October 9--Even as talk of a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis escalated over the past week, the giant U.S. aircraft carrier Independence was moving into the Gulf, its deck crammed with attack planes and escorted by a battle group of smaller warships and mine sweepers.
This move alone speaks volumes and belies President Bush's less bellicose speech to the United Nations. The deployment of troops, weapons, ships and planes to Saudi Arabia has not stopped for one minute.
Nor should anyone be fooled by the play-acting in Washington about the military budget being cut. The Pentagon got everything it wanted in the little conspiracy with key Congressional leaders hatched at Andrews Air Force Base (see WW article, Sept. 27). That has not been changed. Except for the phasing out of a few obsolete bases, any military cuts are far in the future and don't affect the current struggle.
Our problem is to assess the peace talk, which is words, against the actual deeds.
Peace talk by the ruling capitalist establishment is always calculated to paralyze the struggle of the working class and oppressed against the war. Let's not be fooled by it. Indecision on the eve of every great war crisis is a characteristic feature of adventurous imperialism. It does not affect the objective direction of the military-industrial complex or the essence of the struggle, which is for the redivision of the world's resources by the imperialist oppressors.
Capitalist peace talk tends to paralyze the anti-war forces while leaving the initiative solidly in the hands of the imperialists. Forgetting the above is to risk demoralizing the growing resistance to the Gulf war, which is also responding to racism and to unemployment arising out of the economic crisis.
No admiral, no general, no Pentagon officer has breathed a word about pulling back or hesitating to use military force. All the peace talk is based on surmises. Every single word uttered about a diplomatic solution is hedged by a saving clause that points to military action.
Cracks in the plans?
However, that shouldn't stop us from examining some critical aspects of the struggle, or from pointing out cracks and miscalculations in the Bush-Pentagon grand plan for a unified worldwide front organized by imperialism against the oppressed people.
In order to understand the current phase of the war crisis and its intimate connection to the budget struggle, it is worth considering some key developments of the last two weeks. All are intertwined with the looming economic crisis now acknowledged by almost all the capitalist economists and evident in such significant developments as the rise in unemployment, including layoffs in such sensitive areas as the banks, led by Chase Manhattan.
The imminent attack on Iraq, which had been announced in scare headlines just two weeks ago, has been moved to the inside pages. Most of the networks have begun to put the war crisis second or third on the news and focus on the budget crisis instead. This is understandable, but the budget issue is a sham struggle which will end up as a compromise that does not resolve the financial crisis of the capitalist government arising out of its unprecedented indebtedness on a world scale.
Let's understand, but not give much credence to, the reports that the so-called doves in the ruling establishment, led by Zbigniew Brzezinski and (if we are to believe the reports) certain elements in the National Security Council and State Department, seem to have suddenly got the upper hand.
Note, however, that nobody says Brent Scowcroft--Bush's National Security Adviser and a protege of Kissinger and the Rockefeller dynasty--is a dove. Moreover, Secretary of Defense Cheney, a front man for the Pentagon, has been characterized as leading the hawks.
The capitalist press is saying virtually nothing about the developments of real significance. What is the meaning of the dismissal of General Michael Dugan, former Chief of the Air Force, the military branch most crucial in a blitzkrieg against Iraq? There has been no discussion, no articles in the public press, no explanation.
His firing seemed, at least based on its superficial appearance, to represent a shift of actual policy. Lending support to this conception is the position of Brzezinski, as outlined in the New York Times of Oct. 7. Henry Kissinger also has toned down his position of Aug. 20; at that time, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post and other papers, he called for the immediate destruction of the Iraqi regime.
Next we have to consider Bush's Oct. 1 talk to the UN, where he virtually came out for a diplomatic solution, while at the same time refusing to give up his military options. In this talk, Bush endorsed what he had turned down just a few days earlier--an overall settlement in the Middle East to go along with an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. How did this change of position come about?
Failed to get Soviet support for military attack
The class-collaborationist Gorbachev administration, which has been enticed more and more into the orbit of U.S. imperialism, has been giving political support to the U.S. campaign against Iraq. However, at the end of the Bush-Gorbachev press conference in Helsinki when Bush directly referred to military support for the U.S. action in the Gulf, Gorbachev pulled back from the brink.
Nevertheless, Soviet political support of the resolutions at the UN Security Council sanctioning and embargoing Iraq--such harsh, just-short-of-war measures--gave the imperialists a handle to try and draw the USSR further into acquiescing to or even joining in a military attack.
But, after all the talk of collaboration with the imperialists, after all the mutual friendship declarations and support of U.S. imperialism's policy against Iraq, with the Soviet leaders denouncing the Iraqi regime and Hussein himself, and even after the brazen speech made by Shevardnadze at the UN in which he virtually tied the USSR to the war machines of the U.S. and its imperialist allies--the Soviet leaders pulled back from supporting an outright U.S. military attack.
The statements of love and affection were fine, but what the U.S. military establishment wanted to know was: Are you going to approve a military attack? Are you joining with us in it? That was the big question.
