The Organization for Democratic Action

(Da'am in Arabic)

From Challenge # 78  March-April 2003

The road won't stop at Baghdad

A New and Dangerous Era

Yacov Ben Efrat 

THE COLLAPSE of the Soviet Union in 1990 opened a series of wars, first in the Persian Gulf (1991), then in the Balkans (1995). Now comes a new one, again in the Gulf, but it is different. If it occurs (and by the time you read these words, it may be underway) it will take place against the will of the world, as expressed by ten million demonstrators on February 15. It will also take place against the will of key states in the UN Security Council.

Why is US President George W. Bush so keen on this war? Some say oil is the answer. It is indeed important to a nation that consumes a fourth of the world's supply. But Bush's America wants more than Iraqi oil. It wants absolute control over all of the globe's resources – other peoples be damned. That is the long and short of it.

There is a world of difference between the present Iraqi regime and the Spanish republic of the 1930's. Yet the conquest of Iraq is likely to open the door to a new fascist order, this time under US leadership. To Adolph Hitler, the Spanish republic provided a test case for his own ambitions, showing him whether the rest of the world had the will to unite against Fascism. The fall of Spain gave Hitler a green light for expansion. So too, a victory over Iraq will not end in Baghdad. In order to shore up its influence, the American regime will need further "victories" in additional Arab capitals – and then, who knows? We stand today before events that will open a new historical period and establish a new international order.

The ruling conception in the White House is a dangerous mix of raw capitalism, military pushiness and messianic ideology. The Bush Administration has appointed itself to defend the world against Evil by imposing American values, presumably democratic, on the rest of the nations. The Administration's contempt for Europe derives from its belief that America saved that continent's western half from Nazism and its eastern half from Communism. These putative achievements are supposed to form a basis for claiming special rights worldwide. 

The combination of politics and religion is dangerous. One finds the same kind of mix in the fundamentalist Islamic movements and in Zionism. It is even more dangerous, however, when backed by America's enormous military and economic power.

The ideology of the White House is quite openly expressed in several documents, including Rebuilding America's Defenses, published in September 2000 (See "Sowing the Whirlwind", Challenge # 76). We may summarize the doctrine as follows: The fall of the Soviet Union left the US as the sole superpower. After Democrat Bill Clinton won the presidency, however, there was a severe decline in America's status and power of deterrence. Clinton attempted to achieve his goals by diplomatic means. Thus, he projected an image of moderation and weakness. In contrast, the forgers of the new Bush policy (led by Vice President Dick Cheney) understand that the US needs to develop its military superiority. Unlike Clinton, they support an increase in the defense budget. They see themselves, to some extent, as heirs of the Reagan Administration, which stoked up the arms race beyond the Soviet ability to compete. That victory is proof, they believe, that Reagan's approach was correct. In terms of today's world, they translate it into a doctrine of pre-emptive war. They deem it their right to nip in the bud any power that might conceivably grow to the point where it could threaten American interests. 

This policy was already formulated on September 11, 2001, but the attacks of that day enabled the White House to implement it, masking its imperialism under the title of a war against terrorism. To this end, the Administration has made use of a range of propaganda techniques, familiar since the Nazi era. It invents non-existent dangers, lies systematically, and whips up fear.

In the eyes of the Bush Administration, the worldwide popular opposition to the war merely goes to show that America under Clinton lost its status. The world, they believe, is returning them evil for good, denigrating their values and refusing to recognize their sacred global mission. They think they can restore the lost prestige by force. Thus, paradoxically, the demonstrations push the ruling junta ever closer to war. Even in the teeth of protest, it is determined to topple Saddam. It seeks to nullify the anti-war movement by the act of war itself, using its unparalleled might against a weak and poverty-stricken country.   

Behind the messianic ideology are  interests of a more material nature: The huge economic firms are indeed under threat – not from al-Qaeda and not from Iraq, rather from the inner contradictions of monopoly Capitalism: sagging demand, massive debt, and speculation run rife. As a driver of growth, high technology has not taken up the slack where the post-war boom of the 50's and 60's left off. Thus, the world shows no sign of emerging from the recession that set in after the collapse of the high-tech index, NASDAQ, in March 2001. The slump affects all countries, developed and undeveloped – from the US, Japan and Germany to Argentina, Brazil and Turkey.

