How the Bush Administration Destabilized the
‘Arc of Instability'
by Tom Engelhardt
This article originally appeared in TomDispatch.com.
"Iraq is the poster-boy for the Bush administration's
ability to turn whatever it touches into hell on Earth."
One night when I was in my teens, I found myself at a
production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. I had
never heard of the playwright or the play, nor had I seen a play performed in
the round. The actors were dramatically entering and exiting in the aisles
when, suddenly, a man stood up in the audience, proclaimed himself a seventh
character in search of an author, and demanded the same attention as the other
six. At the time, I assumed the unruly "seventh character" was just
part of the play, even after he was summarily ejected from the theater.
Now, bear with me a moment here. Back in 2002-2003,
officials in the Bush administration and their neocon supporters,
retro-think-tank admirers, and allied media pundits, basking in all their
Global War on Terror glory, were eager to talk about the region extending from
North Africa through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the
former SSRs of Central Asia right up to the Chinese border as an "arc of
instability." That arc coincided with the energy heartlands of the planet
and what was needed to "stabilize" it, to keep those energy supplies
flowing freely (and in the right directions), was clear enough to them. The "last
superpower," the greatest military force in history, would simply have to
put its foot down and so bring to heel the "rogue" powers of the
region. The geopolitical nerve would have to be mustered to stamp a massive
"footprint" - to use a Pentagon term of the time - in the middle of
that vast, valuable region. (Such a print was to be measured by military bases
established.) Also needed was the nerve not just to lob a few cruise missiles
in the direction of Baghdad, but to offer such an imposing demonstration of
American shock-and-awe power that those "rogues" - Iraq, Syria, Iran
(Hezbollah, Hamas) - would be cowed into submission, along with uppity U.S.
allies like oil-rich Saudi Arabia.
"The ‘last
superpower,' the greatest military force in history, would simply have to put
its foot down and so bring to heel the ‘rogue' powers of the region."
It would, in fact, be necessary - in another of those
bluntly descriptive words of the era - to "decapitate" resistant
regimes. This would be the first order of business for the planet's lone
"hyperpower," now that it had been psychologically mobilized by the
attacks of September 11, 2001. After all, what other power on Earth was capable
of keeping the uncivilized parts of the planet from descending into
failed-state, all-against-all warfare and dragging us (and our energy supplies)
down with them?
Mind you, on September 11, 2001, as those towers went down,
that arc of instability wasn't exactly a paragon of... well, instability. Yes, on
one end was Somalia, a failed state, and on the other, impoverished,
rubble-strewn Afghanistan, largely Taliban-ruled (and al-Qaeda encamped); while
in-between Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a severely weakened nation with a
suffering populace, but the "arc" was wracked by no great wars, no
huge surges of refugees, no striking levels of destruction. Not particularly
pleasant autocracies, some of a fundamentalist religious nature, were the rule
of the day. Oil flowed (at about $23
a barrel); the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simmered uncomfortably; and, all in
all, it wasn't a pretty picture, nor a particularly democratic one, nor one in
which, if you were an inhabitant of most of these lands, you could expect a
fair share of justice or a stunningly good life.
Still, the arc of instability, as a name, was then more
prediction than reality. And it was a prediction - soon enough to become a
self-fulfilling prophesy - on which George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
and all those neocons in the Pentagon readily staked careers and reputations.
As a crew, already dazzled by American military power and its potential uses,
such a bet undoubtedly looked like a sure winner, like betting with the house
in a three-card monte scheme. They would just give the arc what it needed - a
few intense doses of cruise-missile and B-1 bomber medicine, add in some
high-tech military boots-on-the-ground, some night-vision goggled eyes in the
desert, some Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones overhead, and some
"regime-change"-style injections of further instability. It was to
be, as Andrew Bacevich has
written, "an experiment in creative destruction."
"How could
the mightiest force on the planet lose to such puny powers?"
First Afghanistan, then Iraq. Both pushovers. How could the
mightiest force on the planet lose to such puny powers? As a start, you would
wage a swift air-war/proxy-war/Special-Forces war/dollar-war - CIA agents would
arrive in friendly areas of Northern Afghanistan in late 2001 carrying
suitcases stuffed with money - in one of the most backward places on the
planet. Your campaign would be against an ill-organized, ill-armed, ragtag
enemy. You would follow that by thrusting into the soft, military underbelly of
the Middle East and taking out the hollow armed forces of Saddam Hussein in a "cakewalk."
