Iraq rebuilds, with a little US help A ceasefire agreement between Iraq and
Iran was signed on August 20, 1988. Iraq then
rebuilt its military capability with bank credits
and technology from Western Europe and the United
States, financed mostly by Saudi Arabia. Five days after
the ceasefire, Saddam Hussein sent planes and helicopters
to northern Iraq to begin massive chemical attacks
against Kurd separatists. In September 1988 the US
Department of Commerce again approved shipment
of weapons-grade anthrax and botulinum to Iraq for use
in domestic security operations. In that month
assistant secretary of state Richard Murphy said:
"The US-Iraqi relationship is ... important to our
long-term political and economic objectives." That December, Dow
Chemical sold US$1.5 million in pesticides to Iraq,
despite knowledge that these would be used in chemical
weapons domestically. Brutal actions against Kurdish
separatists were undertaken in 1988 in northern Iraq,
where Ali Hassan al-Majid was accused of ordering the
gas attack against civilians that killed about 5,000. It
took six years and a change in geopolitical conditions
before the US shed crocodile's tears for the tragedy.
The US legally and illegally helped build
Saddam's military into the most powerful war machine in
the Middle East outside of Israel. The US supplied
chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq
when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the
Iranians. The US supplied intelligence and
battle-planning information to Iraq when those battle
plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve
agents. The US blocked UN censure of Iraq's use of
chemical weapons. The US continued to supply the
materials and technology for these weapons of mass
destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that
Saddam was using this technology to kill Kurdish
separatists. The US did not act alone in this effort.
The Soviet Union and later Russia was the largest
weapons supplier, but Britain, France and Germany were
also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.
All sold weapons to both sides of the war.
Iraq searches for identity Since 1958,
when the last persistently pro-West Iraqi government in
Baghdad was overthrown, and diplomatic relations between
the US and Iraq formally broken nine years later,
first-hand knowledge of Iraq and of the successive
regimes that had since governed it has been unavailable
to senior officials in Washington, whose fixation on
global anti-communism left them with little interest on
subtleties. The US had largely operated in a policy
vacuum without the support of full understanding of
Iraq, of its people and most importantly of the concerns
that motivated its leaders. Much of US policy on Iraq
has been based on advice from biased Iraqi exiles,
opportunistic academics and self-serving pro-Israel
partisans.
Notwithstanding
Washington's penchant to demonize its latest enemies, Iraqi leaders,
at least those not having been imposed by foreign
powers, not unlike independent leaders anywhere else,
are motivated and constrained in their policy deliberation
by their perception of popular aspirations which are shaped
by a nation's collective self-image, history and
cultural tradition. The self-image of the Arabic people is one of
a long victimized people, most recently at the hands of
Western imperialism and historically of Christian bias,
persecuted for their Arabic ethnicity and Islamic
heritage. Iraq, like all Middle East nations, aspires to
be finally free of foreign intervention in its domestic
affairs, to enjoy a high standard of living in peace and
harmony consistent with its oil riches as God's gift.
These national aspirations have been shaped by a history
of wounded national pride, of betrayal by foreign allies
who exploited inter-tribal rivalry, of evolving
nationalism, of ethnic, religious and linguistic
tension, and of demographic pressure from an
increasingly youthful and impatient population. In Iraq,
as in many other countries in the region, more than half
of the population of 25 million is under the age of 25
who have not accumulated any assets that would provide
incentive to be politically conservative.
Besides history, Iraqi politics is influenced by
its location and geography, climate and the availability
of water, which in many ways is more critical than oil.
The scarcity of water in the Middle East, heightened by
rapid urbanization and industrialization, has placed
more importance on Iraq's two rivers, the Tigris and the
Euphrates. Even with the ascendance of oil as a source
of wealth, agriculture relying on renewable water
remains the main source of employment. These factors
have influenced settlement patterns, tribalism, resource
utilization and the development of diverse regional
economics. For example, the fact that these two rivers
flood between April and June, too late for winter crops
and too early for summer crops, means that agriculture
depends on irrigation, which has been under central
government control since the creation of the Iraq state,
implemented with the cooperation of diverse ethnic,
religious and tribal groups. Water was able to unite the
Iraqi population more than oil. Baghdad, located in the
center of the country, lies in the transitional zone
between north and south where the Tigris becomes
navigable and large-scale irrigation possible. The
capital city is a historical center of trade and
communication.
