World responds with alarm
Decoding Bush's 'Axis of Evil' speech
By Fred Goldstein
The mighty demonstration of millions in Teheran who turned
out Feb. 11 to denounce U.S. imperialism should bring some
element of sobriety to the Washington overlords. They have been
drunk with power after having unloosed a storm of high-tech
death and destruction upon the totally defenseless Taliban
regime in Afghanistan, murdering thousands of civilians in the
process.
The Iranian rally was one of the first truly massive
outpourings against Washington's new "endless war" program. It
was provoked by President George W. Bush's bellicose "axis of
evil" State of the Union speech. This speech, attacking Iraq,
Iran and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, was not
only a threat but a gross insult that turned social reality on
its head.
Bush, by using the term "axis," implicitly compared three
formerly colonized countries to the fascist imperialist powers
in World War II. Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and militarist
Japan, the have-not imperialist powers that arrived late on the
scene, formed an axis to try to conquer the colonial
territories of the British and French imperialists, who were
allied with U.S. imperialism, a rising super-power.
The three countries Bush dubbed an "axis of evil," however,
had all been enslaved colonial countries. Their territory and
people suffered from both the Axis powers and the so-called
democratic imperialist Allies, which fought over who would
control them.
The three also each went through a revolutionary process,
which has allowed them to maintain their independence from
imperialism.
The Korean people drove out the Japanese imperialists, the
capitalists and the landlords in 1945 and established a
socialist regime in the north.
The Iraqi people rose up and overthrew the British puppet
feudal monarchy in 1958 in a bourgeois national liberation
struggle.
And the Iranian masses waged a massive struggle to topple
the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran.
Flag waving and fear mongering
Bush's bellicose speech stirred consternation in many places
and a variety of interpretations. Of course, it is impossible
to overlook the fact that the speech took place just as Bush
was about to submit the budget, with a $48 billion increase for
the military, to Congress. Bush is promoting a $2-trillion
increase for the military over the next five years--the largest
since the Reagan era.
By conjuring up fear in the population of "weapons of mass
destruction," Bush hopes to get past the fact that social
service programs will be cut across the board and Social
Security funds will have to be raided, all to enrich the
military-industrial complex with lush contracts. This includes
the oil companies, as well as Lockheed Martin, Northrop,
Boeing, and so on. Belligerence, flag-waving and fear-mongering
is a time-tested way for militarists to drown out the concerns
of the workers and oppressed.
Nor can it be ignored that this push for massive military
spending comes at a time of an economic downturn. Bush wants to
avoid the political fate of his father, who became popular
during the Gulf War and then lost the election. The Bush
administration is counting on military spending to overcome the
capitalist crisis and restore jobs, after 1.9 million workers
were laid off in the year 2001, according to official
statistics. It is not that Bush cares one bit for the workers.
All his calculations in this regard are political, aimed at the
2004 elections.
It is also obvious to all that the speech, which did not
mention Enron, could partly be considered a bold attempt to
change the subject and distance the Bush administration from
the mounting scandal. It is engulfing the financiers and
corporate thieves, their accountants, lawyers and the
regulators who were supposed to keep the financial fraud in
some kind of check. The Bush administration, up to its neck in
Enron money, is counting on patriotic war fever to immunize it
from accusations and indictments.
The speech was a challenge by the Bush administration to the
ruling class with respect to the Enron scandal and other issues
with the potential to cause a split. Do not dare strike at us
when we are engaged in the noble and valiant task of trying to
destroy your enemies. Do not be unpatriotic and undermine our
unity of purpose as we strive to roll back all forms of
resistance to U.S. military and economic domination.
Freshly-anointed Caesar
But the speech should not be viewed merely from a U.S. point
of view. Much of it was directed across the oceans, at the
imperialist rivals. The reference to the axis did not play well
in Berlin, Tokyo or Rome. It reminded the German and Japanese
imperialists in particular of their status as formerly defeated
powers.
It was a humiliating reference and a reminder to the second-
and third-largest economies in the imperialist world not to
challenge Washington. After all, these are still the principal
rivals of the U.S. ruling class. The world capitalist economic
crisis intensifies the struggle among the powers immensely and
invests that struggle with greater venom.
Despite the hard times for Japanese capitalism, right now it
still competes ferociously with the U.S. for investment and
markets throughout Asia, as well as in Europe, Latin America
and in the U.S. itself, where it is fighting to take back its
positions in the auto market. It was not so long ago in the
1980s that Japanese capital bought up the precious symbol of
U.S. financial power, Rockefeller Center, as a show of their
aggressive, rising corporate power, which was making inroads
everywhere against U.S. finance capital.
A German delegation from the giant electronics monopoly
Siemens has been in Kabul trying to get the contract to rebuild
the telephone system. This is a payoff for the $1 billion that
the U.S. forced the German government to contribute for the
reconstruction fund.
