1. BLOWBACK: THE AMERICAN MILITARY EMPIRE, “FREE-
MARKET” GLOBALIZATION, THE IRAQ WARS, AND THE RISE OF
ISLAMIC STATE
_______________
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
San Diego State University
_______________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
in
Sociology
_______________
by
Jarrett Robert Rose
Fall 2015
4. iv
ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS
Blowback: The American Military Empire, “Free-Market”
Globalization, the Iraq Wars, and the Rise of Islamic State
by
Jarrett Robert Rose
Master of Arts in Sociology
San Diego State University, 2015
Despite the end of the Cold War, the United States continues to act in a Cold-War
manner, building on and spreading its armed services around the globe in the effort to utilize
its position as global hegemon to police the world, engage in clandestine imperialist
operations, and enhance its position as the world’s empire. These endeavors are oftentimes
achieved at the direct expense of the peoples and resources of nations around the globe.
Behaving in such a destructive manner obviously invites the potential for blowback, or
violent repercussions such as 9/11 from those around the world affected by America’s
actions. Furthermore, throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the conception of the
military-industrial-intelligence complex has become an institution with massive influence
over US foreign policy and has crafted all aspects of war into a profitable pursuit. This thesis
will use the case of Iraq War II to show how the US uses both its military power and the
ideology of “free-market” globalization as both a lucrative pursuit and an instrument of
global control while highlighting how the rise of Islamic State is a direct result of United
States intervention in foreign events around the world.
5. v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ABSTRACT............................................................................................................................. iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..................................................................................................... vi
CHAPTER
1 INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1
2 THE AMERICAN MILITARY EMPIRE AND THE MILITARY-
INDUSTRIAL-INTELLIGENCE COMPLEX .............................................................4
The New Empire......................................................................................................4
An Empire of Bases .................................................................................................7
Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex..............................................................11
The American Military Empire: Expansion, Elimination of Threats, and
Control of Resources..............................................................................................14
3 IRAQ WAR II: IMPERIALISM AND THE “FREE MARKET”...............................16
The US Invasion of Iraq: An Imperial Venture .....................................................16
The Creation of a Free-Market Satellite State .......................................................18
The Satellite State: Iraq as an Exemplar Free-Market State..................................21
The Consequences of a Failed Occupation............................................................25
4 BLOWBACK: THE RISE OF ISLAMIC STATE......................................................29
The Logic of Empire, and Blowback.....................................................................29
Blowback from Iraq War II....................................................................................33
Islamic State: The Ultimate Form of Blowback ....................................................37
The “Sorrows of Empire” ......................................................................................40
5 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................44
Moving Forward ....................................................................................................48
BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................................50
WORKS CONSULTED ..........................................................................................................53
6. vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the professors that I have had the
pleasure of getting to know throughout my time in college. You have inspired me not only to
believe that making a difference in this crazy world is possible, but to believe in myself.
Without you, I would not be here today.
To Jung Choi and Tom Semm, for being two of the most stimulating, passionate
humans I have ever encountered. Your knowledge and yearning for social justice has put me
on the path that I am on today, and I could not have done it without your help and friendship.
Every day you inspire individuals to fight to make this world a better and more just place.
Your work has changed this world in immeasurable ways and I speak for literally thousands
of persons when I say, thank you.
To Mike Roberts, my colleague, my friend, who is the coolest combination of
surfer/scholar I ever thought possible. You have inspired me to do great things in many
fields. The transformation that has come over me the last two years would not have been
possible without you. Rock on! Party wave! And of course, my other dear friends:
Christine, Laura, April, Jimmy, etc. I love you all and you mean the world to me.
To our cohort: Chris Miley, Harout Bursalyan, Marco Vazquez, Christiana Mercier,
Naomi Cano, Charlene Holkenbrink, and Sandy Somo. I will never forget your individual
and collective contributions to our time in graduate school. On this wonderful path that is
only just beginning, you have provided me with love, compassion, energy, friendship, and
your beautiful knowledge. Our group has given me the strength to move forward, despite my
inadequacies, my forgetfulness, and my alternative approaches to many things. Thank you
for giving me the opportunity to be President of the Sociology Graduate Student
Committee—I may have been unprepared for such a challenge, but I think we did pretty well!
Obviously it could not have been done without everyone’s help and love. Thank you.
7. vii
To Sandy, who has been a driven scholar from the very beginning and whose
professionality I hope to be able to match one day. Similar in ways, opposite in others, we
have been great partners, and what I have learned from you cannot be fully expressed in
words. Through good and bad, rain and shine, we have been there for one another and I
know that will continue onward into the future.
8. 1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
If one could lift the veil on the American ideology of spreading democracy and
freedom around the world, it may become apparent that US endeavors abroad serve mainly
one purpose: the propping up of free-market state apparatuses, oftentimes through the use of
military force, to facilitate the various mechanisms of a growing empire. In the process of an
expanding empire, a nation must disguise its actual trajectory in order to achieve its goals.
An empire, as Chalmers Johnson asserts, “must pretend that its exploitation of the weak is in
their own best interest, or their own fault, or the result of ineluctable processes beyond
human control, or a consequence of the spread of civilization, or in accordance with scientific
laws—anything but deliberate aggression by a hyperpower” (2000:255).
In what Stephen Kinzer (2008) calls America’s “century of regime change,” the
United States has continued to intervene numerous times in foreign nations both covertly and
overtly, and oftentimes militarily, to impose its status as the world’s lone superpower. The
political and economic violence projected by the US at others around the globe continues to
this day, providing further possibility that unintended and violent consequences will find
their way back to American soil just as it did on 9/11.
After two disastrous wars, trillions of dollars spent, the building of over 1,000 foreign
military bases, torture and abuse of prisoners in prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, Abu
Ghraib, and others, complete disregard for international law and the US Constitution,
clandestine operations by governmental organizations and drone attacks killing terrorists and
civilians alike, an increasing gap between the rich and the wealthy, unprecedented
government surveillance never seen before in history, and an international reputation left in
tatters, the US empire has seen better days (Stone and Kuznick 2014:549).
At this point in history, it is oftentimes difficult to assess the actual amount of
violence and destruction associated with wars overseas. Even with the peace and anti-war
9. 2
movements, and the use of advanced communication technology and data-gathering tools,
factual information about the devastation of high-tech warfare and its social consequences
remains difficult to obtain, and even more difficult to grasp. The government’s desires to
keep information withheld from the public, especially concerning its foreign interventions
and wars waged abroad, is nothing new. But when such a government withholds information
about its military endeavors and leaves the public it is supposed to represent uncertain about
its engagements in global affairs, it makes it difficult for the public to criticize its actions.
The scope and purpose of this project is to show how the American military empire,
and with it, the Western version of globalization—the free-market system—has been used as
an instrument of global control by the United States. As an example, this thesis will focus on
the Iraq Wars and will highlight the potential blowback (unintended consequences) created
by the trajectory of American imperialism. Lastly, this research will show how the
destruction of Iraq by the United States has facilitated the rise of a lethal form of blowback:
the rise of the Islamic State.
Chapter 1 will discuss the consequences of America’s trajectory as the world’s sole
superpower after the Cold War and expansion of its military empire attempting to garrison
the globe while controlling political events abroad. This chapter will also delve into some of
the consequences felt by nation-states and the globe in general from what Johnson calls
“militarism” in the US that are directly in line with acts of imperialism by America in its
attempt at policing the world. Chapter 1 will end by showing how the goal of the US and its
military is to expand, eliminate threats to its dominance, and control the resources of the
globe.
Chapter 2 will show how the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 was an imperial
venture, and will highlight the consequences of the United States military-industrial-
intelligence complex and its brand of “globalization,” or free-market capitalism. It was the
decision of the US government to force Iraq to become an exemplar free-market state, one
that would be a leading example of the future of the Middle East. This endeavor was an act
of imperialism by the US where multinational corporations reaped unimaginable wealth at
the expense of the people of Iraq. This chapter will further highlight how the results of Iraq
War II were disastrous and forced millions of Iraqis to leave their homes, tens of thousands
to be apprehended and/or imprisoned, and hundreds of thousands to be killed.
10. 3
Chapter 3 will argue that United States reaps what it sows through acts of political
and economic violence in nations abroad. The atrocities committed by the US have come
full circle resulting in violent blowback, such as the September 11 attacks in 2001. US
intervention in foreign nations, as well as the “war on terror,” has drastically changed the
lives of not just American citizens, but peoples around the globe. Chapter 3 will further
show that the blunders of Iraq War II have not only destroyed large parts of the Middle East
and caused upheaval in nations around the region, but also, as a result of US intervention, the
ultimate form of blowback has occurred in the rise of violent religious extremist groups like
the Islamic State. The thesis will conclude with a brief summary of the project and its
limitations.
11. 4
CHAPTER 2
THE AMERICAN MILITARY EMPIRE AND THE
MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-INTELLIGENCE
COMPLEX
We believe we have a responsibility to defend nations everywhere against communism. This
is not an imperial ambition, but it has led our country to use imperial methods—
establishment of military garrisons around the globe, granting of subsidies to client
governments and politicians, application of economic sanctions and even military force
against recalcitrant states, and employment of a veritable army of colonial administrators
working through such organizations as the State Department, the Agency of International
Development, the United States Information Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Having grown accustomed to our empire and having found it pleasing, we have come to take
its institutions and its assumptions for granted. Indeed, this is the mark of a convinced
imperial power: its advocates never question the virtues of empire, although they may dispute
the way in which it is administered, and they do not for a moment doubt that it is in the best
interests of those over whom it rules.
