From: "Nicholas J. Kiersey" <nkiersey-AT-vt.edu>
Subject: Re: AUT: geopolitics article part 1 - introduction
Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 17:58:27 -0400


Dear Andrew:

Thanks for sending out a copy of your article. Sorry it has taken so 
long to reply but I was on holiday at home in Ireland and I did have 
much access to the Internet. As an International Relations theorist, I 
found your article to be very interesting indeed, not least because in 
it you wrestle with some of the issues I am dealing with right now as I 
write my PhD proposal. I think what has sparked my interest about your 
piece is the direction you take with the theoretical sources. But I'll 
get to that in a minute...

First, let me say that I I think you are absolutely on the money with 
the way you have approached the 'problem'. You have described the 
distributive problems of globalization well. And I like your idea of 
using "fragmentation" of "identity-communities" as a resource (However, 
you perhaps too neatly skip over the particularity of "ethno-religious" 
movements?). The central point you make in the first part of the paper 
is that the US has suffered a dramatic loss of 'hegemonic' or 
"communicative" power at the hands of all manner of networked 
resistances enabled by technology. As a consequence, you suggest that 
the US 'soft power' hegemony is on the wane and that the US is now 
responding with hard/disciplinary power means. As you see it, power has 
copped itself on to this new game and is demonstrating its 
micro-fascism as we might have expected. Bobbit and network war mavens 
Arquilla and Ronfeldt (who are also advisors to the US government) 
express the obvious anxiety that power is experiencing with these new 
networks. These are good sources - clearly, important people are 
worried about rhizomes (even though they forget that the statist 
enterprise they are quick to offer counter-strategies too is largely 
responsible for creating these threats in the first place).

The above notwithstanding (and this is less a criticism and more a 
point where I am currently quite confused and very much open to 
suggestion), I am by no means convinced (as you seem to be, if I have 
read you right) that these folks value "closure". Surely there are the 
Pat Buchanan's of this world - the classical conservatives or 'other' 
fundamentalists, if you will - who are opposed to capital's project. 
But the neocon 'assemblage of enunciation' that has produced the plan 
for the invasion of Iraq does not seem to fit this bill. Certainly they 
are trying to reterritorialize the networks because of a perceived 
breakdown in Empire's overcoding biopower in the Middle East. But this 
is not a 'return of the same' or a 'regression' to a pre-gloablization 
stage. They aren't trying to isolate the US from the world. They aren't 
really 'isolationists' but, rather, 'neo-reaganite unilateralists'. And 
this is a trope that has dominated American foreign policy thinking 
since the Founding. Our Neocons are pro-market, pro-network, 
pro-globalization. But they are so on their own terms. Thus I feel I 
need to see a more sophisticated analysis on the tools and techniques 
of the neocons that merely dismissing their efforts as "ideological 
beliefs and values" or a "fall back position" (8). These are surely 
part of the story. But they are not sufficient to pull off the trick 
described in Frum and Perle's 'End to Evil' or Perle, Colbert, et al's 
'A Clean Break'. As I see it, they have  a very material geopolitical 
vision. They planned the invasion of Iraq a long time ago - long before 
9/11. So, while the invasion of Iraq can be read as a phenomena driven 
by paranoia and Cold War ontology - its not quite an isolationist 
backlash (though fear has been used to legitimize it). It is, rather, 
an effort to employ novel and techniques of deterrence in order to make 
“soft capitalism” work in an unruly and interconnected world. I think 
an investigation of Frum and Perle's writings reveals this clearly. 
Well, that and a serious small penis complex...

The US has resorted to disciplinary techniques - as you note (9). But I 
have to say I am not sure I see why you used Baudrillard to describe 
the "recent vintage" of the disciplinary "approach" (9) taken in the 
recent war in Iraq. For me, Baudrillard's analysis says much about the 
domestic American sociology of both wars in Iraq. However, in terms of 
the problem you are dealing with (which I feel is the same problem I am 
dealing with), I am not as convinced that Baudrillard has much to say. 
Specifically, I am just not sure Baudrillard can explain the actual 
strategy and vision for a future Iraq that has been articulated for 
Iraq by the neocons. This is a serious problem.

