GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED ALLY
Part 2: Everything is broken
By Axel Brot
Broken machinery
The American political class seems to have drawn all the wrong conclusions from
the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Its leisurely
stroll towards permanent global hegemony just did not happen. Thus, frustration
and the craving for revenge have become main drivers of US policies. The events
of September 11 focused their common dysfunctionality, but they are not its
root cause.
It is from this vantage point that arises the resigned and poignant expectation
that the US will permit neither a stable Russia nor a non-cataclysmic
accommodation of China's rise. American politics now have just enough
flexibility to negotiate the short-term priorities of whom to put under the
pressure of regime-changing demands; but the system is rigged not to reward
persuasion or accommodation but toward increasing confrontation, deadline
diplomacy, and grandstanding on principles that carry the load of broken
credibility.
Notwithstanding the worthy efforts of the Iraq Study Group or the Princeton
Project on National Security to get some means-to-ends rationality back into US
policies, politics are impaired by the lack of discipline and prudence that
come with the reinforcement of the imperial mind-set of official Washington by
the media and think tanks.
Unfortunately, this mind-set is not only the defining attribute of the present
administration but of both parties - and abundantly so, of the serious
contenders for the next US presidency. They are already competing in burning
the bridges to a somewhat more patient approach to imperial policies while
berating the present administration for its weakness. Different combinations of
bombing Iran, breaking Hezbollah, confronting the Russians, sanctioning the
Chinese, squeezing the Saudis and Pakistanis, pressuring the Indians into a
subordinate relationship, installing an "accountable" dictatorship in
Iraq (and/or taking it apart), are on the menu of the main candidates - plus
unfettering US "soft power" and hitching the allies more effectively
to whatever load is to be pulled.
It is therefore all too easy to see in the current travails of global diplomacy
efforts to adapt to the implicit American choice of "either the US or
chaos". But the lessons are not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but the failed
attempts of Serbia (1999), Iran (2003) and Syria (ongoing), to bow to
US/Western demands while keeping a measure of independence and dignity. In
fact, looking at the last 16 years or so, at the fate of the former Soviet
Union in the 1990s, of the former Yugoslavia, and of Iraq or Afghanistan, they
may come to the conclusion that they have nothing to lose even in a military
confrontation.
And since the march of empire is tuned to the racial - alias
"civilizational" - superiority (of the "Anglosphere"), non-Western
elites may interpret this choice as "the US and chaos". If it
is their ambition just to loot their countries and then to set-up shop in one
of the Western tax-sheltered playgrounds or to turn into sharecroppers of their
countries´ resources, the choice is a good one. If they are at all attentive,
reasonably patriotic, and have a measure of pride, they cannot but resist it.
It is, in the last analysis, also a question of self-esteem and a sense of
historical accountability. Can elites in their right mind bear to be the butt
of a sardonic witticism like the one going around among Anglo-Saxon officials,
targeting the Saudi combination of immense corruption and paying immense
protection money: the Saudis "prefer to suffocate on their knees instead of
dying on their feet".
But contempt and the lust for chaos ("creative destruction") have
become the coin of the realm. They are heated by fantasies of a global caste
society where "The Shield of Achilles", "Imperial Grunts",
"Left Behind", and "The Diamond Age" are busy
cross-pollinating the imperial imagination. One might add that a Pentagon
(Office for Net Assessment) study of the consequences of climate change
provides a window into the darkest, survivalist corner of this mind-set and
implies, in addition, an answer to the questions "who is the West?"
and "who is superfluous?"
The return with a vengeance of the "covert operations approach" to US
international policies, therefore, has much more to do with this sinister
self-fictionalization than with the nature of threats or the simple
availability of the instruments. While for most periods of the Cold War,
concerns about exposure, blowback, and provoking war with the Soviets kept it
somewhat under control, it has slipped the leash. Everyone who can has gone
into business. It is not only the White House that is exceedingly liberal in
its use of privateers, frequently retreaded intelligence and military officials
who should have been disposed of out of harm's way.
There is the evolution of a huge gray zone of private "consultancy"
enterprises of former government officials who parlay their international
contacts with state and sub-state actors, with insurgencies in search of
upscale sponsoring, and policy-lobbying groups, as well as their international business
contacts - in particular with the energy, financial, arms and security
industries - into business and influence. On returning to government service,
their pet projects, policies and money-spinners don´t just go into hibernation,
they are continued as government policies. The merchandising of imperial
policies and the mercantilization of military violence have become the hallmark
of this strange combination of militarism and venality. One of the new breed of
temporary, parvenu officials demonstrated its bottom-line aspect with the pithy
question: "What is the use of empire when you can´t make money out of
it?"
On the policy level, the concern about blowback and exposure has all but
disappeared, except as a weapon of bureaucratic bloodletting when the hunt for
the scapegoat is on. It can only operate as a restraint if a sense of
moderation can be imposed and if its consequences have a deterring effect. None
of this pertains. US policies, instead, gestate in the world of the much-quoted
Melian Dialogue where a sense of impunity and omnipotence have destroyed any
regard for prudence. Since the tyro-days of retired Air Force Major General
Richard Secord's rubbing shoulders with the cocaine mafia in order to finance
the Nicaraguan Contras, this state of affairs has given a completely new
meaning to "unleashing covert operations", "plausible
deniability", and, of course, to Ronald Reagan´s famous "boys will be
boys" mentality.
