Rationalising imperial conquest

BOOKS

PRAFUL BIDWAI

The book is a devastating critique of the U.S. Empire-building project and its principal rationalisations.

FIVE and a half years after the United States launched its Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, by invading Afghanistan, the world has become considerably more insecure, and terrorism has become more menacing than ever before. A study for Mother Jones magazine in the U.S. by the Centre on Law and Security at the New York University (NYU) Foundation finds that there has been a 607 per cent increase in the incidence of terrorism between September 2001 and March 2003, and March 2003 and September 2006.

One of the biggest failures of GWOT strategy is none other than Iraq, where over 150,000 U.S. troops are deployed. A country free of religious extremism and terrorism until its invasion four years ago, Iraq now reports the world's largest number of terrorist and violent incidents, week after week. Over 650,000 civilians have perished in Iraq, besides 3,000-plus U.S. troops. The occupation forces there have no grip on the fast-deteriorating situation despite the "surge" in U.S. troops.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has seen any of the promised "stabilisation" or "democratisation". In Afghanistan, there is a strong resurgence of the Taliban amidst rampant warlordism, and a serious danger that President Hamid Karzai's regime may come unhinged altogether. Opium production is booming as never before and now accounts for well over one half of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).

Worse, GWOT has alienated and antagonised large numbers of people in the Islamic world. The U.S. has lost all credibility in their eyes, as well as among growing numbers of people in the West. Discontent in the Islamic world, in particular West Asia, is growing along with the expanding cesspools of unaddressed grievances — further feeding violence, counter-violence and terrorism.

The U.S. is now increasingly perceived as a power in search of an Empire, to be built primarily by military means. It presents a new, ugly, aggressive and belligerent face in the post-Cold War era. New apologists have also emerged for the new imperialism of the post-Cold War era. During the Cold War, U.S. hegemonism was based on "saving the world from communism", and presenting a benevolent face to the "free world". Today's Empire needs different, if equally irrational, justifications or rationalisations.

Six of these rationalisations or banners and apologies for Empire are important: (i) the global war on terror; (ii) weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the `wrong hands'; (iii) failed states; (iv) the necessity and justice of external and forcible humanitarian intervention; (v) regime change in the name of democracy; and (vi) the war on narcotics.

The present book, an initiative of the Transnational Institute, an Amsterdam-based radical fellowship, and authored mainly by its Fellows, is a devastating critique of the U.S. Empire-building project and its principal rationalisations. Its greatest merit is that it centrally confronts the reality of post-Cold War U.S. imperialism and tries to analyse it comprehensively. It persuasively argues that each of the slogans and premises through which U.S. Empire-building is sought to be legitimised is fundamentally flawed.

The book's authors make their case on a broad canvas, which includes a discussion on the purposes of Empire (themselves related to specific regimes of economic power and to furthering inequality-enhancing neoliberal capitalism); the manufacture of intellectual opinion in favour of neoliberal ideas; and the special role played by American exceptionalism in legitimising Empire-building through its assertion that the U.S. is unique as the world's "natural" leader, in that "it is the one country whose pursuit of its national interest is, at one and the same time, the pursuit of a cosmopolitan universal interest".

These essays are followed by six chapter presentations on the six ideological banners. As important as these sections are the Introduction and Conclusion, both by Achin Vanaik, who weaves together the different themes and illuminates numerous connections between them.

To begin with, Walden Bello analyses the economics of Empire by postulating a massive crisis of over-accumulation: overproduction and building up of excess capacities, whose output the economics of the industrial North cannot absorb. He argues that recent attempts by international capital to develop new communications technologies; to colonise public spheres such as health, education, power, water supply and transport; to "financialise" itself; and to tap China's rapid growth to finance a debt-led consumption boom in the U.S. will not adequately remedy the causes of this crisis. Walden Bello presents U.S. post-Cold War belligerence as a consequence of economic weakness, not strength.

Susan George presents a critique of the neoliberal doctrine, rooted in a combination of conservative interpretation of neoclassical economic theory, and libertarian and ultra-individualist legal-political ideas. Susan George convincingly shows that the dominance of neoliberalism owes little to its intrinsic merit; nor was it a "natural" outcome of intellectual debate.

Rather, it followed a systematic and lavishly funded effort to "sell" the ideology through think tanks, select university departments, policy institutes and key individuals in the media. She explores and exposes the institutional framework through which this $1 billion enterprise was conducted.

Mike Marquesee's chapter is a searing critical analysis of American exceptionalism and its historical roots in settler colonialism. This notion sees the U.S. not just as a territorial entity, but as a "great social experiment", which must be propagated — if necessary, through colonial wars and the Monroe Doctrine. American exceptionalism sees the U.S. as the ultimate telos and goal of modernity itself.

Marquesee explains how this exceptionalism survives despite the blows delivered by the U.S.' ignominious defeat in the Vietnam war and the visible inferiority of the U.S. model of capitalism in relation to its Western European variants in respect of, say, public services.

The six chapter presentations that follow delve into the rationalising banners, by analysing their provenance and purpose, and their structural weaknesses and deceitful nature. They also suggest some alternative approaches.

Vanaik argues that the one-sided view of terrorism contained in the dominant discourse in the U.S. (which excludes state terrorism altogether), and the militarised solutions offered to it through GWOT, is an excellent "framing device" for the imperial project and "possesses the greatest capacity to mobilise domestic support for the U.S. pursuit of Empire abroad".

Vanaik, however, dissects GWOT's failure. He holds that demonisation of Islam and Muslims is "an inevitable corollary" of GWOT. Vanaik offers the International Criminal Court as an alternative framework within which to prosecute and punish terrorist acts.

Zia Mian takes apart the WMD argument as an excuse for waging war on Iraq. Washington deliberately concocted falsehoods about Saddam Hussein's pursuit of WMD and manipulated the media. The "in the wrong hands" proposition is a means of selectively rewarding friends, allies or client-states, while attacking enemies and "Axis of Evil" states.

Mian documents the U.S.' spectacular hypocrisy in developing new uses for and designs of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile defence systems, while preaching disarmament to others. He also shows how the mystique built around the bomb comes back repeatedly to haunt the U.S. through its spread to other countries. This is the inevitable consequence of the "Empire of Fear".

The U.S. claims that its wars in Central and West Asia were rationally calculated to promote regime change in the interests of "democracy"; or they were humanitarian interventions, necessitated by the failure/paralysis of the multilateral system (the United Nations, in particular). This argument has some resonance outside the U.S., especially given the context of the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda — although the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organisaion (NATO) allies failed to act in these very cases.

But as Mariano Aguirre shows, unilateral, offensive, armed intervention mocks at international law and weakens multilateral institutions that ought logically to intervene and honour their obligation to protect threatened civilians.

Aguirre persuasively argues that the Left "should not abandon the moral imperative to protect victims, nor the principles of democracy and international law... We need to recognise that there are massive violations of human rights, that there are dysfunctional states that do not protect their people... Also, that the U.N. system lacks the administrative capacity and flexibility to respond and that power politics limit its capacities, and that, therefore, the international community has a role to play."

Phyllis Bennis writes a blisteringly critical account of how the U.S. first contemptuously bypassed the U.N. Security Council, and then cynically manipulated it to obtain a carte blanche in Afghanistan and Iraq. She criticises the U.S.' mollycoddling of regimes with dubious human rights records (for instance, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Russia), its setting up of puppet regimes in the occupied countries, and its policies of creating or widening sectarian divides and of promoting the outright loot of Iraq's wealth through corporatisation and privatisation.

Bennis presents a scathing analysis of the effects of U.S. policy in West Asia, including promoting authoritarian allies, legitimising Israel's brutal occupation of Palestine, and the negative examples all this has set for West Asia as a whole.

David Sogge exposes state weaknesses, fragility or "failure" as a dishonourable pretext for Empire-building.

Most characterisations of failing states totally ignore the causes of failure, typically rooted in the structure of the global economy, neoliberal policies imposed by international financial institutions or Western governments, and absence of democracy and accountability. Military interventions rarely offer a solution, nor does the "shell of elections".

Last but not least is a discussion by David Bewley-Taylor and Martin Jelsma of the "war on narcotics" as yet another excuse for Empire. The U.S.'s supply-side approach to the drugs problem emphasises physical interdiction, although this has proved a failure. In practice, as "Plan Colombia" shows, the "war on narcotics" provides a convenient excuse for attacking Left-wing insurgents and maintaining a heavy U.S. military presence in select Third World countries. The authors argue for an alternative "harm reduction" and "decriminalisation" approach to drugs.

Vanaik concludes with a final summing up, which takes a bird's-eye view of the six legitimising themes and their weaknesses, and argues for a comprehensive, critical, Left-wing approach to dissecting Empire.

The book is, then, a broad-horizon yet penetrating critique of the rationalisations for Empire in the post-Soviet era. One wishes it had explored some themes (for instance, the economics of Empire, the relations between the U.S. and its allies, the manufacture of domestic consent in different countries, and alternative international arrangements, and so on) in greater depth.

Above all, one wishes it had devoted some space to a discussion of the growing resistance to Empire through the anti-war and peace movements, themselves linked to the global justice agenda.

Despite these shortcomings, the book remains one of the sharpest critical analyses of contemporary imperialism published recently. It is highly recommended.

Praful Bidwai is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute. He co-authored with Achin Vanaik South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.

THE "CRAZIES" TAKE OVER

Tuesday/Wednesday, April 17-18, 2007

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the world hailed the end of the Cold War. The U.S. and the Soviet Union would have billions of extra dollars to spend on education, health care, infrastructure upgrades, and job creation. The term used in the U.S. was the "peace dividend."

While most of the world was celebrating a future of world peace, the U.S., with little fanfare, began to write the last chapter of its book on taking over the world. Today, the results are evident to anyone, except mainstream America, who is still in a state of denial. To them, the Cold War is still being enacted, but with different players. The decades-old battle of East vs. West has turned 90 degrees to a North vs. South confrontation. The North represents mainly the U.S., with Europe being basically a neutral observer, and the South is comprised of Third World nations, most of whom are populated by people of color.

The 1990s were crucial in the development of U.S. world hegemony. Little-by-little, the pieces began to fall for the rest of the word as America extended its tentacles to very corner of the Earth. At times, there was direct military intervention; at times military threats; and, sometimes, military hardware did not have to be pulled out of the warehouses because economic intrusion did the job.

The U.S. learned that by surrounding potential "enemy" countries, it could control its greedy interests without going to war. Just look at a map. Russia is almost surrounded by former Soviet republics that have signed military agreements with the U.S.; Iran has borders with Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries the U.S. is occupying. Ethiopia is another new U.S. ally and it borders Sudan, a possible U.S. adversary. North Korea is the last link in countries bordering China. The U.S. does not care if North Korea has nuclear weapons; it only wants to control North Korea and have a military presence near China.

Today, the U.S. has a military presence in more than 140 countries. The U.N. consists of 192 national members, leaving few countries without a U.S. military footprint.

How did the "peace dividend" turn into a nightmare for various countries that the U.S. has attacked since the demise of the Soviet Union? Members of a once little-known group have been behind the push for word domination.

In 1997, "The Project for the New American Century (PNAC)" unveiled its agenda. It was quite simple: the U.S. should take over the world by military means during the 21st century.

The group may not have been well-known in 1997, but many of its charter members were: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliot Abrams, Gary Bauer, Elliot Cohen and others.

Most were members of the Reagan administration at various levels. They were young conservative activists who helped write some of the diabolical policies of the Reagan years. Their power receded slightly under George Bush I and more under Bill Clinton. In fact, the Republican Party of the early 1990s evaded them and nicknamed them "The Crazies."

When George Bush II was appointed president of the U.S. in 2000, The Crazies came out of hiding. They were given the new moniker of "neoconservatives" or "neocons." Bush immediately began appointing them to positions in the new government. They were the same names, but with different titles. Rumsfeld was secretary of defense and Cheney was vice-president. Wolfowitz became Rumsfeld’s assistant. Elliot Abrams was given another title, but his duties were the same as under Reagan: keep a low profile but initiate and implement vile activities.

The chart accompanying this article shows the names and government positions of signers of the PNAC as well as excerpts from a letter they sent to Clinton in 1998 advising him to attack Iraq.

Despite the Republican election losses of 2006, The Crazies are still calling the shots, especially in foreign policy. They surround Bush and pump their ideology to him and he, in turn, passes it on to the public.

These people may be crazy, but they are not stupid. They have found and exploited the ethnocentric nerve that runs through many Americans. When the discussion about military intervention, or economic sanctions arises, most Americans accept the decision and allow the leaders to enact their vile policies.

There are many ways in which the U.S. controls foreign nations. Let’s look at Egypt, for example. The Egyptian military is mainly supplied by the U.S. But, the U.S. has put limits on the independence of the Egyptian military by limiting stocks of spare parts as well as controlling Egyptian military communications. If the Egyptian army ever becomes a threat to Israel, the spare parts shipments would be halted.

The main task for Egypt’s military is to protect Hosni Mubarak, the country’s president. He is in the pockets of the U.S. and he must remain in power without opposition.

The control of Egypt does not end with keeping tabs on its military power. The country must rely on outside help to feed its quickly-growing population. The U.S. supplies four million tons of wheat a year to Egypt through aid programs that must be approved by the U.S. Congress. Many of those who vote to retain the aid programs are staunch supporters of Israel. Mubarak knows this and he does not rock the boat. If he did, his country would quickly suffer a devastating famine.

Many Democrats criticize the Bush administration about its foreign policy, but their record is not much better. To ensure the continuation of the embargo against Iraq in the 1990s, Clinton spokespeople consistently lied about its weapons of mass destruction. More Iraqis died during Clinton’s tenure than under the two Bush regimes. Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s secretary of state, when asked if the embargo was worth the lives of a million Iraqi children, unhesitatingly answered, "Yes."

Bush II has merely escalated the xenophobia and ethnocentrism that grips much of the U.S. He has taken the concept of world domination up a notch or two. Clinton was more subtle about U.S. hegemony. He never made the statement that Bush did when he promised "to export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of this grate country and rid the world of evil."

Omar Barghouti, an independent Palestinian political analyst, stated:

We are witnessing the ominous rise of the most powerful empire ever to exist. Judging from consistent media reports and opinion polls, the rest of the world seems to view it as a menacing rogue state that is arrogantly bullying other nations, east and west, north and south, into unqualified submission to its self-declared designs for world domination and incontestable economic supremacy.

He has aptly stated how the rest of the word sees the U.S. — a view totally opposite to that shared by most Americans. He added:

A century and a half after officially abolishing slavery in the U.S., the new-old masters have a diabolical agenda to resurrect it, except this time on a worldwide scale.

