2010+HO+Iraq+Colonialism+1AC



Advantage 1 is Security After 9/11, the United States began to spread democracy through violence and terror. This project of colonization is inextricable from the continuation of the war – absent withdrawal, the initial legacy will continue. Kramer and Michalowski 05 (Ronal C. Kramer, professor university of western Michigan, and Raymond J. Michalowski, professor northern Arizona university. “War, Aggression and State Crime” April 05, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies)

Even though a stroke of good luck had placed them near the center of power, neo- conservative unipolarists found that the new president remained more persuaded by “pragmatic realists” in his administration such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, than by their aggressive foreign policy agenda (Dorrien, 2004). This was to be expected. The PNAC report, //Rebuilding America’s Defenses//, had predicted that “the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic or catalyzing event- like a new Pearl Harbor.” The neo-conservatives needed another stroke of good luck. The 9-11 attacks presented the neocons with the “catalyzing event” they needed to transform their agenda in to actual policy. The terror attacks were a “political godsend” that created a climate of fear and anxiety which the unipolarists mobilized to promote their geopolitical strategy to a president who lacked a coherent foreign policy, as well as to the nation as a whole (Hartung, 2004) As former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill revealed, the goal of the unipolarists in the Bush administration had always been to attack Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein (Susskind, 2004). This, they believed, would allow the United States to consolidate its power in the strategically significant Middle East and to change the political culture of the region.  On the evening of September 11, 2001, and in the days following, unipolarists in the Bush administration advocated attacking Iraq immediately, even though there was no evidence linking Iraq to the events of the day (Clarke, 2004; Woodward, 2004). After an internal struggle between the “pragmatic realists” led by Secretary of State Powell and the unipolarists led by Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the decision was eventually made to launch a general ‘war on terrorism,’ and to begin it by attacking Al Queda’s home-base in Afghanistan and removing that country’s Taliban government (Mann, 2004). The unipolarists were only temporarily delayed insofar as they had achieved agreement that as soon as the Afghanistan war was underway, the U.S. would begin planning an invasion of Iraq (Clarke, 2004; Fallows, 2004). By November, barely one month after the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush and Rumsfeld ordered the Department of Defense to formulate a war plan for Iraq (Woodward, 2004 ). Throughout 2002, as plans for the war on Iraq were being formulated, the Bush administration made a number of formal pronouncements that demonstrated that the goals of the unipolarists were now the official goals of the U.S. government. In the 29 January State of the Union address, Bush honed the focus of the “war on terrorism” by associating terrorism with specific rogue states such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea (the “axis of evil”) who were presented as legitimate targets for military action (Callinicos, 2003). In a speech to the graduating cadets at West Point on 1 June the President unveiled a doctrine of preventative war, a policy that many judged as ‘the most open statement yet made of imperial globalization’ (Falk, 2004; 189), soon to be followed by the new National Security Strategy. This document not only claimed the right to wage preventative war as previously discussed, it also claimed that U.S. would use its military power to spread “democracy” and American-style laissez-faire capitalism around the world as the ‘single sustainable model for national success’ (Callinicos, 2003: 29). As Roy (2004: 56) notes: ‘ Democracy has become Empire’s euphemism for neo-liberal capitalism.’ 

The continued framing of Iraq as a security threat creates a nexus through which it is impossible to approach it as anything other than an object in need of development and westernization.
 * Bilgin, 2008**. Pinar Bilgin (Department of International Relations, Bilkent University), Thinking Past Western IR? Third World Quarterly. [] 

One speciﬁc product of such synergy between the US scholarly community and the policy world has been models of military-led development, which were popularised during this period. During the 1950s, as US policy making increasingly turned towards ‘non-Western’ militaries as allies in maintaining stability in the ‘Third World’ (thereby recalibrating civil – military balances to the beneﬁt of the latter), US scholarly writings provided the rationale. The main di ﬀ erence between policy making and scholarly approaches was that whereas policymakers appeared content to identify the reasons for endorsing greater involvement of the US military and its local counterpart in Development programs, policy scientists and those who regarded themselves as allied theoreticians of Development rationalized the role in romantic terms. 29 These scholars were not prepared to advocate a militarisation of politics. Instead they provided a ‘rationale rich in psychology and history’ as to why civilians in the ‘Third World’ su ﬀ ered from a ‘post-colonial syndrome’ that led them to react against the ‘West’, whereas ‘a sense of security’ seemed to enable military leaders to ‘accept the weakness of their countries in relation to the West’. Such ostensibly ‘scientiﬁc’ basis, in turn, allowed scholars to propagate ‘myths of Development that simultaneously supported the view of the military as models of democratic, non-authoritarian training while arguing that the militarization of politics was an undesirable failure of Third World politics’. 30 Thus US-originated understandings and practices of ‘national security’ and ‘development’ were exported to ‘non-Western’ locales in a context characterised by the convergence of the US national security agenda of maintaining stability by way of encouraging military-led modernisation, and of the ‘non-Western’ actors’ agenda of seeking security through sovereign development. Whereas US policy makers and the scholarly community provided the logistical and conceptual back-up, local actors stepped in to shape domestic political processes in line with their own preferences. It is an ironic twist of history that those ostensibly ‘Western’ concepts such as ‘national security’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘development’, which have helped make these ‘non-Western’ ‘realities’ are now found wanting in providing scholarly explanations of the very same ‘realities’ .  

This otherization of external threats provides the State with a mandate to violently eradicate any and all opposition. Pinar Bilgin , @ Bilkent Univ,  ‘4  [International Relations 18.1, “Whose ‘Middle East’? Geopolitical Inventions and Practices of Security,” p. 28]  This top-down approach to regional security in the ‘Middle East’ was com- pounded by a conception of security that was directed outwards – that is threats to security were assumed to stem from outside the state whereas inside is viewed as a realm of peace. Although it could be argued – following R.B.J. Walker – that what makes it possible for ‘inside’ to remain peaceful is the presentation of ‘outside’ as a realm of danger, 25 the practices of Middle Eastern states indicate that this does not always work as prescribed in theory. For many regional policy-makers justify certain domestic security measures by way of presenting the international arena as anarchical and stressing the need to strengthen the state to cope with external threats. While doing this, however, they at the same time cause insecurity for some individuals and social groups at home – the very peoples whose security they purport to maintain. The practices of regional actors that do not match up to the theoretical prescriptions include the Baath regime in Iraq that infringed their own citizens’ rights often for the purposes of state security. Those who dare to challenge their states’ security practices may be marginalized at best, and accused of treachery and imprisoned at worst. The military priority of security thinking in the Cold War manifested itself within the Middle Eastern context by regional as well as external actors’ reliance on practices such as heavy defence outlays, concern with orders-of-battle, joint military exercises and defence pacts. For example, the British and US security practices during this period took the form of defending regional states against external intervention by way of helping them to strengthen their defences and acquiring military bases in the region as well as bolstering ‘friendly’ regimes’ stronghold over their populace so that the ‘Middle East’ would become inviolable to Soviet infiltration and intervention. The ‘Middle East’ perspective continues to be military-focused and stability- oriented in the post-Cold War era. US policy towards Iraq before and after the Gulf War (1990–1) and the 1998–9 bombing campaign directed at obtaining Iraqi cooperation with the UN team inspecting the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programme could be viewed as examples of this. What has changed in the after- math of the 11 September attacks is that US policy-makers declared commitment to ‘advancing freedom’ in the Middle East as a way of ‘confronting the threats to peace from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction’. 26 The 2003 ‘war on Iraq’ and the US effort to change the Iraqi regime were explained with reference to this new policy priority. At the same time, US policy-makers sought to give momen- tum to Israeli–Palestinian peacemaking by presenting a new ‘roadmap’. For the peace process (that began in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War) had come to a halt towards the end of the 1990s for reasons largely to do with the incongruities between the US perspective of regional security and those of regional states. Among the latter, the critique brought by the proponents of what I term the ‘Arab’ perspective is likely to be of particular significance for the attempts to jump-start Arab–Israeli peacemaking.  

