Within 24 hours, on October 16-17, the New
York Times ran three stories about the threat
increasing chaos posed to emerging, still fragile
political orders in Iraq, Palestine and the Sudan.
In all three cases, the chaos afflicting these
societies was described as an unintentional and
negative consequence of ill-conceived policies put
in place by the various governments involved: the
US in Iraq, Israel as it withdrew from Gaza, and
the Sudanese government as it finally tried to
restrain marauding Janjaweed militias in Darfur.
In no case was the chaos viewed as
intentional or beneficial to one or more of the
forces competing for control of these countries.
The US occupation of Iraq in particular has
been judged a failure by its critics almost from
the start because of the chaos it has generated.
Even with the approval of the constitution,
"experts" are arguing that, as long as American
and other foreign troops
remain in Iraq,
the situation "will become more chaotic", or in
the words of Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, will
continue to "destabilize the Middle East".
Of course, only angry, irrational Arabs -
in this case, Sunnis - could desire such a state
of affairs. As the Project for a New American
Century's Gary Schmitt wrote in a Washington Post
op-ed, they "could well believe that the resulting
chaos and even occasional death of a neighbor or a
member of his extended family is a price worth
paying for a return to Sunni ascendancy".
Similarly, last week Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice argued before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee that "the enemy's strategy is
to infect, terrorize and pull down".
The
tolerance for disorder, it seems, is a clear sign
of an archaic Muslim mentality at work. As a
Marine spokesperson explained recently, after a
deadly attack on American forces, "The insurgents
are against progress and only desire a return to
the ways of the seventh century."
No less
a personage than British Prime Minister Tony Blair
was in agreement. Al-Qaeda, he claimed, is engaged
in a "premedieval religious war utterly alien to
the future of humankind", whose goal, according to
his friend President George W Bush, is to
"establish a radical Islamic empire that spans
from Spain to Indonesia". Our goal is order. The
urge to create chaos is not only pre-modern, it's
inherently theirs.
The problem with this
narrative is that the neo-conservatives, who were
primarily responsible for launching the "war on
terror" as well as the invasion and occupation of
Iraq, have, by and large, not viewed chaos in this
manner.
For them, chaos has been not just
an inevitable consequence of globalization, but a
phenomenon that might be well used to further
their long-term agenda of remaking the Middle East
in America's image. Indeed, as they saw it, it was
only natural for the world's first true hyperpower
to adopt a historically well-tested policy of
"creative destruction". Their goal, as explained
in the now famous comment of an anonymous
administration official, was to "create our own
reality" wherever we tread. ("We're history's
actors," he continued, "and all of you will be
left to just study what we do.")
Such a
comment might seem the height of Bush
administration hubris alone, if it hadn't also
reflected the avant-garde of American business
thinking of the previous decade or more. In his
1988 book Thriving on Chaos, for instance,
business guru Tom Peters argued that Americans
must "take the chaos as given and learn to thrive
on it. The winners of tomorrow will deal
proactively with chaos ... Chaos and uncertainty
are ... market opportunities for the wise."
The advice of Peters and of the Pentagon
was taken to heart by scholars and policymakers
like Paul Wolfowitz, Samuel Huntington and Robert
Kaplan, who in the mid-1990s began writing of a
"new Cold War" or "clash of civilizations" between
Islamism and neo-liberalism across an "arc of
instability" stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to
Central Asia. Specifically, post-Cold War
experiences in Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda and elsewhere
in Africa called for an organized effort to figure
out how the United States could best "manage the
chaos" that the coming global "anarchy" was
certain to bring.
Similarly, the World
Bank argued in a 1995 report that modernizing the
Middle East might well necessitate a "shake-down
period" before the region could even begin
adapting to the new global economic order. Some
neo-con intellectuals believed that the best way
to manage such a moment was to bring it on, to
provoke a level of chaos that would be but the
prologue to a new, American-style world order. (In
keeping with that spirit, "Shock and Awe" made its
debut in Iraq in March 2003, a level of force
whose very intention was to create chaos, however
short-lived it may have been expected to be.)
