Mark LeVine: '101 uses of chaos'

Mark LeVine, TomDispatch

Perhaps the greatest illusion of any strategists, leaders, or generals is
that they are in control -- and perhaps the most hubristic version of this
illusion is the belief that they can use chaos itself to further their
control, to strengthen their situation. Our world today reminds us
constantly that you ride that tiger at your peril.

Object lesson one: Iraq. While the world's attention and the headlines now
focus on the Israel-Hezbollah war, recalcitrant, fracturing Iraq continues
to spin out of the Bush administration's control. On August 3, Thom Shanker
of the New York Times reported on a blunt warning from John B. Abizaid,
commander of American forces in the Middle East, at a Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing: "[S]ectarian violence in Iraq, especially in the capital,
Baghdad, ha[s] grown so severe that the nation could slide toward civil
war."

Three days later, Times reporter Dexter Filkins published a disturbing (if,
by now, familiar) piece pointing yet again to the Bush administration's
mismanagement of its occupation of Iraq. Headlined Baghdad's Chaos Undercuts
Tack Pursued by US, the article explained that civil-war level chaos has
forced American military commanders to abandon the administration's program
of "Iraqifying" the security of the capital and other major cities. Once
again, U.S. troops were being called in to patrol Baghdad's violent streets.

The truth is, however, that since American troops first arrived in the
capital just over three years ago, it's hard to remember a time when chaos
wasn't said to be enveloping parts of Iraq. From the moment the looting of
Baghdad began and those victorious troops guarded nothing (except the Oil
Ministry), fawda -- an Arabic word that suggests chaos but with a graver
emphasis on discord and hostility -- has ruled the land. Yet an American
general in the Filkins piece is quite typical when he claims, of the most
recent manifestation of the chaos, "I don't think anyone could have
anticipated the [recent] sectarian violence."

Statements like his -- and they have been commonplace -- strike me as odd in
the extreme. After all, when I was in Iraq only a year into the American
occupation, among the first things most Iraqis I met, particularly Sunni and
Shiite leaders, would bring up were their fears of onrushing
factional/sectarian violence and possible civil war and their desire to
avoid it at all costs (unless it involved the Kurds, held in disdain because
of their close relations with the U.S.). Then they would almost invariably
state their belief that the Bush administration was encouraging sectarian
differences and tensions in pursuance of a classic imperial strategy of
divide and rule -- or at least, divide and make sure no one asks you to
leave.

Filkins, however, has another explanation. "The failure of the Iraqis to
halt the slide into chaos in Baghdad," he writes, "undercuts the central
premise of the American project here: that Iraqi forces can be trained and
equipped to secure their own country, allowing the Americans to go home." In
other words, it's the damned Iraqis' fault our boys can't come home, which
they'd already have done (except perhaps for a few hundred marines guarding
our massive, still-under-construction embassy in Baghdad and who knows how
many thousands more stationed in out of the way permanent bases) if those
nasty insurgents hadn't started massacring civilians and police recruits
wholesale.

Perhaps that's true. But a Times article several weeks earlier, also by
Filkins (as well as Edward Wong) and headlined, In an About-Face, Sunnis
Want the U.S. to Remain in Iraq, had pointed to other possibilities. The
violence that increasingly powerful Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated
national army were committing against Sunnis, Filkins and Wong reported, had
turned "many Sunni Arab political and religious leaders once staunchly
opposed to the American presence here" into supporters of that presence.
They saw it, the reporters claimed, as a much-needed check against Shiite
dominance of the country.

Needless to say, such a change of mind by any group of influential Sunnis
could hardly have displeased Bush administration officials and affiliated
neoconservative strategists, among whom remaining in Iraq for the indefinite
future remains the highest priority. Indeed, the story could be seen as
reflecting one of the administration's few Iraqi victories in quite some
time.

In fact, both stories are probably accurate, each reflecting but an aspect
of the American "adventure" in Iraq. The Bush administration initially
planned to -- and would undoubtedly still like to -- quickly draw-down the
lion's share of its forces, leaving the policing of the country to loyal
Iraqis. In a similar way, Israel wanted the Palestinian Authority to police
Palestinians and imperial Britons once sought -- for the most part
successfully -- to have Indians do the dirty work of policing their own
country during the Raj.

