By Tariq AliThis was an editorial in the March/April issue of the New Left Review in 2006. The editorial talks about key events in U.S. foreign policy, and the world, over the past couple of years.
Tariq Ali is an editor for the New Left Review and a historian who has writen books on history and contemporary events as well as fiction books.
The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.
Looking down on the world from the imperial grandeur of the Oval Office in the fall of 2001, the Cheney–Bush team was confident of its ability to utilize the September events to remodel the world. The Pentagon’s Vice Admiral Cebrowski summed up the linkage of capitalism to war: ‘the dangers against which us forces must be arrayed derive precisely from countries and regions that are “disconnected” from the prevailing trends of globalization’. Five years later, what is the balance sheet?
On the credit side, Russia, China and India remain subdued, along with Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Here, despite the attempts of Western political science departments to cover the instrumentalist twists of us policy with fig-leaf conceptualizations—‘limited democracies’, ‘tutelary democracies’, ‘illiberal democracies’, ‘inclusionary autocracies’, ‘illiberal autocracies’—the reality is that acceptance of Washington Consensus norms is the principal criterion for gaining imperial approval. In Western Europe, after a few flutters on Iraq, the eu is firmly back on side. Chirac now sounds more belligerent than Bush on the Middle East, and the German elite is desperate to appease Washington. On the debit side, the Caracas effect is spreading. Cuba’s long isolation has been broken, the Bolivian oligarchy defeated in La Paz and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has assumed a central role in mobilizing popular anti-neoliberal movements in virtually every Latin American country.(1)
More alarmingly for Washington, American control of the Middle East is slipping. No irreversible setbacks have yet occurred, but in the past year the position of the us in the region has weakened. The shift has not been uniform—at least one front has moved in the opposite direction, with a successful intervention in Lebanon. But elsewhere the tide of events is running against Washington. In Iran and Palestine, elections have humiliated those on whom it had counted as pliable instruments or interlocutors, propelling more radical forces into power. In Iraq, the resistance has inflicted a steady train of blows on the us occupation, preventing any stabilization of the collaborator regime and sapping support for the war in America itself. The Cheney–Wolfowitz political project of establishing a model satellite state for the region lies buried underneath the rubble of Fallujah. In Afghanistan, guerrillas are on the move again and Washington is wooing Taliban factions close to Pakistani military intelligence. Further revelations of torture by us and British forces, and plunder of local resources by the invaders and their agents, have intensified popular hatred of the West across the Arab world. American forces are overstretched, and the belief of troops in their mission is declining. Establishment voices at home are beginning to express fears that a debacle comparable to—or even worse than—Vietnam may be looming. But outcomes across the whole theatre of conflict still remain uncertain, and are unlikely to be all of a piece.
Palestine
Western enthusiasm for rainbow revolutions stops, as is to be expected, when the colour is green. Hamas’s triumph in the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council has been treated as an ominous sign of rising fundamentalism, and a fearsome blow to the prospects of peace with Israel, by rulers and journalists across the Atlantic world. Immediate financial and diplomatic pressures have been applied to force Hamas to adopt the same policies as those whom it defeated at the polls. Numerically, the extent of that victory should not be overstated—with 45 per cent of the vote on a 78 per cent turnout, Hamas took 54 per cent of the seats. But morally, given the undisguised intervention by Israel, the us and the eu to assure a Fatah majority, the result was equivalent to a landslide. Palestinian voters rebuffed the concerted threats and bribes of the ‘international community’ in a campaign that saw Hamas members and other oppositionists routinely detained or assaulted by the idf, their posters confiscated or destroyed, us and eu funds channelled into the Fatah campaign, and us congressmen announcing that Hamas should not be allowed to run. Even the timing of the election was set by the determination to rig the outcome. Scheduled for the summer of 2005, it was delayed till January 2006 to give Abbas time to distribute assets in Gaza—in the words of an Egyptian intelligence officer: ‘the public will then support the Authority against Hamas’.(2) Popular desire for a clean broom after ten years of corruption, bullying and bluster under Fatah proved stronger than all of this.
