Now, bear with me a moment here. Back in 2002-2003, officials in
the Bush administration and their neocon supporters, retro-think-tank
admirers, and allied media pundits, basking in all their Global War on
Terror glory, were eager to talk about the region extending from North
Africa through the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the
former SSRs of Central Asia right up to the Chinese border as an "arc
of instability." That arc coincided with the energy heartlands of the
planet and what was needed to "stabilize" it, to keep those energy
supplies flowing freely (and in the right directions), was clear enough
to them. The "last superpower," the greatest military force in history,
would simply have to put its foot down and so bring to heel the "rogue"
powers of the region. The geopolitical nerve would have to be mustered
to stamp a massive "footprint" -- to use a Pentagon term of the time --
in the middle of that vast, valuable region. (Such a print was to be
measured by military bases established.) Also needed was the nerve not
just to lob a few cruise missiles in the direction of Baghdad, but to
offer such an imposing demonstration of American shock-and-awe power
that those "rogues" -- Iraq, Syria, Iran (Hezbollah, Hamas) -- would be
cowed into submission, along with uppity U.S. allies like oil-rich
Saudi Arabia.
It would, in fact, be necessary -- in another of
those bluntly descriptive words of the era -- to "decapitate" resistant
regimes. This would be the first order of business for the planet's
lone "hyperpower," now that it had been psychologically mobilized by
the attacks of September 11, 2001. After all, what other power on Earth
was capable of keeping the uncivilized parts of the planet from
descending into failed-state, all-against-all warfare and dragging us
(and our energy supplies) down with them?
Mind you, on
September 11, 2001, as those towers went down, that arc of instability
wasn't exactly a paragon of… well, instability. Yes, on one end was
Somalia, a failed state, and on the other, impoverished, rubble-strewn
Afghanistan, largely Taliban-ruled (and al-Qaeda encamped); while
in-between Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a severely weakened nation with a
suffering populace, but the "arc" was wracked by no great wars, no huge
surges of refugees, no striking levels of destruction. Not particularly
pleasant autocracies, some of a fundamentalist religious nature, were
the rule of the day. Oil flowed (at about $23 a barrel); the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict simmered uncomfortably; and, all in all,
it wasn't a pretty picture, nor a particularly democratic one, nor one
in which, if you were an inhabitant of most of these lands, you could
expect a fair share of justice or a stunningly good life.
Still,
the arc of instability, as a name, was then more prediction than
reality. And it was a prediction -- soon enough to become a
self-fulfilling prophesy -- on which George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald
Rumsfeld, and all those neocons in the Pentagon readily staked careers
and reputations. As a crew, already dazzled by American military power
and its potential uses, such a bet undoubtedly looked like a sure
winner, like betting with the house in a three-card monte scheme. They
would just give the arc what it needed -- a few intense doses of
cruise-missile and B-1 bomber medicine, add in some high-tech military
boots-on-the-ground, some night-vision goggled eyes in the desert, some
Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drones overhead, and some
"regime-change"-style injections of further instability. It was to be,
as Andrew Bacevich has written, "an experiment in creative
destruction."
First Afghanistan, then Iraq. Both pushovers.
How could the mightiest force on the planet lose to such puny powers?
As a start, you would wage a swift air-war/proxy-war/Special-Forces
war/dollar-war -- CIA agents would arrive in friendly areas of Northern
Afghanistan in late 2001 carrying suitcases stuffed with money -- in
one of the most backward places on the planet. Your campaign would be
against an ill-organized, ill-armed, ragtag enemy. You would follow
that by thrusting into the soft, military underbelly of the Middle East
and taking out the hollow armed forces of Saddam Hussein in a
"cakewalk."
Next, with your bases set up in Afghanistan and
Iraq on either side of Iran -- and Pakistan, also bordering Iran, in
hand -- what would it take to run the increasingly unpopular mullahs
who governed that land out of Tehran? Meanwhile, Syria, another
weakened, wobbly state divided against itself, now hemmed in not only
by militarily powerful Israel but American-occupied Iraq on the other
would be a pushover. In each of these lands, you would soon enough end
up with an American-friendly government, run by some figure like the
Pentagon's favorite Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi; and, voilà! (okay, they
wouldn't have used French), you would have a Middle East made safe for
Israel and for American domination. You would, in short, have your
allies in Europe and Japan as well as your possible future enemies,
Russia and China, by the throat in an increasingly energy-starved
world.
