The Logic of Escalation
As the final two years of the Bush presidency commence in earnest, the emerging foreign policy of the administration is one that is surprising, indeed horrifying, analysts and general observers around the world, even within the US establishment. Far from scaling back its ambitions, consolidating its position and attempting to recover some of the prestige it has lost since September 2001, the White House appears more keen than ever to make yet greater use of force and violence to achieve its maximum objectives in the broader west Asian region, no matter how doomed those ambitions are widely seen to be.
Moreover, this reckless strategy, carrying potentially ruinous consequences, is a product not only of the much discussed neo-conservative agenda of the President, the Vice-President and their various cohorts, but also of the internal logic and mechanics of the imperial structure they currently manage. Only when we understand the administration’s present actions as symptomatic, rather than simply aberrational, can we appreciate the gravity of what currently appears to be an impending crisis with truly global implications.
It now seems almost cruel to quote the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins, writing after the Democrats’ victory in last November’s US congressional elections:
“The gun-toting, pre-Darwinian Bushite, the Tomahawk-wielding, Halliburton-loving, Beltway neo-con has been lain to rest, and by a decision of the American people. Americans should be proud and the world should take note. The White House ran on a "pro-victory" ticket and lost. Retreat becomes the only option. A wretched era of American interventionism has come to an end. A new day has dawned.”
In truth, practically the opposite is true. The application of violence to secure US objectives – directly or via proxies - is being accelerated, raising the possibility of far more catastrophic outcomes in the near future than have been seen thus far.
Escalation
Starting with the obvious example, Washington – with full support from the ever-servile Britain - has rejected pleas from several quarters that it seek a broad political settlement to end the multifarious war in Iraq, opting instead to intensify its military effort and force yet more bodies into the meat grinder in a futile bid to impose itself. This so-called “surge” of extra US troops will be directed not only against Sunni guerrilla forces but also against the Mahdi Army of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. This raises the prospect of a return to the two-front, counter-insurgency war the US was fighting against Sunni and Shia forces during 2004, before the Mahdi Army withdrew from the fray under duress. It also raises the probability of the collapse of the current Iraqi government, being as it is an uneasy coalition with al-Sadr’s political forces at its centre but with a leadership allied to the White House.
For those who would prefer peace and an end to sectarian mass killing to a victory for any of the belligerents, the salient point is that this latest escalation can only take Iraq deeper into the throes of violence. As Michael Schwartz argues, the US is a problem, not a solution for Iraq. Iraq needs not more but less of the US, preferably none at all:
“More of anything that the U.S. is doing is bound to prove just another effort to win a war of conquest and occupation whose goals are antithetical to just about every Iraqi desire. What more ensures is only more death, more destruction, and more violence.”
The intensification of US military activity, like the intensification of activity on the part of any of the other armed groups in Iraq, can only inflame the situation further. The bloodshed in Iraq is therefore set to get worse, with the consequences for spillover into the wider region still looming in the background. Unfortunately Washington’s ‘urge to surge’ doesn’t end there. Far from it.
Next comes the Palestinian occupied territories, where it has recently become clear that the violence between Palestinian factions has been the result of a specific policy – under the management of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams, but again with British support - to instigate a “hard coup”, toppling the elected Hamas government and replacing it with Fatah forces armed, trained and funded by the US and its allies. Tony Karon sums up the situation:
“In the coming weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will cluck regretfully about the violence unfolding in the Palestinian territories as if the chaos in Gaza has as little to do with her as, say, the bizarrely warm winter weather in New York. And much of the U.S. media will concur by covering that violence as if it is part of some inevitable showdown in the preternaturally violent politics of the Palestinians. But any honest assessment will not fail to recognize that the increasingly violent conflict between Hamas and Fatah is not only a by-product of Secretary Rice’s economic siege of the Palestinians; it is the intended consequence of her savage war on the Palestinian people – a campaign of retribution and collective punishment for their audacity to elect leaders other than those deemed appropriate to U.S. agendas.”
