The Drive to War

War has, of course, been a feature of civilization since its birth; but the post-Cold War period shares a number of features not found in previous wars, among them the decline of American economic and political power, the reversal of the bipolar or tripolar alignment of the Cold War, the growing privatization/denationalization of killing, the triumph of the volunteer army, and the advent of modern ways of killing. But the basic logic governing war, the logic of finance capital, is the same as it was in Lenin's time.

The modern war drive can be said to begin with the Gulf War. Iraq's belligerency against Kuwait was the proximate cause of the war. Iraq, at the time, boasted one of the largest and best-supplied armies in the world, having received massive material aid from the U.S. and USSR during the war with Iran (this betrayal on the Soviet part, a consequence of years of playing big-power politics at the expense of supporting world revolution, prefiguring the post-Cold War alignment). Presuming on the confidence of the imperialist and social-imperialist powers, calculated that it could take over Kuwait's oil and port, weakening the U.S.'s alliance with Saudi Arabia and cementing Iraq's position as a regional power broker. Most importantly, the material and psychological benefits of an easy victory would undo the humiliation of the stalemate with the poorly equipped Iranians, and shore up the senile dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. But,like any leader of a poor country who counts on his friendly relations with the wealthiest coubntries, Saddam Hussein was betrayed.

The U.S. led the way in assembling an international coalition against Saddam Hussein for a variety of reasons that are symptomatic of the country's bipartisan drive to war today. First, the 1987 stock market crash had exposed the vulnerability of the world financial system and (as has been the case since World War 2) war was the stimulus program of first resort. In fact, the U.S. has never had economic growth during peacetime since before WW2, and its economic stability today depends heavily on permanent war. During the Reagan administration, I think, the official unemployment rate was recalculated to include members of the military among the employed, instead of out of the labor force, one of many steps taken by Reagan, Clinton, and Obama to hide the true extent of economic devastation. Besides this, the U.S. was actively preventing the rise of a strong Iraq, as it would similarly prevent the rise of a strong Brazil or S. Korea, to protect its hegemony from being challenged and reassure its client regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia. With its resounding defeat in Vietnam, and France's temporary defection from NATO, as well as the exposure of American atrocities and war crimes, the U.S. is no longer the political power it was during the Truman era; and American economic power, tied to the fortunes of the capitalist system as a whole, has been in free fall since 1987. But the U.S. is still by far the strongest military power in the world. President Carter, envisioning this situation, inaugurated a major militarization drive, ramped up later under Reagan and Clinton. Since then, the U.S.'s mainstrategy in world affairs has been to use its military power to reverse its declining economic and political fortunes.

Other countries joined the coalition against Iraq for a variety of reasons--Saudi Arabia to preserve its own regional hegemony, the USSR in exchange for backdoor deals in Afghanistan, trade concessions, etc., Syria in hopes of repairing its relations with the U.S., European powers to get a piece of the military contracts. China, preoccupied by student revolt, chose not to take on the world's biggest powers by exercising its veto power. The UK, Australia, and New Zealand all are politically dependent on the clout that comes from their "special relationship" with the U.S. and are usually reliable military allies of the U.S. Meanwhile, Israel was pressured into not retaliating for Iraqi rocket launches, in a humiliating diplomatic comeuppance, for fear of alienating American allies.

The war was an open massacre of largely unarmed, often fleeing Iraqis--partly because Hussein reserved his best military forces to use against his own people. Hussein set afire Kuwaiti oil wells causing senseless environmental destruction, while coalition forces destroyed much of Iraq's infrastructure, planning for a containment strategy that would reap big profits for oil speculators, lawyers, and arms dealers while leaving Iraqis with poor access to medicine, clean water, and electricity for years. In the aftermath, Palestinians were massacred in Kuwait, Shi'ites in Iraq, and Kurds in Iraq and Turkey.

The next major war was in Bosnia, the largest war on European soil since WWII. Above all else, this war, ostensibly between rival gangs spawned from Yugoslavia's ruling Stalinist party, exposed the fragility of the NATO and EU alliances that had assembled coalitions against Iraq. Germany, eager to get out from under the U.S.'s shadow and create a 4th Reich where German industrial capital monopolized European production, early backed the Croatian Tudjman faction. France, jealous of German power, found itself supporting Karadzic's Serb forces, in alliance with Russia, which sought a reunification of Yugoslavia under a corrupt Chetnik pro-Russian regime. As it happened, the Serb and Croat militias, in that order, were responsible for most of the atrocities of that war. The UK, seeing Yugoslavia being carved up into rival spheres of influence, began backing the Bosniak Muslim forces just enough to keep the Serb forces from dominating, while military strategy pushed Serb and Croat forces toward alliance. Meanwhile, the U.S. let its rivals in Europe bleed their treasuries for months, while lives were lost in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, until it saw its political fortunes served by intervention which would humiliate its rivals and create a new Balkan regime that, while it did little directly for the U.S., preserved a balance of power among its European rivals.

Liberals like to say, "When Clinton lied, no one died." In fact, his lies about the length of the Bosnian intervention paved the way for a war that cost thousands of lives and stoked anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe.

