Mark Phillips: The American Question

11/21/01: It's Not a War For Oil.

Notes for Antiwar Activists on What the War is About.

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn.
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
--W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

INTRODUCTION

Here's a summary of what I'll argue in these notes. Many antiwar activists explain the Afghanistan war in terms of oil, or of secret elite agendas. These explanations are dubious, and close off opportunities we should be thinking about. A more helpful analysis looks at the balance of forces between imperialism and the struggles arrayed against it. Islamic fundamentalism plays leading roles in many of those struggles. One fundamentalist group, Hizballah, won a major victory in 2000 which has had a significant impact on the balance of forces; and there have been other contributing developments, including the rise of the satellite TV station al-Jazeera. The 9/11 attacks need to be understood in this context. The U.S. ruling class response to 9/11 is not about oil, etc., it's about quelling a nexus of resistance struggles that are threatening to get out of hand. It's likely to fail, and antiwar activists should have things to say about all this.

THE ANALYSIS YOU HEAR MOST OFTEN

1. So far, activist analysis of the "war on terrorism" is pretty strikingly consistent from speech to speech, event to event, and article to article. ¹  It's not a Marxist view, although it's sometimes expressed in Marxist jargon. Its bases are economism and conspiracy theory, and it's a bad thing because it's likely to lead activists to miss opportunities within the antiwar mobilization.

2. Economism explains history as the outcome of direct economic motives, e.g., United Fruit didn't want to pay taxes, therefore the CIA invaded Guatemala. It removes the political and ideological determinants of the situation in a crude way, in particular by displacing class struggle from the center of analysis. It tries to explain the "war on terrorism" as a war for oil, which fundamentally denies the politics of the current conjuncture; that is to say, the state of the class, national, and popular struggles before and in response to the 9/11 events.

The most crude version of this explanation argues that there's something unique about the region's oil reserves, which causes them to be uniquely valuable. Kazakistan's potential wealth is often the focus. Thus one recent article refers to

"the Caspian Basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for 30 years"; ²

while another says,

"Geologists estimate that sitting beneath the wind-blown steppes of Kazakstan are 50 billion barrels of oil -- by far the biggest untapped reserves in the world. (Saudi Arabia, currently the world's largest oil producer, is believed to have about 30 billion barrels remaining.)"; ³

and a third refers to

"The last untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world" ⁴

But, it ain't so. The Kazak resources are not so exceptional as all that; and there are richer fields available which would be more plentiful and probably more profitable without necessitating war. ⁵  Perhaps the best examples of these are in the Middle East and North Africa, which between them have double the reserves of Soviet Central Asia and Siberia combined, and where the infrastructure already exists allowing them to be secured, extracted, and transported efficiently, that is, at rates of profit that are likely to be higher. ⁶, ⁷  Yet even if Caspian oil were really the issue, it would be more cost effective and more risk-averse to simply buy the oil and bribe the governments, certainly the usual modes. And why would Italian, French, British, German, Spanish, Japanese and Turkish imperialists be willing to fight a war for U.S. oil interests?

3. Conspiracy theory is economism's twin sibling, in which a narrow band of shadowy do-badders wag the dog by manipulating governments and public opinion, often but not always in the service of narrow personal gain. E.g., the Dulles brothers owned stock in United Fruit, therefore the CIA invaded Guatemala. There are very many of these, but there seem to be three that you hear most often:

a. The oil pipeline. Energy mega-conglomerate Unocal wants to construct a pipeline running from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan. The Taliban oppose it for unstated reasons. The war is to replace the Taliban with a more tractable government. This assumes the Taliban are averse to the usual capitalist deal, a piece of the action in some form or another, which seems questionable. ⁸  It also assumes there are no alternatives to shipping oil through Afghanistan, which seems equally dubious. ⁹ 

b. Trip-wire imperialism. The war is not especially related to 9/11. Rather, it's an attempt under the smokescreen of anti-terrorism to extend the imperium to the territories of the former Soviet Union. ¹⁰  Why? Some proponents seem to be suggesting that the reason is ontological, that is, built into the fabric of reality: this is simply how imperialists are, and they'll move into the former Soviet empire because they can. Others argue it's about the Caspian oil, which is the economistic explanation we've already seen. ¹¹  In either case, it's not clear why Putin would support these objectives.

c. The Cold War redux. "They", the ruling class, need an enemy on a permanent basis in order to justify their ongoing evildoing; thus a phony-baloney new one has been opportunistically invented out of the ashes of the World Trade Center. The goal is reproduction of Cold War ideological hegemony; what's "really" underway is a war on us, the American people. ¹²  Except that somebody really did crash those airplanes.

4. These explanations have two things in common:

a. A strong tendency to devalue the events of 9/11. It's as if 9/11 somehow doesn't count. I have no explanation to offer why activists would want to take this stance, other than psychological ones: we've never dealt with anything like this before; ¹³  we're afraid we'll be associated with the attackers if we oppose the war; ¹⁴  etc. I suppose these are inevitable reactions but my point is they'll tend to weaken our response.

b. The notion that history is made by extremely small groups of people acting covertly. Regardless of whether these explanations are true or not, they're not Marxist ones. Marx's insight of course is that history is made by very large groups of people, that is, by struggles between social classes including their international and ideological refractions. These analyses spirit away that struggle, which is to say, the political conjuncture in which the 9/11 attacks occurred. ¹⁵

5. Indeed it's noteworthy that the motives and strategies of the attackers disappear from view. What was their analysis? What is their political context? What goals were they hoping to achieve? How were these attacks calculated to advance their cause? Have they? What outcomes have the attacks had in their world, so far? On the whole we seem to be uninterested in these questions.

