18 Janvier 2003
Grenoble, France

Dear Colleagues and Friends,
We have repaired our email system -for at least the present moment- and we take this opportunity to send our reflections on what many believe to be the imminent war in the Middle East.

(Please see below the important article on Iraq and the Bush administration sent to us by our research associate Michael Parenti, at Berkeley.)

_______________________________
Fragments from A Reflection on War
by Francis Feeley

Classic military science teaches that there are essentially four types of
war: a) wars of national independence, b) imperialist wars of expansion, c)
wars of national self-defense, and d) civil wars between social classes.

In American history, the War of Independence (1776-83) represents the first
type. The subsequent 19th-century conquest of Indian lands, the Mexican
War, the U.S. conquest of Cuba and the Philippines are illustrations the
second type of war. An example of the third type of war in U.S. history is
World War II (AKA "the Good War"), which is represented as a war against
fascist expansion.

The fourth type of war, Civil War, is problematic in American history: Some
historians argue that beginning in 1860 a new industrial capitalist class,
in alliance with western farmers, gained political power, via the New
Republican Party,  in Washington, D.C. and went to war against the
reactionary, slave-owning agrarian class in the southern states, which had
controlled, through the Democratic Party,  the three branches of government
in Washington for the past decades. The ascendancy of this new political
party, with its specific social class interest was incompatible with
southern Democratic interests, and the definitive defeat of southern
aristocratic control of the state quickly released the forces of rapid
industrial expansion in late 19th-century America.

Other historians have argued that the so-called Civil War was more
accurately a "War of Secession," or a "War between the States," fought
between regional factions for national self-defense, i.e. to preserve the
union of the United States of America against regional separatism. Either
way, no less than 2% of the total U.S. population ended up dead before this
war was over.

Another observation from classic military science is that open conflict is
preceded by a period of preparation that includes psychological warfare.
Wars, in other words, usually begin long before the actual confrontation
occurs.

Today, modern science permits virtual wars to be fought. The author George
Orwell suggested in his book 1984, such "wars" are perpetuated to
strengthen popular  allegiance to the state. A post-Orwellian strategy used
by the United States military is to hide the evidence of criminal
activities in the "killing fields" during war by preventing reporters and
cameraman from visiting sites until the destruction and the mass burial of
the evidence has been achieved. This "sanitized" version of war is more
like a "Covert Action," where U.S. agents are sent to the hospitals and
morgues of suppress evidence, and burial brigades spend hours, if not days,
burning and hiding dead bodies. Thus it would seem that modern military
science teaches a  pre-war strategy of psychological terror and a post-war
tactic of hiding the evidence of destruction, in order to control descent.
("What's all the fuss about, anyway?)

For more on new techniques employed by the state to hide the costs of war
from public view, please see the "Reporters without Borders" trilingual
(French/English/Spanish) web site:

                                         <http://www.rsf.org>
 

The ease with which the American ruling class manipulates the feelings and
perceptions of the American public is cause for alarm in distant places.
Today's friends could quickly appear on tomorrow's "enemy list" in a world
where capitalist competition reigns and where real communities have been
subverted and replaced by an imaginary sense of community that is promoted
and paid for by commercial interests. Many years ago, William Appleman
Williams observed that what we as a nation share in common has been reduced
to a desire to consume and a fear of communism.

The latter notion of an "indispensable enemy" is not new, but Lewis Carroll
reminds us that any conflict, even one which evokes the most bitter
feelings, can be transcended by the perception of  a GREATER DANGER: "just
then flew down a monstrous crow, as black as a tar barrel, which frightened
both the heroes so they quite forgot their quarrel."

in solidarity,
F. Feeley
Professor/Director of research
Grenoble III

_________________________________________
To Kill Iraq: The Reasons Why
by   Michael Parenti

In October 2002, after several days of full-dress debate in the House and Senate, the US Congress fell into line
behind almost-elected president George W. Bush, giving him a mandate to launch a massive military assault against the already battered nation of Iraq. The discourse in Congress was marked by its usual cowardice. Even many of the senators and representatives who voted against the president's resolution did so on the narrowest procedural grounds, taking pains to tell
how they too detested Saddam Hussein, how they agreed with the president on many points, how something needed to be done about  Iraq but not just yet, not quite in this way. So it is with Congress: so much political discourse
in so narrow a political space. Few of the members dared to question the unexamined assumptions about US virtue, and the imperial right of  US leaders to decide which nations shall live and which shall die. Few, if any, pointed to the continual bloody stream of war crimes committed by a succession of arrogant US administrations in blatant  violation of human rights and international law.

