Imperial Sunset?
by Aijaz Ahmad
This article was originally published in Frontline, India's national magazine.
For the first time since its rise as a superpower the United
States is facing a serious threat to its hegemony across the globe.
In February this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin
addressed a security conference in Munich that had 250 of the world's top
leaders and officials in attendance, including such luminaries as the German
Chancellor and the U.S. Secretary of State. He said some very rude words about
the United States, denouncing its unilateralism and unipolar pretensions, its
trampling of international law, its stoking of the arms race, its aggressions
across the globe. These, Putin said, were factors that encouraged others to
seek their own weapons of mass destruction and even commit terrorist acts.
"Brazil, Russia, India and China have among them a larger
gross domestic product than the European Union."
He went further and warned Europe itself that the continuing
eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was "a
serious provocative factor" and that the Organization of Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had been converted into "a vulgar instrument
for advancing the foreign policy goals of one country or a group of countries
against other countries." The global missile defense system developed by the
U.S. would, he said, "give it a free hand to launch not only local, but
global conflicts" and the proposed deployment of U.S. missile interceptors
in Europe to neutralize Russia's nuclear arsenals would trigger "another
round of the inevitable arms race." Calling for a new "global security
architecture," Putin reminded the Europeans that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia,
India and China) had among them a larger gross domestic product (GDP) than the
European Union. "There is no doubt that in the foreseeable future the
economic potential of these new centers of power will inevitably get converted
into political clout and will strengthen multipolarity," he said.
That Russia and Iran, the world's supreme energy giants and
both countries in the eye of U.S. military designs, would seek military
cooperation and an energy alliance - even perhaps an eventual "gas
cartel" as no less a personage than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has suggested -
is entirely understandable. The real scandal of the situation is that soon
after delivering that speech,
Putin went off to seek energy cooperation with, and sell
weapon systems to, such U.S. 'reliables' as the Saudi, Jordanian and Qatari
royals.
The Financial Times, the premier newspaper for global
capital, reacted to Putin's sweeping speech with a simple question: Imperial
Sunset? The 'decline of U.S. hegemony' has been a favorite theme among many
circles of the left since the early 1970s, not as an absolute event but as a
relative decline, related to the growing power of its major capitalist
competitors. Is that 'decline' now becoming a real 'sunset'?
"The Pentagon has increasingly become a ‘global oil
protection service.'"
A variety of factors have contributed to this question: the
military debacle of the U.S. in Iraq and of Israel, its only 100 per cent ally,
in Lebanon, which precipitated comprehensive domestic crises of confidence
inside both countries; the immensity of U.S. deficits and instability of the
dollar as the pre-eminent global currency; the challenges of the famous
"pink tide" in Latin America; the resurgence of Russian power and
high rates of growth in China and India; "resource wars," that is, the
emergence of giant energy producers and consumers on the one hand and, on the
other, what Michael Klare calls "energo-fascism" in which, he avers,
the Pentagon has increasingly become a "global oil protection service."
That is a very tall order, and no one article, or a set of articles as the
current issue of Frontline is presenting them, can wholly answer questions of
such magnitude. What follows here offers a basic outline, starting with the
Achilles' heel, the historically unprecedented and currently unrivalled
military power of the U.S., which is proving to be the principal cause of its
hubris.
The Killing Fields
On April 1, 2003, barely 10 days after the U.S. began its
war of occupation in Iraq with a night of "Shock and Awe" in which
its forces hit Baghdad with one thousand cruise missiles - exceeding the TNT
equivalent of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and well before the U.S. troops
entered that city, Immanuel Wallerstein began his Commentary No. 110 with these
prophetic words:
"At a turning point in the Second World War, someone
asked Winston Churchill whether the battle marked the beginning of the end. And
he replied, famously, no, but it might be the end of the beginning. With the
Iraq war, the world is marking the end of the beginning of the new world
disorder that has replaced the world order dominated by the United States from
1945 to 2001.... One week into the war, it is clearly going less well than the
hawks had hoped and anticipated. It seems we are likely to be in for a long,
bloody, drawn-out war. ... The fact that it goes badly for the U.S. hawks will
make them only more desperate. They are likely to try to push harder than ever
on their agenda. ... Their economic program seems to be one that will bankrupt
the United States."
"The U.S. hawks' economic program seems to be one that
will bankrupt the United States."
