Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts

Sunday, February 25, 2018

iran: a colonial power


Street protests have erupted in some middle eastern countries in January of this year, particularly in many Iranian cities, and in Sudan, Algeria, and Tunisia as well, where the protests have been the longest and most tenacious thus far. Though the protests were diverse, a common cause was attributed to the high prices for basic daily-needed commodities (beginning with bread), unemployment (particularly among the youth), and disappointing economies stagnating with hyperinflation. However, Iran’s protests, even though they may not be unique, are special due to the country’s rising political and military stardom in the region. In the last decade, particularly since the American withdrawal from Iraq in December 2010, the Arab uprisings in 2011–12, the Syrian civil war since March 2011, and the failure of the Afghani government to stop the expansion of the Taliban, have all contributed, among others, to the rise of Iran’s might in the middle east. From Afghanistan, to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, Iran was able to construct a geo-military and political “alliance” of sorts, one that has made it a mini-colonial power in the region. It remains to be seen whether such alliance would produce any economic benefits to the concerned populations, particularly to “middle classes” that are more tuned to consumerism than political adventurism. In common jargon, the Iranian geo-military loose “alliance” is described as a Shiʿi consolidation against the political hegemony of Sunni Islam, one that is presumably led by the likes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the former derives its wealth predominantly from oil rent, while the second is over-populated and labor abundant. Upon a closer examination, however, what is routinely dubbed as a “Shiʿi alliance” turns out a vague term for a hodgepodge of “Shiʿisms” that by and large are historically unrelated and belong to different social and economic configurations. Iran itself belongs to a majority brand of Shiʿism, that of the Twelver Imamis, and to a social and economic formation that heavily depends on oil rent and its distribution among classes and ethnicities. Like any developing country, Iran is plagued by class inequalities created by rapid and uneven development, particularly touching on the commercialization of land and what is left of traditional agriculture, hence the importance of oil rent in conjunction with political adventurism. Its ethnic composition, by far the most complex in the region, combines under one state the Farsi Twelver Imami majority with Arabs, Kurds, Azeris, Armenians, Turkmen, and Baloch. In Iraq by contrast, the Shiʿi majority, which comes at around 65 percent, and which has been historically dominated by the Arab Sunni minority (20 percent), has been in power only recently thanks to the American occupation in 2003–2010. The Syrian ʿAlawi minority, which has been in power since 1970, could also be looked upon as another brand of Shiʿism, but its social and economic base is very different from the other Shiʿisms in the region and along the Eastern Mediterranean. So is Lebanese Shiʿism, which since the end of the civil war (1975–1990) has been associated with the radical paramilitary Hezbollah organization, which acts as a state within a state. In short, the Iranian political genius consists at bringing different social and economic formations under one informal geo-strategic alliance. But what for exactly? Perhaps one question that begs itself in this regard, in particular in light of the January street protests, is whether the costs of such an Iranian-led informal alliance would pay the bills.

The last big anti-government protests in Iran came in the wake of the disputed reelection of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in summer 2009. According to opposition records, more than 73 people were killed back then and over 4,000 were arrested. There are a few major differences this time. The Green Movement in 2009 was led by reform-minded intelligentsia and educated middle class and was concentrated in the streets of Iran’s capital city. This one has been led by mostly working-class young men; there are far fewer people rallying, yet the protests are more widespread across the country. In 2009, the protests were about empowering the reformists. This time, they look and feel anti-establishment, hence against the whole Islamic Republic. Somehow the cost of the informal Shiʿi alliance, constructed in the last decades with paramilitary civil war strategies that involved the best trained Iranian special and intelligence military personnel, are turning against the very foundations of the Islamic Republic itself. What the young men and women were questioning this time in the streets of many Iranian cities is the “usefulness” of what their country has been doing inside and outside Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Is the sacrifice worth the economic misery of a large part of the Iranian populace? Should the Republic maintain its moribund paramilitary alliance while people are suffering at home? But if the questioning seems radical, it is nevertheless extremely fragile, as there already are state attempts at the highest level to suffocate it through the services of the Revolutionary Guard and other special paramilitary forces which have become the hallmark of the Republic since the Revolution. Iran has been able to forge its alliance thanks to a country-by-country civil war strategy, betting on all kinds of structural weaknesses among the rogue countries, while avoiding civil war at home. Perhaps the time has come to look inside.

Perhaps the lesson to learn in this regard is that countries like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon cannot be “on their own” anymore, as autonomous political units, assuming they ever did, and that they can only be governed through the kind of rough “alliance” that the Iranians are proposing, and to which Russia would serve as a political umbrella. This is a new reshaping of the middle east, an unexpected outcome of the street revolts, in which everyone is learning that states cannot be sovereign anymore. The obsession with state security, which has been nurtured by the likes of Nasser and Saddam Hussein, and which meant playing on the weaknesses of other states and societies, while raising the flag of civil war, now gets another turn. Now state security implies a process of collaboration between states, where a regional power like Iran would monitor the process on the ground with experts all over but in small numbers, which makes cost redundant the notion of a full-fledged occupation as was Iraq and as is Afghanistan now under American occupation. Russians and Iranians come in small numbers, bring their experts and mercenaries, impose themselves on the ground, and end up more cost-effective than the traditional colonial powers which have shaped the future of the middle east since Sykes–Picot in 1916.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

from sykes-picot to civil war


From Sykes–Picot to civil war: the delusions of American power

There are various ways of doing a history of the present, or a history that follows the tracks of a theme of relevance to the present. In the short time that I have I want to trace the genealogy/archeology of the theme of the middle eastern nation-state, as it has emerged in the space of a century in US domestic and foreign policy since the dismemberment/demise of the Ottoman Empire, up to the present. I want to argue that the nation-state has become the forgotten concept, having been replaced by national security and the constant threat of terrorism and the fear of terrorist groups in particular in Islamic societies. Defeating so-called terrorist groups has given precedence over concerns as to what stands as a modern nation-state in those disturbing and disturbed times. But what if defeating jihadic groups is the biggest fallacy of all times? I want to narrow down that line of reasoning to specifically presidential campaigns in particular in the aftermath of September 11.

The failure of the middle eastern nation-state and the rise of jihadic groups represent a case of historical and material restrictions on what is said and in their relations with the exercise of power, which goes beyond the classical divisions of left versus right, democrat versus republican. I am interested in what is said, how what is said is framed within a discursive reality at a specific historical juncture. We want to examine things that are said, how they were said, and the occasion that made such statements possible. There were rules or “regularities” in what is said at a given time and place, and that these rules govern not just the kind of things that are talked about, but also the roles and positions of those talking about them.

This summer we’ve celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Sykes–Picot agreement which divided what is now the East of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Jordan between British and French zones of influence, versus zones of direct control, colored on the map as zones A and B respectively. Sykes–Picot is usually read in terms of the borders that were imposed, not so much the borders of the 1916 agreement, but the actual borders of the 1920s, which turned out very different from those anticipated barely a decade earlier. There has been so much in the century since Sykes–Picot on the “fairness” of the borders, and whether they made sense, or whether they were justified at all.

What I want to propose in my brief intervention is that it is not so much how the borders were mapped, but to question the genealogy of the nation-state. I want to argue that various administrations, in particular in the aftermath of WWII, have erred from placing a priority on the nation-state, and the difficulty of such requirement. What has replaced the nation-state are concerns regarding security and US or NATO interests, where the fight against terrorist jihadic groups took precedence.

The American response to Sykes–Picot came rather rapidly within the framework of the King–Crane Commission in 1919, in the aftermath of WWI and the Paris Versailles peace conference attended by Woodrow Wilson.

In his fourteen-point address to Congress in January 1918 Wilson promoted self-determination. The twelfth point concerned the Ottoman Empire:

The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.

What matters in such statement, notwithstanding “secure sovereignty,” is the concept of “nationality.” What does this mean?

When it comes to “Syria” and the “Syrian people” the King–Crane Commission spoke of a Mandatory Administration that would take hold of the newly formed territory for the sake of a “democratic state,” and “the development of a sound national spirit.” And the text adds: “This systematic cultivation of national spirit is particularly required in a country like Syria, which has only recently come to self-consciousness.” Self-consciousness is what would ultimately lead to self-government (p. 21 in The Israel–Arab Reader, fifth edition).

What we can retain thus far from the awareness of the Commission apropos the uniqueness of a historical situation of the formation of “nationalisms” that have only recently come to self-consciousness is that the newly formed nation-states are fragile and always in danger. The process of their coming into being could be aborted for the simple reason that they are “imagined communities,” as Benedict Anderson would say, which implies the formation of a vernacular culture in support of nationalism.

