Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003? None of the stated reasons hold up to scrutiny. The threat, as originally presented, was that Saddam’s reconstituted weapons program would yield WMD’s that Saddam would share with his allies in al-Qa’ida. The “al-Qa’ida-Saddam link” was always patently absurd among those who understood the situation in the Middle East: the removal of Saddam was one of al-Qa’ida’s founding goals. Some made the argument that, like the USSR and Nazi Germany in World War II, al-Qa’ida and Saddam might have set aside their differences in the face of their greater, American enemy. This neglects the fact that America is only a secondary enemy in al-Qa’ida’s world, and only because of America’s unwavering support for their primary enemies: secular and fascist despots like Saddam Hussein! The attacks of 9/11 were not aimed to weaken America, but to rally the Muslim world against their local oppressors: that if even their American benefactors could be harmed, then surely the tyrants of the Middle East are not so invincible after all. The “links” between al-Qa’ida and Saddam showed some limited al-Qa’ida activity in Iraq, but popular American reporting neglected that the organizations thus linked to al-Qa’ida, like Ansar al-Islam, were all anti-Saddam resistance groups, like SCIRII, the Iranian-backed group whose members now form most of the current Iraqi government.

The argument that Saddam even had a reconsituted weapons program has since been shown to be demonstrably false. The Bush administraton insists that no one could have known this at the time, and every intelligence agency in the world agreed that Saddam was developing WMD’s. I don’t doubt Saddam’s desire, but I always doubted his abilities, and I was not alone. Scott Ritter, the UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, insisted “that no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact.” Michael Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris confirmed my positions so precisely that my brother joked that I must have been its then-anonymous author.

In fact, we knew much about Saddam’s arsenal, because we provided most of it, during the 1980s when Saddam was our ally against Iran. What we provided were chemical and biological weapons, like those Saddam turned against a Kurdish border town with suspicions of Iranian collusion. Since then, Saddam’s Iraq has never deployed WMD’s, nor shown any evidence of possessing them, save the WMD’s we supplied him with during that war. The charge that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons was always absurd, as the facilities to do so would either be visible from space, and/or imply that Saddam’s Iraq possessed miraculous technology several decades ahead of every other country on earth, while evincing to all appearances precisely the opposite.

Moreover, all of the intelligence to indicate otherwise, used by the Bush administration to “sell” the war, came from a few, well-known sources that had been discredited even under Clinton. They were all defectors with strong ties to SCIRII–the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq–one of the largest and most successful anti-Saddam resistance groups. While the U.S. was helping Saddam during the height of his atrocities during the 1980s, Iran was helping the Shi’ite majority in Iraq resist Saddam, with groups such as SCIRII, whose ultimate goal was the deposition of Saddam and replacing him with an Iranian-style, Shi’ite theocracy. The defectors, smuggled in by SCIRII, were, for all intents and purposes, Iranian agents, yet they were for years propped up as valid sources by neoconservatives. Though made long before, such outrageous claims were only taken seriously after 9/11.

The revisionist claim that there was any kind of unanimity on Saddam’s WMD before the war preys upon the lack of long-term memory that the general American public so often displays. In fact, when the CIA could not offer the proof the administration needed, Rumsfeld formed his own, personal spy ring.

As the evidence mounted, the Bush administration has largely abandoned its original rationale, though it still clings to the deceptive claim that “no one could have known” these things beforehand (except, one supposes, the millions of people worldwide who marched against the war and sounded precisely these arguments so vigorously, as I did). Instead, the claim has shifted to the importance of removing an evil dictator, and creating a foothold for freedom and democracy in the Middle East.

Only a fool would argue that Saddam was not a bloodthirsty, heinous despot, but his greatest atrocities were long in his past–all of them done either while he was our ally, or, as with the the massacres of 1991, while we literally stood by and watched in silent approval. Yet, there are many countries with rulers so vile as to make Saddam appear a rank amateur, including such allies in the War on Terror as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Our previous campaign in Afghanistan was against the Taliban; the “open secret” of the region was well-known, that the Taliban was a foreign invasion force created and funded by Pakistan’s secret police, the ISI. While Saddam was one of al-Qa’ida’s most bitter enemies and had no WMD ability, other countries such as Iran–to say nothing of our ally, Pakistan–have both.

