------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Oct. 4, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
BUSH, CAPITALISM, AND THE WAR CRISIS By Fred Goldstein As the people in the United States try to recover from the horrendous destruction of thousands of lives in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration is working overtime. It is using the suffering of the victims as a pretext to drum up war fever and prepare the groundwork for thousands more deaths in the Middle East--and probably among the workers in this country. Bush and the Pentagon are using so-called war powers to mobilize aircraft carriers, cruise missile destroyers and B- 52 bombers and to call up thousands of reservists for military intervention. Only Barbara Lee, a Black woman representing the district that includes Oakland, Calif., cast a heroic "no" vote in Congress. They are carrying out the war drive in the name of rooting out terrorism and protecting the people of the U.S. But, in truth, this leap toward militarism is doing precisely the opposite. Washington is preparing a civil war and air strikes in Afghanistan that will kill untold numbers of civilians. Already a million and a half impoverished Afghani people have been converted into refugees, desperately fleeing the anticipated U.S. air attacks. The bombing of Afghanistan will not bring back the victims of the Sept. 11 attack. High officials in Washington and former government officials regard this bombing as the first step in a much broader military campaign. Those who prepare the public for what the Pentagon may do talk about "getting" Iraq, Sudan and Syria. It is likely that the vast majority of the people of the Middle East were horrified by the Sept. 11 attack. Either they opposed the death of so many innocent civilians, a fate with which they are very familiar, or they could see that the U.S. government would use this as a way to threaten all Arab people, or both. But as much as they may have opposed the attack, they are even more opposed to the U.S., the British, the French and all the NATO imperialist countries coming into the area and causing even more death and suffering. These world powers have dominated the countries of the region for over a century, and it is already too long. They know of the thousands of Palestinians who have been killed resisting Israeli occupation. They know of the million-plus Iraqis who have died because of U.S.-imposed UN sanctions. They know Washington supported an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that killed 17,500 people in Beirut alone. Indeed, the history of the Middle East is one of being tortured by Western powers. This slaughter goes all the way back to the mid-19th Century, when 125,000 Egyptian workers died building the Suez Canal under the whip of French colonialism. The people of the region may not endorse the Sept. 11 attack. But they will surely resist a new wave of Western military intervention aimed at all the states in the region that displease Washington, London, Paris and Berlin. They will eventually oppose the local regimes imposed on them, such as the feudal Saudi oil monarchy. This clique sits on vast petroleum reserves tapped by U.S. oil companies for super-profits. They have turned the land into an outpost of the Pentagon. The people will eventually resist the conservative pro-U.S. Cairo regime that has protected Western corporations and capitalism in Egypt. And they will continue the struggle against the oppressive, colonial Israeli occupation. OIL--THE PRIZE Such a situation has the potential to lead to a vast war in the Middle East. In such a war, workers from the U.S. will eventually be called on to kill and be killed. This war will not be against "terrorism" but to protect the financial interests of the rich in the Western imperialist countries. Bush's latest war moves are just the beginning of a process that has no end. There is only one way to secure peace and protect the genuine interests of the U.S. workers. That is to withdraw U.S. forces from the Middle East and let the peoples of the region control their own resources and determine their own destiny. The other way leads to endless war and death for capitalist profit. The Bush administration's response to the Sept. 11 attack can only be understood in terms of the long-standing interests and strategy of the U.S. and European corporate oil and banking elite that dominates the region-Exxon/Mobil, Texaco, British Petroleum, French oil companies and Royal Dutch Shell. Oil is not only the lifeblood of industrial society. It is the source of super-profits and military strength. The oil magnates have forced this situation upon society. They have blocked all alternative forms of energy. They cannot own the sun, the wind, nor the hydrogen in the air-all technologically possible alternatives to fossil fuels. But none of these alternative fuels lend themselves to private ownership and super-profits. As long as they can have a stranglehold on oil--until they are forced out--the