It must be remembered that the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia--which ended up in war--began when the German
imperialists detached Croatia and Slovenia from the Yugoslav
Federation in 1991 against the will of Washington.
German corporations contend with U.S. transnationals in
eastern and southern Europe, in Russia, China and every other
part of the world. Where the U.S. for decades had the Big Three
auto companies that dominated the U.S. auto market and much of
the world, there are now only two. The U.S. government once
spent billions of dollars to bail out Chrysler because its
failure was "unthinkable," but it has become Daimler-Chrysler
and is now just a part of the German industrial empire.
Bush's speech, by appealing to wartime anti-axis sentiment,
supposedly reminiscent of World War II, was also calculated to
pressure the British and the French governments to line up in
lock step behind Washington's new expansionary campaign of
military aggression, or face the consequences.
This mood was reflected in a report in the Jan. 31 New York
Times. Gauging European reaction, the Times cited a television
editorialist on LCI, France's 24-hour news station, who said,
"The speech belonged to 'a sheriff convinced of his right to
regulate the planet and impose punishment as he sees fit.'
"In Germany," the Times continued, "an editorial in the
daily Suddeutsche Zeitung offered Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder
sympathy as he heads for Washington tonight. 'Poor Gerhard
Schroder. ... It can't be easy being the first grumpy European
to appear at the throne of the freshly anointed American
Caesar.'"
The Europeans and the Japanese imperialists--the displaced
overlords of Africa, the Middle East and Asia--all of whom are
dependent on Middle Eastern oil, are watching with anxiety as
the Pentagon gears up for an escalation of the war, without so
much as consulting them.
They are fully aware of the information that was reported in
the Feb. 4 New York Times concerning concrete war preparations.
"The top Marine general for Central Asia and the Persian Gulf
is moving his headquarters to Bahrain from Hawaii," it read,
"joining Army, Navy and Air Force counterparts who have already
uprooted from peacetime postings in the United States to set up
battle stations in the region, military officials said
today.
"More than 1,000 war planners, logistics experts and support
specialists are now at sophisticated command posts in the
region, ready to pivot quickly from the focus on Afghanistan if
President Bush orders operations such as those he hinted at in
his State of the Union address last week, in which he denounced
Iran and Iraq," continued the Times.
"The military has not ordered a comparable march of senior
tactical commanders to Southwest Asia since the Gulf War, in
1991."
The other imperialists know that the vast military budget
proposed by Bush has profound military, political and economic
implications. They know that the $2-trillion plan for the next
five years is not just to enrich the military-industrial
complex; it is not just to pump up the U.S. economy; it is not
just to get around the Enron scandal; and it is not just a
re-election scheme.
Ronald Reagan's $2-trillion military buildup also served to
counter the recession of 1981 and get him re-elected in 1984.
But it was also part of a much more overriding historic
purpose. Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as an "evil empire"
and his military budget was part of a policy called the "full
court press" to bring about the collapse of the USSR and
socialism.
In the same way, Bush's military buildup and his State of
the Union speech branding the countries of Iran, Iraq and the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea as an "axis of evil" are
part of a larger historic purpose of U.S. imperialism. In the
wake of the collapse of the USSR, his administration wants to
make a new leap to establish its absolute domination over the
globe.
This purpose flows inevitably from imperialism as a system,
as described by V.I. Lenin in his indispensable work,
"Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." Among the many
things analyzed in this great Marxist classic is the permanent
struggle of each imperialist power to gain profit advantage
over its rivals. It describes how much of this battle is a
struggle for domination of the oppressed peoples of the
colonial world--what is referred to as the Third World.
Lenin showed that whenever there is a change in the
relationship of forces among these imperialist powers, the
stronger ones strive to re-divide the world and take more of
the loot, i.e., profits. For Washington the Gulf War, the
Yugoslav war and now the war against Afghanistan have
demonstrated the overwhelming military and economic dominance
of the United States.
This rivalry was masked during the Clinton administration
because it took the primary form of economic competition under
the banner of neo-liberalism. But with the Asian economic
crisis and the subsequent world capitalist downturn in the
summer of 2000, the situation became more intense and has now
moved into the military sphere.
What the U.S. ruling class has not taken into consideration,
as always, is the role of the masses. The demonstration in Iran
should give them a clue as to the scope of resistance that
awaits them should they plunge into new and larger adventures.
The ambition to rule this planet of six billion people is far
beyond their capabilities. Such possibilities exist only in the
minds of military intellectuals, think tanks, and political
strategists of the rich exploiting class. On the ground of
reality are the workers and oppressed, at home and abroad, who
will resist these adventures and the imperialist system that
breeds them.
Reprinted from the Feb. 21, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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