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. Read more!

Gender, Race and the Logic of Extraterritoriality

The Blackwater bodyguards who killed 17 Iraqi civilians have been granted immunity from prosecution by the U.S. State Department. This is a symbolic middle finger from Washington to Nuri Al-Maliki, who recently said that Blackwater ‘must pay’ for the killings. Evidently, the State Department is no longer even trying to pretend that the Republic of Iraq is a sovereign state. (Kind of like the U.S. vis-à-vis South Vietnam circa 1963. And, in fact, some Washington insiders have made no secret about wanting to pull a Ngo Dinh Diem on Al-Maliki, and replace him with another puppet who really knows his place.)

It’s not just private U.S. mercenaries who get this kind of treatment. Just last week, Japanese police announced that they would not arrest U.S. marines who a 19-year-old Japanese woman had accused of gang-raping her. The police cited “inconsistencies” in her story. Perhaps they were hoping to avoid a repeat of an embarrassing 2005 incident in which, after 6 U.S. soldiers gang-raped a 22-year-old Filipina, the U.S. embassy refused to surrender the soldiers to the Philippine Department of Justice. Or how about Okinawa in 1995? At least the perpetrators in that case were tried in a Japanese court, and paid reparations to the family of the victim. But the U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement continues to grant extraterritorial rights to U.S. soldiers in Japan, and there are similar agreements in place in the Philippines and dozens of other countries.

In July 2006, the Paraguayan National Congress granted U.S. soldiers immunity from prosecution until December 2006, despite claims that they are engaged in legitimate “anti-terrorism operations.” In 2004, the U.S. demanded that the U.N. Security Council pass a resulting granting war crimes immunity for U.S. peacekeepers on U.N. missions.

The consistent policy aim of placing U.S. soldiers, private mercenaries and even peacekeepers “above the law” in foreign countries perpetuates a two-tiered legal relationship between the U.S. and its satellites--a kind of Jim Crow jurisprudence. In this framework, there are rules for “Us” and rules for “Them,” and in practice the line between "Us" and "Them" is a sexualized and racialized one. These sexual and racial aspects can be seen at the macro-level of history, or the micro-level of day-to-day practices. At the broadest level, regarding sex, the connection between patriarchy and warfare (or prostitution, rape and standing armies) stretches back to the upper Paleolithic or to the Bronze Age, depending on who you ask. (For a review of the debate, see, for example, the work of Gerda Lerner and Joshua Goldstein.) Regarding race, at a similarly (though less) broad level, there is the historical continuity between the European conquest of four-fifths of the planet from 1492 to 1945 (one of whose episodes was the conquest of North America by white settlers and soldiers); and the global dominance (in economic, military and cultural affairs) of the biggest of the white settler states, the USA, from 1945 to the present. Despite the weakening of U.S. hegemony post-Vietnam, the resurgence of China, the upsurge in Latin America, and the tokenistic integration of women and people of color in the U.S. military, U.S. military power remains coded as both male and white. And the presence of 737 major U.S. military bases in 130 countries abroad is nothing if not an expression of power.

Conversely, it is not hard to find sex and race in terms like “client state,” “host country” and “native population,” much less “towelhead” and “Haaji.”

The expression of this patriarchal/white supremacist power is often blatant. As Katharine H.S. Moon notes in her study Sex Among Allies, since the Korean War “over one million Korean women have served as sex providers for the U.S. military.” And as Cynthia McEnloe (I am indebted to Moon’s study for the citation) writes in her book Bananas, Beaches and Bases:

“A military base isn't simply an institution for servicing bombers, fighters, aircraft carriers, or a launch-pad for aggressive forays into surrounding territories. A military base is also a package of presumptions about the male soldier's sexual needs, the local society's sexual needs, and about the local society's resources for satisfying those needs. Massage parlors are as integral to Subic Bay, the mammoth U.S. naval base in the Philippines, as its dry docks.”

