andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> The long and short of it is that it's not hard to see
> what is going on. The motives are power, oil, and
> bases, not necessarily in that order. You don't need
> to be an economist to figure this one.
>
Justin's post is about the most precise (and succint) statement I've seen on the basic parameters of the war against Iraq.
But on U.S. decline -- a number of fundamentally _different_ questions are being mushed together, it seems to me. Doug's statements are true of the U.S. as a nation (the perspective of the u.s. ruling class), they are true of many but by no means all of small capitalists and petty producers, it is even true of many sectors / strata / what have you of the working class.
But large (and perhaps growing) sectors of the u.s. working class are living under "third-world" conditions (or in fact are migrants from the "third world"). That is spectacularly visible if you check into many or most hotels. I believe Dennis R has used this fact, quite irrelevantly in my opinion, to support his view on the u.s. as a declining power. Poverty and misery in the u.s. could increase by orders of magnitude without it affecting the relative position of the u.s. as a nation in the world economy.
I don't know just how much of u.s. industrial production has been shifted to other parts of the (first or third) world, but that is also irrelevant to u.s. economic strength as long as there is no military power that can intervene between u.s. corporations and their overseas production. Until a competing economic power cannot only achieve greater economic power than the u.s. but also the _force_ to assert that greater economic power, the u.s. reamins and will remain the global hegemon.
I don't know what goes on inside the heads of the leaders in Washington, and they could be going to war in Iraq for some utterly irrational and merely private set of motives. But the fact Justin underlined, "Control over Iraq's oil would put the US's thumb on Europe and Japan's cartoid artery," remains true --
Whether or not the war makers in washington are as smart as Schwartz & Cox -- :-)
Carrol