Again, violence is not a regrettable reaction but a positive choice, with options more likely to bring peace, if not victory, specifically rejected; thus revealing the guiding values of western foreign policy. Just last week, Khaled Meshal, supposedly one of Hamas’ most hardline and intractable leaders, repeated the offer made several times by his party to accept Israel’s annexation of 78% of his people’s historic homeland as part of a peace deal. But the US and its allies are not interested in peace offers from the Palestinians, no matter how generous; only surrender.
Over to Somalia, where a semblance of peace and order, however unsavoury some of its enforcers, seemed to have arrived after a decade and a half of near-total anarchy. Now, a US-backed Ethiopian invasion, complete with the indiscriminate use of US airpower, raises the likelihood of new insurgency war in that country, with its effects potentially spreading across the borders of Ethiopia and Kenya.
Here too a choice is made. It is plain that this latest “intervention” will spawn far more recruits for anti-US terrorism than may be killed in any military action; as has been the case throughout the “war on terror”. But the potential prizes for US power are deemed worth the risk. Salim Lone, formerly of the UN’s mission in Iraq, points out that:
“As with Iraq in 2003, the United States has cast this as a war to curtail terrorism, but its real goal is to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region by establishing a client regime there. The Horn of Africa is newly oil-rich, and lies just miles from Saudi Arabia, overlooking the daily passage of large numbers of oil tankers and warships through the Red Sea”.
In addition to the above conflicts, war still rages in Afghanistan, 5 years after the US-led “victory” over the Taliban, whilst on the opposite edge of the broader west Asia region, an uneasy stand-off between Israel and Hezbollah continues, with the former extremely unlikely to accept for long its defeat in the war between the two of summer 2006.
But all this pales in the ominous shadow of a US-Israeli conflict with Iran, long-rumoured and ever-present both in the minds of certain policymakers and in the fears of observers of the region. It is well understood that any such war holds the potential for a catastrophe that would make today’s bloodbath Iraq seems small by comparison. Not only is a US-Israeli attack likely to be anything but ‘surgical’ but Iran is fully capable of retaliating against US assets throughout the region and beyond. A drawn-out conflict could seriously affect the flow of vital oil and gas exports out of the Persian Gulf, with increasingly perilous effects on the world economy depending on how long hostilities persisted.
Furthermore, if it is true that Israel is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons in such an action then matters elevate to a new level entirely. In the first instance, massive casualties would be certain; but beyond even this tragedy lie potential implications in terms of precedent for world security which could not be more serious.
Israel retains its nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran has signed the NPT, does not have nuclear weapons, probably could not produce them within the next 10 years, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence that it is trying to acquire them. We need waste few words on Israel’s declared fears of a nuclear attack from Iran; not least since they are based upon a straightforward mistranslation of the words of a man – President Ahmadinejad – who in any case does not control Iranian foreign policy. Far from threatening to wipe Israel from the map, Iran proposed in 2003 a “grand bargain” wherein all outstanding issues between itself and the US would be resolved, including acceptance of an Israeli state on the 1967 borders in accordance with the Arab peace plan of the previous year. The offer was flatly rejected. Again, war is not forced upon the West. It is a positive choice. What Iran represents to Israel and its Western backers, is not a threat to their security but to their strategic dominance of the region.
In these circumstances the use of battlefield nuclear weapons - in the absence of any credible threat, unprovoked, after peace overtures were ignored, in an overt rejection of the NPT and with the sign-off of the world’s only superpower - would both lower the threshold for the use of such weapons to a truly alarming extent and send a clear message to the world that any country could suffer a nuclear attack merely at the whim of powerful states. The global non-proliferation regime would be effectively over, with states across the world citing the attack on Iran as precedent and justification both for building (somewhat rationally in terms of self defence) and potentially for using their own nuclear capabilities.
Of course it is possible that the US and its allies aim only to credibly intimidate Iran, and not ultimately to go as far as to initiate military conflict. But the escalations and interventions from Somalia, through Gaza into Anbar and Baghdad do not inspire confidence in Washington’s sense of self-restraint. And even if it were true, belligerent moves short of war – the movement of equipment and personnel into position, the US assault on the Iranian consulate in Irbil – serve only raise the temperature to an extent where war could be triggered whether by design or otherwise; that is if these moves are not designed specifically as provocation.
