What makes the current development critical for US and other leftists is that the United States may be embarking upon an endless war after it has lost its post-war economic supremacy in large part due to economic competitiveness of the very social forces -- German and Japanese ruling classes and power elites, many of whom rehabilitated fascists and war criminals and their proteges -- that it aided for the purpose of creating an anticommunist empire. In other words, the economic foundations of the US empire -- now the world's largest debtor nation -- have become fragile, likely incapable of withstanding the costs and consequences of an endless war that the faction of its elite currently in power appear to be determined to pursue, in the midst of global economic downturns, no less.
I now write:
Bingo, the upcoming conflagration in Iraq and surrounding countries is more about renewed inter-imperialist rivalry -- not just unalloyed U.S. imperialism -- than anything else. Or perhaps I should say (attempted) unalloyed U.S. imperialism in response to renewed inter-imperialist rivalry. (The U.S. left would be well advised to keep in mind the dialectial interplay between the two, rather than just the sheer menace of U.S. hegemonism, sheer menace though it may be.) As others have sagely pointed out, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, and gang are not "mad," nor are they mere handservants of U.S. hydrocarbon capital. A unilateral invasion of Iraq is a calculated gamble to retain and strengthen U.S. "full spectrum dominance," one made more urgent by the bursting of first the dot-com bubble, second the Wall Street bubble, and now the dollar bubble. (BTW, the Pentagon has endorsed the post-Cold War "full spectrum dominance" doctrine for more than a decade. Permanent stagnation in Japan, German adjustment to reunification, and eight years of Clintonian liberal internationalism put it on the back burner for a while, but it's not as if it's a spontaneous product of the current conjuncture.
Securing oil field claims and drilling rights for ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco (or is that TexacoChevron ?), Halliburton, and so on are small potatoes (_contra_ the conspiracy-minded). What matters is brokering these claims and rights to Russian, French, Chinese, et. al. firms, and the leverage the power to broker gives the U.S. state (acting largely on behalf of U.S. capital) on a host of other geoeconomic (and geopolitical) fronts -- the Doha round, the row over steel tarrifs and farm subsidies, the WTO ruling against bonuses to overseas affiliates of U.S. TNC's, the refusal of the sclerotic LDP to euthanize ailing banks and firms, China's mercantilist implementation of WTO rules and regs, tentative EU moves toward an independent defense policy and security instrument, etc., etc., etc.. Also, what matters is a (hypothetically) pliant Iraq acting as the swing producer in the world oil market, nudging Saudi Arabia to reconvert its "petroeuros" into petrodollars.
The prospect of UN Security Council approval of a military invasion of Iraq is something of a disaster for Bush and company. It necessarily means the kind of vote-buying which defeats most of the purposes of a military invasion in the first place. But a bigger disaster is the resumption of weapons inspection without a "tough new" mandate attached that Saddam cannot but fail (because he will refuse inspection of presidential sites as a fatal violation of his regime's sovereignty). Undesirable though it may be, Bush and company would far rather cut deals with France, China, and Russia (and TotalFinaElf, SinoPec, and Yukos) than have UNOSCOM certify a clean bill of health for Saddam. Ironically, even though the inter-imperialist intrigue has little or nothing to do with WMD, the current fracas over resumption of weapons inspection seems pretty crucial. If no "tough new" UN resolution is forthcoming, then Bush and company will have to go in very soon (before Saddam passes UN muster), risking partial loss of legitimacy on the home front (since the domestic propaganda campaign has been predicated on the WMD angle).
In my puny opinion, though, the biggest stumbling block for Bush and company will be selecting an Iraqi client government which can at one and the same time a) keep the lid on Kurdish and Shia independence movements, b) apportion exploration claims and drilling rights in a reasonably coherent fashion, and c) accomplish a) and b) in a manner that doesn't make imperialism's professed sympathies for the welfare of ordinary Iraqis appear as hollow as they truly are. Good luck, guys.
(My apologies for the pedantic-sounding nature of this message. Basically, I'm working through some of these ideas out loud).
John Gulick
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