Pretexts for War
Bush and other members of his administration have given varied and
unpersuasive reasons to justify the "war"---actually a one-sided
massacre--- against Iraq. They claim it is necessary to insure the safety
and security of the Middle East and of the United States itself, for Iraq
is developing weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear missiles. But
UN inspection teams have determined that Iraq has no such nuclear
capability and actually has been in compliance with yearly disarmament
inspections.

As for the fact that Iraq once had factories that produced chemical and
bacteriological weapons, whose fault was that? It was the United States
that supplied such things to Saddam. This is one of several key facts about
past US-Iraq relations that the corporate media have consistently
suppressed. In any case, according to UN inspection reports, Iraq's C&B
warfare capability has been dismantled.  Still the Bushites keep talking
about Iraq's dangerous "potential."  As reported by the Associated Press (2
November 2002), Undersecretary of State John Bolton claimed that "Iraq
would be able to develop a nuclear weapon within a year if it gets the
right technology." If it gets the right technology? What does that say
about anything? The truistic nature of this assertion has gone unnoticed.
Djibouti, Qatar, and New Jersey would be able to develop nuclear weapons if
they got "the right technology."

Through September and October of 2002, the White House made it clear that
Iraq would be attacked if it had weapons of mass destruction. Then in
November 2002, Bush announced he would attack if Saddam denied  that he had
weapons of mass destruction. So if the Iraqis admit having such weapons,
they will be bombed; and if they deny having them, they still will be
bombed--whether they have them or not.

The Bushites also charged Iraq with allowing al Qaeda terrorists
to operate within its territory. But US intelligence sources themselves let
it be known that the Iraqi government was not connected to Islamic
terrorist organizations. In closed sessions with a House committee, when
administration officials were repeatedly asked whether they had information
of an imminent threat from Saddam against US citizens, they stated
unequivocally that they had no such evidence (San Francisco Chronicle, 20
September 2002). Truth be told, the Bush family has closer ties to the bin
Laden family than does Saddam Hussein. No mention is made of how US leaders
themselves have allowed terrorists to train and operate within our own
territory, including a mass murderer like Orlando Bosch. Convicted of
blowing up a Cuban airliner, Bosch walks free in Miami.

Bush and company seized upon yet another pretext for war: Saddam
has committed war crimes and acts of aggression, including the war against
Iran and the massacre of Kurds. But the Pentagon's own study found that the
gassing of Kurds at Malahja was committed by the Iranians, not the Iraqis
(Times of India, 18 September 2002). Another seldom mentioned fact: US
leaders gave Iraq encouragement and military support in its war against
Iran. And if war crimes and aggression are the issue, there are the US
invasions of Grenada and Panama to consider, and the US-sponsored wars of
attrition against civilian targets in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, El
Salvador, Guatemala, Yugoslavia, and scores of other places, leaving
hundreds of thousands dead. There is no communist state or "rogue nation"
that has such a horrific record of military aggression against other
countries over the last two decades.

With all the various pretexts for war ringing hollow, the Bushites
resorted to the final indictment: Saddam was a dictator. The United States
stood for democracy and human rights. It followed that US leaders were
obliged to use force and violence to effect regime change in Iraq. Again,
we might raise questions. There is no denying that Saddam is a dictator,
but how did he and his crew ever come to power? Saddam's conservative wing
of the Ba'ath party was backed by the CIA. They were enlisted to destroy
the Iraqi popular revolution and slaughter every democratic,
left-progressive individual they could get hold of, which indeed they did,
including the progressive wing of the Ba'ath party itself---another fact
that US media have let slide down the memory hole. Saddam was Washington's
poster boy until the end of the Cold War.

So why has George II, like his daddy, targeted Iraq? When individuals keep
providing new and different explanations to justify a particular action,
they most likely are lying. So with political leaders and policymakers.
Having seen that the pretexts given by the White House to justify war are
palpably false, some people conclude that the administration is befuddled
or even "crazy."  But just because they are trying to mislead and confuse
the public does not perforce mean they themselves are misled and confused.
Rather it might be that they have reasons which they prefer not to see
publicized and debated, for then it would become evident that US policies
of the kind leveled against Iraq advance the interests of the rich and
powerful at much cost to the American people and every other people on the
face of the earth. Here I offer what I believe are the real reasons for the
US aggression against Iraq.

