US Global Policy and September 11

"Adapted from Remarks to the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) Dec. 1, 2001"

by Mark Solomon

Has everything changed with September 11?

Has the unprecedented attack on the United States brought a profound transformation in the character and content of US global policy -- fostering a grand coalition against terrorism that requires new political thinking, new strategies and new alliances by the left?

Or -- is the "war on terrorism" a cover for US policymakers to extend their drive to consolidate the global economy and attain military, economic and strategic dominance within it? If so, that would impel unqualified opposition by progressive, antiwar forces. At the same time, do complex elements exist which command those forces to adopt new ideas in resisting war?

An examination of US policy before September 11 is a logical starting point in attempting to understand and assess that policy in the present situation.

From the 1980s class fractions representing transnational capital gained control of state apparatuses. That process was driven by a major restructuring of production though the utilization by advanced capitalist states of major scientific and technological developments coupled with a relentless campaign to reduce the power of labor. In the political and strategic sphere, the collapse of the Soviet Union and associated states in 1990-91 swept away all significant obstacles to the neoliberal model. For the first time in history, one system, capitalism, dominated the entire global landscape with the power to impose its property relations and its market nexus on the whole world. The successful effort to bring unruly Yugoslavia to heel and to propel NATO deeply into the Balkans marked a final hot war stage of the East-West Cold War.

The path was cleared for intensified North-South conflict as the North set about to bend that vast segment of humanity to the requirements of capitalist globalization. Sociologist William Robinson has described that process as a - "war...of a global rich and powerful minority against the global poor..." a war aimed at achieving unfettered capital mobility, imposing open markets upon even the most fragile economies; pressuring and exploiting low wage, poor environmental standards and low taxes; forcing submission to the ravages of unanticipated capital withdrawal, effecting arbitrary cutoffs of raw materials purchases no longer needed in high tech production, underselling and disrupting domestic markets, and using international finance and trade institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization to constrict public spending and threaten economic strangulation.

Such policies are systemic and rooted in the nature of capitalist globalization. The results have been catastrophic: 1.3 billion people in the Global South living in absolute poverty, 50 million deaths every year from malnutrition, a widening gap between rich and poor, rending of age-old social and cultural fabrics which have spawned scores of ethnic and religious conflicts and local wars. Aggravating the growing economic chasm has been the grossly inadequate material support from the North to ease spreading pandemics resulting from poverty and rotting infrastructures. Diseases like the Ebola virus and sleeping sickness have reappeared after years of dormancy. While AIDS has ravaged whole societies in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the Global South, only 400 million dollars has been contributed to combat the disease while Washington alone gave 15 billion dollars to bail out the airlines industry. Such circumstances, in totality, constitute a "war" and foment the very instability which is an anathema neo-liberalism.

While economic pressure has been transnational capital's favored weapon, it has not been loath to summon the military force of the state to suppress resistance and achieve its notion of stability and "proper" behavior. In a rare revelatory moment, the United States Space Command's "Joint Vision 20/20" said that the United states in the next generation will face the challenge of a "widening between ‘haves' and ‘have nots'" as a result of "continuing globalization." Such a "widening" would require the space based weapons arrayed mainly against the Global South.

Despite claims that the national state is in decline, it plays a crucial role in providing the infrastructure for transnational capital, in developing fiscal and monetary policies for the global economy, in spreading commodified culture, in providing social control internally and externally through the use of police and military forces. The national state has not withered away, but has become the neoliberal state, armed with the tools designed to impose the will of transnational capital all over the world. All this was ingrained well before September 11 when high altitude bombers and cruise missiles had already been utilized as low-risk means of inflicting damage upon recalcitrant countries. The Clinton administration was particularly adept at aggrandizing powerful transnational fractions of capital through aggressive promotion of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. It continued to use military force to extend social controls beyond national borders required by transnational capital.

