The Bush Doctrine, the New World Order, and Desert Storm Revisited

In the waning days of his presidency George Bush authorized the renewal of military war against Iraq, recalling what many mainstream commentators have described as the “proudest achievement” of his Presidency on what many noted was a kind of two-year “anniversary celebration” of “Operation Desert Storm.” Ironically, the very same president who presided over the ideological relegitimation of the rapid and flexible use of military force as a preferred “solution” to a wide range of “problems” threatening the security and stability of a “new world order” had only just completed outlining, in his last major speech as president, a “Bush doctrine” insisting upon “prudence” and “restraint” in the use of military force, and that the United States cannot and should not act as “the world’s policeman.”

Because the critical response in the United States to the glaring contradiction between “the Bush Doctrine” and Bush’s revisitation of “Operation Desert Storm” has been so effectively muted (and, in fact, the most visible criticism has been that Bush “should have gone all the way into Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein once and for all when he had the chance”) it is useful to reflect upon what — little — change has taken place since Bush’s rhetorical inaugaration, in January 1991, of the “new world order.” As we have seen, underlining the commonality of interest between Democrats and Republicans, new President Bill Clinton completely supported — and continues completely to support — Bush’s decision to renew the war against Iraq. Yet what is particularly striking and indicates the degree to which Bush’s legacy is and will be substantial, is that so many Americans, including President Clinton in his inaugaral address, have accepted that it is now a virtually unquestionable fact that we do live in “the new world order” first proclaimed by Bush in January 1991 and that this is a world order in which the United States can and should freely intervene militarily whenever and wherever it sees fit to insure “security” and “stability,” especially of “United States interests.”

Given the duration of this Bush contribution, not only to “American foreign policy” but also to American popular self-consciousness and “the American political imaginary,” it is crucial that the American radical left inquire into what is this “new world order” really all about so as to be best equipped to fight back against its injustices. I would like to contribute to this process of inquiry by recalling a speech I made at a forum on “The New World Order” as part of a full-day teach-in against the Iraq War in February of 1991. Unfortunately, my analysis at that time is still very appropriate to today’s situation:

The War in the Context of Global Capitalism Today

I would like to begin with a brief anecdote. My sister Jennifer is a junior political science major at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Connecticut. Several weeks ago Jennifer attended a university forum at Southern Connecticut, sponsored by the political science department, to discuss the war between the United States and Iraq. The forum was well-attended and lasted for nearly four hours. Over 90% of all comments made, both from a panel of faculty from the political science department and from the audience of students, faculty, and staff, were opposed to the war. One comment Jennifer relayed to me from this forum struck me as particularly relevant to what we are concerned with in this workshop today, and that was made by a marxist professor named Gold who said this: “Bush’s new world order is nothing but the same old shit.”

The question I would like to address very briefly is this: is this “new world order” “nothing but the same old shit ?” I think the answer to this question is both yes and no.

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Let us begin with the “yes” side. The world today is a capitalist world. Capitalism is the dominant mode of production not only within the nations of the first world, but also, in the form of imperialist capitalism, within the third world and increasingly the second world as well. Late capitalism is genuinely global capitalism — and late capitalism is also a genuinely global imperialism. So-called “neo- imperialism” is not only still imperialism, but is also moroever an imperialism which is even more intensive and more extensive in its exploitation of the “post-colonial” third world — and now also the “post-capitalist” second world.

Capitalism is rooted in competition among many capitals. Competition leads to concentration of capital which leads in turn to centralization of capital which leads to the formation of monopolies which leads in turn to imperialism. Imperialism refers to capitalism which has reached the stage of development in which capital expands beyond national boundaries; the home nation now provides markets for commodity exports and investment of capital which are insufficient to satisfy the needs of large monopoly capitals. Under imperialism, capitalist production and circulation become transnational and the world becomes subject to the needs of capital, supported by the power of the imperialist state. The imperialist state conquers and maintains conquest of markets for export of finished goods, sources of raw materials and supplies to be used in capitalist production, markets for investment of excess capital, and sources for cheaper production which make use of cheaper labor and are largely freed of the environmental, health and safety, and tax restrictions faced in the “metropolitan” nations from which imperialist capital originates.