What happened in the decades following the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the end of colonial rule is the establishment of nation-states that for the most part are autocratic at best. How to deal with troubled nation-states—or the existence of states with “nations” divided among many ethnic lines and loyalties—is what has preoccupied US foreign policy since WWII and without much success. The problem has only gotten worse with “states” and “nations” falling apart since the Arab revolts in 2011–12. Not only the nation-state has become an impossibility, but the hyphen between “nation” and “state” seems irreversibly lost. The situation is new, but also as old as the problems that have emerged with the fall of the Ottomans and colonialism.

There are several chapters that are worth exploring in this regard, beginning with Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948; the Free Officers’ revolution in Egypt in 1952; the overthrow of Moṣaddegh in 1953; the nationalization of the Suez canal and the tripartite war against Egypt in 1956; the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis at the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979–1980. One could add other episodes, in particular the coming of the Baath in Syria and Iraq in 1963.

In the 1950s as the United Kingdom was reluctantly acknowledging the end of empire, the US was filling the vacuum in the Middle East. But while the British had an 80,000-man garrison in Suez, the American method of influence was no troops on the ground. More importantly, the US supported any ruler that could bring order at home, leaders as diverse as the Shah of Iran, Nasser, Saddam Hussein, or Syria’s Asad. There was that attitude of accommodating oneself to such leaders, as long as they were not overtly hostile to US interests, in an era when terrorism was not there yet. There was no concern at the time, nor is there any concern in the present, as to what kind of nation-state was in the process of formation. As the concept of Realpolitik became fashionable in the 1970s, dictatorships could be “authorized” as long as they kept order and civil peace inside. Nor was the existence of the Israeli “model” of nation-state, which stood side-by-side to other hostile state formations, scrutinized in terms of its originally western political roots: it was rather a fait accompli that could be useful for the stability of the region. The US became distracted by the issue of the “fairness” and legitimacy of Israeli existence, and the parallel issue of Palestinian rights, both of which were projections from neighboring Arab states. With the stability of the region perceived in relation to “full” Palestinian rights for an autonomous state, if not the right of full return, the US took it for granted that a stable peace means overall stability.

But now, with the excitement of the Arab Spring behind us, such concerns seem not only out of hand, but we’re back to where we had originated with the fall of the Ottomans, namely, the question of the nation-state. It is impossible to understand the “success” of the Israeli state since its inception without looking at how the ideology of “Jewish labor” was formulated in the 1880s and later at the turn of the century.

In the last century, since Sykes–Picot and the King–Crane Commission, we can detect the following discursive formations in US foreign policy towards the middle east. I understand discursive formation in relation of what things could be stated under specific circumstances. Discourse is a space that organizes language at a historical juncture. It tells us how things are linguistically structured, and how such structures have been historically shifting.

In US middle eastern foreign policy several topoi have emerged since WWI:

Self-determination and the emerging nationalisms have become prominent with the dismemberment and demise of the Ottomans. The coming of nationalisms assumes autonomous nationhood and statehood, jointly understood as the formation of an autonomous nation-state. Autonomous in the aftermath of WWI means that the nascent nation-state should be free of western (or other) “tutelage” or colonialism or imperialism. The King–Crane Commission for one forcefully argued that in the transition from Ottoman rule to autonomous nationalism there should be a Mandate and a Mandatory power that would ease the process of self-determination (which should be taken in relation to an international right of national existence). What remains uncertain was the concept of “nationalism,” used in the context of “Syria” in its plurality as “nationalisms,” without any further elaboration as to what stands as “nationalism” in a context of multiple ethno–nationalisms, as we refer to them today. Should the Kurds, Armenians, Christians, Druze, Alawis, etc., be considered different brands of “nationalisms” that should “melt” into some kind of political “Syrian” entity? [Careful examination of the text of the King–Crane Commission versus Arab texts: the Syrian delegation in Paris.] Self-determination is the discourse espoused by Woodrow Wilson and his administration: it simply states the melting-pot of empires has ceased to exist and that nationhood has emerged all over the world and is not anymore the privilege of the rich and the powerful. Beyond that, self-determination is remarkably deficient at elaborating on transitions—from empire to nation-state—and even more so on the melting of “nationalisms”—or ethno-nationalisms—into one coherent nation-state. This was a question that was a left-over, and over which British and French had to struggle with in their respective Mandates over Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

That was the kind of discourse maintained by the US until WWII. By that time, the above countries had gained their independence, and new problems began to emerge. When the Truman administration recognized the state of Israel in 1948, as the former Soviet Union did, US foreign-policy discourse was still operating under the banner of self-determination, but with a twist: the western and eastern Jews which constituted the bulk of the population of the newly formed Jewish state were not for the most part an outcome of the demise of the Ottoman political framework. As they “competed” for nationhood with the “native” “Palestinians,” they were able to formulate their own Jewish nation-state. With the Truman administration, therefore, the novelty consisted at giving “privileges” to a particular nation-state: one that was to be democratic and prosperous, and western friendly. [cf. Balfour declaration]

The real challenge, however, was not placed in the Israel’s declaration of independence, nor in the Israeli–Palestinian–Arab conflict for that matter. What in the Woodrow Wilson era was aptly labeled “national self-determination” became more of a reality in the 1950s with post-colonialism and the end of the British empire. Neither Eisenhower nor his fervently anti-communist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, understood this transition from British to American hegemony in strictly geopolitical terms. However, national self-determination was the beginning of a long and confusing line of biased politics. It took several decades, with the Camp David agreements, to finally acknowledge some form of national self-determination for the Palestinians. The US successfully plotted in 1953 to overthrow the democratically elected Muhammad Moṣaddegh in Iran who was undermining the shah’s authority; yet at the same time it saw credibility in Nasser’s emerging pan-Arab nationalism.

The roots of America’s Mideast delusion are not so much in having taken sides by recognizing the existence of Israel under the Truman administration, but at an inability to see what the likes of Nasser were fermenting across the region. Nasser’s politics consisted at capitalizing on the logic of civil war in countries that were weak on the rule of law and civil society, and where social networks, which were kin based, were meant to protect “society” from an obtrusive state. It was not the logic of pan-Arabism that Nasser was asserting as norm, but rather a hegemonic rule where weak states were held hostage to more assertive ones. In the ill-fated Union with Syria, for example, what became the “northern province” under the Union saw its political and military infrastructures undermined in favor of the “southern Egyptian province.” By bargaining on civil war and weak states, Nasser created the practice of ruling by weakening the adversary. The real opponent wasn’t so much the state of Israel as the other Arab states, in their failed attempts to create normative post-Ottoman and post-colonial polities.

At first sight, it seems incomprehensible that the US would undermine the authority of Moṣaddegh in Iran, while favoring Nasser as a hero of self-determination. The truth dawned—but slowly. When Nasser executed his master stroke, nationalizing the Suez Canal in July 1956—Egypt’s declaration of independence—Britain demanded that Washington join it and France in what became the tripartite Suez war against Egypt. Eisenhower demurred, thinking that he would alienate Arab public “street” opinion, only to realize that Nasser was the big beneficiary of the war, and began purchasing weapons from the Russians.

The Nasser episode, his so-called pan-Arabism, nationalism, and self-determination, the fiasco of the Suez war, not to mention the “restitution” of the shah’s authority over that of Moṣaddegh, would in toto point to the imbroglio that American foreign policy would find itself into up to presidents Bush and Obama. With nationalism and self-determination waning in the background, the US would stand with the “strong man,” even if that implies inconsistent policies.

Other episodes come to light here: the six-day war; the Iranian revolution; Lebanon’s civil war and Israel’s intervention in 1982; the Camp–David agreements and Sadat’s assassination; etc. Perhaps it is too easy to speak of inconsistencies. In all those chapters (failed or successful) US intervention, whatever its merits or failures, was done off-hand from a distance. That is the major change with Afghanistan and Iraq.

I want to explore such inconsistencies in the chapter on Afghanistan, which is the forgotten episode of the current presidential election.

Let us divide US foreign policy into four periods based on the economic performance of the US.

1.     from Sykes–Picot and King–Krane to WWII and the recognition of the state of Israel in 1948.
2.     from WWII to 1973 and the Yom Kippur war. This is the 30-year period which for the US and Europe and probably the world at large has witnessed the ultimate economic prosperity fuelled by rebuilding economies after the massive war destruction. The changes were infrastructural due to a redirecting to the war industries to civilian ones.
3.     from 1973 and the Iranian revolution up to 9/11.
4.     from 9/11 and the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab uprisings, and the coming of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

What are the advantages of a periodization that looks at US foreign policy in the middle east (and the world at large) in relation to US internal growth (development) and economic performance?

