Bush War Ruptures Globalization
athena.tbwt.com By Roger Burbach IPPN Article Dated 1/30/2003
Bush’s aggression against Iraqi represents a rupture with the framework of globalization that the United States has been pursuing ever since the end of the Vietnam War. This rupture is going to have appalling consequences for the United States as well as the rest of the world.
Beginning in the 1970s as the United States withdrew from Vietnam, it sought to expand its interests in concert with the other dominant power by laying the foundations for what is now called globalization. This has meant an extensive reliance on a framework of global, multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations. This convergence among the great powers was necessary because capital itself had become internationalized. International investments required stability and an array of supportive international institutions to facilitate their continued expansion.
Within this new global framework, the New World Order as it was dubbed by Bush the father, the United States operated as the primus inter pares in terms of the role that its business class and its government leaders played on the world scene. Antoni Negri and Michael Hardt in their book “Empire” captured the role of the United States in this New World Order. The U.S. project was that of a “network power.” The United States in effect networked globally with the other dominant financial and state interests, and basically forged a consensus before undertaking military actions abroad.
This is the case with all the conflicts and interventions that have occurred since the end of the Cold War. In the first Gulf War the United States enjoyed broad international support because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby threatening the oil supplies of the dominant powers as well as the existence of other nations in the Gulf. This explains why Bush Senior had the backing of a highly diverse international coalition ranging from Japan to Saudi Arabia to the nations of Western Europe. In the first Gulf War, U.S. allies paid for two-thirds of the total cost of the conflict.
The subsequent U.S. interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Yugoslavia/ Kosovo can all be seen as efforts to restore stability in parts of the world that were threatened by domestic or regional conflicts. These interventions did not respond to the specific, narrow unilateralist interests in the United States; they were supported by a spectrum of the international community of nations.
Now the current Bush administration has shattered the global consensus that previous U.S. administrations, including his father’s, had fostered. The reasons for this new unilateralist and imperialist thrust are internal as well as external. Internally, as is well known, George W. Bush basically stole the U.S. election in 2000. He did not represent the majority of voters either in Florida or in the United States at large. A narrow clique came to power with him representing what can be called the “military-petroleum complex.” It is based on petroleum and military interests, and it believes that it needs to act unilaterally to secure its hold over most of the world’s remaining supply of “black gold.” This military-petroleum complex does not express a broad consensus of U.S. capital, let alone that of global, international capital.
Many of the international accords and agreements that previous administrations had endorsed were seen as standing in the way of the advance of this narrow clique.This is why the Bush administration immediately jettisoned the Kyoto Treaty to control global warming, as well as the International Criminal Court, the latter because it represented a challenge to the Pentagon’s ability to wage war in any way the administration thought appropriate.
However, before September 11 the efforts of this elite to secure its control were floundering. Bush himself was viewed as inept and incompetent, even by much of the U.S. corporate media. In this context, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon provided a golden opportunity for the Bush administration to push forward its unilateralist agenda. Even before the Afghan war had ended, Bush proclaimed the “axis of evil,” a propaganda ploy aimed at securing control of the Gulf oil supplies via a war against Iraq, with the potential of even going after Iran’s oil supplies. North Korea was thrown in as a fig leaf, as we now see in the Bush administrations decision to use the United Nations to “disarm” the only one of the axis countries that may actually possess “weapons of mass destruction.”
Domestically it is also necessary for the Bush administration to launch a war of repression because it realizes that it is necessary to eliminate civil liberties and to cower even the corporate media in order to secure its grip on power. The Patriot Act, the detention of U.S. citizens with absolutely no civil rights, the virtually unrestricted surveillance of the internet and phone conversations--these are the opening salvos in the domestic war against all potential adversaries.
It is difficult to predict exactly where the international and domestic wars of the Bush administration will take the world. A war in Iraq will open a Pandora’s box. In the short term it appears the world is headed for a dreadful period of death and destruction. But given the fact that the Bush administration represents such a narrow unilateralist clique, there is every reason to believe that it will be consumed by its own war. Virtually the entire world is against the war in the Gulf, and there is no internal U.S. consensus supporting it as the demonstrations on January 18th in the United States verified. Opinion polls now indicate that 70 per cent of the U.S. people favor giving the United Nations team sufficient time to complete its inspections in Iraq that will extend into March or April.
As I said earlier, global capital needs stability and international institutions to flourish. These are the requisites for the expansion of markets and capital as well as the development of network technologies, the keys to globalization. International business will suffer a major shock with a new Gulf War. We already see the effects of the military buildup in the drop in stock market values around the world and the fall in the value of the dollar. Jeffery Sachs, one of the ideologues of neo-liberalism the 1990s, recently declared that a war in the Gulf would be a disaster for international business.
Given these realities, in the next two years it is likely that the United States itself will experience a major internal political crisis because the global and national consensus will be fractured by a new Gulf War. We are headed for a period akin to the domestic and international upheaval that occurred with the Vietnam War. That conflict lead to a political and cultural transformation of the United States and much of the world, not only due to the antiwar movement but also because of the growth of the civil rights and student movements and the upsurge of a new feminism.
Even before the launching of the new Gulf War we are already seeing the politicization of a new generation in the United States after a period of alienation and depoliticization in the 1990s. The new protest movement will spawn a broad rethinking of social, cultural and political norms that we do not yet fully understand or envision. Minimally it will compel us to realize that we can no longer depend on fossil fuels, that new energy technologies will have to be developed.
The aggression against Iraq also presents some important opportunities in Latin America, particularly South America. It is here that the major challenge to the paradigm of neo-liberalism is occurring in countries like Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and Ecuador. If it were not for its obsession with Iraq, the Bush administration would undoubtedly be playing a more interventionist role in Venezuela, and may have even moved against Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil.
This is the moment for Latin Americans to build a continental alliance among their peoples, and to collaborate with the social forces in the United States that have been mobilizing against globalization since the Battle of Seattle in 1999. We in the United States now more than ever need international solidarity, and Latin America can play a critical role in assisting the unfolding of the politics of confrontation within the United States. For more discussion on this article and to see what others have to say click on the link below to go to discussion forums.
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