Next, with your bases set up in Afghanistan and Iraq on
either side of Iran - and Pakistan, also bordering Iran, in hand - what would
it take to run the increasingly unpopular mullahs who governed that land out of
Tehran? Meanwhile, Syria, another weakened, wobbly state divided against
itself, now hemmed in not only by militarily powerful Israel but
American-occupied Iraq on the other would be a pushover. In each of these
lands, you would soon enough end up with an American-friendly government, run
by some figure like the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi; and, voilà!
(okay, they wouldn't have used French), you would have a Middle East made safe
for Israel and for American domination. You would, in short, have your allies
in Europe and Japan as well as your possible future enemies, Russia and China,
by the throat in an increasingly energy-starved world.
Certainly, many of the top officials of the Bush
administration and their neocons allies, dreaming of just such an orderly,
American-dominated "Greater Middle East," were ready to settle for a
little chaos
in the process. If a weakened Iraq broke into several parts; or, say, the
oil-rich Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia happened to fall off that country, well,
too bad. They'd deal.
Little did they know.
The Tin Touch
Here's the remarkable thing, when you think about it: All
the Bush administration had to do was meddle in any country in that arc of
instability (and which one didn't it meddle in?), for actual instability, often
chaos, sometimes outright disaster to set in. It's been quite a record, the
very opposite of an imperial golden touch.
And, on any given day, you can see the evidence of this on a
case by case basis in your local paper or on the TV news. You can check out the
Iraqi, or Somali, or Lebanese, or Iranian, or Pakistani disasters, or impending
disasters. But what you never see is all those crises and potential crises
discussed in one place - without which the magnitude of the present disaster
and the dangers in our future are hard to grasp.
Few in the mainstream world have even tried to put them all
together since the Bush administration rolled
back the media, essentially demobilizing it in 2001-2002, at which
point its journalists and pundits simply stopped connecting the dots.
Give the Bush administration credit: Its top officials took in the world as a
whole and at an imperial glance. They regularly connected the dots as they saw
them. The post-9/11 strike at Afghanistan was never simply a strike at al-Qaeda
(or the Taliban who hosted them). It was always a prelude to war against Saddam
Hussein's Iraq. And the invasion of Iraq was never meant to end in Baghdad (as
indicated in the neocon pre-war quip,
"Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran").
Nor was Tehran to be the end of the line.
"The invasion of Iraq was never meant to end in Baghdad."
Under the rubric of the "Global War on Terror,"
they were considering literally dozens of countries as potential future targets.
Dick Cheney put
the matter bluntly back in August 2002 as the public drumbeat for an
invasion of Iraq was just revving up:
"The war in Afghanistan is only the beginning of a
lengthy campaign, Cheney noted. 'Were we to stop now, any sense of security we
might have would be false and temporary,' he said. 'There is a terrorist
underworld out there spread among more than 60 countries.'"
Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, they began
stitching together the arc of instability in their minds with an eye not so
much to Arabs, or South Asians, or even Israelis, but to playing their version
of what the British imperialists used to call "the Great Game." They
had the full-scale rollback of energy-giant Russia
in mind as well as the containment or rollback of potential future imperial
power, China, already visibly desperate for Iraqi, Iranian, and other energy
supplies. In the year before the invasion of Iraq, they were remarkably blunt
about this. They proudly published that seminal document of the Bush era, the
National Security Strategy of the United States of America, 2002, which called
for the U.S. to "build and maintain" its military power on the planet
"beyond
challenge."
Think about that for a moment. A single power on Earth
"beyond challenge." This was a dream of planetary dominion that once
would have been left to madmen. But in what looked like a world with only one
Great Power, it was easy enough to imagine a Great Game with only one great
player, an arms race with only one swift runner.
The Bush administration was essentially calling for a world
in which no superpower, or bloc of powers, would ever be allowed to
challenge this country's supremacy. As the President put it in an address at
West Point in 2002, "America has, and intends to keep, military
strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of
other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of
peace." The National Security Strategy put the same thought this way:
"Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from
pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of
the United States." That's anywhere on the planet. Ever. And the President
and his followers promptly began to hike the Pentagon budget to suit their
oversized, military fantasies of what an American "footprint" should
be.
"This was a dream of planetary dominion that once would
have been left to madmen."
With this in mind, the arc of instability, which, in
energy-flow terms, was quite literally the planet's heartland, seemed the place
to control. And yet - look hard as you will - you're unlikely to find a single
piece in your daily paper that takes in that arc; that, say, includes Somalia
and Pakistan in the same piece, even though Bush administration policy has
effectively tied them together in disaster. To take another example, the rise
of Iran (and a possible "Shiite crescent"), Iran's influence or
interference in Iraq, Iran's nuclear program, and Iran's off-the-wall president
have been near obsessions in the U.S. media; and yet, you would be hard-pressed
to find a piece even pointing out that the Bush administration's two invasions
and occupations - Iraq and Afghanistan - which left both those countries
bristling with vast
American bases and sprawling American-controlled
prison systems, took place on either side of Iran. Add in the fact that
the Bush administration, probably through the CIA, is essentially running
terror raids into Iran through Pakistan and you have a remarkably
different vision of Iran's geostrategic situation than even an informed
American media consumer would normally see.
