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.
   
   Bibliography
   
   Armstrong, David. 2002. Dick Chaney's Song of America. Harper's
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   Caffentzis, George. 2001. From Capitalist Crisis to Proletarian
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   Ferguson, Niall. 2001. The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern
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   Midnight Notes. 1992. Midnight Oil: Work Energy War, 1973-1992. New
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   Midnight Notes. 2001. Auroras of the Zapatistas: Local and Global
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   O'Hanlon, Michael E. 2002. Defense Policy Choices for the Bush
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   Yuen, Eddie, et al. 2001. The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to
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