Respect Your Enemies--The First Rule of Peace:
An Essay Addressed to the U. S. Anti-war Movement
Midnight Notes
P.O. Box 204
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
USA
www.midnightnotes.org
The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Fear of Death; Desire of
such things as are necessary for commodious living; and a Hope by
their Industry to obtain them.
-Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
1. Introduction.
There is now a fledgling anti-interventionist, anti-war movement in
the US. It will have a lot of work to do in the near future, although
the present threat of war on Iraq is the most pressing issue it faces.
The question is: can the antiwar movement do its work effectively and
successfully? At the moment it is not completely marginalized, if the
votes in Congress are any indication. On October 9, between
one-quarter to one-third of the congressional representatives voted
against granting George W. Bush "war powers." But in order to show
itself as expressing the majority perspective in this country, it
needs new arguments, a new respect (as in "look again") for its
opponents, a deeper understanding of the reasons for the actions of
its opponents, and a realistic assessment of their weaknesses. For its
old arguments do not seem convincing to the majority of US citizens,
and its lack of curiosity about its opponents and their reasoning is
dulling its strategic sense.
2. Losing Arguments.
In the run up to the Iraqi war, the anti-war movement has put forth a
number of arguments to the U.S. public to justify its opposition to
the Bush Administration's position. Two of the most important are: (1)
an invasion of Iraq will lead to the death of many innocent civilians
(on top of the hundreds of thousands killed in the last decade
directly or indirectly by the sanctions) and that is immoral; (2) the
important principle of national sovereignty will be violated by such
an invasion (even if it is done with UN approval), and that threatens
to bring the world back to a Hobbesian "state of nature" where nations
will war against nations with the excuse that they do not like each
other's treatment of their populations. Neither of these arguments has
had much persuasive effect. Why?
The first argument is sound. It is true that a U.S. attack on Iraq
under conditions of contemporary warfare, especially in the way the
U.S. military fights war so that it will suffer no casualties from
enemy fire, would involve the death of thousands of innocent
civilians. It is also true that such deaths are immoral, since a
government's intentional inflicting of civilian casualties is a war
crime.
But unlike the picture that logicians paint, sound arguments are not
necessarily winning arguments. Perfectly reasonable people can agree
that it is immoral to kill innocent Iraqi civilians but also come to
the conclusion that it is more immoral to leave Saddam Hussein's
Ba'ath Party in power since it can cause even more Iraqi and non-Iraqi
(including U.S. civilians') deaths. At the moment, it appears that the
second argument is trumping the first within the minds of many moral
and reasonable (and immoral and non-reasonable) people in the US.
The "national sovereignty" argument is also problematic. It is true
that national sovereignty is an important political value, especially
since the period of decolonization. Third World governments have
rightly appealed to this principle to criticize the tendency of old
and new colonial powers to intervene in their internal affairs and
bring about "regime changes" favorable to the past and future
imperialists. People in the antiwar movement are likely to have been
in one or more efforts to oppose U.S., British and/or French
interventions in the Third World, so they are sympathetic to this
argument.
The problem is that these very same people are strong supporters of
human rights doctrines that contradict an absolute "national
sovereignty" principle. Antiwar activists do not in general believe
that any government which violates the human rights of its population
or is preparing to threaten the human rights of people outside its
territory ought to have sovereignty. Consequently, any use of this
argument has a tendency to divide the movement internally. We saw this
in the NATO-Kosovo and the U.S.-Afghanistan wars. Defending the
Taliban's national sovereignty, for example, was hardly an easy pill
for the feminists in the antiwar movement to swallow. So, this
argument is even weaker than the first, since is it both unconvincing
to those outside the movement and tends to divide the movement from
within.
