Anarch
12-01-2005, 02:24 AM
http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml
GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN
STATES OF WAR
The greatness of an estate, in bulk and territory, doth fall under measure; and the greatness of finances and revenue, doth fall under computation. The population may appear by musters; and the number and greatness of cities and towns by cards and maps. But yet there is not any thing amongst civil affairs more subject to error, than the right valuation and true judgement concerning the power and forces of an estate.
Francis Bacon
At the turn of the century, it seemed unlikely that American strategic planners would contemplate any course of action that might disrupt a number of exceptionally favourable international trends. All the main ones seemed to point to the dawning of another American century: an unopposed encroachment of nato into the void opened up by the elimination of the ussr, the apparent reversal of a quarter-century of economic decline in a climate of explosive speculation, the deft deflection of Europe back into the Atlantic fold, the deepening synergy with China as the low-wage supplier of the world market, and a compliant attitude at the un Security Council before the step-wise progression of us revisionism. Washington was allowed the exemptions and privileges of a super-state on the plausible assumption that it had committed its power to the protection and expansion of the zone of globalization. This accommodating hegemonic formula seemed to obviate the need for big and medium powers to have to concern themselves with the arduous task of balancing against the American ‘hyperpower’. Indeed, the two potential nuclear adversaries of this democratic peace—rising China, and declining Russia—exhibited little interest in an alliance, seemingly convinced of the pointlessness of security competition with the great enforcer of Open Door capitalism.
On the peripheries of this volatile circuitry of market forces, tightened neoliberal conditions of access to Western investment, aid and moral legitimation resulted in a far-reaching attenuation of the sovereignty of weak and failing states. Washington’s initiatives against small rogue regimes in the name of human rights and wmd interdiction appeared to have consigned to the past traditional statecraft based on great power rivalries. The new strategic doctrines authorizing us and Western interventions in violation of the un Charter derived their legitimacy from a vague but widely held assumption that the period was a transitional state of exception laying down the foundations of an international community to come. This assumption offered some consolation to liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, who rapidly embraced an airbrushed version of it as the credo of a new cosmopolitanism.
The scrambling of this picture in the aftermath of 9/11 has created a historical context whose elements have yet to settle into an intelligible pattern. In trying to determine whether 9/11 signals the beginning of a new era of international politics, it is necessary to begin by asking whether the aggressive ‘unilateralism’ of the us response to this event has been an atavistic regression from previously more ‘multilateral’ norms of neoliberalism, or, alternatively, their continuation by other means. It is here that the Retort group’s striking recent intervention, Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20), poses a series of fundamental questions. [1] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn1)This is an intricate piece of work, interconnecting the three constituents of its subtitle—capital, spectacle and war—at a remarkable level of imaginative intensity. In what follows, I will consider the principal themes of the book in turn, and end by offering some reflections of my own on certain of the wider issues it raises.
Primitive accumulation?
Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) sets out, in the first instance, to examine the adequacy of certain Marxist concepts to the current geopolitical situation and ask if this can be made more intelligible by locating it within the historical pattern of capitalist development. One of the keys to understanding the sudden darkening of the horizon, its authors maintain, is Marx’s conception of ‘primitive accumulation’—the earth-shaking use of force to create or restore the social conditions of profitability. In the tradition of historical materialism, the periodization of eras in the history of capitalism has typically involved controversial narrative conjunctions of political and economic developments. Lenin’s explanation for the outbreak of an inter-imperialist world war as an effect of the passage from free-market to monopoly capitalism is a famous example. The attempt to do this today puts into the question the ability of the term ‘liberal-democracy’ to capture the latest, emergent features of advanced capitalist polities: indeed, not so long after it had been declared to be the culminating point of history, Philip Bobbitt went so far as to argue that the convergence of powerful trends in markets, media and warfare was spawning a new type of polity in the West. For Bobbitt, the line of historical development points to a national security regime committed to market freedoms, pre-emptive strikes against human rights violators and unauthorized wmd holders, and stage-managed televisual plebiscites. [2] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn2)
By contrast, Retort’s analysis attempts to offer an explanation of the continuities of American foreign policy in terms of the general logic of capitalism, without reference to the structure and history of the capitalist, or more specifically, the American state. Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) presents post-9/11 American ‘unilateralism’ as a response to the sputtering out of the first round of neoliberalism with the end of the stock market bubble and it boom of the 90s. But the story its authors tell by and large avoids any emphasis on the crisis dynamics of capitalism and the distinct periods to which these can be said to give rise. That, they dismiss as the outmoded preoccupations of an older generation. This is a more than questionable judgement, as even a cursory familiarity with the contents of a business magazine would demonstrate. Economics to one side, however, they cannily put their finger on a sudden change in the realm of appearances.
In but a few years, the figures typifying contemporary capitalism have shifted from silicon to oil, guns and steel. This is happening, they claim, because neoliberalism is ‘mutating from an epoch of “agreements” and austerity programmes to one of outright war . . . those periodic waves of capitalist restructuring we call primitive accumulation.’ [3] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn3)This conception of the role of force in jump-starting and lubricating accumulation comes from Rosa Luxemburg, although the name goes unmentioned. In effect, Retort wholly subscribe to Luxemburg’s definition of imperialism as ‘the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment’. [4] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn4)For them, this is no demarcated stage, but a continuous process in history since the dawn of capitalism. ‘Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe’ characterizes not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step. [5] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn5)
Retort give this Luxemburg-derived account a further, Polanyian twist: the violence that marks the history of capitalism has typically taken the form of coercive enclosure of ‘the commons’—i.e. the appropriation of myriad forms of common wealth embedded in the non-market environment upon which capitalism feeds. This claim is a striking example of a near-universal tendency on the part of Marxists to understand the relationship between capitalism and war in terms of a systematic logic. I will question the degree to which capitalism has a geopolitical logic at all. In evaluating the plausibility of Retort’s argument—or alternative accounts which make this same assumption—three signal contemporary developments need to be borne in mind. There has been a quarter-century of protracted structural adjustment whose main indices are wage stagnation, heightened job insecurity, speed-up and lengthening of work hours, burgeoning debt service, and levels of inequality not seen since the 1920s. Accompanying it has been a major internal expansion of markets through privatizations over the same period. In the last fifteen years, there has been a huge external expansion of capitalism, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the more or less complete incorporation of China into the world market.