Imperial logic
After more than five years of an ironically named “war on terror” that has proved disastrous, counterproductive in terms of its purported aims, and deeply unpopular, why would the US and its allies take exactly the opposite route to that so confidently predicted by Simon Jenkins and many other commentators just a few short weeks ago?
The answer lies in two terms of jargon in international statecraft, which we will first have to translate into English before examining how they apply in this situation. The first of these is “national interest”, which in English means the interest the elite groups that govern the US have in maintaining and extending their power in the world.
At a point in time where extraction of the world’s finite oil reserves is expected to peak and fall away, just as the economies of two of the world’s most populous nations – India and China – are growing at breakneck speed, thus putting massive new demands on those dwindling resources, control over energy reserves constitutes “critical leverage” over one’s rivals, in the words of former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, or “veto power” in the words of Cold War era US diplomat George Kennan, and is therefore a prize that Washington cannot afford to lose if it is to fulfil its stated aim of maintaining permanent global dominance. This is particularly true when Russia is consolidating and extending its own control over such resources, in an increasingly effective collaboration with China and other states.
Securing a long-term military presence and a client government in Iraq, which has the world’s second largest oil reserves and lies in the centre of the principal energy producing region, therefore constitutes a critical step towards achieving Washington’s objectives. The principle obstacle is the regime in Tehran, ironically strengthened by the US invasion of Iraq, arguably more influential in Baghdad than the US, and whose weakening or elimination is therefore imperative in terms of the “national interest”.
The second reason is “credibility”, i.e. maintaining the understanding across the world that the US and its allies to can and will successfully deploy military force to discipline, subdue or crush recalcitrant nations and peoples: a concept well understood by Mafia bosses. The serious loss of prestige sustained by defeats and stalemates in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Israel’s war with Hezbollah can not be tolerated by a nation that, not only under Bush but under every President since WW2, has spent staggering sums of public money on building the greatest military machine in all history. The fact that this vast expenditure has also served effectively as a nanny-state style welfare programme for firms able to make a profit from the duel-use products of military-technological research – e.g. aeronautics, computing – can only increase resistance across US elite opinion to any loss of military stature that could lead to public calls for the subsidy tap to be turned off. In short, for a US establishment where military thinking and solutions dominate, and which tools are rendered useless by the damage to credibility sustained by defeat, the response to military disaster with ever greater military action has its own compelling logic.
When we understand the vital importance – both within and beyond the neo-conservative school - of both the “national interest” in strategic dominance and the “credibility” of US military power, then we can comprehend the rationale behind the apparently irrational willingness of the Bush administration to court yet greater disaster in its “war on terror”. If the US accepts its defeat and diminution of credibility and scales back in Iraq and the Middle East, then openings emerge for its major rivals - Europe, Russia, and China - to contractually carve up the energy heartlands of the planet, building state-to-state relations with west Asian governments that exclude US influence, and potentially marginalising Washington’s power on the world stage.
Of course this is an unconscionable scenario for the US and its allies. But if they continue, even accelerate, down the course they have set themselves these past 5 years, there is no guarantee of success. Their inability thus far to prevail in various asymmetric conflicts may well persist, thereby only exacerbating the problems described above. From Iraq and Iran outwards, the Middle East could begin to disintegrate, US credibility in terms of its known ability to apply organised violence and protect compliant Arab despots would dissolve, and ultimately the result for US power would be the same as if it had simply retreated.
Far more importantly, military escalation and the opening of new fronts will undoubtedly result in more death, disaster and misery for the region and the wider world. But it seems abundantly clear that such considerations are of no concern to the US. Indeed, Dr. Michael Vlahos (Senior Staff, National Security Analysis Department, Johns Hopkins University) writes that:
“I can attest to many "Defense World" conversations that have ended with: "the time may come when we will have to kill millions of Muslims," or, "history shows that to win over a people you have to kill at least 10% of them, like the Romans"”
In the coming weeks and months we will find out just how much influence such figures have in the Pentagon and over US policy, and whether they feel that the moment they speak of has now arrived. Given the expected handover of power in Downing Street we may also get an early, definitive answer to the question of what a post-Blair British foreign policy will look like.
