What Iraqi Air Force?

The LA Times has come out with an article on one of the most under-reported but important considerations for any meaningful discussion of the future of the occupation: the Iraqi Air Force. It sums up the situation thusly: “The U.S. military has hurriedly tried to turn over square mile after square mile of territory to Iraqi soldiers and police officers, but it has yet to yield control of a single cubic inch of the country's skies.” Further, “[A]ddressing the question of when [the US] will allow the Iraqi air force to acquire combat capabilities is years away. The U.S. Air Force… will retain control of Iraqi airspace for the foreseeable future, regardless of any drawdown of ground troops.”

For the sake of thoroughness (and because the risk of long-windedness on this issue is so slight), here is the current status of the Iraqi Air Force, taken from the Department of Defense’s May 2006 report "Iraq: Measuring Stability and Security" (which can be found here):

Iraqi “reconnaissance aircraft consist of single-engine airplanes used in civilian and commercial markets.” In other words, the reconnaissance force is not, strictly speaking, composed of military equipment. It numbers no more than a handful of aircraft. There are three helicopter squadrons: 2nd, 4th & 12th. The 2nd Squadron consists of 16 UH-1H helicopters, all of which will be in the United States for upgrades at least until January of next year. Eight of a planned ten Mi-17 helicopters have been delivered to the 4th Squadron, but are awaiting armor upgrades as well as further pilot training. The 12th Squadron is equipped with five Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopters, all of which are used for training purposes. The 23rd Transport Squadron has three C-130E planes. This plus 600 personnel (only 14 of whom are actual pilots) represents the length and breadth of the Iraqi Air Force.

There are several points to be made from this. The first regards what effect US control over Iraqi air space will have on Iraqi sovereignty. The second is the stunning lack of clarity about the Iraqi air force as the question of troop withdrawal is batted around the domestic sphere. The third is the longer-term relevance that such control has for the geopolitical interests of the US.

The point about Iraqi sovereignty is the easiest of the three to make. Simply put, there can be no sovereignty so long as a country’s air space is under the complete control of a foreign power. The foreign power acts as a permanent veto on all policies - military and governmental. This particular plank in the overall US strategy is perhaps the most consistent element of the past fifteen years. The 1991 policy of "No-Fly Zones" has been removed from the current lexicon only because the "zone" and the entire country are now indistinguishable.

The second point is murkier, for it involves the misleading rhetoric of withdrawal and the domestic political disconnect with any real commitment to Iraqi sovereignty and self-determination. The problem with calls to “bring home the troops” is not that it is premature or defeatist, but that it is disingenuous. For example, the debate today in the Senate over the Defense Appropriations Bill for 2007 is focused around “redeployment” in Iraq rather than “withdrawal”. (As the New York Times notes, the latter word is not even used in the Democrat's proposal.) Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), explains “redeployment”: the US would retain a force in Iraq capable of “direct participation in counter-terrorism activities, training Iraqi security forces, and protecting United States infrastructure and personnel.” Beyond police check-point duty, what else is there? The crucial point is that the cited activities can all be accomplished from one of the US’s massive, permanent air bases. The Democratic Party is calling not for withdrawal from Iraq, but for withdrawal to the permanent footprint. This is but the latest in the long line of America's empty gestures toward Iraqi sovereignty.

The geopolitical advantages of a permanent military control over Iraq are too numerous to be handled in detail here. They range from containment of China to bulwark against Iran to support for Israel to encirclement of Russia and beyond. Each of these (and many others) requires separate treatment, not only to emphasize the advantages, but to explore the dangers involved and the ever-present possibility of overstretch. Suffice to say for the moment that wielding ultimate control over Iraq through air power achieves the trifecta of allowing incremental troop withdrawal for US domestic consumption, the absence of major US military presence in Iraqi urban centers and Washington's ultimate authority over the government in Baghdad.

As with any other country, Iraq is incapable of defending itself without an air force. Internally, the central government is incapable of asserting its authority without the air power of the occupier. In short, without an independent air force Iraq as a military power is untenable. Under these circumstances, total US withdrawal would amount to national suicide. If foreign powers (Israel in the Kurdish north or Iran in the Shi’ite south) did not fill the vacuum, then the warring fault lines within the country would rip it apart in short order.

The point to be digested is not that the United States should, therefore, continue to stay in Iraq. Rather it is that the efforts made up to this point (and even on this day) demonstrate clearly that there has never been any intention of leaving. As President Bush recently told the troops in Baghdad, Iraq is the "central front in the war on terror" and, presumably, operates by the laws of that larger conflict on which all parties agree. To truly withdraw from the former, we shall, it seems, have to end the latter.

“Be Jubilant My Feet!”

