Behind the Wolfowitz, Bolton appointments
By
Fred Goldstein
Published Mar 23, 2005 2:23 PM
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.
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Hawkish unilateralism has been a disastrous failure in Iraq. So Bush has repositioned the two neo-cons where they can still pursue their inflexibly belligerent unilateralist policies but where anti-imperialist resistance is less formidable than in the streets of Baghdad or Mosul, Gaza, south Lebanon, Tehran, Pyongyang, Caracas or Havana.
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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.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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