Bureaucracy, The Individual and Rational Decision Making?

This was originally a response to a question my lecturer posed my class, "Individual cognition and bureaucratic interests undermine rational decisions in the “War on Terror". I didn't really like the question, so i went my own way in answering it...

The post 9/11 years have been marked with a distinct loss of civil liberties and “The ‘War on Terror’ serves as the latest guise for the aggressive reassertion of the principle state sovereignty, beyond the traditional limits imposed on it by legal institutions or democratic polities” (Newman, 2008). The ‘War on Terror’ can be seen as the forefront of, as Newman put it, this “creeping conservatism’s” initiative to reaffirm its hold on power by using the 9/11 event to do so. I cannot in good conscience argue for or against the fact that individual cognition and bureaucratic interests are undermining rational decisions for this 'war', for in doing so leads me to experience a peculiar form of cognitive dissonance as it is in my opinion, that this 'war' is in essence irrational. However I can agree with the fact that rationality in decision making can be undermined by falsely perceived notions of truths, individual cognition and bureaucratic interests which actually does, in my opinion, exemplifies the 'war' in all entirety. Namely it is an irrational 'war' that was created based on falsehoods to serve bureaucratic (and private) interests using an abhorrent act of terrorism as its vehicle to push through policies that would never have taken shape otherwise.

That aside, rationality can sometimes be impaired by individual cognition (or in the case of the neocons, group cognition). Individual experiences, bias, self-interest, personality or even delusions are want to persuade decisions one way or another, an example of which could be seen in Thatcher's poll-tax in 1989. Against all advice she persisted to push through this highly unpopular system for, as some analyst put it, her "Iron Lady" persona made it impossible for her to "U-Turn" on any decision she made. This trait was an asset for her in the past, unfortunately for her it eventually led to her being toppled from government in 1990. A more curious example irrational decision making due to individual cognition would be the late Saparmurat Niyazov, or Turkmenbashi, the 1st President of Turkmenistan who amongst other things renamed the month January after himself and shut all hospitals outside his capital, Asgabat.

Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.", and no doubt he said it with the intention satirising the insanity of this monolithic organ of government. In essence, the bureaucracy of a nation officially exists to execute, maintain and perpetuate the policies of the nations political core. However, more often than not, a bureaucracy exists with the sole intention of perpetuating itself whilst expanding its budget, and it is this instinct of self-interest and self-preservation that sometimes undermines rationality. In 2008, Tom Sauer, of the International Politics University of Antwerp, presented a paper at the SOAS Conference ‘Globalisation and Disarmament’, entitled "US nuclear weapons policy under the Clinton administration: a missed opportunity due to bureaucratic inertia and a lack of political leadership" in which he outlined how the US military-industrial complex managed to prevent Clinton from revising the US' nuclear weapons policies as any change to the status quo could threaten its relevancy. This is a clear example of how bureaucratic interests can subvert both policy and clear, rational decision making. It is in the US' best interest to reduce its nuclear armaments as this would not only help reduce an already bloated defence budget but would also provide it with the moral high ground to insist other nations to follow suite and help it prevent newer upstart nations from insisting on joining the nuclear club. However, bureaucratic self-interest won over rationality.

In his paper, Sauer concluded that arms control was limited by "the power of the bureaucracy and a lack of political leadership. " and one could say the same concerning the rationality of our leaders decisions. The power of the bureaucracy can and does subvert rationality, and so does the personal limitations, in other words individual cognition, of the decision makers. An apt analogy would be when a car hits a tree. If you consider the tree as a constant, then there are only two variables left to consider in such an accident to determine why it happened, one being the inertia and mass of the car along with any mechanical problems it may have could make it impossible for the driver to correct any mistakes or miscalculations he made to cause the crash, and the other would of course be the state of mind the driver was in during the accident. If the drivers drunk and the breaks don't work, then you could say that the accident was inevitable.

Do new threats to national security justify the use of torture?

Regardless of how it's proponents may posit the necessity of using torture as a means of extracting information, there is no way to justify the practice. Not only does it disgrace the country that countenances it, it inevitably undermines the country's ability to protect itself. History has thought us that the costs of utilising torture have been astronomical, for the French in Algeria, for the Americans in Vietnam, and now for the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The French army may have won the Battle of Algiers but they soon lost the war for Algeria, in part because their systematic torture delegitimated the larger war effort in the eyes of most Algerians and many French. “You might say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” observed British journalist Sir Alistair Horne, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

For the Americans, they're track record with their use of torture has shown its ineffectiveness. Official sources are nearly unanimous that the yield of the massive Phoenix program, with over forty prisons across South Vietnam who systematically tortured thousands of suspected communists, was surprisingly low. One Pentagon contract study found that, in 1970-71, only 3 percent of the Viet Cong “killed, captured, or rallied were full or probationary Party members above the district level.” Not surprisingly, such a brutal pacification effort failed either to crush the Viet Cong or win the support of Vietnamese villagers, contributing to the ultimate U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War. Even the comparatively limited torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay has done incalculable damage to America’s international prestige whereas the information. In short, the intelligence gains are soon overwhelmed by political costs as friends and enemies recoil in revulsion at such calculated savagery.

