------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Jan. 16, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
BUSH CAN'T SELL WAR FOR EMPIRE By Fred Goldstein As the Bush administration plunges ahead toward war, the apologists for imperialism are having great difficulty fashioning a coherent public justification for this obviously unprovoked war of aggression. Is it about "regime change"? Is it about "weapons of mass destruction"? Is it about oil? Is it about empire? The Bush administration demanded inspections. But with each new daily announcement by the weapons inspection team that they have found nothing and are getting complete cooperation from the Iraqis, the Pentagon dispatches more weapons, more troops and more commanders to surround Iraq and launches more attacks in the no-fly zones. Bush says "we seek no empire" and that war is not inevitable. But at the same time the administration leaks its plans for the military occupation of Iraq, the seizure of the oil fields, and "war crimes" trials of the Iraqi leadership. Most importantly, the glaring connection between the Bush administration's incestuous ties to the oil industry and Iraq's 112 billion barrels of oil reserves, the second largest in the world, keeps looming larger and larger as the anti-war movement at home and abroad spreads the word. As the war approaches, the propagandists and policy experts of imperialism are rushing to keep up with the government's conflicting and confusing explanations for its war drive. Doing its part to promote a fresh and bold justification for the war, the New York Times has opened the pages of its influential Sunday magazine section to a major piece by Michael Ignatieff entitled "The Burden." It was the cover story of the magazine's Jan. 7 issue, and was promoted in blazing red, white and blue letters as "The American Empire (Get Used to It)." Because of the source, this article will be read carefully in capitals and embassies throughout the world. Ignatieff is the director of human rights of the Carr Center at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Times, through the words of this propagandist of war, has floated an ideological trial balloon. It is toying with something that has not been attempted since the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of the world national liberation movement: sanitizing imperialism. ADMITTING EMPIRE IN ORDER TO PRAISE IT Ignatieff takes the bull by the horns. He disputes Bush's claim that "we seek no empire." He attempts to deal with the obvious. "Yet what word but 'empire' describes that awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean." But, says Ignatieff, the new U.S. empire "is not like empires of times past, built on colonies, conquest and the white man's burden. We are no longer in the era of the United Fruit Company, when American corporations needed the Marines to secure their investments overseas. The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known." Before making the claim that U.S. imperialism no longer uses the military to protect its investments, Ignatieff would do well to consult his infamous war-mongering colleague on the New York Times, Thomas Friedman. Friedman openly proclaimed in his column on March 28, 1999, at the time of the bombing of Yugoslavia, that it takes the military contractor McDonnell Douglas to insure the safety of McDonald's around the world. Ignatieff should listen to Credit Suisse First Boston oil analyst Mark Flannery, as cited in an MSNBC study of oil and Iraq: "If it's your tanks that dislodged the regime and you have 50,000 troops in the country and they're in your tanks, then you're going to get the best deals. That's the way it works. The French will have three men in a 1950s tank. That's just not going to work." The same MSNBC study revealed that not only is Bush a former director of Harken Energy, Cheney a former executive of Halliburton and Condoleezza Rice on the board of Chevron Oil, but "the top 100 officials in the Bush administration have the majority of their personal investments, almost $150 million, in the traditional energy and natural resources sector." So much for Ignatieff's "new invention in the annals of political science." The Iraq war is not about United Fruit. But it is about ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, BPAmoco and the entire edifice of U.S. and British finance capital seizing the strategic oil reserves of Iraq, setting themselves up for further expansion in the Middle East and around the globe. CONQUEST TO ACCOMPLISH 'SELF-DETERMINATION' According to Ignatieff, this new, idyllic imperialism has nothing in common with the "white man's burden" of earlier imperialism and colonialism. He claims that "Iraq is an imperial operation that would commit a reluctant republic to become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratization and oil supplies in a combustible region of Islamic peoples." The U.S. would bring "self-determination" and "create democracy in Iraq, then hopefully roll out the same happy experiment throughout the Middle East." Such a task is both "noble and dangerous--noble because if it is successful, it will finally give these peoples self-determination." Ignatieff also declares that "the case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike." And he argues that "the moral evaluation of empire gets complicated when one of its benefits might be freedom for the oppressed." Throughout the piece Ignatieff steadily propounds the "burden of the beneficent empire" thesis. What is this except an update of the ideology invented for the expansion of British colonialism and the emergence of rapacious, modern-day imperialism? This is the 21st-century version of the ideology embodied in Rudyard Kipling's infamous poem, "The White Man's Burden," written at the time of the U.S. military seizure of the Philippines in 1899, during the Spanish-American War. Kipling, Britain's imperial poet, began this racist tract with the lines, "Take up the White Man's burden--Send forth the best ye breed--Go bind your sons to exile-To serve your captives' need," and so on. Washington also colonized Cuba and Puerto Rico during the war and soon took over Santo Domingo and Haiti. To promote the enslavement of India, where Kipling was born, as well as of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, the British and U.S. imperialists resorted to the ideology of a superior white race with a "civilizing" mission. Theodore Roosevelt, secretary of the Navy and two- term president from 1901 to 1908, was one of the pioneers of