Posted October 28th, 2004
...Of Course It's World War IV
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I believe Iraq is a theatre in the War on Terror.
George W. Bush
In September, Commentary's editor-at-large, Norman Podhoretz, wrote an article titled 'World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win' . In it, he quoted military strategist Eliot A. Cohen, who believes that "the Cold War" was actually "World War III, which reminds us that not all global conflicts entail the movement of multimillion-man armies, or conventional frontlines on a map." Podhoretz goes on to compare the Truman Doctrine, which kicked off World War III, with the Bush Doctrine, which announced the onset of World War IV. World War IV being, of course, the War on Terror.
Well, this is obviously too convenient. After all, both Podhoretz and Cohen have a political investment in a global war of unlimited duration. (Worse: Podhoretz's essay is an exercise in partisan politics. It quickly morphs into a paranoid dissection of his critics, from former comrades on the Left like Susan Sontag, to the State Department and CIA.) Podhoretz and Cohen's declaration of WWIV supplies, in their minds at least, the open theoretical framework for unilateral action against any state deemed a strategic threat. For them, the US war should be ambitious and extensive and ideological. The single issue of defense disguises a more radical programme: the promotion of democratic revolution in the Middle East and beyond. More generally, as Robert Kagan points out, the Bush Doctrine is rooted in America's liberal, revolutionary tradition; a lineage that leads directly back to the Founding Fathers. So Podhoretz and Cohen (and Kagan, come to that) pursue a specific agenda. Very well. They're still right. We are fighting World War IV.
When George W. Bush declared a "War on Terror" a lot of people wondered, "how do you declare war on an abstract noun?" By all precedents and prerequisites, the War on Terror is impossible to bind by definition or law. Its semantic and legal ambiguity reflects, even underpins, the ambiguity of the war itself. In terms of strategy, purpose and scope, it is not exact or finite. There aren't even clear "sides." And the problem isn't that the Americans have no goal. It's that they have too many. They can't quite streamline or manage them all. But, as the Left and Right agreed (it seemed) after 9/11, to combat international terrorism, the US required brand new strategies, an overhaul of military planning, and a fresh foreign policy doctrine. All of these things evolve over time and in the thick of combat. And, in the case of 9/11, the shock was such that any restructure would be blighted and undermined by confusion, lack of intelligence, ideological infighting, and panic. Nevertheless, there was no longer any time to wait. So where, and when, to begin?
We must take the battle to the enemy.
George W. Bush
How was the Cold War declared? By George Kennan's Long Telegram to Washington, or the first Soviet atom bomb test? And, at that early stage, did the US really have clear strategic or tactical aims beyond defeating the bad guys? In any sense more exact than the War on Terror? And if not, then was the cold war not, in fact, a war?
A world war changes...well, the world. It alters assumptions and amends experience; it destroys old definitions and, crucially, replaces them with new defintions...which become immediately redundant. The Cold War did not correspond to any previous war model. It created singular precedents as it developed. Cold warfare was the result of specific geopolitical events that occurred within the world-historic clash of two incompatible systems: Communism and Capitalism. The conflict was defined, finally, by technological innovation in the military industrial complex. This reached a limit with MAD which was, itself, delimited by postmodern proxy warfare. Every global war, inevitably and by necessity, involves new tactical models. Everything is site and time specific. Determined by context.
The Cold War is an odd name. In the event of nuclear Armageddon, the Cold War would suddenly become, in a supremely irrelevant semantic switch, WWIII. This absurd pedantry derived from an entirely Eurocentric perspective. But the Cold War was a world war. And a hot one, too. It was fought in the Middle East, South and East Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. It burrowed into every corner of the globe. At one insane moment, the most important frontline was the moon. But, based on historical example and conventional definition ("outbreak of hostilities"), WWIII didn't actually happen.
Similarly, war-skeptics deny WWIV on the basis of historical example and conventional definition. In the meantime, over the last three years, war has been declared across the globe. There's no time or reason to cite history. History is made. As Paul Wolfowitz put it, with certain eloquence, in 2002, "if you're not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, you're going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact means after horrendous things have happened." If you allow things to happen, things happen; if you deny that they are happening, they still happen. Which is to make the same mistake that the Clinton Administration and Western security services made in the 90s. It's the same willful ignorance and lack of imagination that allowed Pakistan to build nuclear bombs and failed to detect the 9/11 plot. It gives the world's most reactionary forces an incredible, indelible advantage. It gives them license to destroy us (and themselves, if they so wish).
