Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002

   From: "Mario Profaca" <mprofaca@jagor.srce.hr>

Subject: U.S. Imperial Ambitions and Iraq

 

December 2002

 

U.S. Imperial Ambitions and Iraq

by The Editors

 Officially Washington’s current policy toward Iraq is to bring about a

“regime change”—either through a military coup, or by means of a U.S.

invasion, justified as a “preemptive attack” against a rogue state bent on

developing and deploying weapons of mass destruction.* But a U.S. invasion,

should it take place, would not confine its objectives to mere regime change

in Baghdad. The larger goal would be nothing less than the global projection

of U.S. power through assertion of American dominance over the entire Middle

East. What the world is now facing therefore is the prospect of a major new

development in the history of imperialism.

 

The imperialism of today is definitely not the same as that of the late

nineteenth century. In the early days of the modern era of imperialism,

several powers—notably Germany, Japan, and the United States—came on the

scene to challenge Britain’s hegemony in various parts of the globe. There

were a number of notable features of imperialism during this period: the

scramble among the European powers to divide up Africa; heightened

competition in Europe for each other’s markets; the growing German challenge

to London as the core of the international money market. At the same time,

the United States was attempting to enter the competition for markets in

Europe and was developing its own colonies and spheres of influence in Latin

America and Asia. The primary causes of the First World War included both

the bitter competition among the great powers for colonies and markets and

the German attempt to eliminate Britain as the center of international money

and commodity markets.

 

The period after the First World War represented a second phase of modern

imperialism. The Treaty of Versailles was a process of the winners dividing

the gains, with a unitary goal—the defeat of Bolshevism. Thorstein Veblen

wrote that wiping Bolshevism off the map was not simply a secret clause in

the Treaty of Versailles, it was the very “parchment” of the Treaty (Essays

in Our Changing Order, 1934, p. 464). However, the plan to isolate and bring

down the Soviet Union was interrupted by the Great Depression and by the

Second World War, which developed out of the struggles of the axis powers,

Germany, Italy, and Japan, to carve out larger spaces within the world

system.

 

A third phase of imperialism emerged after the Second World War. During the

war, the United States, as the new hegemonic state within the capitalist

world, had developed a plan for gaining control of what it considered to be

the strategic centers of the world economy—an ambition that was then only

limited by the existence of the Soviet sphere of influence. Writing in this

space in November 1981, Noam Chomsky described the formation of U.S.

geopolitical strategy in this period as follows:

 

The general framework of thinking within which American foreign policy has

evolved since the Second World War is best described in the planning

documents produced during that war by the State Department planners and the

Council for Foreign Relations who met for a six-year period in the War and

Peace Studies Program, 1939­45. They knew, certainly by 1941­42, that the

war was going to end with the United States in a position of enormous global

dominance. The question arose: “How do we organize the world?”

They drew up a concept known as Grand Area Planning, where the Grand Area is

defined as the area which, in their terms, was “strategically necessary for

world control.” The geopolitical analysis behind it attempted to work out

which areas of the world have to be “open”—open to investment, open to the

repatriation of profits. Open, that is, to domination by the United States.

In order for the United States economy to prosper without internal changes

(a crucial point which comes through in all of the discussions in this

period), without any redistribution of income or power or modification of

structures, the War and Peace Program determined that the minimum area

strategically necessary for world control included the entire Western

hemisphere, the former British empire which they were in the process of

dismantling, and the Far East. That was the minimum, and the maximum was the

universe.

Somewhere between the two came the concept of the Grand Area—and the task of

how to organize it in terms of financial institutions and planning. This is

the framework that remained constant throughout the postwar period.

The liberation of Europe’s colonies and the defeat of Japan’s ambitions in

the Pacific allowed U.S. capital, backed up by U.S. military power, to begin

to penetrate markets that were previously inaccessible. While the Bretton

Woods Agreement provided a new economic framework for the imperialist

powers, U.S. military might and covert operations were projected around the

globe with increasing frequency—wars in Korea and Vietnam, the overthrow of

governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, the attempted overthrow of the

Cuban government, and interference in numerous civil wars in Central America

and Africa.