The U.S. has copied the former imperialist actions of Great Britain by forcing countries to relinquish their raw materials. Today’s treasures, instead of gold, cotton and spices, can be explained in one word: oil. This commodity is not merely a raw material for fuelling the economies of the world, but it has become the number one item for power and bragging rights. Hence, Iraq had to be invaded by the U.S. for a show of power. According to Robert E. Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics. It is no longer commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed onto a determinant of well-being, of national security, and of international power.

Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, added:

Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel. Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It’s like having our hand on the spigot.

Now, it becomes even more clear why the U.S. had to invade Iraq. It was for total domination, not the ouster of a regime or the destruction of invisible weapons. The Portuguese writer and Nobel laureate, Jose Saramago, said: "We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world."

Even former U.N. Secretary General Boutrous Ghali, who more than once supported U.S. hegemony in U.N. affairs, now sees the entire picture. He said:

Multilateralism and unilateralism are just methods for the United States: they use them a la carte, as it suits them. The United Nations is just an instrument at the service of American policy.

Millions of Americans hold the U.N. in contempt and maintain that the New York-based agency is attempting to impede U.S. sovereignty. They speak of a "one-world government" in which the U.N. rules every country. In reality, the opposite is occurring. The U.S. uses the U.N. when it can for legitimacy, and, when the members oppose the U.S., the Americans accuse them of not doing their job and then ensue their own agenda.

The acquiescence of the American people to their government’s (Democrat and Republican parties) policies has led to a point in history that is very dangerous for the rest of the world. Eventually, that hazard will rebound in the U.S. I never thought I would be the citizen of a country, that, in its own words, tells its citizens not to visit more than 100 countries on the Earth because their lives may be in danger. The Department of State lists the countries which consist of democracies, dictatorships, kingdoms, leftist governments, rightist governments, authoritarian governments, etc. In other words, there is no common political persuasion to the opposition of U.S. policy worldwide. U.S. foreign policy has taken away the freedom to travel for many of its citizens and turned what was once an enjoyable vacation into a life-threatening experience.

A German journalist recently stated:

Every day conservative U.S. ideologues deepen the rift by accusing Europeans alternatively of being arrogant, incompetent or simply stupid. In this situation, there remains nothing for the Europeans to do than to free themselves once and for all from the U.S. Politically and morally, it will not be a problem — but militarily, things are much more difficult.

He hit the nail right on the head. U.S. military might is overwhelming. While the rest of the world was talking of the peace dividend following the Cold War, the U.S. just kept on increasing its war machine. But, there are occurrences that could alter the balance.

France, Belgium and Germany are behind an effort to create s strong European military, aloof of NATO. The U.S. has told them it is not necessary, but forward-thinking Europeans think otherwise. They can see their countries being future Iraqs within decades.

Another event is happening that will slow down the U.S. power grab. In Iraq, the people are fighting back. For decades, the U.S. had been able to conduct wars against various Third World countries with little loss of life on the U.S. side, while dealing out massive amounts of death and damage to the opponents. In Panama and Grenada, the U.S. death toll was a couple of dozen. In Somalia, again a few dozen. In the campaign against Serbia, the U.S. did not lose one service person. The irony of the Serbian campaign is that the former president of Serbia, the late Slobodan Milosevic, went on trial in the Hague for killing al-Qaida-trained Muslim insurgents in Serbia, while U.S. soldiers received medals of merit for employing the same actions against al-Qaida-trained Afghanis.

Iraq broke the mold of the U.S. attacking countries without having to pay a high price in human lives. The U.S. lost about 100 military personnel before Bush declared victory over Iraq on May 1, 2003. That was a small price to pay. But, the Iraqis did not appreciate the U.S. actions and began a resistance that is constantly growing and becoming more proficient. Several thousand U.S. military people have died and more than 20,000 have been severely injured with lost limbs, blindness and brain damage.

The momentum is beginning to change. Many nations have taken notes on the Iraqi resistance strategy. In the entire history of warfare, a determined guerilla movement has always eventually worn out a militarily superior force. However, the U.S. is still in denial of the real reasons of its calamity in Iraq. Even with the Democrat’s victory in the 2006 elections, Bush is still threatening any country that will not kiss his backside. The Democrats, instead of creating an anti-imperialist movement, have said they will maintain the status quo on the basic issues of homeland security and foreign affairs. It will take more misadventures, such as that of Iraq, to convince U.S. politicians to re-think their policies of world domination.

An often-heard statement is "history repeats itself." Sometimes, it is hard to believe this in today’s unipolar world. But, when one compares the rise and fall of the Roman Empire with today’s U.S.-dominated world, there is compelling logic in the argument.

CHART

The Emperor of Africa

Posted April 17, 2007

Tony Blair cannot let go of Britain’s inordinate global powers

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 17^th April 2007

The disease that afflicts all British governments is an inability to let go. Unable to accept the end of empire, they cling to past glories. However much they speak of modernity and democracy, they cannot help managing other people’s lives, preserving foreigners – often at gunpoint – from the mistakes they would make if they were allowed to govern themselves.

I was going to call this an imperial delusion, but the United Kingdom has been remarkably successful at defending its powers. Our government has retained a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Its membership of the G8 is unchallenged. Most importantly, it has preserved its unwarranted share of the vote on the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And it has no intention of giving this up.

In advance of the IMF’s spring meeting (which has just concluded in Washington) France and the United Kingdom rejected any political reform(1). It is true that the fund’s proposals are feeble. It is true that even after far more ambitious reforms the IMF would remain the wrong body, constitutionally destined to fail. But this is not why our government is holding out. It is resisting change because it wants to preserve its imperial rank.

The United Kingdom, with 1% of the world’s population, has 5% of the IMF’s votes(2). Sub-Saharan Africa, with 12% of the population, has 4.6%(3). The UK’s share equals that of China and India put together. It is 5 times as big as Argentina’s, 19 times Bangladesh’s, 35 times Kenya’s, 124 times bigger than Malawi’s(4). The G7 nations – the UK, US, Japan, Germany, France, Canada and Italy – together possess 45% of the vote. The other 177 members are left to squabble over the remains.

Even these numbers tell only half the story. The five countries with the biggest quotas – the US, UK,

Japan, Germany and France – are each allowed to appoint their own executive director to the IMF’s board(5). The rest must submit their candidates for election. Because poor nations don’t know what’s good for them, they are assigned to the tutelage of richer ones. The votes of the English-speaking Caribbean countries are given to Canada. Mongolia is represented by Australia, Kazakhstan by Belgium(6). The reason the UK and France are resisting even the most timid reforms is that these would tip them below the threshold for automatic election: like the other countries they would be represented on the board as part of a bloc.

Power is distributed like this because the IMF is a plutocracy. A country’s vote represents its “quota”, which is a function of its gross domestic product. In theory the quota reflects countries’ financial contributions to the fund. This is no longer the case, as the IMF receives much of its income from loan repayments from poorer nations. But the old formula has resisted 60 years of complaints.

The result is that the governments which are never made subject to the IMF’s strictures control it, while those whose countries have been reduced to an IMF franchise have no say in the way it runs. The fund’s allocation of votes is a perfect inversion of democracy.

A new report by ActionAid gives us a glimpse of how this unfair distribution of power affects the poor(7). After years of protests by poor countries and their supporters in the rich world, the IMF and the World Bank at last permitted them to provide healthcare and education without charge. The rich nations also promised, in 2000, to ensure that by 2015 every child on earth would have primary education(8). It looked like a great victory for the global justice movement. But the IMF is ensuring that the promise won’t be met. It has, in effect, forbidden the poorest nations to hire sufficient teachers.

No one disputes that public sector wage rises can contribute to inflation. No one denies that governments have to exercise some degree of restraint. But the paternalists who run the IMF – who are fixated on creating safe havens for foreign capital – cannot help micromanaging the economies of the poor nations, without reference to the needs of the people who live there. The limits they have imposed on the public sector pay bill ensure that schooling can’t be improved.

ActionAid studied three very poor countries with major education problems: Malawi, Mozambique and Sierra Leone. After they abolished user fees (and when the civil war ended in Sierra Leone), vast numbers of pupils enrolled. But a combination of the rich nations’ failure to provide the foreign aid they had promised and the restrictions imposed by the IMF has prevented these countries from meeting the new demand. As a result, the pupil to teacher ratio in Sierra Leone is 57:1; in Malawi 72:1 and in Mozambique 74:1. That’s the average: in rural areas it can be much higher. Many of the teachers are untrained; many give up because they cannot survive on their wages. In Malawi, for example, the goods required for the most basic level of subsistence cost $107 a month. A trained teacher receives $55(9).

So crowds of pupils strain to hear a scarcely-literate teacher somewhere in the middle distance seeking to instruct them without books, chalk, paper or pens. We should not be surprised to discover that 40% of children fail to complete primary school in Sierra Leone and Mozambique, and 70% in Malawi. Most of the drop-outs are girls.

As a result, these countries are stuck in a vicious circle of misery. Until education improves, GDP remains low. Until GDP rises, there’s little money for education. As one of the agencies charged with rescuing countries from poverty, the IMF should be seeking to break this circle. But the conditions it attaches to its loans keep these countries in their place. In Malawi the IMF sets the ceiling for public sector wages directly; in Sierra Leone and Mozambique the broader macroeconomic rules it imposes have the same effect. ActionAid argues that its fiscal targets are outdated and unnecessary: all these countries have now achieved sufficient stability to start raising teachers’ pay.

But in no case did the IMF consult either the public or the state’s own ministry of education before laying down the law. The amount of money a teacher in rural Malawi is paid is decided by the men in Horse Guards Road and Pennsylvania Avenue. Except for the district commissioners in pith helmets, little has changed since the country was called Nyasaland.

Last year Tony Blair acknowledged that the IMF “must become more representative of emerging economic powers and give greater voice to developing countries.”(10) But he just can’t let go. The proposed reforms do nothing to democratise the IMF; by linking the quota to purchasing power parity rather than raw GDP, they simply turn it into a more sophisticated plutocracy. But they would have the effect of very slightly empowering some middle-income countries while taking a few votes away from some of the rich ones. Even that is too much for the Emperor of Africa. If the British government wants to help the poor, it must first give up its power to tell them how to live. Until that happens, everything the prime minister says about “partnership” and “solidarity”(11) with the world’s oppressed is humbug.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Larry Elliott, 13^th April 2007. UK opposes plan for developing nations to have more say at IMF. The Guardian.

2. International Monetary Fund, 2007. IMF Members’ Quotas and Voting Power, and IMF Board of Governors

http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/memdir/members.htm

3.David Woodward, New Economics Foundation, February 2007. IMF Voting Reform: Need, Opportunity and Options. Paper for the G24 Technical Meeting, 12 March 2007. http://www.g24.org/wood0307.pdf

4. International Monetary Fund, ibid.

5. David Woodward, ibid.

6. International Monetary Fund, ibid.

7. Akanksha A. Marphatia et al, April 2007. Confronting the Contradictions: The IMF, wage bill caps and

the case for teachers. ActionAid. http://www.actionaid.org/assets/pdf/1%20%20CONFRONTING%20THE%20CONTRADICTIONS%20E-VERSION.pdf

8. The UN Millennium Development Goals, 2000. http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

9. ActionAid, ibid.

10. Tony Blair, 26^th May 2006. Foreign Policy Speech 3. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page9549.asp

11. Tony Blair, 8^th July 2005. Statement on the final day of the G8 Summit.

http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page7877.asp

Hail and Farewell: the End of the American Empire: Gore Vidal

Zuade Kaufman / Truthdig

Posted on Apr 16, 2007

By Gore Vidal

Whenever The New York Times finally gets the point to what is going on in our native land a celestial choir can be heard in Times Square, shouting hosannas. This happened recently, on April 14th, when they realized that there could be a dark explanation for what W. is doing when he sends a Mr. Bolton, a U.N. hater, to be ambassador to that body or a Mr. Wolfowitz to the World Bank, a man as ignorant of history and finance as the president himself. Maureen Dowd in the Times was allowed to set the pitch for the latest revelations with her “More Con Than Neo” headline. Meanwhile, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of incompetents are now cluttering the Justice Department while known incompetents are in place to wreck from within regulatory systems and even mighty Walter Reed Hospital itself.

Click here to listen to Gore Vidal read this essay.

And then such investigations that W. has cut back—particularly at the height of the pet food investigation, a matter of such passionate interest to our countrymen.

Needless to say, the Times, instinctively pro-Bush, as it too is an inept creature of our leviathan master: corporate America. But though the Times now notes a mysterious problem with Bush’s general relations to the outside world, the Times, as usual, cannot grasp what so many of us fans of the American Republic can see so clearly: In the name of Manichaean religious cults he is eager to destroy every last trace of the New Deal (privatize Social Security) by destroying both the state and its global imperium.

W.’s love of torture and the death penalty suggests this that is Caligula Redux, but actually he is a home-grown Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor as viewed by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt and refashioned by me in an English version that played on Broadway in the 1960s. As the play opens, the northern barbarians are closing in on Rome, while the emperor dawdles, neglecting to appoint a “war tsar” to defend the city itself. What is wrong with him? Well, he does have a plan. When Odoaker, the king of the Teutons, arrives, Romulus expects to be executed, but Odoaker also has a plan: The two rulers will unite in a realm of peace. Romulus then admits that all his actions and non-actions had a single end: the destruction of the bloody empire he had inherited.

For the admiring Teutons he holds up an imaginary globe. “Now watch,” he says, as the emperor dissolves his empire. “Look, all of you, once more upon this tinted globe, this dream of a great empire, floating in space, driven by the slightest breath of my lips, yes, look once more upon the far-flung lands encircling the blue sea with its dancing dolphins, these rich provinces golden with wheat, these teeming cities overflowing with life, yes, the empire was once a sun, warming mankind, but at its zenith it scorched the world. Now it is a harmless bubble, and in the hands of the emperor it dissolves into nothing. And, thus, the throne of blood is overturned!”

Obviously, our weird little emperor is incapable of moral reflection, thus inviting us to reflect morally upon him as he has gone about his systematic wrecking of our common empire, which, after 1945, should have come into its own but thanks to Truman et al. it stayed forever at war and now but, Hark! what is the Times chorus singing now? Can it be a new weekend edition? Without troubling news? Or has W. finally snapped our military machine for fun if not global peace. On a high moral ground Romulus the Great disowned his empire. W. the Minuscule, driven by ignorance and greed like his cronies, leaves us defenseless and at sea in a terrorized world of prisons, phony trials, renditions, executions without due process of law, while leaving in the Middle East a vast charnel house which he likes to call “a fledgling democracy.”

