Urban 1 The Evergreen State College The Master’s Tools the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria as a Weapon/ Repercussion of United States Neoliberal Foreign Policy in the Middle East Mariana Urban A NEW MIDDLE EAST APRIL 2nd, 2016 THESIS - PART 1 Urban 2 The history of colonialism lives deep within the veins of the United States. Founded on stolen land, the United States has continued to grow into a country that idealizes individualistic greed. Now, a select few US corporations and individuals, occupy the global economy, often by force. This individualistic greed that inspires most foreign policy actions abroad, in the interest of US assets, has spread across the globe. Extreme measures are taken to protect these assets. This is where Neoliberalism comes in and merges with US Military industrial complex. One of these extreme measures is found in the framework laid for, and financing of the worlds biggest terrorist organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. What was a creation of neoliberalism, then a weapon for foreign policy, is now US imperialisms worst nightmare. Through tracing the history of US imperialism in the Middle East, we will witness the birth and metamorphosis of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. This document’s aim is to tackle the complex and ever morphing landscape of United States Neoliberalism in the Middle East, and its subsequent creation of one of the greatest evils known today, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. It will deconstruct US Neoliberalism’s birth and intention in Part I, and go on to analyze US involvement and promotion of Political Islam in the Middle East beginning from the Cold War, in Part II. Part III will explore the violence of Neoliberalism in the Iraq War and the beginnings of ISI. Part IV will explain ISIS formation and intentions, leading up to the crisis in Syria. It will unpack the complexities of the Syrian crisis, its proxy wars, and US involvement in Part V. Finally, it will synthesize the realities of cycles of violence and greed that have lead to ISIS and its now devastating repercussions. Urban 3 PART 1 - Neoliberalism WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM To begin, we must understand the roots of Neoliberalism. It was birthed by Milton Friedman in Chicago’s notorious School of Economics and founded on John Locke’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of property”. As Klein explains, “This Liberation from all constraints, in essence Chicago school economics… is capitalism stripped of its Keysian appendages, capitalism in its monopoly phase, a system that has let itself go – that no longer has to work to keep us as customers, that can be antisocial, antidemocratic and boorish as it wants” (Klein, 319). In this arena the citizens, the voters, have no power and this is the precise intention. Noam Chomsky on the fate of democracy explains, “Neoliberal initiatives of the past thirty years have been designed to restrict it, leaving basic decision-making within largely unaccountable private tyrannies, linked closely to one another and to a few powerful states.” (Chomsky, 6) This is the latest phase of Capitalism, shifting the balance of power away from democracy and towards corporate free market dreams. Neoliberalism is an economic ideology that utilizes the full influence of violence to “eliminate the public sphere, total liberation of corporations and skeletal social spending” to “free the market from the state” and create a “powerful ruling alliance between very few large corporations and a class of the wealthiest politicians” or individuals. In a word, enslaving the economies and bodies of the Third World to fuel the powerful luxuries of international oligarchies. (Klein, 18) Or, as Chomsky positions, “It is necessary to safeguard a system of elite decision-making and public ratification – ‘polyarchy,’ in the terminology of political science – not democracy.” (Chomsky, 5) Neoliberalism is taken to Urban 4 the Third World to occupy labor, resources and flood the international markets with these procured and privatized resources, leaving countries economically devastated, barren and with not a bargaining chip to play. Ironically then the IMF (International Monetary Fund, whom has many ties to the Chicago School) steps in to sink these countries into irreconcilable debt, both monetary and political. This ideal of pursuing self interest to lead to the wealth and democracy of a nation is the veil that hides the reality of neoliberalism. It is not national prosperity that is the goal, it is First World wealth of a select few and Third World weakness. NEOLIBERALISM MILITARIZED Two of the richest industries in the West are Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex, occupying the majority of the wealth in the United States and abroad, they maintain unwieldy power. Military spending alone takes up 55% of the nations annual fiscal spending. In the the globalization of Neoliberal ideologies they work symbiotically. The West’s imperialism must first gain access into said nation, usually without invitation. Militarized occupation (and/or coup) is a surefire way to gain access to these