The key question in any assessment of the central thesis of Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) is that of the role, if any, that politico-military coercion played in enforcing this wide-ranging transformation at the expense of labour and other strata, on the one hand, and opening up and determining the conditions of access to new areas of capital development, on the other. Scepticism is appropriate here. Firstly, most of this domestic restructuring of society for the benefit of investors, owners and rentiers has unfolded from the early 80s without any significant bouts of organized violence from above—certainly when measured against comparable periods in the past when police, Pinkertons and fascist squads were crucial agencies of labour discipline. Secondly, unlike conditions in the era of colonialism, the semi- and non-capitalist environment is now organized on a nation-state basis that impedes the open use of military coercion to acquire or retain spheres of influence. It seems rather unlikely that the new round of imperial wars and occupations is securing the conditions for the ongoing expansion of capitalism, as they claim. In practice, Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) itself shows some uncertainty here, oscillating between depictions of military force as a way of breaking down barriers standing in the way of the expansion of neoliberalism, and characterizations of it as a product of ideological fixations and delusions peculiar to an impasse of neoliberalism.
The particularity of the United States
In attempting to theorize the relationship between capitalism and military power, Retort equates the us with ‘the state’ generically conceived, without regard to the sui generis character of the former. Carl Schmitt argued, by contrast, that the extension of America’s manifest destiny from the Western hemisphere into the Old World was transforming the geo-spatial order of territorial statehood, altering the very meaning of the terms ‘sovereignty’, ‘war’ and ‘international law’. [6] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn6)The entry of the us into the Eurocentric old regime of sovereign states was accelerating the erosion of its classical norms of war and diplomacy. The jus publicum europaeum, he argued, was a concrete diplomatic order in which war was a legitimate instrument of settlement between fully sovereign states able to measure each other’s relative power positions in a geopolitical environment structured by the homogeneity of state forms and aims. But once a field of relatively homogeneous rival powers vanishes, the very meaning of balancing becomes problematic, while the theories based on this assumption become correspondingly less realistic. Confirming this assessment, the final destruction of Axis empires at the opposite ends of Eurasia did in fact result in a far-reaching reconstruction of the inter-state matrix of the core capitalist zone, precluding any restoration of a traditional system of separate regions and balances. [7] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn7)
But the consequences of this radical departure from the security concepts of an older world of war and diplomacy were not entirely apparent during the Cold War, because superpower rivalry, based on a rough symmetry between the main contenders, imposed an overarching bi-polar logic onto the political, military and ideological heterogeneity of a vastly expanded state system. Arguably, the specificity of the us relationship to the inter-state order became evident in the aftermath of the Cold War, when American strategic planners scotched any talk of returning to the Western hemisphere after their victory over the last great contender for Eurasian hegemony. [8] The narrower security concepts of Realpolitik cannot explain the historical pattern of this transformative and expansionary agenda. The attempt to account for the change was the rational kernel of Hardt and Negri’s conception of Empire as an open polity transcending the coordinates of closed sovereign states. It could be said that the us differs from other states, because it is the paradigmatic capitalist regime, geared, like the system it promotes, for unlimited expansion. In contrast to the authors of Empire, the Retort collective seems more cognizant of the fact that the American Republic is still very much a particular state, vigilantly pursuing its particular strategic interests, while articulating these interests within a wider project of universalizing capitalism by enabling regime changes, from gunboat and dollar diplomacy to shock therapy in both core and periphery. ‘Each military intervention is intended to serve an overall strategic project of pressing American power—and the potential for Western capital entrenchment in “emerging markets”—ever further into vital regions of the globe.’ [9] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn9)Although Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) pays little attention to the structure of the inter-state system, its general line of argument allows for an explanation of why the latter has undergone a series of substantive transformations even as the nominal form of an older sovereignty principle has been preserved and generalized.
No blood for oil?
Retort’s principal concerns, however, lie elsewhere. Their objective is to address the limitations of the slogans and analyses offered by today’s anti-war movement. A focus on the Middle East logically follows. The notion that some combination of Oil, Israel and Islam defines the specificity of the region and the us relation to it is not uncommon, and much of Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) is an attempt to disentangle and weigh the various elements of this series. In a wider context, of course, what distinguishes this zone is its partial insulation from post-Cold War trends that have everywhere else resulted in neoliberal structural adjustment and corresponding regime changes. To date, its old guard of family rulers and police states has without exception held on to power. In terms of its intended regional effect, the invasion of Iraq was supposed to be a step towards abolishing this anomaly—suddenly less tolerable after the attentats of 9/11—with a dramatic nation-building experiment. Victory over the Baath regime was intended to send a powerful signal to the Arab elites of the need for a modest dose of perestroika, and to the Arab masses of American invincibility and Israel’s status as an untouchable beachhead of the new regional order. But this course of action was also meant to have a global demonstration effect as the first clear test of the legitimacy of preventive war and regime change as a strategic-legal norm of the New American Century. This should be near the centre of any account of what Retort call ‘the contradictions of military neoliberalism under conditions of spectacle’. [10] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn10)
Oil is a focus of much of the commentary on the origins of this war. For the anti-war movement, indeed, it has seemed an overwhelmingly obvious explanation of it, from start to finish. And how can its significance be denied, given that the organizers of this enterprise and their well-wishers in the strategic community often met such charges with an unruffled ‘so what?’ Yes, they said, we need to pry the oilfields out of the hands of Saddam and his henchmen so they can’t wreak more destruction. Such candour was no doubt unsettling for those who assumed that the sordid truth had to lie deeper below the surface. Indeed, those who seek to explain the invasion and occupation of Iraq in terms of oil interests are presented with an embarrassment of riches: the unprecedented ties of both the first- and second-in-command to the petro-industrial complex; a fire sale of crony capitalist development contracts; hostile takeovers of French and Russian agreements by Anglo-American super-majors; installation of a pliable swing producer to diminish dependency on the House of Saud; oil leverage over other capitalist centres; and the clinching of the status of petrol as a dollar-denominated store of value.
