The French didn't figure it out -- it being the inevitability* of resistance to imperialism -- before they lost much of their empire. They are smarter than the Americans today, but they didn't become smart before their colonial subjects, the Algerians and the Vietnamese above all, taught them unforgettable lessons. (The French, proud of their "culture," used to believe in their empire's civilizing mission more deeply than the Americans ever have in theirs.) The same was true for other imperialists of the past, and it will be true for US imperialists, too: the Americans will learn the same bitter lesson only if and when their country ceases to be the hegemon (occasional defeats, even costly defeats, are not enough, as is demonstrated by the fact that the Vietnam War did not serve as deterrent against the Iraq War).
Till then, most Americans, liberals and leftists included, will always be mystified by peoples in the South who lack good sense to do what Washington wants them to do. They will think of their refusal to peacefully submit to the empire as first and foremost a symptom of their cultural backwardness, an inability to understand that globalization is good for them. They will think of other peoples' patriotism as nothing but a manifestation of xenophobia, or only a ruse of tyrants to oppress their own peoples, in the South. And "intellectuals" among them will congratulate themselves for being cosmopolitan above nationalism, so unlike primitive creatures out there, all the while enjoying the benefits of relative peace and prosperity that living at the heart of the empire, backed by the power of their nation-state, affords them. In short, they will remain provincial simpletons, and they will make the same "mistakes," again, and again, and again.
* When we speak of "inevitability" of resistance here, we are taking a long view of history. The French ran Algeria for more than a century, from 1830 to 1962, before the Algerians achieved independence. It usually takes a lot of time before resistance becomes coherent and effective. Moreover, while the rise of resistance itself is just about inevitable, its triumph isn't. Much of anti-colonial resistance before the age of modern nationalism was defeated, and some peoples who have engaged in modern nationalist resistance have failed to achieve their goals so far: the Irish and the Palestinians are the best known examples of failure.
On 5/28/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On May 28, 2007, at 3:15 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
> > That's the part that puzzles me: why didn't they see that coming?
> > Did they
> > really think Iraq would be like Timor, or Kosovo?
>
> It depends on which "they" you mean. The CIA projected something like
> what happened. I had people on my radio show who projected something
> like what happened. Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, and the rest of the
> gang didn't want to listen.
But you forgot all their warnings once the US troops went in, much like most Americans, and you didn't change your mind and come out for US withdrawal until it became clear that Washington couldn't pacify Iraq. There is no evidence that people on this mailing list are on the average a lot smarter than the American public: the former decided that US withdrawal would be necessary just about the same time as the latter, and neither feels very strongly about it -- hence the continuing US presence in Iraq.
It's truly a shame that neither God nor law exists, and no one, except a few hapless foot soldiers of the empire, will pay for their crime.
On 5/28/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On May 28, 2007, at 2:53 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Well yeah, but that's part of the point I'm making about the ruling
> class. It's unable to think in any other terms than current profits;
> it's a monied class that can't think about its long-term interests.
What's new? Marx told us that a long time ago: "Après moi le déluge! [After me, the flood] is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation." And judging by what you are saying now about Iraq, your memory span is as short as capitalists'.
On 5/28/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> 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.
The beginning of the end of Iraq was the then still existing USSR refusing to protect Iraq from the Gulf War. Since then, more and more ruling classes and power elites outside the West have become more deeply integrated into the multinational empire, with only a few exceptions such as Cuba and Iran, and a few counter-trends like Nepal and Venezuela. Even when the power elites of other nations do not go along with Washington, they never stand in its way, in the manner that the USSR used to do once in a while.
Iran's power elite should try to use their country's considerable assets to divide the powers integrated into the multinational empire as much as possible, and they in fact have sought to do just that, but, as things stand now, they can't assume that there exists any irreconcilable antagonism among them.
> 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.
Peoples of the Middle East would be committing collective suicide if they waited for the Americans to build a left. No, there will be no left worth the name anywhere in the North in the foreseeable future -- certainly no anti-imperialist left! -- and peoples of the South had better decide what they must do based on the assumption that much of what is done by most leftists in the North is and will continue to be either useless or positively harmful to them. Some of them may have a chance to take down their local American clients in the near future, but only if they don't listen to what leftists in the North have to say! -- Yoshie