The following article is long but I hope that some of you enjoy reading it.

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A Trap of Their Own Making
Anatol Lieven

Nineteenth-century empires were often led on from one war to another as a
result of developments which imperial governments did not plan and domestic
populations did not desire. In part this was the result of plotting by
individual 'prancing proconsuls', convinced they could gain a reputation at
small risk, given the superiority of their armies to any conceivable
opposition; but it was also the result of factors inherent in the imperial
process.

The difference today is that overwhelming military advantage is possessed
not by a set of competing Western states, but by one state alone. Other
countries may possess elements of the technology, and many states are more
warlike than America; but none possesses anything like the ability of the US
to integrate these elements (including Intelligence) into an effective
whole, and to combine them with weight of firepower, capacity to transport
forces over long distances and national bellicosity. The most important
question now facing the world is the use the Bush Administration will make
of its military dominance, especially in the Middle East. The next question
is when and in what form resistance to US domination over the Middle East
will arise. That there will be resistance is certain. It would be contrary
to every historical precedent to believe that such a quasi-imperial hegemony
will not stir up resentment, which sooner or later is bound to find an
effective means of expression.

US domination over the Middle East will, for the most part, be exercised
indirectly, and will provoke less grievance than direct administration
would, but one likely cause of trouble is the 'proletarian colonisation' of
Israel - the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. Given past
experience and the indications now coming from Israel, there is little
reason to hope for any fundamental change in Israeli policies. Sharon may
eventually withdraw a few settlements - allowing the US Administration and
the Israeli lobby to present this as a major concession and sacrifice - but
unless there is a tremendous upheaval in both Israeli and US domestic
politics, he and his successors are unlikely to offer the Palestinians
anything more than tightly controlled bantustans. Palestinian terrorism,
Israeli repression and wider Arab and Muslim resentment seem likely to
continue for the foreseeable future.

How long it will be before serious resistance grows is hard to tell. In some
19th-century cases, notably Afghanistan, imperial rule never consolidated
itself and was overthrown almost immediately by new revolts. In others, it
lasted for decades without involving too much direct repression, and ended
only after tremendous social, economic, political and cultural changes had
taken place not only in the colonies and dependencies but in the Western
imperial countries themselves. Any attempt to predict the future of the
Middle East must recognise that the new era which began on 11 September 2001
has not only brought into the open certain latent pathologies in American
and British society, culture and politics; it has also fully revealed the
complete absence of democratic modernisation, or indeed any modernisation,
in all too much of the Muslim world.

The fascination and the horror of the present time is that so many different
and potentially disastrous possibilities suggest themselves. The immediate
issue is whether the US will attack any other state. Or, to put the question
another way: will the US move from hegemony to empire in the Middle East?
And if it does, will it continue to march from victory to victory, or will
it suffer defeats which will sour American public support for the entire
enterprise?

For Britain, the most important question is whether Tony Blair, in his
capacity as a senior adviser to President Bush, can help to stop US moves in
this direction and, if he fails, whether Britain is prepared to play the
only role it is likely to be offered in a US empire: that fulfilled by Nepal
in the British Empire - a loyal provider of brave soldiers with special
military skills. Will the British accept a situation in which their chief
international function is to provide auxiliary cohorts to accompany the
Roman legions of the US, with the added disadvantage that British cities, so
far from being protected in return by the empire, will be exposed to
destruction by 'barbarian' counter-attacks?

As is clear from their public comments, let alone their private
conversations, the Neo-Conservatives in America and their allies in Israel
would indeed like to see a long-term imperial war against any part of the
Muslim world which defies the US and Israel, with ideological justification
provided by the American mission civilisatrice - 'democratisation'. In the
words of the Israeli Major-General Ya'akov Amidror, writing in April under
the auspices of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, 'Iraq is not the
ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the Middle East, the Arab world and the
Muslim world. Iraq will be the first step in this direction; winning the war
against terrorism means structurally changing the entire area.' The Neo-Con
model is the struggle against 'Communism', which they are convinced was won
by the Reaganite conflation of military toughness and ideological
crusading..
The ultimate goal here would be world hegemony by means of absolute military
superiority.

The Neo-Cons may be deluding themselves, however. It may well be that, as
many US officials say in private, Bush's new national security strategy is
'a doctrine for one case only' - namely Iraq. Those who take this position
can point to the unwillingness of most Americans to see themselves in
imperial terms, coupled with their powerful aversion to foreign
entanglements, commitments and sacrifices. The Bush Administration may have
made menacing statements about Syria, but it has also assured the American
people that the US military occupation of Iraq will last 18 months at the
very most. Furthermore, if the economy continues to falter, it is still
possible that Bush will be ejected from office in next year's elections.
Should this happen, some of the US's imperial tendencies will no doubt
remain in place - scholars as different as Andrew Bacevich and Walter
Russell Mead have stressed the continuity in this regard from Bush through
Clinton to Bush, and indeed throughout US history. However, without the
specific configuration of hardline elements empowered by the Bush
Administration, American ambitions would probably take on a less
megalomaniac and frightening aspect.

