McJihad
ISLAM IN THE U.S. GLOBAL ORDER
by TIMOTHY MITCHELL
Social Text 73, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Duke
University Press.
continued
In the Gulf, Washington began to back the government of Saddam Hussein in
Iraq. After Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, the United States lent
its support to the prolongation of the conflict, as a means of weakening
Iran and as a cover for its own growing military role in the Gulf. In the
Israel/Palestine conflict, the United States supported Israel’s 1982 invasion
of Lebanon and funded its military occupation and accelerating coloniza-tion
of the West Bank and Gaza, while blocking the 1981 Fahd peace plan,
the 1982 Rabat initiative, the 1983 U.N. peace conference proposal, and
several further efforts to end the occupation. In Afghanistan, following the
Soviet attempt to negotiate a withdrawal beginning in 1983, Washington
more than doubled its support for the mujahideen, in an effort to delay
the Soviet departure. After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the
United States blocked attempts to negotiate Iraq’s withdrawal and seized
the opportunity for a war that would permanently weaken Iraq by the
devastation of its economy and enable America’s reoccupation of its mil-itary
base in Saudi Arabia.
In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, the increasing levels of opposition to the
corruption of the ruling dynasty and the repression of political activity
found its outlet in the religious schools and mosque preachers of the
muwahhidun—the only form of political expression the regime could not
suppress. The discontent was briefly visible in December 1979, when
religious militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. It took several
days of siege and shooting and the assistance of French special forces to
eliminate the insurgents. Political discontent increased in the 1980s,
espe-cially
after the collapse of the price of oil in 1984 –85, which precipitated
a fiscal crisis, a sharp fall in national income, and high levels of
unem-ployment.
The Saudi government saw in Afghanistan the solution to these
growing domestic difficulties. It exported as many as twelve thousand
young religious activists, increasingly critical of the corruption of the
rul-ing
family, to fight the crusade against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden, with his family’s close connections to the regime, was the
figure who coordinated this development. In the 1990s, as the mujahideen
returned from Afghanistan, the country’s economic difficulties worsened.
The 1990–91 war against Iraq galvanized a much broader opposition.
Despite the billions of dollars squandered on arms purchases in preceding
years, the regime suddenly appeared helpless, hastily agreeing to the
arrival of American forces to save it from the Iraqi threat. The combina-tion
of a regime kept in power jointly by the military resources of the West
and the local authority of the muwahhidun was becoming increasingly
dif-ficult
to hold together.
It is often said that the politics of the Middle East are shaped by the
power of the international oil industry. It would be better to say that they
are shaped by its weakness. Extraordinary rents can be earned from con-trol
ling
the production and distribution of oil. The multinational oil cor-porations
seek to secure and enlarge these rents in a rivalrous collabora-tion
with the governments that control the oil fields. Large rents can also
be made from controlling the production and distribution of weapons, for
which the same governments have become the largest overseas customers.
The oil and arms industries appear as two of the most powerful forces
shaping what is called the capitalist world economy. Yet their power exists
to overcome a weakness, a deficiency that always threatens the enormous
potential for profit.
On the one hand, there is the overabundance of oil, creating the per-manent
risk that the high rents earned by the oil industry might collapse.
The industry must constantly manufacture a scarcity of oil to keep this
threat at bay. On the other, there are the political structures that have
come into being to help achieve this end. Since the oil industry was never
strong enough to create a political order on its own, it was obliged to
col-laborate
with other political forces, social energies, forms of violence, and
powers of attachment. Across the Middle East, there were various forces
available. But each of these allies had its own purposes, which were never
guaranteed to coincide with the need to secure the scarcity of oil. At the
heart of the problem of securing scarcity, for reasons we have seen, was
the political control of Arabia. The geophysics of the earth’s oil reserves
determined that the rents on the world’s most profitable commodity could
be earned only by engaging the energies of a powerful religious move-ment.
McJihad is a term that describes this deficiency of capitalism. The
word does not refer to a contradiction between the logic of capitalism
and the other forces and ideas it encounters. It refers, rather, to the
absence of such a logic. The political violence that the United States, not
alone but more than any other actor, has promoted, funded, and pro-longed
across so many parts of the Middle East over recent decades is the
persistent symptom of this lack.
Notes
1. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Cen-tral
Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 179.
2. Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are
Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine, 1995), 4. Barber discusses a “
dialec-tic” of Jihad and McWorld, but means only that the forces he labels
Jihad must be
understood as a reaction to modernity, not a relic of the past (157).
3. H. St. John B. Philby, “Why I Turned Wahhabi,” Egyptian Gazette, 16
September 1930, cited in Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of
Aramco and the Saudi Kings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 18.
4. Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the
World They Made (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), 87–90.
