The warfare state strikes in Iraq

WHY IS the U.S. waging war in the Gulf?

I THINK it's about several things. It's probably a mistake to focus on one motive. It's a series of inter-related complex reasons that have to be put in context together.

In not any particular order, certainly one factor is the eagerness of the U.S. to establish a military presence in the Middle East--particularly in the Persian Gulf region. I think that's been a consideration for U.S. policy since the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1970s.

The Shah was supposed to be our surrogate in the region, and when that collapsed, I think there was, for a while, the rather foolish notion that Israel could be the regional power that represented the interests of the U.S.

But as the current crisis makes clear, Israel can play no such role whatsoever because it would immediately alienate all of the Arab populations and most of their governments to have Israel actively and overtly representing U.S. interests in the region.

So I think the solution--it was decided a long time ago--was to find a proper pretext for establishing an American military presences, and my guess is that, despite President Bush's weird, ambiguous theme that the troops will not stay there "one day longer than is absolutely necessary," it'll turn out that they'll be there for a long time.

A second consideration is just the need that is perceived by our government to assert American military power every once in a while to keep our allies in line and to keep our adversaries intimidated.

It's a matter of needing to put on a display that we not only have the war machinery, but are willing to use it when the chips are down lest anybody get the idea that they can defy the U.S. and get away with it.

So the display of military power is supposed to impress our allies not to go their own way and to impress our adversaries not to pursue their own interests lest we, as one of the military briefers said recently, "squash them like cockroaches."

The third consideration is the oil in the region. I think it's a terrible oversimplification to say that this is a war for cheap oil. It's not a war for cheap oil. It's not a war for expensive oil. It's a war for determining who will control the oil.

Sometimes it's in the interests of the U.S. to have cheap oil. Sometimes it's in the interests of the U.S. to have expensive oil. It's always in the interests of the U.S. to have the prices and the supply controlled either by us, or by people like the Saudis and the Kuwaitis who do our bidding.

So when somebody like Saddam Hussein comes along and threatens to upset the apple cart, threatens to make his own independent judgments as to supply of oil and price of oil, that is judged to by a major threat to the U.S., to the economy of the U.S., to the interests of the U.S. anywhere in the world.

Because while oil is a critically important commodity, there are a whole lot of other commodities that we are also interested in controlling the supply and price of.

So again, one of the purposes of the war is to send a signal to everywhere in the Third World that people had better not try and control their own resources when the U.S. wants to control them.

And finally, of course, we have various domestic political, economic consideration--the need to the divert attention from the state of the economy, the savings and loan scandals, the whole process of making the government into an even more blatantly single-minded instrument for serving the rich and exploiting the poor, and the middle class, for that matter--than it already has been.

All those considerations come into play.

WHAT DO you think of Bush's talk of a "New World Order" an the use of the United Nations to solve international conflicts?

THE "NEW World Order"...it's a loathsome phrase. It conjures up images of Nazi Germany, of course. It's a repulsive bit of terminology.

The New World Order is the same old world order that might makes right and whoever has the most weaponry and the most technology is going to call the shots. What makes it a new world order in a sense is the collapse of the Soviets as a visible superpower, so that the U.S., once again, can think of itself in total charge.

The reason I say once again is because there was that mentality in Washington for a short period when we had the nuclear monopoly and when we thought the Russians would take a terribly long time to develop nuclear weapons--might never do it in fact--and that the U.S. therefore could arrange the world to its liking.

And then, of course, the Russians dispelled those illusions after a few years. The U.S. had to accommodate itself one way or another to a Soviet counterforce a Soviet counter-pressure.

In a way, while the end of the Cold War is a good thing for Americans and Soviets because it diminishes the likelihood that we will incinerate each other, it's really a terrible blow to much of the Third World because it removes that counterbalance of Soviet power so that the U.S. can now say, "There's nothing to stop us. We're going to have it all our way."

As for the United Nations, it's really a bit of scandalous hypocrisy to contend that the U.S. is acting at the behest of the UN. Since when does this country give a damn about the UN?

It was only within the last two years that the U.S. vetoed a resolution in the UN Security Council that would have criticized the U.S. for invading Panama. We didn't give a damn about the UN then.

