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The Cauldron
What Next? ask Daniel L. Byman, director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies, and Brookings Institution’s Kenneth M. Pollack in a piece on the Iraq civil war. It is a quite bleak outlook.
They explain how other civil wars in Ruanda, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Lebanon spread into neightbouring countries, splintered off new guerilla groups and escalated far beyond their starting cause. This, they say, will happen in Iraq too. It is Michael Ledeen’s wet dream of a Middle East cauldron coming true.
The piece is riddled with historic ommissions (the Taliban did get support from Pakistan’s ISI they say, but the CIA’s major role is not mentioned) and the usual anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian propaganda (the countries many Iraqis already fleed to are named, except Syria and Iran, who did take several hundered thousand refugees.) But I recommend to read it, because the scenario given is realistic and very probable.
Their recommendation to the U.S. is to stay involved by setting up very large refugee camps and by threatening Iran away from engaging in Iraq. The former recommendation is not marketable to the U.S. taxpayer and will therefore not happen. The later threat has already been made and is very well on its escalation route.
To have the U.S. stay in the area and to have it play the players certainly guarantees a longer and more brutal war in the Middle East than all scenarios without U.S intervention.
But then, that may be what these Democratic pundits may really have in mind.
I think the following dove tails nicely w/b’s excellent post. I am always one to try to see in the long view, the metanarrative , wholistically, if you will, and after reading the following it has only confirmed my understanding that what the current axis of demagogues of the ruling elite in our government, in solidarity with current Corporate Law, Capitalist Fundamentalism and corporate colonialism bank on (pun intended) is chaos.
Dominant Capital and the New Wars [pdf]
Shimshon Bichler & Jonathan Nitzan
Abstract:
The recent shift from ‘global villageism’ to the ‘new wars’ revealed a deep crisis in heterodox political economy. The popular belief in neoliberal globalization, peace dividends, fiscal conservatism and sound finance that dominated the 1980s and 1990s suddenly collapsed. The early 2000s brought rising xenophobia, growing military budgets and policy profligacy. Radicals were the first to identify this transition, but their attempts to explain it have been bogged down by two major hurdles: (1) most writers continue to apply nineteenth century theories and concepts to twenty-first century realities; and (2) few seem to bother with empirical analysis.
This paper offers a radical alternative that is both theoretically new and empirically grounded. We use the ‘new wars’ as a stepping stone to understand a triple transformation that altered the nature of capital, the accumulation of capital and the unit of capital. Specifically, our argument builds on a power understanding of capital that emphasizes differential accumulation by dominant capital groups. Accumulation, we argue, has little to do with the amassment of material things measured in ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labor.’ Instead, accumulation, or ‘capitalization,’ represents a commodification of power by leading groups in society. Over the past century, this power has been re-structured and concentrated through two distinct regimes of differential accumulation–‘breadth’ and ‘depth.’ A breadth regime relies on proletarianization, on green-field investment and, particularly, on mergers and acquisitions. A depth regime builds on redistribution through stagflation–that is, on differential inflation in the midst of stagnation. In contrast to breadth which presupposes some measure of growth and stability, depth thrives on ‘accumulation through crisis.’
The past twenty years were dominated by breadth, buttressed by neoliberal rhetoric, globalization and capital mobility. This regime started to run into mounting difficulties in the late 1990s, and eventually collapsed in 2000. For differential accumulation to continue, dominant capital now needs inflation, and inflation requires instability and social crisis. It is within this broader dynamics of power accumulation that the new wars need to be understood.
Via Journal of World-Systems Research
I suggest, as billmon has demonstrated, the Leviathan must keep feeding or it will collapse and die, just as the Soviet system. The two held each other up, and now that the Soviet system counterpart has been destroyed, the Capitalist system, in order to survive has to keep moving, keep feeding, like a terrifying great white shark…unfeeling and devouring everything in its path. Until? Util what? This inertia must continue until it reaches it’s climax. And it will. The manufacture of apathy is crucial to it’s survival. State anhedonia. Apathy has become a technique, a tool that must be forced upon us, hence the side stepping of such things as states rights, National sovereignty, and the old world Geneva Conventions.
How could we face the evening news without it? Another famine, another flood, another casualty of war -if we truely identified with the pain and suffering of others, it would paralize us. Taking Chomsky one step further, the state-apparatus, must now manufacture apathy. And so the State must induce and extend it’s pathology of apathy not only those on the other side of the world, but to our families, friends, neighbors, and lastly ourselves. The system eats itself. Which reinforces my supposition that this war, the GWOT, is not only a foreign war but also domestic war on us.
Finally, Unless we understand that American places greater importance on capitalism than on democracy you will never understand the 20th Century or the actions of our current leadership.
” In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over
communism. In the l990s it triumphed over democracy.” ~David Korten
21st?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 20 2006 18:06 utc | 3
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