Full Spectrum Disorder
29 Aug 2004I am currently reading Full Spectrum Disorder, Stan Goff’s latest, which was written, presumably, before and during the beginning of this latest Iraq war. I’ll get around to a full review when I’m finished, but I wanted to quote a bit that is quite prescient:
An indigenous force fighting a foreign invader or an existing state can use military action as a first course of action, a catalyst, the center-piece of its political struggle, because it is not fighting to retain economic and political control, but rather to disrupt or prevent that control by another force. Military actions are intrinsically better at creating instability than stability. Any one of these leaders, alone or in combination with others, has the capacity to introduce total disequilibrium into the situation in Afghanistan.
Whoever learns to make an ally of that disequilibrium, wins.
With no long-standing armed factions in Iraq except the Ba’ath Party and the norther Kurds, it is more difficult to see what might be on that horizon. From the standpoint of the U.S. occupier, nothing good.
Nothing good indeed.