Reflections of the End of the Iraq War

The US war in Iraq is now officially over. It will go down in history as the greatest US foreign policy fiasco since the Vietnam War. In my lifetime I witnessed two lengthy and illegal wars of choice that the US blundered into. Both the Vietnam and the Iraq wars ended in ignominy and disaster, both for the US and for the countries that we went to war to "save".

Along with millions of other Americans, mainly on the political left, I opposed these wars. But the people who thought like me were ignored, vilified, called unpatriotic, and our concerns about the immorality and folly of these conflicts were discounted. On the other hand, those who ordered our young men and women into unnecessary combat were lionized and were never punished for their crimes, war crimes, in particular, the crime of aggression. In neither case were the main objectives for going to war accomplished. We failed miserably in both cases and these failures were bought at great cost in terms of treasure and lives. 

The goal of the Vietnam war was to stop this country from becoming a socialist state and preventing a "domino effect" leading other Southeast Asian nations to fall into the Communist column. By the end of this stupid war, 58,000 Americans and an estimated 1.5 million Vietnamese died. The conflict set up the conditions for a genocide in neighboring Cambodia in which another 1.7 million Cambodians died. In the end, the People's Socialist Republic of Vietnam won the war, but like its traditional enemy and neighbor to the north, the People's Republic of China, it is now a socialist state in name only. Vietnam is "open for business" and is in no way a threat to global capitalism. The irony is that this probably would have happened anyway and the war that was fought to prevent Vietnam from going communist merely delayed the transition of that nation to a market economy. Had the US done nothing instead of waging a stupid costly war, we probably would have ended up with the same result, a Vietnam that is hospitable to US businesses.

In the case of Iraq the Bush administration invaded this country in order to rid it of weapons of mass destruction (which did not exist) which it was feared might fall into the hands of terrorists groups such as Al Qaeda (which had no ties with the Iraqi government). The real underlying motive for this war was to surround and contain Iran by establishing a set of permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil and securing their vast oil reserves for exploitation by US and British companies such as Exxon and BP. The Bush-Cheney cabal thought we needed more US military bases in the region to guard "our oil", particularly after Saudi Arabia dis-invited us because of concerns raised by Osama bin Laden (among others) about having infidel soldiers stationed on holy land.

But in the end none of these objectives were achieved. The new Shiite-led Iraqi government has stronger ties to Iran that the Sunni-led regime of Saddam Hussein ever did or would have had. This government has also decided that there will be no permanent US military bases on Iraqi soil and has dis-invited us from maintaining any military presence in their country. They did this mainly because of the US insistence that our soldiers be immune from Iraqi law. The US will not allow other countries punish its citizens for war crimes, such as occurred in Haditha in 2005 and Nisour Square in 2007, and we do not punish them either. American insistence on impunity is the reason why American troops are now leaving Iraq.

Meanwhile, the oil fields are still not producing up to their potential and the leases for future production have been sold off to China, Malaysia, Russia and other countries that opposed the US-led war in the first place. It is true that some oil leases have been sold to US and British companies, but who would suggest that this "benefit" was worth the price paid in lives and treasure. If the costs of this war, estimated at over 1 trillion dollars, were factored into the price of gasoline at the pump when we fill up our SUVs, we Americans would appreciate the real cost of our dependence on oil.

Some will point out that we did succeed in toppling Saddam's murderous regime and killing both him and his odious sons. One must, however, wonder whether this would not have happened in due course anyway without US and British meddling. The Arab spring revolutions that took the region by storm in 2011 swept away murderous authoritarian dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Other middle eastern family dictatorships, such as the Assad regime in Syria, are now under siege from their own people. Historical counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but isn't it hard to believe that had the US not invaded Iraq in 2003 and toppled Saddam, the Iraqi people themselves would not have risen up against him by 2011?  The irony in this case is that it might well have been the case that the Iraqi's themselves would have won their freedom from an oppressive dictator had we not decided to do the job for them.

Iraq is now "democratic", but the US is now far weaker, militarily, politically, economically, and morally, than it was before this war was launched. We Americans are victims of self-inflicted wounds.

China and other nations often accuse the US of improperly meddling in other countries' internal affairs. This criticism is correct as it concerns America's record of waging foolish wars of choice by invading other nations to save them from some threat, real or imagined. Political leaders in the United States need to think long and hard about these lessons of history before launching more such foolish wars. 

But curbing US military adventurism is not at all the same thing as arguing for US isolationism. The US must remain engaged in international affairs, but can do far more than it does currently to reshape the world to suit its interests and its values by dramatically increasing its humanitarian and development assistance, budget priorities that have been beggared by the gargantuan cost of maintaining our military dominance. We need to dramatically reduce the size of our bloated and wasteful military establishment. When people talk about shrinking the size of government to "starve the beast" I tend to agree with them if by the "beast" one means the Pentagon and the military industrial complex -- to this is one of the branches of government that does need to be starved and shrunken down to size.