In fact, the neoconservatives had planned the Iraq campaign long before 9/11. In September, 2000, before Bush’s election and a year before the events of 9/11 the Project for a New American Century, a major neoconservative think tank, released a report called, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” [PDF] Among its authors you will find several individuals who soon found high office in the Bush administration, as well as others with close ties to it, including Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. On page 14, these high-ranking members of the Bush administration write:

In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of American forces, along with British and French units, has become a semi-permanent fact of life. Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

In other words, the neoconservatives have now begun to air publicly precisely the reason they advocated an American military prescence in Iraq even before 9/11: as a foothold for their grander vision of America as a force to promote democracy throughout the world, specificially in this case, to promote democracy in the Middle East. There is, however, a spin in this that the Bush administration of today is less willing to say out loud–that such a commitment is permanent.

* * *

Who, then, are these sinister, shady “neocons”? As my brother wrote recently in his proposal for “Godesky’s Law“:

Now don’t get me wrong. I too stand in opposition to the neoconservative political philosophy. But the really sad thing about most of the people you see protesting the “neocons” is that they don’t actually know what a neoconservative is. All they know is that they read it off of their DNC prepared list of talking points. Many of them use the term to refer to just about any Republican. I’m sure they would be surprised to learn that the neoconservative movement was, in fact, founded by Democrats. It’s reached the point where whenever I hear somebody talking about “neocons” I can only think of an organization of cackling Bond villains preparing their Tesla death ray. And while certain neoconservatives may come as close to being real life Bond villains as you’re likely to find, it’s still not exactly an accurate description of the movement.

As the use of the term “neoconservative” as a simple pejorative has spread faster than any meaningful usage, few actual neoconservatives describe themselves by the appelation. This has created a great deal of obfuscation, with little ability to actually refer to a very real political philosophy–which, ironically, would be a very neoconservative thing to do.

The neoconservative philosophy owes itself primarily to Leo Strauss and his marriage of Machiaevelli and Hobbes. Neoconservatism accepts Hobbes’ basic idea of human nature, but extend his logic of “Leviathan” to a much larger context. For the neoconservatives, just as the “Leviathan” of government is necessary to liberate individual humans from their “solitary, nasty, brutish and short” existence, so, too, does the world at large require a global “Leviathan,” a power that is as ruthless as it is powerful, so that sheer, abject terror can extract obedience to the reigning social order. To the neoconservative, the natural candidate for such a Leviathan is the United States of America.

Neoconservatives openly compare the U.S.’s “destiny” to the Roman Empire, and speak of a “Pax Americana.” In their statement of principles, one of the most important neoconservative think tanks–the Project for the New American Century–lays out the overriding vision of neoconservatism in this way:

As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

In their report already cited above, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the term “Pax Americana” appears repeatedly, as it does on the very first page:

The American peace has proven itself peaceful, stable and durable. It has, over the past decade, provided the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth and the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy. Yet no moment in international politics can be frozen in time; even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself.

Neoconservatives thus call openly for global, American hegemony, believing that America is a force for good in the world. David Rovinsky’s review of Mark Gerson’s The Neoconservative Vision summarizes what “good” and “freedom” mean in the neoconservative mind:

Neoconservatives believe that politics is about morality, and that morality should infuse political behavior. Democracy thrives upon what they call “the bourgeois virtues” of thrift, the delaying of gratification, honesty, probity, and loyalty. The importance of individual moral responsibility is the flip side of the classical liberal’s insistence upon personal freedom and initiative; neoconservatives maintain that each side is needed to make the other work. For example, while material wealth is necessary for a thriving society with a high standard of living, it is not an end in itself. This wealth can be put in the service of the things that truly “matter” in life, such as education and intellectual vitality; civil society, as in those mediating institutions that give society a collective existence independent of the state; and religion. Religion is the source of the moral virtues that animate both individuals and the society in which they live.

…

Indeed, neoconservatives have a diffident attitude toward democracy and freedom. Neither is a good in itself. Rather, they are acceptable only to the extent that they are consistent with the bourgeois virtues. While they oppose totalitarian regimes on the grounds that they impose an all-encompassing ideology upon society, the bourgeois virtues seem to take on the same kind of global role. While castigating New Left intellectuals for lacking touch with the common people, neoconservative intellectuals also complain that the United States is too democratic in its ideology, leading the people to reject the wise advice that neoconservatives are offering them. Similarly, neoconservatives believe that freedom is inherently subject to abuse, with liberty dissolving into license, in the terminology of John Locke. Criticism of the bourgeois virtues ultimately undermines society’s institutions, meaning that dissent is a threat to society rather than a vehicle for improving it. Therefore, society is inherently fragile and under constant threat. Perhaps neoconservatives are not aware that they are using a similar argument to that of totalitarian Marxists. Gerson, content merely to summarize neoconservative writings, never addresses this contradiction.

