``Bush Economic Aide Says the Cost Of Iraq War May Top $100 Billion...''
How is it that when it comes to war, costs can be ``..dismissed..., saying it wouldn't have an appreciable effect on interest rates or add much to the federal debt,..'' but if it is a question of federal domestic spending on education, housing, or healthcare, every nickel threatens economic disaster? Nevermind.
And by the same logic,``If you weigh the cost of the war against the removal of [Iraq and terrorist states] a `huge drag on global economic growth for a foreseeable time in the future, there's no comparison..''' (Bob Davis, WSJ) All of which is fine and dandy, but then the same or better could be said against the much more concrete and vast dregs of poverty, disease and high mortality. Yet nobody is stepping up to a campaign against these---which also lay the destructive social foundations for the same terrorist states and ideologies that plague the same impoverished countries. Nevermind that too.
Meanwhile we who vaguely identify with some Left, are treated to endless quibbling about our fealty to high moral purposes and intellectual integrity, with various liberal and left stars mistakes tossed back at us with derision. We are chided with ``The challenge, clearly, is to learn how to be strenuously anti-imperialist without being indiscriminately antiwar. It is a lesson the American left has never had to learn - until now.'' (Michael Berube, Penn State)
Well, Berube, what can I say, you're full of shit. Simple. There is no such antithesis. To be anti-war in the US context is to be anti-imperialist, because all US wars are imperialist. Ever since the middle of WWII, the US has pursued nothing but imperialist wars, in which the closing chapters of WWII set the stage in Asia and Western Europe. There were virtually no cases of US military action that had the slightest thing to do with (what was the line?) truth, freedom, democracy, and a better way of life for all. Go down the list and re-think any of the conflicts, starting with the realpolitik re-construction of western European governments, on into the middle east including Israel, Palestine, Greece, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Or move around to the Pacific theater with Japan, China, Korea, and SEA. Oh, yeah, and all those low grade, on cheap murderous little wars in Latin America.
What in the hell does Senior Berube think imperialism looks like, if not endless war? It is exactly like its cartoons of fat cats and battle ships from the newspapers of 1900. That's what we are. That's what our wars are for. Get it?
Why after a century of such history, would anyone believe the post-cold war era would be driven by anything less but US imperial interests, is beyond me. And the point is, war is the most direct means to those ends. The US government has never changed its course of becoming and then maintaining itself as an imperial power---if not through pursuing geo-political diplomatic power and military security interests, which are only the nasty fore-play for its economic exploitation, then through its sham financial and economic development fronts in the IMF, WB, WTO, NAFTA, with the UN playing sometimes its whore (Oh, Johnnie make me feel good), sometimes its wife (Ay carumba, you bitch).
The core problem with terrorism is it short circuits the diplomatic and economic shams and pretenses of imperialism, and reduces all imperial reactions to their military objectives. Both political revolutions and organized terrorism (which is essentially a degraded form of the latter) threaten the bourgeois social orderliness of capitalism and its primary goal of extorting the world of its human and natural resources.
The real difficulty of the Left is in learning and understanding the process of what it imagines to be a political and economic revolution, and how those aspirations when crushed and frustrated turn into terrorism, and finally into mere criminality. It has always been a threat. Just about any excluded political organization pursuing normal political channels will if crushed or endlessly frustrated, turn to some form of civil disobedience. It is a game of the state through provocations and police measures to force that disobedience into ever more marginal and violent reactions. These marginalized actions automatically attract criminals, socio-paths, and eventually terrorism. Like clockwork, the arrival of these elements, automatically feeds the imperial state line that all forms of political, social, and economic unrest and claims for justice are criminal. In some horrible kind of irony, indeed the more repressed, the more criminal they become until there is nothing remaining but the criminal act. Cut-off from any historical understanding, such acts stand alone as naked, meaningless, and vindictive terror.
If you beat a dog long enough, it will only bite. It seems ridiculous to say the least, to ignore almost a century of Arab and Middle Eastern cultural oppression by western powers, then suddenly discover that yes indeed these regions are filled with violent organizations devoted to nothing else but destroying the West by any means at hand.
If through some accident of imperial war, a few of these are destroyed, then the Left is supposed to cheer the removal and eagerly join the parade for the next one? I don't think so.
Chuck Grimes