Paul Prescod wrote:
> Hakki Alacakaptan wrote:
> >...
> > Just whoa and back up here: "Terrorist act" is not a word that means a great
> > deal. It just means an attack on civilians intended to create terror.
Not necessarily. This may be the usual purpose of state terror, but in the case of terror used against either one's own or some other state by individuals or groups the goal is almost always to generate a reaction that, the terrorist assumes, will rally larger numbers to "the cause." And in this sense 911 seems, so far, to be an unusually effective instance. That is, it provoked a reaction from the U.S. that has made the U.S. presence in southern and western asia and north africa the foremost issue in the world today. Whether that will lead to further defeats of U.S. imperialism in those areas is utterly unclear and unpredictable, but it is clear that the visible continuing presence of U.S. military activity there is a necessary precondition for such struggles. The Tar-Baby scenario is now a definite possibility.
And the U.S. reaction may not have been unforced. If the U.S. response is driven by oil, then that response was freely chosen, since clearly there are a number of strategies (most not involving military action) to secure access to oil. But I am beginning to think that the military action was a forced rather than an unforced error: The dignity of the U.S. empire had to be maintained. (Hence the shameful efforts of apologists for imperialism to wrap their motives in crocodile tears for the victims of 911.) Empires -- especially when so over-extended as the current U.S. empire -- cannot allow themselves to be made to look foolish. (I suppose one could draw an analogy to the street-gang leader who must not allow himself to be 'dissed.') Unless the U.S. can substantially disentangle itself from south asia in the next 6 to 12 months it (and unfortunately, we who live in its belly) may be in real trouble as the recognition that terror of the 911 type constitutes an effective provocation spreads. No reaction from the U.S. (except for greater domestic security) would probably have successfully defused the terrorist threat, but apparently the prestige of empire was incompatible with that abstractly sensible policy.
The U.S. during the cold war successfully crushed all secular (socialist or bourgeois democratic) resistance forces in the western and southern asia (Mossedegh; Carter's subversion of the government of Afghanistan, etc.) Hence the people of that region are at least for the present the losers whether U.S. imperialism and its reactionary allies or the reactionary forces typified by Bin Laden "win" the struggles to come. (The obligation of all progressive forces in the U.S., of course, is to struggle to remove or handicap U.S. interference so that the peoples of the third world and fight out their own internal struggles, as the United States did in the 1860s.)
And this leads to another interesting question. If 911 type "pulling the empire's beard" actions continue, provoking ever greater U.S. military responses, WILL THE UNITED STATES BE ABLE TO MAINTAIN ITS ARMIES OF OCCUPATION IN EUROPE AND JAPAN? Or will those powers be able to regain the freedom of action they lost after World War 2? I have considered Dennis Redmond's chatter about the U.S. being displaced as world hegemon as just that, so much idle chatter not worth refuting. The U.S. remains dominant in every way -- economically, technologically, culturally, etc. But if it becomes mired in a Tar-Baby scenario in asia, and perhaps even in Latin America and Africa, its world position will indeed become seriously endangered, and renewed struggles between it and European or Chinese/Japanese capital becomes a real possibilty. Sometime in the next century the U.S. could face the sort of world-wide alliance that Germany and Japan faced in the 1940s.