Global Politico-Economic Supremacy
A central US goal, as enunciated by the little Dr. Strangeloves who inhabit
the upper echelons of policymaking in the Bush administration, is to
perpetuate US global supremacy. The objective is not just power for its own
sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to
privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to
hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhereincluding the people of North
America ---the blessings of an untrammeled "free market" corporate
capitalism.  The struggle is between those who believe that the land,
labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to
maximizing capital accumulation for the few,  and those who believe that
these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic
development of  the many.

The goal is to insure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as
such, but the supremacy of US  global capitalism by preventing the
emergence of any other potentially competing superpower or, for that
matter, any potentially competing regional  power. Iraq is a case in point.
Some nations in the Middle East have oil but no water; others have water
but no oil. Iraq is the only one with plenty of both, along with a good
agricultural basealthough its fertile lands are now much contaminated by
the depleted uranium dropped upon it during the 1991 Gulf War bombings.
In earlier times, Iraq's oil was completely owned by US, British, and other
Western companies. In 1958 there was a popular revolution in Iraq. Ten
years later, the rightwing of the Ba'ath party took power, with Saddam
Hussein serving as point man for the CIA. His assignment was to undo the
bourgeois-democratic revolution, as I have already noted. But instead of
acting as a compradore collaborator to Western investors in the style of
Nicaragua's Somoza, Chile's Pinochet, Peru's Fujimora, and numerous others,
Saddam and his cohorts nationalized the Iraqi oil industry in 1972, ejected
the Western profiteers, and pursued policies of public development and
economic nationalism. By 1990, Iraq had the highest standard of living in
the Middle East (which may not be saying all that much), and it was evident
that the US had failed to rollback the gains of the 1958 revolution. But
the awful destruction delivered upon Iraq both by the Gulf War and the
subsequent decade of economic sanctions did achieve a kind of
counterrevolutionary rollback from afar.

Soon after the collapse of the  Soviet Union, US leaders decided that Third
World development no longer needed to be tolerated. Just as Yugoslavia
served as a "bad" example in Europe, so Iraq served as a bad example to
other nations in the Middle East. The last thing the plutocrats in
Washington want in that region is independent, self-defining developing
nations that wish to control their own land, labor, and natural resources.
US economic and military power has been repeatedly used to suppress
competing systems. Self-defining countries like Cuba, Iraq, and Yugoslavia
are targeted. Consider Yugoslavia. It showed no desire to become part of
the European Union and absolutely no interest in joining NATO. It had an
economy that was relatively prosperous, with some 80 percent of it still
publicly owned. The wars of secession and attrition waged against
Yugoslavia---all in the name of human rights and democracy---destroyed that
country's economic infrastructure and fractured it into a cluster of poor,
powerless, right-wing mini-republics, whose economies are being privatized,
deregulated, and opened to Western corporate penetration on terms that are
completely favorable to the investors. We see this happening most recently
in Serbia. Everything is being privatized at garage sale prices. Human
service, jobs, and pension funds are disappearing. Unemployment, inflation,
and poverty are skyrocketing, as is crime, homelessness, prostitution, and
suicide. Welcome to Serbia's free market paradise.

Judging from what has been happening in Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia,
Panama, Grenada, and elsewhere---we can anticipate that the same thing is
in store for Iraq following a US occupation: An Iraqi puppet government
will be put in place, headed by someone every bit as subservient to the
White House as Tony Blair. The Iraqi state-owned media will become "free
and independent" by being handed over to rich conservative private
corporations. Anything even remotely critical of US foreign policy and free
market capitalism will be deprived of an effective platform. Conservative
political parties, heavily financed by US sources, will outspend any
leftist groupings that might have survived. On this steeply unleveled
playing field, US advisors will conduct US-style "democratic elections,"
perhaps replicating the admirable results produced in Florida and
elsewhere. Just about everything in the Iraqi economy will be privatized at
giveaway prices. Poverty and underemployment, already high, will climb
precipitously. So will the Iraqi national debt, as international loans are
floated that "help" the Iraqis pay for their own victimization. Public
services will dwindle to nothing, and Iraq will suffer even more misery
than it does today. We are being asked to believe that the Iraqi people are
willing to endure another massive bombing campaign in order to reach this
free-market paradise.