The present boundaries of Iraq,
undefined until 1926, were drawn in the 20th century by
European political and economic interests with little
regard for indigenous demographic patterns. There is a
tension between the Iraqi state, representing the
central authority within its borders, and the Iraqi
nation, a tribal society divided by religious schism. As
Faisal, the first Hashimite king of Iraq, lamented in the
early 1930s: "I say in my heart full of sadness that
there is not yet in Iraq an Iraqi people." This is the
root argument of pan-Arabism in Iraqi politics. The
history of the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party reflects the
evolution of modern Middle East politics, in that it has
departed from formal ideology of its original founders
to adopt pragmatic measures to solve real problems
within an Arabic/Islamic world view. The war with Iran,
the most costly and bloody conflict not involving a
Western power directly since World War II, and the Iraqi
incorporation of Kuwait, were not mere conflicts over
borders, or access to the Shatt al-Arab waterway. The
Iran-Iraq war was a clash between extremist Islamic
fundamentalism espoused by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
of Iran and the pan-Arab nationalism of the Ba'athists,
both in and out of Iraq.
The irreconcilability
of the two opposing ideologies is based on Iranian
rejection of limiting radical Islamic fundamentalism
within one country, and Ba'athist resistance to a world
Islamic revolution, manifesting in Iraq as resistance to
Iranian incitement of the large Shi'ite population in
Iraq, many of whom are of Iranian descent. The
incorporation of Kuwait was a fulfillment of pan-Arab
nationalism.
Iraq, situating on the eastern
flank of the Arab world, is sandwiched between two
historical formidable non-Arab powers which have
survived as the modern states of Turkey and Iran, with
whom Iraq shares ethnic groups. Propinquity translates
into vulnerability. In a speech on November 5, 1980,
Saddam said: "Turkey once imposed on us the Turkish
language and culture ... They used to take turns on
Iraq. Turkey goes and Iran comes; Iran goes and Turkey
comes. All this under the guise of Islam. Enough ... We
are Iraqis and are part of the Arab homeland and the
Arab nation. Iraq belongs to us." He was using the term
Iraq the way it was used in the Koran, denoting all of
Mesopotamia in a pan-Arab context, not the modern state
of Iraq, whose borders were delineated by British
imperialism.
It has been suggested that the US
deliberately lured Saddam into Kuwait in order to attack
an increasingly intransigent Iraq. Saddam's meeting with
US ambassador April Glaspie is usually cited as
evidence. The records of that meeting indicate that
Glaspie did not discourage Saddam, let alone warn him
about his highly visible massing of troops along the
Kuwait border. But the real purpose was not related to
Iraqi aggression or intransigence. It was to exploit the
contradiction between Arab regionalism and pan-Arabism
to strengthen US control of the region. Saddam told the
US that he expected just reward for Iraq's role in
helping the US contain a hostile and extremist Iran, in
a war that had cost 60,000 Iraqi lives in one single
battle, a price Saddam claimed the US would be unable to
shoulder itself, given the nature of US society. Iraq
was left with a foreign debt of more than $40 billion after
the Iraq-Iran War, and needed higher oil prices of
around $40 per barrel to help pay this debt. Kuwait was
deliberately keeping oil prices low to destroy Iraq's
economy. Glaspie responded that there were people from
oil states within the US who would also want to see
higher oil prices.
A transcript excerpt of the
meeting between Saddam and Glaspie, on July 25, 1990
(eight days before the August 2, 1990, Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait), released by British journalists, reads as
follows:
July 25, 1990 - Presidential Palace -
Baghdad. Ambassador Glaspie: I have direct
instructions from President Bush [Sr] to improve our
relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for
your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause
of your confrontation with Kuwait. (pause) As you
know, I lived here for years and admire your
extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. We know
you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is
that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your
country. (pause) We can see that you have deployed
massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that
would be none of our business, but when this happens
in the context of your threats against Kuwait, then it
would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this
reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in
the spirit of friendship - not confrontation -
regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed
so very close to Kuwait's borders?
Saddam
Hussein: As you know, for years now I have made
every effort to reach a settlement on our dispute with
Kuwait. There is to be a meeting in two days; I am
prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief
chance. (pause) When we [the Iraqis] meet [with the
Kuwaitis] and we see there is hope, then nothing will
happen. But if we are unable to find a solution, then
it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.
Ambassador Glaspie: What solutions
would be acceptable?
Saddam Hussein: If
we could keep the whole of the Shatt al-Arab - our
strategic goal in our war with Iran - we will make
concessions [to the Kuwaitis]. But if we are forced to
choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the whole
of Iraq [ie, in Saddam's view, including Kuwait] then
we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims
on Kuwait to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we
wish it to be. (pause) What is the United States'
opinion on this?
