18 Janvier 2003
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
We have repaired our email system
-for at least the present moment- and we take this opportunity to send
our reflections on what many believe to be the imminent war in the Middle
East.
(Please see below the important article
on Iraq and the Bush administration sent to us by our research associate
Michael Parenti, at Berkeley.)
_____________
Fragments from A Reflection on
War
by Francis Feeley
Classic military science teaches that there are essentially four types of war: a) wars of national independence, b) imperialist wars of expansion, c) wars of national self-defense, and d) civil wars between social classes.
In American history, the War of Independence
(1776-83) represents the first type. The subsequent 19th-century conquest
of Indian lands, the Mexican War, the U.S. conquest of Cuba and the Philippines
are illustrations the
second type of war. An example of
the third type of war in U.S. history is World War II (AKA "the Good War"),
which is represented as a war against fascist expansion.
The fourth type of war, Civil War, is problematic in American history: Some historians argue that beginning in 1860 a new industrial capitalist class, in alliance with western farmers, gained political power, via the New Republican Party, in Washington, D.C. and went to war against the reactionary, slave-owning agrarian class in the southern states, which had controlled, through the Democratic Party, the three branches of government in Washington for the past decades. The ascendancy of this new political party, with its specific social class interest was incompatible with southern Democratic interests, and the definitive defeat of southern aristocratic control of the state quickly released the forces of rapid industrial expansion in late 19th-century America.
Other historians have argued that the so-called Civil War was more accurately a "War of Secession," or a "War between the States," fought between regional factions for national self-defense, i.e. to preserve the union of the United States of America against regional separatism. Either way, no less than 2% of the total U.S. population ended up dead before this war was over.
Another observation from classic
military science is that open conflict is preceded by a period of preparation
that includes psychological warfare. Wars, in other words, usually begin
long before the actual confrontation
occurs.
Today, modern science permits virtual
wars to be fought. The author George Orwell suggested in his book 1984,
such "wars" are perpetuated to strengthen popular allegiance to the
state. A post-Orwellian strategy used
by the United States military is
to hide the evidence of criminal activities in the "killing fields" during
war by preventing reporters and cameraman from visiting sites until the
destruction and the mass burial of the evidence has been achieved. This
"sanitized" version of war is more like a "Covert Action," where U.S. agents
are sent to the hospitals and morgues of suppress evidence, and burial
brigades spend hours, if not days, burning and hiding dead bodies. Thus
it would seem that modern military science teaches a pre-war strategy
of psychological terror and a post-war tactic of hiding the evidence of
destruction, in order to control descent. ("What's all the fuss about,
anyway?)
For more on new techniques employed by the state to hide the costs of war from public view, please see the "Reporters without Borders" bilingual (French/English) web site:
The ease with which the American
ruling class manipulates the feelings and perceptions of the American public
is cause for alarm in distant places. Today's friends could quickly appear
on tomorrow's "enemy list" in a world
where capitalist competition reigns
and where real communities have been subverted and replaced by an imaginary
sense of community that is promoted and paid for by commercial interests.
Many years ago, William Appleman
Williams observed that what we as
a nation share in common has been reduced to a desire to consume and a
fear of communism.
The latter notion of an "indispensable
enemy" is not new, but Lewis Carroll reminds us that any conflict, even
one which evokes the most bitter feelings, can be transcended by the perception
of a GREATER DANGER: "just
then flew down a monstrous crow,
as black as a tar barrel, which frightened both the heroes so they quite
forgot their quarrel."
in solidarity,
F. Feeley
Professor/Director of research
Grenoble III
_________________________________________
To Kill Iraq: The Reasons Why
by Michael Parenti
In October 2002, after several days
of full-dress debate in the House and Senate, the US Congress fell into
line
behind almost-elected president
George W. Bush, giving him a mandate to launch a massive military assault
against the already battered nation of Iraq. The discourse in Congress
was marked by its usual cowardice. Even
many of the senators and representatives
who voted against the president's resolution did so on the narrowest procedural
grounds, taking pains to tell how they too detested Saddam Hussein, how
they agreed with the president on many points, how something needed to
be done about Iraq but not just yet, not quite in this way. So it
is with Congress: so much political discourse in so narrow a political
space. Few of the members dared to question the unexamined assumptions
about US virtue, and the imperial right of US leaders to decide which
nations shall live and which shall die. Few, if any, pointed to the continual
bloody stream of war crimes committed by a succession of arrogant US administrations
in blatant violation of human rights and international law.
