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iraq war is about more than oil
More than just a war for oil: the politics of armed globalisation
Many people say that the coming assault on Iraq is a 'war for oil'. While it's true that securing privileged access to Middle East oil is a key US objective - the US consumes 10 million barrels of the 70 million produced each day - that is only a part of the story. American capitalism is mainly fighting to extend and deepen its global political and economic dominance. It is fighting to crush or neutralise what it identifies as key enemies or rivals. And it is using its key military asset, the one area in which its dominance is completely unrivalled.
September 11 2001 was a heaven-set gift for the Bush team. Until then, the nine-month-old Bush administration was beleaguered, locked in trade battles with Europe, vilified for its refusal to ratify the Kyoto agreement and isolated over its total support for Israel. But September 11 gave them the opportunity to declare the 'war on terrorism' as a new organising principle for world capitalist politics.
Through it the US is trying to push back third world liberation movements, subordinate European states to its leadership, undermine the global justice movement - and above all reposition its military capacity worldwide to attack or intimidate any potential adversary. All this to ensure world economic domination for the US transnational corporations.
Thus the 'war on terrorism' is a long-term strategy. In the short term its major victims are the poor and oppressed in countries where it has directly intervened or given the green light for unleashing all-out counter-revolutionary war.
This includes Colombia where the US is funding and training the forces trying to crush the FARC and ELN leftwing guerrillas; the Philippines where 10,000 US 'advisors' are preparing to spearhead a new offensive against Islamist insurgents; Palestine, where the Bush administration has removed all restraining conditions to the support it gives to the Sharon government; and of course the people of Afghanistan, where the number of civilians killed by the US in the war exceeds the numbers killed in the September 11 attacks.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of military intervention. The strategic military build-up is concentrated in central and southeast Asia. The Afghan war enabled to US to build new and permanent bases in the central Asian republics Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. US military positions have been reinforced in South Korea and US naval forces in the Taiwan Strait boosted. Add to that the return of the US military to the Philippines, then a glance at the map shows what is happening: China is being militarily surrounded.
This doesn't mean that war with China is being contemplated as an objective in the foreseeable future. But it remains a permanent threat and pressure, especially in view of China's great vulnerability to air attack: the bombing of half a dozen dams on the Yangtze River would immediately drown 50 million people.
Launching the war on terrorism Bush proclaimed that "either you're with us or against us". But the key political step was the January 11 State of the Union speech, which launched the 'Axis of Evil' - a proclamation of the right of the United States to 'pre-emptive' strikes against any regime of which it disapproves - Iraq, Iran and North Korea being specifically named.
At one stroke the US has overturned the whole notion of sovereignty, which has - in theory - governed international relations since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Now national sovereignty is, especially in the third world, conditional on US approval. Do as we say or your license to govern is terminated, if necessary with extreme prejudice.
In fact the 'conditional sovereignty' idea is a consequence of the changed international position since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This enabled the Western powers to deepen the global neoliberal offensive and especially to launch a new offensive against the South.
While the European states accept the notion of limited sovereignty, they object to the sole licensing agency being the United States government. Rather, they want a multilateral system of world governance.
This is part of what underlies the continued pathetic bleating in Europe (privately echoed by the Blair government) that any attack on Iraq must be approved by the United Nations, a process which - formally at any rate - enables multilateral discussion and agreement to prevail.
The 'Axis of Evil' position on the upfront use of military power is the brainchild of the 'defence intellectuals' who are central to the Bush administration - notably Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz - and behind them their mentor Richard Perle, dubbed by Dennis Healey 'the Prince of Darkness'.
Most of these people served in the Reagan government and were described by George Bush senior, in a 1987 conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev, as 'marginal intellectual thugs'.
Their doctrine has supplanted the dominant thinking in the Clinton administration, described most clearly by Zbigniew Brzezinski (former national security advisor and the eminence grise behind secretary of state Madeleine Albright) in his book The Grand Chessboard. Brzezinski argues that the key to world leadership is economic, political and military domination of the major centre of world population and economic production, Eurasia - the vast landmass between Lisbon and Vladivostock, bounded by North Africa in the south, the Atlantic in the west and the Pacific in the east.
A part of this - but only a part - is military domination, crucially control of the oceans and air power dominance. While this forms a crucial backdrop, also central to the maintenance of US domination are a bundle of advantages, including economic and technological leadership, the magnetic attraction (especially to the young) of US mass culture and the attractiveness of the US political and society 'model'.
Maximising these advantages requires not the profligate use of military might, which is inimical to democracy, but the adroit use of political and diplomatic skills.
Brzezinski's own formula for this is roughly a) be nasty to Russia and prevent its economic revival b) be friendly to Germany, but support European capitalist unification which will prevent Germany from becoming a major independent political power c) deepen the strategic alliance with Japan as a bulwark against Chinese economic and political domination of east Asia.
Brzezinski' version of course does not simply counterpose political and diplomatic mechanisms to military ones. Military dominance has a crucial role to play. It is however a question of balance. Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle have thrown the Grand Chessboard version into the dustbin and proclaimed a new militarist activism amounting to a doctrine of permanent war, with no natural limits - including on the use of nuclear weapons.
Central to the thinking of the Bush team is the automatic assumption that military might can be easily cashed in politically. This is a strategy with immense risks. Iraq is a case in point. The chances are the war will be easily won, but it is by no means certain that it can be without huge political damage. American troops will have to take Baghdad.
