Aref Assaf
A Dream Derailed: America's War on Terror
12-31-2007
President George Bush sure has a lot of visions that do not
materialize. The world is in the seventh year of a war with no end in sight.
A short six years ago, in late December 2001, it all looked very
different. A United States-led campaign had terminated the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the talk in Washington was
already about moving on to deal with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
After the visceral shock of the 9/11 atrocities, the George W
Bush administration was on a roll – indeed the sheer force of
what was just beginning to be called the "war on terror" was
already beginning to recapture the vision of a "new American
century".
In January 2002, the president's state-of-the-union address
celebrated victory in Afghanistan and extended the war against
al-Qaida to an "axis of evil" of rogue states (Iraq, Iran, and
North Korea). The message was toughened in his speech at a
graduation ceremony at West Point in June 2002, when he
reaffirmed America's right to pre-empt future threats.
It was becoming clear that the Taliban regime was just the first
to be eliminated, and that Washington's ambitions extended to
"regime change" in a number of countries. In its international
relationships, moreover, the mantra became "you are with us or
against us" – even more so as preparations to confront Iraq
intensified in 2002-03.
The destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime in the war of
March-April 2003 was acclaimed in a further grandstanding speech
on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in May, against the
backdrop of a giant banner reading "mission accomplished". At
that, perhaps the high point of American hubris – with
Afghanistan and Iraq counted as successes, and before the
insurgency in Iraq had reached a critical point – the way seemed
clear for Washington's larger, audacious political and military
project: the wholesale transformation of the middle east and its
own peripheries.
Afghanistan itself was planned to evolve into a pro-American
state with permanent military bases at Bagram and Kandahar; the
country would also provide easy access for new oil pipelines to
the Indian Ocean. In the neighborhood, the bases established in
Uzbekistan (and perhaps other central Asian states) would both
ensure greatly increased US influence in the oil-rich regions
around the Caspian basin and perform the critical geopolitical
task of countering the influence of Russia and China.
This alone was an extraordinary vision, but Iraq would be an
even greater prize. There, Saddam Hussein's dominion had now
been replaced by the comprehensive control of the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) under its viceroy, Paul Bremer. The
convenient rewriting of the CPA's history suggests that it
represented and oversaw little more than unplanned chaos. This
is incorrect:
The reality was of a precise neo-conservative plan to create a
client regime based on an extraordinarily sweeping free-market
economy. The intention was to undertake comprehensive
privatization of all state assets (in which foreign investors
would included Israeli companies), heavy foreign involvement in
the oil industry, a flat-rate tax system, all underpinned by a
virtual absence of financial regulation.
The imagined result would be a sort of "dream economy", one
impossible to create in the United States itself, given the
annoying presence of trade unions, citizen movements, business
regulations and other hindrances.
The United States would support this economic fantasy by
entrenching in power a client Iraqi state, protecting (and
overseeing) it via a network of major military bases across the
country. The fact that a tenth of the world's oil reserves were
under Iraqi soil and waters (four times that of the whole of the
US, including Alaska) meant that a US-controlled Iraq would
greatly improve oil security in the homeland.
Perhaps best of all, the success of this strategy would
constrain the real enemy, Iran – to the extent that it might not
even prove necessary to terminate the Tehran regime. After all,
with two of Iran's neighbors (Afghanistan to the east and Iraq
to the west) firmly in American hands, and with the US navy
controlling the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, the ruling
elite in Tehran – whatever its political color – would hesitate
before risking its now vulnerable national security.
This, in May 2003, was the plan and the expectation. How do they
look in the cold light of reality?
In Afghanistan, Taliban and other militias have made a
remarkable comeback and are now tying down over 50,000 foreign
troops. Across the border in western Pakistan, large areas are
out of government control and available to al-Qaida, Taliban and
their affiliates as safe territory from which to prepare, launch
and recover from operations.
In Iraq, over 100,000 civilians have been killed directly by
violence; as many as 4 million Iraqis have been displaced from
their homes (nearly half of them forced to seek refuge in other
countries). Tens of thousands of Iraqis have succumbed to
disease and malnutrition, including diseases of poverty such as
cholera. More than 100,000 Iraqis have been detained without
trial. The human cost includes the death of 3,895 United States
troops (as of 19 December 2007) and injuries to tens of
thousands more.
