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November 15, 2006

Nomadic Imperialism, Sedentary Hegemony

One of the factoring causes for the US that continues to be in quandary in Iraq is originating from an orthogonal opposition (hence sharing a center along identical axes) between the nature and quality of US militarization and the US policy i.e. the US territorial policy.

Although US remilitarization aiming at engendering a highly dynamic army to both ward off the obscure hostilities in Iraq (lack of definite target in a military sense) and to continue its existence as a more obscure entity (inter-states soldier, intra-state enforcer and constabulary) succeeded but it resulted in an attritional situation for US domestic and foreign policies. Not only to occupy and remain in Iraq but also to prevent the war from turning into a war between states which results in a pro-longed organized resistance, US army underwent a drastic re-militarization marked by two axial reassemblies. One was involved with a shift from open battlefield to urbanized spaces – thus subjected to more complex rules and policies on both command and tactical / executive levels. The other was the radical infantrication of the army to leverage the US military might against urban defenders whose military peculiarities vacillate between the two poles of ex-civilian soldier and ex-soldier civilian (militia?), and whose military obligations are from completely different agendas. In short, the remilitarization was based on bridging a dynamic and versatile nexus (minimally under the influence of territorial functions) between the quality and level of the army as a foreign army or what can operate as an inter-state force, and a quasi-police force with a designated focus of activity which is tackling not military forces of another state but forces which have little in common with the military forces of the State ruling over them. Such a dynamic bridge established within the US army for eliminating threats both from the decreasing State’s resistance and growing militias with rather obscure origins and mostly outside of any connection with the State fully pushed the US army to a new military realm. The characteristics of this new realm could be summarized as the progressive loss of static qualities and military configurations or formations of the army to maintain a constant vigilance and capacity against the hostilities in Iraq which are instigated by the urbanized soldier or militia as a free-play and unconventionally dynamic military interference rather than the solid State’s resistance which is diminishing. The consequence of this re-militarization for the US army was losing the ability to fully settle. In order to be settled, or more precisely, to occupy a concrete territory and acting as an occupant merely caring about the geographic that is to say concretely spatial aspects of occupation, the US army must be consolidated as an inter-States force of colonialization or a conventional Imperial army. But to be such an army with a stationary yet geographically expanding ambition is not compatible to being vigilantly dynamic and polymorphous and not in line with mustering the hegemonic (necessarily dynamic at all costs) objectives of the US policy in seeking out Jihadies from civilians or the other way around.

The nomadic configuration of the US army in its hegemonic war against the Jihadi-civilian or the ‘Jihadi under Taqiyya’ prevents the army to fully settle in a geographic space or territory. Meanwhile, complete occupation of a territory or ‘excluding a spatial region’ is necessary for defending. To defend can only be made possible by asserting control over a geographic area (territory) and the exclusive use of territory; without possessing such a ‘territory’ defending is almost impossible. The consequence of this lack of defense capacity in Iraq for the US army leads to at least two conclusions. One is that if the US army does not have a consolidated defense program or military formation of this kind in Iraq then it is mounting up around purely offensive and intrusive configurations. The singularity structure of the American hegemony as the liberating leadership in the region and a paradigm for international policies, too, in the same way hammers out its dynamic edge out of offensive tactics. The next immediate conclusion, in the wake of this bipolar military disorder of the US army in Iraq is developing a suicidal attitude and direction because pure offense (through nomadic remilitarization) fulfills an immanent tactics that fails to survive because its dynamism escapes what the planes of logistics and strategy provide for the line of tactics: survival gravity.

The excluding attitude of the US domestic policy (manifested in its homeland security) is always willing to exponentially compensate what it lacks outside of its concrete geographic territory that is 'full settling' and 'home', by exerting more territorial regulations and escalating the territorial functions of the homeland. The perplexing nature of the US military machine and its policies in Iraq and the rest of the globe are originating from the consummation of the US as an enigmatic Imperialist which is too nomadic outside of its geographic state and too sedentarized inside its territory to be hegemonic.

Posted by Incognitum at November 15, 2006 04:54 PM