Yes.
The USA in arrogance and fear after Sept 11 tries to ensure that there is no stone in the world under which an envious terrorist may hide. We are in an accelerating agenda towards some sort of mucky world government, in which the USA has incomaparable military power, but its loyal allies may be less than enthusiastic about its methods.
Frankly much of the battle for progressive people needs now to be about the terms *in which* intervention takes place and that it should never be in terms of turning the US loose.
While some regard anti-interventionism as a fundamental principle of Marxism, I know that Justin and Nathan do not turn up their noses at reforms. To take a concrete example, it was progressive to use massive financial pressures on Indonesia (despite the cruelty of its previous treatment by the IMF) to force its military to allow a peaceful occupation of East Timor, by a sub-imperialist force led by the Australians. My recollection is that Chomsky called for that.
Yes the anti-apartheid struggle was a massive form of intervention in which international finance capital had its own agenda which temporarily coincided with that of the oppressed masses of South Africa.
To apply this today, re Zimbabwe, whatever the terms of the fight within that country, those of us in countries like the USA and Britain should be pressing for something like this: Not a hounding of Mugabe as such on the grounds that his election was unfair, (unlike the recent Enron-financed election in the USA, or the democratic consultation exercise that has just taken place in Chechnya with the collusion of the west.
A radical progressive stance from outside Zimbabwe should call for a massive financial package that allows white colonial farmers to retire, resettles rural landless, and allows the country to develop from bottom up with structural adjustment programmes.
Now of course if global progressives press for such a reform the net result will be one in which global finance capital will also be pushing its own way, and it will probably get the largest slice of the cake. Nevertheless it would bring some justice to the people of Zimbabwe and give them an opportunity to build some consensus without the repression that often accompanies highly charged conflict. This would also help the MDC and Tsangvirai who are being used by the Westfor its own purposes.
Because I am talking about global reformists, I hope radicals within southern Africa will not immediately grasp the label of global reformist.
To be interventionist is not to be an idiot of Empire if we analyse the balance of forces and the possible outcomes in an objective way. It is not socialism but it would aid a struggle for a more radically democratic world order which would lay the groundwork for more socialist policies within individual states. The self-proclaimed pure socialist revolutionaries meanwhile can accelerate their victorious struggle independently of the material balance of forces, and call it marxism if they will.
As another correspondent has put to me privately:
>The point the left seems to miss is that real progress lies in reducing
>the US to the role of an ordinary state within some-type of international
>civil umbrella and not simply to oppose US actions as if national
>liberation is being played out.
Paradoxically the road to doing this is not to oppose all intervention but to criticise the methods of specific interventions and to propose more appropriate and democratic ones.
Chris Burford