What is the position of Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) on all this? Retort argue that while the future of capitalism still depends on the control of a few strategic resources, the No Blood for Oil argument fails to penetrate the enigmatic core of fossil fuel capitalism, falling back on populist stereotypes of scams and lobbies. Their purpose is not to deny the abundant evidence for the existence of the latter, but to provide an account of the wider context in which the profits of the American oil industry could possess a significance for us policy in the region far beyond what the share of this sector in the national economy would suggest they should have. For the first question that must be asked when constructing a more plausible explanation of the role of oil interests in the calculation of us policy, is how American super-majors could ever be powerful enough to drive up the price of crude when they do not control supply, and higher prices must be borne not just by consumers but by all other firms—an aggregate incomparably larger than Big Oil.
Is there any way to explain why one economic sector might exercise an influence on American policy in the Middle East vastly disproportionate to its actual size, yet cannot exercise this power to achieve any sustainable ‘price leadership’? Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) makes a commendable effort to do precisely this by developing an alternative to what can be regarded as the most sophisticated attempt to present oil—not just as an industry, but as a strategic use-value whose supply is bound up with the future of the capitalist system—as the main motivation for regime change in Iraq.
According to this view, the invasion’s principal aim was to secure the reserves of Iraq in anticipation of a coming peak—the so-called Hubbert’s Peak—in world oil production, after which a rapid depletion of regional fields will set in. Underlying the claim is a Malthusian anticipation of imminent scarcity. What the various End of Oil prophecies that have circulated since the 70s ignore, however, is the periodic recurrence of the opposite danger—glut and falling prices. Such interpretations also fail to address the ongoing investment in hitherto inaccessible fields from Alberta to the Bight of Benin. These developments, Retort argue, must postpone the moment of peak production into a future too distant for markets and regimes to compute. In any event, they point out that natural gas is the future of the industry and its geography lies largely outside the Middle East.
Weapons and wells
Malthusian assumptions, moreover, cannot explain the half-century pattern of a very gradual long-term rise in the price of oil, with fluctuations cutting against the trend in response to real, anticipated and imagined political turbulence. In Retort’s view, the determinants of these fluctuations and their distributional consequences are the real story that needs to be uncovered and theorized. Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) offers an overview of the history of empires, regional state formation and the scramble to control and manipulate the most lucrative nodal points in the extraction and distribution of petroleum, in order to frame a new understanding of these determinants and consequences. The story begins in the early years of the last century, with a semi-colonial patchwork of weak dynastic entities propped up as cover for massive concessions to Western oil consortiums. Iraq was forged as an artefact of such oil politics. The League of Nations Mandate to Britain required it to perform cosmetic nation-building tasks and share the loot with French and American oil companies. A client monarchy and rigged elections provided the requisite façade of semi-statehood. By the 1930s the Big Three controlled 70 per cent of world oil output, and American investment in the region’s fields was increasing rapidly.
In a second phase, nationalist regimes began to take over these semi-colonial concessions and extra-territorial corporate fiefdoms, a development associated with the names of Mossadegh in Iran and Qasim in Iraq. American and European oil companies were relegated to the sphere of distribution, where they by and large remain to this day. us administrations learned to live with this new state of affairs as the price of oil smoothly adjusted to the growth of demand in Western economies.
Despite the formation of opec in the early 60s, technological development steadily brought down its real price over this entire period. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 led to a brief second wave of Arab nationalism resulting in an oil embargo against the us. While the ensuing price spike stoked inflation in the world economy, most of these surpluses ended up being recycled by low absorbers (the Gulf dynasties with little interest in using oil revenues to build up national power) back into us banks, and by both high and low absorbers into the profit margins of weapons manufacturers around the world. The balancing act that took shape in the 80s between Western economic growth, oil company profits, and high absorbers (states like Iran and Iraq) was more or less satisfactory to all the major parties. When periodic breakdown occurred, the us intervened decisively to hold the centre—an elusive equilibrium price—against potential turbulence. The geopolitical determinants of price movements in this period were the Iranian Revolution and its containment, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War, the establishment and decay of the sanctions regime and, more speculatively, storms on the horizon in Saudi Arabia. But by the end of the 90s regional tensions seemed to be declining, and this, combined with the deflation of the stock-market bubble in the us, led to glut and plummeting prices for the super-majors.
Such was one of the contexts, Retort contends, in which a high-risk regime change in Iraq—one of the pipedreams of right-wing strategic planners in the 90s—began to seem an attractive prospect for many inside the industry, as well as for policy circles who tend to identify its interests with those of the ustout court. Before the grim realities of the occupation set in, there was much bold talk in Washington about American proconsuls imposing a neoliberal revolution from above, with the privatization of Iraq’s nationalized oil assets first on the agenda. The oil industries of the ‘developing world’ had been tenaciously resistant to privatization, but with an Iraqi client installed in opec, optimists foresaw the beginning of the liquidation of these last holdouts of statism. Neo-conservative ideologues announced that this was the first step in a wider structural adjustment to the norms and even the way of life of the new American century.
The lesson of Retort’s narrative seems to be that while Big Oil is central to the explanation of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the No Blood for Oil argument is a misunderstanding of the force field of world demand, war and speculation in which fluctuations in the price level of this commodity turn out to abound in geopolitical subtleties. The alternative offered by Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) develops out of various qualifications to the thesis proposed by two Israeli scholars that links the political economy of oil to that of the weapons trade—a connection that these writers, focusing on the way opec oil revenues created the market for a massive expansion of the private arms industry in the us, call the Weapondollar–Petrodollar Coalition. [11] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn11)After the 60s, so this argument runs, the us shifted from the provision of weapons to clients in the form of aid to the promotion of a private arms trade; since then the opec share of world market demand for arms has risen from 9 to 36 per cent. For the Retort collective, however, this is only one segment of a larger circuit connecting oil to engineering, construction, financial services and hedge funds. This vast regional and offshore vortex draws into it bountiful underworld streams of laundered and drug money, consisting, they suggest, of ‘trillions of dollars’ of speculative hot money, although they concede that such estimates are little more than guesses. In this combustible field, the objective of us planners is to ensure, against all hazards, that it is their priorities that supervene on the logic of supply and demand. Nitzan and Bichler go so far as to claim that, by ratcheting up regional instability, American interventions have had the intended effect of staving off collapsing petrol prices, and enriching the beneficiaries of oil price inflation. For the authors of Afflicted Powers, this is to simplify a far more opaque picture. But although they write as if—after criticizing and qualifying the alternatives—they are going to provide a more adequate account, they ultimately fail to do so. Perhaps, however, this very failure to reconstruct the geo-economic constellation they scan into a causal pattern is a way of bringing home an earlier claim that the contemporary conjunction of capitalism, war and the spectacle is dissolving the intelligible field of strategies.
