------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the March 27, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
BUSH CROSSES THE RUBICON By Fred Goldstein With his declaration of war against Iraq, Bush and his administration have ushered in a new and dangerous phase in the post-Soviet world politics of imperialism. The brutal offensive being launched by the White House and the Pentagon against the Iraqi people is a war only in the formal sense of the word: two states and two armies confronting each other. It is more accurately described as a 21st-century, high-tech, murderous colonial expedition to re-subjugate a people who once were claimed as subjects by the British Empire. Assuming that Washington is successful in its aggression, the underlying results of a U.S. military victory will be multifold: U.S. corporate control of the oil fields and their immense profits; Washington's control over the strategic oil supply of its imperialist rivals; the Pentagon positioned in the heart of the Middle East, poised for expansion; and a government of occupation to be followed by a puppet government as pliable as any colonial regime. U.S. ECONOMY 1,000 TIMES THAT OF IRAQ Consider the relationship of forces. The U.S. is a country of 290 million people. It is the richest country in the world. It has a $10- trillion economy. Iraq is a country of 23 million people with a gross domestic product estimated at between $5 and $10 billion a year, depending upon the sources. This was reduced from $50 to $60 billion by 12 years of U.S./UN sanctions. The Pentagon will submit a $399-billion budget for the next fiscal year. Iraq's military budget is $1.4 billion. Iraq's military forces have been degraded by massive destruction in the 1991 Gulf War and by the sanctions. Even the $1.4 billion does not allow them to buy spare parts for unworkable equipment or upgrade their military in any way. The Pentagon has already spent many times more on military preparations than the entire Iraqi defense budget. By the time the first weeks of fighting are over, the U.S. will have spent more on this war than the entire gross domestic product of Iraq. Formerly the most developed country in the Middle East, Iraq's sanctioned economy is approaching the poverty level of sub-Saharan Africa. Iraq is ringed by 1,000 U.S. and British warplanes, five U.S. aircraft carriers, each with 70 fighter planes, each plane capable of launching guided bombs that can hit 700 targets in one day, regardless of weather conditions. There are 30 cruisers and destroyers equipped with satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles. There are F-117 stealth fighters and B-1 stealth bombers, which will be part of the "shock and awe" blitzkrieg designed to deliver 3,000 missiles and bombs in the first 48 hours of the war. Washington has 800 computerized Abrams tanks and scores of Apache helicopters that can fire over the horizon. It has computer-guided artillery, bunker busters and a massive 21,000-pound terror bomb capable of mass destruction. Its troops have night goggles, heat sensors, high- tech portable bridges, amphibious assault vehicles that can emerge from the sea and travel at 25 miles per hour in the sand. All its forces are commanded by the latest computerized battle-control equipment. The fact that the Pentagon's plans may be foiled by Iraqi resistance does not change this unfathomable disparity in military strength. This illegal assault is nothing but a modern-day version of the colonial expeditions in which the oppressed were vastly outgunned by the superior military technology of the colonial powers. OTHER IMPERIALISTS FEAR U.S. MONOPOLY ON OIL But all this firepower will be used not only to subjugate Iraq. It will be used to nullify all the oil concessions for drilling that have either been under discussion or negotiated between the government of Saddam Hussein and at least two dozen oil companies from 16 countries, including France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Algeria, Malaysia, Canada, Turkey, Vietnam, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Britain and the Netherlands. (Wall Street Journal, Feb. 27) Should this invasion succeed, it will increase the economic and military depend ence of the whole world on Wash ington and Wall Street. This is what has precipitated the crisis in the United Nations Security Council and in NATO. The German and French imperialists and the Russians are not inherently opposed to preemptive attack upon an oppressed people. In fact, all those ruling classes wish they had the power to do it themselves, as they have done in past periods. But they are weak powers that cannot act preemptively. Furthermore, because of their weakness, they cannot afford to be associated with such a policy. And to make matters worse, this policy of Washington is also directed against them and their interests. The one thing that would immediately reconcile them to a preemptive invasion of Iraq is if the U.S. ruling class would honor their contracts and invite them to share in the spoils. If the White House and Wall Street were to have told the French that TotalFinElf could keep its concession to develop the oil fields in Majnoon with a potential 30 billion barrels of oil; if they were to have told Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the German imperialists that they could bid on concessions, and told the Russians that they could keep their West Qrna oil fields with a capacity of 800,000 barrels a day, that would have put an immediate end to the diplomatic crisis. This sheds light on the argument about multilateralism versus unilateralism. The U.S. ruling class wants multilateral diplomacy, in other words, include everyone in the alliance, seek them out, give them a role and console them. But it doesn't want multilateralism when it comes to the spoils. To the European capitalists, multilateralism means share the loot. Unilateralism means that the U.S. corporations and the Pentagon take it all. That is what the turmoil in the Security Council and NATO is all about. WHY U.S. WANTED UN AND NATO The United Nations Security Council was formed at the end of World War II. It was structured even earlier by President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. ruling class to accommodate and help lift up the exhausted European imperialists, and to include and discipline the Soviet Union. NATO was formed in 1949 to unite the Western imperialist world against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe-the socialist camp. NATO was used to confront and threaten the USSR for 40 years. The German imperialists were on the front line of that struggle and Washington backed them fully. The UN was used to partition Palestine and set up the Zionist settler state of Israel. It was used to wage a brutal war against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. In general, it served the purpose of U.S. imperialism over the years. When it did not, Washington just went around it or overrode it. It used its veto numerous times, especially to stop condemnations of Israeli aggression. But with the collapse of the USSR and the defeat of the socialist camp, the anti-Soviet collaboration between Washing ton and