Global Justice in the 21st Century

[Prefatory Note: In the face of the failure of the US Government to use its diplomatic

leverage to end the war in Ukraine, and renounce the project to score a geopolitical victory over Russia at the expense of the people of Ukraine (and Russia) and persisting with its active complicity with Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people residing in Gaza, and so far to a lesser extent to those residing in the West Bank, this book could not be timelier. It is a grim reminder of the Iraq War precedent in which the United States openly embraced a criminal path in both its attack and long occupation of Iraq beginning with  “shock and awe’ unprovoked aggression and culminating in a state-building venture that brought the Islamic State to the region. Memories of geopolitical failures of the magnitude of what took place over the course of more than a decade of occupation and supposed state-building is brilliantly depicted in this authoritative book dedicated to the memory of Jacqueline Ismael, the long devoted partner of Tareq Ismael. It was my privilege to have been invited to write the foreword to this fine book, just published, which I strongly recommend both to remind us of the Iraq War and its dismal aftermath, and to cast light on the present negation of the most minimal standards of decency in the course of human interaction. I find myself haunted by a simple epistemological question: WHY DO WE AS A NATION, PEOPLE, AND SPECIES REFUSE TO LEARN FROM PAST TRAGIC FAILURES?]   

Intrioducing Pax Americana: Ae

Foreword to  Pax Americana: America’s Unending War on Iraq by

                  Jacqueline S. Ismael, Tareq Y. Ismael, & Leslie T. MacDonald

                  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Narrating the Logic of Pax Americana

Recent references to the Iraq War of 2003 in the West tend mostly to

come from the political or anti-war left sources seemingly intent on issuing

stern reminders that Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine was foreshadowed in

its most objectionable features by the US/UK attack followed by a long

controversial occupation of Iraq, while the mainstream tries to erase

America’s experience from collective memory.

Those invoking Iraq as a precedent relevant to Ukraine offer a justifi-

able critique of the imperial aspects of American foreign policy that make

a mockery of self-righteous appeals to international law and the UN

Charter to mobilize international opposition to Russia while building

global support for sanctions, arms shipments, and huge donations of eco-

nomic assistance. Adopting such an ahistorical, abstract, and Eurocentric

optic, however useful, comes at a price. Iraq loses its core reality as a coun-

try inhabited by people who have endured the trials and tribulations of

tyranny, war, foreign intervention, and prolonged occupation. The US

refusal to practice what it preaches when dealing with the Global South,

especially in the countries of the Middle East, vividly confirmed by its

complicity in Israel’s genocidal onslaught upon Gaza, remains a significant

precedent in relation to the policy debate about Ukraine, but it is far from

telling the whole story of the Iraqi ordeal of the past 80 years.

This remarkable book is written by Jacqueline and Tareq Ismael, both

highly respected Iraqi specialists who are longtime scholarly commenta-

tors on the sorrowful recent history of the country. They present us with

Forewordviii FOREWORD

a devastating critique of the American role in Iraq during the 20 years

since the ill-conceived aggression of 2003, but they do much more. Above

all, they convincingly explicate the comprehensive anatomy of victimiza-

tion that became the fatal destiny of Iraq and its people, climaxing with

the aggressive regime-changing war of 2003. The historical contextualiza-

tion of the war and the refusal to erase from political consciousness its

terrible impact on the Iraqi civilian population is what makes this book

such a powerful indictment of American foreign policy. The understand-

ing imparted by their analysis goes far deeper than typically superficial

assessments based on a simple model of ‘attack and occupation.’

Jacqueline Ismael, who sadly died earlier this year, and Tareq, her Iraqi-born

writing partner and husband, have long devoted their scholarly lives

to narrating the American desecration of Iraq. Additionally, they have

together built an ambitious academic infrastructure that has made major

contributions to Iraqi studies. These have included the founding of a jour-

nal, organizing international conferences, and publishing books. And per-

haps most of all, by developing an international community of scholars

committed to probing various less-known, yet integral, aspects of the

complex Iraqi experience of the last century. This high-quality scholarship

should not be confused with the one-dimensional output of Beltway think

tanks that offer the US government menus of policy options that are gen-

erally pleasing to the Pentagon and mainstream foreign policy venues. In

contrast, the Ismael orientation is objective, exhibiting and encouraging

others to undertake interdisciplinary styles of inquiry and assessment. This

work also valuably merges standard political and economic concerns with

serious attention to the social, ethical, religious, and even artistic and phil-

osophical dimensions of Iraq’s extraordinary cultural heritage. It is this

heritage that has been shattered by Iraq’s encounters with America in the

course of fragmenting the political and cultural unity of the Iraqi people.