This means that new arguments must be devised that both trump the
counter-arguments of the opposition and do not divide the movement
internally. But why has the antiwar movement been so inadequate in its
arguments? We think it is due in large part to the antiwar movement's
lack of respect for its opponents in the Bush Administration and to
its failure to grasp the underlying imperative propelling the
administrationís actions. It looks at the ungrammatical President, the
secretive Vice-President, the Dr. Strangelovian Secretary of Defense
and the Lady Macbeth-like National Security Advisor and concludes they
are just lackies of a right-wing conspiracy fueled by the oil
industry. However, the greatest error in any struggle is to disrespect
your opponents. This adage is especially true when the other side is
winning!
3. Oil, War and Neoliberalism.
We are told that Communism collapsed in 1989, but many have argued
that the political economy of post-WWII capitalism, Keynesianism,
collapsed a decade before to be replaced by a system that was called
at first Thatcherism and Reaganism, and later neoliberalism and/or
globalization. This system claimed that the basic institution of
modern society ought to be the Market not the State, and that the best
form of all social interactions is the commodity form. This conception
of social life had a great propaganda triumph with the dissolution of
the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist bloc. More
importantly, it set into motion a remarkable shift in the economic
policies of most Third World countries (under the name of Structural
Adjustment Policies) that opened them to foreign investment, lower
tariffs, and unrestricted movement of money across their borders.
Finally, it undermined the guarantees of subsistence (early
retirement, unemployment benefits, health care, free education, etc.)
that the working class in Western Europe and North America had won in
a century of struggle (Midnight Notes, 1992).
The early 1990s was a remarkable period of triumph for neoliberalism
and globalization. Never before had the economic policies of the
planet been so homogenous, while institutions like the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization were
given the financial and legal power to keep the governments of the
planet true to the rules of the neoliberal global economy.
Up until July 1997, the supporters of this political economy seemed
invincible. Then, the "Asian Financial Crisis" struck. Ever since,
there have been breathtaking reversals that have put neoliberalism
into question more rapidly than the rapid pace of its triumphs. We
need not detail the recent stock market bubble burstings, the
recessions, the financial system collapses, the dramatic devaluations,
and the dot.com fiascoes. They constitute an international crisis of
neoliberalism and globalization -- but not simply because the 1990s
globalization boom ended in the "loss" of trillions of dollars in a
very short time.
First, they signaled a serious ideological defeat, for at the very
moment of this collapse an international anti-globalization movement
had taken to the streets of the major cities of the planet to contest
the institutions of the neoliberal order (Yuen et al., 2001). This
post-Cold War oppositional movement, especially after the anti-WTO
demonstrations in Seattle at the end of 1999, voiced a powerful
critique of the system whose truth literally materialized before the
world's eyes at the instant of its articulation.
On top of that, the fraudulent nature of neoliberal capitalism
revealed itself in the so-called scandals involving Enron, Arthur
Anderson, Tyco, WorldCom, etc., showing that the corporate "masters of
the universe" had taken the neoliberal gospel of deregulation to be
synonymous with a license to defraud their workers and, much more
worrisome for the system, their investors.
Equally problematic was the inability of this neoliberal regime to
actually increase wages and income for a decisive part of the U.S.
proletariat and the "middle classes" in the Third World in the 1990s.
Neoliberalism is often called a 20/80 system. If it can dramatically
increase the incomes of at least 20% of a country's or the world's
population, then the other 80% could be forced to go along with the
project. Whatever the wisdom of this cynicism, by the beginning of the
21st century neoliberalism's failure to do even this was becoming
clear.
In the U.S., for example, the more than twenty years of wage decline
was reversed in 1997, and for the following two years the average
wages increased modestly. This was the first consistent multiple-year
increase since the 1960s (Caffentzis, 2001). But by 2000 this increase
had halted, and wages have stagnated since. A similar problem revealed
itself in Africa, Latin America and much of post-1997 Asia (with China
as an exception): the "middle classes" were being decimated. This
failure was especially revealed in the Argentine bank deposit freeze
in the last year which reversed the gains of Argentina's 20% and have
made them sworn enemies of neoliberalism.
