Bedtime Stories for the Bewildered Herd

This was completely false. Beyond technically irrelevant predictions from within the Middle East and from the U.S. and global left, numerous key establishment “elite” advanced serious warnings about disastrous consequences after a quick military victory over a weak regime. The agents of advance warning (to name just some of the more prominent voices) included Bush senior’s National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, retired Air Force Colonel John Warden, Marine Corps consultant Frank Hoffman, National Defense University professor Daniel Kuehl, conservative Congressperson Ike Skelton (the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee), and the Committee on International Security Studies at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. All of these and other voices within and beyond the foreign policy establishment issued relevant notes of caution and alarm regarding the difficulties inherent in illegally occupying Mesopotamia. 

There have been numerous other fairy tales told to the bewildered American herd by the Administration and its media enablers. We’ve been told tall tales about the invasion of Iraq being part of the “war on terror” when it was widely understood in numerous intelligence circles that invading the sovereign territory of Iraq would increase the threat posed to America and the world by stateless terror networks. We’ve been fed stories about successful U.S.-sponsored elections and noble U.S. school and hospital building projects that supposedly indicate the hidden success and humanitarian benevolence of the occupation. We’ve been instructed to think that the killing of a leading terror operative (Zarqawi) was a major step forward in the reduction of violence in Iraq. We’ve been asked to believe that the U.S. torture of Iraqis in Abu Ghraib and other locations was the result of the misconduct of a few deranged rank-and-file GIs and not of explicit, top-down U.S. policy. We’ve been told foolish tales about ethnic violence the U.S. supposedly did nothing to create, had no reason to expect, and which now necessitates a continuing U.S. military presence to guarantee “public safety.” 

Never Mind the Imperial Agenda 

N ever mind that the preponderant majority of Iraqis have wanted U.S. troops to leave their nation from the start. According to a recent poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, 78 percent of Iraqis now believe that the U.S. military presence is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing” and 61 percent of Iraqis approve of attacks on Americans. A poll commissioned by the British Ministry of Defence last year found that fully 82 percent of Iraqis were “‘strongly opposed’ to the presence of foreign troops and that less than 1 percent believed the troops were responsible for improvement in security.” 

Never mind that a poll conducted by the U.S. State Department reports that almost three-fourths of Baghdad’s residents would “feel safer” if U.S. forces left their country. 

Never mind that 72 percent of Americans surveyed by the mainstream Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in 2004 (the percentage is certainly higher today) said that the U.S. should remove its military from Iraq if that’s what a clear majority of Iraqis want. 

Never mind that more than half the U.S. population now says the war on Iraq is not morally justified. 

Never mind that (according to a recent New York Times /CBS poll) a majority of the population now rejects Administration efforts to link the war on Iraq with the so-called “war on terror.” 

Never mind that (according to a CNN poll in August), 60 percent of the U.S population opposes the war, 61 percent believes that some troops should be removed before the end of the year, and 57 percent want a timetable for full withdrawal. 

Never mind that the U.S. “democracy”-promoting president rejects these policy choices supported by the American popular majority as naïve elitist “appeasement”—so-called “cut and run”—even while he insists that the war is being fought on behalf of the idea that government should reflect the “will of the people.” 

Never mind that America’s own regressive, hyper-plutocratic domestic policy is highly unpopular with the American majority, which rejects the regressive policies that have helped make their nation the most unequal and wealth-top-heavy state in the industrialized world. 

Never mind that one of the first actions of the U.S. occupation authorities was to open up much of Iraq’s economy to multinational corporate ownership—an action that would never have been supported by the Iraqi majority and which violated core principles of national independence. 

Never mind that the U.S. is building a number of permanent military bases in richly oil-strategic Iraq. 

Never mind that the U.S. is a close ally and sponsor of the feudal, arch-repressive Saudi Arabian regime along with numerous other authoritarian state and political forces (including the Israeli occupation state) in the region and around the world. 

Critical Leverage in the Heart of
the World’s Energy System 

T he notion of the Iraqi people doing whatever they wish with their own state’s critical petroleum resources—second or third only to those of Saudi Arabia—is completely unacceptable to U.S. foreign policy makers from either of the nation’s dominant two imperial business parties. As James M. Lindsay, a vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently proclaimed: “It was always hard to sustain the argument that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam there would be immense geopolitical consequences. As we look at Iraq, it’s a very different issue. It’s a country in one of the most volatile parts of the world, which has a very precious resource that modern economies rely on, namely oil.” 