Certainly, many of the top officials of the Bush
administration and their neocons allies, dreaming of just such an
orderly, American-dominated "Greater Middle East," were ready to settle
for a little chaos in the process. If a weakened Iraq broke into
several parts; or, say, the oil-rich Shiite areas of Saudi Arabia
happened to fall off that country, well, too bad. They'd deal.
Little did they know.
The Tin Touch
Here's
the remarkable thing, when you think about it: All the Bush
administration had to do was meddle in any country in that arc of
instability (and which one didn't it meddle in?), for actual
instability, often chaos, sometimes outright disaster to set in. It's
been quite a record, the very opposite of an imperial golden touch.
And,
on any given day, you can see the evidence of this on a case by case
basis in your local paper or on the TV news. You can check out the
Iraqi, or Somali, or Lebanese, or Iranian, or Pakistani disasters, or
impending disasters. But what you never see is all those crises and
potential crises discussed in one place -- without which the magnitude
of the present disaster and the dangers in our future are hard to
grasp.
Few in the mainstream world have even tried to put them
all together since the Bush administration rolled back the media,
essentially demobilizing it in 2001-2002, at which point its
journalists and pundits simply stopped connecting the dots. Give the
Bush administration credit: Its top officials took in the world as a
whole and at an imperial glance. They regularly connected the dots as
they saw them. The post-9/11 strike at Afghanistan was never simply a
strike at al-Qaeda (or the Taliban who hosted them). It was always a
prelude to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the invasion of Iraq
was never meant to end in Baghdad (as indicated in the neocon pre-war
quip, "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to
Tehran"). Nor was Tehran to be the end of the line.
Under the
rubric of the "Global War on Terror," they were considering literally
dozens of countries as potential future targets. Dick Cheney put the
matter bluntly back in August 2002 as the public drumbeat for an
invasion of Iraq was just revving up:
"The war in
Afghanistan is only the beginning of a lengthy campaign, Cheney noted.
'Were we to stop now, any sense of security we might have would be
false and temporary,' he said. 'There is a terrorist underworld out
there spread among more than 60 countries.'"
Almost immediately
after the 9/11 attacks, they began stitching together the arc of
instability in their minds with an eye not so much to Arabs, or South
Asians, or even Israelis, but to playing their version of what the
British imperialists used to call "the Great Game." They had the
full-scale rollback of energy-giant Russia in mind as well as the
containment or rollback of potential future imperial power, China,
already visibly desperate for Iraqi, Iranian, and other energy
supplies. In the year before the invasion of Iraq, they were remarkably
blunt about this. They proudly published that seminal document of the
Bush era, the National Security Strategy of the United States of
America, 2002, which called for the U.S. to "build and maintain" its
military power on the planet "beyond challenge."
Think about
that for a moment. A single power on Earth "beyond challenge." This was
a dream of planetary dominion that once would have been left to madmen.
But in what looked like a world with only one Great Power, it was easy
enough to imagine a Great Game with only one great player, an arms race
with only one swift runner.
The Bush administration was
essentially calling for a world in which no superpower, or bloc of
powers, would ever be allowed to challenge this country's supremacy. As
the President put it in an address at West Point in 2002, "America has,
and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby
making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and
limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." The National
Security Strategy put the same thought this way: "Our forces will be
strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a
military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the
United States." That's anywhere on the planet. Ever. And the President
and his followers promptly began to hike the Pentagon budget to suit
their oversized, military fantasies of what an American "footprint"
should be.
With this in mind, the arc of instability, which,
in energy-flow terms, was quite literally the planet's heartland,
seemed the place to control. And yet -- look hard as you will -– you're
unlikely to find a single piece in your daily paper that takes in that
arc; that, say, includes Somalia and Pakistan in the same piece, even
though Bush administration policy has effectively tied them together in
disaster. To take another example, the rise of Iran (and a possible
"Shiite crescent"), Iran's influence or interference in Iraq, Iran's
nuclear program, and Iran's off-the-wall president have been near
obsessions in the U.S. media; and yet, you would be hard-pressed to
find a piece even pointing out that the Bush administration's two
invasions and occupations -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- which left both
those countries bristling with vast American bases and sprawling
American-controlled prison systems, took place on either side of Iran.
Add in the fact that the Bush administration, probably through the CIA,
is essentially running terror raids into Iran through Pakistan and you
have a remarkably different vision of Iran's geostrategic situation
than even an informed American media consumer would normally see.