Natural Resource Grab
Another reason for targeting Iraq can be summed up in one word: oil. Along
with maintaining the overall global system of expropriation, US leaders are
interested in more immediate old-time colonial plunder. The present White
House leadership is composed of oil men who are both sorely tempted and
threatened by Iraq's oil reserve, one of the largest in the world. With 113
billion barrels at $25 a barrel, Iraq's supply comes to over $2.8 trillion
dollars. But not a drop of it belongs to the US oil cartel; it is all state
owned. Baghdad has offered exploratory concessions to France, China,
Russia, Brazil, Italy, and Malaysia. But with a US takeover of Iraq and a
new puppet regime in place, all these agreements may be subject to
cancellation. We may soon witness the biggest oil grab in the history of
Third World colonialism by US oil companies aided and abetted by the US
government.

One thing that US leaders have been interested in doing with Iraqi
oil---given the glut and slumping price of crude in recent years---is keep
it off the market for awhile longer. As the London Financial Times (24
February 1998) reported, oil prices fell sharply because of the agreement
between the United Nations and Iraq that would allow Baghdad to sell oil on
the world market. The agreement "could lead to much larger volumes of Iraqi
crude oil competing for market shares." The San Francisco Chronicle (22
February 1998) headlined its story "IRAQ'S OIL POSES THREAT TO THE WEST."
In fact, Iraqi crude poses no threat to "the West" only to Western oil
investors. If  Iraq were able to reenter the international oil market, the
Chronicle reported, "it would devalue British North Sea oil, undermine
American oil production and---much more important---it would destroy the
huge profits which the United States [read, US oil companies]  stands to
gain from its massive investment in Caucasian oil production, especially in
Azerbajian." We might conclude that direct control and ownership of Iraqi
oil is the surest way to keep it off the world market and the surest way to
profit from its future sale when the price is right.

Domestic Political Gains
War and violence have been good to George W. Bush. As of September
10, 2001, his approval ratings were sagging woefully. Then came the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, swiftly followed by the newly
trumpeted war against terrorism and the massive bombing and invasion of
Afghanistan. Bush's approval ratings skyrocketed. But soon came the
corporate scandals of  2002: Enron, WorldCom, and even more perilously
Harken and Halliburton. By July, both the president and vice-president were
implicated in fraudulent corporate accounting practices, making false
claims of profit to pump up stock values, followed by heavy insider selling
just before the stock was revealed to be nearly worthless and collapsed in
price. By September, the impending war against Iraq blew this whole issue
off the front pages and out of the evening news. Daddy Bush did the same
thing in 1990, sending the savings and loan scandal into media limbo by
waging war against that very same country.

By October 2002, the Republican party, reeling from the scandals
and pegged as the party of corporate favoritism and corruption, reemerged
as the party of patriotism, national defense, and strong military
leadership to win control of both houses of Congress, winning elections it
should never have won. Many Americans rallied around the flag, draped as it
was around the president. Some of our compatriots, who are cynical and
suspicious about politicians in everyday affairs, display an almost
child-like unlimited trust and knee-jerk faith when these same politicians
trumpet a need to defend our national security against some alien threat,
real or imagined.

War also distracts the people from their economic problems, the need for
decent housing, schools, and jobs, and a recession that shows no sign of
easing. Since George II took office, the stock market has dropped 34
percent, unemployment has climbed 35 percent, the federal surplus of $281
billion is now a deficit of $157 billion, and an additional 1.5 million
people are without health insurance, bringing the total to 41 million. War
has been good for the conservative agenda in general, providing record
military spending, greater profits for the defense industry, and a deficit
spending spree that further enriches the creditor class at the taxpayer's
expense, and is used to justify more cuts in domestic human services.
Liberal intellectuals are never happier than when, with patronizing smiles,
they can dilate on the stupidity of George Bush. What I have tried to show
is that Bush is neither retarded nor misdirected. Given his class
perspective and interests, there are compelling reasons to commit armed
aggression against Iraq---and against other countries to come. It is time
we dwelled less upon his malapropisms and more on his rather effective
deceptions and relentless viciousness. Many decent crusaders have been
defeated because of their inability to fully comprehend the utter depravity
of their enemies. The more we know what we are up against, the better we
can fight it.
 

_____________________
Michael Parenti's latest books are The Terrorism Trap (City Lights); To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (Verso): and the 7th edition of Democracy for the Few (Wadsworth). His forthcoming work, The Assassination
of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome, will be published in the spring by The New Press.
 

****************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research at CEIMSA
Center for the Advanced Study of American
Institutions and Social Movements
http://www.u-grenoble3.fr/ciesimsa
University of Grenoble-3
France
Tel: 04.76.82.43.00<html>