oil magnates will never let the Middle East be in peace. According to the Oil and Gas Journal and World Oil, two principal industry research organs, the proven oil reserves in the world came to approximately 1 trillion barrels as of Jan. 1, 2000. This doesn't include future discoveries that are expected to be much larger. Of these 1 trillion barrels, anywhere from 630 to 675 billion barrels are in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Add to that the 30 billion barrels in Libya and the oil reserves in this area of U.S. military, political and economic domination come close to 70 percent of the world's total. In addition, the earth has 5 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, of which 2 quadrillion are in the same region. This is significant because of technological leaps made recently in the use of natural gas. PENTAGON IN THE PERSIAN GULF The frenzy of the Bush administration and the capitalist establishment about a war on terrorism has to be seen in the light of their historic political and military objectives. Consider the military terror that the peoples in the Persian Gulf have been under. According to the New York Times, there were extensive U.S. forces in the region prior to Sept. 11. The Navy had 20,000 personnel and two aircraft carrier battle groups with 70 aircraft. In Saudi Arabia there are 5,200 U.S. troops, mainly from the Air Force, with Patriot missiles, F-15, F-16 and F-117 fighter planes, U-2 spy planes and AWACS flying command posts. In Kuwait there are 4,800 troops from the Army and Air Force plus a prepositioned, reinforced brigade with two tank battalions, a mechanized infantry battalion and an artillery battalion. Bahrain houses 1,000 personnel, mostly naval, and is the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet. In Turkey, 2,000 troops, mostly from the Air Force, are stationed at a base used to fly over Iraq with F-15 and F-16 fighters. Other U.S. forces are spread around the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and, in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia. Altogether the U.S. has 30,000 troops, massive numbers of aircraft, missiles, artillery and bases for rapid deployment in the region. These forces were already there before the current crisis. They threatened the people on a 24-hour-a-day basis lest anyone in the region did anything to jeopardize the vast oil, financial and militarily strategic interests of the U.S. Now they are being vastly increased. KISSINGER ON RULING-CLASS AIMS The dangers of the Bush adventure were made clear by Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state, who appeared on a special panel on Fox TV at 10 p.m. on Sept. 21, along with a number of other former government officials. Kissinger summed up his thinking about the present situation. This "could be a turning point," he said, comparable to the "defeat of communism in the Soviet Union," in that it held out the prospect of the "defeat of terrorism on a global basis." During the Vietnam War, Kissinger threatened the Vietnamese numerous times with nuclear annihilation. He was the architect of the Chilean military coup d'etat by General Augusto Pinochet on Sept. 11, 1973. In that coup, thousands of revolutionaries, progressives and liberals were summarily killed or "disappeared." To Kissinger, as to his colleagues in the capitalist government hierarchy, "terror" and "anarchy" apply to any force that resists the domination of the U.S. multinational corporations and banks and the Pentagon. Such a definition could easily be extended to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. It could be extended to the liberation fighters in Colombia trying to rid the people of a reactionary government that countenances death squads. It could be extended to the people of Puerto Rico, should they escalate their struggle to get the U.S. military out of Vieques or to gain national independence. Cuba, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Libya are also included on the U.S. government's official "terrorist" list. All the claims of the Bush administration and the capitalist establishment about fighting "a war against terrorism" must be understood in the context of the multi-trillion-dollar interests of the rich corporate ruling class in controlling the world. WHO WILL HELP THE WORKERS? If the workers watch carefully what Washington is doing instead of just what it is saying, they will get a truer picture of how the bosses are handling the economic dislocation that coincides with this capitalist war crisis. The airline industry has announced 100,000 layoffs. What did Congress do about it? It held a hearing on Sept. 18 where the companies demanded $24 billion in direct aid and loan guarantees. So Congress bailed out the airline bosses, not the laid-off workers. There was not a word about who is going to help the laid-off workers pay their home and credit card loans, keep food on the table, and maintain some semblance of normal economic life. Congress has not yet decided