- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Article: found
Killing “Hajis” in “Indian Country”: Neoliberal Crisis, the Iraq War and the Affective Wages of Anti-Muslim Racism
Abstract
Starting in the 1970s neoliberalism began to undermine and chisel away at liberalism, taking aim at the social wage. By the twenty-first century this had resulted in a structural crisis of overaccumulation and a political crisis of legitimacy as social dislocation and precarity became prevalent. The war in Iraq created through war and reconstruction new spaces for accumulation. The invasion and occupation were premised on and worked to maintain anti-Muslim racism in order to scaffold legitimacy for a neoliberal state that is hollowed out of its previous liberal promises. No longer offering a social wage, this becomes the affective wages of neoliberalism, premised on the reification of ontological difference between a civilized, humane and rational West, and a fundamentally illiberal Muslim other. At the same time that liberalism is eroded by neoliberalism, the latter draws from and reinforces the liberal logic of deflection manifest in frontier logics.
Content
Author and article information
Notes
J. Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1–19.
The US Army War College issued a two-volume, 1300-page study in January 2019, in which they detailed some of the mistakes, concluding for example that Iran was the clear strategic winner in Operation Iraqi Freedom. T. South, “Army's Long-Awaited Iraq War Study Finds Iran was the Only Winner in a Conflict that Holds Many Lessons for Future Wars,” The Army Times (2019), https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/18/armys-long-awaited-iraq-war-study-finds-iran-was-the-only-winner-in-a-conflict-that-holds-many-lessons-for-future-wars/
G. Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).
I am using the formulation of disavowal as a key logic of neoliberalism based on A. Davari, “Indeterminate Governmentality: Neoliberal Politics in Revolutionary Iran, 1968–1979” (Doctoral Dissertation, 2016).
V. Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), xv-xix.
S. Daulatzai, Black Start Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xxiii.
V. Prashad, “Dream History of the Global South,” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 4: 1 (2012), 43–53.
J. L. Gelvin, “Why there was a Human Rights Revolution in the 1970s and Why it Took the Form that it Did,” First Istanbul World Forum, Turkish Prime Ministry's Office of Public Diplomacy and the SETA Foundation for Political Economic, and Social Research, October 2012.
Daulatzai, Black Star Crescent Moon, 89–103; N. Singh, Race and America's Long War (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 53–73; Prashad, The Darker Nations, 151–164.
D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 39–63.
J. G. Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36:2 (1982), 379–415; Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 9–19.
L. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2003), 36.
V. G. Devinatz, “Right to Work Laws: The Southernization of US Labor Relations and the US Trade Union's Decline,” Labor Studies Journal 40:4 (2015), 297–318; E. Gould and W. Kimball, “‘Right to Work’ States Still have Lower Wages,” Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper 395 (2015).
A. Barba and M. Pivetti, “Rising Household Debt: Its Causes and Macroeconomic Implications—-A Long Period Analysis,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33:1 (2009), 113–137; B. Z. Cynamon and S. M. Fazzari, “Household Debt in the Consumer Age: Source of Growth—Risk of Collapse,” Capitalism and Society 3:2 (2008), https://ssrn.com/abstract=1153180
S. Gill, “New Constitutionalism, Democratisation and Global Political Economy,” Global Change, Peace and Security 10:1 (1998), 23–38.
US Government Accountability Office, “Action Needed to Improve Rating Agency Registration Program and Performance Related Disclosure,” GAO-10–782 (2010).
W. Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2015), 38–45.
I am using a model articulated in terms of domestic race relations in the US and globalizing it so as to interpret US foreign policy and neoliberal global capitalism. See for example D. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso Press, 1991).
A. Ali, “The Impossibility of Muslim Citizenship,” Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 11:3 (2017), 110–116.
M. Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Three Leaves Press), 17–36.
H. J. Richardson III, “US Hegemony, Race, and Oil in Deciding United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 on Iraq,” Temple International and Comparative Law Journal, 17 (2003), 47.
Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 20–27.
Singh, Race and America's Long War, 31.