If, however, the choice in Iraq is put more starkly -- 130,000 U.S. troops
or none -- the administration assuredly opts for the former, only praying
that it can keep the American body count low enough to ensure a largely
quiescent, if disgruntled, populace at home.

Chaos and Miscalculation

The problem is, in the world of occupational politics, one rarely gets to
eat one's cake and have it too. At some point, the ripples from the chaos
you generate, whether purposely or by accident, converge into the kind of
perfect wave of horror that you just may not be capable of riding out. Ask
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the top brass of the Israeli Defense
Forces about that. Thanks to Matthew Kalman of the San Francisco Chronicle,
we now know that the current Israeli air campaign against, and invasion of,
Lebanon had been planned out perhaps two years ago; that, more than a year
ago, "a senior Israeli army officer" was giving "off-the-record" PowerPoint
presentations about just such a "three-week campaign" to influential figures
in Washington; and that Hezbollah's July 12 capture of Israeli soldiers was
the pretext that the government had been waiting for to launch its campaign.

It is no less clear now that the Israelis underestimated the strength,
training, preparation, and resolve of Hezbollah's fighters, leading to
unanticipated destruction inside Israel that, in turn, seems to have caused
some chaos within the military command structure. No doubt at least in part
because of this situation, the last few weeks have witnessed an
ever-widening, ever less controlled military campaign -- against every
aspect of Lebanese society -- in a fruitless attempt to pressure Hezbollah
to agree to Israel's terms.

Olmert, however, isn't the only leader who miscalculated, who convinced
himself that he could control the chaos he was about to let loose rather
than let it control him. Hezbollah also clearly planned its initial attack
over a long period (possibly with Iranian support or training). Yet its
leaders have let it be known that they did not anticipate the fierceness of
the Israeli reaction. While this may be true, given the levels of
destruction visited on Lebanon, it also has an odd ring to it -- and not
just because the Olmert government was, at the very second Hezbollah
launched its attack, demonstrating its no-holds-barred fierceness in an
assault on Hamas in Gaza. If officials of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)
were PowerPointing their intention to invade to Washington's chattering
class, Hebzollah's leaders also had to be in the know. After all, the whole
point of Israel doing little short of advertising its military desires to
the world was, at least in part, to warn Hezbollah of what lay in store.

Perhaps, like Olmert, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah convinced himself
that loosing chaos was in his movement's self-interest. Perhaps he was
convinced that the resulting violence would be manageable, clearing away
threats to Hezbollah's future political and social hegemony in Lebanon. At
the very least, he seems to have concluded that his movement stood a better
chance against Israel's military than against the coalition behind Lebanon's
2005 Cedar Revolution which brought Hezbollah into parliament, but also
threatened to transform the country in ways that looked less promising to
its future.

Although other interested parties, particularly the Syrians, were well aware
that Lebanon was in grave danger of "spinning out of control" in the long
year between the Cedar Revolution and the capture of Israeli soldiers on
July 12, it seems apparent that the hubris of each side led the leaders of
Israel and Hezbollah to underestimate badly each other's intentions and
strategies, even though both sides had long declared them.

The result? As in Iraq, chaos and destruction of a sort that feeds on itself
and deepens with the passage of time.

Creating an Arc of Instability

Lebanon is but the most intense site at present for such chaos and
destruction, which has been spreading and deepening across what the
neoconservatives (many of whom were receptive to the idea of loosing a
"generative" chaos in the region) once liked to call the "arc of
instability." Little did they know, when they gave the oil heartlands of our
planet that name, what was actually in store for us all.

Indeed, even if hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah die down sooner
rather than later, the settling of scores within now-ruined Lebanon is
likely to be bitter -- and perhaps brutal too. As Rami Khouri, the editor of
the Lebanese Daily Star, argues: "Whether [Hezbollah] emerges from the
current conflict weaker or stronger -- and stronger seems the answer now --
it will then have to battle the country's other political, religious and
ethnic groups for the soul and identity of Lebanon. This face-off will
transcend borders, for it is a microcosm of the wider struggle in the Middle
East."

The seeds of further fragmentation and chaos lie buried as well in
Nasrallah's sudden rise to "iconic" status within the Muslim world (even the
Sunni Arab part of it), whose leaders are almost uniformly undemocratic and,
more often than not, dependent on the U.S. for survival. Remember, Sunni
leaders in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia barely hid their pleasure
in the first days of Israel's invasion when it seemed that Hezbollah -- and
with it, dreams of a "Shiite arc" across the Middle East -- would be dealt a
serious blow.

