Many people say that the coming
V assault on Irag is a 'war for oil.
While it's true that securing privileged access to Middle East oil is a key US objective - the US consumes 10 million barrels of the 70 million produced each day - that is only a part of the story. American capitalism is mainly fighting to extend and deepen its global political and economic dominance. It is fighting to crush or neutralise what it identifies as key enemies or rivals. And it is using its key military asset, the one area in which its dominance is completely unrivalled.
September 112001 was a heaven-set gift for the Bush team. Until then, the nine-month-old Bush administration was beleaguered, locked in trade battles with Europe, vilified for its refusal to ratify the ! Kyoto agreement and isolated over its total support for Israel. But September I| gave them the opportunity to declare the 'war on terrorism' as a new organising principle for world capitalist politics.
Through it the US is trying to push back third world liberation movements, subordinate European states to its leadership, undermine the global justice movement ••• At one stroke the US has overturned the whole notion of sovereignty, which has - in theory -governed relations since 1648
and above all reposition its military capacity worldwide to attack or intimidate any
potential adversary. All this to ensure
world economic domination for the US
transnational corporations.
Thus the 'war on terrorism' is a longterm strategy. In the short term its major
victims are the poor and oppressed in
countries where it has directly intervened
or given the green light for unleashing allout counter-revolutionary war.
This includes Colombia where the US! crush the FARC and ELN leftwing guerrillas; the Philippines where 10,000 US 'advisors' are preparing to spearhead a new offensive against Islamist insurgents; Palestine, where the Bush administration has removed all restraining conditions to the support it gives to the Sharon government; and of course the people of Afghanistan, where the number of civilians killed by the US in the war exceeds the numbers killed in the September 11 attacks.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of military intervention. The strategic military build-up is concentrated in central and southeast Asia. The Afghan war enabled to US to build new and permanent bases in the central Asian republics Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. US military positions have been reinforced in South Korea and US naval forces in the Taiwan Strait boosted Add to that the return of the US military to the Philippines, then a glance at the map shows what is happening: China is being militarily surrounded.
This doesn't mean that war with China is being contemplated as an objective in the foreseeable future. But it remains a permanent threat and pressure, especially in view of China's great vulnerability to air attack: the bombing of half a dozen dams on the Yangtze River would immediately drown 50 million people.
Launching the war on terrorism Bush proclaimed that "either
—you're with us or against us". But the key political step was the January 1! State of the Union speech, which launched the 'Axis of Evil' - a proclamation of the right of the United States to 'pre-emptive' strikes against any regime of which it disapproves - Iraq, Iran and North Korea being specifically named.
At one stroke the US has overturned the whole notion of sovereignty, which has - in theory - governed international relations since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Now national sovereignty is, especially in the third world, conditional on US approval. Do as we say or your license to govern is terminated, if necessary with extreme prejudice.
In fact the 'conditional sovereignty' idea
is a consequence of the changed international position since the collapse of the
Soviet Union. This enabled the Western
powers to deepen the global neoliberal
offensive and especially to launch a new
offensive against the South.
While the European states accept the
notion of limited sovereignty, they object
to the sole licensing agency being the
United States government. Rather, they
want a multilateral system of world governance.
This is part of what underlies the continued pathetic bleating in Europe (privately echoed by the Blair government)
that any attack on Iraq must be approved
by the United Nations, a process which -is funding and training the forces trying to ! formally at any rate - enables multilateral discussion and agreement to prevail.
The 'Axis of Evil' position on the upfront use of military power is the brainchild of the 'defence intellectuals' who are central to the Bush administration - notably Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz - and behind them their mentor Richard Perle, dubbed by Dennis Healey 'the Prince of Darkness'.
Most of these people served in the Reagan government and were described by George Bush senior, in a 1987 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, as 'marginal intellectual thugs'.
Their doctrine has supplanted the dominant thinking in the Clinton administration, described most clearly by Zbigniew Brzezinski (former national security advisor and the eminence grise behind secretary of state Madeleine Albright) in his book The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski argues that the key to world leadership is economic political and military domination of the major centre of world population and Deadly cargo: US bombers rain death on Afghanistan. A new war on Iraq would mean massive air strikes roughly a) be nasty to Russia and prevent its economic revival b) be friendly to Germany, but support European capitalist unification which will prevent Germany from becoming a major independent political power c) deepen the strategic alliance with Japan as a bulwark against Chinese economic and political domination of east Asia.
Brzezinski version of course does not simply counterpose political and diplo matic mechanisms to military ones Military dominance has a crucial role to play. It is however a question of balance Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle have thrown the Grand Chessboard version into the dustbin and proclaimed a new militarist activism amounting to a doctrine of permanent war, with no natural limits -including on the use of nuclear weapons.
Central to the thinking of the Bush team is the automatic assumption that .... military might can be easily cashed in politically. This is a strategy with immense risks. Iraq is a case in point. The chances are the war will be easily won, but it is by no means certain that it can be without huge political damage. American troops will have to take Baghdad.
If the Iraqi military and the Ba'ath party still have sufficient motivated cadres to organise house-by-house street fighting (something that's by no means certain in a police dictatorship), the US will either have to take huge casualties or destroy the city in a manner which would make the Russian destruction of Grozny look like a tea party. The political consequences would be immensely damaging for the US worldwide
Overall the recourse to globalised militarism runs the risk of generating a huge array of anti-US political forces and - vitally - politicising the opposition towards