That photo on the front page of the New York Times yesterday — seven American commanders in Baghdad, Tommy Franks in the center, seated behind a gold-filigreed marble table in Saddam Hussein’s Abu Ghraib presidential palace, all but one in uniform, all facing us, all looking satisfied (if just a tad sheepish) is a classic shot of conquest. They have placed themselves in the seats of power, quite literally occupying the palace of the former “caliph” and it looks it. If we knew nothing, and if it were in black and white, the photo might easily be mistaken for a relic of the European colonial era in the Middle East. It’s a souvenir, a postcard sent back to the American people and perhaps our boyish commander-in-chief. (“Hi! Smoky in this strange burg. Having a great time! Wish you were here. Best, The Boys”). It’s — can we say it — the ur-image of the victorious commanders, our guys in Baghdad, at their moment of conquest, the covering postcard on the fold-out twelve pack that would include the shots we’ve all seen of the GIs sleeping on Saddam’s sofas or picnicking in his gardens. It is a small memorial to conquest and, only days on, the occupation is starting to look that way as well — like a conqueror’s “peace” imposed on a subject populace.
It is, in fact, starting to look like a genuine scandal. Even for the neocons, this could turn out to be a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for, a monkey’s paw tale of an occupation-to-come (if any of you remember that old hair-raiser of childhood). I’m here in sunny Berkeley, California, part of a fearful land at peace, whose people, according to the latest Washington Post poll, think things are going just fine thanks, not only for us but for the Iraqis as well.
“The public mood on the Iraqi invasion remains buoyant, the survey found. Roughly eight in 10 backed the war effort, and more than six in 10 said the U.S. is doing its best to keep order following the collapse of Hussein’s government. President Bush’s job approval rating remains high at 74 percent.
“And an increasing number of Americans think the military action in Iraq has made them safer at home: 58 percent said the war will decrease the risk of further terrorism, up 10 percentage points from the days before the invasion.
“Meanwhile, a majority of the public says North Korea poses a real threat to the United States, and Syria at least a minor one.”
Robert Fisk of the Independent, on the other hand, is on the scene in Iraq — and instead of posing for his portrait behind a marble table in a former presidential palace, he’s wandering the burning ministries and cultural palaces of Baghdad looking at what few others are as yet giving a moment’s thought to. And so he has quite a different tale to tell (as you’ll see below), one whose consequences may, sooner or later, change those polls drastically. Fisk, in fact, seems these days to be everywhere (and my service in the last two weeks has teetered at the edge of becoming the Robert Fisk News Service). But, as of this moment, he is certainly the reporter of the year — the Year Zero in Iraq. He has in his hands the documents no one else is even looking at, that of course most Americans in Iraq, whether soldiers, generals, or reporters can’t even read. He’s watching Baghdad burn, “35 ministries now gutted by fire and the number goes on rising,” and trying to sort out who the arsonists actually are and who is responsible. The National Museum taken down, the library gone, the hospitals ruined, while he creates new documents of the Year Zero, vivid accounts of American soldiers standing by idly under orders as nearby ministries burn, as the documents of the torturers of the previous regime lie open to anyone or to destruction, documents in which the Americans seem to have no interest at all and probably couldn’t read if they did. (One of the great ironies of this “war of liberation,” by the way, is that, with the exception of 600-700 lightly armed soldiers of Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress airlifted in, the liberators seem to have arrived without accompanying Iraqis of any sort, something almost unprecedented for conquering armies.)
The problems that ensue are predictable. Here’s a quote, for instance, from a Time magazine article by Alex Perry, “Lamenting a Civilian Casualty,” about the aftermath of the killing of an unarmed man who was probably a farmer in a truck that didn’t stop at a checkpoint:
“And an increasing number of Americans think the military action in Iraq has made them safer at home: 58 percent said the war will decrease the risk of further terrorism, up 10 percentage points from the days before the invasion.