As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. With the agency's multinational gulag full of dozens, even hundreds, of detainees of dwindling utility, CIA agents, active and retired, have been vocal in their complaints about the costs and inconvenience of limitless, even lifetime, incarceration for these tortured terrorists. The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam, pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. After all, the systematic French torture of thousands from the Casbah of Algiers in 1957 also entailed more than 3,000 “summary executions” as “an inseparable part” of this campaign, largely, as one French general put it, to ensure that “the machine of justice” not be “clogged with cases.” For similar reasons, the CIA’s Phoenix program produced, by the agency’s own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

To reassert my answer, no, there is no way to justify the use of torture regardless of any arguments given on the security of the state. Basically torture is are always wrong, regardless of what the suspect is thought to know or to have done. It's banned absolutely under international law. Further more, the information gained is more often than not are unreliable. The practice of torture corrodes the rule of law and undermines the criminal justice system and in no way does it do not make us any safer. The use of torture to stop ticking bombs leads ultimately to a cruel choice?either legalize this brutality, à la Dershowitz and Bush, or accept that the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sponsored murder, à la Vietnam.

A, B & C vs Ireland: Should Ireland Be Excluded From The EU?

The question of whether or not Ireland should be kicked out of the EU because of the entitled case cannot be answered by a simple yes or no as it brings up two questions with seemingly conflicting answers, namely; what exactly are the reproductive rights of the mothers and what rights to life does an unborn foetus have.

Reproductive Rights

In the case of A, B & C v Ireland, the mothers claim was that the laws of Oreland contravened their reproductive rights as expressed by the WHO as:

“Reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. They also include the right of all to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence.”

As which, A,B & C argue that in enforcing anti-abortion laws, Ireland has negated their right “to determine freely and responsibly the number and the spacing of their children."(Proclamation of Teheran 1968). However, reproductive rights as stated by the WHO and the Teheran proclamation are non-binding agreements which and many of the articles are yet to be recognized in hard-law hard. To complicate matters more, the European Convention on Human Rights is silent on the question of reproductive rights

Right to Life

All member states of the EU have to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights to in order to maintain their membership with the EU, and this is where Reproductive Rights clash with the Article 2 in that document, The Right to Life. Many Pro-lifers argue that the act of aborting a pregnancy constitutes a negation of the foetuses right to life. However, most pro-lifers rest their argument on a religious or philosophical definition of when a human is defined as a being a human; they consider as soon as a woman’s pregnant, the collection of fertilised cells that make up the embryo is already human thus Article 2 applies at the moment of conception. The pro-abortion lobby on the other hand argue that a human can only be considered a human upon delivery.

When is a Human, Human?

So when does Article 2 apply to an individual? When is a foetus recognised as being human? As I mentioned earlier, most pro-lifers take the religious high ground and base their arguments on 2,000-year-old religious dogma, but it seems unwise to base such an important definition on something that essentially has no factual backing. At the same time studies have shown that foetuses in towards the end of their third trimester actually experience REM sleep (Schwab & Schiller 2009), meaning they dream and is not dreaming indicative of consciousness? Descartes posited, “I think therefore I am” in his “Discourse on Method” (1637) when he was discussing the proof of self-existence so perhaps in can further be expanded to define when a human can be considered human. Meaning, that if thinking about your existence acknowledges that you do in fact exist, your existence is based on the fact that you thought about it thus thought or the act of thinking defines your humanity. So perhaps, in order for us to adequately determine when Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights applies, you would have to determine when brain activity, or thought, occurs in the foetus.

Conclusion

To conclude, since reproductive rights aren’t enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, technically, Ireland is not at fault for denying its citizen’s the right to abort unwanted pregnancies. However, it is disconcerting that reproductive rights aren’t discussed in the document, since this means that European states technically could be as draconian as China in regards to reproduction.

My opinion is that it is uncertain on whether or not A, B and C’s rights were abused as not enough information as given on each of their cases, e.g. How long were they into their pregnancies? How did they become pregnant to begin with? What were their reasons for wanting an abortion? These questions matter when discussing abortion rights for though I’m not a pro-lifer since I do believe women have the right to decide what happens in their bodies, I also believe that the right of the foetus to live also has to be taken into consideration. A common consensus has to be reached on when humanity occurs in a foetus. This consensus however must be based on provable facts and not ideological nor religious suppositions or philosophical debate.

My Thoughts on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy & The Identity of the State

Conventionally, foreign policy is a set of goals that provides the general rule of conduct determining how a state interacts with its neighbours economically, politically, socially and militarily, and to a lesser extent, how the state will interact with non-state actors. The objectives of these policies are to protect the states interests, namely its security, ideological goals, and economic prosperity. This can occur as a result of peaceful cooperation with other states, or through exploitation. Diplomacy on the other hand, is how the state communicates these policies to its neighbours. Together, they represent an instrument of statecraft necessary to identify the state in relation to its neighbours.

A state’s foreign policy represents a linkage between the state’s domestic interior and the international exterior and can be seen as a portrayal of the state’s character or ‘personality’. This ‘personality’ is determined principally by the culture practiced by either the state’s citizen’s en mass or simply by its elites and how this culture views itself to be in relation to the international. The culture of the state constructs its identity by contrasting itself against its neighbours, acknowledging primarily the differences, real, perceived or synthetic, in order to define itself a unique singularity from which it can determine its current standing and where it wishes to be.

It is through this self-examination of what it perceives its identity to be and its place in the international that defines its interactions with its neighbours. This ‘self-made identity’, or interior, exerts itself onto the exterior by determining the form of conversation between itself and its neighbours. This colours the state’s ‘personality’ by making it inherently bellicose or passive in its attempts to achieve its goals. In recent years however, with the growth of stronger inter-state and non-state players and the diffusion of cultures via mass diaspora the concept of an inherent ‘stable-state-identity’ is increasingly becoming fictitious.