The more vicious side of the problem, though, exposes the meltdown of the firewalls
between the branches of government, between the executive branch and Congress,
between public and private, between business and government - in a witches'
brew of projects and interests. And no government agency has the clout or the
will to turn off any of the cross-married projects of policy-lobbying,
intelligence and black operations that acquired godparents in government, in
Congress, or with one of the powerful lobbying outfits.
They may sink, perhaps, below the awareness threshold of the principals, but
move they will unstintingly, metamorphosing, mutating and spawning descendents
in the fetid swamp of subcontractors, public-private intelligence outfits,
mercenaries, fundamentalist missionary organizations, security firms, to
reappear someday as "operation in place", and thus renewing the
cycle. The Sudanese troubles are a prime example of how this itinerant
ecosystem produces and reproduces ever increasing mayhem in weak states cursed
with strategic significance.
But all of that does not even begin to address the destructive effects of its
frequent connection to the underworld, of the illicit trade in weapons, raw
materials, etc, or to the globally operating crime syndicates and their
economic infrastructure.
It is only logical that the selection of policy-making personnel seems now to
follow the Israeli, Italian, and Japanese model, moving ever deeper into the
world of clan loyalties (the neo-conservatives are only the most
self-consciously "family-oriented" clan) where the distinction
between loyalty to office and loyalty to clan disappears completely at the
level of deputy assistant secretary.
And it is starting to infect Germany. Not only because many corners of the
German foreign intelligence apparatus are, by design and tradition, bespoke to
US and Israeli intelligence, and its political control mechanisms are slick
even by Western standards. It is the osmosis of bad habits via the demands of
Western solidarity.
In a moment of unguarded candor, the Berlin correspondent of the conservative
Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung bemoaned the unrestrained recruiting of
journalists and NGO representatives by German intelligence as far worse than
spying on journalists to plug leaks. This comment illuminated for a short
moment one of the rooms in the sub-basement of German foreign policy.
Of even greater salience for the shape of things to come is the introduction
into Germany of the linkage of intelligence and business, and of both to covert
operations. A story is floating around in the international media that the
former head of German intelligence and current member of parliament Bernd
Schmidbauer is allegedly the facilitator for an Israeli intelligence agent
turned businessman who is deeply involved in Israeli projects in Iraqi
Kurdistan. Using Schmidbauer's contacts among the leadership of the Iraqi
Kurds, the Israeli agent reportedly secured land contracts worth many millions
of dollars to give the Kurds a greater share of the (disappeared) billions from
the oil-for-food account.
It is probably just an interesting, albeit rather disingenuous cover-story. But
whatever the details, it is a fact that Schmidbauer is using his former office
for that kind of purpose, and that is the message. And it is hard to judge what
is worse: Schmidbauer involved in Israeli shenanigans that connect covert
operations to business profits; or a private venture doing the same.
The discontent with German military involvement
More immediate, however, are concerns that German soldiers are already being
sent into open-ended missions in potentially casualty-rich intervention
environments - environments where American (British and Israeli) policies have
publicly, contemptuously, and irreversibly debauched 100 years' worth of
international law that tried to regulate the use of military violence. The
German allies are running a kind of social-Darwinian selection experiment in
their militaries, to weed out the conscience-ridden, the susceptible, and the
whistle-blowers and to breed back the mind-set of colonial warfare against
"enemy populations", with all the repercussions on civil society that
this entails.
The resulting mercenary habits and "warrior ethics" - moral
inhibitions restrained in favor of racial contempt as part of unit bonding -
cannot but infect and then corrode and turn the once restrained professional
soldiers into the "citizen-soldiers" of a parliamentary army. The
more they are committed to operations in the "war on terror", the
more they will encounter the desperate hate of those who have been exposed to the
American ways of pacification.
In other words: there is fear that German forces will absorb this mentality by
participating in these society-destroying operations whose results can already
be seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine - and in future campaigns that have
the potential to deteriorate into annihilation warfare. The fear is not
far-fetched: one might look at the doctrinal evolution with regard to warfare
in the "global ghettos" or, by way of example, scrutinize the
strategies considered and the fervor for a war against Iran.
Those with legal training and some historical awareness cannot but see
parallels between what is happening now and the judicial and propaganda
preparations during the run-up to the German attack on Soviet Russia: imprinting
on the soldiers' minds that they are going to confront a sub-human, vicious,
cruel, and cunning enemy; then denying whole categories of enemy combatants
any legal status, depriving others of the protections of the Hague Conventions,
and limiting the protection of civilians by the code of military justice to the
bare bones of maintaining combat discipline and preventing the army from
turning into a raping, looting, murdering mob (which it did anyway, more often
than not, especially after the expected short road to victory turned into the
long slog towards defeat).
Thus, classifying anyone as a terrorist who fights, or as a supporter of
terrorism who could harbor hostile intent against, or support organizations
judged hostile to Western interventions and interests, wards and dependents,
simply extends the German experience of how to create a perverted ius in
bello from Soviet Russia to the whole globe. It aims, of course, to
delegitimize all armed (and increasingly unarmed) resistance to Western military
expeditions and occupation, even trying to get international law to proscribe
it because there is a population in the way ("human shields") of
killing the terrorists. Less concerned with finding a way around the Geneva
Conventions or the jurisdiction of Nuremburg is the innovative Israeli concept
of "terrorist population". It just puts a new title over an old
dictate: "Exterminate with extreme prejudice."
