Imperialism
Washington's gamble for a
new Middle East
by Phil Gasper
International Socialist Review,
Jan/Feb 2003
Despite the failure of UN arms inspectors
to uncover any serious evidence of "weapons of mass destruction,"
the U.S. government was moving inexorably towards a massive military
attack on Iraq, probably due to begin in mid to late February
... By the middle of January, over 60,000 U.S. troops were already
deployed in the Persian Gulf region, with another 120,000 on their
way and an additional 26,000 from Washington's only major ally
in the current crisis, Britain.
Bush's single-minded drive to war has
continued despite a growing rift with most of Washington's traditional
European allies, and with France and Germany in particular, on
the Iraq question. The U.S. war drive also faces opposition from
Russia, China, nearly all Middle Eastern governments and most
other countries, as well as a vocal and growing antiwar movement
in the streets in the U.S. and around the world.
Whatever the risks, the Pentagon hawks
who are dictating the Bush administration's policy, have been
itching for a war against Iraq for a long time. Back in 1998,
for example, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and
other key members of the current administration were already calling
for "a determined program to change the regime in Baghdad"-the
position adopted later by the Clinton administration. That, and
not the phony campaign to disarm Iraq, remains the goal, and the
administration is betting that the potential rewards of regime
change followed by a U.S. military occupation are worth the costs.
Colin Powell and other administration
members publicly deny it, but the most obvious reward for them
is, of course, oil. Others are more honest. "Regardless of
whether we say so publicly," says Anthony H. Cordesman, senior
analyst at Washington's Center for Strategic and International
Studies "we will go to war, because Saddam sits at the center
of a region with more than 60 percent of all the world's oil reserves."
Indeed, when the Bush administration came to office it commissioned
a study on energy policy from the Baker Institute for Public Policy
at Houston's Rice University-a think-tank run by James Baker III,
secretary of state in the first Bush administration and W's point
man in Florida during the 2000 election controversy. The report,
titled Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For the 21st Century,
was issued in April 2001. Among its advisers were Kenneth Lay
(at that time still CEO of Enron), Luis Giusti (a member of Shell's
board of directors), John Manzoni (regional president of British
Petroleum), David O'Reilly (CEO of Chevron Texaco) and Sheikh
Suad Al Nasser Al Sabah (formerly Kuwait's oil minister). The
Baker report warns that the U.S. faces "unprecedented energy
price volatility" and it concludes:
The United States remains a prisoner
of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilizing influence...to
the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East.
Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten
to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate
oil markers. Therefore the U.S. should conduct an immediate policy
review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic
assessments.
The following month, Vice President Cheney
issued his own national energy plan, which openly acknowledged
that "The [Persian] Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S.
international energy policy." The Cheney plan states that
the U.S. is increasingly dependent on imported oil and that it
may be necessary to overcome foreign resistance in order to gain
access to new supplies. As the political scientist Michael Klare
noted last April, this means that ~-
American efforts to obtain increased
supplies of foreign oil will ) require more than trade deals and
diplomacy-it will also require the threat of or the use of force
to dissuade hostile forces \ from attempting to obstruct the flow
of petroleum to the United l States. This, in turn, will require
an enhanced U.S. capacity to operate militarily in areas of likely
fighting over oil....And while hese efforts have been accelerated
since September I l, it is important to note that they began well
before that date. [Pacific News Service, April 23, 2002]
Iraq has the world's second biggest known
oil reserves after Saudi Arabia. There are also many promising
oilfields yet to be explored, and Iraqi oil is very easy to extract.
While war would certainly initially disrupt production and cause
a sharp spike in the price of oil, the Bush administration is
betting that this will be a temporary phenomenon. With a U.S.
puppet regime installed in Baghdad, the hope is that within a
few years there will be an abundant supply of cheap oil on the
world market. According to Lawrence Lindsey, Bush's former economic
adviser, "When there is a regime change in Iraq, you could
add three to five million barrels [per day] of production to world
supply. The successful prosecution of the war would be good for
the economy." Donald Kagan, a member of the neo-conservative
Project for the New American Century, another think tank with
close ties to the Bush administration, puts it even more bluntly:
"When we have economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions
in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no
disruption in oil supplies." Recent newspaper stories have
reported that the Pentagon plans to occupy and protect Iraq's
oilfields from potential damage or sabotage at an early stage
in the impending war.