Uncompromised by the Palestinian Authority’s combination of greed and dependency, the self-enrichment of its servile spokesmen and policemen, and their acquiescence in a ‘peace process’ that has brought only further expropriation and misery to the population under them, Hamas offered the alternative of a simple example. Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people. It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad basis of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran.
How far its conduct in the second Intifada has given it an additional degree of credibility is less clear. Its armed attacks on Israel, like those of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade or Islamic Jihad, have been retaliations against an occupation far more deadly than any actions it has ever undertaken. Measured on the scale of idf killings, Palestinian strikes have been few and far between. The asymmetry was starkly exposed during Hamas’s unilateral ceasefire, begun in June 2003, and maintained throughout the summer despite the Israeli campaign of raids and mass arrests which followed, in which some three hundred Hamas cadres were seized from the West Bank.(3) On 19 August 2003 a self-proclaimed ‘Hamas’ cell from Hebron, disowned and denounced by the official leadership, blew up a bus in West Jerusalem, upon which Israel promptly assassinated the Hamas ceasefire’s negotiator, Ismail Abu Shanab. Hamas in turn responded. In return, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states cut funding to its charities and, in September 2003, the eu declared the whole Hamas movement to be a terrorist organization—a long-standing demand of Tel Aviv.
What has actually distinguished Hamas in a hopelessly unequal combat is not dispatch of suicide bombers, to which a range of competing groups resorted, but its superior discipline—demonstrated by its ability to enforce a self-declared ceasefire against Israel over the past year. All civilian deaths are to be condemned, but since Israel is their principal practitioner, Euro-American cant serves only to expose those who utter it. Overwhelmingly, the boot of murder is on the other foot, ruthlessly stamped into Palestine by a modern army equipped with jets, tanks and missiles in the longest armed oppression of modern history. ‘Nobody can reject or condemn the revolt of a people that has been suffering under military occupation for forty-five years against occupation force’: the words of General Shlomo Gazit, former chief of Israeli military intelligence, in 1993.(4).
The real grievance of the eu and us against Hamas is that it refused to accept the capitulation of the Oslo Accords, and has rejected every subsequent effort, from Taba to Geneva, to pass off their calamities on the Palestinians. The West’s priority now is to break this resistance. Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority is an obvious weapon with which to bludgeon Hamas into submission. Boosting the presidential powers of Abbas—as publicly picked for his post by Washington as was Bremer in Baghdad—at the expense of the Legislative Council is another.(5)us and Israel could achieve their objectives at less cost than had the old regime prevailed . . . The leader who stands most to gain from this new setting is President Abbas . . . He has become the central figure upon whom all depend: the Islamists, who need him as a conduit to the outside world; Israel, which will see him as the most palatable and reliable interlocutor on the Palestinian scene; the us and Europe, as they seek to shun Hamas without turning their backs on the Palestinians’—‘Hamas: the Perils of Power’, New York Review of Books, 9 March 2006. A photograph taken at the obsequies of King Fahd in Riyadh shows Abbas, Allawi and Karzai sitting together at the feet of more eminent mourners, as if auditioning for a Hollywood remake of a Three Stooges film. But since each of these involves some risk of boomeranging, more likely is an attempt to domesticate Hamas, in the belief that it too will relax with the fruits of office, and become in time as ‘pragmatic’ as its predecessor. This is certainly a reasonable calculation. Hamas is historically an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Egyptian branch is now scarcely more radical in outlook than the ruling party in Turkey.(6)plo rivals were decimated in Jordan and driven to Beirut. The Brethren’s inactivity was justified by a refusal to work with godless militants; instead a period of ‘mosque-building’ was in order. As the secular leadership was discredited in the 90s, Hamas, while retaining the cloak of Islam, adopted an increasingly nationalist persona. Like all religions, Islam offers a complete palette of ideological positions, from fulsome collaboration with capital and empire to impassioned opposition to them, with a great deal of mobility in between.