In this analysis, both the grotesque public optimism of the Neo-Con rhetoric
about democratisation and its exaggeration of threats to the US stem from
the fact that it takes a lot to stir ordinary Americans out of their
customary apathy with regard to international affairs. While it is true that
an element of democratic messianism is built into what Samuel Huntington and
others have called 'the American Creed', it is also the case that many
Americans have a deep scepticism - healthy or chauvinist according to taste
- about the ability of other countries to develop their own forms of
democracy.

In the case of Iraq, this scepticism has been increased by the scenes of
looting and disorder. In addition, there have been well-publicised
harbingers both of incipient ethnic conflict and of strong mass opposition
to a long-term US military presence and a US-chosen Iraqi Government. Even
the Washington Post, which was one of the cheerleaders for this war in the
'serious' American press, and which has not been too anxious to publicise
Iraqi civilian casualties, has reported frankly on the opposition to US
plans for Iraq among the country's Shia population in particular.

Even if most Americans and a majority of the Administration want to move to
indirect control over Iraq, the US may well find that it has no choice but
to exercise direct rule. Indeed, even those who hated the war may find
themselves morally trapped into supporting direct rule if the alternative
appears to be a collapse into anarchy, immiseration and ethnic conflict.

 There is a tremendous difference in this regard between Iraq and
Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the mass of the population has been accustomed
to fend for itself with very little help from the state, very little modern
infrastructure and for that matter very little formal employment. In these
circumstances, it was possible for the US to install a ramshackle pretence
of a coalition government in Kabul, with a tenuous truce between its
elements held in place by an international peacekeeping force backed by US
firepower. The rest of the country could be left in the hands of warlords,
clans and ethnic militias, as long as they made their territories open
hunting ranges for US troops in their search for al-Qaida. The US forces
launch these raids from airbases and heavily fortified, isolated camps in
which most soldiers are kept rigidly separated from Afghans.

Doubtless many US planners would be delighted to dominate Iraq in the same
semi-detached way, but Iraq is a far more modern society than Afghanistan,
and much more heavily urbanised: without elements of modern infrastructure
and services and a state to guarantee them, living standards there will not
recover. Iraq needs a state; but for a whole set of reasons, it will find
the creation of a workable democratic state extremely difficult. The
destruction of the Baath regime has involved the destruction of the Sunni
Arab military dominance on which the Iraqi state has depended since its
creation by the British. Neither the US nor anyone else has any clear idea
of what to put in its place (if one ignores the fatuous plan of Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz to install Ahmad Chalabi as an American puppet and Iraqi
strongman). Equally important, the US will not allow the creation of a truly
independent state. Ultimately, it may well see itself as having no choice
but to create the state itself and remain deeply involved not just in
supporting it but in running it, as the British did in Egypt for some sixty
years.

Very often - perhaps most of the time - the old imperial powers preferred to
exercise control indirectly, through client states. This was far cheaper,
far easier to justify domestically and ran far less chance of provoking
native revolt. The problem was that the very act of turning a country into a
client tended to cripple the domestic prestige of the client regime, and to
place such economic, political and moral pressures on it that it was liable
to collapse. The imperial power then had the choice of either pulling out
(and allowing the area to fall into the hands of enemies) or stepping in and
imposing direct control. This phenomenon can be seen from Awadh and Punjab
in the 1840s to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1989.

Of course, the threat to imperial client states did not come only from
within their own borders. In a world where ethnic, clan, religious and
personal loyalties spilled across national boundaries, a power that seized
one territory was likely to find itself inexorably drawn to conquering its
neighbours. There were always military, commercial or missionary interests
to agitate for this expansion, often backed by exiled opposition groups
ready to stress that the mass of the population would rejoice in an imperial
invasion to bring them to power.

Whatever the Neo-Cons and the Israeli Government may wish, there is I
believe no fixed intention on the part of the US Administration to attack
either Syria or Iran, let alone Saudi Arabia. What it had in mind was that
an easy and crushing US victory over Iraq would so terrify other Muslim
states that they would give up any support for terrorist groups, collaborate
fully in cracking down on terrorists and Islamist radicals, and abandon
their own plans to develop weapons of mass destruction, thereby making it
unnecessary for the US to attack them. This applied not only to perceived
enemies such as Syria, Iran and Libya, but to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen
and other states seen as unreliable allies in the 'war against terrorism'.