Do not trust their authors- We currently use colonial sources in our attempt to forcibly expand democracy and American values in Iraq. The result has been a quarantine society and mass death Said 03 (Edward Said, professor at Columbia, 4/22/03, “The Appalling consequences are now clear” http://www.counterpunch.org/said04222003.html We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq." Who is going to ask questions now that that Middle Western farm boy General Tommy Franks sits triumphantly with his staff around one of Saddam's tables in a Baghdad palace? I am convinced that in nearly every way, this was a rigged, and neither a necessary nor a popular war. The deeply reactionary Washington "research" institutions that spawned Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Feith and the rest provide an unhealthy intellectual and moral atmosphere. Policy papers circulate without real peer review, adopted by a government requiring what seems to be rational (even moral) justification for a dubious, basically illicit policy of global domination. Hence, the doctrine of military pre-emption, which was never voted on either by the people of this country or their half-asleep representatives. How can citizens stand up against the blandishments offered the government by companies like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed? And as for planning and charting a strategic course for what in effect is by far the most lavishly endowed military establishment in history, one that is fully capable of dragging us into unending conflicts, that task is left to the various ideologically based pressure groups such as the fundamentalist Christian leaders like Franklin Graham who have been unleashed with their Bibles on destitute Iraqis, the wealthy private foundations, and such lobbies as AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, along with //its// associated think tanks and research centers. What seems so monumentally criminal is that good, useful words like "democracy" and "freedom" have been hijacked, pressed into service as a mask for pillage, muscling in on territory, and the settling of scores. The American program for the Arab world is the same as Israel's. Along with Syria, Iraq theoretically represents the only serious long term military threat to Israel, and therefore it had to be put out of commission for decades. What does it mean to liberate and democratize a country when no one asked you to do it, and when in the process you occupy it militarily and, at the same time, fail miserably to preserve public law and order ? The mix of resentment and relief at Saddam's cowardly disappearance that most Iraqis feel has brought with it little understanding or compassion either from the US or from the other Arab states, who have stood by idly quarreling over minor points of procedure while Baghdad burned. What a travesty of strategic planning when you assume that "natives" will welcome your presence after you've bombed and quarantined them for thirteen years. The truly preposterous mindset about American beneficence, and with it that patronizing Puritanism about what is right and wrong, has infiltrated the minutest levels of the media. In a story about a 70 year old Baghdad widow who ran a cultural center from her house wrecked in the US raids and is now beside herself with rage,//NY Times// reporter Dexter Filkins implicitly chastises her for having had "a comfortable life under Saddam Hussein," and then piously disapproves of her tirade against the Americans, "and this from a graduate of London University."  

The occupation of Iraq is an attempt at enforcing democracy by the sword. The discursive project of colonialism pervades all debate on the war - only a complete break with securitized logic of the status quo offers hope for resistance. Anthony Burke , Prof. of Politcs & IR @ Univ. of New South Wales,  ‘5  [Social Identities 11.4, “Freedom’s Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent War,” p. 322-3] Hann ah Arendt recognized this instrumental, utilitarian form of action in the modern dream of historical progress, particularly in the modern transformation of the ‘unknown and unknowable ‘‘higher aims’’’ of history (which Kant, after Vico, had merely read backward into events) into future-directed, purposive action: ‘planned and willed intentions’. The result was that ‘meaning and meaningfulness were transformed into ends’: this is what happened when Marx took the Hegelian meaning of all history*/the progressive unfolding and actualisation of the idea of freedom*/to be an end of human action, and when he furthermore, in accordance with tradition, viewed this ultimate ‘end’ as the end-product of a manufacturing process. . . In this version of deriving politics from history, or rather, political conscience from historical consciousness*/by no means restricted to Marx in particular, or even pragmatism in general*/we can easily detect the age-old attempt to escape from the frustrations and fragility of human action by construing it in the image of making. . . he alone realized that if one takes history to be the object of a process of fabrication or making, there must be a moment when this object is completed, and that if one imagines that one can make history, one cannot escape the consequence that there will be an end to history. Whenever we hear of grandiose aims in politics, such as establishing a new society in which justice will be guaranteed forever, or fighting a war to end all wars or to make the whole world safe for democracy, we are moving in the realm of this kind of thinking. (Arendt, 1961, pp. 78_ / 79). With hindsight, we can see that Marx was not the only thinker to understand or posit an end to history (Hegel and Koje`ve did, and Fukuyama after them) and the irony and tragedy is that this end should have been proclaimed in the defeat of socialism and the triumph of ‘liberal-democratic’ civilization based on US example and leadership (Fukuyama, 1992). This is the meaning of Fukuyama’s signature on the PNAC Statement of Principles, a document utterly infused with the ‘grandiose aims’ of an enframing technological reason masquerading as historical inevitability. Thus we can understand how George W. Bush could follow the invasion of Iraq with 332 A. Burke the announcement of a ‘forward strategy of freedom in the Middle-East’, a strategy apparently in the tradition of Wilson’s fourteen points and Roosevelt’s four freedoms that requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace. (Bush, Remarks at the National Endowment for Democracy, 6 November 2003) This links with a further crucial feature of freedom in the American enlightenment: its Eurocentric and Orientalist nature. Freedom is something the East lacks, and it will be achieved not by the agency of its own people, or the upwelling of some genuinely universal human aspiration, but by the particular application of American pressure and force. The seeds of this view can be glimpsed in Aristotle’s distinction between Greece’s ‘love of freedom’ and Asia’s despotism, but it was given a distinctively racist and dialectical cast in Hegel’s system which declared that Africa was at the ‘mere threshold’ of history, and China at its ‘childhood’, while Europe was at its end (Hegel, 1990, pp. 104_ / 05). Now America, history’s ‘future’ according to Hegel, is to bring the Middle-East into history, into the freedom that is ‘the direction of history’ and ‘the design of nature’. Yet the first act in America’s ‘forward strategy of freedom’ was to invade and subjugate Iraq, suggesting that if ‘peace’ is its object its means is war: the engine of History is violence, on a massive and tragic scale, and violence is ultimately its only meaning. This we can glimpse in ‘Toward a Pacific union’, a deeply disingenuous chapter of Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. This text divides the earth between a ‘post-historical’ world of affluent developed democracies where ‘the old rules of power-politics have decreasing relevance’, and a world still ‘stuck in history’ and ‘riven with a variety of religious, national and ideological conflicts’. The two worlds will maintain ‘parallel but separate existences’ and interact only along axes of threat, disturbance and crucial strategic interest: oil, immigration, terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Because ‘the relationship between democracies and non-democracies will still be characterized by mutual distrust and fear’, writes Fukuyama, the ‘post-historical half must still make use of realist methods when dealing with the part still in history. . . force will still be the ultima ratio in their relations’. For all the book’s Kantian pretensions, Fukuyama naturalizes war and coercion as the dominant mode of dealing with billions of people defined only through their lack of ‘development’ and ‘freedom’. Furthermore, in his advocacy of the ‘traditional moralism of American foreign policy’ and his dismissal of the United Nations in favour of a NATO-style league of truly free states. . . capable of much more forceful action to protect its collective security against threats arising from the non-democratic part of the world we can see an early premonition of the historicist unilateralism of the Bush Administration. 10 In this light, we can see the invasion of Iraq as continuing a long process of ‘worldhistorical’ violence that stretches back to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, and the subsequent politics of genocide, warfare and dispossession through which the modern United States was created and then expanded */initially with the colonization of the Philippines and coercive trade relationships with China and Japan, and eventually to the self-declared role Luce had argued so forcefully for: guarantor of global economic and strategic order after 1945. That this role involved the hideous destruction of Vietnam and Cambodia, ‘interventions’ in Chile, El Salvador, Panama, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan (or an ever more destructive ‘strategic’ 

