Bassam Haddad, a prominent Syria specialist at George Mason University, interviewed me this fall for the new web radio program Status Hour , on the Middle East. Do check out the range of important interviews already up at the site.
My own audio interview is here. For those who like to read, I am mirroring below the transcript kindly made by Zachary Cuyler at Status Hour.
Juan Cole Interview Transcript
Transcribed by Zachary Cuyler
Bassam Haddad (BH): Good afternoon. We have with us here Professor Juan Cole, who has been able to give us some time during his lecture tour—which seems to be consistent and constant. We would like to ask Professor Cole about a few things that are happening now in the media and in the region, starting with the question that is on everyone’s mind, and that is: What is happening in the region right now, in terms of the basic drivers—what would you consider are some of the basic drivers that are producing the outcomes we are all watching on television and listening to on the radio, and so on?
Juan Cole (JC): The post-war governments of the Middle East tended to be Arab nationalist governments. They were deeply influenced by the Soviet model, even though they were not
So these were socialist states, and their premise was that the colonial powers and often indigenous rulers in cahoots with the colonial powers had produced extremely unequal societies, and had produced societies that were not characterized by healthy social statistics. They were largely rural, villages, they were largely illiterate, the countries lacked infrastructure, they lacked very much in the way of factory production. They were still, for the most part, agricultural and dependent on primary commodities. And these post-war, anti-colonial, anti-imperial states attempted to bring their populations forward. They established mixed school systems, they established high schools, universities, and they really did succeed in making most of the population, at least of the younger generation, at least literate.
And then they did state-led industrialization: they committed resources to making sure that there were factories producing things, substituting those locally-made commodities for international imports.
And then the 1990s came, and the Soviet model collapsed, and Soviet patronage disappeared, and enormous pressure was applied by Washington, London, and Paris on the states of the Middle East to privatize their economies and reduce the size of their public sectors. And in the process of privatizing, new billionaires were created, so it was a little bit like the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the oligarchs in Russia. And neoliberal policies where market mechanisms were instituted, started to substitute for some of the public sector enterprises. But, as we know from Eastern Europe, there are right and wrong ways to privatize, and in the Middle East the state elites engaged in insider trading, they used their advantages to create crony billionaire classes, and because the state elites were not representative. Typically, they were what is called in the Middle East a shillah, or a clique. The inequalities that grew through the 1990s and 2000s excluded often the majority of people living in the country, and those inequalities—regional, ethnic, sectarian, and so forth—they hurt people, they hurt the ability of young people to get jobs, their futures seemed blocked. So you had a lot of regional protest, a lot of labor protest, and what seemed as though they were sectarian protests. But I am arguing that sectarianism was really invoked as a way of objecting to the concentration of wealth in a few hands of a particular social group.
BH: Thank you. Surely, this is not what you would hear in mainstream circles, whether media or academia, sometimes, regarding these political economy factors that are drivers. How do you think someone might respond to this and say, no, this is strictly a cultural issue and what you’re saying is some [. . . sentence ends]. They might even say some Marxist, leftist jargon from a time gone by.
JC: If it is cultural, the culture hasn’t changed that much, so why were these ethnic and sectarian conflicts not big in the 1950s and 1960s? If you go back and read the US State Department cables about a place like Iraq, Shi’i Islam almost doesn’t appear. And concerns about instability owing the Sunni-Shi’i conflict is almost completely absent from those cables of the 1960s and 1970s. The big concern is the strength of the communist movement, the ways in which there were conflicts between poor peasants and big landowners. Now, it may be that sometimes the poor peasants were Shi’a and the big landowners were Sunnis, but that was not ethnicity that they were fighting about, it was the distribution of land and wealth. We saw in Iraq in the 1950s enormous numbers of landless laborers had grown up and maybe 2-3,000 families owned the lion’s share of the good land in Iraq. So the big conflicts were over political economy and I think that has continued.
But whereas in the 1960s and 1970s, it was unusual for those conflicts to be reworked into sectarian or other kinds of primordial identity conflicts, over time this became a fruitful tactic for entrepreneurial politicians. Once you have two groups that are fighting over distribution of material goods—for jobs and resources—it becomes an advantage for politicians if they can mobilize one of the groups against the other on identity grounds.
I think the reason that political economy is not taken into account is that you have to know something fairly serious about economics to understand it, you have to know something serious about the history of these societies in the last fifty years. And, frankly, a lot of our journalists are not trained either in economics or history, or certainly of this region.
And so what is easiest is to fasten upon surface characteristics, though we have the trope of the age-old hatreds. They did this in the Balkans when the Croats and the Bosnians started fighting with each other in the 1990s and the journalists in the United States often attributed it to age-old ethnic hatreds. But the fact is that there is very little difference among the languages. Serbo-Croatian is basically a single language and the big difference among them was religion—the Croats were Catholic and the Bosnians [Muslim] and the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox but almost nobody practices religion so that cannot possibly have been very important. And, in fact, if you look at the history of that region, there was some trouble in the mid-19th century, but for the last hundred years or so, there really had not been much in the way of ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia. So there is a tendency to essentialize, to see primordial identities as somehow eternal, unchanging, and then as productive of constant conflict, whereas none of those things is true. So I think there is a lack of attention to history, to the fluidity of identity over time.