The first period witnessed a collapse of the financial and monetary system and the recession of the 1930s which saw the coming of the new-deal. It was WWII that finally turned the economy over. This was the aftermath of Sykes–Picot, when British and French created the borders of the middle east and the emerging economies of the nation-states. Like all emerging economies it was a period of robust growth in spite of the recession in the US and Europe, which was propelled by urbanization and the growth of public services. Middle Eastern societies would remain however by and large overwhelmingly agrarian, with all kind of industrial plans that will have a hard time to take off. With British and French colonization, the US had little to propose politically and economically. The recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 should not be overestimated and looked upon as ushering a new era in foreign policy. It rather comes as an attempt to fill out the vacuum left over by the British in the aftermath of their withdrawal in 1947.

The second period is more interesting politically and the most prosperous economically, but it also marks all the impasses and accusations of American-centrism, racism, and colonialism that US foreign policy has stepped into. That’s when the US finally takes over from British and French colonialism and establishes itself as a world power in the cold war era. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the US and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan. Unemployment in industrial countries was unknown.

It was in this period of prosperity that confronted middle eastern countries in their postcolonial experience. Postcolonialism is more than a time frame denoting national independence, as the national élites were still operating within the framework of colonialism, of societies that were hostile to the emerging states, of economies that were subdued to the world order, and of stumbling industrialization plans. The stability and prosperity of the industrialized world is faced with turmoil on the eastern Mediterranean and the middle east. This is the era where the colonial national élites were to be run over by military dictatorships, beginning with the free officers in Egypt in 1953; Iraq in 1958; Syria in 1963; Libya in 1969; and the Iran in the aftermath of the revolution of 1978–79. Not to mention the Yom Kippur in 1973 which marks the end of three decades of western prosperity. Both the Iranian revolution and Yom Kippur went “unforeseen” by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

The US took side with the shah of Iran against the democratically elected Moṣaddegh. It then forced its hand on the shah in 1963 in what became known as the “white revolution,” whereby the long awaited agrarian reforms meant distributing land to lower classes and peasants from the small group of large landowners. Such reforms were already under way since the late 1950s in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. The militarization of the régimes in such societies did not seem to have much troubled the US. Indeed, there are many that the US “encouraged,” if not fully supported, the first military coup in Syria in 1949; that it saw in Nasser a populist “national” much better rooted than the defunct monarchy that he overthrew; that even the pro-British Hashemite monarchy in Iraq did not merit much praise. What has emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, the first two decades of American power, is probably not much different from the kind of discourse that became predominant in Latin America in the same period and later: namely, there was that submission to right-wing military “populist” dictatorships, on the basis that they would stop any possible communist threat; maintain a neoliberal economy; and fully open up to the industrial west. More specifically, in the case of Arab countries bordering Israel, populist military régimes would also accept the existence of the Jewish state. Such beliefs, however, would not stand for a long time. Nasser for one was staunchly anti-communist (even in his brief tenure on Syria under the Union), but this did not prevent him to buy arms from the former Soviet bloc and become one of their many allies. From Nasser to Saddam Hussein the US has learned how to be disillusioned: those were dictators that were neither popular nor western friendly, nor did they implement liberal strategies. They were simply good survivors, who locked all communists and other activists at home, but nevertheless bought all their weapons from the former Soviet Bloc. Needless to say, it is the collapse of such order, which the US did not create, but which it de facto accepted, that sits at the heart of the current uprisings.

Nasser had duped Eisenhower. “Nasser proved to be a complete stumbling block,” Eisenhower confided to his diary as his Arab–Israeli peace efforts failed. “He is apparently seeking to be acknowledged as the political leader of the Arab world.” He has concluded “he should just make speeches, all of which breathe defiance of Israel.”

Herein lies one of the biggest misplaced fallacies of American politics, namely, the thought, which comes from Arab leaders and their militarized régimes in the first place, that the Arab–Palestinian–Israeli problem constitutes the prime conundrum in middle eastern politics; finding a solution to the “Palestinian state” would undermine all kinds of hurdles in the Arab world, perhaps bring social welfare and equity at a larger scale on the long run. By the time the second Bush was president, and in the wake of 9/11, such “optimism” gave way to something much more radical. The problem is not the absence of a Palestinian state (its very existence could pose more problems), nor is it Islam, but nation-building, failed economies, and the radicalization of Islam for specific purposes. Nations have to be built from the bottom up, with their social institutions carefully monitored for the sake of more egalitarian political institutions. The financing of the new wars, in their military and civil portfolios, is an offshoot of the transformation of the international financial system in 1971 when overseas military spending forced the US dollar off gold. US Treasury bonds had become a proxy for gold, which were supplied by the US economy running a balance-of-payments deficit.

The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lower thermostats. It shocked the world economy. But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply. The economic crisis of the industrial world has opened up national frontiers to globalization. The cultured financial and industrial élites would seek projects beyond their national and nationalistic borders in favor of capital accumulation worldwide. This non-commitment at the national level would institute an inside rift between a populist streak at home and successful international business. Right-wing movements (some of which are plainly xenophobic) which have become more common in Europe in the last decade and in the US as well, are hangovers from the 1980s decline. Neither Carter’s pessimism not Reagan’s optimistic supply-side tax cuts will bring post-war productivity levels. It is such atmosphere of great depression that the US will live the Iranian debacle, Lebanon’s civil war, the unpopularity of the Camp David agreements, and, last but not least, September 11.

In spite of the dot.com boom of the 1990s, George W. Bush became president at a time when neoliberalism was experimenting in various ways to catch up with post-war productivity, while deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy, have become normative for the industrialized nations and the world at large, imposed by the likes of the IMF and the World Bank as the sine qua non for international loans and to indebted nations.

It was in such atmosphere of strained productivity and growth that president Bush would risk two major wars abroad. Even though Bush Sr. had already broken the golden rule of a hands-off approach towards the middle east in the liberation of Kuwait, it was indeed the younger Bush that will usher a new ground with the full occupation of two sovereign countries.

Obama’s failed legacy in Afghanistan

With the emergence of ISIS and the battle of Mosul (and possibly Raqqa) in the foreground, not to mention the Syrian wars, Afghanistan is hardly mentioned these days—not even in the presidential campaign. Even “smaller wars” like Yemen and Libya have eclipsed the American involvement in Afghanistan to the point that what is going on over there, after over a decade of investment, hardly matters at all.

The legacy in Afghanistan, like Obama’s foreign policy record as a whole, is troubled at best. At points he had the elements of the right approach—more troops, more reconstruction assistance, and a counterinsurgency strategy—but he never gave them the time and resources to succeed. Obama came into office rightly arguing that the war was important but had been sidelined, and promised to set it aright. Yet Obama’s choices since 2009 reflect a more conflicted stance, and it is not clear he ever settled on a coherent strategy. He deployed more troops than needed for a narrow counterterrorism operation, but not enough for a broader counterinsurgency campaign. He initially increased reconstruction funding because he believed, rightly, that effective Afghan governance was an essential condition for victory, but quickly second-guessed himself and subsequently reduced civilian aid every year thereafter. Most damagingly, Obama insisted on the public issuance of a withdrawal deadline for US troops, undermining his own surge—which eventually became so obvious that he finally reversed himself. Obama’s belated decision to sustain a small force of some 5,500 troops in Afghanistan beyond his term in office is likely to keep the Afghan army in the field and the Taliban from outright victory—but this is at low bar compared to what Obama once hoped to achieve there.

The good war: 2007–09

Before leaving office president Bush argued in a favor of a report for a more counterinsurgency effort, including more troops and civilian resources.

The report found a receptive audience because Obama had been making the same case from the earliest days of his campaign. He wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007, “We must refocus our efforts on Afghanistan and Pakistan—the central front in our war against al Qaeda—so that we are confronting terrorists where their roots run deepest.” In July 2008, in a major speech on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he rightly noted the situation in Afghanistan as “deteriorating” and “unacceptable.” He promised, “As president, I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win.” He pledged to deploy at least two additional brigades and spend an additional $1 billion in civilian assistance every year.

It is no surprise therefore than when he took office Obama pledged in March 2009 “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to Pakistan or Afghanistan.” His policy explicitly committed the US to “promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan,” which required “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.” In light of this, he ordered 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, quadrupled the number of US diplomats and aid workers, and increased civilian assistance by an impressive $2 billion from 2009 to 2010.

The turn: 2009

In summer 2009 violence worsened dramatically, as insurgent attacks increased by a staggering 65 percent compared to the previous summer, and that year 355 US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, more than double the previous year. Add to this the mistrust and disrespect that the Obama administration nurtured towards Afghani president Hamid Karzai.

