{"id":145755,"date":"2019-10-21T12:00:33","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T11:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=145755"},"modified":"2024-09-23T14:41:50","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T13:41:50","slug":"the-management-of-savagery-greater-middle-east-project-of-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/10\/the-management-of-savagery-greater-middle-east-project-of-chaos\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Management of Savagery\u2019: Greater Middle East Project of Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Management of Savagery<\/em><\/strong> by Max Blumenthal, 2019, Verso<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>19 Oct 2019 – <\/em>Destination Afghanistan was known as the big easy back in the halcyon days of the late 1960s. Hippies from throughout the affluent West hitchhiked to the capital, Kabul, where crash pads and hashish were cheap, and the locals were tolerant. Life appeared to be mellow in the scenic shadow of the Hindu Kush Himalayans. That was then.<\/p>\n

Now Afghanistan is engulfed in year 18 of the forever US war with no end in sight. The war has gotten so old \u2013 the longest in US history \u2013 that the Pentagon PR flacks changed the code name from Operation Enduring Freedom to Operation Freedom\u2019s Sentinel to spruce up its image.<\/p>\n

Half of Kabul is now in rubble. Music, education for girls, and cultivation of opium poppies are prohibited in areas controlled by the former US-allied Taliban. US-backed warlords in the rest of this devastated land supply the majority of the world\u2019s illicit heroin, visiting a plague of drug addiction on nearby Iran, China, and Russia \u2013 official US enemies \u2013 and on the ghettoes, rural wastelands, and hipster dens of the West. US attempts at \u201creconstruction\u201d of Afghanistan have cost $117 billion, eclipsing the price tag of the entire Marshall Plan for Europe.<\/p>\n

So why is the US still in Afghanistan? The official explanation has something vaguely to do with the arch villain Osama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia who was last holed up in Pakistan before reportedly being assassinated by US special forces and unceremoniously dumped into the sea eight years ago.<\/p>\n

Max Blumenthal\u2019s The Management of Savagery<\/em><\/a> provides a far more cogent explanation for the US wars in Afghanistan along with Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria with Iran on the to-do list (and may be on the war list by the time this article gets posted). Savagery <\/em>reads like a real-life whodunit tracing the shadowy back channels of the CIA, FBI, DIA, and NSA piping jihadists around the greater Middle East to create chaos only to find their assets turning against them. Besides being well written, the analysis of the maturation of the neoliberal imperial project by the world\u2019s sole remaining superpower illuminates the current bi-partisan consensus for militarism.<\/p>\n

The politics of chaos<\/strong><\/p>\n

The collapse of the Soviet Union left a geopolitical power vacuum and an opportunity for the US to more aggressively exert its imperial will. The ensuing politics of chaos produced some strange bedfellows: \u201chuman rights\u201d thinktanks with Gulf monarchies, anti-Semites with Zionists, the US security state with jihadists, and neoconservatives with establishment liberals.<\/p>\n

Bin Laden, according to Savagery,<\/em> had a master plan to create \u201cfull chaos\u201d in the greater Middle East, which he believed would precipitate the collapse of local regimes so that the culture of jihad could supersede them. Dovetailing this scenario was the neocon plan for regime change in regional states not subservient to US dictates and Israeli expansion. \u201cIn the global war bin Laden envisioned,\u201d Blumenthal reports, \u201cthese [US] foreign policy fanatics would make the perfect partners.\u201d Leading the charge were neocon Republicans like John Bolton and Elliot Abrams with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), later to be joined by liberal Clinton Democrats.<\/p>\n

Both foreign jihadists and domestic militarists needed a precipitating incident, what the PNAC envisioned as a \u201ccatastrophic and catalyzing event.\u201d That came with 9\/11. Blumenthal finds credence that the US government likely had some foreknowledge of the attacks, but accuses some Truthers of inadvertently running interference \u201cfor the imperialist power they claimed to disdain\u201d by \u201comitting any historical discussion of the American government\u2019s relationship with the forces directly implicated in the attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Authorization for the Use of Military Force was passed just five days after 9\/11 as a joint resolution of Congress with only one dissenting vote. \u201cCongress thus voluntarily abdicated its constitution authority and,\u201d according to Blumenthal, \u201cgave its blessing to America\u2019s forever war.\u201d The Patriot Act followed a month later, \u201cgranting the executive branch unprecedented wartime powers to investigate and prosecute Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

The neocons and the alt-right have been able to mainstream anti-Muslim politics in the US. Meanwhile the liberal \u201cresponsibility to protect\u201d (R2P) doctrine has created popular support for forever war \u201cby weaponizing the discourse of human rights to justify the use of force against governments that resisted the Washington consensus.\u201d The R2P liberals achieved what the right could not.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the era of Russiagate, when so many liberals cling to institutions like the FBI and NATO as guardians of their survival,\u201d Blumenthal explains, \u201cthe dastardly record of America\u2019s national security mandarins has been wiped clean.\u201d The forever wars are \u201cmarketed to the Western public as clinical exercises in freedom-spreading\u201d with a \u201cdual layer patina of patriotic hoopla [for the right] and humanitarian goodwill [for the liberals].\u201d<\/p>\n