6. And it's striking that 1.5 billion people, that is the masses of the Islamic world, appear in this discourse solely as victims. Imagine that your only source of world news was the antiwar movement: you wouldn't know that Islamic peoples are engaged in history. There's no intifadeh, there was no victory in Lebanon, there's no anti-imperialist movement in Malaysia or Indonesia, there's no fundamentalist insurrection in Algeria, there's no insurgency in the Philippines, there are no wars in Iraq or Chechnya. There are no struggles: just victims. And there's no hint that the conjunctural balance of these struggles could have played a role in the events of 9/11. ¹⁶

7. Which I hope makes it possible to see why this analysis has a bad impact on activism:

a. Ultimately it's a series of ad hominems. What we're claiming is, "those evil, greedy bastards are being evil and greedy again." So that when our hearers don't understand who those bastards are, or what's so evil and greedy about them, we're left with very little to do except ratchet up our rhetoric in frustration. ¹⁷  In a sense we're starting from the end, the point we should be leading people to. Especially, we're implying it's not about the 9/11 attacks, when it very obviously is; and when we do that we surrender the unique chances we have of making contact with hearts and minds outside the progressive ghetto.

b. It obscures the links between the war in Afghanistan, the war in Palestine, the war in Iraq, and so on; which is to say, it takes away a great portion of our message.

c. It'll cause us to miss opportunities for struggle, because in an odd way, it suggests that the bad guys are omnipotent. It implies that the war in Afghanistan is planned, systematic, and likely to be effective, when in fact it's none of those things. It reeks of panic, that is of an extremely short-sighted need to do something in response to 9/11, although exactly how this particular response is likely to be helpful is another question entirely. There's real scope for progressive pedagogy here. ¹⁸

d. It'll cause us to miss opportunities to make reasonable guestimates of the war's likely dynamics, time-scope, and effects on the Islamic world. Experienced activists have argued the war will be short, a decisive walk-over, like Desert Storm V.2. ¹⁹  This prognosis impacts our activist response, and it's wrong.

e. It'll tend to trap us in no-way-out arguments about whether to call for police response rather than war; whether the attackers are "evil" or not; whether the U.S. "deserved" it or not; and so on. These are moral arguments rather than political analyses, and the dominate the major progressive journals. They have a strongly demobilizing tendency because they accept the ruling class ideological contention that the attacks were irrational.

f. In extreme cases, it'll cause us to refuse to mobilize at all. There are smart folks arguing that 9/11 maybe isn't such a turning point as all that. ²⁰

8. I don't mean to suggest that every activist explanation of the war is equally unsophisticated. In meetings and individual conversations, there are folks attempting to make analyses based on deeper dynamics. These individuals argue that 9/11 marks a "new period", an historical turning point in which the balance of forces has shifted dramatically in favor of imperialism as people rally 'round the flag. This is right, but it's unfinished, because the optic remains domestic. ²¹  What's the balance of forces in the Islamic world? How has that balance shifted recently? When did the shift occur? How has that shift influenced the "nature of the period" for the popular, national and anti-imperialist struggles throughout Islam? What did it contribute to the events of 9/11?

CHANGES IN THE BALANCE OF FORCES PRE-9/11

9. The major "force" to be balanced in the Islamic world today is, of course, militant fundamentalism. Fundamentalist leaderships have won key if not dominant roles in the popular, national, and anti-imperialist struggles in many Islamic nations. I imagine everybody understands this. But, this is too general to be an adequate answer.

10. I believe that at least some part of the answer lies with two significant developments of the pre-9/11 period: Hizballah's defeat of Israel on 5/24/00, and the emergence of al-Jazeera as a mass voice. A third, Sharon's provocation of 9/29/00, triggered the same kind of overwhelming conjunctural shift for the Palestinian struggle that 9/11 caused in the U.S.; but I'm not sure what weight it has outside of Palestine.

11. Here's some background on Hizballah. During the second half of the '90s, Hizballah transformed itself from an underground armed resistance faction into a mass party with a sophisticated, multifaceted strategy. One striking thing about their approach is their "pragmatism", by which I mean their ability to combine a spectrum of disparate tactics under the guiding strategy of "Lebanonization": a deft analysis of their society's specific political, class, cultural and military particulars at that moment in history. Thus during the 1990s they considerably modified their call for an Islamic state in Lebanon, stressing their society's patchwork, polycultural nature and renouncing use of force in implementing their vision of Islam. They became a political party, electing a parliamentary delegation which took on a dialectical role similar to the Bolsheviks' Duma fractions in 1905-06. They became a "dual-power" political authority in southern Lebanon, in particular by taking over welfare functions usually devolving on the state. Thus Hizballah provides medical care which is generally recognized to be superior to that provided by the Lebanese government; and it was Hizballah who typically rebuilt the houses demolished by Israel. They built a sophisticated media presence with their own TV station, radio stations, newspapers, and a high-end Web site from which you can view videos of their guerrilla successes. ²²  They sustained a deft guerrilla campaign against Israeli occupation, and they became exceptionally skilled at use of the suicide bombing tactic to attack symbolic targets at strategic moments to achieve maximum demoralization of Israeli troops and society. They sent Israel packing on 5/24/00 in what has been widely reported in the West as Israel's first and only military defeat, but which is in fact their second, the earlier being 1985, also at the hands of Hizballah. ²³