 

Crucial to the whole conception of the Grand Area was control of the Middle

East, which was regarded as part of the old British Empire, and absolutely

essential for the economic, military, and political control of the globe—not

least of all because it was the repository of most of the world’s proven oil

reserves. The United States thus began a long series of overt and covert

interventions in the region in the 1950s, the foremost of which was the 1953

overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh government in Iran, which

had nationalized foreign-owned oil companies. The success of the U.S. drive

was clear. Between 1940 and 1967, U.S. companies increased their control of

Middle Eastern oil reserves from 10 percent to close to 60 percent while

reserves under British control decreased from 72 percent in 1940 to 30

percent in 1967 (H. Magdoff, Age of Imperialism, p. 43).

 

The long delayed meaningful integration of Western Europe, partially caused

by the effects of economic stagnation, meant that it was not able to become

the bulwark against U.S. interests that European leaders had hoped. With a

weak Europe and Japan unable to mount a serious challenge to U.S. interests

in Asia, the defeat of actually existing socialism in Europe by the early

1990s paved the way for a renewed period of U.S. hegemony, which had partly

faded in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

Viewed from the standpoint of the historical evolution of imperialism, it is

clear that the real motive behind Washington’s current drive to start a war

with Iraq is not any genuine military threat from that country, but rather

the goal of demonstrating that the U.S. is now prepared to use its power at

will. As Jay Bookman, deputy editorial page editor of the Atlanta-Journal

Constitution observed in that paper (“The President’s Real Goal in Iraq,”

September 29, 2002):

 

The official story on Iraq has never made sense....It [the threatened

invasion of Iraq] is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or

Saddam, or UN resolutions. This war, should it come, is intended to mark the

official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire,

seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would

be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by

those who believe that the United States must seize the opportunity for

global domination, even if it means becoming the “American imperialists”

that our enemies always claimed we were....Rome did not stoop to

containment; it conquered. And so should we.

The Defense of Empire

 

Wars of imperial expansion, however unjustifiable they may be, always demand

some kind of justification. Often this has been accomplished through the

doctrine of defensive war. In his 1919 essay, “The Sociology of

Imperialisms,” Joseph Schumpeter wrote of Rome during its years of greatest

expansion,

 

There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged

to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman,

they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies

would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an

interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The

fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being

attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing-space.

The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly

Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.*

Of course for many (if not most) of the imperial adventures of the

nineteenth century there was never much latitude for pretending that the

motives were defensive. The Opium Wars were fought not against an aggressive

China, but rather to impose free trade in opium. The struggle amongst the

European powers to divide up Africa was not directed against a belligerent

Africa but rationalized as the “white man’s burden.”

 

The pretense that an endless series of defensive wars was needed to check

evil-minded forces bent on aggression in every corner of the known world did

not die with the Roman Empire, but was part of the rationale for the

expansion of British imperialism in the nineteenth century and American

imperialism in the twentieth.* This same mentality pervades the new National

Security Strategy of the United States, recently transmitted from the

executive branch to Congress (New York Times, September 20, 2002). This

document establishes three key principles of U.S. strategic policy: (1) the

perpetuation of unrivaled U.S. global military dominance, so that no nation

will be allowed to rival or threaten the United States; (2) U.S. readiness

to engage in “preemptive” military attacks against states or forces anywhere

on the globe that are considered a threat to the security of the United

States, its forces and installations abroad, or its friends or allies; and

(3) the immunity of U.S. citizens to prosecution by the International

Criminal Court. Commenting on this new National Security Strategy, Senator

Edward M. Kennedy declared that, “The administration’s doctrine is a call

for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should

accept” (October 7, 2002).

 

Washington’s ambition to establish a global empire beyond anything the world

has yet seen is matched only by its paranoid fear of innumerable enemies

lurking in every pocket of the globe ready to threaten the security of the

“homeland” itself. These external threats only serve to justify, in its

eyes, the extension of U.S. power. The targeted enemies of the United States

at present are conveniently located in the third world, where the

possibilities for outright expansion of U.S. imperialism are greatest.

