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Submitted by Webteam on Mon, 01/01/2007 - 12:00am
<!--wrsf-->"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - McDonalds’ cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas (the maker of the Tomahawk cruise missile). And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." War is particularly a feature of the imperialist stage of capitalist development — the domination, since the end of the 19th century, of the world economy by the rich First World nations (like Australia and the United States). When workers go on strike and get out of line, the bosses send in the police to sort them out; when Third World nations get out of line - deciding, for example, that their natural resources should be used for their own good, not that of First World multinationals — the imperialist nations send in the troops, either their own armed forces or those of a Third World client regime.
"War is merely the continuation of policy by other means", Karl von Clausewitz, a Prussian general in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, famously noted. First World governments use their militaries — sometimes in a form of armed blackmail — to protect the investments their country’s capitalists in Third World countries, and defend capitalists’ right to exploit the materials, markets and labour of the poor countries.
In his 1933 book War is a Racket, retired and heavily decorated US Major-General Smedley Butler reflected on his former job: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps... And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."
"I helped make Mexico ... safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long."
Of course it isn’t just direct threats to capitalists’ profits that encourage imperialist interventions — it’s also political threats. For example, the US has a long history of military interventions and of backing brutal dictatorships in order to crush left-wing movements and governments. That’s because revolutions and uprisings in one country can inspire the populations of other countries to buck the system.
Imperialist military interventions are never sold to the public on the basis of "reaping more profits for corporations" however. Instead they’re cloaked in the rhetoric of democracy, human rights and "humanitarian interventions". So in the case of Iraq, the "Coalition of the Killing" ostensibly didn’t invade for the sake of mega-corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel, it was sold to the public as a "war of liberation" to "bring democracy to Iraq" and remove the threat posed by alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
The hypocrisy of the US-Australian-British coalition was evident to millions though — Hussein was a firm US and British ally in the ’80s, and when he was carrying out his genocidal anti-Kurd policies. Scarcely a word of protest was heard from the Australian business elite on the issue either. An enduring image from the West’s relationship with Iraq is the video footage of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein in Baghdad in December 1983. Rumsfeld, of course, was the head of the Pentagon when the US unleashed its murderous blitzkrieg on Iraq in March 2003, aiming to replace friend-turned-foe Hussein with a regime more willing to cooperate with Washington’s plans in the Middle East.
"No blood for oil" was a popular slogan of the anti-war movement because people made the connection between the US-led drive to war and the big corporations’ desire to "liberate" Iraq’s oil (the second-largest known reserves in the world at the time of the invasion). The US aimed to install a new regime in Baghdad that would be more amenable to USbased multinationals.
In a sick twist the "reconstruction" of Iraq has been a massive source of "corporate welfare", the contracts (handed out by the US authorities in Baghdad) mainly going to companies based in countries that supported the war — the very same countries that helped devastate Iraq’s infrastructure and economy!
War: Capitalism With the Gloves Off
Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, almost before the World Trade Center’s towers had finished collapsing, the US elite were plotting how to take advantage of the tragedy. While people globally mourned the loss of almost 3000 lives, the US administration and the Pentagon began planning the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq produced a massive global movement that protested against the warmongers’ brutal assault on two already devastated Third World nations. In the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the largest-ever coordinated, worldwide demonstrations took place in opposition to George Bush’s war plans over the weekend of February 14- 16. Bush, along with Australian Prime Minister John Howard and British PM Tony Blair, showed a callous disregard for Afghan and Iraqi lives and carried out a policy that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents. War, however, is not just caused by the plots of groups of evil men and women who couldn’t give a toss about the price people will pay. It’s a fundamental feature of the capitalist system. Of course war existed before the development of capitalism, but it is only since capitalism became the dominant social and economic system that war has been such a central feature of human existence (for example, more wars were fought in the 20th century alone than were waged between 0 and 1000CE). And just as wars have become more prevalent, so too have they become more destructive. Killing people on a mass scale has been refined to a science — capitalism has brought us such "wonder weapons" as the atomic bomb (killing hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945), depleted uranium weapons (the deadly legacy of which still kills in Iraq) and cluster bombs (the US dropped around 1230 cluster bombs on Afghanistan between October 2001 and March 2002, containing 248,056 deadly "bomblets").Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
