Therefore the "MULTIPLE CONFLICTS DUE TO THE USE AND FINAL DESTINATION OF THEIR LANDS AS DETERMINED BY THE INTEREST OF GOVERNMENTS AND COMPANIES IS NOT SURPRISING(...)THE EXPLOITATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES (OIL AND MINERALS) AND TOURISM ARE THE PRINCIPAL INDUSTRIES WHICH THREATEN INDIGENOUS TERRITORIES IN AMERICA" (interview with Martha Garcia in "La Jornada". May 28, 1997). Behind the investment projects comes the pollution, prostitution and drugs. In other words, the reconstruction/reorganization of the destruction/depopulation of the zone. (Subcommendante Marcos 1997)
The Iraqi people are not the only intended targets of the threatened smart bombs. As in the previous Gulf War, all people around the world involved in the production of oil and not totally subservient to the plans of major oil companies and their US and British governmental allies are also targeted.
In the previous Gulf War this was obvious, but the political situation of this oil producing proletariat is now different. In the late 1980s and early 1990s workers from Trinidad to Algeria to Nigeria to the Middle East were in revolt against austerity and structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and WB (Ryan 1991; Midnight Notes 1992; Ihonbvere 1992; Walton and Seddon 1994). They refused to starve while knowing that the most vital commodity on the planet was being extracted from their land in front of their eyes without equivalent. They were also inspired by the intifada which made it clear that a people's revolt cannot be stopped by even the most technologically advanced oppressor. This revolt was centered in the cities (from Port of Spain, to Algiers, to Lagos, to Gaza) and the revolutionaries' demands were centered on their governments and the IMF. At the center of this international intifada against austerity were the immigrant workers in the Middle East (especially the Palestinians, but also the Egyptians and Yemanis), for they threatened to upset the despotic regimes the US government still sees as its most important allies and were important stockholders in the IMF.
The Gulf War forced a total change in the composition of the workforce in the Middle East. The Palestinian, Yemini and Egyptian workers were expelled and along with them the threat of their demands for political recognition in the states like Kuwait and the UAEs where they comprised the majority of inhabitants. Similar defeats occurred elsewhere, e.g., the anti-IMF movement in Algeria has been replaced by fundamentalist armed groups exterminating whole towns and the Palestinian intifada has been rigidified into the PLO's precarious control of a quasi-state in the West Bank and Gaza. Consequently, the sources of insurgency the Gulf War was directed towards are not to be found in the same places.
The oil proletariat's revolt since the early 1990s has moved out of the cities and into the countryside, e.g., in Chiapas in Mexico, in Ogoniland in Nigeria, in Chechenya in Russia, and in the Caspian region (Cecena and Barreda 1995). These people are demanding a return for the suffering that oil exploration and extraction has and will impose on them.
They are beginning to put formidable roadblocks to the oil industry's desperate advance to the last remaining oil areas of the planet . Shell, Chevron, and Mobil are confronting "those who have been left behind," the indigenous, the marginal. These are people that the Zapatista Subcommendate Marcos speaks of when he refers to the protagonists of a "Fourth World War." They are confronting the soldiers of their own governments as well as the death squads of the transnational companies anxious to get at the oil beneath them at any cost (Subcommendante Marcos 1997). They are the people who are living on top of the most important commodity in the world and who must be displaced and humiliated in order to make its extraction profitable.
These people, who have been living on the "margins" of industrial development, have been forced to become protagonists in a new world war because of the growing scientific consensus that world oil production will peak in the next decade or two. Oil companies are now desperately trying to position themselves to be able to stake out and possess the remaining oil areas on the planet which invariably are in regions that had previously been undeveloped. According to this reasoning, if the companies do not make their claims now, they will be left out of the price boom in the first half of the 21st century caused by a decline in production and an increase in demand.