--Ronald Steel
THE NEW EMPIRE
It is no secret that the devastation of September 11, 2001 shocked the United States.
The attack on the Pentagon and the destruction of the World Trade Center—a symbol of
global capitalism—struck fear and confusion into the heart of the American public. This
series of events was extraordinarily surprising to American civilians, many of whom live
under a government, military, and a range of multinational corporations that, for many
generations now, continue to defend and perpetuate the militarist status quo by withholding
pertinent information from those they pretend to serve (Johnson 2000). Such secrecy
provides the ultimate defense for the horrors that take place in foreign nations due to
American militarism and imperialism. It was not until after 9/11 that much of the US
population, as Johnson (2004:4) notes, “finally began to grasp what most non-Americans
already knew and had experienced over the previous half-century—namely, that the United
12. 5
States was something other than what it professed to be, that it was, in fact, a military
juggernaut intent on world domination.”
After World War II, many in America believed that fate had given their nation the
responsibility to play the role of global superpower, the undisputable champion of morality
and freedom whose destiny it was to provide the world with its wisdom and guidance
(Johnson 2000). This role, simply put, is asserted in the words of George W. Bush when he
stated that America is “the greatest force for good in history" (Johnson 2004:103) The United
States’ military force is indeed great, as Bush remarked, in the sense that aside from having
nearly 725 US bases existing outside the country alone in 2001, it also “deploys well over
half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in
other nations and just under a dozen carrier task forces in all the oceans and seas of the
world” (Johnson 2004:1). It is the United States’ military that is the “greatest force” in
history.
Distinct from peoples of other nations, much of the American citizenry rarely
question the logic or rationality behind such military prowess, nor do they often consider the
overall implications of what it means to be the world’s dominant military power.
Furthermore, to add to the naivety, there is and has been a plethora of propaganda focused on
convincing not just the American public, but the world community at large of the US
government’s benevolence abroad. This is no surprise, however, for in June of 2005, for
example, the Pentagon gave three contracts worth $300 million to “companies it hoped
would inject more creativity into US psychological operations to improve foreign public
opinion about the United States, particularly their opinion of the American military” (Blum
2014:29-30). In short, there are full-time professional jobs available to make sure that people
within the US and around the world hold high regard for the American empire and its
militaristic endeavors. To be sure, it seems that if the US was the “greatest force for good,”
such convincing would be unnecessary.
Despite what the American citizenry know about their military’s endeavors around
the globe, the destruction of various nations and peoples caused by its power is remarkable as
no other nation in history has acquired the military supremacy the United States now holds
(Astore 2015; Johnson 2000, 2004; Hedges 2013). In using its military power and/or
intelligence apparatuses, William Blum, previously employed at the US Department of State,
13. 6
writes that the United States since the end of the Second World War has: “endeavored to
overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;
grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries; attempted to assassinate
more than 50 foreign leaders; dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries;
attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries” (2014:1).
When US imperialism began during the 19th
century, like many empires of past
centuries, it found itself unable to resist continuous expansion. Despite the fall of the Soviet
Union, the end of the Cold War, and the previous expansion into various Latin American
nations “for the greater good” in the fight against communism, Chalmers Johnson (2004)
argues that the world at large is facing a dire situation where the US continues to use its vast
military supremacy, intelligence apparatuses, and ideological rigidity incessantly in a post-
Cold War world. To this day, the United States continues to pursue its interests globally with
little regard for those who stand in its way while claiming its God-given responsibility as
world superpower to defend innocent nations against subversive ideologies and threats from
“evil” nations (Johnson 2000, 2004). There are two main differences that constitute the
American empire of today with those fallen empires of the past: an incredibly vast territory
of military bases stretching over the globe, and the increasing use of those bases in spreading
US-style (free-market) “globalization” through imperial conquests.
What Johnson (2004) calls America’s “empire of bases” plays a much darker role
than is often acknowledged by leading advocates; the uses of its power and scope go much
deeper than how it is portrayed—as generous and compassionate protector of the American
people and their allies. Contrary to this perspective, I argue throughout this chapter that the
United States’ empire of bases is actually a grand apparatus mainly used to advance projects
of American imperialism and to forcefully dominate nations and resources when deemed
necessary by the American government, military, and/or large corporations.
Johnson’s analysis in The Sorrows of Empire (2004) is useful in moving forward with
this project. Johnson’s thesis is that despite the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United
States maintained its Cold War posture, never ceasing to acquire new territory in foreign
nations and/or extend its military bases and geopolitical influence. It is with his analysis,
amongst the contributions of others, that build the first case for my argument that the United
States, in its overarching use of military power—facilitated by the powerful politicians and
14. 7
multinational corporations who run the military-industrial-intelligence complex—continue to
amass military installations in countries around the world in their effort to maintain and
increase America’s status as global hegemon. Johnson states that what he sees in the United
States is eerily similar to that of the Soviet Union when it fell: “internal economic
contradictions driven by ideological rigidity, imperial overstretch, and an inability to
reform… the similarities [between the US and the Soviet Union] are obvious and it is
nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must
go on forever” (2004:13).
AN EMPIRE OF BASES
The frenzy of building US military bases in large numbers around the globe began a
new phase during the Cold War. It was during this time, Johnson (2004) states, that “a
growing conviction that vital interests, even national survival, demanded the ‘containment’
of the Soviet Union, helped turn an informal empire begun during World War II into
hundreds of installations around the world for the largest military we ever maintained in
peacetime” (2004:2). As of 2015, the United States military has around 800 military bases in
foreign countries across the globe, with a cost of $100 billion per year just to maintain
them—more than the government spends on education (Astore 2015).
After the fall of the Soviet Union the United States continued flexing its power in
new regions—its hundreds of bases spanning the globe acting as the main catalyst. The US
steadily continued the role it had played in the past—previously justified via the Cold-War
mentality or through the “Red Scare”—by engaging in self-proclaimed “responsibilities for
humanitarian intervention, the spread of American-style ‘market democracy’ via
globalization… the quarantining of ‘rogue states,’ leadership of an endless ‘war on
terrorism,’ and finally ‘preventative’ intervention against any potentially unfriendly power
anywhere that threatened to possess the kinds of weapons of mass destruction the United
States first deployed and still wished to monopolize” (Johnson 2004:21-2). In other words, it
was during the Cold War (and continuing afterwards) that the US began claiming sole
responsibility for governing and policing events in foreign nations and increasing its effort to
inseminate ideological control over world affairs.
15. 8
In engaging in such endeavors of global control and ideological manipulation (such as
the rigidity and dominance of global capitalism), the US began instigating other nations by
increasingly acting unilaterally in foreign affairs. Instead of seeking international diplomacy,
the US no longer seemed concerned with how many enemies it made, acting as “a law unto
itself, creating new rules of international engagement without agreement by other nations”
(Johnson 2004:22). One important aspect facilitated this transition and further opened the
gateway for future American unilateralism and the subsequent projects of imperialism: the
“transfer of power from the representatives of the people to the Pentagon and the various
intelligence agencies, especially the Central Intelligence Agency” (Johnson 2004:3). In other
words, those in power in the United States began dismantling the democratic institutions and
processes that the country was founded upon. As I will discuss in the latter section of this
chapter and the next, the implications of the switch to unilateralism amongst the transfer of
power from the American public to those in high-ranking government and military
institutions highlight the growing role and influence of the ever-growing American military
apparatus and the diminishing role of the American citizenry in international and domestic
matters.
It was during the Cold War, Johnson (2004) states, that there was a shift in America
from standard uses of military power to what he calls “militarism,” the “inescapable
companion of imperialism” (p.24). Johnson defines the onset of militarism as “the
phenomenon by which a nation’s armed services come to put their institutional preservation
ahead of achieving national security or even a commitment to the integrity of the
governmental structure of which they are a part” (Johnson 2004:23-4). Three indictors mark
the switch to militarism: (1) “The emergence of a professional military class and the
subsequent glorification of its ideals… who will fight solely and simply because they have
been ordered to do so and not because they necessarily identify with, or have any interest in,
the political goals of a war; (2) The preponderance of military officers or representatives of
the arms industry in high government positions; (3) A devotion to policies in which military
preparedness becomes the highest priority of the state” (Johnson 2004:58-65). One look at
the budget for the United States military shows how high this priority is.
In 2000, the United States alone accounted for 37 percent of the total global military
spending of $798 billion, and was also the world’s largest arms dealer (Johnson 2004:63). In
16. 9
2008, the official US defense budget was $623 billion, while the next closest national
military budget was China’s at $65 billion (Hedges 2015). This, Johnson (2004) argues,
shows that the United States has transitioned to militarism, and the need to use such military
power has led the US into the dangerous era of “preventative warfare”—an oxymoron in
many respects. Furthermore, this era is when the George W. Bush administration began
increasingly seeking new threats to US dominance in order to justify expanding the military
budget that was already beyond unnecessary. “In many ways,” Johnson states, “the terrorist
attacks of 9/11 came as manna from heaven to an administration determined to ramp up
military budgets” (Johnson 2004:64).