This also applies to female soldiers on the bases. In her essay "Why the War is Sexist," Huibin Amee Chew reports the following statistics:

"Alarmingly, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, over 80 percent of recent women veterans report experiencing sexual harassment and 30 percent report rape, or attempted rape, by other military personnel [!]. Crimes of sexual violence by military personnel are shocking yet are institutionally ignored. Lawyer Dorothy Mackey of Survivors Take Action Against Abuse by Military Personnel reports that of the 4,300 sexual assault and abuse cases she is handling, only 3 were actually prosecuted. In Mackey’s own experience as a survivor of repeated sexual assault by military personnel, her attempt to press charges was opposed by the Department of Justice as a threat to national security."

The same hierarchies that render such statistics invisible in mainstream U.S. discourse also serve to distort perceptions of risk. Polls show that a majority of Americans erroneously believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11. Even if that were true, consider the trade-off: some 1.2 million Iraqis may have been killed since 2003 as a result of the U.S.-UK invasion, whereas 2,973 people died on 9/11. And it needs to be acknowledged that the logic tying 9/11 to Iraq is both sexualized (vengeful retaliation) and racialized ("Bin Laden and Hussein are both Arabs, so they might as well be in cahoots"). And, let's face it, only a worldview seriously distorted by white supremacy could see the loss of 1 million-odd Iraqi lives between 2003 and 2007 as a ho-hum affair, but the loss of 3,000-odd American lives on 9/11 as an occasion for profound grief.

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The U.S. and the Kurds

60,000 Turkish troops have massed on the Iraqi border. Meanwhile, the PKK has offered Turkey an unconditional ceasefire on the condition that it does not cross the border.

The U.S. has poured arms into Turkey throughout the duration of its brutal counter-insurgency campaign against the Kurds. Turkey was the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid between 1994 and 2004, behind Israel and Egypt. The Turkish campaign against the Kurds was arguably as murderous as Saddam's next door, which the U.S. also facilitated with billions' worth of arms (Bell Textron helicopters were used to gas the Kurds at Halabja). The idea that the Kurds are "natural" allies of the U.S. is a sad joke.

As Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed wrote in a still-useful 2001 article:

"The Turkish government has been practicing ethnic cleansing and genocide against its Kurdish minority[21] as part of its war on the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) that began in 1984. The war against the Kurdish people en masse continues despite the fact noted by the Federation of American Scientists that the vast majority of Turkey’s 13 million strong Kurdish population do not claim to support the PKK. The scale of the war also happens to be much wider than what Serb forces perpetrated in Kosovo, which elicited NATO intervention. By 1999, an estimated 45,000 Kurdish civilians had been killed, and 3,000 Kurdish villages plundered and sub-sequently incinerated by Turkish security forces in a brutal scorched earth campaign, the occupants either killed or driven out. Up to 3 million people have been internally displaced in this way from their homes in this manner.[22] Most of this destruction has taken place within the last several years.[23]

Systematic detention and torture of captured Kurdish civilians has also continued with impunity. One representative example of the nature of these policies is noted by Amnesty International in its annual country report:

“Two Kurdish girls, 16-year-old N.C.S. and 19-year-old Fatma Deniz Polattas, were detained and reportedly tortured for several days at the Anti-Terror Branch of Police Headquarters in Iskenderun in early March. They were held blindfolded and naked. N.C.S. was exposed to verbal and sexual harassment. Fatma Deniz Polattas was anally raped. A formal complaint was lodged, but the prosecutor decided not to prosecute the police officers.”[24]

The Turkish authorities justify their campaign on the pretext of attempting to prevent the secession of areas in the south inhabited by Kurds, who for decades have sought self-determination through the establishment of their own state. However, as a matter of chronological fact, the movement for secession sprouted and grew in reaction to, and thus as a direct consequence of, comprehensive repression of the Kurdish population within modern Turkey since the founding of Republic by Ataturk. The institutionalised violations of human rights perpetrated by the Turkish authorities against the Kurds have been instrumental in provoking the backlash of separatist movement based on Kurdish nationalism. In the same vein as conditions between Serbia and its Kosovan province, it is primarily due to the massive repression of Kurds by the Turkish authorities that there exists a movement in the country for Kurdish self-determination, similar in kind to the plea of the Kosovan Albanians. Indeed, the Turkish government refuses to recognise the most elementary rights of the Kurdish people, repressing them by refusing to acknowledge their very existence. All human, social, civil, political, cultural and linguistic rights have been denied the Kurds by the Turkish authorities. To even speak the Kurdish language or have a Kurdish name is illegal. The result can only be described as a form of Turkish apartheid.[25]