In Conclusion, it is from this Manichean construct of “us against the other” that the state perceives what its interests to be. Furthermore, it also determines the methodology it will use, namely the disposition of the diplomacy it practices, in order to attain these interests. It is in the author’s opinion that this represents a form of self-inflicted division, however it is an inherent facet of the current international system and it is increasingly becoming redundant in this current era globalisation but that is the topic of another paper.

A Brief Essay on Human Rights

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

—Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

On December 10^th, 1948 The United Nations General Assembly adopted Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. The UDHR consists of 30 Articles covering the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled. Examples of rights and freedoms which have come to be commonly thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law; and economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to be treated with respect and dignity, the right to food, the right to work, and the right to education.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has acted as the leading modern codification of commonly accepted rights. However, this Bill of Rights does not represent international law and all signee countries adhere to it only on a voluntary basis. Indeed internationally, there has been many debates and disagreements over which rights are human rights, and about the precise nature, content, justification and appropriate legal status of those rights. One of the biggest questions has been over at what point is a human deemed to even be human for these rights to apply? Some countries have even criticized the Universal Declaration for its perceived failure to take into the account the cultural and religious context of different countries.

That aside, what is the necessity of having an internationally accepted doctrine of human rights? The necessity is that without doing so, all humanity would be condemned to a future of persistent barbarity where insecurity would be the norm. History has shown that societies in which the rights of the individual have been ignored have all been doomed to eventual entropy. The definition of what these rights are have of course changed over time from the Cyrus Cylinder of the ancient Persians, the Natural Laws of the Romans, the Magna Carta, the Natural Rights of the French and finally the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What this shows is that people have long understood that there is value in being human and it is this value that needs to be protected.

In conclusion there is a distinct need to identify an internationally accepted covenant that would legally bind states to protect the dignity and sanctity of the life of the common man. We need to identify the prerequisites for a "universal" minimal standard of justice and tolerance that would maintain this dignity and would be considered the internationally accepted moral norms owed by and to the individual by the mere virtue of their humanity and of course at what point does it apply. These prerequisites can exist as the shared norms of actual human moralities, as justified moral norms or moral rights supported by strong reasons, as legal rights at a national level, or as a legal right within international law.

“I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!”

Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network (1976)

A Case Study on the 'War on Terror' : An Analysis from the Perspective of Critical International Relations Theory

In post 9/11 years there have been a number of new, serious challenges facing radical politics, there has been the new hegemony of neo-liberal projects of capitalist globalization, such as the WTO, as well as the ideological obscurantism of the so-called Third Way. Furthermore, the intense disillusionment in the wake of the collapse of Communist systems nearly two decades ago has resulted in a political and theoretical vacuum for the radical Left, which has on the whole, been futile in its attempts to counter the rise of the Far Right in Europe, as well as Newman (2008) put it, “the more insidious ‘creeping conservatism’ whose dark ideological implications we are only just beginning to see unfold”. However, most serious of all, would be the re-emergence of the aggressive, authoritarian state in its new guise of security and bio-politics all of which is a reaction to the 9/11 event. The post 9/11 years have been marked with a distinct loss of civil liberties and “The ‘War on Terror’ serves as the latest guise for the aggressive reassertion of the principle state sovereignty, beyond the traditional limits imposed on it by legal institutions or democratic polities” (Newman, 2008). The ‘War on Terror’ can be seen as the forefront of this “creeping conservatism’s” initiative to reaffirm its hold on power by using the 9/11 event to do so.

(a) On Critical International Relations Theory

This case study will analyse the ‘War on Terror’ from the perspective of Critical International Relations Theory. It is in this papers opinion that the more traditional perspectives of Liberalism and Realism are myopic and far to narrow in its understanding of the interactions of state and the individuals that constitute it to adequately analyse such a complex issue the “War on Terror”. It is in this papers opinion that the continued use of such perspectives contributes to “a civil society… that thinks, reflects and analyzes complex international events through a very narrow set of theoretical lenses" (Smith, 2002). Whereas with Critical Theory, it allows greater flexibility in analysing the information at hand and would provide a more realistic critique by drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities.

(b) On criticism

Both postmodern and post-Marxist approaches to international relations can be said to be critical of the prevailing rationalist orthodoxy as well as that they both approaches share a commitment to human freedom, though differently understood. Freedom for postmodernists is negatively constituted, as resistance to determination. Where as with Post- Marxists, however, freedom is looked at in positive terms, it is the literal institution of human emancipation. From there on the approaches diverge even further as they echo the fundamental philosophical schism that divides the rational school they criticise.

Realist and postmodern approaches are sceptical about the prospective for human progress whereas idealist and post-Marxist approaches rest on the assertion of a rigid criterion of judgement (Hutchings, 2001). In so far as possible the analysis of the ‘War on Terror’ here under presented will attempt to decouple from the remainder of the critical school and codify post-Marxist analyses. Within this post-Marxist mainstream of critical theory, there are two branches that will be considered. The initial segment of this essay will consider the shared theoretical framework that structures both bodies of criticism. From here the treatment of the two branches under consideration will diverge thus sections two and three of the essay will then treat these in turn.

i. The first branch is primarily associated with the writings of Andrew Linklater as it is based on notions of cosmopolitan idealism and traces its philosophical lineage through the work of Habermas to Kant.

ii. The second branch, that can be said to be the most closely associated with the work of Robert Cox, is more eclectic as it builds most notably through the work of Gramsci on the historical materialism of Marx.

