{"id":10016,"date":"2011-02-14T00:00:09","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T23:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=10016"},"modified":"2011-02-07T18:44:26","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T17:44:26","slug":"goodbye-to-all-that-pox-americana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/02\/goodbye-to-all-that-pox-americana\/","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye to All That: Pox Americana"},"content":{"rendered":"

Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East <\/em><\/p>\n

As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them.\u00a0 Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people.\u00a0 When it came to Egypt in particular, there was initially much polite (and hypocritical) discussion in the media about how our “interests” and our “values” were in conflict, about how far the U.S. should back off its support for the Mubarak regime, and about what a \u201ctightrope\u201d<\/a> the Obama administration was walking.\u00a0 While the president and his officials flailed, the mildest of questions were raised about how much we should chide our erstwhile allies, or encourage the massed protestors, and about whether we should \u201ctake sides\u201d (as though we hadn\u2019t done so decisively over the last decades).<\/p>\n

With popular cries for \u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201cfreedom\u201d sweeping through the Middle East, it\u2019s curious to note that the Bush-era\u2019s now-infamous \u201cdemocracy agenda\u201d has been nowhere in sight.\u00a0 In its brief and disastrous life, it was used as a battering ram for regimes Washington loathed and offered as a soft pillow of future possibility to those it loved.<\/p>\n

Still, make no mistake, there\u2019s a story in a Washington stunned<\/a> and “blindsided,”<\/a> in an administration visibly toothless<\/a> and in disarray as well as dismayed over the potential loss of its Egyptian ally, \u201cthe keystone<\/a> of its Middle Eastern policy,\u201d that\u2019s so big it should knock your socks off.\u00a0 And make no mistake: part of the spectacle of the moment lies in watching that other great power of the Cold War era finally head ever so slowly and reluctantly for the exits.\u00a0 You know the one I\u2019m talking about.\u00a0 In 1991, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the United States found itself the last superpower standing, Washington mistook that for a victory most rare.\u00a0 In the years that followed, in a paroxysm of self-satisfaction and amid clouds of self-congratulation, its leaders would attempt nothing less than to establish a global Pax Americana<\/em>.\u00a0 Their breathtaking ambitions would leave hubris in the shade.<\/p>\n

The results, it’s now clear, were no less breathtaking, even if disastrously so.\u00a0 Almost 20 years after the lesser superpower of the Cold War left the world stage, the \u201cvictor\u201d is now lurching down the declinist slope, this time as the other defeated power of the Cold War era.<\/p>\n

So don\u2019t mark the end of the Cold War in 1991 as our conventional histories do.\u00a0 Mark it in the early days of 2011, and consider the events of this moment a symbolic goodbye-to-all-that for the planet\u2019s \u201csole superpower.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abroads, Near and Far<\/strong><\/p>\n

The proximate cause of Washington\u2019s defeat is a threatened collapse of its imperial position in a region that, ever since President Jimmy Carter proclaimed his Carter Doctrine<\/a> in 1980, has been considered the crucible of global power, the place where, above all, the Great Game must be played out.\u00a0 Today, \u201cpeople power\u201d is shaking the \u201cpillars\u201d of the American position in the Middle East, while — despite the staggering levels of military might the Pentagon still has embedded in the area<\/a> — the Obama administration has found itself standing by helplessly in grim confusion.<\/p>\n

As a spectacle of imperial power on the decline, we haven\u2019t seen anything like it since 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.\u00a0 Then, too, people power stunned the world.\u00a0 It swept like lightning across the satellite states of Eastern Europe, those \u201cpillars\u201d of the old Soviet empire, most of which had (as in the Middle East today) seemed quiescent for years.<\/p>\n

It was an invigorating time.\u00a0 After all, such moments often don\u2019t come once in a life, no less twice in 20 years.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t happen to be in Washington, the present moment is proving no less remarkable, unpredictable, and earthshaking than its predecessor.<\/p>\n

Make no mistake, either (though you wouldn\u2019t guess it from recent reportage): these two moments of people power are inextricably linked.\u00a0 Think of it this way: as we witness the true denouement<\/a> of the Cold War, it\u2019s already clear that the “victor” in that titanic struggle, like the Soviet Union before it, mined its own positions and then was forced to watch with shock, awe, and dismay as those mines went off.<\/p>\n