Pretexts for War.
Bush and other members of his administration
have given varied and unpersuasive reasons to justify the "war"---actually
a one-sided massacre--- against Iraq. They claim it is necessary to insure
the safety
and security of the Middle East
and of the United States itself, for Iraq is developing weapons of mass
destruction, including nuclear missiles. But UN inspection teams have determined
that Iraq has no such nuclear
capability and actually has been
in compliance with yearly disarmament inspections.As for the fact that
Iraq once had factories that produced chemical and bacteriological weapons,
whose fault was that? It was the United States that supplied such things
to Saddam. This is one of several key facts about past US-Iraq relations
that the corporate media have consistently suppressed. In any case, according
to UN inspection reports, Iraq's C&B
warfare capability has been dismantled.
Still the Bushites keep talking about Iraq's dangerous "potential."
As reported by the Associated Press (2 November 2002), Undersecretary of
State John Bolton claimed that "Iraq
would be able to develop a nuclear
weapon within a year if it gets the right technology." If it gets the right
technology? What does that say about anything? The truistic nature of this
assertion has gone unnoticed.
Djibouti, Qatar, and New Jersey
would be able to develop nuclear weapons if they got "the right technology."
Through September and October of
2002, the White House made it clear that Iraq would be attacked if it had
weapons of mass destruction. Then in November 2002, Bush announced he would
attack if Saddam denied that he had weapons of mass destruction.
So if the Iraqis admit having such weapons, they will be bombed; and if
they deny having them, they still will be bombed--whether they have them
or not.
The Bushites also charged Iraq with
allowing al Qaeda terrorists to operate within its territory. But US intelligence
sources themselves let it be known that the Iraqi government was not connected
to Islamic terrorist organizations. In closed sessions with a House committee,
when administration officials were repeatedly asked whether they had information
of an imminent threat from Saddam against US citizens, they stated
unequivocally that they had no such
evidence (San Francisco Chronicle, 20 September 2002). Truth be told, the
Bush family has closer ties to the bin Laden family than does Saddam Hussein.
No mention is made of how US leaders themselves have allowed terrorists
to train and operate within our own territory, including a mass murderer
like Orlando Bosch. Convicted of blowing up a Cuban airliner, Bosch walks
free in Miami.
Bush and company seized upon yet
another pretext for war: Saddam has committed war crimes and acts of aggression,
including the war against Iran and the massacre of Kurds. But the Pentagon's
own study found that the gassing of Kurds at Malahja was committed by the
Iranians, not the Iraqis (Times of India, 18 September 2002). Another seldom
mentioned fact: US leaders gave Iraq encouragement and military support
in its war against Iran. And if war crimes and aggression are the issue,
there are the US invasions of Grenada and Panama to consider, and the US-sponsored
wars of attrition against civilian targets in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua,
El
Salvador, Guatemala, Yugoslavia,
and scores of other places, leaving hundreds of thousands dead. There is
no communist state or "rogue nation" that has such a horrific record of
military aggression against other
countries over the last two decades.
With all the various pretexts for
war ringing hollow, the Bushites resorted to the final indictment: Saddam
was a dictator. The United States stood for democracy and human rights.
It followed that US leaders were obliged to use force and violence to effect
regime change in Iraq. Again, we might raise questions. There is no denying
that Saddam is a dictator, but how did he and his crew ever come to power?
Saddam's conservative wing
of the Ba'ath party was backed by
the CIA. They were enlisted to destroy the Iraqi popular revolution and
slaughter every democratic, left-progressive individual they could get
hold of, which indeed they did,
including the progressive wing of
the Ba'ath party itself---another fact that US media have let slide down
the memory hole. Saddam was Washington's poster boy until the end of the
Cold War.So why has George II, like his daddy, targeted Iraq? When individuals
keep providing new and different explanations to justify a particular action,
they most likely are lying. So with political leaders and policymakers.
Having seen that the pretexts given by the White House to justify war are
palpably false, some people conclude that the administration is befuddled
or even "crazy." But just
because they are trying to mislead and confuse the public does not perforce
mean they themselves are misled and confused. Rather it might be that they
have reasons which they prefer not to see
publicized and debated, for then
it would become evident that US policies of the kind leveled against Iraq
advance the interests of the rich and powerful at much cost to the American
people and every other people on the
face of the earth. Here I offer
what I believe are the real reasons for the US aggression against Iraq.