Whether Hamas could be so rapidly suborned to Western and Israeli ends may be doubtful, but it would not be unprecedented. Hamas’s programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether, or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country. From the fantasy maximalism of the first to the pathetic minimalism of the second, the path is all too short, as the history of Fatah has shown. The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of Western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling tradition. To do that would require the Palestinian national cause to be put on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equally, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size—not 80 per cent to one and 20 per cent to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the long run.(7)
Lebanon and Syria
To the north, the relative independence of Syria’s Ba’ath regime, and the institutional stability that allowed it to punch above its weight in the region, have long been irritants to Tel Aviv and Washington. Whatever its history of political opportunism, Damascus, unlike Cairo, has refused to scuttle the Palestinian cause by signing a separate peace with Israel, or to collaborate with the us occupation of Iraq. With the spread of the Iraqi insurgency in the provinces along its border, able to draw on a sympathetic hinterland, neutralization or removal of the younger Assad has moved up the American agenda.(8) Since us forces are now in no position to mount a second invasion, the obvious route to toppling the government in Syria was to create a pressure point in Lebanon, where Western powers can manoeuvre freely. For there Syrian troops, installed since 1976, were an exposed and unpopular presence. Forcing their withdrawal, it could be hoped, would foment domestic unrest conducive to regime change.
Contemporary Lebanon still remains in large measure the artificial creation of French colonialism it was at the outset—a coastal band of Greater Syria sliced off from its hinterland by Paris, once it became clear that Syrian independence was inevitable, to form a regional client dominated by a Maronite minority that had long been France’s catspaw in the Eastern Mediterranean. The country’s confessional chequerboard has never permitted an accurate census, for fear of revealing that a substantial Muslim—today perhaps even a Shi’a—majority is denied due representation in the political system. Sectarian tensions, over-determined by the plight of refugees from Palestine, exploded into civil war in the mid-seventies, providing the occasion for the entry of Syrian troops into Lebanon with tacit us approval, and their long-term establishment there—ostensibly as a buffer between the warring communities, and deterrent to a complete Israeli takeover, which was on the cards with the idf invasions of 1978 and 1982. Over time, Damascus came to exercise a pervasive control over wide areas of Lebanese political life. Its military and intelligence apparatus picked candidates for the highest offices of the state, manipulated cabinets and factional disputes, assassinated recalcitrant politicians and amassed personal fortunes in the process.
In 1994, the billionaire property magnate Rafik Hariri—a creature of the House of Saud—was approved for premier. Once installed in power, he became the Berlusconi or Thaksin of his native land, rebuilding the centre of Beirut with his own companies to his own profit and engineering an exchange-rate crisis when he was briefly ousted, to return as the only man rich enough to solve it. With his huge hoard of cash, he could purchase connections to give him increasing leeway in dealing with Damascus. Among friends acquired in these years was another venal politician, Jacques Chirac, to whose campaign funds he is said to have generously contributed.(9) France has never lost interest in its colonial foothold. By 2004, Chirac was seeking to make up for the desertion of the us over Iraq required by domestic considerations, and after arranging for a joint Franco-American coup in Haiti, had every reason to help Bush and Hariri expel Syria from Lebanon. Damascus, of course, knew what was afoot. In August, Bashar Assad summoned Hariri and—according to his son—told him: ‘If you think that President Chirac and you are going to run Lebanon, you are mistaken. This extension [of President Lahoud’s term] is going to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head and over Walid Jumblatt’s’.(10)
The following week, France and the us pushed a resolution through the Security Council demanding Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarming of the Hizbollah militia. The response was not long in coming. In February, as the campaigning season opened for Lebanese elections, Hariri was blown up by a car bomb outside the St Georges hotel in Beirut. He was not the first Lebanese politician to suffer this fate—two previous presidents, Bashir Gemayel in 1982 and René Moawad in 1989, had gone the same way without much commotion. This time, however, the un Secretary-General immediately convened a Commission of Enquiry, dispatching a German prosecutor armed with plenipotentiary powers to investigate the crime, which duly concluded that Syria was responsible. Since this was plain from the outset, all that the Commission has revealed is the extent to which the un, under the miserable figure of Annan, has become an automaton for the will of the West. For, of course, Israeli assassinations—of leaders of Hizbollah, Fatah, Hamas—have never raised a whisper of reproach in the Secretariat, let alone any commission of enquiry. The fate of Lumumba, Ben Barka, Guevara, Allende, Machel, says enough about the continuity of these Western traditions.
