SPEAKING
FREELY The chaos theory in
action By Mark LeVine
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It is
perhaps hard for Americans to understand their
occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization. But
Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of that trend, and
in this context chaos is king. Here, military force was
used to seize control of the world's most important
commodity, oil. While corporate prospectors allied with
the US search the country like safari hunters on
elephants for any opportunity to profit from Iraq's
misery - that's how conspicuous they are - inside the
Green Zone their innocuous-looking counterparts draft
regulations for privatizing everything from health care
to prisons.
It is chaos that makes this whole
system possible. Without the chaos, Iraqis would not
allow the country to be sold off wholesale, or allow the
US troops to remain after the June 30 "transfer" of
sovereignty. Without chaos, there is little reason to
assume that the imposition of neo-liberal globalization,
which has wreaked such havoc in so many other countries
of the developing world, would be in the process of
entrenchment in Iraq. Without the chaos, there would be
more reporting on the appalling conditions in the
hospitals and schools, which are violations of the US
obligations as occupying power under the Geneva and
Hague Conventions.
Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) contractors would have to budget more
than US$10,000 to "rehabilitate" each school, and
certainly couldn't get a way with a $1,000 paint job,
pocketing the rest. Anesthesiologists wouldn't be stuck
with surplus needles that are so long they can't be used
on children and shorter people, who have to get the more
dangerous c-line procedure for lack of the correct $1
instrument.
It is also chaos that allows the
mainstream press to focus on the overt violence without
addressing what an unmitigated disaster the occupation
is viewed holistically. As I was writing this article, I
received a call from a major TV news program to join a
panel on Falluja. After a 40 minute pre-interview, the
producer decided that I "didn't fit into the mix" of the
guests he was putting together, which wound up being
three middle-aged men: a retired general, colonel and a
professor, none of whom had driven on the road to
Falluja, and none of whom dared discuss the roots of the
deepening quagmire in Iraq.
If Iraq is sliding
toward chaos, this is exactly where most Iraqis believe
the US wants them to be. A prominent Iraqi psychiatrist
who has worked with the CPA and US military explained to
me that "there is no way the United States can be this
incompetent. The chaos here has to be at least partly
deliberate." The main question on most people's minds is
not if his assertion is true, but why. In this context,
the sending of foreign contractors into Falluja in
late-model SUVs with armed escorts - down a street
clogged with traffic where they would literally be
sitting ducks - only feeds suspicion that the US is
deliberately instigating more violence as a pretext for
"punishment" and further chaos courtesy of the US
military.
Not surprisingly, the angry mob
dragging the mutilated American corpses down those
streets carried posters of Sheikh Yassin, the slain
Hamas leader. In the minds of most Iraqis, America
greenlighted his assassination by the Israelis.
If we realize that companies like Blackwater
Security services (whose personnel were killed in
Falluja) constitute a $100 billion a year business, it's
hard to imagine how the people in charge - all
well-trained military personnel with lots of combat
experience - couldn't foresee they were sending their
people into a death trap. Or is it possible that they
are that arrogant and that ignorant? I'm not sure which
is worse.
Colgate University professor Nancy
Ries describes the chaos in Iraq as "sponsored chaos",
which fits into the broad definition of chaos theory as
an ordered system or purpose underlying seemingly random
events. That is, war and occupation are wonderful
opportunities for corporations to make billions of
dollars in profits, unchecked by the laws and
regulations that hamper their profitability in peace
time.
Because of this, in the postmodern global
era, global corporations and the government elites with
whom they work have great incentive to sponsor global
chaos and the violence it generates. Several recent
books, such as Joma Nazpary's Post-Soviet Chaos
or Vadim Volkov's Violent Entrepreneurs, explore
how the chaos of the post-Soviet era enabled a
"counter-revolution" in Russia and countries like
Kazakhstan, where competing networks of groups, from
criminal gangs and political parties to families and
friends, all compete for resources in the decidedly
one-sided contest for power and wealth that is the
globalized market economy. Iraq is sadly following this
trend.
Yet if Jonathan Steele argued in the
Guardian that the US is "creating its own Gaza" through
the chaos in Iraq, for me the application of the chaos
theory there has created a strange mix of Gaza and Tel
Aviv: on the one hand there's the violence of the
resistance against the occupation, which feels like Gaza
or Nablus - at least you know who your enemy is and
who's shooting at whom. But on top of it is the violence
of Iraqis against Iraqis - the suicide bombings and
assassinations whose randomness gives one the feeling of
living in Tel Aviv. Put the two together and the
tenseness and violence of daily life in the main cities
of Iraq is hard to bear, and it's only going to get
worse. Worst of all, the chaos and insecurity make it
impossible for civil society to produce an alternative
political discourse either for collaboration with or
violent religious opposition to the occupation.
The day I returned home I spoke to a leading
scholar of Iraqi Shi'ism, who firmly argued against the
notion that the US was deliberately stoking the flames
of chaos: "Believe me," he said, "they are that
incompetent." And perhaps he's right - at least from
10,000 miles away a lot of the mess that is Iraq can be
explained by the combination of arrogance, ignorance and
ideological bolshevism of the political and military
leadership in the Bush administration, coupled with the
greed of their corporate sponsors.
But when
you're on the ground and you experience the daily impact
and scale of the chaos, it's much harder not to
understand the situation at least as a combination of
what one activist described as "the chaos that is the
occupation, plus the chaos the US is specifically
creating to further the occupation". Whatever the cause,
a lot of Iraqis and Americans are dying needlessly -
unless you consider that the billions being made off the
occupation, and the larger war on terror, is worth the
price in blood and hatred.
Mark LeVine
is assistant professor of history at the University of
California, Irvine. He is the co-editor, with Pilar
Perez and Viggo Mortensen, of Twilight of Empire:
Responses to Occupation (Perceval Press, 2003) and
author of the forthcoming tentatively titled Why
They Don't Hate Us: Islam and the World in the Age of
Globalization (Oneworld Publications, 2004).
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click hereif you
are interested in contributing.