how much to give, but the latest number is $15 billion. Many of these layoffs were planned before Sept. 11, as the recession deepened. But the best the government will do for the workers is to possibly speed up their unemployment insurance. We'd like to see the bosses live on unemployment insurance instead of the millions of dollars they all saved up during this last boom. In addition, no one in the capitalist establishment has called for emergency aid to the untold hundreds of thousands laid off in the wake of this crisis. Boeing alone has announced 30,000 layoffs. Many thousands more worked in medium and small businesses that were already in trouble and went over the edge after Sept. 11. In a $10-trillion economy, the government has found no room for instant, massive emergency aid to the masses of people to keep them afloat. But Alan Greenspan, chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, stepped in within days to aid the bankers and Wall Street traders. According to the Oct. 1 edition of Business Week, "the Fed pumped tens of billions into the money markets. ... The cash deluge peaked on Sept. 14, when the Fed flooded the banking system with $81.25 billion-many times the $5 billion or so it normally adds." Several hundred billion dollars were made available to the bankers, but the more than 7 million people officially unemployed as the result of the already existing recession and those additional workers unemployed because of the attack do not qualify for emergency aid. MILITARY AWASH WITH FUNDS According to the Sept. 22 New York Times, even as the attacks have "sent the stock market plummeting and caused havoc for much of American business, prospects for the military industrial complex are looking stronger than ever. "Overnight," continued the Times, "political opposition in Congress to huge increases in Pentagon spending has vanished, along with concerns about dipping into the surplus of Social Security funds." Congress gave the Pentagon a quick $33 billion with promises of more. This clearly was aimed at grabbing funds from the people's pensions to line the pockets of the military contractors. "The service chiefs and senior lawmakers," said the Times, "will probably want to spend those funds on favored weapons programs, like Boeing's F-18 E and F fighters, United Defense's Crusader artillery system, and Northrop Grumman and General Dynamic's DD-21 stealth destroyer. It will not matter if those systems are not clearly useful in the war on terrorism." Bush has said he is going to wage war to "save our way of life." But this society is a divided society. It is divided into oppressor and oppressed peoples. It is also divided into classes--workers and bosses, exploiters and exploited. NATIONAL, CLASS DIVISIONS PREVAIL There is no one way of life. If you are Black, Latino, Asian, Native or, especially now, Middle Eastern, you suffer racism, police brutality, incarceration, discrimination of all types. If you are one of the 50 million people who live in poverty or at the near-poverty level, you have a way of life that means just trying to survive. But if you are one of the tiny minority of the super rich, a Wall Street speculator, a banker or a major stockholder or CEO, your hardships are different. You might have to postpone buying another Mercedes or toning down a renovation on a mansion. You might even have to sell a few million shares of stock to cover your losses. This crisis has brought out the capitalist nature of this society. It has underlined capitalism's warlike nature abroad and its cruelty at home. The people want and need peace. Peace can only be won if U.S. forces get out of the Middle East. The workers and the oppressed communities need an immediate end to their growing economic crisis at home. That can't be done by using the vast wealth and resources at the disposal of society to bail out the airline bosses. It can't be done by handing over hundreds of billions behind closed doors to the bankers and money managers, or by giving it to the Pentagon and the military corporations for more profits and more instruments of death. The bosses will tell you that they must come first, otherwise businesses will fail and no one will have a job. But that is only true when the capitalist profit system is forced on society. The profit system is what stands in the way of keeping everyone on the job, working and producing the wealth of society, and distributing the products to those who need it. That is what the workers need, and it's called socialism. Needless to say, the capitalists don't like it. - END - ------------------------------------------- Macdonald Stainsby Rad-Green List: Radical anti-capitalist environmental discussion. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green ---- Leninist-International: Building bridges in the tradition of V.I. Lenin. http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international ---- In the contradiction lies the hope. --Bertholt Brecht _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