On June 19th, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union Army came ashore at Galveston, the Texas barrier Island and slave colony. Granger took to the balcony at Ashton Villa (the newly built home of a wealthy slave-owner and hardware store mogul) to read the contents of his “General Order No. 3”:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

That day came to be known as Juneteenth—to commemorate the moment when the those who were the subject of remote political engagements became aware of their newly won freedoms. For people who had never been recognized by the state as anything other than chattel Juneteenth signified the instantiation of a new set of political ideas that until then had been the stuff of abolitionist fantasies. While Galveston may not have been the first jurisdiction to reorient itself to the new freedoms, it came to signify the entire process of translating political vision, through warfare, into the substance of daily life—in short, Juneteenth was the day that the new freedoms achieved a corporeal existence in the minds and activities of the freedmen themselves. Juneteenth was the day it became real.

Of course these freedoms were in some sense already “real” and had material force in the minds and activities those who protested against slavery and fought in the Civil War, on either side. In their book, Labor’s Untold Story, Boyer and Morais quote a newspaper article from the Boston Daily Evening Voice:

Capital knows no difference between white and black laborers; and labor cannot make any, without undermining its won platform and tearing down walls of its defense. The whole united power of labor is necessary to the successful resistance of the united power of capital.

Clearly the deeper ideas of freedom and labor were already in circulation among even the working classes. That people who held these ideas were willing to make a principled defense against every incentive to ignore their enslaved counterparts and fight what remains America’s most costly war draws uneasy comparisons with our situation today. Juneteenth 2006 brings into relief how the US projection of military force in the War on Terror is starved of ideas. Beneath the stage-crafted freedomspeak there is no official declaration of political principles in this war. Mere pragmatism rules the day, and even then it is hard to see the how the arguments for war could stimulate human agency into changing something. The enemy is vague, the Iraq war is grey, and there is no particular enemy against whom we can build a strategy for instantiating a political vision that our leaders have yet to enumerate. To celebrate Juneteenth in 2006 is to have nostalgia for a moment when the political conditions were laid bare, revealing us all to be freedmen.

Why are we in Vietnam?

Recently, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld toured Indochina to revitalize concerns for Prisoners Of War and those left Missing In Action at the end of the Vietnam War. The POW/MIA organizations have refused to close-up shop and continue to propagate the myth of how the man in black pajamas never released captive US soldiers or their remains. The myth has generated rumors of mass graves, of secret detention centers (not unlike those really-existing facilities in use at this moment by covert US forces), torture camps and the like.

During the 1990’s a senate committee was organized under pressure from such POW/MIA groups, and rightly so, to find the truth of the situation and repatriate the dead from Vietnam. In a move that should not be mistaken for heroism, Senators McCain and Kerry took up the “unglamorous task that nobody else wanted.” Their Senate Select POW/MIA Committee found that the issue was closed, and confirmed in large part the thesis advanced in Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW-MIA Myth in America; namely, that U.S. politicians employed family ties and solidarity with veterans to advance unrelated political goals. For example, the postwar sanctions against Vietnam lasted until 1994 as a punitive measure that leveraged the POW issue as a smokescreen to stifle, among other economic activities, Vietnamese catfish and shrimp exports.

Rumsfeld’s South-Asian safari was yet another smokescreen. The vets he tries so desperately to appeal to, including those on active duty, are meant to see this trip as a significant “helping hand” from the DOD at a time when pay cuts, cuts to veterans benefits, cuts in tuition benefits for National Guardsmen and VA hospital closures* are being felt in aggregate by the potentially mutinous rank and file. The morale issue is certainly too broad to be understood in terms of Rumsfeld’s POW PR stunt, but the trip is symptomatic of the DOD’s awareness that a morale problem is on the rise.

In the Vietnam War this problem manifested itself in mass desertion and resistance against the Selective Service. The problem became so acute that many soldiers defected to Vietnam to start new lives, if not defecting into the North Vietnamese Army directly. Overworked soldiers, remunerated with less, and facing a crisis of mission legitimacy will ultimately disobey—the question is what form this disobedience will take. The US presence in Vietnam turned Americans against corruption in their own society, and those who realized their situation were drawn to a North Vietnamese politics that was more emancipatory than that which produced the Gulf of Tonkin and Napalm. It might be worth rethinking the heroism of those Missing In Action, who unlike John McCain, would rather be dead and forgotten than return to a diseased polics as a hero of that sinister war.

This side of the POW/MIA body count has never been reconciled among families and veterans organizations in the US, but the issue was pervasive enough to invite official recognition in a DOD amnesty program to bring defectors back into the fold. In the end 268 defectors came back to base, with some allegations of retaliatory violence against them in spite of the amnesty program, and the rest remain today in Vietnam, classified in the US as POW-MIA.

