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CounterPunch
February
28, 2003
George W. Bonaparte
The Renunciation
of Leadership
By MATT VIDAL
In 1848, Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, Louis Philippe,
was elected to the French presidency. A few years later he staged
a coup against his own government, setting up a military dictatorship.
In two analytical pamphlets written soon after these world-historical
events, Karl Marx wrote of the conditions that "made it
possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part."
Although under much different conditions, we are again witnessing
a person of grotesque mediocrity mascarading as a hero. With
Bush's relentless drive for war, we have the dubious distinction
of living in a similar world-historical conjuncture.
There is much speculation by critics
of the war on Iraq as to the reasons behind what Senator Robert
Byrd has termed "a massive unprovoked military attack on
a nation which is over 50% children" (Senate Floor Speech,
2/12/03). It has been argued that the war is for oil, driven
by the military-industrial complex, or to divert attention from
the dragging economy. Perhaps the critics have it all wrong.
Is it really, as Bush claimed in his latest state of the union
address, to "help the afflicted and defend the peace and
confound the designs of evil men?"
UN humanitarian coordinators Hans von
Sponeck (1998-2000) and Denis Halliday (1997-1998) should be
able to tell us something about "helping the afflicted."
Their efforts on the ground in Iraq have led them to agree with
the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) that US-imposed sanctions
against Iraq are responsible for "the death of some 5-6000
children a month . . . mostly due to contaminated water, lack
of medicines and malnutrition" (The Guardian 11/29/01).
In spite of the Bush Regime's claims of its selfless humanitarian
aid, von Sponeck and Halliday also note that an October 2001
UN report finds that "the US and UK governments' blocking
of $4bn of humanitarian supplies is by far the greatest constraint
on the implementation of the oil-for-food programme."
The Bush Regime also argues that war
is necessary in order to secure the safety of the US and Iraq's
neighbors. Yet, in their article, von Sponeck and Halliday note
that Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, told incoming
President Bush that "Iraq no longer poses a military threat
to its neighbors." More strikingly, in a report to congress
right before the Joint Resolution on Iraq was passed, the CIA
said that "Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line
short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or chemical
and biological weapons against the United States." The
CIA said that only if Iraq concludes that "a US-led attack
could no longer be deterred" would the threat of attack
on the US be serious. Furthermore, Islamic fundamentalist extremists
are more likely to find nuclear warheads from among the likely
thousands of unaccounted nuclear warheads from the breakup of
the former Soviet Union, than from the secular, anti-religious
fundamentalist Baathist regime in Iraq.
Furthermore, after promising to back
the Northern Kurds and Southern Shiites in overthrowing Hussein
after the Gulf War, the US immediately withdrew support, leaving
the opposition to be crushed. Stephen Zunes, of Foreign Policy
in Focus, notes that while the US banned the use of airplanes
by the Iraqi airforce, which could threaten US troops, they allowed
the use of helicopter gunships, which were used to slaughter
of the opposition (www.fpif.org/commentary/0111gulfwar.html).
In another article, Zunes notes that, again contrary to the high
rhetoric of the Bush Regime, "according to Amnesty International,
the majority of recipients of arms transfers from the United
States engage in a pattern of gross and systematic human rights
violations" (www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0201sou.html).
These include allies from Egypt and Oman and Uzbekistan to clear
dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (and, of course,
formerly Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war).
Indeed, the killing of civilians by Israel
and NATO member Turkey are officially sanctioned via US military
aid, and carried out with military hardware (planes, armored
tanks, etc.) manufactured by US multinationals. Colin Powell,
in his speech at the World Economic Forum (1/26/03), instructed
us that "Afghanistan's leaders and Afghanistan's people
know that they can trust America to do this, to do the right
thing." Could he be referring to events described by journalist
Robert Fisk, such as the strategic assistance in war crimes given
by the United States Air Force when it bombed Mazar-i-Sharif
so that the Northern Alliance were able to "move into the
city and execute up to 300 Taliban fighters?" Fisk contrasts
these legally sanctioned American death squads, created to bypass
public justice, with Truman's decision to send Nazis-responsible
for tens of millions of deaths-to public trials at Nuremberg.
The days of Wilsonian idealism are over,
and the fragile framework of multilateralism and the rule of
law in international relations are crumbling. At this critical
juncture we must reject the Orwellian logic of peace through
war, and the at once banal and apocalyptic epithets that the
bumbling Bush can hardly utter correctly between pauses. In a
glimmer of hope, such resistance has been growing. In the February15th
anti-war protests, over 10 million people demonstrated in the
streets, in counties on every continent. And the Los Angeles
city council recently passed a resolution against the war, joining
over US 100 cities in such action.