At the end of the Broadway play, one Roman soldier (played by Robert Duvall) eager to save Rome joins Romulus but Romulus tells him “the Roman empire has been dissolved,” as surely as W. is dissolving us as hurricanes, tempests, droughts of his making ravage our alabaster cities and amber waves of grain. Ave Atque Vale.

Getting Screwed

by Karen Kwiatkowski

Screwed up, screwed over, and just plain screwed. The brutality of this language sadly fails to approximate what is happening to our soldiers and Marines in Iraq, and afterwards.

We knew that the invasion of Iraq was conducted without transparent or comprehensive planning. We knew that the fundamental objectives were hidden from the American people – endless occupation, big permanent American military bases, and the destruction, fragmentation and American political and economic subjection of a once politically important Iraq.

What we didn’t know is that the administration’s recklessness, greed, and callousness extended to the American soldiers and Marines who did the administration’s dirty work.

Our American soldiers and Marines have done what our insane Washington leadership asked them to do, regardless of its fundamental unconstitutionality and idiocy. That alone, under Nuremburg rules, may ultimately be a war crime in some international court. "Just following orders" is not a valid defense. Our young men and women have killed, destroyed, and even tortured at the command of the state. For these choices – native to any war – there will be personal and private suffering for years to come.

In any war, even a corrupt state owes its soldiers a certain standard of care. It owes its veterans a debt that is more than gratitude. In the case of America’s all-volunteer military system, this standard of care for soldiers, and the debt to veterans is spelled out in a contract of sorts.

It is said that we are a nation of laws. My experience and observations as a military officer in an equal opportunity era confirmed that. But perhaps I only believe this because I was never deployed as a grunt soldier in Iraq.

When it comes to protecting our young men and women in Iraq, we seem to be functioning in a collective fugue state. If serving in a forward combat role in Iraq (and also Afghanistan), you are likely to be male. You are also lacking one or more of the following: a clear mission, quality leadership, the proper equipment, armor, and training, a functional and wise set of standard operating procedures for suppressing a hostile local populace that does not speak your language nor share your customs. When you make a mistake or crack under pressure, you will be thrown to the legal wolves. Unless, of course, you are a senior officer, in which case you have an excellent chance of being quickly promoted out of harm’s way.

If you are injured in combat, you will be rushed into the vast system of hospitals, where you will vie for the attention of an overworked, very frustrated, and yet anonymous and unaccountable set of health care professionals who are increasingly overburdened.

If you are female in uniform, and deployed to Iraq, you face all of the above plus a few more. Sexual harassment, pressure for sex from peers and superiors, abuse, rape and even the chance of dying because you cannot safely hydrate yourself for fear of being raped in the night on your way to the latrine – these additive challenges face our female volunteers.

And that’s all before they come home to Walter Reed or Smallville, USA.

The recent flurry of publicity and firings of military figureheads over the dilapidated state of medical care for our wounded and soon-to-be medically discharged Iraq and Afghanistan veterans speaks to one more Washington betrayal.

We have seen an Army General or two fired in response to late-coming national publicity of abhorrent treatment of our maimed and recovering soldiers. But the real crime is much higher than three or four stars.

The administration and the Pentagon didn’t plan for an occupation of Iraq, because that planning would belie our public optimism, betray the propaganda of cakewalks and a thousand flowers, and reveal the truth about the administration’s 2003 force-march to war. Likewise, to have planned for 25,000 injured Iraq and Afghan veterans, many permanently crippled, blinded, disfigured and brain damaged, and 100,000 psychological and emotional head cases trying to reintegrate into their former lives would have revealed the administration’s Iraq narrative to be dead wrong. No matter the cost, the Bush-Cheney narrative must be seen as the "reality."

The lack of planning for medical and hospice care, rehabilitation, counseling and therapy – as with the Congressional decision to close/replace the premier military hospital in 2005 – occurred even after the Pentagon, the administration and the Congress had recognized the bloody human costs the Iraq occupation was bringing home. Instead of attending funerals and visiting amputees and paraplegics at Walter Reed, the Administration and the Pentagon seized an opportunity to spend more tax money and get new stuff – even though that would mean an immediate cutoff of improvement and maintenance funds for Walter Reed, filled to overflowing already with sick solders.

Bush doesn’t like to veto legislation, unless it offends his religiously-couched "love of life" or prevents him from going to war with whomever he pleases, whenever he wants, and for no particular reason. We knew Bush and Cheney had nothing but contempt for the Iraqi and Afghani people. Apparently, that contempt extends to serving Americans as well. Had either Bush or Cheney, or Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz cared about the impacts of their war-play on the people of this country, they would have dealt with this well-known medical care shortfall, shown concern over what BRAC-listing Walter Reed would mean to our recovering veterans. These so-called leaders they would have demanded executable plans to ensure both the bureaucratic and medical capacity was sufficient.

But neither Bush nor Cheney care one whit for the fighting soldiers, and neither wishes to be reminded of the shattered limbs and lives left when the fighting is done. The ugly truth doesn’t fit their carefully constructed narrative of "winning" and "wars on terror" and "patriotism." As a Bush aide explained to Ron Suskind a few years ago, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

That reality means that not only are the hapless targets of our imperialism screwed, but so is every serving soldier and Marine in Iraq. At least in the Roman Army, the milites could expect to share in the booty of conquered lands. In the American empire, that privilege is reserved for Halliburton, as our wasted foot-soldiers are buried alive.

This article originally appeared on MilitaryWeek.com.

March 23, 2007

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosted the call-in radio show American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power. Archives of her American Forum radio program can be accessed here and here. To receive automatic announcements of new articles, click here.

Copyright © 2007 Karen Kwiatkowski

Understanding Empire: Hierarchy, Networks and Clients

Mar 20, 2006

By Prof. James Petras

The structure of power of the world imperial system can best be understood through a classification of countries according to their political, economic, diplomatic and military organization.

Introduction:

The imperial system is much more complex than what is commonly referred to as the “US Empire”. The US Empire, with its vast network of financial investments, military bases, multi-national corporations and client states, is the single most important component of the global imperial system (1). Nevertheless, it is overly simplistic to overlook the complex hierarchies, networks, follower states and clients that define the contemporary imperial system (2). To understand empire and imperialism today requires us to look at the complex and changing system of imperial stratification.

Hierarchy of Empire

The structure of power of the world imperial system can best be understood through a classification of countries according to their political, economic, diplomatic and military organization. The following is a schema of this system:

I. Hierarchy of Empire (from top to bottom)
A. Central Imperial States (CIS)
B. Newly Emerging Imperial Powers (NEIP)
C. Semi-autonomous Client Regimes (SACR)
D. Client Collaborator Regimes (CCR)

II. Independent States:
A. Revolutionary
Cuba and Venezuela
B. Nationalist
Sudan, Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea

III. Contested Terrain and Regimes in Transition
Armed resistance, elected regimes, social movements

At the top of the imperial system are those imperial states whose power is projected on a world scale, whose ruling classes dominate investment and financial markets and who penetrate the economies of the rest of the world. At the apex of the imperial system stand the US, the European Union (itself highly stratified) and Japan. Led by the US they have established networks of ‘follower imperial states’ (largely regional hegemons) and client or vassal states which frequently act as surrogate military forces. Imperial states act in concert to break down barriers to penetration and takeovers, while at the same time, competing to gain advantages for their own state and multinational interests.

Just below the central imperial states are newly emerging imperial powers (NEIP), namely China, India, Canada, Russia and Australia. The NEIP states are subject to imperial penetration, as well as expanding into neighboring and overseas underdeveloped states and countries rich in extractive resources. The NEIP are linked to the central imperial states (CIS) through joint ventures in their home states, while they increasingly compete for control over extractive resources in the underdeveloped countries. They frequently ‘follow’ in the footsteps of the imperial powers, and in some cases take advantage of conflicts to better their own position.

For example China and India’s overseas expansion focuses on investments in extractive mineral and energy sectors to fuel domestic industrialization, similar to the earlier (1880-1950’s) imperial practices of the US and Europe. Similarly China invests in African countries, which are in conflict with the US and EU, just as the US developed ties with anti-colonial regimes (Algeria, Kenya and Francophone Africa) in conflict with their former European colonial rulers in the 1950’ and 1960’s.

Further down the hierarchy of the imperial system are the ‘semi-autonomous client regimes’ (SACR). These include Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Chile and lately Bolivia. These states have a substantial national economic base of support, through public or private ownership of key economic sectors. They are governed by regimes, which pursue diversified markets, though highly dependent on exports to the emerging imperial states. On the other hand these states are highly dependent on imperial state military protection (Taiwan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia) and provide regional military bases for imperial operations. Many are resource-dependent exporters (Saudi Arabia, Chile, Nigeria and Bolivia) who share revenues and profits with the multi-nationals of the imperial states. They include rapidly industrialized countries (Taiwan and South Korea), as well as relatively agro-mineral export states (Brazil, Argentina and Chile).

The wealthy oil states have close ties with the financial ruling classes of the imperial counties and invest heavily in real estate, financial instruments and Treasury notes which finance the deficits in the US and England.

On key issues such as imperial wars in the Middle East, the invasion of Haiti, destabilizing regimes in Africa, support for global neo-liberal policies and imperial takeovers of strategic sectors, they collaborate with rulers from the CIS and the NEIP. Nevertheless, because of powerful elite interests and in some cases of powerful national social movements, they come into limited conflicts with the imperial powers. For example, Brazil, Chile and Argentina disagree with the US efforts to undermine the nationalist Venezuelan government. They have lucrative trade, energy and investment relations with Venezuela. In addition they do not wish to legitimize military coups, which might threaten their own rule and legitimacy in the eyes of an electorate partial to President Chavez. While structurally deeply integrated into the imperial system, the SACR regimes retain a degree of autonomy in formulating foreign and domestic policy, which may even conflict or compete with imperial interests.

Despite their ‘relative autonomy’, the regimes also provide military and political mercenaries to serve the imperialist countries. This is best illustrated in the case of Haiti. Subsequent to the US invasion and overthrow of the elected Aristide Government in 2004, the US succeeded in securing an occupation force from its outright client and ‘semi-autonomous’ client regimes. President Lula of Brazil sent a major contingent. A Brazilian General headed the entire mercenary military force. Chile’s Gabriel Valdez headed the United Nations occupation administration as the senior official overseeing the bloody repression of Haitian resistance movements. Other ‘semi-autonomous’ clients, such as Uruguay and Bolivia, added military contingents along with soldiers from client regimes such as Panama, Paraguay, Colombia and Peru. President Evo Morales justified Bolivia’s continued military collaboration with the US in Haiti under his presidency by citing its ‘peacekeeping role’, knowing full well that between December 2006 and February 2007 scores of Haitian poor were slaughtered during a full-scale UN invasion of Haiti’s poorest and most densely populated slums.

The key theoretical point is that given Washington current state of being tied down in two wars in the Middle East and West Asia, it depends on its clients to police and repress anti-imperialist movements elsewhere. Somalia, as in Haiti, was invaded by mercenaries by Ethiopia, trained, financed, armed and directed by US military advisers. Subsequently, during the occupation, Washington succeeded in securing its African clients (via the so-called Organization of African Unity according to the White House’s stooge, Ugandan Army spokesman Captain Paddy Ankunda) to send a mercenary occupation army to prop up its unpopular client Somali warlord ruler. Despite opposition from its Parliament, Uganda is sending 1500 mercenaries along with contingents from Nigeria, Burundi, Ghana and Malawi.

At the bottom of the imperial hierarchy are the client collaborator regimes (CCR). These include Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf States, Central American and Caribbean Island states, the Axis of Sub-Saharan States (ASS) (namely Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Ghana), Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, Eastern European states (in and out of the European Union), former states of the USSR (Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Latvia, etc), Philippines, Indonesia, North Africa and Pakistan. These countries are governed by authoritarian political elites dependent on the imperial or NEIP states for arms, financing and political support. They provide vast opportunities for exploitation and export of raw materials. Unlike the SACR, exports from client regimes have little value added, as industrial processing of raw materials takes place in the imperial countries, particularly in the NEIP. Predator, rentier, comprador and kleptocratic elites who lack any entrepreneurial vocation rule the CCR. They frequently provide mercenary soldiers to service imperial countries intervening, conquering, occupying and imposing client regimes in imperial targeted countries. The client regimes thus are subordinate collaborators of the imperial powers in the plunder of wealth, the exploitation of billions of workers and the displacement of peasants and destruction of the environment.

The structure of the imperial system is based on the power of ruling classes to exercise and project state and market power, retain control of exploitative class relations at home and abroad and to organize mercenary armies from among its client states. Led and directed by imperial officials, mercenary armies collaborate in destroying autonomous popular, nationalist movements and independent states.

Client regimes form a crucial link in sustaining the imperial powers. They complement imperial occupation forces, facilitating the extraction of raw materials. Without the ‘mercenaries of color’ the imperial powers would have to extend and over-stretch their own military forces, provoking high levels of internal opposition, and heightening overseas resistance to overt wars of re-colonization. Moreover client mercenaries are less costly in terms of financing and reduce the loss of imperial soldiers. There are numerous euphemistic terms used to describe these client mercenary forces: United Nations, Organization of American States and Organization of African Unity ‘peacekeepers’, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ among others. In many cases a few white imperial senior officers command the lower officers and soldiers of color of the client mercenary armies.

Independent States and Movements

The imperial system while it straddles the globe and penetrates deeply into societies, economies and states is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Challenges to the imperial system come from two sources: relatively independent states and powerful social and political movements.

The ‘independent’ states are largely regimes, which are in opposition to and targeted by the imperial states. They include Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe. What defines these regimes as ‘independent’ is their willingness to reject the policies of the imperial powers, particularly imperial military interventions. They also reject imperialist demands for unconditional access to markets, resources and military bases.

These regimes differ widely in terms of social policy, degree of popular support, secular-religious identities, economic development and consistency in opposing imperialist aggression. All face immediate military threats and /or destabilization programs, designed to replace the independent governments with client regimes.

Contested Terrain

The imperial hierarchy and networks are based on class and national relations of power. This means that the maintenance of the entire system is based on the ruling classes dominating the underlying population – a very problematical situation given the unequal distribution of costs and benefits between the rulers and the ruled. Today massive armed resistance and social movements in numerous countries challenge the imperial system.