5. The Texas quota system was reinforced by the federal Connally Act,
known as the “Hot Oil” Act, of 1935 (Harold F. Williamson, The American
Petro-leum
Industry [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1959–63], 2:543–
44). Thirty years later, OPEC took the Texas system as a model for its system
of
international quotas (Sampson, Seven Sisters, 92). U.S. import quotas were
estab-lishedin 1957 by an industry-government body, the Oil Policy Committee,
and
formalized by a proclamation by President Eisenhower in 1959 using powers
granted by the 1958 Trade Agreements Extension Act. The proclamation limited
imports (excluding those from Mexico and Canada) to 9 percent of domestic
demand. The system was scrapped after the 1974 oil price increases, which
made
it redundant, although the collapse of oil prices in 1998–99 led to efforts
by
Congress once again to protect domestic oil producers. Oil was excluded from
the provisions of the World Trade Organization (Robert Bamberger et al.,
“Domestic Oil and Gas Producers: Public Policy When Oil Prices Are Volatile,”
CRS Report for Congress, no. RL30290 12 November 1999, www.cnie.org/
NLE/CRSreports/energy/eng-65.cfm).
6. Christopher T. Rand, Making Democracy Safe for Oil: Oilmen and the
Islamic East (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 16–18.
7. For production figures, see www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/nonopec.html.
8. See www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/opec.html. Surplus capacity is defined as
oil production that can be brought on line within thirty days and sustained
for at
least ninety days.
9. Robert Vitalis, “Black Gold, White Crude: An Essay on American
Excep-tionalism,
Hierarchy, and Hegemony in the Gulf,” Diplomatic History 26.2 (2002):
185–213.
10. Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia (New York: New York
Uni-versity
Press, 2000), 270–71.
11. Socal established Aramco in 1933 as the California Arabian Standard Oil
Company, adding Texaco as co-owner in 1936. In 1943, Socal persuaded the
U.S. government to take over the company’s and Great Britain’s funding of
the
Saudi government. The U.S. government then decided to nationalize the
com-pany.
Socal managed to limit the proposed state ownership to one-third, but then
Exxon and Mobil defeated the plan. In response to these threats, in 1944
Socal
renamed the company the Arabian American Oil Company and in 1946 agreed
to add Exxon and Mobil as co-owners (Irvine H. Anderson, Aramco, the United
States, and Saudi Arabia: A Study of the Dynamics of Foreign Oil Policy, 1933–
1950
[Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981]).
12. Saïd K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of
Saud, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996), 7. Aburish estimates
that
about 15 percent of national oil income is taken as the private income of the
royal
family. Most of this money is deducted from the country’s oil income before
it is
recorded in national accounts, however, so precise figures are unavailable.
This
money excludes the family’s income from payoffs on arms purchases and other
nonoil trade (294–95).
13. Vassiliev, History of Saudi Arabia, 337.
14. On the possible role of the CIA in the plot to kill Nasser, see Aburish,
The House of Saud, 128. On the CIA’s failed attempt to murder President Qasim
of Iraq in February 1960, see Thomas Powers, “Strategic Intelligence: Part
One,
an Isolated Man,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1979, and the hearings and report
of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect
to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee), 1976. On CIA support for
the 1963 coup, see “The Survival of Saddam: An Interview with James Akins,”
PBS Frontline, at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/
akins.html.
15. On the problem of the “homoficience” of capital, see Timothy Mitchell,
Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of
Califor-nia
Press, 2002), 245.
16. Rand, Making Democracy Safe for Oil, 14 –36, 274–353.
17. See Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 209–303.
18. Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World
(New York: Congdon and Weed, 1984), 215; Selig S. Harrison, “The Shah, Not
Kremlin, Touched off Afghan Coup,” Washington Post, 13 May 1979; Fred
Hal-liday,
Soviet Policy in the Arc of Crisis (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy
Studies, 1981), 84–90.
19. Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five
Pres-idents
and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 131–49.
The quotation, the words of Walt Slocombe of the Department of Defense, is
from p. 145. On the political unrest that spread in response to the attempt
to
break the old social order through land reform, see Barnett R. Rubin, The
Frag-mentation
of Afghanistan, 2d ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2002), 111–21.
20. John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and International
Terrorism, 2d ed. (London: Pluto, 2000); Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan,
197.
21. “How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen: Interview with Zbig-niew
Brzezinski,” Le nouvel observateur, 15–21 January 1998, 76. The interview
was not included in the abridged edition of the magazine sold in the United
States. This translation is by Bill Blum.
22. Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside
Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (London: Oxford University Press, 1995),
details
the Reagan administration’s efforts to prevent a Soviet withdrawal. Cordovez,
the United Nations undersecretary-general for Special Political Affairs, was
a
key figure in negotiating the Geneva Accords of 1988 that finally provided a
framework for the Soviet withdrawal, completed in 1989. U.S. aid to the
mujahideen increased from $120 million in fiscal year 1984 to $250 million in
1985 and almost doubled again in the later 1980s, when combined U.S. and
Saudi aid reached $1 billion per year (Rubin, Fragmentation of Afghanistan,
180–81).
23. Gwenn Okruhlik, “Networks of Dissent: Islamism and Reform in Saudi
Arabia,” Current History 101 (January 2002): 22–28.
Timothy Mitchell
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