However, Bush has rejected these heartening
displays of grass-roots democratic voice. While unwilling to
listen to popular opinion, at home and abroad, Bush continues
with the same rhetoric as used in his 2002 State of the Union
address: "America will lead by defending liberty and justice,"
standing "firm for the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity:
the rule of law, limits on the power of the state . . . ."
However, it would be hard to read Bush's record as anything other
than a systematic subversion of the rule of law (e.g., denying
due process to all suspected terrorists and "interrogating"
key Al Qaeda prisoners outside of the US) and dramatic expansion
of the power of the state, both domestically and internationally.
But a process perhaps even more ominous is unfolding: the Bush
regime, executive of the sole superpower in a unipolar world,
is rejecting its leadership role.
The notion of hegemony in international
relations has entered popular discourse as the idea of a superpower
that dominates in international relations. Yet this term has
been applied by (some) international relations theorists in a
more naunced form. The concept of hegemony was originally developed
by the Italian Marxist Gramsci, to refer to a form of class compromise
under capitalism which combined domination with leadership. He
reasoned that in modern societies pure coercion will be ineffective
and inefficient. Capitalist relations are better reproduced if
there is some non-trivial degree of effective leadership by the
dominant classes. Capitalists are able to rule better when they
provide "moral and intellectual" leadership, and when
they allow some of the interests of the dominated to be realized
(hence, a growing middle class).
Hegemony works similarly in international
relations. Stability in a unipolar international political economy
cannot be maintained when the hegemonic power dominates exclusively
in its own interests. Rather, it must also provide a form of
leadership in which it makes compromises. However, with utter
disregard for any interests other than those of the Bush Regime,
Powell declared to the World Economic Forum: "Multilateralism
cannot become an excuse for inaction . . . We continue to reserve
our sovereign right to take military action against Iraq."
This is a direct signal that the administration has rejected
its role as a world leader. The notion of sovereignty, which
is about the right to defend oneself, is now being used
to justify blatant aggression, even against widespread world
opinion. Leadership has given way to domination. While the rhetoric
that Iraq has defied UN resolution 1441 may sound compelling,
the reality is that the US is systematically undermining the
whole UN framework. Such a system of international cooperation
can only work if the sole superpower provides the leadership
to make it work, rather than acting unilaterally whenever the
Security Council (or any other international body) does not agree.
Back to the original question, is this
war because of oil or other capitalist interests? Marx's analysis
of Louis Philippe has more in common with our present conditions
than central figure of grotesque mediocrity. In his class analysis,
Marx generally held that the state is either directly controlled
by the capitalist class or that whoever is in control, their
actions will be constrained by the imperatives of capitalist
accumulation. In a capitalist system, the state cannot take actions
that will seriously undermine the conditions of profitability.
In his more specific applications of class analysis, such as
the analysis of Louis
Philippe's Eighteenth Brumaire, however, he made two arguments
relevant for our current conditions.
First, capitalists are often divided
(e.g., oil, versus global finance, versus military contractors,
versus domestic exporters, etc.). Thus, we may find that many
fractions of the capitalist class are against the massive amount
of uncertainty that this war will cause. Indeed, such uncertainty
has caused hundreds of billions in stock market losses, and it's
quite plausible that the majority of capitalist interests are
against the war. This leads to Marx's second point: in extraordinary
conditions, the state in capitalism may in fact act against the
interests of capitalists, acting unconstrained by the constraints
of capital accumulation. Marx used the term Bonapartism to describe
just his situation, when Louis Philippe, an elected president,
established a military dictatorship and ran the French state
against the interests of its capitalists. While I'm not intending
a strict analogy here, I do think it is clear that the Bush Regime
is acting against the interests of many sectors within the global
capitalist economy. Such massive risks and uncertainties involved
in a war with Iraq, including radical disruptions of oil flows,
are by no means in the interests of global capitalism.
The point of understanding the current
political situation is not so much to pinpoint what the Bush
Regime's motivations are. What is important are the larger effects:
a war machine is on the loose, out of control of the discipline
of capital, and set to destroy nascent and precarious framework
of international cooperation, along with hundreds of thousands
of innocent children and other civilians. Capitalism is brutal
enough, but when the hegemon switches its modus operandi from
domination-cum-leadership to self-regarding domination, times
are dangerous for everyone.
Matt Vidal is
pursuing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
He can be reached at: mvidal@ssc.wisc.edu
Yesterday's
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February 22
/ 23, 2003
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