Rumsfeld’s trip has to be seen in relation to the Gen. Michael Hagee’s “Core Values” publicity tour. Hagee has taken an itinerant response to Haditha, conditioned by similar incidents in Afghanistan and the general unease about torture in Guantanamo and Europe. These trips aim to restore some of the key relationships between soldiers and their commanders, but in a completely therapeutic way. Rumsfeld makes a gesture toward the soldier’s sense of well-being and Hagee makes a complimentary gesture toward the soldier’s sense of purpose.

Hagee’s pitch is more difficult. The War on Terror is eroding the internal justifications of U.S. military force and this in turn pits soldiers against their own values. Haditha and Abu-Ghraib are just a small part of far larger theater of war that offers multiple opportunities for atrocity—which are sometimes taken up by men and women who would otherwise be living among us as well adjusted neighbors. Somehow low morale and a failure to identify with, (or perhaps an over-identification with), the “Core Values” leads our homespun heroes into dark acts, and while this path is complicated it is not above our understanding—or the DOD’s for the matter. Hence the Rumsfeld-Hagee PR campaigns.

Sadly, there is no Ho Chi Minh in the War on Terror. Disaffected soldiers wanting more than the morass of inner corruption at the DOD will not be turned around by the leadership’s therapeutic gestures—but there seems to be no politics to which they can turn and this begs the question: what happens to defectors in the absence of a concrete politics of human emancipation? To what side can they defect?

*The hospitals issues is complex, with scale-backs and closures contextualized by an increase in the number of veterans seeking care, as well as the beltway maneuvering over CARES recommendations to neoliberalize the VA health system. In some cases, today’s proposed closures are tomorrow’s electoral pet projects—but always the resolve to consolidate services in the VA health system mirrors what is happening in the civilian system: less service for more patients.

Gestural Politics

In the wake of similar moves by DOD brass, Bush’s surprise visit to Iraq extends his administration’s proud tradition of leadership in gestures, symbols and half-measures of etiquette. This tradition actually took root in the Clinton administration where the most celebrated act of New World Order political catharsis was the President chewing on his lower lip, and offering his empathy: “I feel your pain”.

Immediately after hurricane Katrina Bush found himself on the wrong side of this tradition when he failed to appear, in person, at the site of the disaster. Critics from all sides chiseled at the President’s approval rating, as if his first-hand presence in the aftermath would have made anything better for those affected by the situation. It was as if Bush paid the price for not bearing witness, in the good Christian sense, to the misery of others. But he has not always been so insensitive. At ground-zero on September 14th Bush branded his Presidency with the state of emergency, standing atop a mound of ground-up Trade Center, shouting his bullhorn address: “I can hear you! I can hear you!”

It seems that our leaders are responding to a generalized wish for recognition, not of our collective interests or Utopian social dreams, but rather a validation of the most basic facts of the emergency situation. Leadership always has symbolic qualities that should be taken seriously and maintained as essential—what is most important is not that symbolization is taking place, but the content of the symbolizing process. It matters not that Bush didn’t appear instantly at the Katrina disaster, since when he eventually made the trip all he could offer was an inventory of government intentions to be carried out remotely and apolitically, and at the expense of the political autonomy of those hit hardest by the disaster.

Bush’s Baghdad surprise is no different. His visit was so logistically complicated and secret, that when he finally appears it is as if he has jumped out of a cake to validate the newly minted Iraqi leadership. The symbolism of his visit is meant to confer legitimacy not because of the positive content of specific ideas about the Iraqi political process, but because of how hard it was for him to get into the Green Zone without getting shot down by insurgents. Thus the content of the symbolizing process is simply a reference to the process itself, not to politics. So it is that when Bush told Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki that he had come to "to look you in the eye”, he meant nothing more.

Levels of Complicity

A short while back, the New York Times had a lengthy piece on the evolving role of the security forces in Iraq. Their well-known complicity in the ongoing violence makes the situation appear quite bleak. Elements from the Ministry of Defense are exposed as having actively aided the Sunni insurgency, just as Shiite death squads from the Interior Ministry have targeted the Sunni minority. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath the seemingly clear sectarian division lies a vast network of competing security agencies and a “galaxy” of armed groups, each with its own loyalties. Significantly, since the various armed groups act on behalf of either political parties or factions within the government (or insurgents), there is nothing resembling unanimity among Iraq’s leaders on how to address the problem, or even how properly to identify it.

