John Buell

Blowback and the IED

Why is the United States now once again waging war unsuccessfully in Iraq? The best answer, though seldom acknowledged by the mainstream media, is blowback. We are at war because previous efforts to dominate the Middle East not only have failed, they have been counterproductive.

The Taliban, armed by the US under President Carter to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan, developed the skills and the firepower to turn on their benefactors, whose presence in their holy land was deemed blasphemy.

In Iraq itself, US imperialism also unleashed its own demonic response. Having displaced Saddam, the Bush Administration’s ultra conservative proconsul Paul Bremer fired Saddam’s entire army on the grounds that they had been members of the Ba’ath Party, without any regard to their level of commitment or past actions.

Just as in the old Soviet Union, to be anything at all in totalitarian societies one had to be at least nominally a member of the Party. By summarily firing an entire army, Bremer created a core of idle, discontented, and well trained elite sure to turn on the US. Now the Obama Administration seeks to extirpate the terrorism and extremism to which it has contributed so mightily by bombing suspected ISIS sites in Iraq and Syria. Yet, as Phyllis Bennis of the Institute For Policy Studies points out, you cannot bomb extremism. Bombing these selected targets inevitably kills civilians and becomes a tool to recruit further extremists. Such bombing has been carried out even as US authorities acknowledge that ISIS is no existential threat to the US.

Though blowback has been written all over the rise of ISIS, less attention even in the Left press has been devoted to another factor in the United States long and agonizing retreat/defeat in this region. That is the role of the humble IED (improvised explosive device). Seldom is mention made of Pentagon efforts to defeat/prevent the use of these devices. University of Hawaii International Relations theorist Jairus Grove points out that the Pentagon spent $26 billion over a six-year period to achieve its goals, only to see attacks increase from about 800 to over 15,000 between 2006 and 2012. IEDs accounted for two thirds of all soldiers wounded and killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In dollar terms, the legacy of the IED is even more pronounced. The US has spend over $16,000 for every dollar the insurgency has spent to defeat the IED.

Distant cousins to the defensive land mines of the earlier world wars, these devices are far more. They have totally disrupted the major arteries on which the modern US army depends for its imperial adventure.

IEDs have received far less academic scrutiny than other weapons of war, such as nuclear armament and chemical weapons. Nuclear’s capacity to destroy civilization and the pall it cast over an entire era obviously justify the attention it receives, but in more subtle ways IEDs have reshaped not only Iraq and Afghanistan but war as well.

There are at least three reasons for this paucity of scholarship. Traditional scholarship looks at the weapons of war as following a fairly predictable course. The most powerful and technologically advanced societies develop new weapons first, with their presence and demand for them then moving outward to lesser powers and wannabees. In addition, IEDs have no famous scientific parent and no path breaking scientific theory upon which their development rests. Finally, they are hard to define. They are not reducible to any one component or even to one particular whole. Citing another scholar, Grove points out that as with a coral reef, which can be composed of coral but could instead be composed of dead tires, no single totality defines it. Yet both teem with life and we can tell the difference between a reef and a parking lot.

Grove argues convincingly that the IED is revelatory of modern life. It is an event, one that never stands still. IEDs “are the weaponization of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus, violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating innovation of contemporary global life.” Grove adds that “To foreground the event and especially the efficacy of things makes the experience of military acid reflux sernsible.”

The larger context in which this event has emerged is war itself. “War has always been an assemblage of things in which any particular human being played only a linkage or fulcrum of a larger, more heterogenous orders.” Artisans and tinkerers are not the only factor keeping the constant evolution of the IED alive. “It is the stubborn perdurance of high tech and manufactured waste dumping that provide the near limitless flow of materials from place to place. The protocols of production, waste disposal, and consumption habits — that are never entirely human — generate the exteriorization waste from the centers of cutting edge commerce to the periphery.” (700 million new computers will be manufactured this year, up from 183 million just five years ago.)

Ironically the US, with overweening confidence in its technological mastery of the social and nonhuman world, for years refused to sign a land mine treaty. But as the tables turned it then endorsed such treaties, but characteristically remained blind to the ability of the mine to evolved in unpredictable ways.

This saga exposes the consequence of elites’ consistent repudiation of ecological perspectives on the world. Ecology appreciates “ creativity and participation at multiple levels of complexity and organization, species, populations, individual organisms, and assemblages of living and non-living things …To this end ecological relations are characterized by shifting stabilities, creativity, and variable involvement from top to bottom, cosmos to microorganism.”

An account that treats the IED as itself a complex evolving species deeply intertwined with social, economic, and nonhuman forces and agents exposes the arrogant faith in technology of the military planner and of much of contemporary economic thought. It is little wonder the IED has proven to be the most painful blowback from our most recent imperial venture.

John Buell writes on labor and environmental issues. Email jbuell@acadia.net.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2015

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