PEN-L message, Re: Beyond Quagmire

There is one outstanding reason why the US went to war and that is control of oil and to secondary degree oil per se. Now control comes as it has been in the gulf way before the end of the cold war, a strong military presence, i.e. Saudi had 20,000 US military experts on average for a long time. Further control into Iraq and Iran means at least in part an extension of the Saudi model. The purpose of course is 'dynamic' extortion of others in the imperialist camp. But let me stop slightly at the word dynamic and qualify it so as to mean calibrating the amount control and violence together to the highest rate of accruing imperial rents, part of which-and only part, is of course the daily inflow of world capital into the coffers of empire. Now there are other views, but tensions in the near east are key to global instability, a matter which feeds neatly into militarism and of the US type in particular, upon which of course a host of other rents follow including reverse flows from around the globe into the most powerful nation. So now let us think of this as a system where if the US wants to keep growing in the way it did before, a reflection of which is so-called global imbalances, then it will need to instigate more tensions and move in more troops into strategic areas depending on the metabolism of its mode of capital accumulation. hence, the deeper the dependency of American capital on imperial rents as opposed or distinguished from pure home grown economic muscle, the more it will have to infuse a certain degree of near east tensions and move troops in. I think one should eavesdrop on the novel necessities of American capital accumulation and not the hubris of selling democracies abroad. The process is dynamic and imperialism can only reproduce the killing fields.

----- Original Message ----
From: Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>
To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 6:41:43 PM
Subject: Re: Beyond Quagmire

what's important is that just because X (destruction of Iraq as a
social entity) results doesn't mean that X was the prior goal of the
US elite. Even the most powerful country in the world doesn't always
get what it wants. "Even the president of the United States sometimes
has to stand naked."

On 3/14/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 3/14/07, Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On 3/13/07, soula avramidis <soulaavramidis2002@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Nothing can be further from the truth.. The US went to war to completely
> > > destroy Iraq as a social and political entity, and it did. That is the
> > > ultimate victory: pulling out or, staying in, is just a mere detail.
> >
> > the US went to war to destroy Iraq as a "social entity"? I doubt it.
> > Did the US elite want an area in the world which -- like Somalia --
> > represents a Hobbesian war of each against all which can harbor al
> > Qaeda and spawn new (retail) terrorist movements, along with perhaps
> > some unexpected anti-US movement? (For example, the US did not expect
> > the Taliban to arise from Afghan chaos.) No, the US power elite wants
> > law & order (the preservation of their property and class privileges).
> >
> > IMHO, the US goals were:
> > 1. strategic control over Iraqi oil and over a country with a very
> > strategic location in the most oil-rich region of the world.
> > 2. destruction of Saddam Hussein, including his opposition to Israel.
> > 3. creation of a "friendly" state in that area.
> > 4. maybe some others...
>
> I agree with Jim, but we can't totally discount a possibility that,
> for at least some of the power elite involved in selling the war to
> the American public, (2) trumped everything else and even "to
> completely destroy Iraq as a social and political entity" was an
> acceptable means for that purpose and still is, for, if Iraq remains a
> coherent social and political entity, Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism
> (or another ideology equally opposed to Israel) may rise in the
> future, though most in Washington probably had more rational economic
> and geopolitical goals in mind.
> --
> Yoshie
>

--
Jim Devine / "The truth is more important than the facts." -- Frank Lloyd Wright