In this same vein, ExxonMobil, Halliburton
and Lockheed Martin leaped to take advantage of
the market opportunities presented by
post-September 11 chaos. In doing so, they helped
turn the "breadth economy" of the 1990s, in which
many sectors grew at a sustained rate, into the
"depth economy" of the new millennium, in which
core "old" industries like oil, defense and heavy
engineering regained a disproportionate share of
corporate profits - a position they are unlikely
to relinquish as long as chaos remains king in the
global political economy.
A less
Pollyanna-ish view of the coming chaos was
expressed in Vision for 2020, the mission
statement of the US Strategic Space Command
(published in 2000). Globalization, that document
suggested, was producing a global zero-sum game of
winners and losers.
In such a context,
Americans must prepare to do whatever it might
take to "win", including, of course, dominating
space in order to "protect US interests and
investment". What the Space Command didn't
mention, though it has since become a predominant
concern of the Bush administration (as the secret
files of the Cheney Energy Task Force reveal), is
how the expected arrival of the era of "peak oil"
and the levels of global energy chaos sure to
accompany it have exponentially increased the
stakes involved in controlling Iraq's immense oil
reserves.
Growing competition with an
energy-thirsty China and, to a lesser extent, the
European Union has only amplified this concern,
and helped produce a situation where the blowback
potential from the invasion and long-term
occupation of Iraq seemed, at least on paper, well
worth the risk.
Playing the chaos card
in Iraq Given the chaos and violence
currently afflicting much of Arab Iraq,
particularly its Sunni regions, it is hard to
imagine that the Bush administration intended such
an outcome to its long-awaited invasion and
occupation.
Of course, everyone would
undoubtedly have cheered if the immediate
post-invasion chaos had quickly given way to a
free-market democratic paradise along the Tigris.
But while significant parts of the chaos in Iraq
have resulted from rank incompetence (or perhaps a
total lack of concern with the consequences of the
policies set in place), some of it can still be
viewed as serving the interests of Bush
administration policy desires, albeit at great
cost.
Even with the blowback from the
chaos Bush has unleashed now creeping towards Karl
Rove's office in the White House and beginning to
encircle Vice President Dick Cheney, we need to
consider what other means this administration
might have used to achieve three of its most
important goals in Iraq:
Its first goal
has long been to retain a (much reduced) military
presence in that country for the foreseeable
future. The administration is on record as saying
that it will leave if asked to do so; but the
continuing chaos and conflict, largely sparked by
the continued presence of US troops, ensure that
the desperately weak government in Baghdad's Green
Zone, which is unlikely to survive without
American protection, won't make such a request.
Its second goal is to ensure a predominant
role for US companies in the development,
production and sale of the country's vast
reservoirs of oil. Indeed, the few documents made
public from the Cheney Energy Task Force revealed
that concern over losing Iraq to European oil
companies, combined with China's insatiable thirst
for petroleum and fears that it would increasingly
encroach on America's sphere of economic
dominance, were important reasons for the war.
If the world really has entered an era of
zero-sum competition over its remaining oil
supplies, Iraq is a prize worth shedding a lot of
blood to secure - and chaos, whatever the ensuing
pain, a strategy potentially worth pursuing.
The administration's final goal has been
to continue the wholesale, disastrous
privatization of Iraq's economy - something that,
as the World Bank warned, was unlikely to be
accepted by the people of any Middle Eastern
country who possessed the wherewithal to resist.
It is obviously harder for people to
resist when their lives have been thrown into
chaos. In fact, most of the Middle East has
avoided succumbing to American pressures to adopt
the kind of large-scale, structural-adjustment
reforms that have spread increased poverty and
inequality across the global south. As key members
of the Bush administration saw the matter, Iraq
could do for neo-liberalism in the Middle East
what Chile did for it in Latin America.
The vast majority of Iraqis are, of
course, opposed to each of these goals. Yet the
constitution on which they just voted - being
essentially an American-brokered document -
carefully avoided addressing any of these
concerns. It is hard to imagine that such an end
would have been possible in a more peaceful
environment where Iraqis had the public space and
time to debate these important issues,
particularly when polling shows that upwards of
80% of them are opposed to the presence of US
troops and to the policies they are enforcing.
Perhaps Juan Cole has best summarized how
and why chaos has become a defining dynamic in
Iraq: "Iraq was," he said recently, "like a
treasure in a strongbox ... The obvious thing to
do was to take a crowbar and strike off the
strongbox lock."
