by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
The power of his map is in its simplicity. Barnett graphically defines what he terms his “horizontal” way of thinking by mapping out the locations of major American military operations since the end of the Cold War. These zones fall almost entirely within the region of what he refers to as the “non-integrating gap.” This vast region, he contends, is disconnected from the global flows of people, capital, and security that sustain mutually assured dependence across “the core.” The resulting territorial division of the globe is what Barnett describes as “the Pentagon’s new map” defining American security challenges in the twenty-first century (Figure 10.1).54 Rather than read this ordering of the planet as a legacy of colonialism, structural inequality, or un-derdevelopment, Barnett writes: “September 11 told me that globalization’s uneven spread around the planet delineated more than just a frontier separating the connected from the disconnected—it marks the front lines in a struggle of historic proportions. The combatants in this conflict harbor very different dreams about the future.”55
Barnett notes that “the true enemy” is “neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (the Middle East), but a condition—disconnectedness.” He continues: “To be disconnected in this world is to be kept isolated, deprived, repressed, and uneducated. For the masses, being disconnected means a lack of choice and scarce access to ideas, capital, travel, entertainment, and loved ones overseas. For the elite, maintaining disconnectedness means control and the ability to hoard wealth, especially that generated by the exportation of valued raw materials.”56 Although he notes the enemy is a condition, not a place, his map of the “gap” region results in a territorially contiguous space where he claims globalization has not reached (note Figure 10.1). “These are the world’s bad neighborhoods . . . the enter-at-your-own risk regions.”57
Figure 10.1. Barnett’s “Core” and “Gap.” “The Pentagon’s new map” as redrawn in Roberts, Secord, and Sparke, “Neoliberal Geopolitics,” 2003.
Barnett views globalization as a process in which the local dissolves into the emerging global mosaic, but like Friedman, he worries that the Middle East is resisting such integration. Due to its vast oil resources as well as its religious and cultural proclivities, Barnett argues that the Middle East continues to be the region “most disconnected from the global economy by many measures and it’s getting worse with time. . . . Simply put, the Middle East exports oil and terrorism and virtually nothing else of significance to the global economy.”58 In his view, Middle Eastern societies tend to “harbor very different dreams about the future.” He notes that “Saddam Hussein’s outlaw regime was dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world. . . . He was the Demon of Disconnectedness.”59
Such views of the Middle East have provided the basis for claims by American and other Western policy makers, development experts, and business elites that to make the West safe, the Middle East must be transformed in order to integrate it into the global economic order. Barnett argues for a military strategy beginning with Iraq, suggesting that “America’s use of military power in this war has to be guided towards strategic ends: the destruction of those who would wage war against global connectivity and the freedoms it unleashes.”60 By breaking Saddam’s hold on power, Barnett enthusiastically claims, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 “could be the first step towards a larger goal: true globalization.”61 He views the war through the lens of what he refers to as the “big bang theory”: an American strategy to radically shrink the spaces across the globe that remain disconnected from globalization by reconnecting Iraq and demonstrating to the people of the Middle East that the mission of the United States is to offer what he refers to as “connectivity.” Barnett’s vision seeks to redefine the American grand strategy in a manner akin to Henry Luce’s vision of “the American Century,” which similarly argues that the United States should become the guarantor of global trade and mobility.62
“A FORWARD STRATEGY OF FREEDOM”
We can show, based on their own statements, that scholars such as Lewis and Ajami, who supported both the Iraq war and notions of Middle East exceptionalism, influenced the Bush administration’s thinking about the Middle East.63 Barnett claims that “senior military officials began citing [his] brief as a Rosetta stone for the Bush Administrations’ new national security strategy.”64 Nevertheless, the above survey of the post-9/11 discourse about globalization, the Middle East, and security cannot offer a complete explanation for the American invasion of Iraq. It does, however, suggest its important contributions. For one, these perspectives helped build support for the war among some “liberal hawks,” such as Friedman, who found the case for war based on the supposed threat of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” not fully convincing.65 At the same time, Middle East exceptionalism both bolstered claims that Iraq was undeterrable and depicted for the American public a view of the Middle East as a region of dysfunctional states, economies, and societies, which was devoid of any awareness or appreciation of the geopolitical factors that may account for such conditions. Moreover, this discourse helped frame the Bush administration’s break from policies based on realist balance of power calculations and its embrace of an ambitious vision for using military force to launch a radical transformation of the political, economic, and social conditions in the region. Although we cannot fully account for all the factors that determined Bush administration policies, we can show that Middle East exceptionalism provided a logic the administration used to publicly justify its policies.
