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George Monbiot/ David Harvey on reasons behind the War

  
 
illmatic
14:32 / 18.02.03
The extract below was taken from a piece by George Monbiot from The Guardian's website. I'm posting most of it as it's one of the best explanations of the forthcoming war I've seen thus far.

Why, when the most urgent threat arising from illegal weapons of mass destruction is the nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, is the US government ignoring it and concentrating on Iraq? Why, if it believes human rights are so important, is it funding the oppression of the Algerians, the Uzbeks, the Palestinians, the Turkish Kurds and the Colombians? Why has the bombing of Iraq, rather than feeding the hungry, providing clean water or preventing disease, become the world's most urgent humanitarian concern? Why has it become so much more pressing than any other that it should command a budget four times the size of America's entire annual spending on overseas aid?
In a series of packed lectures in Oxford, Professor David Harvey, one of the world's most distinguished geographers, has provided what may be the first comprehensive explanation of the US government's determination to go to war. His analysis suggests that it has little to do with Iraq, less to do with weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with helping the oppressed.
The underlying problem the US confronts is the one which periodically afflicts all successful economies: the over-accumulation of capital. Excessive production of any good - be it cars or shoes or bananas - means that unless new markets can be found, the price of that product falls and profits collapse. Just as it was in the early 1930s, the US is suffering from surpluses of commodities, manufactured products, manufacturing capacity and money. Just as it was then, it is also faced with a surplus of labour, yet the two surpluses, as before, cannot be profitably matched. This problem has been developing in the US since 1973. It has now tried every available means of solving it and, by doing so, maintaining its global dominance. The only remaining, politically viable option is war.
In the 1930s, the US government addressed the problems of excess capital and labour through the New Deal. Its vast investments in infrastructure, education and social spending mopped up surplus money, created new markets for manufacturing and brought hundreds of thousands back into work. In 1941, it used military spending to the same effect.
After the war, its massive spending in Europe and Japan permitted America to offload surplus cash, while building new markets. During the same period, it spent lavishly on infrastructure at home and on the development of the economies of the southern and south-eastern states. This strategy worked well until the early 1970s. Then three inexorable processes began to mature. As the German and Japanese economies developed, the US was no longer able to dominate production. As they grew, these new economies also stopped absorbing surplus capital and started to export it. At the same time, the investments of previous decades began to pay off, producing new surpluses. The crisis of 1973 began with a worldwide collapse of property markets, which were, in effect, regurgitating the excess money they could no longer digest.
The US urgently required a new approach, and it deployed two blunt solutions. The first was to switch from the domination of global production to the domination of global finance. The US Treasury, working with the International Monetary Fund, began to engineer new opportunities in developing countries for America's commercial banks.
The IMF started to insist that countries receiving its help should liberalise their capital markets. This permitted the speculators on Wall Street to enter and, in many cases, raid their economies. The financial crises the speculators caused forced the devaluation of those countries' assets. This had two beneficial impacts for the US economy. Through the collapse of banks and manufacturers in Latin America and East Asia, surplus capital was destroyed. The bankrupted companies in those countries could then be bought by US corporations at rock-bottom prices, creating new space into which American capital could expand.
The second solution was what Harvey calls "accumulation through dispossession", which is really a polite term for daylight robbery. Land was snatched from peasant farmers, public assets were taken from citizens through privatisation, intellectual property was seized from everyone through the patenting of information, human genes, and animal and plant varieties. These are the processes which, alongside the depredations of the IMF and the commercial banks, brought the global justice movement into being. In all cases, new territories were created into which capital could expand and in which its surpluses could be absorbed.
Both these solutions are now failing. As the east Asian countries whose economies were destroyed by the IMF five years ago have recovered, they have begun, once more, to generate vast capital surpluses of their own. America's switch from production to finance as a means of global domination, and the government's resulting economic mismanagement, has made it more susceptible to disruption and economic collapse. Corporations are now encountering massive public resistance as they seek to expand their opportunities through dispossession. The only peaceful solution is a new New Deal, but that option is blocked by the political class in the US: the only new spending it will permit is military spending. So all that remains is war and imperial control.
Attacking Iraq offers the US three additional means of offloading capital while maintaining its global dominance. The first is the creation of new geographical space for economic expansion. The second (though this is not a point Harvey makes) is military spending (a process some people call "military Keynesianism"). The third is the ability to control the economies of other nations by controlling the supply of oil. This, as global oil reserves diminish, will become an ever more powerful lever. Happily, just as legitimation is required, scores of former democrats in both the US and Britain have suddenly decided that empire isn't such a dirty word after all, and that the barbarian hordes of other nations really could do with some civilisation at the hands of a benign superpower.
Strategic thinkers in the US have been planning this next stage of expansion for years. Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary for defence, was writing about the need to invade Iraq in the mid-1990s. The impending war will not be fought over terrorism, anthrax, VX gas, Saddam Hussein, democracy or the treatment of the Iraqi people. It is, like almost all such enterprises, about the control of territory, resources and other nations' economies. Those who are planning it have recognised that their future dominance can be sustained by means of a simple economic formula: blood is a renewable resource; oil is not.

Makes a lot of sense to me, especially when read in conjunction with this article by Chomsky.

