COMMENTARY

Globalization and War: Two Sides of the Petrodollar

The far greater, near certain risk of 500,000 Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of the war is seen as a necessary cost to allegedly remove the by far lesser and highly speculative, but greatly over-inflated risk of Saddam Hussein launching a Bin Laden -type attack on American civilians. Now, we watch stock analysts in CNN arguing that a short war in Iraq would be good since it would calm the war-anxious stock market.

By Ricco Alejandro Melchor Santos 
Contributor, Bulatlat.com

Obsessed with invading Iraq, George W. Bush today is at the helm of a military juggernaut that threatens to dissolve the post-World War II “peace.”  In this sense, the famous Dabayu or W in between the "George" and the "Bush" could very well stand for World War III. 

A growing wisdom perceives that the Bush and Blair war mania springs from a business interest in Iraqi oil as well as in military sales.  Indeed, Bush's intimate ties with oil-related corporations such as Halliburton that are at the same time his major campaign contributors arouses valid suspicions that the road and airspace to Baghdad is a petrowar. Perceptive journalists have also noted that in-between and during wars, Pentagon officials tend to be sales agents of the military industrial complex more than anything else. After all, what better way to perk up arms sales than a recycled war!

But Bush's pending war has an even broader economic logic to it. The war is a mirror - if perverse -- image of the three-fold panoramic trends driving world capitalism today.   

The first facet of global capitalism is - what else - globalization. Although globalization may mean many things to many people, to people in the third world, where Iraq is firmly located, globalization chiefly means a losing battle with imports from the industrial countries of the West. Today, it is American mega-capitalism that is pushing for the most extremist form of globalized trade.  This means going as far as seeking to dump wheat in Japan, where rice is sacred, or to foist Hollywood on France, where the French value their Frenchness.

Of course, free trade could cut both ways. Where the U.S. has been less globally productive and competitive as in steel, the Bush government has been less ready to practice what it preaches.  Last year, it raised steel tariffs to 30 per cent against cheaper South Korean and Russian steel, prompting critics to cry double standard. But where the other developed, industrial countries are able to either fend off, match or offset the American free trade offensive, the third world is not as successful. Mexican fruit farming reeling from the effects of importation of American apples and oranges is just one of many third world's stories of globalized trade woes.  The rationale of business theory for trade globalization is that Western countries export competition and competitiveness to the third world.  From the viewpoint of academic formulae and the reality of competing equally industrial and strong economies, the rationale could very well, be, just that, rational. But to the third world that admittedly has remained at a state of inequality vis-a-vis the industrial West, free trade and globalist economics stares it in the face like a permanent nightmare. 

War fever

However, the war fever is giving a new meaning to the word "globalization." The war has increasingly a globalist ring to it. In the rhetoric of President Bush, the war on Iraq is meant to export world peace and American security by bringing the so-called war against terrorism to its alleged sources-not just Bin Laden but Bush's "axis of evil." The war's ideologists often raise the argument that what it calls international terrorism calls for a counter-terrorism that tends to be not only international but also both anti-national or transnational.   Transnational, in the sense that the U.S. as the only superpower possesses the absolute right to openly attack suspected terrorists in foreign countries, or invade what it regards as terrorist or terrorist-coddling states-a presumption widely condemned for its arrogance as much as its dangers. Anti-national, in the sense that the third world countries must suspend their national sovereignty -- it seems, an increasingly obsolete concept for the U.S. -- to give way for U.S. police action. 

In effect, the Bush and Blair administrations claim to export world peace and Anglo-American security in exchange for what they allege to be necessary third world losses and sacrifices: losses in national sovereignty and a certain amount of "collateral damage." Of course, in Bush’s and Blair's view, these costs are a negligible price to pay for that world peace and Anglo-American security.  They thus picture the future invasion of Iraq to be that panacea and magic bullet -- $100 billion of it, to be more exact - to prevent a repeat of 9-11.  

The earlier Pentagon decision to field more than a thousand U.S. troops to subdue the Abu Sayyaf -- a ragtag band numbering a hundred to five hundred kidnappers in the Philippines -- even at the risk of defying the Philippine constitution and bypassing the Philippine Congress appears to proceed from such a concept of militarized globalization.  If not borderless economies bypassing third world governments, why not borderless wars, too, that simply ignore third world governments that, at any rate, are too inept or corrupt to catch their own bandit groups?  A thin line divides freely exporting goods and various business services, and freely exporting foreign troops and military services.    

