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Military defeat in Iraq, the revelations about torture and military brutality, mass opposition to the war and climate catastrophe is turning the 'war on terror' into a political disaster, says Phil Hearse. As everyone now knows, on the day after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, Secretary Rumsfeld and then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice privately raised the idea of attacking Iraq. The neocons who surround Bush thought all the Christmases had come at once. Here was a chance to deal with the world differently – to maximise the political and economic advantage that total domination in the military sphere gives American capitalism. The 'war on terror' was born. After three years, does it rate as a success or failure? A hint of where we are now is contained in Rice’s September 30 2005 speech in which she argued against withdrawing US troops from Iraq and warned of the creation of ‘an empire of terror’ which would threaten the US mainland, if the troops were brought home. Three years ago that sort of ultra-defensive speech, with its resort to risible arguments, would have been unthinkable. To give a more exact answer to the success of otherwise of the ‘war on terror’, we have to ask what exactly American objectives were with this offensive. Part of this is helpfully explained in the 2002 White House document 'United States National Security Strategy'. No one reading that document can be under any doubt about fundamentals; the strategy incorporates key military, political and economic objectives, which center on assuring American world dominance against all potential rivals. More specifically, the strategy calls for open free market economies everywhere, the imposition of American-style democracy and the establishment of multiple political alliances between governments and the United States. But these are just headline slogans. Behind them is an overarching strategy for a new stage of American hegemony. In addition to ensuring the dominance of US banks and multinational corporations, this means using the war on terror to militarily and politically dominate the Eurasian landmass; weld political elites and significant sections of the intelligentsia worldwide into a new acceptance of US political leadership and goal-setting, which would be the modern version of the old Cold War anti-communist ideology; militarily surround economically emerging China; and recast domestic American politics, using alleged external threat to secure indefinite domination of US politics by the neoconservative right. 'Hegemony' for the US does not just mean being the most powerful or dominant capitalist state. It means a capacity to ensure political compliance and support by huge sections of the population internationally, which is key to the success of the other goals. Measured by this criterion, the war on terror is turning into a disaster. It is turning into a disaster because its central arms – militarism and the repression of civil liberties – are incapable of dealing with the new threats the US faces. One straw in the wind. Robert Novack reported in the Guardian of September 28 that the recent 'Little Aspen Weekend', an annual conference for the super-rich organised by investment bakers Frostmann Little in the Colorado millionaires’ playground, turned into two days of bashing Bush. His own attempts to defend the White House got a frosty reception. On the field of battle, the results are well-known. The Iraq insurgency is undefeated and undefeatable. Tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 2000 US and allied troops have been killed in a war without end. In the US and Britain numerous commentators who supported the war initially now say that invasion has made life much worse for Iraqis, a dire result for the Bush administration. This is compounded by the unending series of revelations about torture, which will grow as the clamour for the publication of hundreds of suppressed photos from Abu Ghraib grows. The Guantanamo detention camp remains a ticking time bomb for the US, one which the White House doesn't know how to handle. If the current round of hunger strikes result in deaths it will be another public relations disaster for Bush. If the failure to pacify Iraq is at the core of the crisis of the ‘War on Terror’ strategy, then New Orleans tragedy and the growing realisation of the effects of climate change are the new factor undermining the neocons. For millions of Americans it was just as much the wake up call on poverty and racism as the wake up call on climate change which hit home as a result of New Orleans. The US magazine Newsweek ran a full five-page feature on ‘Poverty USA’, the first time for forty years it had run such an article. But for the US ruling class, who are not exactly ignorant of the facts about racism and poverty, it is the issue of climate change which is causing intense concern. The possibility that hurricanes Katrina and Rita might be the omens of a prolonged epoch of climate catastrophe, links to concern over energy security. Ironically, the first major economic impact of Katrina was to rapidly push up world oil prices as the Mexican Gulf production and refining facilities went offline. As gap between (declining) supply and (rocketing) demand for oil narrows, there is no slack in the system. Minor turbulence can throw it off balance. And no one in big business or government know how energy supplies will be secured in the next few decades, as the oil and natural gas begin to run out. For US policy strategists all this is deeply worrying. Splits among the US ruling class on this issue are shown by the August 2005 decision of nine states in the north eastern USA to implement their own ‘Kyoto’ agreement, voluntarily cutting power station emissions without waiting for the White House. It is likely that dozens of other states will follow this initiative. White House partisans point to one unassailable fact that mitigates against the idea of a crisis of the Bush presidency and the ‘war on terror’ – namely that Bush won the 2004 presidential election by some margin, and a staggering 62 million people voted for him. However present figures show a different story. Approval ratings for the president vary between about 40 and 45%, as against disapproval ratings of about 52%. The number who disapprove of the conduct of the war is around 57% and rising. The anti-war movement has gained a new legitimacy by the courageous stand of Cindy Sheehan whose son was killed in Iraq and who staged a protest outside Bush’s holiday ranch – with massive support and sympathy across America. This, combined with events like George Galloway’s appearance before the US Senate and the flak Bush got over Katrina have remoralised and remobilised the US anti-war movement. The 300,000 who demonstrated in Washington on 24 November were joined by tens of thousands in other towns across the country. The impact of the anti-war movement is shown by the viciousness of the attacks of the attacks against Sheehan and Galloway, and the increasing use of right-wing media hoodlums like Christopher Hitchens to engage in character assassination against anti-war activists. Reactionary radio ‘shock-jocks’ and other pundits whip up the right-wing public. This is a typical example, one of thousands, from a local paper in Fallbrook, California: “So the son dies in Iraq and then Cindy shows up to make a stink. She gets an audience with Bush. That was not enough. She goes to Crawford and demands another audience. How many news stations carry the ongoing saga of Cindy? Practically all of them. Cindy didn’t care about her son. She let another woman raise him. Cindy doesn’t care about the other soldiers in Iraq. Cindy cares about her liberal, feminist agenda and about using the death of her son to lobby against Republicans and Bush.” Hitchens’ accusations against George Galloway and the anti-war movement are part of an offensive around one key point: those who support the anti-war movement are conscious or unconscious apologists for terrorism, an accusation alas repeated by one of Hitchens’ new and effusive fans, ex-Marxist Norman Geras (“There are apologists amongst us”, Guardian 21 July). Polemical desperation shows that the ideological punch of the ‘war on terror’ is failing. In the 45 years from the end of the second world war to fall of communism in 1989-90, defense of the ‘Free World’ against Communism provided the ideological glue which held together the US-led alliance of major capitalist countries crystallised by NATO, and the common ground which defined the mainstream of US politics. No one serious about getting into government, from Japan to Iceland to Washington, went outside that framework. The ‘war on terrorism’ is not able to play that role. Three years after 9/11, when the front page of the French paper Liberátion – “We Are all Americans” – summed up a global response, too few people worldwide believe in it and it is losing support at home in a way that cold war anti-communism never did. But more than that, climate change, economic insecurity and the looming energy crisis, create a completely different context from the cold war era. In that era, the US and major capitalist nations oozed stability and self-confidence. In the era of the war on terror (and partially because of the war on terror) the sense of things being out of control is everywhere. And the absence of serious answers in Washington is obvious as well.