Nor only is it a question of securing
oil for the U.S. itself. Europe and Japan are far more dependent
on Middle Eastern oil than the U.S. A military occupation of Iraq
would thus give Washington increased leverage over its main economic
rivals. Moreover, U.S. control of Iraqi oil would undermine the
power of the OPEC cartel, long a goal of U.S. foreign policy,
and lessen Washington's dependence on Saudi Arabia, with which
U.S. relations have cooled considerably since September 11.
Oil, however, is only part of the picture.
Though many liberals are loathe to admit it, the U.S. is not just
a superpower, it is the world's preeminent imperialist nation.
Despite Bush's protestations that "America has no empire
to extend or utopia to establish," a war with Iraq is needed
to enforce unquestioned military and economic dominance for the
American empire. The New York Times' Michael Ignatieff explains
"the burden" of U.S. imperialism this way:
Being an imperial power, however, is
more than being the most powerful nation or just the most hated
one. It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and
doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules
America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction)
while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on
climate change and the International Criminal Court) that go against
its interest. January 5, 2003]
The Bush administration has made it clear
that war against Iraq is simply one step in a much bigger plan
in which Washington intends to use its military strength to ensure
that the U.S. remains the dominant global power for the indefinite
future. The attacks of September 11 provided the opportunity to
put these plans into action, but this is a strategy that goes
back more than a decade to the last Bush administration. In early
1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then Dick Cheney's deputy at the Pentagon,
wrote a classified report arguing that in the post-Cold War world,
the U.S. "must now refocus on precluding the emergence of
any potential future global competitor.... [W]e must maintain
the mechanism for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring
to a larger regional or global role." The same sentiments
were publicly expressed by Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, who told the Armed Services Committee that the
U.S. needed to be "the bully on the block" in order
to "deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging
the U.S. on the world stage."
When Wolfowitz's document was leaked to
the New York Times in March 1992, however, it created such an
uproar that it was quickly withdrawn. But the same ideas were
rearticulated in a report from the Project for the New American
Century (PNAC) issued in September 2000. Among the report's contributors
were Wolfowitz (now deputy defense secretary), John Bolton (now
undersecretary of state for arms control and international security),
Lewis Libby (now Dick Cheney's chief of staff) and several other
prominent members of the Bush administration.
The PNAC report calls for the U.S. to
use overwhelming military force to take control of the Gulf region:
"While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate
justification, the need for a substantial American force presence
in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
War with Iraq, in other words, is seen as little more than an
excuse for "maintaining global U.S. preeminence...and shaping
the international security order in line with American principles
and interests."
The report is in effect a blueprint for
the Bush administration's foreign policy since September 11, 2001.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon gave it
the perfect opportunity to put into effect plans that it already
wanted to pursue. And the Democrats have provided near-unanimous
support for the Bush administration's onslaught. As the PNAC report,
with uncanny foresight, had put it a year earlier, what was needed
to implement such policies was "some catastrophic and catalyzing
event-like a new Pearl Harbor." Much of the strategy spelled
out by the PNAC was repeated in Bush's September 2002 National
Security Strategy document, better known as the Bush Doctrine,
with its emphasis on preemptive strikes and unilateral military
action. On the basis of these documents, Jay Bookman-an editor
at the Atlanta Journal Constitution recently spelled out Bush's
strategy as follows:
This war, should it come, is intended
to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged
global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary
policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more
in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States
must seize the opportunity for global domination....ln essence,
[the National Security Strategy document] lays out a plan for
permanent U.S. military and economic domination of every region
on the globe, unfettered by international treaty or concern. And
to make that plan a reality, it envisions a stark expansion of
our global military presence... [September 29, 2002]
The U.S. already has military bases in
over 60 countries and troops in 130. Since coming to office, the
Bush administration has wanted to expand that presence with new
permanent military bases in the Middle East, in Southeast Europe,
in Latin America and in Southeast Asia. As Bookman points out:
The Cost of such a global commitment
would be enormous. In 2000, we spent $281 billion on our military,
which was more than the next 11 nations combined. By 2003, our
expenditures will have risen to $378 billion. In other words,
the increase in our defense budget from 1999-2003 will be more
than the total amount spent annually by China, our next largest
competitor.
As Gregory Copley, head of the International
Strategic Studies Association, wrote September 20 in Investors
Business Daily, "Iraq is a stage on the way to securing U.S.
interests, and U.S. credibility will be absolutely lost unless
it follows through effectively. The U.S. has got to be perceived
to have had its way with the world community. This is the reality
of historic power." In other words, the enormous carnage
that a war on Iraq will surely mean, with tens of thousands killed,
is worth it to enhance U.S. credibility.