Often when one system enters into crisis, ruling classes' strategists
have something else in place. But not always. In the case of
neoliberalism/globalization, there is no alternative system waiting in
the wings, for the moment at least. It has to be preserved, or elseÖ
The Bush electoral coup of 2000 made it clear that there were very
powerful forces in the world (from the Supreme Court to the major
corporate CEOs) which were willing to face governmental illegitimacy
at the heart of the system in order to put the Bush group in the
position to deal with the crisis.
That should give the antiwar movement pause. The Bush Administration
takes power not in a moment of business-as-usual, but in the midst of
a systemic crisis that transcends a mere recessionary blip in the US.
The Bush Administration's answer to the crisis of liberalism is
simple: War. The 1980s and 1990s saw the building of an elaborate
international regime of trade, capital transfer and money flow, but it
did not see the development of an institution of violence that would
enforce the rules of neoliberalism. Certainly the UN was hardly the
vehicle for such a job, since the important players (the permanent
members of the Security Council) were not a unified collection of
states that could or even want to enforce the rules of neoliberalism.
Nor was there on the historical horizon an international body of armed
men and women that would have the global monopoly of violence. The
Clinton/Gore effort to create a such body ñ one the U.S. government
could control from behind the scenes under the guise of a formal
equality among national participants -- was anathema to the most
powerful fraction of the U.S. ruling class. Its suspicion of Clinton's
efforts was behind the extraordinary animus expressed in the
impeachment proceedings of 1998 and the electoral coup of 2000. There
was a genuine fear that the Clintonites would sign away, on a formal
level at least, the U.S.'s imperial role in the 21st century.
Supporters of the Bush administration often described this role by
analogy with the place of the British empire in the 19th century world
system. That century's international gold standard and free trade
(called economic liberalism) required a hegemonic state that would
make sure that the rules of the system were followed. That state was
Great Britain. A central ideological problem with liberalism both old
and new is that it presents itself as an autonomous, self-regulating
system, but it is not. It needs to have an enforcer, since individuals
and governments, especially those who are being put into crisis or are
chronic losers, are tempted to break the rules. In the 21st century,
according to this reasoning, the only state that could play Great
Britain's role is the United States. (For a sophisticated presentation
of this argument see Ferguson, 2001; for a discussion of the military
aspects of the U.S. role in this scenario see Armstrong, 2002.)
Of course, history is over-determined (i.e., there are multiple causes
for most historical events) and "it is no accident" that Iraq has
become the first major test case of this policy. After all, Iraq, a
member of OPEC, has the second largest proven oil reserves on the
planet. Therefore, Iraq's fate is of vital interest to anyone
interested in the oil industry, and the Bush family, Vice President
Cheney and National Security Advisor Rice were and are all deeply
involved with oil. They are familiar with the oil industry's problems
and sympathetic to the oil companiesí desire to return to the world
before the nationalization of the oil fields that took place
throughout the world in the early 1970s. Certainly a quick "regime
change" in Iraq leading to US-imposed privatization of the oil fields
would help set the clock back before 1970, and not only in Iraq.
However, increasing the immediate profits of the oil companies, though
important, is not the consideration that makes Iraq the first object
of the new Bush policy. Oil and natural gas are basic commodities for
the running of the world's industrial apparatus, from plastics to
chemicals, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, and energy for cars and
electric power plants. Whoever controls the commodity, its price and
the profits it generates, has a powerful impact on the whole
capitalist system. Yet oil is an unusual commodity. It is exempt from
the rules of neoliberalism. The trading rules of the WTO do not apply
to oil; and OPEC, a self-proclaimed if not completely successful
oligopoly, is tolerated in a period when the "free market" ought to be
determining the price of all commodities, especially basic ones. How
could it be that even though OPEC now controls about 80% of the
"proven oil reserves," it operates in contradiction to the larger
rules of the neoliberal game? No wonder neoliberalism is in crisis.
