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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2003
Philosophic Dialogue
Reflections on Bush's drive for warby Kevin B. Anderson What are the U.S.'s war aims and why is it targeting
Iraq today? At the surface level, Bush is attempting to distract from the fact
that the "war on terrorism" has netted almost zero in terms of
catching any of the major perpetrators of September 11, especially the fact that
neither Osama bin Laden nor Mullah Omar have been found. Another motivation is
obviously oil, with Iraq controlling the biggest oil reserves besides Saudi
Arabia. If a pro-U.S. regime could be installed, this would give the U.S. even
greater control than now of the vital levers of the world capitalist economy. There is also the motivation of politics. Given the end
of the Cold War, Iraq today, insignificant as it is on the global scale, is one
of the largest military powers that expresses opposition to the U.S.--its
government hailed the September 11 murderous attacks on U.S. civilians, for
example. None of these, however, add up to reasons for war. Iraq,
despite its hostility to the U.S., had nothing to do with September 11, while
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, U.S. allies, clearly did. Oil can be obtained
elsewhere, and Iraq is hardly a military or political threat to the U.S. The
more salient motivations for war run deeper. The main factor is the changed
world since September 11 in a broader sense than what is usually discussed. The September 11 attacks on U.S. civilians by murderous
theocratic fascists, whose motives were as reactionary as those of neo-Nazi
Timothy McVeigh at Oklahoma City in 1995, have had a deep impact on U.S. public
opinion. The equally reactionary Khomeini regime's seizure of
American hostages in Iran in 1979 paved the way for the election of Ronald
Reagan in 1980 and the deep retrogression that followed. By the same token, the
Bush administration, the most conservative U.S. administration since the 1920s,
believes that September 11 has put wind in its sails and will allow it to
unleash the type of warmongering that it always had in mind, but was unsure that
its loss of the popular vote and selection by the Supreme Court would allow it
to do. Note how once he declared war on terrorism after
September 11, Bush didn't have to add a single new face to his military foreign
policy apparatus. He already had a war cabinet, with a former Secretary of
Defense, Dick Cheney, as Vice President, another old warhorse, Donald Rumsfeld,
as Defense Secretary, and a warlike National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
The fact that a former general, Secretary of State Colin Powell, is seen as a
voice of relative moderation only shows just how warlike this group is. The Bush administration believed that September 11 would
give it public support to do something even Reagan had not dared to propose,
permanent war for a generation or more on any and all perceived enemies of the
U.S. And that support would extend, they felt, for sending U.S. troops anywhere
in the world where they said there was a threat, thus getting the U.S. over what
the rulers call its "Vietnam syndrome." That is the name for the deep
distrust and opposition the American people have felt toward foreign
intervention ever since that barbarous imperialist war organized a revolutionary
mass opposition movement in the 1960s. U.S. GLOBAL DOMINANCE If the U.S. were England or France, or even Russia or
China, it could desire these things but have no hope of achieving them. But the
U.S. today is in an unprecedented position as a dominant power. In the entire
history of modern capitalism it has far greater military and economic power
relative to the rest of the world than did Hitler in 1941, or even Britain in
the 19th century. The U.S. annual gross domestic product is $10 trillion,
far more than Russia and China, the closest thing the U.S. has to a military
rival today. U.S. GDP is ten times the economic output of China's, $1 trillion,
and 40 times that of Russia, $250 billion. In fact, New York City, Los
Angeles-Long Beach, and Chicago each out-produce Russia, and combined,
out-produce China. As for the other developed capitalist lands, Japan,
Germany, Britain, and France combined come close to, but do not surpass U.S.
economic output. Even before September 11 and the massive increases Bush has
secured, the U.S. military budget had a still greater imbalance with that of the
rest of the world. So in answer to the pragmatist liberal question, can the
U.S. fight a war in Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time, the answer would seem
to be yes. More importantly, doesn't the sheer weight of the U.S. economy and
military make it very hard for anyone to oppose it, even in a UN vote, without
running the risk of economic pressure through the world financial institutions
that the U.S. largely controls, or even military pressure? The Bush
administration is gearing up for war on Iraq because it feels it can do so
without fear of serious opposition from any other power or economic interest. In
one sense, this is a grand illusion. Such a war will cost the U.S. economy
dearly since the allies will not help to foot the bill as they did in 1991. An
even grander illusion is the idea, shared by Israel's Sharon and some in the
administration, that such an invasion, if successful, and if the Iraqi people
greet U.S. troops as liberators in Baghdad (not impossible), would strike such a
blow against Arab nationalism that it would isolate the Palestinians as never
before. But the overall motive of the U.S. is what it has been
since World War II: total mastery of the world political and economic system as
an imperative of the state-capitalist age. Just as Microsoft aims at total
domination of its market, in fear that anything else would lead to its demise,
so too with the U.S. economic-political system and the world. Earlier it was
checked by rivalry with Russia, but today nothing seems to stand in its way, or
so Bush's most aggressive strategists seem to think. What, then, is the opposition to the U.S. war drive?
Largely it lies not in other governments which, even if they oppose the U.S. war
drive, as does Germany, will not really do anything concrete to oppose it, like
denying the U.S. the right to use all those bases in Germany as part of its war
on Iraq. Rather it lies within those countries, whether Western European or
Arab, that are U.S. allies and whose people will hold them to blame for any war
on Iraq. There is also a growing opposition inside the U.S. Bush
seems to be counting on the supposed ignorance of the U.S. population on
international politics, hoping they will not grasp the obvious fact that Iraq is
not a supporter of the type of fundamentalist movements behind September 11.