Ambassador Glaspie: We
have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as
your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of state James]
Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction,
first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait
issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)
While pledging US neutrality on Arab-Arab
conflicts, thus not discouraging Iraq from moving
against Kuwait, the US at the same time gave Kuwait,
through then defense secretary Dick Cheney, assurances
that it would defend it against an attack from Iraq,
emboldening Kuwait to refuse to negotiate.
The US goes to war in the Gulf On
August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. Four
days later, on August 6, the United Nations imposed
heavy sanctions on Iraq, on request from the US.
Simultaneously, after consulting with US secretary of
defense Cheney, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the head of
the Arab regionalist snake, invited US troops on to
Saudi soil. The unhappy fate of Kuwait had led the Saudi
king to seek protection from the US against the march of
pan-Arabism. Iraq's transgression was not so much to
repossess Kuwait as an integral part of Iraq, but that
it claimed Kuwait as the first step on the march toward
pan-Arabism. If Iraq were to be allowed to keep Kuwait
on the basis of pan-Arabism, the survival of the Arab
regionalist states will be directly threatened.
President
George H W Bush quickly announced that the US would launch
a "wholly defensive" mission to prevent Iraq from
invading Saudi Arabia, and US troops moved into Saudi
Arabia on August 7, 1990. Those who thought simplistically that
the US moved troops into Saudi Arabia to
protect Saudi oil were missing the point. At the time,
Iraq was selling a higher percentage of its oil to
the US than Saudi Arabia, and there was no reason to expect
Iraq to change its oil export strategy. The Iraqi purpose
in repossessing Kuwait oil was to sell it, not to
hoard it. Yet the idea of a war to protect oil supply enjoyed
wide automatic support in US politics, more than
obscure geopolitical calculations, especially when greed
and power have been celebrated in US society as moral
positives since the 1970s. Under the cover of protection of
oil supply, the US moved troops into Saudi Arabia to
stop the march of pan-Arabism. It was a fateful development,
as the al-Qaeda pretext for the attacks on
US soil on September 11, 2001, 11 years later was centered
on demands for the removal of US troops from Saudi
Arabia. The unintended consequences of geopolitical stratagem
was being expressed through the iron law
of terrorism of what goes around, comes around, known generally
as the blowback effect, a term coined by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA).
On September 25, the UN imposed an
interdiction on air traffic to and from Iraq. On
November 29, the US got its UN war resolution. John
Pilger reported in The Guardian that this was achieved
through a campaign of bribery, blackmail and threats. In
1990, Egypt was the most indebted country in Africa.
Secretary of state James Baker bribed president Hosni
Mubarak with $14 billion in "debt forgiveness" in
exchange for Egypt withholding opposition to the pending
war on Iraq. Washington gave President Hafez al-Assad
the green light to wipe out all opposition to Syrian
rule in Lebanon, plus a billion dollars' worth of arms.
Iran was bribed with a US promise to drop its opposition
to World Bank loans. Bribing the Soviet Union was
especially urgent, as Moscow was close to pulling off a
deal that would allow Saddam to extricate himself from
Kuwait peacefully. However, with its wrecked economy,
the Soviet Union was easy prey. Bush sent the Saudi
foreign minister to Moscow to offer a billion dollars
before the Russian winter set in to compensate for
Soviet investment in Iraq. Mikhail Gorbachev, with
life-threatening political problems of his own at home,
quickly agreed to the war resolution, and another $3
billion from other Gulf oil states was wired to the
Soviet government to secure outstanding Iraqi debts to
the USSR.
The votes of the non-permanent members
of the Security Council were crucial. Zaire, occupying
the rotating chair, was offered undisclosed "debt
forgiveness" and military equipment in return for
silencing Security Council members during the attack.
Only Cuba and Yemen held out. Minutes after Yemen voted
against the resolution to attack Iraq, a senior US
diplomat characterized the vote to the Yemeni ambassador
as the most expensive "no" vote he ever cast. Within
three days, a US aid program of $70 million to one of
the world's poorest countries was suspended. Yemen
suddenly had problems with the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund; and 800,000 Yemeni workers
were abruptly expelled from Saudi Arabia.
On
January
16, 1991, the United States led an international coalition
from US bases in Saudi Arabia to invade occupied Kuwait
and Iraq. The US established a broad-based international
coalition to confront Iraq militarily and diplomatically
to defend the international principle of non-aggression.
The coalition consisted of Afghanistan*, Argentina,
Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh*, Belgium, Canada,
Czechoslovakia*, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany*,
Greece, Hungary, Honduras*, Israel, Italy, Kuwait,
Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger*, Norway,
Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania*, Saudi
Arabia, Senegal, South Korea*, Spain, Syria, Turkey, the
United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United
States (countries marked with * were non-combatants.)
