Sowing Crisis, page 24
In the end it is irrelevant whether these hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or in Israel or Somalia or Pakistan, or at home on unnecessary weapons systems. In any case, this was all part of a larger effort by a United States administration that for eight years was led by individuals who appeared to believe seriously, or at least pretended to believe, that all of the entirely discrete and separate wars, conflicts, and forces that the United States has been engaged with from the Middle East through central Asia, with manifold extensions elsewhere, were integrally linked. In their view, the United States is fighting a single enemy in all of these disparate arenas, which some of them, including Senator John McCain before and during the 2008 presidential campaign, have termed “Islamofascist.” This neat Madison Avenue conflation of two stock bogeymen was a typically cynical concoction of the Bush administration’s neoconservative fellow travelers and spinmeisters. These individuals showed no compunction and absolutely no shame in arbitrarily invoking Munich, appeasement, a nuclear holocaust (or the Nazi Holocaust),32 or any other ahistorical precedent to justify their extreme twenty-first-century policies. In the rhetoric of the Bush administration, this single hydra-headed enemy that it proclaimed the United States must fight the world over was the same one that attacked the United States on 9/11, and was responsible for numerous other terrorist outrages against Americans and others.
Is this a correct view, or a well-informed and objective one? It is certainly not correct: I have already discussed the extreme diversity, in some cases the complete dissimilarity, among the disparate targets of this “war.” I have also pointed out that most of them clearly have no intention of harming the United States or its citizens. Moreover, it is not a well-informed and objective view. We know this from many sources. One is the devastating account of Paul Pillar, the experienced professional intelligence official who from 2002 until 2005 was national intelligence officer for the Middle East, in effect the American intelligence community’s most senior analyst. He damningly describes how his and other expert advice was systematically overruled on the basis of spurious “evidence” trumped up by political appointees like Lewis Libby, David Addington, Stephen Cambone, and Douglas Feith, doing the bidding of their ill-informed political superiors, notably Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in order to justify the rush to war with Iraq.33
Another damning piece of evidence is an article by an editor of the Congressional Quarterly showing that many top members of the Bush administration (and of the congressional leadership as well) did not know some of the most elementary things about Islam and Middle East politics, like the difference between Sunnis and Shi’a, or between Hamas and Hizballah.34 Given this abysmal degree of ignorance regarding basic facts about Islam and the Islamic world today, it is inconceivable that these senior officials could have had any clear idea about the true nature of the links—if any—that existed between the elements of the international concatenation of “rogue states” and Islamist “terrorist organizations” which they described as the monolithic “Islamofascist” enemy of the United States. There was clearly much else such senior figures inside and outside government did not know and did not want to learn about the Middle East and the Islamic world, as their superficial, Manichaean depiction of this struggle and their fumbling conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have amply demonstrated. This grievous lack of basic knowledge, and a stubborn unwillingness to listen to experts or to hear contrary views, was in fact broadly characteristic of the Bush administration. Given these realities, one must ask how these individuals could have had any serious understanding of the enemy against which they claimed the United States must wage an unending struggle.
It is not coincidentally an article of blind faith among those of the neoconservative ideological persuasion that dominated the Bush administration (and an enduring staple of Israeli government rhetoric as well) that such “rogue states” are the driving engines of terrorism, even in the absence of any concrete evidence for this assertion. The obsession with fighting “state sponsors of terrorism,” which the Bush administration and earlier administrations have firmly embedded in United States law, helped justify the invasion of Iraq, and has been used as a justification for a future war with Iran. The pursuit of this white whale is central to the worldview of these policymakers and their ideological soul-mates in the plethora of generously funded right-wing “think tanks” that have played such a prominent role in Washington in recent decades.35 It is almost invariably wedded to a lack of any in-depth historical, linguistic, cultural, or other expertise about the countries in this category, or indeed about the broader Middle East.36
Nevertheless, however misguided, simplistic, and ill-informed these views may have been, they constituted the fundamental basis for the policies and actions in the Middle East of the Bush administration from its inception. These initiatives escaped virtually without public scrutiny inside the United States for several years because of the powerful aftereffects on the American national psyche of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., of September 11, 2001. At least where Iraq is concerned, some of these policies were finally called into question by American public opinion, and provoked the skepticism of a growing segment of the higher ranks of the U.S. officer corps, as well as many experienced intelligence professionals and diplomats. However, these public attitudes and the private doubts of those in government service hardly affected the course of the war in Iraq, which would enter its seventh year in March 2009. Nor did they have much impact on the policy of the Bush administration in its last years in a variety of other areas in the Middle East.
