Jonathan Schell (The Nation): The Empire Backfires

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation issue of March 29
Posted online Thursday March 11

The Empire Backfires
By Jonathan Schell

he first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended; their numbers would have been reduced to the low tens of thousands, if not to zero; Iraq's large stores of weapons of mass destruction would have been found and dismantled; the institutions of democracy would be flourishing; Kurd and Shiite and Sunni would be working happily together in a federal system; the economy, now privatized, would be taking off; other peoples of the Middle East, thrilled and awed, so to speak, by the beautiful scenes in Iraq, would be dismantling their own tyrannical regimes. Instead, 549 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, have died; some $125 billion has been expended; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and water are sometime things; America's former well-wishers, the Shiites, are impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and Iraq as a whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century. And yet all this is only part of the cost of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq. To weigh the full cost, one must look not just at the war itself but away from it, at the progress of the larger policy it served, at things that have been done elsewhere--some far from Iraq or deep in the past--and, perhaps above all, at things that have been left undone.

Nuclear Fingerprints

While American troops were dying in Baghdad and Falluja and Samarra, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman, was busy making centrifuge parts in Malaysia and selling them to Libya and Iran and possibly other countries. The centrifuges are used for producing bomb-grade uranium. Tahir's project was part of a network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the "father" of the Pakistani atomic bomb. This particular father stole most of the makings of his nuclear offspring from companies in Europe, where he worked during the 1980s. In the 1990s, the thief became a middleman--a fence--immensely enriching himself in the process . . . .

The War and Its Aims

Proliferation, however, is not, as the President seemed to think, just a rogue state or two seeking weapons of mass destruction; it is the entire half-century-long process of globalization that stretches from Klaus Fuchs's espionage to Tahir's nuclear arms bazaar and beyond. The war was a failure in its own terms because weapons of mass destruction were absent in Iraq; the war policy failed because they were present and spreading in Pakistan. For Bush's warning of a mushroom cloud over an American city, though false with respect to Iraq, was indisputably well-founded in regard to Pakistan's nuclear one-stop-shopping: The next warning stemming from this kind of failure could indeed be a mushroom cloud.
The questions that now cry out to be answered are, Why did the United States, standing in the midst of the Pakistani nuclear Wal-Mart, its shelves groaning with, among other things, centrifuge parts, uranium hexafluoride (supplied, we now know, to Libya) and helpful bomb-assembly manuals in a variety of languages, rush out of the premises to vainly ransack the empty warehouse of Iraq? What sort of nonproliferation policy could lead to actions like these? How did the Bush Administration, in the name of protecting the country from nuclear danger, wind up leaving it wide open to nuclear danger? . . .

A New Leviathan

The answers seem to lie in the larger architecture of the Bush foreign policy, or Bush Doctrine. Its aim, which many have properly called imperial, is to establish lasting American hegemony over the entire globe, and its ultimate means is to overthrow regimes of which the United States disapproves, pre-emptively if necessary.

Read more.

[bemildred]

1. I always do enjoy reading Mr. Schell.

A fine writer and a sharp mind.

The bit on proliferation is excellent, it should be reqired
reading for all those that think all that is required is
bombing Bushehr in Iran.

I see he somewhat concurs with Emmanuel Todd on the purpose
of the Iraq War, and why it had to be Iraq. Todd calls it
"theatrical micro-militarism".

Thanks for the post.

[Jack Rabbit]

2. You're welcome

It's easy to point out that the invasion did nothing to alleviate the threat of terrorism. That should be obvious, since Saddam had nothing to do with al Qaida.

However, since Saddam had no weapons to proliferate, the invasion did nothing to solve that problem, either. Mr. Schell lays out the problem that was neglected while Mr. Bush and his fellow prevaricators where rolling out their defective product.

[fedsron2us]

3. The threat of terrorism

provides the one of the key justifications for current US military expansion overseas. If the terrorists did not exist or had been defeated then it is highly unlikely that there would have been sufficient support to start a war in Iraq. Therefore. it is not in the interests of the current administration to destroy Al Qaida or any other terrorist group.

[Jack Rabbit]

5. It's more complicated than that

True, the Bush junta needs enemies, real or imagined, to carry out the PNAC agenda. There would have been no support for invading Iraq if it were generally believed (as was actually the case) that Saddam's weapons arsenal posed no imminent threat to anyone or that Saddam had no associations with the September 11 terrorists. Saddam's brutality, as bad as real as it was, simply did not stand alone as a sufficient causus bellum.

However, the junta can destroy al Qaida and still justify the war, at least in the terms they have established for it. This is not a war against specified terrorists or even specified terrorist-supporting states, but a war against terrorism. Defeating terrorism is a vaguely defined and probably unobtainable goal. It can be used to justify an endless series of wars.

We should hope that one of the things President Kerry will do upon assuming power is to redefine the war on terrorism as a war on specific terrorists, such as Osama and his lieutenants, and specific states, if any, that aid and harbor these specified terrorists. That would provide a obtainable goal by which success and failure can be measured.

However, as Mr. Schell points out here, much of the problem in today's world comes not from states but from rogue individuals, like Tahir and Dr. Khan, who profit from trafficking in material and expertise. These people must also be targeted.

[teryang]

4. The war "against terrorism" was

...in fact an abandonment of nuclear non-proliferation policies as well as an endorsement of Pakistani sponsored terrorism. Not only is Pakistan the incubator of nuclear proliferation, it has also been a major supporter of terrorist attacks against India. We abandoned all sanctions against Pakistan for nuclear proliferation after 911.

Its participation in the political theater of al qaeda operations in Afghanistan, South Florida, and Washington D.C. all serve our regimes political agenda. Proliferation serves the defense industry's raison d'etre.