Contested terrain includes: Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, Palestine, Sudan and Lebanon where armed resistance is intent on defeating imperial clients. Sites of mass confrontations include Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Iran where the imperial powers are intent on overthrowing newly elected independent regimes. Large scale social movements organized to combat client regimes and the imperial patrons have recently emerged in Mexico, Palestine, Lebanon, China, Ecuador and elsewhere. Inside the imperial states there is mass opposition to particular imperial wars and policies, but only small and weak anti-imperialist movements.

The Anomaly: Israel in the Imperial System

Israel is clearly a colonialist power, with the fourth or fifth biggest nuclear arsenal and the second biggest arms exporter in the world. Its population size, territorial spread and economy however are puny in comparison with the imperial and newly emerging imperial powers. Despite these limitations Israel exercises supreme power in influencing the direction of United States war policy in the Middle East via a powerful Zionist political apparatus, which permeates the State, the mass media, elite economic sectors and civil society (3a). Through Israel’s direct political influence in making US foreign policy, as well as through its overseas military collaboration with dictatorial imperial client regimes, Israel can be considered part of the imperial power configuration despite its demographic constraints, its near universal pariah diplomatic status, and its externally sustained economy.

Regimes in Transition

The imperial system is highly asymmetrical, in constant disequilibrium and therefore in constant flux – as wars, class and national struggles break out and economic crises bring down regimes and raise new political forces to power. In recent times we have seen the rapid conversion of Russia from a world hegemonic contender (prior to 1989), converted into an imperial client state subject to unprecedented pillage (1991-1999) to its current position as a newly emerging imperial state. While Russia is one of the most dramatic cases of rapid and profound changes in the world imperialist system, other historical experiences exemplify the importance of political and social changes in shaping countries’ relationship to the world imperial system. China and Vietnam, former bulwarks as independent, anti-imperialist states, have seen the rise of liberal-capitalist elites, the dismantling of the socialized economy and China’s incorporation as a newly emerging imperialist power and Vietnam as a semi-autonomous client regime.

The major transitions during the 1980’s – 1990’s involved the conversion of independent anti-imperialist states into imperial client regimes. In the Western hemisphere, these transitions include Nicaragua, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Jamaica and Grenada. In Africa, they include Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Algeria, Ethiopia and Libya, all converted into kleptocratic client regimes. In Asia similar processes are afoot in Indo-China. Because of the disastrous consequences of imperial-centered policies administered by client regimes, the first decade of the new millennium witnessed a series of massive popular upheavals and regime changes, especially in Latin America. Popular insurrections in Argentina and Bolivia led to regime shifts from client to semi-autonomous clients. In Venezuela after a failed coup and destabilization campaign, the Chavez regime moved decisively from semi-autonomous client to an independent anti-imperialist position.

Ongoing conflicts between imperial and anti-imperialist states, between client regimes and nationalist movements, between imperial and newly emerging imperial states, will change the structure of the imperial system. The outcomes of these conflicts will produce new coalitions among the principal forces, which compose the imperial hierarchy and its adversaries. What is clear from this account is that there is no singular omnipotent ‘imperial state’ that unilaterally defines the international or even the imperial system.
Even the most powerful imperial state has proven incapable of unilaterally (or with clients or imperial partners) defeating or even containing the popular anti-colonial resistance in Iraq or Afghanistan. The major imperial political successes have occurred where the imperial states have been able to activate the military forces of semi-autonomous and client regimes, secure a regional (OAS, OAU and NATO) or UN cover to legitimate its conquests. Collaborator elites from the client and semi-autonomous states are essential links to the maintenance and consolidation of the imperial system and in particular the US empire. A specific case is the US’, intervention and overthrow of the Somali Islamic regime.

The Case of Somalia: Black Masks - White Faces

The recent Ethiopian invasion of Somalia (December 2006) and overthrow of the de-facto governing Islamic Courts Union (ICU)or Supreme Council of Islamic Courts and imposition of a self-styled ‘transitional government’ of warlords is an excellent case study of the centrality of collaborator regimes in sustaining and expanding the US empire.

From 1991 with the overthrow of the government of Siad Barre until the middle of 2006, Somalia was ravaged by conflicts between feuding warlords based in clan-controlled fiefdoms (3). During the US/UN invasion and temporary occupation of Mogadishu in the mid-1990’s there were massacres of over 10,000 Somali civilians and the killing and wounding of a few dozen US/UN soldiers (4). During the lawless 1990’s small local groups, whose leaders later made up the ICU, began organizing community-based organizations against warlord depredations. Based on its success in building community-based movements, which cut across tribal and clan allegiances; the ICU began to eject the corrupt warlords ending extortion payments imposed on businesses and households (5). In June 2006 this loose coalition of Islamic clerics, jurists, workers, security forces and traders drove the most powerful warlords out of the capital, Mogadishu. The ICU gained widespread support among a multitude of market venders and trades people. In the total absence of anything resembling a government, the ICU began to provide security, the rule of law and protection of households and property against criminal predators (6). An extensive network of social welfare centers and programs, health clinics, soup kitchens and primary schools, were set up serving large numbers of refugees, displaced peasants and the urban poor. This enhanced popular support for the ICU.

After having driven the last of the warlords from Mogadishu and most of the countryside, the ICU established a de-facto government, which was recognized and welcomed by the great majority of Somalis and covered over 90% of the population (7a). All accounts, even those hostile to the ICU, pointed out that the Somali people welcomed the end of warlord rule and the establishment of law and order under the ICU.

The basis of the popular support for the Islam Courts during its short rule (from June to December 2006) rested on several factors. The ICU was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians (7). Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation. In the process of unifying the country, the Islamic Courts government re-affirmed Somali sovereignty and opposition to US imperialist intervention in the Middle East and particularly in the Horn of Africa via its Ethiopian client regime.

US Intervention: The United Nations, Military Occupation, Warlords and Proxies

The recent history of US efforts to incorporate Somalia into its network of African client states began during the early 1990’s under President Clinton (8). While most commentators today rightly refer to Bush as an obsessive war-monger for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they forget that President Clinton, in his time, engaged in several overlapping and sequential acts of war in Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Yugoslavia. Clinton’s military actions and the embargoes killed and maimed thousands of Somalis, resulted in 500,000 deaths among Iraqi children alone and caused thousands of civilian deaths and injuries in the Balkans. Clinton ordered the destruction of Sudan’s main pharmaceutical plant producing vital vaccines and drugs essential for both humans and their livestock leading to a critical shortage of these essential vaccines and treatments (9). President Clinton dispatched thousands of US troops to Somalia to occupy the country under the guise of a ‘humanitarian mission’ in 1994 (10). Washington intervened to bolster its favored pliant war-lord against another, against the advice of the Italian commanders of the UN troops in Somalia. Two-dozen US troops were killed in a botched assassination attempt and furious residents paraded their mutilated bodies in the streets of the Somali capital. Washington sent helicopter gunships, which shelled heavily, populated areas of Mogadishu, killing and maiming thousands of civilians in retaliation.

The US was ultimately forced to withdraw its soldiers as Congressional and public opinion turned overwhelmingly against Clinton’s messy little war. The United Nations, which no longed needed to provide a cover for US intervention, also withdrew. Clinton’s policy turned toward securing one subset of client warlords against the others, a policy which continued under the Bush Administration. The current ‘President’ of the US puppet regime, dubbed the ‘Transitional Federal Government’, is Abdullahi Yusuf. He is a veteran warlord deeply involved in all of the corrupt and lawless depredations which characterized Somalia between 1991 to 2006 (12). Yusuf had been President of the self-styled autonomous Puntland breakaway state in the 1990’s.

Despite US and Ethiopian financial backing, Abdullahi Yusuf and his warlord associates were finally driven out of Mogadishu in June 2006 and out of the entire south central part of the country. Yusuf was holed up and cornered in a single provincial town on the Ethiopian border and lacked any social basis of support even from most of the remaining warlord clans in the capital (13). Some warlords had withdrawn their support of Yusuf and accepted the ICU’s offers to disarm and integrate into Somali society underscoring the fact that Washington’s discredited and isolated puppet was no longer a real political or military factor in Somalia. Nevertheless, Washington secured a UN Security Council resolution recognizing the warlord’s tiny enclave of Baidoa as the legitimate government. This was despite the fact that the TFG’s very existence depended on a contingent of several hundred Ethiopian mercenaries financed by the US. As the ICU troops moved westward to oust Yusuf from his border outpost – comprising less than 5% of the country – the US increased its funding for the dictatorial regime of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia to invade Somalia (14).

Despite the setbacks, scores of US military advisers prepared the Ethiopian mercenaries for a large-scale air and ground invasion of Somalia in order to re-impose their puppet-warlord Yusuf. Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian dictator, depends heavily on US military and police weaponry, loans and advisors to retain power for his ethnic ‘Tigrayan’ based regime and to hold onto disputed Somali territory. The Tigrayan ethnic group represents less than 10% of the Ethiopian multi-ethnic population. Meles faced growing armed opposition form the Oromo and Ogandese liberation movements (15). His regime was despised by the influential Amhara population in the capital for rigging the election in May 2005, for killing 200 student protesters in October 2006 and jailing tens of thousands (16). Many military officials opposed him for engaging in a losing border war with Eritrea. Meles, lacking popular backing, has become the US most loyal and subservient client in the region. Embarrassingly parroting Washington’s imperial ‘anti-terrorist’ rhetoric for his attack on Somalia, Meles sent over 15,000 troops, hundreds of armored vehicles, dozens of helicopters and warplanes into Somalia (17). Claiming that he was engaged in the ‘war against terrorism’ Meles terrorized the people of Somalia with aerial bombardment and a scorched earth policy. In the name of ‘national security’ Meles sent his troops to the rescue of the encircled war lord and US puppet, Abdullahi Yusuf.

Washington co-coordinated its air and naval forces with the advance of the invading Ethiopian military juggernaut. As the US advised-Ethiopian mercenaries advanced by land, the US air force bombed fleeing Somalis killing scores, supposedly in hunting ‘Al Queda; sympathizers (18). According to reliable reports, which were confirmed later by US and Somali puppet sources, US and Somali military forces have failed to identify a single Al Queda leader after examining scores of dead and captured fighters and refugees (19). Once again the pretext to invade Somalia used by Washington and its Ethiopian client – that the ICU was attacked because it sheltered Al Queda terrorists - was demonstrated to be false. US naval forces illegally interdicted all ships off the coast of Somalia in pursuit of fleeing Somali leaders. In Kenya, Washington directed its Nairobi client to capture and return Somalis crossing the border. Under Washington’s direction both the United Nations and the Organization of African ‘Unity’ (sic) agreed to send an occupation army of ‘peace-keepers’ to protect the Ethiopian imposed puppet Yusuf regime.

Given Meles precarious internal position, he could not afford to keep his occupying army of 15,000 mercenaries in Somalia for long (20). Somali hatred for the Ethiopian occupiers surged from the first day they entered Mogadishu. There were massive demonstrations on a daily basis and increasing incidents of armed resistance from the re-grouped ICU fighters, local militants and anti-Yusuf warlords (21). The US directed Ethiopian occupation was followed in its wake by the return of the same warlords who had pillaged the country between 1991-2005 (22).

Most journalists, experts and independent observers recognize that without the presence of ‘outside’ support – namely the presence of at least 10,000 US and EU financed African mercenaries (‘peacekeepers’) the Yusuf regime will collapse in a matter of days if not hours. Washington counts on an informal coalition of African clients – a kind of ‘Association of Sub-Saharan Stooges’ (ASS) – to repress the mass unrest of the Somali population and to prevent the return of the popular Islamic Courts. The United Nations declared it would not send an occupation army until the ‘ASS’ military contingents of the Organization of African Unity had ‘pacified the country (23).

The ASS, however willing their client rulers in offering mercenary troops to do the bidding of Washington, found it difficult to actually send troops. Since it was transparently a ‘made-in-Washington’ operation it was unpopular at home and likely to set ASS forces against growing Somali national resistance. Even Uganda’s Yoweri Musevent, Washington’s subservient client, encountered resistance among his ‘loyal’ rubber-stamp congress (24). The rest of the ASS countries refused to move their troops, until the EU and US put the money up front and the Ethiopians secured the country for them. Facing passive opposition from the great majority of Somalis and active militant resistance from the Courts, the Ethiopian dictator began to withdraw his mercenary troops. Washington, recognizing that its Somali puppet, ‘President Yusuf’, is totally isolated and discredited, sought to co-opt the most conservative among the Islamic Court leaders (25). Yusuf, ever fearful of losing his fragile hold on power, refused to comply with Washington’s tactic of splitting the ICU.

The Somali Invasion: the Empire and its Networks

The Somali case illustrates the importance of client rulers, warlords, clans and other collaborators as the first line of defense of strategic geo-political positions for extending and defending the US empire. The Somali experience underlines the importance of the intervention by regional and client rulers of neighboring states in defense of the empire. Client regimes and collaborator elites greatly lower the political and economic cost of maintaining the outposts of empire. This is especially the case given the overextension of US ground forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and in their impending confrontation with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Given the ‘over-extension’ of the US ground forces, the empire relies on air and sea assaults combined with regional mercenary ground forces to oust an independent regime with popular backing.

Without the Ethiopian invasion, the puppet Somali warlord Abdullahi Yusuf would have been easily driven out of Somalia, the country unified and Washington would no longer control the coastal areas facing a major maritime oil transport route. The loss of a Somali puppet regime would have deprived Washington of a coastal platform for threatening Sudan and Eritrea.

From a practical perspective however, Washington’s strategic plans for control over the Horn of Africa are deeply flawed. To secure maximum control over Somali, the White House chose to back a deeply detested veteran warlord with no social base in the country and dependent on discredited warring clans and criminal warlords. Isolated and discredited puppet rulers are a fragile thread on which to construct strategic policies of regional intervention (military bases and advisory missions). Secondly Washington chose to use a neighboring country (Ethiopia) hated by the entire Somali population to prop up its Somali puppet. Ethiopia had attacked Somali as late as 1979 over the independence of Ogadan, whose population is close to Somalis. Washington relied on the invading army of a regime in Addis Ababa, which was facing increasing popular and national unrest and was clearly incapable of sustaining a prolonged occupation. Finally, Washington counted on verbal assurances from the ASS regimes to promptly send troops to protect its re-installed client. Client regimes always tell their imperial masters what they want to hear even if they are incapable of prompt and full compliance. This is especially the case when clients fear internal opposition and prolonged costly overseas entanglements, which further discredit them.

The Somali experience demonstrates the gap between the empire’s strategic projection of power and its actual capacity to realize its goals. It also exemplifies how imperialists, impressed by the number of clients, their ‘paper’ commitments and servile behavior, fail to recognize their strategic weakness in the face of popular national liberation movements.