“Meanwhile, a majority of the public says North Korea poses a real threat to the United States, and Syria at least a minor one.”
Robert Fisk of the Independent, on the other hand, is on the scene in Iraq — and instead of posing for his portrait behind a marble table in a former presidential palace, he’s wandering the burning ministries and cultural palaces of Baghdad looking at what few others are as yet giving a moment’s thought to. And so he has quite a different tale to tell (as you’ll see below), one whose consequences may, sooner or later, change those polls drastically. Fisk, in fact, seems these days to be everywhere (and my service in the last two weeks has teetered at the edge of becoming the Robert Fisk News Service). But, as of this moment, he is certainly the reporter of the year — the Year Zero in Iraq. He has in his hands the documents no one else is even looking at, that of course most Americans in Iraq, whether soldiers, generals, or reporters can’t even read. He’s watching Baghdad burn, “35 ministries now gutted by fire and the number goes on rising,” and trying to sort out who the arsonists actually are and who is responsible. The National Museum taken down, the library gone, the hospitals ruined, while he creates new documents of the Year Zero, vivid accounts of American soldiers standing by idly under orders as nearby ministries burn, as the documents of the torturers of the previous regime lie open to anyone or to destruction, documents in which the Americans seem to have no interest at all and probably couldn’t read if they did. (One of the great ironies of this “war of liberation,” by the way, is that, with the exception of 600-700 lightly armed soldiers of Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress airlifted in, the liberators seem to have arrived without accompanying Iraqis of any sort, something almost unprecedented for conquering armies.)
The problems that ensue are predictable. Here’s a quote, for instance, from a Time magazine article by Alex Perry, “Lamenting a Civilian Casualty,” about the aftermath of the killing of an unarmed man who was probably a farmer in a truck that didn’t stop at a checkpoint:
“Private First Class Damon Young, a good-looking 25-year-old from Idaho, said he was sure it was his round that hit the windshield. ‘That was me then,’ he said. ‘I probably killed him.’ [Sergeant] Lewis asked, to no one in particular, ‘Why do they make you do that? They don’t want to f–king listen, goddammit.’ Young paused. ‘It’s just stupid to have to shoot people who are not armed,’ he said. ‘This language barrier really sucks.'”
Fisk, who can speak the language, asks a different but no less telling question, “In whose interest is it — now, after the American occupation of Baghdad — to destroy the entire physical infrastructure of the state, along with its cultural heritage?” It’s a question he — and we — still can’t answer, but the longer this goes on, the more purposeful these results of American policy in Iraq are going to come to seem. Before you know it, Americans could find themselves talking about “winning hearts and minds” in Iraq, while dodging bullets and organizing urban equivalents of “strategic hamlets.” (Whatever you do as you start into your weekend, don’t miss Fisk’s full piece.)
And speaking of purposeful, Rod Liddle of the British Spectator has written an eye-opener about the sacking of the National Museum of Antiquities (pointed out to me by Paul Woodward of www.thewarincontext.org). Liddle did what any good reporter should do — and to the best of my knowledge no American reporter has done. He tried to find out who the American Council for Cultural Policy, a lobbying group of artifact dealers and god knows who else, formed in a rush in the prewar period might actually be. They have been lobbying for freer “dispersal” of Iraqi artifacts (mainly to American collectors, natch) and against the latest Iraqi sin — “retentionism” — that is, the unreasonable desire of a people to retain the objects of their own history. What’s amazing here is that while scholars, museum directors, and archeologists could evidently hardly get the time of day from this administration, these privatizers seem to have had no trouble getting themselves heard at the highest levels of the administration and may even have had a meeting with the president. Once again, the word “scandal” leaps quickly to mind
At every level, the meanest, most selfish elements of our society are rising up to meet the administration’s id. It’s like — for anyone who even remembers scifi movies of the 1950s — a bad rerun of Forbidden Planet.