Concomitant with the onset of militarism and the buildup of the empire of bases
(between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first anniversary of 9/11), there was a “revolution
in America’s relations with the rest of the world” (Johnson 2004:22). Before this period,
political events abroad were commonly dealt with by civilian-professionals using means of
diplomacy based on international law and democracy. However, with the rise of the military
budget and the militarism in general, that slowly began to change. In an analysis of eight
major international agreements which include the Nuclear nonproliferation Treaty, the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, researchers state that
the US “has violated, compromised, and or acted to undermine in some crucial way every
treaty that we have studied in detail,” and that the US “not only refuses to participate in
newly created legal mechanisms, it fails to live up to obligations undertaken in treaties that it
has ratified” (Johnson 2004:73). Such a lack of concern for diplomacy in international
matters highlight both the diminishing of US democracy-based foreign policy and an attempt
to increase the power and role of the US military.
To maintain an empire is a multifaceted task. The spectrum of US empire today
contains a variety of channels such as “university research and development centers,
petroleum refiners and distributors, innumerable foreign officer corps whom it has trained,
manufacturers of sport utility vehicles and small-arms ammunition, multinational
corporations and the cheap labor they use to make their products, investment banks, hedge
funds and speculators of all varieties, and advocates of ‘globalization,’ meaning theorists
who want to force all nations to open themselves up to American exploitation and American-
style capitalism” (Johnson 2004:26). In other words, the empire of bases retains, in some
17. 10
senses, a grasp on the whole of humanity; its effects touch on a plethora of businesses at
home and abroad as well as public, private, and governmental institutions that all have a
stake in American intervention in foreign nations. This complex interweaving of interests
highlight, as I will further show below, the reasons the US has shifted from democracy to
unilateralism, which revolves more around economic interests in US foreign policy than
majority rule.1
The US empire of military bases is built on and functions with the goal of
imperialism, which Johnson defines simply as “the domination and exploitation of weaker
states by stronger ones” (Johnson 2000:28). Imperialists are, John Hobson states, “‘parasites
upon patriotism’… who anticipate ‘profitable businesses and lucrative employment’ in the
course of creating and exploiting an empire. They hold military and civilian posts in the
imperial power, manufacture weapons and munitions for wars and police actions, and
provide and manage capital for investment in the colonies, semicolonies, and satellites that
imperialism creates” (Johnson 2004:28). In other words, the main mechanism that facilitates
increasing global domination by the US is its set of military bases overseas. This use of the
empire of bases has been fallaciously justified in humanitarian terms and has been said to
provide a means to obtaining democracy and international diplomacy. However, these bases
provide a cyclical pathway of profit, expansion, control, and destruction, and are the
inevitable projects of imperialism. “The habitual use of imperial methods…,” Johnson states,
“ultimately transformed the defense establishment into a militarist establishment and vastly
enlarged the size and scope of the role played by military forces in the political and economic
life of the nation” (Johnson 2004:65).
1
Johnson states that the United States has become just like ancient Rome, whereby “the size of the
[Roman] empire and the armies its maintenance required overwhelmed the capacities of the senate and the
consuls… [until] democracy was supplanted by dictatorship” (Johnson 2004:16). In today’s society, however,
democracy has become instead a form of “manufactured consent,” an ethos that floats through society creating
forms of acceptance and/or disinterest. In a similar vein, Karl Marx once wrote that the group of citizens who
control the material force of society—the ruling class—are also those who control the mental production, or the
ideas, of that society. In short, the majority of the US populace today is either left out, or told that violent
international matters and imperialist projects abroad are benevolent and humanitarian. In this sense, the ruling
class still produces the ruling ideas.
18. 11
MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-INTELLIGENCE COMPLEX
When the plans for a new office building for the military, which came to be
known as The Pentagon, were brought before the Senate on August 14, 1941,
Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was puzzled. ‘Unless the war is to be
permanent, why must we have permanent accommodations for war facilities of
such size?’ he asked. ‘Or is the war to be permanent?’
--William Blum
In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower during his farewell address warned the US
about the rising influence of what he called the “military-industrial complex.” “For the first
time in history,” stated Eisenhower, “the United States has a permanent war-based industry…
This creates a danger that what the Communists have always said about us may become true.
We must be careful to ensure that the ‘merchants of death do not come to dictate national
policy’” (Stone and Kuznick 2014:288). Rather than heeding Eisenhower's warnings, the
“merchants of death” indeed dictate US national policy as the military-industrial-intelligence
complex of today is so large, powerful, and profitable, that its expenditures are around $600
billion a year, or almost 54 percent of all spending in America (Hedges 2015).
In an article titled “Big Money Behind War: The Military-Industrial Complex,”
Jonathan Turley describes why there is an immense incentive for America to perpetuate war.
“The core of this expanding complex is an axis of influence of corporations, lobbyists, and
agencies that have created a massive, self-sustaining terror-based industry…” of which
“hundreds of billions of dollars flow each year from the public coffers to agencies and
contractors who have an incentive to keep the country on a war-footing…” (Turley 2014).
Even more disturbing is the fact that the military-industrial-intelligence complex continues to
achieve the necessary backing from both Democratic and Republican parties for the wars in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, just to name a few, despite polls showing opposition from
the majority of Americans. In this situation, both the politicians and leaders of multinational
corporations who control the military-industrial-intelligence complex highlight a type of era
where a war-based oligarchy governs on matters of profitability rather than democracy.
While hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on the war budget, “Congress is planning to
cut billions from core social programmes, including a possible rollback on Medicare due to
lack of money” (Turley 2014).
19. 12
In its ever-expanding drive to promote both war and projects of imperialism, the
building of bases in foreign territories—not to mention providing full amenities and
commodities to those bases—or the manufacturing and selling of arms, are only some of the
areas that allow the military-industrial-intelligence complex to thrive.2
Its drive is so strong,
and its hunger so immense, that the former US ambassador to Spain and Italy, Richard
Gardner, once estimated that “by a ratio of at least sixteen to one, the United States spends
more on preparing for war than on trying to prevent it” (Johnson 2004:63). In a nation where
the military-industrial-intelligence complex receives the majority of the budget, where the
drive for war is immense and those interested in perpetuating it are powerful, it seems that
war is more important than peace.
In an article on the military-industrial-intelligence complex, Chris Hedges outlines
not only how destructive this institution can be, but how it is continuously fed by the
unemployed or underemployed persons of the working class.3
Hedges writes:
The hypermasculinity of the military, celebrated by Hollywood and the media, is
seductive to an underclass trapped in menial, dead-end jobs. Empires feed like
vultures on these pools of frustrated surplus labor. They manipulate their feelings
of powerlessness. This is why capitalists create pools of surplus labor. Those who
are desperate to secure a place in society are easy fodder for the military and
ready candidates for underpaid jobs without benefits or job security. Our
corporate, neofeudal society is by design. (Hedges 2015)
Within the current US society, persons that are displaced by a corrupt political-
economic system featuring premeditated joblessness increasingly find life in the military
quite attractive, for they do not have many options.
Despite the United States having an empire of bases promoted and perpetuated by the
military-industrial-intelligence complex, the majority of Americans have little knowledge of
their government’s use of its military supremacy abroad (Johnson 2004). As stated above,
2
For further examples of the amenities and commodities provided to US military bases by corporations
via protectionist measures, see Johnson (2000; 2004).
3
Karl Marx called this group the “reserve army of labor,” referring to those persons of the proletariat
class without jobs who become more vulnerable to exploitation in a capitalist society that produces and benefits
from structured unemployment.
20. 13
the reasons for such naivety come from the fact that the US government often does a good
job of hiding and obfuscating the reality of its interests in international endeavors. William
Blum keenly describes this phenomenon by stating, “The American people are very much
like the children of a Mafia boss who do not know what their father does for a living, and
don’t want to know, but then wonder why someone just threw a firebomb through the living
room window” (Blum 2014:10). The efficacy of the disinformation given to the US public
and distributed via corporate-run mass media, the education system, right-wing think tanks,
the military, and other mediums, purposefully conceal the true aims of the ruling class that
drives the American empire. Such a setting leaves the American populace mislead, ignorant,
and ultimately ineffective against a government that acts at the behest of the military-
industrial-intelligence complex which has—as is its nature—spun wildly out of control. In
short, as Blum (2014:33) states, “propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a
dictatorship.”
The reality is that there are a variety of persons, groups, institutions, and
multinational corporations that have a vested interest in our nation’s military-industrial-
intelligence complex. This, as Johnson (2004) suggests, is the direct business of
imperialism—groups of people, politicians, and private corporations create profitable
relationships during the expansion of a nation, when a revolving door between big business,
the military, and politicians becomes increasingly intertwined with one another. The
seemingly endless wars and military projects abroad bring with it multibillion-dollar
industries that become aroused at the possibilities for accumulating more enemies around the
world. To give an example of war profiteering, during the Second Iraq War the Carlyle
Group benefitted immensely from its sales of “robotics systems, defense communications
systems, and a major Iraq contract to train police…” During the first year and half in Iraq,
the Carlyle Group’s chief investment officer stated that it was “the best 18 months we have
had… we made money and we made it fast.” The Carlyle Group and its investors made a
record-breaking $6.6 billion during only the first phase of Iraq War II (Klein 2007:401).
This is just one example of the economic incentives which make for a truly scary twenty-first
century. “War may be hell for some,” Turley states, “but it is heaven for others in a war-
dependent economy” (Turley 2014).
