Page 3 of 4 DISPATCHES
FROM AMERICA The theater of the imperially
absurd By Tom Engelhardt
Hamid Karzai as the "mayor
of Kabul", only to abandon the task of providing
real security and beginning the genuine
reconstruction of the country in order to invade
Iraq. The rest of this particular horror story is,
by now, reasonably well known. The country beyond
booming Kabul remains impoverished and
significantly in ruins; the population evidently
ever more dissatisfied; the US and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) air war ever more
indiscriminate; and it is
again the planet's largest producer of opium
poppies and, as such, supplier of heroin.
More than five years after its
"liberation" from the Taliban, Afghanistan is a
failed state, home to a successful guerrilla war
by one of the most primitively fundamentalist
movements on the planet, and a thriving
narco-kingdom. It is only likely to get worse. For
the first time, the possibility that, like the
Russians before them, the Americans (and their
NATO allies) could actually suffer defeat in that
rugged land seems imaginable.
Iran: The country is a
rising regional power, with enormous energy
resources, and Shi'ite allies and related
movements of various sorts throughout the region,
including in southern Iraq. But it also has an
embattled, divided, fundamentalist government
capable of rallying its disgruntled populace only
with nationalism (call it playing the American
card).
Energy-rich as it is, Iran also has
a fractured, weakened economy, threatened with
sanctions; and its major enemy, the Bush
administration, is running a series of terror
operations against it, while trying to cause
dissension in its oil-rich minority regions. It is
also deploying an unprecedented show of naval and
air strength in the Persian Gulf. (An aircraft
carrier, the USS Nimitz, with its strike group, is
now on its way to join the two carrier task forces
already in place there.)
In addition, the
Bush administration has threatened to launch a
massive air assault on Iran's nuclear and other
facilities. Though Iraq runs it a close race, Iran
may be the single potentially most explosive hot
spot in the arc of instability. In a nanosecond,
it would be capable, under US attack, or even some
set of miscalculations on all sides, both of
suffering grievous harm and of imposing enormous
damage not just on US troops in Iraq, or on the
oil economy of the region, but on the global
economy as well.
Iraq: Do I
need to say a word? Iraq is the poster-boy for the
Bush administration's ability to turn whatever it
touches into hell on Earth. In Iraq, the vaunted
US military has been stopped in its tracks by a
minority Sunni insurgency. (In recent weeks,
however, the war is threatening to turn into
something larger, as the US military launches
attacks on radical Shi'ite cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia.)
Iraq now is
the site of a religio-ethnic civil war of striking
brutality, loosing waves of refugees within the
country and on neighboring states; neighborhoods
are being ethnically cleansed and deaths have
reached into the hundreds of thousands. Amid all
this, the occupying US military fully controls
only Baghdad's fortified citadel within a city,
the Green Zone (and even there dangers are
mounting) as well as a series of enormous,
multibillion-dollar bases it has built around the
country.
Iraq is now in essence a failed
state, and the situation continues to devolve
under the pressure of Bush's latest "surge" plan.
If that plan were to succeed, the citadel-state of
the Green Zone would, at best, be turned into the
city-state of Baghdad in a sea of chaos. Like
Iran, Iraq has the potential to draw other states
in the region into a widening
civil-cum-religious-cum-terrorist war.
Israel/Palestine/Lebanon:
From an early green light for prime minister Ariel
Sharon to join the "war on terror" (against the
Palestinians) to a green light for Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert to launch and continue a war against
Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, the Bush
administration has largely green-lighted Israel
these past years.
It has also ignored or,
in the case of the Lebanon war, purposely held
back any possibility of serious peace talks. The
provisional results are in. In Lebanon, the
heavily populated areas of the Shi'ite south were
strewn with Israeli cluster bombs, making some
areas nearly uninhabitable; up to a quarter of the
population was, for a time, turned into refugees;
parts of Lebanese cities including Beirut were
flattened by the Israeli Air Force; and yet
Hezbollah was strengthened, the US-backed Fouad
Siniora government radically weakened, and the
country drawn closer to a possible civil war.
In the Palestinian areas, Bush
administration democracy-promotion efforts ended
with a Hamas electoral victory. Starved of foreign
aid and having suffered further Israeli military
assaults, the Palestinian population is ever more
immiserated; Hamas and Fatah are at each other's
throats; and the US-backed president of the
Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is
in a weakened position. In the wake of a
disastrous war, Israel, with a government whose
head has a 3% approval rating, is hardly the
triumphant, dominant power in the Middle East that
various Bush administration figures once imagined.
This looks like another deteriorating situation
with no end in sight.
Somalia (or
Black Hawk Down, Round 2): In 2006,
director Porter Goss's CIA bet on a group of
discredited Somali warlords, threw money and
support behind them, and - typically - lost out to
an Islamist militia that took most of the country
and imposed relative peace on it for the first
time in years.
The ever-proactive Bush
administration then turned to the autocratic
Ethiopian regime and its military (advised and
armed by the US with a helping hand from the North
Koreans) to open "a new front" in the "war on
terror". The Ethiopians promptly launched their
own "preventive" invasion of Somalia (with modest
US air support), installed a government in the
capital, Mogadishu, proclaimed victory over the
Islamists, and - giant surprise - promptly found
themselves mired in an inter-clan civil war with
Iraqi overtones.
Today, Somalia, long a
failed state and then, for a few months, almost a
peaceful land (even if ruled by Islamist
fundamentalists), is experiencing the worst
fighting and death levels in 15 years. The new
government in Mogadishu is shaky; its Ethiopian
military supporters bloodied; more than 1,000
civilians in the capital are dead or wounded, and
tens of thousands of refugees are fleeing
Mogadishu and crossing borders in a state of need.
Rate it: a developing disaster - with worse to
come.
In short, from Somalia to Pakistan,
the region is today a genuine arc of instability.
It is filled with ever more failed states
(Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, which
never even made it to statehood before collapse),
possible future failed states (Lebanon, Pakistan),
ever shakier autocracies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
Pakistan); and huge floods of refugees, internal
and external (Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan)
as well as massively damaged areas (Afghanistan,
Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon). It is also
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