US empire building efforts in the Horn of Africa, especially in Somalia, demonstrate that even with elite collaborators and client regimes, mercenary armies and ASS regional allies, the empire encounters great difficulty in containing or defeating popular national liberation movements. The failure of the Clinton policy of intervention in Somalia between 1993-1994 demonstrated this.

The human and economic cost of prolonged military invasions with ground troops has repeatedly driven the US public to demand withdrawal (and even accept defeat) as was proven in Korea, Indochina and increasingly in Iraq.

Financial and diplomatic support, including UN Security Council decisions, and military advisory teams are not sufficient to establish stable client regimes. The precariousness of the mercenary-imposed Yusuf warlord dictatorship demonstrates the limits of US sponsored UN fiats.

The Somali experience in failed empire-building reveals another even darker side of imperialism: A policy of ‘rule or ruin’. The Clinton regime’s failure to conquer Somalia was followed by a policy of playing off one brutal warlord against another, terrorizing the population, destroying the country and its economy until the ascent of the Islamic Courts Union. The ‘rule or ruin’ policy is currently in play in Iraq and Afghanistan and will come into force with the impending Israeli-backed US air and sea attack on Iran.

The origins of ‘rule or ruin’ policies are rooted in the fact that conquests by imperial armies do not result in stable, legitimate and popular regimes. Originating as products of imperial conquest, these client regimes are unstable and depend on foreign armies to sustain them. Foreign occupation and the accompanying wars on nationalist movements provoke mass opposition. Mass resistance results in imperial repression targeting entire populations and infrastructure. The inability to establish a stable occupation and client regime leads inevitable to imperial rulers deciding to scorch the entire country with the after thought that a weak and destroyed adversary is a consolation for a lost imperial war.

Faced with the rise of Islamic and secular anti-imperialist movements and states in Africa and possessing numerous client regimes in North Africa and the ASS grouping, Washington is establishing a US military command for Africa. The Africa Command will serve to tighten Washington’s control over African military forces and expedite their dispatch to repress independence movements or to overthrow anti-imperialist regimes. Given the expanded, highly competitive presence of Chinese traders, investors and aid programs, Washington is bolstering its reliable allies among the African client elites and generals (26).

-James Petras’ latest book is The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press: Atlanta). His articles in English can be found at the website – www.petras.lahaine.org

Footnotes

1. Petras, James and Morris Morley. Empire or Republic (NY: Routledge, 1995); Petras, J. and M. Morley: “The Role of the Imperial State” in US Hegemony Under Siege (London” Verso Books 1990).
2. Petras, James and Morris Morley. “The US imperial State” in James Petras et al Class State and Power in the Third World (Allanheld, Osmin: Montclair NJ, 1981).
3. (3A) see Petras, James The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity: Atlanta 2006)
3. see Andrew England “Spectre of Rival Clans Returns to Mogadishu”, Financial Times (London), ) December 29, 2006 p.3)
4. Financial Times January 22, 2007 p.12.
5. Financial Times December 29, 2006 p.3.
6. William Church: “Somalia: CIA Blowback Weakens East Africa” Sudan Tribune Feb 2, 2007.
7. (7A) The Transitional government was restricted to Baldoa, a small town and its survival depended on Addis Abbaba. Financial Times December 29, 2006 p.3
7. Financial Times January 31, 2007 p.2.
8. Stephan Shalom “Gravy Train: Feeding the Pentagon by Feeding Somalia” Z Magazine February 1993.
9. Clinton claimed the pharmaceutical plant was producing biological and chemical weapons – a story which was refuted by scientific investigators.
10. Shalom ibid.
11. Mark Bowden Black Hawk Down (Signet: New York 2002)
12. FT December 31, 2006 p.2
13. FT January 5, 2007 p. 4
14. William Church ibid.
15 “Somalia” Another War Made in the USA” interview with Mohamed Hassan (Michel.Collon@skynet.be)
16 ibid
17. FT January 5, 2007 p.5; FT December 29, 2006 p. 3
18. BBC News “US Somali Air Strikes ‘Kill Many’”, January 9, 2007; aljazeera.net “US Launches Air Strikes on Somalia” January 9, 2007
19. FT February 5, 2007 p.5 “…there has been no confirmation yet of targeted al-Queda suspects according to Meles Zenawi, Ethiopian Prime Minister.”
20. aljazeera.net January 23, 2007; BBC News “More Ethiopians to Quit Somalia” January 28, 2007.
21. aljazeera.net December 29, 2006; aljazeera.net January 6, 2007; BBC News January 26, 2007; Aljazeere.net January 28, 2007, aljazeera.net February 11, 2007
22. “Looting and shooting broke out as soon as the Islamic fighters left the crumbling capital as militias loyal to the local clans moved on to the streets.” FT December 29, 2006
23. BBC News January 25, 2007; BBC January 30, 2007; BBC January 5, 2007/
24. People’s Daily Online “Ugandan Parliament halts bid to rush deployment of peacekeepers to Somalia”. February 2, 2007
25.Financial Times January 26, 2007 p.6
26.aljazeera.net February 7, 2007

Israel in the U.S. Empire

March 2007

by Bashir Abu-Manneh

Any reader of Israel Studies’s recent issue on the “Americanization of Israel” would be likely to conclude that the most important aspect of U.S.-Israel relations was cultural and religious exchange.¹ U.S. commodification of Israeli consumption is a key focus here, as is the impact of U.S. religious trends on Israeli religious practices. Though politics does feature in the issue, its place is largely restricted to the influence of the United States on the Israeli party political system and to the ideological convergence between Christian fundamentalism and the Likud Party. The informing conception of the issue, then, seems to be the endeavor to pinpoint those aspects of Israel that have been “Americanized” in recent years. Contributors are thus preoccupied with determining how specific U.S. forms and norms have migrated to and been translated into Israeli culture and society.

However valuable such an approach might be in tracing interesting connections between the United States and Israel, it is very poorly equipped to tackle a major dimension of U.S.-Israeli relations: U.S. state support for Israeli colonialism. The questions never raised include the following: What has U.S. support for Israel actually meant for the Israeli state? Which state capacities have been enhanced and which were curtailed as a result of this support (importantly, force or peace)? And what impact has this had on Israeli society and its economy at large? To answer such questions would involve specifying the nature of U.S. involvement in Israel-Palestine, spelling out the kinds of policies and objectives the U.S. state has allowed the Israeli state to pursue. It would, in fact, involve raising the specter of Israel as a colonial and occupying power, and this the various contributors to Israel Studies seem unwilling to do. Colonialism and occupation are far from mainstream concerns in the Israeli academy. This may sound strange since both practices have defined the history of Israel since 1967 if not before. Yet it is not so strange if one considers that in this respect the Israeli academy merely reflects the attitudes of wider Israeli society: academic evasion mirrors popular denial and indifference.

One group of academics that has managed to break away from this stifling national consensus has been dubbed post-Zionist. Though by no means a unified or politically homogeneous trend, post-Zionism has come to characterize a certain critical engagement with Israeli history and society that has led to a re-examination of Israel’s “founding myths” and ideology. Broadly speaking, it has been defined as follows: “In a general sense, post-Zionism is a term applied to a current set of critical positions that problematize Zionist discourse, and the historical narratives and social and cultural representations that it produced.”² Inherited Zionist versions of Israeli history and society have thus been debunked.

In the field of history, their main contribution has been analyzing the “causes, character, and course of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” where Zionist historiography has been challenged and proven fallacious.³ Based on research conducted in newly opened Israeli archives, this revisionist history has clearly documented how, for example, Palestinians had actually been expelled in 1948, as they have always maintained (and were not asked to leave by Arab invading armies, as Israeli propaganda has it);⁴ Arab armies never intended to “liberate” Palestine, and Jordan colluded with the Zionists to divide it; Israel consistently shunned peace and settlement of the “refugee problem” at every opportunity in the early years; and, finally, that Israel has always been the powerful side in the conflict and has been the party responsible for denying Palestinian rights and national restitution.⁵ The picture that emerges here entirely reverses the conventional orthodoxy about victims and victimizers: Israel is seen as an ongoing perpetrator of a massive injustice against the Palestinians.⁶ Edward Said has summed up the collective contribution of this revisionism in the following terms: “It is certainly true that the great political importance today of the new Israeli historians is that they have confirmed what generations of Palestinians, historians or otherwise, have been saying about what happened to us as a people at the hands of Israel.”⁷ And this judgment also applies to Israel’s new critical sociologists.

In the field of sociology, Jewish-Israeli history and society has for the first time been examined without the blinkers of Jewish particularism and Israeli exceptionalism.⁸ A crucial development here has been the analysis of Israel as a colonial-settler state and society, both in foundation and in continuing practice. Dubbed the “colonization model,” this literature “depicts Israel as a settler-colonial society driven by the needs of territorial acquisition and pressures of the labor market, and it regards the Israeli-Arab conflict as the most crucial determinant in the shaping of Israeli society.”⁹ Spearheaded by Baruch Kimmerling and Gershon Shafir, this research has been deeply preoccupied with both charting the specific features of Jewish colonization of Palestine and comparing it to other settler-colonies like America and South Africa.¹⁰ Jewish colonization should thus be understood as “a late instance of European overseas expansion.”¹¹ Its unique features are the following: Jewish conquest of land and labor; pioneering and settlement; historical-biblical rights as justification; and the construction of what Avishai Ehrlich calls a “permanent war society.”¹² Shafir, for example, has shown how the failure of capitalist settlement in Palestine gave impetus to the ideology and practice of Labor Zionism, in which national colonization was spearheaded by Jewish labor and supported by Jewish capital under the leadership of colonizing bureaucratic elites. The nation in Zionism thus emerges from this research as primary and determining. National primacy stifles class conflict, silences dissent and internal democracy, and sidelines social solidarity and egalitarianism, while Zionists conquer and dispossess Palestine.¹³ Israel is therefore seen as a colonial-nationalist state: colonialism is constitutive to state-formation and nation-building, and continues to determine the allocation of power, rights, and privileges in Israel to this day.¹⁴

For the first time in Israeli history, then, colonialism has become a serious topic of academic research and examination. Israeli economy, history, politics, and society can now be analyzed and studied using the colonization paradigm. What is important to note here, however, is that the academy was not the trailblazer on this front. Such analysis existed outside of the academy since at least the early 1960s in Israel.15 As Uri Ram has noted: “The agenda of the Matzpen (The Israeli Socialist Organization) group exemplifies the emergence of an explicit colonization perspective in Israeli society.”¹⁶ Founded in 1962, Matzpen (“Compass,” in Hebrew) was an anti-Stalinist, anti-Zionist splinter from the Israeli Communist Party which was particularly close to radical Palestinian activists and communists inside Israel.¹⁷ Collectively, it launched the “Israel as colonial-settler state” analysis, and continued to develop it in its magazine Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East published from London, where many of its members ended up as a result of state persecution and repression.¹⁸ A specimen of their most important contributions can be gleaned in “The Class Nature of Israeli Society,” an essay they published in New Left Review in 1971. Here exactly the same emphases of the critical sociologists of the 1980s are clearly evident: labor colonization, class collaborationism in Zionism, and bureaucratic control:

Israeli society is not merely a society of immigrants; it is one of settlers. This society, including its working class, was shaped through a process of colonization....The permanent conflict between settlers’ society and the indigenous, displaced Palestinian Arabs has never stopped and it has shaped the very structure of Israeli sociology, politics, and economics.

In Israel the dominant ideology was never a capitalist one; it was a blend of bourgeois elements combined with dominant themes and ideas typical of the Zionist Labor movement, ideas derived from the socialist movement in Eastern Europe but transformed to express the aims of political Zionism.¹⁹

There is clearly much common ground between 1980s sociologists and 1960s Matzpen, and this is an important recognition of Matzpen’s critical rigor. There is also, however, one crucial divergence between them: their analysis of Western influence in the region after the establishment of Israel in 1948. For Matzpen, it takes the form of imperialism and is constitutive to the making of Israel and to shaping its role in the region. Israel’s policy towards Arabs and Palestinians cannot be understood in its entirety without considering the role and interests of Western powers, Matzpen contends:

it is clear that Israel’s foreign and military policies cannot be deduced from the dynamics of the internal social conflicts alone. The entire Israeli economy is founded on the special political and military role which Zionism, and the settlers’ society, fulfill in the Middle East as a whole. If Israel is viewed in isolation from the rest of the Middle East there is no explanation for the fact that 70 per cent of the capital inflow is not intended for economic gain and is not subject to considerations of profitability.²⁰

Imperialist subsidy, then, but for a reason: Israel’s role as watchdog of U.S. interests in the region after 1967: “Israel is a unique case in the Middle East; it is financed by imperialism without being economically exploited by it. This has always been the case in the past: imperialism used Israel for its political purposes and paid for this by economic support.”²¹ There is no reason at all to conclude from this analysis that everything Israel does is caused by external pressure or foreign interest in order to be able to appreciate the significant connection that Matzpen makes between imperialism and Israeli settler-colonialism. This is in fact what is novel about their argument: it combines those specific exogenous and endogenous factors in the analysis of Israeli state objectives and social dynamics. Israel is thus seen as a Zionist-colonial project that is constitutively aligned with Western interests in the region: the state structure and colonizing project are sustained and consolidated by Western powers while Western objectives are fulfilled and realized. Such a consistent geopolitical configuration has provided Israel with both opportunities (to avoid reversing colonial expansion) and constraints (being ready and willing to protect vital Western interests in the region): the wars of 1956 and 1967 constitute important markers in this pattern (as I argue below).

In the shift from the 1960s to the 1980s, however, the “Western imperialism” part of the “colonization model” is dropped and forgotten. As “Israel as colonial-settler state” develops in the academy, Israel’s subsidy and support by U.S. imperialism loses its constitutive value in the analysis of the Israeli polity. In fact, a positive assessment of the U.S. role in the region is introduced in its place.