But the question is, as it always has been, not whether our government is "too big" or "too small", but whether it is a good government. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, I do not think our government has been all that good in either its foreign or domestic policies. To say this is not to be unpatriotic -- it is merely stating a truth that is obvious to all unbiased observers. This is why I always laugh to myself when people talk about exporting democracy to other nations. If our system of government is so great why are Congress's approval ratings so low?

The people in this country who think like me have been saying these things for more than fifty years. I have thought this way since I was twelve, in 1961. I am now 62 and have not changed my mind. Indeed the events of history I have witnessed in my lifetime have only strengthened my conviction and my willingness to speak my mind. Perhaps now, at the end of yet another stupid, immoral, and wasteful US military adventure, more people in this country will begin to listen and take action.  No more (stupid) wars. 

Occupy TCNJ Talk

Last February we all viewed with amazement the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt which quickly spread to other Middle Eastern nations such as Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya. The protesters were united by their common desire for human rights and democracy, putting an end to authoritarian dictatorships that had held them down for decades, and in the hope that their children might enjoy a better future. Another important theme of these protests was economic inequality, unemployment, and the lack of hope on the part of the young that economic conditions would enable them to prosper. The Arab spring represented the awakening of a social movement of citizens who were tired of waiting for these political, social, and economic conditions to change -- they decided to take matters into their own hands and force them to change.

Now we see popular protests taking place here in America and around the world. These protests are also led by young people and are also a response to injustice and inequality.  The American autumn is an awakening of a populist movement which is tired of waiting  for a corrupt and dysfunctional political system to address the real problems of this country: unemployment and underemployment, the debt burdens of families and students, the lack of real opportunity for many, and the concentration of wealth and political power among the 1% -- the rich men who rule the world -- the plutocrats who have taken control of the Republic  and have deployed the resources of both the State and the Market to entrench their own wealth, privilege, and power.

In a poll conducted the The Hill nearly three-quarters of the respondents said that income inequality is a problem in the United States (The Huffington Post, 31 Oct 2011). The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the income of the top 1% of the income distribution has increased 243% from1979 to 2007, while that of the bottom 90% grew by only 5%. The top 10% of Americans control two-thirds of the wealth, and the richest 400 Americans control as much wealth as the bottom 50% of households, while at the same time 46 million Americans, or 15.1%, live below the poverty line, and half of those who do have jobs earn less than $27,000 a year. The most popular slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement, “We are the 99%” is obviously a reference to the fact that most of us are not among the super-rich. But it also expresses the truth that we the people are also the democratic majority. If so, how did we get to this place?

The answer is that in America, and much of the rest of the world, we live in a plutocracy, that is, under a system of domination and exploitation in which the richest also control the levers of political power of the State. This combination and concentration of wealth and political power we see among the plutocratic ruling classes in contemporary societies is not a new phenomenon; has been seen many times before in history.

In Athens of 594 BC, according to Plutarch, "the disparity of fortune between the rich and poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances…..seemed possible but despotic power" (The Life of Solon). Things began to get tense in Athens with the poor preparing to revolt and the rich preparing repress them with force, but in this case, violent class warfare was avoided by the election of Solon who eased the burden on all debtors by devaluing the currency; “he also reduced all personal debts and ended imprisonment for debt, cancelled arrears for taxes and mortgage interest, decreed that the sons of those who had died in Athens wars would be educated at government expense, and he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay twelve times that required by the poor” (Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History 56). The poor complained that he did not divide the land, and the rich whined that he had confiscated their property, but by redistributing wealth Solon averted a revolution and ushered in a Golden Age.

Whenever the poor begin to complain about wealth and income inequality, the representatives of the rich ruling class accuse them of engaging in “class warfare”. The progressive magazine The Nation recently had a cover proclaiming that Wall Street invented class warfare. But, in fact, class struggle that sometimes erupts into class warfare is much older than that.  If you want to know what class warfare is really like, reflect on how the historian Barbara Tuchman described what happened in 1358 when the Jacqueries revolted against the lords of the Oise Valley: 

At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her husband and then killed her. (A Distant Mirror)

Now that is class warfare! Anyone who has ever visited Versailles understands immediately that the main cause of the French Revolution was social injustice and in particular the inequality and wealth and political power.  But the French Jacobin’s Reign of Terror made liberal use of the guillotine, and the revolution ended badly, ushering in the Napoleonic wars. Things went somewhat better on this side of the Atlantic; the American Revolution succeeded in throwing off the yoke of the British aristocracy without lopping off a lot of aristocratic heads.

But, observing the French and American revolutions Karl Marx concluded that their chief results was not greater wealth and income equality, but rather the transfer of wealth and political power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Marx was among those who understood that these cycles in which wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, which produces a backlash of popular discontent and revolution, are recurring features of human history. He made it the basis of his theory of class struggle and saw the competition between classes as the main driver of history. But Marx also thought that the class struggle could be ended by a communist revolution leading to the final victory of the proletariat in which the ownership and control of the means of production would be shared democratically among the workers themselves.