As Cohen suggests, WWIV eludes conventional frontlines. Frontlines are everywhere, and can be anywhere: from Manhattan and Washington to the Caucas States, Kashmir, Nigeria, Bali, Bosnia, Chechnya. The jihadi cadets and commanders work on a global model that implicates states (Afghanistan under the Taliban, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan) while working outside their boundaries or control. It's a war fought with the highest and lowest-tech weaponry: from million dollar bunker busters to home-made bomb belts. State power deploys stealth bombers and gunships; precision missiles guided by agents on horseback, equipped with laptops, lasers, radios; drones and satellites; advanced bombs like daisy cutters and low-yield nuclear devices. Jihadis collect and hoard conventional weapons (Kalashnekovs, anti-aircraft rockets, mines, grenades), exploit advanced telecom systems and seek unconventional weapons of any, and every, kind. In this latter case, half the battle is won: its effect resides largely in the attempt or threat of procurement. The point is to instill and exploit fear in a society that fears death. A frontline can exist for as long as a military campaign (such as Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan) or a one-off spectacular (a single morning in Madrid); furthermore, every city is a frontline before anything even happens. Psychological tension, pervasive uncertainty: the very air is tinged with fear and anticipation, even when dissipated by exhaustion and cynicism. The psychology of the frontline is now common experience. The physical limits of "a battlefield" no longer exist.
This war is multipolar, multilateral, non-linear. The US formulation "the mission defines the coalition" is the practical and philosophical foundation of WWIV. The Russians work on this basis. So do al-Qaida cells. So do Syria and Hezbollah and Iran and Hamas. So do the Sunni militias and al-Zaqwiri jihadis in Iraq. It describes every geographical outpost of jihad. It explains the covert links and alliances and proxy channels that cross and convulse the Middle East. It explains European and UN alliances that attempt to check US Superpower. It explains why neoconservatives support Chechans but not Palestinians.
This is why Putin was right to place Beslan within the context of a global War on Terror (and also why US-Russian tensions linger). The school siege overshadowed other events in the same week: the week Chechans went to the polls to vote another Kremlin puppet into power; the week two passenger jets were hijacked and destroyed and a bomb was detonated in Moscow. It was the most deadly jihadi offensive since 9/11; indeed, it became "Russia's 9/11," and received blanket coverage in Israel. The Russian response explicitly echoed the Americans: Russia's chief of staff, General Yuri Baleuvsky, said, "as for launching pre-emptive strikes on terrorist bases, we will carry out all measures to liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world."
Putin's motives may be cynical, and his subsequent actions deeply sinister, but his diagnosis is not incorrect. The Chechan conflict predates 9/11, predates the emergence of al-Qaida, predates the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, predates the Soviets themselves. True. But, between the first and second Chechan wars the fight for Chechan independence was converted, deliberately and under considerable influence, to the cause of jihad. A meeting was held to discuss Chechnya and Kashmir in Mogadishu in 1996 between Pakistan's ISI, Iranian intelligence officers, and a variety of Islamist groups. Osama bin Laden was there too. He went on to donate $25 million to the Chechen jihad. Chechan leader Shamil Basayev is himself a product of ISI dissembling: he was trained in Gulbudin Hekmatyar's Amir Muawia camp in Khost. Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iran funded his war before the coordinated escalation plotted at the Mogadishu "summit". Yeltsin and Putin's brutal military response to the Chechan insurgency created a moral and political vacuum in which Islamic extremism flourished. The Islamist alliance nurtured this process. It made the Chechan jihad in its own image. It was an explicit policy. A collaboration. And the September offensive that ended in Beslan was a direct product of it.
Meanwhile, senior Chechan commanders co-ordinate fighters in the North West Frontier Province (where Michael Palin, in a lovely post-colonial touch, was filming Himalaya at the same time). The US and the Pakistani army fight assorted Chechans, Uzbeks, local tribesmen, and fighters from Xianping. Uzbekistan itself suffered a minor uprising in March when the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan staged a series of same-day bomb attacks and suicide missions. But the US aren't even after Uzbeks and Chechans in the tribal areas of Afghanistan or Pakistan: they're looking for the remnants of al-Qaida and the Taliban, who don't appear to be there anymore.
The age of American collapse has begun.
Ab'd Al Mun'im Muad, August 2001
The Occidentalist network is delicate and conditional. We have seen what happens when international terrorism is able to collaborate with state backers and protectors. 9/11 was the joint production of al-Qaida, Taliban Afghanistan, the BCCI bank, and Pakistan under Benazir Bhutto and the ISI. The result pits avatistic terrorist cells, financed and equipped by a network of state and private sponsors, against professional armies and allied proxies tooled with cutting-edge military hardware. It's an asymmetrical contest between suicidal strikes and special operations. Which is why the motives and actions of the Islamist factions are so deadly. And why the US and Russian and allied response looks cynical and venal.