This consensus is based on the work M. King Hubbert in the 1950s who accurately predicted that US non-Alaskan oil production would peak in 1969. Extrapolating Hubbert's work on the US to the whole planet, geologists like Colin Campbell, Jean H. Laherrere and Craig Bond Hatfield have noted that the number and size of new oil discoveries have been falling since the 1960s and are rapidly heading to zero (Campbell and Laherrere 1998; Hatfield 1997; Hartshorn 1993: 225-251). They also note that the larger fields are usually found first, while there are diminishing returns on new exploratory wells in the late period. Since oil consumption is growing at approximately 2 percent per year, while the old oil fields are drying up and new fields are expensive to find and exploit as well as being objectively rare, a price hike of dramatic proportions looms.
It follows that all the new profit to be made out of oil production now lies in the geographical margins of the planet. But it is exactly in this drive to the margins, all the horrors of the primitive period of the oil industry are returning. Indigenous people must be driven from their lands; previously uncontaminated waters and lands must be polluted; cultures, peoples and ecologies must be exterminated. But these peoples are resisting their extermination and are receiving the support of the world, from the Chiapans to the Ogonis to the Papuans, and are stalling the final advance of the oil industry.
The US's ongoing threat to bomb of Baghdad at the slightest hint of resistance makes it clear that any people that does not accept the recolonization of the oil fields by the international oil companies and their US and British government allies will likely suffer attack. As Secretary Cohen paradoxically suggests, the Iraqi people have become the objects of military assault because they have not overthrown the Baath regime and on top of that would not accept the recolonization of their country the US promises. This places them in the same position as the Zapatistas in Mexico and the Ogoni in Nigeria.
In African and Latin American countries. globalization--which is premised on the total control of the world's resources by transnational corporations--requires low-intensity warfare, i.e., the use of lightly armed groups (from death squads to "contras") whose aim is not to militarily defeat the opponent, but to starve and terrorize a resisting population that supports the opponent. We have seen its application in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mozambique and Angola. In Iraq, instead, the dictates of globalization seem to call for a very high tech war. But the logic is the same.
The US prosecution of the Iraq war is best understood as the contemporary equivalent of the British empire's Opium War against China mid-19th century. The British saw their war as a crusade for "free trade" and their major war objective was to break down the Chinese government's perfectly reasonable (but "protectionist") resistance to opening up its market to opium produced in the British colony of India (Rowling 1987: 80-84). At stake in Iraq is the right of the US government to control the resources of the planet according to its desires as long as it presents itself as the uniform of an international agency, be it the UN, the IMF, the WTO or the WHO. This is the late 20th century version of an appeal to the "natural law" of nations in the past that allowed propagandists like John Locke to justify the colonization of the Americas in the 17th century (Arneil 1996). This is the message the planned war conveys and not to the Saddam Hussein regime alone.
The Russian government is also deeply concerned, as indicated by Yeltsin's remark that a US attack on Iraq could trigger "World War III" (NYT 2/5/98). The planned attack on Iraq is an attack on its future as well--it puts an end to the hope that the Russian state and capital may draw some benefit from liberalization and that the oil resources of the previous Soviet Union will not be monopolized by US and English oil companies. With the intensification of its strategy of tension, the US state is telling its Russian colleagues that their management of oil resources must comply with the its schemes or else.
The planned attack also sends a message to Asian governments. In fact, there is a deep relation between Iraq and Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and South Korea. For all these states have tried to a nation-state model of capitalist development in the 1970s and 1980s. The Asian attempt proved tremendously successful capitalistically in the 1980s and appeared to be an alternative development model for previously colonized countries. But this alternative was thrown into crisis this last year. In this case too, the US response to the crisis is to demand the right of absolute surveillance. Just as the Iraqis have to show the US government every secret nook in the country, similarly the Thais, Indonesians and Koreans have to "open up their books" to show the IMF (backed by the US government) all their dealings and, of course, gain their approval in order to survive.
The US government is proposing a global Panopticon ("all seeing") regime, where everything that occurs on the planet has to been seen, controlled and approved by the US government (or its representatives in an international agency it controls). Thus, the US is not only aiming to be the "cop" of the world, as it did in the 1960s, but at the dawn of the 21st century it aspires to be the "investigator," "warden" and "executioner" of the "world" as well.