But the event that had the most dramatic impact on the new Administration’s view of the war was the initial assessment of the new Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), General Stanley McChrystal, in August 2009. He warned that the current situation will undermine US credibility and embolden the insurgents. He called for 80,000 more troops to maximize chances of success; or 40,000, with medium risk. He also developed a third option: deploying just 20,000 more troops and abandoning counterinsurgency in favor of a leaner counterterrorism mission with high risk.

McChrystal’s report, his request for more troops, and the cost of the war appalled the Obama Administration and triggered a major reassessment. But it is unclear why Obama reacted the way he did. The crises of 2009 would not have unsettled a more experienced Administration.

Obama’s attempt was only to compromise, which only led to strategic incoherence. First, he ordered another surge, this time of 30,000 troops, bringing the total to more than 100,000 by mid-2010—far more than required for a narrow counterterrorism operation. Afghanistan, the third-largest military operation since Vietnam, had definitely become Obama’s war. But Obama deployed far fewer troops than McChrystal recommended for a counterinsurgency campaign. In contrast to his campaign rhetoric, Obama spent the rest of his presidency carefully avoiding saying that the US aimed to “defeat” the Taliban or “win” the war. The aim was narrower than resourced counterinsurgency or nation building. It wasn’t until May 2014 that Obama finally set a deadline—by the end of 2016—to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan. According to an account by Bob Woodward, Obama stated in an internal deliberation that “I can’t lose all the Democratic Party… And people at home don’t want to hear we’re going to be there for ten years… We can’t sustain support at home and with allies without having some explanation that involves timelines.” Obama was right about one thing: The Democratic Party solidly opposed the surge and supported the deadline. By 2011 Obama decided to exit even if the job was far from complete, even if there was no guarantee that gains made in the past decade could last.

The surge worked. Fatalities of US troops began to decline in 2011, and the number of Afghan civilians killed in the war declined in 2012 for the first time. Poppy cultivation appeared to be holding steady well below its 2007, while opium production plummeted in 2012. However, by the be beginning of 2013, the withdrawal was well underway: There were 65,000 US troops in Afghanistan at the start of 2013; 40,000 in 2014; and just 9,800 in 2015.

We will take out ISIS

Iraq represents another one of those missed opportunities, even more aggravating than that of Afghanistan. This is a country with more resources than Afghanistan, with an oil wealth and an urban and educated population. Women are an important part of the labor force, and have more freedom in public. Yet, it is very much divided along sectarian and religious and regional lines. American occupation, like that of Afghanistan, involved the ambitious operation of nation-building. But to keep up with his campaign promises, and in order not to alienate the Democratic Party any further, Obama withdrew all US troops by December 2011. With the surge of ISIS in 2014–15 and its control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, American special operation forces are back as “partners” to the Iraqi army, police, and security forces. The number could be around 5,000.

There is a reason why the Afghani war, and the advances of the Taliban, have no place in the current presidential campaign. We’ve seen Obama avoiding in his two-term as president the language of “winning” a war against the Taliban, not to mention nation building, which has dropped from usage in the Obama administration. Instead we have a more diffuse language of a status quo ante, of simply letting the survival of the Afghani régime, its army, police, and security apparatuses as they are. Nothing more, nothing less.

When it comes to Iraq in the grammars of the current presidential campaign, the language now is to “win” the war against ISIS, but nonetheless without much deployment of US troops there.

Watch Hillary Clinton discuss her plan for Iraq in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015.
Mrs. Clinton said that “to be successful, airstrikes will have to be combined with ground forces actually taking back more territory from ISIS.” But, mindful that her 2002 vote to authorize force in Iraq largely contributed to her loss in the 2008 Democratic primary, she was quick to say these should be local Sunni troops, and “we cannot substitute for them.”
“Like President Obama, I do not believe that we should again have 100,000 American troops in combat in the Middle East,” she said.
Similarly, she called for more air power, but only in cooperation with Persian Gulf allies. And she acknowledged in a question-and-answer session that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had halted their air attacks on the Islamic State to focus instead in Yemen.
The 100,000 figure seems revealing: that was the number in troops in Afghanistan by mid-2010, and Obama began their withdrawal in 2013. Clinton not only seems to be in line with Obama on possible troop deployment, but she also consolidates a dogma of the DP on the mission of Americans abroad. There is a war to be “won”—a vocabulary that was dropped regarding the Taliban—and this could be done through “partnership” with the Iraqi, Iranians, Russians, and whoever wants to join in—as long as there is this common enemy called ISIS. The unsaid has more importance than what is actually said: no one knows for sure how the “liberated” territories will be “governed” once the war is “won.” How can a “coalition” of “partners” with different agendas and economies form a system of “governance” in the aftermath of ISIS. But a more intriguing question is, Will there be an aftermath to ISIS? There could be a linguistic rollover from the Taliban to ISIS: sooner rather than later we could witness a wavering to the claim of “winning” over ISIS. If ISIS is not simply an organization of terror, but a dense nexus of social relations, can ISIS be “defeated”?

Does the expression “defeating ISIS” means anything?

The debate we are not having in the campaign, we will continue not to have, how to foster a modern state that doesn’t metastasize corruption, cronyism, élites helping themselves? That would bring us away from defeating presumed “enemies.”

The debate on the Iraqi disaster usually lingers on that other disaster—Syria. Iraq and Syria now look “connected” for no other reason but their common Islamic State rule. But here the Obama’s presidency is total passivity. Since the early years of the war, particularly in 2012–13 when the Asad régime began using an air-technology known as explosive barrels, various opposition groups and humanitarian agencies have requested that the US and NATO begin implementing a no-fly zone at least in the north, in the Idlib and Aleppo provinces.

Clinton in November 2015, based on the NYT
Expanding on her previous call for a no-fly zone, Mrs. Clinton said it should be limited to northern Syria, where Turkey has proposed a buffer zone to protect civilians, and enforced by many countries. That, she said, “will confront a lot of our partners in the region and beyond about what they are going to do.”
She took a particularly hard line against Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations who she said had been complicit in the rise of the Islamic State. “Once and for all, the Saudis, the Qataris and others need to stop their citizens from directly funding extremist organizations,” Mrs. Clinton said.
The core of Mrs. Clinton’s argument for a faster, more aggressive military operation was her contention that it would reinforce Secretary of State John Kerry’s diplomatic effort to negotiate a cease-fire, and ultimately a political solution, in Syria. Administration officials said it closely resembled the arguments Mr. Kerry has made to Mr. Obama — but Mr. Kerry has not yet persuaded the president, who remains hesitant about the risk of being sucked into a ground war.
Asked whether Mr. Obama had underestimated the Islamic State when he referred to the group as the “J.V. team,” Mrs. Clinton said, “I don’t think it’s useful to go back and replow old ground.”
But in a new break with the administration’s stated policy, Mrs. Clinton declared what some White House officials have privately said for months: that the fight in Syria is no longer about ousting President Bashar al-Assad.
“We had an opportunity, perhaps,” for a regime change, Mrs. Clinton said. But given the current circumstances, she added, “We need to get people to turn against the common enemy of ISIS.”
In saying so, Mrs. Clinton seemed to align her strategic approach more closely with those of Russia and Iran, who are backing Mr. Assad, though she criticized both nations in her speech Thursday.
Let us note a couple of things in this regard. First of all, in what seemed back then in November 2015, in the wake of the Paris attacks, like a campaign promise to get tougher on Syria, is already obsolete. Back then the Russian involvement was only a few months old and aimed at “maintaining the Asad régime,” as the reference to the “Syrian state” goes. But since then the Russian (not to mention Iranian) involvement has gotten much deeper to the point that eastern Aleppo has been annihilated, and the small Russian naval base in the Mediterranean city of Tarṭūs is being expanded into a permanent base. So, ironically, for the Russians too it is not longer a question of ousting Asad or maintaining him—that’s the common ground with the Americans—but it’s about Russian power in Syria and the middle east at large. US passiveness was a conduit to Russian expansiveness. The fact that ISIS is our common enemy and that Russians and Iranians are with us on this one is pure nonsense. What is never enunciated is what kind of state and society are at work in those civil war countries.

In the second presidential debate Clinton reiterated her position.