In Lebanon itself, the killing of Hariri—whose largesse had built a wide clientele—provoked more genuine reactions, with vast demonstrations by the country’s middle class demanding the expulsion of Syrian troops and police, while a host of Western organizations arrived to assist the progress of a Cedar Revolution (11). Backed by threats from Washington and Paris, the momentum was sufficient to force a Syrian withdrawal, and produce a more congenial government in Beirut. But the various Lebanese factions remain as spreadeagled as ever, Hizbollah has not disarmed, and Assad has not fallen (12). America has taken a pawn, but the castle has yet to be captured.
2. Graham Usher, ‘The New Hamas’, merip, 21 August 2005.
3. By the end of 2004, Israeli death squads and helicopter gunships had assassinated much of the Hamas leadership—Sheikh Yassin, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, Ibrahim Makadmeh, Adnan Ghoul, Sheikh Khalil—and tried but failed to kill Muhammad Dayf, Mahmoud Zahhar, and possibly Khaled Meshaal and Musa Abu Marzuq in Damascus.
4. Yediot Aharonot, 12 August 1993, cited in Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, Washington 2000.
5. For this hopeful prospect, see Hussein Agha and Robert Malley: ‘Insofar as the burden has shifted to Hamas, the us and Israel could achieve their objectives at less cost than had the old regime prevailed . . . The leader who stands most to gain from this new setting is President Abbas . . . He has become the central figure upon whom all depend: the Islamists, who need him as a conduit to the outside world; Israel, which will see him as the most palatable and reliable interlocutor on the Palestinian scene; the us and Europe, as they seek to shun Hamas without turning their backs on the Palestinians’—‘Hamas: the Perils of Power’, New York Review of Books, 9 March 2006. A photograph taken at the obsequies of King Fahd in Riyadh shows Abbas, Allawi and Karzai sitting together at the feet of more eminent mourners, as if auditioning for a Hollywood remake of a Three Stooges film.
6. In the late 60s and 70s the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood stood by as their secular plo rivals were decimated in Jordan and driven to Beirut. The Brethren’s inactivity was justified by a refusal to work with godless militants; instead a period of ‘mosque-building’ was in order. As the secular leadership was discredited in the 90s, Hamas, while retaining the cloak of Islam, adopted an increasingly nationalist persona.
7. Virginia Tilley, The One-State Solution, Ann Arbor and Manchester 2005. For nlr’s positions on what a viable two-state solution might entail, see Perry Anderson, ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’, Guy Mandron, ‘Redividing Palestine?’, Gabriel Piterberg, ‘Erasures’, Yitzhak Laor, ‘Tears of Zion’, nlr 10, July–August 2001.
8. Initially, it was hoped that Bashar, trained in a British medical school, would prove as amenable as the younger Mubarak or Gaddafi, both in the pocket of the West. His loyalty to the traditions of his father was a severe disappointment.
9. On the Elysée’s campaign, see Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial by Fire, Washington 2005, p. 259.
10. See Detlev Mehlis’s uniiic report on the assassination of Hariri, October 2005. Jumblatt is the—currently staunchly pro-Western—clan leader of the Druze.
11. Saatchi & Saatchi helped orchestrate ‘Freedom Square’ rallies; Spirit of America supplied sandwiches, flags and theatrical effects, including a huge Freedom Clock with an electronic ‘countdown to liberty’; a deck of ‘Most Wanted’ playing cards with Syrian faces—a gimmick pioneered by the Israeli paper Maariv when targeting Palestinians, and publicized globally by the American army in Iraq—was distributed. See CounterPunch, 18 November 2005.
12. During the recent crisis, several Syrian opposition groups offered the Assad regime a deal: a national government to defend the country against the West, followed by elections in which the Ba’ath Party would be a major player. The Ba’ath High Command turned it down, preferring to rely on repression at home and manoeuvring abroad.
Image From:
New York Times
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