The coalition included all Arab regionalist states, such
as Syria, Bahrain, Egypt, the UAE, Morocco, Qatar, Oman,
Kuwait and above all, Saudi Arabia. To crush pan-Arabism
by exploiting its conflict with Arab regionalism was the
geopolitical purpose for the US attack on Iraq. The war
was financed by countries which were unable to send
troops. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the rich regionalists,
were the main financial donors. More than $53 billion
was pledged and received.
Exhaustive
remote-controlled precision bombings were followed by
blitzkrieg movements of ground troops. Tens of thousands
of Iraqis troops were killed by smart-bomb air strikes,
never having even come within sight of the enemy, and
most of the military infrastructure was destroyed
together with much of the civilian infrastructure. On
March 3, a ceasefire was reached between US-led
coalition forces and Iraq. By April, Iraq suppressed
rebellions in the south by Shi'ites, and in the north by
Kurds. Millions of Kurds fled to Turkey and Iran. US,
British and French troops moved into northern Iraq to
set up refugee camps and to protect the Kurds. In May,
Iraq was presented with an international claim for
compensation of $100 billion, which dwarfed the $23
billion reparation imposed on Germany after World War I
that was considered incredibly excessive and as
contributing to the rise of Nazism in the defeated
nation. But the government of Saddam survived, while the
Iraqi population suffered a decade of sanctions that
caused the death of 2 million people, 800,000 of whom
were children. While pan-Arabism was dealt a setback,
the suffering of the Arab people in Iraq boosted Arab
solidarity in the region.
Bush Sr and his
national security adviser explained their decision on
"Why we didn't remove Saddam" in an interview with Time
(March 2, 1998):
While we hoped that popular revolt or coup
would topple Saddam, neither the US nor the countries
of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi
state. We were concerned about the long-term balance
of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate
Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of
Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not
changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission
creep", and would have incurred incalculable human and
political costs. Apprehending him was probably
impossible. We had been unable to find [Manuel]
Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would
have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect,
rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have
collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other
allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances,
furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to
set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold
War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus
unilaterally exceeding the UN's mandate, would have
destroyed the precedent of international response to
aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the
invasion route, the US could conceivably still be an
occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would
have been a dramatically different - and perhaps
barren - outcome."
Essentially the same
argument was repeated in their book, A World
Transformed.
And off to war again ... Yet a decade later, in response to terrorist attacks
of September 11, the second Bush administration launched
a regime-changing invasion of Iraq, on a number of
drummed-up pretexts that in hindsight proved to be
unsubstantiated, ranging from preemptive strike against
weapons of mass destruction to spread of democracy, to
humanitarian intervention. It is a misnomer to
characterize current US policy as preemptive defense. It
is more accurate to call it presumptive defense. A
legitimate government far away from the US with no
credible threat capability against the US was toppled by
military force not because it actually possessed weapons
of mass destruction that could be used against the US,
but that it was presumed to have possessed or at least
would seek to possess them in character with its alleged
evil constitution as defined by US short-term
geopolitical consideration.
Secretary of State
Colin Powell, the administration dove who spoke of
"regime change" in Iraq for at least 18 months prior to
actual beginning of the second war on Iraq, said as the
war drew near that the US might not seek to remove
Saddam if he would abandoned his weapons of mass
destruction. It was the latest in a series of comments
by Powell that seemed to back away from the White House
goal of deposing the Iraqi president, which remained as
steadfast Bush administration policy. "We think the
Iraqi people would be a lot better off with a different
leader, a different regime," Powell told the UN Security
Council. "But the principal offence here is weapons of
mass destruction, and that's what this resolution is
working on. The major issue before us is disarmament.
All we are interested in is getting rid of those weapons
of mass destruction." But George W Bush said on October
7 that he was "not willing to stake one American life on
trusting Saddam Hussein". Earlier he had told the
public: "This man tried to kill my daddy!"
The record shows that
Powell, the good cop as opposed to Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld the bad cop, was also an early proponent of the
regime-change policy. He told the House International
Relations Committee on March 7, 2001, that the
administration was considering such a policy. In
February, he told the same committee that "regime
change" was policy, and the US "might have to do it
alone". He began backing away in an October 2 interview
with USA Today's editorial board. Should Iraq be fully
disarmed, he said, "Then, in effect, you have a
different kind of regime no matter who's in Baghdad." On
ABC, Powell put it this way: "Either Iraq cooperates,
and we get this disarmament done through peaceful means;
or they do not cooperate, and we will use other means to
get the job done."