The George W. Bush presidency appeared to reverse the transnational thrust of US foreign policy. With its abrogation of ABM, its rejection of the Kyoto environmental agreement, the land mines treaty, the antiterrorism convention, world criminal court, its initial rejection of "nation building," etc., it seemed to reverse the strategic logic of global integration and interdependence. Bush's neo- isolationist policies and nationalistic appeals appeared to reflect the interests of a cramped right wing domestic base centered in oil, natural gas and real estate.

This was most likely a misreading of what the Bush Administration represented. Like Clinton, Bush was facilitating the global neoliberal agenda while also pursuing his own sharply focused nationalist interests. Global integration is a process that is by no means completed. Clashing regional, national, and local interests and histories still exist and engender contradictions between states and regions. While these contradictions are significant (and in the present crisis can grow in importance) they are really internal to global capitalism -- limited at this time to how the system will ordered and who will run it. Europe, with a lingering tradition of social democracy has been slower to embrace the more openly mail fisted and dangerous aspects of neoliberalism promoted by the US. Problems of protectionist trade policies persist. Many states and populations in Europe and elsewhere fear the destruction of national identities in the wake of the overwhelming dominance in the world market of the US cultural product. The emergence of unchallenged US military supremacy has been troublesome enough for Europe to develop its own interventionist forces. In the long run at least, Washington's use of the carnage on September 11 to strengthen its military hand and increase its leverage over the world system will deepen the concerns of its allies.

Post September 11

From the outset, September 11 was an unmitigated disaster. The assault on New York and Washington was the work of quasi-feudal and nihilist forces (with modern technological training) who appropriated just causes to shroud their own reactionary agenda. The Committees of Correspondence and other groups which strongly condemned the crime of September 11 were right in seeing that this non-state criminal act that had to be confronted and dealt with through legal channels and effective global cooperation. This was not only for reasons of taste and pragmatism. The terrorist crime itself, whatever the alleged religious and political motives of its perpetrators, was inherently reactionary and was contemptuous of mass movements and their will to struggle for justice through the vigorous exercise democratic principles. The attacks of September 11 served the US right wing well -- dealing a severe blow to democracy and the struggle against injustice the world over.

Within hours of the attacks, George W. Bush declared "war on terrorism." That move, without constitutional sanction, turned the search for apprehending the criminals and dismantling their apparatus into bombing of Afghanistan and killing perhaps thousands of civilians, the introduction of ground forces, and the establishment of bases that will more than likely become permanent. An interim regime replacing the Taliban was thrown together under the aegis of a tribal leader with suspected CIA ties. A US strategic presence in Central and South Asia was rapidly established on the basis of new regional military dominance.

National security advisor Condolezza Rice who crafted Bush's scorn of "nation building" now changed that position while speaking bluntly of defending "US interests" all over. The Bush administration quickly used the US's new strategic advantage to pursue oil deals with regional states quickly falling under the US "security" umbrella -- exploiting prospects that had been previously downplayed. The New York Times on December 15 ("As The War Shifts Alliances, Oil Deals Follow") reported that Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia were being targeted for oil and gas pipeline deals organized by intersecting US and transnational oil companies. The Bush family's closest operative, James A. Baker, III succeeded in pressing the Russians to end their objections to a pipeline that bypassed Russia, running from Baku to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. That pipeline is owned by a consortium led by British Petroleum and represented by Baker. Kazakhstan with 88 percent of Central Asia's oil wealth eagerly opened its airspace and military bases to the equally eager Pentagon. While Afghanistan has no oil, it is valued as a pipeline route. The dormant deal that Unocal Corporation was negotiating with the Taliban to build a natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan, linking Turkmenistan to Pakistan, will perhaps be dusted off. And now Bush has appointed a former aide to Unocal, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to Afghanistan, advancing Washington's strategic resource objectives in the region. Further, Michael Klare has noted that the determination to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden in no small measure is due to his threats against oil rich US client Saudi Arabia.

A new phase of the transnational quest for global dominance has begun -- marked by escalating warfare conducted with an unchallenged arsenal. The most significant development in US global policy since September 11 is the qualitative increase in the use of military force. The mission to destroy terrorism has now been conflated to include "those who harbor terrorists" and "those who refuse to join the fight against terror." The list includes Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, possibly Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- with a potential blurring of the lines between liberation movements and terrorism. We are in a new situation sadly not one in which the principal priority is to properly stamp out terrorism, but to advance globalization through military means. The weapons unleashed in Afghanistan had no clear relationship to destroying terrorist cells the world over, but presaged violence against all who do not abide by the requirements of an integrated global order and a suppliant Global South.