You may note in the foregoing that I am quick to assume the neoconservatives are being deceptive. This is no mere cynicism. The first neoconservatives were secular Jewish immigrants in New York, but more importantly, Trotskyists. From Trotsky, they inherited the idea of the ongoing revolution; from Lenin, the notion of the revolutionary vanguard. Leo Strauss argued that it was the duty of such a vanguard to promote “necessary myths” in order to achieve the greater good which hoi polloi could not appreciate. In other words, neoconservatives believe they know what is best for us better than we do, and anything they do to achieve that is justified (the aforementioned influence of Machiavelli). Neoconservatives believe that decieving the public is not just excusable, but that they, as the revolutionary vanguard of goodness itself, have a moral obligation to do so. For this alone, anything that comes from a neoconservative should be considered suspicious.

* * *

We have discussed the nature of empire before, so let us merely review from that previous piece here:

If this seems all far too cynical and “anti-American,” then I would highlight that this not simply an attribute of America, but a fundamental principle to all empires. Caesar’s Gallic Wars chronicles how he played internal rivalries among the Gauls in the very same manner as the British in India. Rome often ruled through “client kings,” like Herod, who retained a fictive authority, but only as a figurehead. There, too, it was a fiction fed to the people to avoid the ugly truth of Roman domination. In Rome, as in our current neocolonial enterprise, the purpose of empire was the same: to benefit the imperial center, at the expense of the periphery.

Most of the resources any society needs ends up existing in a zero-sum game: in order for one society to have more of it, some other society must have less. As John Dominic Crossan illustrated so well in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Rome found that “peace” and “prosperity” were just such resources. The Pax Romana was a golden age–for Italy. The provinces suffered poverty, famine, and a nearly chronic state of war. Essentially, the imperial enterprise was, for Rome, an exercise in the exportation of violence and suffering themselves.

The modern United States has established itself in a similar manner as an imperial center. We have established a thriving, industrialized economy based on the consumption of fossil fuels. We obtain those fuels from the neocolonial periphery, where it is obtained well below market value because of our military domination–maintained largely by maintaining a sufficient level of violence and internecine strife that keeps our oil suppliers as dependent on us (militarily) as we are on them (economically). The IMF, the World Bank and similar organizations keep the Third World eternally in crushing debt (see John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man), creating a situation where it makes more sense for an individual farmer to grow cotton or coffee for the United States, than food for his family. This keeps the Third World as dependent on the United States (nutritionally) as we are on them (commercially).

Thus we see, that the key to First World prosperity is Third World suffering. The trend of globalization and the development of the Third World can only progress so far before it begins to have a negative impact on the First World’s level of prosperity. What will happen when this balance begins to shift? Will we see political turmoil resulting in the fall of the current imperial center? It may well be–and the United States would go down in history as one of the shorter-lived empires in the world. What can be said with certainty is that there can be no First World, without a Third World–wherever they may be, geographically. There can be no prosperous center, without an exploited periphery. The legal definitions of these areas means nothing; only the system of dependence and control.

Such is the nature of empire.

According to the neoconservatives, the American empire is different from past empires, because our hegemony spreads peace, prosperity, and democracy. Irving Kristol, one of the oldest and most respected neoconservatives, described it thus in “The Emerging American Imperium“:

One of these days, the American people are going to awaken to the fact that we have become an imperial nation, even though public opinion and all of our political traditions are hostile to the idea. It is no overweening ambition on our part that has defined our destiny in this way, nor is it any kind of conspiracy by a foreign policy elite. It happened because the world wanted it to happen, needed it to happen, and signaled this need by a long series of relatively minor crises that could not be resolved except by some American involvement. The British Empire may not really have been created in a fit of absent-mindedness, as a prominent historian once claimed, but there does seem to be an awful lot of absent-mindedness about the way an American imperium–a more subtle term than empire–has come (and is coming) into existence.

In the popular neoconservative article “The Case for American Empire,” published in The Weekly Standard (the essential neoconservative publication), Max Boot called it “a liberal and humanitarian imperialism, to be sure, but imperialism all the same.” In another article, an editorial for USA Today, Boot addresses the issue more directly:

While the formal empire mostly disappeared after World War II, the United States set out on another bout of imperialism in Germany and Japan. Oh, sorry — that wasn’t imperialism; it was “occupation.” But when Americans are running foreign governments, it’s a distinction without a difference. Likewise, recent “nation-building” experiments in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan are imperialism under another name.

