Iraq War and Geopolitics

Using Napolean as a mouthpiece, George Bernard Shaw makes a telling comment on British Imperialism, which is no less - if not more - apposite to the American imperialism of our time. He says: There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cut off his king's head on republican principles. America is no different. It claims to act in terms of international law; but feels free to subvert international norms whenever it wants. It supports the authority of the United Nations but turns its back on the U.N. to suit its convenience. It globalises trade in the name of fairness; and most unfairly usurps the major trade benefits to its own advantage. It launches a war to secure the largest oil reserves in the world but pretends it fights for peace. It claims to act in the name of democracy, but leaves behind battered states wherever it has gone. It fights a war for peace, but makes huge profits by the sale of arms that follows. Its peacekeeping results in war. Its war brings no peace. No sooner are its interests maintained, it leaves behind a debris of enfeebled states. It is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude.

Eighty-six years ago, another powerful invading army had just entered Baghdad. At the same time, other divisions driving north-eastwards from Egypt were occupying Palestine. Urged on by their own strategists and intellectuals, these forces would soon advance upon Damascus. They would exercise great influence upon Iran and the Persian Gulf states. Donning the mantle of liberators, they would encourage regime change in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They would send out messages of hope that the entire Arab world may rise once more to greatness and renown now that its oppressors were defeated. These were folks determined to make the entire Middle East secure and stable -- a blessing to the world, no doubt, but a particular blessing to their own hegemonic nation, and that nation was Great Britain.

On November 11, 2000, Richard Haass - a member of the National Security Council and special assistant to the president under the elder Bush, soon to be appointed director of policy planning in the state department of newly elected President George W. Bush - delivered a paper in Atlanta entitled Imperial America. For the United States to succeed at its objective of global preeminence, he declared, it would be necessary for Americans to re-conceive their role from a traditional nation-state to an imperial power. Haass eschewed the term imperialist in describing America's role, preferring imperial, since the former connoted exploitation, normally for commercial ends, and territorial control. Nevertheless, the intent was perfectly clear:

To advocate an imperial foreign policy is to call for a foreign policy that attempts to organize the world along certain principles affecting relations between states and conditions within them. The U.S. role would resemble 19th century Great Britain ... Coercion and the use of force would normally be a last resort; what was written by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson about Britain a century and a half ago, that The British policy followed the principle of extending control informally if possible and formally if necessary, could be applied to the American role at the start of the new century.

The existence of an American empire is no secret. It is widely, even universally, recognized in most parts of the world, though traditionally denied by the powers that be in the United States. What Haass was calling for, however, was a much more open acknowledgement of this imperial role by Washington, in full view of the American population and the world, in order to further Washington's imperial ambitions. The fundamental question that continues to confront American foreign policy, he explained, is what to do with a surplus of power and the many and considerable advantages this surplus confers on the United States. This surplus of power could only be put to use by recognizing that the United States had imperial interests on the scale of Britain in the nineteenth century. The world should therefore be given notice that Washington is prepared to extend its control, informally if possible and formally if not, to secure what it considers to be its legitimate interests across the face of the globe. The final section of Haass' paper carried the heading Imperialism Begins at Home. It concluded: the greater risk facing the United States at this juncture...is that it will squander the opportunity to bring about a world supportive of its core interests by doing too little. Imperial understretch, not overstretch, appears the greater danger of the two.

... Many of the features of contemporary imperialism, such as the development of the world market, the division between core and periphery, the competitive hunt for colonies or semi-colonies, the extraction of surplus, the securing of raw materials to bring back to the mother country, etc. are part of capitalism as a global system from the late fifteenth century on. Imperialism, in the widest sense, had its sources in the accumulation dynamic of the system (as basic as the pursuit of profits itself), which encouraged the countries at the center of the capitalist world economy, and particularly the wealthy interests within these countries, to feather their own nests by appropriating surplus and vital resources from the periphery - what Pierre Jalée called The Pillage of the Third World. By a variety of coercive means, the poorer satellite economies were so structured - beginning in the age of conquest in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries - that their systems of production and distribution served not so much their own needs as those of the dominant metropoles. Nevertheless, the recognition of such commonalities in imperialism in the various phases of capitalist development was entirely consistent with the observation that there had been a qualitative change in the nature and significance of imperialism that commenced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

...In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the principal global reality was the decline in British hegemony and the increased rivalry among the advanced capitalist states that followed, leading to the First and Second World Wars. The rise of the Soviet Union in the context of the First World War posed an external challenge to the system eventually leading to a Cold War struggle between the United States, the new hegemonic power of the capitalist world economy following the Second World War, and the Soviet Union. The fall of the latter in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. By the end of the 1990s the United States had gained on its main economic rivals as well. The result of all of this by the beginning of the new century, as Henry Kissinger declared in 2001 in Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, was that the United States had achieved a pre-eminence not enjoyed by even the greatest empires of the past.