In some sense, then, it is difficult to see how this situation will be brought under control as the sectarian divisions become endemic to the way in which Iraq is governed. (In spite of the uplifting “turning-point” rhetoric of the new cabinet appointments, one doubts how significantly this will improve things in the long run.) And the situation seems to be getting worse, not better. According to the LA Times, more people died last month in Baghdad than in any other month since the invasion. The figure, just shy of 1,400, does not include soldiers nor victims of explosions, making the number all the more breathtaking for what it says about the spiraling sectarian divide and the role of the security forces. Yet, as the BBC reports, “[N]o-one believes these are the true figures from the violence in and around Baghdad as many bodies are not taken to the morgue, or are never found…”

Although the New York Times treats the American effort to build the Iraqi security forces as a failure, they regard the ensuing violence as though it were a mere byproduct of that failure. In other words, it was the half-hearted effort that helped lead Iraq to its current insecurity. But is that all there is to it? Was the effort itself essentially pure-of-heart and lacking only in the execution?

In fact, as Lenin’s Tomb points out, the history of the security build up has been anything but a well-meant but under-staffed affair. From US-sponsored assassination and kidnapping squads, to the portfolios of certain figures charged with training and leading the security forces, the weight of the violence seems not so much a byproduct, as a coordinated plan that, admittedly, has gotten beyond anyone’s control. In short, though sectarian divisions exist within Iraq, what made them decisive to the security situation was the corrosive influence that the United States had on the initial training and recruiting of the various forces. The murderous role that certain police commandos were playing, says LT, was known from the beginning. “Yet there’s no consistency to the narrative, there’s no sense of connecting these things.” There is, he says, a “perceptible prohibition” against taking the narrative beyond the causes of death or identification of the parties involved. Those ultimately responsible appear to have had no influence at all.

Another Milestone on the Road to Hell

Business as usual in Iraq Monday, as two large bombs exploded in Kirkuk killing 15. Later, a grim-faced Bush announced that the US would 'bring to justice' the newly announced successor to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi who was 'brought to justice' by a 500lb bomb last Wednesday. Against Christopher Hitchen's predictable claim that "Zarqawi contributed enormously to the wrecking of Iraq's experiment in democratic federalism", it appears that there remain some issues unresolved.

Not that anybody will much mourn the passing of Zarqawi. A lengthy (and fortuitously timed) article in Atlantic Monthly describes his sordid rise from petty criminal to brutal head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. A relatively late-comer to jihadi circles, Zarqawi was neither intelligent, nor charismatic. Perhaps more than any of the prominent jihadis, his infamy was established by the US. Indeed, as the Atlantic Monthly article reminds us it was Colin Powell himself who, in February 2003 "catapulted him onto the world stage. In his address to the United Nations making the case for war in Iraq, Powell identified al-Zarqawi—mistakenly, as it turned out—as the crucial link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime."

Zarqawi obviously made an effort to fill the role allotted to him, bringing to the insurgency a brutality that left both local and international audiences shocked. But this too was his downfall. Zarqawi's particular brand of media-savvy nihilism seems to have been too destabilizing and anarchic for the mainstream insurgency. In a process that we have described here before, the jihadi's vision of zealous self-sacrifice for the cosmic cause can have little to offer established societies with social and material needs. Alexander Cockburn reminds us on Counterpunch, that Zarqawi dies isolated and largely undefended.

But Zarqawi and the other militants never clearly aimed to integrate themselves with, and help, the Iraqis. They are in Iraq living out their own fantasy of clashing civilizations, sacrificing political goals and even themselves for a victory whose only measure can be some internal ethic. Just as in Afghanistan, where they were more often than not at loggerheads with local mujahadeen, the complex battlefield to which they have taken the jihad is contingent; the political situation of the indigenous society is a potential obstacle to be negotiated on the way to fulfilling a larger purpose. In this sense the jihadis are the mirror image of the US occupation--fighting a war in somebody else's name in order to escape the moribund nature of their efforts at home. Each 'milestone' of this war, as Zarqawi's death is claimed to be, marks out another measure on our own road, not that of the Iraqis.

Proving Innocence

In response to another bungled police raid, the London Observer newspaper penned an editorial that made the bold claim that ‘it is better to occasionally kick down the wrong doors than to allow a tragedy for fear of causing offence’. There are few statements that express so succinctly the degraded understanding of human freedom that prevails today.

The Observer was referring to the police raid in Forest Gate, an East London suburb, which took places in the early hours of Friday, June 2nd. The Metropolitan Police had acted upon intelligence information provided to them by what they thought was a reliable source. The information pertained to the preparation of a bomb in a house in the Forest Gate area. One reason for the ensuing controversy is that one of the two suspects, Mohammed Abdul Kahar, was shot in the shoulder during the raid. The British Muslim community responded in anger, seeing the raid as another example of British Muslims being targeted, without the requisite proof, in the name of a preventative ‘war on terror’.