As the leading left critic of U.S. foreign policy Noam Chomsky observes, “The U.S. invaded Iraq because it has enormous oil resources, mostly untapped and it’s right in the heart of the world’s energy system.” If the U.S. succeeds in controlling Iraq, Chomsky notes, “it extends enormously its strategic power, what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls its ‘critical leverage’ over Europe and Asia. That’s a major reason for controlling the oil resources—it gives you strategic power. Even if you’re on renewable energy you want to do that. That’s the reason for invading Iraq, the fundamental reason,” readily understood, Chomsky argues, by anybody who has “three gray cells functioning.” Early in the occupation of Iraq, Chomsky adds, Brzezinski argued, “America’s control over Middle Eastern oil producers ‘gives it indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the [Persian Gulf] region’.” Brzezinski was simply “reiterating the leading post-World War II U.S. planners, George Kennan in this case, who recognized that control of the resources of the Gulf region would give the United States ‘veto power’ over its industrial rivals.” 

But even if the U.S. overcame its gasoline addiction and became fully energy-self-reliant (it currently receives 20 percent of its oil from the Middle East), something else would still make U.S. officials positively obsessed with Middle Eastern petroleum: the ongoing and ever-worsening loss of America’s one-time supremacy in basic global-capitalist realms of production, trade, international finance, and currency and the related emergence of the rapidly expanding giant China as a new strategic military (as well as economic) competitor. As the noted left geographer and world-systems analyst David Harvey argues, the United States’ long decline, reflecting predictable (and predicted) shifts in the spatial patterns of capitalist investment and social infrastructure gives special urgency for the U.S. to deepen its control of Middle Eastern oil and use it as what Chalmers Johnson calls “a bargaining chip with even more oil-dependent regions” like Western Europe and East Asia, homes to the leading challengers to U.S. economic power. That core objective would hardly be attained helping Iraq independently determine its own fortunes. 

The U.S. Would Go to Nuclear War
Before Allowing That 

T o make “the logic of withdrawal” yet less apparent to U.S. planners, the majority of Iraqis are Shiite Muslims and therefore likely to use real national independence as an opportunity to form a rough partnership with oil-rich Iran. Together with Iran, Iraqi Shiites might well inspire Shiite resistance to state power in the Persian Gulf’s ultimate oil prize, feudal and arch-repressive Saudi Arabia, home (by the way) to the world’s largest known oil reserves where “strategic” petro-imperial considerations have long mandated a deep U.S. partnership with tyranny and dictatorship. As Chomsky explains: “Let’s talk about withdrawal. Take any day’s newspapers or journals and so on. They start by saying the United States aims to bring about a sovereign democratic independent Iraq. I mean, is that even a remote possibility? Just consider what the policies would likely be of an independent sovereign Iraq. If it’s more or less democratic, it’ll have a Shiite majority. They will naturally want to improve their linkages with Iran, Shiite Iran. Most of the clerics come from Iran. The Badr Brigade, which basically runs the South, is trained in Iran. They have close and sensible economic relationships which are going to increase. So you get an Iraq/Iran loose alliance. Furthermore, right across the border in Saudi Arabia, there’s a Shiite population that has been bitterly oppressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny. Any moves toward independence in Iraq are surely going to stimulate them, it’s already happening. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabian oil is. Okay, so you can just imagine the ultimate nightmare in Washington: a loose Shiite alliance controlling most of the world’s oil, independent of Washington and probably turning toward the East where China and others are eager to make relationships with them—and are already doing it. Is that even conceivable? The U.S. would go to nuclear war before allowing that, as things now stand” (Noam Chomsky, “There is no War on Terror,” ZNet, January 16, 2006).

Silly Liberal Talk 

O ne of the remarkable things about the democracy-promotion fairy tale is the exceptional power it holds over liberal war opponents at the leftmost boundaries of dominant U.S. media’s narrow spectrum. In a March 2006 op-ed titled “Stop Bush’s War,” the New York Times ’ antiwar left-liberal columnist Bob Herbert found it relevant to quote Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era special assistant Jack Valenti on “how difficult it is ‘to impress democracy’ on other countries.” He took the Bush administration’s democracy promotion rhetoric seriously when he argued, “The democracy that was supposed to flower in Iraq and then spread throughout the Middle East was as much a mirage as the weapons of mass destruction.”  He engaged in wildly wishful thinking and whistled in the wind of imperial realities when he said that “the White House should be working cooperatively with members of both parties in Congress to figure out the best way to bring the curtain down on U.S. involvement.” 

