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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Thu Jan 20 2011 - 15:42:00 EST
Tunisia and the zombification of
war<http://web.overland.org.au/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/>
http://web.overland.org.au/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/
Written by Jeff Sparrow <http://web.overland.org.au/author/jeff-sparrow/> on
20-01-2011
<http://www.marxist.com/tunisian-uprising-dec-2010.htm>At the recent joint
meeting between Australian and British foreign and defense
secretaries, Britain’s
Liam Fox made an astonishing
confession<http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/afghan-war-effort-was-off-course-for-years/story-e6frg6so-1225990603222>.
‘In terms of having adequate manning, in terms of having adequate
equipment,’ he said, ‘we’ve really only been in Afghanistan for the last
year.’
Get that? The previous nine years (nine years!) had been, according to Fox,
so thoroughly mismanaged that they may as well have not happened at all.
And what was the reaction to this remarkable admission? Here was the defense
secretary of the second most important nation of the Afghan coalition
casually announcing that the billions of dollars and thousands of lives
expended in that time had been squandered, so much so that the invasion
might be said to be now only just beginning – and yet where was the outrage?
Where were the demands for accountability?
Yep, crickets.
It was a striking example of what we might call the zombification of the War
on Terror. Intellectually, the original project might be dead, its
theoretical basis entirely discredited, but somehow it still shuffles and
shambles on – and consumes more human flesh than ever.
Certainly, no-one now talks about the supposed domino effect of the Iraq and
Afghanistan interventions. Yet for the original neocon theorists, that
‘Freedom Agenda’ was a central plank of the whole Bush doctrine.
‘Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of
freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long
run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty,’ Bush
explained. ‘As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does
not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence
ready for export.’
Iraq, in particular, was, we were told, going to light a spark throughout
the world (and the middle east in particular), igniting pro-freedom
revolutions that would burn out corrupt dictatorships and hence reshape
global politics.
As Bush put it in 2003, ‘Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will
send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future
of every nation.’
Some of the Bushites sounded positively insane on the topic. For instance,
Michael A. Ledeen, from American Enterprise Institute, explained matters
like this.
We are an awesome revolutionary force. Creative destruction is our middle
name. We tear down the old order every day... Seeing America undo old
conventions, they [our enemies] fear us, for they do not wish to be
undone... We wage total war because we fight in the name of an idea...
Stability is for those older, burnt-out countries, not for the American
dynamo.
Well, whatev.
But a version of the theory appealed, in particular, to disappointed
ex-leftists (Christopher Hitchens comes to mind), who could transfer the
hopes they once invested in popular democracy to the liberatory bayonets of
the US army.
These days, of course, there’s not too many people who look at the situation
in Baghdad or in Kabul and think, ‘Gosh, I wish that could happen to my
country.’
Nonetheless, it’s worth thinking through what went wrong and why –
especially in light of recent events in Tunisia.
After all, Bush and his supporters always declared freedom a universal
aspiration. Against those so-called ‘realists’ who suggested that Arabs and
other colonial peoples needed – and perhaps secretly craved – a strong
ruler, the neocons insisted on liberty as a universal virtue, so that the
fall of a dictator in one oppressive state would inevitably generate
enthusiasm in others.
On the face of it, the dictator Ben Ali’s ignominious flight from Tunisia
has vindicated them. In Egypt, protesters have been chanting ‘Mubarak
next!’; in Algeria demonstrations have been spreading; in Libya, the old
tyrant Quadaffi clearly fears a Tunisian-style uprising in his country.
Quite evidently, there’s widespread popular dissatisfaction with the corrupt
and brutal regimes in the regime. Quite evidently, democracy is contagious.
Why, then, did the Bush-Cheney plan so comprehensively fail?
Interestingly, Tunisia never really featured on the list of nations that the
neocons sought to liberate. If the old Project for a New American Century
(the thinktank that spawned most of the Bushite cadre) focused initially on
Iraq, the broader target of the neocon agenda was always Iran.
‘Anyone can go to Baghdad,’ infamously explained a senior Bush official in
2003. ‘Real men go to Tehran.’
But no-one even mentioned Tunisia.
Indeed, it’s notable that, when Hitchens, a pretty reliable barometer of
neocon prejudice, wrote about that country in 2007, he didn’t push his usual
barrow about military intervention against totalitarianism. Instead, he
found much to praise in Ben Ali and his
dictatorship<http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/07/hitchens200707?currentPage=2>
:
Why pick on mild Tunisia, where the coup in 1987 had been bloodless, where
religious parties are forbidden, where the population grows evenly because
of the availability of contraception, where you can see male and female
students holding hands and wearing blue jeans, and where thousands of
Americans and more than four million Europeans take their vacations every
year?
