[Marxism] Cyrus Bina on the causes of the war in Iraq

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(Thanks to Rakesh Bhandari for making this available.)

Journal of Iranian Research and Analysis, Vol. 20, No. 2, November 2004
The American Tragedy: The Quagmire of War, Rhetoric of Oil, and the 
Conundrum of Hegemony

Cyrus Bina University of Minnesota-Morris

?A foreign policy that is both immoral and unsuccessful is not simply 
stupid, it is increasingly dangerous to those who practice or favor it. 
That is the predicament that the United States now confronts.? Gabriel 
Kolko, Another Century of War? 2002, p. 138

Introduction The invasion of Iraq­and subsequent occupation of the country 
since March 2003­is a déjà vu in the context of the repeated attempts by 
the United Sates at turning back the clock of history in order to save her 
global hegemony. In this connection, the building of the so-called 
coalition, which was troublesome back in 1990, is now unworthy of the name, 
particularly in the view of the fact that neither the region?s friendliest 
(U.S.) client-states nor the spirited ?partners? of the exclusive 
imperialist club of the now defunct Pax Americana have had any desire to 
join the invasion. Britain, of course, has been an aberration in this and 
the previous Persian Gulf War. The mirror image of this adventurous 
undertaking has also revealed itself in the deepening of the differences in 
the United Nations? Security Council and the widening cleavage within the 
ranks of NATO itself. This, however, was not entirely unexpected, given the 
lingering global contradictions that were simmering long in the period 
between the quiet implosion of the Pax Americana in the late 1970s, and the 
disquiet implosion of Soviet Empire in the late 1980s. As it turned out, 
the objective conditions of the emerging international polity and 
subjective tendencies of American unilateralism did not find mutual 
congenial ground on the epochal plane of globalization. The loss of 
American hegemony prompted undisguised belligerence, culminating in 
outright aggression by the Bush administration. The war against the weak, 
symbolic enemy seemed inevitable.

I argue throughout this paper that the war-for-oil scenario is a misleading 
myth that contradicts globalization. First, it ignores the analytical 
periodization of oil into (1) an early period of cartelization, (2) the 
transitional period of 1950-1972, and (3) the era of globalization since 
the mid-1970s. Second, it overlooks the distinction between the cartelized 
regime of ?administrative pricing? and pricing according to the objective 
conditions and dynamics of global oil markets.4 Third, it neglects the 
nature of property relations in the industry and the resultant formation of 
differential oil rents in the newly found post-1974 oil crisis. Fourth, by 
focusing on OPEC alone, it discounts the pivotal role of the least 
productive U.S. oilfields that are the key to worldwide pricing of oil. 
Fifth, it is unaware of the fact that OPEC prices are constrained by the 
worldwide competitive spot (oil) prices, which makes OPEC oil rents subject 
to global competition. Finally, the war-for-oil scenario does not recognize 
that words such as ?access,? ?dependency,? ?control,? etc. have no place in 
the context of post-cartelized global oil industry. By rejecting the 
epiphenomenon of the war-for-oil scenario as the cause of American 
belligerence, this paper focuses on the epochal changes that in reality 
caused the eventual fall of American hegemony and the stubbornly 
reactionary behavior of the U.S. government against it. This diagnosis is 
far more relevant to the unilateralist U.S. actions against the global 
peace and stability than the flimsy, reductionist, and purported notion of 
the ?oil grab.?

full: http://www.marxmail.org/CyrusBina.pdf

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