This logic found its clearest expression in a November 2003 speech that President Bush made as American troops occupying Iraq, who had failed to discover stockpiled “weapons of mass destruction,” were facing domestic resistance from Iraqi nationalists and struggling to bring order to a country that now lacked a functioning state and was plagued by deadly bombings perpetrated by foreign terrorists. Extending a theme previously developed, President Bush boldly announced that “the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom” for transforming the political and economic landscape of the Middle East. Whereas the United States had long sought to promote reform and modernization in the Middle East, mostly to help ensure the stability of allied regimes, President Bush now defined the lack of reform as a security threat to the United States: “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export [as experienced on September 11, 2001].”66
Though the articulation of a “forward strategy of freedom” was developed and promoted most forcefully in the weeks and months after the fall of the Baathist regime in Iraq, the policy was a core element of the “Bush doctrine” developed in the wake of 9/11. In his January 2002 “axis of evil” State of the Union address Bush called for “sweeping political change in the Arab world.”67 He pledged that “America will take the side” of those “around the world, including the Islamic world,” “who advocate” American values of freedom.68 Although the case for promoting economic and political reform was often presented without direct reference to the Iraq war, the discourse resonated in ways that likely increased support for the war as it projects the geopolitical imaginary of Middle East exceptionalism and defined domestic conditions in the Arab world as the basis of the most pressing security threat facing America. In December 2002, as Bush was beginning to promote his vision for “regime change” in Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) to promote political, economic, and educational development in the Middle East. In his speech Powell noted, “The spread of democracy and free markets, fueled by the wonders of the technological revolution, has created a dynamo that can generate prosperity and human well-being on an unprecedented scale. But this revolution has left much of the Middle East behind.”69 The MEPI was one of the first major American policy initiatives to explicitly seek to redress the “job gap,” “freedom gap,” and “knowledge gap” between the Arab world and global trends.70 Po
well emphasized that these “gaps” are the ones defined by the UN-sponsored Arab Human Development Reports.71 Powell did not make the case for war based on the AHDR, but as noted above, influential pundits such as Thomas Friedman were doing so at the time.
To build public support for the war in Iraq, Bush administration officials often blended the logics of promoting reform into their case for regime change in Iraq. They evoked the notion of Middle East exceptionalism, which suggested the need to eliminate the conditions that fostered support for international terrorism, and exaggerated the “gathering threat” Iraq posed by evoking images of deterritorialized dangers, such as international terrorism. In doing so, they associated the threat of international terrorism with the threat of Iraq, though the two were not connected. In his speech announcing the “forward strategy of freedom,” after invoking the notion that the Middle East, due to lack of freedom, was generating “violence ready for export” as experienced on 9/11, Bush notes, “And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.”72 Bush also indirectly depicts the war as one that will convert Iraq into a developed, liberal democratic state. Bush then implies that by bringing political and economic freedom to the Middle East through the projection of U.S. power in the region—as it did previously in Europe and Asia (with the defeat of totalitarian regimes during World War II and then with its triumph in the Cold War)—the United States would be able to establish peace and diminish threats to U.S. interests. Regime change in Iraq lay at the center of this strategy that was to transform the political and economic landscape of the Middle East. As U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick wrote in the summer of 2003: “The reconstruction and reopening of Iraq presents an opportunity for change—a chance for the people of the Arab world to ask why their region, once a nucleus of trade, has been largely excluded from the gains of this modern era of globalization.”73
REDEFINING THE MIDDLE EAST
In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration even tried to invent a new geographical moniker, the “Greater Middle East,” to refer to the countries of the Arab world, plus Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. This exercise in naming follows that of Mahan as it defines its object in reference to Western security interests rather than any regional conceptions, identities, or geographical features. A draft memo outlining the American proposal for a “Greater Middle East Partnership Initiative” (GMEPI) to be discussed at a G-8 summit explains: “The Greater Middle East region poses a unique challenge and opportunity for the international community. . . . So long as the region’s pool of politically and economically disenfranchised individuals grows, we will witness an increase in extremism, terrorism, international crimes and illegal migration.”74 The memo supports its vision with a review of data drawn from the Arab Human Development Reports that starkly illustrates the various “gaps” between conditions in the Arab states and the rest of the world. The GMEPI announces the region is at a crossroads and must choose between continuing on the same path of “adding every year to its population of underemployed, undereducated, and politically disenfranchised youth” or, instead, taking the “alternative . . . route to reform.”75 To stem the tide of the threatening flows emanating from the Middle East, the GMEPI called for counterflows of expert advice and joint programs to help promote institutional reform across the region. It offers a long list of reform projects, guidelines, and institutions that cover education, finance, governance, media, and elections. The goals are less striking than the impression that the memo’s authors seem to want to micromanage the process of change within these societies bypassing the authority and sovereignty of regional governments. Although the document does not link reform with the American rationale for the invasion of Iraq, it does state that “the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq from oppressive regimes” is one of the factors that has presented Western countries with “a historic opportunity” to “forge a long-term partnership with the Greater Middle East’s reform leaders and launch a coordinated response to promote political, economic, and social reform in the region.”76 Moreover, the GMEPI specifically mentions as its model the experience of East Europe whose inclusion into the global economy was initiated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The “fall” of the Baathist regime in Iraq is seemingly viewed as providing an analogous impetus expected to ignite a similar regional transition to free market democracy.
