Rolling the Dice Once Again - in Iran
by BAR executive editor
Glen Ford
"The Lords of Capital have always chosen to resolve their
contradictions through war."
Tom Engelhardt, the prolific intellectual engine of the
Nation Institute's daily column TomDispatch,
recently predicted that the Bush administration won't attack Iran
because...well, because they're too sensible to launch such a mad enterprise. In
a July
9 piece titled "Why Cheney Won't Take Down Iran," Engelhardt acknowledged
the many signs that point towards an air assault on the world's fourth biggest oil
exporter by the United States, Israel or both. "Given the Bush administration's
‘preventive war' doctrine," wrote Engelhardt, "which has opened the way for the
launching of wars without significant notice or obvious provocation, and the
penchant of its officials to ignore reality, all of this should frighten
anyone"
Then Engelhardt rolled off some of the many reasons the
U.S., for its own good, should not wage war on Iran: the "global shock"
of $300-$400 per barrel oil, "$12 gas at the pump"; International Atomic Energy
Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei's warning that a military strike "would turn the
region into a fireball"; last year's revolt of U.S. generals
and spies, who conspired to undercut the administration's rationale for an
Iran attack; and doubts among the chattering classes as to Dick Cheney's clout
in the last months of George Bush's regime.
Engelhardt tends to believe that "the weight of reality" and
the strategic presence of more "adults in the room" have brought a degree of
sanity to the Bush gang, and that Karl Rove's 2002
declaration, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality" is no longer operative in the White House. "Are they still capable of
creating ‘their own reality' and imposing it, however briefly, on the planet,"
asks Engelhardt? "Every tick upwards in the price of oil says no. Every day
that passes makes an attack on Iran harder to pull off."
"The Bush pirates believed the consequences of failure to
invade Iraq were far graver than the risks of war."
Engelhardt's underlying assumption appears to be that an
attack on Iran would be, in a word, crazy - too crazy even for the Bush men -
that the risks to the United States and world order are so terrifyingly high
that only madmen would take the plunge. The flaw in the argument is the
assumption that the Bush men and the Lords of Capital whom they serve see the
world in much the same way as the rest of us. They do not, and we know they do
not based on their behavior in 2002-2003, when the same cost-benefit analysis
would have argued decisively against an unprovoked invasion of Iraq. Clearly,
the Bush pirates believed the consequences of failure to invade Iraq were far graver
than the risks of war. The question we should be asking is: What makes relative
peace so scary that American imperialists would rather gamble the fate of the
planet, including their own futures, on a roll of the dice in the Persian Gulf?
Imperialism's Nightmare Vision
I submit that the Lords of Capital and their servants -
today, as in 2003 - understand perfectly well that the system they oversee
cannot long exist under the current paths of world development; that their only
hope to perpetuate themselves into future decades is to violently upset the
planetary game board - as often as necessary. From the financial oligarchy's perspective, the death of the world
as they know and possess it - their world - is imminent, and can only be
avoided through acts of horrific aggression, terror and barbaric reversion to
primitive modes of accumulation, i.e. brute theft and pillage.
That is the weight of their reality - actually, the
weight of the contradictions of late stage capitalism under the hegemony of the
all-powerful finance sector, which produces nothing yet seeks to monetize,
commodify and buy and sell everything.
So, what do the Lords
of Capital see, when they survey “their” world? They see the final failure of
their grand scheme to shift the centers of global production to the South and
East while somehow preserving the supremacy of the de-industrializing West – an
impossibility. As arch-speculator George Soros keenly understands, power
must “shift in favor of the developing world, particularly
China” – an unacceptable outcome to the Lords of Capital. They therefore require a
military alternative to the laws of political economy and civilized relations
among nations. Their continued existence depends on their capability and willingness
to smash and rearrange the planetary reality whenever imperialism’s illogical
and wildly contradictory arrangements are threatened. Raw military power – a global coercive regime – must be
deployed to counter the elemental logic of political economy (and history) with
the logic of terror.
"The supremacy of western finance capital can only be
maintained by periodically waging war against world order."