The bizarrely logical cross-over from free trade to free war appears too tempting for U.S. war -- and overall business -- interests.  After all, history is replete with examples of economies and empires able to extract not only profits but also long-term competitive and global advantages from war. And why should not the U.S. enjoy this opportunity after serving as the world's only military-industrial super-enforcer making the world safer for Western capitalism?  But this kind of global extremism has failed to capture enough hearts and minds globally.  

The clinical assurance that the war in Iraq will take just two weeks and the world will be more happily peaceful and secure ever after is not convincing enough that the warning that the war itself will arouse a hatred and animosity in the third world against what is increasingly perceived to be Anglo-American imperialism and an attempt to resurrect a modern version of the British Empire. The targeted two weeks of the invasion and the two years of American military occupation of Iraq could very well lead to two centuries of third world resentment and radicalism.   

Advertising claimThe advertising claim for the war as an export of world peace and security upon closer inspection appears to be more doubtful and fraudulent in the light of the more realistic assessment that the war would more likely export globalized insecurity and loss of peace. In this sense, the recent Pentagon move to send U.S. troops to fight the Abu Sayyaf in Sulu Island in the Philippines serves as a miniature model of the war in Iraq. The least worrisome issue here was that the announcement by Pentagon officials of the U.S. deployment caught the administration of President Macapagal-Arroyo with its pants down.  Arroyo and her lieutenants faced the embarrassment of having to deny having accepted the Pentagon plan and to appear impotent, bypassed and simply dictated upon by Pentagon.  The more alarming aspect was that the Pentagon decision - taken with or without the secret compliance of the Macapagal administration - simply ignored the likely larger consequences of the intervention. 

More important, U.S. troop deployment in Sulu threatens to provoke even greater historically-rooted hostility among Sulu's native Tausugs and Filipino Moros in general against the American presence and the Manila-based government.  In 1910 in Bud Dajo, the Moros lost at least 600, many of them women and children, in what American and Filipino observers later described as practically a massacre at the hands of American occupation troops. Downplaying this factor of popular backlash, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld announced that Pentagon would rethink the plan in the light of charges that U.S. ground combat with the Abu Sayyaf would violate the Philippine constitution. In Sulu, public opinion has at least for now won against the notion that America's war will export security.

The second fact of the global economy is speculation. In the past two decades, financial globalization and liberalization has driven the world economy deeper into speculation - from stocks to derivatives. World capitalism has greatly and dangerously on transactions in financial derivatives, which totaled $111 trillion worldwide by the end of 2001. In 1997, speculation in derivatives gave way to the Asian financial meltdown.  Stock speculation has given us the crash in NASDAQ high-tech socks in 2001 and the Enron scandals.  The speculation has spiraled in such an enormous way that some have coined the phrase "casino economy." But as if this is not precarious enough, this speculation appears to be spilling over to the field of international power politics and security. 

The Pentagon rationale for the urgency of the war against Iraq is the concept of preemptive strike. What if Iraqi officials sold or granted biological weapons to Bin Laden and Al Qaida?  The operative word is, of course, "if." Just like the window-dressing of Enron stocks - a scandal which linked Bush to energy corporate interests - the "if" is an "IF" MAGNIFIED MANY TIMES OVER. The far greater, near certain risk of 500,000 Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of the war is seen as a necessary cost to allegedly remove the by far lesser and highly speculative, but greatly over-inflated risk of Saddam Hussein launching a Bin Laden -type attack on American civilians. Now, we watch stock analysts in CNN arguing that a short war in Iraq would be good since it would calm the war-anxious stock market.

But the third facet of the globalization is devaluation. This means both the stock market crashes and the massive fall in third world currencies such as Argentina.  But, the war mania is bringing about its own version of devaluation, in fact, the worst devaluation of all - the lives of millions of Iraqi people.  Reliable estimates are that 500,000 Iraqi civilians will die and at least 5 million Iraqi will be rendered homeless from a U.S. invasion. Five million Iraqis homeless in exchange for a fictitious American homeland security. In the end, this global equation overtaxes and devalues the credibility of its Anglo-American exponents, and the intelligence of people worldwide being seduced into supporting invasion and occupation. Declining mega-capitalism and rising world petrowar: are these the two sides of the same petrodollar - of a decaying world order blasted and battered by Bush's booming bombs? Bulatlat.com

Ricco Alejandro Melchor Santos is the author of Crime of Empire, a book on the world order to be published soon in the United States.

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