In the meantime, getting around the Geneva Conventions provided a challenging
occupation for the lawyers of the Bush Administration. They decided the Taliban
were "unlawful combatants" - though they were the soldiers of a
country the Clinton administration exercised heavy pressure on Germany to
recognize - because Afghanistan was a "failed state". Even if
Afghanistan under the Taliban would justify the term "failed state",
it is useful to keep in mind that the West bears a heavy responsibility for
making it thus. One has only to look at the textbooks and instruction material
provided to the mudjahedin by the US and its co-workers in the 1980s.
Particularly disturbing, though, is the deliberately transparent hypocrisy that
does not cover but flaunts a kind of violence that elementary common sense (not
to mention a sense of shame) would keep sporadic and isolated. But there are
now tens of thousands of victims of the institutionalized global archipelago of
black torture prisons and camps. They have been subjected by a select and
trained force to the result of decades of research into techniques of torture
and sexual humiliation, as a way, one is led to believe, of "searing
defeat into their minds", to spread the message that there is no recourse,
no redress, no defense; any resistance will just hasten the transition to the
violent dissolution of society, of the underpinnings for a functional state.
Moreover, the right to kill at will outside this system in covert free fire
zones, to keep the subcontracting domestic security apparatus of dependent
states on torture and assassination standby, cannot but herald the willful
surrender of any credible claim by these governments to legitimacy or capacity
for creating order. The United States and its allies are setting the stage for
the kind of massive violence last seen in the "pacification"
campaigns in colonial Africa and Asia. This time, however, it is for everyone
to see - and for quite a number of its strategists, this seems to be part of
the purpose.
The German political class and the media make all efforts to keep the scale and
ramifications of this system as far as possible from public debate and from
itself; if it deals with it at all, then it is as the unavoidable, though ugly,
battle scars on the face of Western values. The contortions involved in
refusing its connection to German military commitments and the ever more
drastic, networked security measures are nothing if not remarkable.
There is, nevertheless, a black thread connecting Germany to the explosion of
fundamentalist terrorism, buried in files and memories that reach back to the
late 1970s. At that time, Germany sought to assure the ascendancy of Islamist
right-wing organizations over its large Muslim community, to neutralize the
influence of left-wing organizations. The consequences of this kind of social
engineering are still in evidence today, and much bewailed by the political
class.
Germany hosted also a substantial emigre community of fundamentalists from
secular Arab countries - especially from Syria. Since Israeli intelligence had
the free run of Germany, and parts of German intelligence (as well as its
Bavarian godfathers) were at the beck and call of the Mossad, recruiting among
the Syrian Muslim Brothers in Germany for a terrorist campaign against the
government of Syrian President Hafez al-Assad could have been called a joint operation.
Co-financed by Saudi money, Israel and its South Lebanese mercenaries trained
them in camps in south Lebanon, advertized at that time as the
top-of-the-league graduate school offering instruction in all these interesting
techniques which make Western life now so thrilling.
This operation led, of course, to serious bloodletting in Syria. The survivors
either returned to Germany, possibly as recruiters for the anti-Soviet jihad in
Afghanistan, or transferred their talents directly to this new theater of
Western endeavors
Recruiting for subversion and terrorism requires screening, interrogation of
the bad apples and of the doubtful cases, and holding them for future use.
Germans helped in the screening but avoided the other procedures (at least, one
may hope so). The Khiam prison in south Lebanon was used for these purposes -
for torture and prisoner-breaking beyond the Israeli rule-book (high-value
kidnappees, though, are still kept in the "black wings" of Israeli
prisons, also designed to be beyond the reach of the already exceedingly
permissive rule-book).
The German connection to Israeli operations reached the awareness of some
senior German bureaucrats and exposed them to the meaning of "black
prison" via Khiam - which can be taken as one of the models for the
American system. The horror and revulsion of the susceptible ones had at least
the effect of making life difficult for former German foreign affairs minister
Joschka Fischer when he had to assert piously that there were "no
violators of human rights" among the 300 Lebanese torture- and
rape-artists Germany accepted from Israel.
The will to ignorance that dominates the German debate makes it all too easy to
sideline concerns about the myriad ways this system has begun to infest
Germany: via its special forces, trained in the US, Israel, and Great Britain;
or the officer exchange program with the US Army general staff college (where
its ideological underpinnings are taught in the writings of Israeli Arabist
Rafael Patai); via the busy network of itinerant torture specialists, bent
psychologists and MDs, interrogation trainers, and anthropologists. The
political principals are colluding with it behind the back of the less
controllable members of parliament, and frequently against the better judgment
of senior career officials.
What began in 2002 as a way to show solidarity with the Americans and went into
high gear in 2003 to rebuild bridges to the US, transmogrified the enthusiasm
of former Social Democratic interior secretary Otto Schily ("if they want
death, they can have it"), the cravenness of former foreign minister
Joschka Fischer, and Merkel´s impeccable "pro-American" credentials
into an ideological program to make Germany (and the EU) fit for eternal war
against the enemies of the West.