Moreover, this reckless strategy, carrying potentially ruinous consequences, is a product not only of the much discussed neo-conservative agenda of the President, the Vice-President and their various cohorts, but also of the internal logic and mechanics of the imperial structure they currently manage. Only when we understand the administration’s present actions as symptomatic, rather than simply aberrational, can we appreciate the gravity of what currently appears to be an impending crisis with truly global implications.
It now seems almost cruel to quote the Guardian’s Simon Jenkins, writing after the Democrats’ victory in last November’s US congressional elections:
“The gun-toting, pre-Darwinian Bushite, the Tomahawk-wielding, Halliburton-loving, Beltway neo-con has been lain to rest, and by a decision of the American people. Americans should be proud and the world should take note. The White House ran on a "pro-victory" ticket and lost. Retreat becomes the only option. A wretched era of American interventionism has come to an end. A new day has dawned.”
In truth, practically the opposite is true. The application of violence to secure US objectives – directly or via proxies - is being accelerated, raising the possibility of far more catastrophic outcomes in the near future than have been seen thus far.
Escalation
Starting with the obvious example, Washington – with full support from the ever-servile Britain - has rejected pleas from several quarters that it seek a broad political settlement to end the multifarious war in Iraq, opting instead to intensify its military effort and force yet more bodies into the meat grinder in a futile bid to impose itself. This so-called “surge” of extra US troops will be directed not only against Sunni guerrilla forces but also against the Mahdi Army of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. This raises the prospect of a return to the two-front, counter-insurgency war the US was fighting against Sunni and Shia forces during 2004, before the Mahdi Army withdrew from the fray under duress. It also raises the probability of the collapse of the current Iraqi government, being as it is an uneasy coalition with al-Sadr’s political forces at its centre but with a leadership allied to the White House.
For those who would prefer peace and an end to sectarian mass killing to a victory for any of the belligerents, the salient point is that this latest escalation can only take Iraq deeper into the throes of violence. As Michael Schwartz argues, the US is a problem, not a solution for Iraq. Iraq needs not more but less of the US, preferably none at all:
“More of anything that the U.S. is doing is bound to prove just another effort to win a war of conquest and occupation whose goals are antithetical to just about every Iraqi desire. What more ensures is only more death, more destruction, and more violence.”
The intensification of US military activity, like the intensification of activity on the part of any of the other armed groups in Iraq, can only inflame the situation further. The bloodshed in Iraq is therefore set to get worse, with the consequences for spillover into the wider region still looming in the background. Unfortunately Washington’s ‘urge to surge’ doesn’t end there. Far from it.
Next comes the Palestinian occupied territories, where it has recently become clear that the violence between Palestinian factions has been the result of a specific policy – under the management of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams, but again with British support - to instigate a “hard coup”, toppling the elected Hamas government and replacing it with Fatah forces armed, trained and funded by the US and its allies. Tony Karon sums up the situation:
“In the coming weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will cluck regretfully about the violence unfolding in the Palestinian territories as if the chaos in Gaza has as little to do with her as, say, the bizarrely warm winter weather in New York. And much of the U.S. media will concur by covering that violence as if it is part of some inevitable showdown in the preternaturally violent politics of the Palestinians. But any honest assessment will not fail to recognize that the increasingly violent conflict between Hamas and Fatah is not only a by-product of Secretary Rice’s economic siege of the Palestinians; it is the intended consequence of her savage war on the Palestinian people – a campaign of retribution and collective punishment for their audacity to elect leaders other than those deemed appropriate to U.S. agendas.”
Again, violence is not a regrettable reaction but a positive choice, with options more likely to bring peace, if not victory, specifically rejected; thus revealing the guiding values of western foreign policy. Just last week, Khaled Meshal, supposedly one of Hamas’ most hardline and intractable leaders, repeated the offer made several times by his party to accept Israel’s annexation of 78% of his people’s historic homeland as part of a peace deal. But the US and its allies are not interested in peace offers from the Palestinians, no matter how generous; only surrender.
