A letter from a good friend:

There’s a very interesting play of paradoxical requirements within the neoliberal order that I saw highlighted today on the Abu Aardvark website. It has to do with garrisoning defective territories for capitalist domination. The military is pursuing all kinds of advanced social and behavioural modification methods for subduing hostile populations and has recruited social scientists and theorists to that end. They have published a much discussed field manual [U.S. Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24)] as the outcome. But, to be successful in its implementation at all levels of society, as the manual requires, the military must have immanent command over resources and institutions. A problem arises with the simultaneous privatisation of these same resources and institutions. It can’t be both a hegemonic military force and an open field for economic exploitation! Which is more important?

What Wendy Brown (political theorist from UC Berkeley) has to say about all this:

If the manual can be reduced to a single didactic point, it is that successful wars against insurgents involve erudite and careful mobilization of every element of the society in which they are being waged. These wars will be won through a new and total kind of governance, one that emanates from the military but reaches to security and stability for civilian life, formal and informal economies, structures of authority, patron–client relationships, political participation, culture, law, identity, social structure, material needs, ethnic and linguistic subdivisions, and more (pp. 81–99). So the COIN military not only must coordinate closely with other agents of regime change, including in the host nation, but must itself apprehend and manipulate every aspect of a society if it is to bend the society to its cause rather than to the insurgent one.

….

The boundary breakdowns and erasure of settled jurisdictions articulated and advocated throughout the volume, however, are also at the heart of a set of contemporary problems for counterinsurgency that the manual cannot address or solve. What happens when the military is no longer in charge of the wars it wages because the wars themselves are outsourced to private contractors, and when an occupier is no longer in charge of its occupation because the resources and enterprises of the occupied country have been sold off to the highest bidders in the world market? These are the problems signified today by proper nouns like Blackwater, Halliburton, Abu-Ghraib, and J. Paul Bremer. While the new manual clearly represents a serious effort at securing American hegemony through stabilizing and transforming rather than simply sacking the regions targeted as critical to this hegemony, insurgents are often the least of the forces exceeding the military’s control. There are more than 180,000 private security employees in Iraq, substantially more than the total number of U.S. troops even after the spring 2007 surge. The deadly Blackwater shooting spree of September 2007 revealed the extent to which these private security forces are not only beyond the pale of American military command but also beyond the pale of law, any law. As nonmilitary personnel, they are not subject to the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice and, if fired, could not be court-marshaled in any event. Operating as combatants outside the boundaries of the United States, they are not subject to American constitutional law. International law would be awkwardly and ineffectively summoned in a context in which international justice instruments have been spurned from the outset.

….

So the manual represents something of a tragic irony, in which the American military has grasped the importance of conducting counterinsurgency on all fronts and with a transformed military culture at the very moment that it is neither capable of controlling most of these other fronts nor in charge of outsourced military operations. The deliberate facilitation of capital’s superordination in the new Iraq radically undermines the possibility of coordinating and controlling the elements of counterinsurgency identified as critical in the manual. Similarly, even as the manual repeatedly stresses the importance of unity of effort in counterinsurgency struggles (Chapter 2 is wholly concerned with this), such unity is rendered impossible by the ubiquitousness of privatized security forces, privatized resources, privatized infrastructure building and rebuilding, privatized industry, and privatized prisons and water supplies. How is unified and coordinated effort to be expected among agents produced and governed by a neoliberal rationality whose ruling principle is lack of regulation, restriction, or control by anything outside the private enterprise? And what motivation could there be for investors and contractors involved in these operations to organize their efforts around any end other than profitability, an end that might well collide with “successful” counterinsurgency? It is hard to know why the private enterprises lured to Iraq specifically to sustain an occupation would aim to conclude that occupation. It is even harder to know why any of the foreign capital that flooded post-Saddam Iraq would become invested in national sovereignty and substantive democracy there.

My conclusion: What’s happening in Iraq is what always happens when capital thinks it’s nothing but itself—pulling itself up by the hair like Baron Munchausen. Iraq marks the dreamy (or nightmarish) moment when capital starts to believe its own fiction. When it sees its own ideology as the world, as the rational, as the real. But capital can not function without state force, state power, the state apparatus. It orders weaker economic systems to do so (Economic Structural Adjustments Programs, and so on), to be like it sees (imagines) itself—a consequence of itself. But it is in reality a consequence of cannons “battering down China walls,” and state funded operations and adventures of every kind. The separation of state from capital is not in any way realistic. In the way labor power is the substance of an object and use value is the object, the state is the object and capital its substance.