Since last Friday, no evidence of bomb-making activity has been found. The two brothers who were arrested have been released from police custody without charge. The Met are having difficulty hushing up this particular blunder, and are opting instead to pass the blame onto the MI5, the British intelligence service. Gareth Pierce, the lawyer for the brothers, has also said that they will sue the Met commissioner, Ian Blair, for damages. This mistake comes at a very bad time for Scotland Yard, as another British newspaper, the News of the World, releases a leaked copy of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report on the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian who died in an another case of mistaken identity. This report suggests that de Menezes was killed as a result of a series of informational and organizational police failures.

In such a context, we might be surprised to read that the Observer comes out so heavily in favor of the police and the government’s ‘war on terror’. Comments written in response to the op-ed suggest that many of the left-leaning Observer readers are shocked that the newspaper should endorse, so whole-heartedly, such a police blunder as the price to pay for living in a comparatively safe society. Most responses echo Benjamin Franklin’s pithy statement: ‘they that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’. Granting the police ‘carte blanche’ in following up intelligence tips is generally regarded as too much of a trade-off of one’s liberty.

However, as has been argued on AWOT before, there are limits to understanding such blunders through the framework of a security-liberty trade-off. Rather than a trade-off, what we see here are the consequences of a much degraded view of liberty. Previously the presumption of innocence was considered to be a pillar of liberty. What this presumption reflects are the bonds of trust that unite society, and make up the foundations of social order. At the same time, the role played by the presumption of innocence in the functioning of our legal system expresses the extent to which legal institutions are founded upon free subjects, who willingly delegate power to the state. Only with the presumption of innocence can we understand law as something that we freely accept to be bound by.

The Observer’s editorial makes a mockery of such a presumption. What it implies is that we are all guilty, rather than innocent. Consequently, only once a police raid has trashed our house, and once we’ve been shot, can our innocence be properly established. The presumption of guilt has become as much a pillar of contemporary society as was the presumption of innocence. It encapsulates the role played by fear and suspicion today, where we view fellow citizens as threats to our own security. Our willingness to accept bungled police raids as a cost to pay for our security has little to do with a calculated trade-off. Rather, it is the logical conclusion of a society of individuals frightened of, and isolated from, one another.

AWOT Essay: Liberty and the Need to Assert Interests, Part II

Among the more jarring aspects of the war in Iraq is the way in which it melds two apparently contradictory justifications. On the one hand, the Administration claims that the war is one front in the war on terror, and that the purpose of invasion was to eliminate all potential threats to domestic security and to protect Americans against violent attack. On the other hand, the Administration claims that the war was a humanitarian gesture, motivated by a selfless moral principle of providing all victimized peoples with their basic human rights.

Rather than expose the obvious fallacies of both positions, we'd like to take a step back and discuss how these two arguments are actually intertwined. But even more so, we want to show how these arguments take place against a contemporary cultural backdrop. This backdrop reduces politics to an exclusive concern with physical safety, and bases individual equality not on the capacity of groups to assert their sense of the good life, but on the desire of all individuals to avoid injury. In a sense, the images of personhood represented by the war on terror and by humanitarian intervention are identical: in both cases, the safeguarded person is presented as a victim, isolated and subject to violence. In this essay, more theoretical than many of our pieces, we'd like assess how the rise of security as the defining political language goes hand in hand with the loss of interests as a meaningful way to talk about politics and collective liberty.

In Part I of this post, we discussed how the war on terror, the rise of a unitary executive, and the pervasiveness of arguments from security each result from a breakdown in social trust. One of the critical consequences of this breakdown is the way in which it undermines the ability of citizens to see each other as sharing collective interests, and thus to imagine politics as a means for unifying and asserting such interests. In Protest USA, we sought to illustrate how immigrant mobilizing hints at the social possibilities if interest is once again placed at the center of politics. Recent immigrant organizing has been reminiscent of the great historical efforts of the past (such as the labor, civil rights, and women's movements), which were all premised on concrete and common experiences, and saw group action as a means not only for redress but also for developing new, more compelling accounts of freedom.

Today, by contrast, the very idea that promoting one's interests should be the basis for democratic practice seems suspect. Interests are deemed "special interests," attempts by partial associations to serve their own selfish needs at the cost of the greater good. One sees this most clearly in how previous social movements -- those that sought to speak in the name of all Americans and on behalf of a specific account of liberty -- have each been transformed into "special interests."

Labor once had an expansive meaning, covering all agricultural, industrial, and service workers. Labor organizing struggled to demonstrate how shared economic interest, regardless of one's race or gender, could unite distinct groups and provide a common language for citizenship and freedom. Today, however, the labor movement has in large measure been reduced to a bargaining entity, the union, which exists as one among many competing interest groups employing money and lobbying efforts to capture benefits for members (benefits that at times directly undermine the interests of other marginalized, often non-white, workers).