involvement in the Persian Gulf that saw the US first building up Iraq as a formidable regional military power, and then punishing its people with a fourteen-year sanctions regime that caused the deaths of at least two-hundred thousand people) we are meant to accept as proof of America’s benign intentions, of America putting its ‘power at the service of principle’. They are merely History working itself out, the ‘design of nature’ writing its bliss on the world ( quotes from Bush, Remarks at the National Endowment for Democracy, 6 November 2003). But this freedom offers us the bliss of the graveyard, stretching endlessly into a world marked not by historical perfection or democratic peace but by the eternal recurrence of tragedy, as ends endlessly disappear in the means of permanent war and permanent terror. This is how we must understand both the awesome horror visited on the people of Iraq since 1990, and the inflammatory impact the US invasion will have on the new phenomenon of global anti-western terrorism. American exceptionalism has deluded US policymakers into believing they are the only actors who write history, who know where it is heading, how it will play out, and that in its service it is they (and no-one else) who assume an unlimited freedom to act. Osama bin Laden and his many supporters do not accept the American narrative of power in the service of principle; they see merely power in the service of power, and derive from it a lesson that it is both necessary and legitimate to respond with a commensurate violence. As Bin Laden said in his chilling 1998 interview with John Miller, who asked him if his ‘fatwa’ calling on all Muslims to kill Americans extended to all Americans: We are surprised this question is coming from Americans. Each action will solicit a similar reaction. We must use such punishment to keep your evil away from Muslims. . . America does not have a religion that prevents it from destroying all people. . . . The prophet said: ‘A woman entered hell because of a cat’. She did not feed it and blocked it from finding food on its own. She is going to hell for blocking a cat to death, but [what do you] say to those who agreed and gave reason for the hundreds of thousands of troops to blockade millions of Muslims in Iraq? (Miller, 1998b) Furthermore the rhetoric of freedom and the ‘way of life’, at both a philosophical and practical level, cannot but inflame the fundamentalist community that serves as a social and cultural basis for al-Qaeda and its associated organisations. It will do so because it is read as a confirmation of the critique* / found in the philosophy of thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb* / of the moral and ethical bankruptcy of western rationalism and its imperialist agenda to dominate and destroy Islam, to perpetuate a state of modern jahiliyya, the ‘conscious usurpation of God’s authority. . . [the] foundational transgression of human hubris’ (Euben, 2000). The narrative of freedom that Bush speaks (and the US armed forces enact) has already been written and interpreted in fundamentalist thought, with a starkly different meaning from that Bush seeks to convey, one further transformed by every American action in Iraq and throughout the Middle-East. The Bush Administration’s April 2004 endorsement* / in pointed defiance of countless UN resolutions on the issue* / of the Israeli government’s unilateral plan under the guise of ‘disengagement’ to impose a grossly unjust ‘final settlement’ on the Palestinians, one that will undermine any possibility of meaningful self-determination, is just such an example of arrogance and hubris that will deepen Islamic hatred of the West and rebound upon it in new acts of terror (MacAskill, 2004, p. 1). This US gesture, portrayed throughout the Arab world as a new ‘Balfour declaration’, is yet another example of the callous, ‘strategic’ use of instrumental reason that treats the Palestinian people as so much human cattle who can be contained and corralled, and whose destiny can be decided by a handful of men in Jerusalem and Washington (Howeidy, 2004; see also Katib, 2004; Alpher, 2004; Beilin, 2004 ). The arguments of Bin Laden and Bush have one important thing in common: they betray the same deluded, claustrophobic commitment to the easy translation of means into ends, as if either of their policies could protect Muslims, ensure the security of Americans, or bring about the utterly irreconcilable ‘ends’ of history they seek (‘Freedom’ fights the ‘Caliphate’, like Punch and Judy dolls squabbling on the arms of History). Nothing has been more detrimental to the livelihood and future of Muslims than Al-Qaeda’s campaign of terror, and nothing has been more detrimental to future global security than the invasion of Iraq, yet we are locked in a terrible hall of mirrors where each discourse makes the other meaningful, and each act precipitates the next (as the latter-day Isaac Newton says, ‘each action will solicit a similar reaction’) (Miller, 1998b). As we count the enormous toll of dead and wounded in Iraq, and ponder the abyss of violence, frustration and insecurity into which it has slipped since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the times more than ever call for the insight of a Hannah Arendt. Violence is not power, she warns us, and the very substance of violence is the means-end category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, is that the end is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and are needed to reach it. We face a choice: between a terror ‘that comes into being when violence, having destroyed all power, does not abdicate’ and a hopeful effort to eliminate the Social Identities ‘disastrous reduction of human affairs to the business of dominion’ so that they can ‘appear, or rather reappear, in their full diversity’ (Arendt, 2002, pp. 19_ / 34).  

