GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED ALLY Part 2: Everything is broken
By Axel Brot
(For Part 1: Readiness for endless war,
click here)
Broken machinery
The American political class seems to have drawn all the wrong conclusions from
the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Its leisurely
stroll towards permanent global hegemony just did not happen. Thus, frustration
and the craving for revenge have become main drivers of US policies. The events
of September 11 focused their common dysfunctionality, but they are not its
root cause.
It is from this vantage point that arises the resigned and poignant
expectation that the US will permit neither a stable Russia nor a
non-cataclysmic accommodation of China's rise. American politics now have just
enough flexibility to negotiate the short-term priorities of whom to put under
the pressure of regime-changing demands; but the system is rigged not to reward
persuasion or accommodation but toward increasing confrontation, deadline
diplomacy, and grandstanding on principles that carry the load of broken
credibility.
Notwithstanding the worthy efforts of the Iraq Study Group or the Princeton
Project on National Security to get some means-to-ends rationality back into US
policies, politics are impaired by the lack of discipline and prudence that
come with the reinforcement of the imperial mind-set of official Washington by
the media and think tanks.
Unfortunately, this mind-set is not only the defining attribute of the present
administration but of both parties - and abundantly so, of the serious
contenders for the next US presidency. They are already competing in burning
the bridges to a somewhat more patient approach to imperial policies while
berating the present administration for its weakness. Different combinations of
bombing Iran, breaking Hezbollah, confronting the Russians, sanctioning the
Chinese, squeezing the Saudis and Pakistanis, pressuring the Indians into a
subordinate relationship, installing an "accountable" dictatorship in Iraq
(and/or taking it apart), are on the menu of the main candidates - plus
unfettering US "soft power" and hitching the allies more effectively to
whatever load is to be pulled.
It is therefore all too easy to see in the current travails of global diplomacy
efforts to adapt to the implicit American choice of "either the US or chaos".
But the lessons are not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but the failed attempts of
Serbia (1999), Iran (2003) and Syria (ongoing), to bow to US/Western demands
while keeping a measure of independence and dignity. In fact, looking at the
last 16 years or so, at the fate of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, of
the former Yugoslavia, and of Iraq or Afghanistan, they may come to the
conclusion that they have nothing to lose even in a military confrontation.
And since the march of empire is tuned to the racial - alias "civilizational" -
superiority (of the "Anglosphere"), non-Western elites may interpret this
choice as "the US and chaos". If it is their ambition just to loot their
countries and then to set-up shop in one of the Western tax-sheltered
playgrounds or to turn into sharecroppers of their countries´ resources, the
choice is a good one. If they are at all attentive, reasonably patriotic, and
have a measure of pride, they cannot but resist it.
It is, in the last analysis, also a question of self-esteem and a sense of
historical accountability. Can elites in their right mind bear to be the butt
of a sardonic witticism like the one going around among Anglo-Saxon officials,
targeting the Saudi combination of immense corruption and paying immense
protection money: the Saudis "prefer to suffocate on their knees instead of
dying on their feet".
But contempt and the lust for chaos ("creative destruction") have become the
coin of the realm. They are heated by fantasies of a global caste society where
"The Shield of Achilles", "Imperial Grunts", "Left Behind", and "The Diamond
Age" are busy cross-pollinating the imperial imagination. One might add that a
Pentagon (Office for Net Assessment) study of the consequences of climate
change provides a window into the darkest, survivalist corner of this mind-set
and implies, in addition, an answer to the questions "who is the West?" and
"who is superfluous?"
The return with a vengeance of the "covert operations approach" to US
international policies, therefore, has much more to do with this sinister
self-fictionalization than with the nature of threats or the simple
availability of the instruments. While for most periods of the Cold War,
concerns about exposure, blowback, and provoking war with the Soviets kept it
somewhat under control, it has slipped the leash. Everyone who can has gone
into business. It is not only the White House that is exceedingly liberal in
its use of privateers, frequently retreaded intelligence and military officials
who should have been disposed of out of harm's way.
There is the evolution of a huge gray zone of private "consultancy" enterprises
of former government officials who parlay their international contacts with
state and sub-state actors, with insurgencies in search of upscale sponsoring,
and policy-lobbying groups, as well as their international business contacts -
in particular with the energy, financial, arms and security industries - into
business and influence. On returning to government service, their pet projects,
policies and money-spinners don´t just go into hibernation, they are continued
as government policies. The merchandising of imperial policies and the
mercantilization of military violence have become the hallmark of this strange
combination of militarism and venality. One of the new breed of temporary,
parvenu officials demonstrated its bottom-line aspect with the pithy question:
"What is the use of empire when you can´t make money out of it?"