 If the US restricts itself to this strategy and this goal, it may enjoy
success - for a while at least. Several states in the region are clearly
running very scared. Moreover, every single state in the region - including
Iran - feels under threat from the forces of Sunni Islamist revolution as
represented by al-Qaida and its ideological allies; so there is a genuine
common interest in combating them.

But for this strategy to work across such a wide range of states and
societies as those of the Muslim world, US policymakers would have to
display considerable sensitivity and discrimination. These are virtues not
usually associated with the Bush Administration, least of all in its present
triumphalist mood. The policy is in any case not without its dangers. What
happens if the various pressures put on the client regimes cause them to
collapse? And what happens if an enemy calls America's bluff, and challenges
it to invade? It is all too easy to see how a new US offensive could
result..

 Another major terrorist attack on the US could upset all equations and
incite another wave of mass hysteria that would make anything possible. If,
for example, it were once again perceived to have been financed and staffed
by Saudis, the pressure for an attack on Saudi Arabia could become
overwhelming. The Iranian case is even trickier. According to informed
European sources, the Iranians may be within two years of developing a
nuclear deterrent (it's even possible that successful pressure on Russia to
cut off nuclear trade would not make any crucial difference). Israel in
particular is determined to forestall Iranian nuclear capability, and
Israeli commentators have made it clear that Israel will take unilateral
military action if necessary. If the US and Israeli Governments are indeed
determined to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, they may not have much
time.

The second factor is the behaviour of the Shias of Iraq, and especially of
Iranian-backed factions. Leading Shia groups have boycotted the initial
discussions on forming a government. If they maintain this position, and if
the US fails to create even the appearance of a viable Iraqi government,
with disorder spreading in consequence, Iran will be blamed, rightly or not,
by powerful elements in Washington. They will use it as an additional reason
to strike against Iranian nuclear sites. In response, Tehran might well
promote not only a further destabilisation of Iraq but a terrorist campaign
against the US, which would in turn provoke more US retaliations until a
full-scale war became a real possibility.

Although the idea of an American invasion of Iran is viewed with horror by
most military analysts (and, as far as I can gather, by the uniformed
military), the latest polls suggest that around 50 per cent of Americans are
already prepared to support a war to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear
weapons..
Moreover, the voices of moderation among the military tend to be the same
ones which warned - as I did - of the possibility of stiff Iraqi resistance
to a US invasion and the dangers of urban warfare in Baghdad, opposed
Rumsfeld's plans to invade with limited numbers of relatively lightly armed
troops and felt vindicated in their concern by the initial setbacks around
Nasiriya and elsewhere. The aftermath has shown Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld to
have been correct in their purely military calculations about Iraq, and this
will undoubtedly strengthen them in future clashes with the uniformed
military. Rumsfeld's whole strategy of relying on lighter, more easily
transportable forces is, of course, precisely designed to make such imperial
expeditions easier.

As for the majority of Americans, well, they have already been duped once,
by a propaganda programme which for systematic mendacity has few parallels
in peacetime democracies: by the end of it, between 42 and 56 per cent of
Americans (the polls vary) were convinced that Saddam Hussein was directly
involved in the attacks of 11 September. This gave the run-up to the war a
peculiarly nightmarish quality in the US. It was as if the full truth about
Tonkin Gulf, instead of emerging in dribs and drabs over a decade, had been
fully available and in the open the whole time - and the US intervention in
Vietnam had happened anyway.

While the special place of Saddam Hussein in American demonology means that
this wouldn't be an easy trick to repeat, the American public's ignorance of
international affairs in general and the Muslim world in particular make it
by no means impossible. It isn't just Fox TV: numerous even more rabid media
outlets, the Christian Coalition and parts of the Israeli lobby are all
dedicated to whipping up hatred of Arabs and Muslims. More important is the
fact that most Americans accept Bush's equation of terrorism and 'evil',
which makes it extremely difficult to conduct any serious public discussion
of threats from the Muslim world in terms which would be acceptable or even
comprehensible to a mass American audience. Add to this the severe
constraints on the discussion of the role of Israel, and you have a state of
public debate close to that described by Marcuse. If America suffered
another massive terrorist attack in the coming years, the dangers would be
incomparably greater.

