>From the Israeli left magazine "Challenge"
http://www.hanitzotz.com/challenge/75/edit75.htm
an excerpt:
Roni BenEfrat
Both the American and Israeli right-wings like to warn against the "Neville Chamberlain syndrome", one applying it to Saddam Hussein, the other to Yasser Arafat, as if a failure to stop the "evil one" will bring disaster. The appropriate comparison is not with Chamberlain, however, rather with John Foster Dulles. In 1954, this American Secretary of State voiced his belief that if South Vietnam fell to Communism, all countries between Vietnam and Australia would drop one after another, like dominoes. Japan too would go, and the implication was, the threat would turn on America itself. Insane as the notion may seem today, it did not appear so to most Americans then. It determined US policy for twenty years, costing many lives.
But why should Bush and Cheney believe that the life of their country depends on its ability to dominate the world? Both are scions of a rough-riding kind of capitalism. On that America's place in the world does indeed depend. Capitalism has entered a decade which, it is clear, will be difficult. Through most of the 1990's, it seemed victorious. The Soviet Union had collapsed. The US economy ascended (and so did Israel's) on the wings of high-tech. In that heady but deceptive atmosphere (symbolized by none better than saxophonist Bill Clinton), the thesis of Oslo also developed. Yet the Roaring Nineties proved short-lived. In capitalism, every boom eventuates in a chronic set of problems: overproduction, unemployment and poverty, leading toward a subsequent stage of chaos and war. The question isn't whether the bubble will burst, but when.
Now American capitalism is in trouble, and its leaders see no solution. High-tech has not created demand as the automobile did in the 1950's. China is too agrarian to offer new markets, and most of the rest of the world is too backward and poor. Having no prospects, the leaders of capitalism resort to a policy of total control - over oil, first of all, and everything else. They cannot tolerate Saddam Hussein, sitting in the oil fields defying them.
The aggressive tendencies of the US and Israel are results of a political and economic crisis that is basically without solution. Bush and Sharon, Cheney and Ya'alon, are mirrors of their time. Humanity must defend itself not just against them, but against the system that spewed them up. This system assumes that military power gives certain persons and certain nations a right to a bigger share of the pie. It is hurling humanity toward an apocalypse, while clothing its goals in the demagogy of "sacrifices we must make". The short-sighted fall for this demagogy. The longer-sighted know that rule by force will not endure, and that the only solution requires a new social order, based on the fair distribution of resources. n
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