12. It's significant that for Hizballah, "terrorism" and mass mobilization are not counterposed. The Marxist left has traditionally rejected "terrorism" in part because it tends to demobilize mass struggles, counterposing "terrorism" and mass struggles as antinomic poles of possibility. Hizballah seems to have evolved a different view, in which "terrorist" tactics appear to be subordinate to a wider strategy of mass engagement, and indeed are frequently intended to contribute to mass mobilization in specific ways. This is part of what seems unique in their strategy. ²⁴

13. Victory being contagious, it's likely that the period from 5/24/00 to 6/11/01 should be seen in hindsight as a transitional one in which the leading elements of the militant popular struggles throughout the region assimilated first Hizballah's enormous victory-prestige, and then their experience, adopting their approaches, or at least beginning to. We all know this phenomenon. 1917 led to the Leninist movement; 1949 to the Maoist movement; Cuba to Guevarist guerrillaism throughout Latin America; Nicaragua to the growth of the Frente Popular. Politically, maybe it would be better to mention the March on Rome in 1925, which accelerated the growth of Fascism throughout Europe. I'm not knowledgeable enough of these organizations to judge whether Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or the PFLP, succeeded in transforming themselves into the same kinds of vibrant multifaceted mass movements which Hizballah had become. I do believe that after 5/24/00 this became their intention; and that their increasing use of Hizballah-style suicide bombings against the Israeli "heartland" is one indication of their assimilation of a Hizballah-like "hearts and minds" strategy vis-a-vis the Israeli population.

14. I think it's possible to site evidence of this assimilation from struggles throughout the Islamic world. Here are several press citations focusing on Palestine:

a. "In the Gaza Strip, the Hezbollah flag, with its distinctive raised assault rifle, has become a regular feature of street demonstrations and is even sold at the Palestine Liberation Organization flag shop. In the West Bank town of Ramallah, protesters were heard in a chant, nearly rhyming in Arabic: 'Hezbollah our beloved/Destroy, destroy Tel Aviv.' " ²⁵

b. "Once Hamas seemed marginal, its independence-or-death rhetoric too absolutist for many Palestinians. Today it is Arafat's Palestinian Authority, whose public declarations urge a return to negotiations, that appears out of step with public opinion. [...] On the streets of Gaza, and to a somewhat lesser extent in the West Bank, Hamas' status has been underpinned by a network of medical clinics, schools and welfare institutions that distribute free and subsidized food to the needy." ²⁶

c. "'The competition is clear and the people are the judge,' said the Islamic Jihad leader, who was with the two candidate suicide bombers in his living room. 'If the PLO's way worked, they would stay with them. But they are coming to us. Our way is effective.' And, "'It is something people have begun to take pride in. We are not second to Nablus or Gaza in struggle', said Ramadan Bitta, the Jenin District governor." ²⁷

I believe these quotations show that groups adopting a Hizballah-like strategy became mass forces in Palestinian society, achieving or threatening to achieve grass-roots leadership of the uprising.

Here are several more citations re the rise of fundamentalist Islam. I don't mean to imply a direct link here to Hizballah, rather I'm including them as general indications of the weight of fundamentalism in the global balance of forces. Note that cites d, e and h are from the mainstream press, that is, they present the way the ruling class weighs the balance:

d. "Deadly clashes between guerrillas and the armies of two former Soviet republics in Central Asia last month are deepening concerns that an effort is under way to destabilize the region. [...] The evidence is strong that the insurgents are Islamic militants trained and armed in Afghanistan, say Kazakh officials and Western diplomats. Some officials said the rebels wanted to create havoc to keep borders open for the heroin flow, which the authorities said was increasing sharply. Other officials speculated that the intent was to spread Islamic fundamentalism. [...] Whatever the goals, the violence has clearly reached a new stage." ²⁸

e. "The surge in peaceful Islamic fundamentalism as well as violent extremism is viewed by many government officials, political analysts and diplomats as one of the most serious threats to stability in Southeast Asia, a region whose shipping lanes, low-cost manufacturing and emerging markets make it important to the global economy. In Indonesia, the world's fourth-most populous country, the stakes are particularly high. The rise of fundamentalism is threatening to undermine secular traditions as the country tries to embrace democracy after more than three decades of authoritarian rule. [...] 'The growth of radical Islamic movements in the region is very alarming,' said a senior Western diplomat in Jakarta. 'It's already a major destabilizing force -- and it has the potential to become much worse.' " ²⁹

f. "... politically, all this has aided Islamic fundamentalism, which has grown at an alarming rate because it is the only popular movement which the government cannot outlaw. Widespread anti-western feeling means there is a danger of internal unrest and more violence against western interests. [...] These elements combined are driving more and more Saudis to join militant Islamic movements and reducing the monarchy's already small popular base." ³⁰

g. "...there is a strong and vocal Islamic fundamentalist opposition, which at one point controlled a quarter of the seats in the Jordanian parliament." ³¹

h. "Hijackings and anthrax could be just a warm-up to a very different kind of terrorism. The next thing people may have to worry about is a civil war in Saudi Arabia that turns oil into a weapon against the industrialized nations, the U.S. in particular. [...] Forget all the rhetoric about ousting infidels and saving starving Iraqis and oppressed Palestinians. Osama bin Laden's primary goal is to overthrow the ruling al-Saud family of Saudi Arabia. [...] A fundamentalist government in Saudi Arabia would be 'ten times more powerful [than those of] Iraq or Iran,' says Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi-raised oil expert and a Ph.D. candidate at MIT. 'They could make the Iranian mullahs look like babies.' " ³²