R. L. Ivie, “Savagery in Democracy's Empire,” Third World Quarterly 26:1 (2005), 59.
Ibid., 55.
Ibid., 59.
Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 23–24.
I. Buruma, “Lost in Translation: The Two Minds of Bernard Lewis,” The New Yorker (2004), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/14/lost-in-translation-3, accessed March 9, 2019.
B. Lewis, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” The Atlantic Monthly 266:3 (1990), 47–60.
B. Lewis, “What Went Wrong,” The Atlantic Monthly 289:1 (2002), 43–45.
Buruma, “Lost in Translation.”
J. Zeleny, “As Candidate, Obama Carves Antiwar Stance,” New York Times (February 26, 2007); S. Youngman, “Once the Anti-War Candidate, Obama Strikes Military Posture,” The Hill (2011).
J. Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine, ” The Atlantic 317:3 (April 2016), 70–90.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense at the time, remarked in a Congressional hearing, “There is a new Hitler that needs to be addressed … . He [Hitler] might have been stopped early at a minimum cost of lives had the vast majority of the world's leaders not decided at the time that the risks of acting were greater than the risks of not acting.” See Armed Services, US Policy toward Iraq, 2, 9/18/2002 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2002). Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that ruled Iraq between April 2003 and June 2004, compared Saddam to Hitler as well. For example, see L. P. Bremer, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 37–39, 71.
C. Coughlin, Saddam: His Rise and Fall (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 38–41; R. Morris, “A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,” New York Times (March 14, 2003).
Ibid., 16. The Americans were not able to bring electricity to Iraq after they destroyed the country's power supply in 1991 and 2003, and prevented its reconstruction in the years between through their sanctions regime. To get an idea of the disastrous sanctions policy, see for example D. M. Armitage, Economic Sanctions on Iraq: Going Nowhere Fast (US Army War College, Carlisle Barracks,1998); P. Boone, H. Gazdar, and A. Hussain, Sanctions Against Iraq: Costs of Failure, (New York: Center for Economic and Social Rights, 1997); R. Morran, R. Normand, J. Paul, J. Rempel and C. Wilcke, Iraq Sanctions: Humanitarian Implications and Options for the Future (New York: Global Policy Forum, 2002); E. Rouleau, “America's Unyielding Policy toward Iraq,” Foreign Affairs 74:1 (1995), 59–72.
Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 10.
Ibid., 90.
Ibid., 91.
Ibid., 80–81.
See Bremer's account of dealing with a member of the Iraqi Communist Party (95).
Timothy Mitchell cites an episode recounted by Rory Stewart in which an American democracy expert addressed a provincial Iraqi council: “Welcome to your new democracy. I have met you before. I have met you in Cambodia. I have met you in Russia. I have met you in Nigeria.” Mitchell explains this incident, “It is to see democracy as fundamentally the same everywhere, defined by universal principles that are to be reproduced in every successful instance of democratization, as though democracy occurs only as a carbon copy of itself. If it fails, as it seems to in an oil state, the reason must be that some universal element is missing or malfunctioning.” T. Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy,” Economy and Society 38:3 (2009), 399–432, 400.
Ibid., 45, 183–184, 221, 319–320, 54.
Ibid., 18, 26.
Bremer, My Year in Iraq, 52.
See for example S. Samuel, “It's Disturbingly Easy to Buy Iraq's Archeological Treasures,” The Atlantic (2018); P. G. Stone and J. F. Bajjaly, eds., The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2008). https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/03/iraq-war-archeology-invasion/555200/
Ibid., 350–351.
Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism.
D. Egan, “Frantz Fanon and the Construction of the Colonial Subject: Defining ‘the Enemy’ in the Iraq War,” Socialism and Democracy 21:3 (2007), 147.