In 2007, a determined surge in United States troop numbers has
had some effect in curbing the violence in Iraq; though the
strategy is unsustainable and has been pursued with short-term
tactics that may have stored problems that will become apparent
later. The rhetoric of the Bush administration about a
"drawdown" in Iraq notwithstanding, the commitment to remain in
Iraq is evident in the negotiation of long-term deals with the
Nouri al-Maliki government and the construction of the world's
largest embassy in Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the pressures on the US army in Afghanistan (as well
as other NATO contingents) mean that there are calls to divert
troops there. Most NATO states, however, are resolute in their
determination not to commit themselves even further; it is now
questionable whether the sizeable Dutch and Canadian forces will
even be maintained at current levels.
Against this background, the al-Qaida movement continues to
evolve. Its "brand" is capable of attracting recruits,
maintaining networks, inserting itself into local conflicts, and
(as in Algeria on 11 December 2007) mounting deadly operations.
The use of "hard power" by the United States has proved a gift
for its enemies.
This reality cast a sobering light on the decisions made and the
thinking done in the immediate period after 11 September 2001.
From the start, the response to the atrocities in New York and
Washington was wrong. The al-Qaida movement was seen as a
near-satanic bunch of extremists bent solely on death and
destruction instead of a complex transnational revolutionary
movement centered on a perverse ideology with religious
foundations. With such foundations, its leaders and ideologues
did not, as those of most revolutionary movements did, expect
success in their lifetimes.
Even such short-term aims as the eviction of "crusader" forces
from Muslim lands and the destruction of the elite regimes of
the "near enemy" in the Middle East could take decades; while
longer-term objectives such as the establishment of an Islamist
caliphate might take a century.
For such an organization, the response to its assaults by the
George W Bush administration – one predicated almost entirely on
the use of force – was exactly what it wanted. The successive
campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq could be skillfully presented
(via a sophisticated propaganda machine using new technology and
appealing to existing popular sentiments) as assaults by
"crusader" (and "Zionist") forces against the heartland of the
Islamic world (see "After Saddam, no respite", 19 December
2003).
In addition, there was the hugely valuable benefit for al-Qaida
and its allies in both countries of providing combat-training
zones for new generations of young paramilitaries.
A response to the 9/11 attacks based on reasoned understanding
and foresight would have had a far greater chance of ensuring a
just and humane global outcome. This would have treated the
murderous incidents as horrendous examples of transnational
criminality, and enabled the United States and many willing
partners to build a formidable coalition across the world to
bring the perpetrators to justice.
It might have taken years and proved to be a complex and
difficult process, but the benefits are clear: undercutting the
limited support for the al-Qaida movement that then existed in
2001, and avoiding the disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq with
their huge human costs.
Instead, the Bush administration fell straight into a trap.
Since then, tens of thousands of innocent people have been
killed (in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in other theatres of the "war
on terror"); even greater numbers have detained, and many of
those tortured and abused. Washington's post-9/11 response has
laid the ground for a decades-long conflict.
The deeply embedded nature of the "control paradigm" in United
States military thinking means that a significant change of
policy is hard to envisage and will be extremely difficult to
undertake - even if the Democrats take the White House in
November 2008. At some stage, though, reality must and will
bite: the deeply counterproductive impact of the conduct of war
on terror will come to be recognized and more sensible policies
implemented.
Indeed, perhaps it is in the deeply counterproductive character
of the policies of the last six years that there are some slight
grounds of hope. The very failure of these policies offers space
for a rethinking of western attitudes to security which could
extend to much greater issues of global security.
The real drivers of conflict between 2001 and 2008 are likely to
be issues of deep global inequality, economic desperation,
people movement, and environmental limits – all reinforced by
climate change. In such circumstances, it will be all too easy
to see the key western security requirement as maintaining
control in a fractured world. In the seventh year of a war with
no end in sight, the failures of intelligence that marked its
beginning may after all be the springboard for a new approach to
human and planetary security in the decades to come. |
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