15. Many of these fundamentalist leaderships are coordinating internationally, at least in some loose sense. This seems to have ruling class strategists really, really upset:

"The Uzbek government said that the guerrillas included fighters from other countries in addition to Tajikistan and Afghanistan and that they had modern arms and communication equipment as well as good financing." ³³

16. In this same period al-Jazeera arose as an independent mass-medium respected throughout the Islamic world, which seems to be taking a principled position of sustained, sympathetic coverage of the popular, national, and anti-imperialist struggles: ³⁴

"Within minutes of the conclusion of a recent Arab summit, Qatar's al-Jazeerah satellite television station was firing with both barrels at the results. It interviewed Islamic radicals and more mainstream Arab opposition figures who chided the outcome as ineffectual and warned that only revolution in the Arab states and armed struggle with Israel would alter the region's future. On the outskirts of Egypt's capital, in a village carpet shop amid the lush farms of the Nile Valley, Nasser Mondy said he couldn't get enough. The four-year-old station's raw commentary, unabashed criticism of Arab governments, and hard-hitting coverage of Israel has, he said, given voice to the thoughts of millions of Arabs, but until recently was seldom reflected in mass media kept under tight government control." ³⁵

17. Sharon's entry into the Dome of the Rock sanctuary on 9/29/00 was the provocation which sparked the new intifadeh. In the same sense that 9/11 caused a seismic domestic shift toward pro-war patriotism, 9/29/00 led to immediate armed insurrection against Israel throughout the occupied territories. For the Palestinian struggle this is a major determinant of the pre-9/11 political conjuncture. Its impact includes a big shift toward fundamentalist leaderships, concomitantly eroding support for the Palestinian Authority. Has it had a key impact on the resistance struggles outside Palestine? I don't know, but will guess that it has. I base this guess on the interlinked, networked, internationalist flavor which Islamic resistance movements have taken on in recent years, and which al-Jazeera furthers.

9/11 WAS AN ESCALATION WITHIN THIS EXISTING CONTEXT

18. This is the context in which somebody took the war home to the Americans. The important thing is that someone judged that the balance of forces of their struggle, whoever "they" are, favored strategic escalation. ³⁶

19. There's really not any other rational way to look at this. Pretty much the only alternative is to accept the pro-war explanation that these acts are random, insane, cowardly, evil, and unknowable; and if you accept that, there's not a whole lot of room for opposing the war except from purely ethical-pacifist positions. Thus, much of the debate in the major progressive journals right now centers on false antinomies: criminal act versus act-of-war, send the cops versus send the troops, justice versus revenge. This is because much of the progressive press accepts the ruling class definition of events.

20. I want to stress that I make no claim about who might be responsible. I really have no idea. What I'm arguing is that the decision arose from a calculation that the balance of forces was favorable for an escalation; and I'm trying to articulate some of the key factors in that calculation. ³⁷

21. As my final qualifier I want to stress that denying the irrationality of the attacks in no way constitutes political or ethical support for them. Any more than understanding how cancer works makes one a supporter of cancer. We now return you to our regularly scheduled numbered paragraphs.

22. What are the most visible outcomes of the 9/11 attacks so far?

a. Marginalization of the Palestinian Authority. Press reports this week suggest the PA is "tottering" in isolation from mass sentiment below. ³⁸  They seem to be unable to control the streets. The PFLP assassinated an Israeli politician. "They are coming to us. Our way is effective", said the Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin quoted above. Seems they're coming quickly lately. ³⁹

b. Joint U.S. / British initiation of an incompetent ⁴⁰  war in Afghanistan, which will not and cannot have any strategic political outcome other than the strengthening of the "terrorists" it aims to stamp out.

c. Marshal law, arrest of fundamentalist leaders, general strikes, and armed attacks on U.S.-shared air bases in Pakistan.

d. Bin Laden halfway elevated to the greatest 3^rd world liberation hero since the day Ho Chi Min met Simon Bolivar.

e. A very not happy global economy. Whether deliberately or fortuitously, the 9/11 attacks seem to have been exceptionally well-timed to maximize impact on an already shaky international economy. ⁴¹

IT'S NOT ABOUT OIL, IT'S ABOUT SUPPRESSING RESISTANCE

23. Thus the war is not about adding new turf to the imperium. And it's not about oil. It's about clamping the lid on resistance struggles which are on the ascendant, have won a key victory, have developed a new and sophisticated strategy and tactics, have found a mass voice, are coordinating internationally, and include somebody who was confident enough to up the ante.

