When Clouds Appear …

When clouds appear, wise men put on their cloaks;

When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand;

When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?

– William Shakespeare, Richard III

The year gone by has been one of civil protests, upheaval and violence in many parts of the world. Old wars continued, most notably in Afghanistan and Iraq. Peaceful awakening movements that sprang up with much hope in Algeria and Tunisia turned violent as they spread east from North Africa to the Gulf region. A brief and bloody war in Libya, with an overt display of NATO’s military power on behalf of the anti-Gaddafi forces, resulted in his overthrow and brutal killing. For NATO, the Libya war was over, but not for Libyans. A fledgling government now competes with warlords for territorial control and legitimacy in a fragmented country.

External intervention in Syria is more vocal internationally, but shrouded in secrecy on the ground. Accounts of the conflict are based on claims and counterclaims and not much independent evidence to corroborate. If detractors are to be believed, the Ba’athist regime of President Basher al-Assad is on the brink of collapse. The outcome of the Syrian conflict will have profound consequences for the balance of power in the Middle East, in particular for Syria’s ally Iran, as well as in Lebanon and Palestine.

Human aspirations for liberty and freedom from oppression defined the year 2011. Paradoxically, great powers who played a role in sustaining oppressive systems, and still do where it suites them, declared themselves on the side of liberty in other places. The result is confusion, division, conflict and a more insecure world. Afghanistan and Iraq in the last decade were America’s “bleeding wounds,” a term first coined by Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s Soviet war in Afghanistan. With both Iraq and Afghanistan far from stable, there is an unwelcome prospect of Libya and Syria also extracting a high price in terms of security threats and energy costs in the current decade.

Past events cannot be reversed, nor are their consequences easy to contain. So I have in mind events which I believe the world in 2012 would be better off without. In the United States, from President Obama and administration hawks to his Republican opponents have been talking about punitive action against Iran and others in this election year. Powerful voices in the ruling circles of Israel, France and Britain are egging the American president on. The gap between rhetoric and posturing can lead to something far more serious. How civil movements can be manipulated by external forces for their own interests has been demonstrated during the current upheaval in the Arab world.

The overthrow and killing of Gaddafi may have resolved the conflict in Libya in the West’s view. Now the prospect of real power remaining with the militias, and an ineffective Western-supported government, reminds one of Afghanistan following the 1992 collapse of the last Communist leader Najibullah. Libya, with its porous borders, surrounded by Tunisia, Algeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Egypt, is vulnerable itself and threatens others. The year 2012 could be decisive, not only for Libya, but for the region and beyond.

The situation in Syria is very dangerous. Unlike Libya, Syrian state institutions are more robust. The regime’s friends are not many, but Russia and China are taking a much tougher line with the West. Iran, its ruling allies in Iraq, and Lebanese and Palestinian groups have huge stakes in Syria. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, supported by the West, are determined to see the end of the current Syrian regime.

Turkey, a NATO member, has moved from its previous “independent” position to a stance much more in tune with the Western interests in the Middle East. Once a close ally of Syria, Turkey hosts the anti-Assad Free Syrian Army and allows the group to train its fighters and orchestrate attacks inside Syria. The Turkish military guards the Syrian rebel base, and a refugee camp, just across the Syrian border.

For Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party, which professed to seek close relations with its neighbors, this is a complete about face. Two factors appear to be at work here. The Sunni support base of the party is one. The prospect of joining the European Union, an idea that France and Germany in particular oppose, may be the other.

How far Turkey’s moderate Islamic government will go is difficult to predict. It has its own Kurdish insurgency to contend with, so the strategy is risky. Turkey’s growing involvement in Syria reminds one of the 1980s when, from a small beginning, Pakistan, in the midst of ethnic insurgencies, became a base for anti-Communist Afghan forces. The consequences were disastrous.

The conflict in Syria continues to simmer. The sanctions on Iran are steadily being tightened. The talk of military action is persistent and the risk of a weak U.S. president facing reelection being pushed into a war against Iran is haunting. Sectarian violence in Iraq is on the rise. The country faces a new political crisis after an arrest warrant was issued for the Sunni Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi on terrorism charges, prompting the mainly Sunni party al-Iraqiya to boycott parliament. The Syrian conflict threatens further instability in Lebanon and the wider region. And between Libya in North Africa and Pakistan on the edge of South Asia lies an ominously explosive region, waiting for a trigger strong enough to stage a catastrophe.

[END]

Savage Decade

Deepak Tripathi
(State of Nature, Winter 2010 Issue)

The inaugural decade of the new century will be remembered for two phenomena above all: the savagery of human nature, and the United States, the world’s sole hegemon, going rogue, and taking other nations with it. As we were about to leave the twentieth century, and many in the West were enjoying unprecedented prosperity, the prospect of a clash of ideologies was becoming a reality. Instead of the ‘menace’ of communism, the neoconservatives and the religious Right in the United States had found another enemy in radical Islam. It was one of the supreme ironies that the confrontation would be between President George W Bush and the ideology that his father George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan had promoted in their fight against Soviet communism when they were in the White House during the last phase of the Cold War.

