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| November 25, 2014 Tomgram: Engelhardt, Iraq War 4.0?
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Here’s a small suggestion as the holidays approach. If you want to lend a hand to TomDispatch before the year ends, why not make a donation of $100 (or more) for a signed, personalized copy of my new book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. If you’d like to have it signed for a friend this season, go to our donation page, make the necessary contribution, and email me telling me whom to sign it for. As for the rest of you, don’t forget to pick up a copy of the book for yourself or a friend. It’s a great way to spread the word about TomDispatch. By the way, if you want to read an interview Don Hazen and Jan Frel of Alternet did with me on the new book and our ragged old world, click here.
Russians Invade Afghanistan (Again!), Chinese Fight Iraq War (Again!)Note as well that there will be no TomDispatch post on Thanksgiving. Tom] What If It Weren’t Us? By Tom Engelhardt Let’s play a game, the kind that makes no sense on this single-superpower planet of ours. For a moment, do your best to suspend disbelief and imagine that there’s another superpower, great power, or even regional power somewhere that, between 2001 and 2003, launched two major wars in the Greater Middle East. We’re talking about full-scale invasions, long-term occupations, and nation-building programs, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. In both countries, that power quickly succeeded in its stated objective of “regime change,” only to find itself mired in deadly conflicts with modestly armed minority insurgencies that it simply couldn’t win. In each country, to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, it built up a humongous army and allied “security” forces, poured money into “reconstruction” projects (most of which proved disasters of corruption and incompetence), and spent trillionsof dollars of national treasure. Having imagined that, ask yourself: How well did all of that turn out for this other power? In Afghanistan, a recent news story highlights something of what was accomplished. Though that country took slot 175 out of 177 on Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption Perceptions Index, though its security forces continue to suffer grievous casualties, and though parts of the country are falling to a strengthening Taliban insurgency, it has for some years proudly held a firm grip on one record: Afghanistan is the leading narco-state on planet Earth. In 2013, it upped its opium poppy cultivation by 36%, its opium production byalmost 50%, and drug profits soared. Preliminary figures for this year, recently released by the U.N., indicate that opium cultivation has risen by another 7% and opium production by 17%, both to historic highs, as Afghanistan itself has become “one of the world’s most addicted societies.” Meanwhile, where there once was Iraq (171st on that index of kleptocracies), there is now a Shiite government in Baghdad defended by a collapsed armyand sectarian militias, a de facto Kurdish state to the north, and, in the third of the country in-between, a newly proclaimed “caliphate” run by a terror movement so brutal it’s establishing records for pure bloodiness. It’s headed by men whose West Point was a military prison run by that same great power and its bloodthirstiness is funded in part by captured oil fields and refineries. In other words, after 13 years of doing its damnedest, on one side of the Greater Middle East this power has somehow overseen the rise of the dominant narco-state on the planet with monopoly control over 80%-90% of the global opium supply and 75% of the heroin. On the other side of the region, it’s been complicit in the creation of the first terrorist mini-oil state in history, a post-al-Qaeda triumph of extreme jihadism. Click here to read more of this dispatch. |
