Jul. 21, 2010 - Issue #770: Draw It Yourself

Clarifications

Historian Juan Cole makes sense of US foreign policy

For decades, the region where many assert civilization began has seemed hell-bent on becoming where it will end. Israel, Iran, Turkey, Iraq and their eastern neighbours—the area called "the fertile crescent"—seem every day more like an apocalyptic sickle.

Speaking with a sense of calm about this house of dynamite is professor and historian Juan Cole. Cole in his clear, sometimes shockingly understated way, calls out the facts without the bombastic blowhard tactics that are typically mandatory for entering the media spotlight. Strangely, many American media outlets have embraced Cole anyway, including PBS's Lehrer News Hour, and Democracy Now to Anderson Cooper 360 and Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

Having lived in the Muslim world for a decade and being fluent in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, Cole is well-positioned to know whereof he speaks. As the author of Engaging the Muslim World and Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, Cole believes the recent Mavi Marmara incident, in which Israeli commandos killed nine civilians on the Turkish aid vessel, has had a great impact on how the world sees Israel. "The Israelis see themselves as an embattled democracy in the middle of a dictatorial Middle East, reasoning people in the Enlightenment tradition in the midst of religious fanatics, surrounded as if in a bunker, Davids confronting the Goliaths that have extremely sinister intentions towards them of a Nazi-like character." explains Cole.

Corporate media has helped cement that image, despite "the ease with which Israel mopped the floor with the Egyptian armies in 1948, '56 and '67," says Cole. "What happened on the Mavi Marmara aid ship is that Israel became the Goliath ... In some ways, that image had already been built by the Lebanon and Gaza wars. It was an Israeli raid on a ship in international waters, and it was an attempt to enforce an illegal blockade of a civilian population."

According to Cole that blockade causes food insecurity in Palestine. "About 10 percent of Gazan children are said by medical experts to be stunted by malnutrition ... That doesn't look like Israel standing for Enlightenment values and democracy. It looks like an overwhelming bullying power that's willing to punish children for political purposes. When this kind of thing happens, it drives the right in Israel into more of a bunker mentality. They think people are already hating them and wanting to kill them, so they're not surprised at this hostility. But they can't see that they were actually pretty liked, and that they are now turning people against them."

Making sense out of seemingly pointless conflict seems to be a major part of Cole's public work; by his own description, he's spent three decades putting "the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context." So what does he make of the US/Canada-Afghanistan War? Why, after nearly a decade of war are Western powers still occupying "the graveyard of empires"?

"I've talked to people in positions of power in Washington and they don't seem to be able to explain it very well," says Cole. He suspects that the Bush Administration, especially then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, were too locked into Cold War thinking, and that seizing Afghanistan was part of Russia-containment. "For them, going into Afghanistan was for some of the same reasons they're very interested in Poland and Georgia: keep Russia from re-emerging as a pure power by surrounding it. They wanted to be players in Central Asia," with natural gas in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, and oil in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. "For an energy-hungry country like the United States, having bases somewhere near all that black gold isn't a bad thing."

Despite this, Cole believes the discovery of $1 trillion in Afghan mineral deposits is hype leaked for political purposes. "First of all, a trillion dollars in mineral resources in a whole country is nothing to write home about." He explains. "A medium-income country would have a GDP of $100 billion a year. At that rate, [this find] would be gone in ten years."

Aside from being old and minor news, says Cole, the Afghan mother-lode can't justify the eventual hundreds of billions in treasure required to get it. And the US could not unilaterally expropriate the country's entire wealth, anyway, since he says the Chinese are also doing a lot of mining. "The whole thing doesn't make any sense. I think that story was deliberately leaked by the Pentagon in order to convince the Wall Street Journal to run the story, to convince corporate America that there's some reason for the US to be there, that there may be some profits to be made for the private sector so as to shore up support for the war among the business classes."

So if it's not for profit, and if the Bush era is over, why is Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama still sending wave after wave of soldiers? "Every time Afghanistan comes up they keep talking about the need to fight Al Qaeda and global terrorism, and yet they admit there virtually is no Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. So that can't possibly be the goal." Cole posits: "The goal is, I think, to stand up the Kabul government and have it not fall to its various kinds of insurgents. And if that's the goal, then you don't need 100 000 troops on the ground. What you need is a more targeted kind of military campaign. I don't deny the need for military intervention. You don't want Kabul falling to some of these seedy groups."

Cole believes US presence in Afghanistan is treading into the territory of mission creep. "Once [the US] stood up a government in Kabul, it's embarrassing for a great power to have [their] allies hanged in public. And so they kind of became devoted to keeping the Kabul government from falling since it's a very rickety government. And finally, I think being in Afghanistan gives them a 'hand in' with Pakistan and India, which are nuclear powers."

That "concern" comes with a major price for the Afghan people: 1074 civilians killed in the last six months. Cole estimates the total civilian body count since 2001 at around 18 000 people, and the same in wounded. Few countries, says Cole, currently suffer such high war-death tolls, although it's small compared that of Iraq or the Democratic Republic of Congo. "It's a horrible situation that comes on top of decades of war and poverty." says Cole. "Afghanistan is the fifth-poorest country in the world. The US, in deciding to pursue the counter-insurgency campaign, is putting more troops in, is engaging in bombing raids which seem to always be killing civilians or hitting wedding parties."
Yet Cole does not think everything the US is doing is bad. The Obamites have delivered civilian aid via provincial reconstruction teams for community development and economic development, and are a major improvement over the Bushites, who made a mess of reconstruction while also mishandling the war.

But Cole isn't impressed by the recent changing of the US guard in Afghanistan. Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal, replacing him with General David Petraeus, both advocates of COIN, the Counter-Insurgency Doctrine. "The Pentagon is alleging that it worked in Iraq," says Cole. "I have my doubts about that. But the idea that if you translate [COIN], that these Pashtun rural villages want [US] marines walking through their villages and that they would prefer the marines to their own cousins, the Taliban, if only they had a choice. Not in this world ... I think the big counter-insurgency campaign is likely to provoke a greater insurgency."

So as the US bestrides the world like a colossus, its footsteps seem to be leaving craters. And with so many partisans foisting so many distortions, understanding this zone—before the doomsday calendar reads "today"—becomes more critical by the hour. V
 

More stories in front »

vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus