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Imperialism and its young admirers
Democracy talk was a sham, and realists in Washington are getting
worried as the vacant character of the neo-cons is exposed for what
it is: adolescent, dangerous bravado
By Azmi Bishara
01/01/06 "Al-Ahram" -- -- Apart from the inevitable readjustments
necessitated by having become bogged down in a bloody and
intractable situation in Iraq, Washington's policy towards the
region remains essentially the same. Spreading democracy was not
originally one of its aims, and it was not the goal of the Iraqi
parliamentary elections, the Palestinian presidential elections or
the Saudi municipal elections, which nonetheless have been cheered
as the first tender shoots of a democratic future. Following all
these elections, violence in Iraq intensified and spread in new
directions. In spite of these elections, the US bore down on regimes
that were targets for the policy the US secretary of state dubbed
"constructive destabilisation". Meanwhile, Washington's allies in
the region have become increasingly bolder in making it choose
between accepting them with all their corruption and the spectre of
radical political Islam.
The US still acts as though it is at the beginning of a historic
mission in the region, as Britain had in the wake of World War I.
Bush showered Sharon with promises in an exchange of letters in
April 2004 that have a strong whiff of the Balfour Declaration.
Then, as surreptitiously as Sykes and Picot, the US began to draw up
plans for dividing the Middle East. Although these British and
French colonial architects used their pens and straightedges to
carve their map onto countries, Washington is carving up countries
along sectarian and ethnic lines.
As awry as things have gone in Iraq, the US administration cannot
bring itself to look at that disaster in any way other than how it
impacts on its popularity ratings or on its allies in the area who
are cringing at the prospect of the growing influence of Iran. The
destruction of Iraq and the suffering of the Iraqi people acquire
importance only from this perspective. Therefore, the American
president sat down with his military chiefs on 28 September to
ponder a way to lift the morale of the American public, and came up
with the ingenious "plan for victory in Iraq". The "plan" is to
enable the Iraqis to defend "the freedom they have won" by building
an Iraqi army capable of that aim. Then, once the Iraqi army "stands
up" America will "stand down", as the US president so eloquently put
it. The "victory plan" is reaping yet more bloodshed and more
destruction.
How odd it is that this is the US that inaugurated its occupation of
Iraq by dismantling the Iraqi army in accordance with an imperial
edict issued by Caesar Bremer the Great in May 2003, as part of its
project to build a sectarian confederation. The effect of this
project and its attendant policies was to increase the power and
prestige of the Kurdish and Shia militias, and the operations and
assassinations these militias have carried out have only worked to
augment the violent rejection of the new order in so-called Sunni
areas. The subdivision of Iraq into sectarian-based political areas
was unknown to that country before the Iraq-Iran war, which was one
of the disasters initiated by Saddam Hussein with the support of the
US and all its then allies, and opposed by all of the US's current
ones. However, the sectarian politicisation we see today, which
exceeds all bounds of the imagination, is a purely American
achievement.
American journalists and commentators have wondered why statements
issuing from the White House with regard to the reconstruction of an
Iraqi army capable of taking on the "insurgents" have fluctuated so
wildly between the optimistic and the pessimistic. In the course of
an article recounting his impressions during a visit to Iraq, one
American journalist smuggled in his conviction that the real culprit
in the whole business is the culture of fear and apathy that had
become ingrained under the Saddam dictatorship, and that this whole
culture would have to be changed in order to build an effective
Iraqi army. (Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, 29 September
2005). The funny thing is that this illustrious columnist, whose
epigram regularly boasts of him being a three-time Pulitzer Prize
winner, drew this conclusion after being witness to a single
anecdote, during his visit to the Um Qasr naval base, of a boatload
of Iraqi sailors who decided to take a long lunch break one
scorching afternoon, causing training exercises to be delayed that
day. Nor did he catch the inconsistency in the same article between
this conclusion, and his admiration for the ingenuity of the
insurgents who began to use infrared devices from garage door
openers after coalition forces had introduced jamming methods to
block the detonation of roadside bombs by means of cell phone
signals.
Why did Friedman not pick up on the fact that this "enemy" who "just
keeps getting smarter" was made up of the same people who were
reared under Saddam's alleged culture of fear and lack of
initiative? Why did it escape him that the members of the new army
lacked motivation whereas their adversaries had motivation in
spades? Because he, like his military informants, has fallen into
the habit of regurgitating half-baked truths about the culture of
the US's Iraqi allies. The attitude is reminiscent of the disdain
with which the Americans regarded their allies in South Vietnam, in
contrast to their respectful awe for the Vietcong, even though the
latter are as Vietnamese as the former. What is at work,
essentially, is contempt on the part of the occupiers for those
dependent upon them. It must be this contempt that has blinded them
to the reality that the destruction of an entire economy and
national infrastructure, the opening of the floodgates to theft and
corruption, the subcontracting of the reconstruction of the Iraqi
army to a host of greedy private catering, construction and security
firms, and that recruitment into this army has become virtually the
only source of livelihood for millions of unemployed, does not offer
the greatest motives for fighting.