The possibility of such a "Shiite arc" is but another striking example of
how the chaos one means to unleash can unleash further levels of chaos that
prove unmanageable -- even for the most self-confident of imperial powers.
After all, the very thing that made such a Shiite arc a possibility was not
the rise of fundamentalist Iran, but the Bush administration's decision to
take down the secular, if brutal, regime of Saddam Hussein and then occupy
Iraq. It's hard now even to recall that key Bush strategists saw Iraq mainly
as a jumping-off spot for the transformation of the rest of the Middle East,
especially for the control of, or subjugation of Shiite Iran. (As they put
it at the time: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to
Tehran."

The American invasion of Iraq, of course, resulted instead in the
empowerment of that country's long repressed Shiite majority; while the
violence and chaos brought on by the invasion and occupation put Hezbollah's
Iranian patron in a far stronger strategic position. If recent history is
any guide, however, this position will only ensure that, like the Bush
administration, Olmert's government, and the Hezbollah leadership, the
Iranians too will miscalculate and overplay the hand they have, releasing
yet more unmanageable chaos on the world (and on themselves).

It is ironic that Israel was, to say the least, extremely supportive of the
Bush administration's drive to war with Iraq in good measure because they
expected an American presence in Baghdad to "contain" or, better yet, roll
back Iran. Now, its unrepentant violence against Lebanese civilian areas is
changing the world calculus about which state is the greater threat to
peace: the state of Israel, currently occupying and bombing two neighboring
countries and violating international law on an hourly basis, or a
potentially nuclear-armed Iran. It's hard to imagine that this is the
scenario Ehud Olmert and his advisors imagined as they launched their little
war.

Yet all is certainly not well in the bunkers of southern Beirut either. One
day, Nasrallah warns his fellow Lebanese that "those who sinned against us"
by not supporting his movement "will not be forgotten"; the next, he offers
a conciliatory message, perhaps in the realization that Shiites are not the
only Lebanese with access to lots of weapons and foreign patrons. A war
Hezbollah helped precipitate in good measure to reinforce its political
power in Lebanon has, in fact, resulted in the destruction of much of the
country, and with it Lebanon's future; even if Hezbollah "wins," its victory
might well be followed, in the words of one Lebanese commentator, by a
"return to civil war. And if that happens, nothing will put Lebanon -- let
alone liberal Lebanon -- back together again." But, of course, Nasrallah was
never interested in creating a liberal Lebanon. Certainly, there will be
enough bitterness to be spread around for years, if not decades, to come.

The "Birth Pangs" of a Chaotic World

War has always generated unintended consequences and high levels of social
and political chaos. But in the post-Cold War era, new ways of conceiving of
the usefulness of violence fused war and chaos in what turned out to be a
particularly grim fashion. First, in the mid-1990s, policy-makers began to
think of chaos as having an important role in the functioning of the
emerging "dominate or die" global economic system that went under the rubric
of "neoliberal globalization" (or as it was euphemistically known, "free
market democracy"). "Creative destruction," an old term that gained a new
life in these years, also came to be seen as an apt way of understanding and
justifying the violence and chaos that planners believed would be necessary
to transition from the old Cold War world of superpowers, dictatorship, and
poverty to a new globalized order of progress and democracy. Second,
neoconservative strategists in the U.S. began to imagine that wielding the
dazzling military power of the world's sole remaining superpower would be
the easiest path to creating a global Pax Americana -- or is it Bellum
Americanum?

This combination of attitudes still lies behind a revealing comment
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made on July 21: "What we're seeing [in
Lebanon], in a sense, is the growing -- the birth pangs of a new Middle East
and whatever we do we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the
new Middle East not going back to the old one."

This idea of a "new" Middle East, though essential to the larger
neoconservative project, was first conceived by then-Israeli Labor Party
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. It was the foundation upon which the chimera
of the Oslo process of negotiations with the Palestinians was built, only to
collapse ignominiously less than a decade later. Peres imagined Israel as
the future cultural and economic engine of a Middle East fully incorporated
into a neoliberal global system; in fact, the opposite would occur. As the
economy of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza became "liberalized," poverty and
inequality in Israel increased to unprecedented levels, leaving a large
working and middle class that saw few of the economic and cultural gains
promised by the Labor Party. They therefore had little stake in the Oslo
Process and were easily persuaded to blame the Palestinians as well as Labor
itself for their economic problems and the violence that only became worse
as Oslo wore on.