For decades, Germany, like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway, managed to be
regarded as more of a global social worker than as one of the closest American
allies. Its role was well served by keeping aloof from military interventions,
sticking scrupulously to its commitments, striving to coopt the modernizing
elites of developing countries into the Western system, even at the price of
high politics keeping itself ignorant of its netherworld's doings, and of
sometimes diverging from US policies. Germany´s good name was a net provider of
legitimacy for the West.
But under the new dispensation when the netherworld has become the main show
and the compensatory human rights rhetoric an ever more strident exercise in
hypocrisy, legitimacy seems to come from impunity. And the American political
class has no more patience with divergent interests, claims of independent
judgment, or "decent respect for the opinion of mankind".
The discontents with German-Israeli jointness
Last year, Germany inserted itself militarily into the Middle East's troubles
with a naval squadron off the Lebanese coast. Its mission: to prevent the
replenishment of Hezbollah armament stocks from the ocean. It has openly taken
sides, notwithstanding its sub rosa alliance with Israel for decades,
thus becoming part of a problem without a solution. Not only a majority of the
population refuses to support the German commitment; it is also accompanied by
the misgivings of quite a number of professionals - for good reasons.
One of them is rooted in the conviction that the pounding the US and Israel are
inflicting on the Middle East is locking the West into an unending cycle of
violence. Driving it is Israel's inability to consider peace more desirable
than keeping its conquests. Though it would be a real career killer to admit to
fears that Israel might use, or ignite itself, another conflagration in the
Middle East to resolve its Palestinian problem once and for all - and, at the
same time, to destroy all challenges to its hegemony - it is impossible not to
be aware of this prospect. It informs concerns about the impact of the
"war of civilizations" rhetoric that German (and European) opinion
leaders are spreading in the media; a rhetoric,that can turn any moment into a
free ticket for the Israeli leadership to get serious about what it has
prepared its allies to expect and what a majority of its population demands.
In fact, indicators that the Israelis might limit their ambition to
establishing a Bantustan-like system run by the Dahlan-Balusha goon squads of
Fatah appears to be taken by official Germany as testimony to admirable and
forward-looking Israeli restraint - to be encouraged, legitimized, and paid for
to keep the Israelis from "acts of desperation".
The use of the term "Bantustan" in this context has nothing to do
with an anti-semitic slur: when former South African premier and Nazi
sympathizer John Vorster visited Israel in 1976, Shimon Peres, Menachem Begin,
Yitzhak Rabin, Israel Shamir, et al, lauded the South African system of racial
separation as a role model for dealing with "their kushims"
("niggers"). And the conservative part of the German political class
(especially in Bavaria, where the rather incestuous relationship between German
intelligence and the Christian Social Union had sired its own foreign policy
priorities) was deeply involved in the strategic cooperation between Israel and
South Africa. Examples include support for the Mozambican National Resistance
(Renamo) - also dubbed the "Khmer Noir" for starting the African
plague of recruiting small children by traumatization - to WMD research, to the
illegal transfer of blueprints for a new class of cruise-missile capable
submarines. In the 1990s, by the way, Germany donated several of these
submarines to Israel.
During the 1970s and 1980s Israel and South Africa were joined at the hips in
their common fight against the kushims (and against the still numerous
Jewish communists, hated by the Israeli political class more than the remaining
German Nazis). And from some German conservative nooks and crannies, there was
always facilitation, scientific support, or co-financing available.
But the above-board German support for Israel has also a tradition of
unconditionality - since the 1970s especially - in co-financing the Israeli
ways of occupation and never holding Israel to its obligations under the Geneva
Conventions. During the Schmidt and Kohl governments it was tempered,
nevertheless, by their commitment "to facilitate dialogue". Much of
the reporting from the German embassy served to gauge where and when discrete German
assistance could make a difference in encouraging contact between official
Israel and chosen Palestinian interlocutors .
Under Green neoconservative foreign minister Fischer, though, not only context
had changed. He threw the principle of differentiation out of the window. He
chose himself as the main propagandist of Israeli claims that Palestinian
violence had nothing to do with the occupation but with the failure of
Palestinian leadership and institutions, with foreign instigation (led by Iran
and Syria), and that Israel is under "existential threat" by a tide
of anti-semitism rooted in cultural and political retardation. As rumor has it,
he even forbade any in-house discussion that went counter to his view of the
world, valuing Israeli (or US) instruction much higher than the briefings of
his desk officers.
At any rate, "unconditional support" came to mean no more in-house
dissonances in analysis or judgment from the "solitary"
interpretation of Israeli policies, motivations, and their consequences. The
Merkel government then screwed tight Fischer´s proactive approach towards
unconditionality - not only in supporting audibly and energetically last year's
efforts to destroy Hezbollah, but working up toward military involvement on the
Israeli side; its precise meaning will become much clearer with the next round
of war.
The direction of Germany´s involvement, though, is unambiguous: Germany
colluded avidly in preventing an early end to the Israeli campaign (during the
Rome Conference) and left no doubt about its underwriting the Israeli right to
kill and kidnap in Lebanon at will. In addition, in a gauche effort to rally
public support for intervention on the Israeli side, Merkel dubbed Germany´s naval
detachment in Lebanese waters (as well as the expanded United Nations Interim
Force in Lebanon's presence on the ground) as an "Israel Protection
Force". It goes without saying that Germany's assistance for Israeli
operations in Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Iran (in all three Germany has a
heavy intelligence presence) has grown in scope and risk.
