03.31.07

Which imperialism worse: yank or Islamic?

Posted in Rad-Green, you've got mail at 4:36 pm by nemo

From Rad-Green

Imperial sunset?

AIJAZ AHMAD

For the first time since its rise as a superpower the United States is
facing a serious threat to its hegemony across the globe.

President George W.Bush.
LAWRENCE JACCKSON/AP

IN February this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a
security conference in Munich that had 250 of the world’s top leaders
and officials in attendance, including such luminaries as the German
Chancellor and the U.S. Secretary of State. He said some very rude
words about the United States, denouncing its unilateralism and
unipolar pretensions, its trampling of international law, its stoking
of the arms race, its aggressions across the globe. These, Putin said,
were factors that encouraged others to seek their own weapons of mass
destruction and even commit terrorist acts.

He went further and warned Europe itself that the continuing eastward
expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was “a
serious provocative factor” and that the Organisation of Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had been converted into “a vulgar
instrument for advancing the foreign policy goals of one country or a
group of countries against other countries”. The global missile
defence system developed by the U.S. would, he said, “give it a free
hand to launch not only local, but global conflicts” and the proposed
deployment of U.S. missile interceptors in Europe to neutralise
Russia’s nuclear arsenals would trigger “another round of the
inevitable arms race”. Calling for a new “global security
architecture”, Putin reminded the Europeans that the BRIC countries
(Brazil, Russia, India and China) had among them a larger gross
domestic product (GDP) than the European Union. “There is no doubt
that in the foreseeable future the economic potential of these new
centres of power will inevitably get converted into political clout
and will strengthen multipolarity,” he said.

That Russia and Iran, the world’s supreme energy giants and both
countries in the eye of U.S. military designs, would seek military
cooperation and an energy alliance - even perhaps an eventual “gas
cartel” as no less a personage than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has
suggested - is entirely understandable. The real scandal of the
situation is that soon after delivering that speech, Putin went off to
seek energy cooperation with, and sell weapon systems to, such U.S.
`reliables’ as the Saudi, Jordanian and Qatari royals.

The Financial Times, the premier newspaper for global capital, reacted
to Putin’s sweeping speech with a simple question: Imperial Sunset?
[LINK:
]
The `decline of U.S. hegemony’ has been a favourite theme among many
circles of the left since the early 1970s, not as an absolute event
but as a relative decline, related to the growing power of its major
capitalist competitors. Is that `decline’ now becoming a real
`sunset’?

A variety of factors have contributed to this question: the military
debacle of the U.S. in Iraq and of Israel, its only 100 per cent ally,
in Lebanon, which precipitated comprehensive domestic crises of
confidence inside both countries; the immensity of U.S. deficits and
instability of the dollar as the pre-eminent global currency; the
challenges of the famous “pink tide” in Latin America; the resurgence
of Russian power and high rates of growth in China and India;
“resource wars”, that is, the emergence of giant energy producers and
consumers on the one hand and, on the other, what Michael Klare calls
“energo-fascism” in which, he avers, the Pentagon has increasingly
become a “global oil protection service”. That is a very tall order,
and no one article, or a set of articles as the current issue of
Frontline is presenting them, can wholly answer questions of such
magnitude. What follows here offers a basic outline, starting with the
Achilles’ heel, the historically unprecedented and currently
unrivalled military power of the U.S., which is proving to be the
principal cause of its hubris.

THE KILLING FIELDS

On April 1, 2003, barely 10 days after the U.S. began its war of
occupation in Iraq with a night of “Shock and Awe” in which its forces
hit Baghdad with one thousand cruise missiles - exceeding the TNT
equivalent of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and well before the
U.S. troops entered that city, Immanuel Wallerstein began his
Commentary No. 110 with these prophetic words:

“At a turning point in the Second World War, someone asked Winston
Churchill whether the battle marked the beginning of the end. And he
replied, famously, no, but it might be the end of the beginning. With
the Iraq war, the world is marking the end of the beginning of the new
world disorder that has replaced the world order dominated by the
United States from 1945 to 2001. … One week into the war, it is
clearly going less well than the hawks had hoped and anticipated. It
seems we are likely to be in for a long, bloody, drawn-out war. …
The fact that it goes badly for the U.S. hawks will make them only
more desperate. They are likely to try to push harder than ever on
their agenda. … Their economic programme seems to be one that will
bankrupt the United States.”

