The failure of 'Iraqification' and the colonial temptation. posted by Richard Seymour

I think it obvious that the US government would much rather have successfully imposed a client regime on Iraq than have to deal with a long-term military commitment to Iraq. As Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed out, 3 trillion dollars may not be a lot of money to George W Bush, but it is seriously draining on a national economy - even where, as has been the case, a great deal of that money funnels back into select US corporations. So, the strategy to date has been one of 'Iraqification': train up sufficient Iraqi security forces allied to the regime, itself a sort of klepto-bureaucratic elite uniting sectarians of all sects in a pact of national self-destruction. Into those security forces were elevated a combination of ex-Baathists, Badr Organisation militia members, and the most sinister criminal elements, all of whom were ready for a nationwide blitz of torture and executions. Various components of these security forces have been used in tandem with US troops to engage in 'pacification' operations, with the long-term goal of preparing them to control the country. The fallback position was that the US would maintain permanent bases in the territory, but somewhat more in the fashion of America's 'lily-pad' strategy than of straightforward colonisation I think. Nonetheless, we now know that the US plans not 14, but over 50 permanent military bases in Iraq. [Note: the SW article points out that documents leaked to Al Hayat suggest that the total number of bases planned is 400 - that's larger than the current total of 251. If the Al Hayat report is accurate, then the US plans not only a permanent occupation, but an expanded one.] That would be an unprecedented commitment, and no one could believe that it didn't amount to the complete, enduring occupation of Iraq. What else could you call it? It's a colonial commitment, quite different from the way the US has tried to exert power arguably since WWI and certainly since WWII.

A bit of background. Neil Smith's excellent work on Isaiah Bowman, "Roosevelt's geographer" as he was known, demonstrates some of the geo-economic intelligence that went into determining America's global posture in the era of WWII and after. Bowman had been involved in the imperial strategies of successive administration since Woodrow Wilson's, and under Roosevelt he helped devise the response to Hitler. One of his responsibilities after Kristallnacht was to find a way to deal with the huge refugee flow from Nazi Germany. America was reluctant to accept them, and Bowman's proposition was that America 'acquire' Angola from the Portuguese - whether in the way that Louisiana was acquired, or in the fashion that Cuba was, I can't say - and use it as the basis for a Jewish Homeland. This is not as bizarre as it may sound. The early Zionists had considered Uganda as a possible 'homeland', which underlines the colonial nature of the project. In part, Bowman's stance may have been guided by his scepticism about the idea of colonising Palestine - especially if it included what was then known as Transjordan, since this would result in a Jewish minority in perpetual conflict with an Arab majority.

Bowman was aware by 1942 that the Nazi regime was engaged in genocide, and the public outcry prompted Roosevelt to accept an immensely important project by Bowman, similar to his Inquiry during and after WWI, which had been intended to devise a settlement suitable for America's purposes. This undertaking was known as the 'M Project' and it sought to find a solution to the organisation of Europe and its populations. It has to be stated candidly that Bowman was not a humanitarian. He was a eugenicist and a racist (against Jews as well as others), and believed that certain populations would have to be separated from others to prevent these centrifugal forces from tearing Europe apart again. He certainly didn't think America should relax its immigration standards, or allow an even bigger surplus of labour to develop at a time when 12 million were unemployed. This was part of the intellectual basis, if I may speak loosely, for his proposals. His survey produced hundreds of documents, reports, memoranda, translated materials and so on, and he fed Roosevelt with ongoing advice. On Palestine, he initially advised him to make no promises beyond consultion with both sides after the war. He was concerned both about the prospects for conflict in Palestine if the US backed the Zionist takeover, and also about the idea that European states would see the US as interfering in its affairs and thus take the opportunity to disregard the Monroe Doctrine. But above all, Bowman believed that there had to be conditions for accumulation - land, labour and capital - for any territorial enterprise to work. And it was his focus on the economic dimension of the spatial order that was decisive in his plans for a post-war American hegemony. To the Nazi claim of "Lebensraum for one" he proposed "Lebensraum for all" - this was not because he didn't believe in empire, but because he knew that control of productive resources was far more central to a nation's global power than direct territorial control. America could exercise its dominance primarily through market relations: a new world order, in which the New World ruled by the profit margin. This did not mean no use of military power. On the contrary, America should be able to "police the world": "If we are expect to build a vast Navy and operate merchant ships on an unheard-of scale, we are not going to toss those things away at the end of the war on any theory of peace. We are going to keep them and make them work in the interests of the way that we set up". Further, "In the economic field we shall want to be in on everything the world around." Military action would conserve a global order shaped in America's interests - and as we have seen, that can involve a quite unprecedented frequency and intensity of global violence.

