K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
The United States' new backyard
When the US decided that its backyard would in future be a greater
Middle East - from Pakistan to Morocco - it imagined that it could
rearrange the region to suit itself. The results have been disastrous
and will be long-lasting
By Alain Gresh
The United States undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns, said this
year: "Ten years ago Europe was the epicentre of American foreign
policy. This was how things stood from April 1917, when Woodrow Wilson
sent one million American troops to the Western Front, through to
President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo in 1999. For the better
part of the 20th century, Europe was our primary, vital focus." But,
he added, everything had changed and the Middle East was now, for
President George Bush and his successors, "the place that Europe once
was for the administrations of the 20th century" (1).
President Bush had said much the same a while earlier: "The challenge
playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military
conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one
side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other
side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their
intention to destroy our way of life" (2).
This broader Middle East is an ill-defined area extending from
Pakistan, through the Horn of Africa to Morocco. Since 9/11 it has
become the main theatre for the deployment of US military power and
the decisive, even the sole, battlefield in what the US sees as a
global conflict. The region's oil resources and strategic position,
and the presence of Israel, have made it a US priority, particularly
since the French and British began to withdraw after 1956. As Philippe
Croz-Vincent has pointed out in a subtle analysis of the "American
moment", the Middle East has replaced Latin America as the US backyard
(3). But with a major difference: Latin America was never a crucial
battlefield in a third world war.
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).
Weakened states
All this, on top of decades of dictatorship and corruption, has helped
weaken states in the region. Some, like Afghanistan, have collapsed.
The current break-up of Iraq is not due solely to the present
conflict. A 13-year embargo (1990-2003) undermined the state and
opened the door to Salafist (Sunni) influence, which filtered in along
clandestine routes from Jordan with food, medicine, weapons and
radical ideas (8). Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Syria, unable to
ignore the instability on their borders, are all directly or
indirectly pursuing their own agendas within Iraq. Attempts to rebuild
central authority in Lebanon have fizzled out. The Palestinian
Authority is dependent upon foreign military and economic aid, and the
support of the Israeli government. Areas like Iraqi Kurdistan and Gaza
are becoming autonomous and feeding the separatist ambitions of
Turkey's Kurds and the Baluch of Iran and Pakistan.
The unprecedented influence of armed groups makes any negotiation more
difficult. They hold the whip hand in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.
Hizbullah dominates Lebanon; Hamas controls Gaza. They have proved
formidably effective against the US in Iraq and against Nato in
Afghanistan.
In Lebanon, Hizbullah held out for 33 days against the Israelis and
changed the rules of the game: for the first time since 1948-49 a
significant number of Israeli civilians were forced to abandon their
homes. Despite being holed up in Gaza, Hamas is still capable of
launching rockets into Israel (9).
Rudimentary, but effective and easily replaceable, munitions (IEDs,
Qassam rockets, anti-tank weapons) define the limits of US and Israeli
military power.
The late Ze'ev Schiff, military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, gave a realistic assessment: "Even if we declare dozens of
times that Hamas is under pressure and wants a ceasefire, it will not
erase the fact that in the battle for Sderot, Israel has in effect
been defeated... [it] is experiencing something in Sderot that it has
not experienced since the war of independence, if ever: the enemy has
silenced an entire city and brought normal life there to a halt" (10).
The political impasse in Palestine, the fragmentation of states and US
military interventions have created a suicidal sense of despair and
lend weight to the extremist assertions of al-Qaida.
On 31 August 2006, following the kidnapping in Gaza by an unknown
group of two Fox News journalists, the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan
published an article on the third generation of Islamist militants
emerging in Palestine to challenge Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They were
described as having no mass support, rejecting any compromise,
refusing to play by the rules of the political game, not targeting
just Israelis and not limiting their demands to Palestine. The ability
of groups claiming allegiance to al-Qaida to develop in Iraq and
Afghanistan, to penetrate the Palestinian camps in Lebanon and
establish themselves in North Africa and Somalia demonstrates the
pressure that ideological extremism is capable of exerting on fragile
borders.
The nationalism that has structured the broader Middle East since 1918
is now under threat from the resurgence of ethnic and religious
identity - a process encouraged, consciously or not, by General David
Petraeus, the current US commander in Iraq, who led the 101st Airborne
Division that captured Mosul in 2003.
One of his first decisions was to create an elected council to
represent the city, with separate polls for Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens and
Christians. No mention of Iraqis. By reducing the region to a mosaic
of minorities, US policy forces everyone to identify with their
community, to the detriment of any national or other loyalty (11).
This undermines national cohesion and fosters conflict in Iraq now and
possibly in Syria and Iran tomorrow. It encourages outside regional or
international parties to intervene, manipulating local factions in
pursuit of their own interests. Israel has been particularly guilty of
this since the 1980s.
During Bush's first term, the neocons developed the doctrine of
"constructive instability" in the Middle East (12). As Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice said while Israel was bombing Lebanon in July
2006: "What we're seeing here is, in a sense, the growing - the birth
pangs of a new Middle East; and whatever we do, we have to be certain
that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to
the old Middle East."
