Chaos and U.S. Power

Gilbert Achcar on U.S. foreign policy and violence in the Middle East; Jack Miles on Iraqi oil; Syed Saleem Shahzad on Musharraf's predicament; Alain Gresh on America's New Backyard

Read together, these three commentaries suggest how fragile things are becoming in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon, countries which are regarded in decreasing order of importance by U.S. planners. The strategic challenge they are faced with, like the British a century ago in the same region, is maintaining a level of conflict between clients and non-clients that is high enough to prevent broad alliances against foreign influence from forming, but low enough to prevent total chaos.

But as Alain Gresh shows in the above article, U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan (like Soviet-occupied Afghanistan) are becoming magnets for multinational, multiethnic coalitions of pan-Muslim nationalists, many from countries thousands of miles away. The indirect U.S. backing of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, direct U.S. involvement (including air and naval deployments) in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia last winter, the expansion of the Afghan war into Pakistani Waziristan, and threats war against Iran from Republicans and Democrats alike have involved the U.S. in armed conflicts and local struggles from the Horn of Africa to South Asia. (One might add that, with U.S.-Malian and U.S.-Filipino joint military exercises and operations taking place in the last year, the U.S. is at war across the entire Muslim world.)

An excerpt from Gresh's article:

The landscape of the Middle East has been redrawn. This was the objective of Pentagon strategists and the neo-conservatives; but it is doubtful whether the results match their dreams of remodelling the region to secure the lasting hold that the French and British established after the first world war.

Western forces are directly involved in ferocious conflicts across the broader Middle East. Afghanistan has collapsed into chaos, dragging US and Nato troops down with it. It will be hard to heal the wounds in Iraq, where religious and ethnic rivalries and resistance to foreign occupation have caused hundreds of thousands of casualties – more, according to some observers, than the Rwandan genocide. Lebanon is mired in a silent civil war between Fuad Siniora’s government and the opposition, centred on Hizbullah and Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement; despite a significant UN presence, the war with Israel could resume at any moment. Colonisation and repression have accelerated the geographical and social fragmentation of Palestine, and the possibly irreversible collapse of the national movement. Since Ethiopia’s US-backed intervention in December 2006, Somalia has been called the “new front in the war on terror”. Then there are Darfur, the tensions in Pakistan, a “terrorist threat" in North Africa and the possibility of a new confrontation between Syria and Israel.

A self-fulfilling prophecy
All these conflicts have been subsumed into a US world view that projects a specific meaning on to them. During and after the cold war, the US (like the Soviet Union) viewed any crisis in the light of the East-West conflict. So the issue in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 1980s was not the Sandinista struggle against a brutal dictatorship in an attempt to build a fairer society, but the danger that the country might become part of an “evil empire” (4). This cost the people of Nicaragua a decade of war and destruction. The US is indifferent to the problems of the Palestinians, the crisis in Somalia or the sectarian conflict in Lebanon; it is fixated on a global confrontation between good and evil. And this discourse feeds al-Qaida’s vision of a continuing war against Jews and crusaders.

This dichotomy has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, which local forces have exploited for their own ends. Somalia’s transitional federal government – corrupt, incompetent warlords–persuaded the White House that international terrorism was at work (5). The US responded by encouraging Ethiopian military intervention in an attempt to expel the Union of Islamic Courts forces that had seized Mogadishu six months previously (see page 4). Global preconceptions eclipsed the real internal situation. Christian Ethiopia’s invasion of its Muslim neighbour served only to enhance the credibility of ultra-radical Islamist groups (6). Lebanon is a fragile entity that depends upon a subtle sectarian alchemy. By deciding to support one side against the other, the US and France made any internal resolution more difficult. Lebanon has become a battleground where the West and its allies can confront Iran and Syria. And any compromise, however necessary, is in danger of being perceived as a victory for the “forces of evil”. As they have multiplied, the conflicts have become interrelated. Weapons, combatants and skills move across porous frontiers, sometimes in the wake of hundreds of thousands of refugees driven into exile by the fighting. Over the past two years combat techniques pioneered in Iraq have spread to Afghanistan – the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against troop transports, and suicide bombings, which were unknown during the Soviet occupation (and which have now also spread to Algeria).

This summer, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, hundreds of fighters, many of them foreigners who fought in Iraq, held out for more than three months against the Lebanese army. There are thousands of Arab, Pakistani and central Asian combatants now on the loose, all trained in Iraq. Others, trained by the US and Pakistan to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, migrated to terrorist groups in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere, as well as into al-Qaida. All these wars have encouraged a profitable trade: weapons handed out to the Iraqi security forces are now in the hands of Turkish criminals (7).

This sense of overspilling regional violence is confirmed by these news reports:

Dozens feared dead in suicide bomb blasts in Rawalpindi, Pakistan

Fifteen people killed in seven coordinated bomb blasts in Uttar Pradesh, India. The blasts took place near court complexes in three different cities: Lucknow, Varanasi and Faizabad.

And look at the violence in Iraq from the just the last few days:

Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/24/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/23/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/22/07
Reuters on Iraq Violence 11/21/07
Twin Bombings Kill at Least 26 in Iraq

In other news: Human rights organizations call for a halt to the demolition of 3,000 public housing units in New Orleans. The same cynicism and greed that leads rich countries to push liberalization on the poorest ones is also leading developers to see dollar bills in the "whitening" of New Orleans. This is just another example.