 

Iraq under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is presented as the

foremost rogue state, global enemy number one. Although Iraq is not yet

armed with the most feared weapons of mass destruction—nuclear weapons—it is

claimed by the Bush administration that it may soon obtain them. Moreover,

because of the purported utter madness of its leader, Iraq is said to be so

irrational as to be immune to nuclear deterrence. As a result, there is no

choice, we are told, but to strike this evil regime quickly, even before it

obtains the feared weapons. The UN inspection process is largely useless at

this stage, the Bush administration has insisted (though overruled in this

respect by the other Security Council members). Saddam Hussein, it is

contended, will always find a way to hide his most critical weapons

operations somewhere in the extensive complexes dedicated to his personal

security, which will not be opened fully to UN inspectors, however much Iraq

may agree to unconditional inspections. There is no real choice then but

“regime change” (installing a puppet regime) through exercise of

force—either by military coup or invasion.

 

It is by instilling fear in this way in an American public already primed by

the events of September 11, 2001 that the administration has sought to pull

the country and the world toward war. If a U.S. president and his

administration can stand up day-after-day and insist that the United States

is vulnerable to an imminent attack by weapons of mass destruction (raising

the question of a surprise attack involving a “mushroom cloud” even in a

case where the nation concerned has no such weapons capabilities), a large

part of the population is bound to be carried along. The ceaseless

repetition of these dire warnings under something like the big lie

principle, coupled with the echo chamber provided by the mass media,

gradually wears away at popular skepticism. “If public support is weak at

the outset,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has written with respect to

convincing the population to back an unpopular war, then the “U.S.

leadership must be willing to invest the political capital to marshal

support to sustain the effort for whatever period of time may be required”

(New York Times, October 14, 2002).

 

So crazed have been the claims emanating from the Oval Office, in its

efforts to concoct the merest shreds of a justification for an invasion,

that none other than CIA Director George J. Tenet has been compelled to step

out and challenge the false assertions of the president. Thus Tenet has

openly contradicted the president’s claim that Iraq constitutes an immediate

nuclear threat to the United States, pointing out that it would take Iraq

until the second half of the decade at the very least to produce enough

fissile material for a single nuclear weapon. The administration has

attempted to get around the weakness of its case with respect to nuclear

weapons by placing more emphasis on the chemical and biological weapons

threats of Iraq. In a speech delivered in Cincinnati on October 7 the

president said that Baghdad might attempt at any time to attack targets in

the United States with these weapons if aided and abetted by terrorist

networks in delivering the weapons to their targets. Yet the CIA, in a

letter to Congress signed by Tenet that same day, contradicted such an

assessment, arguing that Iraq shows no signs of developing chemical and

biological weapons except for purposes of deterrence and that it could be

expected to refrain from sponsoring terrorist attacks in the foreseeable

future if the United States does not attack it first. “Baghdad for now

appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with

conventional or C.B.W. [chemical and biological weapons] against the United

States,” the letter read. However, “should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led

attack could no longer be deterred,” the letter continued, “he probably

would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions” (New York

Times, October 10, 2002).

 

The Trojan Horse

 

The fact is that Iraq today probably does not possess functional chemical

and biological war capabilities since these were effectively destroyed

during the UN inspection process in 1991­1998. Its earlier capabilities in

this respect date back to the 1980s when Iraq under Saddam Hussein was an

ally of the United States. During 1985­1989, overlapping with the Iran-Iraq

War of 1980­1988, and after Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iran in

1984, U.S. companies, with the approval of the Reagan and the first Bush

administrations, sent numerous fatal biological cultures, including anthrax,

to Iraq. Eight shipments of cultures were approved by the Department of

Commerce that were later classified by the Centers for Disease Control as

having “biological warfare significance.” Altogether, Iraq received at least

seventy-two shipments of clones, germs, and chemicals with chemical and

biological warfare potential from the U.S. in these years.* The United

States continued to ship such deadly substances to Iraq even after Iraq

reportedly used chemical weapons against the Kurds in northern Iraq in 1988.