It seems, even at the fringes of our government, some agree. Today, Yahoo reported,
“The head of a U.S. presidential panel on cultural property has resigned in protest at the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad’s antiquities museum. ‘It didn’t have to happen,’ Martin Sullivan said ‘Our priorities had a big gap,’ Sullivan told Reuters on Thursday. ‘In a pre-emptive war that’s the kind of thing you should have planned for.'” (Sullivan had chaired the panel for eight years.)
One of the first claims of premeditation behind the looting of cultural treasures comes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed by Eleanor Robson, a British scholar and archeologist,
“It is now almost certain that at least some of the shocking despoliation of the museums in Mosul and Baghdad was organized by Iraqi gangs taking orders from foreign collectors As for the high-profile, high-value items taken by the organized thieves, we may never see them again. They are too well known for anyone to risk taking them to a reputable dealer or auction house. They will become collateral in drug deals or remain hidden in bank vaults. Some of the thefts may have been commissioned directly by collectors and will go straight to their new ‘owners.'”
And then, of course, there’s oil, which in a clear act of premeditation and meticulous planning the Bush administration has guarded carefully indeed. As a friend of mine likes to say now, “To the victors go the oils.” Below, as the third of my articles today, I include the smartest piece I’ve seen recently on oil and Iraq by Yahya Sadowski in Le Monde Diplomatique. He’s particularly strong on the confused oil dreams of this administration and why exactly the neocon conviction that oil will pay the occupation’s way and rebuild Iraq is sure to come a-cropper.
Finally, Immanuel Wallerstein’s latest declinist essay on the American imperial project considers the massive loss of legitimacy that lies just beneath the triumphalism of the moment. (“Military power never has been sufficient in the history of the world to maintain supremacy.”) If then, as Fisk suggests, the occupation is already knee-deep in scandal and catastrophe and heading for resistance; if Iraq’s economic, political and cultural infrastructure (oil aside) is being reduced to rubble by what begins to look like acts of policy or even acts of state; if oil is not the substance that will float the new American Iraq; and if we’re only hurrying along a declining slope — then those poll figures should be relished by this administration now, while they’re still available. (And I haven’t even brought up the perils of the American economy.) Of course, you could say that all this just fits my own predispositions on such subjects — and that would, indeed, be true. As those of you who have read my dispatches know, I’ve never thought the Americans couldn’t win this war, but I’ve always felt the dreams of Washington’s neocons were a mad and doomed version of right-wing utopianism now being imposed on a recalcitrant world. From the beginning my fear has never been the American empire til the end of time — though I oppose our imperial project with all my heart — but a world in rubble to hand on to our children. We’ve already, it seems, foreclosed on Baghdad. I’m not eager to see the world “privatized” by force of arms in exactly this manner. Tom
For the people on the streets, this is not liberation but a new colonial oppression
America’s war of ‘liberation’ may be over. But Iraq’s war of liberation from the Americans is just about to begin
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
17 April 2003It’s going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of “liberation” has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of “liberation”.
At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men with automatic rifles. Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being flung at them. “Go away!
Get out of my face!” an American soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man’s face suffuse with rage. “God is Great! God is Great!” the Iraqi retorted.“Fuck you!”
The Americans have now issued a “Message to the Citizens of Baghdad”, a document as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone….
To read more Fisk click here
The day of the jackals
By Rod Liddle
The SpectatorThe Iraqi information minister, Said al-Sahaf, was still telling Western journalists that the treacherous infidel jackals of the US army had, in fact, killed themselves by swallowing poison, at the time the first looting of antiquities in Baghdad took place.
For some Iraqis, clearly, it was not enough to celebrate liberation from Saddam’s cruel and iniquitous yoke simply by throwing garlands of flowers at advancing US marines. Far better, far more impressive, was the idea of heading straight for the Iraqi National Museum in downtown Baghdad with a pick-axe handle and a crowbar and a Kalashnikov or two.