For post-Zionists, the United States can do no wrong; it is in fact a model to emulate and a country that Israel should aspire to be. While being critical of Israel’s foundation and continuing practice, post-Zionists have been exceptionally uncritical of the United States. Tom Segev’s Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel is an excellent example in this regard. Segev, an independent historian who played a central role in shattering Israel’s “founding myth” and documenting its abuse of the Holocaust,²² has been completely blind to the question that U.S.-Israel relations may have had serious negative effects on Israel or have led to the consolidation of state-sponsored colonialism in the Occupied Territories. There is a strong correlation in his work between Americanization, erosion of old forms of Zionist collectivist values, and the freeing up of the individual from constricting structures. Israel, he argues, is becoming more like the United States in political, social, and cultural norms. Israel’s media has been Americanized, as has its protest movements (which he compares to American protest movements of the 1960s, no less), its multiculturalist pluralism, its new judicial civil rights activism, and its political culture. One particularly crucial connection between the United States and Israel that post-Zionists like Segev keep on repeating seems central to their worldview: the United States is good for Israel because it pushes Israel to compromise, accommodate to the region, and make peace. Segev puts it thus:

This American [peace] spirit, which produced the Camp David agreements between Israel and Egypt, would later lead people to feel they had had enough of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip [which miraculously continues]. It also produced Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 [not Hezbollah resistance]. The peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan and the agreements between Israel and the Palestinians were all signed under the sponsorship of the United States and due to intense personal involvement of the sitting president [not as a result of the October/Yom Kippur War of 1973, i.e., Arab readiness to use force]. All these agreements were made possible, to a large extent, because of the willingness of the American people to finance them. They also reflect Israel’s dependence on the U.S., and the depth of American penetration of all areas of Israeli life.²³

The portrait Segev draws here is idealist in the extreme: after the 1960s the United States developed a peace culture, which it has been busy spreading in the Middle East ever since: no strategic interests, no geopolitical considerations or wars are relevant. In Segev’s world, such material factors seem to have no role to play in the U.S. presence in the Middle East.

For post-Zionists, then, the association between the United States and peace is strong and pervasive. Peace with Egypt comes to emblematize U.S. intervention in the region, and breeds a certain “political illusion” in Israel (as well as for the Palestinians, as I argue below) that the United States is as interested in settling the Arab-Israeli conflict as it was in exchanging the return of Sinai to Egypt for Egyptian peace with Israel. What is never appreciated here is that Camp David (forcing Israel to reverse its occupation of Sinai, i.e., to decolonize Sinai) is an exception not the rule, and has come about mainly because of Egypt’s use of massive force in the 1973 war. The post-Zionists thus neglect the unique features of the Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement. They also, significantly, fail to recognize how unjust and totally rejectionist of Palestinian rights it was. Writing immediately after Camp David, Fayez Sayegh put it exceptionally well: “The Camp David Framework thus bestows American-Egyptian ‘legitimacy’ upon the continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian areas in question for years to come.” It allows Israel to maintain and expand settlements in the Occupied Territories, and it leaves the Palestinians with no right of self-determination or sovereignty: “A fraction of the Palestinian people (under one-third of the whole) may attain a fraction of its rights (not including its inalienable right to self-determination and statehood) in a fraction of its homeland (less than one-fifth of the area of the whole).”²⁴ No peace here, only more suffering, dispersal, and occupation.

With the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993, the same correlation between the United States and peace emerges again among post-Zionists, even though the actors, powers, and circumstances are totally different here. Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled see Oslo as a time of lasting American peace and decolonization. This structures their reading of the 1990s in Israel: economic liberalization, they argue, is inseparable from political liberalization and the ending of the occupation (a word never even mentioned in the Oslo Accords). Uncritically endorsing Bush Senior’s vision of the New World Order as a time of peace and prosperity for all, Shafir and Peled contend that: “Both globalization and decolonization may, then, be viewed as sharing the goal of replacing political mechanisms and forces, identified with the nation and the nation-state, with financial and commercial ties which, on their part, are global forces.”²⁵

The frontier, exclusionary society that Zionism has built is thus on the decline, being slowly replaced by a liberalized nation, both economically and politically. And the Israeli business community plays a leading role in this new “neoliberal peace-and-privatization bloc”: “The liberal economic values of the Israeli business community are naturally more consonant with a liberal conception of citizenship than with the ethno-republican conception of pioneering civic virtue. Thus, these business leaders have been promoting liberal reforms not only in the economy, but also in civil rights, the electoral system, health care, education, mass communications, and other areas of social life.”²⁶ And this puts Israeli business in the position of contributing to “emancipating the non-citizen Palestinians residents of the Occupied Territories.”²⁷

The symbol of this triple process of economic privatization, political liberalization, and peace has been captured by Uri Ram: “A pamphlet of the Peace Now movement from the Oslo Accord period exposes explicitly the link between peace and prosperity. ‘From the seed of peace your economic growth will flourish,’ declares the pamphlet. The pamphlet is decorated with a figure of a flower cut from an American dollar bill. The flower symbolizes locality and life, the dollar globalization and wealth.”²⁸ The “dollar flower” accurately captures the post-Zionist position, and it comes to obscure the fact that Oslo was neither about decolonization nor about the ending of conflict, Palestinian sovereignty, or halting the settlement drive.

Meron Benvenisiti, an ex-Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem and contributor to Haaretz, recognized this from the beginning. Rather than reading Oslo from a post-national, globalization perspective, he stated unequivocally on reviewing the accords that: “one can hardly not recognize that Israeli victory was absolute and Palestinians defeat abject.”²⁹ No dilution of Israeli nationalism here: a total victory versus a total capitulation. One nationalism is up, the other down.

The only political sociologist to contest this post-Zionist association between the United States and peace, economic stability, and political liberalizations, is Avishai Ehrlich. Ehrlich has updated and developed the Matzpen connection between U.S. imperialism and Israeli colonialism and has argued that post-Zionism is “a local version of U.S. ideological globalization.”³⁰ He strongly contradicts all the basic premises of this approach: end of conflict, peace of the business class, more democracy and secularism and less Judeocentrism, and the diminishing role of the nation-state. Ehrlich reads a crude reductionism and economism in the post-Zionist account of the 1990s. There is no peace, stability, or liberality under U.S. hegemony, he contends. The conflict will indeed intensify, and this everybody comes to recognize by the time of the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada, which comes to mark the end of post-Zionism.³¹

If Segev blames this on “Palestinian terror,”³² Shafir and Peled are here much more cautious and recognize that it is Israeli colonialism which is to blame: “A clear indication that the colonial drive has not spent itself yet is the doubling of the Israeli settler population in the O[ccupied] T[erritories] since 1993. This was one of the main reasons for the resumption, in September 2000, of the intifada that the Oslo Accords were meant to end.”³³

Ehrlich’s important reading thus holds: under U.S.-sponsored peace Zionism-as-colonialism continues and becomes entrenched, ending both the reigns of Labor and Revisionist Zionisms and transforming Zionism into a political religion: “Both [versions] have been replaced by religion as the source of political legitimation for the state of Israel and for its continued control and colonization of the whole of Palestine...political religion is the use of religion to explain the cohesion and uniqueness of the ethos, its history and ethos; it is the use of religion as an argument for the claim to territory and justification of political measures to defend the national project.”³⁴ The hopes of the post-Zionists for a more liberal, less colonialist Israel are thus dashed. They turn out to be based on an illusory analysis of both the U.S. role in the region and its real impact on Israel. It is clear, then, that the categories of U.S. peace and decolonization have to be conceptually separated and the association between globalization and political liberalization broken. U.S. hegemony and market fundamentalism are in fact much more likely to breed religious fundamentalism than liberal values.

My aim in the following is to show why this set of developments is neither unexpected nor surprising. Since 1967, U.S. imperialism and Israeli colonialism have, I argue, worked in tandem in order to produce both Israeli and U.S. nationalist outcomes. This is the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from a closer look at U.S. history in the region, which I consider below. By analyzing the roots and causes of U.S. support for Israel, its dynamic, limitations, and major consequences, I aim to show how Washington’s interests in the Middle East have become consistent with supporting the Jewish state and defending its colonialist objectives. My argument proceeds as follows: I first determine what those U.S. vital interests in the region have historically been, and how they have evolved over time. I then go on to utilize this structure of ongoing U.S. imperial interests in order to explain the substance of U.S. strategy during and after the Cold War, including our contemporary moment, and show how crucial Israel has been in the realization of the U.S. Empire in the Arab world. Before concluding with a brief description of the contemporary ramifications of U.S. empire in Israel-Palestine specifically, I trace the major impact that Israeli dependency on Washingon’s support has had on Israeli ideology and society.

This, I hope, will clearly show why I believe it is imperative to extend the critical analytic engagement accorded to Israel by the academic practitioners of the “colonization model” to U.S.-Israel relations. Post-Zionism has successfully managed to integrate the Arab-Israeli conflict as a constitutive factor in the analysis of Israeli state and society, and this has been its greatest achievement. It is time to extend this theoretical framework to include relations between “actually existing U.S. imperialism” and “actually existing Israeli colonialism” in the period after 1967. U.S. imperialism should, then, come to be seen as an intrinsic factor in the shaping and development of both the Arab-Israeli conflict and the structure of the Israeli polity. Relevant here is a rich and growing tradition of analysis and radical critique exemplified in Israel by Matzpen and in the West by Said, Rodinson, and Chomsky.³⁵ Utilizing this ”imperialism-colonialism” paradigm will not only make a more accurate approximation of U.S.-Israel relations and of U.S. interests in the Arab world. It will also actively contribute to opening up a public space for critical reflection and debate on the United States in Israel, a country that seems to be the last bastion of uncritical idealism about and identification with U.S. global power. As Segev puts it: “The full story of the Americanization of Israel has yet to be told, even though it is central to the country’s history.”³⁶ I hope the following aids this process.

U.S. Imperialism and Israeli Settler Colonialism

The initial point of analysis of U.S. involvement in the region has to be oil. Nobody has made this point better and for longer than Noam Chomsky: “It has been a basic principle of international affairs since World War II that the energy reserves of the Middle East constitute an essential element in the U.S.-dominated global system. American policy towards affairs of the region cannot be understood apart from this fundamental principle.”³⁷ And, more recently: “In 1945, State Department officials described Saudi Arabian energy resources as ‘a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’; the Gulf region generally was considered ‘probably the richest economic prize in the field of foreign investment.’ Eisenhower later described it as the ‘most strategically important area of the world.’”³⁸ Gilbert Achcar has been equally forceful in making this claim, and in arguing for the decisive role that the Open Door policy over oil plays in U.S. imperial grand strategy: “George W. Bush’s administration, like his father’s administration that waged the first U.S. war against Iraq, is as tightly linked to the oil industry as any administration in history. At the risk of annoying those who react to any explanation of U.S. foreign policy in terms of economic interests, and oil interests in particular, with cries of ‘reductionism,’ the oil lobby has traditionally played a key role in formulating U.S. foreign policy, at the very least since the Second World War.”³⁹ The Cold War and post-Cold War confrontation with enemies (the Soviet Union, Arab independence and fundamentalist movements, Iraq after 1991, and Bin Laden), and U.S. relations with allies (Europe, Japan, and Israel), cannot be understood outside of this fact: control of oil is a decisive instrument of global policy.

“Regional stability” thus means a Middle East amenable to U.S. primacy. During the Cold War, Arab regimes had to be kept away from the Soviet Union (to prevent it from gaining a strategic presence in the region) and their independent political and economic initiatives had to be stifled, if not destroyed. “Moderate” Arabs are subordinate Arabs; “extremists” are independent ones who go against U.S. interests. Nasser became an extremist in the eyes of Washington: after 1956 he became an international symbol of Third World independence and Pan-Arabism. His Arab national project had therefore to be rolled back because it threatened U.S. dominance in the region. Mired in Vietnam, the United States wasn’t able to do this itself: Israel was brought in from the cold to perform this function. After having been forced by Eisenhower to return Gaza and Sinai in 1956, Israel was given the green light to attack; but this time to serve U.S. not British and French interests. As former U.S. ambassador to Israel Samuel W. Lewis has argued, the U.S. relationship with Israel changed from being “quite cool and distant,” as a result of “an acute sensitivity to America’s strategic interests, clearly identified with Saudi Arabia and its oil reserves,” to a strategic alliance in the period after 1967.⁴⁰ Cheryl A. Rubenberg has also emphasized this change in policy, and has described it in the following terms: “The most important outcome of the June War was that for the majority in the policymaking elite, Israel’s spectacular military performance validated the thesis that Israel could function as a strategic-asset to the United States in the Middle East....The belief about Israel’s strategic utility was expressed in U.S. policy through the provision of virtually unlimited quantities of economic assistance and military equipment, a de facto alliance between Washington and Israel, and in American support for virtually every Israeli foreign policy objective.”⁴¹ Israel thus became a tool of regional stability for the United States: “In the context of the Nixon Doctrine, Israel assumed the role of preserving a regional balance of power favorable to American interests. This meant, above all, curbing Arab radicalism and checking Soviet expansionism in the Middle East. Israel’s local interest in keeping the Arabs in their place neatly converged with the Nixon administration’s interest in expelling the Soviets from the Middle East.”⁴²

Nasser and Egyptian Pan-Arab nationalism were not the only victims of the U.S.-Israel convergence of interests. The period when this alliance was cemented was also the period of the rise of Palestinian nationalism. The battle of al-Karamah in which both Palestinian and Jordanian troops defeated an Israeli offensive in 1968 propelled the Palestinians onto the historical stage. Palestinians became the inheritors of radical nationalism: al-Karamah (dignity, in Arabic) turned the PLO into a mass organization. Calling for the liberation of Palestine from Zionist colonialism (backed by U.S. imperialism), the PLO, like Nasser, had to be crushed as well. This came to be called “Black September.” Here again the U.S.-Israel alliance proved essential. Nixon and Kissinger interpreted the Jordanian civil war with the Palestinian guerrillas as a global superpower confrontation not just a local or regional conflict and put the U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean on high alert.⁴³ Israel backed the Jordanian monarchy against the PLO and mobilized its army to protect it from a Syrian tank invasion (which failed as a result). The Iraqi contingent in eastern Jordan failed to come to the assistance of the Palestinians. Nasser was equally constrained: having accepted the Rogers Plan, which called for the return of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, he was ready to sacrifice his anti-imperialist stance for the return of Egyptian lands. The Saudis also stood with King Hussein. The Russians themselves, in actual fact, had no desire to destabilize the state system in the region. Even Arafat himself preferred a policy of non-interference with the Arab regimes and wanted to focus on liberating Palestine instead. Unlike the more radical Popular and Democratic Fronts, Fatah has always believed that Palestine will deliver Arab unity, not Arab unity Palestine: i.e., Palestinians should not actively seek to become social revolutionaries in the Arab world.