The cynicism of her remarks provoked caustic comments at the time, but
she was, in a sense, right: since 9/11 we have witnessed the emergence
of a new Middle East that bears no resemblance to anything that US
politicians might have envisaged, and which has become a major and
lasting destabilising factor in the world.
http://mondediplo.com/2007/11/03mideast
When the US decided that its backyard would in future be a greater
Middle East - from Pakistan to Morocco - it imagined that it could
rearrange the region to suit itself. The results have been disastrous
and will be long-lasting
By Alain Gresh
The United States undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns, said this
year: "Ten years ago Europe was the epicentre of American foreign
policy. This was how things stood from April 1917, when Woodrow Wilson
sent one million American troops to the Western Front, through to
President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo in 1999. For the better
part of the 20th century, Europe was our primary, vital focus." But,
he added, everything had changed and the Middle East was now, for
President George Bush and his successors, "the place that Europe once
was for the administrations of the 20th century" (1).
President Bush had said much the same a while earlier: "The challenge
playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military
conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one
side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other
side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their
intention to destroy our way of life" (2).
This broader Middle East is an ill-defined area extending from
Pakistan, through the Horn of Africa to Morocco. Since 9/11 it has
become the main theatre for the deployment of US military power and
the decisive, even the sole, battlefield in what the US sees as a
global conflict. The region's oil resources and strategic position,
and the presence of Israel, have made it a US priority, particularly
since the French and British began to withdraw after 1956. As Philippe
Croz-Vincent has pointed out in a subtle analysis of the "American
moment", the Middle East has replaced Latin America as the US backyard
(3). But with a major difference: Latin America was never a crucial
battlefield in a third world war.
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).
Weakened states
All this, on top of decades of dictatorship and corruption, has helped
weaken states in the region. Some, like Afghanistan, have collapsed.
The current break-up of Iraq is not due solely to the present
conflict. A 13-year embargo (1990-2003) undermined the state and
opened the door to Salafist (Sunni) influence, which filtered in along
clandestine routes from Jordan with food, medicine, weapons and
radical ideas (8). Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Syria, unable to
ignore the instability on their borders, are all directly or
indirectly pursuing their own agendas within Iraq. Attempts to rebuild
central authority in Lebanon have fizzled out. The Palestinian
Authority is dependent upon foreign military and economic aid, and the
support of the Israeli government. Areas like Iraqi Kurdistan and Gaza
are becoming autonomous and feeding the separatist ambitions of
Turkey's Kurds and the Baluch of Iran and Pakistan.
The unprecedented influence of armed groups makes any negotiation more
difficult. They hold the whip hand in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.
Hizbullah dominates Lebanon; Hamas controls Gaza. They have proved
formidably effective against the US in Iraq and against Nato in
Afghanistan.
In Lebanon, Hizbullah held out for 33 days against the Israelis and
changed the rules of the game: for the first time since 1948-49 a
significant number of Israeli civilians were forced to abandon their
homes. Despite being holed up in Gaza, Hamas is still capable of
launching rockets into Israel (9).
Rudimentary, but effective and easily replaceable, munitions (IEDs,
Qassam rockets, anti-tank weapons) define the limits of US and Israeli
military power.
The late Ze'ev Schiff, military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, gave a realistic assessment: "Even if we declare dozens of
times that Hamas is under pressure and wants a ceasefire, it will not
erase the fact that in the battle for Sderot, Israel has in effect
been defeated... [it] is experiencing something in Sderot that it has
not experienced since the war of independence, if ever: the enemy has
silenced an entire city and brought normal life there to a halt" (10).
The political impasse in Palestine, the fragmentation of states and US
military interventions have created a suicidal sense of despair and
lend weight to the extremist assertions of al-Qaida.
On 31 August 2006, following the kidnapping in Gaza by an unknown
group of two Fox News journalists, the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan
published an article on the third generation of Islamist militants
emerging in Palestine to challenge Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They were
described as having no mass support, rejecting any compromise,
refusing to play by the rules of the political game, not targeting
just Israelis and not limiting their demands to Palestine. The ability
of groups claiming allegiance to al-Qaida to develop in Iraq and
Afghanistan, to penetrate the Palestinian camps in Lebanon and
establish themselves in North Africa and Somalia demonstrates the
pressure that ideological extremism is capable of exerting on fragile
borders.
The nationalism that has structured the broader Middle East since 1918
is now under threat from the resurgence of ethnic and religious
identity - a process encouraged, consciously or not, by General David
Petraeus, the current US commander in Iraq, who led the 101st Airborne
Division that captured Mosul in 2003.
One of his first decisions was to create an elected council to
represent the city, with separate polls for Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens and
Christians. No mention of Iraqis. By reducing the region to a mosaic
of minorities, US policy forces everyone to identify with their
community, to the detriment of any national or other loyalty (11).
This undermines national cohesion and fosters conflict in Iraq now and
possibly in Syria and Iran tomorrow. It encourages outside regional or
international parties to intervene, manipulating local factions in
pursuit of their own interests. Israel has been particularly guilty of
this since the 1980s.
During Bush's first term, the neocons developed the doctrine of
"constructive instability" in the Middle East (12). As Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice said while Israel was bombing Lebanon in July
2006: "What we're seeing here is, in a sense, the growing - the birth
pangs of a new Middle East; and whatever we do, we have to be certain
that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to
the old Middle East."
The cynicism of her remarks provoked caustic comments at the time, but
she was, in a sense, right: since 9/11 we have witnessed the emergence
of a new Middle East that bears no resemblance to anything that US
politicians might have envisaged, and which has become a major and
lasting destabilising factor in the world.
http://mondediplo.com/2007/11/03mideast