Global Politico-Economic Supremacy.
A central US goal, as enunciated
by the little Dr. Strangeloves who inhabit the upper echelons of policymaking
in the Bush administration, is to perpetuate US global supremacy. The objective
is not just power for its own
sake but power to insure plutocratic
control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies
of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhereincluding
the people of North
America ---the blessings of an untrammeled
"free market" corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those
who believe that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the
world should be dedicated to
maximizing capital accumulation
for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used
for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many.
The goal is to insure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as
such, but the supremacy of US global capitalism by preventing the
emergence of any other potentially competing superpower or, for that matter,
any potentially competing regional power. Iraq is a case in point.
Some nations in the Middle East have oil but no water; others have water
but no oil. Iraq is the only one with plenty of both, along with a good
agricultural basealthough its fertile lands are now much contaminated by
the depleted uranium dropped upon
it during the 1991 Gulf War bombings. In earlier times, Iraq's oil was
completely owned by US, British, and other Western companies. In 1958 there
was a popular revolution in Iraq. Ten years later, the rightwing of the
Ba'ath party took power, with Saddam Hussein serving as point man for the
CIA. His assignment was to undo the bourgeois-democratic revolution, as
I have already noted. But instead of
acting as a compradore collaborator
to Western investors in the style of Nicaragua's Somoza, Chile's Pinochet,
Peru's Fujimora, and numerous others, Saddam and his cohorts nationalized
the Iraqi oil industry in 1972, ejected
the Western profiteers, and pursued
policies of public development and economic nationalism. By 1990, Iraq
had the highest standard of living in the Middle East (which may not be
saying all that much), and it was evident
that the US had failed to rollback
the gains of the 1958 revolution. But the awful destruction delivered upon
Iraq both by the Gulf War and the subsequent decade of economic sanctions
did achieve a kind of
counterrevolutionary rollback from
afar.Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, US leaders decided
that Third World development no longer needed to be tolerated. Just as
Yugoslavia served as a "bad" example in Europe, so Iraq served as a bad
example to other nations in the Middle East. The last thing the plutocrats
in Washington want in that region is independent, self-defining developing
nations that wish to control their own land, labor, and natural resources.
US economic and military power has been repeatedly used to suppress competing
systems. Self-defining countries like Cuba, Iraq, and Yugoslavia are targeted.
Consider Yugoslavia. It showed no desire to become part of the European
Union and absolutely no interest in joining NATO. It had an economy that
was relatively prosperous, with some 80 percent of it still publicly owned.
The wars of secession and attrition waged against Yugoslavia---all in the
name of human rights and democracy---destroyed that country's economic
infrastructure and fractured it into a cluster of poor, powerless, right-wing
mini-republics, whose economies are being privatized, deregulated, and
opened to Western corporate penetration on terms that are completely favorable
to the investors. We see this happening most recently in Serbia. Everything
is being privatized at garage sale prices. Human service, jobs, and pension
funds are disappearing. Unemployment, inflation, and poverty are skyrocketing,
as is crime, homelessness, prostitution, and suicide. Welcome to Serbia's
free market paradise.
Judging from what has been happening
in Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Panama, Grenada, and elsewhere---we can anticipate
that the same thing is in store for Iraq following a US occupation: An
Iraqi puppet government
will be put in place, headed by
someone every bit as subservient to the White House as Tony Blair. The
Iraqi state-owned media will become "free and independent" by being handed
over to rich conservative private
corporations. Anything even remotely
critical of US foreign policy and free market capitalism will be deprived
of an effective platform. Conservative political parties, heavily financed
by US sources, will outspend any leftist groupings that might have survived.
On this steeply unleveled playing field, US advisors will conduct US-style
"democratic elections," perhaps replicating the admirable results produced
in Florida and elsewhere. Just about everything in the Iraqi economy will
be privatized at giveaway prices. Poverty and underemployment, already
high, will climb precipitously. So will the Iraqi national debt, as international
loans are floated that "help" the Iraqis pay for their own victimization.
Public services will dwindle to nothing, and Iraq will suffer even more
misery than it does today. We are being asked to believe that the Iraqi
people are willing to endure another massive bombing campaign in order
to reach this free-market paradise.
Natural Resource Grab.
