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COMMENTARY
The war that may end the
age of superpower
By Henry C K Liu
The United States, like ancient Rome, is
beginning to be plagued by the limits of power. This
fact is tactically acknowledged by US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs Chairman General
Richard B Myers that the war plan should not be
criticized by the press because it has been framed in a
diplomatic and political context, not merely pure
military considerations in a vacuum. They say that it is
the best possible war plan politically, though it may be
far from full utilization of US military potential.
America's top soldier has criticized the uniformed
officer corps for expressing dissent that seriously
undermines the war effort. Such criticism is
characterized by Myers as "bearing no resemblance to the
truth", counterproductive and harmful to US troops in
the field.
Only time will tell who will have the
last laugh. The US Central Command (Centcom) has
announced that the next phase with an additional 120,000
reinforcements will not begin until the end of April.
That is three times the duration of the war so far. In
Vietnam, the refrain of all is going as planned was
heard every few weeks with self-comforting announcements
that another 50,000 more troops would finish the job
quickly.
There is no doubt the US will prevail
over Iraq in the long run. It is merely a question of at
what cost in lives, money and time. Thus far, a lot of
pre-war estimates have had to be readjusted and a lot of
pre-war myths about popular support for US "liberation"
within Iraq have had to be re-evaluated. Time is not on
America's side, and the cost is not merely financial.
America's superpower status is at stake.
This
war highlights once again that military power is but a
tool for achieving political objectives. The pretense of
this war was to disarm Iraq of weapons of massive
destruction (WMD), although recent emphasis has shifted
to "liberating" the Iraqi people from an alleged
oppressive regime. At the end of the war, the US still
needs to produce indisputable evidence of Iraqi WMD to
justify a war that was not sanctioned by the United
Nations Security Council. Overwhelming force is
counterproductive when applied against popular
resistance because it inevitably increases the very
resolve of popular resistance it aims to awe into
submission.
To dismiss widespread national
resistance against foreign invasion as the handiwork of
coercive units of a repressive regime insults the
intelligence of neutral observers. All military
organizations operate on the doctrine of psychological
coercion. No-one will voluntarily place him/herself in
harm's way unless they are more apprehensive of what
would appen were they to do nothing. Only when a nation
is already occupied by a foreign power can the theme of
liberation by another foreign power be regarded with
credibility. A foreign power liberating a nation from
its nationalist government is a very hard sell. The US
manipulates its reason for invading Iraq like a magician
pulling color scarves out a breast pocket. First it was
self defense against terrorism, then it was to disarm
Iraq of WMD, now it invades to liberate the Iraqi people
form their demonic leader. Soon it will be to bring
prosperity to the Iraqi people by taking control of
their oil, or to save them from their tragic fate of
belonging to a malignant civilization.
There is
no point in winning the war to lose the peace. Military
power cannot be used without political constraint, which
limits its indiscriminate application. The objective of
war is not merely to kill, but to impose political
control by force. Therein lies the weakest part of the
US war plan to date. The plan lacks a focus of what
political control it aims to establish. The US has not
informed the world of its end game regarding Iraq,
beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein. The idea of a US
occupational governor was and is a laughable
non-starter.
Guerilla resistance will not end
even after the Iraqi government is toppled and its army
destroyed. Drawing upon British experiences in Malaysia
and Rhodesia, the force ratio of army forces to guerilla
forces needed for merely containing guerilla resistance,
let alone defeating a guerilla force, is about 20 to 1.
US estimates of the size of Iraq's guerilla force stands
at 100,000 for the time being. This means the US would
need a force of 2 million to contain the situation even
if it already controls the country.
At the
current rate of war expenditure at $2.5 billion a day,
the war budget of $75 billion will be exhausted after 30
days, or until April 20, ten days before the projected
arrival of all reinforcements to the front. Nobody has
asked how a doubling of forces will win a guerilla war
in Iraq. The US is having difficulty supplying 120,000
troops now, how will doubling the supply load over a 300
miles supply line help against an enemy that refuses to
engage face to face? Domestic political opposition in
the United Kingdom has started to demand that Prime
Minister Tony Blair should pull British troops out now,
based on the grounds that the US war plan has changed.
The White House is trying to protect Bush by
feeding the media video clips of his old speeches
warning against high casualties and a long war: a grand
total of three times in the past six months. Bush aides
are also trying to deflect attention from Vice President
Dick Cheney's excessive optimism, in which he said
confidently that the war would be over in a matter of
weeks, not months.
There seems to be a link
between the war on Iraq initially going badly for the US
and a lull in terrorist threats in the US, despite
heightened fears of terrorism risks at the start of the
war. No mainstream or anti-war commentators have pointed
this out, despite it seeming to be empirical evidence
that terrorism is only a weapon of last resort.
