Thursday, September 10, 2009

Immanuel Wallerstein: The Firestorm Ahead

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http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=34025

The Firestorm Ahead

"There is a firestorm ahead in the Middle East for which neither the US
government nor the US public is prepared. The storm will go from Iraq to
Afghanistan to Pakistan to Israel/Palestine, says Immanuel Wallerstein."

By Immanuel Wallerstein
Middle East Online/Agence Global:2009-09-01

There is a firestorm ahead in the Middle East for which neither the US
government nor the US public is prepared. They seem scarcely aware how close
it is on the horizon or how ferocious it will be. The US government (and
therefore almost inevitably the US public) is deluding itself massively
about its capacity to handle the situation in terms of its stated
objectives. The storm will go from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to
Israel/Palestine, and in the classic expression "it will spread like
wildfire."

Let us start with Iraq. The United States has signed a Status of Forces
Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq, which went into effect on July 1. It provided
for turning over internal security to the Iraqi government and, in theory,
essentially restricting US forces to their bases and to some limited role in
training Iraqi troops. Some of the wording of this agreement is ambiguous.
Deliberately so, since that was the only way both sides would sign it.

Even the first months of operation show how poorly this agreement is
operating. The Iraqi forces have been interpreting it very strictly,
formally forbidding both joint patrols and also any unilateral US military
actions without prior detailed clearance with the government. It has gotten
to the point that Iraqi forces are stopping US forces from passing
checkpoints with supplies during daytime hours.

The US forces have been chafing. They have tried to interpret the clause
guaranteeing them the right of self-defense far more loosely than the Iraqi
forces want. They are pointing to the upturn in violence in Iraq and
therefore implicitly to the incapacity of Iraqi forces to guarantee order.

The general commanding the US forces, Ray Odierno, is obviously extremely
unhappy and is patently scheming to find excuses to reestablish a direct US
role. Recently, he met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq and
President Masoud Barzani of the Kurdish Regional Government. Odierno sought
to persuade them to permit tripartite (Iraqi/Kurdish/American) joint patrols
in Mosul and other areas of northern Iraq, in order to prevent or minimize
violence. They politely agreed to consider his proposal. Unfortunately for
Odierno, his plan would require a formal revision of the SOFA agreement.

Originally, there was supposed to be a referendum in the beginning of July
on popular approval of the SOFA agreement. The United States was afraid of
losing the vote, which would have meant that all US forces would have had to
be out of Iraq by Dec. 31, 2010, one full year earlier than the theoretical
date in the SOFA agreement.

The United States thought it was very clever in persuading al-Maliki to
postpone this referendum to January 2010. Now it will be held in conjunction
with the national elections. In the national elections, everyone will be
seeking to obtain votes. No one is going to be campaigning in favor of a
"yes" vote on the referendum. Lest this be in any doubt, al-Maliki is
submitting a project to the Iraqi parliament that will permit a simple
majority of "no" votes to annul the agreement. There will be a majority of
"no" votes. There may even be an overwhelming majority of "no" votes.
Odierno should be packing his bags now. I'll bet he still has the illusion
that he can avoid the onset of the firestorm. He can't.

What will happen next? At the present, but this may change between now and
January, it looks like al-Maliki will win the election. He will do this by
becoming the number one champion of Iraqi nationalism. He will make deals
with all and sundry on this basis. Iraqi nationalism at the moment doesn't
have much to do with Iran or Saudi Arabia or Israel or Russia. It means
first of all liberating Iraq from the last vestiges of US colonial rule,
which is how almost all Iraqis define what they have been living under since
2003.

Will there be internal violence in Iraq? Probably, though possibly less than
Odierno and others expect. But so what? Iraqi "liberation" -- which is what
the entire Middle East will interpret a "no" vote on the referendum to be --
will immediately have a great impact on Afghanistan. There people will say,
if the Iraqis can do it, so can we.

Of course, the situation in Afghanistan is different, very different, from
that of Iraq. But look at what is going on now with the elections in
Afghanistan. We have a government put into power to contain and destroy the
Taliban. The Taliban have turned out to be more tenacious and militarily
effective than any one seemed ever to anticipate. Even the tough US
commander there, Stanley McChrystal, has recognized that. The US military is
now talking of "succeeding" in perhaps a decade. Soldiers who think they
have a decade to win a war against insurgents have clearly not been reading
military history.

Notice the Afghan politicians themselves. Three leading candidates for the
presidency, including President Hamid Karzai, debated on television the
current internal war. They agreed on one thing. There must be some kind of
political negotiations with the Taliban. They differed on the details. The
US (and NATO) forces are there ostensibly to destroy the Taliban. And the
leading Afghan politicians are debating how to come to political terms with
them. There is a serious disjuncture here of appreciation of realities, or
perhaps of political objectives.

The polls -- for what they are worth -- are showing that the majority of
Afghans want the NATO forces to leave and the majority of US voters want the
same thing. Now look ahead to January 2010, when the Iraqis vote the United
States out of Iraq. Remember that, before the Taliban came to power, the
country was the site of fierce and ruthless fighting among competing
warlords, each with different ethnic bases, to control the country.

The United States was actually relieved when the Pakistani-backed Taliban
took power. Order at last. There turned out to be a minor problem. The
Taliban were serious about sharia and friendly to the emergent al-Qaeda. So,
after 9/11, the United States, with west European approval and United
Nations sanction, invaded. The Taliban were ousted from power -- for a
little while.

What will happen now? The Afghans will probably revert to the nasty
continuing inter-ethnic wars of the warlords, with the Taliban just one more
faction. The US public's tolerance for that war will evaporate entirely. All
the internal factions and many of the neighbors (Russia, Iran, India, and
Pakistan) will remain to fight over the pieces.

And then stage three -- Pakistan. Pakistan is another complicated situation.
But none of the players there trust the United States. And the polls there
show that the Pakistani public thinks that the greatest danger to Pakistan
is the United States, and that by an overwhelming vote. The traditional
enemy, India, is far behind the United States in the polls. When Afghanistan
crumbles into a full-fledged civil war, the Pakistani army will be very busy
supporting the Taliban. They cannot support the Taliban in Afghanistan while
fighting them in Pakistan. They will no longer be able to accept US drones
bombing in Pakistan.

So then comes stage four of the firestorm -- Israel/Palestine. The Arab
world will observe the collapse of US projects in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan. The US project in Israel/Palestine is a peace deal between the
Israelis and the Palestinians. The Israelis are not going to budge an inch.
But neither now, and especially after the rest of the firestorm, are the
Palestinians. The one consequence will be the enormous pressure that other
Arab states will put upon Fatah and Hamas to join forces. This will be over
Mahmoud Abbas's dead body -- which might literally be the case.

The whole Obama program will have gone up in flames. And the Republicans
will make hay with it. They will call US defeat in the Middle East
"betrayal" and it is obvious now that there is a large group inside the
United States very receptive to such a theme.

One either anticipates firestorms and does something useful, or one gets
swept up in them.

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, is the
author of The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World (New
Press).

Copyright ©2009 Immanuel Wallerstein

(Distributed by Agence Global)

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