21. 14
THE AMERICAN MILITARY EMPIRE: EXPANSION,
ELIMINATION OF THREATS, AND CONTROL OF
RESOURCES
The United States has and continues to expand its empire of bases to this day. In
doing so, the ruling class of America continues to perpetuate and profit from war while
further maintaining its dominance over the status quo domestically and abroad. After the
Cold War, new arenas for intervention were increasingly sought in an attempt to dominate
and control resources while making money from the projects of imperialism. “Instead of the
Soviet Union,” Johnson states, “the ‘menace’ of China, Fidel Castro, drug lords, ‘instability,’
and more recently, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and the ‘axis of evil’—Iran, Iraq,
and North Korea—would have to do as new enemies” (Johnson 2004:20). The US puts more
effort and resources into military endeavors than in making sure its impoverished citizens are
fed or sheltered.
The reasoning for such arguments is not too difficult to grasp: the military-industrial-
intelligence complex, the high-ranking members of the military and government, and the
leaders of multination corporations, thrive off of the expansion of the American empire and
the imperialist endeavors that propel it. In other words, as Chris Hedges puts it, “Military
muscle exists to permit global corporations to expand markets and plunder oil, minerals and
other natural resources while keeping subjugated populations impoverished by corrupt and
brutal puppet regimes” (Hedges 2015). Whether it be the accumulation of foreign foes with
which to fight wars, the drive to build free-market apparatuses for the movement of capital
and the benefit of multinational corporations (as is the subject of Chapter 2), or in the process
of dismantling subversive groups, nations, or ideologies that either threaten US domination
or advocate any potential alternative to the capitalist model, the driving force of the
American empire is its military bases, the military-industrial-intelligence complex, and those
who stand to profit from imperialism.
Most of the American public is unaware that the US government has been facilitating
the projects of imperialism for quite some time. For example, in The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Klein 2007), Naomi Klein builds the case that through US
government and CIA intervention, many countries—especially those in Latin America such
as Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and others—have in the past
22. 15
become “living laboratories” of US-led political-economic restructuring through what is
called “neoliberalism” (Klein 2007:107). Klein makes the case that the “shock doctrine,” or
what she calls economic shock therapy, is a method used deliberately by political leaders to
shock a nation’s citizenry into accepting extreme political-economic policies that benefit core
nations such as the US while crippling the population of periphery nations.
Stephen Kinzer’s book, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change (2006),
outlines the vast history of US-led events where the government, wealthy political actors,
and/or the CIA have deliberately overthrown foreign governments or have backed violent
coups d’état all over the world. The reasons for such endeavors, Kinzer argues, are usually
hidden from the public but are most often used for political-economic advantages for large
US corporations and are facilitated by powerful government actors. In a similar vein,
Chalmers Johnson’s book, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
(2000), unveils the discontent held by groups and nations worldwide regarding the United
States’ seemingly omnipresent militarism, its empire of bases, and the imperialist projects it
embarks on. Equating America with the ancient Roman Empire, Johnson says that America
has far overstepped its militaristic boundaries and will continue to receive “blowback” (or
violent retaliation) from those who have been severely affected by US foreign policy and
militarism.
As Hedges (2015) states,
The war machine is not, and almost never has been, a force for liberty or
democracy. It does not make us safe. It does not make the world safe. And its
immense economic and political power internally, including its management of
the security and surveillance state and its huge defense contracts, has turned it into
the most dangerous institution in America. (Hedges 2015)
As will be illustrated in the next chapter, the empire of bases and the military-
industrial-intelligence complex create the relations whereby war, destruction, intervention
overseas, and the over-policing of the world’s nations by the American empire create a
profitable business venture for many while assuring US dominance worldwide.
23. 16
CHAPTER 3
IRAQ WAR II: IMPERIALISM AND THE “FREE
MARKET”
Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the
United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine
services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests.
Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and
liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons—
specifically, to establish, promote, and defend the right of Americans to do
business around the world without interference.
--Stephen Kinzer
THE US INVASION OF IRAQ: AN IMPERIAL VENTURE
The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Strategic Assessment 1999 stated specifically that a war in
the Persian Gulf was plausible, and that the U.S. must “eliminate once and for all the
influence of Saddam Hussein, gain control of his oil, and extend our influence into the
vacuum created in the oil-rich lands of southern Eurasia by the demise of the Soviet Union”
(Johnson 2004:226). Sitting directly next to two of the world’s largest oil reserves—the
Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf—Iraq offers a unique position in terms of geography, but
more importantly, access to and control of oil. As Michael Klare, professor of peace and
world security once stated, “Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over
Europe, Japan, and China… It’s having our hand on the spigot” (Stone and Kuznick
2014:527). Iraq also sits directly next to Iran, which has been, according to US diplomats, a
“hotspot” for decades, especially since the Islamic revolution of 1979 when Iran finally broke
away from the American influence on their political-economic system, including power over
24. 17
its oil.4
Additionally, as Naomi Klein states, Iraq “made a good central location for military
bases now that Saudi Arabia looked less dependable, and Saddam’s use of chemical weapons
on his own people made him easy to hate” (Klein 2007:416). Considering this information—
although not an exhaustive account—Iraq seems to have many corresponding qualities for an
extension of the American empire.
When the time came to justify the invasion of a country that had zero connections to
the 9/11 attacks, the United States fabricated a story connecting Saddam Hussein—then the
President of Iraq—to weapons of mass destruction. It has since become widely documented,
however, that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was not a threat to the United
States, and, even more alarming, there was not even a single hijacker from Iraq aboard the
planes on 9/11. Furthermore, despite the Bush administration’s vehement efforts to do so,
little or no evidence was found that linked Saddam to Al-Qaeda. Iraq War II was justified
via a purposefully manufactured lie that, some estimates suggest, sent one million Iraqis to
their grave (Stone and Kuznick 2014). What is true is that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 which
lead to the war against Iraq, the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Bush
administration’s subsequent “war on terror,” further stimulated the plan that had been in the
works for decades: the drive to reshape the Middle East.
Because of Iraq’s immense geopolitical significance and its vast oil reserves, it was a
prominent and promising location for the next set of American military installations. The
grand strategy of the invasion of 2003, Johnson argues, was to “replace the Ba’ath regime in
Iraq with a pro-American puppet government and build permanent military bases there”
(Johnson 2004:226). In other words, according to Johnson Iraq was to become another
extension of the American empire. There was, however, an additional and more concealed
aspect to the invasion and occupation. Iraq was, as Klein states, “one of the last remaining
holdouts from the drive to build a global market based on [Milton] Friedman’s vision of
4
See Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men (2008) for an in-depth history of United States’ intervention in
Iranian political-economic processes and their facilitating of British Petroleum’s monopoly of Iran’s oil reserves
since the early 20th
century.
25. 18
unfettered capitalism. After the [free-market globalization] crusade had conquered Latin
America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia, the Arab world called out as its final frontier”
(Klein 2007:413). Iraq was, according to some, the perfect candidate to serve as the catalyst
that would project American-led free-market “democracy” into the Middle East.
In short, the United States, using the power of its vast military-industrial-intelligence
complex, engaged in an unnecessary full-scale invasion and occupation of Iraq to assert its
influence and power in the region. The reasons, aside from expansion of empire, were
twofold: the Arab world’s “deficit in free-market democracy” and oil as geopolitical power
(Klein 2007). As Anglo history has shown, this moment was to be a rerun of a modern form
of Kipling’s “white man’s burden,” a cultural imperialism justified as a noble venture and
projected by those in power who perpetuate war and violence across the globe in the name of
“humanity,” “freedom,” and “democracy,” yet continue to invest in and profit from the
destruction and death they distribute. In other words, in the pursuit of dominance, the
world’s superpower would, for the “benefit” of the Middle East, install the necessary
apparatuses to project the US brand of globalization—a political-economic system based on
free-market theory. The grand strategy was to modernize, or “globalize,” the entire Middle
East—beginning with the chosen nation of Iraq—into a system of nation-states working
together with one another on the global market. “Freedom” (of the market) was coming to
Iraq.
THE CREATION OF A FREE-MARKET SATELLITE STATE
Contrary to the vast amount of propaganda distributed by various mainstream media
sources justifying the invasion of Iraq (e.g. George Bush’s “spreading freedom in a troubled
region”), Naomi Klein (2007) makes the argument that Iraq was bombed and invaded by the
United States so that it could become a model state of US-based free-market fundamentalism
for the Middle East. Iraq, it was argued by members of both the US government and the
military-industrial-intelligence complex, would need an entirely new foundation—a “clean
slate”—to begin the complete overhaul of its political-economic system in order to build Iraq
into a new free-market state for the Middle East to follow. Thomas Friedman of The New
York Times made this clear when he stated, “We are not doing nation-building in Iraq. We
are doing nation-creating” Klein (2007:417). To accomplish this goal, Klein states, “whole
26. 19
categories of people and their cultures would need to be pulled up ‘from the root’” (Klein
2007:418).
The bombing campaign and subsequent invasion that began in 2003 marked the
commencement of what would become a new era for Iraq and its people. And it was the US,
not the people of Iraq, who would be in charge of its destiny. To give an example of the
destruction that took place, during the First Iraq War in 1991, approximately three-hundred
Tomahawk cruise missiles were used in five weeks; in the invasion of 2003, however, three-
hundred and eighty were fired in a single day. Furthermore, in 2003 between March 20 and
May 2, thirty thousand bombs were dropped on Iraq, “as well as twenty-thousand precision-
guided cruise missiles—67 percent of the total number ever made” (Klein 2007:419). Overly
malicious it may seem, this was indeed a large part of the plan—its title: “Shock and Awe.”