We’re making progress. Our military is assisting in Iraq. And we’re hoping that within the year we’ll be able to push ISIS out of Iraq and then, you know, really squeeze them in Syria.
But we have to be cognizant of the fact that they’ve had foreign fighters coming to volunteer for them, foreign money, foreign weapons, so we have to make this the top priority.
And I would also do everything possible to take out their leadership. I was involved in a number of efforts to take out Al Qaida leadership when I was secretary of state, including, of course, taking out bin Laden. And I think we need to go after Baghdadi, as well, make that one of our organizing principles. Because we’ve got to defeat ISIS, and we’ve got to do everything we can to disrupt their propaganda efforts online.

The entire logic when it comes to ISIS and al-Qaʿida, and previously the Taliban, is that they’re presented as a cancer that metastases “outside” society, so that we can killed them and kill their leadership too. But that’s the kind of language that was adopted for the Taliban and then was dropped under Obama. Will ISIS follow?

In the same debate Trump responded the following.

Well, first I have to say one thing, very important. Secretary Clinton is talking about taking out ISIS. “We will take out ISIS.” Well, President Obama and Secretary Clinton created a vacuum the way they got out of Iraq, because they got out — what, they shouldn’t have been in, but once they got in, the way they got out was a disaster. And ISIS was formed.
So she talks about taking them out. She’s been doing it a long time. She’s been trying to take them out for a long time. But they wouldn’t have even been formed if they left some troops behind, like 10,000 or maybe something more than that. And then you wouldn’t have had them.
Or, as I’ve been saying for a long time, and I think you’ll agree, because I said it to you once, had we taken the oil — and we should have taken the oil — ISIS would not have been able to form either, because the oil was their primary source of income. And now they have the oil all over the place, including the oil — a lot of the oil in Libya, which was another one of her disasters.

Trump’s strength is on the “getting out” of Iraq, but to do this, he’ll have to constantly deny that he ever requested any US involvement in Iraq, in spite to contrary evidence. But the whole debate on whether either candidate endorsed the occupation in 2002–03 or later is a misplaced argument. What matters is that the withdrawal in December 2011 should not have happened at all, in spite of the fact that staying in Iraq would have been unpopular for both Democrats and Republicans.

Notice here for both candidates the “taking out” of ISIS and their leadership (and also the Qaʿida and Taliban). The logic of the bipartisan discourse of “taking out” so-called terrorist groups, be it the Islamic State, the Qaʿida, and the Taliban (in their distinct metamorphoses between Afghanistan and Pakistan), which has the power image of a surgical operation which can separate cancerous cells from their healthy background, does in fact suggest that terrorist groups can be indeed separated from their background. Such discourse tends to isolate, in the case of ISIS, for example, how the group came into being in Iraq (before expanding to Syria) in the middle of a failed and struggling US occupation of the country, when the Iraqi army and its intelligence services have been totally disbanded in order to reshape all security apparatuses into something more robust and cohesive, something that would make more sense for a modern state. In short, is it possible to understand the likes of the Islamic State without going over the troubled history of Iraq from the end of Ottoman rule, to the Hashemite dynasty, and the various military coups from 1958 and on that undid whatever the monarchy attended to do. What is crucial for our purposes here is the suppression of Shiʿa politics and political parties under the Baath, and then the coming of the groups from their exiles once the Americans occupied the country. It is not enough to claim, however, that the coming of the likes of Zarqāwī and Baghdādī was an “outcome” of the disbandment of the Iraqi army and its intelligence apparatuses. The claim that “the Americans made the Islamic State possible” comes with own pretensions and fallacies. What needs to be examined is the infrastructure of the Iraqi state under the Baath in relation to the (predominantly) Sunni groups that it had fostered and others it had suppressed, Sunni opposition, Kurds, Shiʿa, or otherwise.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

dominance without hegemony


Syrian wars of domination without hegemony[1]


The Islamic State in Iraq and Sham[2] began as the Iraqi affiliate of al-Qaida during the American occupation of the country (2003–2011), then managed to expand in the Syrian north and east since 2012. It split off with the other “Islamist” (predominantly Syrian) groups, in particular its chief rival the Nusra Front, when Isis leader, operating under the nom de guerre of Abu Bakr Baghdadi, demanded in summer 2013 the bayʿa from Nusra’s chief Abu Muhammad Jūlānī, another one of those war-machines pseudonyms. Had Jūlānī given his bayʿa (“endorsement”) it would have meant the end of the Nusra as an autonomous military unit; but having refused “endorsing” his rival, Isis marginalized itself, in one of its rare military setbacks, in the Aleppo region. There was a time until the end of 2013 when Isis controlled even some of the northern predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo (e.g. Bustān al-Bāsha), and the crucial “gateway” (mamarr) of Bustān al-Qaṣr, but ultimately withdrew when facing mounting pressures. Unconfirmed press reports claim that Isis has become a “wealthy revolution,” with tons of cash at its disposal, operating with a monthly budget of $50 million, and paying its militiamen, which happen to be from very diverse nationalities (including Europeans), a hefty $400 a month, which is at least twice what the others are paying. Here the “other” could mean anything from the Nusra Front, the main rival, or other Islamist groups, or the Free Syrian Army (FSA) for that matter. But while the latter, in all their conflicting configurations, religious or secular, are mostly Syrian, in the sense that were born and raised on Syrian territory, with a wide majority of Syrians into them, Isis by contrast saw its inception in Iraq during the American occupation, and Baghdadi himself was in jail until probably 2010. Its “Syrian” component is barely half of its military force. When Baghdadi declared the caliphate in the first day of Ramadan in early July 2014, he appointed himself as caliph Ibrahim, gave a public sermon in a prestigious Mosul mosque in a defiant gesture to the world-at-large, which marked his first public appearance ever (previous unconfirmed photographs of him during his captivity years were circulated by Iraqi intelligence; the Americans have set a $10-million reward over his head). A week later, as the head of the new “Islamic State,” which is now a “territorial reality,” in addition to being an act of the “imagination,” Baghdadi appointed “governors” (wulāt; s. wālī) over the newly gained ghanīmas (“booty”) of the central “Iraqi provinces.” What is striking here is that he proceeded with appointments that were not “local,” that is to say, were not “Iraqi,” as if the new “caliphate” has a de facto pan-Arab if not “universal” pan-Islamic mission. For example, the Libyan Abu Usama al-Miṣrāṭa (from Miṣrāṭ, Qadhdhāfi’s hometown and tribal area) was appointed as “governor” (wālī) to the Iraqi nāḥiya of Saʿdiyya in the province of Diyāla. But he was ambushed and killed four days later when his convoy was hit by a side bomb in Saʿdiyya, which has been under Isis’s rule for a month. The incident has probably to do with the refusal of the other Sunni militias, which have benefited from Isis’s expansion in June from giving their bayʿa to the self-appointed caliph. Among those groups are “the Naqshabandi group” of ʿIzzat al-Dūrī, who was Saddam’s ex-vice president, and which the Americans had failed to capture; in addition the Army of Anṣār al-Sunna; and the Islamic Army (al-Hayat, Beirut, 10 July 2014). (It was known that the Ottomans appointed administrators and governors in provinces that were not those of their origins, shifting them every few years, in an attempt not to have those governors intermingle more than they should with the local populace.)

What is important here, in the newly established caliphate whose territory stretches over northern Syria and central Iraq, is how a group like Isis, not to mention the other groups which are not to be reduced to their “Islamist” components, “govern” the populations, neighborhoods, towns, villages, tribal areas, which they seem to have “seized” “with ease.” The seizure of entire territories in central “Sunni” Iraq on June 10th comes to mind first in this respect: is such seizure an outcome of military prowess, the tactics of “guerilla” war which faces a much more equipped and organized army than its own (be it Iraqi, Syrian, or American), or has it more to do with a populace which initially suffers from poor systems of representations, has been ruled by “external” forces, including the “national state,” hence is not even a “society” in the first place.

To elaborate, what needs to be questioned is the ability of small militarized groups (experts assume that Isis controls parts of Syria and Iraq with no more than 10,000 to 15,000 well-trained but modestly armed men) to “govern” and “subdue” populations and territories (including tribal areas) which could be even “alien” to them, and with a minimal force which would be no more than 2 to 5 percent of the populations of the conquered territories. This is, in our view, the fundamental aspect of the Syrian wars, which have become since June joined Iraqi–Syrian wars led by militias whose organization is not much in sync with the populations.