This peculiar singularity is intensified by the nature of the main
political figures in OPEC (aside from Iraq's Ba'ath regime): in Iran
there are the desperate Islamic clerics, in Saudi Arabia there is a
ruling class that is divided between globalization and Islamic
fundamentalism, in Venezuela there is the populist government of
Chavez, in Ecuador there is a government that was nearly seized in a
rebellion by the indigenous, in Libya there is Ghaddafi (need more be
said?), in Algeria there is a government that just narrowly repressed
an Islamist revolution, and in Nigeria and Indonesia there are
"democratic" governments with questionable legitimacy that could
collapse at any moment. This list constitutes a "rogues galleryî from
the point of view of the thousands of capitalists who send a
tremendous portion of "their" surplus to OPEC governments via their
purchases of oil and gas. With such a composition, OPEC is hardly an
institution to energize a neoliberal world.
Of course, OPEC was not always a political or economic problem. In the
1960s and in the early 1970s, OPEC was a relatively pliable
organization, and nationalization and monopolistic pricing were still
acceptable elements of the accepted Keynesian political economy of the
day. Iran was under the Shah, the Ba'athists had just lost their
Nasserite zeal, Ghaddafi's fate was still undeveloped, Venezuela was a
tame neo-colony, Indonesia was under the communist-killer Suharto,
Nigeria was under the control of General Gowan, and the Saudi Arabian
monarchy's Islamic fundamentalism was considered a quaint facade under
which the movement of billions of "petro-dollars" could be recycled
back into the U.S.-European economies (Midnight Notes, 1992).
But that was then and this is now. From the Bush Administration's
viewpoint, OPEC needs to be either destroyed or transformed in order
to lay the foundation of a neoliberal world that would be able to
overcome the crisis and truly control the energy resources of the
planet. The Bush administration is putting as much pressure as
possible on OPEC's members. In April of 2002, there was a
U.S.-supported coup d'etat in Venezuela against the Chavez government,
the leading price hawk in OPEC. It failed. In August 2002, it was
Saudi Arabia's turn. The RAND corporation issued a report claiming
that the Saudi Arabian monarchy was the "real enemy" in the Middle
East and should be threatened with invasion if it did not stop
supporting anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli groups. However, that verbal
threat has been nullified by the Bush Administration as its war plans
have unfolded.
The Iraq government is clearly the weak link in OPEC. It lost two wars
it instigated. It is legally in thrall to a harsh reparations regime,
it cannot control its own air space, and it cannot even import freely
but must have UN accountants approve every item it wants to buy on the
open market. Ideologically and economically it is prostrate.
A US-sponsored Iraqi government committed to neoliberal policies would
definitely be in a position to undermine OPEC from within or, if it
leaves OPEC, from without. Such a transformation would make it
possible to begin a massive investment in the energy industry that
might be an alternative to the spectacular failure of the high-tech
sector that has dissolved hundreds of billions of dollars. Rather than
the now-uncertain computer- and bio-technology sectors, the more
ìtraditionalî oil-driven sectors will be given primacy in re-launching
profitability.
There is an additional reason for Iraq having the dubious honor of
being the first test case for the hegemonic role of the US: weapons of
mass destruction. Saddam Hussein's regime has been very interested in
investing in industrial development that has in the past also been
used to develop chemical and biological weapons. These weapons were
used extensively in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The Bush
administration has put forward a doctrine with respect to Iraq that,
if generalized, would look something like this:
(1) Almost any advanced technological production process can be used
to create "weapons of mass destruction."
(2) Any such production process not directly controlled by a
multinational corporation (MNC) headquartered in the US (or Japan or
Western Europe) can be used by a government to create weapons of mass
destruction.
(3) No government outside a list agreed upon by the US government
ought to have the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, no government (whether democratically elected or not)
outside of the agreed list can be allowed to exist unless its advanced
technology is controlled by an acceptable MNC.
This argument means that the US government has taken on the role of
overseeing and vetoing all forms of industrial development throughout
the world in perpetuum. Autonomous industrial development not
controlled by an approved MNC by any government is out of order. Hence
this "war on terrorism" doctrine becomes a basis for the military
control of the economic development policies of any government on the
planet.