 

It is no secret that the United States is the country that has by far the

largest weapons of mass destruction capabilities and the most advanced

technology in this area. It is hardly surprising therefore that Washington

is viewed by much of the world as operating with double standards, when

confronting nations such as Iraq. As former chief weapons inspector for the

United Nations in Iraq, Richard Butler, has pointed out: “My attempt to have

Americans enter into discussions about double standards have been an abject

failure—even with highly educated and engaged people. I sometimes felt I was

speaking to them in Martian, so deep is their inability to understand.” In

Butler’s view, “What America totally fails to understand is that their

weapons of mass destruction are just as much a problem as are those of

 Iraq.” The view that there are “good weapons of mass destruction and bad

ones” is false. As a UN arms inspector, Butler found himself confronted with

this contradiction every day:

 

Amongst my toughest moments in Baghdad were when the Iraqis demanded that I

explain why they should be hounded for their weapons of mass destruction

when, just down the road, Israel was not, even though it was known to

possess some 200 nuclear weapons....I confess, too, that I flinch when I

hear American, British and French fulminations against weapons of mass

destruction, ignoring the fact that they are proud owners of massive

quantities of these weapons, unapologetically insisting that they are

essential for their national security, and will remain so....This is because

human beings will not swallow such unfairness (Sydney Morning Herald,

October 3, 2002).

 

Far from consistently opposing the proliferation of weapons of mass

destruction, the United States, which has a greater vested interest in such

weapons than any other country, has frequently blocked international

attempts to limit them. For example in December 2001, two months after the

September 11 attacks, President Bush shocked the international community by

killing the proposed enforcement and verification mechanism for the

Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention on the spurious grounds that if

biological weapons inspections were to be carried out in the United States

they could threaten the technological secrets and profits of U.S. biotech

companies.

 

Washington’s objectives in Iraq in the years following the Gulf War were

inconsistent with the UN inspection and disarmament process, which was aimed

at ridding that country of weapons of mass destruction. According to Scott

Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq in 1991­1998, this was evident

through U.S. unilateral subversion of the inspection process.* By 1998,

90­95 percent of the proscribed weapons capacity estimated to be in Iraq was

accounted for and had been destroyed as a result of the UN inspection

process. The sticking point in the inspections related to the extensive set

of structures devoted to Saddam Hussein’s personal security and the security

of the Ba’ath Party. A procedure, known as “Modalities for Sensitive Site

Inspection,” was therefore agreed upon through which four UN inspectors

could enter immediately into and search those facilities. Yet, in the case

of the inspection of a Ba’ath Party headquarters in Baghdad in December

1998, the United States, rather than simply allowing the UN to send in its

four inspectors, acted on its own, by insisting on sending in additional

intelligence officers. The goal was to penetrate Hussein’s security

apparatus, unrelated to the inspection of weapons of mass destruction—and to

provoke an international incident. The whole operation, according to Ritter,

was directed by the U.S. National Security Council, which gave orders

directly to Richard Butler, who was then the head of the UN inspection team.

 

Iraq protested against this gross infringement of the Modalities for

Sensitive Site Inspection and the United States used this as the pretext, in

Ritter’s account, for a “fabricated crisis,” ordering the UN inspectors out

and two days later initiating a seventy-two-hour bombing campaign, known as

Operation Desert Fox, directed at Saddam Hussein’s personal security

apparatus. Intelligence on Ba’ath Party hideouts obtained through U.S.

violations of the UN weapons inspection process was used to guide the

bombings. After that Iraq refused to readmit inspectors to sensitive sites,

objecting that these inspections were being used to spy on the Iraqi

government, and the UN inspection process fell apart.

 

In this way, Washington effectively torpedoed the final stage of the UN

inspection process and made it clear that its real goal was “regime change”

rather than disarmament. It had used the inspection process as a Trojan

horse in its attempts to destroy the Iraqi regime.

 

Oil Hegemony

 

Military, political, and economic aspects are intertwined in all stages of

imperialism, as well as capitalism in general. However, oil is the single

most important strategic factor governing U.S. ambitions in the Middle East.