Large portions of Syria and Iraq are now controlled by heterogeneous military groups, which in sheer number and equipment seem far below what the Syrian and Iraqi “national” armies have now or had for decades. Such groups come in sorts: some claim to be liberal democratic, like the Free Syrian Army, while the majority are jihadic, with Isis pioneering in this regard. For the most part, however, they do not seem to have anything that even comes close to a political or social “program” to “govern” the territories, tribes, villages, towns, cities and neighborhoods under their control. Their tactics are rather one of pure survival. First of all, in the conquest, withdrawal, and re-conquest, they would never adopt a style of frontal attacks, as regular armies would normally do. (T.E. Lawrence’s art of guerilla tactics against the Turkish soldiers and garrisons in the Hijaz come to mind here as a source of inspiration for understanding such methods; but also the “failures” of the Americans in Vietnam and later in Iraq to “subdue” or “kill” guerilla groups, from the Vietcong to the jihadists.) Second of all, once an area is conquered, they may or may not adopt a harsh style (arrest and torture of “opponents”), but even if they do they tend to be “friendly” with the population at large, not requesting much, as the sources of income tend often, though not always, to originate “from elsewhere.” That’s an important point: controlling a territory which would not de facto generate much income to the conquering group, at least not in the early phase. Thus, some of the resources used in Syria, say, in the northern-central areas of Minbij and Raqqa may come from other regions, for instance, the oil-wealthy region of Dayr al-Zor, or, indeed, from neighboring Iraq (the take over of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was particularly lucrative, bringing close to $500 million in a single day from the city’s banks).

Thirdly, we need to compare and contrast modes of “domination,” “governance,” control—in short, governmentality—between “the state” and “the rebel militias.” What stands as “the state” has been a steady evolution of modes of dominance, at least since the 1960s, which initially consisted of a takeover of the resources of the state by force. At the time, Syria, in spite of a brief but unfortunate union with Egypt, “society” was still fairly liberal and democratic, hence the forced seizure of power by the Baath has ended decades of liberalism. In Iraq, the liberal bourgeois state of the old classes went down with the coup of Abdul-Karim Qasim in 1958, hence the Baath brought a permanent, if not everlasting blow, to that liberalism.

Now that Isis is gone from Aleppo since January 2014, the “opposition” has come under a conglomerate of groups known as the Islamic Front, a rebel coalition dominant in the city and much of northern Syria. The Islamic Front is a fierce and effective opponent of Isis but also, in its Islamist platform and indirect connections with al-Qaida is a different beast than the Free Syrian Army. The FSA, surrendered as it is now in the southern neighborhoods of Salah-u-ddin and Sukkari and Sayf al-Dawla, among others, which had inaugurated the battle for Aleppo back in July 2012 (in the first year of the insurgency, the city remained totally “silent,” as it did in the “great revolt” of 1925), without water, food, and ammunition, is allegedly negotiating with the Asad régime its surrender and withdrawal à la Hama (May 2014), that is, without punishment or retribution. We’ll come later for an explanation as to why the city was taken over by “outside” elements, which negotiated their way by force through the southern neighborhoods, prior to moving east. It remains uncertain how much “local” elements of the popular neighborhoods have “contributed” to the uprising, which adds to that problematic that we have been following regarding the lack of “political autonomy.” I want, for now at least, to underscore that element of “externality” in the war process, and pose the question as to how “local” elements “articulate” with “external” ones coming from the “outside.” Let’s assume for now that, as we’ve witnessed it until the winter of 2011, there were more or less peaceful movements (from Damascus to Hims and Hama) which, facing the military brutality of the state apparatuses, were hijacked by militarized elements outside them, some of which, like Isis, were not even Syrian. Moreover, those peaceful demonstrations, which at some point in summer 2011 in Hama reached the million mark, had no particular organization. Their aim was punctual in the sense that they vaguely aimed at the presidency, even though the popular motto was no less than a “régime change.” For this very reason, the “opposition”-held areas in Aleppo and elsewhere cannot be said to be “opposed” to “the state” as such. There is an ambiguity to those militarized “oppositions” in their relations to the neighborhoods and the other localities which they have seized by force, on the one hand, and their relation to the state on the other; an ambiguity that we need to keep track of in its unraveling.

Isis’s abandoned headquarters in Aleppo are just across from another large building that serves as the base for Tawhid Brigade, one of the largest of the seven rebel groups that joined ranks together in November to form the Islamic Front. Isis had been present in opposition-held Aleppo since the beginning of 2013, but by the end of the year tensions with rebel groups had reached a crisis. Considering itself a sovereign state, Isis was refusing to accept meditation for any dispute, and it had taken to kidnapping those it considered to be critics or enemies, including people who worked with foreign journalists. Reporters found in its Aleppo abandoned building signs of prisoners being tortured and summarily executed (Matthieu Aikins, The International New York Times, July 8, 2014).

On January 7, Isis carried out a surprise attack on Tawhid Brigade’s headquarters. It was held off. The next day, Tawhid Brigade forces from around the city counterattacked and surrounded the hospital. “We cut them off and prevented them from bringing any support,” said the commander who led the offensive and who goes by the nom de guerre of Abu Assad.

At around 3 a.m., the Isis fighters trapped inside the hospital asked to be allowed to leave the city, and Abu Assad, not wanting further bloodshed, agreed. When he and his men searched the hospital at first light, they discovered that Isis had massacred its captives. “We found a group of bodies every ten meters,” said Abu Assad. Most of them had been shot in the head while bound. Not long after the battle, the rebels had recorded a footage of the liberation of the hospital and its aftermath which was posted on YouTube.

The battle against Isis in Aleppo is part of a larger conflict that started at the beginning of this year, as rebel groups across the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo—including the powerful Syrian al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra—fought a pitched battle to expel Isis. The face-off left the Islamic Front pre-eminent. It controls the key border crossing with Turkey at Azaz and, with its estimated 50,000 to 60,000 fighters, is thought to be the largest and most potent rebel alliance in Syria.

The Islamic Front is entirely Syrian in leadership, and its central goal is to overthrow the Asad régime. Many of the group’s most powerful members—including the Tawhid Brigade and one of the largest factions fighting in the Damascus suburbs, Jaysh al-Islam—are not particularly ideological, and were once allied with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.

But they are far from secular. The Islamic Front draws on support from pre-war Islamist resistance networks, including wealthy, religious donors across the Muslim world and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and exiled Islamist group, who turned underground in 1982, amid the massacres and destruction of Hama, which pitted at the time the régime of Asad-père against the Brotherhood. (The mini-civil war was initiated in 1979 when allegedly members of the Brotherhood killed dozens of Alawi officers at the Artillery School in Aleppo, turning many of the city’s popular neighborhoods unsafe in their fight against the régime.)

One of the coalition’s key members, Aḥrār al-Shām, has links to al-Qaida’s core leadership, and the Islamic Front as a whole closely coordinates operations with Jabhat al-Nusra.

By the summer of 2014, the Islamic Front, together with Jabhat al-Nusra, and the FSA, are fighting a battle of survival in Aleppo, which has been cleared out of Isis. The régime’s armed forces, which look more and more like a popular militia, with 10,000 plus Lebanese Hezbollah militiamen on their side, not to mention Iranian military “experts,” Russian support and so on, are preparing for a major offensive against Aleppo this winter. That would entail a complete takeover of the eastern and southern popular neighborhoods, and the expulsion of the Islamist militias. Already, we are told, the FSA, which controls its own neighborhoods in the south, where the battle has originally started in 2012, is in negotiation mode with the régime: to surrender with our lives and equipment intact. If such an offensive turns out a “success,” the régime will be left with Isis in the east, its main opponent, and various rebel groups in the Idlib and Hama provinces, not to mention the Damascus–Hims countryside, and the border with Israel.

For its part Isis controls territories in the central north and the north-east, which since June it has “opened” to Iraq by seizing most of the Iraqi border crossings. What is important for our purposes, from the perspective we have been following, is to document how Isis has tightened its grip on the territories it has controlled in the Syrian north and east: what are the procedures, and how this control is negotiated on the ground with tribes, villages, neighborhoods and cities. A Lebanese reporter, writing from Amman, Jordan, has noted that Isis uses different modes of domination between Syria and Iraq, where the movement had originated during the American occupation. In Iraq negotiations with the tribes and the underground Sunni militias are more “subtle,” in the sense that they take into consideration the latter’s “interests,” not to mention the Sunni–Shiʿi divide which is inexistent in Syria. Thus, the Iraqi Isis takes the others as “partners,” while managing the overall operation. It has adopted, in some ways, the policies that Saddam Hussein, the Americans, and the government of Nuri al-Maliki had opted with those same groups.

In Syria things are a bit different. In light of its June successes at expanding in central “Sunni” Iraq, Isis (now “the Islamic State” pure and simple since the first day of Ramadan) decided to tighten its grip on the Dayr al-Zor region (which has been renamed “wilāyat al-khayr,” the province of goodness, upon the declaration of the caliphate on the first of Ramadan). For one thing, the region is the only oil-producing area in Syria, and Isis managed to control the majority of the oil wells for at least a year, even selling its services to the Asad régime. For another, it wants to establish in every locality a long-term mode of domination: how that is achieved is our concern in this section.