The consequences of such a doctrine are, of course, enormous, although
their immediate impact is on the Hussein regime (and any of its
successors). For even if Saddam Hussein could prove beyond a
reasonable doubt that there were no chemical, biological or atomic
weapons in Iraq at this moment, the Bush doctrine would not be
satisfied. The mere existence of industrial capacity not owned and
controlled by MNCs in Iraq that could be used in the construction of
weapons of mass destruction would violate the doctrine.
This doctrine shows us that the struggle now unfolding in Iraq is not
only about oil. What is at stake is the shape of planetary industrial
development for decades to come. The combination of the restoration of
oil-driven accumulation with the imposition of the Bush doctrine on
global industrial development ensures that the "suburban-petroleum"
mode of life we are living in the U.S. (and increasingly in Western
Europe) will lead to endless war.
4. An Antiwar Strategy
Given the over-determined character of the moment, an antiwar movement
must look for arguments and allies that would not deal with Iraq alone
but direct its attention to the Bush Administration's policy as a
whole. What are its weaknesses? They lie in two areas: money and
people, and both involve the military.
It is not clear how many regions of the world in the coming years will
be put into crisis, condemned to such a chronically low and
unsustainable position that the people of those regions will be
tempted to break the rules of the neoliberal game. Thus, the Bush
Administration has been careful to reject any suggestion that the U.S.
is the military force of last resort for neoliberalism. Instead of
locating the rule-breakers n the vocabulary of neoliberal economics,
they are presented as threats to the security of US citizens. The U.S.
has labeled its enemies using moral and political categories like
"evil," "rogue," "terrorist," and "failed."
There are different types and levels of these enemies, according to
the political criminology provided in the speeches of Bush and his
advisors. First there are the "axis of evil" countries (Iraq, Iran,
North Korea) and the "rogue states" (Cuba, Libya and, previously,
Sudan). The "failed states" category (which includes Sierra Leone and
Somalia) is very open, since much depends upon the definition of
"failure." For example, is either Haiti or Argentina now a "failed
state"? Finally, there are the unspecified "forty or fifty countries"
that might harbor (more or less actively) international terrorists.
This articulation of the enemy in the endless war against both
ìterrorismî and states with potential for creating weapons of mass
destruction is open ended and can include more than a third of the
nation states on the planet.
With Communism, it was relatively clear what constituted the enemy,
i.e., states ruled by Communist parties, and one could plan for the
financial requirements of the conflict. While the project of the Bush
administration outlined above necessitates a substantial increase in
military investment, the uncertainties of the neoliberal order make it
impossible to predict the required size of the increase.
At the moment, the projected military budget allocation for 2003 is
$372 billion. This means that in real terms the US has returned to the
ten-year average (1982-1991) of the Reagan-Bush years of $370 billion
(O'Hanlon, 2002: 2). What will the 2007 budget allocation for defense
be? It is now slated to be $406 billion (in constant 2002 dollars)
(O'Hanlon, 2002: 2). But how can we take seriously a five-year
projection that depends upon the vagaries of "failed states," "rogue
states," "countries harboring terrorists," etc. -- or, in our reading,
those states and peoples who have broken with the rules of the
neoliberal order due to necessity or desire.
This uncertainty is a basic weakness of the Bush Administration's
policy. Undoubtedly there will be the possibility of pillage in the
case of Iraq, through the seizure of its oil fields to defray the
costs of the adventure. Perhaps this possibility of pillage has
convinced many in the U.S. that an invasion is acceptable. But pillage
will not be possible in most future applications of the doctrine.
Consequently, the future of education, social security, Medicare,
agriculture, and ecology will be held hostage to the open ended
demands of the hegemonic role. There will be many who will not.