(c) On terrorism

This case study understands terrorism as a political technique that relies on the systematic use of violence to instil fear in civilian populations (Devetak, 2005a) in order push forward an agenda. It thus attempts to avoid any simplistic recourse to political labelling on the basis of the actors responsible for acts of violence; that is to say that according to the above definition, terror can equally be brandished by state and non-state groups and determination should be based on substantive analysis of the method rather than the actor that wields it.

A. The framework of criticism

The two branches of critical theory to be considered both share certain core criticisms of traditional rationalist approaches to international relations and the specific application of these criticisms to the US war on terror will be explored in the succeeding sections of this case study. In the first instance, a criticism of the bracketed ontological assumptions of the rationalist schools is shared. That this ontology is 'prior' or 'given' is vehemently disputed as the objects of analysis chosen by traditional approaches structure the questions asked and the answers received. Secondly, each branch challenges the epistemology of more orthodox approaches. In his essay entitled “Political Realism and Human Interests“, Ashley argued that positivist methodologies constitute knowledge of practical and technical interests, in other words positivists are interested in knowledge as a means of understanding and controlling the world. This understanding of what knowledge is ignores and inhibits emancipatory constitutive knowledge interests. Thus it ignores forms of knowledge that seek to reveal the relations of domination and the conditions of “distorted communication and understanding that deny humans the ability to make their future through full will and consciousness” (Ashley, 1981). This, it is argued, results in a mode of knowing that proliferates the paradigms of the past into the future.

B. Cosmopolitan Universalism

In “Men and Citizens” (1990), Linklater sets out his criticism of the morally particularistic ontology of mainstream international relations theory. He argues that the foundational enforcement of the state as the key source of subjectivity in international relations causes rigid boundaries between the self and the other. This exclusionary notion of what community is and how the individual relates to it creates a discourse that privileges the ethical rights of the citizen above those of the rest of humanity. The US “War on Terror” relies precisely on such particularism in order to privilege the perceived interests of the US above those of the rest of humanity.

The analysis that Linklater (2002) gives on the “War on Terror” is guided by the progressive notion that it is possible to universally eliminate unnecessary human suffering. In his book, he lines out both the extent to which the war on terror devalues normative progress made towards reducing unnecessary human suffering and the extent to which it creates even more unnecessary suffering. Firstly, the continued “War on Terror” has eroded the protection offered by established legal norms thus it has caused various contraventions of the well established and widely observed human rights and humanitarian legal conventions. Examples of which can be seen in conditions of detention and the legal process extended by the US to enemy prisoners at its facilities in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and also in the regime of clandestine extradition and interrogation euphemistically termed rendition. In addition to that, the various unauthorised, extra-national military operations instigated by the US in pursuit of its war aims, such as the US air strikes of January 2007 in Southern Somalia, breach the international legal principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. The US may hold the outcomes to be absolute goods, in other words the ends justify the means, however this ignores the universally agreed limits on state action as it privileges a narrowly defined US military interest above the universal rights of mankind.

Secondly, as Linklater pointed out, the pursuit by the US of its “War on Terror” has been responsible for instituting human suffering afresh. Marc Herold estimated that there were more civilian casualties that resulted from the first two months of US military action in Afghanistan than from the attacks of September 11th (Herold, 2002). This differential value placed on US and 'enemy' civilian lives is further emphasised by the United States’ willingness to use cluster munitions in areas of high civilian population density (Oliver, 2003). Arguably, US military planners consider the risks presented to US ground personnel intrinsic in mounting more targeted operations to outweigh the risks presented to the lives of Iraqi civilians by using cluster munitions. As Devetak pointed out, “[u]nchecked particularism” is used to deprive outsiders of their rights (Devetak, 2005b).

Chomsky's criticism however (2002), is based more upon the closely related principle of reciprocity; the idea that one should be subject to the same norms of behaviour that one seeks to impose on others. He is of the opinion, that according to the definition of terrorism used by the US army, the actions of US and British forces in Afghanistan also constitute international terrorism; i.e. 'a calculated use of violence to attain goals that are political ... in nature' (US Army manual quoted in Chomsky, 2002).

Linklater describes in Transformation of Political Community (1998) how the processes of state-building, geopolitical rivalry, capitalist industrialisation, and moral practical learning contribute to the monopolisation by the state of sources of political identity. The result of which is a discourse that understands a necessity of correlation between the boundaries of sovereignty, nationality, citizenship and territory and it is with such a vision of the international order that allows a causal connection between the attacks of September 11th, the Taliban regime and the Afghan 'quasi-state' to be understood. Surely criminal legal proceedings should have been instituted against those individuals implicated in the 9/11 attacks rather than the machinery of war mobilised to confront a nation? It reflects interestingly on the power relations that exist between different branches of the international relations school that the threat posed by a diffuse, transnational network was confronted by the machinery of inter-state warfare (see the treatment of the work of Ashley in section A above, for a discussion of the potential for the epistemological method of the traditional branches of international relations to introduce such oversights). Linklater argues that a decentralisation of the sites of power and a diversification of human loyalties offers the potential to alter the relationship between universality and particularity away from the totalising project of the state.

Habermas (2003) on the other hand, seems to see the “War on Terror” more of a rhetorical pretext for an extant policy of unilateral domination than an epistemologically driven error. He argues that the “War on Terror” consists of the forceful imposition of a global liberal order in place of the consensual, human rights based approach grounded in international law that preceded it. This shift is held to be best animated by opposing the continental European understanding of intervention based on giving force to the legitimacy of internationalized human rights (after the cosmopolitanism of Kant), to the Anglo-American understanding based on the imposition of a liberal international order (after the liberal nationalism of Mill). It is argued that the United States’ approach is actually a setback to the trend of the domesticisation of state power through international law that has characterised international relations since World War II. In choosing to act unilaterally, the United States has devalued this universal principle and has actually undermined its normative authority.

