Today, Somalia still grapples with multiple indices of deprivation, with a state that is barely capable of fulfilling basic functions; Sudan is split, with the new state of South Sudan mired in civil war, while Iraq and Libya have been reduced to rubble. US-allied Saudi Arabia has been a prime mover in a failed but destructive campaign to overthrow President Assad in Syria, and is now threatening Lebanon. President Trump wasted no time, after taking office, in aligning his White House with Riyadh in an aggressive new campaign against the Iranians, purporting to see Tehran’s malign influence behind all the problems of the region.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s become a commonplace in foreign policy circles in troop-supplying countries to lament the lack of a \u2018plan\u2019 for the countries \u2013 such as Iraq and Libya \u2013 whose ruling authorities were easy to displace, but altogether more difficult to replace. The Chilcot Inquiry into Britain\u2019s participation in the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein complains that the government of then Prime Minister Tony Blair \u201cfailed to take account of the magnitude of the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing Iraq\u201d.<\/p>\n
To varying degrees, all the states on the list shown (or \u2018not shown\u2019) to General Clark were constructed in the first place, then stabilised and administered, by gathering the proceeds from their natural resources and investing them publicly. Not having free markets, they were places where capital met with barriers to its further accumulation.<\/p>\n
Now, some of those barriers have been removed. Naomi Klein writes about post-invasion Iraq as an example of \u201cdisaster capitalism\u201d, with the economic policies imposed by the Coalition Provisional Authority \u201cmaking the entire affected area a flat<\/em>–<\/em>tax<\/em> free-enterprise zone\u201d. The Bush Administration did indeed have a plan, she goes on: \u201cto lay out as much honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies\u201d[ii]<\/a>.<\/p>\n When the US corporate giant, General Electric, this year picked up $1.4 billion worth of honey in the shape of a contract to rebuild Iraq\u2019s electricity industry, that was a plan coming to fruition. A \u2018defense contractor\u2019 with over four billion dollars a year in arms sales, GE is also an active contributor \u2013 through individual donors and Political Action Committees \u2013 to parties and candidates, and a cornerstone of the Washington lobbying industry.<\/p>\n Through the period covered by the invasion of Iraq, it also owned the NBC Television network, thus giving it a direct means of influencing public opinion, at a time when the studios were knee-deep in retired generals. As the late Danny Schechter, the New York film-maker, media activist and \u201cnews dissector\u201d memorably observed, TV newsrooms packaged and promoted the Iraq invasion as a product: they were not so much \u201ctelling\u201d as \u201cselling\u201d.<\/p>\n Are these observations leading to a putative grand conspiracy, involving multiple individuals in different domains \u2013 industry, military, politics and media \u2013 scheming in secret to propel us into war, come what may, in order to make money? This is where we reach for the concepts furnished by social science to locate political agency not in the words and deeds of identifiable actors \u2013 the \u2018behavioural\u2019 \u2013 but instead as a generative force that is stored in, and activated from, systems and structures.<\/p>\n A signature contribution here is that of Johan Galtung, the \u201cstructural violence\u201d that keeps invisible barriers in place, abrogating human potential. Then, there is no power that is exercised without a set of aims and objectives, Michel Foucault tells us, in The Power of Sexuality<\/em>; but that does not mean we should look for \u201cthe headquarters that presides over its rationality\u201d. In English, at about the same time, Stephen Lukes was writing about a \u201cthird dimension\u201d of power, beyond the behavioural and even hidden agendas, in which \u201cthe bias of the system can be mobilized, recreated and reinforced in ways that are neither consciously chosen nor the intended result of particular individuals\u2019 choices\u201d. Later, the communications scholar Manuel Castells added an elegant embellishment, the \u201cnetwork society\u201d, in which identifiable \u201cflows of power\u201d induce less \u201csocial determination\u201d than the \u201cpower of flows\u201d around influential networks.<\/p>\n The reason we keep having wars, in short, is that we have built a war system. Taken together, President Dwight D Eisenhower warned, in a valedictory radio address to the American people on leaving the Oval Office way back in 1961, the sheer gravitational pull of mighty armed forces and a vast arms industry will exert \u201cunwarranted influence\u2026 whether sought or unsought\u201d; unless constrained by \u201can alert and active citizenry\u201d.