When it's put like that, who wouldn't want the alternative of an African
Titoism, or perhaps an African Gaullism, where presidential rule keeps a
guiding but not tyrannical hand? A country where people discuss
micro-credits for small business instead of "macro" schemes such as holy
war? Mr. Ben Ali does not make lengthy speeches on TV every night, or appear
in gorgeously barbaric uniforms, or live in a different palace for every day
of the week. Tunisia has no grandiose armed forces, the curse of the rest of
the continent, feeding parasitically off the national income and rewarding
their own restlessness with the occasional coup. And the country is lucky in
other ways as well. Its population is a smooth blend of black and Berber and
Arab, and though it proudly defends its small minorities of Shiites,
Christians (Saint Augustine spent time here), Baha'is, and Jews (there is a
Jewish member of the Senate), it is otherwise uniformly Sunni. It has been
spared the awful toxicity of ethnic and religious rivalry, which makes it
very unusual in Africa.
That, of course, would be the same ‘mild Tunisia’ where, the next year, the
US state department
noted<http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/nea/119128.htm>
:
that security forces tortured and physically abused prisoners and detainees
and arbitrarily arrested and detained individuals. Security forces acted
with impunity sanctioned by high-ranking officials. There were also reports
of lengthy pretrial and incommunicado detention. The government infringed on
citizens' privacy rights and continued to impose severe restrictions on
freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and association. The government
remained intolerant of public criticism, and there were widespread reports
that it used intimidation, criminal investigations, the judicial system,
arbitrary arrests, residential restrictions, and travel controls to
discourage criticism by human rights and opposition activists.
Why, then, was Hitchens, who usually puffed himself as a principled
‘anti-fascist’, so keen on Ben Ali, a pretty old school tyrant?
Well, look back at the quoted passage. In among all the hand-holding and the
vacationing, we discover that, for Hitchens, one of the attractions of
African Gaullism is that ‘religious parties are forbidden’.
And what does that mean? Basically, in the 1990s, as Michael Koplow
explains<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/14/why_tunisias_revolution_is_islamist_free>,
the regime put ‘hundreds of members of the al-Nahda party, Tunisia's main
Islamist movement, on trial amid widespread allegations of torture and
sentencing party leaders to life imprisonment or exile’.
Not surprisingly, given such a record, Ben Ali proved a staunch US ally
during the war on terror. Indeed, in the wake of 9/11, Tunisia, like so many
countries, passed its own draconian ‘anti-terror’ laws, which it used to
crack down on dissidents of all sorts. But it still found time to
collaborate with American repression, playing, for instance, a key role in
the ‘extraordinary rendition’ atrocities.
Basically, Ben Ali might have been a son-of-a-bitch but he was our
son-of-a-bitch, as the old imperialist mantra had it.
In that sense, the ‘Freedom Agenda’ did not represent as much of a break
from traditional *real-politik* as people like Hitchens pretended. The
policy was entirely predicated upon the (quite bizarre) notion that, if
anti-American tyrants were toppled, the people would necessarily vote for
Western-oriented governments.
When it became apparent that, in many cases, they would do precisely the
opposite, the White House very quickly lost its enthusiasm for democracy –
as, for instance, in the Palestinian Authority, where Palestinians
overwhelmingly opted for Hamas, rather than corrupt and pro-American Fatah.
That was why Hilary Clinton was initially reluctant to support the Tunisian
demonstrations (which were, after all, targeting a loyal ally); it’s why the
Israelis were openly despondent about the fall of Ben Ali , with Deputy
Prime Minister Silvan Shalom telling an
interviewer<http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/3926.aspx>that if nearby
regimes were replaced by democracies, Israeli national
security might be threatened because ‘a democratic system would be governed
by a public generally opposed to Israel’.
But there’s another, and perhaps more important, point. Neoconservative
foreign policy usually walked hand-in-hand with neoliberal economics, a
point that the ‘Left’ enthusiasts for Bushism almost never acknowledged.
President Bush famously scribbled ‘Let freedom reign’ when Condy Rice
brought him the news of the first Iraqi election. Yet right from the start,
the plans to reconstruct that country were predicated on extreme
marketisation. In 2004, Naomi Klein described the US economic
program<http://www.harpers.org/archive/2004/09/0080197>,
in paragraphs worth quoting in full:
L. Paul Bremer, who led the U.S. occupation of Iraq from May 2, 2003, until
he caught an early flight out of Baghdad on June 28, admits that when he
arrived, “Baghdad was on fire, literally, as I drove in from the airport.”
But before the fires from the “shock and awe” military onslaught were even
extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more
wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary
Fund has managed to enact over three decades in Latin America. Joseph
Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the World Bank,
describes Bremer's reforms as “an even more radical form of shock therapy
than pursued in the former Soviet world.”
The tone of Bremer's tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he
fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors,
nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the
country's borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties,
no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived,
was “open for business.”
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the
invasion, Iraq's non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200
state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to
washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and
announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting
inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential
for Iraq's economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation
sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Bremer's economic engineering had only just begun. In September, to
entice foreign investors to come to Iraq, he enacted a radical set of laws
unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was
Order 37, which lowered Iraq's corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to
a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign companies to
own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. Even
better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq
out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest and they would
not be taxed. Under Order 39, they could sign leases and contracts that
would last for forty years. Order 40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under
the same favorable terms. All that remained of Saddam Hussein's economic
policies was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining.
