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INTERFAITH PEACE PILGRIMAGE AND SOLIDARITY VISIT TO PALESTINE-ISRAEL
International Conference on Justice for Palestine
2007 November 10-12 | Hotel Toledo, Amman, Jordan
PANEL PRESENTATION
The Empire and the Middle East
By NINAN KOSHY
2007 November 11
The United States is by circumstance and design an emergent global empire. The Middle East has the most prominent place in the scheme of the Empire. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Undersecretary of State said earlier this year, “Ten years ago Europe was the epicenter of American policy. For the better part of the twentieth century Europe was the primary vital focus.” But he added that everything had changed and Middle East was ‘the primary vital focus’ for the US administration now and will continue to be so.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 battle of our times.”2
“The military victory in Iraq seems to have confirmed a new world order”, Joseph Nye, Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote in The Washington Post. (25 May 2005) “Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others. Indeed the ‘word’ empire has come out of the closet”. Indeed it was in relation to the Middle East the transformation of America to an empire was fully recognized.
The September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington immediately pushed the global security agenda into the centre-stage of world politics. What became clear almost from the first response of the USA was a decision to frame its response to megaterrorism in terms that incorporated the extreme neoconservative conception of a future world order. September 11 provided the ‘catastrophic and catalyzing event’ for which the Project for the New American Century was waiting for. The enlarged conception of the war allowed the Bush administration to shift the focus of attention from the al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan to the ‘axis of the evil’ countries that essentially had no connection with megaterrorism but were definitely standing in the way of the American espousal of global dominance as a goal to be actively pursued. This is what brought the issue of ‘empire’ into the open. The War on Terror thus became a war for building the empire.
At the beginning of the war against Afghanistan, Scott Pearson wrote that the “the borders of a new American empire appear to be forming”.3 With the occupation of Iraq the borders of the empire expanded. There are many elements of classical empire building seen today: military occupation, regime change and direct control of economic resources. The new empire cannot be any longer called non-territorial. Comparisons are inevitably made with the British and more so with the Roman empire.
The ideology, the military doctrines and the economics of the empire all seem to have been fashioned with special focus on the Middle East.
Admittedly what may be described as the Charter of the U.S. Empire is the National Security Strategy of the USA 2002. The document insists that “the President has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead that the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago”. The document argues that while the U.S. will seek allies in the battle against terrorism, “We will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary to exercise our right of self-defence by acting preemptively”. The doctrine of preemptive action which actually means preventative war and unilateral action and the scorn of the United Nations and its Charter are blatant imperial doctrines representing a fundamental challenge to the world order.
The NSS 2002 declares that American strength and influence in the world is ‘unprecedented’ and ‘unequalled’. The United States has “unparalleled responsibilities, obligations and opportunities” beyond its borders. It calls for possessing such overwhelming military power so as to discourage any other power from challenging American hegemony or developing weapons of mass destruction. Committing the US to a much expanded understanding of security, it argues that the US must reserve the right to act unilaterally and preemptively against potentially threatening states or organizations.
It is important to note that the fashioning and formulation of military strategies and doctrines for building the empire were already in process before September 11. They were all in place before the attack on Iraq. On 20 September 2001, nine days after the terrorist attacks, the Bush administration released the 2001 Quadrennial Defence Review. Obviously this was prepared long before the terrorist attacks. While generally following the earlier reviews, the document did signal a critical shift in U.S. defence strategy and policy with clear potential for empire. As Carl Cornetta explains:
The official difference is that the new QDR puts an emphasis on war fighting and war-fighting capabilities bringing maximum war objectives to the fore. Besides seeking decisive victory, it aims for the decisive defeat of adversaries. This it defines ambitiously in terms of ‘changing the regime of an adversary state’ and ‘occupying foreign territory until US strategic objectives are met.”4
The classified Nuclear Posture Review (details of which appeared in the media in March 2002) revealing Pentagon’s ambitious nuclear battle plans, the role of nuclear weapons as fundamental to U.S. defence policy, places new emphasis on the utility of nuclear weapons in U.S. doctrine and strategy. The Review makes it clear that the US is ready to use nuclear weapons “in the event of surprising developments.” It is evident that the doctrine of preemption applies to nuclear weapons as well.
