Iraq: What Will the Empire Do?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

09 July 14

ike it or lump it, Barack Obama has the only vote that counts. As commander in chief of a still potent American empire, he decides how much of our blood and treasure to waste on what could become the third major military intervention in Iraq since the end of the Cold War. He has advisors, constituencies, bureaucracies, financial donors, and legacy to consider. But short of a popular uprising, mutiny, assassination, or conviction upon impeachment, he remains for a time an almost absolute monarch, the lone decider.

Few outsiders truly grasp what this means. Think back to his predecessor, the incomparable George W. Bush. Almost everyone claims to know exactly why he ordered a war of choice against Iraq, and they make their claims with self-deluding certainty, as if the intervention had only a single motivation:

It was the oil, stupid. Hadn’t Vice President Dick Cheney come to office as CEO of the oil services giant Halliburton? Didn’t he continue to meet with industry executives on his Energy Task Force during the run-up to the war? Would he have been so gung-ho if Iraq had only olive oil? But wait. Might he have believed the nonsense he spouted about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda? Or, bully that he is, could he have primarily wanted to throw Saddam against the wall to show other nations in the region and beyond that the American empire meant business in both senses of the word?

No, you idiot, it was the Jews – or more politely the neocons – doing Israel’s bidding. Or the Christian Evangelicals – the theo-cons – expressing their hatred of Muslims. Or the military industrial complex pursuing their love of Pentagon contracts.

Cheney and the others all pushed Bush hard to follow their lead. But, as he loved to remind us, he was “the decider.” So whose advice, if any, persuaded him? It could as easily have been the voice he heard in his head as his “higher father.”

“I’m driven with a mission from God,” the Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath claims to have heard him say at a meeting in June 2003. “God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,” and I did.”

The faith-based Bush expressed similar sentiments when he tried to persuade Jacques Chirac, then president of France, to support America’s war on Iraq. Journalist Kurt Eichenwald tells the story in his book “500 Days,” which Vanity Fair excerpted in October 2012.

“Jacques,” he [Bush] said, “You and I share a common faith. You’re Roman Catholic, I’m Methodist, but we are both Christians committed to the teachings of the Bible. We share one common Lord”

Chirac said nothing. He didn’t know where Bush was going with this. “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East,” Bush said. ‘’Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.”

Gog and Magog? What was that, thought Chirac.

“This confrontation,” Bush said, “is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a new age begins.”

Readers will recognize this happy-clappy as a reference to the Rapture, which I decried in detail many years ago in “America's Religious Right: Pie in the Sky.” I raise it here only to make a point that should be obvious, but is obviously not. Where one person – the commander in chief – makes the major foreign policy decisions, knowing for certain what motivated him (or her) would require us to read the emperor’s mind.

Obama is no George W, to be sure. But his motivations are only marginally less perplexing. Presenting himself as a reluctant foreign policy realist in the tradition of W’s earthly father, Obama too often seems – as John Cassidy wrote in The New Yorker – “about eighty per cent Brent Scowcroft/John Mearsheimer and about twenty per cent Paul Wolfowitz/Samantha Power.”

Talk about Obama mixing his messages. Scowcroft was George H.W. Bush’s national security adviser and remains his doppelganger. Mearsheimer teaches “offensive neorealism” at the University of Chicago and co-wrote “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” Wolfowitz was the highest-ranking neocon in George W’s administration and – along with Cheney, whose conservatism is anything but neo – the most relentless advocate of attacking Iraq. Power, Obama’s UN Ambassador, is a leading “humanitarian hawk,” regularly urging Washington to intervene in some other country to do good and fight evil.

Obama tried to strike a careful balance in his speech at the West Point commencement at the end of May. “I believe that a world of greater freedom and tolerance is not only a moral imperative; it also helps keep us safe,” he declared. “But to say that we have an interest in pursuing peace and freedom beyond our borders is not to say that every problem has a military solution. Since World War II, some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the conse­quences, without building international support and legitimacy for our action, without levelling with the American people about the sacrifices required.”

Will this professorial balance keep him from getting dragged back into Iraqi Quagmire 3.0? It is still too early to know. So far, he has sent only a few hundred troops back into the country, and as far as the public knows, he sent them without a status of forces agreement to hold them immune from any Iraqi prosecution. The absence of such an agreement is the reason Obama gives for refusing to leave 10,000 troops in Iraq in 2009.

As Cassidy points out, Obama continues to identify terrorism as the “biggest direct threat to America at home and abroad,” which frames the issue in a way that favors further intervention. Obama has also defined America’s national interests in exceptionally broad terms. He claims to want nothing more than to prevent “an all-out civil war inside of Iraq” and to promote regional stability, keep our allies strong, and protect “global energy markets.”

If these multiple goals are truly why Obama acted, they are imperial in scope, and it’s hard to see how a few hundred soldiers, drones, and even larger unacknowledged airstrikes or other covert trickery can possibly get the job done. Nor would even ten thousand troops be enough to force the Shiite majority to accept a political solution that would bring the rebellious Sunnis and independence-minded Kurds into a workable government of national reconciliation.

So, what will the emperor then do? Walk away in humiliating defeat? Or, however reluctantly, double down on a war he can never win and from which he or his successor will ultimately have to withdraw? Whatever Obama and his advisors are now telling themselves, more war seems all too likely, followed by the regional chaos of a loser’s peace.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

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