Iran – Imperialism, capitalism and war

Mike Macnair examines the paradox of the rational irrationalism of US foreign policy

Imperialism, capitalism and war

2 August, 2012 – Weekly Worker 925 – Mike Macnair

For some years now the USA and its allies have been carrying out a blockade, or siege warfare, against Iran, under the euphemistic name of ‘sanctions’. In July, the sanctions siege was significantly intensified and alongside it the US and Israel have been organising semi-clandestine sabotage operations (most notably the Stuxnet computer virus) and assassinations.

Also parallel to the siege has been the running threat of direct bombardment – with its own set of euphemisms: the ‘surgical strike’ to ‘take out’ Iran’s potential nuclear capability. The level of media attention paid to this threat varies: very recently Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has given his backing to an Israeli ‘strike’, while publicity has been given to the arrival in the region of US super-bunker-buster bombs.

There is something obviously irrational about this policy. The suggestion that Iran getting the bomb threatens an immediate attack on Israel, which has 100 or more warheads and complete delivery systems, etc, is ludicrous. The arguments that president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a madman or can be analogised to Hitler are both equal nonsense, and scarily reminiscent of similar claims about Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Moreover, one might imagine that the US would be a bit more cautious, given that its budget has been tightened by the results of the 2008 crash, and it spent billions failing either to find weapons of mass destruction or to create a shining beacon of democracy in Iraq, and has equally failed to defeat the Taliban in 11 years of war in Afghanistan.

The apparent irrationality – in a certain sense real irrationality – has substantive present political implications. On the one hand, an important section of the anti-war movement has seized upon it with the aim of persuading the capitalist class, or at least sections of it, to act more rationally: it is not really in their interests to pursue such wars.

(Or perhaps the idea is that we could have capitalism without US hegemony (or any other hegemon state): the United Nations as a proto-world-state, the ‘law-governed world order’ which Peter Gowan promoted before his death. The reality is that the UN, though an entity with which the US is often partially at odds, is an agency of the US’s alliance systems; and the ‘law-governed world order’ is precisely a regime in which the security council can authorise siege warfare, bombing and invasions.)

On the other hand, an equally important section of the left argues that behind the irrational arguments are real, rational reasons for the US to act as it does – chiefly concerned with the price and control of oil and with maintaining US geopolitical dominance through surrounding Russia and China. This latter view is associated with the idea that the left and the workers’ movement has a stake not merely in the defeat of the war drive, but positively in the victory of the US’s ‘anti-imperialist’ opponents.

This idea is a bastardised form of the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ of the colonial workers’ movement and the nationalists and/or pan-Islamists, which was promoted by the early Communist International. ‘Bastardised’, because in its modern form it is filtered through the diplomacy of the old USSR-led ‘socialist bloc’. The underlying idea is that the overthrow of imperialism (identified in modern practice with US-led imperialism) can precede and provide the basis for socialist revolution.

The view that the irrational explanations conceal real rational reasons of imperialist interests is associated with the ‘anti-imperialist united front’ conception, but is not essential to it. Rather, it offers supporting grounds for it: if the imperialists have a real economic or geopolitical interest at stake in creating puppet regimes in the Middle East, then the ‘resistance’ offered by nationalists can potentially actually undermine the imperialist order.

How should we judge these questions? In my view the siege warfare and bombing threats against Iran are part of a larger pattern of US policy and the nature and incidence of wars since the US defeat in Indochina in the 1970s. This US behaviour is neither simply irrational, nor, on the other hand, do the irrational explanations conceal real decisive interests which explain the war decisions.

I propose to explain, or to contribute to an explanation of, this US behaviour by three elements. The first is the political effects of the business cycle. The second is the relative decline of the United States, which partially repeats the previous experiences of older ‘leading capitalist states’. The third is the decline of capitalism as such, which is reflected in differences between the present relative decline of the US and the decline of British world hegemony in the late 19th century.
The pattern

Before the 1970s, US Middle East policy had a clear and rational character as part of the general policy of the cold war. This was an orientation involving state-to-state alliances, ‘containment’ of ‘communism’ – ie, of the USSR and its alliance system – and US-Soviet competition in development aid within the framework of managed trade and limited import-substitution industrialisation in ‘developing countries’. US military interventions and those of the US’s British side-kick were directed to supporting existing state regimes and used quite limited force. The 1967 Arab-Israeli war and 1973 Yom Kippur war were fought wholly within this strategic framework.

After Vietnam, the US gradually broke with this policy and embarked on a new orientation. Financial globalisation is the most discussed aspect of the changed orientation; but other aspects of it include the ‘human rights’ offensive; increased use of US support for guerrilla and militia operations to destabilise regimes seen as hostile to the US, with some tendency to produce ‘failed states’ (most strikingly Afghanistan after 1980); and episodic large-scale military operations that are merely destructive.

There is an apparent indirect connection to financial crises. The point at which the 1987 stock market crash began to feed through into the real economy around 1990 was followed by the first Gulf war of 1991. The point at which the economy was affected by the dot-com crash of 2000-02 (as opposed to mere financial difficulties), was followed by the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It looks to me (I may be wrong) as though, although the sheer severity of the crash of 2008-09 has delayed the process, nonetheless this crash has already been followed by an escalation of siege and sabotage operations against Iran, while a large-scale bombing campaign against Iran appears to be in the offing. …more