After September 11, 2001, but based on the sort of pre-2001
thinking you could find well represented at the neocon website Project for the New American
Century, the Bush administration's top officials wrote their own drama
for the arc of instability. They were, of course, the main characters in it,
along with the U.S. military, some Afghan and Iraqi exiles who would play their
necessary roles in the "liberation" of their countries, and a few
evil ogres like Saddam Hussein.
Today, not six years after they raised the curtain on what
was to be their grand imperial drama, they find themselves in a dark theater
with at least six crises in search of an author, all clamoring for attention -
and every possibility that a seventh (not to say a seventeenth)
"character" in that rowdy, still gathering, audience may soon rise to
insist on a part in the horrific farce that has actually taken place.
Six Crises in Search of an Author
Sweeping across the region from East to West, let's briefly
note the six festering or clamoring crisis spots, any one of which could end up
with the play's major role before George W. Bush slips out of office.
Pakistan: The Pakistani government was
America's main partner, along with the Saudis, in funding, arming, and running
the anti-Soviet struggle of the mujahedeen, including Osama bin Laden,
in Afghanistan back in the 1980s; and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI,
was the godfather of the Taliban (and remains, it seems, a supporter to this
day). In September 2001, the Bush administration gave the country's
coup-installed military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, the basic
you're-either-with-us-or-against-us choice. He chose the "with" and
in the course of these last years, under constant American pressure, has lost
almost complete control over Pakistan's tribal regions along the Afghan border
to various tribal
groups, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other foreign jihadis, who
have established bases there. Now, significant parts of the country are
experiencing unrest in what looks increasingly like a countdown to
chaos in a nuclear-armed nation.
Afghanistan: In the meantime, from those
Pakistani base areas, the revived and rearmed Taliban (and their al-Qaeda partners)
are preparing to launch a major spring offensive in Afghanistan, using tactics
from the Iraq War (suicide
bombers or "Mullah
Omar's Missiles," as they call them, and the roadside
bomb or IED). They are already capable of taking over
southern Afghan districts for periods of time. The Bush administration used the
Northern Alliance - that is, proxy Afghan forces - to take Kabul in November
2001. It then set up its bases and prisons
and established President Hamid Karzai as the "mayor of Kabul," only
to abandon the task of providing real security and beginning the genuine
reconstruction of the country in order to invade Iraq. The rest of this
particular horror story is, by now, reasonably well known. The country beyond
booming Kabul remains impoverished and significantly in ruins; the population
evidently ever more dissatisfied; the American and NATO air war ever more indiscriminate;
and it is again the planet's largest
producer of opium poppies and, as such, supplier of heroin. Over five
years after its "liberation" from the Taliban, Afghanistan is a
failed state, home to a successful guerrilla war by one of the most primitively
fundamentalist movements on the planet, and a thriving narco-kingdom. It is
only likely to get worse. For the first time, the possibility that, like the
Russians before them, the Americans (and their NATO allies) could actually suffer defeat in that
rugged land seems imaginable.
Iran: The country is a rising regional power, with
enormous energy resources, and Shiite allies and allied movements of various
sorts throughout the region, including in southern Iraq. But it also has an
embattled, divided, fundamentalist government capable of rallying its
disgruntled populace only with nationalism (call it, playing the American
card). Energy-rich as it is, Iran also has a fractured, weakened economy,
threatened with sanctions; and its major enemy, the Bush administration, is
running a series of terror
operations against it, while trying to cause dissension in its oil-rich
minority regions. It is also deploying an unprecedented show of naval and air
strength in the Persian Gulf. (An aircraft-carrier, the USS Nimitz, with
its strike group, is now on its way
to join the two carrier task forces already in place there.) In addition, the
administration has threatened
to launch a massive air assault on Iran's nuclear and other facilities. Though
Iraq runs it a close race, Iran may be the single potentially most explosive
hot spot in the arc of instability. In a nanosecond, it would be capable, under
U.S. attack, or even some set of miscalculations on all sides, both of
suffering grievous harm and of imposing enormous damage not just on American
troops in Iraq, or on the oil economy of the region, but on the global economy
as well.
"Iran may be the single potentially most explosive hot
spot in the arc of instability."
