[lbo-talk] RE: Wallerstein on US & Iraq

John Bizwas bizwas at lycos.com
Wed Sep 15 05:02:44 PDT 2004


Wallerstein writes:


>(1) The first is the destruction of the Baath party and its political
>influence in the future in Iraq. Well, the party is formally
>dismantled. And initially the U.S. occupying authorities sought to
>eliminate the Baathists from any role in Iraqi institutions (the army
>which was dismantled, the police which was reorganized, the
>universities, and the government ministries). But when the U.S. was
>faced by insurrectionary forces in Fallujah which they found they
>couldn't dislodge, they found that the only solution was to turn to
>ex-Baathist leaders in order to bring about a truce and to restore
>order locally after the U.S. forces withdrew.

Not completely true. Much of the negotiating around Fallujah was with Sunna leaders long in control of their city. Also, it should be pointed out that the US-installed Alawi is an ex-Baathist of Shia affiliation, though he seems quite secular and is not regarded as any sort of a religious leader.


>Now, we learn from the N.Y. Times that these former Baathists were
>subsequently tagged by the local population as U.S. agents, and have
>been forced to resign or to shift their allegiance to an Islamic
>fundamentalist group that now controls not only Fallujah but a good
>deal of the Sunni areas of western Iraq. So, the U.S. is in the
>extraordinary position of regretting the downfall of the ex-Baathist
>group in Fallujah and its environs.

The US Occupation seems to have been propagandizing that the Fallujah insurrection was 'Baathist holdouts'. A lie followed up with the 'Zarqawi is everywhere' lie.


>In Afghanistan, the U.S. succeeded in the 1980s in ousting a secular >Communist regime only to install thereby the Taliban, whom they >discovered eventually to be far worse. The U.S. seems to be doing >something similar in the Sunni areas of Iraq.

Oh no, we've created another Frankenstein's monster: people who do not partake of American values! Really, the argument here speaks far too much for the 'power' of American influence in terms of turning people into something they wouldn't otherwise be were it not for some mistake the Americans make. The rise of the Taliban has far more to do with later US policies in accord with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan projecting power and influence in that part of the world, which fit nicely with the US desire to control the influence and power of Russia, China and India.


>(2) The second is control over the world oil supply. It is hard to
>see that the U.S. is in a better position today than it was three
>years ago. Iraqi oil exports are erratic because of continual
>guerilla attacks on the pipelines. Whether, once the political
>situation settles down (and this may take quite some time), the U.S.
>will end up with a greater de facto influence on how Iraq plays its
>oil cards than say France or Russia remains to be seen.

But what if the point was to take pricing power out of the hands of the Saddam regime? If anything, Iraqi oil production contributed greatly to overproduction and cheap oil prices in the 1990s, which caused panic at the Fed over deflation and dismayed various oil interests, whose capital syndicates often cite a minimum price of 27-30 dollars a barrel to maintain more expensive oil production (such as oil patch states in the US) while capital can be raised to go after more exploration and riskier production.


>(3) The third is reducing the ability of Islamic "terrorists" to
>attack the U.S. or otherwise to achieve hostile objectives. Despite
>all the nonsense that is sometimes said, it is clear that, before
>2003, the regime of Saddam Hussein did not really allow these groups
>to operate from an Iraqi base. Now, these "terrorist" groups are free
>to roam in Iraq, seize hostages, and recruit new participants.
>Whatever the degree of achievement of U.S. objectives in this regard
>elsewhere (cutting off funds to al-Qaeda and destroying its bases in
>Afghanistan and Pakistan), invading Iraq cannot be said to have
>advanced significantly U.S. objectives in this regard.

Well, once you can get the US and its western allies to believe that the military attack on Afghanistan was a direct strike against the 9-11 plotters, anything is possible. The 9-11 perpetrators came from the ME, launched from Europe, the ME and North America. And the profile they present to anyone who follows such matters would be military, special forces or intel operatives with military and pilot training from the Gulf States. Not the Taliban in Afghanistan.


>(4) The fourth is creating a stable, pro-American government in Iraq.
>Well, the U.S. is certainly not there yet. The present Allawi interim
>regime is weak in every way - in military and police power, in
>political control of Iraq, and in legitimation by the population. The
>recent standoff in Najaf of the offensive of Allawi and the U.S.
>military against Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi militia hardly
>enhanced Allawi's status. For the moment, the interim regime is still
>utterly dependent on the support of the U.S. military.

Would the US military--I mean the CentCom people who are into politics and business in a big way--have it any other way? What if, afterall, the unstated goal was simply to break up Iraq or reconfigure it into a stable 3-part confederation? Then the US occupation is there to help bring about and to control the break up so the results are amenable to the actual US goals. For example, their actions (or lack of them, except against Ansar al-Islam, who reportedly had Zarqawi with them) in the Kurdish territories would support this argument.


>If it wants to achieve legitimacy, it has to either increase radically >its military strength (which seems remote) or increase its legitimacy >(which means distancing itself from the U.S.). Allawi may aspire to be >the next Saddam Hussein, but he has a long way to go. And if he gets >there, is it sure the kind of stable government he might thereby create >would really remain "pro-American"?