Through this break with the security discourse surrounding Iraq, the affirmative internally deconstructs contemporary Imperialism. Welch, 2008. (Michael Welch, September 26, 2008. Ordering Iraq: Reﬂections on Power, Discourse, & Neocolonialism) <span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> <span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> By attending to discourse and the recolonization of Iraq, we can decipher the process of translation and how it serves to channel power from one locale to another. Foucault’s bottom-up method of replicating (bio)power relations at the local level demonstrates how the phenomenon unfolds in the governing of populations within territories of nation-states. Several scholars offer comments on contemporary imperialism and globalization espe- cially along lines of dominant discourse. For instance, Jameson (2003) issues a bold view of what he calls the Americanization of the world, arguing that technology has produced a new transnational cybernetic, a term that implies not only a system of communication but also one of control. Gregory takes exception to Jameson’s notion of a world economic system benevolently regulated by the US, comparing it to Conrad’s (1926) ‘‘Geography Triumphant’’ in which the world had been measured, mapped, and made over not only in the image of science but also of capital (see Hardt and Negri 2001). Among his obser- vations, Gregory notes: ‘‘the middle passage from imperialism to globalization is not as smooth as he [Jameson] implies, still less complete, and the ‘new transnational cybernetic’’ imposes its own unequal and uneven geographies’’ (2004, p. 12). Gregory calls for alternative ways of mapping the turbulent times and spaces in which we live with special emphasis on studies that narrate the war on terror as a series of stories unfolding far from the US: most notably in Iraq, as well as in Afghanistan and Palestine. The attacks of September 11th have a complex genealogy that reaches back to the colonial past, says Gregory, and those events have been used by Washington (London and Tel Aviv) to advance a brutal colonial present—and future. In the segments to follow, the focus remains on the ordering of Iraq with careful thought given to political, economic, and military maneuverings. 

Advantage 2 is Racism

The Language used to describe the Islamic world has shaped a stereotypical and racist view of Iraq and the Middle East.
 * Jackson, 2007.** (Richard Jackson, 2007, Constructing Enemies: “Islamic Terrorism” in Political and Academic Discourse.)

The Genealogy of the ‘Islamic Terrorism’ Discourse Discourses produce meaning in part through drawing upon the lin- guistic resources and speciﬁc discursive opportunity structures – or the extant cultural raw materials – of a particular social context: ‘texts always refer back to other texts which themselves refer still to other texts’, in other words. 8 A genealogical approach to discourse there- fore can help us understand how current forms of knowledge have been naturalized through time and discursive practice. This is not the place to outline a detailed genealogy of the contemporary ‘Islamic terrorism’ discourse, but simply to suggest that three discernible discursive traditions would seem important for understanding its present form. First and foremost, the current discourse of ‘Islamic terrorism’ is rooted in the assumptions, theories and knowledge of terrorism studies – a discrete ﬁeld of academic research that has grown tremen- dously and gained genuine authority since the 11 September terrorist attacks. The notion of ‘Islamic terrorism’ appears to have emerged from studies of ‘religious terrorism’, a subject founded largely on David Rapoport’s seminal article from 1984. 9 Since then, a number of core texts and scholars have established reputations as leading sources of expert knowledge in ‘Islamic terrorism’. 10 As later sections of this article demonstrate, a great many of the central labels and narratives of the ‘Islamic terrorism’ discourse are drawn from this body of work. Importantly, through well-established networks of inﬂuence linking ‘terrorism experts’ with the policy-making estab- lishment many of these narratives have become politically inﬂuential. 11 Secondly, the discourse derives a great many of its core assump- tions, labels and narratives from the long tradition and archive of orientalist scholarship on the Middle East and Arab culture and religion. 12 This literature expanded rapidly in response to the tumul- tuous events in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s – such as the 1972 Munich massacre, the 1973 oil shocks, the 1979 Iranian revolu- tion and embassy hostage crisis, the Rushdie affair and the terrorist kidnappings and hijackings of the 1980s. It has been greatly stimu- lated once again by the 9/11 attacks and subsequent war on terrorism. Importantly, Samuel Huntington’s highly inﬂuential 1993 essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, the title of which is derived from a much-cited article by Bernard Lewis, 13 reproduced a number of orientalist claims for an international affairs audience and it is there- fore an important antecedent of the current ‘Islamic terrorism’ discourse. 14 As with terrorism studies scholars, a great many identiﬁ- able orientalist Middle East scholars, including Bernard Lewis, Noah Feldman and the late Raphael Patai, have made frequent appear- ances as advisers and expert witnesses for ofﬁcial bodies, thereby transmitting many of the central assumptions and narratives of ori- entalist scholarship into the policy process. 15 Thirdly, the discourse draws on a long tradition of cultural stereo- types and deeply hostile media representations and depictions of Islam and Muslims.16 Typically, in portraying Muslims, the main- stream media has tended to employ frameworks centred on violence, threat, extremism, fanaticism and terrorism, although there is also a visual orientalist tradition in which they are portrayed as exotic and mysterious.17 Moreover, these kinds of cultural representations have proved extremely resilient, perhaps because, as Said claims, they reﬂect deeper social-cultural fears, anxieties and stereotypes of the oriental ‘other’ that go back to the imperial age.18 For others, they are the necessary cultural corollary of contemporary forms of imperialism. 19 In addition to these three primary historical discursive traditions, the post-9/11 ‘Islamic terrorism’ discourse frequently draws upon and is embedded within a wider set of political-cultural narratives surrounding the war on terrorism, including, among others: the ‘good war’ narrative surrounding the struggle against fascism duringthe Second World War ; mythologies of the Cold War, including the notion of ‘the long war’, the deeply embedded civilization- versus-barbarism narrative, the cult of innocence, the language and assumptions of the enemy within, the labels and narratives of ‘rogue states’, and the discourse surrounding the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. 20 <span style="font-family: "Helvetica","sans-serif";"> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> 

The project in Iraq is a new version of the “White Man’s Burden”. Hassan 08 (Salah Hassan, “Never-Ending Occupations” CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2008) The long-term proposition that a U.S. victory in Iraq will in fact be characterized by some form of permanent military presence in Iraq is consistent with the history of U.S. occupations for which a line can now be drawn connecting the Philippines to Iraq, passing through Germany and Japan. 2 It is this map of never-ending military occupations established over the last century that provides the fundamental contours of a modern U.S. imperialism that has been politically justified in terms of Kipling’s famous 1899 poem “ Th e White Man’s Burden ,” significantly subtitled “the United States and the Philippines.”3 From the time when Kipling wrote his now famous poem until its recent invocations by defenders of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, such as Max Boot in Th e Savage Wars of Peace, the United States has not ceased to take possession of parts of the globe. Kipling’s poem is a primer on imperial domination, outlining the ostensible self-sacrificing values that he associates with overseas conquests. In the first stanza, he writes: Take up the White man’s burden— Send forth the best ye breed— Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half devil and half child. Th e racism of the poem already suggested by the title is made explicit here. But particularly significant is the line “To serve your captives’ need,” which is echoed in a different formulation in each of the successive stanzas, reiterating the poem’s underlying principle that imperial occupation is for the good of the natives, an articulation of the all too familiar civilizing mission of modern imperialism. Kipling gives the civilizing mission a particular slant, however, by claiming that the violence of imperial conquest is experienced most directly not by those subject to foreign occupation, “Your new caught, sullen peoples,” but by the occupiers who “wait in heavy harness.” This theme is further elaborated in its most striking image of imperial sacrifice: The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go make them with your living, And mark them with your dead! In addition to emphasizing a modern developmentalist agenda associated with building infrastructure necessary to garrisoning the empire, these lines dramatize the white man’s burden in terms of labor and death. Kipling contributes to a myth of the imperial worker, who will not benefit from the fruits of his sacrifices in the colonies, as if the physical labor and great loss of lives in building the rail system, canals or ports so important to ruling the colonies were suffered by white men. In the final stanza of the poem, Kipling identifies imperial conquest as a rite of passage for nations, crucial to the transition from childhood to manhood. In other words, the maturation of the United States as a nation can only occur through the conquest of childlike nations and the assertion of an imperial vocation. Here masculinism and imperialism converge as they so often do in Kipling’s poetry. Imperial conquest is not merely the work of real men; it is indeed the primary means by which men achieve manhood and nations fulfill their historical role. 