Mind you, this is not meant as a condemnation. The history of American imperialism is hardly one of unadorned good doing; there have been plenty of shameful episodes, such as the mistreatment of the Indians. But, on the whole, U.S. imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century. It has defeated the monstrous evils of communism and Nazism and lesser evils such as the Taliban and Serbian ethnic cleansing. Along the way, it has helped spread liberal institutions to countries as diverse as South Korea and Panama.

In other words, according to neoconservatives, American imperialism and the Pax Americana isn’t just in America’s interests, but the world’s. Neoconservatives often portray the world as “crying out” for the wise, benevolent rule of the United States, and make the case that imperial ambitions are not only justified on our part, but ethically obligatory.

Of course, such rhetoric is not new; it is, in fact, a hallmark of all those bad, old imperialisms the neoconservatives deplore. The British called their obligation the “white man’s burden.” The Roman Empire spread the virtues of Romanitas to barbarians. The Dar al-Islam spread the holy Qu’ran to unbelievers. In all previous instances, such rationales may have been very personally motivating, but were ultimately justifications dreamed up to excuse an imperial endeavor undertaken for entirely different reasons–and almost always betrayed by the naked cruelty inherent in such an enterprise. In nearly all previous cases, such abuses were successfully kept hidden from the population of the imperial center, helped no doubt by our natural inclination to disbelieve such terrible things about ourselves, and the great ease allowed in keeping a secret no one wants to believe anyway.

All these previous empires used precisely the same imperial strategies that the modern American empire uses. As Jeff Vail explained it in “Adapting the Exploitation Model“:

England is a small country, with a relatively small population. They were never able to field the kind of imperial expeditionary forces of other empires. Instead, from the very beginnings in India, they pioneered a new means of controlling colonies: exploit internal divisions. I call this the “Exploitation Model�, and it has been used with great success, first by Britain, then by the US in all corners of the globe. It started in India, where the British recognized that they could not field a force large enough to control the hugely populous and well armed people of the subcontinent. They recognized, however, that India was rife with internal divisions, fractured into a complex web of princes and potentates each with long-running internal disputes. They learned that by leveraging their forces in the support of one local group against another, they could greatly multiply their power, and effectively control a nation several times larger than their own. It was in India that they laid the groundwork for the Exploitation Model: leverage a minority group with the promise of “If you help make us rich, we’ll see to it that you also get a disproportionate share of the wealth�, and ensure loyalty by withholding access to some critical part of the machinery of power – make them rely on you just as much as you rely on them.

This model was used by the British to establish and control their empire: from the apartheid exploitation model used in colonial Africa to the tribal exploitation model used to establish the House of Saud, as well as control the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

With rise in expectations for independence and self-determination beginning in the 20th century, Britain had to adapt their model to the changing geo-political arena. They had to permit the appearance of independence to their colonies, while maintaining the flow of wealth and resources on which they depended. The Exploitation Model adapted quite well to this end: if a minority group depends on your support to control an “independent� country, then you can exert the exact same level of influence on this “sovereign� nation as you can over a colony – perhaps more, because you are no longer as culpable in matters of starvation, poverty and human rights. In addition to adapting the exploitation model to the changing world stage, the British carefully used their monopoly over cartography to ensure that these newly independent entities were cut up into chunks that would perpetuate ethnic strife and provide a ready pool of minority groups bidding for British support to their power with offers of enhancing British influence over the nations affairs.

This kind of de facto control was first called “neocolonialism” by Kofi Ankomah, the first post-independence president of Ghana, and has been discussed by a number of twentieth century scholars and philosophers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Noam Chomsky. Most of the world’s current conflicts can be understood as the legacy of colonialism, and the deliberate creation of dependency by European powers upon their withdrawal. In the article cited above, Jeff Vail cites the specific case of Iraq as illustrative of this phenomenon:

The British first gained control of what is now Iraq after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire following World War I. The value of controlling Iraq’s oil wealth was not lost on the British, even during the war, as the secretary of the War Cabinet, advised Foreign Secretary Arthur Belfour in writing that control of Persian and Mesopotamian oil was a “first-class British war aim.” The territories gained from the Ottomans were quickly divided up by British cartographers into units more compatible with the exploitation model: Kuwait was parceled off from Mesopotamia (later to be renamed Iraq) in an action quite reminiscent of Gerrymandering, ensuring that the Shi’ite majority in Iraq could be effectively managed by the British-supported Sunni minority, and that the British could in-turn exploit internal Shi’ite divisions in Kuwait.