Images of Israel
In their genealogy of the current disaster in the Middle East, Retort address a directly related case in which the norms of realist statecraft have also seemingly broken down. Why has American support for Israel shot up in a period in which the Zionist state has become a major liability in terms both of its regional strategic interests and its hegemonic credibility? It is easy to forget that this most special of all special relationships came into existence in stages. Although Washington had initially been cool to Israel’s debut as a regional power, by the late 50s the rising fortunes of radical Arab nationalism brought about a reassessment of Israel’s role as a deterrent against potential threats to American oil interests. The us stake in a Jewish bulwark in the region grew steadily after the idf overwhelmed Arab armies in 1967. Israel—alongside Pahlavi Iran—was rapidly fortified as a sub-imperial guardian holding the balance against the Soviet-equipped Arab armies of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. From the early 80s onwards, however, the fit between Israeli and us objectives in the region began to loosen. Yet Washington’s commitment to Jerusalem has become increasingly unconditional.
The explanation of this anomaly offered by Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) nimbly side-steps what is often thought to be the most obvious explanation: the influence of the Israeli lobby, strengthened by an emerging alliance with the Christian right, within the United States. Without wholly denying it, Retort claim that this development needs to be situated in the logic of the media sphere. For in their eyes it is less Israel itself, than Israel transfigured by the magic of the spectacle into an ideological totem of American identity, that has become the tail wagging the dog. The problem here is just what constitutes the pays idéel of Zionism in this imaginary. Retort argue that while ‘modern states are often slower to fall prey to a set of spectacular illusions and compulsions than the other sectors of societies they govern’, [12] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn12)once fixated on a mythological image of their identity, they often become incapable of pulling back to a colder assessment of their interests. While suggestive, their account remains itself captive to the tv screens whose effects they seek to lay bare, as if the only perspective on the ideological dimensions of this conflict is from the couch. The ideological mould of us–Israeli relations cannot be completely reduced to the surface images of beleaguered citizens and brave soldiers confronting terrorists, and the occasional bad apples in the midst of so much everyday heroism. There is more to the ideological development that determines this imagery than that.
For the moral authority that the us claims for itself—over and above its role in promoting markets and democracy—has increasingly come to rest on its identity as the modern defender of the Jewish people. Any perusal of the journals that educated Americans read demonstrates the centrality of this historical mission in the contemporary imaginary of the country.
Putting aside the truth of the claim, its expansion as a discourse has been striking. Figuring retrospectively as a rationale for America’s battle against the Third Reich, from the 70s onwards it became a powerful thrust in the propaganda war against the ussr, while at the same time underscoring the need to batten down Arab nationalism, as an emblem of all the dangers surging within the Third World. More recently, if there has been some decline (not much) in the popularity of the Jewish state elsewhere in the West, this has if anything enhanced its attractiveness for those Americans who don’t think much of foreigners anyhow. Within the country, of course, the topic of Israel has long become a criterion for dividing legitimate from illegitimate voices in the great American political conversation.
In the view of Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20), Israel’s time in the sun of the spectacle is coming to an end. Older images of Israel as a pioneering progressive beachhead of the West, it contends, have given way over the last twenty years to the now familiar scenery of a colonial disaster zone. This claim reads more like—rather desperate?—self-reassurance than a sober description of the prevailing image of the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ and the bedrock public support it commands, in Europe as much as in the United States. But even if—all diplomatic evidence to the contrary, from Paris through Karachi to Beijing—its international legitimacy were devalued, what would this imply for the future political trajectory of Zionism? Here Retort neglect to contemplate what might be a disturbing corollary of their more general thesis on war and the spectacle. For Israel is perhaps the only state in the world that closely approximates to their conception of a military capitalism. It is also a land where not a few continue to believe that another regional war might provide them with the main chance, messianically conceived.
A revolutionary Islam?
Reflections on the history of radical Islam round out Retort’s portrait of the colonial battlefields of the world system. Remarking that while the anti-war Left has emphasized the role of oil in the political economy of Empire, it has neglected to address the nature of its most conspicuous antagonist, they maintain that an adequate response to the geopolitical moment that begins with 9/11 requires a gauge of the stakes of the battle between America and jihad. While some have seen in ‘the War on Terror’ merely a pretext for pushing through a second instalment of the Reagan Revolution, Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) argues that the new Islamic vanguards have, in fact, shaken Empire in the realm of image power, provoking it to reckless overreach. Given Retort’s intellectual debt to Guy Debord, this might at first seem like a startling claim. For Debord did not take terrorism very seriously at all, and his judgement of its effects was wholly deflationary: ‘This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results.’ [13] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn13)This verdict has more than a semblance of plausibility. Compare it to the claim made by Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20), that Islamic fundamentalism is ‘something like a mass movement with a nearly unlimited pool of potential operatives.’ Islamists, in the eyes of Retort, have ‘a political project that is global in reach and ambition, anti-imperialist and . . . revolutionary in practice’. [14] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn14)
But here too fixation on the televisual screen of the social world can be deceptive, as the distinction between reality and appearance is, in this case, belied by the very phenomenon itself. Do militant Islamic cells form an elusive mobile network, ready to strike at any moment the bourses and theme parks of the Abode of War? Or are they a tiny fringe, stranded on the edges of a sea that is everywhere drying up? Looking at their numbers and prospects for coming to state power, it seems clear—at least until Iraq changed the picture—that the latter is much closer to the mark. But it is in the very nature of this war that a bombing anywhere in the world seems to verify, on the screens that both Westerners and Muslims watch, the existence of a vast, many-headed foe. Yet in this age of the so-called multitude, what is striking is the fellah-like passivity of the Arab masses, even as they daily watch, enraged, images of the battlefields of Palestine and Iraq. The Arab street has so far remained impotent. Whether more people than ever are watching al-Jazeera or are in chat rooms does not change the fact that they, like their counterparts in the West, are spectators in this mother of all asymmetrical wars.
GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN
STATES OF WAR
The greatness of an estate, in bulk and territory, doth fall under measure; and the greatness of finances and revenue, doth fall under computation. The population may appear by musters; and the number and greatness of cities and towns by cards and maps. But yet there is not any thing amongst civil affairs more subject to error, than the right valuation and true judgement concerning the power and forces of an estate.
Francis Bacon
At the turn of the century, it seemed unlikely that American strategic planners would contemplate any course of action that might disrupt a number of exceptionally favourable international trends. All the main ones seemed to point to the dawning of another American century: an unopposed encroachment of nato into the void opened up by the elimination of the ussr, the apparent reversal of a quarter-century of economic decline in a climate of explosive speculation, the deft deflection of Europe back into the Atlantic fold, the deepening synergy with China as the low-wage supplier of the world market, and a compliant attitude at the un Security Council before the step-wise progression of us revisionism. Washington was allowed the exemptions and privileges of a super-state on the plausible assumption that it had committed its power to the protection and expansion of the zone of globalization. This accommodating hegemonic formula seemed to obviate the need for big and medium powers to have to concern themselves with the arduous task of balancing against the American ‘hyperpower’. Indeed, the two potential nuclear adversaries of this democratic peace—rising China, and declining Russia—exhibited little interest in an alliance, seemingly convinced of the pointlessness of security competition with the great enforcer of Open Door capitalism.
On the peripheries of this volatile circuitry of market forces, tightened neoliberal conditions of access to Western investment, aid and moral legitimation resulted in a far-reaching attenuation of the sovereignty of weak and failing states. Washington’s initiatives against small rogue regimes in the name of human rights and wmd interdiction appeared to have consigned to the past traditional statecraft based on great power rivalries. The new strategic doctrines authorizing us and Western interventions in violation of the un Charter derived their legitimacy from a vague but widely held assumption that the period was a transitional state of exception laying down the foundations of an international community to come. This assumption offered some consolation to liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, who rapidly embraced an airbrushed version of it as the credo of a new cosmopolitanism.
The scrambling of this picture in the aftermath of 9/11 has created a historical context whose elements have yet to settle into an intelligible pattern. In trying to determine whether 9/11 signals the beginning of a new era of international politics, it is necessary to begin by asking whether the aggressive ‘unilateralism’ of the us response to this event has been an atavistic regression from previously more ‘multilateral’ norms of neoliberalism, or, alternatively, their continuation by other means. It is here that the Retort group’s striking recent intervention, Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20), poses a series of fundamental questions. [1] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn1)This is an intricate piece of work, interconnecting the three constituents of its subtitle—capital, spectacle and war—at a remarkable level of imaginative intensity. In what follows, I will consider the principal themes of the book in turn, and end by offering some reflections of my own on certain of the wider issues it raises.
Primitive accumulation?
Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) sets out, in the first instance, to examine the adequacy of certain Marxist concepts to the current geopolitical situation and ask if this can be made more intelligible by locating it within the historical pattern of capitalist development. One of the keys to understanding the sudden darkening of the horizon, its authors maintain, is Marx’s conception of ‘primitive accumulation’—the earth-shaking use of force to create or restore the social conditions of profitability. In the tradition of historical materialism, the periodization of eras in the history of capitalism has typically involved controversial narrative conjunctions of political and economic developments. Lenin’s explanation for the outbreak of an inter-imperialist world war as an effect of the passage from free-market to monopoly capitalism is a famous example. The attempt to do this today puts into the question the ability of the term ‘liberal-democracy’ to capture the latest, emergent features of advanced capitalist polities: indeed, not so long after it had been declared to be the culminating point of history, Philip Bobbitt went so far as to argue that the convergence of powerful trends in markets, media and warfare was spawning a new type of polity in the West. For Bobbitt, the line of historical development points to a national security regime committed to market freedoms, pre-emptive strikes against human rights violators and unauthorized wmd holders, and stage-managed televisual plebiscites. [2] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn2)
By contrast, Retort’s analysis attempts to offer an explanation of the continuities of American foreign policy in terms of the general logic of capitalism, without reference to the structure and history of the capitalist, or more specifically, the American state. Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) presents post-9/11 American ‘unilateralism’ as a response to the sputtering out of the first round of neoliberalism with the end of the stock market bubble and it boom of the 90s. But the story its authors tell by and large avoids any emphasis on the crisis dynamics of capitalism and the distinct periods to which these can be said to give rise. That, they dismiss as the outmoded preoccupations of an older generation. This is a more than questionable judgement, as even a cursory familiarity with the contents of a business magazine would demonstrate. Economics to one side, however, they cannily put their finger on a sudden change in the realm of appearances.
In but a few years, the figures typifying contemporary capitalism have shifted from silicon to oil, guns and steel. This is happening, they claim, because neoliberalism is ‘mutating from an epoch of “agreements” and austerity programmes to one of outright war . . . those periodic waves of capitalist restructuring we call primitive accumulation.’ [3] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn3)This conception of the role of force in jump-starting and lubricating accumulation comes from Rosa Luxemburg, although the name goes unmentioned. In effect, Retort wholly subscribe to Luxemburg’s definition of imperialism as ‘the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment’. [4] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn4)For them, this is no demarcated stage, but a continuous process in history since the dawn of capitalism. ‘Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe’ characterizes not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step. [5] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn5)
Retort give this Luxemburg-derived account a further, Polanyian twist: the violence that marks the history of capitalism has typically taken the form of coercive enclosure of ‘the commons’—i.e. the appropriation of myriad forms of common wealth embedded in the non-market environment upon which capitalism feeds. This claim is a striking example of a near-universal tendency on the part of Marxists to understand the relationship between capitalism and war in terms of a systematic logic. I will question the degree to which capitalism has a geopolitical logic at all. In evaluating the plausibility of Retort’s argument—or alternative accounts which make this same assumption—three signal contemporary developments need to be borne in mind. There has been a quarter-century of protracted structural adjustment whose main indices are wage stagnation, heightened job insecurity, speed-up and lengthening of work hours, burgeoning debt service, and levels of inequality not seen since the 1920s. Accompanying it has been a major internal expansion of markets through privatizations over the same period. In the last fifteen years, there has been a huge external expansion of capitalism, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the more or less complete incorporation of China into the world market.