The refugee crises coming out of the Middle East, generated by the forever wars and accompanying economic sanctions (more accurately, illegal unilateral coercive measures), have consequently fueled xenophobia both in the US and abroad. This, in turn, has fostered an ascendant wave of rightists. \u201cTrump\u2019s election,\u201d Blumenthal contends, \u201cwould not have been possible without 9\/11 and the subsequent military interventionism conceived by the national security state.\u201d\u00a0 The national security state did not arise with Trump, but \u201chas maintained a steady continuity between successive administrations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unwanted refugees are not the only inconvenient byproduct of the forever wars in the greater Middle East. The US security state\u2019s alliance with jihadists to overthrow the Soviet-friendly government in Afghanistan \u2013 a pattern which is has been repeated in each subsequent Middle Eastern misadventure \u2013 has created a \u201cdisposal problem\u201d of what to do with these US-armed combatants.<\/p>\n

For Americans, the tragedy of 9\/11 was just the most dramatic example of the \u201cdisposal problem.\u201d \u201cThe plague of international jihadism that the United States helped to unleash through its covert interventionism in Cold War-era Afghanistan,\u201d Blumenthal warns, \u201cwas to expand and metastasize\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The neoliberal imperial project, a symbiotic association of liberal \u201cmilitary humanism\u201d and rightwing straight-up militarism, is now showing signs of undoing according to Blumenthal:<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough covert operations and overt invasions, America\u2019s national security state had destabilized entire regions, from the Levant to North Africa, unleashed a migration crisis of unprecedented proportions onto Europe and spurred an inevitable right-wing backlash that was unraveling the neoliberal consensus they sought to protect.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Critical reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a critical review<\/a> of Savagery<\/em>, Louis Proyect finds himself \u201cin agreement\u201d on Afghanistan and Libya but not on Syria. Proyect rejects the analysis that the purpose of the US is or ever was regime change of the Assad government in Syria: \u201cwith the regime still intact, it might be obvious that this was never the goal.\u201d \u00a0Proyect dismisses what otherwise the purpose of the US war effort might be with a \u201clet\u2019s leave that aside.\u201d In contrast, regime change<\/a> is the central thesis of Blumenthal\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

Proyect accuses<\/a> Blumenthal of being \u201cone of Assad\u2019s biggest supporters on the left,\u201d though a reading of Savagery<\/em> would suggest Blumenthal is not an apologist for the governments targeted by the US for regime change. In an interview<\/a> after his recent visit to Syria, Blumenthal commented: \u201cWhether or not Syria is a dictatorship or a police state; I would not dispute that at all.\u201d Rather, the focus of Savagery<\/em> is on the policies and actions of the US and its allies, the deleterious effects it has had on the people of the region, and the blowback it has had at home.<\/p>\n

A critique in the Times Literary Supplement<\/em><\/a>, from a liberal \u201chumanitarian imperialism\u201d point of view, kvetches:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is easy to blame the United States for many of the world\u2019s ills: easy because of the availability of evidence. It is also easy to overstate your case, with misleading or one-sided examples \u2013\u00a0the trap that Max Blumenthal falls into in\u00a0<\/em>The Management of Savagery.<\/em>\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which raises the question of why, given \u201cthe availability of evidence,\u201d the TLS and its co-conspirators in the corporate media unerringly fall into the opposite trap of being sycophants of the Empire? Why have they failed to connect the dots<\/a>, as Blumenthal has, and shown \u201chow America\u2019s national security state fueled the rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump\u201d?<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Roger Harris<\/em> is a <\/em>member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network<\/a> and the<\/em> immediate past president of the Task Force on the Americas<\/a>, a 33-year-old human rights organization in solidarity with the social justice movements of Latin America and the Caribbean. He is active with the Campaign to End US-Canadian Sanctions against Venezuela<\/a> and <\/em>is on the state central committee of the <\/em>Peace and Freedom Party<\/em><\/a>, the only ballot-qualified socialist party in California. He<\/em> recently visited Syria for an international conference on the impacts of economic sanctions by the US and its allies on over 30 countries in the world.
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

19 Oct 2019 – Max Blumenthal\u2019s \u2018The Management of Savagery\u2019 provides a cogent explanation for the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria with Iran on the to-do list. Savagery reads like a real-life whodunit tracing the shadowy back channels of the CIA, FBI, DIA, and NSA piping jihadists around the greater Middle East to create chaos only to find their assets turning against them. Besides being well written, the analysis of the maturation of the neoliberal imperial project by the world\u2019s sole remaining superpower illuminates the current bi-partisan consensus for militarism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":145756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,65,66,67],"tags":[93,120,1126,260,1050,741,178,642,263,234,767,291,91,86,109,287,870,128,413,249,70,126,118,172,75,174],"class_list":["post-145755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","category-middle-east-north-africa","category-reviews","tag-afghanistan","tag-conflict","tag-hegemony","tag-history","tag-imperialism","tag-iraq","tag-libya","tag-literature","tag-matw","tag-media","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-occupation","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-reviews","tag-sudan","tag-syria","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war","tag-west","tag-world","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145755","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=145755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275143,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145755\/revisions\/275143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}