24. Why Afghanistan, then? Because Afghanistan is perceived as the low-hanging fruit, the easiest target, with a belligerent but diplomatically-isolated isolated ruling group. Evident Taliban support for Central Asian insurgencies is likely part of the calculus. Yet the Taliban are not the ultimate target, and indeed are not weighty enough to seriously tip the balance. Major strategists of the U.S. ruling class hope to attack Iraq, and, ultimately, Iran, the home and major exporter of militant Islamic fundamentalism. ⁴²  It's possible their campaign will unfold in this fashion over time. I suspect that depends very much on what happens in Afghanistan.

25. This is what "politics" means in paragraph 2 above. It means that the "nature of the period" includes the balance of forces involved in the multiple struggles underway throughout the world, particularly the Islamic world; that the escalation of struggle to include attacks on the U.S. is itself one outcome of shifts in that balance; and that the U.S. response is an attempt to shift it back again. The war in Afghanistan is not a war for oil, or the former Soviet territories, or return to Cold War normality: it's a war to try to clamp the lid on 3^rd world struggles which are currently ascendant and within which a new militancy threatens to become the dominant vision. Powell stated this succinctly on 10/24/01: "We have to deal with bin Laden and the al Qaeda network and the host countries that support al Qaeda. And then in due course, we will turn our eye on other sources of terrorism, which are destabilizing areas around the world." ⁴³

ACTIVIST RESPONSE

26. In my opinion, the principled response of progressive antiwar activists is straightforward. The war in Afghanistan cannot succeed. Indeed, it's likely to strengthen the political forces it intends to combat. It's certain to kill large numbers of innocent people to no purpose. A truly effective response to terrorism must address the root causes from which terrorism arises: oppression, poverty, injustice. To do so we must call for four things:

a. Immediate end to the attack on Afghanistan.

b. Just and lasting peace between Israel and Palestine, where "just" and "lasting" mean recognized as such by both sides.

c. End to U.S. support for the anti-democratic regimes dominating the Islamic world. That is, for the political conditions in which fundamentalism inherits the mantle of popular discontent.

d. End to the economic immiseration of the mass of the people in these societies.

These "helpful suggestions" -- that is, non-demands -- have two practical purposes. First, to articulate a politics based on empowering the people of the Islamic world themselves to deal with al Qaeda and the Taliban, along with the Ba'ath Party, the Egyptian dictatorship, the al Saud monarchy, the Syrian and Libyan dictatorships, ad nauseum. Second, to open a pedagogical space in which progressive activists can engage real people, that is, everyday Americans outside the activist ghetto, in meaningful conversations. ⁴⁴ 

27. While these four points summarize what I hope is a reasonable and principled political response, they do not of course exhaust the opportunities for pedagogy. Here are some interesting facts which seem reasonable to point out:

a. Class bias. $15B bail-out for the airline corporations, not a cent for the 100,000 unemployed airline workers. No retraining, no extension of medical benefits...

b. Class bias. The Secret Service's dogs were tested for anthrax before the postal workers who handled the letters that were known to be exposed to the virus. ⁴⁵  (Species bias? –- lol.)

c. Naked class interest. Why is security at airports so bad? Because the airlines pay for it, i.e., it comes out of their bottom line. What would better security require? Lower profits, or, horrors, "socialized" airport security.

d. Race-based cultural myopia. U.S. military planners really believed their combination of high-tech weaponry with special ops with bribery would weaken support for the Taliban. Instead it's merely driven that support underground, while at the same time handing the Taliban the free political gift of leadership of resistance to foreign invasion. Quite remarkably like Vietnam, 1963-1964, a racist war indeed.

e. Total incompetence. The vaunted U.S. intelligence community which we pay so much for, and for which we sacrifice so many civil liberties, was unable to prevent coordinated devastating attacks on 9/11. What use are they? Who's being held accountable? Isn't Pearl Harbor habitually cited as the entire justification for the existence of the C.I.A.?

f. Panic in high places. The anthrax fright has made Bush's personal panic, along with that of the Congress, unmistakably clear. The war in Afghanistan is less immediately obvious, but will become so over time. Good thing nobody elected these people 'cause otherwise they'd be in trouble.

SUMMARY

28. It's not a war for oil. It's a war to re-stabilize, that is to roll-back the momentum and quell the ascendancy of a militant fundamentalism which has tipped the balance of forces too far in the wrong direction. Hizballah's defeat of Israel was a major determinant of the new period; 9/11 one of its consequences. The war is likely to be long, and there is no guarantee of ruling class success. There are unique opportunities for activist pedagogy in these circumstances.

ENDNOTES

¹ The articles are recent. Early drafts of this piece relied principally on speeches at rallies and individual conversations. (Back to article.)

² John Pilger, "There is no war on terrorism" (Back to article.)

³ For example, Ted Ball, "It's about oil" San Francisco Chronicle, 11/2/01. (Back to article.)

⁴ Pilger, "Hidden Agenda: Behind War on Terror" ZNet, 10/30/01. (Back to article.)

⁵ "Thus re oil reserves, the Caspian area including Kazakistan does possess significant volumes. These however are by no means the most significant in the world, being comparable to those of Siberia, but rather less than undiscovered reserves in the Middle East, etc. Re natural gas, the Caspian area is not significant. Further, 75% of the world's oil reserves and 66% of natural gas have already been discovered; 80% of the oil and 93% of the natural gas remain unused." Mark Phillips, "'The last untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world', aren't" (Back to article.)

