Commentary

Globalization and Invasion:  Two Sides of the Same Petrodollar
(Last of two parts)

Today, Iraq.  Tomorrow, who knows?  It is only in the dark recesses of the mind of George W. Bush will we find the dreaded answer.  But even before the first official bomb is dropped in Baghdad, the first casualty lies vanquished, bloodied and impotent in New York.  It is the victim of no Arab terrorist, but of the power of Bush America itself:  the United Nations.  Shattered like the twin towers are both sides of the concept “United Nations.”   

By Ricco Alejandro Melchor Santos 
Bulatlat.com

Behind the word “United” lies the concept of the consensus in the form of the Security Council due process.   In its ruins rises the new monument of American unilateralism:  If you are not with us, if you do not give us the war we want, you are against us.  It is the Weapon of Mass Dictation: We (not the majority of the Security Council) decide who is breaking the law.  We decide who is punished, and how those we want punished are punished.  It is Machiavelli Magnified:  The end justifies the means.   It is the world order reinvented in the tradition of Mafia or the Yakuza:  Follow us, or else.   It is the Empire of Nike:  Whatever you say does not matter, if this is what we want, we will “Just Do It.”  

Behind the second word “Nations” are the concepts, “national sovereignty” “national independence” and “nation-building”.  It used to be that the natives, the locals decide.  Colonialism, conquest, foreign occupation and puppet governments were taboo.  Or at least, that was SOP in the UN official manual.  With the Bush doctrine of American security, even those principles are just dust in the desert wind, scattered here and there in the wake of an American M-1 Abrams tank rumbling on the road to Baghdad.

The Barrels of Globalization

We know that American Big Oil is largely behind the drive to Baghdad.  But even before this Weapon of Mass Dictation came along, there was already a similar weapon:  a Weapon of Mass Dislocation brandished and deployed by American Big Government and Big Business:  globalization—a cannon with three barrels.      

Globalization’s first barrel is free trade.  To people in the third world, free trade chiefly means a losing daily battle with imports from the industrial countries of the West and the rising prices unleashed by deregulation.   Today, it is American megacapitalism pushing for the most extremist form of free trade under the wings of the World Trade Organization.  This means freely dumping American products from movies to apples and oranges.    This also means freely jacking up prices of Middle East crude oil and other goods and passing these on to hapless consumers round the world. 

There’s a thin line between freely dumping all sorts of goods and services, and freely dishing out bombs and military might in the third world.   If not borderless economies bypassing third world governments and regulation, why not borderless regime change?  After all, both are means to a far greater, loftier end:  the bottomline of Big Business.  Big Oil had not been Bush’s biggest campaign financier – from Texas to the White House – for nothing.

But of course, differences do lie between with the barrage of crude oil, and the barrage of napalm.  One is noisy, the other is silent.  More important, one destroys lives quickly, with all the ratings-boosting drama and spectacle of a firecloud displayed on CNN.   Whereas the other takes the excruciating and tortuous slowness and drabness of a poverty-ravaged lifetime, beyond the reach of CNN’s cameras and ratings-driven agenda.

The second barrel of the globalization weapon is speculation.  Financial globalization and liberalization are fast driving the world economy deeper into speculation –from stocks to derivatives, much the same way Bush is dragging the whole world into world war. World capitalism is dangerously teetering on the edge of transactions in financial derivatives, which already totaled $111 trillion worldwide by the end of 2001.  Speculation in derivatives gave us the Asian financial meltdown in 1997.  Today, courtesy of the biggest foreign banks, it is now driving the peso below 55 pesos per dollar.  Stock speculation has given us the crash in NASDAQ high-tech stocks in 2001 and Petron share prices since 1997.  It is also behind the collapse of the Bush’s number one corporate funder, Enron.  The Ramos speculation in oil sales also gave us the PPA with the help of IPP’s like Bush’s Enron.   Today, the PPA, despite previous promises by Malacanang, is poised to rise even further, under the smokescreen of the Bush war.

The Pentagon rationale for an urgent war is the speculative principle and practice of preemptive strike.  Why the rush to invade Iraq?  What if Saddam  sold or gifted biological weapons to Bin Laden and Al Qaida?  Let’s not take a chance.  So what, if the risk is so small, as the CIA admitted earlier?  Still a risk, isn’t it?    As America’s President, I’ll do anything to make America safe, even if I have to blow up the rest of the world and raise the risk of terrorism against America (as an earlier CIA report predicted, an invasion of Iraq would) just to do it. 

The third barrel of globalization is devaluation.  Just as devaluation is diminishing the peso, the Bush war propaganda is diminishing truth and credibility.  O, don’t worry about the war.  It’ll just take two days, no more than two weeks.  Then, the whole war will be over, and everything back to normal and business—Big Oil business--as usual.   It’ll just take two years of American military occupation to train and install a puppet that all Iraqis will accept nicely.   What anti-American feelings are you talking about?  Don’t we have James Bond and Mission Impossible (whose star Tom Cruise by the way has declared support for the war) to make the rest of the world love America?   And don’t I have all this military power –in and outside Iraq--to deal with these anti-American feelings?   Make no mistake about it:  What do I have all this power for in the first place, tell me?

And what about Iraqi civilian lives and deaths?  An estimated 500,000 Iraqi civilian deaths predicted as resulting from the war?  O, c’mon.  This is all just collateral damage, mind you.  Just the small but necessary price we have to pay to save American lives and enduring freedom.  Enough with your anti-American ideas.  Enough is enough.  Let’s not bother with these trifles and details.  Don’t we in American Big Government, Big Business and Big Media respect life, too?   Hasn’t CNN allotted maximum media attention to the plight of Elizabeth Smart, one American life which deserves all the media attention she gets, just as the CNN deserves all the ratings it gets?    Just half a million Iraqi lives, a million Iraqis homeless in exchange for American homeland security.   From the White House, looks like a pretty good equation.

But still to millions of others, this global equation devalues people’s intelligence.  Declining megacapitalism 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?   Globalization and invasion, anyone?

(Ricco Santos is the author of Crime of Empire, a book on the world order to be published soon.)

C OMMENTARY - Globalization and War: Two Sides of the Petrodollar 

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