Among the most admirable aspects of the Soviet collapse was the decision of its remarkable leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, not to call the Red Army out of its barracks, as previous Soviet leaders had done in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Prague in 1968.\u00a0 Gorbachev\u2019s conscious (and courageous) choice to let the empire collapse rather than employ violence to try to halt the course of events remains historically little short of unique.<\/p>\n

Today, after almost two decades of exuberant imperial impunity, Washington finds itself in an uncomfortably unraveling situation.\u00a0 Think of it as a kind of slo-mo Gorbachev moment — without a Gorbachev<\/a> in sight.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019re dealing with here is, in a sense, the story of two \u201cabroads.\u201d\u00a0 In 1990, in the wake of a disastrous war in Afghanistan, in the midst of a people\u2019s revolt, the Russians lost what they came to call their \u201cnear abroad,\u201d the lands from Eastern Europe to Central Asia that had made up the Soviet Empire.\u00a0 The U.S., being the wealthier and stronger of the two Cold War superpowers, had something the Soviets never possessed.\u00a0 Call it a \u201cfar abroad.\u201d\u00a0 Now, in the midst of another draining, disastrous Afghan war, in the face of another people\u2019s revolt, a critical part of its far abroad is being shaken to its roots.<\/p>\n

In the Middle East, the two pillars of American imperial power and control have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia — along, of course, with obdurate Israel and little Jordan.\u00a0 In previous eras, the chosen bulwarks of \u201cstability\u201d and \u201cmoderation,\u201d terms much favored in Washington, had been the Shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s (and you remember his fate), and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and you remember his fate, too).\u00a0 In the larger region the Bush administration liked to call \u201cthe Greater Middle East\u201d or \u201cthe arc of instability,\u201d another key pillar has been Pakistan, a country now in destabilization mode<\/a> under the pressure of a disastrous American war in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

And yet, without a Gorbachevian bone in its body, the Obama administration has still been hamstrung.\u00a0 While negotiating madly behind the scenes to retain power and influence in Egypt, it is not likely to call the troops out of the barracks.\u00a0 American military intervention remains essentially inconceivable.\u00a0 \u00a0Don\u2019t wait for Washington to send paratroopers to the Suez Canal as those fading imperial powers France and England tried to do in 1956.\u00a0 It won\u2019t happen.\u00a0 Washington is too drained by years of war and economic bad times for that.<\/p>\n

Facing genuine shock and awe (the people\u2019s version), the Obama administration has been shaken.\u00a0 It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful<\/a>, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events.\u00a0 Count on one thing: its officials are already undoubtedly worried about a domestic political future in which the question (never good for Democrats) could be: Who lost the Middle East?\u00a0 In the meantime, their oh-so-solemn, carefully calibrated statements<\/a>, still in command mode, couched in imperial-speak, and focused on what client states in the Middle East must <\/em>do, might as well be spoken to the wind.\u00a0 Like the Cheshire Cat\u2019s grin, only the rhetoric of the last decades seems to be left.<\/p>\n

The question is: How did this happen?\u00a0 And the answer, in part, is: blame it on the way the Cold War officially ended, the mood of unparalleled hubris in which the United States emerged from it, and the unilaterialist path its leaders chose in its wake.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s do a little reviewing.<\/p>\n

Second-Wave Unilateralism<\/strong><\/p>\n

When the Soviet Union dissolved, Washington was stunned — the collapse was unexpected despite all the signs that something monumental was afoot — and then thrilled.\u00a0 The Cold War was over and we had won.\u00a0 Our mighty adversary had disappeared from the face of the Earth.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for terms like \u201csole superpower\u201d and \u201chyperpower\u201d to crop up, or for dreams of a global Pax Americana<\/em> to take shape amid talk about how our power and glory would outshine even the Roman<\/a> and British empires.\u00a0 The conclusion that victory — as in World War II — would have its benefits, that the world was now our oyster, led to two waves of American \u201cunilateralism\u201d or go-it-alone-ism that essentially drove the car of state directly toward the nearest cliff and helped prepare the way for the sudden eruption of people power in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