“Shock and Awe,” Klein states, “is a military doctrine that prides itself on not merely
targeting the enemy’s military forces but, as its authors stress, the ‘society writ large’—mass
fear is a key part of the strategy” (Klein 2007:420). In the case of Iraq, this doctrine
emphasizes the use of massive military power to “shock” the Iraqi people into submission in
an effort to leave them confused and ineffective. The fundamental philosophy of Shock and
Awe is to exploit catastrophic situations—it exploits the human emotions that accompany
disastrous circumstances, or, in the case of Iraq, the use of overt and abundant military power
by the United States. Klein goes on further to state:
That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster—the coup, the terrorist
attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane—puts the entire
population into a state of collective shock… Like the terrorized prisoner who
gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often
give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect… Iraqis, if all had gone
according to plan, were supposed to be so shocked and awed that they would give
up control of their oil reserves, their state companies and their sovereignty to U.S.
military bases and green zones. (Klein 2007:20)
The overwhelming firepower used against Iraq went far beyond that of simply
defeating Saddam and his army. As stated above, from the very beginning it was a planned
effort to reduce Iraq to rubble in order to rebuild it anew. It was, just as its authors intended,
a method of severe and overt destruction on the land and people of Iraq—a “sophisticated
psychological blueprint” designed to provide “sensory deprivation and sensory overload”
producing “disorientation and regression” in order to “overload an adversary’s perceptions
27. 20
and understanding of events” (Klein 2007:421). Klein goes on to say that “the architects of
the war surveyed the global arsenal of shock tactics and decided to go with all of them—
blitzkrieg military bombardment supplemented with elaborate psychological operations,
followed up with the fastest and most sweeping political economic shock therapy program
attempted anywhere, backed up, if there was any resistance, by rounding up those who
resisted and subjecting them to ‘gloves-off’ abuse” (Klein 2007:419). This, apparently, is
how the United States spreads freedom.
Klein (2007) shows how the destruction served its purpose, as mass fear and
displacement pushed civilians into survival mode, paving the way for the free-market agenda
to be implemented unimpeded. And the strategy worked well: when Klein arrived as a
journalist in Baghdad in 2004, an Irish peace activist told her that the destruction was so
severe that much of the Iraqi population were too scared to care about the true interests of the
United States. “No one cares about privatization. What they care about is surviving,” he
said (Klein 2007:412). During the campaign the US military even deliberately bombed the
ministry of communication, various phone networks, and shut off power to a city of 5 million
people, rendering Iraqis trapped and unable to “speak to each other, hear each other or see
outside” (Klein 2007:424). The plan shocked the population into submission and made them
fear for their lives, giving US politicians a fresh start for what was to come. Sadly, the
devastation faced by the Iraqis was directly correlated with the opportunities that would
come in abundance for multinational corporations on the other side of the world. As a
delegate once remarked at the “Rebuilding Iraq 2” conference in Washington D.C., “the best
time to invest is when there is still blood on the ground” (Klein 2007:412).
It is necessary at this juncture to reiterate that the invasion and destruction of Iraq—
which had no connection to Al-Qaeda or any of the individuals responsible for 9/11, and
furthermore had no weapons of mass destruction—was from the very beginning an imperial
strategy that only a military empire could carry out. This planned atrocity was by and large a
deliberate act of politically motivated terrorism by the United States.
28. 21
THE SATELLITE STATE: IRAQ AS AN EXEMPLAR FREE-
MARKET STATE
After much of the country had been bombed to the ground, creating the “clean slate”
necessary for the project, it was time for the free-market fundamentalists to begin creating
the “new Iraq” they had long been waiting for. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, arriving as Baghdad was literally on fire, was prepared
to begin the project that the London Economist would later call a “capitalist dream” (Harvey
2005:7). “For a free Iraq to thrive,” Bremer explained, “its economy must be transformed ...
[and] the central lesson from past transitions is ... [to] switch from value-destroying public
enterprises to value-creating private ones ... And so rebuilding the Iraqi economy based on
free market principles is central to our efforts” (Lafer 2004:329).
Bremer’s first four months were spent transforming the economy, with the clear goal
of creating the apparatuses necessary for capital accumulation which, according to free-
market theory, is absolutely essential for the future well-being of the Iraqi population. He
passed laws reminiscent of classic Chicago School (free market) policies, privatizing two
hundred Iraqi businesses and “getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands” (Klein
2007:436). On May 27, 2003, Bremer announced that Iraq was “open for business again,”
and on September 19 issued orders necessary for a free-market state: “the full privatization of
public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation
of foreign profits… the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for
foreign companies and… the elimination of nearly all trade barriers” (Harvey 2005:6). In
other words, nearly every aspect of resources and state-owned companies in Iraq were up for
grabs by foreign corporations, and those corporations were legally protected to take all
profits out of the country while paying a flat tax of fifteen percent. Most importantly (and
possibly most devastating for the people of Iraq), Bremer made it so financiers could sign
contracts lasting forty years before eligible for renewal, leaving elected governments in the
future with no power over private corporations (Klein 2007).
The changes implemented by Paul Bremer were appealing to some of the world’s
largest corporations. Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, stated that the reforms
created “some of the most enlightened—and inviting—tax and investment laws in the free
world,” while according to Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank chief
29. 22
economist, Bremer was applying “an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued
in the former Soviet world” (Stone and Kuznick 2014:530). The sheer number of contractors
in Iraq alone during the 2000s is telling of what the real mission was all about. Klein
(2007:481) states that during the first Iraq War, there was, on average, only one contractor
for every hundred soldiers; during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, however, that number soared to
one contractor for every ten soldiers, then one to three in 2006, moving to one contractor for
every 1.4 US soldiers in 2007. Indeed, Iraq was turning into a marketplace.
As stated above, the shock thrust onto the people of Iraq was more than just military
based; it was also economic. Although the privatization laws enacted by Bremer and the
CPA would allow numerous foreign businesses into the country to conduct business, this
came at a direct cost to much of the Iraqi population and businesses who, because of the war
and the subsequent privatizing of all state-owned entities, were left without work or
customers, and without the ability to carry on as before, all at a moment when much of their
country had just been destroyed and their people were living in despair. Adding insult to
injury was the fact that most of the corporations coming into the new Iraq imported not only
their materials, but their labor force, while much of the Iraqi population was left jobless. Yet
this is how the free market works in practice: the rights and freedoms embodied in free-
market states, as Harvey (2005:7) asserts, echo only the interests of owners of capital and
those able to engage in matters of business.
Ever since the beginning of the occupation, Bremer stated repeatedly that Iraq’s state-
owned oil enterprises would not be opened up to the international market. Not surprisingly,
however, after some time it became clear that once again the people of Iraq were being
deceived. “In December 2006, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group fronted by James Baker
issued its long-awaited report… [calling] for the U.S. to ‘assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize
the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise’ and to ‘encourage investment in Iraq’s
oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies” (Klein
2007:476). The Bush administration even pushed to construct a new oil law that would allow
corporations such as Shell and BP to sign decades-long contracts monopolizing the oil
industry—estimated at anywhere from tens to hundreds of billions of dollars and 95 percent
of the government’s revenue. This was “the boldest attempt at crisis exploitation yet” (Klein
2007:476).
30. 23
The law that was eventually signed into place contained brutal ramifications for the
Iraqi people by placing “no limits on the amount of profits that foreign companies can take
from the country and made no specific requirements about how much or how little foreign
investors would partner with Iraqi companies or hire Iraqis to work in the oil fields” (Klein
2007:477). This is the free market so praised by Donald Rumsfeld. Furthermore, the
creation of the Federal Oil and Gas Council, run by “a panel of oil experts from inside and
outside Iraq,” made it so the previously state-run oil reserves—the main source of revenue
for the country—was “exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful,
wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq’s broken and ineffective
government” (Klein 2007:477). This series of events which put Iraq’s oil into the hands of
powerful foreign corporations while directly contributing to the impoverishment of the Iraqi
people is eerily similar to the US-facilitated overthrow of the democratically elected
president of Iran in 1953, and the subsequent domination of Iran’s oil by British Petroleum
(then called Anglo-Iranian Oil Company).5
Free-market ideology is inherently riddled with contradictions.6
In the case of Iraq,
while all the rhetoric of the “strict and competitive free market” took place, companies such
as “Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater, and all the other U.S.
corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast
protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred
their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while
guaranteeing them a profit to boot—all at taxpayer expense… No investment, no
accountability, astronomical profits” (Klein 2007:449). Many corporations contracted in the
destruction and reconstruction projects in Iraq never had to compete with other corporations
for their extremely lucrative business ventures. Not only does this contradict free-market
theory, it also shows a perfect example of how intertwined and corrupt the military-
5
See Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men (2008).
6
See David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).
31. 24
industrial-intelligence complex is with the decision making in Washington. “Today, global
instability does not just benefit a small group of arms dealers; it generates huge profits for the
high-tech security sector, for heavy construction, for private health care companies treating
wounded soldiers, for the oil and gas sectors—and of course for defense contractors” (Klein
2007:537). Stated more clearly, war equals profits.