In his work for Roosevelt's territorial committee, he directed the committee members to frame all territorial settlements in terms of the economic and political objectives of the United States. One of the main issues that he had to deal with was the situation of Germany - some in the State Department believed that partition was the answer to the problem, while Bowman envisioned an expansive Germany surviving after the war, with generous eastern territories under an overall Allied military control, the better to act as a bulwark against the USSR. He had misgivings about the possibility of a resurgent German economic power competing successfully with the US, but still took the view that the USSR was a far bigger threat than Germany. He did not in the end win that fight with the administration - Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and Vyacheslav Molotov all agreed that Germany would have to be partitioned. But where he was successful was in pushing for a programme of American expansion. Whereas the British were used to having material interests "everywhere", America had been "tentative, timid, doubtful" and would now have to "make a sudden shift into the new world order". But rather than rest on its colonial laurels (America's colonial possessions were comparatively meagre), the US should engage in a determined effort to shook loose the colonies and open them up to American capital. Bowman was no believer in independence, and held that colonial extraction from colonised territories was simply wise use, since the natives would have no use for the products thus extracted. Trusteeship was the alternative to direct colonial rule for those areas not annexed by the European powers, not independence. For example, not only Japan, but also Korea and Indochina, would become the subjects of trusteeship. (In fact, Roosevelt offered Indochina to Chiang Kai-shek at the Cairo summit in 1943, but the Chinese ruler was not interested). Resource-rich states should be exploited through the market rather than military occupation. If the British imperialists saw this as an attack on the Empire in the name of American economic expansionism, they were right. Bowman admired the British Empire and was fond of Churchill's racist shop-talk on the colonies, but he was as determined as his political masters to make America a truly global power. Bowman was also central to devising plans for a post-war international organisation that would replace the League of Nations, just as US planners were conceiving a 'Grand Area' in which the US would exert its hegemony - this would include the Western hemisphere, the Atlantic and Pacific economies, China, Japan and south-east Asia. Bowman fancied that the UN Charter should be modelled on the US constitution, and asserted that such an organisation should embrace a number of universal "self-evident" truths, including his own nationalist and racist assumptions about population control and immigration. And when, at the United Nations Conference on International Organisation in San Francisco in 1945, the USSR and China argued that any trusteeship should include independence as its eventual goal, Bowman foresaw an "inevitable struggle" with the Russians, whom he saw as trying to expand into the ex-colonies and muscle in on what he regarded as American turf. It was Bowman's lasting lament that the UN could not and did not become a global management system for the United States, because the national issue would not go away. The UN was gradually populated by recently liberated states who spoke the language of Third Worldism or socialism or national independence, and thus became the object of disapprobation and chastisement for American conservatives, from Goldwater to Perle.

Nonetheless, the world order conceived by Bowman and his confederates was roughly realised. America did have long-term military commitments, but this was usually in the way of creating client regimes. It has not been a formal colonial power since it gave up direct rule over the Philippines - you could argue about Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but these are annexed territories rather than colonies. So today, the United States ruling class appears to be divided between those who want to resuscitate 19th Century liberal imperialism, with extended periods of formal occupation, and those who want to stick with the Brzezinski 'realist' camp, managing a global system of vassals through bribery, cajolement, 'lily pads', economic blockade, and brief, effective demonstrations of violence. A number of things would make them more wary than they already are of anything that looked like a formal colonial posture. The first, of course, is that they have the best army in the world and yet can't beat the opposition in either Iraq or Afghanistan: these are unemployed workers, farmers and students in the main, not professional soldiers, and yet they have proven that the US cannot rule their respective countries. The second is that despite the temporary reprieve for the occupiers in Iraq, and the complicity of sectarian elites in the process of breaking the country up and subduing it in a long-term relationship of dominance, even sycophantic pro-US clerics are warning of a much wider uprising should the current plans proceed. Even participants in the puppet government are unhappy about what is proposed. Presumably, the US is not confident that without the presence of troops the advantageous oil contracts it has secured will be honoured - perhaps they envision the overthrow of the Maliki government if troops are even substantially reduced. Yet, what is proposed is such a sweeping and enduring state of occupation and - as a corollary - war against the Iraqi population that it is hard to see this as anything but a temptation to undertake 21st Century colonialism.