The thoughts of Habermas also encapsulate an emancipatory potential that is best approached from a more positive perspective. Habermas' discourse ethics is a dialogic ideal, which seeks to institutionalise inclusive democratic arrangements for decision-making, characterised by procedural fairness rather than guided by notions of moral correctness. If such a process of cosmopolitan decision-making were to be instituted, it would essentially make room for the subjectivities of all affected parties on an equal basis. Aside from that, it would also broaden the political community past the boundaries of the sovereign state and deepen the political community within the state. It was because of the fact that the US attack of Iraq failed to satisfy the conditions of discourse ethics that Habermas refuses to sanction it (Devetak, 2005b).

C. Historical Materialism

Cox (2002) understands the development of world society over time using historical materialism through Marx and from this approach he uses the synchronic dimension to investigate the arrangement of material forces instituted at a given point in time. The social, economic and political processes that lead to changes in this systemic arrangement is not manifest externally, however it can be inferred by arranging synchronic slices in the diachronic dimension. In the words of Marx, "circumstances make men as much as men make circumstances" (1932) thus this approach stresses the fact that current manifestations of world society are directly a function of previous ones. It is the relations of production, which is broadly understood to include cultural institutions like the education system, church and press that produce the social conditions that enable 'behaviours consistent with ... [the] arrangement of power relations in society' (Cox, 1983), that structure transitions from the present to the future and thus hold the key to shaping alternative visions of the future.

As Cox sees it, the historically specific and mutable character of the current world system is emphasised by this perspective. I would imagine that he would look to broaden the conservative framework in which understandings of the war on terror are set. The focus of the lens the “War on Terror” brings to bear on world politics is as notable for what it excludes as for what it describes. The attacks of 9/11 can be seen to target the symbols of the projection of US military and financial power overseas. However, the political realisation of the war on terror brackets and expands the projection of this power while objectifying the reaction thereto as an externality to be managed. Cox would implore that we focus on the manner in which the social conditions and cultural institutions currently instituted have facilitated growing global poverty and inequality and the asymmetric application of legal procedures, that we understand the structural underpinnings of immanent material problems in global society.

In the analysis of Cox, the concept of historical materialism is augmented by that of hegemony, an idea he inherited from Gramsci. On the basis of a historical survey, Cox asserts that hegemonic world order can be said to exist when consensual rather than coercive power prevails, when commonly held interests are shared and relations of domination are latent (Cox, 1983). Hegemonic world orders rest on the regulation of inter-state conflict and a globalised mode of production that unites civil society in different countries. The social, economic and political structures that sustain hegemony are more consistent and complimentary at the core than in peripheral societies where the contradictions between modern economic or political modes and traditional social ones can cause reactions to spring forth.

This understanding of the functioning of hegemony reads the attacks of 9/11 as a counter-hegemonic force, an attempt to challenge the prevailing order. Cox (1983) allows for this to happen in two ways, through 'wars of movement' (physical battles) and 'wars of position' (propaganda battles), asserting that only wars of position are likely to succeed in conditions where the hegemonic order is strongly embedded. It is fair to say that the norms of multi-lateral dispute resolution through international institutions and the global application of free market economics (after Fukuyama) were relatively strongly embedded at the turn of the millennium. The US reaction to the counter-hegemonic attacks of 9/11, paradoxically, engenders greater potential for systemic change than did the attacks themselves. The attacks of 9/11 met with almost universal international condemnation, but the doctrine of unilateral war posited by the US in response has unleashed dissonance in civil society. This reaction in civil society threatens the cultural constitution of the state-society complex (i.e. the 'relations of production' in the broad sense understood above) and by implication the world order. Much of the work of Cox has focussed on possibilities immanent in history for bottom-up social change that will eventually alter forms of state and of world order (see for example Cox, 1999).

Conclusion

When compared to the voluminous output of postmodern scholars in response to the attacks of 9/11 and the associated declaration of a war on terror, the post-Marxist response has been surprisingly muted. Perhaps this reflects the current academic fad within the critical school? Or perhaps mainstream critical scholars consider the strategic and meta-theoretical debates that have traditionally animated the school more important? Either way, given the primacy of the debate on global terrorism in the rest of the academy, it seems strange that more has not been written. That which has been written, has tended to animate that classical philosophical territory between particularism and universalism. Critical theory has retreated, through the immanent critique and multi-lateral cosmopolitanism from bald assertions of universally applicable moral principles, but continues to rely on a belief that progress towards universality remains possible and desirable.

The social contract of security has been shown to constitute political communities through practices of inequality and ‘unfreedom’. The deferral of equality through the creation of the Leviathan makes the liberty granted to a selective and partial form of freedom, allowed to some in the conditions of the ‘silence of the laws’. Yet, the spectre of equality is the greatest danger to the Leviathan. In Hobbes, the multitude can challenge the right of the sovereign to judge on good and evil and manifests itself as an equal judge. The multitude gives shapes to the equal right of publicly using one’s judgement that Kant will later on see as the premise of the Enlightenment. However, if in Kant, this right is still submitted to a selection, to a division of the social positions according to the division of labour, post-Marxist interpretations of equality radicalise it by rendering equality as a maxim for action mobilised against situations of social and political wrongs. ‘Peace, security and order’ as Hobbes defined the function of the modern state attempt do away with the politicisation of debasement, enslavement and contempt. In moral terms the case presented against the war on terror is a compelling one, but the perspectives offered are not immediately striking or novel. Is it then the manner in which we conceive of and produce knowledge about the world order that produces problems therewith? Or does a Manichaean war on terror justify the application of whatever means are deemed necessary to combat it?