In this sense, the invasion of Iraq is part of a wider strategy that considers Occidentalism as a whole: a malignant, festering, unbalanced, and dangerous adversary. Attacking Iraq to depose a self-styled Saladin was the most expedient way to rip at the Occidentalist fabric. The hope was that the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam's terror and the smooth transition to neoliberal democracy would convulse the Occidentalist Middle East. The basic assumption being that, at the heart of Occidentalist rage, there nestles envy of Western power and liberty. That, given the choice, a Palestinian would take a US green card before a liberated Palestine. And, with this impulse unleashed, the clerics and martyrs and terrorists and despots would be swept away by the unstoppable desire to share, or emulate, Western success and privilege. The argument is attractive, but the arrogant and simplistic presumptions that underlie it lead to self-defeat, which is why Iraq has turned from potent victory to self-inflicted wound.
WWIV is the product of extensive weapon proliferation: not just nuclear materials or chemical and biological agents, but the proliferation of conventional weapons, like Kalashnikovs and Stinger missiles. Which, furthermore, reveals another peculiar trait of this war: the proliferation of irony and paradox. It is a war in which allies become enemies and enemies become allies, or, more to the point, allies act as allies and enemies simultaneously. (Who armed the jihadis? Christopher Hitchens puts it nicely: "William Casey's CIA, which first connected the unstoppable Stinger missile to the infallible Koran.") Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are the principal exponents of this double-play. It is not a coincidence that, alongside Iran, they are WWIV's crux states. Here the course of WWIV will be decided. Once this is recognised, its gravity becomes clear.
Saudi Arabia is on the brink of revolution or collapse. It has been for a decade, at least. This, in a way, suggests a strange case of chaotic stasis. Rumours of the House of Saud's imminent demise are constant, but it never seems to happen. The kingdom's finances spiral into a black hole: debts accumulate and push towards bankruptcy. Wahhabi-destabilisation vacillates. What is certain is that the longer this corrupt dynasty clings to power, and the further living standards decrease, the more radically dangerous things become. In the event of revolution, the Wahhabi clerics could provide the only non-Saud political structure available. The Arabian peninsula would become a vast host-body for Islamic extremism and terrorism. A terrorist state of this magnitude would be impossible to dismantle. (Well, it already is.)
In Pakistan, disgruntled, pugnacious military officers and ISI men link up with the Islamist parties (like Jama'at Islami) and form what is, in effect, an old boy's terror network. Musharraf's position is, to a slight extent, secure. It's hard for the Islamists to beat the succor of American aid and the threat of international isolation and sectarian conflict. On the other hand, Musharraf's mandate is wafer-thin, and retention of power depends on maintaining dictatorship within democracy, or avoiding assassination. What's at stake here, for the international community and the continued existence of Pakistan, is the same as in Iran: the first Islamist nuclear bomb. Except that victorious Pakistani Islamists would not pay heed to the diplomatic protocols to which Iran so far concedes. (I wouldn't be sticking around in New Dehli, for example.)
Alliance with the US weakens both Musharraf and the House of Saud. It gives their enemies a concrete reason to hate them. It unites the whole anti-US groundswell behind their personal and political vendettas and ambitions. It also chimes with popular sentiment: people hold their US-dependent "puppet" rulers in contempt. But, at the same time, US support also safeguards their position because it retains a residual quota of fear. Are Pakistanis and Saudi Arabians, the people, really ready for the black hole their resentment, if mobilized and acted on, could plunge them into? What if they fail? What if they don't? The problem for them, and for us, is: well, what if it happens anyway? Without popular support as such, but due to popular indifference, or inconsequence?
We will support policies that use appropriate means...
fightingterror.org
On July 20th, a new Committee on the Present Danger convened, perhaps in anticipation of a Kerry victory or second-term Bush Administration retreat from an aggressive neoconservative foreign policy. Either way, the resurrection of the CPD stems from an expansive (expansionist...) view of the US War on Terror. The CPD-3 chairman is R. James Woolsey, who has already referred to "a World War IV." This re-emergence indicates, I think, high stakes. In fact, the stakes could not be higher: they involve Iran's advanced weapons-grade uranium enrichment programme. (And, therefore, Israel's nuclear arsenal.) Meanwhile, Adam Curtis's documentary, The Power of Nightmares, currently being broadcast on the BBC, reduces the US War on Terror to shadow-boxing and chicanery. He cleverly parallels and so unites Washington's neoconservative fringe with jihadi propagandists. This is almost indescribable folly and, in effect, places the War on Terror in the hands of criminals and theofascists when responsibility should be widely held. Broadly, this war-skeptic tendency ignores global connections and the nuclear precipice on which the future of both West and East (and North and South) balance. It ignores the fact that jihadi forces openly declared war first. It ignores their aims; treats them as mere partisan groups rather than the theofascist revolutionaries that they say they are. It, furthermore, assumes the UN can act as the arbiter of International security and morality. It treats Europe and the anti-war coalition as voices of objective reason. Even worse: it denies far too much. It's in denial.
But things are clear. We will not know when or if we have won. Also, we cannot tell if we're losing. However, if we lose, we really will know about it.