Iraq: Do I need to say a word? Iraq is the poster-boy for
the Bush administration's ability to turn whatever it touches into hell on
Earth. In Iraq, the vaunted American military has been stopped in its tracks by
a minority Sunni insurgency. (In recent weeks, however, the war there is
threatening to turn into something larger, as the American military launches attacks
on radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.) Iraq now is the
site of a religio-ethnic civil war of striking brutality, loosing waves of
refugees within the country and on neighboring states; neighborhoods are being
ethnically cleansed and deaths have reached into the hundreds of thousands.
Amid all this, the occupying U.S. military fully controls only Baghdad's fortified
citadel within a city, the Green Zone (and even there dangers are
mounting) as well as a series of enormous, multibillion-dollar bases it
has built around the country. Iraq is now essentially a failed state and the
situation continues to devolve under the pressure of the President's latest
"surge" plan. If that plan were to succeed, the citadel-state of the
Green Zone would, at best, be turned into the city-state of Baghdad in a sea of
chaos. Like Iran, Iraq has the potential to draw other states in the region
into a widening civil-cum-religious-cum-terrorist war.
Israel/Palestine/Lebanon: From an early green light
for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to join the Global War on Terror (against the
Palestinians) to a green light for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to launch and
continue a war against Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, the Bush
administration has largely green-lighted Israel these last years. It has also
ignored or, in the case of the Lebanon War, purposely held back any possibility
of serious peace talks. The provisional results are in. In Lebanon, the heavily
populated areas of the Shiite south were strewn with
Israeli cluster bombs, making some areas nearly uninhabitable; up to a quarter
of the population was, for a time, turned into
refugees; parts of Lebanese cities including Beirut
were flattened by the Israeli air force; and yet Hezbollah was strengthened,
the U.S.-backed Siniora government radically weakened, and the country drawn
closer to a possible civil war. In the Palestinian areas, Bush administration
democracy-promotion efforts ended with a Hamas electoral victory. Starved of
foreign aid and having suffered further Israeli military assaults, the
Palestinian population is ever more immiserated; Hamas and Fatah are at each
other's throats; and the U.S.-backed President of the Palestinian National
Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is in a weakened position. In the wake of a
disastrous war, Israel, with a government whose head has a 3% approval rate,
is hardly the triumphant, dominant power in the Middle East that various Bush
administration figures imagined once upon a time. This looks like another
deteriorating situation with no end in sight.
Somalia (or Blackhawk Down, Round 2): In 2006,
Director Porter Goss's CIA bet on a group of discredited Somali warlords, threw
money and support behind them, and - typically - lost out
to an Islamist militia that took most of the country and imposed relative peace
on it for the first time in years. The ever proactive Bush administration then
turned to the autocratic Ethiopian regime and its military (advised
and armed by the U.S. with a helping hand from the
North Koreans) to open "a new front" in the Global War on
Terror. The Ethiopians promptly launched their own "preventive"
invasion of Somalia (with modest U.S. air support), installed a government in
the capital, Mogadishu, proclaimed victory over the Islamists, and - giant
surprise - promptly found themselves mired in an inter-clan civil war with
Iraqi overtones. Today, Somalia, long a failed state and then, for a few
months, almost a peaceful land (even if ruled by Islamists fundamentalists), is
experiencing the worst
fighting and death levels in 15 years. The new government in Mogadishu
is shaky; their Ethiopian military supporters bloodied; over
1,000 civilians in the capital are dead or wounded, and tens of
thousands of refugees are fleeing Mogadishu and crossing borders in a state of
need. Rate it: a developing disaster - with worse to come.
In short, from Somalia to Pakistan, the region is today a genuine
arc of instability. It is filled with ever more failed states (Somalia, Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Palestine, which never even made it to statehood before
collapse), possible future failed states (Lebanon, Pakistan), ever shakier
autocracies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan); and huge floods of refugees,
internal and external (Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan) as well as
massively damaged areas (Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon). It is also witnessing
the growth of extremist and terrorist organizations and sentiments.
A Rube Goldberg Machine
At any moment, somewhere in the now-destabilized "arc
of instability," that seventh character could indeed rise, demand
attention, and refuse to be ejected from the premises. There are many possible
candidates. Here are just a few:
Al-Qaeda, an organization dispersed but never fully
dismantled by the Bush administration, has now, according to Mark
Mazzetti of the New York Times, rebuilt itself in the Pakistani
borderlands with new training camps, new base areas, and a new generation of
leaders in their thirties, all still evidently serving under Osama bin Laden.
(In the future, Mazzetti suggests even younger leaders are likely to come from
the hardened veterans of campaigns in Bush's Iraq). Al-Qaeda is a wild card
throughout the region.