The second of those waves began with the fateful post-9\/11 decision of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and company to \u201cdrain the global swamp\u201d (as they put<\/a> it within days<\/a> of the attacks in New York and Washington).\u00a0 They would, that is, pursue al-Qaeda (and whomever else they decided to label an enemy) by full military means.\u00a0 That included the invasion of Afghanistan and the issuing<\/a> of a with-us-or-against-us diktat to Pakistan, which reportedly included<\/a> the threat to bomb that country \u201cback to the Stone Age.\u201d\u00a0 It also involved a full-scale militarization<\/a>, Pentagonization, and privatization of American foreign policy, and above all else, the crushing of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the occupation of his country.\u00a0 All that and more came to be associated with the term \u201cunilateralism,\u201d with the idea that U.S. military power was so overwhelming Washington could simply go it alone in the world with any \u201ccoalition of the billing\u201d it might muster and still get exactly what it wanted.<\/p>\n

That second wave of unilateralism, now largely relegated to the memory hole of history by the mainstream media, helped pave the way for the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, and possibly elsewhere.\u00a0 As a start, from Pakistan to North Africa, the Bush administration\u2019s Global War on Terror, along with its support for thuggish rule in the name of fighting al-Qaeda, helped radicalize the region.\u00a0 (Remember, for instance, that while Washington was pouring billions of dollars into the American-equipped Egyptian Army<\/a> and the American-trained Egyptian officer corps<\/a>, Bush administration officials were delighted to enlist the Mubarak regime as War on Terror warriors, using Egypt\u2019s jails<\/a> as places to torture terror suspects rendered<\/a> off any streets anywhere.)<\/p>\n

In the process, by sweeping an area from North Africa to the Chinese border that it dubbed the Greater Middle East into that War on Terror, the Bush administration undoubtedly gave the region a new-found sense of unity, a feeling that the fate of its disparate parts was somehow bound together.<\/p>\n

In addition, Bush\u2019s top officials, fundamentalists all<\/a> when it came to U.S. military might and delusional fantasists when it came to what that military could accomplish, had immense power at its command: the power to destroy.\u00a0 They gave that power the snappy label \u201cshock and awe,\u201d and then used it to blow a hole in the heart of the Middle East by invading Iraq.\u00a0 In the process, they put that land, already on the ropes, onto life support.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s never really come off.\u00a0 In the wars, civil and guerrilla, set off by the American invasion and occupation, hundreds of thousands<\/a> of Iraqis undoubtedly died<\/a> and millions<\/a> were sent into exile abroad or in their own land.\u00a0 Today, Iraq remains a barely breathing carcass of a nation, unable to deliver something as simple as electricity to its restive<\/a> people or pump enough oil to pay for the disaster.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the Bush administration sat on its hands while Israel had its way, taking Palestinian lands via its settlement policies and blowing its own hole in southern Lebanon<\/a> with American backing (and weaponry) in the summer of 2006, and a smaller hole of utter devastation through Gaza in 2009.\u00a0 In other words, from Lebanon to Pakistan, the Greater Middle East was destabilized and radicalized.<\/p>\n

The acts of Bush\u2019s officials couldn\u2019t have been rasher, or more destructive.\u00a0 They managed, for instance, to turn Afghanistan into the globe\u2019s foremost narco-state<\/a>, even as they gave new life to the Taliban — no small miracle for a movement that, in 2001, had lost any vestige of popularity.\u00a0 Most crucial of all, they and the Obama adminsitration after them spread the war irrevocably to populous, nuclear-armed<\/a> Pakistan.<\/p>\n

To their mad plans and projects, you can trace, at least in part, the rise to power of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza (the only significant result of Bush\u2019s \u201cdemocracy agenda,\u201d since Iraq\u2019s elections arrived, despite Bush administration opposition, due to<\/a> <\/strong>the prestige of Ayatollah Ali Sistani).\u00a0 You can credit them with an Iran-allied Shiite government in Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as the growth of a version of the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.\u00a0 You can also credit them with the disorganization and impoverishment of the region.\u00a0 In summary, when the Bush unilateralists took control of the car of state, they souped it up, armed it to the teeth, and sent it careening off to catastrophe.<\/p>\n

How hollow the neocon quip<\/a> of 2003 now rings: \u201cEveryone wants to go to Baghdad.\u00a0 Real men want to go to Tehran.\u201d\u00a0 But remember as well that, however much the Bush administration accomplished (in a manner of speaking), there was a wave of unilateralism, no less significant, that preceded it.<\/p>\n