References

Ashley, Richard (1981), "Political Realism and Human Interests", in International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 25 6(2).

Aradau, Claudia (2007), “Forget equality? Security, liberty and the ‘war on terror’ “, SGIR Sixth Pan-European International Relations Conference, ‘Making Sense of a Pluralist World’, Turin, 12-15 September 2007

Chomsky, Noam (2002), "Who are the Global Terrorists", in Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Eds. Ken Booth, Tim Dunne, Palgrave Macmillan.

Cox, Michael (2002), "Meanings of Victory: American Power after the Towers", in Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Eds. Ken Booth, Tim Dunne, Palgrave Macmillan.

Cox, Robert (1983), "Gramsci, Hegemony and International Relations: An Essay in Method", in Millennium, Vol. 12 (2).

Cox, Robert (1999), "Civil Society at the turn of the millenium: prospects for an alternative world order", in Review of International Studies, Vol. 25.

Cox, Robert (2002), "Reflections and Transitions", in The Political Economy of a Plural World, Robert Cox, Michael Schlechter. Routledge.

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The Iraq War: America and the Politics of Oil

“It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction ... a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard ... The only acceptable strategy is ... to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."

- 1998 letter from Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle to then President Clinton

It seems fairly obvious from this statement in this statement published in 2001 in the Washington Times of the real objectives behind the justifications given for the Iraq war. If anything, the one statement that unified popular opinion in the different countries of the Middle East, it was that the real motive behind the war and Saddam’s eventual removal was that it was in order to control Iraq’s oil. In fact several Middle Eastern paper printed some of the most sardonic cartoons to make the point. An example of which is one that appeared in Al Akhbar (an Egyptian daily) the cartoonist Mustafa Hussein drew two Iraqi women whispering a rumour that whenever a coalition soldier feels dizzy in the desert, they make him sniff oil. This perspective strongly reverberated with that very popular slogan seen internationally in massive anti-war marches throughout the world, namely “No Blood for Oil”. Therefore, the belief that there is a connection between oil and the Iraq war has been quite widespread. Yet analysis of the relationship between the war and oil interests has been a distinctly invisible element of mainstream war coverage. If anything, the Bush administration during and after the war, were unmistakably tight-lipped about its oil interests in determining war policy and the same goes for the new Obama administration, regardless of its promise to “Pull Out” of Iraq.

Regardless, control over oil in the Middle East was one of the central goals of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC was an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that lasted from early 1997 to 2006, whose members exerted a great deal of influence on the Bush Administration's development of military and foreign policies, especially involving national security and of course, the Iraq War. Since its beginnings, PNAC had been agitating for control of Iraqi oil and to that end had formed the “Committee for the Liberation of Iraq”. Furthermore the letter sent to Clinton in 1998, makes it explicitly clear that Rumsfeld and his ilk believed that control over Iraqi oil should lie not in Hussein’s hands, but in those of the United States. To them, after being long frustrated with Clinton’s lack of military ambition, the 9/11 attacks were a timely geopolitical godsend for muscling into place their bellicose enterprise. The difficulty remains that even though we now have a good understanding of the imperial ambitions of the Bush administration, this paper believes we still lack a systematic analysis of why oil was a driving force behind this war. What kind of eco-liquidity[1] would have been provided to the United States in controlling Iraqi oil at that particular political conjunction?

In “Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West”, Buck-Morss sets out that the end of the Cold War wasn’t marked so much by the “power of the enemy other”, but by the need to “rectify the… materialist contradictions inherent in the mass utopia dreamworld’s of both East and West.” Thus, geo-economics came to replace geopolitics, that is, as Edward Luttwak its key champion says, war by other means. So now, the new and arguably the first, truly global ideological form is consumerism in all its hyperreal, differentiated, and constantly changing forms. In propelling this latest ‘dreamworld’, the Clinton administration engaged in aggressive policies for economic restructuring that successfully furthered geo-economic interests. Conversely, as Michael Klare pointed out, when neo-liberalizing restructuring alone is cannot to push aside the obstructions to easy resource access for ensuring geo-economics goals, it is inevitable that armed conflict again becomes the order of the day. So given the requirements of today’s techno-infrastructure, it is important to maintain the eco-liquidity of that strategic commodity, oil, as it is central to capitalism’s fluidity and this has entered shaky ground in recent years. After all, geo-economics was born from the shock waves of the 1970s OPEC oil crisis. These shocks did not only changed the global oil regime but they were also intimately connected to the massive post-Bretton Woods transformation of the global financial order. As Keohane explained, access to a readily available supply of reasonably cheap oil was central in the development of the open and non-discriminatory monetary and trade system sought by the United States needed. Therefore, oil was “at the center (sic) of the redistributive system of American hegemony” and the Middle East was as Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defence, called in 1981 put it “the umbilical cord of the free industrialized world”. The Carter Doctrine of 1980 further states “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force”.