The second weakness of the Bush Administration's policy lies with its
assumption that U.S. soldiers will not be casualties in the coming
wars of neoliberalism. This assumption is part of the social contract
of contemporary U.S. life--you are not going to die fighting on
foreign soil in a war--and is often called the "Vietnam Syndrome." It
is one of the most peculiar victories of the U.S. working class in the
20th century. The fact that the government fulfilled its side of the
bargain has made it possible to keep more than a quarter million
soldiers outside U.S. territory after the end of the Cold War
(O'Hanlon, 2002: 8). Between 1989 and the present, only a small number
of U.S. troops have been killed by enemy fire in Panama, the Gulf War,
Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan, largely because very few were
exposed to direct enemy fire.
We are clearly in a time similar to the Era of Imperialism and the
Scramble for Africa in the late 19th century when European armies
equipped with machine guns, long-distance artillery, and gun boats
that could penetrate rivers, attacked poorly armed peoples in Africa,
Oceania and Asia, slaughtering and conquering them with almost no
losses. It was only after World War II that the colonized rebels could
hold some technological and strategic "parity" with the colonial
power, as can be seen in the two Vietnam Wars of independence (first
from the French, then from the U.S.). The U.S. military now is so
superior technologically to its opponents that it can carry on its
activities without a loss from enemy fire, just so long as it does not
have to occupy a particular territory. But this is exactly what U.S.
troops will have to do in order to bring about the "regime changes"
U.S. foreign policy requires. The Palestinian revolt against Israeli
occupation should make quite clear that the most sophisticated of
armies will suffer a regular flow of casualties when occupying a
hostile population.
The fate of thousands of Gulf War veterans who were made chronically
ill by their own army speaks to another aspect of the issue of war
casualties: A military machine that takes no casualties from the enemy
inevitably inflicts casualties on its own personnel. The reason for
this is very simple. The process of protecting against an enemy's
aggression is (1) to anticipate it or (2) to respond to it in an
extremely short period of time. Both options, when taken to extreme,
lead to self-inflicted casualties.
The actions required to prepare for anticipated future threats
eventually lead to a logic that accepts small risks of self-inflicted
casualties in order to counter an enemy threat. But the act of
anticipating possible threats causes the anticipations themselves to
multiply. Consequently, the small, separate preventative risks will
multiply until self-inflicted casualties become a certainty. Thus,
vaccinations designed to prevent the consequences of biological
attacks will themselves kill some soldiers; etc. Similarly, if
reaction speed to an enemy threat must be reduced to a minimum, the
ability to detect the true identity or source of the perceived threat
is reduced as well. This invariably leads to friendly fire incidents.
As the drive for adding new threats and reducing reaction time
intensifies, the military machine will become perhaps the greatest
enemy to its own constituents.
Therefore, the assumption that U.S. troops will be casualty-free is
exactly what will be challenged by the new U.S. hegemonic role in the
war for neoliberalism and globalization. The U.S. military will have
to occupy Iraq for a long period of time in order to guarantee that
the oil fields will be privatized and that a "regime change" would
lead to a dissolution or transformation of OPEC. Further, the action
of a military machine operating under the Powell Doctrine of
"overwhelming force" can become its own troops' worse enemy. These
factors, not the immediate invasion itself, will lead to a substantial
loss of U.S. soldiers' lives and a violation of the "no casualties"
social contract. The antiwar movement needs to warn the U.S. working
class of this danger, clearly and distinctly.
More troubling than this danger is the increasing violation of
worker's contractual rights that will be the inevitable immediate
casualty of this militarization. It is a trend that started in the
Reagan years and was intensified during the Clinton Administration
(Caffentzis, 2001). This trend is often euphemistically called a
crisis of "civil liberties." But if we examine the increase in the
prison population, the attack on habeas corpus, the end of welfare
rights and the draconian changes in immigration policy, we see that a
new era of non-contractual semi-slave work has been introduced in the
U.S. during the 1980s and '90s. The Bush Administration has
intensified this trend by attacking workersí contractual rights under
the rubric of the "war on terrorism." The post-9/11 mass arrests based
on no charges, the refusal to provide "terrorist" prisoners legal
counsel or habeas corpus relief, the imposition of Taft-Hartley
provisions on the West Coast dockworkers, and many other actions shows
the Bush Administration's direction: the extreme restriction of
contractual freedom.