U.S. imperialist expansion. He was an admirer of this poem precisely for its expansionist message. This flagrant appeal to racism and white chauvinism concealed the fact that the European and U.S. imperialist ruling classes were plundering the peoples of the world under the guise of spreading "civilization." Roosevelt delivered many racist tracts in justification of imperialist expansion. Typical was an address in 1909 at the Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. "There is one feature in the expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries which should never be lost sight of, especially by those who denounce such expansion on moral grounds," he said. "On the whole, the movement has been fraught with lasting benefits to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place." The slave trade, the butchery of the peoples of the Congo by King Leopold of Belgium, the conquest and enslavement of India and Egypt by the British, of North Africa and Southeast Asia by the French, of Indonesia by the Dutch, of Southwest Africa by the German imperialists-- all were carried out under the ideology of the "burden of empire." Ignatieff's version of the "noble but dangerous" enterprise of spreading "democracy" to the people of Iraq and then to the Middle East is just a warmed-over version of the "serve your captives" ideology of Kipling and Roosevelt. What have the U.S. oil companies, banks and multinational corporations really done in the Middle East with the aid of the CIA and the Pentagon? They have plundered the people of Iran under the dictatorship of the Shah; supported the Israeli Zionist regime in three wars against the Arab people and in their attempt to destroy the Palestinian national movement; propped up the feudal oil monarchies of the Gulf for decades; invaded Lebanon to crush its national movement; bombed Libya; and waged a brutal air and ground war against Iraq followed by sanctions responsible for over a million deaths. Ignatieff and the New York Times have decided, in this post-Soviet period of the 21st century, to float the concept of a new beneficent imperialism in which the oppressors are turned into the liberators--all in the spirit of the paternalistic, racist founders of 20th-century imperialist ideology, Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt. This Harvard professor does it, however, in language more suited to an era following a century of socialist revolutions and national liberation movements. BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION AND UPSURGE OF OPPRESSED Indeed, it was the Bolshevik Revolution and the upsurge of oppressed peoples that forced the imperialists to restrain their racism and chauvinism. Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. president from 1913 to 1921, had invaded or occupied Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Panama, and sent U.S. troops into World War I, an inter-imperialist struggle to redivide the world. But then Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in the name of the workers and peasants. They published all the tsar's secret treaties with the other imperialist powers and declared Soviet solidarity with all oppressed peoples. Wilson, the plunderer of the Caribbean and Latin America, then came forth with a call for the "self-determination of nations." To openly proclaim imperialism had become inflammatory and dangerous for the Great Powers. EMPIRE'S ACHILLES' HEEL In the wake of the collapse of the USSR and the setbacks for the world national liberation struggles, the Bush administration, Wall Street and the Pentagon are engaged in an attempt to solidify their absolute world domination. The war against Iraq is part of this effort. It will soon be impossible to conceal the imperialist ambition of U.S. finance capital. Thus the attempt by the ideologists of imperialism, including Ignatieff, to fashion a political line to sanitize and promote the new, aggressive, world-conquering orientation of Washington. But there is one worried note in Ignatieff's treatise that reveals the ultimate Achilles' heel of U.S. imperialism. He quotes Edward Gibbon's work, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," which attributed the fall of the empire to the fact that the emperors went "beyond the limits that nature seemed to have placed as its permanent bulwarks." Gibbons attributed this to "vanity or ignorance" on the part of the emperors. But in truth, the Roman emperors were driven beyond the "natural limits" of the empire because they needed slaves and loot to sustain it. What Ignatieff does not say about the U.S. empire is that it flows from the lust and need for super-profits. This organic need of the giant monopolies, the banks, the industrialists, the military merchants of death, and the entire edifice of finance capital drives the expansion. The drive to ceaselessly expand exploitation and plunder will be the undoing of the monied monarchs of Wall Street and their servants in the White House and the Pentagon as surely as it brought down the Roman slaveholders. But unlike the Roman ruling classes, the modern-day capitalist class in its imperialist stage has created a world-wide working class and peasantry--and they are not going to "get over it," as Ignatieff suggests. The struggles already underway in Colombia, Palestine, Zimbabwe, Korea, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and elsewhere show that expanded aggression by U.S. imperialism in the name of establishing "democracy and stability" will only galvanize mass resistance. Profit lust drives not only expansion abroad but the intensified exploitation of the working class at home. This multinational working class, which includes millions of people from colonial areas as well as oppressed African American and Native people, is inseparable from the intended victims of U.S. wars abroad. And this working class is suffering growing poverty, layoffs and homelessness along with cuts in social services, healthcare, housing and all the necessities of life. The same corporations and banks behind the war drive against Iraq are issuing pink slips to hundreds of thousands of workers, getting billions in tax breaks from Bush, destroying the environment, promoting racism and running roughshod over the labor movement. Sooner or later there will be a great awakening and an upsurge. The ideology of a beneficent imperialism will be scorned as the people take up the struggle against Washington's war drive. - 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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