If the Iraqi military and the Ba'ath party still have sufficient motivated cadres to organise house-by-house street fighting (something that's by no means certain in a police dictatorship), the US will either have to take huge casualties or destroy the city in a manner which would make the Russian destruction of Grozny look like a tea party. The political consequences would be immensely damaging for the US worldwide.
Overall the recourse to globalised militarism runs the risk of generating a huge array of anti-US political forces and - vitally - politicising the opposition towards various forms of radicalism. What's happened to the global justice movement is indicative here.
Immediately after September 11 the global justice movement was knocked back, especially in the United States itself - a consequence of the gigantic reactionary mobilisation unparalleled since McCarthyism in the 1950s.
However, on a world scale the movement has recovered and fed into the anti-war movement, which in the medium term is bound to radicalise the movement.
Key to this political development are debates about imperialism. When a faintly critical Blairite like Polly Toynbee proclaims in the Guardian that the US is creating a "new imperium", it is indicative of the popular debates which are developing.
A first ideological victim of this will be theorists like Michael Hardt and Tony Negri, who in their influential book Empire, proclaim the transition away from imperialism to a 'smooth' globalised system without an international structure of hierarchy characteristic of the old imperialist empires.
Hardly had the book been published when basic facts in international politics refuted it. Only the classical Marxist theory of imperialism is able to explain events since September 11.
The stakes in the turn to permanent war are immense for American capitalism. The 'war on terrorism' is not just one foreign policy option which can be easily reversed. It is on the contrary being cemented into overarching political framework, which sets the parameters for domestic as well as international politics. Any coherent political framework has to do just this, or it is unsustainable.
In the post-1945 period in the United States the regulatory framework was based on a combination of mass consumerism, supported by a permanent arms economy, more recently called 'military Keynesianism'. Surplus capital was set to work generating arms production whose guarantor and consumer was the state itself.
This system was crystallised with the start of the Korean War, with a vast increase in defence spending, which helped US capitalism pull itself out of its post-1948 recession. The ideological cement which held all this together, and indeed was crucial to sustaining the system, was virulent anti-communism domestically and the Cold War internationally.
It was this system which gave rise ideologically to McCarthyism and economically to the huge US residential suburbs, with their crushing domestic nuclear-family banality. All these things formed a seamless whole; and crucially the leadership of the American unions, the AFL-CIO, were pulled into the anti-communist, cold war consensus. Domestic and international politics fitted together perfectly.
The system was shaken in the 1960s by black rebellion and the mass anti-Vietnam war movement, but re-cemented by the years of the Reagan presidency (1980-88) with the 'evil empire' Second Cold War and the restarting of military Keynesianism as a mechanism for short-term economic growth.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, US capitalist leaders have lacked such an overarching framework. Now with the 'war on terrorism' they have it, but with profound consequences for domestic as well as international politics. Political reaction is rampant and the weak-kneed Democratic Party liberals either silenced or drawn into support for permanent war.
This has gone, together with the trampling of democratic rights, mass arrests and indefinite imprisonment without trial. This, then, is what is at stake - the whole organisation and framework of American domestic and international politics.
If the war on terrorism ends in shipwreck, all the political cards internationally and in the US itself will be throw in the air again, with the grave danger of the strengthening of rivals and enemies across the board.
Events in the past year have highlighted crucial elements of the globalisation process.
First is the exposure of the claim that national states are weakened to the point where the crucial world actors are non-state institutions like transnational corporations, or that globalisation is an inevitable process which states are powerless to resist.
In reality international trade is managed trade, as the new US tariffs on steel imports and European anti-US measures show. State action is crucial to managing the economy and setting the limits of its development in all major states, and state expenditure remains a huge part of every major economy.
Second, globalisation has been shown again not to be an 'automatic' process, but one which led and driven by the major imperialist powers and in particular the United States. The United States demands economic access everywhere, not on the basis of 'free' trade but on the basis of determining where the playing field is, let alone how level it is.
In other words the United States demands absolute subordination of the world to American capital. It turns out of course that this degree of 'globalisation' requires that the world obey the United States politically, and vast amounts of military might are there to attempt to ensure this.
In the end the whole project suffers from an obvious Achilles heel. Overwhelming military might is vulnerable to long-term political subversion. Sustaining the Axis of Evil military posture requires continued political support in key countries, including Britain and the United States, but not only them.
Aircraft carriers and cruise missiles cannot exterminate the international working class or prevent class struggle or stop the rebuilding of the international left, which is gathering pace. Neither can they sink the global justice movement.
The 'war on terrorism' is an ideological empty vessel compared with anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism, which were based on the reality of an oppressive and powerful hostile state system in the east.
When in 1963-4 small groups of people in the United States, very isolated and subject to anti-communist vilification, began the opposition to the Vietnam war, they could not have dreamed of the mass force the anti-war movement would eventually become or the influence on the outcome of the war which it would have.
Today the anti-war movement starts from a much higher level. In the next few years it will have enormous potential to politically undermine the permanent war project, expose the imperialist character of 'globalisation' and powerfully contribute to the rebuilding of the international left, especially among hundreds of thousands of young people becoming politically active for the first time.
The present may be dominated by US capitalism's war machine, but the future belongs to its enemies.
The article above was written by Phil Hearse and first appeared in the British newspaper, Socialist Resistance.