The Iraqi colonial project is part of the Manifest Destiny of the 21st Century. The non- western other is annihilated as an enemy of democracy and security. Ray 05 (Sangeeta Ray 2005, Blackwell Publishing, “A Companion to Post Colonial Studies” p.575-6) So to restate my opening sentiment. A short note as a postscript for the anthology that Henry and I put together in the late 1990s, now appearing in paperback, must be haunted by the cataclysmic event of 9/11. The significance of a date signifying an event is not unusual in the annals of history; however, the overshadowing by the date of the event in its repetitive recounting is perhaps less common. The one other date that seems to have a similar force, especially for those of us concerned with issues of empire, imperialism and postcolonialism is not a day or month but a year, 1492. If 1492 becomes the year demarcating the before and after of a world inevitably altered by the script of conquest, then 9/11 is the day that reintroduces forcefully the idea of a new form of Manifest Destiny as a legitimate ideal for US domination globally. A phrase coined in 1840 by politicians to justify continental expansion by the United States has revitalized a nation’s purpose again but this time extending its reach beyond the continent to the world at large. Once again America is extending the boundaries of freedom to the less fortunate, inculcating its idealism and belief in democratic institutions by any means necessary. The invasion of Iraq appears to be propelled by Manifest Destiny, certainly not weapons of mass destruction –the president himself has mocked his pursuit of these hard to find weapons on national television, wondering if they may not be like the emperor’s new clothes. It likewise motivates the successful, visually gratifying capture of Saddam Hussein and now the inevitable battle of might over right or vice versa depending on whose might and what counts as right. 9/11 is to remain remarkable in the US calendar as a date that must be nationally mourned; 9/11 is the date when the nation must gather for an unqualified reflection on the “us and them” divide; 9/11 is the date that reminds citizens of the necessity for homeland security, for the denial of civil liberties to those that refuse to become us. This latest imperial imaginary defining spaces and bodies while it carries within it traces of an earlier European colonial paradigm is different precisely because the separation of civil and non-civil spaces are being demarcated and maintained by the other despite the best efforts of a US government to maintain “world order.” In other words, if in an earlier colonial scheme “civil lines” were being drawn by the colonizer to restrict the movements of the colonized in a paradoxical attempt to enlarge the space of civility, today the writing on the wall no longer reads the West versus the rest but rather the non-West against the West (with America being more synonymous with the West than any other European country). The world has been replaced by the globe; we no longer talk about world movements so much as global movements and in this global mo(ve)ment/s the other is not invested in becoming like the West. Rather, an American imperium exercised globally is being countered by a global terrorism that is profoundly anti-national in its execution. To put it bluntly, if in an earlier colonial paradigm spaces could be imagined with the promise of a threshold, albeit a limited one as postcolonial theory has taught us, in this drama of an American imperialism there exists a profound despatialization that has little to do with the kind of global good articulated by Hardt and Negri and, paradoxically, everything to do with atavistic notions of identity and territory rero(u)oted in reterritorialized places. 

The idea that US troops are necessary for Iraqi Stability is a Racist description of the non-western world that ensures genocide and unending war. Pinar Batur , PhD @ UT-Austin – Prof. of Scociology @ Vassar,  ‘7  [“The Heart of Violence: Global Racism, War, and Genocide,” in //Handbook of the The Soiology of Racial and Ethnic Relations//, eds. Vera and Feagin, p. 446-7] At the turn of the 20th century, the “Terrible Turk” was the image that summarized the enemy of Europe and the antagonism toward the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire, stretching from Europe to the Middle East, and across North Africa. Perpetuation of this imagery in American foreign policy exhibited how capitalism met with orientalist constructs in the white racial frame of the western mind (VanderLippe 1999). Orientalism is based on the conceptualization of the “Oriental” othe r—Eastern, Islamic societies as static, irrational, savage, fanatical, and inferior to the peaceful, rational, scientific “Occidental” Europe and the West (Said 1978). This is as an elastic construct, proving useful to describe whatever is considered as the latest threat to Western economic expansion, political and cultural hegemony, and global domination for exploitation and absorption. Post-Enlightenment Europe and later America used this iconography to define basic racist assumptions regarding their uncontestable right to impose political and economic dominance globally. When the Soviet Union existed as an opposing power, the orientalist vision of the 20th century shifted from the image of the “Terrible Turk” to that of the “Barbaric Russian Bear.” In this context, orientalist thought then, as now, set the terms of exclusion. It racialized exclusion to define the terms of racial privilege and superiority. By focusing on ideology, orientalism recreated the superior race, even though there was no “race .” It equated the hegemony of Western civilization with the “right ideologic al and cultural framework.” It segued into war and annihilation and genocide and continued to foster and aid the recreation of racial hatred of others with the collapse of the Soviet “other.” Orientalism’s global racist ideology reformed in the 1990s with Muslims and Islamic culture as to the “inferior other .” Seeing Muslims as opponents of Christian civilization is not new, going back to the Crusades, but the elasticity and reframing of this exclusion is evident in recent debates regarding Islam in the West, one raised by the Pope and the other by the President of the United States. Against the background of the latest Iraq war, attacks in the name of Islam, racist attacks on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, and detention of Muslims without trial in secret prisons, Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech in September 2006 at Regensburg University in Germany. He quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor who said, “show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” In addition, the Pope discussed the concept of Jihad, which he defined as Islamic “holy war,” and said, “violence in the name of religion was contrary to God’s nature and to reason.” He also called for dialogue between cultures and religions (Fisher 2006b). While some Muslims found the Pope’s speech “regrettable,” it also caused a spark of angry protests against the Pope’s “ill informed and bigoted” comments, and voices raised to demand an apology (Fisher 2006a). Some argue that the Pope was ordering a new crusade, for Christian civilization to conquer terrible and savage Islam. When Benedict apologized, organizations and parliaments demanded a retraction and apology from the Pope and the Vatican (Lee 2006). Yet, when the Pope apologized, it came as a second insult, because in his apology he said, “I’m deeply sorry for the reaction in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibilities of Muslims” (Reuters 2006). In other words, he is sorry that Muslims are intolerant to the point of fanaticism. In the racialized world, the Pope’s apology came as an effort to show justificationfor his speech—he was not apologizing for being insulting, but rather saying that he was sorry that “Muslim” violence had proved his point. Through orientalist and the white racial frame, those who are subject to racial hatred and exclusion themselves become agents of racist legitimization. Like Huntington, Bernard Lewis was looking for Armageddon in his Wall Street Journal article warning that August 22, 2006, was the 27th day of the month of Rajab in the Islamic calendar and is considered a holy day, when Muhammad was taken to heaven and returned. For Muslims this day is a day of rejoicing and celebration. But for Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Princeton, “this might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and, if necessary, of the world” (Lewis 2006). He cautions that “it is far from certain that [the President of Iran ] Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events for August 22, but it would be **wise** to bear the possibility in mind .” Lewis argues that Muslims, unlike others, seek self-destruction in order to reach heaven faster. For Lewis, Muslims in this mindset don’t see the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a constraint but rather as “an inducement” (Lewis 2006). In 1993, Huntington pleaded that “in a world of different civilizations, each. . .will have to learn to coexist with the others” (Huntington 1993:49). Lewis, like Pope Benedict, views Islam as the apocalyptic destroyer of civilization and claims that reactions against orientalist, racist visions <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> 