Around the same time as this war was Russia's bloody war on Chechnya, demonstrating that the Russian rulers had kept Stalinism's brutal murder machine while discarding its verbal commitment to the oppressed. The use of chemical weapons and spies in this war helped pave the way for the war on Afghanistan, and the scapegoating of Muslims prefigured the "war on terror" of countless powers.

Russia's successful war against Chechen children and peasants also was symptomatic of the defeats of guerrillas around the world--the IRA, ETA, PLO, Hamas, Tamil Tigers, Shining Path, CPN (Maoist), Communist Party of the Philippines, and EZLN have all been dealt major blows by the governments they fought, usually after years of alienating themselves by their thuggish ways, and after a strategy focused on permanent war, not the conquest of power, kept them from capitalizing on their victories. Often in the wake of defeat they've been drawn into an appearance of sharing power (Maoists in Nepal, Sinn Fein in N. Ireland) at the cost of compromising on the very issues that impelled them to war in the first place. The biggest success of guerrilla warfare recently, the S. African revolution, was unlike most of these an urban-led movement with mass support in urban and rural areas in S. Africa and tremendous popular sympathy around the world, largely the fruit of correct political decisions by the ANC, COSATU, and the Communist Party.

Central Africa and the Sudan region also presented us with a spectacle of the horrors of modern war, complete with genocide, mass rape, and cannibalism. One of the most notorious examples is in Rwanda, where in a case of the plunge of rightist politics toward the gutter, the racist Hutu government was overthrown by an even more virulently racist Hutu faction. The Hutu/Tutsi divide , created by the Belgian colonizers but also roughly reflecting the historical rivalry between mostly Hutu farmers and mostly Tutsi herders, erupted in carnage in this impoverished country which notably also has one of the world's highest population densities. France and Belgium, hopeful of using the warfare to reassert their control, essentially endorsed the rampage of the dominant Hutu forces, as did the Catholic church which had several powerful Hutu archbishops and a vested interest in reasserting Hutu power. The U.S. didn't intervene, simply enough, because its interests were adequately served by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans seen as "taking up space" and the embarrassment of its European rivals.

Tutsi refugees led the popular movement to overthrow wealthy, corrupt, CIA-connected dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but ongoing struggles between farmers and herders, rising demand for central African resources, the Cold War proliferation of militia groups supplied by the great powers, and and the absence of a proletarian movement in central Africa, resulted in a bloody, atrocious free-for-all struggle for cobalt, gold, diamonds, copper, aluminum, coltan, and other resources that would eventually kill more people than any other war since WWII. This scramble dragged in half a dozen neighboring governments, and, although the highest-intensity conflict ended with the military defeat and exhaustion of Rwanda, it spawned violence that continues today. Imperialist powers largely ignored the war, both because they didn't care much which militia sold goods to them if the prices were OK, and because rival industries supported different parts of the country and the militias based there.

The war on Sudan has older roots, dating back to the Soviet Union's support for Khartoum when Egypt and Ethiopia were U.S.-dominated, and the U.S.'s support when Ethiopia and Libya were dominated by the Soviets. The Sudanese leaders sought to use their war chests, anti-Christian demagogy, and rivalries between southen tribes of cattle herders and smugglers to establish firm control over S. Sudan's oil fields and establish itself as a regional power. This war fed into and was fed by similar major wars in Ethiopia, Chad, Uganda, and the Central African Republic, but has received more attention partly for the largely Christian composition of the resistance vs. A Muslim government, partly for the media savvy of the rebels, partly owing to the large al-Qaeda presence in Sudan in the 1990s, and partly for Sudan's oil wealth, central location, and sheer size. Early in the war, Sudan was heavily subsidized by the U.S., still thinking in terms of its Cold War rivalry with the USSR. The Soviet-backed regime in Ethiopia meanwhile aided the rebels in hopes of keeping a strong rival from building up on the border. So did Israel, at that time hopeful of building up a power center in E. Africa, and Uganda, which hoped to seize S. Sudan for itself. When Eritrea gained independence and was fighting its own bloody war with Ethiopia, it bribed the rebels to turn on the Ethiopians. Meanwhile, villages, tribes, and language communities in S. Sudan were wiped out with systematic ruthlessness by Khartoum and allied militias.

The S. Sudanese rebels financed propaganda and provocations designed to drag disaffected people in Darfur into war against Sudan, thus relieving pressure on the south. (They did similar things in E. Sudan). Many people conflate the two Sudanese conflicts, believing for example that most Darfurians are Christian, when in fact Darfur is overwhelmingly Muslim and was the center of a slave-trading sultanate in early modern times. These conflicts intensified when starving Arabs, excluded from traditional grazing grounds by considerations of rebel military strategy, were recruited as mercenaries against the mostly "Black" tribes fueling the rebellion. (In fact, the Arabs, of mixed Black-Arab ancestry, would in most contexts also be identified as Black by most Americans.) Sudan was aided primarily by Eritrea, which as a result of spillover from the war on the eastern front had become enemies with tribes that were also fighting the Sudanese, while Libya, always alert for opportunities to expand its power southward, and Chad, serving as Libya's proxy, backed the Darfur rebels. Indeed, Chad helped precipitate the rebellion by funding incursions aimed at Sudanese targets.

Next in this series: the American strike on the al-Shifa plant and its aftermath.