00:00 Gilbert Achcar: Well, I'll try to draw, in something like twenty minutes, a balance sheet of the situation in the area, starting from 9/11 — not because 9/11 is such a watershed by itself, but because it was used as a convenient ideological pretext to launch a set of offensives that were very much in preparation for the US empire.
00:32 And the key motivation behind all that is of course what Phil was pointing to: the issue of oil, the control over oil — I mean the area of oil and gas, actually hydrocarbons, the whole area of the greater Middle East, as they labelled it in Washington later on. And that is for various obvious reasons, some of which are economic, some others are strategic. And strategic issues here are very important, added to the fact that part of that area borders Russia and China [?]. This is one of the major concerns of US imperialism — that is, the alliance that started in the nineties between these two countries, the two most likely challengers of US hegemony worldwide.
01:36 So 9/11 was used as a convenient [pretext] [?] for that, and it led to a set of offensives, starting with Afghanistan and then dealing with what George W. Bush called the axis of evil. I'm speaking here of the Middle Eastern part of that axis of evil — the non-Muslim part was added just for affirmative action — and that's Iraq and Iran.
02:37 So, Afghanistan, as you know, was invaded, but not really invaded actually. When we use the term invasion about Afghanistan and Iraq, that could be misleading, in the sense that to topple the Taliban the United States relied on local allies, the Northern Alliance — another brand of fundamentalists. And the United States never committed the crazy mistake they committed in Iraq; for Afghanistan they never really thought that they could impose total control over that country.
03:09 And that translates in the fact that you have one tenth of the number of US troops in Afghanistan compared to Iraq, which is ridiculous if one wanted to exert real control over Afghanistan. So they knew about the fact that this country is a very difficult one. But the key point was to set [up] a US permanent military presence in the country, because of the strategic location of the country — and here I am referring to what I mentioned about strategic issues — and also to use the war in Afghanistan as a pretext to set foot in Central Asia, [in] the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. And that's what has been done: setting up US military bases in countries like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
04:12 And if we look at the balance sheet of this first stage of the post-9/11 imperial drive, well, the balance sheet here is already disastrous, in the sense that the United States had to withdraw from Uzbekistan — the Uzbek government, well, not for good reason, but because this despotic government didn't like very much the reaction to the kind of uprising you had there. But nevertheless the United States were very comfortable dealing with a despot there, as they are doing with other despots in the area, from the Arab Middle East to Iran [?] to Central Asia. [Still,] the United States had to leave Uzbekistan and they lost the base that they had there. This is a major setback for what they achieved after 9/11.
05:15 And then if we look at Afghanistan, well, we moved from the situation of toppling the Taliban and taking control over the country into a situation where what is actually occurring is the Taliban besieging NATO forces in that country. There has been a major comeback by the Taliban, as you all know, and the failure of US policies here is completely blatant. This is absolutely disastrous as a balance sheet for the United States, and it's not over. It's not over.
05:46 As for Iraq: the United States invaded that country with the belief that it would be — if we don't want to use the term "cakewalk", which was very much commented on — but they believed that the military aspect of toppling Saddam Hussein would be [easy], and that was indeed not very difficult. They believed that they would have almost the same facility in laying control over the country as they had in post-1945 Germany or Japan, and that was the kind of blueprint that was moving them. They very much studied the experiences of post-war nation building, as they call it, in Germany and Japan, [and] thought that that would be a kind of repeat of the experience.
06:48 And that also translated in the fact that Rumsfeld thought — you had a debate even at the Pentagon at that time over the number of troops needed for Iraq, and the idea was that we don't need much, a limited expeditionary corps would be enough. And a few months after the invasion they started understanding that that was completely unrealistic, and they found out that pro-Iranian Shia forces in Iraq are much stronger than what they expected them to be, and actually control the Shia street, which means sixty per cent at least of the population of Iraq, all included, Arabs and Kurds.
07:52 And ever since then the United States has been coping with very difficult conditions in that country. From nation building, from US design of institutions and the rest, they had to move into a classical divide-and-rule kind of policy. Under the pressure of the Shia movement the United States had to organise elections in that country, and the elections were won by pro-Iranian Shiite forces. And ever since then, as I said, the United States is trying to divide and rule, playing Arab Sunnis and Kurds against Shiites and vice versa in various ways, and ended up just fuelling tendencies toward civil war — which in Iraq is not in the interest of the United States.
08:55 Divide and rule is fine as a game as long as you can control it and rule. But if what you get is only divide — that's what they are getting in Iraq — then it's a total disaster. And this drift of Iraq toward civil war has become the most visible sign of US failure, US defeat one could say politically speaking, in Iraq.
09:57 And therefore Washington, as soon as 2004, moved to the other priority, the remaining member of the axis of evil: Iran. Iran being seen not only as a target in itself — in the fact that Iran is, according to figures, either the second or the third holder of oil reserves in the world — but also Iran as a condition for US control over Iraq and over the whole area, because Iran has become by far the major obstacle to US hegemony over the whole Middle East, and therefore a main obsession for the team in Washington.