One would think that the situation in Iraq would have compelled the
powers that be in Washington to give much more careful study to the
problems inherent in direct military intervention in other countries
of the Arab world -- Syria for example. However, American policy has
not changed. Indeed, it appears to be growing more obsessive in its
intent to exploit the 11 September aftermath to settle old grudges,
thereby keeping the train of destruction in motion. In so doing, the
Bush administration wavers between the pragmatism needed to cater to
domestic public opinion, so as to ensure that this is not the last
Republican administration for a long time, and also needed to cater
to international opinion in order to keep America's overseas
interests up and running, and the fundamentalist idealism that
characterises America's foreign policy creed under the
neo-conservatives.
While reading some American strategic studies recently, I was struck
by how deeply the conviction runs in those circles that the aim of
US intervention in the world since the Spanish-American war and the
occupation of Cuba and the subsequent occupation of the Philippines
was "nation-building", by which is meant spreading democracy and
representational government. Clearly there has been some heavy
ideological indoctrination going on in America's military academies,
well before the neo-cons rose to power and imposed their philosophy
on US foreign policy. Somewhere along the line, neo-con theorists,
their consummate zeal and arrogance cloaked behind a façade of
academic detachment, dressed the pretexts for colonialist
intervention in pseudoscientific jargon and forged them into a
fully-fledged theoretical underpinning for an evangelistic drive to
export democracy and defend the American way of life, using the word
"liberty" as its clarion call.
Therefore, when the weapons of mass destruction pretext for invading
Iraq collapsed with the reverberating ignominy that this "globalised
lie" deserved, it was no great feat to pull "democracy" out of the
hat. All that was needed then was some swift footwork to present
this as the unique and noble characteristic that set American
interventionism apart from all other forms of imperialism across the
ages. As part of the packaging, the democracies of Germany and Japan
were touted as renowned successes of this policy. What was not said,
of course, was that this two-nation list that is always dragged out
as ostensible proof of how democracy can be won by military
occupation, forms the exception not the rule. Germany and Japan had
already passed through a phase of modernisation and liberalisation
not long before the American occupation of those countries. They had
a strong unifying nationalist movement with which America could ally
against divisive forces, and they were also relatively homogenous,
linguistically and even ethnically. The American presence in those
countries at the time also conformed to the commonly held domestic
perception of the need to defend national interests against an
outside threat emanating from China, the Soviet Union and East
Germany. By contrast, in economically underdeveloped Iraq, which had
not experienced democracy before the onset of dictatorship, the
American presence encourages the disruptive tendencies, sectarian
fragmentation, disunity and the building upon illegitimate sources
of authority as opposed to legitimate ones that existed beforehand,
even if these were not democratic.
The American experience in Iraq should bring to mind not the
exception but the rule, as exemplified by Cuba, the Philippines, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea,
Chile, Cyprus and other countries that had not had the luxury of a
Marshall Plan, and in which most of America's "democratisation
drive" met with dismal failure. Frequently overlooked, too, is
direct American involvement in the security, politics and economies
of the Central Asian republics, where the regimes that are being
constructed with American supervision on the ruins of the soviet
system are corrupt, despotic and anything but democratic.
On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, when the new American creed was
being developed, Bush and Blair cited different reasons at various
times for intervening militarily in Iraq: UN Security Council
resolutions had to be enforced, Saddam had to be stripped of his
weapons of mass destruction, the flow of oil had to be guaranteed,
the Iraqi people had to be rescued from a cruel dictator, the
democratic forces in Iraq needed support, and terrorism had to be
fought. When one after the other of these myths toppled, Bush,
reading from the neo-con script, continued to insist on the link
between spreading democracy and fighting terrorism. The dictatorial
regimes of the Arab world had the tendency to breed terrorism and
export it to the US, he said. Therefore, breeding democracy in the
Arab world was nothing less than a US national security imperative.
Washington soon discovered, however, that after the fall of the
Soviet Union -- after it was no longer necessary to maintain the
status quo of dictatorial regimes if the status quo was in America's
favour -- it was not necessarily in America's interests to promote
regime change and impose democratic forms of government. After all,
not only might the newly bred democratic governments prove
unpredictable, sometimes it might better serve American security
interests to keep existing dictatorships at the mercy of American
blackmail.
Thus it was that some neo-cons, in spite of their Trotskyite-like
radical temperament (in the opinion of this author, radicalism is as
much a psychological state of mind as it is a political position)
and their belief in "permanent revolution", discovered that there
were times when the US would have to adopt the realism of Lenin. If
Lenin felt it necessary to build the communist order in one state
before exporting the revolution as an instrument for global
domination, and to ally himself with non-communist states in order
to better secure that state, neo-conss reached the conclusion that
they had to give priority, for the moment, to building the
capitalist democratic state in one country, temporarily give up the
idea of permanent revolution and ally themselves with non-democratic
nations if that better served their interests. Not all neo-cons
welcomed this shift. In his article, "Who killed the Bush Doctrine?"
appearing in Haaretz of 30 September 2005, Michael Rubin, editor of
the Middle East Quarterly, laments the compromise. A worshipper at
the neo-con temple, the American Enterprise Institute, Rubin
reminded his readers that Bush, in his inaugural speech of 20
January 2005, had pledged to support democracy and freedom around
the globe. Rubin suspected that some clique had "got to the
president or got around him," for nearly a year later it had become
clear that the Bush administration had chosen to betray the "Bush
Doctrine" and chosen, instead, to support the status quo in Egypt,
Libya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and even Lebanon and Syria.