⁶ Phillips, ibid. The source for these data is U.S Geological Survey, "World Undiscovered Assessment Results Summary". (Back to article.)

⁷ Not every version of this view is equally unsophisticated. "At first its main goal was to destabilize the USSR. After the USSR's collapse, the objective of US oil companies and their government is to secure the fossil fuel resources of Central Asia in their own hands." "Resolution on the September 11th attacks and the aggression against Afghanistan", resolution of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International, received via e-mail 11/3/01. This is more sophisticated because it does a better job of remaining political, at least in the first quoted sentence. It falls into economism in the second. (Back to article.)

⁸ "Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it." Pilger, op. cit., "Hidden Agenda: Behind War on Terror" ZNet, 10/30/01. "Only", really? I can think of all kinds of ways they could control it if it ran some other direction. (Back to article.)

⁹ Ball, ibid "It's about oil" San Francisco Chronicle, 11/2/01. A version of the pipeline story says the war is to bring "stability" required for Unocal to make their investment; if so, the war has evidently failed in this purpose. See Karen Talbot, "Afghanistan is Key to Oil Profits", Centre For Research on Globalization, 11/7/01. Note the author correctly describes U.S. strategy in this context as "baffling", yet repeats this self-contradictory analysis anyway. (Back to article.)

¹⁰ "The long-term objective is to expand US domination to regions formerly under the control of the former Soviet Union and other non-capitalist states and build its global empire." Malik Miah, "Stop the war on Afghanistan", pre-publication manuscript received via email 10/13/01. (Back to article.)

¹¹ "The unread news today is that the 'war against terrorism' is being exploited in order to achieve objectives that consolidate American power. These include: the bribing and subjugation of corrupt and vulnerable governments in former Soviet central Asia, crucial for American expansion in the region and exploitation of the last untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world." Pilger, op. cit., "There is no war on terrorism" (Back to article.)

¹² "Washington's agenda is to entrench a national security state and a new level of international dominance on the basis of a long-term, open-ended 'war against terrorism.' Max Elbaum, "A left perspective on the events", e-mail message dated 10/9/01. Also, speakers at antiwar rallies, San Francisco, 9/29/01 and 10/20/01. (Back to article.)

¹³ "...we now stand before a chasm of political uncertainty the likes of which none of us has ever seen before, much less crossed." Joel Rogers, "The End of Innocence", The Nation, 9/17/01. (Back to article.)

¹⁴ "And as events at the WTO meeting here illustrate, many of the movement's adherents are feeling heightened discomfort about engaging in the sort of militant activity that once brought them attention because they are loath to risk being associated in the public mind with Osama bin Laden and his followers." Paul Blustein, "Protest Group Shifts Tactics At WTO Talks", Washington Post 11/11/01. (Back to article.)

¹⁵ They also share an implicit theory of the state. The idea is that in the U.S. it's possible for narrowly-based fractions of the capitalist class to wield state power in their narrow parochial interests. This seems dubious. The U.S. is a huge place; there's no central dominant metropolis like Paris or London. Compared with Europe, the U.S. is decentralized culturally, geographically, and economically. Our "ruling class" is heterogeneous, fractile along all these lines and probably more. The U.S. state reflects that fractility, with class power refracted through a very large number of concrete centers within the executive apparatus, the legislative apparatus, the two dominant parties, the courts, education, the military, the diplomatic profession, the intelligence and police bureaucracies, and so on. It seems doubtful that any class fraction would be allowed by the others to wage a war in its own parochial interest. This particular war, in any event, is supported by overwhelming consensus of the capitalist class as a whole, symptomized by Barbara Lee's lonely vote. When we describe the Bush administration as representing the oil industry, we're being too simplistic; and when we describe this war as the oil industry's war, we ignore the capitalist consensus supporting it.

Here's a snip from Ralph Miliband, making a related point in a more general way. He's describing something he wrote earlier: "...I reformulated the point by suggesting that a distinction had to be made between the state autonomously acting on behalf of the ruling class, and its acting at the behest of that class, the latter notion being, I said, 'a vulgar deformation of the thought of Marx and Engels'. What I was rejecting there was the crude view of the state as a mere 'instrument' of the ruling class obediently acting at its dictation.", "State Power and Class Interests", reprinted in Class Power and State Power, Verso 1983 p. 64. (Back to article.)

¹⁶ This silence is very loud. It's the location within activist discourse in which ruling class ideology exerts its hegemony. As we would have said back in the '80s. ;-) (Back to article.)

¹⁷ We make it so much harder on ourselves when we lapse into the frustrated rhetoric which has been so common so far. As if 100 sorties a day can seriously be compared with Hiroshima, Dresden and Tokyo. I do not in any way wish to downplay the scope of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Afghanistan. I do wish to point out that the bombing we've seen so far does not compare with the nuclear destruction of a metropolis. It's a simple thing to say "there's a tremendous humanitarian disaster in Afghanistan and the bombing makes it far worse." There's no need to claim "the bombing is akin to Hiroshima" in either scope or intention. When we say that to someone who doesn't understand the humanitarian disaster we surrender our ability to influence that person's thinking. Here's an example: "Bush and the ruling elite are using the demands for blood revenge (actively promoted by government and media) that its goal is a New World Order of US domination where the dictates of Washington must be obeyed or else. That's the real objective of the terror bombing of Afghanistan like the fire-bombing of Dresden in Germany and nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during WW II." Miah, ibid. Note also, "real objective". (Back to article.)

