[A-List] Re: Chalmers Johnson on "blowback"

[Mark Jones <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[forward from China-meister John Gulick. I find this very helpful. Is
Yoshie subbed here btw? I very much hope so, she ought to be here.
Mark]

Yoshie wrote:

What makes the current development critical for US and other leftists
is that the United States may be embarking upon an endless war after
it has lost its post-war economic supremacy in large part due to
economic competitiveness of the very social forces -- German and
Japanese ruling classes and power elites, many of whom rehabilitated
fascists and war criminals and their proteges -- that it aided for
the purpose of creating an anticommunist empire. In other words, the
economic foundations of the US empire -- now the world's largest
debtor nation -- have become fragile, likely incapable of
withstanding the costs and consequences of an endless war that the
faction of its elite currently in power appear to be determined to
pursue, in the midst of global economic downturns, no less.

I now write:

Bingo, the upcoming conflagration in Iraq and surrounding countries is more
about renewed inter-imperialist rivalry -- not just unalloyed U.S.
imperialism -- than anything else. Or perhaps I should say (attempted)
unalloyed U.S. imperialism in response to renewed inter-imperialist
rivalry. (The U.S. left would be well advised to keep in mind the
dialectial interplay between the two, rather than just the sheer menace of
U.S. hegemonism, sheer menace though it may be.) As others have sagely
pointed out, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, and gang are not "mad,"
nor are they mere handservants of U.S. hydrocarbon capital. A unilateral
invasion of Iraq is a calculated gamble to retain and strengthen U.S. "full
spectrum dominance," one made more urgent by the bursting of first the
dot-com bubble, second the Wall Street bubble, and now the dollar bubble.
(BTW, the Pentagon has favored the post-Cold War "full spectrum dominance"
doctrine for more than a decade. Permanent stagnation in Japan, German
adjustment to reunification and EMU, and eight years of Clintonian liberal
internationalism put it on the back burner for a while, but it's not as if
it's a spontaneous product of the current conjuncture).

Securing oil field claims and drilling rights for ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco
(or is that TexacoChevron ?), Halliburton, and so on are small potatoes
(_contra_ the conventional wisdom of some on the left). What really matters
is brokering these claims and rights to Russian, French, Chinese, et. al.
firms, and the leverage the power to broker gives the U.S. state (acting
largely on behalf of U.S. big capital) on a host of other geoeconomic (and
geopolitical) fronts -- the Doha round, the row over steel tarrifs and farm
subsidies, the WTO ruling
against bonuses to overseas affiliates of U.S. TNC's, the unwillingness of
the sclerotic LDP to euthanize ailing banks and firms, China's mercantilist
implementation of WTO rules and regs, tentative EU moves toward an
independent defense policy and security instrument, etc., etc., etc.. Also,
what matters is a (hypothetically) pliant Iraq acting as the swing producer
in the world oil market, nudging Saudi Arabia to reconvert its "petroeuros"
into petrodollars.

The prospect of UN Security Council approval of a military invasion of Iraq
is something of a disaster for Bush and company. It necessarily means the
kind of vote-buying which defeats most of the purposes of a military
invasion in the first place. But a bigger disaster is the resumption of
weapons inspection without a "tough new" mandate attached that Saddam
cannot but fail (because he will refuse inspection of presidential sites as
a fatal violation of Irai soverignty and his regime's stature). Undesirable
though it may be, Bush and company would far rather cut deals with France,
China, and Russia (and TotalFinaElf, SinoPec, and Yukos) than have UNOSCOM
certify a clean bill of health for Saddam. Ironically, even though the
inter-imperialist intrigue has little or nothing to do with WMD, the
current fracas over resumption of weapons inspection seems pretty crucial.
If no "tough new" UN resolution is forthcoming, then Bush and company will
have to go in very soon (before Saddam passes UN muster), risking partial
loss of legitimacy on the home front (since the domestic propaganda
campaign has been predicated on the WMD angle).

In my puny opinion, though, the biggest stumbling block for Bush and
company will be selecting an Iraqi client government which can at one
and the same time a) keep the lid on Kurdish and Shia independence
movements, b) apportion exploration claims and drilling rights in a
reasonably coherent fashion (i.e. a relative absence of back-door
corruption that does not conform to U.S. imperialist aims), and c)
accomplish a) and b) in a manner that doesn't make imperialism's professed
sympathies for the welfare of ordinary Iraqis appear as hollow as they
truly are. Good luck, guys.

(My apologies for the pedantic-sounding nature of this message. Basically,
I'm working through some of these ideas out loud).

John Gulick

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