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s menaces lurk in, and strike from, unregulated spaces: the labyrinth of tax avoidance revealed by the Paradise Papers; the proliferating fake news on Facebook. Arms industries are another such space. The UK Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery and corruption in the notorious Al Yamamah arms deal between British Aerospace and the Saudi government was dropped, not for a want of evidence against the suspects but because the Saudis threatened to cut off intelligence-sharing. The American anti-missile shields now being deployed in both east Asia and eastern Europe had so many budget overruns that a new \u201cspiral accounting\u201d system had to be devised in order to justify the cost. British- and American-supplied weapons are being used to pound Yemen and its civilian population to ruin, with humanitarian concerns deflected by platitudes designed solely to prolong the window for profit.<\/p>\n What to do? In Britain, the world\u2019s second biggest arms dealer after the US, at least the official Opposition is now led by someone who \u2018gets it\u2019: Jeremy Corbyn, chair of the Stop the War Coalition through the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. If and when Labour take office, the list of priorities will be long indeed. But it should include regulating and reducing the supply of weapons. As Corbyn has explicitly recognised, Britain\u2019s participation in the wars of the 21st<\/sup> century has put its own people at greater risk. After a terrorist from the Libyan community in south Manchester killed 21 concert-goers in the city earlier this year, he used a speech to emphasise \u201cthe connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries, such as Libya, and terrorism here at home\u201d.<\/p>\n A revival of UK Labour\u2019s original approach to international relations would also be welcome. In the first leaflet the party published, after adopting its consititution in 1918, the Fabian thinker, Sidney Webb, repudiated \u201call forms of Imperialism\u201d, recognising that this entailed acceptance of \u201cthe right of each people to live its own life, and to make its own specific contribution to the world in its own way\u201d. The neoconservative project, rampaging round the world looking for non-believers to convert to the cause of free elections and free markets, has pitched us into a series of profit-fuelled wars, making our world more dangerous. It\u2019s time for Britain to quit those networks, and to urge others to follow.<\/p>\n NOTES:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n [i]<\/a> https:\/\/www.globalresearch.ca\/we-re-going-to-take-out-7-countries-in-5-years-iraq-syria-lebanon-libya-somalia-sudan-iran\/5166<\/a><\/p>\n [ii] <\/a>http:\/\/www.naomiklein.org\/articles\/2004\/09\/baghdad-year-zero-pillaging-iraq-pursuit-neo-con-utopia<\/a> <\/a><\/p>\n _______________________________________<\/p>\n Are these observations leading to a putative grand conspiracy involving individuals in different domains–industry, military, politics and media–scheming in secret to propel us into war in order to make money? This is where we reach for the concepts furnished by social science to locate political agency not in the words and deeds of identifiable actors but instead as a generative force that is stored in, and activated from, systems and structures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":43152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[344,354,435,70,118],"class_list":["post-102121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial","tag-defense","tag-economics","tag-free-trade","tag-usa","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102121","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=102121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/jake-lynch-180x167-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a>Jake Lynch, former <\/em>BBC newsreader, political correspondent for <\/em>Sky News and Sydney correspondent for the <\/em>Independent, is Associate Professor of Peace Journalism and Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, and w<\/strong><\/em>inner of the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize<\/em><\/strong>.<\/em> He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a> and the advisor for TRANSCEND Media Service-TMS<\/a>. Lynch is the co-author, with Annabel McGoldrick, of <\/em>Peace Journalism (Hawthorn Press, 2005), and his new book, <\/em>Debates in Peace Journalism, Sydney University Press and TUP \u2013 TRANSCEND University Press<\/a>. He also co-authored with Johan Galtung and Annabel McGoldrick \u2018<\/em>Reporting Conflict-An Introduction to Peace Journalism,’\u00a0which <\/em>TMS editor Antonio C. S. Rosa translated to Portuguese.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"