This naturally led to the question: What was the United States to do with its enormous surplus of power? Washington's answer, particularly after 9/11, has been to pursue its imperial ambitions through renewed interventions in the global periphery - on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. In the waging of its imperial War on Terrorism the U.S. state is at one with the expansionary goals of U.S. business.

Richard Haass (whose responsibilities in the present administration were extended to include those of U.S. coordinator of policy for the future of Afghanistan) pointed out in his book Intervention, that regime change often can only be accomplished through a full-scale military invasion leaving the conquered nation in ruins and necessitating subsequent nation-building

... Such a nation-building occupation, Haass stressed, involves defeating and disarming any local opposition and establishing a political authority that enjoys a monopoly or near-monopoly of control over the legitimate use of force. (This is Max Weber's well-known definition of a state - though imposed in this case by an invading force.) It therefore requires, as Haass observed quoting one foreign policy analyst, an occupation of imperial proportions and possibly of endless duration.

It is precisely this kind of invasion of imperial proportions and uncertain duration that now seems to be the main agenda of Washington's War on Terrorism. In the occupation and nation-building processes following invasions (as in the case of Afghanistan), explicit colonialism, in the most brazen nineteenth century sense, will be avoided. No formal annexation will take place, and at least a pretense of local rule will be established from the beginning, even during direct military occupation. Nevertheless, a central goal will be to achieve some of what colonialism in its classic form previously accomplished. As [a co-editor of Monthly Review, Harry] Magdoff pointed out,

Colonialism, considered as the direct application of military and political force, was essential to reshape the social and economic institutions of many of the dependent countries to the needs of the metropolitan centers. Once this reshaping had been accomplished economic forces - the international price, marketing and financial systems - were by themselves sufficient to perpetuate and indeed intensify the relationship of dominance and exploitation between mother country and colony. In these circumstances, the colony could be granted formal political independence without changing anything essential, and without interfering too seriously with the interests which had originally led to the conquest of the colony.

Something of this sort is occurring in Afghanistan and is now being envisioned for Iraq. Once a country has been completely disarmed and reshaped to fit the needs of the countries at the center of the capitalist world, nation-building will be complete and the occupation will presumably come to an end. But in area that contain vital resources like oil (or that are deemed to be of strategic significance in gaining access to such resources), a shift back from formal to informal imperialism after an invasion may be slow to take place - or will occur only in very limited ways. Informal control or the mechanism of global accumulation that systematically favors the core nations, constitutes the normal means through which imperialist exploitation of the periphery operates. But this requires, on occasion, extraordinary means in order to bring recalcitrant state back into conformity with the market and with the international hierarchy of power with the United States at its apex.

At present, U.S. imperialism appears particularly blatant because it is linked directly with war in this way, and points to an endless series of wars in the future to achieve essentially the same ends. However, if we wish to understand the underlying forces at work, we should not let this heightened militarism and aggression distract us from the inner logic of imperialism, most evident in the rising gap in income and wealth between rich and poor countries, and in the net transfers of economic surplus from periphery to center that make this possible. The growing polarization of wealth and poverty between nations (a polarization that exists within nations as well) is the system's crowning achievement on the world stage. It is also what is ultimately at issue in the struggle against modern imperialism.

But critics of the war have no reason to regret their views. No sensible opponent doubted that the world's most powerful military could easily crush such a lesser foe. The real issue was and remains very different: Will the Iraq war increase America's national security, as the Bush Administration has always promised and now insists is already the case, or will it undermine and diminish our national security, as thoughtful critics believed?

In the weeks, months and years ahead, we will learn the answer to that fateful question by judging developments by seven essential criteria:

(1) Will the war discourage or encourage other regional preemptive military strikes, particularly by nuclear-armed states such as, but not only, Pakistan and India?

(2) Indeed, will the Iraq war stop the proliferation of states that possess nuclear weapons or instead incite more governments to acquire them as a deterrent against another US regime change?

(3) Will the war, and the long US occupation that seems likely to ensue, reduce the recruitment of young Arabs by terrorist movements or will it inspire many new recruits?

(4) With or without more recruits, will the war decrease or increase the number of terrorist plots against the United States, whether at home or abroad?

(5) Will the war help safeguard the vast quantities of nuclear and other materials of mass destruction that exist in the world today, and the expertise needed to operationalize them, or make them more accessible to evil-doers?

(6) In that connection, will Russia--which has more ill-secured devices of mass destruction than any other country and which strongly opposed and still resents the US war--now be more, or less, inclined to collaborate with Washington in safeguarding and reducing those weapons and materials?