As the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reports, the Turkish establishment “has prohibited all existing legal avenues for Kurds in Turkey to express themselves politically or culturally…

“Kurdish language television and radio broadcasts are forbidden. In late 1998 and early 1999, Turkish police arrested over 3,000 members of the main Kurdish political party (People’s Democracy Party or HADEP) for alleged ties to the PKK. With elections scheduled for April 1999, the Government is preparing a legal case to close HADEP and another Kurdish-based political party. Fourteen political parties have been banned since 1982. The government has not responded to past ceasefire announcements by the PKK, saying it will not negotiate with ‘terrorists’. Nor is Turkey responding favorably to calls from many governments to begin negotiating with Kurdish leaders now that PKK leader Ocalan has been arrested.”[26]
Turkish political scientist Haluk Gerger comments on the foundations of this apartheid-like repression:

“The basic insecurity that characterized the system and the resultant fear that shaped the behavior of the ruling elite have their roots in history. That is, both in the imperial heritage upon which the republican reconstruction was attempted, and the very essence of the structure that was created. This phenomenon is now being augmented in all its dimensions by the war against the Kurds… Turkish militarism is characterized by the rampant prominence of its values in society, the preponderance of the military establishment in politics, and by the unabashed legitimacy accorded to violence both at popular and official levels. Turkish chauvinism is expressed in extremely aggressive ultra nationalism, in xenophobic Turkism, in excessive bigotry and in the irrational and superfluous ‘master race’ and ‘one-nation state’ ideas.”[27]

The contrast in Western policy towards parallel circumstances is conspicuous. Although, the Turkish government has been practicing ethnic cleansing against its Kurdish minority since 1984 - on an even wider scale than Serb forces have done in Kosovo – Turkey has been in consistent receipt of extensive support from most NATO allies, most prominently from the United States and the United Kingdom, both of whom played leading roles in the intervention in Kosovo. The contradiction is accentuated when we recall that the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Turkey happens to be far beyond the scale of Kosovo’s crisis both before and after NATO intervention. Yet while NATO saw fit to intervene in Kosovo and indict Serb warlord Slobodan Milosevic, the Alliance has actually supported the Turkish Republic as it pursues its scorched earth campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the south, and consolidates its apartheid-like laws throughout the country.

While the international community has failed to condemn the Turkish government’s of state terrorism, the United States has been quick in leading the way for the Western powers to label the PKK a ‘terrorist’ group. And while professing concern for the plight of the Kurds under Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, the international community has ignored repression of Kurds in Turkey. Summarising this hypocrisy, Kurdish expert Vera Saeedpour, Editor of the International Journal of Kurdish Studies, observes that:

“While the U.S. is attacking Iraq almost daily in its self-declared ‘no-fly zones’, saying that it does so because it cares about the Kurds, it is backing Turkey in its attacks against the Kurds. Turkey has destroyed, drowned villages with dams. They deny or punish any manifestation of Kurdish identity, yet Clinton has called Turkey a ‘shining example to the world of the virtues of cultural diversity’. Kurdish parliamentarians are in prison for their words, some spoken in the US. The Iraqi Kurds, under U.S. pressure, have helped Turkey in its attacks on the Turkish Kurds. European countries didn’t give Ocalan safe-haven because of the pressure from Turkey and the U.S., which insisted that Ocalan face justice in Turkey; but there isn’t any justice for a Kurd in Turkey. Ocalan asked for an international trial in Europe, but Turkey refused since they didn’t want their Kurdish policy to get any scrutiny.”[28]

The anti-humanitarian tenor of Western policies towards the Kurds are well rooted in history. Indeed, they are based on long-standing strategic interests in the region. “The Kurds are in several countries and that was planned by Britain”, observes former President of the American Kurdish Society in Boston, Hussein Aktas. “If you have a problem with Iraq, you can use them against Iraq, same for Iran and Turkey.” Thanks to this disasterous condition, historically established by the West, there are “millions of Kurds who have been displaced from their homes since 1993 in Turkey”, and “hundreds of thousands of people have been tortured.”[29]" [Emphasis added]

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