Road Map to Hell. posted by Richard Seymour

The Emperor's New Song: #It's Gettin Hot in Here, So Take of All Your Clothes...#

Boy, that road map to "peace" in the Middle East is taking its fricking time. Fallujah is up in flames again, Baghdad's taking it in the neck , especially Sadr City . Meanwhile, Israel "withdraws" from some parts of the West Bank (translation: they annexed what they wanted and tossed the crumbs to the Palestinians), assassinates two Palestinian leaders and hints that Yasser Arafat may get a bullet or two in the head, and the Prime Minister's reaction to this is to ignore the first assassination, rap Israel's knuckles for the second, but continue to flush the Middle East with arms alongside the US. His position is so servile that "More than 50 former British diplomats have signed a letter to Tony Blair criticising his Middle East policy" .

And Rumsfeld says he was "surprised" by the reaction of Iraqis to their occupation. No shit. It's a quantum leap from flowers and kisses on the cheek to bombings , shootings , mercenaries , kidnappings , and rape . Yet, noone has any right to be surprised by this. Even old hand imperialists like General Anthony Zinni are scathing about the neocon misadventure:

"I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus. Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?"

There's none so blind as those who do not want to see, General.

Asia Minor calling Bush Junior

Yet, this is so much more than a simple bout of radical rightism in American foreign policy. The structure of US policy in the Middle East is essentially responsible for where we are today. There are three essential coordinates of US policy in that region:

1) Support for autocratic regimes against their radical nationalist/Islamist/socialist opponents.

2) Support for Israel against radical nationalists/Islamists/socialists.

3) Opposition to radical nationalists/Islamists/socialists.

I hope that boils it down for you. Basically, the US has been flooding the Middle East with weapons and military aid for decades, but especially the last decade. In 2003, 72% of US foreign aid to the Middle East was military aid. Totalling $3.8 billion, US military aid to the Middle East is 90% of the its total worldwide. Since the Gulf War, this aid has totalled $90 billion. Much of it has gone to Israel, encouraging a rapid build-up in military capacity in a country where external security threats were declining - the usual trend is that countries spend less on their military when there are fewer threats to contend with. Iraq was a wreck after 1991, Syria had lost its Soviet backer, Iran was busy chasing a writer of fiction and most of the other regimes in the Middle East are basically pro-Israel. Following the Gulf War, Middle Eastern countries spent on average 20.1% of their GDP on defense - well above the Western average. This has forced quite dramatic cuts in social spending in many of these states, even as US arms producers (their overwhelming suppliers) garner enormous profits. Moreover, since Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morrocco and other Arab states have relied on Saudi aid for some time, the pressures causing Saudi Arabia to be less generous have reduced their ability to spend. What aid they do get is being used by Egypt to finance its arms purchases and pay off debts incurred from previous purchases, and by Morrocco to subsidise its occupation of the Western Sahara.
With this level of military spending and the population increases associated with greater urbanisation, there is now emerging a "food deficit" across the Arab world. They are not producing enough food to feed their population, because not enough is being invested in agriculture. The result is that in the slums of Rabat in Morrocco, for instance, radical Islamist groups are thriving, one of which carried out attacks on a Jewish community centre in Casablanca last year. In Saudi Arabia itself, the tale could not be more obvious or more chilling. (See, for example, Stephen Zunes, Tinderbox, Zed Books, 2003; and Anne Ashford, "The Politics of Terror: Who Are Al Qaeda?", Socialist Review, April 2004).

The Punchline

In order to control the chaos they've unleashed in the Middle East, the US have been obliged to commit most of its armed forces (yes, there are 1.4 million standing and reserved troops, but there are 400,000 committed at the moment and, since rotation is a three-phase task, this means that 1.2m troops are tied up with current deployments, leaving on 200'000 to work with - which actually means the US can only deploy a third of that - about 70'000 ground troops ). They may be planning on another war. They may try to reintroduce the draft. But, most importantly, they're having to detain many of the Iraqis they don't manage to kill. Guess that's so they don't have any room for Chalabi.