Today the big firms hope that war will somehow allay the problems governments failed to solve by playing with the interest rate, cutting taxes and reducing budgets. They see the conquest of Iraq as their last best chance. They push the war with all their might, despite the risk that instead of solving the economic crisis, they will add to it an enormous human catastrophe.

Israel wants the war

The events of September 11 enabled Israel, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, to draw an analogy between the Intifada and terrorism. It hoped that the world, especially Bush, would accept its actions with greater understanding. It could now exploit the Palestinian suicide bombings as a pretext for invading the Occupied Territories, nullifying an entire people's right to self-determination.

The group that presently rules the US sees things eye-to-eye with the Likud, and especially Binyamin Netanyahu, who enjoys excellent relations with the Republican Party. Guided by right-wing advisers Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Eliot Abrams, this clique staunchly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state and the recognition of national Palestinian rights. It sees the Oslo Accords as a further proof of America's weakness under Clinton.

Bush's refusal to meet Arafat, then, is not just tactical. Many of those surrounding the president, Perle included, view the West Bank as an inseparable part of Israel. That is why the Bush Administration, for the present, refrains from pressing Sharon to dismantle the settlements. The president's "vision" of June 24 demands that the Palestinians reform their government and institutions – and stop terrorism – before requiring Israel to do anything. Bush assumes, as a cornerstone of policy, Israeli strategic superiority over the Palestinians and the Arabs as a whole.

Israel's Labor Party supports the Bush vision, although this is far to the right of the Clinton Plan, which Labor supported since the time of Yitzhak Rabin. The party's spinelessness, in this regard, derives from a structural flaw in the whole of Israeli politics. Israel insists on maintaining its Jewish majority. It is non-egalitarian in principle, or in other words, racist. It can only survive in such an anachronistic position through the support of a major power, i.e., America. No Zionist party, Labor included, can ever take a public position against the US.  

If the war on Iraq has become a White House necessity, it has become, by force of the parasitic relation, a necessity for Israel too. Most Arab leaders shake in their boots about the internal and external problems that this war may arouse, but the only worry in Tel Aviv is that it might not occur. The absence of war would leave the country stuck in its chronic problems: deteriorating security and a crumbling economy. Israel depends on the war, besides, for the $12 billion in extra American aid that it expects in return for its good behavior. Meanwhile it waits, and waiting is expensive: according to the Association of Industrialists in Israel, every day spent in expectation of war costs the economy half a billion shekels (about $100 million) in lack of investment and lack of activity.

All Israel's parties agree that the renewal of economic growth depends on political progress with the Palestinians. This progress, the Zionist parties believe, will be achieved through the shock therapy of war. Sharon and other Israeli leaders have voiced their hope that the toppling of Saddam will demoralize the Palestinians, so that it will be easy to engineer a coup in the Palestinian Authority, quench the Intifada, and reach a quick agreement based on the Bush conception. Such an agreement will not be stable, however, as long as Lebanon remains under Syrian influence – and its southern part under the redoubtable Hizballah. The war plans, therefore, include side excursions. Israel looks for a change of policy, or regime, in Damascus. The result should be something like Shimon Peres' map of the new Middle East, but with a difference: instead of drawing the map by economic conquest, as Peres and Clinton intended, Bush and Sharon will use missiles and tanks.

Will the war be short and sweet?

It is difficult to prophesy the outcome of the war, but this much can be said: anyone who thinks that military force can solve the complex situation we live in, both globally and regionally, is far off the mark. We don't know how much resistance the Iraqi regime can put up, or whether it will crumble at once. The international economic and political conditions, however, leave little doubt that force will only increase the chaos.

The Bush Administration views itself, we have noted, as the heir of Reagan's, which initiated the program known as Star Wars in order to exhaust and eliminate the Soviet Union. Yet the latter did not collapse merely because of Star Wars. There were many other historical factors that caused the failure of the first large scale socialist experiment. On the political plane, the Soviet Communist Party, which ruled alone, gradually lost contact with the mass of the people. On the social plane, after World War II there developed a large middle class, driven by personal ambitions that had little to do with the socialist approach. This class wanted a consumer society as in the West. The Soviet economy could not fulfill these demands, and it stood, therefore, under criticism from the Right. On the economic plane, the leadership had neither the ability nor the political will to extricate the economy from the deep freeze into which it had entered because of a top-heavy bureaucracy. The Soviet regime concentrated enormous projects in its hands, like the space program, which had propaganda value but provided little basis for growth.

It was not chiefly Reagan, then, who defeated the Soviet Union, rather that country's own leadership, which lost the ability to inspire the people and to govern by democratic principles. Today, in contrast, it is the United States that has gradually lost its ability to lead. Like the Soviets in the past, so America seeks to solve its problems by means of tanks, rather than by treating their causes.

The world gave the US a golden opportunity, after the Gulf War of 1991, to usher it to the Promised Land. Expectations were high that the end of the Cold War would lead to widespread economic cooperation among all the nations of the world, opening a future of plenty for the poor and the underdeveloped.

The Middle East was the region where the "New World Order" was to begin. Most of the Arab countries jumped on the peace bandwagon, moving toward normalization of relations with Israel, in order to benefit from American aid. The entire world, and especially Europe, recognized America's right to determine the fate of the Middle East and its oil fields.

Ten years later, where is the "New World Order"? After warmly embracing the dictates of international financial institutions, the Arab states and others today face economic crisis and massive unemployment. They ask today, and rightly so, what good can there be in yet another war against Iraq?

Accordingly, anyone who wants to prophesy what will be the shape of the post-war world must take the broad view, embracing a whole historical period. An immediate victory over Iraq may be quite misleading. Consider, for example, Israel. It triumphed over the Arab states in 1967, and what did it get? The popular Intifada twenty years later, and now a second Intifada, which has degenerated into chaos – but a chaos that reaches into Israel itself, in the form of suicide attacks. Or take the US. It beat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and what did it get? The first suicide attackers on its own soil, whose leaders it itself had equipped against the Soviets in Afghanistan! No war can solve the problems that give rise to it, and he who wins by force in the short run receives force back in the long.

The split in NATO

The rupture between France and the US over Iraq is without doubt a historical event unprecedented since the end of the Second World War. This is a new kind of schism, whose cause lies in the deep differences that France and Germany have with the Bush Administration's economic and security policies. The major European states understand that the war against Iraq is no local conflict. It will not be just another of the seventy putsches carried out by the CIA. They understand that for America, the war on Iraq is intended to open up another world, in which Europe will have no place.

The schism has struck the heart of Europe itself, after the US brought into its camp a number of European states in addition to Britain, including Italy and Spain. The division reflects basic political differences within Europe. Silvio Berlusconi expresses a fascistic current in Italy, and the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, also tends to the right. Thus, we can understand their alliance with the right-wing Bush Administration, as against more moderate states like France and Germany.

The US has not contented itself, however, with mobilizing members of the European Common Market. It has also brought in former members of the Warsaw Pact, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. These countries have flung themselves at the feet of American capital, yielding to the dictates of the International Monetary Fund. On the one hand, they want to join the European Union and pluck its economic fruits. On the other, they have become, in the words of France's president, an "American Trojan horse in the heart of Europe."

Europe has united around a new currency, aiming to establish a huge economic bloc to compete with the US dollar. Now, however, it has split on the issue of Iraq. America, for its part, opposes the rise of any independent bloc than can compete with her. America wants Europe to understand that the rules which obtained in the Cold War must remain in force, despite the fact that the Soviet Union no longer exists. 

The events of 9/11 showed many Europeans that America's foreign policy had failed. Instead of treating crises in a balanced fashion, the US had opened the door to chaos: in Afghanistan, for instance, it had supported the triangle of the Taliban, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

This unbalanced American policy ended in a reversal of roles, when the US turned to Europe for help in its war against terrorism. According to the European view, America brought these troubles on its own head – and then asked the world to help foot the bill.

Ill feeling, then, was already in the background when Washington decided to go after Iraq. Its broad coalition then began to break up – and with it, NATO. Nor is it only Europe that takes an independent stance: even the Arab states have begun to criticize American policy. Bush wants to end a state of affairs where public opinion determines the political agendas of foreign regimes. He saw how it did so in the Clinton era, for example, when the Arab world kept Arafat from signing a peace treaty at Camp David. It did so again, more recently, in Germany, where Gerhard Schroeder plucked victory from the jaws of defeat by pushing an anti-war position. The White House believes that if it defeats Iraq, a frightened world will once more huddle under America's aegis.

