New Imperialism and beyond

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(This article contains some interesting insights, but lapses into
reformist illusions about "old Europe" and multilateralism in the
conclusion.)

New Imperialism and beyond. Why the New Imperialism will fail and unseat
the Bush Administration?
Petri Minkkinen

After the shock of S-11-2001 terrorist attacks the administration of
George W. Bush launched a full scale global military operation
supposedly to deter and root out international terrorism. Peoples around
the world were shaken by the scale and arrogance of the attacks and by
the equally arrogant nature of the counter-attack of the Bush
administration. Immediately after the terror attacks many began to pose
irritating questions and observations on the nature of attacks[1]. It
seemed obvious that things were not necessarily as self-evident as
supposed by the mainstream media and political pundits. It also became
evident that a terror operation of this magnitude required a level of
skill, resources and planning no ordinary terrorist organization could
have possessed. Therefore some kind of backing by a state level actor
was evidently involved.

Two possibilities emerged out of this presupposition: either the act was
backed and/or ordered by an 'unfriendly' state supporting terrorist
activities, or the US government itself was or some 'friendly' states
were involved in one way or another. The Bush administration acted on
the mixed state-terrorist organization assumption: the attacks were
executed by a dangerous and skillful terrorist organization -al-Qaida
run and financed by Osama bin Laden- and one or several states hostile
to US interests supported the terrorists. There is also another
possibility: Bush administration or its ideologues preaching for the US
global supremacy knew about these attacks and did not act accordingly to
stop them. A more damaging, dangerous and demoralizing version of this
alternative -or subversive, if you wish- line of thought is that the
government, its ideological backers, some 'friendly' state or some other
actors connected to them were more directly involved with these cruel
acts. Be it as it may, this is the central question related to the
attacks and the world political events following them.

The article at hand does not try to resolve this still unanswered
question. Interesting as it is, the arguments presented here are
independent of this crucial question. They rest upon the assumption that
irrespective of the Bush administrations relationship to the attacks
proper, the New Right ideologues of The Project for the New American
Century (PNAC)[2] and its predecessors had planned for a heavy
militarization program and for the maintenance and enhancement of US
world supremacy -militarily, if necessary- well before the sad events of
S-11-2001. Interestingly enough, in a report published a year before the
attacks the PNAC makes itself a suspect. PNAC demanded a massive
rearmament program for the US militarily 'weakened' by the Clinton
administration. However, they expected that "the process of
transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be
a long one, absent some (sic) catastrophic and catalyzing event -like a
new Pearl Harbor"[3]. The purpose of this global exercise is to inhibit
the rise of any competing state or group of states capable of
challenging the US global hegemony. According to the century-old
geopolitical doctrines -adopted and updated by various key players in
the US foreign policy establishment and inside the PNAC- the control of
Eurasia or certain Central Asian countries would be essential for that
purpose. Direct or indirect control, for example, of the oil resources
would give the US ruling classes a possibility to exert control over the
future development of the European Union, Russia and China, not to
mention the Islamic countries of that area inhabited by "some stirred-up
Moslems"[4]. This control allied with a military presence in the region
would also allow the US to defend Israel, use the enduring
Israel-Palestine conflict as a test site for the latest military
technology and control the future development of the Middle-East and
Eastern Mediterranean in general. Intellectual grounds for the direct or
indirect control of the area in question was prepared during the 1990's
by varying actors, such as the pro-imperialist PNAC or pro-hegemony
scholars like Samuel "Clash of Civilizations" Huntington and Zbigniew
"Trilateral Commission" Brzezinski who hold a more cooperative and more
pro-transnational capitalism stance[5].

full: http://www.hapress.com/haol.php?a=n04a07

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