Imperialist, first of all, in the most popular sense--like imperial Rome and its legions. The legions of a dominant power that exaggerates its contributions to human culture and ideas in order to rationalize marching off to dominate other parts of the world. A war fought by an imperial army, claiming imperial rights and prerogatives for an imperial race. A war against illogical heathens with strange gods. A war aimed at economically draining, politically oppressing, and militarily subjugating another people. An imperial power--often with high-flown rhetoric and practiced apologists--that claims the right to police the world.

It's good to use the term this way. There's nothing wrong or "unscientific" about it. It is an imperialist war in that most classical, most popular sense. It goes back thousands of years, and rings a bell with people throughout the world.

Moreover, it's completely accurate in another sense, too. Because Washington--the last of the world's massive, brutal, imperial powers--is now embarking on a series of final wars to try to hold together a crumbling order, the capitalist order. And in the course of these conflicts--regardless of how long it takes--that empire will go down to defeat under the combined blows of workers and farmers at home and abroad.  
 
War for Big Oil
It's also an imperialist war in the popular economic sense--a war over oil. It will be a war to guarantee that the profits derived from the organization and control of petroleum remain in the hands of Big Oil, of the monopolies and the imperialist governments that defend their interests. That's the sense in which you hear people say, "I'm not sure oil is worth a single life over there."

We shouldn't be hesitant to use the word imperialist in that sense, either. There's a great deal of truth to the statement that the war is being fought over oil. It's a battle over resources--a battle by the U.S. rulers to stop another capitalist class, in this case the Iraqi capitalists, from gaining too much control over those resources, directly or indirectly.

We should remember that the U.S. capitalists alone use 26 percent of the world's oil production. Moreover, every aspect of the world oil market--right down to the gas pump--is highly monopolized by a handful of superrich capitalist families in the United States, Britain, and other imperialist countries.

Today, while the price of a barrel of oil remains well above what it cost four months ago, substantially more is being produced, sent through pipelines, and put on tankers than prior to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In fact, in November world oil production reached a six-month high. Washington has played up information about the Saudi Arabian government bearing a big load in financing the U.S. military buildup there. But the windfall profits to the Saudi ruling families from the rise in oil prices since August 2 has produced five times as much income for them as they've laid out for Operation Desert Shield.

But it's not the Saudi throne or the ruling classes of the OPEC countries that are the biggest victors of this price-gouging--although they do benefit, and at the expense of both the workers and peasants in their own countries and those in non-oil-producing countries throughout the Third World.

The big winners are the wealthy families who own the imperialist oil monopolies. They more than anyone else--more than OPEC--influence the world price of oil. This is true even though most of the Mideast oil fields have been nationalized in the decades since World War II, as well as those in many other semicolonial countries. The imperialist-owned monopolies not only own and operate their own massive oil fields, but also dominate world petroleum refining capacity, transportation, and distribution networks. The government of the Soviet Union, the world's largest oil producer, has also benefited from recent price increases, helping to offset falling revenues from the declining output of its crisis-wracked petroleum industry.

The great losers economically--not to mention from the slaughter that is being planned--are working people in the United States and around the world. The majority of humanity--those in the semicolonial world--are being hit the hardest by the monopoly-rigged leap in oil prices. The Third World is being devastated. The working people of Eastern Europe are special victims too. They have been hit by the price hikes, the cutoff of Iraqi oil, the failure by the Soviet government to come through with contracted supplies, and-beginning January 1, 1991--with the necessity for the first time in decades of paying for Soviet oil in hard currency at the world market price.

So the war that is being prepared is an imperialist war in that sense too--a war for Big Oil.

There's a third way in which it's an imperialist war--the way Marxists have used the term for most of this century. It's a war waged by finance capital. It's a war over economic domination and control--redivision--of a big piece of the semicolonial world. It's a war against other propertied classes in other countries for the domination of raw materials, markets, and access to the superexploitation of low-paid labor.

It even has the aspect of a war to redivide world power and influence among rival imperialist ruling classes. Despite the broad backing of the world's capitalist ruling families for the war drive, the massive military operation in the Gulf is not a "coalition" effort. It's not a partnership of equals. U.S. imperialism is calling the shots.

The bottom line, however, is that this will be a war in which all the imperialist powers--U.S. imperialism above all--stand to lose. It will be a war of a declining, not an advancing, imperialist power.