Labels: cold war, colonialism, fdr, imperial ideology, isaiah bowman, the geography of capitalism, US imperialism

The Glass Cage posted by Richard Seymour

Apropos an earlier post:

Labels: evil paradises, neoliberalism, the geography of capitalism

Evil Paradises posted by Richard Seymour

Around 1998, I was living in dismal North Woolwich on a student's lack of income. An impoverished, amenity-free colony on the north bank of the Thames, it is connected to its southern metropole by a foot tunnel and a free ferry, in whose freezing, windy chambers you can sit for fifteen minutes as more important (commercial) traffic is conveyed across the water. To the rest of East London, it is connected by an unreliable and dirty Silverlink railway line (recently closed to make way for new development) or, if you're prepared for a walk through a short stretch of desolation, you can take the DLR from Gallion's Reach. For entertainment, there is a sort of 'beach' that you can walk along - actually a pebbly mount that gradually becomes dark, toxic sludge. There, on the grey concrete wall facing the river, you will find out what lonely fascists are capable of doing with a spraycan and a bladder in the dead of night - they mark out their territory, one way or another, stealing tiny, subterranean dirt plots here and there, lurking and waiting. There is an ugly little park, some pubs promising raunch or sports, a sugar factory, and two newsagents, which seemed madly extravagant at the time - what to do with such choice?

The evil pole star of that East End was, and probably still is, the blinking light on top of One Canada Square, former residency of Lord Black. I worked in the 19th floor for about three months while Andrew Marr tried to turn The Independent into a Blairite fan magazine. Commuting daily from dirt cheap to filthy rich territory, I also had a clear view of work from my bedroom window. The utopian element to the construction of Canary Wharf, with its intricate system of waterways and chic shops, the buildings carefully calibrated to control not only the flows of people in and out (rent-a-cops by the thousands in that small area alone), but also every particle of air and moisture, the fountains, broad avenues and cultivated atmosphere of opulece, is in one respect a complete failure. It fails because of the wind. The whole place is an elaborate wind tunnel. Perhaps that is part of the point, however - nothing about the place is hospitable to anyone without cash or access. It's a thought that occurs if you're waiting in Richard Rogers' railway station for the next ride back to whereverthefuck - was this freezing, exposed, glacial structure really designed with people in mind? In fact, the hypertrophic architectural scale, the ludicrous gigantism of everything in the place, has the effect of reinforcing the comparative unimportance of anyone who happens to be passing through. The contrast with those who live within the gated luxury zones could not be more obvious. The plethora of high rise buildings and towers, concrete vertebrates, corporate dinosauria, Tyrannodomus Rex, suggests that the place has been mis-named. Not so much Canary Wharf as Jurassic fucking Park. It is a place, moreover, replete not only with idolatry, but also with the enlarged runic symbols of corporate presence: symbols that are opaque to ordinary interpretation, but which nevertheless mutually corroborate one another, sustaining the hyperstition of capital. And, far from interacting with local economies to generate employment, it seems to have insulated itself successfully, creating a sickly, enchanted working environment that is as psychically distant from the Millwall housing estates as Poplar is from Silicon Valley. Expanding perpetually into the formerly residential areas of the local working class, the parasitical alien compound now relies chiefly on suited labour imported from outlying suburbs, (as well as a few underpaid migrant workers who clean and dispense teas to the offices in absolute silence). This high-profile effort at reshaping the East End social space, coterminous with Thatcher's pitch battles to reform the ideological space, has produced something that is finally almost as surreal and exclusive and intrusive as the Green Zone.