The US has overwhelming strategic superiority in
the sense that given enough time, the sheer military and
economic power of the US will prevail. But the problem
is that the political objectives of the US do not lend
themselves to unrestrained use of military power. The
need of presenting the US invasion as a liberating force
prevents the full application of both "shock and awe"
and US air superiority. "Smart" bombs are both expensive
and ineffective because they need specific targets. Yet
such targets are also ones that the Iraqis expect the US
to hit. These weapon can easily be neutralized with a
tactic of preemptive dispersal. What is the point of
firing 40 cruise missiles costing a total of $1 billion
to hit a few empty buildings in one night.
If
the Iraqis manage to hold out past the summer, the war
is going to be a new ball game. The other Arab
governments in the region can manage to stand by if the
US scores a quick victory, but Arab governments would
have to come to yield to popular demand to come the aid
of Iraq if the war drags on for months, even if the US
makes steady military progress, but fails to bring the
war to a convincing close. Syria and Iran are at risk of
becoming part of the war. The prospect of Russian
intervention is not totally out of the question. Bush
already has had to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin
about alleged Russian military aid to Iraq, which Moscow
summarily dismissed.
For the US, it is not a
matter of winning the war eventually, it must win a
quick and decisive victory, or its image of superpower
invincibility will suffer. An offensive war must
conclude within a short time, while a defensive war only
needs to continue. This is particularly true with a
superpower. Every day that passes without a decisive
victory for the invader is an incremental victory for
the defender. Stalingrad did not need to destroy the
German Wehrmacht. It only needed to hang on without
surrendering. Despite orchestrated denial, the US has
failed to deliver on its original war scenario of a
quick and easy win with both military and moral
superiority. Claiming that it had always anticipated a
long war now only adds to the credibility gap on new
assurances of the reliability of any new war plan.
Globally, two traditional allies of the US,
France and Germany, will now want to be treated with
more equal status with more political independence. The
European Union may even begin to claim the moral high
ground in world affairs over the US, promoting more
tolerance for diversity of cultural values and
historical conditions, over the impositions of US values
as a universal standard for the whole world, for which
no non-US citizens will be willing to die to implement.
Even US citizens may only be willing to die to defend
the US, but not to project by force US values all over
the world, particularly if this war should show that
even with much sacrifice in the form of American
soldiers' lives, success remains elusive.
The US
must bring the war to a successful conclusion within a
matter of weeks, or it will be fighting a defensive war
on all fronts. There is only one thing worse than an
empire, and that is an empire that fails to conquer a
small nation.
The "collateral damage" from this
war is not limited to Iraqi civilians. The US economy
will also be considered collateral damage - and by
extension global economy as well. The first Gulf War,
notwithstanding its military success due to clear
political objectives, the uncertainty over oil prices
further weakened an US economy already in recession.
Despite the Federal Reserve's aggressive cutting of
short-term interest rates, the economic slowdown
persisted and cost the first President George Bush his
re-election in 1992.
Today, the Fed again faces
the impact of war against Iraq on the global economy,
coupled with what chairman Alan Greenspan calls a "soft
patch" at home. Business confidence may remain low for
some reasons not related to the war, even if the war
should end quickly - an unlikely prospect at best.
Unemployment has continued to climb, industrial
production remains stagnant and the economies of Europe
and Japan are slumping even more than that of the US.
Much of the Third World, except China, is gripped by
economic and financial distress.
If the war
drags on further, or if the economy does not bounce back
when the fighting ends, Fed officials have suggested
they are prepared to pump money into the economy by
reducing interest rates even more than they have done
already.
Despite its institutional role as an
central bank that is independent of political influence,
the Fed is constitutionally obliged to support the White
House on national security issues that affect the
economy. Thus Greenspan has not made public any anxiety
he may have about the endless costs of war or the risks
of disruption to world oil supplies, in aquiescence of
Bush's war plans. Greenspan was reported to have been at
the White House at least three times in the first 10
days of the war, and he met with Bush on Monday to
review the US economic outlook.
The impact of
war costs on the federal budget deficit played a part in
Congress' gutting of the proposed Bush tax cut package.
Some have even accused the White House of denying the
military adequate troops in Iraq for fear of its adverse
impact of the budget deficit, which would jeopardize
chances of congressional passage of the tax package.
Charges of exposing US soldiers to unnecessary danger
merely to protect tax cuts for the rich have been heard.
In the end, Congress cut the Bush tax cut proposal by
half anyway. Former White House chief economist R Glenn
Hubbard argued that the country could afford both the
war on Iraq and the Bush tax cut plan, which had been
largely put together by himself.
