Behind the Wolfowitz, Bolton appointments

With the appointment of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the nomination of Paul Wolfowitz to be president of the World Bank, President George W. Bush is trying to accomplish in the political and financial spheres what he has been unable to do by military means—that is, to drastically and unilaterally expand Washington’s world domination.

Bolton (“There is no such thing as the United Nations”) and Wolfowitz (“They [the Iraqis] will greet us as liberators”) are two of the most hard-driving unilateralist hawks in the Bush administration. Hawkish unilateralism has been a disastrous failure in Iraq; foreign policy by military threat has only stiffened world resistance to Washington and revealed its vulnerability.

So the Bush administration has repositioned Bolton and Wolfowitz into areas where they can continue to pursue their inflexibly belligerent unilateralist policies but where anti-imperialist resistance is not as formidable as it is on the streets of Baghdad or Mosul, Gaza, south Lebanon, Tehran, Pyongyang, Caracas or Havana.

Bolton was formerly undersecretary of state for arms control and international affairs. He was the representative of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the State Department. Bolton was a protégé of ultra-rightist, militarist and racist senator Jesse Helms from North Carolina, who said of him at his confirmation hearings in 2001: “John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it is to be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world.” (www.fpis.org/republicanrule)

Bolton: the hit-man diplomat

The United Nations is the arena in which Washington will try to step up its pressures on Iran. Bolton has made a cause out of getting Mohamed ElBaradei fired from his job as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency because ElBaradei failed to take a tougher line with Iran. Bolton was quoted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in early 2003 as saying that “the United States, after defeating Iraq, would ‘deal with’ Iran, Syria and North Korea.” (International Herald Tribune, March 8)

Bolton’s appointment is a particularly aggressive move against China, since he is a paid lobbyist for the Taiwanese government and was helping the Taipei regime develop a strategy to get UN recognition.

Bolton had to be excluded as a negotiator from the six-party talks on North Korea after he called its leader, Kim Jong Il, a “tyrannical dictator” of a country where “life is hell.” In an unprecedented concession, the State Department removed him from the delegation after the North Korean government said that “such a human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks.”

According to the Tribune article: “In an interview with the New York Times in 2002, Bolton was asked about what seemed to be mixed signals from the administration on North Korea. He grabbed a book from a shelf and laid it on the table. Its title: ‘The End of North Korea.’”

“’That,’ he told the interviewer, ‘is our policy.’”

These candid public outbursts from Bolton are nothing more than a crude repetition of Bush’s “axis of evil” pronouncements in his belligerent 2002 State of the Union message.

This, however, was all pre-Iraqi resistance, pre-quagmire. It represents the aggressive mood of the neo-cons and the other right-wing militarists who dominate the Bush administration. But while the mood and the ambitions may persist, the world-wide resistance has forced the Bush administration to rely more heavily on diplomatic methods, intimidation, financial strangulation and subversion while it tries to deal with its political setback in Iraq.

The nominations of Bolton and Wolfowitz are calculated to convey forward aggressive momentum by bringing two of the most important world institutions of imperialism, the UN and the World Bank, more closely under the domination of U.S. imperialism—especially the right-wing grouping represented by the Bush administration.

Wolfowitz: integrating militarism and banking

There are several important aspects to Wolfowitz being nominated to head the World Bank. It is highly significant that the second most powerful figure in the Pentagon could make the transition to becoming the head of the largest public financial institution in the imperialist world.

Much is being made of Wolfowitz’s lack of experience in economic development. But the World Bank is only secondarily about economic development. Its primary function—all the altruistic pronouncements of its liberal advocates notwithstanding—is to channel funds for investment and exploitation to the giant monopolies, particularly the oil giants. This facilitates their plunder of the oppressed countries around the world.

V.I. Lenin, the organizer of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote a groundbreaking book in 1916 entitled “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” Lenin summed up what was then a new stage of capitalism, after the competitive stage. He described the development of giant monopolies and cartels and the merger of bank and industrial capital into finance capital. This integration of the banks with the transnationals laid the basis for the division of the entire world into different spheres of imperialist interest.

Lenin was writing in the first stage of the development of imperialist militarism, during World War I. Particularly since World War II, one of the most pronounced developments in the evolution of imperialism has been the deep integration of the military with finance capital. And the Pentagon has become that nexus in the U.S.

Wolfowitz is Cheney’s protégé. Toget her they served in the first Bush administration in the Pentagon, Cheney as secretary of defense and Wolfowitz as undersecretary for defense planning and policy.

