Michael Smith wrote:
>
>
> The Israel lobby was right out there in public, pushing the war for all it was
> worth, and as far as I could see, nobody else was quite so conspicuously
> invested. It's hard for me to believe that the tail could possibly wag the
> dog to this extent. But why then? This is not a rhetorical question. I really
> wonder. I wasn't in any of the meetings where the thing was decided, and
> presumably none of us was. So we can all only speculate. But my own
> speculations have come up empty-handed, and it would be nice to have some
> better ones.
I agree that we can only speculate -- and I am wary of any results that speculation brings. Moreover, I am even more wary of the premise of "ruling class interests" on which such speculation is based. There certainly does not exist "The Ruling Class Interest" as a Platonic Real, and given that there exists some more or less messy set of interests, there is no strong reason to assume that "The Ruling Class" or X Political Group "knows" those interests. What we have, presumably, are varying currents of opinion (capitalists have opinions too as well as interests) mixed with varying conceptions of interests of a given capitalist group (which may or may or may not correspond very precisely to the "real interests" (unknowable?) of that group.
It would appear (only appear) that the Iraq invasion was a blunder on someone's part, that the interests of the u.s. state and of u.s. capitalism are being hurt by it. But we can't _know_ (nor can the capitalists). And while the managers of Halliburton may think the war is serving and will serve their narrow interests, they may be wrong (as other capitalist managers of various bankrupt firms have been wrong) -- or it may be true that the war is serving their interests but we may be wrong in thinking they think so.
My interest, however, is how leftists should work in opposing the war (or if they should work on something else altogether), and on what premises that work should be grounded. For the time being I'm arguing that the u.s. is trapped in Iraq & Afghanistan, and whatever this or that capitalist or all capitalists may think about the original wisdom of the invasion that as it will work out the u.s. will remain trapped in hopeless struggles there for at least another three or four years, probably more. And that makes building the anti-war movement politically promising, and that we have time to build it slowly and powerfully, without out pretending to ourselves or anyone else that we can have any near term impact on policy.
One point, however. I think one of Yoshie's premises is as wrong now as it was a 100 years ago. She writes:
> Imperialism after the age of inter-imperialist rivalry, instead, is
> best understood as a process of integrating the ruling classes and
> power elites (overlapping groups) of the world: the ruling classes and
> power elites of the North, who used to compete with one another in the
> age of competing empires that Lenin analyzed, are now integrated into
> one multinational empire under US hegemony, and the process of
> imperialism has and will continue to integrate the ruling classes and
> power elites of the South into that multinational empire.
Capitalism (and capitalist classes) cannot have and do not have and will not have that sort of unity. Capitalism is fundamentally chaotic (dynamic), and though it continually struggles for "order" it as continually loses it. The disunity presumably is of a new form, not the same as that which led to WW1, but differences among imperialist powers still remain as fundamental as the unity for which they strive. Nations still count. That is what makes a general sort of sense, however confused, of the Mideast policies: control of oil, control to increase or decrease its flow, or even to stop it altogether. In any case, "rogue" (=independent) states in the mideast must not be allowed to determine oil policy.
The hope is then that (a) the U.S. must continue to struggle to oversee the Mideast and (b) that it will fail but not give up and get in deeper and deeper. And we may yet be able to build a left out of that.
Carrol