On the policy level, the concern about blowback and exposure has all but
disappeared, except as a weapon of bureaucratic bloodletting when the hunt for
the scapegoat is on. It can only operate as a restraint if a sense of
moderation can be imposed and if its consequences have a deterring effect. None
of this pertains. US policies, instead, gestate in the world of the much-quoted
Melian Dialogue where a sense of impunity and omnipotence have destroyed any
regard for prudence. Since the tyro-days of retired Air Force Major General
Richard Secord's rubbing shoulders with the cocaine mafia in order to finance
the Nicaraguan Contras, this state of affairs has given a completely new
meaning to "unleashing covert operations", "plausible deniability", and, of
course, to Ronald Reagan´s famous "boys will be boys" mentality.
The more vicious side of the problem, though, exposes the meltdown of the
firewalls between the branches of government, between the executive branch and
Congress, between public and private, between business and government - in a
witches' brew of projects and interests. And no government agency has the clout
or the will to turn off any of the cross-married projects of policy-lobbying,
intelligence and black operations that acquired godparents in government, in
Congress, or with one of the powerful lobbying outfits.
They may sink, perhaps, below the awareness threshold of the principals, but
move they will unstintingly, metamorphosing, mutating and spawning descendents
in the fetid swamp of subcontractors, public-private intelligence outfits,
mercenaries, fundamentalist missionary organizations, security firms, to
reappear someday as "operation in place", and thus renewing the cycle. The
Sudanese troubles are a prime example of how this itinerant ecosystem produces
and reproduces ever increasing mayhem in weak states cursed with strategic
significance.
But all of that does not even begin to address the destructive effects of its
frequent connection to the underworld, of the illicit trade in weapons, raw
materials, etc, or to the globally operating crime syndicates and their
economic infrastructure.
It is only logical that the selection of policy-making personnel seems now to
follow the Israeli, Italian, and Japanese model, moving ever deeper into the
world of clan loyalties (the neo-conservatives are only the most
self-consciously "family-oriented" clan) where the distinction between loyalty
to office and loyalty to clan disappears completely at the level of deputy
assistant secretary.
And it is starting to infect Germany. Not only because many corners of the
German foreign intelligence apparatus are, by design and tradition, bespoke to
US and Israeli intelligence, and its political control mechanisms are slick
even by Western standards. It is the osmosis of bad habits via the demands of
Western solidarity.
In a moment of unguarded candor, the Berlin correspondent of the conservative
Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung bemoaned the unrestrained recruiting of
journalists and NGO representatives by German intelligence as far worse than
spying on journalists to plug leaks. This comment illuminated for a short
moment one of the rooms in the sub-basement of German foreign policy.
Of even greater salience for the shape of things to come is the introduction
into Germany of the linkage of intelligence and business, and of both to covert
operations. A story is floating around in the international media that the
former head of German intelligence and current member of parliament Bernd
Schmidbauer is allegedly the facilitator for an Israeli intelligence agent
turned businessman who is deeply involved in Israeli projects in Iraqi
Kurdistan. Using Schmidbauer's contacts among the leadership of the Iraqi
Kurds, the Israeli agent reportedly secured land contracts worth many millions
of dollars to give the Kurds a greater share of the (disappeared) billions from
the oil-for-food account.
It is probably just an interesting, albeit rather disingenuous cover-story. But
whatever the details, it is a fact that Schmidbauer is using his former office
for that kind of purpose, and that is the message. And it is hard to judge what
is worse: Schmidbauer involved in Israeli shenanigans that connect covert
operations to business profits; or a private venture doing the same.
The discontent with German military involvement
More immediate, however, are concerns that German soldiers are already being
sent into open-ended missions in potentially casualty-rich intervention
environments - environments where American (British and Israeli) policies have
publicly, contemptuously, and irreversibly debauched 100 years' worth of
international law that tried to regulate the use of military violence. The
German allies are running a kind of social-Darwinian selection experiment in
their militaries, to weed out the conscience-ridden, the susceptible, and the
whistle-blowers and to breed back the mind-set of colonial warfare against
"enemy populations", with all the repercussions on civil society that this
entails.
The resulting mercenary habits and "warrior ethics" -
moral inhibitions restrained in favor of racial contempt as part of unit
bonding - cannot but infect and then corrode the restraint trained into the
"citizen-soldiers" of a parliamentary army. The more they are committed to
operations in the "war on terror", the more they will encounter the desperate
hate of those who have been exposed to the US ways of pacification, and the
greater the danger of contamination.
In other words: there is fear that German forces will absorb this mentality by
participating in these society-destroying operations whose results can already
be seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine - and in future campaigns that have
the potential to deteriorate into annihilation warfare. The fear is not
far-fetched: one might look at the doctrinal evolution with regard to warfare
in the "global ghettos" or, by way of example, scrutinize the strategies
considered and the fervor for a war against Iran.
Those with legal training and some historical awareness cannot but see
parallels between what is happening now and the judicial and propaganda
preparations during the run-up to the German attack on Soviet Russia:
imprinting on the soldiers' minds that they are going to confront a sub-human,
vicious, cruel, and cunning enemy; then denying whole categories of enemy
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