In addition to the profit potential of all that oil for large corporations,

the fact that the United States, with about 2 percent of the known oil

reserves in the world, uses 25 percent of the world’s annual output gives it

an added impetus to attempt to exert control over supplies. There can be no

doubt that the United States seeks to control Iraqi oil production and the

second largest set of proven oil reserves in the world (next to those of

Saudi Arabia), consisting of over 110 billion barrels, or 12 percent of

world supply. The Middle East as a whole contains 65 percent of the world’s

proven oil reserves (see map facing page 11). Of seventy-three fields

discovered in Iraq so far, only about a third are producing at present. The

U.S. Energy Department estimates that Iraq also has as much as 220 billion

barrels in “probable and possible” reserves, making the estimated total

enough to cover U.S. annual oil imports at their current levels for

ninety-eight years. It is calculated that Iraq could raise its oil

production from three million to six million barrels a day within seven

years after the lifting of sanctions. More optimistic figures see Iraqi oil

production rising to as much as ten million barrels a day.*

The U.S. Department of Energy projects that global oil demand could grow

from the current 77 million barrels a day to as much as 120 million barrels

a day in the next twenty years, with the sharpest increases in demand

occurring in the United States and China. At present about 24 percent of

U.S. oil imports come from the Middle East and this is expected to rise

rapidly as alternative sources dry up. OPEC under the leadership of Saudi

Arabia, however, has kept oil supplies low in order to keep prices up.

Middle East oil production has stagnated over the last twenty years, with

overall OPEC production capacity (despite massive reserves) lower today than

in 1980 (Edward L. Morse and James Richard, “The Battle for Energy

Dominance,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002.). For this reason the

security and availability of oil supplies has become a growing issue for

U.S. corporations and U.S. strategic interests. As right-wing pundit and

Yale professor, Donald Kagan, has stated: “When we have economic problems,

it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in

Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies” (quoted in Bookman, “The

President’s Real Goal in Iraq”). Already U.S. oil corporations are

positioning themselves for the day when they will be able to return to Iraq

and Iran. According to Robert J. Allison Jr., chairman of the Anadarko

Petroleum Corporation, “We bought into Qatar and Oman to get a foothold in

the Middle East....We need to position ourselves in the Middle East for when

Iraq and Iran become part of the family of nations again” (New York Times,

October 22, 2002).

 

At present the French oil giant TotalFinaElf has the largest position in

Iraq, with exclusive negotiating rights to develop fields in the Majnoon and

Bin Umar regions. The biggest deals after that have been expected to go to

Eni in Italy, and a Russian consortium led by LukOil. If U.S. armed forces

enter and establish either a puppet government or a U.S. mission, all of

this is brought into question. Which country’s oil companies should we then

expect to do the negotiating for new contracts—as well as obtaining a

healthy share of the oil now owned by the French and other non-American

companies?

 

However, direct U.S. access to oil and the profits of U.S. oil corporations

are not enough by themselves to explain overriding U.S. interests in the

Middle East. Rather the United States sees the whole region as a crucial

part of its strategy of global power. The occupation of Iraq and the

installation of a regime under American control would leave Iran (itself an

oil power and part of Bush’s “Axis of Evil”) almost completely surrounded by

U.S. military bases in Central Asia to the north, Turkey and Iraq to the

west, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman to the south, and Pakistan and

Afghanistan to the east. It would make it easier for the United States to

protect planned oil pipelines extending from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia

through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. It would give

Washington a much more solid military base in the Middle East, where it

already has tens of thousands of troops located in ten countries. It would

increase U.S. leverage in relation to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern

states. It would strengthen the global superpower’s efforts to force terms

favorable to Israeli expansion, and the dispossession of the Palestinians,

on the entire Middle East. It would make the rising economic power of China,

along with Europe and Japan, increasingly dependent on a U.S. dominated oil

regime in the Middle East for their most vital energy needs. Control of oil

through military force would thus translate into greater economic,

political, and military power, on a global scale.

 

A Unipolar World

 

In the early 1970s, as a result of the loss of economic ground to Europe and

Japan over the course of the previous quarter-century, and due to the

delinking of the dollar from gold in 1971, it was widely believed that the

United States was losing its position as the hegemonic capitalist power.

However, in the 1990s the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the

United States as the sole superpower, and faster growth in the United States

than in Europe and Japan, suddenly revealed a very different reality. The

idea arose in U.S. strategic circles of an American empire beyond anything

seen in the history of capitalism or of the world, a true Pax Americana.