Throughout George W. Bush’s second term, expressing the slightest doubt about the near-sacred construct of the “global war on terror” was perceived as being lethally dangerous to American politicians, particularly Democrats. Casting doubt on central aspects of this concept seemed nearly as toxic then as was the accusation of being “soft on communism” at the height of the Cold War. This blanket dispensation in turn covered a multitude of sins. Thus, since al-Qa‘ida was based in Afghanistan and was allied to the Taliban, it is virtually impossible to question whether it makes sense for the United States to continue to fight a war in Afghanistan against the Taliban. One looks in vain for American politicians or policy “experts” who will ask whether the United States and it allies should continue to occupy and try to pacify Afghanistan after eight years of trying, without success, to prevail over the Taliban. Even less likely is public questioning of whether there might be some means of achieving the universally-agreed-upon end of defeating the global terrorists of al-Qa‘ida other than an unending war in exceedingly difficult terrain against what is, and for nearly a decade has been, the strongest force among the Pushtun population of Afghanistan (who constitute the country’s largest single ethnic group and whose fellow Pushtuns dominate Pakistan’s adjacent northwest provinces). Not entirely surprisingly, therefore, during the summer–fall 2008 election campaign, both presidential candidates dutifully made it clear that in spite of their differences over Iraq, they would expand the war in Afghanistan with the dispatch of further units of American troops.
The stubbornness with which its proponents put forward the basic idea that in order to deal with terrorism, the United States must make war all over the Middle East and in its environs, and that full-fledged war is the only means to deal with this scourge, should give us a clear sense of how deadly serious is the “global war on terror” and its concomitant, the cold war the Bush administration has waged with Iran and what are described as its proxies, notably Hizballah and Hamas. Those who disseminate these ideas affect this seriousness in spite of the fact that rational assessment would reveal that both global Islamist terrorism directed against the United States and the threat posed by Iran and all its minions are in fact far less formidable and lethal in their potential than were the Soviet Union and the “international communist movement” in their heyday. And yet the levels of hysteria, hyperbole, and hyperventilation among the Chicken Littles who propagate such ideas are at least as high as at the apogee of the Cold War. What makes this situation particularly dangerous is not the connections they have imagined between elements of a shadowy and sinister Islamic “terrorist international,” but the interaction of this vivid fantasy world with the dangerous actual linkages that have emerged between a number of real-world hot spots.
I have argued that the years since the end of the Cold War have witnessed the growth of closer linkages between the Gulf, the eastern Mediterranean, and global terrorism. Most notable among these linkages have been the connections between the Arab-Israeli conflict and issues related to the conflicted American-Iranian relationship since the fall of the shah. This has meant that the ongoing crises, conflicts, and friction involving Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are now ever more closely related. This process has been enhanced significantly in consequence of the impact over the past few years of a number of important, novel phenomena:
1. The destruction of the Iraqi state. Iraq, while barely over eighty years old in 2003 and nominally created by the British, was firmly rooted in governmental processes and institutions left behind by the Ottoman state, which ruled this region for four hundred years. The most important of these institutions was Iraq’s military establishment, which was created in its entirety by former Ottoman officers.37 The dissolution of these hard-won state structures began with the suicidally misguided decision of Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th regime to attack Iran in 1980. This decision, it is worth recalling again, was strongly encouraged and supported at the time by the United States and its European allies and Arab clients. There followed nearly nine devastating years of war with Iran, and then the Ba‘th regime’s equally foolhardy decision to invade Kuwait in 1990. The resulting slow disintegration of Iraqi society and economy, and with them of the power of the Iraqi state, was then compounded by Iraq’s defeat and expulsion from Kuwait in 1991, and the ravaging of the country through the U.S./UN sanctions regime for the next twelve years. This process of disintegration was finally completed and may have been made irreversible by the Bush administration’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq and dismantle its state structures and army, without putting anything in their place but an overstretched and underprepared army of occupation. The result was, for a time at least, the virtually complete dissolution of one of the most powerful Arab states and the potential disappearance of Iraq as a unified country; the sparking of acute sectarian civil strife, which at one point reached the level of an Iraqi civil war; grave possible ramifications for sectarian conflict in various parts of the Islamic world; and the creation of a lasting power vacuum in a critical part of the Middle East. Even if the Iraqis can succeed in reconstructing the Iraqi state themselves (once the American occupation of their country has finally ended), hopefully on a more equitable and democratic basis than that of the pre-2003 state, the process will be painful and will take many years. Moreover, until this process is completed, a power vacuum will remain at the heart of the region.
