Thanks for putting it politely, Joanna! [see below] It attempts a summation of the Neo-Con strategy for the Middle East, with the class implications for the intelligentsia and for capitalism made explicit.
Risky and speculative, because probably there was no one specific Neo-Con position but a number of positions that overlapped. Nevertheless there is enough in circulation to make clear that there is a link between their policy on Israel/Palestine and their policy on Iraq, and indeed the whole of the Middle East. There is also a larger scale link about using massive US military force to outflank Europe in the Middle East. Now I do not know how many of the neo-cons ever had sufficiently left-leaning Democrat affiliations to think of themselves as "liberals" or still worse, as "socialists", but ideas are only partially conscious reflections of reality according to the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge. I am suggesting the *underlying* implications of the Neo-Con strategy for capital and for classes and strata in the Middle East depended on....... 1. Hegemonic supervision of the flow of oil and oil revenues.This is more than a question of mere price. 2. That bourgois liberal civil society should be imposed on the muslim lands by systematic intervention, if necessary by force. That is was pointless to try to go on avoiding making enemies. Indeed a few months ago I stumbled on an issue of Foreign Affairs in the international quarter of London, explicitly arguing this. Though I do not know whether the author was a neo-con, he clearly shared an overlapping discourse. 3. Support for the Zionist state. Crushing of any violent resistance by its Helots, the Palestinians. At best allow the 4 million (!!!) Palestinian refugees to be a vast reserve army of labour for Israeli capital, as a sort of subaltern/garrison sector of US hegemonic finance capital. 4. Violent attacks on any states that support Palestinian suicide bombers. Denouncing these bombers as terrorists. No concessions to the significant wing of liberal intelligentsia opinion in Europe, the multi-lateralists, who think that the motivation of suicide terrorists needs to be taken into consideration. 5. Transforming the intelligentsia of a nationalist semi-socialist state like Iraq into an intelligentsia continuous with the global intelligentsia of global finance capital. Able to share the same tastes, watch similar televisions programmes and work in different centres to supervise the smooth continued accumulation of finance capital. To make Baghdad into a lively cosmopolitan city like one of the more liberal commercial gulf states, Beirut, Cairo, Athens, Tripoli, Singapore. I do not know the details of these cities but the strategy is clear. 6 In financial terms it was quite do-able. It is the same as the imperialist agenda of other sections of global finance capital, but with the ruthless and if necessary unilateral force of US massive military dominance thrown in. 7. It did, crucially, require separation of the baby intelligentsia of Iraq from the Baathist bath water, and their blunder on this is of even greater strategic significance than their blunder on weapons of mass destruction. 8. Remember their first hope was to decapitate the Baathist state, with their assassination bunker bombs, and text message onslaught on the mobile phones of the Iraqi generals. They hoped to just give instructions to the Iraqi battalions to wait in their barracks until further orders. But everything crumbled in their hands 9 Now they can desperately try to bolster the intelligentsia who grew up with the Baathist state against the muslim fundamentalists. But there are limits to how successful they will be now, and they are in a situation in which almost every move will make the mixture of class forces and strata, and their global position worse. --- What I wrote is a bit of a thought experiment because it takes what I understand to be the broad outline of the Neo-Con strategy IF it could be expressed openly in terms of classes, strata, and the power of different capitals. As if one of them had gone the whole way and become a "right wing Marxist". Because when you look at the whole picture in a materialist and dialectical way, they are in a terrible mess. That does require I suggest a discussion of the swing stratum of the intelligentsia [even though there are other older social formations that are significant, including tribal ones, and national capitalist ones, and military ones] -- Now others would not necessarily buy the picture quite as I have sketched it. There are many interlocking features and my syntax was confusing but partly deliberate to suggest the interlocking nature of these contradictions. Laying it out point by point gives a sort of programmatic feel to it, which the data does not really justify. This IS a sketch, and there could be other sketches. If anybody thinks I have left anything important out, or got any aspect frankly wrong, I hope they will step in. Chris Burford ----- Original Message ----- From: "joanna bujes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2004 8:37 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Intelligentsia and Empire - in Iraq and the world > Chris Burford wrote: > > >Now in relation to Iraq the strategic dream of the Neo-Cons - > >themselves defined as a group of the US intelligentsia by an unusual > >and 'interesting' intellectual trajectory - was that within a new > >century policed by overwhelming US hegemonic power, a whole Middle > >East in which oil not only flowed smoothly to lubricate the > >imperialist forces of production, but there was a bourgeois > >imperialist civil society across the whole of the Near and Middle East > >in which the Zionist state is smugly secure, the Palestinian refugees > >are absorbed as lumpen proletariat in a supposedly expanding global > >capitalist economy. Crucially that the large intelligentsia stratum of > >Iraq and Iran, instead of serving state regimes openly and covertly > >supporting Palestininian suicide bombers (the real axis of terrorism) > >would be in the service of a liberal "middle class" largely urban > >civil society, pre-occupied with cafes and minor features of > >semi-privileged consumer lifestyles, in a capitalist economic > >environment ultimately dominated by the largest finance capitalist > >corporations, especially the US ones. > > > Chris, I can't parse this at all. Can you clarify? Maybe it just needs > some extra commas and semicolons... > > Joanna