Now, support for Israeli projects appears not any longer to be limited to
coordinating policies and information, or providing German passports for
Israeli undercover work in Iran (as had been reported in Der Spiegel), or a
pipeline to agents in Lebanese General Security (tracking Hezbollah leaders)
or, for that matter, to taking the lead in poisoning the initial investigations
into the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri (which was not
the beginning but a second spike in a series of assassinations - the first one
being the 2002 bombing of former Lebanese militia leader and Syrian politician
Eli Hobeika, who allegedly intended to testify in Brussels against Ariel Sharon
concerning the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre). Germany seems to have jumped
with both feet into the sectarian violence game, not (yet?) with hits but by
slaving at different levels of regional engagements to the commands of Israeli
and, to a more limited extent, to American operations.
If Israel's ambassador in Berlin, Shimon Stein, had not reckoned with the
domestic constraints on official Germany's solidarity with Israel, he could
claim for Germany what Justice Minister Haim Ramon and Daniel Ayalon, Israel's
ambassador in Washington, asserted blandly for the US last year: "… even
if our army should commit a 'mass massacre', the United States will still
support us" (quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique).
In fact, in earlier days official Germany would have looked discreetly away or
apologized "off the record" for the Israeli penchant for atrocities
such as the Kfar Qana massacre in south Lebanon - which Israel never made a
real effort to hide under its peculiar doctrine of deterrence. As General Motta
Gur said as long ago as 1978: "... the Israeli army has always struck
civilian populations purposely and consciously … the army … has never
distinguished civilian [from military] targets" (quoted in Haaretz). Now
Israel is demanding that official Germany demonstrate the correct attitude
against "terrorist populations" - and it does, in the name of the
"struggle against terrorism" and of preventing (!) "a war of
civilizations".
For obvious reasons, Germany's original economic support for Israel could never
have been considered leverage. But over the decades, its dimension and its
aggregate impact contributed decisively to the fact that Israel had never to
make hard choices; it subsidized the built-in maximalism in Israel's approach toward
its neighborhood and the pretension that its wars of choice were wars for
survival.
Separate from the meager individual recompensations, restitutions, etc, as
managed (very badly for the destitute) by the Jewish Claims Conference or the
Israeli state, German transfers up to now amount to at least 140 billion euros
(US$193.2 billion) from the federal government in cash, goods, weapons and
patents, another 20 to 30 billion euros in public-private partnership
arrangements, plus billions more via EU mechanisms.
It is not surprising, therefore, that there is an uneasy awareness of German
co-responsibility in fostering the combination of economic dependence, foreign
funded militarism and the peculiar and exceedingly corrupt nature of the
Israeli Praetorian state. The permanent state of siege and its steadily more
powerful racist undercurrents have become the source of its cohesion and define
its relationship to the world. As anyone knows who is acquainted with the
Israeli debate, the old mantra that Israel will make the "concessions
necessary for peace" if it feels sufficiently secure and supported, is
good for public consumption and perhaps self-hypnosis, but nothing else.
Since Israel managed to persuade the Western political classes (the most
fragile and corrupt Arab regimes need no convincing) that Palestinians'
aspirations - as well as their rights under the Geneva Conventions - are
unrealistic and therefore basically illegitimate, they have become a sideshow.
Especially Europe appears resolved to stabilize it in limbo with lip service
and sporadic shows of activism - but with hard support, of course, for those
Israeli measures designed to break the last strands of Palestinian political
and social cohesion.
As any undergraduate in coercive social engineering knows, destroying the
social and economic infrastructure of a society to the extent that there are no
more sources of independent social authority that could regenerate organized
resistance, leaves the field to the broken, the cynics, the corrupt, the
self-haters, the fantasists, and the criminals - and inflicts them on a
dispirited, disposable mass of humanity.
The Iranian ascendancy, in contrast, is billed as the main show. And it was
Fischer (ably assisted by France and Great Britain) who took the lead in
navigating the European negotiating position between the American-Israeli push
for war and the need to avoid it in view of the to-be-expected domestic
repercussions; between the resolve to deny the Iranian right to close the
nuclear fuel cycle and to hide the bad faith of their negotiating approach.
Fischer made the issue repeatedly clear: the Iranian nuclear program signals
the will to achieve "regional hegemony" to the detriment of the
Israeli - and for him, the only legitimate one - claim to regional
predominance.
When the government of then-Iranian president Mohammad Khatami offered in 2003,
practically hat-in-hand, to negotiate with the US all outstanding bilateral
problems - only to be refused, as he was part of the "axis of evil" -
this was absorbed in a European proposal, that offered vague promises and no
security guarantees, for the dismantling of the whole Iranian nuclear complex
(including the courses and training in advanced nuclear engineering), plus the
hobbling of its missile program.
Through the subterfuges and permutations of these negotiations, the German
commitment to a peaceful resolution was always highly conditional, and Israel
acquired something like a behind-the-scenes veto on the limits of the German
position. It could (and can) well appreciate that for Germany - praised by
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as the best Israeli ally - to join a war
against Iran would at that time have destroyed Fischer´s Green Party as well as
the government (and it still might do so now); not to join it would have
created another trans-Atlantic rift, much deeper than the one caused by the
Iraq war. Such rifts have a logic of their own and the potential to deeply
fracture the German (and European) political landscape.