Another reason for targeting Iraq
can be summed up in one word: oil. Along with maintaining the overall global
system of expropriation, US leaders are interested in more immediate old-time
colonial plunder. The present White
House leadership is composed of
oil men who are both sorely tempted and threatened by Iraq's oil reserve,
one of the largest in the world. With 113 billion barrels at $25 a barrel,
Iraq's supply comes to over $2.8 trillion dollars. But not a drop of it
belongs to the US oil cartel; it is all state owned. Baghdad has offered
exploratory oncessions to France, China, Russia, Brazil, Italy, and Malaysia.
But with a US takeover of Iraq and a new puppet regime in place, all these
agreements may be subject to cancellation. We may soon witness the biggest
oil grab in the history of Third World colonialism by US oil companies
aided and abetted by the US government.
One thing that US leaders have been interested in doing with Iraqi oil---given the glut and slumping price of crude in recent years---is keep it off the market for awhile longer. As the London Financial Times (24 February 1998) reported, oil prices fell sharply because of the agreement between the United Nations and Iraq that would allow Baghdad to sell oil on the world market. The agreement "could lead to much larger volumes of Iraqi crude oil competing for market shares." The San Francisco Chronicle (22 February 1998) headlined its story "IRAQ'S OIL POSES THREAT TO THE WEST."
In fact, Iraqi crude poses no threat to "the West" only to Western oil investors. If Iraq were able to reenter the international oil market, the Chronicle reported, "it would devalue British North Sea oil, undermine American oil production and---much more important---it would destroy the huge profits which the United States [read, US oil companies] stands to gain from its massive investment in Caucasian oil production, especially in Azerbajian." We might conclude that direct control and ownership of Iraqi oil is the surest way to keep it off the world market and the surest way to profit from its future sale when the price is right.
Domestic Political Gains.
War and violence have been good
to George W. Bush. As of September 10, 2001, his approval ratings were
sagging woefully. Then came the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, swiftly followed by the newly trumpeted war against terrorism
and the massive bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. Bush's approval ratings
skyrocketed. But soon came the corporate scandals of 2002: Enron,
WorldCom, and even more perilously
Harken and Halliburton. By July,
both the president and vice-president were implicated in fraudulent corporate
accounting practices, making false claims of profit to pump up stock values,
followed by heavy insider selling
just before the stock was revealed
to be nearly worthless and collapsed in price. By September, the impending
war against Iraq blew this whole issue off the front pages and out of the
evening news. Daddy Bush did the same
thing in 1990, sending the savings
and loan scandal into media limbo by waging war against that very same
country.
By October 2002, the Republican party, reeling from the scandals and pegged as the party of corporate favoritism and corruption, reemerged as the party of patriotism, national defense, and strong military leadership to win control of both houses of Congress, winning elections it should never have won. Many Americans rallied around the flag, draped as it was around the president. Some of our compatriots, who are cynical and suspicious about politicians in everyday affairs, display an almost child-like unlimited trust and knee-jerk faith when these same politicians trumpet a need to defend our national security against some alien threat, real or imagined.
War also distracts the people from
their economic problems, the need for decent housing, schools, and jobs,
and a recession that shows no sign of easing. Since George II took office,
the stock market has dropped 34 percent, unemployment has climbed 35 percent,
the federal surplus of $281 billion is now a deficit of $157 billion, and
an additional 1.5 million people are without health insurance, bringing
the total to 41 million. War has been good for the conservative agenda
in general, providing record military spending, greater profits for the
defense industry, and a deficit spending spree that further enriches the
creditor class at the taxpayer's expense, and is used to justify more cuts
in domestic human services.Liberal intellectuals are never happier than
when, with patronizing smiles, they can dilate on the stupidity of George
Bush. What I have tried to show is that Bush is neither retarded nor misdirected.
Given his class perspective and interests, there are compelling reasons
to commit armed
aggression against Iraq---and against
other countries to come. It is time we dwelled less upon his malapropisms
and more on his rather effective deceptions and relentless viciousness.
Many decent crusaders have been
defeated because of their inability
to fully comprehend the utter depravity of their enemies. The more we know
what we are up against, the better we can fight it.
____________
Michael Parenti's latest books
are The Terrorism Trap (City Lights); To Kill a Nation: The Attack
on Yugoslavia (Verso): and the 7th edition of Democracy for the
Few (Wadsworth). His forthcoming work, The Assassination
of Julius Caesar: A People's
History of Ancient Rome, will be published in the spring by The New
Press.