such as his actually prove the validity of his position. Lewis’s assertions run parallel with George Bush’s claims. In response to the alleged plot to blow up British airliners, Bush claimed, “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation” (TurkishPress.com. 2006; Beck 2006). Bush argued that “the fight against terrorism is the ideological struggle of the 21st century” and he compared it to the 20th century’s fight against fascism, Nazism, and communism. Even though “Islamo-fascist” has for some time been a buzzword for Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity on the talk-show circuit, for the president of the United States it drew reactions worldwide. Muslim Americans found this phrase “contributing to the rising level of hostility to Islam and the American Muslim community” (Raum 2006). Considering that since 2001, Bush has had a tendency to equate “war on terrorism” with “crusade,” this new rhetoric equates ideology with religion and reinforces the worldview of a war of civilizations. As Bush said, “. . . we still aren’t completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in” (CNN 2006). Exclusion in physical space is only matched by exclusion in the imagination, and racialized exclusion has an internal logic leading to the annihilation of the excluded. Annihilation, in this sense, is not only designed to maintain the terms of racial inequality, both ideologically and physically, but is institutionalized with the vocabulary of self-protection. Even though the terms of exclusion are never complete, genocide is the definitive point in the exclusionary racial ideology, and such is the logic of the outcome of the exclusionary process, that it can conclude only in ultimate domination. War and genocide take place with compliant efficiency to serve the global racist ideology with dizzying frequency. The 21st century opened up with genocide, in Darfur. <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> 

The US policy of occupation has ongoing material effects. Over 1.3 million Iraqi civilians have died. Washington’s current strategy is a deliberate attempt to collapse national unity and resistance. Petras 09 (“The US War against Iraq: The Destruction of a Civilization” James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). Petras’ most recent book is Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Clarity Press, 2008 August 21st, 2009 [] )  The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

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We have to reject this colonialism- if we allow it continue it will result in the death and destruction of the planet. Nermeen Shaikh , @ Asia Source  ‘7,  [//Development// 50, “Interrogating Charity and the Benevolence of Empire,” palgrave-journals] It would probably be incorrect to assume that the principal impulse behind the imperial conquests of the 18th and 19th centuries was charity. Having conquered large parts of Africa and Asia for reasons other than goodwill, however, countries like England and France eventually did evince more benevolent aspirations; the civilizing mission itself was an act of goodwill. As Anatol Lieven (2007) points out, even 'the most ghastly European colonial project of all, King Leopold of Belgium's conquest of the Congo, professed benevolent goals: Belgian propaganda was all about bringing progress, railways and peace, and of course, ending slavery'. Whether or not there was a general agreement about what exactly it meant to be civilized, it is likely that there was a unanimous belief that being civilized was better than being uncivilized – morally, of course, but also in terms of **what would enable** the most in **human l**ife and potential. But what did the teaching of this civility entail, and what were some of the consequences of changes brought about by this benevolent intervention? In the realm of education, the spread of reason and the hierarchies created between different ways of knowing had at least one (no doubt unintended) effect. As Thomas Macaulay (1935) wrote in his famous Minute on Indian Education, We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. This meant, minimally, that English (and other colonial languages elsewhere) became the language of instruction, explicitly creating a hierarchy between the vernacular languages and the colonial one. More than that, it meant instructing an elite class to learn and internalize the culture – in the most expansive sense of the term – of the colonizing country, the methodical acculturation of the local population through education. As Macaulay makes it clear, not only did the hierarchy exist at the level of language, it also affected 'taste, opinions, morals and intellect' – all essential ingredients of the civilizing process. Although, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out, colonialism can always be interpreted as an 'enabling violation', it remains a violation: the systematic eradication of ways of thinking, speaking, and being. Pursuing this line of thought, Spivak has elsewhere drawn a parallel to a healthy child born of rape. The child is born, the English language disseminated (the enablement), and yet the rape, colonialism (the violation), remains reprehensibl e. And, like the child, its effects linger. The enablement cannot be advanced, therefore, as a justification of the violation. Even as vernacular languages, and all habits of mind and being associated with them, were denigrated or eradicated, some of the native population was taught a hegemonic – and foreign – language (English) (Spivak, 1999). Is it important to consider whether we will ever be able to hear – whether we should not hear – from the peoples whose languages and cultures were lost? The colonial legacy At the political and administrative levels, the governing structures colonial imperialists established in the colonies, many of which survive more or less intact, continue, in numerous cases, to have devastating consequences – even if largely unintended (though by no means always, given the venerable place of divide et impera in the arcana imperii). Mahmood Mamdani cites the banalization of political violence (between native and settler) in colonial Rwanda, together with the consolidation of ethnic identities in the wake of decolonization with the institution and maintenance of colonial forms of law and government. Belgian colonial administrators created extensive political and juridical distinctions between the Hutu and the Tutsi, whom they divided and named as two separate ethnic groups. These distinctions had concrete economic and legal implications: at the most basic level, ethnicity was marked on the identity cards the colonial authorities introduced and was used to distribute state resources. The violence of colonialism, Mamdani suggests, thus operated on two levels: on the one hand, there was the violence (determined by race) between the colonizer and the colonized; then, with the introduction of ethnic distinctions among the colonized population, with one group being designated indigenous (Hutu) and the other alien (Tutsi), the violence between native and settler was institutionalized within the colonized population itself. The Rwandan genocide of 1994, which Mamdani suggests was a 'metaphor for postcolonial political violence' (2001: 11; 2007), needs therefore to be understood as a natives' genocide – akin to and enabled by colonial violence against the native, and by the new institutionalized forms of ethnic differentiation among the colonized population introduced by the colonial state. It is not necessary to elaborate this point; for present purposes, it is sufficient to mark the significance (and persistence) of the colonial antecedents to contemporary political violence. The genocide in Rwanda need not exclusively have been the consequence of colonial identity formation, but does appear less opaque when presented in the historical context of colonial violence and administrative practices. Given the scale of the colonial intervention, good intentions should not become an excuse to overlook the unintended consequences. In this particular instance, rather than indulging fatuous theories about 'primordial' loyalties, the 'backwardness' of 'premodern' peoples, the African state as an aberration standing outside modernity, and so forth, it makes more sense to situate the Rwandan genocide within the logic of colonialism , which is of course not to advance reductive explanations but simply to historicize and contextualize contemporary events in the wake of such massive intervention. Comparable arguments have been made about the consolidation of Hindu and Muslim identities in colonial India, where the corresponding terms were 'native' Hindu and 'alien' Muslim (with particular focus on the nature and extent of the violence during the Partition) (Pandey, 1998), or the consolidation of Jewish and Arab identities in Palestine and the Mediterranean generally (Anidjar, 2003, 2007). <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> 

