Scientists last spring reported that human’s eyes are constantly darting minutely about their sockets. In attempting to explain why they might do this, scientists found that if the eyes weren’t always distracted, the field of vision would dissolve into an average washed out grey. The eye trick was first discovered in birds who are able to still their eyes when up in a branch searching the lawn beneath for worms. When their field of vision washes out, only those things in it that move take on an image in their retina, and this is how birds see worms amidst grass from relatively far away.
When we look at Iraq today, we are distracted by Sunni-on-Sunni, Sunni-on-Shiite, Shiite-on-Kurd, and all-three-on-Americans, violence. If we are able to still our eyes till all the detail of daily news in the papers washes out to the average shape of the nations involved, a different take on things emerges.
As a nation, Iraq has successfully lured America into a vast bear trap. China has engineered a massive rise in stature because of it. Iran has risen as the dominating regional power as a direct result of it.
America’s military, for the last 60 years the muscle behind the global American economic empire, and predicated on the capacity to open up a second major war even while already fighting another major war, has never been more thin and vulnerable, and the empire wholly dependent upon it never more shaky, than right now. Far from asking what progress the Iraqi government and parliament are making on addressing their dire national issues, the world should be asking what progress America is making—or for that matter, what progress that part of the world that is not America, is making—in the wider field of the never ending game of international competition.
It is easy to overlook the world beyond terminally narcissistic America, even for those outside of America. The global reach of its culture and media makes America’s big fat it’s-all-about-me syndrome hard to see around even for those clear across the other side of the world.
So while Americans in America—the conscious ones anyway—busy themselves with worry about the state of America, and their elected leaders worry about who in American leadership lost Iraq, just as they worried about who in American leadership lost China, who lost Korea, and who lost Vietnam (with little regard, it must be noted, for history and forces indigenous to China, Korea, and Vietnam), there is a whole different point of view to consider, an it’s-all-about-them point of view, in which major gains of historical note quite irrelevant to America need to be recorded and filed, too.
In the historic and maddeningly complex tug-of-war between Cairo, Riyadh, Baghdad and Tehran, Washington might more accurately be viewed as a minor character of only passing relevance. While each of those capitals have their own tenor of relations with Washington, it is easy to overlook the possibility they have more important relations of both a positive and negative nature between each other. Did Tehran pull a stunt that drew in Washington’s guns to duly eliminate the real enemy, Baghdad, as a rival? Did China figure out a way to best Japan as the East Asian dominator by draining American guns away from Tokyo? Did Moscow pull a string and draw Europe back closer to itself by sowing confusion, dissent and discord between Washington and Paris, London, and Berlin?
The very notion that some events of global magnitude might not in fact be about Washington no longer occur in the minds of most Western analysts. Certainly very rarely does it occur to even the most progressive and prescient of American commentators that events in which Washington is lured into is only so they play a bit part, however crushingly. The war in Iraq might not be about Washington’s interests at all.
Yet the war in Iraq is stubbornly analyzed almost exclusively from a Washington-centric point of view by both rooters and critics alike. In endless debates about why Washington attacked Iraq, the spectrum of debate is limited to those who say it was about oil, those who maintain it was about terrorism, and even those who see broader, more historic but still American-centric machinations in play. They all fail to notice any possibility that the war happened not due to any American interests at all, whether noble or otherwise, but may in fact be about other nation’s aims, other nations that duped America into doing some dirty work for them.
This is no apologia for America at its moment of ignominious defeat in Iraq. Physically diminutive crime bosses routinely deploy muscle-bound henchmen who do their dirty work unaware of the real nature and purpose of making dead some restaurant goer they only have a picture of to identify. The hit-man is guilty of murder in any event, and deserves the punishment for it, but may not be guilty of plotting the murder.
Analysts of the American hit on Iraq might with benefit raise their eyes from the minute details in that picture to see other more crafty and conniving players higher up on the IQ charts pulling dumb muscleman Washington’s strings to achieve regional or global aims quite unrelated to American interests in oil or in terrorism.
How many times in the elementary school yard did you see some little kid slap the head of a grunt standing beside another grunt, then step back and watch with silent glee as the two grunts box each other’s heads into comas, leaving the object of all their desires sitting there waiting for the little kid to pick it up unmolested? How hard would it have been for Tehran, say, to slap dumb America upside the head on 9/11 and point at Baghdad when angry America turned around? Or for China, for Russian, for Germany or for France, among so many others, to figure out the same possibility?
America, powerful as it is, is very late to the game of international intrigue, a game in which Europeans, Russians, Chinese and Persians have a millennia or more head-start. Those four have been screwing each other around for so long, the tricks they know would be enough to make young America’s head spin. Never too bright in the first place, it is significant to note that the game of “he did it!” came on the watch of the universally acclaimed dumbest president in US history.
It is time to open up the analysis of 9/11 to considerations of Russian aims in relations with Europe, in Chinese aims in relations with Japan, and in Iranian aims in relations with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Analysts who condemn America’s apparent aims and methods in Iraq might be sitting right beside supporters of American aims and methods, both unwittingly serving the nefarious and quite different interests of some other quite different actor.
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