Even though the international oil market has evolved considerably since the 1970s, the Middle East’s oil reserves maintains being the centre of economic gravity as the fact remains that the region still holds just over half of the global oil supply. Right now, outside this region, producers are forced to venture into less productive and more difficult localities many of which have already reached peak oil. Thus, long-term projections now show that OPEC and the Arab Gulf producers will become increasingly important. While Saudi Arabia possesses the largest reserves globally standing at 262 billion barrels or Giga barrels (Gb), Iraq’s proven reserves rank second at 113 Gb. Furthermore, the US Energy Department estimates that Iraq has as much as 220 Gb in undiscovered reserves that would bring the Iraqi total to the equivalent of 98 years of current US annual oil imports. A senior analyst at the Petroleum Finance Company in Washington, DC, has recently said in 2001 that, “the international oil industry regards Iraq as one of the ultimate prizes on offer in the world today”, and it will be the new “Klondike” of the 21st century. Of the 70-odd discovered fields where oil is easy to access, so far only 15 have been developed.

Therefore, given these realities, perhaps it’s easy to just simply chalk this war up to a particularly bellicose US administration who is simply extending its 70-year history of petropolitical intervention in the region. However, upon closer inspection of the dynamics of oil politics over the last few years it becomes apparent that a more specific and complex set of oil supply conditions has resulted in the decision to attack Iraq at this particular time. Seeing the sequence of events, coupled with the Bush administration rhetoric at the time, we could start by questioning by asking whether the 9/11 attacks had anything to do with this US ambition to reconstruct the Iraqi oil regime. It is a fact that out of the 19 suicide bombers, 15 were Saudi, and for whatever unknown reason, the Saudis were not particularly cooperative with the US administration’s investigations. Perhaps this raised the question in the US of whether Saudi Arabia, its largest supplier of oil, would in practice continue to be a reliable ally.

Is there any evidence that these political developments might actually impinge on the Saudi supply of cheap oil to the United States? Lets start by looking at all the recent developments affecting the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia in a chronological timeline as this may further shed some light to this question. Over the last 70 years, the US and Saudi Arabia have shared an intimate relationship first established by the Roosevelt administration and the Saudi royal family. This provided privileged access to oil for the US in return for military protection for the Saudi’s. In particular, since the oil embargoes of the 1970s, the United States boosted its sales of highly sophisticated military armaments to the Saudis. After the first Gulf War, the United States further extended its network of military bases and arms provision from Saudi Arabia to include Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar in order to secure regional oil control. Up until today, Saudi oil supply is centrally important to the United States with Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, providing some 16.8% of total crude imports to the US.

It is often said that it would be impossible for Saudi Arabia to use oil as a political weapon as that income it generates enables it (primarily sustained by oil rents) to maintain social stability through the financing of its extensive patronage and public welfare systems. Indeed, the Saudis have always maintained their side of the bargain by stepping up their production of what Jhaveri in his paper on petroimperialism called “political oil” in order to deal with turbulence in supply from events like the Venezuelan oil strikes of late 2002. He further states that, “Saudi Arabia is, after all, a “swing producer” being the only country in the world with the excess production capacity to achieve this role at any given time.” Even though this role in maintaining supply balance and prices provides them with lucrative profits, they still have to absorb considerable losses. Jhaveri further asserts that for Saudi Arabia, “retaining this power to sustain elevated prices and prevent market volatility is of uppermost importance because dependable oil profit is the basis of its stability as a domestic and regional political power.”

Even though Saudi Arabi’s market share substantially grew for a brief period after the oil shocks of the 1970s, its centrality was significantly undermined by changes in the global oil production system. Ever since the 1970s, Saudi Arabia has not been one of the primary beneficiaries of the ever increasing global demand in oil, as it was the smaller producers in OPEC along with the non-OPEC producers from the North Sea as they offered better oil extraction technology and terms. It was these producers who flooded the oil market that created the 1986 oil crash and it was then that the Gulf producers lost the market battle from which they have yet to fully recover so between 1988 and 1996, the Gulf region took up only one-third of the incremental growth demand. The irony is that these new and more expensive non-OPEC operators were only able to exist because of the elevated prices that OPEC maintained. Faced with declining revenues, Saudi Arabia has since sought to move downstream in the commodity chain to secure the growing Asian markets (in the same way the Venezuelans did in North America) but this strategy proved to be only minimally successful. What this demonstrates is that Saudi Arabia, as the key producer within OPEC, does not possess the necessary power to rig prices. In sum, the Saudi state has been struggling to uphold its revenue base for fulfilling domestic functions. Lacking the capital with which to develop new oil facilities, The Saudi government, as with the other Gulf States, have turned to private investors to develop their natural gas reserves which hold much more promise. Ultimately, what this shows is that the Saudis cannot afford to privatize oil due to its nationally strategic role in their economy.

When things financially worsened in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, there were significant negative repercussions for their relationship with the United States. Saudi Arabia was left in a state of deficit after having to pay for both the war costs and further arms purchases from the US. As a way to overcome this problem, the Saudis started to diversify their network of global and regional political-economic alliances, the most notable new alliance was with its neighbor, Iran, which did not go down well in Washington.In addition to that, after the debilitating stroke of King Fahd in 1995, Crown Prince Abdullah took over as the new regent Saudi Arabia and one of the first things he did was to reduce US arms purchases and thereby reducing their reliance on its protection. Moreover, Prince Abdullah has since stood out as a new political voice in the Middle East that was openly critical of the then US sanctions against Iraq and an advocate of the Palestinian cause. He has also attempted to build a base of support for the introduction of democratic reforms in the country while reining in some of the conservative clergy, which made him is a progressive voice on many counts. After 9/11, this tension between the Saudi’s and the United States intensified. Shockwaves went through Saudi Arabia when a classified Pentagon briefing was leaked describing it as “the kernel of evil” backing Islamic terrorism. In turn, Prince Abdullah himself flew to the United States in 2003 to caution Bush that unless he reduced his support for Israel, oil sales and military cooperation could be in jeopardy.