As Klein argues in her excellent *Shock Doctrine*, these kind of neoliberal
reforms have nowhere received a democratic mandate, precisely because they
involve the immiseration of the bulk of the citizenry. Indeed, that’s her
key thesis – that, from Chile to Iraq, the free market fantasies of the
so-called Chicago Boys have always depended upon a population stunned into
submission by war, natural disaster or some other calamity.
In Tunisa, the calamity was called Ben Ali.
As Richard Seymour
explains<http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/01/rise-and-fall-of-tunisias-ceausescu.html>
:
Globally, the dictatorship aligned itself with neoliberal institutions,
acceding to GATT, then joining the WTO. Throughout the 2000s, it forged a
closer relationship with the EU, under an agreement removing all tariffs and
restrictions on goods between the two. France and Italy have been its main
export and import partners in this period. Given his zeal in prosecuting the
war against 'terrorism' throughout the 1990s, which mission he took to the
UN and the EU, Ben Ali was an obvious candidate to be a regional ally in the
Bush administration's programme for reconfiguring the Middle East in
America's (further) interests in the context of the war on terror. Ben Ali
thus joined Team America, alongside other lifelong democrats such as Hosni
Mubarak and King Abdullah.
The Ben Ali family – described in the Wikileaks cables as basically a mafia
gang – grew insanely wealthy. The rest of the nation, not so much, with
unemployment at something like 15 per cent. Yet the security apparatus
perfected during the suppression of the Islamists also proved very effective
in preventing strikes, demonstrations or other protests.
Until now, that is.
What’s interesting about the Tunisian rebellion is that, much more than many
of the so-called ‘Color Revolutions’, it has manifested a social aspect,
with trade unions leading the struggle, and putting demands about wages and
economic conditions on the agenda.
This, of course, was never what the neocons meant by ‘Freedom’.
‘Liberty,’ said Bush, ‘is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best
hope for progress here on
Earth<http://www.ned.org/george-w-bush/remarks-by-president-george-w-bush-at-the-20th-anniversary>
.’
But that model of freedom never involved a freedom to choose economic
policies – rather, the free market was itself implied in the very definition
of liberty. In the neocon model, the downfall of a dictator necessarily
entailed the privatisation of everything in sight.
Which is why the Tunisian events matter so much. It’s far from clear yet how
the rebellion will play out. But we’ve seen, like so many times in the past,
that real freedom – freedom from below – is contagious, and that the
struggle against political oppression cannot be separated from the struggle
against economic oppression.
In other words, there is a Freedom Agenda. It’s just not quite what George
Bush had in mind.
4 Responses to “Tunisia and the zombification of war”
1. Owen Richardson says:
January 20 2011 at 11:36
am<http://web.overland.org.au/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/comment-page-1/#comment-10489>
Agreed on most of this. But Liam Fox is a member of a government that has
only been in power since May 2010, so he’s well within his rights to say
that the war in Afghanistan wasn’t managed well for the nine years
preceding.
Reply<https://mail.google.com/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/?replytocom=10489#respond>
2. clare says:
January 20 2011 at 3:04
pm<http://web.overland.org.au/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/comment-page-1/#comment-10490>
Thanks Jeff. That image of the zombification is a strong one – and
applies as much to the pillage of the planet’s so-called natural resources.
Your post makes me feel almost … hopeful.
In the heartbreak and horror at the extremes to which people have been
pushed, there seems something fragile and extraordinary about the spirit of
these young, apparently leaderless (but certainly not disorganised)
revolutionaries. And the absence of the mighty West. When I think of the
forces ready to crush them, warp them and pollute them with corruption, my
soul fills with tears (that sometimes fall from my eyes).
Reply<https://mail.google.com/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/?replytocom=10490#respond>
3. Dave says:
January 20 2011 at 4:26
pm<http://web.overland.org.au/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/comment-page-1/#comment-10492>
Thanks Jeff, excellent article. I wonder also, given the continual reign
of the CCP alongside the emergence of increasing marketisation of the
Chinese economy, whether the neoliberals might finally admit that there is
no necessary link between a neoliberal economy and political democracy?
Reply<https://mail.google.com/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/?replytocom=10492#respond>
4. scott says:
January 20 2011 at 10:21
pm<http://web.overland.org.au/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/comment-page-1/#comment-10494>
Thanks Jeff for shedding some more light on this. Have only picked up
bits and pieces of the Tunsian protests as i travel around Laos learning of
America’s murky 9 year bombing and secret war there.
Just wondering if the media has labelled it a revolution yet. It seems in
the last few years every mass prolonged street protest has been labelled a
colour revolution. Considering that most of them did not succeed in
overthrowing the Government in those countries its hard for me to see them
as revolutions. Just wondering whether its a Western Media thing to add more
drama to them.
I don’t know maybe I’ve got a to idealistic definition of revolution.
Anyway your piece brought those ideas to mind.
Reply<https://mail.google.com/2011/01/20/tunisia-and-the-zombification-of-war/?replytocom=10494#respond>
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