It was to avoid such issues that T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a., “Lawrence of Arabia”) proposed the map discussed in “The Nature of Empire.” In The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis makes a similar point:

In the Western world, the basic unit of human organization is the nation, in America but not in Europe usage virtually synonymous with country. This is then subdivided in various ways, one of which is by religion. Muslims, however, tend to see not a nation subdivided into religious groups but a religion subdivided into nations. This is no doubt partly because most of the nation-states that make up the modern Middle East are relatively new creations, left over from the era of Anglo-French imperial domination that followed the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and they preserve the state-building and frontier demarcations of their former imperial masters. Even their names reflect this artificiality: Iraq was a medieval province, with borders very different from those of the modern republic, excluding Mesopotamia in the north and including a slice of western Iran; Syria, Palestine, and Libya are names from classical antiquity that hadn’t been used in the region for a thousand years or more before they were revived and imposed–again with new and often different boundaries–by European imperialists in the twentieth century; Algeria and Tunisia do not even exist as words in Arabic–the same name serves for the city and the country. Most remarkable of all, there is no word in the Arabic language for Arabia, and present-day Saudi Arabia is spoken of as “the Saudi Arab kingdom” or “the peninsula of the Arabs,” depending on the context. This is not because Arabic is a poor language–the reverse is true–but because the Arabs simply did not think in terms of combined ethnic and territorial identity. Indeed, the caliph ‘Umar is quoted as saying to the Arabs, “Learn your genealogies, and do not be like the local peasants who, when they are asked who they are, reply: ‘I am from such-and-such a place.’”

It is the system of depedency, and thus power, that defines imperialism, moreso than territorial control. Anthropologists recognize a spectrum of imperial types, from hegemonic to territorial. Hegemonic empires allow conquered lands to retain somewhat independent local governments, so long as tribute is forthcoming. The Persians and the Aztecs both ruled over hegemonic empires. Territorial empires rule their lands directly, and are deeply interested in spreading their culture to their conquered lands. Rome and the Inka are usually considered good examples of territorial empires. These are, however, extremes on a spectrum, and no empire is purely one or the other. Though generally considered territorial, Rome was not above co-opting local forms of authority or ruling through client-kings, as it did in Judea, Britain and Egypt at various times.

In many ways, it is the periphery that is strongest, as they do not need the imperial center–it is the imperial center that needs the periphery. The heart of the imperial enterprise is to create dependency, and to shift that balance, so that the periphery needs the imperial center every bit as much as the imperial center needs it. That gives the empire the ability to extract what it needs from its provinces. This can be established through direct military conquest, but that is only one way of establishing such patterns of dependency and control. As seen above, the manipulation of various factions is an equally effective means of establishing such control.

So, too, is economics. In the prologue of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins writes of his career at Chas. T. Main, one of the largest and most internationally active firms in contracting, planning, and managing many types of development projects around the world:

That is what we EHMs [”Economic Hit Men”] do best: we build a global empire. We are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks. Like our counterparts in the Mafia, EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure —electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco.

Neoconservatives are candid about their desire to also spread American culture and especially “the bourgeois virtues,” but such cultural imperialism does not require direct, political control, when the United States’ greatest export is its culture. As we have seen in the United States, any group that is eventually caught in the global economy is subject to a certain kind of natural selection. Those willing to give the most of themselves to their companies will prosper; those who insist on living a life do not. Total subservience to a corporate elite leads to longer working hours for lower wages and less benefits, as the iterated game of prisoner’s dilemna that is the global relationship between employers and employees breaks down in fear of betrayal. The spread of the global economy in such a harsh, Darwinian environment must also instill the very “bourgeois virtues” the neoconservatives so cherish, as all those not so dedicated will succumb to those willing to give more to their employers for less compensation. All that is needed for that goal is the spread of American consumerism–a vision that is spread very effectively by the private sector.

Many American companies have launched full-scale offensives against non-American cultures, not for any kind of ideology, but to better serve their shareholders. Golden Arches East, for example, discusses some of the conflicts McDonald’s has had in East Asia, including its attempts to redefine the Japanese concept of a “meal,” so as to no longer require rice. As it was, McDonald’s sales in East Asia suffered because, without rice, it was considered merely a snack. Our own Western attitudes towards bread are largely analogous. When McDonald’s attempt to change a fundamental element of East Asian culture in order to increase sales ultimately failed, the company instead acquiesced and decided to icnrease sales by incurring the cost of developing menus with rice. This episode serves to illustrate, though, the lengths many prominent American corporations will go to, in order to make foreign markets more “American” in culture and outlook. It also highlights the reasons why a corporation would invest such resources in such an endeavor: it’s easier for American corporations to sell to people who think and live like Americans.