AGAINST EXCEPTIONALISM: UNMAPPING THE MIDDLE EAST
By incorporating reference to the Arab Human Development Reports, the GMEPI sought to suggest that its script for reform was a universal one and that it should be supported by Arabs who want to diminish the “gaps” separating Arab countries from the rest of the world. Defined by the binary logic of Middle East exceptionalism, this discourse erases the geopolitical context and tries to depoliticize the notion of reform. The GMEPI memo and similar American plans for reform in the Middle East, however, fail to recognize the diverse ways states and societies in the region understand and seek to engage in their own processes of defining reform and globalization and addressing their forms and impact. Joseph Samahah, then the Beirut-based editor for Al Safir newspaper, wrote about the original 2002 MEPI that its purpose was “to link the ambitions of some people in the Arab world to the objectives of the United States, not the objectives of the United States to the ambitions of people in the Arab world.”77 When the draft memo was leaked to the London-based, pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, it caused a firestorm of criticism from not only leftist, nationalist, and Islamist critics of U.S. policy but also the political leaders of America’s allies in the Middle East and Europe as well as the drafters of the AHDR themselves. Marwan Muasher, the foreign minister of Jordan—one of America’s closest allies in the region—publicly criticized the GMEPI, arguing that “reform is important and needed in the Arab world . . . but for it to work we need ownership of the process, not a one-for-all blueprint from Washington.”78 Nader Fergany, a principal author of the AHDR, was also critical of what he referred to as the American administration’s “arrogant attitude in respect to the rest of the world, which causes it to behave as if it can decide the fate of states and peoples.”79 Most critically, the Bush administration’s approach to reform in the Middle East clearly failed to imagine that in a few years’ time Arab regimes might fall to popular, locally driven protest movements calling for democracy and the rule of law.
The Bush administration’s project for transforming the Middle East was first scaled back, and then it eventually petered out due to the failure to convert Iraq into a model for the region, the success of Islamists opposed to American policy in elections in Palestine and Lebanon, and the unwillingness of the United States to impose reforms on its moderate allies Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. In 2006, with Iraq engulfed in what seemed to be the verge of a sectarian civil war, a new wave of exceptionalist notions entered into American discourse about Iraq. Most Americans converted from expecting the new Iraq to become the model for a new Middle East to blaming the Iraqis and the nature of Iraqi society for the failure of the American project and the ongoing violence.80 Many argued that Americans were only then coming to understand the “true” nature of Iraqi society and history—an artificial nation, where ethics and religious identities left no room for liberal democratic norms and a love of freedom.
The failure of this project should not be understood as rooted in the belief that democracy and reform are not possible in the Middle East, but as with modernization theory, it is due to the conceit of viewing its task as fostering an inevitable outcome as well as assuming that the United States had the capability to succeed in bringing it about.81 In an insightful critique of the influence of modernization theory on U.S. policy toward the Middle East since the 1950s, historian Richard Bulliet notes that one reason for the failure of modernization theory as a guide for U.S. policy in the Middle East is that American “policy circles seem incapable of imagining a Mus
lim model of modernity.”82 The rise of Middle East exceptionalism in American policy debates can trace its origins to the failures of modernization theory to understand and embrace the agency, imagination, and interests of diverse communities across the Middle East who did not have the same dreams as American policy makers. Likewise the Bush administration was also unwilling to ever consider “whether there might be merit in some of those other ways of looking at reality.”83 The notion of Middle East exceptionalism fails to recognize such alternatives because they challenge its binary structure, which views the differences between the Middle East and the rest of the world in exceptional terms. It is more profitable to approach the range of diversity found across the Middle East in terms of variations across the same multiple registers experienced elsewhere.
Oddly, the Bush administration often sought to argue that its project for regional transformation represented a rejection of the notion of Middle East exceptionalism. By this they did not mean they rejected what I have analyzed as Middle East exceptionalism, but rather they rejected simpleminded “skepticism about the capacity or even the desire of the Middle Eastern peoples for self-government.”84 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice often tried to defend the Bush doctrine by arguing that the Bush administration had rejected past American policies that followed “so-called Middle East exceptionalism,” meaning pursuing “stability at the expense of democracy.”85 Journalist David Brooks, a strong supporter of the Bush doctrine, defines the notion of “Arab exceptionalism” as follows: “This is the belief that while most of the world is chugging toward a globally integrated future, the Arab world remains caught in its own medieval whirlpool of horror. The Arab countries cannot become quickly democratic; their people aren’t ready for pluralistic modernity; they just have to be walled off so they don’t hurt us again.”86 Brooks claims President George W. Bush stands against this view, because the latter believes that “the Arabs aren’t very different from anybody else, and can be brought into the family of democratic nations.”87