The same story repeats itself in the cases of the civil rights and the women's movement, with no greater example than the ongoing debates over affirmative action. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of such policies, affirmative action illustrates how asserting interests no longer works to build collective solidarity (by articulating and emphasizing shared experiences), but instead reinforces social divisions. Opponents see such measures as the special benefit par excellence, balancing the material interests of one group against those of others. Where once the project of equality required uniting students, labor, churches, and disenfranchized citizens into a single coherent movement, now it seems to be a zero-sum game. The central question has become how best to redistribute a diminishing pie rather than how to articulate the common grievances that bind even seemingly opposed groups.

The result is a political divide between the high and the low. Most citizens have come to view the ordinary business of government as tedious pork-barrel politics, in which countless organized interests vie for money and goods. Such a vision reduces democratic life to little more than organized bribery and electoral turnover. For some, this is all there is to politics: competing groups fight over state entitlements, and to the extent that politicians can provide such entitlements they remain in office. A well-functioning democracy simply spreads benefits widely, and ensures an appropriate balance of power between conflicting interests so that no single group (business or the unions) can predominate. This image of politics goes hand in hand with the reality of massive popular demobilization. Citizens, who see themselves as sharing little of value with fellow neighbors and workers, view government as just an endless fight over resources in which the spoils go to whoever is richer, stronger, or more connected.

Perhaps even more insidiously, the breakdown of social trust means that citizens are increasingly loath to make arguments about freedom and liberty in terms of interests. Bringing up one's concrete economic, social, or political position smacks of selfishness and seems ill-suited for articulating lofty ambitions. With interests reduced to the low politics of group bargaining, high politics becomes the domain of moral argument. To the extent that we hope to convince others of the idealism and purpose of our commitments, individuals increasingly couch arguments in abstract moral terms (terms independent of one's social standing or particular experience).

For instance, supporters of affirmative action often avoid arguments defending the policy as materially improving the conditions of women or minorities (say by raising standards of living or increasing the size of the middle class). The actual tangible improvement is less important than the larger moral principle at stake -- be it diversity or historical redress. In other words, the principle of righting past wrongs justifies the policy even if the particular individuals who benefit may come from privileged backgrounds. Whether or not their current experiences necessitate action is less important than making the moral statement about equal dignity. The fear that affirmative action will be seen as simply a special entitlement leads proponents to diminish interest-based arguments, and to argue that the principle at stake is so valuable that it alone justifies whatever hardships or social costs are produced.

The classic example of the turn to moral argument as a basis for high politics is the discourse of human rights and, specifically, humanitarian intervention. Intervention is considered noble and morally worthy precisely because the intervenor has no "political" stake in protecting the victim of state violence or of foreign oppression. In a sense, such acts are entirely stripped of any basis in interest, and so cannot be accused of being selfish or morally questionable. Rights protection seeks only to guard individuals from violence, and thus serves no indentifiable interest besides the thin, universal one of freedom from cruelty. In fact, such arguments are not properly political at all, because they hope to transcend ordinary disagreements. For the activist, rights should be promoted regardless of the petty disputes and social commitments that ordinarily dominate government action and interest group mobilizing.

This vision of high politics as a realm that embraces moral rather that interest-based arguments suggests a serious hollowness in contemporary democracy. Exactly because humanitarian arguments are not rooted in the specific social experiences of the given activist, they underscore the difficulties of sustaining political action. Such mobilizing is ill-equipped to create links of solidarity either at home or abroad, since it bases activism on a deeply reduced account of what individuals collectively share. Rather than being tied by a common social position or set of grievances, humanitarianism links activists to far away victims by resorting to a lowest common demoninator -- one's equal subjection to physical harm. Think, for example, of T-shirts commonly seen at anti-globalization rallies that say 'We Are All Palestinians Now', a clear sign that the morally-inspired see the links between themselves and others in terms of victimization. Moreover, because the activist's position is usually disconnected from the actual material circumstances facing the "suffering" individual in Asia, Africa or the Middle East, humanitarian arguments tend to blind potential intervenors to the real political contests and thus the likely effects of foreign intervention.

The key point is not that human rights arguments should be abandoned or that one should never resort to purely moral reasoning. Rather, it's that for such arguments to bind citizens together and to create the conditions for collective action and a robust account of liberty, they must be tied to shared interests. Without such interests the foundation for popular power -- group solidarity -- disappears. Instead, we're left with two isolated realms of politics. One where any attempt to articulate interests seems tinged with corruption, and another where real political engagement reduces to the vanishing point one's actual personal stake in events and their outcomes.