These new strategies were a response to the growing domestic turbulence in Saudi Arabia as a result of the precarious nature of the state’s oil revenue base from the 1980s onwards. Saudi Arabia is a government that retains its legitimating power through close alliances with the Muwahhidun[2] (Wahhabists) and it is oil money that has helped consolidate these ties. They originally emerged during the era of British colonial expansion with the goal of transforming and re-moralising the community, however, they later worked hand-in-hand with the Saudi state. The Muwahhidun then came to oppose the ruling dynasty, after the 1970s down turn, calling it corrupt and self-serving, and their relationship with them became more disjunctive. The cause of this disjunctive turn requires, as Robert Vitalis emphasizes, an examination of material encounters “on the ground”. Such a study could help us understand how the persistence of a significant US military presence on Saudi soil after the end of the first Gulf war has led to deep resentment and the fuelling of Islamic fundamentalisms. In fact, this was a primary motive behind bin Laden’s declaration of a Jihad against America, and the reason why so many Saudis were among those carrying out the 9/11 attacks. Rather than pursuing a careful analysis of these disjunctive processes, the US media instead is saturated with perversely orientalist readings on how the House of Saud is breaking down because of a dysfunctional royal family, or circulates hard-line denunciations of the Saudi kingdom’s austere flavour of Islam, namely Wahhabism. Inevitably, the Saudis are speculating they may be next in line after Iraq.

In brief, it has been increasingly difficult for the Saudi government to maintain a simple relationship of allegiance with the United States due to the changes in the global oil market as well as its own domestic political instabilities. From the mid- 1990s, the response by the Saudi leadership has resulted in the emergence of a new power nexus in the region that began to limit the capacity for US regional dominance. It was clear that this was likely to lead to negative consequences for the US as Saudi Arabia was not just a major oil supplier but it continued to play a significant role as swing producer that had a substantial influence on global oil prices. When seen in this light, it was fairly obvious that the US was under pressure to determine a way of undermining the power of the Saudi government in the oil market was intensifying for at the same time, this tension was further being exacerbated by the US’ ever-voracious appetite for oil which only could only be met through further imports. This tension intensified when, after the Asian financial crisis in 1998, OPEC tried to bring prices back up by cutting production. This, however, led the United States in 2000 to turn be even heavy-handed in its attempts to pressure OPEC to increase production. It had to undergo the humiliation of lobbying OPEC in a fashion seldom seen in the 40-year history of the oil cartel. This led to a staccato of furious demands within the United States for breaking up OPEC, a few even demanded the arrest of OPEC ministers for price fixing. As a result, the United States dropped its objections to easing UN limits on the funds Iraq could use once Baghdad had agreed to release more oil. Around this time, the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy concluded from several studies that showed the growing role of Iraq as a new kind of swing producer and this posed difficulties for the US administration. When the Venezuelan oil strikes took place in December 2002, Iraq (along with several other nations) had helped compensate by increasing production by 140,000 b/d.

Looking at this tangled conjunction of anxieties Gulf oil presented to the US, the restoration of control of Iraqi oil could not come soon enough, and hence the war on Iraq. The plan was simply to privatize the Iraqi Oil Industry that would create a new oil order that harks back to the glory days of the time when oil majors ruled the trade. This would sever the enormous power of the governing elites from the profits of state oil. Furthermore, this move would counter OPEC’s centrality and eventually result in a supply of reasonably priced oil for both the United States and the global market. Iraq would become a frontier bonanza boom for the majors where oil is very cheap to extract. However, it is highly doubtful that the Iraqi people would accept the privatisation of the oil sector forced onto them even if it was part of a package of democracy and prosperity, and indeed they haven’t. Without political stability, the oil majors would not invest irrespective of their desperation for access to such a cheap source of oil and so far they haven’t managed to get in. This has caused the US to stay on far longer than it intended to in Iraq.

It may be contrary conventional interpretations, but the war did not appear to have been an imperial manoeuvre in the sense that the US government or private corporations obtained any direct immediate gains from the Iraqi oil wealth for their own aggrandizement. Yahya Sadowski pointed out that the Bush administration did not have any strong ties to the oil supermajors, of which only one is American (Exxon). While it may be true that many potentially lucrative contracts were handed out in closed-door sessions to US oil engineering and servicing companies such as Bechtel and Halliburton (in some cases even before the war began), these were not the long-term deals that the oil majors are waiting for. Michael Watts in a paper he wrote in 1994, “Oil as money: The devil’s excrement and the spectacle of black gold” that petroimperialism is one of the eight natures of oil and here we see a form of it that is true to the intentions of post-Cold War geo-economics aimed at chaos management by implementing privatization structures. The US’s rather short-sighted dreamworld continues to be fixed in the abundant oil bedrock of the Gulf region, so you could argue that they had no choice but to use such imperial strategems. Therefore, it would not be unfair to say that America was the architect of its own violent embroilment with Islamic “terrorists” caused by their ever growing need to control the petropolitical order.

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[1] By eco-liquidity, I mean the dual and fluid circulation of oil both as an asset to be interchanged with money, as well as creating physical power, that collectively furnish capitalism with its dynamic energy.

[2] The term "Wahhabi" (Wahhābīya) was first used by opponents of ibn Abdul Wahhab. It is considered derogatory by the people it is used to describe, who prefer to be called "unitarians" or Muwahiddun.