For me, I think it is important to look at this problem through the 
'lens' of governmentality. We should look at the neoconservatives' 
practices of governmentality - which to me seem to amount to a great 
deal more than a war fought on the level of "hyper reality" and 
"simulacrum" and "symbolic control". We have to note that this is also 
a very real war - a very material war - even if you are right to note 
that a strong measure of what we might call 'coercive constructivism' 
has been used. Yet, the right of many sovereign states to determine the 
meaning of democracy for themselves has now been made conditional to 
the ability of those states to exercise their sovereignty within the 
parameters of the liberal republican tradition. As Panitich notes, the 
Unites States “is now requiring all states to restructure their 
coercive apparatus to fit America’s strategic concerns” (2003: 239). As 
such, we have to pay attention to strategies for material 
rearrangements. Thus I see US efforts at governmentalizing Iraq within 
a wider strategy of maintaining the global liberal order of flows and 
speed.

How I see this happening is another matter. I have approached this 
through Foucault so far. Borrowing from governmentality of geopolitics 
scholars like O’Tuathail and Herod, I think that a focus on New 
Imperialism as a phenomena of “globalization of governmentality” should 
be central to our efforts to comprehending the scope and orientation of 
New Imperialism’s priorities. Pushing this argument in terms of the 
sociology to which it is applied, we can examine the vision of a 
governmentalized Middle East in terms of what Reid has referred to as 
the “logistical” society (2003). As I understand it, the term is 
originally Virillio's. However, as Dillon and Reid express it, since 
discourses of biological complexity, computer networks and information 
have entered the "Western strategic imaginary" (2001: 59), we should 
try to imagine what the effect of this thinking has been on strategic 
practices (2001: 52).

To understand the logistical vision, we have to start thinking about 
how biopower today concerns itself with bodies and population data and 
the ontological status it affords these. As the 'hard sciences' have 
shifted away from Newtonian conceptions about the 'real' world and 
towards a view based on "radical relationality", 'strategy' has 
followed and also started to see its objects as highly relational and 
contingent.

However, as Dillon and Reid go on to note, a non-linear approach to the 
sciences and to strategy does not imply that there is no sense of 
causality. There are new attendant notions of predictability and how 
things might be arranged to encourage/discourage outcomes. Dillon and 
Reid call this new principle of causality the "philosopher's stone for 
biopolitical strategic discourse" (54). They note that new metaphors of 
complexity have also been applied to data and the networks in which 
data must be managed. Information systems, like life forms, are said to 
be tremendously "adaptive". These "complex adaptive systems" are 
manipulable for effect because they are defined fundamentally by 
varying degrees of "openness to intervention" (55). However, and here 
is the rub, because the 'stuff' of these systems is information 
(information is the "prime mover"), the regulative ideal is that they 
remain open (and - hence - efficient and adaptive). And this runs up 
against the fundamental risk of every agent possibly being dangerous. 
In the network society:

"vulnerability is a direct function of its very resilient design" (60).

All this is crucially significant for the question we confront because 
it has eliminated as an element of strategic doctrine the need for 
"them-us" and "friend-enemy" distinctions. Where all are 
'becoming-dangerous', traditional 'biopower' can no longer be applied 
to categorically distinct entities. It is applied to every agent in the 
system, according to their coding. The result is a kind of paranoia:

"Security goes hyperbolic in as much as unlimited knowledge of 
infinitely definable assemblages, populations and networks is a 
necessary concomitant of the problematic of becoming-dangerous" (57).