Fatah’s position became difficult to sustain when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was hijacking planes and exploding them in Jordanian airports: Jordanian sovereignty was clearly challenged. Palestinians had, therefore, to pay the price of their radicalism: all forces converged against them. At its moment of inception, then, the Palestinian revolution was defeated by its Arab enemies and their imperialist allies. Achcar describes it in the following terms:

The year 1970 in any case saw Arab nationalism finished off politically, so that the 1967 attack attained its political objectives with a three-year lag. This required crushing the other most advanced, most spectacular spearhead of the radicalization of the popular movement, which had temporarily counter-balanced the military victory of the U.S.-Israel alliance. In September 1970 (“Black September”) the Jordanian army drowned in blood the alternative, quasi-state power that the bloc of Palestinian armed organizations had built....Thus 1970 was the year of the final rout of radical Arab nationalism.⁴⁴

1970 sounded the death knell of revolutionary transformation in the Middle East. Jean Genet, who was then with the guerrillas in Jordan, clearly understood what he was witnessing: “I’d already been told the Palestinian Revolution might be summed up in the apocryphal phrase, ‘to have been dangerous for a thousandth of a second.’”⁴⁵

The events of 1970 in Jordan should be regarded as the most illuminating in the history of the post-1967 period. The interests of global and local actors become clearly visible, and the alliance between U.S. imperialism, Israel, and Arab reaction against revolutionary nationalism in the region was dramatically played out here. The Arab elites, it transpires, feared Arab radicalism much more than they feared the existence of Israel: the seeming contradiction between U.S. oil interests and supporting Israel turned out to be no contradiction at all. Both were objectively (if not subjectively) allied and worked towards the same outcome: anti-Arab independence and democracy, and pro-Arab authoritarianism and dependence on the United States. The Arab elite understood this fundamental lesson well. The Egyptian infitah policy (economic and political openness) and shift towards the West was a clear indication of that. It took the 1973 war to convince the United States of Sadat’s clear objectives: peace in return for Egyptian territory, while abandoning Palestinian and Arab rights and becoming a U.S. client regime.⁴⁶ As Samir Amin concluded, after surveying these developments in his The Arab Nation: “the Arab bourgeoisie got what it was after: Washington was forced to take it seriously.”⁴⁷

Sadat’s success in retrieving Egyptian territory by aligning with the United States in the region bred what can be described as a “political illusion” within the Palestinian camp, which would ultimately lead to Oslo. The belief was the following: national rights could only be retrieved by becoming politically “moderate” and gaining American acceptance. If Sadat could do it, why couldn’t Arafat? This logic came to justify future Palestinian capitulation, which was only fully realized in Oslo (it needed the second crushing of the PLO in Beirut in 1982, the Intifada, and the alienation and weakness of the PLO after the Gulf War to create the material conditions for its actualization). But this dangerous assumption neglected the fact that there was an important difference between Egypt and the Palestinians: strategic significance. Egypt was arguably the most important state in the Arab world (in terms of size, position, and capacity) while Palestinians were the weakest and most powerless group in the region: dispossessed, stateless, and fragmented. Arafat had very little to offer the United States (other than recognizing Israel), while Sadat could offer them peace with Israel and legitimation of the status quo. The only way that Palestinians could be strategically significant was by actively threatening U.S.-Israel domination. And that required getting organized and mobilized and gaining Arab mass support. In practice, this meant the following: lacking the objective capacity to achieve their national rights themselves the Palestinians needed the support and capacities of the Arab masses. To achieve their liberation, Palestinians had to mobilize Arabs behind their struggle and assume the position of progressives and radical nationalists in the Arab world. In short, they needed to become what they actually claimed they were: revolutionaries. As Amin put it: “the liberation struggle can only succeed if it is also a social revolution.”⁴⁸

If anything, 1970 showed how difficult it would be for the Palestinians to get their national rights with effectively the whole world against them. How to overcome this impediment was a brief topic of debate within the PLO. Its outcome, however, never led to the desired structural-organizational changes that would empower a mass movement: bureaucracy and opportunism won out. There was to be no “revolution within the revolution” as Palestinian radicals (like Husam Khatib) wanted.⁴⁹ In his powerful critique of Palestinian nationalism, Marxist philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm blamed the PLO’s defeat in 1970 on its lack of ideological preparedness for the role Palestinians were in a position to assume in the Arab world: that of social revolutionaries. For al-Azm, the PLO ironically ended up replicating exactly the same mistakes of its Arab petty-bourgeois counterparts (like Nasser). Palestinians repeated rather than transformed Arab nationalist defeats: 1970 was like 1967.⁵⁰ And like their Arab counterparts, the Palestinian elite ultimately ends up dependent on the United States for security, support, and patronage.

What this tells us about the Israeli role in the region is, therefore, quite clear. Israeli interventions have ended up pushing the whole geopolitical alignment of the Arab elite into the American sphere. And that has been an enormous and sustained effort. Control of oil in and of itself cannot achieve that: the United States needed an activist warring state to help it perform this task. For this service, Israel has been substantially rewarded. Since 1967, the United States has been Israel’s single-most important strategic ally. The United States supports Israel diplomatically, politically, and economically, and allowing it to continue to expand and colonize the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and to go unpunished for its countless violations of international law, including its invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (which cost 20,000 mostly civilian lives), its occupation until 2000 of a long stretch of Lebanese land (which it called its “security zone”), and its occupation and annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights. Without U.S. support, none of this would have been possible. Israel’s expansion would have been rolled back, as it had been in 1956.

Operating within the parameters and imperatives of U.S. empire frees Israel from conforming to the international consensus which all the world shares, bar the United States (with the momentary exception of the Rogers Plan of 1970, which was sabotaged by Nixon-Kissinger): a two-state solution based on full withdrawal to the 1967 borders, the dismantling of settlements, and the creation of a Palestinian state. To complete its mission of colonizing Palestine, Zionists had therefore to fulfill Theodor Herzl’s racist prophecy in The Jewish State: “form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.”⁵¹ To expand, Israel has had to subordinate itself to U.S. imperial imperatives and become dependent on the United States (which at times generates the occasional Israeli public resentment at the extent of U.S. control). Samuel W. Lewis has described this process well:

The 1950s and early 1960s fostered an illusion that Israel could be truly independent economically and politically, even surrounded by a sea of hostile Arab states. The 1973 War badly eroded that confidence. Since then, Israelis have come to understand that adequate modern weapons are too expensive for a small state to obtain without close allies and economic support from abroad. Their level of frustration has grown as has their realization of their inevitable dependency on Washington. That frustration periodically produces the tendency to lash out against the very American leaders whose continued support is most needed.⁵²

Such moments aside (the most recent being Sharon’s accusation that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Israel was being abandoned by the United States in the same way Czechoslovakia was abandoned by the allies in 1938), Israel has indeed understood that there is no occupation, no expansion, and no rejection of Palestinian national rights without U.S. support. As long as this agenda continues to be the dominant one in Israel, its reliance on the United States will continue. Chomsky describes this bind thus:

There can be little doubt that from shortly after the 1967 conquest, Israel has been moving in the directions indicated earlier: international isolation apart from pariah states, dependence on the U.S. with the concomitant pressure to serve U.S. interests, militarization of society, the rise of religious-chauvinist fanaticism, the internal “feed-back” from the policies of oppression and domination, an increasing sense of the inevitability of permanent conflict and with it, the perceived need to disrupt the region and establish a form of Israeli hegemony under the U.S. aegis.⁵³

The United States has thus allowed, encouraged, and aided the continued Israeli colonization of Palestine. The expansion of 1967 is indeed a continuation of the 1948 logic of occupation and dispossession, which has defined the Zionist movement in Palestine from the beginning. What was novel about 1967 was that it went against the international consensus: Israel was seen as occupier where before it had been seen as victim. To legitimate this state of affairs, expansionism became the dominant doctrine of the Israeli elite. Colonialism was strengthened and consolidated in Israeli politics and society, breeding new political ideologies and practices of occupation and settlement. Nur Masalha has described this process well in his Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion:

The war produced a spectacular territorial expansion. This territorial expansion made messianic religious and ultra-orthodox thinking seem highly credible. The 1967 conquests also made the historical Revisionist maximalist vision highly relevant. All the ingredients of Israel’s new right radicalism—militarism, ultra-nationalism, territorial expansionism, and neo-religiosity—produced political movements, including the new territorial maximalism of the Whole Land of Israel Movement and the fundamentalist settlements movement of Gush Emunim.⁵⁴

Occupation, therefore, further fortified Israeli rejection of the Palestinian right of self-determination. Partition (albeit inequitable, leaving Palestinians 22 percent of their homeland) was actively rejected, bolstered by U.S. rejectionism.

It is also important to emphasize that 1967 both reinforced and transformed existing Israeli “national security” patterns of militarization. Baruch Kimmerling has shown that Israeli “civilian militarism” has always been dominant in Israel: “The situation arises when the civilian leaders and the led both regard the primary military and strategic considerations as being self-evidently the only or the predominant considerations in most societal and political decisions or priority ordering.” The military-political nexus rules over the Palestinians and defines the national objectives (including economic) of the Israeli collectivity.

After 1967, this prioritizing of national security was modified by the “amplification of the ideological-political sphere” of religious Zionism.⁵⁵ The Greater Israel ideology became wedded to strategic state considerations, and the former was fostered and supported by the latter: “thus the new orientation spawned fringe variants that favored the expulsion of the entire non-Jewish population of the territories either immediately or as a result of a deliberate program that would create circumstances favorable to such dispersion (for example, war on a local-regional scale). Jewish settlements were established feverishly in regions of the occupied territories densely populated by Palestinians so as to guarantee control over the whole conquered area, and create ‘irreversible’ fait accompli.”⁵⁶

Kimmerling has developed this line of analysis further in his recent Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians. Here he argues that occupation has already corrupted Israeli democracy to such an extent that Israel can no longer be considered a liberal democracy: it is now a Herrenvolk democracy: “This term, coined to describe South Africa under Apartheid [OED dates it back to the Nazis], describes a regime in which one group of its subjects (the citizens) enjoys full rights and another group (the non-citizens) enjoys none. The laws of Israel have become the laws of a master people and the morality that of lords of the land.”⁵⁷

While this reasoning is important to understanding Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories, it ignores the fact that Israel itself has always been defined by its particularist components. Post-1967 is a mere continuation of post-1948, but now in a new environment where decolonization is a powerful global ideological force (hence the UN response). The questions that Kimmerling never raises are: When was Israeli democracy ever uncorrupted by colonialism? When did Israel treat even its own citizens as equals? The military government of 1948-1966, which only applied to Palestinians citizens of Israel, is clear evidence that Israel has never actually been a liberal democracy: its continuing exclusionary definition as “Jewish and democratic” is further evidence of that.⁵⁸ In the post-1967 period, then, Zionist exclusivism and racism have merely been extended, revitalized, and projected onto the West Bank and Gaza. For the Israeli elite, 1967 is like 1948: the similarities are more important than the differences.⁵⁹

The dynamic of American Empire/Israeli colonialism is, therefore, circular: U.S. support reinforces Israeli colonialism and occupation, which bolsters Israeli militarization of state and society, which generates new ideological and political justifications and breeds new religious fanaticisms, leading to further indigenous resistance and to more U.S. interventions in the region. A cycle of violence if ever there was one, ultimately determined by U.S. imperialism. The United States thus becomes both a necessary and sufficient condition for Israel’s colonial expansionism. Without it, Israel would be a pariah state. Without it, conditions of peaceful coexistence in the region are much more likely. Without it, Israeli militarism and Jewish fundamentalism in Israel would be on the defensive; and the mobilization of internal domestic forces calling for the abandonment of the “national security” ethic and the rejection of living by the sword would have a real chance of gaining political ascendancy in Israel. Siding with, serving, depending, and even subordinating itself to the imperatives of U.S. empire in the region can only reinforce the Arab majority perception that Israel is a hostile presence. Militarized security can be no basis for peace and reconciliation. Real security can only be achieved if Israelis come to be seen as a part of the region and not as an imposition on it: in order for that coexistence to take place, the whole logic of the Jewish colonization needs to be questioned.

Which is exactly what didn’t happen in Oslo. On the contrary, Oslo was about further colonization, further expansion, and further domination and control. The early critics of Oslo (most prominently, Edward Said,⁶⁰ Noam Chomsky, and Meron Benvenisti) were proven right: Oslo was a victory for Zionism and a humiliating defeat for Palestinian nationalism. The PLO aborted the Intifada (the main reason for Israel’s willingness to negotiate), legalized the occupation, and became Israel’s colonial enforcer. As Samih K. Farsoun has argued: “Israel achieved what it set out to do since at least the signing of the Camp David Accords with Egypt in 1978: It won limited functional civil autonomy for the Palestinians of the occupied territories and a legalized tight grip on the land, resources, economy, and security of the areas.”⁶¹ No sovereignty, no national rights, and no end of occupation: the U.S.-sponsored peace process was as rejection of Palestinians’ right to independence and self-determination as the post-Kissinger foreign policy consensus was.

If Israel consolidated its occupation in Oslo, the United States reaped the fruits of its victory over the Soviet Union and consolidated its hold over the Middle East. The New World Order declared by Bush Senior in 1991 set this process in motion. Iraq had to be tamed and cut back to size, and its invasion of Kuwait provided an excellent excuse for that. The end of the war with Iran had left it with a bloated army, a huge war debt, and resentment against Arab oil regimes and U.S. double-dealing.⁶² Saddam Hussein was perceived as a threat to U.S. global strategy: oil had to be protected and regional stability (i.e. a pro-U.S. status quo) reaffirmed. The “spectacle” of the Gulf War achieved this when Iraq was bombed back to the preindustrial era (as one UN report put it). It is doubtful that such a diminution of state capacities, economic and political independence, and military power could ever have been realized without force. Though there was clearly an element of “demonstration effect” for both global and U.S. domestic consumption in the projection of American military might, only war could significantly diminish Iraqi state power, consolidate American military presence, and safeguard the preeminence of U.S. political and economic interests in the region. Arab oil regimes were protected, and Israeli military supremacy was assured: Iraq would never be able to pose any sort of threat to either Saudi Arabia or Israel (and, if Bush Senior had had enough support for regime change then, the United States wouldn’t have had to wait for what Rice called the “opportunity” of post-9/11 to occupy Iraq). Only war, thus, could have satisfied the material and ideological requirements of U.S. imperialism.

The end of the Cold War generated a peculiar expectation with regard to U.S. policy towards Israel: Israel would become far less important for the United States. Because the Gulf War coalition excluded Israel (and included Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt), and because Bush Senior delayed a ten billion dollar loan-guarantee to Israel until it agreed to participate in the Madrid Peace conference, which came on the heels of the Gulf War, Israel’s role in the U.S. empire was perceived to have been diminished. The days of the “strategic asset” thesis were over, it was claimed: the United States was now freer to create a more balanced foreign policy strategy in line with the international consensus of the impermissibility of acquiring territory by force.