The US asserted that Iraq had
biological and chemical weapons and could be close to
making nuclear arms. Congress had given Bush authority
to use military force, after coordinating with the UN to
see whether inspections could be made to work. The
Security Council maneuver that the US had expected to be
smooth sailing turned into a five-week round-robin of
talks and a pitched battle of wills with France. The
fracas gave rise to criticism by many countries that the
US had pressed its case against Iraq too hard, not only
straining international law but also causing anxiety
about how Washington would play its role as the lone
superpower, now faced with the new threat of global
terrorism.
President Jacques Chirac of France,
traveling in the Middle East, demanded postponing
authorizing war against Iraq until after UN weapons
inspectors had completed their work. The US was not
eager to compromise, but both Washington and Paris
recognized that a rift between them could be very
damaging and that there were important advantages to
widening support for any American action taken against
Iraq.
Bush administration officials
characterized the protracted talks as an example of UN
vacillation. Bush raised question on the UN's relevance.
Powell told NBC that he expected the UN Security Council
to enact a resolution setting strong guidelines for
inspection teams to be sent back into Iraq. But, he
added, "The issue right now is not even how tough an
inspection regime is or isn't. The question is will
Saddam and the Iraqi regime cooperate - really, really
cooperate - and let the inspections do their job. All we
are interested in is getting rid of those weapons of
mass destruction." Rumsfeld began talking about the "New
Europe" of former Soviet satellites as against the
irrelevant "Old Europe" of France and Germany in the new
world order.
On February 5, 2003, Powell
presented "proof" to the United Nations Security Council
that Iraq still produced and held weapons for mass
destruction. Western non-affiliated inspectors to Iraq
later declared Powell's proof on mass destruction to be
a "lie", while the US officially attributed the untruths
to intelligence failure.
Investigative
journalist Bob Woodward of Watergate fame provided in
his sensational book, Plan of Attack, the first
detailed, behind-the-scenes account of how and why the
president decided to wage war in Iraq based on
conversations with 75 of the key decision-makers,
including Bush himself. The president permitted Woodward
to quote him directly. Others spoke on the condition
that Woodward not identify them as sources. Woodward
reports that just five days after September 11, Bush
indicated to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
that while he had to do Afghanistan first, he was also
determined to do something about Saddam. "There's some
pressure to go after Saddam Hussein," Woodward quoted
Rumsfeld as hearing the president saying: "This is an
opportunity to take out Saddam Hussein, perhaps. We
should consider it." And Woodward quoted the president
saying to Condi Rice head-to-head: "We won't do Iraq
now. But it is a question we're gonna have to return
to."
Woodward wrote that "there's this low boil
on Iraq until the day before Thanksgiving, November 21,
2001. This is 72 days after 9/11." This is part of this
secret history. Bush, after a National Security Council
meeting, took Rumsfeld aside, "collared him physically,
and took him into a little cubbyhole room and closed the
door and said: 'What have you got in terms of plans for
Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to
get on it. I want you to keep it secret'." Woodward
wrote immediately after that, Rumsfeld told General
Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and
remove Saddam - and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank
check. Woodward detailed when and how the decision to
invade Iraq was made, but he shed no light on why.
Now what's the plan? The Bush
administration went into Iraq with enormous illusions
about how easy the postwar situation would be: it
thought the reconstruction would be self-financing, that
US forces could draw on a lasting well of gratitude for
liberating Iraq from tyranny, and that the US could
occupy the country with a small force structure and even
draw US forces down significantly within a few months.
This illusion is reflected in US policy on force
structure. After the Cold War, because of defense budget
reduction and popular opposition in the host countries,
the US was forced to gradually reduce its troops
stationed overseas. US troops abroad had shrunk to
247,000 people before the second Iraq War in April 2002.
In 1968, during the height of the Vietnam War, army
strength reached 1,570,000; navy 723,600; marine 307,300;
and air force 904,900. In 2002, army strength had
dropped to 486,500, navy 385,000, marine 173,700 and air
force 368,300. The air force, together with navy
carrier-based planes, has become the dominant arm of the
US military.
At the conclusion of offensive
military operations in Iraq, the US Army announced its
plan to set up four military bases in occupied
territory. Up to now it still has more than 140,000
troops stationed in Iraq and it is expected to keep a
considerable scale of forces there for a long time to
come. The US occupation authority repeatedly singled out
inadequate troop numbers as the main difficulty in
carrying out its mission. The US force structure is
designed to win short limited wars with smart weapons,
but is clearly inadequate for extended occupation of the
long list of countries in which US foreign policy aims
to effectuate regime changes.
Bush has adopted
the "transformationalist" agenda embraced by Rice, who
in August 2003 set out US ambitions to remake the Middle
East along neo-conservative lines by using US military
power to impose democracy and free markets on an Islamic
tribal culture. It is a policy for political
transformation of Arab countries deemed vital to victory
in the "war on terrorism". Yet this policy is at odds
with the force structure of the US military, which has
been designed to prevail in short intense conflicts, not
long drawn-out occupations.