Now, there is a particular way in which info-war strategists  
understand security problems. The principle of the Grid (the system of 
information systems) suggests that in an fully efficient info-market, 
everybody will know what everybody else is doing and so there will be 
no centre to power to seize. In a situation where there is nothing to 
fight against, the only threat to the system is, literally, particular 
behavior already within the system. The only way to fight this is 
through "full-spectrum dominance" (63). The way not to fight is to get 
tied down in territorial positions, etc. What you will do, however, is 
bring in as many value-added components into the network as possible. 
You will use private contractors, etc., if you can get a higher return 
from them. The principle here: the stronger the economy in the network, 
the stronger the network.

And so based on this principle, the object of strategy changes: instead 
of strategy as a tool for an ontologically prior being, you have the 
objective of "transforming political bodies into governable material 
conforming to the laws of connectivity and its superior creative force" 
(65). And this has implications for Foucault's idea of the role of 
strategy in society. The strategic assemblage overcoding society then 
is one finely tuned to how power can code life. And in this, of course, 
the life sciences will play a key role in providing the metaphors upon 
which all strategies (military, governmental, etc.) will pursue their 
common objective.

Concerning Iraq then, we must look to the arguments made in favor of 
the current assertion of disciplinary power in Iraq: the discourse of 
the Bush administration in favor of regime change in Iraq – and how 
this has been envisioned as the catalyst of a liberal democratic 
“shockwave” that will re-make the Middle East in the name of 
suppressing pan-Arab nationalism (see Lemann 2003). However, crucially, 
the ‘peace dividend’ that such a project might be expected to promise 
has not been forthcoming. Instead, the only promise that has been made 
is one of a ‘network war’ of possibly indefinite duration.

My operative suspicion here then is that democratization in the Middle 
East is much less about democracy and more about the strategic 
imperatives of New Imperial disciplinarity or governmentality. 
Basically, the White House couldn't give a monkey's about democracy 
(thats why congress cancelled the 40 million that Bush promised to the 
NED so that they could give it to small businesses - and likely Bush 
doesn't care much either). As the Republicans see it, new techniques of 
management and new technologies of control have allowed them to 
seriously bypass the need for 'soft power' legitimacy. These 
technologies mean that the US will not lose too much blood in this and 
so domestic legitimacy will not be hard to secure. And anyway, as 
Fukuyama writes in "Military Organization in the Information Age" 
(RAND: 1999): "...in the event of a disaster, one can always add a new 
layer of regulations or controls to show that one is doing something to 
prevent the problem's recurrence". These guys don't care about mistakes 
and they believe that they can defeat US accountability mechanisms ... 
and they believe that such tactics can serve the greater moral good.

As for stabilizing Iraq, and as the above will hopefully have 
suggested, the neocon strategists believe in a market-based solution. 
They are applying principles of information efficiency and free-market 
competition to Iraq. So the 'symbolic' power dimension here is out the 
window - or, at least, that is my thesis right now. Iraq will be 
governmentalized through a combination of privatization (to create buy 
in to the network) and hi-tech security practices (provided by private 
security, of course). But it will be governmentalized either way - As 
one major Neocon, David Wurmser, of the American Enterprise Institute, 
argued in 1996: "Whoever inherits Iraq dominates the entire Levant 
strategically" (Disinfopedia 2004). But what we need to ask ourselves 
is the “Levant” so important to fixing "the" problem?

As per Foucault, we can argue that liberal democracy in general is a 
form of war by other means, and that the idea of ‘liberal peace’ itself 
can act as a strategic assemblage on a whole society. At the very 
least, this would suggest that we adopt an ironic posture towards both 
the proclaimed morality of a war to promote world democracy and the 
stable ontological boundaries we assume separate the businesses of 
government and war. Thus the mission to ‘democratize’ Iraq and the 
recently announced ‘Greater Middle East Initiative’ become highly 
problematic - and all the more problematic taken in the context of a 
strategy of global ‘war’ – and all the more problematic still when that 
war is a war of possibly infinite duration, wherein the enemy is a 
technique or a behavior.