A relevant extract:
Actually one of the purposes of the [post World War II] Marshall Plan, this great benevolent plan, was to shift Europe and Japan from coal to oil. Europe and Japan both had indigenous coal resources but they switched to oil in order to give the US control. About $2bn out of the $13bn Marshall Plan dollars went straight to the oil companies to help convert Europe and Japan to oil based economies. For power, it's enormously significant to control the resources and oil's expected to be the main resource for the next couple of generations.



Anyone want to attempt unpacking this one? I don't have enough econmic knowhow to criticse it - and it's certainly much more belivable the Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's as convincing an arguement as I've seen.

Will look for transcripts of David Harvey's stuff online as well.
 
 
Baz Auckland
17:13 / 18.02.03
Hey! I learned about this in American History last week in covering the beginning of American imperialism in the 1890s

This sounds exactly like what the USA did at the turn of the century in their invasions of Colombia, Cuba, Samoa, Hawaii, Nicaragua, Philippines, etc. etc.

The idea of the time was to establish 'economic colonies' throughout the western hemisphere and pacific rim, as opposed to Britian's physical colonies. Alaska was apparently purchased to act as a bridge to the Asian markets. The pacific islands to act as coaling stations for the freighters. There was serious talk of making Japan and China economically dependent on American goods, thereby helping to restore the depressed American economy at the time.

Creepy how 100 years later nothing changes...
 
 
Nematode
19:58 / 18.02.03
The other morning I was lucky enough to wake up just as one of the really interesting bits they have on Today came on with this Oxford professor of Economics talking about the fact that the American shift from industrial to financial power was moving into a new phase with the dollar threatened with losing primacy as the worlds dominant currency and the financial action moving over to the pacific rim nations, leaving America with a trade defecit problem similar to the black hole japan now finds itself in and in dire socio economic trouble. Which resonates with what the G M article in todays Guardian and yes it does look like a reasonably convincing motive for going to war, assuming a particular life outlook and economic mind set.] far more convincing than 'humanitarian grounds'... [oh these people have made me sooo cynical.]
 
 
MJ-12
00:28 / 19.02.03
Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary for defence, was writing about the need to invade Iraq in the mid-1990s.

FWIW, Wolfowitz had actually submitted a how-to paper on invading Iraq in 1979.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
19:54 / 22.02.03
David Harvey seems like quite an interesting thinker anyway - I've done a bit of casual research into him, and he seems to have started out as a specialist in city geography and anthropology. There's an interview with him here, on globalisation and rural to urban drift, which seems to be a reasonable intro...

I can't find any transcripts of the series he's just given here, but given that they were the Clarendon Lectures I imagine OUP will be bringing them out reasonably soon, and hopefully not for huge amounts of money. Even if they don't, he seems to have been giving quite a few lectures on very similar topics, so I'd guess tehre's probably some kind of book in the offing in any case...
 
 
000
00:25 / 23.02.03
1-That the scheme to grab Iraqi oil fields was in the works over a year and a half ago when several billion dollars was transferred to bank accounts set up for the private benefit of Blair.

I know it's not a primary news source and they are shockfull of conspiracy madness, but it would nonetheless be wonderful if Blair was under investigation for alleged bribery.
 
 
Cavatina
11:33 / 23.02.03
Interesting - thanks for posting so much of the article, Mr Illmatic.

I think that elements of Harvey's Marxist analysis have been around for a while, but he's brought them together more comprehensively. It's certainly a plausible argument. But I'd like to see it linked Britain's pro-war stance, too, given Monbiot's examples of Blair's abandonment of Middle England for Big Business in his recent book, Captive State: The corporate takeover of Britain, and the speech he gave not long after Sept. 11 (broadcast on 'Background Briefing' on Radio National here).

If I'm remembering correctly, in the 1920s Winston Churchill and Lawrence of Arabia, with the help of the British spy Gertrude Bell, virtually drew up the boundaries of present Iraq with the intention of preventing it from ever becoming a sovereign Islamic state. It would be interesting to find out just what business infrastructures relating to Iraq's oil were put in place during that period of British intervention, and what remains of them now under Hussein's control.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
22:15 / 23.02.03
This is quite interesting: article which suggests that a key aim of the Bush administration is to prevent OPEC switching to the euro for oil transactions (as Iraq has, which I didn't know and which is interesting).

The reality is that the strength of the dollar since 1945 rests on being the international reserve currency for global oil transactions (i.e., "petro-dollar"). The U.S. prints hundreds of billions of these fiat petro-dollars, which are then used by nation states to purchase oil and energy from OPEC producers (except presently Iraq and, to some degree, Venezuela). These petro-dollars are then re-cycled from OPEC back into the U.S. via Treasury Bills or other dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. stocks, real estate, etc. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the U.S. has extracted since 1973 from oil-producing countries for U.S. tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel.

Dollar reserves must be invested in U.S. assets which produces a capital-accounts surplus for the U.S. economy. Despite poor market performance during the past year, U.S. stock valuation is still at a 25-year high and trading at a 56 percent premium compared with emerging markets. The U.S. capital-account surplus finances the U.S. trade deficit.

Since it is the U.S. that prints the petro-dollars, they control the flow of oil. Period. When oil is denominated in dollars through U.S. state action and the dollar is the only fiat currency for trading in oil, an argument can be made that the U.S. essentially owns the world's oil for free.

I'm not totally convinced that it's the chief reason for war but it is an interesting angle...
 
  
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