He also surmised that an attack on Iran and the creation of a “police
state” in the U.S. itself formed a part of the agenda, and that the
“hawks” would need two presidential terms to achieve these goals. Bush
and his gang are now in the middle of that second term. Prophetic
words, indeed. In the third week of April 2003, as U.S. forces
completed their occupation of Baghdad and after former President
Saddam Hussein and his men had vacated the city, I wrote a piece
entitled “Wars Yet to Come” (Frontline May 9, 2003), in which I
predicted that resistance to the U.S. occupation would take three to
six months to get going and would then go on for as long as it took to
get the U.S. out of Iraq. I had also predicted immediately after the
occupation of Afghanistan that the Taliban would prove undefeatable
and the combined forces of the U.S. and its allies would face a long,
long war of attrition. However, in that same article, I also warned:

“What the Americans have brought with them is not only the gift of
colonisation but all the paraphernalia of communalisation and
fragmentation of Iraqi society: dividing the Turkoman against the
Kurd, the Kurd against the Arab, the Sunni against the Shia, and
indeed one Shia faction against the other, Ba’athist against the
non-Ba’athist, the clients against the patriots. … [C]ollapse into
fiefdoms of local power in the name of primordial loyalties is very
probable, and the colonial power is likely to do all it can to
accentuate these conflicts [so that] the presence of colonial
authority, as keepers of the peace among communities, can be
justified. … A foretaste of the bloody nature of this
communalisation can be seen in the ethnic cleansing of Arabs that is
already under way in northern Iraq at the hands of Kurdish zealots.”

That too, alas, has come to pass, but on a scale that was wholly
unimaginable when I penned that dire prophesy. This is not the place
to elaborate on it, however.

Bush famously announced “Mission Accomplished” on May 1, 2003, a month
after Wallerstein composed his commentary and a week after I sent my
article to Frontline. That war of occupation has now entered its fifth
year and continues with no end yet in sight. The war against Iraq
began not in 2003 but in 1991, when the U.S. attacked the country in
order to recover Kuwait and ruin Iraq. U.S. aircraft flew 110,000
sorties between January 17 and February 28 1991, averaging one aerial
attack every 30 seconds, and dropped 88,500 tonnes of explosives,
which is the TNT equivalent of seven and a half Hiroshimas. No
accurate figures are available but many sources, including the United
Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), estimated that perhaps as many as
two million Iraqis died during the six years between 1990 and 1997,
including more than half a million children. Under the four years of
occupation from 2003 to 2007, estimates endorsed by such sources as
the prestigious British scientific journal The Lancet suggest that
approximately 650,000 Iraqis have died; some two million refugees have
left the country; almost an equal number have become refugees within
Iraq; over half of Iraq’s 4.5 million children are malnourished; and
unemployment stands at over 70 per cent. These numbers should be seen
in the perspective of the total population of the country, which was
considerably less than 25 million at the onset of the war. We are
talking of perhaps as much as half the population killed, maimed and
injured, driven out of the country, driven into starvation,
malnutrition, epidemic diseases, despair, and even crime.

What has the U.S. achieved? The U.S. embassy in Baghdad is the largest
any country has built anywhere in the world. There is a network of
military bases, some of which are as large as any in the world. Some
170,000 military personnel are in place, backed by perhaps an equal
number of mercenaries and contractors who do a variety of military
duties and civilian jobs. A client regime is now in place, confected
by the U.S. in close cooperation with Iran, and quickly recognised by
such stalwarts of global peace as the U.N. Security Council, the
`international community’ and so forth. All sorts of new laws have
been put on the books. For all that, the writ of the occupying power
and the regime of its clients does not run beyond the narrow confines
of the Green Zone in a portion of Baghdad where that ruling circle has
garrisoned itself. All the Shia and Sunni factions, including those
serving in the client regime, agree that the U.S. troops must leave.
The question is, when and under what sort of arrangement.

