Now, now, be nice. Anderson takes the Chomskyan view that humanitarian interventions just cloak imperial designs. He adds that the Iraqi venture is for "peace and stability" of the capitalist order and so consistent with previous interventions. Unlike Chomsky's pessimistic pre-war take on the war on the Taliban and al Qaeda, Anderson is more sanguine in a way on the war on Saddam and speaks of the "Nicaragua effect." I think this landed aristocrat is wrong about humanitarian interventionism. However I think he's on target in his analysis of the coming war on Saddam, whereas much of the left is underestimating Empire, but what else is new?
"This is a region in which—unlike Europe, Russia, China, Japan or Latin America—there are virtually no regimes with a credible base to offer effective
transmission points for American cultural or economic hegemony. The assorted Arab states are docile enough, but they lack any kind of popular support, resting on family networks and secret police which typically compensate for their factual servility to the US with a good deal of media hostility, not to speak of closure, towards America. Uniquely, indeed, Washington’s oldest dependency and most valuable client in the region, Saudi Arabia, is more barricaded against US cultural penetration than any country in the world after North Korea.
In practice, while thoroughly subject to the grip of American ‘hard’ power (funds and arms), most of the Arab world thus forms a kind of exclusion zone for the normal operations of American ‘soft power’, allowing all kinds of aberrant forces and sentiments to brew under the apparently tight lid of the local security services, as the origins of the assailants of 9.11 demonstrated. Viewed in this light, Al-Qaeda could be seen as a warning of the dangers of relying on too external and indirect a system of control in the Middle East, an area which also contains the bulk of the world’s oil reserves and so cannot be left to its own devices as an irrelevant marchland in the way that most of Sub-Saharan Africa can. On the other hand, any attempt to alter the struts of US command over the region by tampering with the existing regimes could easily lead to regime backlashes of the Madame Nhu type, which did the US no good in South-East Asia. Taking over Iraq, by contrast, would give Washington a large oil-rich platform in the centre of the Arab world, on which to build an enlarged version of Afghan-style democracy, designed to change the whole political landscape of the Middle East.
Of course, as many otherwise well-disposed commentators have hastened to point out, rebuilding Iraq might prove a taxing and hazardous business. But American resources are large, and Washington can hope for a Nicaraguan effect after a decade of mortality and despair under UN siege—counting on the end of sanctions and full resumption of oil exports, under a US occupation, to improve the living conditions of the majority of the Iraqi population so dramatically as to create the potential for a stable American protectorate, of the kind that already more or less exists in the Kurdish sector of the country. Unlike the Sandinista government, the Ba’ath regime is a pitiless dictatorship with few or no popular roots. The Bush administration could reckon that the chances of a Nicaraguan outcome, in which an exhausted population trades independence for material relief, are likely to be higher in Baghdad than they were in Managua.
In turn, the demonstration effect of a role-model parliamentary regime, under benevolent international tutelage—perhaps another Loya Jirga of the ethnic mosaic in the country—would be counted on to convince Arab elites of the need to modernize their ways, and Arab masses of the invincibility of America. In the Muslim world at large, Washington has already pocketed the connivance of the Iranian clerics (conservative and reformist) for a repeat of Enduring Freedom in Mesopotamia. In these conditions, so the strategic calculus goes, bandwagoning of the kind that originally brought the PLO to heel at Oslo after the Gulf War would once again become irresistible, allowing a final settlement of the Palestinian question along lines acceptable to Sharon.
Such, roughly speaking, is the thinking behind the Republican plan to occupy Iraq. Like all such geopolitical enterprises, which can never factor in every relevant agent or circumstance, it involves a gamble. But a calculation that misfires is not thereby necessarily irrational—it becomes so only if the odds are plainly too high against it, or the potential costs far outweigh the benefits, even if the odds are low. Neither appears to apply in this case. The operation is clearly within American capabilities, and its immediate costs—there would undoubtedly be some—do not at this stage look prohibitive. What would upset the apple-cart, of course, would be any sudden overthrow of one or more of the US client regimes in the region by indignant crowds or enraged officers. In the nature of things, it is impossible to rule out such coups de théâtre, but as things stand at the moment, it looks as if Washington is not being unrealistic in discounting such an eventuality. The Iraqi regime attracts far less sympathy than the Palestinian cause, yet the Arab masses were unable to lift a finger to help the second intifada throughout the televised crushing by the IDF of the uprising in the occupied territories."