economies and governments. Primarily nations targeted by Neoliberal agendas are Socialist-leaning Third World countries, particularly ones with large resource or strategic assets that have nationalized said assets. These nations usually have more thriving economies because of nationalization and likely have no intention of allowing those assets to be privatized by transnational corporations. Hence, the need for militarized entry, accordingly occupation (and/or coup) is necessary to forcibly acquire access to resources and government control. Often the shear destruction involved in occupation hinders Urban 5 the nation enough for a quick government overthrow and the assertion of a proxy occupational government. In this way, Western free market interests view these actions as “nation creating”, a way to “empower” nations “democratically” by enforcing predestined terms. This is a form of discipline by dispossession. “ The so-called characteristic of U.S. ideology of the “consensus” (meaning submission to the requirements of the power of the generalized monopoly capitalism); the adoption of “presidential” political regimes that destroy the effectiveness of the anti- establishment potential of democracy; the indiscriminate eulogy of a false, manipulated individualism, together with inequality (seen as a virtue); the rallying of the subaltern NATO countries to the strategies implemented by the Washington establishment—all these are making rapid headway in the European Union which cannot be, in these conditions, anything other than what it is, a constitutive bloc of imperialist globalization.”(Amin) It reaffirms the primacy of capitalist values and the dominance of the West. The United States in particular, practices these tactics widely. In fact, many resource rich Third World nations have fallen prey to this military backed privatization movement. However, the Middle East, has contended for decades, partially due to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan alliance with the former Soviet Union. Middle East countries are considered the final frontier for Imperialist free market globalization. NEOLIBERALIST PURSUITS IN PINOCHET’S CHILE The effects of Neoliberalism on national economies can been seen drastically in Chile. After the coup and murder of Salvadore Allende, one of the first initiatives that now dictator Pinochet implemented, (after encouragement from Milton Friedman himself) was to cut public Urban 6 spending by 27 percent. The intention was to encourage a depression to shock the economy to a point where the majority of the public would be in poverty, and would be at the financial mercy of the state. “Causing a recession or a depression is a brutal idea, since it necessarily creates mass poverty, which is why no political leader had until this point, has been willing to test the theory… Dr. Strangelove world of deliberately induced depression.” (Klein) In an attempt to achieve international economic success and appease the Northern oligarchs, Pinochet denationalized nearly all industries. “De Castro privatized almost five hundred state- owned companies and banks, practically giving many of them away, since the point was to get them as quickly as possible into their rightful place in the economic order” (Klein, 100). This relinquishing of resources was perhaps the biggest mistake, as it meant that Chile had no bargaining power in the global arena and was completely at the will of transnational corporations. Debt accumulated drastically and options narrowed. Another aspect of this initiative was to cut jobs, and reduce access to labor, the intention being that if workers fear for the lively hood of their families and themselves, they will be more likely to succumb to the low wages and inhumane work of privatized corporations. “Friedman predicted that the hundreds of thousands of people who would be fired from the public sector would quickly get new jobs in the private sector soon to be booming thanks to Pinochet’s removal of ‘as many obstacles as possible that now hinder the private market’”. (99) However, Freidman’s assumptions were incorrect and unemployment sky rocketed, “unemployment – only 3 percent under Allende – reached 20 percent, a rate unheard of in Chile at the time” (Klien 101). Poverty became the norm, malnutrition was an epidemic, “Roughly 74 percent of its income went simply to buying bread, forcing the family to cut out Urban 7 such ‘luxury items’ as milk and bus fare to get to work” (Klien 102). Neoliberalism took a country on its way to financial independence and social liberation, and disappeared the dream (like it did its people), throwing the majority of the country that survived the coup, into dangerously deep poverty, taking away their access to resources and jobs and sovereignty in the international markets. Chile was no longer a country, now it was yet another cog in the transnational neoliberal machine. Supplying land, resources and bodies for it to gobble up. PART II – US INVOLVEMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST ARAB NATIONALISM Arab Nationalism rose out of the post-World War II landscape, as North African and Arab Nations were gaining liberation form their European colonizers.