On the "other" side, the liberalization of the Palestinian economy involved
closing it off almost entirely to the outside world and making it utterly
dependent on Israel. Corruption and monopolies within the Palestinian
Authority (made all the more glaring by the rapid expansion of Jewish
settlements on the West Bank) helped convince poor and working class
Palestinians that the peace process was an illusion. They came to feel that
any hope for economic development, or at least protection, would be found
only in the network of services, institutions, and employment opportunities
provided by Hamas.

These dual dynamics would come together to produce the al-Aqsa intifada, led
in good measure by Hamas, which instead of bringing Palestinians closer to
independence offered Israel the chance to put chaos to yet another use.
Israel proceeded to sow enough of it within Palestinian society to mortally
weaken the fabric of its emerging national institutions and social life. In
so doing, Palestinian dreams of an independent state were ended for the
foreseeable future -- and violence only increased.

All of this was somewhat less evident at the time only because the Israeli
plan seemed, for a while, to work as the religious Hamas movement and the
formerly dominant Fatah Party (the historical core of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization) battled over turf, while young militants and
criminal gangs roamed the streets of devolving Nablus and other towns
challenging the existing social and political order. Then Hamas won the
national elections, so eager encouraged by the Bush administration, and
Israel proceeded to bombard the Palestinians in Gaza back into a more or
less unified agenda of resistance and summud, (or steadfastness).

Not surprisingly, Hezbollah played a similar role in Lebanon (as, by the
way, did the party of North African and Middle Eastern Jews, the Shas Party
in Israel) by feeding off a combination of economic disempowerment and
ethno-religious identity. In both cases, a powerful synergy was created
between the kind of "resistance identity" that the eminent sociologist
Manuel Castells warned would come to dominate the marginalized societies --
or sections of societies -- of the global era, and a positive "project
identity" that would motivate people to take great risks and endure great
hardships -- great chaos, in fact -- to pursue their particular vision of
freedom, national or religious identity, and social or economic justice.

Indeed, as downtown Beirut's skyline grew tall (and the country's
international debt massive) under the premierships of Prime Minister Rafiq
Harriri, who led three governments between 1992 and 2004 before being
assassinated, those left out of the non-stop partying -- the largely
working-class Shiite constituents of Hezbollah -- naturally saw the
movement-turned-party-and-social-service-provider-but-still-militia as
offering their best hope for at least a piece of the new pie.

This, of course, brings us back to the present moment in which the leaders
in power in Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, and the
United States are unable to converse in a language not overdetermined by
violence, chauvinism, and most frighteningly, messianic nationalism (of a
sort that, by now, Americans should be all too familiar with).

The New Middle East was conceived on the lawn of the White House in
September 1993 when Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yasser Arafat, and Bill
Clinton shook hands. It was taken up by American, Iranian, Iraqi, Israeli,
and Lebanese leaders among others, all of whom have felt at one point or
another that it was theirs to control. It now veers between stillbirth and
the arrival of Rosemary's baby. The circles of chaos that have enveloped
countries across the Middle East, and that threaten the globe by threatening
world energy supplies, would seem at the moment to be converging around an
Eastern Mediterranean epicenter that is no stranger to cataclysmic
disasters, both God-inspired and man-made.

With George Bush still insisting on the need to fight "Islamic fascism" to
the bitter end, Labor Party Defense Minister Amir Peretz imploring Israeli
soldiers to turn southern Lebanon "to dust," and Iran's Mahmud Ahmedinejad
declaring the need to wipe Israel off the map, the hubris, arrogance, and
utter disdain for human life that has brought the Middle East to its latest
precipice continues to harden the hearts of leaders and peoples alike. And
all will be the losers because of it.

Mark LeVine is a professor of modern Middle Eastern History at UC Irvine and
author of Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil
(Oneworld, 2005) and the forthcoming Heavy Metal Islam (Random House/Verso).
His website is www.culturejamming.org.

Copyright 2006 Mark LeVine

Source: TomDispatch
http://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=110345

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson