Angela forwarded this from Michael Hardt:
>None of these explanations, however, really correspond to the situation we
>are facing. The images do not quite match the reality and the disparity
>causes a slight sensation of unease and nausea, like when wearing a pair of
>glasses with the wrong correction. In fact, to arrive at a clearer view of
>the war, we opponents first have to recognize the truth of the claims of
>the war's proponents. We have to recognize that this is not an action of
>US imperialism.
It's an act of NATO imperialism, with the U.S. in charge. We can disagree about the precise motives, but this seems as clear to me as glasses with the right correction. Peter Gowan has an excellent article in the latest New Left Review on how Yugoslavia was a kind of battleground between U.S. and German interests, with Germany looking to expand its imperial power eastward (by encouraging the breakup of Yugo) and the U.S. trying to keep Germany and the EU from developing its own security policy. I'll scan bits of it an post them over the weekend.
>It is in fact an international (or really, supranational)
>operation. And its goals are not guided by the limited national interests
>of the US; it is actually aimed at human rights (or really, human life).
Why? Becuase Clinton & Blair say so? I'd really like to see some evidence beyond the statements of publicists.
>It may seem paradoxical to claim that the war against Yugoslavia (or the
>one against Iraq for that matter) is not an act of US imperialism, or at
>least an imposition of US national will over another nation, while
>recognizing the supremacy of US military might and the ultimate authority
>of US military leaders. If we were to limit our vision strictly to the
>military terrain and if we were to understand power only in terms of lethal
>force, then this might be a logical interpretation. A power that acts
>only, or even primarily, through force and coercion, however, is a very
>precarious power that cannot last long.
The U.S. has run a very successful empire for over 50 years using massive amounts of force - not always, of course, but when needed. (As Noam Chomsky put it once, most of the time you can rely on the IMF, but every now & then you have to send in the Marines.) And it's pretty well established that the U.S. has long used the tactic of appearing mad, of using wildly disproportionate violence, to scare the shit out of any potential troublemakers.
>This war and the deployment of lethal force in general has to be understood
>as merely one element that operates in a broader field of cultural,
>political, and economic forces. In this broader context, it cannot be said
>that ultimate authority resides in the US ? or Germany, Japan, or any other
>nation-State. When we adopt this perspective we can begin to recognize the
>existence of a new power that is not national or even international, but
>rather supranational. This is not to say that all nations are now
>equivalent, that nation-States are powerless, or that national interests
>play no role, but rather that the powers of nations now act as elements
>within the framework of a global power and that sovereignty and authority
>reside finally only at that supranational level. This is an
>extraordinarily difficult proposition to verify, in part because the center
>of this supranational or global power exists nowhere.
That last sentence reminds me of the old Baltimore catechism definition of God. So the Oval Office and No. 10 exist in some imaginary world? I'll concede that power can be hard to trace, that contradictions and divisions exist among the world's ruling class(es), but it's not *this* insubstantial.
>In the old framework of competing national powers one of the highest
>objects of the nation was the pursuit and protection of the interest of its
>people against outside forces. There is no outside, however, to this new
>global power. Its object is thus not tied to the interest of any
>particular people but concerned instead with the life of the entire global
>population, or really, with human life itself. Human rights, or rather,
>the protection and the reproduction of life is the "virtue" of Empire.
Eh? How do 1 million dead Iraqis fit into this model?
>Recognizing the supranational nature of the power behind this war and the
>"virtue" of its motives does not hinder our abilities to oppose it, but it
>should change our strategies. It is certainly not wrong in each nation to
>call on political leaders to end the war, but we should recognize that the
>powers of national leaders and institutions are very limited.
The U.S. and a handful of other governments launched the missiles and bombers. Just how are their powers "very limited"?
>In some senses we are in a position similar to that of the communists who
>opposed World War I. There was nowhere for them to stand in that war.
>Since they were against all sides, they had to invent a new war. Transform
>interimperialist war into civil war within every nation! We are now faced
>with not an interimperialist but an imperial war, and we need to discover
>the terms of a new social struggle, a civil war, that extends transversally
>across national and regional boundaries, a counter-Empire. This is a tall
>order and it is unclear how we can fulfill it immediately, but we need to
>think to the future. Kosovo will not be the last imperial war, and our
>opposition to Empire is only beginning.
I'm all for this, and I'm all for a plague on all your houses approach to the war (in contrast to taking either a pro-NATO or pro-Serb position) but I don't see how we get to this antiimperial international any quicker by playing down the sovereign power of the NATO governments in launching the war, and in laying the foundations for it over the last 10-15 years.
Doug