A close reading of the Bush administration plan in NSS 2002 reveals an audacious agenda for world economic dominance. Its opening remarks in the words of President Bush boldly proclaim that “the United States will use this ‘moment of opportunity’ (i.e. the war on terrorism) to bring the hopes of democracy, development, free markets and free trade to every corner of the world.”
The empire is built on increasing and expanding military relationships of various kinds with a very large number of countries as well as the stationing of hundreds of thousands of US troops around the world. The vast number of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire—an empire of bases with its own geography. These military bases numbering hundreds are today’s version of the imperial colonies of the old. Washington may call them ‘forward deployment’ but colonies are what they are. On this definition there is no place outside America’s military reach.
In Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson advances the claim that the U.S. has consolidated its cold-war era far flung military base system into a new global imperial system. Military commanders in regional headquarters are modern-day pro-consuls, ‘warrior-diplomats’ who direct the United States’ imperial reach.
The Director of the neo-conservative Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, Stephen Peter Rose summarized the basic assumptions of this new military view of the world in mid-2002. “The United States has no rival. We are militarily dominant around the world. ...Our goal is not combating a rival, but maintaining our imperial position and maintaining imperial order. ...Planning for imperial wars is different from planning for conventional wars. ...The maximum amount of force can and should be used as quickly as possible for psychological impact to demonstrate that the empire cannot be challenged with impunity. ...Imperial wars end but imperial garrisons must be left in place for decades to ensure order and stability…Finally imperial strategy focuses on preventing the emergence of powerful hostile challengers to the empire by war if necessary, but by imperial assimilation if possible”.5
September 11 gave renewed impetus to American hegemony and stripped away the public’s hesitation to project force around the globe. The US has used force on previous occasions to overthrow governments. What distinguishes the current movement is the apparent zeal to inculcate a new set of political and cultural sensitivities among an entire people. The imperialist enthusiasm is specious however, in that talk of democracy is little more than a mechanism for creating compliant states that will choose to further US interests.
An understanding of U.S. imperial policy in the Middle East requires an analysis which contains three factors:
- The power and influence of Israel and related power configuration on US political institutions.
- The capacity of the US empire to construct and instrumentalize Middle East client states and regimes to implant US policies.
- An alliance with rightwing regimes and rulers to provide military bases, intelligence and political backing for the colonial occupation of Iraq and economic sanctions and if necessary war against Iran.
As the U.S. administration struggled to find justification for launching an attack on Iraq churning out dubious intelligence reports about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links with al Qaeda the proponents of a New American Century produced the outline of a democratic Pax Americana in the Middle East.
The occupation of Iraq has been the centerpiece of the Empire in the Middle East. Just before the beginning of the Iraq war, Michael Igantieff wrote that “Iraq is an imperial operation that would commit a reluctant republic to become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratization and oil supplies in a region of Islamic people stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan. A role once played by the Ottoman Empire, then by the French and the British will now be played by the United States. If America takes on Iraq it takes on the reordering of the whole region.”6
In the same article Ignatieff wrote that “regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire has the right to trump the sovereignty of a state” The National Defence Strategy of the United States, March 2005 is explicit that Washington will not be reluctant to send forces into other states that, in its opinion, do not “exercise their sovereignty responsibly” or that “use the principle of sovereignty as a shield behind which they claim to be free to engage in activities that pose enormous to their citizens, neighbours or the rest of the international community.”
In the geopolitical vision driving the current US policy, the key to national security is global hegemony—conquest of and dominion over any and potential rival. To that end the US must not only be able to project its military forces anywhere at any time it must also control key resources chief among them oil—and especially Gulf oil. To the Bush administration, the region is crucial not simply for the share of the US oil supply but because it would allow the US to maintain a lock on the world’s energy lifeline.
Controlling Iraq is about oil as power rather than oil as fuel (Michael Klare, Resource Wars) “Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan and China. It is having our hand on the spigot.”
From Afghanistan to the landlocked former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the US forces have established themselves in an area that had long been in Russia’s influence. Oil-rich in its own right and strategically vital, Central Asia is now the eastern link in a nearly continuous chain of US bases, facilities and allies stretching from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea far into the Asian hinterland.
