7-14-05,8:50am
There’s little new to say about last week’s London terror bombing. It has proved Bush’s “flypaper” theory – that if we “take the war to the terrorists” in Iraq, then “they” – whoever “they” are – won’t be able to attack “us” – to be nonsense, if we needed any more proof. It was a heinous crime, like Madrid, or the Bali nightclub, or Beslan, or like either of the two U.S. assaults on Fallujah in 2004. Like the first of those Fallujah assaults, it didn’t even seem designed, or likely, to accomplish anything beyond killing people.
It did give the British a taste of daily life in Iraq over the last 11 weeks. Over 1500 have been killed since then, the vast majority in attacks that targeted civilians, not soldiers in the foreign occupying forces. One Iraqi preacher, explaining the vastly different levels of global concern, said, “This is because Iraqis are like chickens and nobody cares about the killing of a chicken, but the British are the lords of this world.”
Bush’s openly and repeatedly avowed strategy of making Iraq a central battlefront in the “war on terror” has been stunningly successful – although making Iraq unsafe has hardly made anyone else safer. It’s difficult to understand why he expects the Iraqis to be grateful for this. Other recent developments, however, are perhaps more important and likely to remain so when the London bombings are just a footnote.
103 out of the 275 members of the Iraqi parliament – nearly 40% -- have demanded that the Iraqi government rescind its previous request for extension of the occupation and that it put forward “a clear plan for army building and a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops from Iraq.” This includes numerous members of the ruling United Iraqi Alliance.
Dulaimy says the Iranians have offered of $1 billion in reconstruction aid and there is talk of building an oil pipeline between the two countries.
The British Daily Mail just published details of a secret British memo prepared by its Defence Secretary a few weeks ago that alludes to a strong desire in the Pentagon to reduce forces dramatically by the middle of next year.
The memo should be interpreted with care. The Pentagon has expressed all along a desire to keep the troop presence in Iraq low – before the war, Paul Wolfowitz even suggested that by October 2003 they could have as little as one division in Iraq. The way it has prosecuted the war since then has made it unable to carry out such reductions. There’s no reason to believe that it will be able to now. Also, the memo does not express a desire for full withdrawal –full withdrawal without creating a government under the American thumb would negate the reasons for the invasion and is a position the United States would have to be forced into.
Finally, despite the renewed focus on terrorism, the G8 meeting still wrapped up with an “in-principle” agreement to double aid to Africa by 2010, on the heels of an earlier debt relief agreement. The practical value of these agreements to the countries in question is limited or nil, weighted as they are with conditionalities on the one hand and vagueness on the other. Even so, these four pieces of news all point to the same thing. The developments of the last three years have seen a catastrophic decline in U.S. global hegemony. Bad enough that it has to sit by quietly while revolutions go on in Venezuela and Bolivia and Argentina defies international finance capital. Bad enough that it can no longer defend extortionate debt repayment requirements on destitute nations, a policy that required no defense ten years ago.
Worse, it has invaded Iraq and cost itself blood, treasure, and legitimacy only to find that its political weakness has forced it into allowing elections and the advent of a government that may well instead increase the power of Iran. This eventuality, anathema to the American imperium, is a very clear sign of its weakness in what we have been told is to be a new American century.
--From Empire Notes
--Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the blog Empire Notes and teaches at New York University. He has been to Iraq twice and reported from Fallujah during the siege in April. He is the author fo two books: “The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism” (April 2002, Monthly Review Press) and “Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond” (June 2003, Seven Stories Press).
