A recent sign of Washington’s current tardiness is the late visit to Kiev by the head of the CIA. Plans had already been made and significant events had already taken place before the “seasoned” intelligence officer paid his visit, which was not intended to initiate but rather to enquire about outcomes. The Kremlin took advantage of this by implying that the US is hatching some scheme behind closed doors in Langley and that the Russian stance was but a response to these conspiracies. And despite the fact that Russia is leading a pack of bandit states, the US still bares the stigma of being the bad guy.
Obama tried his best during his first term to improve America’s global standing after the crude animosity directed at it during the Bush years. But ever since he delivered his inaugural speech in Cairo, the president has seemed to have underestimated the level of mutual hatred and hostility that his predecessor’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would create in the hearts and minds of the “freed people.” Obama’s pro-modernity discourse, in the way it transforms “America the globalized empire” into “America the state,” lacks teeth.
America’s democratization campaign in the Middle East has created deep divisions in Iraq over power, wealth, and welfare. Not only has the new mostly-Shiite majority bloc worked hard to monopolize power: the American campaign also destroyed the intellectual foundations of the “monstrous” modern state that was represented by the nationalist and pseudo-nationalist regimes in the region, particularly the Baath Party.
When political conflict leaves the traditional milieu of secularist social class struggle for an ethno-sectarian one, the idea of state borders becomes obsolete. Therefore, in the Middle East, people are left with no option but to adopt a caliphate model to express their political ambitions.
The death of two nations
To share power in Iraq based on anachronistic notions of the modern state is simply unjust because what unites citizens in a modern state is starkly different from what unites Iraqi citizens today. As things stand, Shiite Iraqis and their Iranian counterparts certainly have a stronger bond than they do with their Sunni compatriots, and Iraqi Shiites see themselves as an extension of a new socio-geographic sectarian reality so much larger than that of Iraqi Sunnis. Sunnis, on the other hand, find their progressively-shrinking part of the power pie untenable as a minority in their own country while being able to connect with the larger tribal and sectarian regional allies against the new Shiite majority. Hence, since the way Iraqi society currently self-identifies harkens back to the Middle Ages, it is unfair to all factions to negotiate power along the lines of a modern state.
Meanwhile in Syria, following Hezbollah’s footsteps, Jabhat al-Nusra is receiving growing sympathy from parties interested in the Syrian issue, largely as a result of the abject desperation that engulfs the Syrian people on the one hand, and Nusra fighters’ mix of battlefield success and diplomatic pragmatism on the other.
There is fascination and horror in the way the fighters are portrayed in the war videos that Jabhat al-Nusra broadcasts to the outside world: tough, healthy, determined fighters, armed to the teeth atop mounds of rubble and destruction. These foreboding /images might not be intentionally constructed, but one only needs to remember that before the war broke out three years ago, those piles of debris were cities that were among the oldest in the world, now filled with a sense of a horrific future to come.
This is but a tiny continuation of what America previously in Iraq: destroying a modern state built to protect all its citizens and maintain its strength and stability in the prosperity of its cities. What happens in Syria today is a methodical disintegration of any salvageable components of a state upon which reconstruction could be possible. The Syria that was has been rightfully declared dead by many. However, no one is prepared yet to imagine the depth of its burial: the Syria of yesteryear was a center of civilization, while the Syria of today is a wasteland of militias.
Mourning an empire
Meanwhile, America has lost its hold on the cosmic clock since it changed its tactics from offense to retreat and decided to build a state in lieu of an empire. An American empire might be partial and cruel with sharp claws that could hurt regardless of whether the intent is to help or punish. However, it is the modern empire that made the resilience of modern states possible and provided fragile, troubled modern cities with the tools to survive and reproduce.
Consequently, America’s decision to retreat into its state-making posture would throw the whole world, from Crimea through Chechnya to Syria and Yemen, into havoc. Nations far and near would lose their sense of importance and relevance created over centuries and become unnecessary burdens on the emerging empires of the new Middle Ages.
Nothing would survive this burning region but knights on their horses who prefer to tread on the debris of civilization rather than live in it.
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https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/545975-disrupting-the-cosmic-clock