Hubbard
reasoned that the tax cut would add one percent to the
US gross domestic product (GDP) for the next two years
and would help to pay for the war, the expenditure for
which is a fraction of the GDP. One percent of the GDP
would be $100 billion. The budget revenue boost from
$100 billion of GDP would be $30 billion a year. The war
is costing $2.5 billion a day at current engagement
levels. In the past 11 days, the war cost is already
over $30 billion. Perhaps the Harvard-educated Hubbard
should brush up on his arithmetic.
It is true
that the Persian Gulf now accounts for a smaller share
of world oil production than in 1990, and the major
industrial economies have become more efficient in oil
consumption than a decade ago. Yet the global economy
now operates in a globalized market so efficient that
its vulnerability comes not from an industrial slowdown
caused by a disruption of oil supply, but from oil price
volatility in an uncertain market. For Japan and
Germany, even a slight rise in oil prices would do great
damage to their respective prospects of recovery.
Greenspan's reputation was built mostly on his
response to financial crises. When the stock market
crashed on October 19, 1987, two months after Greenspan
became chairman, the Fed lent tens of billions of
dollars to financial institutions and pushed down
overnight lending rates. The moves flooded financial
markets with money, which helped preserve liquidity and
restore confidence in the financial system, but it
started the bubble economy of the 1990s.
After
the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Fed pumped $100
billion into the monetary system in four days. On
September 12 alone, the Fed lent a handful of key banks
$46 billion unconditionally. The Federal Reserve Bank of
New York, which runs the Fed's trading operations,
flooded the banking system with additional billions of
dollars by buying up treasury securities at record
volumes throughout the week.
Greenspan's record
has been blemished since the stock market bubble burst
in 2000. He was stubbornly late in recognizing the
excesses of the "new economy" in the stock market bubble
by hailing it as a spectacular rise in productivity.
Since 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates 12 times
and reduced its benchmark federal funds rate to the
lowest level in 41 years. When talk of war escalated
last year, raising anxiety levels in business and among
investors, the Fed reduced the federal funds rate in
November by an additional one-half percentage point, to
1.25 percent from 1.75.
Fear of deflation
provides the argument is that if oil prices move up, the
Fed could easily reduce interest rates further, without
causing inflation. Yet the ramifications of higher oil
prices go beyond inflationary effects. Higher oil prices
distort the economy by siphoning consumer spending away
from non-oil sectors, which at the moment are holding up
much of the economy.
If the war drags on,
depressing business confidence further and tilting the
country toward a new recession, the Fed has little room
for further cutting interest rates, since it cannot
reduce the federal funds rate for overnight loans to
below zero.
But Greenspan and other Fed
officials have recently insisted that even if the
overnight Fed funds rate is lowered to zero, they still
have other tools to stimulate the economy. The Fed can
buy longer-term Treasury securities, such as two-year or
five-year or even ten-year securities. By paying cash
for such securities, the Fed would essentially be
pumping money into the economy and pushing long-term
interest rates even lower from the current 4.5 percent
to 2.5 percent. But that would be virgin territory for
the Fed, and officials have acknowledged that the
precise impact would be unpredictable.
There are
other issues as well. The Fed's easy-money policies have
already stimulated home buying and refinancing,
prompting consumers to convert the appreciated equity in
their homes to cash by so-called cash-out refinancing,
to buy big-ticket consumer goods. But this easy money
has done nothing to rejuvenate business spending, which
had been held down by overcapacity and poor earnings, as
well as war jitters. Furthermore, abrupt changes in
interest rates, particularly long-term rates, does
violence to structured finance (derivatives) which is
already exceedingly precarious. The Fed may fall into
the trap of setting off an implosions of derivative
defaults, what Warren Buffet has called "financial
weapons of mass destruction".
The militant right
in the US has committed suicide with the war on Iraq. It
has given itself a fatal dose of poison in an attempt to
cure the Saddam virus.
The link between war
expenditure and the Federal budget and the Bush tax cut
is complex. The size of the invasion force was arrived
at more by the constraints of logistics and the new
"trasnsformational" doctrine, championed by Rumsfeld,
behind the war plan. The myth upon which the war plan
was based was that there would be instant domestic
rebellion against Hussein, at least in the Shi'ite south
- not concerted Iraqi guerilla resistance. The plan for
a two-front, north-south attack on Baghdad was foiled by
Turkey, the support from whom the US had been
overconfident and did not secure with sufficient
bribing. Washington was also unwilling to pay the
political price of accommodating Turkish interests in a
post-war Iraq at the expense of the Kurds. The Rumsfeld
war plan was a fast moving, light forward force to enter
Baghdad triumphantly with little resistance after a
massive "shock and awe" air attack and wholesale
surrender by the Republican Guards.