The German political class is hamstrung and duly embarrassed over the lack of
martial spirit in its population. But under the banner of "anything but
war (now)", it maneuvers and waits for the right constellation that frees
its hand: a Western uproar over a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident, a major
terrorist event in the US or Germany, which will have nothing to do with Iran
but could create the right popular mood. It compensates in the meantime with
German overt and covert involvement for Israel's willingness not to put quite yet
German domestic politics to the test. Nevertheless, after so many aborted moves
toward war, the "war now" party in the US may any time push the Bush
administration over the brink and tell the Germans to deal with it or even make
it a test of the Merkel government´s survivability and pro-American stance.
Discontent with the seeding of future conflicts
Paul Wolfowitz noted with satisfaction in 1999 (in The National Interest) that
his Lone-Ranger position of 1992 had turned into the bi-partisan consensus of
US grand strategy: never to permit again a power, or combination of powers, on
the Eurasian landmass to achieve the capacity to act as a "peer
challenger" to US interests. And it is this principle that the European
political elites are about to underwrite, too. Its apologetics are tried out in
working- and study-groups: democracy and free markets can only take root when
the Russian state is deprived of the economic, social, and demographic
resources for its reconstitution as a viable ("imperial") power; and
China, for the same reasons, has to be dissected into five independent states.
And all of this by the right combination of applying hard (overwhelming
military) and soft (dissolving elite and regime cohesion) power.
These are, of course, just fond hopes or selling points. In reality, it is a
prescription for decades of chaos and violence, with a deep impact on Europe
and Asia. But even these - one might call them Plan B - prospects may have much
to recommend themselves from the American perspective, and they offer even an
absolutely convincing, though difficult to pitch, strategic rationale for
developing a global ballistic missile defense network.
It is this consensus, nevertheless, that provides the only reliable guide to
the course of US policies towards Russia and China - and insight into the
nature of the "hedges" against the worsening of relations be it with
Russia, be it with China, or both. Since being tougher on national security
than the next guy (or girl) or the sitting administration, is the coin of
national strategy debates between Republicans and Democrats as well as the
ultimate arbiter of the career prospects for elected office,
"hedging" has not much to do with taking out insurance. It has,
instead, everything to do with being able to initiate confrontations.
"Hedging" with regard to China highlights this approach. The massive
building of depth into the American military dispositions in the Western
Pacific, the pressures upon Taiwan to get on with its US$12-18 billion arms
buying program, the success in integrating the Taiwanese as well as the
increasingly offensive Japanese posture into American operations plans,
enticing India into sharpening its strategic profile against China, are sold as
measures for Asian stability. This is, however, everything that the hawks of
the "confront-China" lobby ever demanded, minus the damage to
US-Chinese economic relations.
These "hedges" are not designed to work as an insurance mechanism but
as the rock slide overhanging China's continuously narrowing path between a
sheer cliff face and the abyss. More prosaically, whenever America's internal
bargaining comes up with the ace of spades for China, "full spectrum
dominance" should be in place. Or so one might think. The problem,
however, is the destabilizing consequences of the effort in getting there. The
Chinese cannot but react to what they surely appreciate as the tailoring of a
strategic straitjacket to immobilize them for vivisection, ie, "soft"
regime change.
Similar considerations hold with regard to Russia. The expansion of NATO to
members of the former Warsaw Pact and to the Baltic countries, as well as the
anticipated one to the Ukraine and Georgia, are equally sold as a joist of
Eurasia's security architecture. Ironically enough, the same rationale is given
for the German-led efforts to draw the Central Asian and Caucasian republics -
and, in particular, the Caspian resources - out of the Russian into the Western
orbit. In this, Russia's "true, legitimate interests" are being served
because this process encourages democracy, accountable government, respect for
human rights, and the non-violent resolution of territorial conflicts.
The tongue-in-cheek character of the "stability" rhetoric reveals
itself most clearly in the hasbara about the "missile shield"
installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, ostensibly directed against
incipient threats from North Korea (which is in the process of denuclearizing
itself) and Iran (whose threat potential against the US is as phantasmagorical
as its supposed intentions are fictional). They are sold to mass media
consumers as insurance against the familiar "madmen"; to the more
discerning audience as not directed against Russia (and Russian complaints are
sold as Russian mischief-making), and to the more worried western European
insiders, in classified briefings, as a "hedge" with growth potential
to dissuade the evolution of a greater than expected Russian or Chinese threat.
In reality, as even the more godfearing observers of US policies cannot help
but notice, it is a provocative move designed to trap the Russians into easily
denouncable, but helpless gestures of protest and to put the onus on them for
burdening further the EU-Russian relationship. And Russia has no way to evade
the trap: retch or spit, down it will go.
At the same time, it increases the political weight of America's main allies in
Eastern Europe. It provides the substance for aligning Poland and the Czech
Republic (plus their Baltic retinue) ever closer with US policies - a US-dependent
sub-NATO within a sub-EU. In the short term, this issue cannot but further
weaken the already fragmenting will of the western European part of the EU to
negotiate (in good faith) a successor to the partnership and cooperation
agreement between the EU and Russia.
In the longer run, the substantial American military presence these two
installations require, will tighten the strategic noose around Russia's throat.