If you re-read Shevardnadze's speech and go over Gorbachev's press conference with Bush, you see they could not get themselves to say yes to that.
It must have been a keen disappointment to the imperialist establishment and showed that the Gorbachev administration was reluctant and fearful of any such step.
This caused the ruling establishment here to look for other avenues than Gorbachev and Shevardnadze. They wanted to test whether the Gorbachev grouping had been hindered from completely collaborating with U.S. imperialism by the military in the USSR. Assurances by Gorbachev that the military was in support of all his policies were not enough. The Pentagon as well as the Bush administration wanted to see for themselves whether the military was hindering the policy of class collaboration, including military action.
Invited Soviet Chief of Staff
So they went over the head of Gorbachev and invited the chief of the Soviet military, General Mikhail A. Moiseyev, to come to the U.S. This was not in accord with diplomatic procedures. The sudden invitation by U.S. Chief of Staff Colin Powell to the Soviet Chief of Staff was an extraordinary development.
None of the military chiefs of the Western imperialist powers, so far as we know, has met with General Powell with regard to the Gulf crisis. Not the French, Germans or Japanese. Powell did make a visit to Saudi Arabia, but that was intended as a morale builder for the troops.
It's all the more unusual because such a meeting is only proper after political agreement has been reached. Notwithstanding all the effusive praise by Gorbachev for U.S. policy, the Gorbachev administration was not for the use of force, not for a military solution. That was the bottom line.
Therefore, there was no need to discuss military coordination, no need to have a meeting of the military chiefs of staff. It was a political matter and was being discussed between Bush and Gorbachev, then Baker and Shevardnadze.
The Soviet Chief of Staff is an appointee presumed to be a supporter of Gorbachev. But how much power the Chief of Staff exerts over the military, or is representative of their views, is open to question. It was an unorthodox procedure between allies to invite the Chief of Staff and attempt to probe the differences, since the political answer had already been given.
Moreover, the Pentagon began to fish in troubled waters. Even within the framework of this pro-imperialist collaboration, it would have been more proper for the Gorbachev regime to either politely accept the invitation but postpone it to a distant time after the crisis, or politely reject it. But the Gorbachev administration is not known for being adamant in relation to imperialism and must have agreed with great reluctance. It was revealed as weak and vulnerable in relation to imperialism.
This act of brazen intervention in the internal affairs of the USSR pushed the Gorbachev administration as far as it could go. But fortunately it appears that the general stuck even more pointedly to the policy of not using force. He conveyed the impression that the military was solidly opposed to intervening on behalf of U.S. imperialism.
All this was covered in an article in the New York Times of Oct. 3 headed "Top Soviet General Tells U.S. Not to Attack in Gulf," based on a special interview given by General Moiseyev to writers and editors of the Times. Parts of what he said are outrageously offensive and arrogant to the Iraqis. The net result, however, is that the trip wasn't worth two cents to the Pentagon. They wanted to know from the general if the Soviet military was supportive of an intervention or not. And they found out that the military was very strongly opposed to it.
Thus the Bush administration found out what many specialists in the imperialist think tanks have known--that the military in the Soviet Union is not pro-imperialist, certainly not to the extent of pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for the U.S. in the Middle East. This reflects what still remains of the social system created by the October Revolution, and shows that the bourgeois grouping in the leadership fears the class-conscious workers, collectivized peasantry and progressive intelligentsia. It is a key factor in trying to understand what's behind the halt in the war talk, at least for now.
Differences among imperialists resurface
Also, the old and abiding differences in the imperialist camp began to surface after it was made clear that there was a limit to the collaboration of the USSR's bourgeois ruling group with U.S. imperialism. While earlier there had been great jubilation in the U.S. press about the solidity of the alliance against Iraq, a vitriolic editorial in the Oct. 8 New York Times ("Who Will Pay for the Gulf Crisis?") assails the imperialist allies and the client states in the Middle East for not contributing enough.
The appearance of these differences is altogether in harmony with the laws of capitalist development and its drive in the imperialist epoch for the redivision of world markets and sources of raw materials and super-exploited labor.
Nevertheless, the deployment is continuing. The inherent tendency of the imperialist monopolies faced with a domestic crisis is to find an external, military solution. One question stands in the way: Will military expansion solve the economic crisis?
Unlike earlier economic collapses, this one comes at a time when the military has already been built up to such gargantuan proportions that it's difficult for even the most ultra-imperialist elements to see how much further that can go. With the banks themselves in danger of losing their credit, the capitalist establishment isn't sure whether the military solution will mitigate the economic crisis or deepen it.
Will they go ahead anyway and risk a firestorm of simultaneous rebellions throughout the Middle East? Will they arouse the masses of people at home by dragging them into an already unpopular war at the same time that the workers are bracing for a domestic economic crisis of unknown proportions? These are the enormous calculations that have given the imperialist strategists pause. But only for the moment. For the historical tendency of imperialist militarism is to expand, even in the face of obvious economic contraction.