About Green Zones, and their global proliferation, there is an excellent new volume edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. Through a series of focused essays by people like Patrick Bond and China Mieville, it details both the devastation of vast global spaces - the 'Slum World' of Davis' previous book - and the bathetic utopias of the rich. In Afghanistan, the tiny allotments of paradise amid the devastation are given over to both the occupiers and their now massively wealthy warlord allies, who control territories on Nato's behalf, tax on their own behalf, exact punishments and blandishments as they see fit, accumulate mountains of cash from unofficial streams of US dollars and illicit flows of opium. Squatters living in mud huts are evicted so that the most powerful warlords and businessmen can construct fairytale havens on the expropriated plots. This "architectural Babylon", with its "sinister real-estate economy" flaunts the wealth of the new elite as crudely as it drives the poor into the margins. Military strategy, corruption, drug-money, laundering, land piracy and patrimony interact in the new geography of occupied Kabul to produce these little enclaves for the rich, for Western aid workers, for the occupiers. Surreal contrast with a country at large immiserated and strafed with hundreds of bombing raids, not to mention now under techno-toxin assault from Dyncorp. As refugees are forced back into cities and towns ill-equipped to meet their needs, the strategies of exclusion originating from Afghanistan's current, heteromorphic status, ossify into permanent structures of the social and geographic landscape.

Beyond this Babylon is Johannesburg, a city made rich by the trade of gold and diamonds, first under colonial rule, then under apartheid, and now under the neoliberal post-apartheid settlement. Of course, to describe a city as rich in itself is an abstraction - a gold-bricking white capitalist class was made rich, a class that today reluctantly accomodates a small layer of black South Africans. The ANC's rapid ditching of its reformist agenda has confirmed that the city's function is to have an appropriate image, a "world-class" image, rather than to support the livelihoods of its inhabitants. The ANC and their white capitalist allies have been busily encouraging a landscape of conspicuous consumption in order to attract investors, largely without success, cutting corporation taxes, selling off public properties, privatizing electricity so that millions of low-income workers are forced off the grid. The rich hide behind three metre high walls and razor-wire, as some of the dispossessed poor turn to entrepreneurial criminality. Horrified at the prospect of a DIY redistribution of their durables, they hire a low-waged class of security guards from the townships. Between and beyond this centre of financial skyscrapers and that gated suburb are the expanding slums, the urban corridors with diminishing employment prospects and conditions. Patrick Bond insists on the capacity for pressure from below to disrupt these processes. Tenacious traditions of social activism seek to counteract the worst of this and hold up the possibility of a militant resurgence, while working class movements resourcefully mobilise in their own defense.

In the rebooted, secured homeland of consumption, the mall is regnant. In the land of the indebted, subprimed, sold-out and disenfranchised, the man with the super-trolley and SUV is king. Marco d'Eramo writes of an "age of bourgeois consumption", inaugurated with the 19th Century Parisian arcades that so fascinated Walter Benjamin, culminating in the giga-marts, the mother-of-malls that today - under inauspicious grey canopies - offer commuting consumers low-cost goods to fill their car boots with. The modern French hypermarché simply isn't a patch on its American counterpart. Take the Mall of America, with its 525 shops, four department stores, a fourteen-screen multiplex, eighteen restaurants, a seven-acre centrepiece under a glass canopy with an aquarium, a legoland... a visit to such a place could last for weeks. No wonder the larger malls contain a few hotels. If the mall has well-documented deleterious effects on local towns, its principles - of destruction and artificial reconstruction; of infantilism; of the privatization of social life, in which most intercourse is through consumer response to signs and price tags - are operative in American life, particularly in suburbia, the terminus of the white flight. 'Private towns' are emerging, heavily controlled by the homeowners, in which the protections of political life do not apply: forget the First Amendment in rosy little 'Leisure World' of Arizona, whose board of directors censors material at will, precisely as one might in one's own household, or one's own company. In these zones, Mexicans and other people of colour may work, but in total silence. If they say anything to the whites who live there, they're out. The triumph of property rights over human rights is close enough to being complete that it permits forms of segregation and repression that would ordinarily be outlawed. And don't imagine these places are merely small communities of privileged white people living the dream as they see fit. There are 43 million Americans living in common-interest housing developments of this kind, with the main aim apparently being to secure property-holders against crime - a word whose raciological dimensions are apparent in its application. The satisfaction of individual needs, including the market-tested need to be free of the poor, especially the darker-skinned poor, or the need to be able to strongly regulate sexual habits, or whatever other 'need' might enter into one's dim-witted head, is the sustaining ideology here. The free market in the service of serfdom and the family values of Louis Quatorze.