(7) Finally, considering the rampant anti-Americanism it has provoked, will the war result in more or fewer governments willing to cooperate with--individually or in multinational organizations like the United Nations--George W. Bush's stated top priority, the war against global terrorism?

It is by these crucial (and measurable) criteria that the American people, and any politician who wants to lead them, must judge the Administration's war in Iraq and President Bush's own leadership.

Iraq's resumption of oil exports under a new government would expose OPEC to considerable uncertainty. Iraq has the world's second-largest proven oil reserves. Flows of Iraqi oil to the world market unconstrained by OPEC quotas could further erode the cartel's already limited ability to set prices and might even trigger a price war, eating into the profits of its member countries. Such an outcome would surely delight the Bush administration as well as buyers of gasoline in the United States, the world's largest oil consumer. With that in mind, commentators -- particularly in Europe -- have contended that the real purpose of Bush's war in Iraq was to put in place a government that would break OPEC. Such an outcome would dismay the world's largest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran.

Japan was not the inspiration for the democratic upsurge that swept through East Asia in the 1980s. Instead, it was the junior partner to the United States during the cold war, when Washington created an alliance of anticommunist dictators who supported American foreign policy while repressing their own people. Those policies didn't inspire democracy in Asia; if anything, they helped to stifle it.

The symbiotic relationship between Washington and Tokyo was forged in 1948, when the United States reversed course in its occupation of Japan to focus on the containment of communism. Almost overnight, US policy shifted from punishing Japanese bureaucrats and industrialists responsible for World War II to enlisting them in a global war against the Soviet Union and China. The shift was symbolized by Nobusuke Kishi, who was prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Kishi was minister of commerce and industry in the wartime Tojo Cabinet and labeled a Class A war criminal for helping run Japan's colonial empire in Manchuria.

...Japanese industry profited handsomely by supplying the Pentagon with steel, munitions and even napalm when the United States fought wars in Korea and Vietnam. Then, as Washington propped up South Korea's Park Chung Hee, the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos and Indonesia's Suharto with vast quantities of military aid, Japan kept their economies alive with financial aid and investments from Mitsui, Sumitomo and other big corporations. Japan's collaboration with Washington was carefully hidden from the Japanese public but greatly appreciated by American leaders, as shown from newly declassified documents stored in the National Archives.

In Wolfowitz's rosy view of history, the millions of Koreans, Filipinos and Indonesians who rebelled against their authoritarian governments were following in Japan's footsteps. That is false. In reality, democratic activists in those countries endured torture, imprisonment and military repression imposed by governments backed by the Pentagon, financed by Japan and tolerated by Wolfowitz and other American officials in the name of US national security.

On April 7, Wolfowitz told the Washington Post that he met quite a few dictators up close and personal in my life. Indeed he has. It was under Wolfowitz's watch at the State Department that Reagan invited South Korean military dictator Chun Doo Hwan to the White House in February 1981, nine months after Chun murdered hundreds of demonstrators in Kwangju. And it was Wolfowitz, who was US ambassador to Indonesia during the 1980s, who urged Congress to look beyond the important and sensitive issue of human rights to acknowledge the strong and remarkable leadership of President Suharto.

[President Bush] failed even once to say a critical word about any non-democratic U.S. ally in the region. It is noteworthy, for example, that he called for spreading freedom from Damascus to Tehran but not from Riyadh to Cairo.

...Few people familiar with the Middle East could disagree with his observation that support for dictatorial regimes has not led to greater stability. However, there are no indications that the Bush administration is planning to stop its support for governments that deny freedom or otherwise promote freedom in the region.

It is hypocritical in the extreme to state that Many Middle Eastern governments now understand that military dictatorship and theocratic rule are a straight, smooth highway to nowhere, but some governments still cling to the old habits of central control when the United States is the primary backer of such regimes in the region.

Until the extent of the repression and the American complicity in the repression is recognized, it will be difficult to understand the negative sentiments a growing number of ordinary people in the Islamic world have toward the United States. Therefore, self-righteous claims by American leaders that the anger expressed by Arabs and Muslims toward the United States is because of our commitment to freedom only exacerbates feelings of ill-will and feeds the rage manifested in anti-American violence and terrorism.

has failed, for example, to fit the invasion of Iraq into a consistent post-1945 pattern of cynical Western intervention in the Third World. This intervention has been driven, not by humanitarian motives, but by corporate greed, by the need to secure and protect resources and markets abroad - needs that require compliant, iron-fisted, pro-Western governments subordinating their own populations to the interests of Western business. [For the mainstream] media ... this pattern doesn't exist, or doesn't matter. The reality is simply too ugly for the mainstream; it can't be accepted as real.