10:58 So starting from 2004 that has become the key priority, which also explains a certain number of moves related to the fact that when they say Iran in Washington, they don't think only of the country named Iran but of a whole arc of forces, the epicentre of which is in Tehran. That includes, of course, the already-mentioned pro-Iranian Shiite forces in Iraq; it also includes the Syrian regime; of course Hezbollah, which is very closely tied to Iran, also as a Shiite organisation sharing the same kind of ideology that is ruling Iran; and Palestinian Hamas.
11:30 And by the very description of that arc of forces you can already see that labelling these forces as Shia is completely misleading, because at least two members of this kind of regional alliance could not be described as Shia. And this is Hamas, which is a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist organisation, and the Syrian regime, which is not even a fundamentalist or even a religious kind of regime, but a so-called — between a lot of quotation marks — secular regime, claiming to be socialist, officially speaking. Well, of course it's a mafia-like kind of dictatorship, but nevertheless it's not the type of regime having natural affinities with Iran. And the only real common denominator between these forces and countries is just opposition to US designs over the area.
13:06 And Washington believed that the weakest link in this regional alliance is Lebanon, where in one blow you could deal blows to three forces actually: Hezbollah, behind it Iran, and of course the Syrian regime, troops of which were in Lebanon before 2005.
13:40 And so starting [in] 2004 there was increasing pressure by Washington, with the help of Paris — which by the way shows the limitation of Paris's disagreement with Washington over Iraq, which I think no one in this room ever believed was anything principled, but just a matter of very material, pragmatic interest related to Iraq and former French ties with Saddam Hussein.
14:13 Anyway, starting from 2004 there was this pressure over the issue of the [presidency] [?], which translated into a resolution by the UN Security Council. [Inaudible — the assassination of Rafic Hariri.] [Then] a mass mobilisation of quite huge scope in Lebanon, which compelled the Syrian regime to remove its troops from the country.
14:44 But, to the great disappointment of Washington, what happened after that is [that] instead of moving to stage number two related to Lebanon, [in] Washington they understood that actually Washington's Lebanese [allies] don't have enough strength to deal with Hezbollah, and what was needed was outside intervention. That's the first time in history that Israel launches a war to impose the implementation of a UN Security Council resolution.
15:49 And, well, you know the rest of the story, in the sense that that was a real fiasco. It was not an absolute failure, in the sense that Washington took over and tried to continue the war by other means, through the deployment [of troops] to help the Lebanese government in the implementation of Security Council resolutions, including of course the disarming of Hezbollah. And that's why — after the resignation of Hezbollah and other Shiite ministers from the Lebanese government — this opposition is asking for veto power in the government, and there's a tug of war going on in the country over that.
16:49 In that case Washington was keen on preventing any kind of agreement, or renewed compromise, in Lebanon, and trying to push the country towards civil war — a civil war which Washington would like to see with NATO intervention in it, and that's why NATO troops have been deployed.
17:20 The same could be said about Palestine, where Washington suffered another setback in January 2006 with the victory of Hamas in the parliamentary election. And ever since that victory Washington has exerted enormous pressure on Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority and Washington's partner among the Palestinians — although not the closest one to Washington; there are even closer people in Fatah, like Dahlan, for those among you who follow the situation closely. Washington has been exerting very big pressure in order to prevent any compromise — in the same way as [in] Lebanon; these are twin situations — to prevent any compromise between the two camps among Palestinians, and to push toward civil war.
18:23 But all that shows the extent to which the overall US agenda, or the Bush administration's agenda [in the] area, has been defeated. And this became quite obvious for everybody, the United States included, and that led to the Bush administration turning into a minority in its own country. I'm not only referring to public opinion polls, but of course also to the November election and the fact that the US administration has lost Congress; but also, and even to a certain extent more importantly, this administration has become a very obvious minority within the US establishment, including major sections of the Republicans.
18:54 And the majority consensus among the US ruling class is better represented by the famous Baker–Hamilton kind of report. It's a bipartisan commission, Baker–Hamilton, and Baker represents, let's say, a more traditional section of the Republican party and the legacy of Bush senior, which is quite different from the son.
19:59 And therefore this has been a major turning point in the situation, and has led to something which is not emphasised enough, or not even noticed, in some of the western media: it has led to the major ally of the United States in the area starting to move independently from the Bush administration. And I'm referring here to the Saudi kingdom. The Saudis are much closer to the Baker–Hamilton kind of approach, especially with their present king, than to the George W. Bush administration; and, seeing the extent of the disasters, they have started to try to move on this other line — the Baker–Hamilton approach, which is: deal with Iran, deal with Syria, try to get some kind of compromise to stabilise the situation, otherwise you're heading toward disaster.
21:04 And that's what the Saudis have started doing. They started intensive negotiations with Iran in recent months and weeks. They are promoting attempts at compromise in Iraq with the Iranians. The same goes for Lebanon, where the Saudis are intensively negotiating with the Iranians and with the two Lebanese camps in order to foster some [kind] of compromise between them. And as you know, the Saudis also godfathered the reconciliation between the two Palestinian camps — and that was the so-called Mecca conference, which led to the formation of this coalition government in Palestine.
21:35 All this to the great resentment of the Bush administration, because it doesn't fit into its own views. And that also is a further indication of the extent of the disaster that not only this administration, actually, but the whole US imperial agenda for the area has suffered. Thank you.
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