U.S. foreign policy analysts now refer to this as the rise of a “unipolar

world.” The consolidation of such a unipolar world on a permanent basis has

emerged as the explicit goal of the Bush administration a year after the

September 11 attacks. In the words of G. John Ikenberry, professor of

geopolitics at Georgetown University and a regular contributor to Foreign

Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations:

 

The new grand strategy [initiated by the Bush administration].... begins

with a fundamental commitment to maintaining a unipolar world in which the

United States has no peer competitor. No coalition of great powers without

the United States will be allowed to achieve hegemony. Bush made this point

the centerpiece of American security policy in his West Point commencement

address in June: “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths

beyond challenges—thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras

pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.”

...The United States grew faster than the other major states during the

decade [of the 1990s], it reduced military spending more slowly, and it

dominated investment in the technological advancement of its forces. Today,

however, the new goal is to make these advantages permanent—a fait accompli

that will prompt other states to not even try to catch up. Some thinkers

have described the strategy as “breakout,” in which the United States moves

so quickly to develop technological advantages (in robotics, lasers,

satellites, precision munitions, etc.) that no state or coalition could ever

challenge it as global leader, protector and enforcer (“America’s Imperial

Ambition,” Foreign Affairs, October 2002).

Such a grab for unlimited imperial dominance is bound to fail in the long

run. Imperialism under capitalism has centrifugal as well as centripetal

tendencies. Military dominance cannot be maintained without maintaining

economic dominance as well, and the latter is inherently unstable under

capitalism. The immediate reality, however, is that the United States is

moving very rapidly to increase its control at the expense of both potential

rivals and the global South. The likely result is an intensification of

exploitation on a world scale, along with a resurgence of imperialist

rivalries—since other capitalist countries will naturally seek to keep the

United States from achieving its “breakout” strategy.

 

The goal of an expanding American empire is seen by the administration not

only as a strategy for establishing the United States permanently as the

world’s paramount power, but also as a way out of the nation’s economic

crisis that shows no signs at present of going away. The administration

clearly believes it can stimulate the economy through military spending and

increased arms exports. But enhanced military spending associated with a war

may also contribute to economic problems, since it will undoubtedly cut

further into spending for social programs that not only help people but also

create the demand for consumer goods that business needs badly to stimulate

economic growth. Historically, attempts to use imperial expansion as a way

around needed economic and social changes at home have nearly always failed.

 

In the end what it is most crucial to understand is that the new U.S.

doctrine of world domination is a product not of a particular administration

(much less some cabal within the administration), but rather the culmination

of developments in the most recent phase of imperialism. Reversing the drive

to greater empire will not be easy. But the will of the people can play a

critical role in how far Washington is able to proceed with its imperial

ambitions. For this reason, mobilization of the population both in the

United States and abroad in a militant struggle against both war and

imperialism is of the utmost importance to the future of humanity.

----------------------------------

 

* Recently the Bush administration has also said that “regime change” could

be stretched to include an Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein that

cooperates fully with UN inspections and disarmament, in terms acceptable to

the United States. But the administration has declared this to be highly

improbable, and its position in this respect can thus be interpreted as part

of a diplomatic-legal strategy to garner support for its threatened

invasion, in the event that Iraq is declared to be non-compliant with the

U.N. inspection process.

 

* Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, edited and introduced

by Paul M. Sweezy (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1951), p. 66.

 

* Of course for many (if not most) of the imperial adventures of the

nineteenth century there was never much latitude for pretending that the

motives were defensive. The Opium Wars were fought not against an aggressive

China, but rather to impose free trade in opium. The struggle amongst the

European powers to divide up Africa was not directed against a belligerent

Africa but rationalized as the “white man’s burden.”

 

* Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, United States

Dual-Use Exports to Iraq and their Impact on the Health of the Persian Gulf

War Veterans, 103rd Congress, 2nd sess., May 25, 1994, pp. 264­76; Buffalo

News, September 23, 2002.

 

* See William Rivers Pitt with Scott Ritter, War on Iraq (New York: Context

Books, 2002); Newsday, July 30, 2002; The Guardian, October 7, 2002.

 

* wMiddle East Report, Fall 2002; San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 2002.

 

+All material copyright

©2002 by Monthly Review