Afghanistan is almost not worth talking about. It was invaded and
occupied soon after the debacle of September 11, which served as a
pretext for war even though the Taliban government was in no way
involved and there is no conclusive proof that even Osama bin Laden
knew of the event before it occurred. Subsequent developments have
been essentially the same as in Iraq. Here, too, Iran helped persuade
the Northern Alliance to accept the Karzai government, which was put
together by the neocon stalwart, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was later
despatched to Iraq, serving in both places as imperial proconsul. The
transition was then made from U.S.-United Kingdom occupation to NATO
occupation, implicating the whole of Europe; U.S. and British troops
continue to serve. Five and a half years later, more than half of the
world’s heroin comes from Afghanistan each year’s aggregate amount
breaking the record of the previous year; Karzai still has to be
protected by NATO personnel as Afghans themselves are not trusted with
the job; and the writ of the regime and its patrons does not run much
beyond Kabul. On the other side, though, the Taliban, which controls
vast swaths of the country and some slivers of Pakistan, are a much
more pious and disciplined lot than the murderous Shia and Sunni
militias of Iraq, so that Afghanistan is subject to the rule of the
warlords but not the sort of sectarian killings which are the order of
the day in Iraq.

THE “HIZBOLLAH EFFECT”

A protest in Sao Paulo against President Bush’s visit, on March 8.
TENGKU BAHAR/AFP

The decisive event of the past six years may yet turn out to be the
34-day war between Israel, generally considered one of the world’s six
great military powers (after the U.S., Russia, U.K., France and
China), and Hizbollah, a Shia militia that gained valuable experience
in guerilla warfare during the 1990s when it participated in the
Lebanese Resistance that drove the Israelis out of southern Lebanon,
which they had occupied for two decades. Moreover, unlike the
Americans and the Russians who were defeated in Vietnam and
Afghanistan respectively, Israelis have enjoyed an unparalleled myth
of invincibility since the birth of the state in 1948. Over the years,
Israeli invincibility has been buttressed not only with the possession
of over 200 nuclear bombs but also by the immense aid Israel has
received from the U.S., especially since 1974: $51.3 billion in
military grants, $31 billion in economic grants, $11.2 billion in
loans for military equipment, in addition to all sorts of loan
guarantees and investments in joint military projects. That myth of
invincibility is what lies shattered in the rubble of Lebanon, never
to be wholly recovered. In 1967, Israel took a mere six days to
destroy the Arab armies and capture vast swaths of territory, all the
way from the Suez Canal to the Golan Heights, including all the
remaining territories of historic Palestine, at the height of
Nesserist and Baathist Arab nationalisms. In 2006, at the time of
utter disarray in the Arab state system and with the major Arab
country Iraq occupied by the U.S., a mere militia fought for 34 days,
destroyed Israeli armour and shot down Israeli helicopters, inflicted
a considerable number of casualties, and forced Israel to abandon its
invasion in sheer disarray, in a war that Israel itself had initiated.

Israeli sources have generally conceded that preparations for the war
began in late 2005, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has himself said in
testimony before the Inquiry Commission headed by Judge Vinograd that
he began such preparations immediately after taking over in January
2006, a full six months before Hizbollah’s kidnap of two soldiers gave
him the pretext. Hizbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has said, by
contrast, that he misjudged the situation and did not anticipate that
Israel would respond with a full-fledged war when he ordered the
kidnappings. In short, Israel initiated the war with full preparations
while Hizbollah was caught unprepared. Yet Israel failed to achieve
even the smallest of its war aims while Nasrallah emerged out of the
war as a hero across the Arab and Islamic worlds - and he shall remain
so unless he squanders that prestige by provoking sectarian strife
within Lebanon, which he may yet do.

The U.S. has been wholly complicit in all this. Olmert wanted the
invasion from the beginning but had faced opposition from some of his
senior colleagues; that opposition was silenced when the U.S.
authorised Israel to go into Lebanon and eliminate Hizbollah. The U.S.
then shielded Israel from universal condemnation and made it possible
for its forces to carry on for 34 days; and, as Israel was destroying
villages, towns and infrastructure, U.S. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice breezily described all that as the “birthpangs of a
New Middle East”. A crisis for Israel is a crisis for the U.S as well,
and saner voices there are likely to become louder to insist that the
U.S. must restrain, not encourage, Israel’s venal rulers and that it
should not mortgage its own future in this strategic region to
Israel’s whims.

