By Stephen Gowans
http://www3.sympatico.ca/sr.gowans/neocons.html
(snip)
...Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, who worked in the US Defense Department's Office of Special Plans -- it's responsible for developing Pentagon policy vis-a-vis Iraq -- agrees (these - see the article) are the reasons the US went to war [7].
But she says the US government has been hijacked by a neo-conservative cabal.
This is a pleasing fiction moderate Republicans, and equally Democrats and progressives, use to insulate themselves from reality, for it says the invasion of Iraq was an aberration, not a manifestation of a deep-seated tendency in US foreign policy that spans liberal Democrat to neo-conservative Republican administrations.
It's a comforting idea, from which springs forth an illusion: if you want US war-making to stop, all you have to do is vote the neo-conservatives out. Forget about radical change. There's nothing wrong with the system. It's just that the American people occasionally vote for the wrong people.
But the reasons Kwiatkowski cites for the war hardly seem to have a unique affinity with the neo-conservative ideology of the people in power, and seems to have more to do with the imperatives of competition between corporate America and corporate Europe.
Consider again what lay at the base of the US decision to invade Iraq to seize control of the country from the Baathists.
1. The need to establish military bases that, Kwiatkowski says, "we had been searching for since the days of Carter to secure energy lines of communication in the region" [my emphasis].
2. The need to ensure US firms would get a "financial benefit" once sanctions were lifted.
3. The need to ensure oil sales were denominated in US dollars, not Euros.
Since administrations back to the days of Carter have been seeking to establish US bases in the Middle East, we can hardly count this motivation as being uniquely neo-conservative.
And it would be ludicrous to say that denominating oil sales in US dollars is a neo-conservative shibboleth. Wouldn't Democrat and moderate Republican administrations want to preserve this standard, as much as neo-conservatives?
Finally, both the Bush I and Clinton administrations insisted that sanctions wouldn't be lifted so long as Saddam remained in power. Indeed, as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld correctly pointed out, the policy of regime change in Iraq became official US policy under the Clinton administration, not the Bush II regime.
With support for sanctions breaking down, and European firms poised to secure lucrative contracts in Iraq at the expense of corporate America, it's almost certain a Gore administration would have pursued the accustomed US government role of guardian of US corporate interests abroad by following through on the Clinton administration policy of regime change in Iraq.
Perhaps the tactics would have differed, but there's no doubt the state would have been used to secure access to critical raw materials and to expand the markets of its corporations at the expense of foreign rivals.
That's what the governments of imperialist powers do.
Democrats, and Republicans aghast at Bush's brazenness, offer three alternatives to the course Bush pursued:
Washington could have agreed to the lifting of the sanctions.
This would have meant corporate America would have lost out to its European competitors. Since corporate America is not only the principal campaign contributor to both major parties, but is the lobbyist par excellence, and holds all the strategic positions in US society, it is all but certain that corporate America's interests would have been pursued zealously, and not sacrificed to those of European rivals by allowing the sanctions to be lifted prior to the US asserting complete control over the country, its resources, its politics, and its economy.
The sanctions could have been maintained.
Corporate America would still have lost out to its European competitors as the sanctions regime slowly crumbled through lack of compliance by France, Germany and Russia. Not a scenario any government committed to promoting US corporate interests (i.e., any US government) would tolerate.
The backing or active participation of France, Germany and Russia in the war could have been enlisted.
If secured, the spoils of conquest would have had to have been shared with European competitors. This, from the perspective of corporate America, would be an unnecessary concession. Why share the spoils when you don't have to? The US was perfectly capable of toppling the Saddam regime and asserting control over Iraq without the assistance of France, Germany and Russia.
And there was no guarantee European rivals could be drawn into a coalition, or, at the very least, be cajoled into giving the invasion their blessing. If efforts at securing European support failed, what then -- a unilateral war? But that's no different than the course the Bush administration pursued. And sitting tight would have meant a crumbling of the sanctions regime and corporate Europe beating corporate America to the punch in Iraq -- an outcome no US government would willingly accept.
All this may seem to be a defense of the actions Bush officials took vis-a-vis Iraq. And it is, but only in the sense that what the Bush administration did in the context of the social and economic forces they were constrained by, made sense.
A different administration, free from neo-conservatives, would have been subjected to the same social and economic forces, a point made clear by the fact that analyses of why the Bush administration went to war (even by exponents of the Washington has been hijacked by neo-cons thesis, like Kwiatkowski) have nothing to do with a uniquely neo-conservative ideology, but with safeguarding and promoting the interests of corporate America relative to those of its French, German and Russian competitors.
A victory by the non-neo-conservative Gore in 2000 wouldn't have made the competition among US and European firms any less acute, or the means of ensuring US corporate interests prevailed any less brutal. Nor would it have attenuated corporate influence over the US state.
The same can be said of a victory by anyone but Bush in 2004.
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