Jim D. wrote:
Marvin, how did you leap from "the totality of leading forces in the u.s." to "unanimity within the US ruling class"? there was clearly NOT unanimity amongst the ruling classes. But the "leading forces" seems to refer to those in governmental power, what C. Wright Mills called the "power elite" rather than Karl Marx's "ruling classes." (There is competition between the in-power elite and the out-of-power elites within the capitalist class.) What CC seemed to be saying is that the entire dominant coalition in US politics favored the war, so it wasn't simply a neocon adventure.
========================== I sent the note below to Yoshie offlist, in reply to her similar comment, and since the thread is continuing: "Micheal Perelman cried "enough!" so this is offlist. "I think we can agree that the dissident factions of the ruling class always close ranks in wartime, and once the horse has bolted the barn, they join in efforts to retrieve it. Foreign policy is bipartisan, so the DP has the same interest in disguising the appearance of a "defeat". On partisan grounds, the DP calculates - probably wrongly given the breadth of antiwar sentiment - that it is vulnerable to Republican manipulation of US xenophobia and fear of terrorism which paints it as an unreliable defender of Americans' physical security. "At issue is really whether the ruling class was united in opening the barn door in the Iraq case, and whether there is a unanimous desire to pursue the same course in relation to Iran, NK, and other trouble spots. I'm in the camp of those who say it is the "clumsiest" administrator of the US empire in history, which has nothing at all to do with my view of the opposing party as the one preferred by the left's target audience of union and social movement activists."
