When faced with the prospect of analyzing the current rise
of ISIS, or the misinformed
albeit widely accepted and perceived threat of Russia, or that of Iran,
it is imperative that we keep in mind a few key points.
One of these is the US foreign policy strategy of
containment, or more aptly, the strategy of limiting the power of anyone who
challenges the United States’ hegemony on the global chessboard. The memo depicting this strategy was penned
under the supervision of influential neo-conservative statesmen Paul Wolfowitz
in 1992, thus dubbed the “Wolfowitz doctrine,” and was not intended for public
release. I would argue strongly that the
evidence of the past decades suggests that this is still the dominant foreign
policy doctrine that has been followed under both the Bush and Obama
administrations.
The preeminent strategy goal outlined therein is to “establish
and protect a new order,” that
accounts for “the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage
them from challenging our leadership
or seeking to overturn the established
political and economic order.” The
goal is to protect a world order in which the United States is the supreme
power, and to stop any nation who seeks to challenge this dominance and
overturn America’s preeminent position. The
memo states that the US, accompanying the role of global hegemon, should engage
in “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role
or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests,” and this requires that we, “endeavor to
prevent any hostile power from dominating
a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to
general global power.” Key
considerations are therefore that the US should prevent any power from
dominating a region whose resources would generate for them global power in
order to prevent a challenge to America’s leadership, and that this should be done
even if these nations are protecting legitimate interests.
Given that it is true that America’s foremost goals are to
protect its status on top of the global order, and also to halt any challenger
or competitor (one may argue this point, or the relevance of the Wolfowitz
doctrine today, but I think the US’ recent aggressive actions towards Russia,
the continual expansion of NATO bases and their encirclement of Russia, coupled
with the observations outlined in the Wolfowitz doctrine that, “Russia will
remain the strongest military power in Eurasia and the only power in the world
with the capability of destroying the United States,” provides stark evidence against
this counter-argument, not to mention the imperialistic military adventurism
aimed at controlling regions “whose resources would, under consolidated
control, be sufficient to general global power,” such as was done in Iraq,
Libya, and Syria, all of which attacked challengers to US hegemony and fostered
US consolidation of Middle-Eastern oil resources.) it is important that we
understand something that was eloquently, and correctly I feel, stated by the
former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter Zbigniew Brzezinski,
one of Obama’s main foreign policy advisors, a man whom Obama praised as being “one of our
most outstanding thinkers.”
Brzezinski stated that,
“the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion,” and therefore, in order to pursue this goal of power acquisition there is necessity for “conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”(1)
Therefore, in order to protect this new order and to
discourage challenges to US leadership, an outside threat is necessitated in
order to foster domestic popular support for the pursuit of power which the
general public are usually apathetic towards.
This point is further illustrated by the esteemed former Professor of
the Science of Government at Harvard University Samuel P. Huntington, who
described the policy the US used during the Cold War in which military
interventions were legitimated by creating the false impression that the US was
defending against the Soviet Union,
“you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. This is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine.”(2)
It should be noted that the Truman Doctrine was
enunciated back in March of 1947.
The US has been misrepresenting its pursuit of global
preeminence and containment of challengers by exploiting fake external threats
since as far back as 1947; the misimpression of an external threat has been a
key US foreign policy doctrine for over half a century.
Enter the threat of ISIS, whom now even Vice President Joe
Biden concedes
that America’s allies,
“The Saudis, the Emiratis… were so determined to take down (Syrian President Bashar) Assad and have a proxy Sunni-Shia war, [that] they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad. Except that the people who were being supplied were (Jabhat) al Nusra and al Qaida, and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.”
Biden also quoted Turkey’s President Erdogan as saying, in reference to
accusations that Turkey had allowed thousands of extremists jihadists,
including those associated with the Islamic State, through its borders in order
to fight against Syrian President Bashar al Assad, that “You were right. We let
too many people through. So we’re trying to seal the border.”
Former CIA Station Chief Graham Fuller recently elucidated
further on the US’ role alongside its allies in generating the conditions
for ISIS’ rise,
“I think the United States is one of the key creators of this organization. The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS, but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the war in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS.”
Britain’s leading national security scholar Dr. Nafeez Ahmed
further clarifies the United States’ role in actively
coordinating the financing and arms shipments to the most virulent elements
of the Syrian opposition, including al Qaeda linked groups al Nusra and ISIS,
citing leaked Stratfor documents, Rand Corporation reports, mainstream media
journalism, and Israeli intelligence as evidence.