With September 11, The left in the US and elsewhere was confronted with an especially complex situation. The public's desire for community in the face of fear, grief and anger was seized by the administration and its media accomplices to promote a pseudo-patriotic frenzy and support for the air war. The accusation of "lack of patriotism" and "service to the terrorists" was leveled against critics and became a lever to curb dissent. Even prominent liberals and progressives admitted to feeling unaccustomed comfort by supporting US military power. Others warned that the left looked foolish and courted irrelevance in opposing war against al Qaeda and the despised Taliban.

In the face of terrorism with a quasi-fascist face, some have called upon the left to constitute itself as a progressive, critical force within the anti-terror coalition. There are precedents for that strategy. However, the problem is deeper than adding a progressive voice to the so-called coalition. When "war" was declared, the door was opened to submerging the campaign against terror into a full bore assault led by US military power to wipe out perceived obstructions to an aggressive global agenda. The link between war and empire is inseparable and systemic. Even during bourgeois democracy's finest moment the WWII struggle to defeat fascism a vastly better government than the present one sought to keep the development of the atomic bomb a secret from its principal ally; the Bretton Woods Conference established the IMF and World Bank, pegging the entire postwar monetary system to the US dollar and laying the groundwork for US domination of the global economic and political arena. At the same time the major components of the left in the name of unity supported the internment of Japanese-Americans or were lukewarm at best about A. Philip Randolph's "Double V" campaign to defeat racism abroad and Jim Crow at home. That near abandonment of constructive independence caused considerable long term damage and rendered many on the left poorly prepared for the onset of the Cold War.

Everything is new and everything is not new. There are powerful elements of continuity in the push for an integrated transnational capitalism US version. There's discontinuity in a new situation that embraces the need to defeat terrorism while stopping the manipulation of that threat to engender new waves of war and reaction.

The public's concern about terror is hardly without a basis in light of September 11. That concern could not be addressed within an old Cold War framework of empire vs. national independence. Alternative ways to defeat terror had to be advanced. And they were: reliance upon the UN and other international political and legal structures, broad international cooperation across ideological and political lines, vast pooling of intelligence resources, sincere exploration of offers by various forces in exile or in Afghanistan to assist in capturing the perpetrators, cutting off money to the criminals, improved security with respect for civil liberties, concerted action to redress injustice that spawns terror, etc.

But with the muting by a compliant media of civilian casualties, with the collapse of the Taliban, with al Qaeda camps overrun, with the rapid ascension of the Northern Alliance, with the use of cash and concessions to contain restive allies -- an image of success has been projected which has undoubtedly weakened the impact of the slogan: "war is not the answer." Indeed, by touting success and warning of a possible 40 year "war" at the same time, Bush's team has neatly muted public disquiet while laying the groundwork for protracted aggression against the Global South.

Nevertheless, it's time for a new peace movement to gather a second wind. Aside from the fact that the "job" of defeating terrorism is not getting done, perhaps its time to ask the public to confront to the implications of dependence upon weapons of mass destruction for the health of our own society for democracy, free speech, racial justice -- and for the rest of the world. Perhaps it's time to sharply question the incipient extension of violence to the Global South and to ask that we all confront a growing "war on the poor" abroad and at home. In that regard, a revived movement against capitalist globalization needs to be linked with the movement to stop and expanding war.

All this can't be easily fit on a button. While demonstrative actions should not diminish, the most promising avenue of antiwar organizing is at the community level where neighbors could meet to explore underlying issues, grasp the incompatibility of antiterrorism and war, and find common purpose on common ground.

These are dark and difficult times. But the facts have a way of coming out; public opinion will shift. A hallmark of this nation's history is the record of its working people making the right choices at a time of crisis. With an effective movement for peace, that will happen again.