THE EVIL SEED
Christian Parenti, author of "The Freedom, Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq," contributor to The Nation magazine and visiting professor at CUNY Graduate School spoke last night (November 27) at Pacific University.
RAD hosted Parenti's father, Michael Parenti many years ago during a week of the Tom McCall Forum - so it was intriguing to hear the son of the father. As they say, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree!
The CUNY Graduate School is also a familiar place since in the early '70s RAD regularly attended annual spring conferences where intellectual heavyweights in political philosophy met. My most vivid memories were hearing Robert J. Lifton, Bernard Crick and C.B. MacPherson.
Christian Parenti as a working journalist has been in both Iraq and Afghanistan. So his knowledge of the scene of America's latest neo-colonial war comes first hand. And nothing he said last night gives anyone hope that there is a light at the end of the Iraq/Afghanistan tunnel.
Parenti argues that the long-term strategic objective in Iraq is tied to a larger hegemonic role of the US as the wannabe arbiter of the oil riches of the Middle East. Keep in mind, Iraq alone has 10% of world's untapped oil reserves. Nothing new there.
But more intriguing, Parenti connects the Bush policy of pursuing hegemony over oil as a kind of preemptive strike at China - a move to prevent that emerging giant from becoming the next economic and military superpower challenge to US hegemony in the world.
As Parenti says in The Freedom (p. 53) - "Of course the war is about much more than contracts or even access to oil. Iraq is part of an ongoing project of ever-expanding US power…" Parenti argues that the Bush strategy is part of a great-power competition.
"…The two possible candidates for this [competition] are an independent European Union or down the line, China…" So the policy enunciated by Richard Perle et al and carried out by Donald Rumsfeld et al is part and parcel of a policy "…tied to a larger strategy of global control…" (p. 54)
The doctrine of American hegemony has been best articulated by Richard Haas, currently President of the Council on Foreign Relations but until June 2003, Haas served as director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, where he was a principal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Parenti argues - "In his superb book The Global Gamble: Washington's Faustian Bid for Global Dominance, Peter Gowan points out that during the Cold War, the other two poles of world capitalism - Europe and Asia (with Japan as its economic engine) - were beholden to the US for protection against Soviet power and regional communist rebellion…" (p. 54)
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union all of this changed. "…How would the US maintain its power over its friends, particularly the developed economies that might become possible 'peer competitors?'" Oil becomes central to maintaining US hegemony. In this case American military control and influence from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Basin is the key.
With US control of this oil rich region that serves the increasing petro demands of Europe, Japan and now India and China, less so than the US (only 11% of our oil comes from the region) - we can become the "…sole security arbiter upon which all advanced economies are dependent…" (p. 54)
As "energy gendarme" the US can then put the squeeze on ally and foe alike. We then can keep other core economies in the role of "junior partners" as the Global North extracts the resources of the Global South.
But as Parenti concludes - with a taste of sarcastic irony - "But in the end this grand strategy has turned out to be a pipe dream. There will be no clean victory in Iraq." P. 55) Nor for that matter in Afghanistan. And with the election results of '06 - the screws have tightened.
But what is fascinating is that the old China card emerges as part of a very complex vision or plot. The US has always had a problem with China. In the 1920s we obsessed about the "Yellow Peril." In the 1950s under the aegis of McCarthyism we engaged in the blame game over who "lost" China to the "commies." And in Vietnam, we worried about the domino effect of losing another piece of Asia to godless Sino/Soviet communism.
In a globalized economy - why is hegemony necessary? Why can't each nation with its human and natural resources use its particular "comparative" advantages to compete? And as global economic and environmental protocols create a more even playing field - such advantages will even out over the long term.
What in the American psyche requires of us that we "dominate"? The search for American hegemony seems to be the evil offspring of two doctrines - manifest destiny and American exceptionalism. Both have been the undercurrents in US history from our founding.
However, they have bought us the veil of tears associated at home with the mistreatment of Native Americans, African-Americans, Asian Americans and now Latinos. And throughout our history American foreign/military policy has been one of explicit or implicit conquest - first of a continent and then of an economic empire extending from the developing world to space.
In our primal urge of conquest and forgetting the lessons of Vietnam, we have now come full circle - sacrificing another generation of American soldiers on the altar of the illusion of global hegemony.
So, no matter how much George Bush says it, shouts it, proclaims it - at the end - our policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not about freedom, regime change or bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice - it's about creating an imperium premised on OIL.
Pax Britannica was built on the doctrine of British mercantilism. The American offspring seems to have not fallen far from that evil British seed. When Christopher Columbus and Lewis & Clark were exploring the "West" - the goal was to find that passage to the East. What is this obsession in the Euro/Anglo mindset about China?
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