See for example P. Hess,“Raid in Iraq's ‘Indian Country,’” United Press International (April 6, 2003); D. Fears, “Native Americans Back from Iraq Decry Cutback,” Washington Post (February 17, 2005); P. J. McDonnell, “No Shortage of Fighters in Iraq's Wild West,” Los Angeles Times (July 25, 2004). See the following article for a list of other examples of the usage of the phrase: S. W. Silliman, “The ‘Old West’ in the Middle East: US Military Metaphors in Real and Imagined Indian Country,” American Anthropologist 110:2 (2008).
Silliman, “The ‘Old West’ in the Middle East,” 237.
Ibid., 241.
C. Kyle, S. McEwen, and J. DeFelice, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History (New York: W. Morrow, 2012).
C. Eastwood, American Sniper (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2015); C. Mauricette, “American Sniper (2014),” in S. Murguia, ed., The Encyclopedia of Racism in American Films (London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018), 18–24; L. Soberon, “‘The Old Wild West in the New Middle East’: American Sniper (2014) and the Global Frontiers of the Western Genre,” European Journal of American Studies 12:2 (2017), 1–18.
Mauricette, “American Sniper (2014),” 20.
Ibid., 4–5. Kyle et al. repeatedly refer to Iraqis as “savages.” See the following pages just for a sampling of the usage: Kyle et al., American Sniper, 167, 97, 250, 60, 324.
Ibid., 304, 32.
Soberon, “The Old Wild West in the New Middle East,” 3–4.
Ibid., 10.
C. Hedges, “Killing Ragheads for Jesus,” Truthdig (2015).
See for example his well-known article, “The Coming Anarchy”, Atlantic Monthly 273:2 (February, 1994), 44–76. He rehearses a similar argument as the “Clash of Civilization” thesis put forward by Samuel Huntington. For a critique of the orientalist logic of the article, see D. Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s),” Third World Quarterly 24:4 (2003), 591–599.
R. D. Kaplan, “Indian Country,” Wall Street Journal (September 21, 2004).
R. Dunbar-Ortiz, “Indian Country,” Counterpunch (October 11, 2004).
For a history of the frontier and “frontier logic” in American nationalist discourse and foreign policy see G. Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019). This argument is also rehearsed in G. Grandin, “The Myth of the Border Wall,” New York Times (February 20, 2019). Recent scholarship has also shown how parts of the Middle East are frontier spaces and laboratories for neoliberal capitalism such as A. Boodrookas and A. Keshavarzian, “The Forever Frontier of Urbanism: Historicizing Persian Gulf Cities,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43:1 (2019), 14–29.
R. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People's History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014), 192–195.
Kaplan, “Indian Country.”
C. Rice, “Transcript of Secretary Rice News Conference,” speech given in Washington, DC, on July 21, 2006.
R. D. Kaplan, Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground (New York: Random House, 2005), 43.
Silliman, “The ‘Old West’ in the Middle East,” 241.
Ibid., 243.
Dunbar-Ortiz, “Indian Country.”
Singh, Race and America's Long War, 21–22, 118.
Fears, “Native Americans Back from Iraq Decry Cutback.”
G. W. Bush, “State of the Union,” speech given in Washington, DC, on January 29, 2003.
Ibid.
N. Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007) 283–307; J. Scahill, Black Water: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books, 2007), xiii-xxvii.
P. W. Singer, “Outsourcing War,” Foreign Affairs 84:2 (2005), 127–128.
M. Schwartz, “Department of Defense Contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq: Background and Analysis,” Congressional Research Service, R40764 (2011).
William D. Hartung, “The Military Industrial Complex Revisited: Shifting Patterns of Military Contracting in the Post-9/11 Period,” Report for the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute (2014).
For example, the Bush administration hired BearingPoint in 2004 to draft a proposal for the Oil Law. BearingPoint also was contracted to develop the Iraq National Development Strategy of 2005. C. Foote, W. Block, K. Crane, and S. Gray, “Economic Policy and Prospects in Iraq,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18:3 (2004), 47–70, 59; N. Klein, Shock Doctrine, 348.
Y.K. Baker, “Global Capitalism and Iraq: The Making of a Neoliberal State,” International Review of Modern Sociology 40:2 (2014), 121–148.