The needs of — and the competition among — imperialist monopoly capitals provides the ultimate framework for understanding all wars fought by the capitalist nations of the first world ever since the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the case of the United States, this includes the Spanish-American war, World War I and World War II, the Korean and Vietnamese War, the Iraq War, and over 100 other uses of military force by the United States government in the nations of the third world, primarily in Central and South America, since the beginning of the 20th century.

Nominal political independence has not freed the nations of the third world from domination by first world, imperialist monopoly capital. Imperialist capital owns and controls much of the production in these now formally independent nations and supplies the financial means of operating both domestic-based production as well as local government in these nations. This financial “support” is extremely costly for the people of these third world nations. Not only is money loaned out to third world industry and government at exorbitant rates of interest, making repayment very difficult and forcing the third world nation to transfer a great proportion of all wealth generated within its borders for decades to come to first world financial capital, but also this money is only loaned on draconian terms that usually require that the economy of the third world nation be restructured so as to provide an easier and more profitable location for further imperialist exploitation, including subjecting the people of the third world nation to a program of “austerity” which causes the vast majority to experience terrible pain and hardship. "Financial assistance” from the IMF, the World Bank, and other first world capitals and capitalist institutions ostensibly designed to assist in the “development” of the third world quite rightly have been identified with development of third world “underdevelopment” — with development which serves to enhance the profit of imperialist capital and simultaneously maintain and even extend poverty within the third world and dependence of the third world upon the first.

Under neo-imperialist conditions, in which imperialist monopoly first world capital towers over indigenous third world capital, often swallowing this indigenous capital up entirely and making it a subsidiary and complementary part of first world capital’s transnational field of operation, third world governments must cater to the needs and wants of imperialist capital, and their chief political and military agent, the imperialist state, or suffer dire consequences. The fate of attempts to develop even semi- autonomous national economies in Chile under Allende, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and now Iraq under Saddam Hussein all testify to the costs of not playing by the rules set by imperialism and agreeing to act at the virtual beck and call of imperialist masters. The Kuwaiti state is a perfect example of a state which has accepted its place and in so doing has become a good and useful servant of imperialism: Kuwait has invested its profits where they have been needed in the United States and Britain — rather than in the Arab world —and has agreed to adjust the price of its oil to suit the interests and needs of first world capital.

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And yet the emerging new world order is also not just the same old imperialist shit. The fact that the United States has felt the need to make use of massive military force, at huge expense, in the time of a serious national and global recession, against a nation and a government which has up until very recently been a U.S. ally and which has received a significant amount of U.S. aid (including sales of military arms which are now being used against the United States) should make it clear that this war is a war not of triumphant imperialism but of desperate imperialism. The fact that the limited autonomy of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime cannot be allowed to interfere with the need for total subservience by the Gulf states to imperialist interests indicates that first world, transnational capital is now so pressed by the continuation of the current long wave of stagnation and decline in the average rate of profit — and by the current global recession — that it cannot afford to lose any important avenue for profit from the third world at this time and that, furthermore, a deepening of current imperialist exploitation of the third world has become necessary.

In a long wave of stagnation and decline in capitalist profit — and each successive long wave of stagnation and decline in the history of capitalism becomes even more difficult and costly for capital to overcome — capital must intensify its assault on labor, on social welfare, on third world colonies and neo-colonies, and on non- (pre-, semi-, and post-) capitalist production to compensate for its loss in profit. At the same time, inter-capitalist competition becomes more ruthless. In the age of late capitalism, in which transnational capitals dominate over smaller capitals that compete with each other for the most part within national industries, this inter-capitalist competition increasingly takes the form of inter-imperialist rivalry among transnational regional blocs, today American, dominated by the United States (and here it is worth noting not only how long Central and South American production has been subordinated to U.S. capitalist interests, but also how thoroughly Canadian capital is being integrated into an increasingly less autonomous and increasingly more subordinate position in relation to U.S. capital), Europe, now likely to be dominated over by Germany, and East Asia, dominated over by Japan.