If the plans of the Neo-Cons depended on mass support for imperialism within
the US, they would be doomed to failure. The attacks of 11 September,
however, have given American imperialists the added force of wounded
nationalism - a much deeper, more popular and more dangerous phenomenon,
strengthened by the Israeli nationalism of much of the American Jewish
community. Another attack on the American mainland would further inflame
that nationalism, and strengthen support for even more aggressive and
ambitious 'retaliations'. The terrorists may hope that they will exhaust
Americans' will to fight, as the Vietcong did; if so, they may have
underestimated both the tenacity and the ferocity of Americans when they
feel themselves to have been directly attacked. The capacity for
ruthlessness of the nationalist or Jacksonian element in the American
democratic tradition - as in the firebombing of Japan and North Korea,
neither of which had targeted American civilians - has been noted by Walter
Russell Mead, and was recently expressed by MacGregor Knox, an American
ex-soldier, now a professor at the LSE: Europeans 'may believe that the
natural order of things as they perceive it - the restraint of American
power through European wisdom - will sooner or later triumph. But such
expectations are delusional. Those who find militant Islam terrifying have
clearly never seen a militant democracy.'

America could certainly be worn out by a protracted guerrilla struggle on
the scale of Vietnam. It seems unlikely, however, that a similar struggle
could be mounted in the Middle East - unless the US were to invade Iran, at
which point all bets and predictions would be off. Another terrorist attack
on the US mainland, using some form of weapons of mass destruction, far from
demoralising the US population would probably whip it into chauvinist fury.
To understand why successful guerrilla warfare against the US is unlikely
(quite apart from the fact that there are no jungles in the Middle East), it
is necessary to remember that the imperial domination made possible by
19th-century Western military superiority was eventually destroyed by three
factors: first, the development of military technology (notably such weapons
as the automatic rifle, the grenade and modern explosives) which
considerably narrowed the odds between Western armies and 'native'
insurgents. Second, the development of modern ideologies of resistance -
Communist, nationalist or a combination of the two - which in turn produced
the cadres and structures to organise resistance. Third, weariness on the
part of 'metropolitan' populations and elites, stemming partly from social
and cultural change, and partly from a growing awareness that direct empire
did not pay economically.

Guerrilla warfare against the US is now a good deal more difficult because
of two undramatic but immensely important innovations: superbly effective
and light bullet-proof vests and helmets which make the US and British
soldier almost as well protected as the medieval knight; and night-vision
equipment which denies the guerrilla the aid of his oldest friend and ally,
darkness. Both of these advantages can be countered, but it will be a long
time before the odds are narrowed again. Of course, local allies of the US
can be targeted, but their deaths are hardly noticed by US public opinion.
More and more, therefore, 'asymmetric warfare' will encourage a move to
terrorism.

The absence or failure of revolutionary parties led by cadres working for
mass mobilisation confirms this. The Islamists may alter this situation,
despite the disillusioning fate of the Iranian Revolution. But as far as the
nationalists are concerned, it has been tried in the past, and while it
succeeded in expelling the colonialists and their local clients, it failed
miserably to produce modernised states. Algeria is a clear example: a
hideously savage but also heroic rebellion against a particularly revolting
form of colonialism - which eventually led to such an utterly rotten and
unsuccessful independent state that much of the population eventually turned
to Islamic revolution.

And now this, too, is discredited, above all in the one major country where
it succeeded, Iran. Arab states have failed to develop economically,
politically and socially, and they have also failed properly to unite. When
they have united for the purposes of war, they have been defeated. Rebellion
against the US may take place in Iraq. Elsewhere, the mass response to the
latest Arab defeat seems more likely to be a further wave of despair,
disillusionment and retreat into private life - an 'internal emigration'. In
some fortunate cases, this may lead to a new Islamist politics focused on
genuine reform and democratic development - along the lines of the changes
in Turkey. But a cynicism which only feeds corruption and oppression is just
as likely a result.

Even if despair and apathy turn out to be the responses of the Arab
majority, there will also be a minority which is too proud, too radical, too
fanatical or too embittered - take your pick - for such a course. They are
the natural recruits for terrorism, and it seems likely that their numbers
will only have been increased by the latest American victory. We must fear
both the strengthening of Islamist terrorism and the reappearance of secular
nationalist terrorism, not only among Palestinians but among Arabs in
general. The danger is not so much that the Bush Administration will
consciously adopt the whole Neo-Con imperialist programme as that the
Neo-Cons and their allies will contribute to tendencies stemming inexorably
from the US occupation of Iraq and that the result will be a vicious circle
of terrorism and war. If this proves to be the case, then the damage
inflicted over time by the US on the Muslim world and by Muslims on the US
and its allies is likely to be horrendous. We have already shown that we can
destroy Muslim states. Even the most ferocious terrorist attacks will not do
that to Western states; but if continued over decades, they stand a good
chance of destroying democracy in America and any state associated with it.

Anatol Lieven, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington DC, is the author of Chechnya and Ukraine
and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry.
12 May 2003  from the london review of books

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