Iraqi Kurdistan is now a relatively peaceful
area, but from the disputed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk to its Turkish and Iranian
borders it is also a potential
future powder keg and the focus for interventions of all sorts.
Oil pipelines, which, from the Black Sea to the
Persian Gulf, crisscross the region, are almost impossible to defend
effectively. At any moment, some group or groups, copying the tactics
of the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, could decide to begin a sabotage campaign
against them (or the other oil facilities in the region).
"It seems the President and his top officials have
learned nothing about what their meddling is likely to
accomplish."
Saudi Arabia, an increasingly ossified
religious autocracy, faces opponents ready to practice terrorism against its
oil infrastructure and rising unrest in its oil-rich Shiite areas as well as an
ascendant Iran.
Syria, a rickety minority regime, under internal pressure,
now faces the launching of a renewed
Bush administration campaign to further undermine its power. Though we
have no way of knowing the scope of this campaign, it seems the
President and his top officials have learned absolutely
nothing about what their meddling is likely to accomplish.
Outside the "arc of instability," but deeply
affected by what goes on there, let's not forget:
The U.S. Army: 13,000
National Guardsmen have just been notified of a coming call-up, long
before they were due for another tour of duty in Iraq. The Army, like the
Marine Corps, finds itself under near-unbearable
pressure from the Iraq and Afghan Wars and, as a result, is sending
less than fully trained troops, recruited under ever lower standards, with worn
equipment, into battle. The Army, for instance, is having trouble holding on to
its best soldiers. Beyond their minimum five years of service, to take an
example, "just 62% of West Pointers re-upped, about 25 percentage points
lower than at the other service academies." And the public grumbling of
the top brass is on
the increase. Who knows what this means for the future?
The American People
- Oh yes, them. They haven't really hit the streets
yet, but they've hit the opinion
polls hard and last November some of them hit the polling booths -
decisively. Who knows when they will "stand up" and insist on being
counted. Perhaps in 2008.
In other words, in addition to the normal cast of characters
dreamt up by the Bush administration in its fantasy production in the global
round, a whole set of unexpected characters are already moving up and down the
aisles, demanding attention, and at any moment, that seventh character -
whether state, ethnic group, terrorist cadre, or some unknown crew in search of
an author is likely to make its presence felt.
And let's not forget that there is one more obvious
"character" out there in search of an author; that there is one more
Bush-destabilized place on the planet not yet mentioned, even though it may be
the most important of all. I'm talking, of course, about Washington D.C.; I'm
talking about the Bush administration itself.
Consider the process by which it turned Washington into a
mini-arc of instability: First, it fantasized about the "arc of
instability," then stitched it together into a genuine Rube Goldberg
instability machine, one where any group, across thousands of miles, might pull
some switch that would set chaos rolling, the flames licking across the oil
heartlands of the planet. Then, remarkably enough, the administration itself
and all its dreams - both of a Pax Americana globe and a Pax
Republicana United States - began to disintegrate. The whole edifice, from
Rumsfeld's high-tech military to Karl Rove's political machine, became
destabilized under its own tin touch. The putative playwright became just
another desperate character.
"The whole edifice, from Rumsfeld's high-tech military to
Karl Rove's political machine, became destabilized under its own tin touch."
It's no longer far-fetched to say that, with the President's
polling figures in the low
30s, resistance to his war still growing, a Democratic Congress
beginning to feel its strength, the Republican Party shaking and its
presidential candidates preparing to head for the hills, corruption and
political scandals popping up everywhere, and high military figures implicitly
reading the riot act to their political leaders, the already listing Bush
imperial ship of state seems to be making directly for the next floating
iceberg.
Imagine then, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney still clinging
tenaciously to what's left of their dreams and delusions
amid the ruins of their plans -- as the USS Nimitz sails toward the
Persian Gulf; as American agents of various sorts "advise" and,
however indirectly, shuffle aid to extremist groups eager to fell the Iranian
regime; as a new campaign against the Syrian regime is launched; as stolen
Iraqi oil money is shuttled to the Siniora government in Lebanon (and then,
according to Seymour
Hersh, to Sunni jihadi groups in Lebanon and the Muslim
Brotherhood in Syria); and as American agents continue to
"interrogate" suspected jihadis in their latest borrowed
secret prisons in
Ethiopia, while American-backed Ethiopian troops only find themselves
more embroiled in Somalia. Imagine all that, and then ask yourself, what levers
on that Rube Goldberg machine they've done so much to create are they still
capable of pulling?
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's
Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is
the co-founder of the
American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
To contact the author, email him at [email protected]
Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt
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