BY JACK BARNES
Seven years after their 1990-91 assault on Iraq that has
led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its people, the
U.S. rulers still have not accomplished their goal of ousting
Saddam Hussein and imposing a regime more to their liking.
The excerpt below tells the truth about how that war
exacerbated the economic and political contradictions in the
United States and worldwide that drove Washington to use its
military might in the first place. The excerpt is taken from
the article, "The Opening Guns of World War III" by Jack
Barnes in New International no. 7. It is copyright (c) 1991
by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp. and reprinted by
permission.
The assault against Iraq was the first of Washington's wars since World War II in which it sought to use its military might to deal blows, indirect but palpable, to U.S. imperialism's rivals, especially in Bonn, Tokyo, and Paris. The Gulf war exacerbated the conflicts and divisions between Washington and its imperialist competitors, as well as between these rival powers themselves. While we know these sharpening conflicts already existed (every working person has been deluged by protectionist propaganda from the U.S. government, bourgeois politicians, trade union bureaucrats, and their radical hangers-on), the war brought them to the surface with greater force and accelerated them to a degree not seen in world politics for some time.
Coming out of World War II, U.S. imperialism emerged the dominant power in the world imperialist system, both economically and militarily. For a substantial period following that war the rate of profit, and for even longer the tempo of growth of the mass of profits, was rising in all the imperialist countries. As a result, competition between the imperialist powers over markets for commodities and capital and over sources of raw materials was buffered.
Since the mid-1970s, however, the combination of the declining rate of profit, halting growth in the mass of profits, and relative slowdown in economic expansion has precipitated growing, sometimes sharp rivalry among the imperialist ruling classes. The years 1974-75 saw the first worldwide recession since 1937, as economic interdependence among the major capitalist powers grew alongside their competition and conflict. Although the sheer size and output of the U.S. capitalist economy remains enormous, and while it remains the largest market in the world, its position as an industrial and trading power has slipped substantially in recent decades in the face of growing challenges from German, Japanese, and other rivals. U.S. strategic military power remains unchallenged, however, and is the main lever the U.S. rulers have to compensate for their relative decline....
The U.S. war against Iraq once again emphasized the fact that for any ruling class aspiring to world power, a chasm cannot be allowed to persist between its economic power and its ability to use strategic military might abroad. A time comes when a ruling class recognizes that it has to put the checkbook away, put the gold away, and reach for the troops - or else it cannot maintain itself as a world power capable of defending its own class interests, either against workers in rebellion or competitors on the prod.
One certain result of the Gulf war will be efforts by the German and Japanese rulers to strengthen their armed forces and to push back political constraints - both at home and abroad - on the use of military power beyond their own borders. The German and Japanese rulers are determined they will never again be in a position of forking over billions of dollars to their chief rival to help it strengthen its strategic and competitive power. Their resolve is all the stronger after having paid for a war that strengthens Washington's domination over a vital commodity, especially one that both Germany and Japan must import. Bonn and Tokyo have just been compelled to pay through the teeth to make the cost of their access to that oil more vulnerable to manipulation by Washington and Wall Street.
Germany and Japan already have large and modern standing armies - much more so in reality than their image in the United States would lead us to believe. Germany has the largest army in Western Europe, with 480,000 soldiers in uniform; it spends some $30 billion on its military annually. Japan has 247,000 soldiers in uniform and an annual military budget roughly the same as Bonn's. Tokyo and Bonn will now seek to transform these armies into forces capable of taking decisive action in the world.
The bourgeois press has played up the fact that the German and Japanese constitutions have provisions restricting the use of military forces abroad. But the history of the modern capitalist world proves that constitutions don't prevent ruling classes from doing what they need to do to advance their state interests: substantial agreement in the ruling class, well-prepared public opinion, a shift in the class relationship of forces, and - voila! -a new "interpretation" of the constitution, or an amendment to it.
The German and Japanese rulers will start acting as military powers in their regions and in the semicolonial world. This fact alone means that the world has become more volatile and unstable. Political conflicts will sharpen between these two mighty imperialist powers and Washington, Paris, and other rivals - and between each other. Conflicts will be exacerbated between Japan, Korea, and the United States, as well as between North and South Korea. These conflicts can spark real political battles at home that the vanguard of the working-class movement can involve itself in by advancing a political course that defends working people independent of any wing of the capitalist rulers....
Ultimately, this is not simply a political or a military question; it's an economic question. The rulers in Tokyo remember how the Roosevelt administration put an embargo on oil sales to Japan in 1940. (And the U.S. Navy remembers Tokyo's rejoinder: the December 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor.) There is a good reason why the Gulf region was one of the most contested prizes in both the first and second world wars. Oil is vital in the modern world, and the Gulf today supplies more than 20 percent of the world oil market. No capitalist ruling class can with impunity allow itself to become vulnerable to oil blackmail by its rivals.