The key question in any assessment of the central thesis of Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) is that of the role, if any, that politico-military coercion played in enforcing this wide-ranging transformation at the expense of labour and other strata, on the one hand, and opening up and determining the conditions of access to new areas of capital development, on the other. Scepticism is appropriate here. Firstly, most of this domestic restructuring of society for the benefit of investors, owners and rentiers has unfolded from the early 80s without any significant bouts of organized violence from above—certainly when measured against comparable periods in the past when police, Pinkertons and fascist squads were crucial agencies of labour discipline. Secondly, unlike conditions in the era of colonialism, the semi- and non-capitalist environment is now organized on a nation-state basis that impedes the open use of military coercion to acquire or retain spheres of influence. It seems rather unlikely that the new round of imperial wars and occupations is securing the conditions for the ongoing expansion of capitalism, as they claim. In practice, Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) itself shows some uncertainty here, oscillating between depictions of military force as a way of breaking down barriers standing in the way of the expansion of neoliberalism, and characterizations of it as a product of ideological fixations and delusions peculiar to an impasse of neoliberalism.
The particularity of the United States
In attempting to theorize the relationship between capitalism and military power, Retort equates the us with ‘the state’ generically conceived, without regard to the sui generis character of the former. Carl Schmitt argued, by contrast, that the extension of America’s manifest destiny from the Western hemisphere into the Old World was transforming the geo-spatial order of territorial statehood, altering the very meaning of the terms ‘sovereignty’, ‘war’ and ‘international law’. [6] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn6)The entry of the us into the Eurocentric old regime of sovereign states was accelerating the erosion of its classical norms of war and diplomacy. The jus publicum europaeum, he argued, was a concrete diplomatic order in which war was a legitimate instrument of settlement between fully sovereign states able to measure each other’s relative power positions in a geopolitical environment structured by the homogeneity of state forms and aims. But once a field of relatively homogeneous rival powers vanishes, the very meaning of balancing becomes problematic, while the theories based on this assumption become correspondingly less realistic. Confirming this assessment, the final destruction of Axis empires at the opposite ends of Eurasia did in fact result in a far-reaching reconstruction of the inter-state matrix of the core capitalist zone, precluding any restoration of a traditional system of separate regions and balances. [7] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn7)
But the consequences of this radical departure from the security concepts of an older world of war and diplomacy were not entirely apparent during the Cold War, because superpower rivalry, based on a rough symmetry between the main contenders, imposed an overarching bi-polar logic onto the political, military and ideological heterogeneity of a vastly expanded state system. Arguably, the specificity of the us relationship to the inter-state order became evident in the aftermath of the Cold War, when American strategic planners scotched any talk of returning to the Western hemisphere after their victory over the last great contender for Eurasian hegemony. [8] The narrower security concepts of Realpolitik cannot explain the historical pattern of this transformative and expansionary agenda. The attempt to account for the change was the rational kernel of Hardt and Negri’s conception of Empire as an open polity transcending the coordinates of closed sovereign states. It could be said that the us differs from other states, because it is the paradigmatic capitalist regime, geared, like the system it promotes, for unlimited expansion. In contrast to the authors of Empire, the Retort collective seems more cognizant of the fact that the American Republic is still very much a particular state, vigilantly pursuing its particular strategic interests, while articulating these interests within a wider project of universalizing capitalism by enabling regime changes, from gunboat and dollar diplomacy to shock therapy in both core and periphery. ‘Each military intervention is intended to serve an overall strategic project of pressing American power—and the potential for Western capital entrenchment in “emerging markets”—ever further into vital regions of the globe.’ [9] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn9)Although Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) pays little attention to the structure of the inter-state system, its general line of argument allows for an explanation of why the latter has undergone a series of substantive transformations even as the nominal form of an older sovereignty principle has been preserved and generalized.
No blood for oil?
Retort’s principal concerns, however, lie elsewhere. Their objective is to address the limitations of the slogans and analyses offered by today’s anti-war movement. A focus on the Middle East logically follows. The notion that some combination of Oil, Israel and Islam defines the specificity of the region and the us relation to it is not uncommon, and much of Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) is an attempt to disentangle and weigh the various elements of this series. In a wider context, of course, what distinguishes this zone is its partial insulation from post-Cold War trends that have everywhere else resulted in neoliberal structural adjustment and corresponding regime changes. To date, its old guard of family rulers and police states has without exception held on to power. In terms of its intended regional effect, the invasion of Iraq was supposed to be a step towards abolishing this anomaly—suddenly less tolerable after the attentats of 9/11—with a dramatic nation-building experiment. Victory over the Baath regime was intended to send a powerful signal to the Arab elites of the need for a modest dose of perestroika, and to the Arab masses of American invincibility and Israel’s status as an untouchable beachhead of the new regional order. But this course of action was also meant to have a global demonstration effect as the first clear test of the legitimacy of preventive war and regime change as a strategic-legal norm of the New American Century. This should be near the centre of any account of what Retort call ‘the contradictions of military neoliberalism under conditions of spectacle’. [10] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn10)
Oil is a focus of much of the commentary on the origins of this war. For the anti-war movement, indeed, it has seemed an overwhelmingly obvious explanation of it, from start to finish. And how can its significance be denied, given that the organizers of this enterprise and their well-wishers in the strategic community often met such charges with an unruffled ‘so what?’ Yes, they said, we need to pry the oilfields out of the hands of Saddam and his henchmen so they can’t wreak more destruction. Such candour was no doubt unsettling for those who assumed that the sordid truth had to lie deeper below the surface. Indeed, those who seek to explain the invasion and occupation of Iraq in terms of oil interests are presented with an embarrassment of riches: the unprecedented ties of both the first- and second-in-command to the petro-industrial complex; a fire sale of crony capitalist development contracts; hostile takeovers of French and Russian agreements by Anglo-American super-majors; installation of a pliable swing producer to diminish dependency on the House of Saud; oil leverage over other capitalist centres; and the clinching of the status of petrol as a dollar-denominated store of value.