A continued contraction of these rights will parallel the inevitable
rise in ill-health and death among residents of the U.S. In response
to war costs and tax cuts, everything from access to medical care to
public health, occupational and environmental safety regulations and
interventions will be reduced or eliminated. Tamed as the U.S. media
is, these facts are already being printed with growing regularity. The
deaths that will inevitably follow should be counted as casualties of
war.
We believe that if the antiwar movement emphasizes the fact the Iraq
invasion is part of an overall strategy of endless war that will
jeopardize the U.S. population's life, liberty and property in order
to try to secure an economic system that will continue to be in deep
crisis, then we can lay the foundation for a major change in the
political debate and sentiment in this country. (And lest we be
misunderstood, we do agree that one continuing, necessary task of the
anti-war movement will be to bring to the attention of the U.S.
population the massive casualties around the planet that will ensue
from the endless war to preserve capitalism.)
5. Conclusion: No Fear
The Bush Administration's policy is not a product of crackpots, it is
a desperate initiative to try to militarily save a failing world
economic system. Many people in South and Central America, Africa and
Asia have lost hope in finding themselves in this system and are
trying to recreate their lives outside the precincts of neoliberalism.
The same threatens to happen here in the U.S. That possibility, and
not the machinations of Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein, is the Bush
Administration's deepest fear.
Now it is time to learn from the wisdom of an enemy philosopher,
Thomas Hobbes, the defender of the absolute state. In the epigraph we
quoted, Hobbes locates the source of peace in three passions: Fear,
Desire, and Hope. The Bush Administration has effectively used Fear to
stifle opposition. It correctly claims that the right not to be killed
is the greatest human right. It has asked for a carte blanche to
defend that right and impose Peace on the world through the sword.
Bush often pointed to the cinders of the World Trade Center towers to
win the "war powers against Iraq" resolution, for the Fear is real.
Not accidentally, however, the Bush Administration spokespeople have
forgotten the other passionate sources of Peace--Desire and Hope. They
know that they cannot stimulate these passions even rhetorically
without rousing derision throughout the planet. Their economic and
social system is that bankrupt. This is the Bush Administration's
deepest weakness: it cannot win on the basis of Fear of Death alone.
That is why our movement cannot simply trade Fear for Fear with the
Bush Administration, or be amplifiers of the Fear on which the
administration thrives. We cannot best them in this game. Of course,
it is our civic duty to point out bureaucratic failures and hyperboles
that endanger people in the U.S. or abroad and, if we have good
evidence, to point out past, present, or future U.S. government
complicity with Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. But unless we
can call to the other passionate sources of Peace, we will be bankrupt
as the Bush regime and its supporters.
The antiwar movement should, therefore, speak to the Desires and Hopes
of the people of the U.S., from universal healthcare to a healthy
environment. We also need to bring the demands of the
anti-globalization movement of the 1990s into our demonstrations,
forums and programs, especially the wisdom behind the slogan, "This
Earth is Not For Sale," i.e., an end to the privatization of the gifts
of the planet and its history. We can work out the details, it is the
direction that is crucial now.
We leave you with a historical example in support of our thesis. The
most effective way the threat of nuclear terror was answered in the
1950s was not the antinuclear war movement, but the black revolution
in the U.S. and the anti-colonial movement around the planet. Black
people in the U.S. and colonized people in the rest of the world made
it clear that B-52 bombers and their hydrogen bombs were not
liberating them, and they refused to be delayed by them. They declared
that their civil liberation was a precondition for the "Desire of such
things as are necessary for commodious living; and a Hope by their
Industry to obtain them" that could lead to Peace. Indeed, it has been
the thwarting of this Desire and this Hope by the imposition of a
neoliberal economic order that has been the source of most of the War
of the last two decades.
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