Here he is wrong, just as the pundits were wrong in thinking that the public
would be swayed by all the revelations about Clinton's sex life enough to allow
a Republican constitutional coup through impeachment in 1998-99. INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS This brings us to what Marxist-Humanists call the
subjective factor--the role of the masses in history and society, be they
workers, women, Blacks, Latinos and other oppressed minorities, youth, or
gay-lesbian-transgendered. Surely all of these groups feel targeted by Bush,
like the longshore workers of the West Coast who were slapped with the
Taft-Hartley law that strangles their right to strike. Among these opposition
forces has been the anti-war movement, both today and in the past. However, in recent years the anti-war and
anti-imperialist movements have developed some deep contradictions. 1) In 1991, the anti-war movement against the first Iraq
war failed to support the Iraqi masses when, after the U.S.-led invasion rolled
Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, there was a mass uprising against Saddam's
genocidal dictatorship, much of it spearheaded by oppressed national and
religious groups like the Kurds and the Shi'ites. Even today, it is rare to hear
a leftist European or U.S. or Arab voice come out in support of the Kurds,
actual victims of genocide in 1988. In making only brief and pro-forma statements about the
Saddam Hussein regime's oppressive character, Noam Chomsky and other
anti-imperialist voices have lost touch with what needs always to motivate the
Left: how we can support forces of human liberation, at home and abroad. Here
and elsewhere, again and again, anti-imperialism has trumped support for human
liberation whenever U.S. imperialism comes into conflict with powers that are
themselves oppressive and reactionary. 2) Another contradiction emerged over Bosnia in 1992-95,
when most of the Left and the anti-war movement were usually either silent or
worse, supportive of Milosevic during the period of his genocidal policies that
resulted in 200,000 deaths, most notably the massacre of 7,000 unarmed civilians
at Srebrenica, for which he is on trial today. 3) Yet another contradiction developed in 1994, when
800,000 Rwandans were massacred in an ethnic genocide on a scale not seen since
Hitler's time. To this day the Left and the anti-war movement have had little to
say about this massacre since it was carried out by indigenous African elites,
in a situation when UN or even U.S. intervention could have saved lives. 4) Another, even deeper contradiction emerged in 1999
when the Left and the anti-war movement sided with Milosevic's genocidal regime
against the Kosovars because its anti-imperialist politics predominated over
everything else. 5) Finally, after September 11, the Left and the
anti-war movement opposed the war on Afghanistan in a way that tended to excuse
the brutalities of the Taliban and bin Laden and to this day cannot bring itself
to admit that, with all its contradictions, the toppling of the Taliban has
improved the lives of Afghan women, at least marginally. All of this puts the anti-war movement in a difficult
position today. Was the anti-war movement right that the Taliban or Milosevic
were not as awful as the U.S. administration said? Is not Saddam Hussein pretty
awful too? Shouldn't we support his overthrow? I certainly do. Yet it is in that
context that I also oppose the Bush war on Iraq. Without such a context of
support for movements of human liberation, including those directed against foes
of the U.S., anti-war movements lose much credibility, both pragmatically and
morally. This does not mean that anti-war movements cannot grow
very large--during the Cold War, many anti-war movements grew very large indeed,
despite their narrow politics. Take for example the movement against nuclear war
in the 1950s, the main wing of which refused to condemn Russian nuclear weapons,
focusing only on the U.S. But such movements on a narrow, uncritical basis will
not develop into mass movements strong enough really to challenge the overall
global capitalist system. What does it mean to oppose both Bush and the Iraqi
regime at the same time? It is similar to what it meant in the 1960s to oppose
the Vietnam War and also the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, or to support
the Black movement in the U.S. and also that in the Sudan against the Arab
overlords--even though in the 1960s Russia and its ally, Egypt, supported those
same Arab overlords, as did the Sudanese Communist Party. TOWARDS A UNITY OF THEORY/PRACTICE How dangerous to the region is relatively tiny Iraq,
hemmed in by over a decade of sanctions? Not very dangerous to the region, let
alone the U.S., it seems. That is why our opposition to this imperialist war
must be total. Such a war, if it ends in victory for the U.S., will immeasurably
strengthen U.S. hegemony around the world, will serve to militarize our own
society at home and abroad, will marginalize the Left even further, and will
surely lead to other imperialist interventions. As we oppose this war, however, we cannot forget to
think about the Iraqi people and the people of the region who have suffered so
much, both from Western imperialism and from the regime of Saddam Hussein and
other similarly oppressive ones of the region. Our anti-imperialism needs to
find a way to support those movements of Kurds, Shi'ites and other oppressed
national and religious groups, of democratic-minded Iraqis, of the workers'
movement and the Left. In short, can we be both anti-imperialist and for human
liberation, at home and abroad? It is not easy to do so when the U.S. very
carefully picks opponents as reprehensible as the Iraqi, the North Korean, or
Iranian regimes, all of whose peoples dream of overthrow of their brutal rulers.
Yet that is the task we face. Facing it in all of its complex contradictions
will make our work harder now, but will also help us to avoid what happened
during the 1991 Gulf War, when the short-lived anti-war movement collapsed into
silence as the Kurds and Shi'ite majority rose up against the Iraqi regime, thus
losing much credibility as a force for liberation. Put simply, mere knee-jerk anti-interventionism will not
make it in the era of the Taliban, bin Laden, Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein.
These targets of U.S. imperialism are not the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, but
killers in some ways even more brutal than U.S. imperialism. The U.S. of course operates on such a vast scale that it kills far more people, whether in Hiroshima or Iraq. This is true even though internally the U.S. is more democratic. That is why we need to join in the demonstrations against Bush's war in Iraq, while offering, as we always do, a critical, total Marxist-Humanist view that does not stop at opposition to capitalism and its imperialism, but goes on to talk about a new human society for workers, women, oppressed minorities, and youth, whether in the Middle East or the U.S., in Europe or in Africa. |
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