New questions now arose. If Israel could not defeat even Hizbollah,
can it eradicate armed Palestine resistance, which is backed by a
population of millions that has been living under a humiliating
Israeli occupation for 40 years? Since at least 2003, and with the
full backing of the Israeli lobby in the U.S., Israel has been
belligerently calling upon the U.S. to invade Iran and threatening to
do so itself if the U.S. would not. It accuses Hizbollah of being
merely a client of Iran and Syria. Can it successfully hit at Iran
when it cannot even subdue the purported “client”? And, if a mere
militia can defeat the invincible Israel, can the U.S., already pinned
down and bleeding in Iraq, take on Iran, which is ruled by a
generation that cut its teeth in the trenches of the war that Saddam
Hussein, a friend of the U.S. in those days, had imposed on Iran upon
U.S. promptings?

For six years, Bush has refused to talk directly to Iran, despite
entreaties from the E.U. and the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), and despite pressures from inside the U.S. at the highest
levels (including Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski among the
Democrats, and people as high up as James Baker among Republicans).
Over the past two months, however, there is evidence of a new
willingness; a first round of talks has taken place and another one is
due in April. Could one say that the “Hizbollah effect” is part of
this new-found prudence? Is that “effect” helping bring back a
recognition of the fact that Iran helped the U.S. to put together
client regimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and that the U.S. again
needs Iran’s help in extricating itself from the Iraq debacle? Can the
U.S. really invade Iran while asking it to help with the mess of the
Iraq invasion? Or is this new willingness to talk just a charade and a
prelude to actual invasion? We shall have to wait and see.

What can be said with fair certainty is that Israel, America’s most
reliable ally in West Asia, is in a state of advanced internal crisis.
For the first time in its history, more Jews are leaving Israel than
are entering it, and those who are leaving are usually among the most
skilled and privileged; another debacle, and this Jewish immigration
out of Israel shall become a flood, and Israel’s worst nightmare -
that the Arab citizenry of Israel will begin approaching demographic
parity with its Jewish population - shall gain some basis in reality,
releasing the genocidal tendencies of Israel which lurk barely under
the surface. Meanwhile, popular ratings for its Prime Minister hover
at around 10 per cent, the worst in Israeli history and considerably
lower than Bush’s 25 per cent in the U.S., which too is just about as
low as any U.S. President has ever sunk. Haaretz, Israel’s most
prestigious newspaper, says that the government “lacks both direction
and conscience”, while another writer for the newspaper concludes that
Israel is just “stewing in its own rot”. Vardic Zeiler, a retired
judge who headed an inquiry into the state’s operations, concluded
that the Israeli police force resembled that of Sicily and the state
was on its way to becoming a mafia-style regime. Gabriel Kolko, an
eminent American historian, states baldly that “Israel today is well
on its way to becoming a failed state”. This internal “rot” is both
the cause and the effect of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian
territories over 40 years (the longest such occupation in modern
history), its will to treat the inhabitants of those territories like
caged animals, and its will to turn Gaza into a vast prison camp,
shooting and killing virtually at will. But this is not the place to
go into all that.

The U.S.-Israeli axis now has a choice to make. Realism demands that
they forgo their grand illusions of free-fire invincibility, their
will to cut and chop the region to forge a “New Middle East” to their
own specifications, and instead find just solutions to their
respective occupations. The alternative is that both keep sinking
deeper and deeper into their respective quagmires. All available
indications are that as their own crises worsen, the more desperate
and warlike the venal leaderships of the two countries are becoming,
compounding internal divisions. Numerous high officials in Israel,
including its Prime Minister, are now under investigation for one kind
of wrongdoing or another; not a day passes without yet another clash
surfacing between the U.S. Congress and the U.S. President.