¹⁸ The powers that be blew it twice, first through their incompetent intelligence, second through their incompetent war; and in their responses have systematically betrayed their profound class-bias at home and race-based cultural myopia internationally. We can talk to people about these things. (Back to article.)

¹⁹ "In short, it should be easy enough for Washington to topple the Taliban. To construct a durable client state in Afghanistan is, of course, another matter. But for a few years at least, it should not be difficult for US power, tactfully coordinated with Russia and Pakistan, to dominate the scene, even if Taliban guerrillas linger in the mountainous areas of the south-east." Perry Anderson, unpublished exchange with Mike Davis, received via e-mail on 10/16/01. (Back to article.)

²⁰ "The events of September 11 have generated an enormous volume of high-decibel commentary and posturing across the Western political spectrum. One of the most popular tropes is that they represent a world-historical turning-point, nothing less than the entry of humanity into a completely new epoch, the menacing twentieth-first century. (Judt, Garton-Ash, et seq). Even the least excitable writers still describe the current moment as a major international crisis, of potentially far-reaching scope and effects. How justified is such an assumption? Below are some reasons for doubting the common view of the current situation." Anderson, ibid. (Back to article.)

²¹ We seem to experience real discomfort coming to grips with the thought that vibrant mass struggles under far-right leaderships might be powerful enough to tip the balance of forces. "These attacks have nothing to do with anti-imperialism, not even a twisted anti-imperialism. The use of mass terror is an expression of reactionary politics and movements that oppose the fundamental rights of peoples. Fundamentalists of the Bin Laden type support capitalism and defend it. They are or have been linked to bourgeois fractions and to sectors of several reactionary state apparatuses, like the Saudi monarchy and the Pakistani and Sudanese dictatorships. These groups want to impose a discourse on Muslim populations that is fanatically religious, anti-Western rather than anti-imperialist, and anti-Semitic rather than anti-Zionist. They want to impose ultra-reactionary theocratic political regimes like the Taliban regime, and they use the Palestinian cause to disguise these reactionary objectives." FI "Resolution on the September 11th attacks and the aggression against Afghanistan", ibid. Or from another perspective, "A big section of the '60s radical generation, for instance, tended to see international solidarity with armed struggle movements as what leftists were really supposed to do [...]", Elbaum, ibid. Or again, "As the 'war on terrorism' begins, the balance of forces is extremely unfavorable. A comparison with the Cold War period puts this into focus. The Cold War was a straitjacket on social progress and revolutionary change, but in that time there were powerful socialist countries, a strong constellation of national liberation movements and, especially from the 1960s, relatively large workers and progressive movements in the imperialist heartlands. Despite many tensions, conflicts, structural defects and policy blunders, these mainly operated in tandem and acted as a counterweight to imperialist freedom of action. But the main power centers opposed to imperialism are now much weaker or altogether gone." Elbaum, ibid. The old power centers opposed to imperialism are gone, but are there now new ones we should take note of? (Back to article.)

²² "'The use of media as a weapon had an effect parallel to a battle,' the top Hezbollah commander in southern Lebanon, Sheik Nabil Qaouk, said in a rare interview with a Western journalist. He discussed in unusual detail how Hezbollah learned to improve its effectiveness, strategy and weaponry, and how to videotape its successes for distribution to the media. [...] 'By the use of these films, we were able to control from a long distance the morale of a lot of Israelis,' he said, underscoring how demoralization as much as defeat helped to drive the Israelis from southern Lebanon." John Kifner, "In Long Fight with Israel, Hezbollah Tactics Evolved", New York Times 7/19/00. (Back to article.)

²³ See Magnus Ranstorp, "The Strategy and Tactics of Hizballah's Current 'Lebanonization Process'", Mediterranean Politics, Summer 1998. (Back to article.)

²⁴ Right-wing mass-movements have often used terror attacks against civilians, particularly to demoralize and fragment opposing mass mobilizations. The Nazis, the Fascists, and the Zionists are all examples of right-wing mass-movements with terrorist components. Hizballah's uniqueness -- I think -- lies in its use of terror attacks specifically to accelerate the mass mobilization supporting their own movement. As far as I know, this is new. Yet see the FI resolution already cited: "Carried out by conspiratorial networks, [terrorist attacks] reduce the people they claim to champion to the status of powerless observers of the confrontation between two logics of terror." "Resolution on the September 11th attacks and the aggression against Afghanistan", ibid. See the many press citations to the contrary below. (Back to article.)

²⁵ John Kifner, "Guerilla Sect Emerges As Force in Palestinian Uprising", New York Times 10/15/2000. (Back to article.)

²⁶ Lee Hockstader, "Palestinians Find Heroes in Hamas: Popularity Surges For Once-Marginal Sponsor of Suicide Bombings", Washington Post 8/11/01. (Back to article.)

²⁷ Daniel Williams, "Where Palestinian 'Martyrs' Are Groomed: West Bank City of Jenin Emerges As Suicide Bomb Capital", Washington Post 8/15/01. (Back to article.)

²⁸ Douglas Frantz, "Guerrilla Attacks Raise Worries in Central Asia", New York Times 9/6/00. (Back to article.)