To give just one example of war profiteering, the world’s largest defense contractor,
“Lockheed Martin, whose former vice president chaired the committee loudly agitating for
war in Iraq, received $25 billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars in 2005 alone” (Klein 2007:537).
Not only is it difficult to understand exactly “where the government ends and Lockheed
begins,” states Danielle Brian from the Project of Government Oversight, but, as Klein states,
“It’s even harder to tell where Lockheed ends and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq
(an advocate group for the US invasion) begins” (Klein 2007:403). Klein goes on further to
state that 9/11 was used by the Bush administration:
…not only to launch the ‘War on Terror’ but to ensure that it is an almost
completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life
into the faltering U.S. economy… This global war fought on every level by
private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with the
unending mandate of protecting the United States homeland in perpetuity while
eliminating all ‘evil’ abroad. In only a few short years, the [disaster capitalism]
complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to
international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly
frequent natural disasters. (Klein 2007:14)
Naomi Klein calls this profit raid on the public sphere during moments of shock
“disaster capitalism.” Free-market capitalism, Klein states, is not born during moments of
freedom and democracy, but instead “has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal
forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual
bodies… [The case of Iraq and others] merely represent the monstrously violent and creative
culmination of a fifty-year campaign for total corporate liberation” (Klein 2007:23). The
bombs dropped on Iraq and the violence and destruction that followed paved the way for the
very foundations of Iraq to be demolished so they could be rebuilt in the manner that the
neocons in the US government and those within the military-industrial-intelligence complex
saw fit. Klein calls this a “closed profit-loop of destruction and reconstruction… [whereby]
32. 25
the destroyers and rebuilders are different divisions of the same corporations (Klein
2007:482). It is a revolving door of war advocacy and profit.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF A FAILED OCCUPATION
The free-market fundamentalism implemented by Paul Bremer and the CPA brought
with it massive destabilization of Iraq’s political, economic, social, and cultural institutions.
After the utter destruction generated by the US, instead of facilitating the mechanisms to get
Iraqi businesses up and running, or people to work—at the moment when Iraq badly needed
to be rebuilt through humanitarian methods—the country instead was “transformed into a
cutthroat capitalist laboratory—a system that pitted individuals and communities against each
other, that eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs and livelihoods and that replaced the
quest for justice with rampant impunity for foreign occupiers” (Klein 2007:444). May the
best person survive and may the most competitive business win—that was the message
conveyed to the Iraqi people; those who are unable to compete are left to starve or take up
arms. But the situation was much grimmer than that.
The invasion and occupation left Iraq in shambles. According to Klein, “all the
forces tearing Iraq apart today—rampant corruption, ferocious sectarianism, the surge in
religious fundamentalism and the tyranny of death squads—escalated in lockstep with the
implementation of Bush’s anti-Marshall Plan” (Klein 2007:443). After the fall of Baghdad,
Klein states that “unemployment was at 67 percent, malnutrition was rampant and the only
thing holding off mass starvation was the fact that Iraqi households still received
government-subsidized food and other essentials… Iraq was in the midst of a humanitarian
emergency” (Klein 2007:432). Yet despite the massive amount of damage and starvation,
Bremer kept to the original plan. In fact, right before Bremer began to fully dismantle the
political-economic system of the entire nation, he and the CPA decided to fire thousands of
schoolteachers, doctors, nurses, and state workers, and disband the Iraqi military previously
run by Saddam, leaving hundreds of thousands of soldiers out of work. “That was the week
we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq,” a US official told The New York Times
(Scahill 2013:111). Further showing the absolute rigidity of free-market fundamentalism,
James Haveman, the man in charge of rebuilding Iraq’s health care system, “was so
ideologically opposed to free, public health care that, in a country where 70 percent of child
33. 26
deaths are cause by treatable illnesses such as diarrhea, and incubators are held together with
duct tape, he decided that an overarching priority was to privatize the drug distribution
system (Klein 2007:448).
To be sure, hidden from view, Iraq War II was actually an act of imperialism
disguised. “All the careful efforts during the nineties to present ‘free trade’ as something
other than an imperial project were abandoned,” Klein states. With the invasion and
occupation of Iraq in 2003, we now see the modern façade of US “free trade… without
proxies or puppets, seizing new markets directly for Western multinationals on the
battlefields of preemptive wars” (Klein 2007:434). The destruction and reconstruction of
Iraq was nothing more than an extension of the American military empire combined with an
immensely lucrative capitalist endeavor for the high-ranking government officials and the
multinational corporations that make up the military-industrial-intelligence complex. It was
from the very beginning a plan to conquer and capitalize.
Looking back it seems absurd that the architects of the plot to destroy, rebuild, and
privatize Iraq—a case of systematic dispossession—would not have considered the potential
for pushback and violence from the people of Iraq. Yet, as highlighted above, the plan from
the very beginning brings the true nature of Shock and Awe into perspective: there would be
no backlash, it was assumed, because the Iraqis would be so disoriented and ineffective from
US military power and the subsequent removal of Saddam “that they could be easily
marshaled from point A to point B’” (Klein 2007:457). In other words, the sheer brutality of
the invasion and occupation was supposed to put the Iraqi people in a position where they
would accept whatever they were given by the occupying force. This was not the case,
however. Instead, violence broke out across the country, with much of it focused directly at
the occupying force, the corporations, projects, and workers involved. “Some of the attacks
clearly came from elements in Iraq, like al Qaeda, which are guided by a strategy of
spreading chaos,” states Klein (2007:450). “The economy is the number-one reason for the
terrorism and the lack of security,” stated Nouri Sitto, an Iraqi American (Klein 2007:450).
Patrick Graham, investigative reporter who covered the first year of Iraqi resistance, wrote
that Iraqi businessmen “are outraged by the new foreign-investment laws, which allow
foreign companies to buy up factories for very little. Their revenues have collapsed, because
the country has been flooded with foreign goods… The violence, these businessmen realize,
34. 27
is their only competitive edge. It is simple business logic: the more problems there are in
Iraq, the harder it is for outsiders to get involved” (Klein 2007:445).
According to a study from 2006, 655,000 Iraqis died on account of Iraq War II (Klein
2007:442). From 2003 through the middle of 2006, it is estimated that 61,500 Iraqis were
apprehended and imprisoned by the US military, with around 19,000 still in custody as of
2007 (Klein 2005:463). Many Iraqis ended up being tortured in prisons like Abu Ghraib
where international human rights law and the laws of armed conflict were deliberately
circumvented. “‘The horrors of Abu Ghraib were not simply the acts of individual soldiers,’
said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. ‘Abu Ghraib resulted from
decisions made by the Bush administration to cast the rules aside’” (Human Rights Watch
2004). By April 2007, the High Commission for Refugees stated that an estimated four
million Iraqis—or roughly one in seven—were forced to leave their homes due to violence.
Furthermore, in “over just three and a half months in early 2006, nearly twenty thousand
people were kidnapped in Iraq” (Klein 2007:453).
To reiterate, the violence and the outrage expressed by the people of Iraq was a
product of disaster capitalism and US invasion. The US waged an unprovoked war on a
country that had already been ravaged by years of UN sanctions in the 1990s, of which it has
been argued that anywhere from 500,000 to one million men, women, and children had died.
Moving forward to the present day, the privatizing of all Iraq’s state-owned businesses “was
regarded by many Iraqis as yet another U.S. act of war” (Klein 2007:446). The dismantling
and firing of the Iraqi military, rampant starvation, joblessness soaring while foreign
corporations imported their workforce, paid little taxes, and took all profits out of the
country—this is how the strategy and the “model” economy was supposed to work. “Now
you have a couple hundred thousand people who are armed—because they took their
weapons home with them—who know how to use the weapons, who have no future, who
have a reason to be angry at you,” states Marine Colonel Thomas Hammes (Klein 2007:445).
Setting aside the intentions of the United States military empire and ruling class for
one moment, we are faced with one consideration: if a real reconstruction effort had been the
original plan from day one, it seems unlikely that the situation would have spiraled out of
control as it did. If it was looked upon as a national mission by the people of Iraq, whereby
Iraqis could assist in the rebuilding of their country, there may have been the potential for
35. 28
achieving productive gains and a positive future. “The Bush administration could easily have
stipulated that any company receiving U.S. tax dollars had to staff its projects with Iraqis” or
contract jobs “directly with Iraqi firms,” Klein states. “Such simple, common-sense
measures did not happen for years because they conflicted with the underlying strategy of
turning Iraq into an emerging market economic bubble—and everyone knows that bubbles
are not inflated with rules and regulations but by their absence” (Klein 2007:450). Klein
goes on further to state:
The mismanagement continued for three and a half years until all the major U.S.
reconstruction contractors pulled out of Iraq, their billions spent, the bulk of the
work still undone. Parsons was handed $186 million to build 142 health clinics.
Only 6 were ever completed. Even the projects held up as reconstruction success
stories have been called into question. In April 2007 U.S. inspectors in Iraq
looked into eight projects completed by U.S. contractors—including a maternity
hospital and a water purification system—and found that ‘seven were no longer
operating as designed,’ according to The New York Times. (Klein 2007:452)
The invasion and occupation of Iraq show what the United States chooses to do with
its vast military empire and the ideology of free-market globalization. “Washington’s
ambition for world domination,” states Blum, “is driven not by the cause of a deeper
democracy of freedom, a more just world, ending poverty or violence, or a more livable
planet, but rather by economics and ideology” (Blum 2014:5). As will be discussed in the
next chapter, the tragic failure of the occupation of Iraq also led to quite possibly the most
extreme and violent form of “blowback”: the rise of sectarian conflict and violent religious
fundamentalist groups. “When the occupation proved unable to provide the most basic
services, including security, the mosques and local militias filled the vacuum” (Klein
2007:454).