After
September 11, 2001, but based on the sort of pre-2001 thinking you
could find well represented at the neocon website Project for the New
American Century, the Bush administration's top officials wrote their
own drama for the arc of instability. They were, of course, the main
characters in it, along with the U.S. military, some Afghan and Iraqi
exiles who would play their necessary roles in the "liberation" of
their countries, and a few evil ogres like Saddam Hussein.
Today,
not six years after they raised the curtain on what was to be their
grand imperial drama, they find themselves in a dark theater with at
least six crises in search of an author, all clamoring for attention –
and every possibility that a seventh (not to say a seventeenth)
"character" in that rowdy, still gathering, audience may soon rise to
insist on a part in the horrific farce that has actually taken place.
Six Crises in Search of an Author
Sweeping
across the region from East to West, let's briefly note the six
festering or clamoring crisis spots, any one of which could end up with
the play's major role before George W. Bush slips out of office.
Pakistan:
The Pakistani government was America's main partner, along with the
Saudis, in funding, arming, and running the anti-Soviet struggle of the
mujahedeen, including Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan back in the
1980s; and Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, was the godfather
of the Taliban (and remains, it seems, a supporter to this day). In
September 2001, the Bush administration gave the country's
coup-installed military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, the basic
you're-either-with-us-or-against-us choice. He chose the "with" and in
the course of these last years, under constant American pressure, has
lost almost complete control over Pakistan's tribal regions along the
Afghan border to various tribal groups, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and
other foreign jihadis, who have established bases there. Now,
significant parts of the country are experiencing unrest in what looks
increasingly like a countdown to chaos in a nuclear-armed nation.
Afghanistan:
In the meantime, from those Pakistani base areas, the revived and
rearmed Taliban (and their al-Qaeda partners) are preparing to launch a
major spring offensive in Afghanistan, using tactics from the Iraq War
(suicide bombers or "Mullah Omar's Missiles," as they call them, and
the roadside bomb or IED). They are already capable of taking over
southern Afghan districts for periods of time. The Bush administration
used the Northern Alliance -- that is, proxy Afghan forces -- to take
Kabul in November 2001. It then set up its bases and prisons and
established President Hamid Karzai as the "mayor of Kabul," only to
abandon the task of providing real security and beginning the genuine
reconstruction of the country in order to invade Iraq. The rest of this
particular horror story is, by now, reasonably well known. The country
beyond booming Kabul remains impoverished and significantly in ruins;
the population evidently ever more dissatisfied; the American and NATO
air war ever more indiscriminate; and it is again the planet's largest
producer of opium poppies and, as such, supplier of heroin. Over five
years after its "liberation" from the Taliban, Afghanistan is a failed
state, home to a successful guerrilla war by one of the most
primitively fundamentalist movements on the planet, and a thriving
narco-kingdom. It is only likely to get worse. For the first time, the
possibility that, like the Russians before them, the Americans (and
their NATO allies) could actually suffer defeat in that rugged land
seems imaginable.
Iran: The country is a rising regional
power, with enormous energy resources, and Shiite allies and allied
movements of various sorts throughout the region, including in southern
Iraq. But it also has an embattled, divided, fundamentalist government
capable of rallying its disgruntled populace only with nationalism
(call it, playing the American card). Energy-rich as it is, Iran also
has a fractured, weakened economy, threatened with sanctions; and its
major enemy, the Bush administration, is running a series of terror
operations against it, while trying to cause dissension in its oil-rich
minority regions. It is also deploying an unprecedented show of naval
and air strength in the Persian Gulf. (An aircraft-carrier, the USS
Nimitz, with its strike group, is now on its way to join the two
carrier task forces already in place there.) In addition, the
administration has threatened to launch a massive air assault on Iran's
nuclear and other facilities. Though Iraq runs it a close race, Iran
may be the single potentially most explosive hot spot in the arc of
instability. In a nanosecond, it would be capable, under U.S. attack,
or even some set of miscalculations on all sides, both of suffering
grievous harm and of imposing enormous damage not just on American
troops in Iraq, or on the oil economy of the region, but on the global
economy as well.
