to which my site is linked, if you look to the right of the screen) on such China thinking — and acting. Tom
Hapless Powell soldiers on
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times
May 14, 2003What a thankless job Secretary of State Colin Powell has. Arriving in Riyadh on Tuesday after several days of frustrating talks with the leaders of Israel, Egypt and the Palestinians, he had probably looked forward to a day of relative relaxation and perhaps less tension-filled talks with senior Saudi officials.
Instead, he was whisked off to the scene of deadly suicide bombings in an expatriate neighborhood just a few hours before, where at least 20 people, including seven US citizens, were killed.
“Terrorism strikes everywhere and everyone,” he told reporters at the scene. “It is a threat to the civilized world.”
As befitted the scene, Powell looked grim, but his expression could as well have summed up his feelings about his broader efforts to take back some control over key areas of foreign policy where triumphalist hawks at the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office are pressing their own agenda.
What Next for Pax Americana?.
By John Gershman
Foreign Policy in Focus
May 12, 2003With the occupation of Iraq firmly underway, and despite the uncertainties on the ground and within the occupying administration, some neoconservative analysts are already looking ahead–and not just to Syria or Iran or North Korea. “The real question now is how the United States can leverage its victory in Iraq to uphold, expand, and institutionalize the Pax Americana,” says Thomas Donnelly in a recent issue of the American Enterprise Institute’s National Security Outlook. Donnelly is a resident fellow at AEI and served as the deputy executive director at the Project for the New American Century from 1999-2002.
Donnelly’s piece focuses on shaping the overall framework guiding the Bush doctrine and the practical challenges facing the institutionalization of unipolarity, and recognizes, unlike some of the less nuanced advocates of unilateralism, the importance of multilateral institutions for managing empire.
John Gershman <[email protected]> is the codirector of Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org).
To read more Gershman click here
China Hawk Settles in Neocons’ Nest
By Jim Lobe
Foreign Policy in Focus
May 12, 2003Neoconservative hawks have scored a new victory in the administration of President George W. Bush with the hiring by Vice President Richard Cheney of a prominent hawk on China policy. China specialist and Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg has been named deputy national security adviser and director of policy planning on Cheney’s high-powered foreign policy staff headed by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, one of the most influential foreign policy strategists in the administration. Libby also served as the general counsel to the Cox Commission, a House Select Committee that issued a report in 1999 accusing China of large-scale espionage to advance its nuclear weapons program and was soundly criticized by many China scholars for its factual errors, unsupported allegations, and shoddy analysis.
(Jim Lobe <[email protected]> is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)
To read more Lobe click here