Between Catastrophe and Revolution by Daniel Bertrand Monk

Author:Daniel Bertrand Monk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: POL000000
ISBN: 9781682192795
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Legitimation: Terrorism

Oil for insecurity represented an effort on the part of the United States to restore its status as the world’s hegemonic power in the 1970s. Solutions to related crises of accumulation, repression, and legitimation afflicting the American empire would be found in the Middle East, a region that happened to contain significant quantities of high-quality petroleum that could be easily obtained through conventional means of extraction. As described above, solutions to the crises of accumulation within the North Atlantic world’s capitalist energy and defense industries were both found in this region through the mechanism of permanent war. In this way, the Middle East also provided an example par excellence of indirect suppression of opposition to US imperialism, which became the solution—albeit temporary—to the post-Vietnam crisis of repression. By promoting war and militarization across the Middle East, and thereby reinforcing authoritarianism when not directly investing in it, American hegemony was partially reconstituted on the basis of outsourced coercion in the context of regionwide destabilization. The greatest domestic challenge to this reconstitution of American hegemony in and through the Middle East has been at the level of legitimation. An effective solution to the problem of legitimation was provided by the events of September 11, 2001, an event that paved the way for a return to direct forms of repression, and which in turn addressed growing weaknesses in the oil-for-insecurity regime that had accumulated in the 1980s and 1990s.

Domestic legitimacy has indeed been the weakest link in this system, especially during its initial years of formation in the late 1970s. As a system constructed in reaction to an excess of direct intervention in Southeast Asia, assembling and exercising US hegemony in the Middle East through indirect repression was often met with tenuous, ambivalent, and contingent legitimations. Yet for the most part, oil for insecurity was justified by its disavowal. In the shadow of Vietnam, American efforts to reconstitute US hegemony in and through the Middle East were never understood, and even less presented, as such. The Middle East policies of the United States, from the Suez crisis to the rise of the Islamic State, have been overwhelmingly framed as being driven by the allegedly innate nature of the region’s persistent insecurity, above all by those who devised these insecuritizing policies in the first place. In this way, oil for insecurity drew on latent Orientalism in Western political and intellectual life as much as on the immediacy of the oil “embargoes” of the 1970s, the visceral drama of Palestinian militancy on the international stage, successive American hostage crises, the emergence of “political Islam,” and the growing US identification with Israel. Nevertheless, indirect involvement in conflicts in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s never elicited broad public support in the United States, nor were there intensive efforts to cultivate it. Touting clandestine US support for the insurgents fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was more of an exception than the rule. The Reagan administration’s double-dealing in the Iran-Iraq war, so as to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.