In addition, if the US should really place an additional installation in
Georgia, this move would deliberately put the detonator for a US-Russian
confrontation into the hands of the reckless and irresponsible Georgian
leadership. In this context, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's slip of
the tongue in terming Russia "the Soviet Union" is not only Freudian
but a declaration of intent.
The Kaczynski twins, President Lech and Prime Minister Jaroslaw of Poland
respectively, also let everyone have a peek at the cat in the bag. In high
dudgeon that its partners in NATO and the EU as well as the Russians might want
to have a say in such a momentous decision, they maintained that the missile
shield should not worry any "normal country".
But Russia, obviously, is nothing if not an "abnormal" country for
the right-wing majority of the Polish political class: still indignant that
Russia spoilt the imperial dreams (Poland from the Baltic to the Black Sea)
that led General Josef Pilsudski to attack Russia in 1920, only to be defeated
by the treacherous Reds; still resentful that World War II did not begin and
end differently than it did; resenting that it has not yet managed a place at
the Western high table, they expect the United States to procure them, at
least, a special role within NATO (it recently blackmailed for itself a special
position in the EU), and further down the line, a zone of Polish influence -
from the Baltic to the Black Sea - and the right of first look for any
territorial bits that may be on offer if or when Russia dissolves further (eg,
the region of Kaliningrad).
Viewing these efforts in their full scope while keeping in mind the incessant
din of media hostility against Russia (not forgetting the provocative mixture
of subtle and crass intelligence operations), all of this is looking less like
a hedge than moving the pieces for the endgame. One recent report of the well
connected, US-based, private intelligence agency, Strategic Forecasting, Inc or
Stratfor, on "The New Logic for Ballistic Missile Defense", spells it
out rather bluntly: "… [T]he US is not yet finished with Moscow from a
strategic perspective. Washington wants to pressure Russia until its will, as
well as its ability, to pose a viable threat completely disintegrates."
And the Russians are quite aware of the vector of US policies. Russian
President Vladimir Putin's speech at the security conference in Munich, even
Mikal Gorbachev´s recent interventions as well as Valentin Falin's widely
discussed somber analysis last year, tell the same story.
They are up against the wall and have neither time nor good options. As
Germany's Peter Struck, the Social Democratic former secretary of defense and
current parliamentary whip, rather smugly, maintained: "The Russians would
lose another Cold War". This in response to the "gobbledygook"
of Putin's list of grievances at the Munich conference in February. A
flash-poll, by the way, did show that a majority of Germans seems to have
grasped its import and a majority even supported Putin's sentiments, in spite
of the exceedingly derogatory chorus of the German media.
There is some worry that all of this might push the Russians into the arms of
the Chinese. It touches, though, the outer limits of what is considered a
legitimate worry. But there is the comforting notion that for such a rather
fundamental revision of its foreign policy, Russia is neither strong and
reliable enough to perform it, nor are the Russian elites ready to support it.
Working toward a closer Russian-Chinese relationship - and knowing that China
will turn out to be the stronger partner (however carefully the Chinese may
defer to Russian sensitivities) - for a measure of security and independence,
would require not only despair, but a sea-change in attitudes of the
loot-corroded, fantasist and cynical majority of the new Russian elites. As the
wag says in Influence 101: "You can always get to the elite Russians; half
of them hate Mother Russia because Petersburg and Moscow aren't Paris or
London; the other half hate her because she spawned the first half."
It helps, of course, that Western intelligence and quasi-NGOs are keeping the
Russian leadership worried about domestic stability. To enrich its options, the
West maintains influence also with the xenophobic right, anti-Chinese liberals,
with the fighters for Chechen independence and others interested in ethnic
strife games. Meanwhile the "new Russians" hope, against all odds,
that Europe might still come around to provide the kind of safe anchorage
against hostile policies Germany and France seemed able to offer in 2002/2003
and thus rescue their rent-funded, cosmopolitan dreams.
All of this is close enough to reality to foster the illusion the Russians can
be managed; it just needs a little less obvious contempt and hectoring and a
little bit more cooperative rhetoric to satisfy their craving for respect. This
is more hope than reality, though - hope that will be disappointed, especially
since Western politics and the venomously Russophobe media will make sure that
the Russians are always aware of the stake which is to be driven through their
collective heart.
There is, of course, also the Chinese perspective. Those Western China analysts
from which its German section takes its cue seem to draw some satisfaction from
observing China and Russia hands wondering whether the Russian leadership is
still in thrall to its Western hopes and whether it is not continuing to commit
slow suicide. These questions are not unreasonable. Russia is investing
everywhere while it has not yet even restored its economy to the levels of
1989. Its industries, infrastructure, research, education, and health are still
suffering from catastrophic underinvestment.
Since the West organized and oversaw the liquefaction of Soviet assets and
their hemorrhaging out of Russia to the tune of about US$800 billion worth of
cash, goods, and patents (including Boris Yelzin's gift to the US of the crown
jewels of Soviet military and space technologies), as well as tens of thousands
of its best engineers and scientists, one might think it would do all to
recover from a disaster at least as bad as what Germany did to the Soviet Union
in World War II, and form a peace worse than the one of the Brest-Litovsk
Treaty of 1918.