He's simply the ex-Baathist who will kill Saddam and disappear once his revenge is accomplished. If he's not assassinated first. That's a prediction with a qualification.


>(5) The fifth is to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction. It
>is not only that the Bush regime found no such weapons in Iraq. It is
>also that the invasion of Iraq may well pull down the last shreds of
>the nuclear non-proliferation program. Iran and North Korea have
>obviously speeded up, not slowed down, their efforts. It is now
>announced that South Korea may be following in their footsteps. And
>if so, can Japan and Taiwan be far behind? What can the U.S. do? What
>can the United Nations do? The bluff may well have been called.

So we are to replace one false alarm with many others? South Korea and Japan beat the North Koreans to nuclear weapons along time ago when the US military stationed nukes in these 'sovereign' countries. Non-proliferation became a sick joke with Israel and Pakistan joining the club.


>(6) The sixth is to spread "democracy" throughout the Middle East.
>Whatever this may be taken to mean, I can't see that much has been
>accomplished. If democracy means multi-party elections with no
>constraints, it seems likely at this moment that such elections would
>result - in Iraq, in Egypt, in Jordan, in Saudi Arabia, in
>Afghanistan, and in many other countries - in regimes far less to the
>taste of the United States than the current ones. It is for this
>reason that the Bush regime has been dragging its feet on such
>elections in Iraq, not pushing them forward at full speed.
>"Democracy" seems to be favored by the Bush people only if it gives
>the right results. The people, unfortunately, are perverse.

It almost seems like a humane sentiment expressed here, but the most likely intentional omission of Israel (on this and the nuclear issue) says it all.


>(7) The seventh is to make friends and influence people, throughout
>the region and the world. Even the strongest supporters of the Bush
>administration in the United States have noticed that its policies
>have had the opposite effect. They have "unmade" friends and
>influenced people negatively. The Bush people are reduced to saying
>that this is not important, and that the U.S. should not allow its
>policies to be dictated by so-called friends.

So the US Republican-Democratic establishment debate in 1998-2001 was whether or not to attack Iraq directly with US forces. Then the debate morphed into whether or not to attack Iraq directly only if a European and E. Asian coalition could be put together to show 'multilateralism' still works. The insiders would have it that the Democrats like Clinton or Gore could have used all that good feeling stirred by 9-11 to wheedle and cajole NATO into joining an invasion of Iraq, but the Bush administration, in all its arrogance, alienated them.

Now the debate has shrunk to whether or not the Bush administration has done a good job pursuing the consensus policy that war against Saddam's Iraq should go ahead as long-planned because somehow it had something to do with the all-out war against terror.


>(8) The eighth is to establish the credibility of U.S. military
>power, as a deterrent to all potential enemies of the U.S. and all
>potential troublemakers everywhere. But using military power,
>especially overwhelming military power, only works if it results, in
>the inimitable words of the Bush administration, in "shock and awe."
>We have seen the shock but not the awe. It is hard to be awesome when
>the great U.S. armed forces are held in check by a popular resistance
>in Iraq that is growing daily. It is hard to be awesome when it is
>clear that the U.S. armed forces are at present stretched to their
>utter limits, in terms of personnel, with few means of expanding
>their number in the near future. It is hard to be awesome when we
>have military and intelligence personnel in the U.S. urging prudence
>on their civilian superiors.

Well, for the imperialist Dems and Reps, the first war against Iraq was supposed to have established that credibility. The US interference in Yugoslavia was supposed to have established the US as a 'neutral' police superpower who could act both with and outside the UN.

So one possible solution is more personnel and firepower, but the US can't muster that now because, well the author doesn't say. How would this author suggest the US military act to be more 'awesome'? The US military's version of prudence, which was echoed in Powell's State Dept., was that the US should only go in with enough fire power to kill every Iraqi or lock them up many times over, so no sacred American military blood would be shed. In the first war US-Iraq war, Schwarzkopf and his fighting mobile, airbourne quartermaster showed more concern about lost US water canteens than about Iraqi casualties.


>The problem with demonstrating credibility is that, if success builds
>on success, lack of success makes the situation worse. The Bush
>regime seems to have achieved this undesirable goal. If this were a
>school exercise, I fear the grade would not be "excellent" or even
>"very good" but at most "barely passing" and at worst, an outright
>failure.

The piece fails to arrive at much of anything simply because it starts on the supposition that we should take stated US policy--and some internal critique of it--at face value. But the author is right in at least one sense if we make the inference for him (I mean this is most likely why the discussion is even taking place): the upcoming election is an establishment debate on whether or not the Bush regime has done a good job, with the war (and the accompanying division of spoils) on Iraq being the largest issue amongst them. This can't be discussed as if it were a real issue of 'democracy'--hence the need , if the issue is popularized, to encode it in things like a debate about the honour of exaggerated river rat patrols vs. coke-powered guard duty with periods of AWOL during the Nam era.

To be sure, even if a large and growing chunk of US and allied capital thinks the Bush administration has made a total botch of the war on Iraq, you won't find them out on the street protesting war, militarism, a lack of health care or failed retirement plans.

Fugazy

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