RESOURCE WARS

The wars of the post-Soviet era have tended to be `Resource Wars’.
Having bankrupted Iraq in the war with Iran, Saddam Hussein invaded
Kuwait to seize its oil resources. The U.S. retaliated with a war to
bring the sheikhs back to their throne so as to re-establish the
status quo ante. Thus began its 17-year-old war against Iraq, with
military conquest paving the way for the more lasting corporate
conquest. Most U.S. soldiers shall leave Iraq sooner or later. Will
the corporations also leave and the military bases be dismantled? That
is the decisive question in judging whether or not Iraq shall be the
graveyard of U.S. ambitions. None of the main players in current Iraqi
politics seems keen to say goodbye to the U.S. corporations; all seem
intent on seeing an end to the military occupation so that they can
cut their own deals with the corporations. Thus it is that the
privatisation law is the most basic of all laws promulgated under U.S.
stewardship, started with the direct intervention of Bremer & Co, and
now continuing through “negotiations” between the occupiers and the
client groups, while the killings go on. It is the essence of the new
oil law on the table now. The shooting war may end but Iraq may yet
emerge as a playground for a rejuvenated “energo-fascism”.

Iraq’s oil reserves are said to be second only to Saudi Arabia’s.
Iran’s combined oil and gas reserves are said to be quite the equal of
Saudi’s oil reserves, in total energy terms. The U.S. has waged a cold
war against the Islamic Republic of Iran for almost 30 years now, and
has threatened a hot war (outright invasion) for a full decade. The
occupation of Iraq is designed partly to compensate for the earlier
loss incurred when the Shah was overthrown, and partly to regain
access to Iranian resources, either by invading it or by imposing upon
it a peace on terms favourable to the U.S. in the energy sector. Iran
has already served the U.S. well by helping it obtain client regimes
in Afghanistan and Iraq. An accommodation between the U.S. and Iran in
the energy sector is not inconceivable. The Security Council is ready
with a draft for tighter sanctions against Iran. The U.S. Navy has
assembled a vast armada in the Gulf and positioned all kinds of
military forces to surround Iran for “psychological warfare” and also
for invasion if necessary. Meanwhile, the two sides, plus Syria, will
meet to see if a larger settlement is possible. It is not at all clear
where this high-stakes brinksmanship by both sides is going.

The so-called “Shia crescent,” which has been so much in the news
lately, has less to do with religion or sect and much more to do with
oil. Iran is predominantly Shia, and Shias are certainly in the
majority among the Arab inhabitants of Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait
are predominantly Sunni, but Shias are in the majority in those
regions of the two countries where oil resources are mostly
concentrated. These are the four major oil-producing countries of the
region,and having exacerbated the Shia-Sunni sectarian rivalries to
the point of armed conflict among respective militias in Iraq, the
U.S. fears (and Iran threatens) that an attack on Iran would rouse and
unify Shia populations across the region, not only against the U.S.
but also against its clients in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and elsewhere
across the Muslim world. If prudence prevails in Washington, the U.S.
shall concede Iran’s security concerns in lieu of a normalisation of
relations, get concessions in the energy sector and, in turn, learn to
live with Iran’s own interests in “multipolar” relations with the
Euro-American bloc on the one hand and Russia and China on the other.

If the “Shia crescent” is about energy, so is “multipolarity” in a
substantial degree. As neighbours and as global giants in gas and oil
reserves, Russia and Iran are natural allies; they are also bound in a
relationship of competitive collaboration in the Caspian region,
itself rich in the same energy resources and extending up to China. At
the other end of the Asian landmass, both Russia and China are
geographically proximate to Japan and other centres of East Asian
capitalism, all of them dependent on imported fossil fuels. As the
financial power of Asian capitalism grows, it is bound to build its
own energy supply systems independent of its European and U.S. rivals.
East Asian countries are already pegging their currencies to the
Chinese yuan; South Korea is drawing closer to China, and investments
in China have helped Japan cope with its stagnating growth. The surest
way for Russia and China to weaken Japan’s historic dependence on the
U.S. is to offer it a terminus for energy pipeline grids starting in
Iran, Russia, and the Caspian Basin and running across the vast
territories of Russia and China, as an alternative to the precarious
sea lanes that run through the Indian Ocean and the Malacca Straits.
It is good to recall that the first privatisations of Iraqi oil came
not after the U.S. invasion but during the period of sanctions from
Saddam Hussein, who gave concessions to Russia and China. The
successor regime, put in place by the U.S., may take that particular
leaf out of Saddam’s book. That is why the U.S. shall not dismantle
its vast military bases in Iraq. The methods are different but Russia
too supplies advanced weapons systems to Iran with an energy
partnership in mind.

