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4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The theater of the imperially
absurd By Tom Engelhardt
One night when I was in my teens, I found
myself at a production of Luigi Pirandello's
Six Characters in Search of an Author. The
actors were dramatically entering and exiting in
the aisles when, suddenly, a man stood up in the
audience, proclaimed himself a seventh character
in search of an author, and demanded the same
attention as the other six. At the time, I assumed
the unruly "seventh character" was just part of
the play, even after he was
summarily ejected from the
theater.
Now, bear with me a moment. In
2002-03, officials in the Bush administration and
their neo-con supporters, retro-think-tank
admirers, and allied media pundits, basking in all
their "global war on terror" glory, were eager to
talk about the region extending from North Africa
through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and the former Soviet Socialist Republics
of Central Asia right up to the Chinese border as
an "arc of instability".
That arc
coincided with the energy heartlands of the
planet, and what was needed to "stabilize" it, to
keep those energy supplies flowing freely (and in
the right directions), was clear enough to them.
The "last superpower", the greatest military force
in history, would simply have to put its foot down
and so bring to heel the "rogue" powers of the
region.
The geopolitical nerve would have
to be mustered to stamp a massive "footprint" - to
use a Pentagon term of the time - in the middle of
that vast, valuable region. (Such a print was to
be measured by military bases established.) Also
needed was the nerve not just to lob a few cruise
missiles in the direction of Baghdad, but to offer
such an imposing demonstration of US shock-and-awe
power that those "rogues" - Iraq, Syria, Iran
(Hezbollah, Hamas) - would be cowed into
submission, along with uppity US allies such as
oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
It would, in fact,
be necessary - in another of those bluntly
descriptive words of the era - to "decapitate"
resistant regimes. This would be the first order
of business for the planet's lone "hyperpower",
now that it had been psychologically mobilized by
the attacks of September 11, 2001. After all, what
other power on Earth was capable of keeping the
uncivilized parts of the planet from descending
into failed-state, all-against-all warfare and
dragging the US (and its energy supplies) down
with them?
Mind you, on September 11,
2001, as those towers went down, that arc of
instability wasn't exactly a paragon of ... well,
instability. Yes, on one end was Somalia, a failed
state, and on the other, impoverished,
rubble-strewn Afghanistan, largely Taliban-ruled
(and al-Qaeda-encamped); while in between Saddam
Hussein's Iraq was a severely weakened nation with
a suffering populace, but the "arc" suffered no
great wars, no huge surges of refugees, no
striking levels of destruction.
Not
particularly pleasant autocracies, some of a
fundamentalist religious nature, were the rule of
the day. Oil flowed (at about US$23 a barrel); the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict simmered
uncomfortably; and, all in all, it wasn't a pretty
picture, nor a particularly democratic one, nor
one in which, if you were an inhabitant of most of
these lands, you could expect a fair share of
justice or a stunningly good life.
Still,
the arc of instability, as a name, was then more
prediction than reality. And it was a prediction -
soon enough to become a self-fulfilling prophesy -
on which US President George W Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney, then-defense chief Donald
Rumsfeld and all those neo-cons in the Pentagon
readily staked careers and reputations.
As
a crew, already dazzled by US military power and
its potential uses, such a bet undoubtedly looked
like a sure winner. They would just give the arc
what it needed - a few intense doses of
cruise-missile and B-1 bomber medicine, add in
some high-tech military boots on the ground, some
night-vision-goggled eyes in the desert, some
Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones overhead,
and some "regime-change"-style injections of
further instability. It was to be, as Andrew
Bacevich has written, "an experiment in creative
destruction".
First Afghanistan, then
Iraq. Both pushovers. How could the mightiest
force on the planet lose to such puny powers? As a
start, you would wage a swift air war, a proxy
war, a war with special forces and a dollar war -
intelligence agents would arrive in friendly areas
of northern Afghanistan in late 2001 carrying
suitcases stuffed with money - in one of the most
backward places on the planet. Your campaign would
be against an ill-organized, ill-armed, ragtag
enemy. You would follow that by thrusting into the
soft, military underbelly of the Middle East and
taking out the hollow armed forces of Saddam in a
"cakewalk".
Next, with your bases set up
in Afghanistan and Iraq on either side of Iran -
and Pakistan, also bordering Iran, in hand - what
would it take to run the increasingly unpopular
mullahs who governed that land out of Tehran?
Meanwhile, Syria, another weakened, wobbly state
divided against itself, now hemmed in not only by
militarily powerful Israel but by US-occupied
Iraq, would be a pushover.
In each of
these lands, you would soon enough end up with a
US-friendly government, run by some figure like
the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi exile, Ahmad
Chalabi; and, voila (okay, they wouldn't
have used French), you would have a Middle East
made safe for Israel and for US domination. You
would, in short, have your allies in Europe and
Japan as well as your possible future enemies,
Russia and China, by the throat in an increasingly
energy-starved world.
Certainly, many of
the top officials of the Bush administration and
their neo-con allies, dreaming of just such an
orderly, US-dominated "Greater Middle East", were
ready to settle for a little chaos in the process.
If a weakened Iraq broke into several parts; or,
say, the oil-rich Shi'ite areas of Saudi Arabia
happened to fall off that country, well, too bad.
They'd deal.
Little did they know.
The tin touch Here's the
remarkable thing, when you think about it: all the
Bush administration had to do was meddle in any
country in that arc of instability (and which one
didn't it meddle in?), for actual instability,
often chaos, sometimes outright disaster, to set
in. It has been quite a record, the very opposite
of an imperial golden touch.
And, on any
given day, you can see the evidence of this on a
case-by-case basis in your local paper or on the
television news. You can check out the Iraqi, or
Somali, or Lebanese, or Iranian, or Pakistani
disasters, or impending disasters. But what you
never see is all those crises and potential crises
discussed in one place - without which the
magnitude of the present disaster and the dangers
in our future are hard to grasp.
Few in
the mainstream world have even tried to put them
all together since the Bush administration rolled
back the US media, in essence demobilizing them in
2001-02, at which point their
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