Plan: The United States Federal Government should withdrawal all of the United States Federal Government’s military and police presence from Iraq. <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">  Advantage 3 is solvency

Solving for colonization in Iraq is the starting point for challenging a new era of US intervention. Only the affirmative’s rejection of the logic of pre-emption combats imperialism on a global scale. Everest 2004. Larry Everest, reporter for 20 years with “The Revolutionary Worker, 2004 “Oil, Power, and Empire: Iraq and the US Global Agenda” Common Courage Press <span style="font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif";"> The NSS mentioned Iraq only once in passing. Yet for any who wonder why the Bush administration was so focused on regime change in Baghdad, it is essential reading, and explains far more than any Colin Powell presentation, British “White Paper,” or UN resolution. After its release, Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution remarked, The official story on Iraq has never made sense... Something else had to be going on; something was missing... In recent days, those missing pieces have finally begun to fall into place. As it turns out, this is not really about Iraq. It is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam, or U.N. resolutions. This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the ‘American imperialists’ that our enemies always claimed we were .98 Why was the Bush II administration focused on Iraq—before Sept. 11 and then like a laser after the attacks? War on Iraq was designed to “mark the official emergence” of a more dominant U.S. imperium and much, much more, as we will explore in depth in chapters 9 and 10. In sum, Iraq represented the confluence of regional and global concerns; it can be thought of as a key piece on the chessboard of empire. Toppling the Hussein regime removed a troublesome piece, captured a central square, opened new lines of maneuver and attack—and announced the U.S. intention to checkmate the world. Enforcing regime change was viewed as essential to solidifying the U.S. position in the Middle East, and thus a continuation of the politics of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. It was also seen as an essential step in implementing Washington’s new grand strategy. The U.S. plans to turn Iraq into a client state and a launching pad for the restructuring of the entire Middle East, which includes moving against states like Syria, Iran, and Lebanon; attempting to forcibly resolve the Palestinian people’s struggle on Israeli terms; bolstering unsteady allies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt; and generally attempting to quash the anti-U.S. anger throughout the region. It was a war intended to “shock and awe” opponents of U.S. domination in the Middle East—and the world. Of course, where the U.S. turns after Iraq is still an open question, which will be shaped by the outcome of the Iraq war, world events, and ongoing debate within the political establishment. Yet occupying Iraq potentially gives the U.S. direct control of the world’s second largest oil reserves and places its armed forces in the center of the Persian Gulf/Central Asia region, home to some 80 percent of the world’s petroleum and natural gas. Control of the global flow of oil and natural gas could give the U.S. enormous leverage over Russia, France, Germany, China, Japan, and others, possibly preventing any from challenging it—regionally or globally. Prior to the war, Kissinger alluded to some of these multiple objectives: The overthrow of the Iraq regime and, at a minimum, the eradication of its weapons of mass destruction, would have potentially beneficent political consequences as well: The so-called Arab street may conclude that the negative consequences of jihad outweigh any potential benefits. It could encourage a new approach in Syria; strengthen moderate forces in Saudi Arabia; increase pressures for a democratic evolution in Iran; demonstrate to the Palestinian Authority that America is serious about overcoming corrupt tyrannies; and bring about a better balance in oil policy within OPEC.99 “In one place—in one regime,” Bush said of Iraq in September 2002, “we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms.”100 Iraq did represent a convergence, but not of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. It represented a convergence of imperialist needs and ambitions. “All Roads Lead Through Baghdad” It is for all these intersecting regional and global reasons that war on Iraq was deemed essential to the plan for a “New American Century.” Different writers, activists and analysts have put forward varying objectives as the “real” reason for the U.S. war on Iraq, including grabbing Iraq’s oil, preventing the Hussein regime from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, stabilizing the dollar, strengthening Israel, or retaliating for Sept. 11. <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> 

If understood as threads in the fabric of global empire, all these objectives and more are part of the U.S. agenda, although none by itself accounts for this war. Instead, it is the convergence of such necessities and ambitions of empire—in the Middle East and globally—that explains why, in the months following Sept. 11, the U.S. “war on terror” grew increasingly focused on Iraq and increasingly distant from the attack that damaged the Pentagon and destroyed the World Trade Center towers. Prior to the war, leading Democrats, such as Senator Tom Daschle and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, argued that attacking Iraq would be a “diversion” from the “war on terror.” This argument takes official statements that the real objective of this “war” is protecting Americans and eliminating global “terrorism” at face value. Yet, an analysis of the roots and objectives of the “war on terror” and the overarching strategy that it is part of shows the opposite to be true: targeting Iraq reveals the essence of this war. The representatives of American power who took office with the ascendancy of George W. Bush felt that the alternative to this audacious grab for dominance was strategic drift, mounting opposition, and the erosion of the U.S. grip on global power, and miss an historic opportunity to extend their reach. Without making an aggressive move against Iraq, their game-plan could unravel. “No course open to the United States is free of risk,” Wolfowitz argued. “The question is how to weigh the risks of action against the risks of inaction and to be fully aware of both.” So for those running the U.S. ship of state, all roads led through Baghdad.101 <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> 