Much else could be said. Suffice it to conclude that if the
“multipolarity” that is now emerging in the world capitalist system as
we now have it - with Russia and China emerging not as socialist
powers but as capitalist giants - ever develops into full-fledged
inter-imperialist rivalry between the old capitalist centres and the
new ones, energy resources, currencies and debts shall be central to
it.

LATIN AMERICA

I have published half a dozen pieces on Latin America in Frontline.
Here I offer just a few generalisations, starting with the proposition
that if the U.S. may potentially lose its wars in West Asia, it may
lose the peace in Latin America as well. The only country that made a
successful revolution against imperialism in the precise sense of the
word (the “highest stage of capitalism”, as Lenin called it), and
which tried to build an alternative to it, was Cuba. The ongoing
revolutionary process in Venezuela is an attempt to radically shift
the nature of the relationships between the metropolitan countries,
principally the U.S. and Venezuela and, by extension, between South
(Latin) and North (Anglo-) America, but within the confines of the
capitalist system. What Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez calls the
`socialism of the 21st century’ looks, strictly speaking, a lot like
`capitalism with a human face’. Within these limits, Chavez has
launched an immense, open-ended process of fundamental transformations
within Venezuela and speeded it up since his recent re-election. He
has also launched a many-sided and increasingly influential
continental project of Latin American unity, ranging from proposed
multilateral pacts such as ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for Latin
America) to the projected Banco del Sur (Bank of the South), with the
ambition of defeating U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Agreements and
throwing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank out
of Latin America.

Chavez has lent $2.5 billion to Argentina and has offered $1.5 billion
to Bolivia and $500 million to Ecuador, while IMF lending in Latin
America has plummeted to a mere 1 per cent of its global portfolio; if
IMF does not lend, it cannot influence policy. Banco del Sur is
designed to supplant international lenders altogether and thus make
the World Bank irrelevant, and also offer a credible alternative to
North American and European private banks. His loan helped Argentina
pull out of its IMF dependence, resolve its financial crisis and
regain impressive growth rates. Venezuelan financial backing is
indispensable to the success of President Evo Morales in
poverty-stricken Bolivia. Rafael Correa, the newly elected leader of
Ecuador, threatens to repudiate his country’s $10 billion debt,
primarily because he expects Chavez to bail him out of the consequent
crisis. Chavez has given oil at subsidised prices to the Caribbean
countries (not to speak of the barter arrangement of `cows for oil’
with Argentina) and promises to finance a large number of ambitious
projects (cross-continental highways and so on) with Brazilian and
Argentine technological resources.

The main problem, however, is that his domestic and continental
projects are highly capital-intensive and presume high and growing
petrodollar incomes. Venezuela’s oil exports amounted to $58.4 billion
last year, with reserves now amounting to $34 billion - enormous for a
small and largely poor country, but a pittance by global standards.
His way of utilising oil incomes certainly holds up a mirror to the
oil-rich countries of West Asia. But the question remains: how long
shall this petrodollar-driven `socialism of the 21st century’ last in
case international oil prices plummet? Venezuelan currency is the
worst performing currency on the global black markets and the
country’s budget deficit rose 20 times last year to $3.8 billion -
still a tenth of the reserves. What happens to these deficits and the
domestic currency, and his projected domestic and continental
spendings, if his oil earnings fall precipitously and continue to fall
for a few years? And what will happen to the solidarity of the bloc he
is trying to lead at present?