Ultimately, it is under circumstances where social trust has collapsed and interests seem to divide rather than to unify constituencies that security becomes paramount. In a sense, security-talk underscores the same minimal account of politics -- protecting the body from physical violence -- that human rights arguments can devolve into at their most abstract. For individuals no longer bound by common grievances or shared aspirations, all that remains is an equality produced by universal threat. Under such conditions, if politics has any higher purpose it is merely to make physical protection widely accessible. Thus, the Administration can justify the war in Iraq as both against terror and in defense of human rights, because both bases are simply alternative means for guarding against bodily threat.

Lost in such an 'equal freedom from violence' are not only the social projects and collective commitments that once motivated citizens and grounded accounts of freedom, but the very means to achieve these goals. Chief among those means has been the attempt to mobilize individuals on the basis of their actual lives and predicaments, and to illustrate how these lives share far more than is ordinarily appreciated. To the extent that the war on terror is part of a larger cultural climate marked by isolation and social mistrust, only by reclaiming the value of interests and grounding popular mobilization in concrete experience can this climate be confronted.

Siege Mentality

One consequence of the hysteria attending the war on terror is that even when a moment of genuine threat is encountered, the rhetoric of fear must make more out of it than is really there.

A CBS/AP article about the recent terror arrests in Canada illustrates this quite nicely. As noted by Wonkette, “officials” in the article (who remain unnamed) are not only convinced that an attack is imminent, but that it will differ in its fundamental ethos from 9/11. According to the article, in the coming attack, “[t]he casualty toll will not be that high, the target probably not that big. We may not even recognize it for what it is at first…”

What accounts for such forecasting? What, after all, does it mean that we might not recognize an attack for what it is at first? Perhaps it has something to do with this Christian Science Monitor piece, also on the fallout from the arrests. Apparently, Canada is facing something new - “the jihadi generation.” Five of the suspects, you see, are juveniles, and there seems to be no connection with Al Qaida. What, then, can account for these activities? John Thomas, from the Mackenzie Institute, a think tank in Toronto, puts it this way: “These are kids at a transition, between Islamic society and Western society. A lot of people will get militarized if they’re unsure of their own identity. They’re just young and stupid. If you’re 17, bored, restless, you want to meet girls – hey, be a radical.”

If the search for the roots of terror are to extend into the minds of Canada’s bored and restless 17 year olds, then the situation must indeed seem a bit hopeless. What’s more, the CSM article quotes a Canadian government report on “homegrown” terror from 2005 which concludes that there “does not appear to be a single process that leads to extremism the transformation is highly individual (sic).” In other words, it could be anyone, and for any reason.

This is a dangerous beginning for the dialogue over these arrests in Canada. Organizing society on the basis of distrust will not solve the problems of estrangement and alienation to which these teenagers have ostensibly reacted. But solving such problems is hardly a priority in the war on terror. The siege mentality, which will find an enemy lurking no matter what, has its own interests to serve, and must go beyond the arrests themselves and weave a much more oblique narrative for these events. To begin with, you likely will not know who it will be, and you might not even know when it happens. But, in case of the latter event, the siege mentality will alert you.

The United States and Somalia: Who Threatens Whom?

Since the terrorists attacks of 9/11, Somalia has received a fair amount of attention as a potential ‘breeding ground’ for terrorism. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example, published a brief on Somalia explaining that the Bush administration was afraid of terrorism in Somalia “because Somalia is a chaotic, poor, battle-weary Muslim country with no central government.” John Prendergast, senior advisor to the International Crisis Group and Washington insider, recently wrote in the Washington Post about ‘Our Failure in Somalia’ in which he argued that

“Somalia is an al-Qaeda recruiter's dream -- with rampant unemployment, travel restrictions, and no government or foreign investment -- and young Somalis will turn to terrorism for money and, occasionally, because of shared ideology.”

The questionable sociology underlying Prendergast’s claim aside (most Al-Qaeda recruits seem to have come from middle class settings, with some education in the West), recent events seem to confirm the general concern.

In the past few days, an Islamic militia has taken control of Mogadishu, ending at least temporarily the fifteen year-long struggle for the Somali capital. This has given force to the argument that there is a ‘Talibanization’ of Somalia. The rising success of Islamist militias, against secular warlords, has convinced observers like Prendergast that the US needs to be more involved, and take sides more seriously in favor of the warlords.

“A successful counterterrorism effort would require the United States to pull the political and military threads together into a coherent strategy of broader engagement. U.S. officials and those from other governments throughout the region uniformly have told me that long-term counterterrorism objectives can be achieved only by American investment in the Somali peace process.”

What Prendergast, and the rest of those calling for more extensive American engagement, miss is that it is precisely the ‘American investment in the Somali peace process’ that has been central to the problem. A little history reminds us why.