The plan was
flawed from the start, a victim of Washington's own
propaganda of the war being one of liberation for the
Iraqi people. Instead, the invasion acted as a unifying
agent for Iraqi and pan-Arabic nationalism and elevated
Saddam to the role of hero and possibly martyr for the
Arab cause in a defensive battle by a weak nation
against the world's sole superpower.
The
Democrats can do nothing, for it is their party that cut
the Bush tax cut by half, and with the exception of a
few brave voices, the Democrats went along with the
fantasy war plan.
Geographically, without the
northern front, Iraq is a big bottle with a narrow
bottleneck in the south and one lone seaport which could
be easily mined. The long supply line of over 300 miles
from the port to Baghdad is along open desert,
vulnerable to easy guerilla attacks at any point. The US
war machine requires massive supply of fuel, water, food
and ammunition. The fuel trucks are 60 feet long and
cannot be missed by even an untrained fighter with a
long range rifle with an explosive bullet. As the
weather turns hot this month, US troops will find nature
a formidable enemy. If these factors weren't enough to
frustrate US war plans, even Lieutenant General William
Wallace has openly admitted that US troops were not
effectively prepared for the enemy it is now fighting.
Now the war is threatening to spill over to
Syria and Iran and is creating political instability in
all Arab regimes in the region. NATO is weakened and the
traditional transatlantic alliance is frayed. This war
has succeeded in pushing Russia, France, Germany and
China closer, in contrast if not in opposition to US
interests worldwide, a significant development with long
term implications that are difficult to assess at
present. Globalization is dealt a final blow by this
war. The airlines are dead and without air travel,
globalization is merely a slogan. The freezing of Iraq
foreign assets is destroying the image of the US as a
financial safe haven. The revival of Arab nationalism
will change the dynamics in Middle East politics. The
myth of US power has been punctured. The geopolitical
costs of this war to the US are enormous and the
benefits are hard to see.
This war will end from
its own inevitable evolution, even without anti-war
demonstrations. It will not be a happy end. There is yet
no discernible exit strategy for the US. After this war,
the world will have no superpower, albeit the US will
remain strong both economically and militarily. But the
US will be forced to learn to be much more cautious, and
more realistic, about its ability to impose its will on
other nations through the application of force. The UK
will be the big loser geopolitically. The British
military has already served notice to Blair that Britain
cannot sustain a high level of combat for indefinite
periods.
The invasion of Iraq represents a
self-inflicted blow to US imperialism. Anti-war
demonstrations all over the world and within the US will
raise public consciousness on what the war really means,
and for what it really stands. The aim is not to simply
stop this war, but the forces behind all imperialistic
wars.
Saddam is not insane, his record of rule
is not pretty, but it is typical of all regimes
afflicted with garrison state mentality. That mentality
has been created by a century of Western, and most
recently US, imperialism.
Americans, even
liberals and radical leftists, cannot possibly
sympathize with the natural need for violence in the
political struggle of nationalists in their struggle
against imperialism. They harbor a genuine sense of
repugnance for political oppression unfamiliar to their
own historical conditions. Be that as it may, only
Iraqis are justified in trying to rid Iraq of any leader
not to their liking, not a foreign power, no matter how
repugnant the regime may seem to foreigners. Moral
imperialism is imperialism nonetheless.
Further,
this invasion is transforming Saddam into a heroic
fighter in defense of Iraqi and Arab nationalism and as
a brave resistance fighter against the world's sole
superpower. The only people in the entire world buying
the liberation propaganda are Americans, and even many
Americans who supported the idea of regime change in
Iraq are rethinking its need and feasability. The
populations in most Arabic nations are increasingly
wishing they had Saddam as their leader.
In a
world order of nation-states, it is natural for all
citizens to support their troops, but only on their own
soil. Support for all expeditionary or invading forces
is not patriotism. It is imperialism. All nations are
entitled to keep defensive forces, but offensive forces
of all countries must be condemned by all, socialists
and right-wing libertarians alike. Some of the most
rational anti-war statements and arguments in the US at
this moment are coming from the libertarian right, not
the left.
The real enemy is neo-liberalism. The
war on Iraq is part of a push to make the world safe for
neo-liberalism. This war is a self-destructive cancer
growing inside US neo-imperialism. Just as the Civil War
rescued Abraham Lincoln from the fate of an immoral
segregationist politician and projected him in history
as a liberator of slaves, this war will rescue Saddam
from the fate of a petty dictator and project him in
history to the ranks of a true freedom fighter. That has
been Bush's gift to Saddam, paid in full by the blood of
the best and bravest of Iraqi, American and British
citizens.
Henry C K Liu is chairman of
the New York-based Liu Investment Group
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