After the collapse of the USSR, they co-authored a document made public in March 1992 asserting that henceforth the U.S. would be the absolute dominant power in the world and no power or group of powers should even think about challenging this supremacy. That document was leaked to the New York Times and then disavowed by the elder George Bush, then the president.

This thesis reemerged in an even more aggressive form in Bush’s National Secu rity Strategy document, issued in 2002. It was the voices of Cheney, Wolfo witz and their backers in the Pentagon and Wall Street, just updated from 1992.

The connection between Cheney and Wolfo witz is important because Cheney, as the former CEO of Halliburton, an oil service company, is at the hub of the oil industry and deals with all the giant companies. These companies, in turn, have a global outlook that is all but identical with that of the Pentagon. The oil monopolies are at the center of U.S. capitalism, integrated with industry, finance and the military. The appointment of Wolfowitz is a step in the further deepening of this integration.

As U.S. and German imperialism competed to dismember Yugoslavia, culminating in the Clinton administration’s war in 1999 and the sending of U.S. troops to occupy Kosovo, the World Bank was on the scene ready to give loans and grants to the corporations for “reconstruction.”

In March 2002, after the Pentagon pulverized Afghanistan with bombs and missiles, the World Bank came on the scene to finance an oil pipeline from Turkestan through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean on behalf of the oil monopolies. The bank was also on the scene after the Iraq invasion to help with “reconstruction” designed to bolster the U.S. occupation of that oil-rich country.

World Bank and Halliburton

The World Bank is as close as you can get to the Halliburton corporation. Cheney’s former firm has a lock on energy contracts in Iraq and is positioned to help U.S. oil giants take control of Iraqi oil.

Wolfowitz was an architect of the war, which was all about that oil. When Wolfowitz takes over the World Bank he will still be in the war for oil; he will still be working with Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon in the service of finance capital and its empire, just in a different capacity.

During the period of 1992 to 2004, the World Bank financed fossil fuel projects—oil, coal, gas, electric power plants, privatization of plants and natural resources—to the tune of $28 billion. (“Wrong Turn from Rio,” www.seen.org) Of that $28 billion, Halliburton got $2.575 billion for projects in Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chad, Cameroon, Georgia, India, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Russia and Thailand. Halliburton was the largest oil contractor with the World Bank.(“The Energy Tug of War,” www.seen.org)

Not to be left out, ExxonMobil got $1.367 billion for projects in Argentina, Chad, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Geor gia, Kazakhstan, Russia; Chevron Texaco got $1.589 billion to go into Cameroon, Chad, Colombia, Congo-Brazza ville, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Thailand; Unocal got $938 million; and Enron received $744 million. All the oil giants of the imperialist world got in on the take.

One glance at the list of oil-producing countries reveals they are also countries of interest to the Pentagon, the banks and other transnational profiteers.

So the shift of Wolfowitz to the World Bank amounts to shifting a militaristic hawk from one part of the imperial apparatus to another part. The centralizing nexus is the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon and big oil. They are all inseparable from imperialism itself.

It is no accident that the architect of the Vietnam War under President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, was also sent to become the president of the World Bank. He had been the CEO of Ford Motors and was familiar with running a corporate empire. His shift to the Pentagon and then to the World Bank was a natural transition within the empire.

There has been speculation that Wolfo witz is being kicked upstairs because he is so identified with a failed war of aggression—in the same way that McNamara was moved out because of the failure to conquer Vietnam. To be sure, Wolfowitz has been removed from the military policy-making position in which he has spent his life. But only time will tell the meaning of this shift, should it succeed.

Wolfowitz’s nomination has many dire economic and political implications for the fate of the Third World. He will undoubtedly deepen the reactionary, neoliberal policies already being pursued by the World Bank.

The World Bank is really a collaborative institution with the International Mone tary Fund. The WB withholds loans until a dependent government submits to all the austerity measures ordered by the IMF: putting national industries and utilities up for sale to the transnationals; putting fees on basics such as healthcare, education, and water; slashing government subsidies for the workers; exporting nationally needed natural resources to the imperialist countries, and many other onerous measures. The WB is under attack in many countries right now.

Wolfowitz is so openly identified with the war in Iraq, the occupation, the torture, the killing of civilians, the destruction of Falluja, and all the openly war-like and aggressive positions of U.S. imperialism that his nomination to the World Bank, should it go through, could easily touch off a new wave of struggle to throw this imperialist institution out of the oppressed countries.