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That
the U.S. war against Afghanistan and now its campaign to invade Iraq is
being represented to the world by the Bush administration and the
corporate media as an act of "liberation" of the Iraqi people
and the securing of the rule of law and order against the violation of
the "norms" of the "international community" shows
the limitless hypocrisy of the ruling U.S. elite in pursuing its class
interests in the post-Cold War world. The
very state which claims to act under the aegis of international law has
not only suspended all criteria of "evidence" and
"proof" in the so-called "war against terrorism" on
both domestic and international fronts but has now openly declared in
its new "National Security Strategy" that America will not be
subject to the International Criminal Court "whose jurisdiction
does not extend to Americans" ("The National Security Strategy of the United States" September 20,
2002).
Bush's
recent appeal to the United Nations and proposal to Congress for carte
blanche in pressuring Iraq—through any means necessary, including
force—to respect and "comply" with United Nations
resolutions is a hoax for putting into power a regime that is more
friendly to the interests of transnational business by ending the bar on
U.S. access to Iraqi oil. Where, for example, is the U.S.
"commitment" to defending UN resolutions with regard to the
illegal and brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine which has been in
violation of UN resolutions for 35 years?
The notion that a war against Iraq is in defense of the lives of
U.S. civilians against a "possible" attack by Saddam Hussein
(and a third world nation already devastated by previous war not to
mention a decade of brutal economic sanctions against Iraqi citizens),
is even denied by its own agents such as Scott Ritter, a former American
arms inspector for the UN, who has openly proclaimed that Iraq does not
have the capacity for nuclear attack.
Both
the story of Iraq as a possible threat to world peace and that of the
"liberation" of the Iraqi people are part of a concerted
strategy of cynical manipulation of U.S. citizens and world opinion into
justifying the global designs of American imperialism and unleashing a
new period of global wars which threatens catastrophic consequences for
people everywhere. They are both
attempts to cover over the fact that "American and foreign oil
companies have already begun maneuvering for a stake in [Iraq's] huge
proven oil reserves of 112 billion barrels of crude oil, the largest in
the world outside Saudi Arabia" ("In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil
is Key Issue", Washington Post, Sept. 15, 2002) and that the
staged "debate" on "national security" issues in the
U.S. media and in Congress is a pretext for ruthless colonial plunder of
the resources and labor of Iraq on behalf of Exxon-Mobil and
Chevron-Texaco. Gaining control
of the labor and resources of Iraq, which has the second largest oil
reserves in the world, will give the U.S. ruling elite a position of
dominance and control over the transnational oil industry which is an
essential resource for global capitalism.
The
"war on terrorism" has been a political bonanza for the
criminal clique of millionaires and corporate CEO's who now are at the
helm of the world's most devastating military arsenal to pursue their
search for profits with utter disregard for the sovereignty of other
countries, a policy which threatens disastrous consequences for the
ordinary citizens of these nations. As international commentators such
as Nelson Mandela have argued, the real "threat to world
peace" is "the attitude of the United States of America".
"We
must understand the seriousness of the situation. The United States
has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which
have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were
taken. Unqualified support of the Shah of Iran led directly to the
Islamic revolution of 1979. Then the United States chose to arm and
finance the [Islamic] mujahedin in Afghanistan instead of supporting
and encouraging the moderate wing of the government of Afghanistan.
That is what led to the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the most
catastrophic action of the United States was to sabotage the decision
that was painstakingly stitched together by the United Nations
regarding the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan…[W]hat
[America] is [now] saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in the
Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the
sovereignty of other countries. That is the message they are sending
to the world. That must be condemned in the strongest terms"
(Nelson Mandela, Newsweek,
September 10, 2002).
It is
in this context that Bush's recently released "National Security
Strategy" which legitimates "pre-emptive" military
actions for installing puppet governments favorable to U.S. corporate
interests (such as that of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan) in nominally
"sovereign" nations must be seen as the return to a barbarous
colonial foreign policy based on forced submission of Third World
nations to the dictates of big business.
What the "pre-emptive" action policy of the Bush
administration ensures is that the fate of these nations will be decided
not by their own people but by the energy monopolies, the arms industry,
and the financial giants who sit in the U.S. corporate boardrooms and
interpenetrate the personnel ranks of the state department.