But things have not turned out that way (except perhaps in a few cooperative, employee owned enterprises such as Spain’s Mondragon). Instead, in the late twentieth century capitalism was triumphant.  In the former Soviet Union, and in post Maoist China, capitalism destroyed communism. In America, and much of the rest of the world, capitalism is now destroying democracy. This is why we are now experiencing another cycle in which wealth and political power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few.

Unlike Marx, I do not believe that these historical cycles of concentration and redistribution of wealth and political power can be eliminated entirely. But I do think they can be managed more rationally and peacefully than in the past. I see these cyclic oscillations in terms of systems theory as features of a regulatory process that involves both positive and negative feedback loops. Wealth and power in society tends to get concentrated in the hands of a few because power can be self-reinforcing; the wealthier and more powerful some people become the more they are able to use these advantages to preserve and enhance their own power and privilege. Small and temporary differences in power can thus be amplified over time into large and permanent ones.

We have understood for a long time now that in order to compensate for this tendency it is necessary for human societies to institute a compensatory negative feedback loop that works to equalize power and wealth in society. In the modern era we learned to do this through democratic institutions that provide for equal basic rights and equality of opportunity, as well as through programs and agencies that provide all citizens a degree of economic security. We have these institutions not only because of the requirements of justice and fairness, although that is one important reason why they exist, but also because we know that greater economic and political equality is conducive to social peace and economic prosperity.  

In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Rutgers University economic historian James Livingston presented evidence that shows that private investment is not in fact the thing that drives economic growth; rather it is consumer spending and government spending (“It’s Consumer Spending, Stupid” October 25, 2011). Between 1900 and 2000 real domestic product per capita grew more than 600%, but during that same period, net business investment decreased by 70%. Contrary to the “common sense” peddled by conservative economists and most Republicans, corporate profits are not the real source of prosperity. The argument that we should cut corporate taxes to jumpstart economic growth is bull-pucky; it is a lie used by the plutocrats and their apologists to justify the transfer of even more wealth from the poor and the middle classes into their own pockets. As a result of these kinds of lies and deception, the USA now ranks 27^th among OECD countries in measures of basic social justice, just ahead of Chile, Mexico, and Turkey (Social Justice in the OECD: How Do Member States Compare? Bertelsmann Siftung, 2011).

So the question we face is how will this crisis of social injustice and economic inequality be resolved? Will we elect wise leaders, who like modern Solons will broker some kind of moderate plan of wealth redistribution which dilutes the power and privilege of our plutocrats, or will the rich men who rule the country (and the world) use the police and military power of the State to repress popular discontent?

We saw these two approaches in the responses to the Arab spring uprisings earlier this year. Given what happened to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, who is now on trial, and also the fate of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi who is now resting in an unmarked grave, it looks like Tunisia's Ben-Ali was the smart one who got out while the getting was good. On the other hand, in Syria President Assad is deploying his military and secret police to kill protesters by the thousands and is getting away with it.  Repression of popular dissent does work, but only for a while. Once it is used on a large scale, the prospects for violent civil war or revolution increase markedly, and history suggests that popular forces are usually ultimately victorious, but often at an enormous cost in human death and suffering.

Here in America we are already witnessing the potential for the Occupy Protests to be violently repressed by the police, as recently happened in Oakland California, Denver Colorado, Atlanta Georgia and elsewhere. On the other hand, in many cities, the local officials are following a more moderate and tolerant course of action, and in Nashville the ACLU has successfully defended the first amendment rights of the protesters and forced the city council to rescind a curfew law designed to remove the Occupy Nashville protest camp.

Because of our first amendment freedoms, there is some reason for hope that here in America that the current crisis of inequality and social injustice will be resolved peacefully through political compromise and equitable wealth redistribution that will reduce the current vast inequalities of wealth and power that we now have in this country. But I think that the only realistic hope for will be if we all, and especially young people like yourselves, occupy the voting booth. Don't let your friends vote for fools and demagogues. Don't buy into the economic dogmas and lies that many politicians are peddling.  Don't let the "money power" in American politics overwhelm the "people power." Let your elected representatives know what you think, and why you are angry.

But, let me say, that I am really quite worried that the deep corruption and dysfunction of the American political system will prevent any meaningful compromise solution from emerging. Our political system is deeply corrupted by the money power of the plutocrats, and the electoral system is rigged in their favor. But, the longer we go on not addressing the real problems affecting our nation, the more the popular pressure for radical change will build.  We the people are tired of waiting for Republicans and Democrats to get their acts together and govern this country responsibly. Many of us no longer believe that President Obama is the agent of change some people were hoping he would be. We no longer trust the Supreme Court to decide justly when so often they side with the plutocracy and the corporations against the people.

The 2008 election popularized the slogan "We are the people we are waiting for." Let me suggest that the slogan for the 2012 election should be, "We are the people. We are tired of waiting, and we are the 99%”.