What do you do when, after making a blustering, bombastic proclamation of world domination, you seem to get no response?No one to whom the proclamation was directed, neither friend nor foe, seems to have fallen on all fours to pay the kind of humiliating homage you had expected. And from the most important area of the Middle East, Iraq, instead of obedience, you find yourself defied in no uncertain terms.
Moreover, your friends at the UN, in particular that little grouping supposed to supervise and inspect certain installations in Iraq, have on two occasions handed you a diplomatic rebuff that could not but be heard around the world.
What are we talking about? Last March 8 the New York Times published excerpts from a 46-page draft document in which the Pentagon proclaimed itself as nothing less than the dominating force on the planet. It spelled out a threat to both friend and foe: unless you get in line with the Pentagon, you can only expect punishment.
Here is some of what the document said:
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.
"First, the U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
"We must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from seeking to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
There was more, of course, but we needn't try the patience of the reader. Suffice it to say that the Pentagon never denied that the document was authentic.
The only thing that happened, after many inquiries by the capitalist press, was that Bush seemed obligated to make some response. As we indicated in Workers World of March 19, Bush disowned the document but in no way denounced it--not a word of criticism of it. And there the matter was left to rest.
It seems eerie that there was no public response to this utterly incredible document. But we can assume there was a great deal of consternation in private discussions and diplomatic representations. Nevertheless, there has been no public outcry anywhere. Did the Pentagon assume that silence meant consent? Or even that silence means a world conspiracy against them?
Could not the very idea of assuming such an odious posture itself induce paranoia?
To bomb or not to bomb
Contradiction is a law of life. And nowhere are the social and political contradictions more acute than in the summits of the U.S. ruling class establishment.
The question of whether or when to launch a significant military offensive always creates sharp differences of approach. And they are never sharper than when military strategy is in dire need of an uplifting development. That is certainly the case today with Bush and his Republican administration.
The readers of the New York Times, and they are worldwide, must have been astonished at the front-page story on Aug. 16. It began, "The United States and its allies have decided to provoke a confrontation with Iraq on Monday morning."
What is particularly astonishing about this is that it doesn't imply that the allies are going to be provoked by Iraq or anybody else. No, they are planning to provoke a confrontation.
We thus see that the U.S. and the oldest imperialist powers, with their rich history of using diplomacy as a cover for a military offensive, have completely discarded it and resorted to open provocation, something that even Hitler never did. The rule had been in imperialist diplomacy to always put the onus of aggression on the other side and play the role of the aggrieved, peace-loving party.
But now, in a sudden turn unquestionably grown out of urgent necessity, the U.S. and its allies--so it says here--agreed to provoke a military confrontation.
Such an outlandish adventure and departure from the norms of imperialist diplomacy had to trigger a split in the U.S. establishment. And thus the so-called more moderate--moderate in tactics but not in principle--faction leaked the impending assault to a principal organ of U.S. finance capital, thereby exposing the rupture within to the world as a whole, to the great embarrassment of the Bush administration and the military.
It's a lesson on how they resolve their differences without an open clash and how important the capitalist media can be as a vehicle for it.
Thus all the braggadocio of the Pentagon draft document seems smashed to smithereens, not by an external force but by the inner antagonisms within the ruling establishment. Cynicism and expediency clashed with military necessity. But it is not clear at this date which has triumphed.
Republican convention
As among those who felt obligated to watch the opening of the Republican convention, we were looking particularly to see whether the "heroes" of Desert Storm, including Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell, were present and whether the media would focus on them. But we didn't see them.
This certainly would have been expected, had the genocidal attack by the U.S. military armada on the small nation of Iraq really been the mighty victory it was touted to be.
As matters stand now, both the U.S. and its dubious allies in the coalition against Iraq stand discredited by their own maneuvers. The pretext for the provocation anticipated in the Times was that a small group of UN inspectors was to arbitrarily demand the right to inspect Baghdad's most closely guarded government ministries, including the Ministry of Military Industrialization. But something funny happened on the way. The little group of military inspectors skipped the building and went elsewhere, thus blowing the military scheme to bits.
Britain and France, the U.S.'s dubious allies and co- conspirators in this case, reneged first. That explains the audacity of the little group of UN inspectors. Earlier, the U.S. got a diplomatic rebuff when they acceded to Iraq's request that the inspection teams should not include Americans or others from countries who had joined the imperialist attack on Iraq.
To the chagrin of the ultra-militarist wing in the U.S., a Times editorial called it an honorable agreement (the editors must have regretted this, since they've had a consistent line of attack against Iraq).
What does all this show? First that this mad scheme was so raw and cynical that it could not possibly find unanimity in all the factions and groupings in the ruling circles. Second, it was possible that a military adventure could have boomeranged and turned into a public relations nightmare for the Bush administration, particularly if the resistance from the Iraqi people were great or the mass of the U.S. population reacted in horror to the use of such an obvious and cynical ploy during the Republican convention.
Now that this scheme has collapsed, the Pentagon has let the cat out of the bag. The real objective of the planned provocation, said a defense department official, was to show "who's in charge." (New York Times, Aug. 16)
Times outlines new plan
But we must await the second act of this sordid drama. There is a new plan, a warmed-over version of an old scheme. According to another story in the Times of Aug. 18 by their informed journalist on the Middle East, Youssef M. Ibrahim, this one "would come close to partitioning the country into three sections: a northern Kurdish region, a southern Shiite region and a middle region largely populated by Sunni Muslims."
The problem with dividing and redividing areas, setting up spheres of influence, carving up the country in such a way as to make a unified front of the oppressed impossible--the problem with all this is that the imperialist ideologues and politicians are thoroughly imbued with 19th-century wisdom about the Middle East and the Arabs in particular, while this is an age of telecommunications, space satellites and technological advances made almost at the speed of light.
The imperialists presume that the mass of the people are a static force. On the contrary. They are a vibrant, dynamic, revolutionary force who are learning to utilize the latest developments in science and technology--the latter being imposed upon them as a necessity to survive the onslaught of imperialism.
While it is true that ideology lags considerably behind swift changes in the material conditions of life, it is not true--as Gertrude Bell described in her many writings about the Middle East used by the British Foreign Office--that the masses are a stagnant force of history. Bell (1868-1926) was a principal adviser to the British government in the 19th century and is said to have actually been the one who recommended the selection of Faisal the First as king of Iraq.
But that era is gone and cannot be brought back to life by the force and violence of the Pentagon and all its allies.
The swift development of the productive forces, the onward march of technology cannot be halted. There's no way the masses can be excluded from this process. On the contrary, they will become the most indispensable element to it. Instead of being mere objects of history, the masses are daily becoming the subject of history.