Learning from the
Israelis (as usual) If such planned chaos
was limited to Iraq, we could perhaps see it as an
aberration rather than part of the larger dynamics
of contemporary globalization. But research on
countries from Africa to the former Soviet Union
has demonstrated that chaos - whether the
"instrumentalized disorder" in sub-Saharan Africa
or the "bardok" of Central Asia - defines
political life across an increasingly large "arc
of instability" stretching across three
continents. Palestine is a particularly good
example of how chaos, or fawda as
Palestinians term it, can serve the political
interests of an occupying power.
It has
long been an open secret that the US conducted
extensive training with the help of the Israeli
defense and security forces to prepare for the
urban warfare and interrogation practices of Iraq.
While discussing the best way to ram through walls
and "interrogate" suspected insurgents, it's not
unlikely that the Israelis shared their
experiences fomenting chaos to wear down
Palestinian society, particularly since the
outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada and the demise of
the Oslo negotiations.
As argues Israeli
social scientist Gershon Baskin, Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's policy of unilateralism in response
to the failure of negotiations has made sense to
the majority of Israelis largely because they see
the "total chaos" across the West Bank and the
"rule of the gun" in newly "liberated" Gaza as
demonstrating that "the PA [Palestinian Authority]
is too weak to rule" an independent Palestine, or
even to negotiate its establishment.
What
few Israelis sharing this position consider,
however, is how Israeli policies have
systematically created the very chaos that is now
used as the excuse for engaging in unilateral
steps such as withdrawing from Gaza while
cementing - literally - Israeli control over much
of the West Bank.
Yet the roots of
Israel's strategy of chaos do not lie in the
outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September
2000, or in the autocratic and corrupt policies of
Yasser Arafat. Rather they go back to 1994 - the
same year that Paul Wolfowitz, then a dean at the
Johns Hopkins University, held a conference on the
"coming anarchy".
It was then that the
Paris protocols to the Oslo Agreements were
signed. These agreements, rarely mentioned in
discussions of why Oslo failed, locked
Palestinians into a catastrophic neo-liberalized
relationship with Israel for the remainder of the
Oslo process. This happened just at the moment
when Israel more or less permanently closed the
Occupied Territories.
Aside from a few
industries run by Palestinians with ties to
Israel, this nearly destroyed what was then a
modest but growing Palestinian economy, led to a
creeping but disastrous emigration of the
country's middle class, and ultimately helped
create a "severely depressed ... devastated"
economy that, in the words of the 2004 Palestine
Human Development Report, was "ripe for
corruption".
It is in the context of the
ensuing decade-plus of chaos engulfing Gaza and
the West Bank that we must read the recent flood
of editorials by American and Israel pundits
offering advice in advance of the coming
Palestinian elections on how the United States and
Israel can help bolster the "authority" of
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
As with Iraq's insurgents, a combination
of religious fanatics (that is, Hamas) and "clans"
and "tribes" are described as increasingly ruling
a situation in which "there is no law". And
because they are depicted as the fountainhead of
the chaos afflicting Palestine, Israeli "liberals"
such as former Israeli General Ephraim Sneh can
safely argue that Hamas is a "greater threat" to
Palestinians even than to Israel.
What
makes this discourse so interesting is how well it
has served its purpose: With the chaos and
violence of the intifada having plunged the
Palestinian economy "into deep crisis," with
poverty rates in the population above 50%, the
most recent poll of Palestinian attitudes reveals
that the idea of ending the Israeli occupation of
the West Bank has become a distant dream, a fate
the Bush administration hopes will be replicated
when it comes to the idea of an America-free Iraq.
In one of his periodic attempts to bolster
public support for the occupation, Bush offered
the following ad-style summary of American policy
in Iraq: "As Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down."
This may be easy to say, but it will remain
exceedingly difficult for Iraqis to stand up as
long as America looms over them in a whirl of
chaos.
Chaos-as-policymaking is a perilous
undertaking, even for the globe's lone superpower.
In the end, the chaos unleashed across Iraq by
Washington might just topple America's latest
imperial incarnation. For now, however, neither
the Bush administration, nor chaos, is likely to
be a stranger to Iraq.
Mark
LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern
history, culture and Islamic studies at the
University of California at Irvine, is the author
of a new book, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting
the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld
Publications, 2005). His website is
www.culturejamming.org.