Since the events of
September 11, the US has looked on Islamic terrorism and
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as the
greatest threats to its national security, thinking the
main threat to be coming from the "unstable arc-shaped
region" encompassing the coastal areas of the Caribbean
Sea, Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle
East, South Asia and the Korean Peninsula. The US
Defense Department has drastically adjusted the
disposition of its overseas troops around this "unstable
arc-shaped region" in an attempt to cope effectively
with a global "preventive" war.
Advance
disposition is a deployment concept of positioning in
advance a considerable amount of weapons, equipment and
supplies in overseas bases, doing the defense and
garrison work with very small forces. When a sudden
crisis erupts, US forces will be sent by quick transport
to the crisis region and, by relying on the advance
installed weapons, equipment and supply, quickly
generate combat effectiveness in the crisis region and
carry out technologically intensive operational tasks.
Currently, US forces have deployed equipment and
materials for two army divisions in Europe and four
marine expeditionary brigades each in Norway, Guam,
Diego Garcia and the Atlantic. In addition, US forces
have 12 mobile advance-storage ships in the
Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regions. This strategy
does not take into account the massive troop requirement
for pacification of occupied lands after an externally
imposed regime change. In imposing this new Pax
Americana by widespread regime changes, the US will need
to maintain a 3-million-man army. What the
neo-conservative hawks at the Bush White House fail to
realize is that the very "rogue nations" on which they
aim to impose regime changes, have been acting as ironic
proxies for the US, albeit unruly in US eyes, in
maintaining the rat-tat world order the US has won from
winning the Cold War. The dismantling of this world
order, however imperfect in US eyes, will threaten the
world's sole remaining superpower more than any rogue
nation does.
Bush has repeatedly drawn
comparisons between the occupation of Iraq to that of
post-World War II Germany and Japan, drawing comfort
from the alleged success of democratization of these two
former enemies. The post-World War II occupation of
Germany was a huge and diverse undertaking spanning
almost 11 years, conducted in conjunction with three
other members of the wartime alliance and involving in
various degrees a good number of US governmental
departments and agencies. The occupation was for the US
Army a mission second only in scope and significance to
the war itself.
On V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, General Dwight D
Eisenhower had 61 US divisions, 1,622,000 men, in
Germany, and a total Allied force in Europe numbering
3,077,000. When the shooting ended, the divisions in the
field became occupation troops, charged with maintaining
law and order and establishing the Allied military
presence in the Western occupied part of the defeated
nation. This was a military occupation, the object of
which was to control the population and stifle
resistance by putting troops into every part of the
occupied nation. Divisions were spread out across the
countryside, sometimes over great stretches of
territory. The 78th Infantry Division, for instance, for
a time after V-E day, was responsible for an area of
3,600 square miles, almost twice the size of the state
of Delaware, and the 70th Infantry Division for 2,500
square miles. Battalions were deployed separately, and
the company was widely viewed as the ideal unit for
independent deployment because billets were easy to find
and the hauls from the billets to guard posts and
checkpoints would not be excessively long. Frequently
single platoons and squads were deployed at substantial
distances from their company headquarters. There is no
indication that the US Defense Department has any such
plans or intentions for the occupation of rogue states
facing regime change. Iraq with an area of 437,072
square kilometers (168,800 square miles) will take more
than 100 divisions to carry out the type of occupation
the US devised for Germany. Some 70,000 US troops are
assigned to Germany, although the army's 1st Infantry
Division and 1st Armored Division are currently in
Iraq, leaving about 40,000 US Army troops, the
equivalent of two divisions, in Germany.
The
Allied occupation of Germany is approaching its sixth
decade, and in the eyes of many Germans it has not yet
ended. Foreign armies are still based on German soil and
Europe's largest and most prosperous "democracy" still
does not have a constitution and a peace treaty putting
a formal end to World War II. If the German model is
applied to Iraq, there may never be a formal end to the
war in Iraq. Because there is no formal peace treaty
between Germany and the Allies headed by the US, German
sovereignty is compromised. On October 20, 1985, John
Kornblum of the US State Department told Germany's
provisional Reichskanzler Wolfgang Gerhard Geunter Ebel:
"Until we have a peace treaty, Germany is a colony of
the United States." Ebel headed the provisional
government that claims to be the legal successor to the
Second German Reich, which was replaced by Adolf
Hitler's illegal Third Reich (1933-45).