Now, as we mourn the death of democracy, leaving only desolation,
the spread of terrorism to other countries such as Jordan, and the
growing Iranian influence in Iraq through the Iraqi elections,
studies have begun to emerge refuting the established lore about the
relationship between the spread of democracy and the fight against
terrorism, or between dictatorship and the breeding of terrorism.
Suddenly, scholars have observed that terrorism in non-democratic
China pales next to terrorism in democratic India; that democracy in
Britain did nothing to dampen the resolve of a group of native-born
British youths to mount a series of terrorist acts, and that
domestic terrorist movements emerged in democratic Germany, America,
Italy, Israel and Japan in the 1970s, 1980s and up to the end of the
last century. It is not true, of course, that democracy breeds
terrorism. It is true that liberal democracy is the best of all
systems of government, or more precisely, the least pernicious.
However, there is no relationship between democratisation and ending
terrorism. Nor has a clear relationship been established between
dictatorship and the breeding of terrorism (see Gregory Gause, 'Can
democracy stop terrorism?' in Foreign Affairs, September/October
2005). More importantly, terrorism has gained a new base of
operations, in dictatorship-free Iraq.
Odd how China and India can crop up suddenly -- or vanish just as
quickly -- as the needs of proponents of the theory of exporting
democracy to fight terrorism dictate. Liberal democracy is better
than dictatorship because it is a more humane system of government,
not because it is more effective in fighting terrorism.
It is clearer than ever that this aphorism that used to be quoted in
connection with communism -- "the idea is great; the problem is in
its application" -- does not hold in the case of neo-con dogma. The
problem is that the idea was turned into a creed of action, which is
to say that it could no longer be distinguished from practice. The
idea -- democracy -- was packaged for export and placed at the end
of the barrel of a gun. The problem also resides in the belief that
America's non-democratic allies who toe the line with US foreign
policy are capable of building democratic governments just because
they know which side their bread is buttered on. In addition, it is
naïve to think that just because some hardcore neo-cons believe in
exporting democracy, the pragmatists among US foreign policy
architects designed their policy in accordance with this doctrine.
Spreading democracy was not initially their creed. Rather, the creed
served their purposes at a time in which they were drumming up
support for a certain plan of action and exploiting the post-11
September hysteria towards this end.
The constant in US foreign policy planning is imperial interests.
Imperial interests may dictate that some of the young zealots who
believed in Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld bewail the death of a
doctrine, just as the tears shed by Israeli settlers at the time of
disengagement served Sharon's designs. The bottom line is that
national interests prevail. The concept is less emotive and less
ideologically coherent than it appears.
Its proponents are also less grandiose and less prone to feigning a
worldly callousness than they appear, unlike adolescents trying to
act as grownups and certainly unlike those neo-con intellectuals who
had never fought a war in their lives, yet who swagger around
spouting their notions about the greater picture. These self-styled
intellectual giants are indifferent to petty details, such as the
cries of misery issuing from the death and destruction below, as
they stomp relentlessly forward to fulfil the historical mission to
which they appointed themselves ever since they started working as
journalists, think-tank scholars, congressional members or
under-secretaries. The realists share this insensitivity to the
suffering of others, of course. However, their insensitivity is
real, not a pose, not the bravado of the university grad who
prattles on blithely about the necessity of war, bloodshed, the
displacement of people and the partition of nations.
The neo-cons have a soft spot in their heart for such things as
ideology, doctrinal consistency and the historic mission of
imperialism. They are always taken by surprise by realists whose
soft spot is in their pockets and by others for whom imperialism is
not a religion, or a substitute for religion, or a logically
coherent ideology to be used against heresy, but something to be
implemented on the ground, with all the conflicting demands this
makes, with all the trial and error that is required and with all
the concessions to imperial interests that are needed in order to
consolidate and expand the dominion of hegemony.
This is why the realists in Washington have begun to recalculate
their strategy. They realise that they have to keep the increasingly
fidgety home front under control, and that they have to make some
concessions to opinion abroad now that the disaster they wrought in
Iraq has made the international situation so much more complex.
The war against terror has produced only one result so far, which
was to expand the range of terrorism. Nor has exploiting terrorism
to expand the realm of American hegemony had any sure-fire results
apart from having opened the gates of hell. And the Iraqi model of
democracy has few buyers; indeed, it is repellent even to Syrian
opposition forces.
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