The eastern town of al-Shaḥīl is mostly tribal in its composition, known to have been a stronghold of the Nusra front, for the simple reason that its leader Abu Muhammad Jūlānī comes from there, hence his nom de guerre is supposed to divert attention, while manifesting sympathy for the occupied Golan Heights. In July 2014 Isis forced more than 30,000 inhabitants of Shaḥīl to leave their homes, having already tortured and mutilated Kurdish fighters in the north, and executed opponents in those same areas (al-Hayat, Beirut, July 7, 2014). The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the only agency to have documented such executions and the forcing out of populations since 2011, claimed that an additional 30,000 were forced to leave (hijra) in the area of Dayr al-Zor in the towns of Khushām (at least 15,500 inhabitants) and Ṭābiyeh (15,000). Many of the Islamist groups mentioned above gave their bayʿa to “caliph Ibrahim” in the first week of Ramadan upon the latter declaring himself the amīr al muʾminīn, as did the two towns in the second of July. But Isis would nevertheless not permit the inhabitants back until they’ve been “forgiven” (tawbah) for what they did, that is, for having sided with Nusra and fought the Islamic State. To the inhabitants the sine qua non condition of “forgiveness” is only an excuse for a permanent hijra.

On the other hand, having seized all oil fields in Day al-Zor, except for the one located at Ward, which has only one well producing 200 barrels a day, Isis began selling crude oil for SP2,000 a barrel or $12, but it forces those same merchants for selling it at no more than $18 in order to accommodate more popular support in its own areas. However, such prices are much lower than when the oil fields were controlled by various Islamic militias, including Isis, at which time, back in 2013, the militants used to sell the oil at the high price of $30 to $50 a barrel. Isis is also planning to sell gas demijohns in the areas under its control, sprawling from Dayr al-Zor to the eastern suburbs of Aleppo, the Turkish–Syrian frontier, and ʿAyn al-ʿArab, with the exception of areas under Kurdish domination, in addition to the eastern countryside of Hims and Hama, and other areas, the total of which (excluding Iraq) is five times the Republic of Lebanon.

Nor is the management of crony capitalism the only talent that Isis has developed in the larges stretches that it has seized between Syria and Iraq. In early July, in the south of Hasakeh, a city in the north-east with a majority of Kurdish population (together with Assyrians and other Christian minorities), Isis fighters have mutilated the bodies of Kurdish militiamen from “the Units for the protection of the Kurdish people” which were killed in action when Isis attacked villages in the area west of ʿAyn al-ʿArab. The bodies were hanged in public on podiums in the presence of small kids, after exposing the bodies in the Jrāblus area.

A pattern has therefore emerged which consists in the following: (1) seizure of a territory by force through military might; (2) the territory could be as small as a single neighborhood, a village, a town, a countryside, or as big as Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city; (3) the technique of warfare consists of guerrilla warfare in small numbers, not frontal attacks (cf. T.E. Lawrence on guerrilla warfare against the Turkish army in the Hijaz); (4) Isis would “share” those conquered territorial units with its “opponents” (Kurds, Nusra Front, FSA, the Islamic Front, all of which have shared territories against their absolute enemy, the Asad régime; however, allegations that Isis is an “offshoot” of the Asad régime seem unfounded; the régime, until recently, with Isis’s expansion in central Iraq has been more “lenient” with the Islamic State, probably because it served as a tool to simultaneously weaken the FSA and Islamic Front; Jūlānī has been released from the jail of Ṣadnāyā at the end of 2011, so that the régime would point fingers at “Islamic terrorism” among opposition ranks) but only if it finds itself in a “weak” position, that is, unable to dominate the others; (5) Isis is more at ease when it is in full control of a territory, rather than sharing it; (6) when it is in a full-control mode, Isis would accept no less than the full “subjugation” of the populations under its control; if the latter had fought against Isis they should ask for repentance (tawbah) and openly give their mubāyaʿa or bayʿa to the new caliph (and the institution of the caliphate); (7) Isis would then establish an “economy of war” in the conquered territories, whereby it would control the most lucrative resources available, beginning with the oil fields, trade routes and businesses. Isis would impose itself as a complete monopoly in a “marginal” capitalist economy where the common people would not be allowed to compete with the master. It would allow anything that would give it the income it needs (its estimated budget allegedly stands at $50 million a month). For example, a member of the Majādhmah tribe in the Minbij area told me that a Turkish cell company decided to plant a reception tower near their village, considering that the only two Syrian cell companies have been for the most part cut off in the north. Isis agrees, only because it receives commissions from the Turks, and the more Syrian consumers buy minutes from the Turkish cell company, the better.

The main point is this: the mode of “domination” remains fairly superficial—at the surface—which only involves “allegiance,” but no new social bonds, no hegemony, class alliances and the like. In short, it is dominance by force but without hegemony. We need to question whether such mode of dominance is in any way different from that that has been instituted by the Baathist state for over half a century, or whether there is anything unique to it.

Let us take as example of the process of negotiation and the economy of war in the province of Dayr al-Zor which is almost fully under Isis’s control.

In early July the people of the town of al-Qūriyyah took to the streets at night to demonstrate their unwillingness to let Isis rule their small town (al-Hayat, 9 July 2014). As reported in al-Hayat, from the London-based Marṣad of Human Rights, negotiations were soon initiated between the elders of the tribes of the western countryside (Khaṭṭ al-Shāmiyyah), and the leaders of the Islamic Brigades, on the one hand, with Isis on the other side. The purpose was to achieve an end to war and settle peace between all parties.

What is interesting here were the conditions (shurūṭ) set by the tribes and the Islamic Brigades—as a single party—for a settlement.

1.     The Islamic Brigades would keep their infrastructure intact in all the western countryside of Dayr al-Zor, but would nevertheless declare their bayʿa to Isis and uphold its banner (rāyah).
2.     The Brigades would not deliver their armaments, heavy or small, to Isis.
3.     Isis would only enter the western countryside in small numbers, to be limited to the “immigrants” (muhājirīn) only, that is to say, from non-Syrian citizenships; thus, Syrian citizens are not welcomed at all.
4.     No one that Isis has on its lists of wanted persons would be arrested.
5.     All parties would agree to fight the [Asad] régime.
6.     The formation of a sharʿi board (hayʾa sharʿiyya) that would be common to Isis and the other parties.

The Marṣad’s “witness” on the ground added that Isis’s prime response was that “there is no negotiation unless the other parties give up all their arms.”

Whatever the outcome of such negotiations, what is interesting here are the conditions set by the tribes and their militias on the ground, that is, the original populations of the western countryside in Dayr al-Zor. What is revealing in the list of the six “conditions” above is that the tribes and their affiliated militias would declare the bayʿa on the proviso that they keep their arms and military infrastructure intact. The bayʿa therefore seems like a minor event, which could be negotiated and exchanged at face value, practically bearing no importance in relation to any essence, which is the military economy of those tribes and their sense of autonomy. Moreover, the insistence on “immigrants”—that is, strangers, which could be Arab, African, Asians, or Europeans—over Syrians points to the fact that the main problem resides in the allocation of power relations among “Syrian” tribes. The bayʿa, therefore, provides that institutional umbrella through which the likes of Isis operate: subjugate groups to Isis’s dominance by giving them rewards which were initially withdrawn from them. In some ways, Isis’s “politics” borrows similar mottos from the Baathist state, not to mention French colonial rule or the Ottomans.

The bayʿa is a sign of loyalty that takes place on a one-to-one basis: not only a specific tribe, but every faction of the tribe (ʿashīra) must specifically declare its loyalty; and so would each faction of the fighting brigades. Which makes the bayʿa a quintessential speech act: an act of declaration where the loyalty of the tribe and its affiliated brigade is openly declared in public. Thus, based on the above report (al-Hayat, 9 July 2014), the “majority” of the “forces on the ground” have openly declared “their bayʿa to the Islamic State and the caliph of all Muslims Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [a.k.a. Khalifa Ibrahim].” Those “powers” (jihāt, “directive forces”) on the ground are then enumerated one-by-one: the people of the town of Ṣubaykhān, Dablān, Ghuraybah, al-Kashmah, Duwayr; then follows the enumeration of the Jund al-Sham Brigades, a total of 12, whose names include common male or female heroic personalities in Islamic history, locations, or metaphors: al-Muʿtaṣim bi-l-llāh, Nūr al-Islām, Jund Allāh, al-Ḥārith, Khālid ibn al-Walīd, ʿAysha umm al-Muʾminīn, etc. The naming is here important because it is inscribed within the logic of speech act: the point of honor of the party that declares the bayʿa to the caliph and caliphate—and to itself—and that would do everything that it takes to remain “loyal.” But then the bayʿa is characterized by a logic of domination which practically leaves intact the structure of the groups that have “subjugated” themselves to the conquering group, or other tribes or tribal factions, or “the state” for that matter, or in the not-so-remote-past local “administrations” which worked on behalf of the far away Ottoman state.