And so on and on, the rich everywhere accumulating massively at the expense of the working class majority, and everywhere secreting themselves in surreal environments - bunkered but luxurious, deliberately attuned to satisfying every possible urge, the mall and the luxury pad converging into one. And the most absurd example of this is the Freedom Ship. More of an ideal than a ship - since construction hasn't even begun since it was first announced almost a decade ago - this voyager promises to deliver the world's wealthy to a life of carefree exuberance, travelling in luxury and style from location to location. The interesting thing about the Freedom Ship is that it is ugly even in conception. An ocean-bound city is the ideal, but it will look more like a multi-storey car park with a helicopter landing range on top. But it will also be, apparently, a floating tax haven. Imagine finally getting the government off your back by going on an extended cruise. As China Mieville writes, it is "banal avarice" offered as "a principled blow for political freedom". For the sake of contrast, one can think here of pirate utopias, the kind described by Marcus Rediker. As Rediker has written, these multiracial, multinational ships were surprisingly egalitarian sodalities, not at all the kinds of violent authoritarian enterprises that we have been accustomed to imagining. Men and women used to the despotic conditions of life on legal trading ships (and slave ships for that matter) found meaningful forms of social solidarity, escape from state control and the emerging forms of capitalist domination. It seems a bit paltry, in comparison, to launch yourself on a three-yearly cycle of seclusion from the rest of the world to escape paying one's taxes. Further, as Mieville rightly emphasises, the history of ship-bound escapes is typically a tragic tale: the "boat people" of Vietnam and Haiti, for example.

I would point out that Iain Sinclair's two brilliant psychogeographic accounts, Lights Out for The Territory and London Orbital are compulsory supplementary reading here, for they extend some of this analysis to this particular heart of neoliberal darkness: London, in which nostalgia is taken to the absurd length of allowing TB to flourish once again in the East End. Soon, rickets too. Sinclair doesn't deal in statistics, or policies as such, and nor does he footnote. Instead, he traverses (or circumnavigates) the city with a photographer and an eye for the substrata, the fossilised remnants of unofficial communications (from "hit and run calligraphers", as Sinclair dubs the graffiti artists), and a wearily satirical eye for bombast. Yet, his books are somehow about the same processes, the same dreamworlds and their inherent sordidness. In London Orbital, in particular, he sniffs out the dystopian reinvention of London's margins and suburbs, the studious re-branding of postindustrial dreck and waste, and the secrets behind the public facades of municipal neoliberalism. However, this new wave of literature in particular, including from David Harvey, Derek Gregory and Mike Davis - and especially the excellent study by Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization - is bringing new emphasis to the spatial dimensions of capital accumulation. In an era in which our space is colonised by, say, Starbucks, and sold back to us so we can consume an over-priced coffee for half an hour; when public space is increasingly privatized; when housing is increasingly a problem in so-called rich cities; when whole swathes of territory are effectively sealed off to the public; when the empire applies its extraordinarily broad geographical mastery to frustrate resistance to its rule; and when even left-wing theorists collude in the neoliberal utopian fantasy of a borderless world... Well, given all this, nothing could be more welcome than the attempt to understand the way power produces space, politically (absolute space, as per the idealised borders of the nation-state), economically (relational space, as per real-time transactions), and ideologically (utopian space, political economy haunted by fantasy).

Labels: neoliberalism, rich man's utopia, the geography of capitalism