²⁹ Rajiv Chanrasekaran, "Southeast Asia Shaken By Rise of Strict Islam: Political Stability In Doubt In Historically Secular Area", Washington Post 11/5/00. (Back to article.)

³⁰ Said Aburish, "The Coming Arab Crash", The Guardian Unlimited 10/18/01. (Back to article.)

³¹ Aburish, ibid. (Back to article.)

³² Daniel Fisher and Lynn Cook, "The prize", Forbes Global, 11/12/01.  (Back to article.)

³³ Frantz, ibid. (Back to article.)

³⁴ "The unprecedentedly comprehensive coverage by Arab television of the second Intifada has, by all accounts, created equally unparalleled attention and solidarity with the Palestinians." Davis, ibid. (Back to article.)

³⁵ Howard Schneider, "Independent TV Gives Arabs A New Perspective on the News: Satellite Broadcasts Contributed to Anti-Israeli Protests", Washington Post, 11/7/00. The U.S. bombed al-Jazeera's office in Kabul on 11/12/01. (Back to article.)

³⁶ "...it's a historic event because there was a change. The change was the direction in which the guns were pointed. That's new. Radically new." Noam Chomsky, "The New War Against Terror", Counter-Punch, 10/24/01. Exactly. (Back to article.)

³⁷ I will tell you, though, who did not do it. It wasn't Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the DFLP, or any other segment of the Palestinian liberation movement. Each of these organizations has condemned the 9/11 attacks and there's every reason to believe them. (Back to article.)

³⁸ "Whether or not Sharon's ambition is to topple Arafat, there are already signs that the Palestinian Authority is beginning to teeter. In Bethlehem, site of the fiercest combat, Palestinian militias have the run of the street, ignoring Arafat's commands to cease fire and battling Israeli tanks at will." Tracy Wilkinson, "Debate Emerges Over Sharon's Motives", Los Angeles Times 10/24/01. (Back to article.)

³⁹ "According to reports, the two Palestinian demonstrators were shot at a rally organized by the militant Islamic group Hamas. [...]Thousands of protesters, some chanting 'hail to Bin Laden' marched through the streets as police fired teargas." "Palestinian protesters killed at pro-Bin Laden rally", Guardian Unlimited, 10/8/01. (Back to article.)

⁴⁰ "Week five of Operation Enduring Freedom saw the subtle redefinition of U.S. goals. The mission of toppling the Taliban and destroying Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network gave way to a campaign dedicated to taking territory and remaking Afghanistan. This shift works against American interests and undermines the long-term war against terror. [...] despite all the fine words once used to described a tailored and unconventional war to match a cunning and resilient enemy, what is being actually implemented is as about conventional and unimaginative as could be. [...] the U.S. approach borders on stupid. The fireworks display of American impunity merely spawns the next generation of terrorists. [...] The result is that the United States, for all the happy headlines this week, is increasingly locked into a conventional war dependent on questionable partners to fight an anachronistic effort to conquer irrelevant territory." William M. Arkin, "Dot Mil: Bad News in the Good News", Washington Post 11/13/01 . (Back to article.)

⁴¹ "no terrorist act since Sarajevo has been so finely tuned (through diabolic design or sheer accident) to so much accumulated economic and political instability." Davis, ibid. In fact they were timed for the day everybody came home from the Durban conference on racism, after failing to condemn Israel, something you don't see stressed much in either the mainstream or the progressive press. (Back to article.)

⁴² The Washington Post and other ruling class sources have made much play of the apparent divisions between Powell and Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, portrayed as advocating removal of Saddam Hussein and etc. Sort of a good cop / bad cop thing, apparently. This is all over the press, but here's a representative quote: "... an ongoing debate inside the administration between those reputedly led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a supposed hawk on the issue of moving the military campaign beyond Afghanistan, and those who agree with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who advocates a more circumscribed strategy." Karen De Young, "Allies Are Cautious on 'Bush Doctrine'", Washington Post 10/16/01. (Back to article.)

⁴³ "Powell: Fighting during Ramadan a possibility", 10/24/01, CNN online (Back to article.)

⁴⁴ In my opinion it's important for activists to carefully avoid any hint of the third-worldism traditional in progressive internationalist milieux. The fundamentalist movements are viciously proto-fascistoid; although they have mass bases, like Fascism proper had, progressives have no points of agreement with them whatever. In my opinion it's important to avoid formulations like this one: "To defend the Afghan state is not the same as supporting the Taliban government or bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. It is the right of national sovereignty for the Afghan people that are under attack." Miah, ibid. I think if this statement were rephrased to "To defend the Afghan nation", rather than "state", it would carry more weight for me. As it stands, I can't see how defending the Afghan state is different than defending the Taliban government. (Back to article.)

⁴⁵ Howard Kurtz, "Feds Fiddled While Anthrax Spread", Washington Post 10/24/01. (Back to article.)

Back to 2001 menu
Back to Mark's Blogspace main page

More Information

1. "All roads lead to Tehran", Phillips
2. "The pipeline redux", Phillips
3. "Complexity", Phillips
4. "weblogs: a history and perspective", blood
5. "You've got blog", Mead
6. EatonWeb Portal
7. BlogHop
8. Blogger
9. Blogroots
10. The Pepys Project