|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
|| [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Greg Schofield (...)
|| Now, the particular charactisation of the war as handled by the
|| great minds of the White House, if I am not stretching things
|| too far, would from your point of view be accidental and idiot
|| president served by a similarily endowed administration and
|| apparently by like limited military minds.
||
|| For me this is not incidental, but an essential characteristic.
|| It goes hand in hand with handling the intervention in a way
|| that destablises the very regimes so carefully fostered as oil
|| puppets. It also seems to follow on from the logic of the
|| Gulf-war where in the last instance the US was faced with the
|| possiblity of installing a new regime in Iraq and backed away
|| from the prospect in fright (odd because the very nature of
|| that war would have made this a fairly predictable problem).
|| Now in pursueing new oil inspired venture, rather than simply
|| straining these semi-colonial assets the US seems oblivious to
|| the obvious threat its actions are posing - more to the point
|| it seems committed to bringing them to breaking point.
||
|| In any Imperial policy this is usually avoided at all costs
|| (grab one piece but lose all the others, is not an Imperial
|| gamble lightly taken) moreso when there is not even another
|| imperial force to compete with. This is very very odd.
||
Odd? Listen, an approximate equation may clarify things: Bush + Cheney = Hitler / 2
Were the Nazis imperialists? No, they were far too barbaric to be succesful imperialists like the British. Clinton was a very succesful imperialist. The current GOP administration, because of the growing cancer of racism, Darwinism, and anti-intellectualism in its ranks, has regressed almost to the point of fascism. It cannot think clearly because it is hampered by this proto-fascist ideology.
|| He has to be bellicose and crude, he
|| has to be a runt fascist, for the essential cause is not oil,
|| but maintaining world dominion for a single state against not
|| other states, but an internationalising bourgeoisie. The
|| fundemental contradiction is between an old system not yet dead
|| and a new emerging system not yet fully born.
||
I'll repeat what I said: The program for US hegemony formulated by Brzezinski is a bipartisan one, just like the Allon Plan (that Bryan mentioned) is for Likud & Labor in Israel. The only way to implement it is the way Clinton has done, through multilateral consultation. However, GOP fascists still think that there is a shortcut, that America doesn't have to say please. This is because of their fascist ideology and the limitless, impatient greed that fascism begets. The US has far better imperialist options, but the fascist disease prevents it from seeing them.
|| In this the particulars of Afghanistan (the particular type of
|| conflict, the particular contradictions and gambles involved)
|| make sense. Unless the US can establish unilateral action as
|| the final judge, it is gradually being sucked into
|| international civility which will inevitably down-grade its
|| status (its freedom to be a super-power).
No, it's precisely a succesful multilateralism that allowed the US to be a world hegemon after the fall of communism. Unilateralism will weaken the US, disrupt its alliances, inflate the budget deficit, push up interest rates, deepen the world depression, and will end up making the US more hated than during the VietNam era. The possibility of US officials being arrested for war crimes is not a joke. The EU would be betraying its very purpose if it does not take some sort of action against the crime against humanity being perpetrated in Afghanistan, and which sooner or later - but certainly before the conflict is over - will be recognised as such.
|| US withdrawal without having resolved these deeper
|| issues is not peace, it is a pause in a much bigger battle.
||
|| Peace as an aim - and it is an achievable aim, is not the end
|| of war as such, wars will crop-up for a variety of other
|| reasons, but the end of unilateral super-power aggression. I
|| say this is achievable, not because capitalism has changed its
|| spots, but rather this particular form of force is in its death throws.
||
|| Hence the political conclusion that the US has but two
|| alternatives, wake-up to itself and embrace a real world
|| governance of international affairs, or suffer a defeat and
|| collapse of the whole Imperial enterprise (if not in Afganistan
|| then in some future conflict). I much prefer the former, but
|| unfortunately the latter seems to be what the US is locked into.
||
Yep, that's about how I figure it. The US has never had to own up to its fascism like Germany or France has, and therefore does not know how to control it. It is now spreading like Camus' plague.
|| The other thing to remember, is that the international
|| bourgeois class are not simply Americans transposed on a
|| grander vista, indeed the dominance of America has been a
|| burden on the other sections of this class which have a variety
|| of national backgrounds and residual loyalities. American
|| dominance in international politics does not serve them
|| particulaily well, American exceptionalism (one set of rules
|| for everyone except the US) does not give this capital
|| sufficient room to develop and the criticisms of it are not
|| difficult to hear, from Europe, Japan and elsewhere. It is true
|| that at the moment though much of capital has escaped the
|| confines of any particular state, a significant section of it
|| has its hind-legs planted in US soil and is advantaged by this
|| - this is the essence of the contradiction itself.
I agree. For e.g. French and Italian energy conglomerates have put their money on Iran, and are full well aware that US political opposition to Iran is just a front for unfair competition by their US rivals on the Tengiz oil field.
|| The real argument is
|| about the level of the dominant contradictions (never an
|| exclusive proposition).
Come again?