Yet
opposition to the current war must be part of a broader struggle against
capitalism. War is not an
"anomaly" of the "normal" workings of
"democratic" capitalism. Even
the "democratic" opposition to U.S. military unilateralism
from such countries as France, Russia, China and Germany (whose justice
minister, in a recent statement subsequently retracted, has compared
Bush to Hitler) is the resistance not of an "international
community" interested in maintaining a "just"
international policy but of inter-capitalist competitors against rival
interests. If the U.S. attacks
Iraq and overthrows Saddam Hussein, installing a new government to
harness the country's oil wealth and labor to make them available to
U.S. capital, this could rip the bottom out of existing Russian and
French economic arrangements with Baghdad and diminish their level of
control over the profits from the world oil industry.
Using
warfare when capitalist "democracy" fails to serve the
interest of profit is, as Lenin explains, integral to capitalism in its
monopoly phase in which giant transnational corporations grown
increasingly desperate for greater profits compete for (re)division of
the world market and for economic territory.
Whatever the asserted "political" motives under which
the drive to war publicly takes place, war is in its essence a form of
economic struggle over profit and dividing the world into zones
dominated by particular transnational capitalist groups.
Imperialist
wars are not an anomaly but a necessity under capitalism.
"The capitalists divide the world, not out of
any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration [of
production] reached forces them to adopt this method in order to get
profits. . . [and] there can be no other conceivable basis under
capitalism for the division of spheres of influence, of interests, of
colonies, etc., than a calculation of the strength of the participants
in the division, their general economic, financial, military strength.
. . . Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies,
which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for
freedom. The result of these tendencies is reaction all along the
line. Particularly acute becomes the yoke of national oppression and
the striving for annexations, i.e., the violation of national
independence" (Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of
Capitalism).
The
economic and financial weakness of the U.S. exposed by the collapse of
the stock market bubble and the corporate corruption scandals is
ensuring that American military hegemony and wars of effective
annexation become increasingly integral to global capitalism in the
coming period leading to new global crises. Moreover, as is also clear,
the class struggle against the working peoples of the world is not
stopping at the borders of the U.S.. The added bonus of the "war on
terrorism" for the U.S. ruling class is not only its re-routing of
public funds through such measures as the $1.3 trillion tax cut for the
wealthy (while millions of citizens go without basic necessities such as
health care, housing and food), but its suspension of bourgeois
democracy and rights of even U.S. citizens, and outlawing of the growing
internal dissent against the massive economic inequality and stark class
polarization of American society. Such measures are thin attempts to
conceal and legitimate the authoritarian security state which has been
put into place to ensure political stability in a period of intense
economic instability, and the invocation of a threat to "national
security" and feverish fomentation of "patriotic" war
fervor function, in such a climate, to normalize the channeling of
grievances "outward," away from the ruling class, its policies
and institutions.
For
the world's citizens, the struggle against U.S. imperialism's new
foreign policy of "pre-emptive" war against
"sovereign" nations is indissolubly bound up with the struggle
against their exploitation by transnational capital which is everywhere
decimating their living standards and forcing them into a life of
growing poverty and economic insecurity.
Contrary to the populist slogans of the
opportunistic left, what lies behind the current situation is not a new
"Empire" reflecting the invention of a new "imperial
thinking" in the U.S. in analogy with ancient Rome (Phillip S.
Golub, "Westward the Course of Empire", Le Monde
Diplomatique, September, 2002). It is not "imperial
thinking" that is the problem but the indissoluble contradictions
of monopoly capitalism which are working themselves out on the world
stage. By opposing "imperial thinking" without opposing
capitalism the left opportunists perform a pragmatic compromise with
capitalism which provides a "leftist" front for imperialism
now. For this opportunism the
"hard-left" opposition to all imperialist wars is a symptom of
"myopia and intransigence" which simply is
"irrelevant" to most Americans (Michael Bérubé,
"Peace Puzzle", The Boston Globe, September 15, 2002).
But "relevance" is a class issue.
What is "relevant" to the "soft-left"
thinking on imperialism is that "the United States cannot be a
beacon of freedom and justice to the world if it conducts itself as an
empire" (Bérubé).
What the "soft-left" wants is a kinder, gentler
imperialism which effectively cloaks itself in heart-warming
humanitarian rhetoric and doesn't trouble their liberal sentiments!
But there is no "humanitarian" imperialism. Imperialism
is class war on the world working class and any effective fight against
the new imperialist wars of transnational capital must be based on
workers' revolutionary internationalism and class solidarity—across
all national boundaries—in the struggle for a new socialist society based
on economic equality for all and the peaceful co-operation of all
peoples.
THE
RED CRITIQUE 5 (July/August 2002)
REDCRITIQUE.ORG
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