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oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to:
One day there will be a psychological profile of the American hysteria that took place between September 11 and the invasion of Iraq. A good case study would be Robert Kaplan's November 2002 Atlantic piece advocating war. Leave aside the surreal experience of reading a forecast wrong in nearly every particular. ("...the next regime change in Iraq might even resurrect the reputation not of any religious figure but of the brilliant, pro-Western, secular Prime Minister Nuri Said...") More illuminating is the enthusiasm for what Kaplan correctly understood as a blatantly imperial venture. Consider this paragraph:
Achieving an altered Iranian foreign policy would be vindication enough for dismantling the regime in Iraq. This would undermine the Iranian-supported Hizbollah, in Lebanon, on Israel's northern border; would remove a strategic missile threat to Israel; and would prod Syria toward moderation. And it would allow for the creation of an informal, non-Arab alliance of the Near Eastern periphery, to include Iran, Israel, Turkey, and Eritrea. The Turks already have a military alliance with Israel. The Eritreans, whose long war with the formerly Marxist Ethiopia has inculcated in them a spirit of monastic isolation from their immediate neighbors, have also been developing strong ties to Israel. Eritrea has a secularized population and offers a strategic location with good port facilities near the Bab el Mandeb Strait. All of this would help to provide a supportive context for a gradual Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. . .No bother worrying about such pedestrian questions as WMD or alliances with al-Qaeda. Credit belongs to Kaplan for taking a more panoramic view: the opportunity presented to reshape the Middle East to our liking. For an unabashed imperialist like Kaplan, opportunity is its own justification. Indeed, in classic imperialist fashion, Kaplan's enthusiasm prevents him from actually discussing the first-order interests for the United States involved in the war, or from the war's imagined second-order effects as defined above. I mean, damn it, man, talk about oil or something. Too easily does imperialism itself become its own justification. For myself, I wonder: I read this piece at the time. Why didn't it wake me up as to what was really going on? --Spencer Ackerman
Kaplan - so wrong, so much of the time. Gotta love how he talks up the Afwerki dictatorship in Eritrea, too. I wonder if he's changed his tune now that they're backing the Islamists in Somalia, now? |
