November
23, 2023
The
dramatic events of the last six weeks have left the U.S. position in the Middle
East a total wreck, with Washington coming across as a dog being wagged by its
tail, the state of Israel, which is carrying out the genocidal elimination of
the Palestinian people in Gaza, of whom over 11,000 have been killed by
airstrikes. Nowhere was the bankruptcy of American diplomacy in the region and
globally more exposed than during the UN General Assembly vote on October 30,
2023, for a Jordan-sponsored resolution for an immediate ceasefire and the
establishment of a humanitarian corridor for aid which passed 120 to 14, with
the United States and Israel in opposition.
The
wreckage of the American position in the Middle East, however, was created not
just by recent events but by a chain of events in which one man played a
central role: Osama bin Laden.
From
Che Guevara to Osama Bin Laden
Bin
Laden operated with something like Che Guevara’s “foco theory.” Guevara had
believed that direct engagement of the enemy was necessary to show peasants
that guerrillas could defeat the military and encourage them to join the
revolution. Bin Laden, operating on a global stage, saw the September 11, 2001,
assault on the Twin Towers in Manhattan as an act that would expose the
vulnerability of the “Great Satan” and inspire Muslims to join his jihad
against it. It would create many fronts and lead to the overextension of U.S.
military power as Washington would move to put out many fires.
It
did not quite work out that way. Instead of being inspired, most Muslims were
horrified and distanced themselves from the terrible deed. Still, bin Laden
lucked out, thanks to George W. Bush and the neoconservatives that had come to
power with him in Washington in 2001. For them, Osama’s attack was a god-given
opportunity to teach both America’s enemies and friends that the empire was
omnipotent. Ostensibly waged to go after the “roots of terror,” the invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq were in fact what the Romans called “exemplary wars,”
and their aim was to reshape the global strategic environment to fit
Washington’s “unipolar” status following the demise of the Soviet Union.
Disappointed
with the reluctance of his father, President George H.W. Bush, to finish off
Saddam Hussein during the 1990-91 Gulf War, George W. Bush initiated these
invasions as the first steps in a demarche that would eliminate the so-called
rogue states, compel greater loyalty from dependent states or supplant them
with stronger allies, and put strategic competitors like China on notice that
they should not even think of vying with the United States.
Bush
Provoked into Waging Unwinnable Wars
Disregarding
the lessons of Vietnam and the British and Soviet debacles in Afghanistan, the
George W. Bush administration drove the United States into two unwinnable wars
against highly motivated insurgents in the Middle East as bin Laden watched
with satisfaction, living unperturbed under the protection of an American ally,
the Pakistani military, in the peaceful garrison town of Abbottabad in
Pakistan. It was not exactly the scenario he had envisaged, but he was not
about to quibble if the Bush administration, owing to its drive for unipolar
hegemony, placed the United States on the road to overextension, which was,
after all, his strategic aim.
Prolonged
occupation demanded boots on the ground, and as Deputy Secretary of State
Richard Armitage saw it, “The Army, in particular, [is] stretched too
thin…fighting three wars—Afghanistan still, Iraq, and the global war on
terrorism.” At the height of the Iraq War, defense analyst James Fallows wrote,
it was “only a slight exaggeration to say that today the entire U.S. military
is either in Iraq, returning from Iraq, or getting ready to go.” Most of the
Army’s maneuverable brigades were overseas, and those left in the United States
were too few to maintain the contingency reserve or the training base
necessary. Even the famed Special Forces were degraded, with their actual
numbers in the field coming to hundreds at the most. Lack of human resources
led the high command to call on the Reserves and the National Guard. As might
be expected, morale plummeted, especially as tours of duty were extended and
casualties mounted in lands to which these part-time soldiers had never
expected to be assigned.
And
as the prospect of prevailing in the battlefield became more and more distant,
public support for the Iraq and Afghanistan expeditions, which was very limited
right from the start, went up in smoke.
Even
as the United States was bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel, the
Euro-American settler colony in the Middle East and Washington’s only solid
ally, was being challenged by new actors. In Gaza, Hamas took over as the
dominant force following Israel’s withdrawal in 2005-2006 and began to
implement its military plan to eventually dismantle the apartheid state.
In
Lebanon, the Hezbollah, allied with Hamas, carried out border raids against
Israel that resulted in 2006 in Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon and
bombing of South Beirut. Hezbollah’s
resistance, however, forced a withdrawal of Israel after a month, under the
cloak of a UN-brokered ceasefire, inflicting an outcome that even members of
the Israeli government regarded as a defeat for the apartheid state. Both Hamas
and Hezbollah were part of the new, reinvigorated stream of Muslim political
radicalism of which Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was also a part, which
increasingly displaced secular liberation movements like the Palestine
Liberation Organization in the Arab world. But, unlike al-Qaeda, Hamas and
Hezbollah had a solid mass base on the ground.
Obama
Pushes Deeper into the Quagmire
Barack
Obama came to power in 2009 promising an end to the Middle East wars. In Iraq,
the bulk of U.S. forces were withdrawn during his first term, but thousands of
marines and Special Forces personnel were reintroduced to fight against the
Islamic State whose growth had been provoked by the U.S. presence in the Middle
East. Even as this was happening, what had been a key U.S. objective in Iraq—a
stable non-sectarian pro-U.S. state–collapsed as the Iraqi Shiite government
aligned itself with Iran, against whom the United States was colluding with the
Israelis in a high-tech effort to sabotage Tehran’s nuclear energy program.
Obama
also began an open-ended intervention in the Syrian Civil War, deploying
Special Forces and airstrikes that eventually enmeshed the United States in a
multi-cornered confrontation with the Islamic State and other jihadists, Syrian
forces, and Russian troops. The Democratic president, ironically a recipient of
the Nobel Peace Prize, in fact expanded the U.S. military reach to North Africa
during the Arab Spring in 2011, unilaterally enforcing with its NATO allies a
“no fly zone” featuring attacks on Libyan defenses that resulted in hundreds of
civilian deaths and massive air support of the ground campaigns of anti-Qaddafi
rebels. The intervention left Libya with no centralized government, and the
country lapsed into an anarchy that persists until the present, another
American-made disaster.
In
Afghanistan, Obama added 33,000 troops to the 68,000 already in the country
when he came to office, thinking this “surge” would cripple the Taliban. This
surge failed, but he maintained 8,400 troops in the country. In fact, Obama
expanded the war to Pakistan, using drones to target Taliban leaders and
jihadists operating from bases near the border with Afghanistan; this
computer-managed war took the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians that the
military termed “collateral damage.” He also sent Special Forces on raids deep
into Pakistan, the most prominent example being the one to Abbotabad that
killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, though by this time, this was mainly a PR event
with no strategic value.
In
contrast to Bush II, who preferred “boots on the ground,” Obama, as The New
York Times’ David Sanger, put it, embraced “hard, covert power, “alluding to
the necessity of a “‘light footprint’ that enables [the United States] to fight
its wars stealthily, execute its operations with the speed of the bin Laden
raid, and then avoid lengthy entanglements.”
Like Bush II, who had never experienced war firsthand, Obama brought to
his brand of war-making an “aggressiveness” that people around him found
“surprising.”
Obama,
though, did appreciate the fact that being bogged down in the Middle East was
sapping U.S. power by provoking disaffection at home and alienation from
America abroad. Fighting so-called “asymmetric warfare” with irregulars like
the Taliban and the jihadists could go on forever, and Obama wanted to shift
the global U.S. military strategy to one that was more congenial to its
perceived strength in conventional warfare instead of counterinsurgency. The
grand new design was the “Pivot to Asia” that involved the deployment of the
bulk of the U.S. naval strength to the Indo-Pacific area to contain China.
Reorientation was easier said than done, however, as extrication from the
Middle East morass was made impossible by the strength of interests that made up
the War on Terror/Counterinsurgency lobby.
Donald
Trump Promises Withdrawal but Fails to Deliver
Donald
Trump rode to power partly on the strength of anti-war sentiment, continually
reminding people during his campaign for the presidency in 2015 and 2016 that
his rival Hillary Clinton had voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when she
was a senator. In office, however, he ended up destabilizing the Middle East
even more. There was, first of all, his unqualified support for Israel, which
led him to a major move that infuriated Arabs: the transfer of the U.S. embassy
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Then he reversed the one tension-lessening
achievement of Obama when he took the United States out of the Iran nuclear
deal that had put effective checks on Tehran’s development of weapons-grade
uranium in return for a relaxation of economic sanctions. Finally, he gave a
blank check for weapons purchases to Saudi Arabia, enabling the benighted
kingdom to wage its cruel intervention in the civil war in Yemen.
Trump
occasionally remembered, however, that eliminating boots on the ground was one
of his major campaign promises, so that the country could focus on “America
First.” But, as in the case of Bush II and Obama, both of whom had an
inferiority complex when dealing with generals owing to their lack of combat
experience, draft dodger Trump also deferred to the military. After he decided
to end the Obama-era intervention in Syria by withdrawing 1,000 U.S. troops in
early October 2019, he caved in to the military’s pushback. Over a month later,
the head of the U.S. Central Command stated there was no “end date” on
Washington’s intervention in Syria and the presence of 2,500 American troops in
neighboring Iraq.