Iraq: Do I need to say a word? Iraq is the
poster-boy for the Bush administration's ability to turn whatever it
touches into hell on Earth. In Iraq, the vaunted American military has
been stopped in its tracks by a minority Sunni insurgency. (In recent
weeks, however, the war there is threatening to turn into something
larger, as the American military launches attacks on radical Shiite
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.) Iraq now is the site of a
religio-ethnic civil war of striking brutality, loosing waves of
refugees within the country and on neighboring states; neighborhoods
are being ethnically cleansed and deaths have reached into the hundreds
of thousands. Amid all this, the occupying U.S. military fully controls
only Baghdad's fortified citadel within a city, the Green Zone (and
even there dangers are mounting) as well as a series of enormous,
multibillion-dollar bases it has built around the country. Iraq is now
essentially a failed state and the situation continues to devolve under
the pressure of the President's latest "surge" plan. If that plan were
to succeed, the citadel-state of the Green Zone would, at best, be
turned into the city-state of Baghdad in a sea of chaos. Like Iran,
Iraq has the potential to draw other states in the region into a
widening civil-cum-religious-cum-terrorist war.
Israel/Palestine/Lebanon:
From an early green light for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to join the
Global War on Terror (against the Palestinians) to a green light for
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to launch and continue a war against
Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer, the Bush administration has largely
green-lighted Israel these last years. It has also ignored or, in the
case of the Lebanon War, purposely held back any possibility of serious
peace talks. The provisional results are in. In Lebanon, the heavily
populated areas of the Shiite south were strewn with Israeli cluster
bombs, making some areas nearly uninhabitable; up to a quarter of the
population was, for a time, turned into refugees; parts of Lebanese
cities including Beirut were flattened by the Israeli air force; and
yet Hezbollah was strengthened, the U.S.-backed Siniora government
radically weakened, and the country drawn closer to a possible civil
war. In the Palestinian areas, Bush administration democracy-promotion
efforts ended with a Hamas electoral victory. Starved of foreign aid
and having suffered further Israeli military assaults, the Palestinian
population is ever more immiserated; Hamas and Fatah are at each
other's throats; and the U.S.-backed President of the Palestinian
National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is in a weakened position. In the
wake of a disastrous war, Israel, with a government whose head has a 3%
approval rate, is hardly the triumphant, dominant power in the Middle
East that various Bush administration figures imagined once upon a
time. This looks like another deteriorating situation with no end in
sight.
Somalia (or Blackhawk Down, Round 2): In 2006, Director
Porter Goss's CIA bet on a group of discredited Somali warlords, threw
money and support behind them, and -- typically -- lost out to an
Islamist militia that took most of the country and imposed relative
peace on it for the first time in years. The ever proactive Bush
administration then turned to the autocratic Ethiopian regime and its
military (advised and armed by the U.S. with a helping hand from the
North Koreans) to open "a new front" in the Global War on Terror. The
Ethiopians promptly launched their own "preventive" invasion of Somalia
(with modest U.S. air support), installed a government in the capital,
Mogadishu, proclaimed victory over the Islamists, and -- giant surprise
--promptly found themselves mired in an inter-clan civil war with Iraqi
overtones. Today, Somalia, long a failed state and then, for a few
months, almost a peaceful land (even if ruled by Islamists
fundamentalists), is experiencing the worst fighting and death levels
in 15 years. The new government in Mogadishu is shaky; their Ethiopian
military supporters bloodied; over 1,000 civilians in the capital are
dead or wounded, and tens of thousands of refugees are fleeing
Mogadishu and crossing borders in a state of need. Rate it: a
developing disaster -- with worse to come.
In short, from
Somalia to Pakistan, the region is today a genuine arc of instability.
It is filled with ever more failed states (Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Palestine, which never even made it to statehood before collapse),
possible future failed states (Lebanon, Pakistan), ever shakier
autocracies (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan); and huge floods of
refugees, internal and external (Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan)
as well as massively damaged areas (Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon).
It is also witnessing the growth of extremist and terrorist
organizations and sentiments.
A Rube Goldberg Machine
At
any moment, somewhere in the now-destabilized "arc of instability,"
that seventh character could indeed rise, demand attention, and refuse
to be ejected from the premises. There are many possible candidates.
Here are just a few:
Al-Qaeda, an organization dispersed but
never fully dismantled by the Bush administration, has now, according
to Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, rebuilt itself in the Pakistani
borderlands with new training camps, new base areas, and a new
generation of leaders in their thirties, all still evidently serving
under Osama bin Laden. (In the future, Mazzetti suggests even younger
leaders are likely to come from the hardened veterans of campaigns in
Bush's Iraq). Al-Qaeda is a wild card throughout the region.
Iraqi
Kurdistan is now a relatively peaceful area, but from the disputed,
oil-rich city of Kirkuk to its Turkish and Iranian borders it is also a
potential future powder keg and the focus for interventions of all
sorts.