One should note here that if the tribes and tribal factions (ʿashāyir) have manifested some resistance to Isis, setting at times conditions for their “surrender,” it is because the tribes of the east are better structured and “harder” than the ones in the central-north in the region of Raqqa, which has become Isis’s official headquarters since 2013. In this instance, the fragility and tenuousness of tribal structures makes them vulnerable to the likes of Isis (and to the other Islamic Brigades as well), a vulnerability that was already manifest under the Baathist state for over half a century.

Mustafa al-Burayji, an astute observer located in the city of Raqqa, told al-Hayat (July 11, 2014): “Once Isis has entered the city as a faction, it rushed at finding a partner (rāfid) among the society of tribes in the province, in which it found an easy prey, considering the fragility and tenuousness of those tribes. Which gave the latter the opportunity to look for easy money and status. Isis was in the meantime using a combination of force and promises through its armed men which were kidnapping (abducting) and beheading their opponents at the sight of the shaykhs of the tribes, helped in this by young members of the tribe of Burayj which had given their bayʿa to the organization. That was the beginning of a bayʿa process that took one tribe after another, beginning with Burayj and ending with ʿUjayl, Bu Jāber, Subkhah, ʿAfādilah, Bu ʿAssāf, Hunādah, al-Shibl, al-Sakhānī, al-Ḥuwaywāt, and Zurashmar… That was completed with the tribes east of Aleppo, represented by the Bubnah in Minbij, and the Khaffājah in Maskanah, in addition to the tribal factions of al-Barri, the Ḥadīdiyyīn, and the Nuʿaymāt… The leaders of those tribes and tribal factions were led in the past to manifest their loyalty to then-president Hafiz al-Asad for the sake of some money and racketeering (ṣuṭwa) which his Baathist governments[3] had deprived them of.”

Note how an observer who is resident of the city knows for sure how to name the tribes one by one (the naming of their “affiliated” brigades, however, is quite different), because naming in relation to the bayʿa only happens on a one-to-one basis. That is to say: tribes would not give their “allegiance” collectively, that would be a meaningless act pure and simple. To understand why this is the case, we need to understand that for each bayʿa with one of the tribes or the tribal factions (ʿashāyir) comes an individual “reward” for the tribe in question. The “reward” would invariably give the tribe “privileges” over an area, like the collection of fees, dues, and racketeering schemes. Such “privileges” would be “on behalf” of Isis, or any other group. But what distinguishes Isis from the other military groups is their systematic requirement of the bayʿa, as the sine qua non condition for the survival of the organization in its newly conquered milieus.

Considering that the tribes and tribal factions have not for the most part invested themselves in men and equipment in the civil war, the bayʿa comes as the closest “investment” in the war effort. However, the bayʿa would neither entail much submission to the “strong” party, nor an “ideological” commitment of sorts. In effect, the bayʿa entails submission to the party which happens to have controlled the area in question, which in this instance is no one else but Isis; other areas which are controlled by the Nuṣra Front manifest their allegiance to al-Qaida’s leader Ẓawāhiri and his “affiliate” Jūlānī (the latter had already given his bayʿa to the former). In all such instances, however, there is no ideological commitment, but only an organization of power relations whereby the “subjugated” party would receive a modicum of “economic” privileges, but not much in the order of the political and ideological. All of this does not so much point in the direction of Isis’s strength, but more in the direction of the fragmentation of tribal formations, in particular in the central north of the country, more specifically, the territories located between the east of Aleppo up to ʿAyn al-ʿArab. But even where the tribes are stronger, as in the Dayr al-Zor region, along the border with Iraq, the process is in the final analysis not much different. For their part, the likes of Isis and Nuṣra behave as if the tribal structure would not matter much to their own internal organizations, as they approach them from the “outside”—domination without hegemony. To wit, whenever Isis imposes its well famed “Islamic norms,” based on its own self-appointed marjaʿiyya, on a territory, such “norms” leave intact tribal structure, neighborhoods, towns and villages. In short, there is no attempt to “integrate” through newly imposed norms: they only are imposed norms without processes of normalization. Thus, for example, because in the process of the bayʿa what matters first and foremost are the “trusted authorities” (al-thiqāt), Isis has set in Dayr al-Zor an office which is presided by a man from the Burayj tribal faction, which handles more security issues rather than administrative ones.

At times, a tribe’s “strength” might give it additional privileges. For example, the bādiya of Dayr al-Zor hosts some of the most powerful tribes, such as the ʿUqaydāt and Baqqārah, which in turn are composed of several tribal factions (ʿashāyir), and which have not “urbanized” as the Raqqa tribes did. Thus, the “integrity” of the ʿUqaydāt has pushed the Asad-père régime to strengthen its ties with it for 40 years, to the point that the eastern town of al-Muḥsin became known as “the treasury of the officers of the Syrian army.” For his part, Asad-père had crowned his associations with the eastern tribes by marrying his son Maher to the daughter of the chief of the tribal faction of al-Judʿān.

The various bayʿas and counter-bayʿas to either Isis or the Nuṣra did not quell the competition among tribes and their factions, in particular in the presence of oil in the eastern regions, and the advantage that Isis has manifested in its thorough organization across “national” territories and in its control of the Iraqi–Syrian border on both sides. As the tribal chief of the Bū Sarāya noted, “Isis knows how to give the best offer when it comes to oil, which drives competition and fitna among the tribes, which in turn drives some tribes outside the competition because they bear no interest on the matter, such as ours” (al-Hayat, July 11, 2014).

Such “allocations” of revenues, oil or otherwise, which are the property of the Syrian state in the first place, could turn violent. The Dayr al-Zor region thus enflamed when Amer Rafdan, a leading tribesman from the ʿUqaydāt, was shot to death, having turned against Jūlānī for the sake of Baghdādī, endorsing the latter with his full bayʿa. The leader of Isis had in effect approached Rafdan with a lucrative deal apropos oil revenues. The new deal—and bayʿa—gave Isis unprecedented control over the oil wells of Jafrah, Koniko, Khashshām and Jadīd ʿUqaydāt, while leaving tribal equilibrium in limbo, with continuous warfare between the Bū Jāmel, on the Nuṣra side, and the Bakīr, on the Isis side. The “deal” seems to work, therefore, on both sides. Isis (or the Nuṣra for that matter) is unable to exploit the oil resources on its own, without the protection that the tribes could furnish to the wells, and the latter have proven unable to organize on their own to exploit the oil wells.

Such divisions came in conjunction with rifts within the ranks of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) whose Dayr al-Zor military decided to give its bayʿa to Isis, which led the latter to take more oil wells in addition to gas pipelines worth billions of dollars, leading also, out of fear, to more bayʿa among tribes that have thus far been “neutral,” such as the Bū ʿIzz al-Dīn and the Baqqārah. In sum, Isis is now in nearly full control of Dayr al-Zor, its countryside and desert, having subdued to it the Nuṣra, the FSA, and the tribal factions, all through lucrative oil and gas deal, which involve protection of the well and pipelines on one side, and the commercialization of the products on the other. However, with all kind of rifts among the tribes and the militias, and the oil wells nearby, the “eternal peace” is not there yet.


[1] The title borrows from Ranajit Guha’s concepts of “domination” and “hegemony.”
[2] Both the terms of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, are inappropriate, as both the Levant and Syria denote meanings that are incongruent with what Sham implies for the purported dawla islāmiyya: the Levant would look like a colonial reality in line with Sykes-Picot, which means “artificial” borders created from the “outside,” through colonial administrators in Paris, London, and elsewhere; while Syria gives the impression of a postcolonial “national” state. Al-Sham by contrast should be understood in its “prophetic” meaning: that of a religious territory which is not fragmented along clearly demarcated borderlines, and which comes “next” to the holy Ḥijāz area. Isis is known as “Dāʿish” in Arabic, for the acronym of al-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fi-l-ʿIrāq wa-l-Shām, but if an unfortunate would utter such a word in public in an Isis-controlled area, he could be punished with 80 whips.
[3] Of the so-called “corrective movement,” ḥaraka taṣḥīḥiyya, which “corrected” and acted upon the early Baath of the 1960s.