Some Americans still deny that neocolonialism is a real phenomenon. This is a testimony to its success, as one of its benefits is not only its lower cost, but the fact that it obfuscates the nature of power, dependence and control. Like all previous empires, however, it is only the imperialists themselves who are fooled by it, because they want to be fooled by it. Neocolonialism is taken for granted in nearly every other country, and among nearly all those who study such matters, even in the United States. Controlling a country is a difficult, expensive, and thankless job, even if the imperial center requires that country’s resources for its continued prosperity. Neocolonialism allows the new imperial center to reap all the benefits of the exploitative imperial relationship, while shifting its costs–both material and social–to its own victims.

The plan works even better when it isn’t land that you require, but oil.

* * *

In a previous article, I made the case that all wars are for resources. The notion of “religious wars” are, in all cases, a justification made after the fact for conflicts over very material goals. My conclusion there was:

Cultural materialism teaches us that every society is dictated by its economic reality. Violence entails a significant risk of our own death; no society engages in violence for trivial reasons. Religion, no matter how deeply held, is always a trivial reason. Societies do not go to war because they believe it is just; they go to war because they believe they have to.

The industrial age has not changed this truth; it has merely changed what exactly it is we need. The Romans were quite explicit that their wars were for more farmland, and until recently, it was the need for more farmland that most limited a civilization’s growth. The industrial age has changed that. Now, from fertilizers to pesticides, to food packaging and transport, there is only one needful resource: fossil fuels. Rather than changing the nature of warfare, the industrial age has merely replaced the need for land, with the need for oil. This has released us from any need for territorial control, so long as tribute–in the form of oil–is forthcoming. This has allowed us to build an empire that is decidedly hegemonic, rather than territorial. We can allow some amount of local control, so long as our supply of oil is uninterrupted. That allows us to offload the costs of control onto the very same entities that we are exploiting in an imperial system of artificial dependence and control.

Oil is now the only resource that matters. In the industrial age, oil must be at the heart of all wars. Nothing else is worth fighting for.

We can understand much of the United States’ post-war history in terms of oil. George Kennan was one of the most essential architects of the United States’ Cold War policies. As Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department in 1948, he wrote Policy Planning Study #23, wherein he stated in stark terms the nature of the United States’ challenge:

We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming… We should cease to talk about vague and…unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization… we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

In 1973, Ibrahim Oweiss, a professor of economics at Georgetown University, coined the term “petrodollar,” to refer to an American dollar earned by a country through the sale of petroleum. Though I live near Oil City, PA, where Drake drilled the first oil well, the oil industry has its true home in Texas. It was in those Texan oil fields that American oil companies first developed. Those same companies used their equipment and knowledge under contract with various Arabian countries to first drill the Arabian oil fields. As a result, oil sales have since been priced in American dollars. This has largely divorced the value of the American dollar from the American economy. It is how the United States is able to incur such massive debts, and it is the key to American economic hegemony.

Mohammed Mossadegh’s reforms in Iran were all alarming in the middle of the Cold War: abolishing Iran’s feudal agricultural system in favor of collective farming and government land ownership, for example. But the governments of Britain and the United States only intervened when Mossadegh, after denying the two countries lucrative oil contracts, decided to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. The United States was instrumental in the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, and the establishment of the Shah’s direct rule.

The Shah proved to be a brutal tyrant, but his military ensured that Iranian oil made its way to the United States. The United States also relied on Saudi Arabia, a newly formed kingdom that had enjoyed American support since its founders had made alliances with FDR. Saudi Arabia owed much of its existence to the United States and Britain, but it also owed much of its existence to radical Wahhabist Sunni Islam. That made the United States wary of Saudi Arabia, and though officially the “twin pillar policy” relied equally on Saudi Arabia and Iran, unofficially, the United States relied on Mohammed Reza’s brutal tactics to maintain a “stability” in the Gulf that was favorable to American interests.

That “twin pillar policy” became all the more important when, in 1971, oil production in North America peaked. The United States’ ascendancy allowed it to clinch control of the oil market at a crucial moment in its growth, but after 1971, the United States found itself reliant on a resource it increasingly did not possess–and thus, utterly dependent on foreign sources of oil. This intensified the United States’ need to maintain that imperial pattern of dependence and control, and made Mohammed Reza’s brutal tactics all the more crucial.