In this necessarily last collaborative book, the Ismaels draw on their

superb qualifications to share with us their cumulative knowledge and wis-

dom about Iraq. This short but profound book manages to consider both

the disasters that have befallen Iraq but also the confused and sinister

behavior embedded in this pattern of dysfunctional US deployments of

hard and soft power over a period of six decades. What results is a highly

instructive book that contextualizes US geopolitical tactics and strategies

in a manner that sheds light on a host of other contemporary concerning

issues around the world. In essence, the Ismaels have managed to interpret

the interplay of America’s global and regional hegemonic ambitions inix FOREWORD

ways that yield a deeply informed narrative of the tragic events that have

ravaged Iraq and spilled over its borders to cause comparable forms of

distress elsewhere in the region. The book brilliantly depicts the intercon-

nections between the fate of Iraq and that of the Middle East as a whole,

presenting an illuminating account of why the impacts of the American

imperial agenda should not be conceptualized as mere aggression followed

by an occupation devoted to benign ‘state-building’ undertakings suppos-

edly aimed at constitutional governance and developmental dynamism.

With electrifying clarity, the Ismaels show that contemporary tragedy of

Iraq should not begin, as in most assessments with a focus on the two wars

in 1991 and 2003, their interim of harsh sanctions, and their chaotic after-

maths, but look at the downward spiral of events starting in 1963. The

book’s illuminating, mostly ignored or suppressed starting point is the

1963 CIA-facilitated coup that replaced the nationalist Qasim govern-

ment with the dictatorial repressive Ba’athist Party leadership, eventually

headed by Saddam Hussein. Tareq Ismael’s personal history of living in

exile ever since this coup and forever scarred by these events of 60 years

that culminated in the roundup and massacre of at least 5000 Iraqi intel-

lectuals and progressive. political activists, lends an aura of authenticity

and significance to these barely recollected events.

In a manner the 1963 coup in Iraq recalls the 1953 coup in Iran that

overthrew the Mossadegh government with the covert help and encour-

agement of the CIA, anticipating in several of its particulars the Iraqi

undertaking ten years later. In Iran, the Shah was restored to the Peacock

Throne, and more importantly, foreign ownership of the Iranian oil indus-

try was restored, with leading American energy corporations the greatly

enriched beneficiaries.

The true character of these events in both major oil producing coun-

tries was thinly disguised by then fashionable Cold War rationalizations of

saving these countries from a Communist takeover by marginalizing and

discrediting Soviet/Marxist/socialist influences that purportedly under-

mined Western strategic interests in the Middle East, as well as threatening

these countries with Stalinist futures. Such state propaganda, spread by an

ideologically subservient Western media, downplayed the true strategic

motivation for these disruptive political events, which was to keep the

energy reserves of the region under secure Western control while entrust-

ing their custodianship to the American oil industry. In this process, the

disregard for the sovereign self-determination rights of the state and suf-

fering of the peoples that followed was ignored as were the allegations thatx FOREWORD

the outcomes reflected the maneuvers of the CIA rather than the revolt of

nationalist forces. Only years later was the instrumental role of the CIA

widely confirmed. The original public rationale portrayed the events as

internally driven anti-Communist rejections of hysterical or tyrannical

leaders.

The book draws appropriate attention to the critical differences between

regime-changing interventions in the period between 1950 and 1990, and

those taking place after the Soviet implosion in 1991. Earlier efforts to

disrupt the politics of self-determination were hidden and covertly carried

out, and hence entrusted to the CIA and collaborating national elites in

countries targeted for regime change. The only overt exceptions of any

consequence during the Cold War occurred in the two wars taking place

in the divided countries of Korea and Vietnam where international fault

lines were breached by the revisionist behavior of rival nationalist forces

seeking restored unification of the states as single nations. Elsewhere, the

United States tried to disrupt what it opposed by acting off-stage and rely-

ing on compliant national elements to construct the successor states.

After the Cold War the dynamic of intervention in the Middle East

became overtly militarist, tied to arms sales and predatory globalization.

The US sought to legitimize these overt interventions at the UN by claim-

ing humanitarian and international law justification or counterinsurgency

imperatives in the face of alleged terrorist threats. Among the rationaliza-

tions put forward in 2003 for violating Iraq’s state boundaries were its

possession of non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction and a secret pro-

gram to develop nuclear weapons; Afghanistan after 9/11 as safe haven for

international terrorism; humanitarian urgency in Libya concerning the

beleaguered population of Benghazi. If UN legitimation was not granted,

as was the case with Iraq (and earlier Kosovo, 1999), then the US together

with allies proceeded to intervene openly, feeling no need for the secrecy

it relied upon during the Cold War. When the UN Security Council

refused the American request for authorization to use force in Iraq, George

W. Bush angrily suggesting that if the UN decided to withhold approval

of US war plans, it would find itself irrelevant. And regrettably, Bush was

to some extent right.