In the age of late capitalism, the third world is no longer principally a supplier of raw materials and supplies to the first world and an additional site for export of finished goods and investment of excess capital, as the third world has become increasingly the primary location for the production of goods in labor-intensive industries dominated by transnational capital. Today, transnational industrial capital operates a global factory in which production of a single product can be divided into multiple separate stages carried out across many different nations and moved rapidly from one nation to the next in the constant search to reduce the cost of production to the lowest possible amount: an urgent necessity for capital that has grown so huge, producing so much and so rapidly, that it becomes increasingly difficult for capital to realize and maintain continuing high levels of profit — to sell all it produces at or above the price of production. The emergence of this global factory has contributed to a growing full-scale industrial development of much of the third world and to the proletarianization of an increasingly large percentage of the population of the third world. And yet, once again, this is third world labor subject — now even more subject — to first world command and control.

At the same time, the struggle and competition for profits in a period in which this becomes increasingly difficult and all kinds of other avenues have been pushed to the breaking point — intensified imperialist exploitation and intensified superexploitation of the labor of women and members of non-white, non-european ethnic and racial groups; vast assistance from the state in the form of loans, tax breaks and credits, public works programs and a permanent arms economy; the invention of a whole new set of markets in the new post-World War II “consumer society” and the acceleration of brand differentiation and of planned obsolescence; permanent inflation, the extension of government deficits and of industrial and consumer credit, etc., etc. — has meant that capital increasingly could not tolerate a whole sector of the global economy largely isolated from and only externally and limitedly subject to capitalist control: the economies of the second world. Of course the development of a long internal struggle within these nations has played the decisive role in the current crisis — and collapse — of stalinism, and yet the pressure exerted by first world capital and its chief political agent, the American state, helped push stalinism over the brink.

The collapse of stalinism is not a cause for much if any sorrow on the part of genuine revolutionary marxists in the west or the east, the north or the south, and yet it has a significant effect on the new world order: eliminating a serious complication of the struggle of capitalists in competition with each other and of capital against labor. Both of these fundamental struggles can be expected to expand and intensify in the immediately foreseeable future — and the war against Iraq is not only likely to be only the first of more such wars against semi-independent third world regimes which control significant sources of profit, but also the development of a new phase in a number of other ongoing and emerging wars: the war among capitals of the same and of different industries, branches, sectors, regions, and departments; the war among American, European, and East Asian capitals and their political agents; and the economic, political, and ideological war of capital against labor — a war which is being fought right now in the United States by means of and through the military war against Iraq. The war against Iraq will result in an increasingly wide gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. as the costs of this war for the U.S. will be — and already are — huge, and these costs will not be shared equally. Further reductions in social welfare, further increases in direct and indirect taxation, and larger profits for large capital at the expense of smaller profits for small capital will raise the cost of purchasing goods produced by the latter without significantly reducing the cost of purchasing goods produced by the former. The military budget will continue to absorb a huge share of government spending — and the ever-more capital intensive industries that dominate the production of military arms will benefit at the expense of the need for jobs — and decent jobs — for American working people. Regulation of health and safety in the workplace, of environmental destruction, and of consumer responsibility will be cut back as will provision for all the worst victims of poverty, hunger, and disease. Restriction on exercise of civil liberties will increase as will the internal policing of the American population throughout virtually all areas of Americans’ lives. And, of course, at the same time the political and ideological victory for the right in the “success” of and “support” for the Iraq war will mean that once again millions of Americans will willingly support their own subjugation while scapegoating and terrorizing others who are not responsible for the problems of a continuing free-fall in average real income and wealth and the average real standard of living in the United States: women, gays and lesbians, African- Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, immigrants and foreigners of all kinds (although, of course, especially non-white and non-european immmigrants and foreigners).

Late capitalism is capitalism in decline: capitalism in virtually continuous and ultimately irremediable crisis. The future beyond capitalism is already being forged from within capitalism today, and the capitalists and their allies are fighting to become the new ruling class in a new post-capitalist global order. Such a future new world order may take the form of an exceedingly repressive, totalitarian barbarism involving massive extension of economic, political, and ideological subjugation and deprivation as well as an increasingly savage destruction of the planet Earth itself. And yet such a future is not inevitable: it is still possible to struggle to build a new world order of a genuinely democratic, egalitarian, collectivist, peaceful, free, and humane socialism and communism. Let us begin.

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