These differences are deep, but we ought not to overestimate their importance. Capitalist Europe is not prepared to take responsibility for global security. One reason for its argument with America is its unwillingness to enlarge defense expenditures at the expense of welfare budgets. This angers the Americans. In their eyes, Europe wants to have a part in the global order without dirtying its hands. The differences came to a head when the US decided to firm up its role as world policeman without taking French or German interests into account.

We should not expect too much, therefore, from French or German opposition. Once the war is over, neither will be willing to stay on the sidelines. The Saudi ambassador to the US said much the same, when he advised the Arab states to think about "the day after".

The worldwide movement against the war

If Bush's warmongering has had one good result, it is in the protest movement it has provoked, which is without precedent. What makes it special is the fact that it has arisen in such massive proportions before the war, united in its position and in the message it proclaims. Coordinated among dozens of nations, the movement is internationalist in the full sense of the word.

The importance of this movement lies not, so far, in the pressure it puts on the Bush Administration (this pressure, we have seen, has an opposite effect). Its importance may be seen if we look in another direction. The West has long remained indifferent to the deterioration of the underdeveloped nations. This indifference has made it easy for Osama Bin Laden and other Islamic extremists to turn to the nations of the third world and arouse them against the West, summoning them to holy war (jihad). Now, however, the indifference is broken. The demonstrations of the millions against Bush's war are showing the peoples of the weaker nations that there are those in the West who care.

The anti-war movement continues that against globalization. The latter developed against the background of the economic crisis that began five years ago in Southeast Asia, spreading to the shores of America itself. It found nourishment in the repulsion felt by the peoples of the world toward the US and its aggressive capitalism.

The movement against globalization was made up of anarchists, the radical left and non-governmental organizations (NGO's). No clearly defined program unites these groups; they merely agree on their common enemy: the international financial institutions. The movement made a false distinction between these institutions and the American administration, which dictates their policies. At times, some parts of the anti-globalization movement (those who sought reforms within the system) even engaged in a kind of courtship with the capitalist regimes, for example with that of Clinton, who "understood" their demands.

The weakness of the anti-globalization movement lay in its encouragement of social pluralism at the expense of the common political denominator. This encouragement was part of a philosophy that despises politics and political parties, seeing the latter as anachronistic and top-heavy. The movement fought against the big multinationals, but not against the political hegemony that enables them to exploit the greater part of the world. Its non-political tendency made it amorphous. It stressed the importance of "civil society", while underplaying that of parties. This lent it an air of artificiality. The protest and anger were real, but the movement chose not to translate them into a political force that could threaten the existing order.

The non-political phase of the worldwide protest movement reached its peak at the Porto Alegre Conference in 2001. The convergence of 60,000 people from all over the world was indeed impressive, but the avoidance of united political action left the movement toothless. When Bush set out to fight "terrorism" (that is, whatever might threaten America's dominance over the world), the issue of war and peace became central. It marginalized the NGO's and the anarchists, who do not have the political structures to cope with it.

The turning point came in Firenze, on November 9, 2002, when what started as the "Conference for a Different Europe" turned into a huge anti-war demonstration. This happened despite the conference's program, which dealt with many issues – environmental, civil, economic and social – but deliberately avoided focusing on any one thing. Then came the demonstration. Organized mainly by the Italian trade unions and Rifondazione (the new Italian Communist Party), it was focused indeed. It set itself the single goal of stopping Bush. Since then, the prevention of war has become the steady aim, drawing not only the opponents of globalization, but millions of new members.

Yet while the anti-war movement has gained in political weight, it remains in the realm of protest. It organizes ad hoc demonstrations against the threat of war, but it has not prepared itself for "the day after", when the political structures that engender war will still be in place.

The worldwide Left has awakened from a very long sleep. It sets out to fight George Bush, but without the backing of a solid counterforce. Going into the streets is not enough. Against world public opinion, no matter how determined it may be, stands an Administration armed to the teeth, waving the banner of militant Capitalism. What force can pit itself against this power? There is, first, enormous potential in the people of the trade unions, who could refuse to operate the war economy. In addition, demonstrators will need to organize in political parties that can challenge and replace the current regimes. We cannot turn Schroeder, Chirac, and Putin into our leaders. We need a socialist program that will replace the profit-motive with the common good – not the illusory welfare of the few European states, but a good that is founded on new economic principles, by which the use of raw materials and the planning of labor power will take place democratically for the sake of all human beings.   n