[lbo-talk] dev'ts in world economy and foreign ownership

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/28/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On May 28, 2007, at 1:39 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
> >> The Iraq War has been a disaster for the Iraqis, and it has had a
> >> much
> >> smaller but still negative impact on American workers, too, but it
> >> has
> >> not hurt the US ruling class _at all_: the share of their income has
> >> gone up, for instance.
> >
> > Do you think the two facts are connected? It's difficult for me to
> > see how, at
> > least in any very direct way. It seems reasonable to think that the
> > general
> > fascistization of society that war makes possible has a global,
> > long-term,
> > positive effect on elite power and wealth.
>
> Against that view, and that quoted from Yoshie, I'll put forward the
> worries of Paul Volcker and some Wall Street types I heard at the CFR
> last week. They think the Iraq war has damaged U.S. interests in the
> world. But there seems to be a view that the US gov never makes a
> mistake, never damages itself, and never operates against the
> interests of US capital. Lenin said it, or something.

The Iraq War has ended up eroding the _political hegemony_ of the US
power elite.  And yet the Iraq War has not hurt the US capitalists'
_economic bottom line_ yet.  Why it is difficult to understand that
both are facts, the former _a welcome fact_ for leftists, especially
those in the South?

And who turned the Iraq War into a mistake for Washington?  Iraqi
guerrillas and foreign jihadists.  It's their insurgency, much
despised by most leftists in the West including yourself, that has
managed to check Washington's progress.  If no one had resisted in
Iraq and everyone more or less collaborated with Washington, as was
the case with the empire's ventures in Yugoslavia, East Timor, etc.,
you, let alone Paul Volcker, wouldn't think of the Iraq War as a
mistake today.  The war turned out to be a mistake only because Iraqis
and others made it unwinnable.
-- 
Yoshie