Aside from these economic realities, three facts stand out. Chavez has
made a revolution, now he has to make revolutionaries: cadres,
organisations, institutions. He has made exhilarating advances but his
is a race against time and he learns as he goes along. Meanwhile, the
second fact is that aside from Cuba and Venezuela, Bolivia is the only
other country where a revolution-minded leadership is in charge. The
other major countries of Latin America are dominated by either the
extreme right-wing (Colombia and Mexico), flamboyant mavericks (Peru),
and moderate social democrats (Chile, Argentina, Brazil) who are
playing along with Chavez while the going is good. Finally, the true
revolts of Latin America, which involve millions upon millions of
people and which reject neoliberalism and all other trappings of
Yankee imperialism, are to be found not in state systems but among the
masses. Fire is in the hills and the mountains, not in presidential
palaces of even the so-called `pink tide’.

IMPERIAL PRECIPICE

Challenging a unipolar order: (Clockwise from top left) Hizbollah
leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran,
King Abullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, President Hu Jintao of
China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Hugo Chavez of
Venezuela.
PICTURES:AP/AFP/REUTERS

We should be cautious in predicting imperial sunsets. The heart of
imperialism is its economy. The U.S. economy survived the defeat in
Vietnam quite handsomely, all things considered, and went on to gain
for itself a unipolar global empire. The U.S. can survive a defeat in
Iraq just as well, and, even under the best of circumstances, the new
Iraqi bourgeoisie will still have to reconstruct the country over the
next two decades and for that it will have to sell oil on the global
market.

The U.S. helped post-War Europe and Japan rebuild themselves and
learned to live very well with their growing economic power. It
supported European integration and supported the Japanese export-based
miracle by running trade deficits with it for decades. Europe has
never materially opposed any of the U.S. military adventures and
supported most of them, while many Japanese scholars still think of
their country as a U.S. dependency. Today, the U.S. similarly supports
the Chinese export-based miracle by providing a huge market for its
products and absorbing much of Chinese money surpluses into its own
deficits. The nightmare in Beijing is that the U.S. economy may enter
a serious recession, even a mild depression, so that Chinese exports,
along with Chinese growth rates, would just collapse. There is no
major country in the world today that does not have a major stake in
the health and stability of the U.S. economy.

The share of the U.S. in global wealth has been declining since the
1970s and the trend is irreversible; today’s emerging “multipolarity”
is just a more advanced stage of the Trilateral Commission. It is
still by far the largest economy, however, and in such a commanding
position that no economy could survive its terminal sunset. Its
problems are of a different kind.

The external debt of the U.S. now stands at $6 trillion, equivalent of
$20,000 an American. If domestic debt and future obligations are
included, the total real debt rises to $70 trillion, utterly unpayable
by any standards. The dollar has lost 15 to 20 per cent of its value
over the past five years and some analysts claim that it will have to
be devalued by another 35 per cent or more, for the full range of U.S.
products to become competitive on the world market: an inconceivable
level of devaluation which would wreck the global economy anyway. Such
fundamental and fundamentally irresolvable problems are then tied up
with a financialisation of the global economy so extreme and
uncontrollable that there is now relatively scant relation between the
circulation of financial capital and its productive base; the whole
system is skating on thin ice. Serious economists such as Joseph
Stiglitz suggest that unless a completely new architecture is found
quickly for macro-management of the world economy, a massive crisis
shall start playing havoc in the very near future.

The Iraq and Lebanon wars have shown up the limits of the latest in
military technology. Relatively small militias, armed with rudimentary
weapons, fought the U.S. and Israeli armies to a standstill; one
withdrew hastily, the other doesn’t even know how to retreat or even
avoid slow attrition. This imposes severe limits on U.S. capabilities
and projects for seeking military solutions to political problems. If
the U.S. repeats in Iran the folly it committed in Iraq, the myth of
its military prowess shall be in full ruin. Stiglitz calculates the
cumulative costs of the Iraq war at $3 trillion or more. Hence the
brewing revolt against the very idea within the U.S. itself.

On the other side of the globe are the mass movements of Latin
America. They are neither “terrorists”, nor “rogue states”; hence not
even fictitious targets for invasions. Not even a spectre of
communism. Just millions of the poor on the march for equality,
justice, and redistribution of wealth. Not a cauldron of religious
millenarianism, sectarian strife and ethnic divisions, as in so much
of the Muslim world. But a direct revolt against neoliberalism and
imperialism as such.

The mass movements of Latin America show us, one hopes, our own future.

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