They must be constantly prepared to wage war against peace,
because only through war can they forestall the inevitable collapse of the rule
of unproductive capital - that grotesque insult to the human productive spirit
and simple common sense. The grand vision of corporate globalism - the finance
capitalists' imperial heaven - cannot exist in the real world except through
the application of terror. That's why the servants of the Lords of Capital were
compelled to devise the Project
for a New American Century (PNAC)
as a grand military strategy to buttress the terminal illogic of their
planet-smothering version of corporate globalism.
The PNAC's mission was to eliminate the capability
of any state or combination of states to mount a "deterrent to American
intervention" anywhere in the world. It was a declaration of war against
the world. The U.S. would develop the capability to wage four separate wars
simultaneously - resistance would be rendered futile.
The
invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003 - the first stage of a much deeper thrust
into Asia that was foiled by the Iraqi resistance - must be understood in the
context of U.S.-based finance capital's imperative to rule the planet through
military coercion. The rise of the euro, the approach of peak oil - let us not get lost in the bushes. The Lords of Capital
will always have reasons for war, since the global regime they seek to maintain
constantly creates conflicts with the productive forces of the world and
threatens human existence - now, for example, diverting food production and
distribution at affordable prices in favor of biofuels.
The U.S.
invasion of Iraq was a terroristic display, a macabre kind of mega-theater
designed to intimidate and straightjacket the entire world, including putative
allies. As I wrote on January 30,
2003, seven weeks before the war:
"The real
show is in the show, itself. The people who created George Bush's ridiculous
War Face are not just playing crazy to gain transient advantage over
Frenchmen and Russians. They are Hell-bent on proving to the natives
(all of us) that they are capable of unimaginable destruction. We must see it
to believe it - which is why this war is all but inevitable. In the aftermath
of horror, the world will become malleable, ready for reshaping in the
not-yet-defined New Order. That's the
plan. The pirates are confident they can improvise the post war details at
their leisure, later. What we are witnessing is essentially the buildup to a
global consciousness-searing U.S. military demonstration - the Mother of All
War Shows. If we search for the military or economic objectives of the conflict
on anything so crude as a map, we have missed the point."
Which is
not to say that Washington didn't have strategic objectives - dominance of the
entire region and its resources - but that they did not achieve them and,
therefore, retain every "reason" for further aggression, to continue pursuing
frustrated objectives. That's why there was no "exit strategy" in 2003. It is
the most compelling reason for remaining in Iraq, and why an attack on Iran is just waiting to
happen.
My friend
Tom Engelhardt thinks the ghastly potential consequences of a strike into Iran act as brakes to U.S. (and/or Israeli) aggression. However, if the point of
the aggression is to prove to the world that the attacker is willing to risk
global catastrophe to impose his will - if the strategy is to play a deadly
game of chicken with the rest of the planet - then the more risky, the better.
It is true, as I wrote on the day Bush's tanks crossed the
Kuwaiti border, that "the Pirates have accelerated the processes of their own
ruin." (See "They
Have Reached Too Far - Bush's Road Leads to Ruin for Himself and His
Pirates," Black Commentator, March 20, 2003.) But the accumulated
contradictions of maintaining imperial hegemony are what drove Washington to
invade Iraq - to attempt to upset the global game board - in the first place.
The fact that the invasion "accelerated the processes" of U.S. decline simply
makes another assault on world order more "necessary" from the perspective of
the Lords of Capital. From their standpoint, the alternative is the demise of
the system that defines their existence. What civilized people would
view as behavior too risky to contemplate, they perceive as defensive
measures to stave off systemic death.
"If the strategy is to play
a deadly game of chicken with the rest of the planet - then the more risky, the
better."
In the five years since the Iraq invasion, the euro has
grown in buying power from $.93 to $1.60, fossil fuel producers lose money
every time they sell oil and gas pegged to the failing dollar, and the nations
of the world continue to discover more creative ways to "redline" the U.S. out
of their political and economic affairs. What's an imperialist to do? Bang the
fist on the table, one more time, to upset the global game. Mr. Engelhardt
believes "[e]very tick upwards in the price of oil" makes it less likely that
the U.S. will attack Iran. But it is mainly U.S. war ranting that has sent the
price of oil into the stratosphere - another American game of chicken in which
it proves it is willing to destroy the economies of the industrial world,
including its own, to somehow preserve imperial hegemony. Washington's conduct
is, if anything, crazier than pre-Iraq invasion - unless one understands the
logic of the Lords of a dying system, whose remaining levers of global
control are artificial, largely disconnected from the real world economy, and
ultimately dependent on military coercion and the threat to bring the whole
house down.