The reality was quite different, however: even during the Gulf War crisis the United States forcefully rejected Hussein’s (self-interested) linkage argument: Iraq would leave Kuwait, Israel would leave the Occupied Territories. No such universal standards were applied: double standards were the order of the day.⁶³ The Madrid conference ended up in near total deadlock. Bush’s “peace and justice” were as elusive as ever. The 1990s would in fact prove to be the most fruitful time in U.S.-Israel relations. The alliance became stronger than ever, intensifying and deepening. It is to Chomsky’s realism that we owe this judgment: the end of the Cold War would only bring tactical modifications not substantial changes in U.S. global strategy. Anti-nationalism and hostility to social radicalism would continue to define its agenda, as he predicted. And this would also apply to Israel, as the following statement from Israeli military strategist Shlomo Gazit clearly shows:

Israel’s main task has not changed at all, and it remains of crucial importance. Its location at the center of the Arab Muslim Middle East predestines Israel to be a devoted guardian of stability in all the countries surrounding it. Its [role] is to protect the existing regimes: to prevent or halt the processes of radicalization and to block the expansion of fundamentalist religious zealotry.⁶⁴

The New World Order is, then, very much like the old world order: the United States and Israel fighting common enemies and satisfying mutual elite interests. The only difference lies in the realization of more amendable conditions of operation. U.S. global primacy has been the main outcome of the Cold War, and after the Gulf War Israel’s regional military superiority was again reconfirmed. One other slight variation is relevant here: a new enemy. If Arab nationalism was the enemy of the Cold War period, major factions of Islamic fundamentalism are the enemies of the New World Order (and this is in no way to equate the social content of each ideology). Once a Cold War ally against nationalism, Islamic fundamentalism has turned into a foe. Examples abound. Two main ones will suffice: the Mujahideen in Afghanistan (the Taliban, Bin Laden, and al-Qaida) and radical fundamentalists in the Arab world. In the Palestinian context, the Muslim Brotherhood is an example of the latter. It went from being supported by Israel against nationalist Fatah to mutating into Hamas and becoming the main agent of anti-colonial struggle and Palestinian self-determination in the Occupied Territories. The cost of this shift is mainly paid by local societies: with the fundamentalists, regressive social agendas rule and the sphere of individual liberty (already severely curtailed by Arab secular nationalism) shrinks even more.

This is not a problem that worries Israel or the United States much, as long as the fundamentalists are suppressed or kept out of office (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc). For U.S.-Israel, the problem with democracy in the Middle East today is the problem of Islamic fundamentalism: most free elections would result in fundamentalists getting into power, as recent victories by Hamas and the United Iraqi Alliance in Iraq (and by the Front Islamique du Salut [FIS] in Algeria before that) show. Denying real democratic sovereignty remains a fundamental premise of U.S. policy. So after the recent elections in Palestine (and the U.S. hope for a Fatah win), the United States now demonizes and boycotts majority-elected Hamas and seeks to punish and “starve” Palestinians for their democratic choice (as a recent New York Times headline put it).

The War on Terrorism is the New World Order unleashed and unbound. It replays the Cold War dynamic, aims to reproduce its oppressive structure, and continues to satisfy longstanding U.S. interests in the Middle East: control of oil and rejection of Arab radicalism, which have led to support for colonial Israel. And so it goes.

What this brief analysis of “imperialism-colonialism” teaches us is clear. The United States has been determining major economic and political outcomes in the Middle East since at least 1967, with Israel continuing to play a crucial role in their realization. In Israel-Palestine, this has meant that force and colonial peace have alternated as main instruments of policy, with the main objective being a constant: Jewish supremacy in Palestine—as much land as possible, as few Palestinians as possible. The United States has exploited this Zionist imperative for its own interests in the region, and has fostered a militarized and fundamentalist Israel in the process. This reality can be gauged in Israel’s most recent parliamentary elections. Gideon Levy has put it well: “An absolute majority of the MKs [Members of Knesset] in the 17th Knesset will hold a position based on a lie; that Israel does not have a partner for peace. An absolute majority of MKs in the next Knesset do not believe in peace, nor do they even want it—just like their voters—and worse than that, don’t regard Palestinians as equal human beings. Racism has never had so many supporters. It is the real hit of this election campaign.”⁶⁵

For the Palestinians, the impact of U.S.-Israel has been much worse: collapse of the secular national project and national unity; continuing annexation of lands and resources; enclosure and “enclavization”; fragmentation, demobilization, and collective paralysis; and unending death and suffering. If for Levy Israelis are “One Racist Nation,” for Amira Hass Palestinians have become: “A Nation of Beggars”: “For it is not natural disasters that have transformed the Palestinians into a nation that lives on handouts from the world; it is Israel’s accelerating colonialist process.”66 This too is an outcome of the U.S.-Israel, imperialism-colonialism, relationship.

Between colonialism, looming starvation, and sumud (steadfastness), hope for real change seems remote, if not impossible. And this may yet prove to be imperialism’s most catastrophic effect.

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Notes

1. Glenda Abramson and S. Ilan Troen (eds.), “The Americanization of Israel,” Israel Studies 5, no. 1 (2000). Israel Studies is one of the leading academic journals specializing in Israeli history, politics, society, and culture.
2. Laurence J. Silberstein, The Postzionism Debates (London: Routledge, 1999), 2. My interest here is not postmodern or postcolonial post-Zionism, for which see Silberstein; Ella Shohat, “The ‘Postcolonial’ in Translation: Reading Said in Hebrew,” Journal of Palestine Studies 33, no. 3 (2004), 55–75; Nada Matta, “Postcolonialism, Multiculturalism, and the Israeli Left,” Holy Land Studies 2, no. 1 (2003): 85–107.
3. Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), xiii.
4. See Walid Khalidi, “Plan Dalet,” Journal of Palestine Studies 18, no. 1 (1988 [1961]), 4–33.
5. Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Ilan Pappe, Britain and the Arab Israeli Conflict, 1948–51 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Nur Masalha (in Expulsion of the Palestinians [Washington D.C.: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992]) also participated in this debate. Unlike Silberstein, however, I don’t see the rationale of including Palestinians under the post-Zionist heading. The term should, I believe, also only refer to work from the late 1980s onwards, and not stretch back to inter-war figures or early Israeli nativist trends like the Canaanites.
6. Whether it is a justified injustice is a political not a historical question. What is quite unique about many of the post-Zionist historians (Pappe excluded) is that while they do acknowledge what happened in 1948 they end up justifying it nonetheless in the name of Zionism-as-refugee from anti-Semitism. Edward Said has described this as “a profound contradiction, bordering on schizophrenia” (“New History, Old Ideas,” in Ephraim Nimni (ed.), The Challenge of Post-Zionism [London: Zed, 2003], 199-202). New Left Review has been much more generous. It not only republished Benny Morris’s recent racist interview with Haaretz (“Ethnic Cleansing,” New Left Review 26 [2004], 37–51), in which he advocated ethnic cleansing of the remainder of the Palestinians, but also preceded it with much praise and adulation (even defending him against his own outrageous statements). The following is particularly troubling: “The hallmark of Morris’s work has been a tough-minded realism—the inclination of a former paratrooper for the Israel Defense Force to call a spade a spade, whatever discomfort it might cause his co-nationals” (37). The suggestion of course is that Morris’s role in the Israeli army has provided him with a requisite dose of realism and historical clarity. But this doesn’t square with the fact that army histories of 1948 have been as complicit with Israeli myth making as any other Israeli historical narratives before the arrival of the “new historians.” Such praise diminishes Morris’s own contribution in uncovering the Israeli historical record on 1948.
7. Said in Nimni, Challenge of Post-Zionism, 201.
8. Baruch Kimmerling, “Academic History Caught in the Cross-Fire,” History and Memory 7, no. 1 (1995), 41.
9. Uri Ram, The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology (Albany: University of New York Press, 1995), 6.
10. Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996 [1989]).
11. Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 8.
12. Avishai Ehrlich, “Israel: Conflict, War and Social Change,” in Colin Creighton & Martin Shaw, eds., The Sociology of War and Peace (New York: Sheridan House, 1987), 121–42.
13. Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
14. Gershon Shafir & Yoav Peled, Being Israeli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On Israeli culture as colonial and exclusionary, see Yerach Gover, Zionism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
15. This is of course not to mention early Palestinian work: Sabri Jiryis, The Arabs in Israel (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976); and Elia T. Zureik, The Palestinians in Israel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
16. Ram, Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology, 175.
17. The much neglected Palestinian Marxist Jabra Nicola (1912–74) was a foundational influence on Matzpen. His most important work is: “Theses on the Revolution in the Arab East” (1972, unpublished?). Ernest Mandel dedicated his Revolutionary Marxism Today (London: New Left Books, 1979), to him in the following glowing terms: “Pioneer Arab Marxist & Palestinian Trotskyist, the most impressive internationalist I ever met.”
18. An important film by Eran Torbiner which documents their history was released in 2003: Matzpen: Anti-Zionist Israelis. For a sample of their work see Khamsin, Forbidden Agendas (London: Al Saqi Books, 1984); and Khamsin, Palestine (London: Zed Books, 1989). See also Silberstein, Postzionism Debates, 84–87.
19. Haim Hanegbi, Moshe Machover, & Akiva Orr, “The Class Nature of Israeli Society,” New Left Review 65 (1971), 3–26.
20. Hanegbi, Machover, & Orr, “Class Nature of Israeli Society,” 11.
21. Hanegbi, Machover, & Orr, “Class Nature of Israeli Society,” 7 (italics in original).
22. Tom Segev, 1949 (New York: Henry Holt, 1998 [1986]) and The Seventh Million (New York: Henry Holt, 2000 [1991]).
23. Tom Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem (New York: Metropolitan, 2002), 64 (my comments in parentheses).
24. Fayez A. Sayegh, “The Camp David Agreement and the Palestine Problem,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 2 (1979), 3–40.
25. Gershon Shafir & Yoav Peled, “Peace and Profits,” in Gershon Shafir & Yoav Peled (eds.), The New Israel (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 243–64.
26. Yoav Peled & Gershon Shafir, “The Roots of Peacemaking,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996), 391–413.
27. Peled & Shafir, “The Roots of Peacemaking,” 409.
28. Uri Ram, “‘The Promised Land of Business Opportunities,’” in Shafir & Peled, “Roots of Peacemaking,” 217–40.
29. Meron Benvenisti, “An Agreement of Surrender,” Haaretz, May 12, 1994, quoted in Samih K. Farsoun, Palestine and the Palestinians (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 274.
30. Avishai Ehrlich, “Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Post-Zionism,” in Nimni, Challenge of Post-Zionism, 63–97; “The Gulf War and the New World Order,” in Ralph Miliband & Leo Panitch (eds.), New World Order? Socialist Register 1992 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 227–38.
31. On what the author generously calls the “post-Zionist decade,” see Ilan Pappe, “The Post-Zionist Discourse in Israel, 1990–2001,” Holy Land Studies 1, no. 1 (2002), 9–35.
32. Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem, 161.
33. Shafir & Peled, Being Israeli, 336.
34. Ehrlich, “Zionism,” 93–94. See also his “Palestine, Global Politics, and Israeli Judaism,” in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds.), Fighting Identities: Socialist Register 2003 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 51–72.
35. See the foundational works, Maxime Rodinson, Israel (New York: Pathfinder, 1973); Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage: 1992); and Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle (Cambridge: South End Press, 1999). Recent examples include, from international relations: Vassilis K. Fouskas & Bülent Gökay, The New American Imperialism (London: Praeger, 2005); and Naseer H. Aruri, Dishonest Broker (Cambridge: South End Press, 2003); from urban studies: Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); from politics: Retort, Afflicted Powers (London: Verso, 2005). On Oslo and colonialism, see Tanya Reinhart’s excellent Israel/Palestine (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), and Marwan Bishara, Palestine/Israel (London: Zed, 2002).
36. Segev, Elvis in Jerusalem, 49.
37. Noam Chomsky, Towards A New Cold War (New York: The New Press, 2003), 342.
38. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 150.
39. Gilbert Achcar, Eastern Cauldron (New York: Monthly Review Press), 36. See also Irene L. Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999).
40. Samuel W. Lewis, “The United States and Israel: Evolution of an Unwritten Alliance,” The Middle East Journal 53, no. 3 (1999), 364–66.
41. Cheryl A. Rubenberg, Israel and the American National Interest (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 126.
42. Shlaim, Iron Wall, 309–10.
43. Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 234–49.
44. Achcar, Eastern Cauldron, 22.
45. Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), 275.
46. Sadat’s recourse to war was forced by Kissinger’s refusal to respond to his endless peace overtures in the early 1970s. see Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, 64–75, Hegemony or Survival, 166–67.
47. Samir Amin, The Arab Nation (London: Zed Books, 1978), 72.
48. Amin, The Arab Nation, 67.
49. Husam al-Khatib, a member of Fatah’s executive committee, wrote the most important radical critique of the Palestinian Revolution, On the Palestinian Revolutionary Experience [fi il-tajriba al-thawria al-falastinia] (Damascus: Manshurat Wizarat il-Thaqafa, 1973).
50. Sadek Jalal al-Azm, Critical Study of Palestinian Resistance Thought [Dirasa Naqdiya li-Fiker al-Muqawama al-Falastinia] (Beirut: Dirasat il-Awda, 1973).
51. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Dover Publications, 1988), 96.
52. Lewis, “United States and Israel,” 376.
53. Chomsky, Fateful Triangle, 462.
54. Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 22.
55. Baruch Kimmerling, “Patterns of Militarism in Israel,” European Journal of Sociology 34 (1993), 196–223.
56. Kimmerling, “Patterns of Militarism in Israel,” 217–18.
57. Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide (London: Verso, 2003), 39. My comments in parentheses.
58. For the contradictions between liberalism and Zionism in relation to the state, see Ahmad Sa’di’s excellent: “The Peculiarities of Israel’s Democracy,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 12 (2002), 119–33.
59. See Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel, 335–36.
60. Edward W. Said, Peace and its Discontents (New York: Vintage, 1996); The End of the Peace Process (New York: Vintage, 2001).
61. Farsoun & Zacharia, Palestine and the Palestinians, 270.
62. Donald Neff, “The U.S., Iraq, Israel, and Iran,” Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 4 (1991), 23–41.
63. Norman Finkelstein, “Israel and Iraq,” Journal of Palestine Studies 20, no. 2 (1991), 43–56.
64. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors (New York: South End Press, 2002), 166.
65. Gideon Levy, “One Racist Nation,” Haaretz, March 26, 2006,http://www.haaretzdaily.com.
66. Amira Hass, “A Nation of Beggars,” Haaretz, March 1, 2006, http://www.haaretzdaily.com.