2. The growth in power of an independent Iran completely outside the orbit of any other state. The Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 was followed by the radicalization and entrenchment in power of an authoritarian Islamist clerical regime that was hostile to both communism and the West and that has dominated Iran ever since. This regime further consolidated its power—and its turn toward radical isolationism was accelerated—as a result of a Pyrrhic victory in the war launched against it by Iraq, with the support of most Arab countries, Russia, and the West. The regime grew in strength with the gradual decline of Iraq under the crushing international sanctions regime after the 1991 Gulf War. The regional rise of Iran was capped by the defeat and destruction of Iraq’s Ba‘th regime in 2003, and earlier, that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as the postoccupation dismantling of the remaining state structures in Iraq. Much of this took place courtesy of the wars of the George W. Bush administration, which thereby eliminated two of the Iranian regime’s most deadly enemies. Relieved of these two neighboring predators, Iran has been free to pursue nuclear power, whether it turns out to be for civilian or military ends, and to extend aggressive support to its allies and proxies like Hizballah throughout the region. These actions have been signs of the clerical regime’s growing power, confidence, and reach, even as they were a response to the fierce overt and covert campaign waged against it by the Bush administration and its allies.38 It is worth noting that the past three decades mark the first extended period in over a century that Iran has not been dominated by external powers or subject to their direct interference. It remains to be seen whether Iran’s actions and the provocative and bellicose rhetoric of leading regime figures like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will play into the hands of powers like the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, which have seemed determined to limit its influence, if not, at times, to destroy its current regime.
3. The destruction of the Afghan state, and the creation of a power vacuum in that country. This process began with the ill-fated 1979 Soviet invasion, and the decision by the United States and its clients to intervene covertly in Afghanistan to defeat the USSR. It was accelerated by the equally ill-fated U.S. decision to support the most radical and extreme Islamic factions inside Afghanistan against the Soviets, including fanatical volunteers recruited by the intelligence services of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Israel, and other countries from all over the Arab and Islamic worlds. In the course of the war, the Red Army, its allies, its opponents, and other forces devastated the country, leading to the near-destruction of the Afghan central government and making Afghanistan nearly ungovernable. The defeat there of the Soviet Union and the latter’s subsequent collapse was followed by the callous abandonment of the country by the United States and eventually by the rise to power of the Taliban, sponsored by Pakistani military intelligence, and by the emergence of al-Qai‘da. Following 9/11, Afghanistan was the scene of overt U.S. military intervention. This provoked the descent of the country once again into a low-grade civil-cum-regional war involving the United States, NATO, Pakistan, Iran, and other actors which has been ongoing for nearly eight years. As I write in late 2008, it does not appear that this war is close to an end, that an Afghan state which can exert control over the entire country is going to be rapidly reconstructed (it is questionable whether such an entity ever existed in the entire history of Afghanistan), or that the power vacuum there is about to be filled. Nor does it appear that the current external intervention in Afghanistan will be any more lasting or successful than was that of Alexander the Great or others who followed him, from the Russian and British to the Soviet empires.
4. The Gulf-Palestine connection. In 1990 and 1991 U.S. secretary of state James Baker offered this linkage in exchange for the support of Arab governments for the American-led counteroffensive against the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. As a sort of quid pro quo, Baker held out the willingness of the first Bush administration to launch a comprehensive negotiation for a resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Arab parties, including the Palestinians. This linkage resulted in the convening of the 1991 Madrid peace conference and later in the negotiation of the 1993 Oslo Accords and the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. The inconclusive—indeed in most respects negative—outcome of the Oslo process had become apparent to most observers less than a decade after the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington, D.C., in 1993.39 This in turn has called into question the wisdom of those Arab governments and the PLO leadership, which accepted the sincerity of the commitment of successive U.S. administrations to a serious effort to end Israel’s occupation of Arab territories and to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians in particular. The attempt by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in late 2007 and in 2008 to launch a new round of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations was linked to the Bush administration’s ongoing region-wide campaign against Iran in ways reminiscent of the linkage with the war with Iraq that was promoted by Secretary Baker seventeen years earlier. It appeared, however, highly unlikely that history would judge that it achieved even the limited success of her predecessor’s initiatives. What is clear in any case is that Palestine-Israel and Gulf issues are more closely linked than they ever had been in the past.
5. The invocation by the Bush administration, discussed in this chapter, of a “global war on terror” as a rubric covering intensive direct and indirect American military intervention and covert operations ranging from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to less visible instances in Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere. Among the indicators of the broad extent of the war on terror are the expanded American military presence throughout the Middle East and central Asia, including the development of many large, new “enduring” bases in Iraq and elsewhere,40 and the creation of a new military command, the United States Africa Command.41 This effort ties together an entirely new level of American activities across a vast range of the Islamic world, from Northwest Africa to central Asia, Pakistan, and perhaps farther afield. It was certainly meant by the Bush administration to put in place a long-term American military presence, at least insofar as Iraq was concerned. The term “enduring bases” was employed by Bush administration officials early on during the occupation of Iraq, and it then faded from their rhetoric, although the major bases there have grown relentlessly larger and more permanent in the six years since the occupation began. The term was reprised in President Bush’s speech of September 13, 2007, in which he spoke of an “enduring relationship” with Iraq, and a U.S. military presence there that “extends beyond my presidency.” By contrast, in July 2008, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wrote, “I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq…. we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea.”42 It remains to be seen how an increasingly assertive Iraqi government will deal with this issue under a new administration, given that Iraqi public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to the long-term presence of U.S. bases in Iraq.43