In Japan, the US did not engage in any regime change
after the war, but built on the existing political culture
and regime, including the retaining of the imperial
house. Japan has been a successful economy, at least up to
the end of the Cold War, but not a particularly
successful democracy, with a one-party political system not
much different than any communist government. It has also
not been a responsible regional citizen, betraying
attitudes and policies, especially in respect to its past
brutal subjugation of its Asian neighbors that are shameful
and geopolitically destabilizing. John Dower argues in
his Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing Defeat: Japan in the
Wake of World War II that the origins of these
shortcomings can be traced to US occupation policy. US
occupation arrived in 1945 full of New Deal statist zeal
and determined to transform Japanese politics and
society in its liberal image. Cold War geopolitics
quickly curbed this reform zeal. The occupation did
purge the military and effectively removed militarists
from the Japanese political establishment. But military
dictatorships that lose wars tend to lose their innate
legitimacy, credibility and power, as Napoleon III found
out after the Franco-Prussian war and the Argentine
military junta discovered after the Falkland War of 1982
with Britain. Otherwise, Japanese leaders of the prewar
and wartime political, business and bureaucratic
establishment who had initially been purged and
imprisoned were quickly rehabilitated by the US
occupation. Leftists and trade union leaders that the US
occupation had initially liberated from jail were
returned to jail. On the other end of the political
spectrum, some of those implicated in Japan's wartime
government later served in high positions in post-war
governments. Nobusuke Kishi, a prominent member of
General Hideki Tojo's wartime cabinet, after a brief
jail sentence, became Japan's prime minister a mere
decade after the war. Some 100,000 US troops are still
in East Asia, including 46,000 in Japan and 37,000 in
South Korea.
The Iraq invasion has caused a
split within the US political right between the
conservatives and neo-conservatives. Conservatives have
become increasingly vocal against the decision to invade
once the initial Pavlovian conditioning reflex of
rallying around the flag in times of war subsided.
Neo-conservative hawks continue to insist that the
invasion decision was right even if it had been based on
the wrong reasons and flawed intelligence. Francis
Fukuyama, famed conservative author of the End of
History , in an essay titled
"Shattered illusions" that first appeared in The Australian on June 29,
2004, since repeated in greater length in The National
Interest, a US conservative publication, questioned "the
confidence [of neo-conservatives] that the US could
transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy and go on
from there to democratize the broader Middle East". He
put forth the argument that "these same
neo-conservatives had spent much of the past generation
warning about the dangers of ambitious social
engineering and how social planners could never control
behavior or deal with unanticipated consequences. If the
US cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in
Washington, DC, how in the world does it expect to bring
democracy to a part of the world that has stubbornly
resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot?"
Fukuyama disputes Pulitzer Prize-winning
columnist Charles Krauthammer, who has noted how wrong
people were after World War II in asserting that Japan
could not democratize, echoing an argument made by
Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who has at several
junctures suggested that pessimism about the prospects
for a democratic Iraq betrays lack of respect for Arabs.
Fukuyama expresses his disbelief that "democracies can
be created anywhere and everywhere through simple
political will". He pointed out that the overall record
of US involvement in approximately 18 nation-building
projects between its conquest of the Philippines in 1899
and the current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq is
not a pretty one. The cases of unambiguous success -
Germany, Japan and South Korea - were all cases where US
forces came and then stayed indefinitely. According to
Fukuyama, in Germany and Japan, the US was not
nation-building at all, but only re-legitimating
societies that had very powerful states. In all of the
other cases, the US either left nothing behind in terms
of self-sustaining institutions, or else made things
worse by creating a modern army and police but no
lasting rule of law. Fukuyama asserts that "US dominance
is clear cut only along two dimensions of national
power, the cultural realm and the ability to fight and
win intensive conventional wars. Americans have no
particular taste or facility for nation-building; we
want exit strategies rather than empires." Fukuyama's
insightful observation about the absence of US will for
global nation-building is supported by recent reforms of
US force structure.
Building an economic
empire US force structure is now designed to
support an economic empire, not a political empire. The
venue for building this economic empire is neo-liberal
globalized trade, not military occupation. A
geopolitical system has been quietly fashioned out of
market fundamentalism to protect this economic empire,
with the deceptive slogan of a crusade for democracy,
the same way Winston Churchill tried to protect the
British economic empire with bogus democracy and market
capitalism after having sucked up all the capital from
the colonies. The British Empire evolved during the age
of waning monarchal absolutism. It was launched to
enhance the authority of the Crown by shipping off
political dissidents, such as the unruly separatist
Scots, to build an empire for the Crown. It was a
political empire that transformed into an economic
empire only after the Industrial Revolution. The debates
in parliament over colonialism were peppered with
arguments that the colonies were fruits of monarchal
chimera and bottomless pits of economic loss to be
shouldered by the aristocracy to prevent them from
challenging royal dominance. An economic empire is
governed by civilian financial institutions, not
military occupation. This explains why US overseas
military engagement must be accompanied by quick,
workable exit strategies. Wall Street support for the
occupation of Iraq is near non-existent. The
unexpectedly endless occupation, euphemistically
referred to as "catastrophic success" has been Bush's
gravest tactic error.