Nobody at the Times has been more naively sucked into the democracy-export fairy tale, perhaps, than liberal columnist Nicolas Kristoff. In a Times op-ed last February, Kristoff naively maintained that the “freedom”-loving Bush administration should just call off its overly “idealistic” misadventure and let the Iraqis work their problems out on their own. “We” should accept “defeat” (which “we” allegedly suffered in Vietnam), he argued, and muster the humanitarian courage to admit “our mistake” and leave (“What We Need in Iraq: An Exit Date,” New York Times , February 14, 2006). 

In early October 2006 Kristoff cited recent PIPA data showing that, “Iraqis who don’t think the U.S. wants [permanent military] bases [in Iraq] are half as likely to favor attacks on Americans as those who do think the U.S. wants [such] bases” to argue that Bush should “stand up and unequivocally renounce bases” in order to “reduce popular support for attacks and save American lives.... The evidence is pretty strong,” Kristoff elaborates, “that our presence—because of suspicions that we plan to stay forever—is doing more harm than good” in Iraq. “The present policy,” he adds, “is also nurturing a broader extremism.” It is now “time to face the grim reality,” Kristoff concludes, “and announce that all our troops will leave Iraq by October 2007.” 

In a similar vein, centrist Democratic presidential hopeful and foreign policy “realist” Barack Obama gave a November 2006 speech in which he combined a call for the White House to renounce permanent military bases in Iraq with a demand that the U.S. abandon the “ideological fantasy” that it could “impose democracy” there. It is time, Obama told the Chicago Council on Global Relations, for the U.S. to make a “pragmatic” retreat from its excessive commitment to the unrealistic export of highminded ideals like freedom and democracy. “The institutions of democracy—free markets, a free press, a strong civil society—cannot,” Obama intoned, “be built overnight, and they cannot be built at the end of the barrel of a gun.” This formulation deleted the conflict between “free markets” and democracy, and the absence of these purported core democratic institutions in the U.S. 

Herbert, Kristoff, Obama, and numerous other “liberals” just don’t get it. America’s imperial and authoritarian policymakers couldn’t care less about Iraqis’ well being or the promotion of actual, substantive democracy at home or abroad and especially in the Middle East—at the heart of the world’s super-strategic energy system. Iraq and the Middle East cannot be physically lost—territorially conceded—to their own people without dire consequences to U.S. state capitalism’s position in the world economic and political system. If abandoned, Iraq’s significant share of what U.S. foreign policymakers have long understood to be “the greatest strategic material prize in history”—Middle Eastern oil—can only be left to the control of others, an outcome that is thoroughly unacceptable to U.S. policymakers for imperial reasons that have nothing to do with the fairy tale goal of exporting something U.S. policymakers don’t possess in the first place: democratic values and institutions. 

At this precarious and potentially late point in the history of its global dominance, the U.S. can be expected to hold on to that control with an impressive imperial death grip. It will likely exhibit a fierce determination to defend that grasp through even the most terrible conflicts and violence abroad and at home. The risks of not holding on are too great, as far as the structurally super-empowered U.S. actors who crave planetary (and indeed inter-planetary) supremacy are concerned. 

Getting policymakers to pull troops out of Iraq is going to be a matter of forcing them from below, not appealing to their need to stand down from purported idealistic notions of democracy. Becoming an effective democratic citizen means putting away mind-numbing fairy tales crafted to keep the restless rabble in line. It means, among other things, reading, hearing, and viewing dominant media with a sharply critical eye, searching out key deletions, deceptions, and distortions between and around the propagandistic lines and images and sound-bites. It also means pursuing, defending, and advancing alternative, uncompromised, and popular sources of information and analysis, beyond the authoritarian reach of the leading architects of imperial policy and opinion and their ubiquitous, democracy-disabling media mechanisms of thought control, fear-mongering, and war promotion.  

Paul Street is a writer, speaker, historian, and social policy researcher in Iowa City, Iowa. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge, 2005); and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (2007).