What is the position of Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) on all this? Retort argue that while the future of capitalism still depends on the control of a few strategic resources, the No Blood for Oil argument fails to penetrate the enigmatic core of fossil fuel capitalism, falling back on populist stereotypes of scams and lobbies. Their purpose is not to deny the abundant evidence for the existence of the latter, but to provide an account of the wider context in which the profits of the American oil industry could possess a significance for us policy in the region far beyond what the share of this sector in the national economy would suggest they should have. For the first question that must be asked when constructing a more plausible explanation of the role of oil interests in the calculation of us policy, is how American super-majors could ever be powerful enough to drive up the price of crude when they do not control supply, and higher prices must be borne not just by consumers but by all other firms—an aggregate incomparably larger than Big Oil.
Is there any way to explain why one economic sector might exercise an influence on American policy in the Middle East vastly disproportionate to its actual size, yet cannot exercise this power to achieve any sustainable ‘price leadership’? Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) makes a commendable effort to do precisely this by developing an alternative to what can be regarded as the most sophisticated attempt to present oil—not just as an industry, but as a strategic use-value whose supply is bound up with the future of the capitalist system—as the main motivation for regime change in Iraq.
According to this view, the invasion’s principal aim was to secure the reserves of Iraq in anticipation of a coming peak—the so-called Hubbert’s Peak—in world oil production, after which a rapid depletion of regional fields will set in. Underlying the claim is a Malthusian anticipation of imminent scarcity. What the various End of Oil prophecies that have circulated since the 70s ignore, however, is the periodic recurrence of the opposite danger—glut and falling prices. Such interpretations also fail to address the ongoing investment in hitherto inaccessible fields from Alberta to the Bight of Benin. These developments, Retort argue, must postpone the moment of peak production into a future too distant for markets and regimes to compute. In any event, they point out that natural gas is the future of the industry and its geography lies largely outside the Middle East.
Weapons and wells
Malthusian assumptions, moreover, cannot explain the half-century pattern of a very gradual long-term rise in the price of oil, with fluctuations cutting against the trend in response to real, anticipated and imagined political turbulence. In Retort’s view, the determinants of these fluctuations and their distributional consequences are the real story that needs to be uncovered and theorized. Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) offers an overview of the history of empires, regional state formation and the scramble to control and manipulate the most lucrative nodal points in the extraction and distribution of petroleum, in order to frame a new understanding of these determinants and consequences. The story begins in the early years of the last century, with a semi-colonial patchwork of weak dynastic entities propped up as cover for massive concessions to Western oil consortiums. Iraq was forged as an artefact of such oil politics. The League of Nations Mandate to Britain required it to perform cosmetic nation-building tasks and share the loot with French and American oil companies. A client monarchy and rigged elections provided the requisite façade of semi-statehood. By the 1930s the Big Three controlled 70 per cent of world oil output, and American investment in the region’s fields was increasing rapidly.
In a second phase, nationalist regimes began to take over these semi-colonial concessions and extra-territorial corporate fiefdoms, a development associated with the names of Mossadegh in Iran and Qasim in Iraq. American and European oil companies were relegated to the sphere of distribution, where they by and large remain to this day. us administrations learned to live with this new state of affairs as the price of oil smoothly adjusted to the growth of demand in Western economies.
Despite the formation of opec in the early 60s, technological development steadily brought down its real price over this entire period. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 led to a brief second wave of Arab nationalism resulting in an oil embargo against the us. While the ensuing price spike stoked inflation in the world economy, most of these surpluses ended up being recycled by low absorbers (the Gulf dynasties with little interest in using oil revenues to build up national power) back into us banks, and by both high and low absorbers into the profit margins of weapons manufacturers around the world. The balancing act that took shape in the 80s between Western economic growth, oil company profits, and high absorbers (states like Iran and Iraq) was more or less satisfactory to all the major parties. When periodic breakdown occurred, the us intervened decisively to hold the centre—an elusive equilibrium price—against potential turbulence. The geopolitical determinants of price movements in this period were the Iranian Revolution and its containment, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War, the establishment and decay of the sanctions regime and, more speculatively, storms on the horizon in Saudi Arabia. But by the end of the 90s regional tensions seemed to be declining, and this, combined with the deflation of the stock-market bubble in the us, led to glut and plummeting prices for the super-majors.
Such was one of the contexts, Retort contends, in which a high-risk regime change in Iraq—one of the pipedreams of right-wing strategic planners in the 90s—began to seem an attractive prospect for many inside the industry, as well as for policy circles who tend to identify its interests with those of the ustout court. Before the grim realities of the occupation set in, there was much bold talk in Washington about American proconsuls imposing a neoliberal revolution from above, with the privatization of Iraq’s nationalized oil assets first on the agenda. The oil industries of the ‘developing world’ had been tenaciously resistant to privatization, but with an Iraqi client installed in opec, optimists foresaw the beginning of the liquidation of these last holdouts of statism. Neo-conservative ideologues announced that this was the first step in a wider structural adjustment to the norms and even the way of life of the new American century.
The lesson of Retort’s narrative seems to be that while Big Oil is central to the explanation of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the No Blood for Oil argument is a misunderstanding of the force field of world demand, war and speculation in which fluctuations in the price level of this commodity turn out to abound in geopolitical subtleties. The alternative offered by Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) develops out of various qualifications to the thesis proposed by two Israeli scholars that links the political economy of oil to that of the weapons trade—a connection that these writers, focusing on the way opec oil revenues created the market for a massive expansion of the private arms industry in the us, call the Weapondollar–Petrodollar Coalition. [11] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn11)After the 60s, so this argument runs, the us shifted from the provision of weapons to clients in the form of aid to the promotion of a private arms trade; since then the opec share of world market demand for arms has risen from 9 to 36 per cent. For the Retort collective, however, this is only one segment of a larger circuit connecting oil to engineering, construction, financial services and hedge funds. This vast regional and offshore vortex draws into it bountiful underworld streams of laundered and drug money, consisting, they suggest, of ‘trillions of dollars’ of speculative hot money, although they concede that such estimates are little more than guesses. In this combustible field, the objective of us planners is to ensure, against all hazards, that it is their priorities that supervene on the logic of supply and demand. Nitzan and Bichler go so far as to claim that, by ratcheting up regional instability, American interventions have had the intended effect of staving off collapsing petrol prices, and enriching the beneficiaries of oil price inflation. For the authors of Afflicted Powers, this is to simplify a far more opaque picture. But although they write as if—after criticizing and qualifying the alternatives—they are going to provide a more adequate account, they ultimately fail to do so. Perhaps, however, this very failure to reconstruct the geo-economic constellation they scan into a causal pattern is a way of bringing home an earlier claim that the contemporary conjunction of capitalism, war and the spectacle is dissolving the intelligible field of strategies.