Strategically, Bush also
failed to recognize that the invasion and occupation of
Iraq as a long-range policy to oppose pan-Arabism will
incur the near term price of massive escalation of
terrorism. A war against pan-Arabism is a war for
terrorism, not on terrorism. Although few in Washington
understand this, or are willing to say it if they
understood, the invasion of Iraq unwittingly launched a
war on pan-Arabism, which would bring about many battles
with terrorism. The US may win some battles with
terrorism, but the odds of it winning its "war on
terrorism" have been reduced with its war on
pan-Arabism. Even accepting Bush's declaration that the
US after the invasion of Iraq is safer, though still not
safe, the price for this controversial claim is a US
certainly not freer domestically.
Just as the Arab-Israel
War of 1973 restructured the world economy by
lifting the market price of oil to $30 a barrel, the invasion
of Iraq has ushered in an era of oil above $50, changing
the economic calculations of all participants in
the global economy. With the US in essence owning
most if not all of the world's oil as long as oil is
mainly denominated in dollars, a fiat currency the US
can print at will with no immediate penalty that has
assumed the status of the main reserve currency for
trade based on geopolitical factors, a monetary
phenomenon known as dollar hegemony, the impact of
higher oil prices translates into a sudden expansion of
the economy in dollar terms. The same amount of oil now
is worth more dollars. Oil inflation, unlike wage
inflation, is not a growth stimulant, draining consumer
demand from the overcapacity that technological progress
has presented to the economy. Oil profits stagnate for
lack of investment opportunities because of low consumer
demand. It is an inflation that drains money from
consumers to the owners of oil who cannot recycle the
money through consumption. It produces a shift of
economic power from the oil consuming economies to the
oil producing and ultimately to the dollar economy.
Within the dollar economy (which extends beyond the
political borders of the US) higher oil prices produce a
shift of economic power from consumer to those who own
oil reserves. It leads to a further step toward the
top-heavy inverse pyramid structure of wealth
distribution in the US economic empire. Unfortunately,
inverse pyramids are inherently unstable.
Since
September 11, it has been reported that Bush views
himself as doing God's work. So did Osama bin Laden
after the quartering of US troops in Saudi Arabia, so
did Khomeini in overthrowing the Shah. Where was it
written that God approved of the global spread of
democracy by US invasions? Was the moral authority of
the Ten Commandments derived from popular vote? The fact
is, God, assuming he exists, is on everyone's side. Bush
must know he is paying a high price globally for his
unilateral policies and his administration's hounding
tone. Judging from overseas reports, Bush may now be the
most unpopular US leader ever around the world. Anti-US
sentiment has grown so intense that few foreign leaders
can cooperate with Bush, on Iraq or any other issue,
without taking a severe hit domestically in their own
popularity.
The leader of the sole superpower
in a world order of sovereign nations is by default
also the leader of the world, who cannot lead without
the support of all the people of the world. But if
Bush should win a second term because of inept Democratic
campaigning, or the absence of a clear alternative
vision from the challenger, his mandate will be not
merely to lead the US out of a false-start quagmire, but
to lead the world out of a destructive path of
geopolitical insanity, and join the ranks of great
statesmen in history. There are those who
unrealistically reject the US because they despair over
the prospect of the US ever acting progressively as
portrayed by its own high-minded self-image. The cruel
reality is that the narrow national interests of the US
often collide with the ideals of that image. There is
much complaint, justified repeatedly by solid evidence,
about the government lying to the public. Yet the
reality is that US policies basically reflect US public
opinion and at times unwittingly at the expense of US
long-range national interests.
If US policies
are frequently aggressively reactionary, it is because
such disposition is part of the American character.
Bush's popularity with Americans rests on his authentic
American character. Yet there are two sides to that
character, made visible by the screen persona of John
Wayne: the tough big guy who champions the defenseless
little guys. The US has evolved into a superpower in the
course of two World Wars and will remain one for the
foreseeable future. As such it has earned the privileges
associated with the instinctive prerogative of a tough
big guy. But the complete American character requires
the US to champion the defenseless little guys of the
world. The US has a rendezvous with destiny as the
forward-looking leader of the world rather the
backward-wishing occupier of the world.