Thus conceived, the New Imperialism’s efforts at democratization have a 
different and rather more complex agenda than those that took place 
under the post-Cold War order, or ‘international state’. "Democracy 
promotion", no doubt, is not at all about 'soft power'. It is, in fact, 
a code word for one of a wider emerging global web of “strategic 
vectors”, as Foucault might have called them, that the New Imperium is 
elaborating in order to secure itself against its enemies. Market-based 
democracy promotion practices can be seen as an instrument of strategy 
and, thus, situated alongside those other instruments of this strategy: 
a network of military bases in post-Soviet Central Asia, Theater Area 
Missile Defense, conventional nuclear weapon development, etc. 
Therefore, if we wish to understand the function of democracy promotion 
in the New Imperial dispotif, it becomes important to read contemporary 
strategic texts to see how the assumptions of American strategists are 
changing to meet the demands of New Imperialism.

New Imperialism sees itself as fighting a network war against stateless 
forces of anti-civilization. The big question is what this augurs in 
terms of the likelihood of a meaningful democracy for the Middle East. 
To answer this, we have to look at the key documents in which this 
strategy is articulated (see authors like Fukuyama, Shulsky, Wurmser, 
Donnelly, Kagan, Perle, Colbert, Frum). We also have to note that these 
guys are Cold Warriors - they believe in deterrence and they believe 
that if the US can appear ever so slightly 'crazy' enough to use 
overwhelming force then nobody will want to fuck with them.

Ultimately, by exploring the strategic rationality of New Imperial 
governmentality through this "imaginary" based on network/information 
power, we can start to think about the future envisioned for the whole 
Middle East region. An examination of how the art of strategy is 
adapting itself to prepare for this infinite war - and how it is being 
informed by Cold War ontologies - might help us reveal the excess 
meaning in ‘democratization’.

NiK

Here are some of the references I used above:

Dillon, M. and J. Reid (2001). "Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, 
Security and War." Millenium: Journal of International Studies 30(1): 
41-66.

Donnelly, T., D. Kagan, et al. (2000). Rebuilding America's Defenses: 
Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. Washington, D.C., 
Project for the New American Century: 90.

Frum, D. and R. Perle (2004). An End to Evil: How to Win the War on 
Terror. New York, Random House.

Fukuyama, F. and A. Shulsky (1999). Military Organization in the 
Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business. The Changing Role 
of Information in Warfare. Z. M. Khalilzad and J. P. White. Santa 
Monica, RAND Corporation.

Lemann, N. (2003). After Iraq; The plan to remake the Middle East. The 
New Yorker.

Luke, T. W. (1996). "Governmentality and contragovernmentality: 
rethinking sovereignty and territoriality after the Cold War." 
Political Geography 15(6/7): 491-507.

Luke, T. W. (2004). "Benign" or "Befuddled" Hegemony: Coercive 
Constructivism as Neoliberal Intervention in the Post Cold War Era. 
Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association.

Ò Tuathail, G., A. Herod, et al. (1998). Negotiating Unruly 
Problematics. Unruly World? Globalization, Governance and Geography. A. 
Herod, G. Ò Tuathail and S. M. Roberts. New York, Routledge.

Perle, R., J. Colbert, et al. (2000). A Clean Break: A New Strategy for 
Securing the Realm. Jerusalem and Washington, D.C., The Institute for 
Advanced Strategic and Political Studies.

Reid, J. (2003). "Foucault on Clausewitz: Conceptualizing the 
Relationship Between War and Power." Alternatives(28): 1-28.

Reid, J. (2004). "War, Liberalism, and Modernity: The Biopolitical 
Provocations of 'Empire'." Cambridge Review of International Affairs 
17(1).

Wurmser, D. (1999). "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam 
Hussein."



On Aug 2, 2004, at 1:11, andrew robinson wrote:

> WITH OR WITHOUT YOU: US Foreign Policy, Domination, Hegemony and 
> Rhizomes of Resistance.
>       Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson
>
> 		
>
>

Nicholas J. Kiersey
PhD Student, Environmental Design & Planning
VPI&SU
email: nkiersey-AT-vt.edu
home: nicholaskiersey-AT-mac.com
mobile phone: (540) 998-1218
AIM: NervousFishdown



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