This overtness, also enabled prolonged foreign occupations, and in Iraq

was an alleged necessity to complete the challenge of liberating the coun-

try from its dictatorial past, which required ensuring that the successor

state was a stable and secure exemplar of constitutional democracy. The

only thing hidden from view in carrying out such state-building plans arexi FOREWORD

the various aspects of economic exploitation, including a forced entry into

neoliberal world economy.

This form of state-building by an occupying foreign power is half of the

abusive story exposed by this book. The other half has not been previously

explicated. What the Ismaels have managed to demonstrate through their

focus on the specifics of the American occupation is a set of policies that

had the intended effects of doing the opposite of what was claimed for

state-building. In actuality, the American occupation destroyed prospects

of a stable, competent, and prosperous Iraq, let alone a state protective of

human security and public order. The policies and practices systematically

pursued destroyed sturdy pillars of governmental stability that existed in

Iraq prior to 2003. The occupation purged the armed forces and bureau-

cracy of its Sunni highly professional staffing during the Ba’athist period,

turned a blind eye to the looting of museums and archeological artifacts

undermining cultural identity and national consciousness. Such an

approach gave ample political space to the assertion of a variety of sub-national

grievances and embittered rivalries among religious factions and

ethnic minorities. As the Ismaels explain state-building turned out in Iraq

to be state-ending, such a dismal assessment of the occupation manifested

itself through greatly increased ethnic strife, radical micro-politics, rising

criminality, gross corruption, persisting chaos, and increasing poverty.

It is for these reasons that ‘state-building,’ as argued by the authors, is

better conceptualized as a process of ‘state-ending’ or ‘state deconstruc-

tion.’ This is a radical claim that goes far beyond critiques of the conven-

tional understanding state-building as benevolence gone wrong with

Afghanistan and Iraq especially in mind. The shocking argument that the

Ismaels advance for our consideration is that this outcome was not a fail-

ure of occupation policy but a deliberately orchestrated success. The goal

of such an approach may seem perverse, but reflects American deep state

thinking on the Middle East, as strongly paralleled by Israeli beliefs and

practice, that the cornerstone of regional security is not so much a matter

of weaponry as it is in the existence of weak, internally divided and preoc-

cupied states.

In an informative chapter on the aspirations of the Kurdish minority

further concreteness is added to the exposition of how occupation mis-

shaped Iraq by showing that the US and Israel both promoted Kurdish

aspirations in ways that weakened Iraqi sense of national identity, so vital

for successful state formation projects.xii FOREWORD

The geopolitical hypocrisy of the American role in Iraq is given a bipar-

tisan slant that goes back to the Kennedy role in promoting the 1963 coup

against Qasim and forward to the efforts of both Bush’s to wage war

against their former client state, Iraq. We need to remember that in 1980

Saddam’s Iraq had been persuaded to attack Iran in what turned out to be

a grueling eight-year war, partly extended by US arms sales to both sides.

In addition, Saddam was given ambiguous signals a decade later by the US

ambassador in Baghdad about launching an attack on subsequent annexa-

tion of Kuwait, only to find Iraq subject to international denunciations by

the US President, Arab neighbors, and the UN as a legitimizing prelude

to a ‘shock and awe’ attack, and after another twelve years of punitive

sanctions that ravaged the civilian population of Iraq, yet another American

aggression launched against its former notorious ally who ended up pay-

ing with his life.

This mastery of the Iraq narrative by the Ismaels does what most Iraqi

commentators do not do. That is, they present dismaying evidence that

the wellbeing of the people of Iraq was consistently sacrificed as a sup-

pressed side-effect of this American quest for political and economic dom-

inance in the post-colonial Middle East. The story of Iraq serves as a

metaphor for the twenty-first-century US imperial (mis)adventures

throughout the entire world. To be sure, the region was especially vulner-

able to imperial design, and a result, has vividly exhibited this state-destroying

and people-victimizing behavior by the United States. This

reflects several factors: oil geopolitics as its supreme strategic priority,

Israel’s junior hegemonic status as its unconditional domestic priority, and

the blowback threats of Islamic radicalism and expansion of Islamic influ-

ence in the region after the 9/11 attacks have shaped its security dialogue

at least until the Ukraine War. We can be most thankful to have such a

book for its insight, knowledge, wisdom, and empathy, and for getting

right the complex story of America’s role in Iraq.

University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

_ Richard Falk

Tags: Iraq War, Israeli attacks, Ukraine War