Oil pipelines, which, from the Black Sea to the Persian
Gulf, crisscross the region, are almost impossible to defend
effectively. At any moment, some group or groups, copying the tactics
of the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, could decide to begin a sabotage
campaign against them (or the other oil facilities in the region).
Saudi
Arabia, an increasingly ossified religious autocracy, faces opponents
ready to practice terrorism against its oil infrastructure and rising
unrest in its oil-rich Shiite areas as well as an ascendant Iran.
Syria,
a rickety minority regime, under internal pressure, now faces the
launching of a renewed Bush administration campaign to further
undermine its power. Though we have no way of knowing the scope of this
campaign, it seems the President and his top officials have learned
absolutely nothing about what their meddling is likely to accomplish.
Outside the "arc of instability," but deeply affected by what goes on there, let's not forget:
The
U.S. Army: 13,000 National Guardsmen have just been notified of a
coming call-up, long before they were due for another tour of duty in
Iraq. The Army, like the Marine Corps, finds itself under
near-unbearable pressure from the Iraq and Afghan Wars and, as a
result, is sending less than fully trained troops, recruited under ever
lower standards, with worn equipment, into battle. The Army, for
instance, is having trouble holding on to its best soldiers. Beyond
their minimum five years of service, to take an example, "just 62% of
West Pointers re-upped, about 25 percentage points lower than at the
other service academies." And the public grumbling of the top brass is
on the increase. Who knows what this means for the future?
The
American People -- Oh yes, them. They haven't really hit the streets
yet, but they've hit the opinion polls hard and last November some of
them hit the polling booths -- decisively. Who knows when they will
"stand up" and insist on being counted. Perhaps in 2008.
In
other words, in addition to the normal cast of characters dreamt up by
the Bush administration in its fantasy production in the global round,
a whole set of unexpected characters are already moving up and down the
aisles, demanding attention, and at any moment, that seventh character
-- whether state, ethnic group, terrorist cadre, or some unknown crew
in search of an author is likely to make its presence felt.
And
let's not forget that there is one more obvious "character" out there
in search of an author; that there is one more Bush-destabilized place
on the planet not yet mentioned, even though it may be the most
important of all. I'm talking, of course, about Washington D.C.; I'm
talking about the Bush administration itself.
Consider the
process by which it turned Washington into a mini-arc of instability:
First, it fantasized about the "arc of instability," then stitched it
together into a genuine Rube Goldberg instability machine, one where
any group, across thousands of miles, might pull some switch that would
set chaos rolling, the flames licking across the oil heartlands of the
planet. Then, remarkably enough, the administration itself and all its
dreams -- both of a Pax Americana globe and a Pax Republicana United
States -- began to disintegrate. The whole edifice, from Rumsfeld's
high-tech military to Karl Rove's political machine, became
destabilized under its own tin touch. The putative playwright became
just another desperate character.
It's no longer far-fetched
to say that, with the President's polling figures in the low 30s,
resistance to his war still growing, a Democratic Congress beginning to
feel its strength, the Republican Party shaking and its presidential
candidates preparing to head for the hills, corruption and political
scandals popping up everywhere, and high military figures implicitly
reading the riot act to their political leaders, the already listing
Bush imperial ship of state seems to be making directly for the next
floating iceberg.
Imagine then, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
still clinging tenaciously to what's left of their dreams and delusions
amid the ruins of their plans -- as the USS Nimitz sails toward the
Persian Gulf; as American agents of various sorts "advise" and, however
indirectly, shuffle aid to extremist groups eager to fell the Iranian
regime; as a new campaign against the Syrian regime is launched; as
stolen Iraqi oil money is shuttled to the Siniora government in Lebanon
(and then, according to Seymour Hersh, to Sunni jihadi groups in
Lebanon and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria); and as American agents
continue to "interrogate" suspected jihadis in their latest borrowed
secret prisons in Ethiopia, while American-backed Ethiopian troops only
find themselves more embroiled in Somalia. Imagine all that, and then
ask yourself, what levers on that Rube Goldberg machine they've done so
much to create are they still capable of pulling?
Writings 
One night when I was in my teens, I found myself at a production of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. I had never heard of the playwright or the play, nor had I seen a play performed in the round. The actors were dramatically entering and exiting in the aisles when, suddenly, a man stood up in the audience, proclaimed himself a seventh character in search of an author, and demanded the same attention as the other six. At the time, I assumed the unruly "seventh character" was just part of the play, even after he was summarily ejected from the theater. 
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