Throughout the 1980s, the United States supported Siad Barre, a deeply authoritarian ruler who was able to dominate by pure force for an entire decade, only because of the financial and military aid he received from the US. When the United States withdrew support for its Cold War client in 1990, Siad Barre was rapidly overthrown, and the years of repression and extreme recession drove the once nationalist opposition back towards a clan basis. The ensuing civil war produced no decisive victor, and the country has since been unable to establish a new government. Civil war in the south of the country was exacerbated by a massive American-led UN intervention in 1992, UNOSOM, that brought nothing but extended misery, increased fighting, and a series of awful abuses by foreign ‘peacekeepers’ including the famous, usually misrepresented, ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident. Only in northern Somalia, where American and other international brokers played little role, did some measure of stability get restored, but in the south, especially around Mogadishu, fighting has persisted amidst endless internationally mediated ‘Transitional Administrations’ and peace talks.

Throughout the 1990s, secular militias have had one foot in these international peace negotiations, taking place mainly in Kenya, and spent as much time trying to please foreign mediators, and outmaneuver competitors, as they have developing deeper foundations in their own society. Lured by the promise of foreign backing, international recognition, and perhaps the actual military support of external forces, these militias weaken themselves politically. Not only have the negotiations actually extended the civil war – creating an incentive for a militia that loses at the negotiating table to return to fighting until its bargaining position is improved – they have ensured that there is a political vacuum in Somalia itself.

It is into this vacuum that the Islamic militias have stepped, laying firmer roots in Somali society, and offering war-weary Somalis the prospect of peace. As with the Taliban, these Islamic militias are successful because they have managed to ground their project in the real needs of Somalis. Moreover, as even the Council on Foreign Relations admits, there is very little evidence that these militias have any contact with al-Qaeda, and the Islamism they preach is more shaped by the peculiarities of the Somali experience, than any trans-national jihadist ideology.

What does this mean for ‘American investment in the Somali peace process? The point is that the Islamic militias are a much more promising source of peace than any internationally lead peace process. Deeper American involvement, especially with the secular militias the US seems to support (see also the CFR report), will only prolong a protracted civil war, and further destabilize a country whose political development has been so profoundly warped by geopolitics. The Talibanization of Somalia is not necessarily a bad thing at all, but rather evidence of an incipient, truly domestic political process, with far more long-run promise than absorption into the vicissitudes of America’s war on terror. The threat the United States poses to Somalia far, far outweighs any threat Somalia poses to the United States.

Whose Scandal is Haditha?

According to this Stars and Stripes report, the commander of the “Multi-National Corps-Iraq” has ordered a new round of training on the “legal, moral and ethical” conduct of war. This is in response to the Haditha massacre, in which it appears that Marines murdered Iraqis execution-style as revenge for the killing of a Marine, and as a broader expression of frustration and hatred. There are many things to say about this ongoing scandal, but this particular aspect of it highlights two important points.

First, while a somewhat half-hearted and opportunistic maneuver, the decision to renew training for the soldiers has a deeper meaning than mere emphasis on the military’s ostensible commitment to human rights. It points to how the major way of calling the war and occupation into question derives from the appearance of having violated human rights standards and international law. The problem, of course, is that the sheer fact of violating human rights standards or international law is not, in and of itself, an argument against the war. If the war is still felt to be necessary, then abuses can and should be tolerated for the broader aim. If the war is wrong, then even if the forces followed every legal, moral and ethical code to the letter, it would still be wrong. This is a familiar point, and there’s no reason to belabor it.

Second, we have discussed in previous posts the importance of sovereignty and self-determination, and the Haditha affair is a good example of why these principles matter. One of the most problematic aspects is not just that the armed forces committed these atrocities, but that the forces committing them cannot be held to account by Iraqis. It is up to the commander, and above him the Department of Defense, and above that the American people, to decide how this affair should be handled, what measures are appropriate, and who to punish. No matter how much Bush insists on the fact that sovereignty has been handed over to the Iraqis, the premise of the intervention was and continues to be that Iraqis are incapable of being the final authority in their own affairs, no matter how much ‘democracy’ they supposedly enjoy.

Once one assumes that Iraqis, or anyone else, can never be ultimately responsible for their own institutions, then foundations are laid not for temporary assistance but permanent dependence. That is exactly what is happening in Iraq. Respecting Iraqi sovereignty means that it is they who must hold their own government - responsible for abuses not all that dissimilar from Haditha - to account. Instead, Iraqis can look forward to a situation in which every scandal becomes a further reason why the US must stay and prove its good intentions, and further evidence that the one thing Iraqis don’t have is sovereignty. Of course, defending sovereignty on the aforementioned grounds means believing that people do possess the desire for liberty, and are capable of taking those collective acts necessary to acquire it. That is the precise belief that is in such low supply these days, as is a commitment to the idea of self-determination at any level of society. But anyone serious about freedom is forced to realize that it is not something that can be handed to you, it is something you take for yourself.