Those tactics ultimately proved intolerable for the Iranian people, leading to the Islamic Revolution and intense hatred for the Shah’s Western patrons who facilitated their oppresson. With the loss of its more relaible “pillar,” the United States was forced into relying solely on the Wahhabist fundamentalists of the House of Sa’ud. Meanwhile, the success of the Islamic Revolution inspired the Middle East, beaten and humiliated, carved up into arbitrary units by foreign powers and manipulated in a neocolonial pattern of exploitation, with brutal tyrants and despots who would fall easily, but for their Western patrons–just like Iran’s Shah. Throughout the Middle East, the message was that their freedom from Western domination could finally be won, and Islamic fundamentalism was the key. Nasser had tried a brand of republic, as well as pan-Arabian nationalism, but it had failed. The Ba’ath party in Syria and Iraq combined pan-Arabian nationalism with fascism, but that, too, failed. Communism failed many times over. The Middle East was looking for anything that could challenge Western dominance; it turned to fundamentalism only because fundamentalism was the only one that worked.

That commitment was strengthened after the mujahideen defeated a superpower in Afghanistan. Islamic fundamentalists, like the neoconservatives themselves, believe that they destroyed the USSR. Meanwhile, the United States aided Saddam in his war against our new enemy and erstwhile ally, Iran. We supplied Saddam, as shown above, with various chemical and biological weapons during this time, in order to more effectively fight Iran. At the same time, Iran did even more to improve the image of fundamentalist Islam by founding anti-Saddam resistance groups like SCIRII.

After the war with Iran, Saddam invaded Kuwait, and became an enemy of the United States by threatening our oil supply. After the First Gulf War, Iraq was left broken and contained. Meanwhile, the resulting increased United States prescence proved a form of imperialism too blatant, and al-Qa’ida was born. Basically a rhizome network with no real organization of its own, al-Qa’ida’s main purpose was to connect the various resistance groups moving against their local despots, to facilitate open source warfare, and to provide training and support wherever possible. They also tried to convince the Middle East that all their various, local struggles against dictatorship were part of a larger struggle–a struggle to free the Middle East of its Western-backed despots, and raise a reborn caliphate governed by Shari’a law in its place.

In September, 2001, al-Qa’ida attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to send a message to the Arab world, to rise up against their local despots and tyrants, because even their invincible ally–the United States–could be harmed by the sheer power of jihad. There was, doubtlessly, another motive, as well. Usamah bn Ladin is a very intelligent man, and was educated in the United States. If he happened to read the writings of the new administration coming into power–such as “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” as above–he would have known that these neoconservatives needed only an excuse to invade Iraq as they had dreamed throughout the 1990s. In the words of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” they needed only a “catalyzing event–like a new Pearl Harbor.” Bin Ladin provided precisely that, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq has proven an incredible windfall for al-Qa’ida. One of al-Qa’ida’s greatest enemies, Saddam Hussein, has been removed from power. Bin Ladin has publicly said that he hopes that in Iraq, he has pulled the United States into a conflict where he can “bleed” it, using the same strategy of attrition that he feels he successfully used in Afghanistan to bring down another superpower, the USSR. In January 2005, the CIA’s National Intelligence Council said that the invasion had turned Iraq into “a training ground, a recruitment ground” for al-Qa’ida, and the senior Marine commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. James Conway, agreed. Even more damaging, however, has been the fact that the entire Iraqi misadventure has essentially proven to the Arab world that bin Ladin had the United States completely pegged. The number of al-Qa’ida’s recruits have sky-rocketed, while the United States pursues so-called “leaders” whose very existence in such a rhizome is almost solely the projection of our own, hierarchical thinking. At the same time, the 2004 “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report–since suppressed by the U.S. government for its unflattering findings–showed more terrorist incidents in 2004 than in any year since 1985.

Meanwhile, the invasion has resulted in an unreported civil war. The American media is finally beginning to report on the predations that the Shi’ite government has made on Sunnis, giving some context to the actions of the Sunni “insurgency.” In fact, these are two factions of a civil war which would be easily recognized, were our interests and media not so thorougly vested and embedded in one of those sides–the Shi’ites. This was not an unforeseen events. In his memoirs, the first President Bush explained why he did not press on to Baghdad:

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different and perhaps barren outcome.

We are forced, then, to choose between the options that the Bush administration is utterly incompetent, and that their claims of “not knowing” are true–even when Bush’s own father understood the situation even ten years ago–or to dig deeper for a real reason. Jeff Vail suggests one, in the very same article cited above, where he considers the implications of the Iraqi elections of 30 January 2005, prior to the actual event.