36. 29
CHAPTER 4
BLOWBACK: THE RISE OF ISLAMIC STATE
World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily
by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century—that is, from the
unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to
maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world.
--Chalmer Johnson
THE LOGIC OF EMPIRE, AND BLOWBACK
The statement above represents the thesis of Chalmers Johnson’s book, Blowback:
The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000), and will be used to build the
argument within this chapter. As the previous chapters have shown, the United States’
insistence on garrisoning the globe with military bases and the need to control the resources,
land, and the political-economic institutions of various nation-states (for this immediate
research, that of Iraq), has paved the way for the repercussions being felt around the world
today. In other words, the logic of empire—invasion, occupation, projects of economic,
social and cultural imperialism, and the expansion of military bases—inevitably leads to
what the CIA calls “blowback,” or acts of retaliation by those who have been affected by the
logic of empire.One consequence, or one case of blowback, from America’s attempt to
control global affairs is illustrated in the Iranian revolution of 1979. The seeds of the
revolution were sown in 1953 when the United States led a successful coup d’état to oust the
democratically-elected nationalist Mohammed Mosaddegh. In his place, the US put into
power a government under General Zahedi, which allowed the monarch Mohammed Reza
Shah to continue his oppressive rule over Iran. The fundamental catalyst for the coup,
however, was the possession of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) by Britain and the
US, who held full monopoly over the production and sale of Iran’s massive and most
important resource.
37. 30
Throughout much of the twentieth century, the majority of Iranians lived in immense
poverty as they watched AIOC control Iran’s oil reserves while collecting vast wealth. The
contrast between the impoverished masses and the profits being taken out of the country by
AIOC was so stark that a radio commentator announced that “all of Iran’s misery,
wretchedness, lawlessness and corruption over the last fifty years has been caused by oil and
the extortions of the oil company” (Kinzer 2008:118). With the help of the coup, the
overthrown Prime Minister Mosaddegh was unable to achieve his goal of nationalizing the
oil company for the benefit of the people. Instead, General Zahedi and the Shah created an
American-led puppet government that would continue to repress its own people while
supporting AIOC (now British Petroleum) and giving the US and Britain access to cheap oil
for decades.
Blowback came in 1979 when a leftist and anti-American revolution took place in
Iran replacing the authoritarian rule of the Shah and bringing to power a radical Islamic
fundamentalist named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. During the overthrow—which was
intended to restore the democracy that Iran once had before American and British
intervention—Iranian revolutionaries took over the American embassy and held its
employees hostage for nearly two years, resulting in a failed and disastrous rescue attempt by
the US military (Kinzer 2008). Furthermore, the revolution signaled a reversal of free-trade
policies in Iran, setting off alarms in Washington. Nevertheless, the dismantling of American
political-economic influence in the region was the ultimate outcome that would have long-
term effects for the US, and which directly contributed to the Iran-Iraq war, a war that was,
as Stephen Kinzer writes, “the beginning of what would become by far the largest and most
expensive operation in CIA history” (Kinzer 2006:265). With the “help” of the US, the war
lasted eight years, cost over a trillion dollars, and, it was estimated, left over one-million
dead (Stone and Kuznick 2014:420).
The example of US intervention in Iran is important in understanding the scope of
American foreign policy because it highlights the drastic measures that US officials are
willing to take in pursuit of their own political-economic interests. The Iranian revolution is
also crucial in illustrating how unintended consequences of American intervention abroad
can bring about destructive blowback to Americans and other nations. As Johnson notes, the
“down-the-line support of the Shah’s repressive rule had only accelerated the coming to
38. 31
power of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and an implacably anti-American regime” (Johnson
2000:97). The various clandestine operations run by the CIA—in its direct effort to
dismantle democracy and nationalism in Iran in order to continue exploiting Iranian oil—
proved quite profitable for over two decades while the US-backed regime of Mohammed
Reza Shah and his brutal repression of Iranians never concerned US or British officials.7
The
remainder of this chapter will focus solely on blowback from the American intervention,
occupation, and destruction of Iraq, as well as the detrimental effects of the free-market
system imposed by the US.
There are many reasons to believe that American foreign policy directly provides
innumerable potential catalysts for blowback: the pursuit of an empire of military bases, the
destructive “preventative warfare” policies, the (oftentimes violent) dispersal of rigid but
contradictory free-market ideology, the torturing of innocent civilians at sites like Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, drone bombings, the creation of the Joint Special Operations
Committee (JSOC), and all the other grotesque aspects that accompany the “war on terror”
(not to mention the consequences seen domestically such as the surveillance state and the
militarization of the police). The logic of the American empire inevitably leads to a high
probability that the United States will continue to be dealt blowback for many years to come.
The most applicable example of blowback for this project is 9/11.
The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September
11, 2001 were not attacking the American public; it was an attack on American foreign
policy, states Johnson (2004). In other words, September 11 was blowback from America’s
wide-ranging endeavors in the Middle East, that include but are not limited to: the projects
led by the CIA to create and fund the mujahideen, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other radical
and violent Islamic groups (Perkins 2004); the massive support of Saddam Hussein as he
fought against Iran and the Soviets (and even while he gassed the Kurds) (Chomsky
2014:118); the support of Saudi Arabia, the “epicenter of terrorist financing,” with their
7
For a complete account of the US-led coup d’état of Iran in 1953, see Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s
Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (2008).
39. 32
brutal repression of women’s’ rights amongst their practicing of Wahhabism, the
fundamentalist and extremist version of Islam (Perkins 2004:112); the economic sanctions
against Iraq in the 1990s “that satisfies the definition of genocide—a deliberate policy that
has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults…” (Shah 2005);
America’s unwavering support for the deadly policies and war crimes of Israel (British
Broadcasting Corporation 2001); and the list goes on. In a video three months after 9/11,
Osama bin Laden himself stated that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were a “response to
injustice.”8
“Those of us who knew,” Chris Hedges writes, “that the attacks [of 9/11] were
rooted in the long night of humiliation and suffering inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians,
the imposition of our military bases in the Middle East, and in the brutal Arab dictatorships
that we funded and supported became apostates” (Hedges 2013:332-33).
Another catalyst for blowback is the vast proliferation of unwelcomed military bases
in foreign countries. In an analysis of 315 suicide attacks from 1980-2003, Robert Pape, in
Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, shows how, contrary to what many
theories assert, “most suicide bombers are members of communities that feel humiliated by
genuine or perceived occupation…” and that “almost every major suicide-terrorism
campaign—more than ninety-five percent—carried out attacks to drive out an occupying
power” (Hedges 2015:269). In spite of this, the United States government has continued to
build numerous military bases in the Middle East between 1991 and 2003.9
Some of the
bases sit atop “holy land,” such as Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, the holiest sites in the
Muslim world where the building of such bases by a foreign occupier is considered an act of
extreme blasphemy. Some sects believe that such an act can be confronted only by jihad, or
“holy war.” Notwithstanding, the United States “has massive military forces concentrated in
8
Osama bin Laden stated: “It has become clear that the West in general and America in particular have an
unspeakable hatred for Islam… How many villages have been destroyed and how many millions have been
pushed out in the freezing cold? …We have witnessed the true crimes of those who call themselves humanists
and claim to be defenders of freedom… Terrorism against America deserves to be praised because it was a
response to injustice, aimed at forcing America to stop its support for Israel, which kills our people” (BBC
2001).
9
This spans the fall of Iraq in the first Gulf War and the beginning of Iraq War II.
40. 33
nearby Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Republics, and Oman, not to mention its
newly acquired bases in such Muslim countries as Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan,
Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Djibouti, and in territories with large Muslim populations such as
Kosovo, Serbia” (Johnson 2000:xv). The military presence of Western forces in Saudi
Arabia, for example, is “an affront not just to Saudi nationalism but to Islam itself” (Johnson
2004:237). Whether or not the US occupation of Islamic holy land would ever produce
blowback never seemed to be an imminent question to consider.10
Given this scenario, it seems logical that the United States will continue to experience
blowback from an unprovoked invasion of Iraq for many decades to come. Hiding behind
the “war on terror,” the US has committed multiple atrocities: “The deaths [of 9/11] were
used to justify pre-emptive war, invasion, Shock and Awe, prolonged occupation, targeted
assassinations, torture, offshore penal colonies, gunning down families at checkpoints,
massive aerial bombardments, drone attacks, missile strikes, and the killing of dozens and
soon hundreds and then thousands and later tens of thousands and finally hundreds of
thousands of innocent people” (Hedges 2013:333). Furthermore, the implementation of a
free-market system while Iraq was in desperate need of repair and collective services made a
dire situation even worse. As Hedges writes: “Our brutality and triumphalism, the byproducts
of nationalism and our infantile pride, revived the jihadist movement. We became the radical
Islamist movement’s most effective recruiting tool. We descended to its barbarity. We
became terrorists, too” (Hedges 2013:335).
