>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.
You may be right, but how do you know these things? What's the evidence? Why did it take a change of administration to lead to this new assertion of U.S. power? Why does the stock market rally on peace news and sink on saber rattling? It may be just short-term anxiety about oil market disruptions, but I don't see any great bellicosity coming out of Wall Street. It seems more a reflection of a certain wing of ruling class thinking (militarist, right-wing, parochial, provincial, disdainful of foreigners, religious or at least pious) and certain sectors of capital (oil, obviously). Partisans of an American empire rather than Empire.
Tying this move to the bursting of bubbles ignores that these schemes have at least a 10-year history - e.g., the Cheney gang's parting planning document from Bush I.
Cheney & Co. may not be "mad" in any narrowly clinical sense, but I think there's a structural madness to imperialism - coldness, grandiosity, paranoia, violence - that draws certain personality types (cold, grandiose, paranoid, violent) into certain lines of work.
Doug