Once there, this well-organised criminal gang reportedly threatened the museum staff with their guns and demanded access to the vaults where the important stuff was being stored for the duration of the war. They then ransacked the place and rapidly made off to God knows where with their fabulous bits of very old rock.
Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator
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To read more Liddle click here
No war for whose oil?
By Yahya Sadowski
Le Monde Diplomatique
April issueThe US administration has cited many causes to justify its war against Iraq. Curbing weapons of mass destruction – so why not tackle nuclear North Korea? Combating terrorism – but Iraq is not even on the US State Department list of major terrorist supporters. Deterring threats to neighbouring states -well, the US cheered last time Saddam invaded Iran, and would probably do so again. Even liberating women – but Iraqi women are better represented in their government and military than US women. Most people suspect that the US has more material interests.
The popular slogan, “no war for oil”, is closer to the truth than is Washington’s propaganda. The Bush administration cares about Iraq (as it has never cared about Pakistan, an unstable dictatorship with nuclear weapons and a plenitude of terrorists) because Iraq is in the middle of two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves….
To read more Sadowski click here
“Shock and Awe?”
Immanuel Wallerstein
Commentary No. 111
April 15, 2003The U.S. hawks promised us “shock and awe.” Have they accomplished it? They think so. But whom were they supposed to shock and awe? Most immediately, the Iraqi regime and its internal supporters. The U.S. did win the war militarily quite rapidly, and those of us (many military figures, but also me) who had predicted that a long difficult war was the greater possibility were proven wrong. The relatively quick victory does however, it should be said, undo the argument of the hawks that the Iraqi regime posed a serious military threat to anyone.
Does it follow that those of us who thought the war a folly were wrong on everything else? I don’t think so. In my Foreign Policy article (July/August 2002), I opened with the following sentences: “The United States in decline? Few people today would believe the assertion. The only ones who do are the U.S. hawks, who argue vociferously for policies to reverse the decline.” The hawks now think they have succeeded in doing this. They are awash with inflated self-confidence. They seem to have adopted Napoleon’s motto, “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.” It worked for Napoleon – for a while.They didn’t even wait for the end of the fighting to begin a campaign against Syria – chosen in part because it doesn’t have a policy friendly to the U.S., plays a key role in the Middle East, and is militarily virtually helpless. Not having found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (at least to date), the U.S. government is now suggesting that they are to be found in Syria. Rumsfeld has designated it a “rogue state.” President Bush has some simple advice to the Syrians: They should cooperate with the U.S.
Having moved on from Afghanistan to Iraq without achieving anything there other than the overthrow of the previous regime and turning over power to a series of local warlords, will the U.S. now do the same in Iraq, moving on to elsewhere? Quite possibly. And if Syria is next, what comes after Syria? Palestine and Saudi Arabia, or North Korea and Iran. No doubt fierce debates about priorities are going on right now in the inner councils of the U.S. regime. But that the U.S. will now move on to further military threats seems not to be in question. The regime seems to be sure that they have (and ought to have) the world’s future in their hands, and they have exhibited not the least sign of humility about the wisdom of their course of action. After all, how many troops does the Pope have, as Stalin famously said?
Still, one should look at the priorities they seem to have established. Number one seems to be reconfiguring the Middle East. This includes three key elements: eliminating hostile regimes, undermining the power (and perhaps the territorial integrity) of Saudi Arabia, and imposing a solution on the Palestinians by getting them to accept a Bantustan regime. This is why they have immediately raised the issue of Syria as a new “threat” to the security of the United States.
While this Middle Eastern reorganization is going on, the U.S. would, I believe, prefer to freeze the situation in Northeast Asia. Immediate military action is risky, and the hawks hope to use China to persuade the North Koreans not to go further in their nuclear quest. One might think of this as a temporary truce. Such a truce would allow the U.S. hawks time to deal with other matters first, North Korea later when their hands would be freer. For they have no intention of allowing the North Korean regime to survive.