Our Financial Jihadis<\/strong><\/p>\n

Though we all know this first wave well, we don\u2019t usually think of it as \u201cunilateralist,\u201d or in terms of the Middle East at all, or speak about it in the same breath with the Bush administration and its neocon supporters.\u00a0 I\u2019m talking about the globalists, sometimes called the neoliberals, who were let loose to do their damnedest in the good times of the post-Cold-War Clinton years.\u00a0 They, too, were dreamy about organizing the planet and about another kind of American power that was never going to end: economic power. \u00a0(And, of course, they would be called back to power in Washington in the Obama years to run the U.S. economy into the ground yet again.)\u00a0 They believed deeply that we were the economic superpower of the ages, and they were eager to create their own version of a Pax Americana<\/em>.\u00a0 Intent on homogenizing the world by bringing American economic power to bear on it, their version of shock-and-awe tactics involved calling in institutions like the International Monetary Fund to discipline developing countries into a profitable kind of poverty and misery.<\/p>\n

In the end, as they gleefully sliced and diced subprime mortgages, they drove a different kind of hole through the world.\u00a0 They were financial jihadis<\/em> with their own style of shock-and-awe tactics and they, too, proved deeply destructive, even if in a different way.\u00a0 The irony was that, in the economic meltdown of 2008, they finally took down the global economy they had helped \u201cunify.\u201d\u00a0 And that occured just as the second wave of unilateralists were facing the endgame of their dreams of global domination.\u00a0 In the process, for instance, Egypt, the most populous of Arab countries, was economically neoliberalized<\/a> and — except for a small elite who made out like the bandits they were — impoverished<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Talk about \u201ccreative destruction\u201d!\u00a0 The two waves of American unilateralists nearly took down the planet.\u00a0 They let loose demons of every sort, even as they ensured that the world\u2019s first experience of a sole superpower would prove short indeed.\u00a0 Heap onto the rubble they left behind the global disaster of rising prices<\/a> for the basics — food<\/a> and fuel<\/a> — and you have a situation so combustible that no one should have been surprised when a Tunisian match<\/a> lit it aflame.<\/p>\n

That this moment began in the Greater Middle East should be no surprise either.\u00a0 That it might not end there should not be ruled out.\u00a0 This looks like, but may not be, an \u201cIslamic\u201d moment.\u00a0 If the second wave of American unilateralists ensured that this would start as a Middle Eastern phenomenon, conditions for people’s-power movements exist elsewhere as well.<\/p>\n

The Gates of Hell<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nobody today remembers how, in September 2004, Amr Musa, the head of the Arab League, described<\/a> the post-invasion Iraqi situation.\u00a0 \u201cThe gates of hell,\u201d he said, \u201care open in Iraq.\u201d\u00a0 This was not the sort of language we were used to hearing in the U.S., no matter what you felt about the war.\u00a0 It read — and probably still reads — like an over-the-top metaphor, but it could as easily be taken as a realistic depiction of what happened not just in Iraq, but in the Greater Middle East and, to some extent, in the world.<\/p>\n

Our unilateralists twice drove blithely through those gates, imagining that they were the gates to paradise.\u00a0 The results are now clear for all to see.<\/p>\n

And don’t forget, the gates of hell remain open.\u00a0 Keep your eyes on at least two places, starting with Saudi Arabia, about which practically no one is yet writing, though one of these days its situation could turn out to be shakier than now imagined.\u00a0 Certainly, whoever controls the Saudi stock market thought so, because as the situation grew more tumultuous in Egypt, Saudi stocks took a nosedive<\/a>. \u00a0With Saudi Arabia, you couldn\u2019t get more basic when it comes to U.S. policy or the fate of the planet, given the amount of oil still under its desert sands.\u00a0 And then don\u2019t forget the potentially most frightening country of all, Pakistan, where the final gasp of America\u2019s military unilateralists is still playing itself out<\/a> as if on a reel of film that just won\u2019t end.<\/p>\n

Yes, the Obama administration may squeeze by in the region for a while.\u00a0 Perhaps the Egyptian high command — half of which seems to have been in Washington at the moment the you-know-what hit the fan in their own country — will take over and perhaps they will suppress people power again for a period. Who knows?<\/p>\n

One thing is clear inside the gates of hell: whatever wild flowers or weeds turn out to be capable of growing in the soil tilled so assiduously by the victors of 1991, Pax Americana<\/em> proved to be a Pox Americana<\/em> for the region and the world.<\/p>\n

___________________<\/p>\n

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the <\/em>American Empire Project<\/em><\/a>, runs the Nation Institute’s <\/em>TomDispatch.com<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 His latest book is<\/em> The American Way of War: How Bush\u2019s Wars Became Obama\u2019s<\/a> (Haymarket Books). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them. Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}