BLOWBACK FROM IRAQ WAR II
The United States’ disastrous attempt at recreating Iraq based on laissez faire
capitalism—turning Iraq into a “living laboratory, as Naomi Klein states—is one of the
fundamental reasons for what has become the most lethal form of blowback: “the dangerous
rise of religious fundamentalism and sectarian conflict” (Klein 2007:454). The culmination
10
For an account of blowback aimed at military bases in Saudi Arabia, as well as in other nations, see
Johnson (2000).
41. 34
of US intervention provided the situational factors to create an adversary which seems even
more potent and dangerous than those of the past. No longer is the “enemy” a geopolitical
site, a group or population, a regime that needs to be overthrown, or even a physical entity at
all; it is rather a dangerous and exponentially proliferating ideology.
On August 8, 2014, the US began bombing Iraq once again, just as the US military
has done throughout each presidency since George H. W. Bush. As well-armed guerillas of a
new radical faction began their route towards Erbil—the oil-filled capital of Kurdistan in
northern Iraq, home to thousands of Americans working for ExxonMobil and Chevron—the
United States was provoked to step in and protect its assets. The usual “humanitarian”
rhetoric imparted on the public provided justification for the destruction: saving the Kurds,
Iraq’s Christians, or the Yazidi minorities. This new war, against an adversary that
proliferates so quickly that its followers now span across multiple countries, is proving to be
quite a complex operation for the US
The critical date was June 10, 2014, when Mosul, the northern capital of Iraq, was
taken by a group of jihadist fighters claiming to represent a new form of Islamic government
willing to take over the region, and soon, they proclaim, the world. The “Islamic State of
Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL), or the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (ISIS), is a jihadi
extremist group led by Sunni Arabs from Iraq and Syria. Patrick Cockburn, who Seymour
Hersh has claimed is “the best western journalist at work in Iraq today,” states that the “very
name expresses its intention: it plans to build an Islamic state in Iraq and in ‘al-Sham’ or
greater Syria” (Cockburn 2015:43).
In an interview with Salon, Noam Chomsky states that the rise of the Islamic State is
heavily dependent upon the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, which
imparted a classic “divide and conquer” strategy to create havoc in order to achieve their
aims. Chomsky discusses how in 2002, before the invasion, there was little sectarian rivalry
amongst the Sunni, Shia, and Kurds, and that all factions were living peacefully in Iraq. But
when the United States decided to attack Iraq in 2003 it was “very destructive…hundreds of
thousands of people killed, millions of refugees, millions of other displaced persons,
destruction of the archeological richness and wealth of the country back to Sumeria.”
Chomsky goes on:
42. 35
One of the effects of the invasion was immediately to institute sectarian divisions.
Part of the brilliance of the invasion force and its civilian director, Paul Bremer,
was to separate the sects, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurd, from one another, set them at each
other’s throats. Within a couple of years, there was a major, brutal sectarian
conflict incited by the invasion… The conflict spread to the whole region [and it]
is being torn apart by Sunni-Shia conflicts. (Salon 2015)
Another aspect of the Islamic State’s rise to power has at its base the vast amount of
corruption, as well as the ostracizing policies, facilitated by the US-led Iraqi government. As
a result of US influence, Nouri al-Maliki was voted in as Prime Minister in 2006 from multi-
party elections, a position he held until 2014. The Maliki-led Shia-dominated government
enacted policies that many felt had, at its core, malicious intentions for the country’s Sunni
majority, further creating increased sectarian tensions. These sectarian rivalries—
concomitant with the Maliki government’s mistreatment of the Sunnis and the US’
imposition of free-market policies amidst the complete failure to rebuild what they had
destroyed in the previous two wars—increased the political and economic marginalization of
the Sunni population that began years before with the US-led overthrow of Saddam.
Furthermore, as stated in the previous chapter, the dismantling of the Ba’ath party—the week
the US created “450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq”—left a large percentage of the
population jobless, without income, and with little option left but to fight for their own well-
being and those of their religious divisions. Cockburn (2015:142) states that though the
policies enacted by the US may have been founded on good intentions, and that the exclusion
of the Ba’athist were “partly a way of guaranteeing jobs for the boys among the opposition…
[Nonetheless] they deepened sectarian, ethnic, and tribal divisions and provided the
ingredients for civil war.” The combination of increased sectarian strife with free-market
political-economic reforms have become a few of the fundamental origins for the escalation
of religious extremism by jihadi groups like ISIS seen in Iraq, Syria, and the surrounding
countries today.
To put it simply, ISIS is an extension of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Islamic State is comprised
completely of Sunni Arabs, and the group practices and advocates the fundamental
puritanical version of Islam called Wahhabism, which has many similarities to other jihadi
groups in the Middle East. “Wahhabism wholly rejects other types of Islamic worship as
well as non-Muslim beliefs,” Cockburn states. “It regards Shi’ism as a heresy, in much the
43. 36
same way Roman Catholics in Reformation Europe detested and sought to eliminate
Protestantism” (Cockburn 2015:99). Similar to the religious ideology practiced in Saudi
Arabia, this violent form of extremist Islam oftentimes promotes the use of violence to
achieve religious goals while breeding contempt for differences in religious practice. One
needs only to take a look at YouTube to see videos of beheadings by ISIS.
Although there are many similarities between ISIS and al-Qaeda, the two groups do
not necessarily see eye-to-eye on all topics. The leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-
Baghdadi (who some claim was a U.S. prisoner from 2005 to 2009, asserts Cockburn), has
proven to be even more violent, uncompromising, and sectarian than the leader of al-Qaeda,
Ayman al-Zawahiri. In order to fully comprehend the scope of ISIS along with its trajectory,
it is necessary at this juncture to reconsider how both the group and ideology were born,
including the historical significance of its predecessor, al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda—originally led by Osama bin Laden—is more effectively an idea rather
than an organization, and has been just one of many jihadi groups in the Middle Eastern
region over the last twelve years. As Cockburn writes:
…al-Qaeda’s name became primarily a rallying cry, a set of Islamic beliefs,
centering on the creation of an Islamic state, the imposition of sharia, a return to
Islamic customs, the subjugation of women, and the waging of holy war against
other Muslims, notably the Shia, who are considered heretics worthy of death. At
the center of this doctrine for making war is an emphasis on self-sacrifice and
martyrdom as a symbol of religious faith and commitment. (Cockburn 2014:54)
To be clear, just as the mujahideen in the 1980s and many other terrorist groups in the
Middle East, or the death squads in El Salvador, or the various dictators and insurgents
propped up in nations around the globe—Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and now
the Islamic State, are products of American intervention through entities like the CIA are a
direct result of allied forces such as Saudi Arabia. It was out of the Taliban that produced the
seeds for al-Qaeda, and considering how al-Qaeda was in many instances a product of
American meddling in the Middle East, the same can be said about the foundations of ISIS
and the people fighting for it. Noam Chomsky states that “…the appearance of ISIS and the
44. 37
general spread of radical jihadism is a fairly natural outgrowth of Washington wielding its
sledgehammer at the fragile society of Iraq…” (Polychroniou 2014).11
ISLAMIC STATE: THE ULTIMATE FORM OF BLOWBACK
The trajectory, brutality, and power of the Islamic State has from its very inception
surprised peoples and nations all over the world. What began as a small faction of armed
rebels has quickly become a force to be reckoned with. “In swift campaigns over the
summer [of 2014] ISIS defeated the Iraqi army, the Syrian army, the Syrian rebels, and the
Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga; it established a state stretching from Baghdad to Aleppo and from
Syria’s border with Turkey to the western deserts of Iraq” (Cockburn 2015:151). Although
Cockburn states that as of early 2015, the Iraqi government and its foreign allies have
expressed joy over victories on the battlefield against ISIS, threatening their regions of
control and even scaling them back on various occasions, these success should not
necessarily provide relief for the adversaries of ISIS. Such confrontations have oftentimes
been won by “highly sectarian Shia militias that do not distinguish between ISIS and the rest
of the Sunni population” leaving Sunnis in Iraq with “no alternative but to stick with ISIS or
flee, if they want to survive” (Cockburn 2015:155). In other words, sectarian violence has
escalated so drastically that many groups of varying religious sects have no option other than
11
The role of the United States’ chief ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, cannot be overstated in the rise of
Islamic extremist groups. Although it is outside the scope of this paper to consider the vast history of nation-
state relations in the Middle East, at this juncture it is absolutely necessary to touch on this topic briefly,
because, in my opinion, it would be highly unsubstantiated in a discussion of the Islamic State to disregard the
Saudi’s exponential proliferation of Wahhabi ideology and their enormous financial contributions made to its
radical proponents. To cite just one example, in a 2013 study titled “The involvement of Salafism/Wahhabism
in the support and supply of arms to rebel groups around the world,” it was stated that “Saudi Arabia has been a
major source of financing to rebel and terrorist organizations since the 1980s,” and has given $10 billion to
promote Wahhabism, making it very likely that the “number of indoctrinated jihadi fighters” will continue to
grow into the future (Cockburn 2014:100). Once again, it is pertinent to note that the crucial period for the
development of jihadi groups (of which the US was highly involved) began with the blowback from 1979 with
the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, leading into the 1980s when the US began increasing ties with
Saudi Arabia—a demonstration that turned out to be important for US influence in the region. This was the
historically significant turn of events that, as Cockburn states, “provided a seed plot for jihadist movements, out
of which Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was originally only one strain” (2015:100). To be clear, the roots of
terrorism in the Middle East are heavily founded on US imperialistic foreign policy and of the overt willingness
of the United States to dominate ideologically and militarily around the globe.