The Current view of international security is based on civilized/uncivilized binaries. We assume Iraq is a breeding ground for conflict. The affirmative resists colonialism by examining the historical contexts of US occupation. Tarak Barkawi , Prof. in Interenational Security @ Univ. of Cambridge, Mark  Laffey  , Prof. in International Politics @ Univ. of London,  ‘6  [//Review of International Studies// 32, “The postcolonial moment in security studies,” p. 344-6] What was true of European economic and military power was also true of the constitution of European identities, which required an imaginary non-Western‘other’. 109 The West is defined through a series of contrasts regarding rationality, progress, and development in which the non-West is generally found lacking. To take an example from the initial period of European expansion, Western thinkers used the notion of the ‘state of nature’ to distinguish between their civilisation and those they encountered in the Western Hemisphere after 1492. The ‘state of nature’ was itself a Eurocentric interpretation of these peoples which located civilization and law in Europe even as Europe set about destroying these peoples and their civilisations. This metaphor, a core notion in Western political thought, only became possible as a result of Europe’s imperial encounter with aboriginal peoples.110 At the same time, it enabled and legitimated European dispossession and appropriation of land, resources and populations. In this way, the ‘state of nature’ played its role in producing a world sharply divided between Western have-lots and non-Western have-nots. This idea has continuing significance in political theory and in discussions of contemporary security issues such as failed states and new wars, discussions which reproduce Eurocentric understandings of world politics.111 Contemporary violence in Africa is often explained in terms of a lack of those institutions and attributes associated with European modernity, such as sovereignty, rather than as a consequence of long histories of colonial and postcolonial interaction with the West. Part of the significance of the postcolonial rupture signaled in the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 is that it forces us to recover these processes of mutual constitution and their significance for how we make sense of security relations and world politics more generally. For many, the War on Terror is a clash between the West and the Islamic world. Al-Qaeda, bin Laden and his allies are conceived as ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ with a passionate hatred of everything Western. The problem with this way of framing the conflict is that it ignores the long history of interconnection and mutual constitution out of which bin Laden’s ideas and organization were produced. Currents of Western, Arab and Islamic cultures and histories, modern technologies and communications, and the policies of various regimes and great powers combined to form crystallizations, amongst them bin Laden’s and Al-Qaeda’s particular way of being modern. Attempting to disaggregate these phenomena and squeeze them into boxes marked ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ will not aid understanding of the dynamics of the War on Terror. More importantly, policies derived from such binary understandings may create the very conditions that crystallize future bin Ladens and Al-Qaedas. Bin Laden’s ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and the Al-Qaeda organization are in fact modern, hybrid creations of Islam’s encounter with the West. 112 Two of the key figures behind contemporary Islamic thinking, Sayyid Qutb and his brother Muhammad, who was bin Laden’s teacher at King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia, viewed the West as suffering from a ‘great spiritual famine’. 113 Much of their thought is a reaction against Western modernity and an attempt to outline a new, Islamic modernity, for they did not want the same fate to befall their societies. The West was not only an initial impetus to their ideology, they also utilized a variety of quintessentially Western ideas. Qutb was influenced in particular by Marxism- Leninism, taking the concept of a revolutionary vanguard and the idea that the world could be remade through an act of will, both important intellectual bases of Al-Qaeda. His notion that Islam could serve as a universal ideology of emancipation in modern conditions is a distinctive combination of Islamic and Enlightenment thinking.114 The Al-Qaeda organization itself is even more obviously of the modern world, rather than simply a product of ‘Islam’. It is a contemporary, global and networked enterprise, with a flattened hierarchy and cellular structure. It is comfortable with computer technology and modern communications. Al-Qaeda also has direct debts to US foreign policy. Bin Laden’s central role and his organization developed out of the US supported resistance to the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul.115 It is through diverse forms of interaction between peoples and places around the world that ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and Al-Qaeda came into existence; they were mutually constituted out of hierarchical relations of interconnection. Our point here is not to provide a full account of Al-Qaeda but rather to highlight in an initial way the kinds of research questions as well as the larger research agenda opened up for security studies by a focus on the mutual constitution of the strong and the weak, amid relations of domination and subordination. For security studies after Eurocentrism, the history and politics of warfare and struggle between what we now call the global North and the global South must become a major focus for inquiry. Especially in the age of the War on Terror, with its avowedly colonial projects and rhetorics in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, there needs to be greater attention to the histories and processes of imperial subjugation and 

the resistance it has so regularly generated. The imperial character of great powers – in all its dimensions – directs inquiry to the constitutive relationship between core and periphery, and in so doing to a reconceptualisation of what a great power is in security studies. This involves explicit recognition and analysis of the many ways in which political, economic and military power is produced out of relations between the strong and the weak, relations that are as necessary as they are contested. The insight of mutual constitution is no less applicable to the character and nature of the weak themselves, as for Al-Qaeda. They too are formed out of their relations with the powerful. 

The plan begins a shift in US policies of colonialism into more peaceful and equitable societies. It is time to begin questioning whether or not our reasons and justifications our correct. Diana Brydon , University of Western Ontario,  ‘6  [Postcolonial Test 2.1, “Is There a Politics of Postcoloniality?” []]

Although the ultimate orientation of a postcolonial politics is toward negotiating political change in the organizations of governance, power and wealth in the world, the more immediate task is creating the kinds of knowledge base and the kinds of subjects who can work together creatively toward achieving such goals. We always need to remind ourselves of the long and short term goals of our work. By drawing attention to the notion of "ends" I am directing attention to the functions of postcolonial work but also highlighting its imbrication within utopian projects as varied and contradictory as Marxism and Christianity. The language of postcolonial theory is heavily imbued with potent metaphors from economics and religion. How do we negotiate across these conflicting agendas? "The Ends of Postcolonialism," my original conference title, carries eschatological echoes from monotheistic religious, liberal and utopian discourses, each of which implies that history is progress toward "an end," a final point of consummation. These are echoes I wish to disclaim but which must be investigated before they can be discarded because the whole enterprise is imbued with them, heavily imbued with them. The notion of bearing witness, for example, grounds much work within the field in a way that seems to delink the concept from its roots in religious experience, but can such associations be so easily delinked? Or should they be? In what ways does the postcolonial politics of bearing witness move this concept out of religious discourse into the realm of the political? What are the implications of such transference for the practice of a politics of postcoloniality? This paper has obliquely addressed a series of inter-related questions: 1. What is the point of postcolonial scholarship? 2. To what extent is the field imbued with a missionary zeal to redeem the world? 3. To what extent can such idealism be harnessed for democratic negotiations concerning governance? 4. To what extent does it remain dangerously embedded in forms of idealism that can slip toward fascism? 5. Is there a temporal limit to the scope of the field? Is postcolonialism a project that will be completed when the legacies of colonialism have been worked through and surpassed, or is it the kind of process that Wilson Harris terms an "infinite rehearsal"? 6. What form should a postcolonial politics take in Canada? 7. How does one think an indigenous literacy alongside a transnational literacy? This last question articulates the project that Ted Chamberlin begins in //If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?// If we can start to become proficient within these forms of literacies, then what would change as a result? As Ivison asks: "Given the history of relations between Aboriginal peoples and the state, on what possible grounds could a liberal state ever become a postcolonial one?" (72). With these questions, we are back to where I began, with Edward Said's observations on the preconditions for political dialogue. Ivison suggests that the "[i]nvocation of reasonableness" as "a deeply contested terrain in colonial contexts" (72) will need to be rethought, as it is being rethought within postcolonial studies today. That thinking proceeds on many fronts. It will take a collective effort across disciplines and different communities of interest to shift these definitions. Its chief enemy right now may be the demand for instant solutions and easy answers. But we cannot discount the fear that such changes bring to many, either. If we are to replace modernism's command to "make it new" with the urging to "make it just," it will be hard to avoid defensive responses that confuse that demand with the politics of blame. Hardt and Negri were too hasty (in //Empire//) in dismissing postcolonial theory as a backward-looking study with no relevance to the challenges of globalization. The civilizing mission remains alive and well and must be distinguished from Balibar's attempt to reclaim the "civil" for a different kind of genuinely emancipatory project. The goal of creating equitable and peaceful societies, beyond the dead hand of the colonial past, is worth embracing. Politics is humanity's means for achieving such a goal, but politics itself requires an infrastructure and value system to function. At the very minimum, politics requires people who can act collectively for the public good. That is why Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak pays so much attention to the urgent need for developing forms of transnational literacy and unlearning those sanctioned forms of ignorance that still too often pass for common sense. That is why Len Findlay and James (Sakj) Youngblood Henderson issue their calls to indigenize. As students and teachers, we have a role to play in defining the focus of postcolonial analysis in response to changing conditions under globalization. To be effective, a politics of postcoloniality will need to keep listening to its critics, from all sides of the political spectrum, while working to create the conditions under which genuine dialogue might begin.