He also surmised that an attack on Iran and the creation of
a "police state" in the U.S. itself formed a part of the agenda, and
that the "hawks" would need two presidential terms to achieve these
goals. Bush and his gang are now in the middle of that second term. Prophetic
words, indeed. In the third week of April 2003, as U.S. forces completed their
occupation of Baghdad and after former President Saddam Hussein and his men had
vacated the city, I wrote a piece entitled
"Wars Yet to Come" (Frontline May 9, 2003), in
which I predicted that resistance to the U.S. occupation would take three to
six months to get going and would then go on for as long as it took to get the
U.S. out of Iraq. I had also predicted immediately after the occupation of
Afghanistan that the Taliban would prove undefeatable and the combined forces
of the U.S. and its allies would face a long, long war of attrition. However,
in that same article, I also warned:
"What the Americans have brought with them is not only
the gift of colonization but all the paraphernalia of communalization and
fragmentation of Iraqi society: dividing the Turkoman against the Kurd, the
Kurd against the Arab, the Sunni against the Shia, and indeed one Shia faction
against the other, Ba'athist against the non-Ba'athist, the clients against
thepatriots. ... [C]ollapse into fiefdoms of local power in the name of
primordial loyalties is very probable, and the colonial power is likely to do
all it can to accentuate these conflicts [so that] the presence of colonial authority, as keepers of the peace among
communities, can be justified. ... A foretaste of the bloody nature of this
communalization can be seen in the ethnic cleansing of Arabs that is already
under way in northern Iraq at the hands of Kurdish zealots."
That too, alas, has come to pass, but on a scale that was
wholly unimaginable when I penned that dire prophesy. This is not the place to
elaborate on it, however.
Bush famously announced "Mission Accomplished" on
May 1, 2003, a month after Wallerstein composed his commentary and a week after
I sent my article to Frontline. That war of occupation has now entered
its fifth year and continues with no end yet in sight. The war against Iraq
began not in 2003 but in 1991, when the U.S. attacked the country in order to
recover Kuwait and ruin Iraq. U.S. aircraft flew 110,000 sorties between
January 17 and February 28 1991, averaging one aerial attack every 30 seconds,
and dropped 88,500 tons of explosives, which is the TNT equivalent of seven and
a half Hiroshimas. No accurate figures are available but many sources,
including the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), estimated that perhaps
as many as two million Iraqis died during the six years between 1990 and 1997,
including more than half a million children. Under the four years of occupation
from 2003 to 2007, estimates endorsed by such sources as the prestigious
British scientific journal The Lancet suggest that approximately 650,000 Iraqis
have died; some two million refugees have left the country; almost an equal
number have become refugees within Iraq; over half of Iraq's 4.5 million
children are malnourished; and unemployment stands at over 70 per cent. These
numbers should be seen in the perspective of the total population of the
country, which was considerably less than 25 million at the onset of the war.
We are talking of perhaps as much as half the population killed, maimed and
injured, driven out of the country, driven into starvation, malnutrition,
epidemic diseases, despair, and even crime.
"All the Shia and Sunni factions, including those serving
in the client regime in Iraq, agree that the U.S. troops must leave."
What has the U.S. achieved? The U.S. embassy in Baghdad is
the largest any country has built anywhere in the world. There is a network of
military bases, some of which are as large as any in the world. Some 170,000
military personnel are in place, backed by perhaps an equal number of mercenaries
and contractors who do a variety of military duties and civilian jobs. A client
regime is now in place, confected by the U.S. in close cooperation with Iran,
and quickly recognized by such stalwarts of global peace as the U.N. Security
Council, the 'international community' and so forth. All sorts of new laws have
been put on the books. For all that, the writ of the occupying power and the
regime of its clients does not run beyond the narrow confines of the Green Zone
in a portion of Baghdad where that ruling circle has garrisoned itself. All the
Shia and Sunni factions, including those serving in the client regime, agree
that the U.S. troops must leave. The question is, when and under what
sort of arrangement.
Afghanistan is almost not worth talking about. It was
invaded and occupied soon after the debacle of September 11, which served as a
pretext for war even though the Taliban government was in no way involved and
there is no conclusive proof that even Osama bin Laden knew of the event before
it occurred. Subsequent developments have been essentially the same as in Iraq.
Here, too, Iran helped persuade the Northern Alliance to accept the Karzai
government, which was put together by the neocon stalwart, Zalmay Khalilzad,
who was later dispatched to Iraq, serving in both places as imperial proconsul.
The transition was then made from U.S.- United Kingdom occupation to NATO
occupation, implicating the whole of Europe; U.S. and British troops continue
to serve.
Five and a half years later, more than half of the world's heroin
comes from Afghanistan, each year's aggregate amount breaking the record of the
previous year; Karzai still has to be protected by NATO personnel as Afghans themselves are not
trusted with the job; and the writ of the regime and its patrons does not run
much beyond Kabul. On the other side, though, the Taliban, which controls vast
swaths of the country and some slivers of Pakistan, are a much more pious and
disciplined lot than the murderous Shia and Sunni militias of Iraq, so that
Afghanistan is subject to the rule of the warlords but not the sort of
sectarian killings which are the order of the day in Iraq.
For the rest of this analysis, go to
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20070406004500400.htm