The Islamic State, home-grown through US foreign policy
actions aimed at consolidating control of regions/resources conducive to
generate global power (Iraq) and containing any power that challenges US
leadership (Syria), accounts now for the modern “threat or challenge to the
public’s sense of domestic well-being,” that will “sell intervention or
military action,” abroad in order to “protect a new order,” and discourage others
from “challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political
or economic order.”
A direct external threat is necessitated in order to justify
and sell US military aggression abroad, and the so called “Global War on
Terror,” a perpetual military doctrine aimed at fostering continual and
never-ending war abroad, continues to deliver on this necessity.
Critics of this analysis will argue that Obama is sincere in
his stated goal of dismantling and disintegrating the extremist terrorist
organization, however as leading Middle-Eastern correspondent Patrick Cockburn
has pointed
out,
“The US campaign against Isis is weakened not so much by lack [of] ‘boots on the ground’, but by seeking to hold at arm’s-length those who are actually fighting Isis while embracing those such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey who are not. There is a similar situation in Iraq, where most of the fighting against Isis is by the Shia militias from which the US keeps its distance.”
Cockburn is referring to the US’ non-strategy
of fighting ISIS by embracing key creators of the terrorist group such as Saudi
Arabia, the UAE, and Turkey, while distancing itself from those who are and
have been fighting against ISIS, such as Syria, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia. “President Obama promised less than a month
ago “to degrade and destroy” the fundamentalists with air power, but Isis is
still expanding and winning victories,” Cockburn concludes.
Further skepticism of Obama’s stated goals are posited by
former British Army and Metropolitan Police counter terrorism intelligence
officer Charles
Shoebridge,
“For the US and UK, to find an answer as to a way out of the mess that is now the Islamic State one must first ask whether for their foreign policy it’s actually a mess at all. Certainly ISIS remains a potent and useful tool for key US and UK allies such as Saudi Arabia, and perhaps also Israel, which seek the destabilisation of enemies Syria and Iraq, as well as a means for applying pressure on more friendly states such as Lebanon and Jordan. It’s understandable therefore that many question the seriousness of US and UK resolve to destroy ISIS, particularly given that for years their horrific crimes against civilians, particularly minorities, in Syria were expediently largely unmentioned by the West’s governments or media.”
ISIS has also allowed for other stated US foreign policy
goals in the region: mainly the breaking up of Iraq into separate factions
under the control of pro-US forces, and the justification of a long-term US
military presence in the region. According
to US private intelligence firm Stratfor
in late 2002, then Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz had co-authored a scheme which depicted the strategic advantages of
an Iraq partition focused on US control of oil:
“After eliminating Iraq as a sovereign state, there would be no fear that one day an anti-American government would come to power in Baghdad, as the capital would be in Amman [Jordan]. Current and potential US geopolitical foes Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria would be isolated from each other, with big chunks of land between them under control of the pro-US forces.Equally important, Washington would be able to justify its long-term and heavy military presence in the region as necessary for the defense of a young new state asking for US protection – and to secure the stability of oil markets and supplies. That in turn would help the United States gain direct control of Iraqi oil and replace Saudi oil in case of conflict with Riyadh.”
“The expansion of the ‘Islamic State’ has provided a pretext
for the fundamental contours of this scenario to unfold, with the US and
British looking to re-establish a long-term military presence in Iraq in the
name of the “defense of a young new state,” Dr. Nafeez
Ahmed determines.
Given this, coupled with Vice President Biden’s and former
CIA Station Chief Graham Fuller’s concessions that US policy in Syria of arming
rebel oppositions was one of the lead causes of the rise of ISIS, Obama’s
tactic of continuing this disastrous policy by funneling more aid to
non-existent moderate rebels, utilizing key al Qeada-linked extremist funder
Saudi Arabia to train such an opposition, further belies the stated claims of
the Obama administration of acting to destroy the ISIS.
When analyzing these policies we should understand that the pursuit
of power and the containment of challengers to America’s global preeminence are
key US foreign policy goals, and that the pursuit of these goals has been
justified through misrepresenting foreign threats to the US homeland since as
far back as 1947; and perhaps most importantly, we should recognize that it is “only in folktales and children’s
stories and the pages of journals of intellectual opinion that power is used
wisely and well to eradicate evil in the world, the real world teaches quite
different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive
them.”
Sources:
1.)
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Eurasian Chessboard,” The
Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It’s Geostrategic Imperatives (New
York, 1997), pg. 35-36.
2.)
Samuel Huntington, Vietnam Reappraised,
6.1 INT’L SECURITY, 14 (Summer 1981).