Having seen off the ‘Soviet threat’, the hegemon that emerged victorious had a fatal belief in its own destructive power. In refusing to learn lessons from the past, it invited worse. The new confrontation was not going to be between two equals, aware of the certainty of mutual destruction in the event of an all-out war. The primary characteristic of the new confrontation would be its lack of symmetry, making it more brutal. For when combatants are not equals and mutual destruction is not certain, the dominant side becomes vulnerable in other ways.

Overwhelming power leads to impudence and disregard for law and reason. Institutions that are there to protect the innocent and the weak begin to lose their meaning. In a world without restraint, the underdog is often depicted as evil and brutality becomes the norm. With too much power comes the belief that it is easy to crush the ‘enemy’. But the underdog has strength in numbers, paving the way to atrocities on all sides. All of this has been witnessed in the savage first decade of the new century.

To view al Qaeda and the many nationalist movements in the Islamic world as one ‘enemy’ during the ‘war on terror’ has been an historic miscalculation. The project under the presidency of George W Bush to crush nationalism in the Middle East has exacted a high price from the West. But countries in the region have paid a price even greater. Al Qaeda’s terrorist violence has been answered by the terror of American military power. The lives of millions of people have been destroyed or blighted. In 2010, a year after Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency, the initial euphoria has evaporated and gloom has set in.

Unlike the Cold War that ended in the 1980s, the United States has no superpower rival in the new century, and the balance of threat of mutual annihilation is absent. Instead, one side in the new conflict has overwhelming destructive power and has become insolent. The underdog is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice – in acts of suicide attacks. Fear has lost its deterrent quality. Death is no longer an unwelcome prospect for a growing number of people living without hope. And for an alarming number, the rationality in martyrdom has replaced the rationality in survival. Humans are at their most dangerous when they no longer fear death.

Iraq Hubris

In the wake of the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation wrote a commentary titled ‘The Long War Against Terrorism’. A retired lieutenant-colonel in the US Army, and a leading neoconservative ideologue, Carafano began with these words: “Two years down the war on terror. How many more to go? We don’t know.” Boastfully, he argued that America’s ‘long war’ against terror was similar in scope and duration to the Cold War. The military establishment, delighted with the enlargement of the Pentagon budget following the return of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary in the Bush administration, jumped at the term. It gained currency in the war lexicon within a few months. In 2006, Rumsfeld invented a phrase of his own, describing it as ‘a generational conflict akin to the Cold War’, likely to go on for decades.

These assertions were based on flawed thinking, and comparisons with the Cold War were not relevant. America’s victory over the Soviet Union was achieved not by bombing the Soviet state out of existence, but by draining the Soviet economy and resolve through an arms race and regional proxy wars. America’s ‘enemy’ in the new century is a ghost army of guerrillas, with little else to lose except their lives. And they are only too willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. The hegemon, in possession of the most sophisticated war technology, decided to confront this loose army of guerrillas equipped with little more than light weapons, explosives and simple timing devices, able to move at will across frontiers.

In The Art of War, believed to have been written in the sixth century BC and still regarded as one of the most influential works about war strategy and tactics, the Chinese general and military theorist, Sun Tzu, said:

Warfare is the way of deception. Therefore, if able, appear unable.
If active, appear not active.
If near, appear far.
If far, appear near.
If they have advantage, entice them.
If they are confused, take them.
If they are substantial, prepare for them.
If they are strong, avoid them.

‘Shock and Awe’, the post-Cold War doctrine written at the United States National Defense University in 1996, was designed to paralyze the enemy and achieve rapid dominance by overwhelming force in battle. The truth is rather different. Provided the enemy removes himself and recovers from the effects of high-altitude bombing and missile attacks, in time he will improvise tactics to fight an effective guerrilla war that a conventional army will find difficult to sustain. A great military power wants rapid victory. The underdog prefers a long war. This, and not merely the use of overwhelming power and lightning speed, is the essence of Sun’s doctrine of warfare. More at State of Nature
Reading Room

Blair’s Iraq Confession

(Informed Comment, December 13, 2009)

Deepak Tripathi, former BBC journalist and author of the book Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan (Potomac, January 2010), writes in guest op-ed for IC:

Since the launch of the Iraq Inquiry in London at the end of July 2009, covers have been coming off with increasing frequency to reveal the circumstances leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And not always before the inquiry chairman, John Chilcot. The latest is the admission by Tony Blair, then British prime minister and President George W Bush’s closest ally. Blair now says that he ‘would still have thought it right to remove’ Saddam Hussein even without weapons of mass destruction; he would have had to ‘use and deploy different arguments’ to achieve the end.

The admission, made in a BBC program, amounts to a complete repudiation of Blair’s own position held since before the invasion: that British intelligence had evidence of there being weapons of mass destruction with Saddam Hussein; some of those weapons were ‘deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them’; and that he had no doubt that the threat was ‘serious and current’. On this assessment of the British government, published in September 2002, Blair had sought the parliament’s approval, which he secured in March 2003 despite a rebellion by 139 of his own MPs. The approval was made possible due to the backing of the opposition Conservative Party for the invasion of Iraq. Two senior ministers resigned from Blair’s cabinet: Leader of the House, and foreign secretary earlier, Robin Cook and, some time later, International Development Secretary Clare Short. More