Images of Israel
In their genealogy of the current disaster in the Middle East, Retort address a directly related case in which the norms of realist statecraft have also seemingly broken down. Why has American support for Israel shot up in a period in which the Zionist state has become a major liability in terms both of its regional strategic interests and its hegemonic credibility? It is easy to forget that this most special of all special relationships came into existence in stages. Although Washington had initially been cool to Israel’s debut as a regional power, by the late 50s the rising fortunes of radical Arab nationalism brought about a reassessment of Israel’s role as a deterrent against potential threats to American oil interests. The us stake in a Jewish bulwark in the region grew steadily after the idf overwhelmed Arab armies in 1967. Israel—alongside Pahlavi Iran—was rapidly fortified as a sub-imperial guardian holding the balance against the Soviet-equipped Arab armies of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. From the early 80s onwards, however, the fit between Israeli and us objectives in the region began to loosen. Yet Washington’s commitment to Jerusalem has become increasingly unconditional.
The explanation of this anomaly offered by Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) nimbly side-steps what is often thought to be the most obvious explanation: the influence of the Israeli lobby, strengthened by an emerging alliance with the Christian right, within the United States. Without wholly denying it, Retort claim that this development needs to be situated in the logic of the media sphere. For in their eyes it is less Israel itself, than Israel transfigured by the magic of the spectacle into an ideological totem of American identity, that has become the tail wagging the dog. The problem here is just what constitutes the pays idéel of Zionism in this imaginary. Retort argue that while ‘modern states are often slower to fall prey to a set of spectacular illusions and compulsions than the other sectors of societies they govern’, [12] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn12)once fixated on a mythological image of their identity, they often become incapable of pulling back to a colder assessment of their interests. While suggestive, their account remains itself captive to the tv screens whose effects they seek to lay bare, as if the only perspective on the ideological dimensions of this conflict is from the couch. The ideological mould of us–Israeli relations cannot be completely reduced to the surface images of beleaguered citizens and brave soldiers confronting terrorists, and the occasional bad apples in the midst of so much everyday heroism. There is more to the ideological development that determines this imagery than that.
For the moral authority that the us claims for itself—over and above its role in promoting markets and democracy—has increasingly come to rest on its identity as the modern defender of the Jewish people. Any perusal of the journals that educated Americans read demonstrates the centrality of this historical mission in the contemporary imaginary of the country.
Putting aside the truth of the claim, its expansion as a discourse has been striking. Figuring retrospectively as a rationale for America’s battle against the Third Reich, from the 70s onwards it became a powerful thrust in the propaganda war against the ussr, while at the same time underscoring the need to batten down Arab nationalism, as an emblem of all the dangers surging within the Third World. More recently, if there has been some decline (not much) in the popularity of the Jewish state elsewhere in the West, this has if anything enhanced its attractiveness for those Americans who don’t think much of foreigners anyhow. Within the country, of course, the topic of Israel has long become a criterion for dividing legitimate from illegitimate voices in the great American political conversation.
In the view of Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20), Israel’s time in the sun of the spectacle is coming to an end. Older images of Israel as a pioneering progressive beachhead of the West, it contends, have given way over the last twenty years to the now familiar scenery of a colonial disaster zone. This claim reads more like—rather desperate?—self-reassurance than a sober description of the prevailing image of the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ and the bedrock public support it commands, in Europe as much as in the United States. But even if—all diplomatic evidence to the contrary, from Paris through Karachi to Beijing—its international legitimacy were devalued, what would this imply for the future political trajectory of Zionism? Here Retort neglect to contemplate what might be a disturbing corollary of their more general thesis on war and the spectacle. For Israel is perhaps the only state in the world that closely approximates to their conception of a military capitalism. It is also a land where not a few continue to believe that another regional war might provide them with the main chance, messianically conceived.
A revolutionary Islam?
Reflections on the history of radical Islam round out Retort’s portrait of the colonial battlefields of the world system. Remarking that while the anti-war Left has emphasized the role of oil in the political economy of Empire, it has neglected to address the nature of its most conspicuous antagonist, they maintain that an adequate response to the geopolitical moment that begins with 9/11 requires a gauge of the stakes of the battle between America and jihad. While some have seen in ‘the War on Terror’ merely a pretext for pushing through a second instalment of the Reagan Revolution, Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20) argues that the new Islamic vanguards have, in fact, shaken Empire in the realm of image power, provoking it to reckless overreach. Given Retort’s intellectual debt to Guy Debord, this might at first seem like a startling claim. For Debord did not take terrorism very seriously at all, and his judgement of its effects was wholly deflationary: ‘This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results.’ [13] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn13)This verdict has more than a semblance of plausibility. Compare it to the claim made by Afflicted Powers (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1844670317/newleftreview-20), that Islamic fundamentalism is ‘something like a mass movement with a nearly unlimited pool of potential operatives.’ Islamists, in the eyes of Retort, have ‘a political project that is global in reach and ambition, anti-imperialist and . . . revolutionary in practice’. [14] (http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR27001.shtml#_edn14)
But here too fixation on the televisual screen of the social world can be deceptive, as the distinction between reality and appearance is, in this case, belied by the very phenomenon itself. Do militant Islamic cells form an elusive mobile network, ready to strike at any moment the bourses and theme parks of the Abode of War? Or are they a tiny fringe, stranded on the edges of a sea that is everywhere drying up? Looking at their numbers and prospects for coming to state power, it seems clear—at least until Iraq changed the picture—that the latter is much closer to the mark. But it is in the very nature of this war that a bombing anywhere in the world seems to verify, on the screens that both Westerners and Muslims watch, the existence of a vast, many-headed foe. Yet in this age of the so-called multitude, what is striking is the fellah-like passivity of the Arab masses, even as they daily watch, enraged, images of the battlefields of Palestine and Iraq. The Arab street has so far remained impotent. Whether more people than ever are watching al-Jazeera or are in chat rooms does not change the fact that they, like their counterparts in the West, are spectators in this mother of all asymmetrical wars.