When Nicaragua took the U.S. government to the World Court for mining Nicaraguan waters, the U.S. government simply declared that it didn't need to pay any attention to the World Court--that the World Court didn't have jurisdiction over us.

So this sudden obedience to the UN is a fraud. If the U.S. were interested in a world order based on UN resolutions, it would do something about the longstanding resolutions pertaining to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights. There is nothing that the U.S. feels obliged to do about those United Nations resolutions.

HOW DO you respond to Bush's claim that he is simply standing up to Saddam Hussein, a tyrant and dictator?

I THINK Saddam is a tyrant and a dictator. There are probably--I don't know--60 or 70 of them in the world today. Most of the world is run by tyrants and dictators. That's what governments are.

There's this horrible mockery of what ought to be civil discourse about the state of the world. There are tyrants and dictators on every continent on this planet, and most of them are friends and allies of the U.S. Many of them were put in power by the U.S. Most are maintained in power by the U.S.

Saddam used to be a friend and ally of the U.S. There are lots of aggressors in the world. And again, most of them are client states of the U.S. Morocco in the Western Sahara. Turkey in Northern Cypress. Syria in Lebanon. Israel in Lebanon. Indonesia in East Timor. And China in Tibet.

These are all examples of aggressive, barbarous occupations--in some cases, like Indonesia in East Timor, they're examples of genocide. And they're far worse than anything Saddam has done in Kuwait.

But the U.S. government doesn't get exercised about that. Most people, in fact, don't even know about these situations, because since our government doesn't choose to make a fuss over them, our press--our compliant press--doesn't make a fuss over them either.

ALMOST NO mainstream politician has taken a stand against the war. What do you think this says about the U.S. political system?

IT SAYS that the political system is bankrupt--morally, politically bankrupt.

The bankruptcy is particularly obnoxious when it comes to the Democratic Party. The Republicans are pretty much people who say what they believe in. They speak their minds and what they believe in may be offensive to you and me, but at least they're not trying to conceal it.

The Democrats, on the other hand...I think the most pathetic public performances I have witnessed since the crisis began was, first of all, the speech that House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) delivered as the official Democratic response to Bush's decision to send the troops last August, and then Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell's (D-Maine) response to President Bush's State of the Union address.

Both of those so-called responses were mealy-mouthed attempts to avoid controversy, to avoid picking a fight with the president, to go along with the program. There is no opposition in this country in the two major parties.

WHAT DO you think of the mainstream media's role in the crisis?

FIRST OF all, we shouldn't have idealistic expectations in the media at all. Unfortunately, a lot of people tend to see the media as quasi-public institutions, as if they were museums or parks or symphony orchestras. They're not. They're businesses. They're private businesses. They exist to turn a buck. They share the same interests that other huge corporate entities have--and most of them are huge corporate elites.

So I don't expect them to do any more for the public interest, so-called, than I would of any corporate entity. But even if their customary sorry performance is eclipsed by the enormity of their total failure to inform people when it comes to other issues that the government cloaks in that wonderfully vague phrase "national security."

When the government talks about national security, the people in the media who...[act as] media watchdogs suddenly become playful little puppies who like to roll over to have their bellies rubbed.

They [give play] to all of the nonsense and replay faithfully all of the propaganda. And they give up any pretense even of serving a higher purpose when it comes to informing the public.

HOW DO you think the war will affect U.S. political developments in the near future?

WITH THE reservation that I don't want to do any crystal ball-gazing, I would say that probably, the short-run effect of the war on the economy will be positive. The recession will probably be shorter than it would have been because of the war.

The long-term effects are quite a different matter, because all of the inherent contradictions and built-in failures of the economic system are going to exacerbate--are going to get worse over a period of time because of this war.

The warfare state will do here what it has always done everywhere else. It will destroy every vestige of democracy and every vestige of concern for the people who live in the country.

WHAT SHOULD we do to stop that?

ORGANIZE. MOBILIZE. March. Protest. Dissent. Resist. Dispel the myth that these destructive policies enjoy the support of most Americans. The only way of dispelling that myth is to be as visible and as voluble as possible in resistance.