My guess is that priority number two is the home front. The hawks want to shape the U.S. government budget so that it has no room for anything but military expenditures. And they will move on all fronts to cut other expenses – by reducing federal taxes, and privatizing as much of social security and medicare as they can. They also want to limit the expression of opposition – to give them a freer hand to deal with the rest of the world, and to ensure their perpetual hold on power. The immediate issue is making permanent the so-called Patriot Act, which has a clause that causes it to expire in three years. Thus far, the Patriot Act has been used primarily against persons of Arab or Moslem identity. But the federal authorities can be expected steadily to expand its reach. On both these fronts, the 2004 elections are crucial.
Europe is probably priority number three. It seems to the hawks harder to break the back of Europe than that of the Middle East or of the U.S. opposition. So they will probably wait a bit, counting on spreading enough shock and awe so as to weaken fatally the will of the Europeans. In their spare time, the U.S. hawks may ask that troops be sent to Colombia, that the U.S. consider a new invasion of Cuba, and otherwise flex its muscles around the globe.
One must say, the U.S. hawks think big. L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace. In that same Foreign Policy article, I said: “Today, the United States is a superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control.” I reaffirm that assessment today, specifically in the light of the U.S. military conquest of Iraq. My view is based on my belief that U.S. decline in the world-system is structural, not conjunctural. It cannot be reversed. To be sure, it can be managed intelligently, but that is precisely what is not happening now.
The structural decline has two essential components. One is economic, and one is political/cultural. The economic component is really quite simple. In terms of basic capabilities – available capital, human skills, research and development – western Europe and Japan/East Asia are at a competitive level with the United States. The U.S. monetary advantage – the dollar as a reserve currency – is receding and will probably disappear entirely soon. The U.S. advantage in the military sphere translates into a long-term disadvantage in the economic sphere, since it diverts capital and innovation away from productive enterprises. When the world-economy begins to revive from its now quite long-term stagnation, it is quite likely that both western European and Japanese/East Asian enterprises will do better than U.S.-based enterprises.
The U.S. has slowed down this creeping economic decline relative to its major competitors for thirty years by political/cultural means. It based its claims to do this on residual legitimacy (as the leader of the free world) and the continuing existence of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union undermined these claims severely and unleashed the growing anarchy of the world-system – “ethnic” wars in the former Soviet zone, civil wars in multiple African states, the two Gulf wars, the expanding cancer of Colombian civil war, and the severe economic recessions in a number of Third World states.
Under Reagan, George Bush father, and Clinton, the U.S. continued to negotiate with western Europe and Japan/East Asia to keep them more or less on the same side in what have been essentially North-South struggles. The hawks under George Bush son have thrown aside this strategy and substituted one of unilateral machismo. The backs of everyone else are up everywhere, and the U.S. victory over Saddam will get them further up, not despite the fact that but precisely because they are so terrified.
On legitimacy, note two things. In March, the United States had to withdraw a resolution from the U.N. Security Council. This was an issue that was really important to the U.S. and in which it invested all its efforts, including repeated telephone calls by George Bush to leaders around the world. It was the first time in 50 years that the U.S., was unable to get a simple 9-vote majority on the Council. This was humiliation.
Secondly, notice the use of the word “imperial.” Up to two years ago, to speak of imperialism was the reserve of the world left. All of a sudden, the hawks started to use the term with a positive connotation. And then, western Europeans who were not at all on the left began to use the term, worrying that the U.S. was being imperial. And since the collapse of Saddam Hussein, suddenly the word is found in almost every news story. Imperial(ism) is a delegitimating term, even if hawks think it is clever to use it.
Military power never has been sufficient in the history of the world to maintain supremacy. Legitimacy is essential, at least legitimacy recognized by a significant part of the world. The U.S. hawks have undermined the claim of the U.S. to legitimacy very fundamentally. And thus they have weakened the U.S. irremediably in the geopolitical arena.
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at [email protected]; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
To read Wallerstein at his site click here