 On Oct. 28, tens of thousands of people across the country marched against the war in Iraq. Photo: Bethany Malmgren |
The midterm congressional election defeat of the Republican majority in the Senate and the House of Representatives, followed by the dumping of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense and his likely replacement by former CIA director Robert Gates, inaugurates a shift in strategy by the Bush White House. It is a shift that almost every sector of the capitalist ruling class supports.
The neoconservatives are out. The old guard of the imperialist foreign policy establishment is retaking control. The Democratic Party is being invited back into the fold and given a place at the government feeding trough in return for their new partnership with Bush.
The Republican loss of 28 congressional seats and the upset of the Republican control over the Senate represent a repudiation of the war in Iraq and a sign of deep economic discontent from sections of the working class and lower middle class.
Because the ruling-class Democratic Party is the beneficiary of voter anger against Bush, however, the people’s aspirations for an end to the war in Iraq and for economic and social justice at home is bound to be frustrated by the new Congress.
The officials in the labor movement and the most moderate peace organizations are presenting the new congressional alignment as a great victory for the people. This is an illusion.
The Democratic Party leadership, in the person of incoming speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, immediately met with Bush at the White House to extend the “hand of friendship and partnership.” She ruled out any Democratic Party moves to impeach Bush.
Changing of the guard
The anti-Republican sweep on Election Day was an expression of disgust for the war and the war makers. For the tens of millions of people who voted to dump the Republicans, there was a euphoric feeling that the elections might mean an end to the Bush government and its odious policies.
That is what millions of people want. But to achieve that end, a far bigger struggle is needed. The real role of the Democrats and the new foreign policy management team that is taking over from the neoconservatives is to rescue the position of U.S. imperialism that has been badly isolated because of Bush’s policies.
The war in Iraq has been a catastrophe for the Iraqi people. The recent war in Lebanon also inflicted an ocean of human suffering. But in both cases, the Bush administration’s rush to war—a direct, unprovoked war in Iraq and a proxy war in Lebanon—has stimulated anticolonial armed resistance that has proved impossible to defeat militarily.
The neoconservatives’ promise of an easy victory turned into its opposite. U.S. imperialism is weakened. Bogged down and over-extended in Iraq, its military machine has not only failed to vanquish its enemy, but now finds itself less able to fight in North Korea and against Iran, Syria, Venezuela or Cuba.
Bush and the neoconservatives have only generated global enmity and reduced the diplomatic and political clout of the U.S. empire among its would-be supporters in northeast Asia, in Latin America, in Europe and elsewhere.
The role of Congress
Power in the modern capitalist state resides in the super-centralized executive branch—the military, the CIA, Homeland Security and the FBI. Congress is a talk shop.
Although Congress’ formal power rests in its sole and exclusive authority to declare war and its exclusive “power of the purse”—its control over the budget and expenditures—this formal, constitutional power is merely a shadow. The last time Congress issued a declaration of war was in December 1941. When Pelosi and the Democrats became the majority party, their first announcement was to pledge that Congress would not cut any of the Pentagon’s funding requests to keep the war in Iraq going.
Congress did not declare war in Korea, nor did it end it. It did not declare war in Vietnam, and it only cut funding for the war in 1974—one year after the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnam.
Congress did not declare war or have a role in the final resolution of the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1989 invasion in Panama, the 1991 war against Iraq, the 1992 intervention in Somalia, the 1995 intervention in Haiti, the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In each of these conflicts, the Congressional talk shop at most passed a resolution authorizing the president to act as he saw fit, then rubber-stamped all funding requests to sustain the war.
When these imperial wars encounter problems, some members of Congress whine about bad management, too few troops, or that they were misled with “bad intelligence.” It did not take any intelligence to know that Iraq posed no threat to the United States in 2003—or ever.
On Nov. 7, people voted for change. There will be change—but not the kind that is needed.
A new grouping of imperialist foreign policy managers is taking over. Some will function openly while others will work behind the scenes. Their names are James Baker, secretary of state during the first Bush administration; Robert Gates, CIA director in the first Bush administration; Zbignew Brezinski, national security advisor to Jimmy Carter; and Gen. Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to the first Bush administration.
Rumsfeld has been sent packing. U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, may be next. Dick Cheney’s wings are clipped. A new management team with a new strategy is being put in place to salvage the situation for U.S. imperialism. Again, the Democrats intend to function as partners in the new arrangement.
Avoiding catastrophic defeat
In the weeks following the election, the Baker-Hamilton Commission is set to release its recommendations about how Washington can prevail in Iraq. These will be the recommendations of the old foreign policy establishment managers.
“Winning” now means nothing more than avoiding catastrophic military defeat. Unless Iraq is stabilized, there is the possibility of armed resistance and revolutions that could potentially topple the pro-U.S. governments in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Important sectors of the capitalist class in the United States have come to the conclusion that the U.S. government must first manage to avoid all-out military defeat with a new strategy in order to secure its long-term interests in the oil-rich Middle East. While the neoconservatives sought to destroy the governments in Syria and Iran, the new strategy may aim to try to draw the bourgeois governments of both countries into a regional settlement.
 Two leaders of the new war strategy team: James Baker (left) and Lee Hamilton. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images |
It is critical that the anti-war movement in the United States understand that a new strategy toward Iraq and the Middle East is not a step toward peace. It is absolutely not a response by the imperialist government to the yearning of the U.S. people—or any people—for peace. It is an emergency realignment of imperialist strategy in the face of their deteriorating position in Iraq.
A history of interventions
The new “bipartisan” foreign policy team is distinguished by decades of overt and covert operations to destroy socialist governments and to maintain proxy or puppet forces throughout the world to fight governments that dare to seek independence from U.S imperialism.
Their achievements include the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA and the Pentagon, beginning in 1978, to overthrow the secular, socialist government of Afghanistan. This required organizing and funding Osama Bin Laden and other right-wing forces and unleashing a campaign of terror that took the lives of thousands of Afghan literacy workers. They were murdered when they dared to go into the Afghan countryside with the goal of teaching girls to read and write. Zbignew Brezinski called this terror war one of the finest moves by the old foreign policy establishment during the Cold War.
These same figures worked to instigate the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, then arming both Iran and Iraq in order to weaken both countries. More than 1 million young people died in that war.
They worked throughout the 1980s to crush the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the burgeoning revolutionary movement in El Salvador. During that same time, they acted to reinforce the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and the Duvalier regime in Haiti.
A new power is needed
The congressional election results showed that the U.S. people want an end to the war in Iraq. Because the imperialist establishment has its grip firmly on the levers of real power in this country, however, the elections are being utilized to replace one team of managers with another.
The mass anti-war sentiment, now clearly expressed, puts the majority of people objectively at loggerheads with the politicians of both parties. The Democrats profited from the anti-war wave, but they intend to become Bush’s partners in Iraq. That is why the immediate struggle to stop the war in Iraq means that the people must act in larger numbers and with greater determination in the coming months.
The struggle for genuine peace is a long and complicated effort. Realizing the will of the people will require a profound, radical transformation of society. Power must be taken from those who profit from a global empire.
The military apparatus is not for “defense” of the people. It exists to enforce the global economic domination of the biggest corporations and banks. There is no law requiring people to submit to a government of, by and for the rich.
Only a new power based on the people can make the U.S. military machine a relic of a tortured past.