its European rivals is no longer there to act as a restraint upon the imperial ambitions of the U.S. ruling class and the resistance of the Europeans to those ambitions. Ignoring the UN is not the root of this crisis. In fact, when Washington wanted to invade Yugoslavia, it knew it faced a Russian veto in the Security Council. The U.S. government simply ignored the UN and turned to NATO. But that did not precipitate any crisis because the French and German imperialists were with the U.S. in the war. Furthermore, Washington under the Clinton administration was still in the mode to share the spoils and the German bosses were allowed to retain their "sphere of influence" in the region. PENTAGON WANTS TO 'PUNISH' GERMANY But things have drastically shifted with the advent of the Bush administration. In the Feb. 16 edition of the London Observer an article spoke about the U.S. "punishing" Germany for its insubordination on the question of Iraq. "America is to punish Germany for leading international opposition to a war against Iraq," wrote the Observer. "The plan-discussed by Pentagon officials and military chiefs last week on the orders of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld-is designed 'to harm' the German economy to make an example of the country for what U.S. hawks see as Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's treachery. " 'We are doing this for one reason only: to harm the German economy,' one source told the Observer last week." The aim is to "hit German trade and commerce," according to the Pentagon, and "make an example" of Germany that will "force other countries heavily dependent on U.S. trade to think twice about standing up to America in the future." Many of the leading lights in the ruling class establishment, including former President Jimmy Carter and former Clinton national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, among others, have chided the Bush administration for its "clumsy" diplomacy. But this is concealing the truth. Clumsy or bungling, as some would put it, implies that one accidentally and unintentionally does something either destructive or disruptive. There has been nothing unintentional about the arrogant diplomacy of the hard core of the Bush right-wing, so-called "neo-conservative" foreign policy group. When Donald Rumsfeld denounced "old Europe," he was not being clumsy but making a flat-out assertion that Washington had captured the vassal states of Eastern Europe, and that the French and the German imperialists were now enemies. To reaffirm the imperial arrogance of the right wing, Rumsfeld calmly said, in the midst of the Security Council crisis, that if the British government of Tony Blair was getting cold feet just because his Labor Party and the majority of the British people were against the war, then the U.S. did not really need them and was quite prepared to go to war without even one major ally. Bush and his cabinet have dwelled over and over again on the Sept. 11 disaster as a turning point in making a war against Iraq a necessity. The entire ruling class knows this is a fraud. Try as they might, the Bush administration was never able to produce an iota of evidence linking the government of Iraq to Sept. 11 that could stand up to international scrutiny. September 11 was a turning point in that it served as the political cover for the world-conquering Bush administration to open up a long- planned global offensive, all but laid out in its National Security Strategy document of September 2002. This campaign began with planting U.S. military forces at bases in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region under cover of the war against Afghanistan. That was followed by unleashing the bloody regime of Ariel Sharon for an offensive to crush the Palestinian national movement. Now comes the third phase: an all-out war to destroy the sovereignty of Iraq. This brazen declaration of war by President George W. Bush for the openly stated purpose of destroying the regime of Saddam Hussein marks a new phase in the open struggle for global domination by Washington-the struggle for a U.S. imperialist world empire. EMPIRES MEAN SUBDUING RIVAL RULING CLASSES Every form of society based upon class exploitation, from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, has shown a tendency toward the establishment of an empire. The relations of domination exercised by the exploiting classes over the exploited--whether they are slave holders over slaves, lords over serfs, or capitalists over workers--also drive the relations among the exploiters themselves. The first and primary function of every ruling class state is the forcible subjugation of the exploited classes and the enforcement of existing class relations. But the empires of Alexander the Great, of Rome's slaveholders, of Charlemagne, of the Ottoman Turks and their military-feudal aristocracy, of Britain with its colonial capitalists, and numerous other historical examples illustrate the tendency of each ruling class to use its state not only for the forcible suppression of the exploited classes but as an instrument in the struggle against contending ruling classes. Under historical circumstance favorable to the development of this tendency, the struggle among city states, feudal dynastic states, or modern-day capitalist states ends up in the widespread domination of one ruling class over the others. Within the framework of modern-day imperialist society, the U.S. ruling class has been won over to an open move in the direction of world empire. This is the new mentality in Washington. The U.S. ruling class has momentarily, provisionally and with worries and misgivings, accepted it, pending the outcome of this struggle. But they are rightfully worried about this adventure. The ruling class here cannot but notice that the French, the Germans and the Russians have been acting openly in concert during the final phase of this crisis. The prospect of a period of inter-imperialist rivalry at a moment when the entire situation in the Middle East may blow up in their faces cannot but make them anxious. Especially as they face the prospect of a firestorm of mass resistance to U.S. aggression and war crimes. Most importantly and fundamentally, the urge to empire in the imperialist epoch confronts the ruling class with a worldwide camp of the working class and the oppressed. They are no longer isolated from one another as were the slaves of the Roman Empire, the serfs of the Holy Roman Empire or the peasants and super-exploited peoples under the British Empire. The working class today is interconnected by global mass production and modern communications. It has a capacity for international solidarity, widespread organization and combat that previously exploited classes did not have. Furthermore, it has over a century of experience of national liberation struggles and socialist revolutions to draw upon. This war for empire could spark the beginning of the movement to undo not only the empire, but imperialism and capitalist exploitation itself. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe wwnews- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. 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