But even here, Western policies make sure that Russians and Chinese cannot but
perceive the beginnings of the mobilization for economic warfare against both
of them. All of a sudden investment barriers against Chinese and Russian
capital appear in the US and in western Europe. There are substantial efforts
devoted to coordinate the rolling-back of Chinese encroachment on the Western
right to African raw materials - in the name of human rights and good
governance (which is like Bluebeard, still gnawing on his latest virgin's
femur, complaining about a peasant who sullies his next lunch with exploitive
marriage proposals). And there is the hue and cry raised about the Russian and
Chinese doing what the US is doing excessively: marking certain industrial
sectors as "strategic".
The Chinese Western analysts are quite astute observers of where their Western
counterparts are coming from. But educated under the all-encompassing need to
gain time and strength to be able to survive gloomy geopolitical weather, the
Chinese debate about Russia and the West just echoes the more salient debate:
whether they are able to influence American (Western) perceptions and reactions
to China's rise, at what price, and for how long. There are still those,
frequently highlighted in Western workshops, quoting Russian voices about the
impossibility of Russian-Chinese strategic cooperation, referring obliquely and
with the due amount of nostalgia, to the golden age of Chinese-American
strategic cooperation against the Soviets, and wondering audibly whether its
resurrection might not promise another dawn in Chinese relations with the West.
But one does not need to carefully examine these debates. Though there is no
audience for bad messages, it has not escaped the attention of the professional
worriers that Russian and Chinese decision-makers seem to have concluded that
they face a similar and geopolitically connected future. They may expect to be
able to delay or blunt it but cannot evade it. The continuous Western efforts
to leverage elite dissent as well as to force-grow and groom alternative elites
(with their typical mixture of venality and blind idealism) in an increasingly
worsening security environment, have hardened the conviction that they are up
against a strategy to enable repeats of the Soviet collapse.
Indicators for the expectations of Russian and Chinese decision-makers are
percolating through their foreign policy and military bureaucracies and are
being picked up: the elimination, defeat, or terminal neutralization of the one
will be the beginning of the same fate for the other. And they seem to feel
that this is being imposed on them; it has not much to do with their choice of
policies. The beginnings of a co-evolution of their strategic doctrines,
therefore, has to be taken seriously. They don't care about facing the full
range of American military power but think about how to stymie and defeat its
deployment in the incipient stages of operations.
How to develop a posture capable of inflicting massive losses on US air power
and carrier groups without requiring a hair-trigger posture seems to draw a lot
of attention. There appears to be even a debate about preemption. With regard
to nuclear deterrence, it appears to be moving toward a marriage between
massive retaliation and different options of "technological decapitation"
(ie, destroying selectively the netspace of military command and control as
well as its fallback operations, plus regime and elite continuity functions).
In order to get a better understanding of its present strategic predicament,
the Russian military has even begun to approach, very gingerly, the causes for
the erosion of Soviet deterrence in the 1980s, especially the reasons why it
could not react by increasing its force readiness to what it perceived as
indications of Anglo-American maneuvering towards war.
But whatever the scenarios for the future or the probings of the past, Russia
as well as China are for the foreseeable future much too weak to compete
militarily at eye level with the West. Both have to struggle uphill just to
make their militaries credible defenders of the integrity of the state. And
there is almost no military backup for the political task of preventing a
further deterioration of their strategic environment. They can neither rely on
their ability to deflect the US from efforts to control it nor could they
compete for control without mortgaging the survival of the state.
It is the paucity of their military and political choices that drives them
together; but the need to avoid the hair trigger of American confrontation
renders an explicit military alliance impractical. The Russians know it, the
Chinese know it. And strategy-minded Americans count on the fact that a thin
mattress makes bad bedfellows. But they also know that American politics are
not strategy-minded; they generate their own stimuli for action.
After the Russian 1990s - and the Chinese 149 years after 1840 - no illusions
are possible about the fate either of them should the West again gain control
over their polities. This plus their weakness, however, should assist not only
the credibility of a defensive nuclear posture but also give the Europeans or
the Japanese reasons to think about the consequences of strategic desperation.
Below this threshold, though, it is all coercive bargaining - be it under the
guise of common interests or in the open, "jump, or else". There are no
common interests, there is just jockeying for position and deferred hostility.
When Henry Kissinger and Yevgeny Primakov established their joint working-group
of American and Russian elder statesmen to deal with "the threat of
nuclear terrorism and proliferation" (as Kissinger described it), there
is, therefore, a subtext: "Work with us regarding Iran (or the eventual
"securing" of Pakistani nuclear warheads) because the first instance
of nuclear terrorism could take place in Russia." One does not need to be
of a wildly paranoid cast of mind to see the possibilities, eg, in view of the
very close relations the British maintain with the Chechen resistance, and the
dozens of tons of Soviet warhead material still waiting to be reworked into
nuclear fuel rods.
The point is, there is no need for even an implied specific message. The
awareness of so many fingers on so many operational triggers is quite
sufficient for the prudent assumption: "What is thinkable, is possible;
what is possible will happen, sometime, somewhere." In the meantime, one
has to act as if some sort of reason and predictability might yet return to the
exercise of American power.
Part 3: Hoisting the American flag. The German educated middle classes,
still hung over from their half century of ideological debauche and from
Germany's role as a genocidal ogre take great satisfaction in their country's
reputation as a mostly harmless global social worker. They are reluctant to
subscribe to an ideology of global mayhem and a "defense of Western
values". But the German media are working overtime to change their minds.
Axel Brot is the pen name for a German defense analyst and
former intelligence officer.