Over to Somalia, where a semblance of peace and order, however unsavoury some of its enforcers, seemed to have arrived after a decade and a half of near-total anarchy. Now, a US-backed Ethiopian invasion, complete with the indiscriminate use of US airpower, raises the likelihood of new insurgency war in that country, with its effects potentially spreading across the borders of Ethiopia and Kenya.
Here too a choice is made. It is plain that this latest “intervention” will spawn far more recruits for anti-US terrorism than may be killed in any military action; as has been the case throughout the “war on terror”. But the potential prizes for US power are deemed worth the risk. Salim Lone, formerly of the UN’s mission in Iraq, points out that:
“As with Iraq in 2003, the United States has cast this as a war to curtail terrorism, but its real goal is to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region by establishing a client regime there. The Horn of Africa is newly oil-rich, and lies just miles from Saudi Arabia, overlooking the daily passage of large numbers of oil tankers and warships through the Red Sea”.
In addition to the above conflicts, war still rages in Afghanistan, 5 years after the US-led “victory” over the Taliban, whilst on the opposite edge of the broader west Asia region, an uneasy stand-off between Israel and Hezbollah continues, with the former extremely unlikely to accept for long its defeat in the war between the two of summer 2006.
But all this pales in the ominous shadow of a US-Israeli conflict with Iran, long-rumoured and ever-present both in the minds of certain policymakers and in the fears of observers of the region. It is well understood that any such war holds the potential for a catastrophe that would make today’s bloodbath Iraq seems small by comparison. Not only is a US-Israeli attack likely to be anything but ‘surgical’ but Iran is fully capable of retaliating against US assets throughout the region and beyond. A drawn-out conflict could seriously affect the flow of vital oil and gas exports out of the Persian Gulf, with increasingly perilous effects on the world economy depending on how long hostilities persisted.
Furthermore, if it is true that Israel is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons in such an action then matters elevate to a new level entirely. In the first instance, massive casualties would be certain; but beyond even this tragedy lie potential implications in terms of precedent for world security which could not be more serious.
Israel retains its nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran has signed the NPT, does not have nuclear weapons, probably could not produce them within the next 10 years, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence that it is trying to acquire them. We need waste few words on Israel’s declared fears of a nuclear attack from Iran; not least since they are based upon a straightforward mistranslation of the words of a man – President Ahmadinejad – who in any case does not control Iranian foreign policy. Far from threatening to wipe Israel from the map, Iran proposed in 2003 a “grand bargain” wherein all outstanding issues between itself and the US would be resolved, including acceptance of an Israeli state on the 1967 borders in accordance with the Arab peace plan of the previous year. The offer was flatly rejected. Again, war is not forced upon the West. It is a positive choice. What Iran represents to Israel and its Western backers, is not a threat to their security but to their strategic dominance of the region.
In these circumstances the use of battlefield nuclear weapons - in the absence of any credible threat, unprovoked, after peace overtures were ignored, in an overt rejection of the NPT and with the sign-off of the world’s only superpower - would both lower the threshold for the use of such weapons to a truly alarming extent and send a clear message to the world that any country could suffer a nuclear attack merely at the whim of powerful states. The global non-proliferation regime would be effectively over, with states across the world citing the attack on Iran as precedent and justification both for building (somewhat rationally in terms of self defence) and potentially for using their own nuclear capabilities.
Of course it is possible that the US and its allies aim only to credibly intimidate Iran, and not ultimately to go as far as to initiate military conflict. But the escalations and interventions from Somalia, through Gaza into Anbar and Baghdad do not inspire confidence in Washington’s sense of self-restraint. And even if it were true, belligerent moves short of war – the movement of equipment and personnel into position, the US assault on the Iranian consulate in Irbil – serve only raise the temperature to an extent where war could be triggered whether by design or otherwise; that is if these moves are not designed specifically as provocation.
Imperial logic
After more than five years of an ironically named “war on terror” that has proved disastrous, counterproductive in terms of its purported aims, and deeply unpopular, why would the US and its allies take exactly the opposite route to that so confidently predicted by Simon Jenkins and many other commentators just a few short weeks ago?