The term New Middle East was introduced to the world in June 2006 in Tel Aviv by the U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (who was credited by the Western media for coining the term) in replacement of the older and more imposing term the Greater Middle East. The conceptualization of the New Middle East was subsequently heralded by the U.S. Secretary of State and the Israeli Prime Minister at the height of the Anglo-American sponsored siege of Lebanon who announced that a project for a New Middle East was launched form Lebanon.7
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice stated during a press conference that “what we are seeing here” (in regard to the destruction of Lebanon by Israeli attacks) “in a sense is the growing—the birth pangs—of a New Middle East and whatever we do “ (meaning the U.S) “have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the New Middle East and not going back to the old one”.8 During Bush’s first term the neo-cons had developed the doctrine of ‘constructive instability’ in the Middle East. Rice was immediately criticized for her statement both within Lebanon and internationally for her lack of sensitivity and indifference to the suffering of an entire nation
The announcement was a confirmation of an Anglo-American ‘military roadmap’ for the Middle East. The project which has been in the planning stages for several years consists of creating an arc of instability, chaos and violence extending from Lebanon, Palestine and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf and Iran and the borders of NATO-governed Afghnistan. The Armed Forces Journal of the Pentagon (June 2006) has published a map of the New Middle East restructuring and redrawing the present one.9
The redrawing and partition of the Middle East from the Eastern Mediterranean shores of Lebanon and Syria to Anatolia (Asia Minor), the Persian Gulf and the Iranian plateau responds to broad economic, strategic and military objectives which are part of a long=standing Anglo=American and Israeli agenda in the region.
The Middle East has been conditioned by outside forces into a powder keg that is ready to explode with the right trigger possibly the launching of Anglo-American and or Israeli air raids against Iran and Syria. A wider war in the region could result in redrawn boundaries that are strategically advantageous to Anglo-American interests and Israel.
As a senior Israeli official explained to the Washington Post on July 16, 2006 “Hezbollah’s cross-border raid has provided ‘a unique moment’ with a convergence of interests. For the Untied States, the broader goal is to strangle what it perceives as the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the ‘strategic playing field’ in the Middle East.10
For the U.S. the Middle East is a ‘strategic playing field’ where the game is establishing full U.S. domination.
In Nicholas Burns’ words, “There are four conflicts underway in the Middle East that are vital to our national interests- vital in the sense that any of them could involve us in a larger war.” He mentioned conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine and in “Iran which is involved in all the other conflicts, the president says Iran should be the dominant country in the region.”11
The Empire has a theology too. The theology is considerably influenced by certain interpretations of Biblical passages by Christian fundamentalist to argue for and justify wars for ‘holy Jerusalem’ and ‘wicked Babylon’.
The Report of the Church of England Bishops does not name America as an empire, just treats it as one. “What distinguishes form many other empires in history is the strong sense of moral righteousness.”. The Report says, “The sense of moral righteousness is fed by the major influence of the ‘Christian Right’ on present US policy. This has a very worrying political aspect in the way in which Christian millinealism has been taken up by so many evangelical Christians, with its apocalyptic overtones and its very clear political agenda in relation to the Middle East.”12
NOTES
1 Remarks by the Undersecretary of State, Boston Review May/June 2007
2 President’s Address to the Nation, The White House, September 11, 2006
3 Scott Pearson, Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 2002
4 Carl Cornetta, ‘The Pentagon, New Budget, New Strategy and New War”, Project on Defence Alternatives, Briefing Report, June 25, 2002
5 Quoted by Rainer Rilling in ‘American Empire as Will and Idea”, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Policy Paper 2. 2003
6 Michael Ignatieff, ‘The Empire, the Burden’, New York Times Magazine, 5 January, 2003.
7 Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, ‘Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a New Middle East’, Global Research, Noveember 18, 2006
8 Ibid.
9 Ralph Peter, ‘Blood Borders, How a Better Middle East Would Look’, Armed Forces Journal, June 2006.
10 Tanya Reinhart, ‘The New Middle East’, ZNet, July 26, 2006
11 Remarks by Undersecretary of State, Boston Review, May/June 2007
12 “Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy”. A Report by a Working Group of the Church of England’s House of Bishops, September 2005.
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