What I am proposing is the possibility that the US is intentionally pressing ahead with an entirely new model, what I am calling the Intentional Instability Model. The impetus for this development is the understanding that the situation in Iraq will deteriorate significantly no matter what happens on January 31st (it will likely be accelerated by the election), and that it is critical to US economic health to stabilize the interrelated crises in Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia simultaneously.

There are some pretty simple issues that underlie this problem. The US economy is dependent on the regular supply of petroleum from the Middle East. The US economy is dependent on the continued use of the petrodollar (dollar denomination of petroleum sales) standard. The US has the most powerful and projectable military force in the world, and will maintain this advantage for the next 10+ years. The Intentional Instability Model is based on the principle that fostering, not resolving instability in a region is the most effective way to ensure acceptance of the use of dominant military force to exert influence. Intentional Instability creates the kind of permanent-crisis mentality first suggested by George Orwell’s continuous state of “war� in his book “1984�. Intentional Instability facilitates the kind of Keynesian stimulus favored by the power elite: defense spending and economic subsidies that concentrate power in the hands of the few. Intentional Instability in the region will provide the context to support the House of Saud when that crisis matures into a full-blown insurgency. Intentional Instability provides a context to contain Iranian ambitions – especially those of establishing an Iranian/PetroEuro alternative to the Saudi/PetroDollar standard upon which the entire US economy hangs. The January 3oth elections will create a civil war in Iraq along Sunni vs. Shi’ite lines, and will ensure the US presence in the region for decades. In classic Exploitation Model manner, the US military will continue to leverage local fighters and governments against each other, attempting to reserve its military power behind protective barriers to launch lightning-quick strikes against carefully planned targets. In my estimation, the Intentional Instability Model will work, and it will work well.

So, after all this, we must return to our orignal question: why did the United States invade Iraq?

The answer at this point should be evident: for oil. This is not suggested in such a fashion as to say the “real reason” is not worth fighting for. Resources are the only things we ever have fought for, and they’re the only things worth fighting for. But that is the stark, naked truth of our mission. The invasion of Iraq is about the American Empire, but it is also about the fuel of that empire. It is about oil.

It is about the foundation of that empire. Saddam was considering pricing his oil in Euros, in order to harm his enemies in the United States. There is a whole movement brewing in OPEC to shift the petrodollar to the petroeuro. Not only would such a shift undermine our economic dominance; it would ruin us. We have become dependent on the petrodollar. We have run up exorbitant debts against that petrodollar base, and even so, the value of the dollar is flagging. In a criticism of the dollar’s power, Henry Liu wrote:

World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world’s interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies. To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies, the world’s central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central bank must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that in turn forces the world’s central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.

“Bush’s Deep Reasons for War on Iraq” and “Petrodollar Theories of the War” provide some of the strongest arguments for war, but ultimately miss the biggest point of all.

It is about oil. Our leaders are well aware of the looming Hubbert’s Peak. George Bush II lives in every hippie’s dream: an enormous, ecologically-immaculate ranch in Crawford, Texas that is the very picture of sustainablity. Many of the neoconservatives live in similar accomodations. Jeff Vail and Steven Lagavulin have presented their evidence for the same conviction. Vail, a United States Air Force intelligence officer who briefs high-ranking government officials, says, “claims that they are ignorant about the problem are simply incorrect.” They now understand what Hubbert’s Peak means, and are determined to make this peak go differently than the North American peak in 1971. The Second Gulf War is the first of the “oil wars” that Peak Oil commentators have so often feared. If, as Dick Cheney claimed, “the American way of life is non-negotiable,” then control of the world’s oil reserves–particularly with emerging competition from China, India and Europe–must be established and maintained, at all costs.

Thus, the Iraqi war is an imperialist endeavor in the truest sense. Its aim is to exploit the periphery in order to maintain the prosperity of the imperial center. This, however, can only be a temporary state of affairs. The depletion of oil will make any amount of control a stop-gap measure, at best. But the neoconservatives abiding faith remains that “the bourgeois virtues” will overcome all, the market will correct and an alternative will be discovered, if they can simply keep the petroleum, the lifeblood of the Imperium Americanum, pumping just long enough. It is a faith ultimately in vain, though in the coming years there can be little doubt that, like the empires of old, much suffering and death will be born out of such misplaced faith.

Our solace and comfort must be that the neoconservatives, their empire, and the petroleum that feeds it, will not interfere in the affairs of the human race for very much longer, before the consequences of such strategies catch up with them, and they find that it is the cessation of the American way of life that is truly non-negotiable.