The answer lies in two terms of jargon in international statecraft, which we will first have to translate into English before examining how they apply in this situation. The first of these is “national interest”, which in English means the interest the elite groups that govern the US have in maintaining and extending their power in the world.
At a point in time where extraction of the world’s finite oil reserves is expected to peak and fall away, just as the economies of two of the world’s most populous nations – India and China – are growing at breakneck speed, thus putting massive new demands on those dwindling resources, control over energy reserves constitutes “critical leverage” over one’s rivals, in the words of former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, or “veto power” in the words of Cold War era US diplomat George Kennan, and is therefore a prize that Washington cannot afford to lose if it is to fulfil its stated aim of maintaining permanent global dominance. This is particularly true when Russia is consolidating and extending its own control over such resources, in an increasingly effective collaboration with China and other states.
Securing a long-term military presence and a client government in Iraq, which has the world’s second largest oil reserves and lies in the centre of the principal energy producing region, therefore constitutes a critical step towards achieving Washington’s objectives. The principle obstacle is the regime in Tehran, ironically strengthened by the US invasion of Iraq, arguably more influential in Baghdad than the US, and whose weakening or elimination is therefore imperative in terms of the “national interest”.
The second reason is “credibility”, i.e. maintaining the understanding across the world that the US and its allies to can and will successfully deploy military force to discipline, subdue or crush recalcitrant nations and peoples: a concept well understood by Mafia bosses. The serious loss of prestige sustained by defeats and stalemates in Iraq, Afghanistan and in Israel’s war with Hezbollah can not be tolerated by a nation that, not only under Bush but under every President since WW2, has spent staggering sums of public money on building the greatest military machine in all history. The fact that this vast expenditure has also served effectively as a nanny-state style welfare programme for firms able to make a profit from the duel-use products of military-technological research – e.g. aeronautics, computing – can only increase resistance across US elite opinion to any loss of military stature that could lead to public calls for the subsidy tap to be turned off. In short, for a US establishment where military thinking and solutions dominate, and which tools are rendered useless by the damage to credibility sustained by defeat, the response to military disaster with ever greater military action has its own compelling logic.
When we understand the vital importance – both within and beyond the neo-conservative school - of both the “national interest” in strategic dominance and the “credibility” of US military power, then we can comprehend the rationale behind the apparently irrational willingness of the Bush administration to court yet greater disaster in its “war on terror”. If the US accepts its defeat and diminution of credibility and scales back in Iraq and the Middle East, then openings emerge for its major rivals - Europe, Russia, and China - to contractually carve up the energy heartlands of the planet, building state-to-state relations with west Asian governments that exclude US influence, and potentially marginalising Washington’s power on the world stage.
Of course this is an unconscionable scenario for the US and its allies. But if they continue, even accelerate, down the course they have set themselves these past 5 years, there is no guarantee of success. Their inability thus far to prevail in various asymmetric conflicts may well persist, thereby only exacerbating the problems described above. From Iraq and Iran outwards, the Middle East could begin to disintegrate, US credibility in terms of its known ability to apply organised violence and protect compliant Arab despots would dissolve, and ultimately the result for US power would be the same as if it had simply retreated.
Far more importantly, military escalation and the opening of new fronts will undoubtedly result in more death, disaster and misery for the region and the wider world. But it seems abundantly clear that such considerations are of no concern to the US. Indeed, Dr. Michael Vlahos (Senior Staff, National Security Analysis Department, Johns Hopkins University) writes that:
“I can attest to many "Defense World" conversations that have ended with: "the time may come when we will have to kill millions of Muslims," or, "history shows that to win over a people you have to kill at least 10% of them, like the Romans"”
In the coming weeks and months we will find out just how much influence such figures have in the Pentagon and over US policy, and whether they feel that the moment they speak of has now arrived. Given the expected handover of power in Downing Street we may also get an early, definitive answer to the question of what a post-Blair British foreign policy will look like.
Labels: Iraq, Oil, US Imperialism
posted by David Wearing at 3:45 PM
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