U.S. threats to bring down the house may be redundant. In
the past year, the world has slowly become aware that the global economic order
as we have known it awaits an implosion unlike any in history. The sky really
is falling in on late stage capitalism.
The Big One
Where has capitalism been warehousing its most fundamental
contradictions during the current epoch of decay? How has finance capital
managed to disconnect itself from so much of global productive enterprise and
still churn out ever-increasing returns, without which it would quickly die?
The answer appears in the form of the Mother of all Bubbles, the $750 trillion
in "fictitious
capital" that former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and other European social democrats point out "represents 15 times the gross
domestic product (GDP) of all countries" on Earth, including more than $500
trillion in derivatives and other "notional" instruments.
This is the "money" that capitalist financial institutions
pretend is real - and whose shadowy presence overwhelms and distorts the real
world's comparatively puny $50 trillion economy (the U.S. GDP is $15 trillion).
Derivatives and such instruments are not wealth, but mainly organized debt that
is treated as money, and which threatens to strangle real economic activity. It
is a "ticking
time bomb" that no one - no one! - knows how to diffuse, much less
eliminate.
Apparently, that's the monopoly money the Lords of Capital
have been playing with to become "notionally" richer and richer while producing
virtually nothing and threatening everyone else with ruin if they disrespect
the Empire. Imperial heaven actually does rest on a foundation of clouds and
other smoke - and weapons of war.
"It is a ‘ticking time
bomb' that no one - no one! - knows how to diffuse."
It is impossible to imagine how the Lords of Capital will
separate their mountains of play money from productive capital, or how the
structures they lord over can survive the inevitable implosion.
Back in 2002, when Washington decided to upset a
disadvantageous global game board by invading Iraq, only $100 trillion in
derivatives floated in the financial firmament. Now the bubble has swollen
five-fold and, thanks to the U.S. sub-prime lending debacle, the world is
becoming aware of the looming catastrophe. Nobody is trading the bogus
instruments, which means their "value" is nil. Since no combination of oil
producers' "sovereign funds" can turn so much "shadow capital" into the real
thing, there can be no effective bailout or controlled deflation of the "fictitious money" bubble. It
is the end game of late stage capitalism's terminal contradictions, the final outcome of the Lords of Capital's futile
quest to maintain global power while disconnected from, and a burden to, the productive sectors of the world.
So, will the Lords of Capital accept their class
extinction - their social death - as the edifices of their rule implode in
utter ruin? Not likely. They've still got the U.S. military, bigger (or, at
least, more expensive) than all the rest of the world's armed forces, combined.
The option will still remain, to seize vital sectors and regions of the planet,
holding them hostage to continuing Western imperial sway. To just take
stuff, in a hi-tech war of primitive accumulation. That was the goal of the
greater Iraq adventure, until it got bogged down by pesky "insurgents." From where
the Lords of Capital sit, they don't have any other choices, not any longer, if
they insist on maintaining global hegemony. And they do insist.
Of course, there is nothing written in stone that says
Iran must be the location for the next U.S. land and resource grab - but there
will be a grab. Africa is daily penetrated and subdued, and
Venezuela is as good or bad a place as any to roll the dice. One thing is
certain: the Lords of Capital are literally incapable of transforming
themselves into productive world citizens. And they have always chosen
to resolve their contradictions through war.
Despite differences of temperament, Barack Obama serves
the same masters as John McCain: the Lords of Capital. That's why Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez wisely refuses to differentiate between the nominees-to-be. "The two candidates for the U.S. presidency attack us
equally, they attack us defending the interests of the empire," Chavez
told his socialist party. "Let's not kid ourselves, it is the empire and the
empire must fall."
Our job is to prevent them from bringing the rest of
the world down with it
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].