Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Long Arabian Nights" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 158-160). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, February 1991
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2014. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
I hate it, I hate it — I hate this war. I have never hated a war so much. It’s even worse than Vietnam, than Nicaragua, which seared our vitals and consumed us with outrage and horror.
It’s worse because this one is something of a shocker. We didn’t really expect America’s imperial decision-makers to do something so inane and self-defeating.
Yet they had to.
They have to preserve their system. They have to carve out their new world order of permanent occupation of Persian Gulf oil producers and colonialist control of the region’s politics.
And who are “they”? I can imagine who advises and orders George Bush around. They are a scary assemblage of fabulously wealthy and callous white males who would blow up the planet to prevent the birth of a beautiful new world based on economic democracy and untrammeled intellectual and cultural freedom.
But why are they so bestial, so arrogant?
Well really, folks, what do you expect from the moguls of finance capital and their military and political errand boys?
The compulsive war on Iraq isn’t Bush’s folly. This ghastly war isn’t a matter of individuals, or personal psychology, or miscalculations, or ignorance of cultural diversities, or accidents, or unpredictable quirks of fate, or sanctions versus saturation bombs.
The carnage is precisely what the U.S. government is all about. Governments reflect and express economic relations, and our economic set-up is predatory. A private-profit and profiteering economy makes for Rambo-istic militarism and an accommodating government. The state, after all, is a body of armed men.
So don’t blame Bush alone. He’s only a spokesman and operative for his ruling class. And he’s good at his job; the years as CEO of the CIA prepared him well for executive-level deceit, chicanery and unsurpassingly cynical demagogy.
For make no mistake about it — Desert Storm is a deliberate, long-planned, and choreographed sting. Saddam Hussein and Kuwait have been manipulated and conned into computer-predictable responses to suit our scenario.
Imperialists always do it the sneaky way. Modern history reads like political detective fiction or the spy novel genre. The White House screams “Naked Aggression” — but the White House provoked it. Our preppy prexy demands “support” for our troops since they are there — but how did they get over there? By necessity. By the intrinsic, driving nature of an aggrandizing, money-making society. The Pentagon and the Bush leaguers manufacture both wars and guile like assembly lines produce refrigerators.
Given this social anatomy, prayers for peace and clarion calls for sanity and restraint won’t cut it. They may be comforting but they are irrelevant. The millions of appalled Americans will not get far enough with protests until they realize that “peace” isn’t an answer because it isn’t possible. War can’t be reformed out of the system. Only revolution will count.
Bush and his cohorts resort to war because of their terror of home-grown radicals and possible revolt. War has always been a continuation of domestic policy on another front, always launched by way of phony warnings about foreign dangers and supposed enemies, all calculated to confuse the working class and its allies, and divert the people from mushrooming evils on the home front.
And worst of all: workers and people of color, who are disproportionately found in the armed forces for want of stateside opportunity, are cruelly forced to slaughter and maim their class brothers and sisters in other lands. Internationalism — the solidarity of workers of the world against their common overlords — gives way to nationalistic patriotism and mutual extermination.
Moreover, war doesn’t only stymie international consciousness but throttles dissent and resistance in the home country. War is a marvelous tactic, a magic gimmick for enforcing conformity and timidity.
The war was meant to disarm and disorient critics and potential radicals. It was meant to cancel the soaring dreams released by visions of glasnost and perestroika; it was crafted to subdue a global passion for global justice. It was unleashed not only for Persian Gulf hegemony but to shut us all up.
But we’re incorrigible. We persist in conducting our subversive business at the same old stand. In a way, we are terrorists just like Bush — but terrorists only of the Idea. Our socialist ideals terrorize him. And that is the source of our eventual power over his ilk.
That ilk does what it has to do. But the majority of us belong to another class, a different race, the other sex, a different sexual orientation, a fresh generation, or an opposing world view. And we’ll see whose ass will be kicked this time around, when all the sands of Saudi Arabia prove unable to conceal the mangled evidence of Bush’s butchery. And when Bush comes to hate our war as much as we detest his.