Like
Obama, Trump was passive-aggressive, eager to show the generals that he could
be as macho as they were. The most notorious display of this behavior was when
he flagrantly disregarded international law and ordered the assassination of
Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian general, at Baghdad International Airport in
January 2020, against the advice of the top brass and the US intelligence
elite.
Faced
with passive resistance on the part of the generals, Trump ended up keeping
thousands of troops in Afghanistan during his term in office, but, mindful of
the consequences of not keeping his promise by the 2020 elections, he directed
the military in February 2020 to withdraw all troops by November 2020. Again,
the military procrastinated, with the support of the War on Terror lobby, the
deadline passed, and Joe Biden inherited some 3,500 troops and Special Forces
personnel still in the country when he took office in January 2021.
How
the Israeli Tail Wagged the American Dog
The
same pressures from the military to stay the course engulfed the new president,
but by the time Joe Biden ascended into office there was no popular support for
continuing the forever wars. They were, he realized, a severe distraction from
the real threat to the U.S. strategic position, which was China. During the 20
years between the invasion of Afghanistan and the start of Biden’s presidency,
China had become the world’s second biggest economy, possessing a military
which, while still far from parity with U.S. military power, appeared headed in
that direction.
When
he decided in 2021 to withdraw from Afghanistan, Biden was not motivated by
concerns for global peace but by an urgent desire to reframe U.S. strategy and
refocus it on China, where the United States could rely on a strategy of
containment, chiefly by naval power, for which its forces were far better
geared to carry out than chasing after popular insurgents or engaging in
nation-building where the conditions did not exist for success, as in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Syria. Obama had tried to do this with his “Pivot to Asia” but
yielded to counter-pressures from his generals to “stay the course” in the
Middle East. By the time he came to power, it was clear to Biden that staying
the course had radically depreciated U.S. power. That he was no peacenik but a
warlord determined to achieve unchallenged U.S. military hegemony with a new
strategy would be shown in his provocative moves to bait China in the South
China Sea and Taiwan a few months after the Afghanistan withdrawal.
But
as was the case with Obama and Trump, leaving the Middle East was easier said
than done. Instead of military engagement, Washington tried to regain a modicum
of control of events there by putting together a diplomatic rapprochement among
Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Arabian Gulf states like Qatar that would
stabilize the region. The Hamas offensive into Israel in October 2023, however,
blew up this plan for regional stabilization, since the Saudi government and
the other reactionary Arab states could not afford to come to a deal with
Israel while the latter was slaughtering another Arab people, the
Palestinians. The United States stood
even more isolated than when it withdrew from Afghanistan over two years
earlier, condemned by the whole Arab world, indeed by the whole world, as it
provided the Israelis with weapons to commit genocide in Gaza. Meanwhile, its
rival, China, allied with the global South, promoted a peacemaking diplomacy
that contrasted with Washington’s unqualified support for Israel’s genocidal
military offensive.
Ethical
Outrage, Political Masterstroke
In
sum, though what he desired did not unfold exactly like his blueprint, with his
attack on the Twin Towers on Sept 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden was able to provoke
the United States into committing to an unending military commitment to the
Middle East. This resulted in the overextension of American power. Once
committed to a campaign of exemplary wars, the United States found it very
difficult to withdraw and the condition of overextension would worsen over
time, sapping the resources of the empire.
Indeed,
Osama bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, for one of the reasons for
overextension is that it is infernally difficult to shed old priorities, so
that everything becomes a priority. Few have been the empires that have been
able to unclench their fists and let go of self-destructive commitments. Bin
Laden was killed in a U.S. raid on his house in Abbotabad in Pakistan in 2011,
but by then the chain reaction triggered by al-Qaeda’s attack on the Twin
Towers was unstoppable.
Judged
ethically, 9/11 was a moral outrage. Judged politically, however, it was a
masterstroke whose negative consequences for U.S. global power are still being
felt today. One may profoundly disagree
with his methods, but, in terms of achieving his goal of drastically weakening
what he called the “Great Satan,” one must, as Americans say, give the devil
his due. 9/11 was horrific, but it was not the first time that history has
paradoxically enabled a foul deed to produce a progressive outcome, in this case,
the erosion of an oppressive imperial power.
No comments:
Post a Comment