On the most general level, the issue at stake in the Gulf War is the possibility of any nation-state charting a sovereign path to its existence and of a people to actively (or even passively) resist the dictates of the world market (as roughly guided by the US government and its supranational proxies). This logic can be seen working not only in the case of former colonial countries. It also applies to "advanced capitalist countries" as well. Consider the case of the joy-riding US pilot who killed 20 people in Italy recently when the tail of his fighter cut the cable of the sky-lift they were on while he was trying to fly under it. The Italian authorities who came to investigate the plane at its home base in northern Italy were turned away by the US military police and told that this was an internal US military matter. When the Italians asked for an explanation of the catastrophe, the US government claimed that it used only its own maps, not the maps of the country the military is stationed in, even if the local maps are better and more clearly marked features like the ski lift! The US's imperial gaze only sees war in any attempt to keep a secret from it, while its own secrets become divine maxims available only to the blessed.
Our question is: how long will those of us in the US go along with this program for eternal war? Can we call ourselves what Frantz Fanon called the French people during the Algerian War, "Sleeping Beauty"? Can we let Sleeping Beauty still sleep, while the rivers of blood shed in our name are rising?
*First, the threatened bombs over Iraq are aimed at the workers there, because even the threat of an attack will cause the UN to pull out the "oil-for-food" inspection teams and bringing the sale of Iraqi oil to an end. The bombs might kill thousands, but the continuation of sanctions will kill millions. The Clinton regime is acting as a genocidal God who plays with the lives of millions at the slightest turn of the political wind. Any people who let monstrous things to be done in their name to others, should not be surprised that this monster will turn upon them.
*Second, the Clinton Administration's strategy of tension is aimed at the control of the world oil market for the interests of the major oil companies and its allies in the Middle East. The US goverment demands that anyone who will trade in that market must accept its conditions. At the moment its strategy is the stabilizing and/or increasing the price of oil while forcing the privatization of nationalized oil companies throughout the planet. But the Iraqi government has refused to privatize its oil production and its entrance on to the market will severely depress the price of oil. Consequently, US troops have become the world market's guards, opening up an endless string of wars, of low, medium and high intensity to protect profits and market shares. (4)
*Third, if you believe that the New Economic Order, often called "Globalization," is a threat to your well being, then you should oppose the Clinton Administration's strategy of tension and war threats (Midnight Notes 1997). For the war is being planned to threaten all those who refuse Globalization, i.e., those who refuse to sell their nation's geological patrimony for a song or to sell themselves for next to nothing to transnational corporations and their supranational allies (the IMF, WB and WTO).
So it came quietly
to the seeker, though he didn't say it out loud,
"What I'm longing for lived in my house in Baghdad!"
But the same insight applies to secret horrors as well as to secret treasures: though you look for them elsewhere, exhausting yourself and your resources, they are in your own home! Stop the war! End the sanctions!
(2) The genocidal intent of the Gulf War began to be known immediately at the end of the bombing. For early data on the medical effects of the war on children see The Harvard Study Team's report (Armijo-Hussein, et al. 1991).
(3) The impact of the threat of US military action on the work of "the oil-for-food" inspection teams and the oil price has been widely noted by oil analysts. For example, Geoff Pyne, oil market analyst at UBS Ltd., London, was quoted in the Oil and Gas Journal as having said that "the threat of miliatry action introduces a huge amount of uncertainty to the market. It also makes the future of the UN oil-for-food deal uncertain. If the US is going to have military action, UN could not have its aid districution teams on the ground. It could be that the oil-for-food deal, which was supposedly to be increase, could be stopped. This is why the oil price rallied [in late January 1998]" (Knott 1998).
(4) The US military's guard duty on the world oil market is going to be even more complex and volatile than in the past. For after the Gulf War, a "new guard" has entered into an oil market previously dominated by OPEC and the major oil companies: traders from the financial markets. "[They] have no innate respect for anything in the fundamental market, oil or otherwise,...[they] profit by systematically taking short positions in crude futures markets," said Edward N. Krapels, president of Energy Security Analysis, Inc., Washington (West 1995: 9-10). These futures market players thrive on volatility and the quantum shifts of uncertainty. This is not to say that the long-run price of oil is actually determined simply by the supply and demand curves of the neoclassical economists. For other (though conflicting) Marxist perspectives on the value and price of crude oil see (Massarrat 1980) and (Caffentzis 1992).
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