working on the Cheney gang

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 5:58 PM -0400 10/4/02, Doug Henwood wrote:
>John Gulick wrote:
>
>>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.

It's been always an American empire under the guise of Empire, at 
least since the end of WW2.  The difference may be that the 
Clintonian advocates of the US empire would accept the limits placed 
on US unilateriaism by G8 allies and international institutions (the 
latter to a lesser extent than the former) in return for the allies' 
shouldering of a large part of the costs of the empire; whereas the 
Cheney gang are not willing to accept such limits at all, the gang 
being borrow-and-spend militarists.  On one hand, Clintonian 
imperialism is more in keeping with the reduced economic 
circumstances of the largest debtor nation than the Cheney gang's. 
On the other hand, borrow-and-spend militarists with a naked agenda 
of world domination (not just global hegemony) may be more responsive 
to the challenge of global deflationary waves finally catching up 
with USA than the party of fiscal responsibility (= the Democrats). 
It might take a total war to get out of an inexorable deflation that 
neither monetary nor fiscal stimulation can reverse (if such a 
deflation gets underway here).
-- 
Yoshie

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