American Footprints

Most of the Iraq chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World will be nothing new to regular readers of his blog. The first part surveys different views of the war in the United States and the Arab world. In the U.S., the war is sold through “Islam Anxiety,” which Cole uses throughout his book to characterize the fear many Americans feel toward the Muslim world, a fear that, as this chapter argues, was deployed by those determined to strike at the secular Arab state. A major factor in the continuation of different perceptions is the differences in the way the war is covered by the American and Arab medias, with American coverage, when it occurs at all, filtered mainly through the military or Pentagon-friendly lenses, while al-Jazeera reports on the bleak realities within Iraq.

The middle portion of this chapter shifts into an exploration of how the U.S. got involved in the war in the first place. Here Cole delves into the geopolitics of world oil supplies. I suspect one reason people have difficulty believing this is that the war-for-oil slogan is often used to call up simple war for corporate profit. Cole notes effectively that for many, economic strength is a vital component of national strength, which is perfectly in tune with aspects of the PNAC writings from the 1990′s.

As a regular Informed Comment reader, I was most interested in Cole’s speculations as to why Cheney and Bush, who as oil men had warm relations with the Arab world, would launch an Iraq invasion. It was before blogs, but I remember in 2000 thinking that the Bush administration was oversee a warming of our relations with Iran because of Exxon-Mobil’s oil interests, which that was also the calculation of the Iranian government during the late Clinton years. Cole tracks Cheney’s views of Middle Eastern policy through the 1990′s, when, contra AIPAC, he was a chronic opponent of sanctions on oil-rich countries in the Middle East, though he may have been content with Halliburton’s involvement with the oil-for-food program in Iraq’s case. Here’s the nut of it:

“My conjecture is that Cheney and other petroleum company executives had despaired of ever besting AIPAC on the sanctions issue. Therefore, they believed that they would be locked out of Iraq and Iran and their enormous oil and gas reserves while France, Russia, and China positioned themselves to benefit from developing those fields. Cheney had spent most of the 1990′s fighting the Israel lobbies and consorting with Saudi princes and Muslim presidents and prime ministers. Yet when he set up as vice president in 2001, he created a rump national security council of his own that he staffed with figures such as Irv Lewis Libby, John Hannahm, and later on David Wurmser – all prominent neoconservatives who were ideologically close to Israel’s Likud Party. This about-face is so stark that it should make our necks snap. Big Oil, with its strong ties to the Arab hydrocarbon monarchies, was cohabiting in the vice presidential mansion with AIPAC and the Project for the New American Century.

“The simplest explanation would be that Cheney made a conceptual breakthrough. He may have seen that if he pushed for regime change in Iraq and Iran, he could turn AIPAC and the Israel lobbies into allies of the oil majors’ plans for investment in Iraq and Iran. If he committed to removing the governments that threatened Israel and replacing them with pro-Western regimes, then Congress would lift those implacable boycotts and allow Houston and Dallas finally to play in Mesopotamia and Khuzistan. Such a development could well be crucial to maintaining the position of the United States as a superpower into the twenty-first century.”

From there the chapter moves into an account of Iraq’s post-invasion problems, which need no elaboration here. Cole finally makes the case for U.S. withdrawal from the country, noting at the end that it, “would reduce America Anxiety in the Muslim world and would eliminate a prime cause of Islam Anxiety for the American public, perhaps making possible movement toward real understanding.” Again, there’s not much new in this chapter for regular Cole readers, but there’s a lot to be said for having an overview of the situation concisely in one highly readable place.

Related posts:

1. Engaging the Muslim World: The Struggle for Islamic Oil
2. Engaging the Muslim World: Muslim Activism, Muslim Radicalism
3. Engaging the Muslim World: The Wahhabi Myth
4. Engaging the Muslim World: Pakistan and Afghanistan
5. Engaging the Muslim World: From Tehran to Beirut
6. Engaging the Muslim World: Overview
7. Khomeinism in Iraq