BH: Thank you. What about, if we want to move from some of the internal dynamics to the external arena, or at least the influence coming from the outside, or the intervention, or the invasion, or the manipulation, what have you, starting with the Iraq-Iran War, which was certainly something that was also in the interest of external powers, and then moving on to the First—or Second Gulf War, according to the people of the region, [the] First [Gulf War] in the United States—then the sanctions and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Can you tell us how these events in this sequence might have produced what everyone is concerned about today—or what many people are concerned about today, especially in the mainstream media—which is that word, ISIS? And how can we put it in a broader context?
JC: Personally, I—with the exception of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which obviously turned that society upside-down in very unfortunate ways—I do not think that the imperial interventions in the region are primarily responsible for these changes. I see them as indigenous. I know that there is a kind of trope out there that Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 at the behest of the Carter administration, but I have talked to members of the National Security Council at the time who deny this, and who say that it came as a surprise to them. Knowing the policies of Jimmy Carter, the idea that he called up Saddam and said “Hey, why don’t you invade Iran” seems a little unlikely. I think later on in the Reagan administration they did send Donald Rumsfeld out, when he was CEO of Searle, to see if Saddam would be willing to do a deal with the United States, and found that he was. So I see the US-Iraqi relationship as close in the 1980s, but I think it really started in 1983.
I think that the invasion of Iran was all Saddam Hussein’s idea, and there were internal reasons for doing it. Saddam was ambitious and he wanted Iranian Khuzistan, which is where the oil is, and wanted to make Iraq a very major player on the world stage. Then, after their revolution in in 1979, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini went on radio and called upon the Iraqi Shi’a to rise up and overthrow the Ba’th party in Iraq. So the Ba’th party felt that the best defense is a good offense and… I do not think that the Iraqi Shi’a would have paid much attention to Khomeini if Saddam had not invaded Iran. And in fact, people say it was a million man army, the Iraqi army, [and] apparently only about forty thousand Shi’i Iraqis defected to the Iranian side. The vast majority of Iraqi Shi’a fought their Iranian co-religionists on behalf of the Iraqi nation. This is why it is so inaccurate for analysts today to see all signs of Shi’i activism as somehow making them cat’s paws of Iran. In fact, a lot of Iraqi Shi’a or Shi’a elsewhere in the region resent Iranian dominance and see themselves as Arabs first or as having local economic or political interests. So I think that while the Americans were drawn into the Iran-Iraq war, I think its impetuses were primarily local, though to some extent the Iranian Revolution itself was a reaction against US imperial dominance of Iran, so the US had a role there.
As for the [Second] Gulf War, that was really a status quo war and in some important respects it was an Arab League war against Saddam Hussein. His invasion and occupation of Kuwait alarmed all of the other states in the world. State elites are very good about protecting the prerogatives of the state, so it was not hard for George HW Bush to put together a coalition that was truly vast. I mean, people now forget that it included Argentina. There was an Iraqi [who was] interviewed who had a sense of humor, who said “Our leader Saddam is very great. He has provoked the entire world—even Argentina is against us.” But the Arab League joined in, [and even] Syria and Egypt were both allies of the Western powers in restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait in that war. So I do not see it as [ . . . sentence ends]. And in fact, it should be remembered that the Bush administration was a realist administration. Realists in foreign policy think you should follow national interest and think that you should not get so worried about injecting morality into politics. James Baker, the Secretary of State at the time, I think genuinely was uninterested in who controlled Kuwait. He thought the oil would be pumped no matter whose hands it was in, and it does not affect the United States’ interests. So, I think that there was resistance to getting involved. It was still the post-Vietnam era: having a war was not popular in the United States.
So I see that whole episode around the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait not in terms of imperial politics, but as, an important part, in a regional response to aggrandization on the part of a “barracuda state”—I think Iraq under Saddam Hussein was what Immanuel Wallerstein calls a ‘barracuda state.’ He [Wallerstein] thinks that those kinds of aggrandizing smaller states that want to become great powers are typical of being on the semi-periphery of the world capitalist system. These are states that are in some way locked out of certain opportunities and resources, and so resort to violence, invasions, big militaries and so forth, and the grabbing of other people’s resources in order to build themselves up to the point at which they could challenge the international system. In the case of Iraq, this barracuda strategy failed because it was too open, it challenged the world system too directly, and it provoked such a powerful, united response—from not only the international powers, but the regional ones—[so] that ultimately Iraq was contained and put under sanctions and its middle class was destroyed.
There, the aftermath of the [Second] Gulf War, I think, is one that was very unfortunate, and for which you could blame US policy, because it was quite ruthless. The sanctions that Iraq was put under by the United Nations and by the United States in the 1990s were the most severe sanctions that had ever been applied to a country up until that point, and they were applied to civilians. And so, since chlorine can be used to make weaponry, it was interdicted as an export to Iraq. But chlorine is essential to water purification. Sewage is such that people’s waste goes into the rivers and we drink from the rivers. Without water purification, the water of the Tigris and the Euphrates became extremely unsanitary, full of bacteria. While adults can survive that kind of thing, they might develop some gastrointestinitis, the children—toddlers and babies—die very easily of bad water. So you probably have excess mortality among toddlers and infants on the order of 500,000 Iraqis who died in the 1990s because of the interdiction of chlorine. That seems to be clearly a war crime, and it was the result of not just US but United Nations sanctions, so the extent to which the world system was willing to go to punish the Iraqi regime spilled over into punishing the Iraqi people.
And that has been a major generator of radicalism in the region. Nobody can stand by and see 500,000 children murdered in this way. You know, a lot of the radical groups mention this as a reason for their anti-US actions, including al-Qa’ida. What al-Qa’ida did is unforgivable, it is a crime, it is a major war crime, but US imperial policy did help to provoke some of this radicalism.
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