Not just Blood for Oil.

• Position: Mobilizing Against War

Midnight Notes

The Passions that incline men to Peace, are Fear of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary for commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them.--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

The slogan "No Blood for Oil" was shouted during the demonstrations against the Gulf War more than a decade ago. It is still being shouted in the demonstrations against the new war with Iraq that is being planned by the Bush Administration. It is an effective slogan, but it also is limited. For it claims that the war against Iraq is motivated only the short-term interests of key players in the Bush Administration who are tied to the oil industry.

But there is a deeper reason for this war mobilization rooted in a crisis of the dominant economic model of the planet: "globalization." In this article we show the reasons why the Asian Economic Crisis, the collapse of the stock markets internationally, the bursting of the technology stock bubble in Europe and the US are essential to the pounding of the war drums. For the war is not simply an effort to divert attention to this crisis, but is seen by Bush and his supporters as the only answer to it.

It is important to note that the Bush Administration took power not in a moment of capitalist business-as-usual, but in the midst of a systemic crisis that transcends a mere recessionary blip in the US.

The Bush Administration's answer to the global economic crisis is simple: War. The 1980s and 1990s saw the building of an elaborate international regime of trade, capital transfer and money flow, but it did not see the development of an institution of violence that would enforce the rules of neoliberal globalization. Certainly the UN was hardly the vehicle for such a job, since the important players (the permanent members of the Security Council) were not a unified collection of states that could or even want to enforce the rules of neoliberalism. Nor was there on the historical horizon an international body of armed men and women that would have the global monopoly of violence. The Clinton/Gore effort to create a such body--one the US government could control from behind the scenes under the guise of a formal equality among national participants--was anathema to the most powerful fraction of the US ruling class. Its suspicion of Clinton's efforts was behind the extraordinary animus expressed in the impeachme nt proceedings of 1998 and the electoral coup of 2000. There was a genuine fear that the Clintonites would sign away, on a formal level at least, the US's imperial role in the 21st century.

Supporters of the Bush administration often described this role by analogy with the place of the British empire in the 19th century world system. That century's international gold standard and free trade (called economic liberalism) required a hegemonic state that would make sure that the rules of the system were followed. That state was Great Britain. A central ideological problem with liberalism both old and new is that it presents itself as an autonomous, self-regulating system, but it is not. It needs to have an enforcer, since individuals and governments, especially those who are being put into crisis or are chronic losers, are tempted to break the rules. In the 21st century, according to this reasoning, the only state that could play Great Britain's role is the United States.

Of course, history is over-determined (i.e., there are multiple...