What does the White House intend to use
that credibility to do? Hawks in and close to the administration
have been talking openly for months about redrawing the map of
the whole Middle East. They welcome unrest in the region as a
prelude to the replacement of regimes that the U.S. dislikes.
When Brent Scowcroft, Bush Sr.'s national security adviser, worried
that a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq "would turn the whole
region into a cauldron," Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise
Institute responded, August 6 in National Review Online that "One
can only hope that we turn the region Into a cauldron, and faster,
please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being
cauldronized, it is the Middle East today." In an article
published the following month in the Wall Street Journal, Ledeen
predicted that "The War Won't End in Baghdad" and called
for the overthrow of the governments of Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The Toronto Sun's foreign editor, Eric Margolis, warns that
Pentagon hardliners are drawing up plans
to invade Iran once Iraq and its oil are 'liberated. 'They hope
civil war will erupt in Iran, which is riven by bitterly hostile
factions, after which a pro-U.S. regime will take power. If this
does not occur, then Iraq-based U.S. forces will be ideally positioned
to attack Iran. Or, they could just as well move west and invade
Syria...." [November 10, 2002]
The incredible arrogance of these plans
is breathtaking, as is the absurd belief of Ledeen and others
that "If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators,
we can expect overwhelming popular support." The reality
is that Washington will be viewed by the vast majority of the
people in the region as an imperial conqueror. New York Times
'superhawk Thomas Friedman insists, however, that a war will deliver
democracy to the whole Arab world:
It is not unreasonable to believe that
if the U.S. removed Saddam and helped Iraqis build not an overnight
democracy but a more accountable, progressive and democratizing
regime, it would have a positive, transforming effect on the entire
Arab world-a region desperately in need of a progressive model
that works. [January 22, 2003]
This must appear as an outlandish notion
to the Iranians who suffered for decades under the U.S.-backed
shah, the people of the American allied Gulf states who live to
this day under some of the world's most repressive regimes and
Iraqis themselves who remember the years when Saddam was funded
and armed by Washington. As historian Said K. Aburish explains
it, "To the West...stability means governments which behave
in a predictable manner and ones whose systems preclude the emergence
of forces that are opposed to the West or wish to deal with it
on an equal basis. Stability means dictatorships and an ensuing
coercion of the people which eliminates the chances of attaining
legitimacy or democracy." The U.S. can never accept genuine
democracies in any of these countries, since this would threaten
its control of the region's resources.
U.S. imperial ambitions extend far beyond
the Middle East. While Iraq is the current focus of the U.S. war
machine, Washington is also lending its support to the attempt
by business leaders to overthrow the populist government of Hugo
Chavez in Venezuela, escalating its intervention against leftwing
guerrillas in Colombia, and provoking a major confrontation with
North Korea. Over the longer term, the neoconservative hawks in
the Bush administration see the key goal as preventing China from
emerging as the dominant power in Asia. Iraq for them truly is
only the beginning.
But the Bush Doctrine represents a huge
gamble for the U.S. ruling class, and it will be faced with major
problems in the months and years ahead. The outcome of a war against
Iraq is far from certain. Even if Washington gains a quick military
victory, a prolonged occupation of the country could spark popular
resistance in Iraq and throughout the region. U.S. ambitions in
Venezuela have been set back for now and the Bush administration
is calling for previously unwanted negotiations with North Korea.
Domestically, the Bush administration is already facing the first
antiwar stirrings in the labor movement, with more than 70 local
and regional unions initiating U.S. Labor Against War. The growing
anxiety over the recession, crumbling schools and an escalating
health care crisis could threaten the Bush administration's plans
further. Even now, the pages of mainstream newspapers and magazines
are filled with speculation about the responses to Bush's "class
warfare" tax giveaway to the wealthy.
Whatever the precise course of events,
there's one thing we do know. Bush's plans for war will mean the
slaughter of tens of thousands abroad and continuing attacks on
living standards and civil liberties at home. Whether the administration
can get away with this will depend on the level of opposition
that develops in the Middle East, around the world, and crucially
here in the U.S. itself. The antiwar movement of the 1960s and
1970s played a crucial role in defeating U.S. imperialism in Vietnam
and demonstrating that the world's biggest superpower was not
invincible. Over the past few months we have seen the impressive
growth of a new antiwar movement in this country. The urgent task
before U.S. is to build it bigger and stronger to demonstrate
that U.S. imperialism is no more invincible today.
Phil Gasper is a professor of philosophy
at Notre Dame de Namur University in California.
U.S.
Imperialism / Neocolonialism
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