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TWO GULF WAR DOCUMENTS
All Quiet on the Eastern Front
Letter to an Unknown Soldier
Supposing we win in Iraq. Supposing it all goes perfectly — the sanctions eventually
bite, the admonitory air strikes take out, say, ten percent of their intended targets, and
there turns out to be no secret weapon, or none the Iraqi field commanders agree to use.
Supposing the ramshackle alliance holds together over the winter — Jordan huffs and
puffs but is ultimately, as usual, a good American dog, the Iranian factions can’t
decide on a policy, the Congressional factions even less so, and Saddam plays the Israeli
card so ineptly — in such obvious fear of the gambit being taken seriously —
that no other Arab state breaks ranks. Supposing in February or March we install exactly
the “democratic” general in Baghdad that the CIA/KGB has been paying for the
past ten years with just such an eventuality in mind — our Noriega, our Pinochet, our
King Hussein. . . .
There will be the usual moment of foul-mouthed togetherness. The polls will shriek
unanimity, the General’s impeccable English will be widely admired, the Liberals will
tell us how good it feels to see America again “on the right side.” And then
what, precisely?
What do we think will have been achieved? How long, for a start, do we estimate our
general will last? How is he going to fare against the fundamentalists, who for sure will
be the main beneficiaries of Saddam Hussein’s fall — why else did we prop up his
secular “Socialism” for so long? As the democratic general’s state begins
to come apart in his hands, splitting up into its Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite components,
what other card will he have to play except his willingness in turn to bite the hand that
fed him and borrow the clothes of Habash and Khomeini? Is our man going to slow down
Iraq’s nuclear program? (Do even his CIA/KGB managers think he could afford to do
that and still hold on to his military constituency?) What’s likely to be his line on
Israel — his line in February, his line the following November? Which chemicals will
he use against the Kurds?
Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. / Yet the General was rubbish in
the end.
* * *
No doubt behind closed doors the policymakers are even more pessimistic about their new
world order than we are. They know much more about the murderers and hypocrites whose
“regimes” they prop up from Ankara to Riyadh. They have the intelligence on
popular unrest in the region, on the latest inroads made by the fundamentalists, on the
comic-opera corruption at the top and the answering vengefulness below. To be sure, the
CIA/KGB underestimates all of the above when it phones its copy in to its masters, but any
accounting of them will make the Middle East seem more of a Hell than an outsider can
possibly imagine. It is a Hell of our making.
The Middle East is the Europe of the late twentieth century: an uncontrollable system
of warring nation-states, driven mad by the same cancerous ideologies: nationalisms,
blueprints for theocracy (the blue already drenched in blood), anti-Semitism, dreams of
the corporate state. The backers and paymasters lean over the squalid cockpit and can
think of nothing to do but pump in more weapons. This Europe has already had its 1914-1918
war along the Tigris and Euphrates, complete with trenches and mustard gas; now it gets
ready for 1939. Only this time one of the players already has the bomb, and no one quite
knows how long it will take Baghdad’s Manhattan Project to cobble together its own
dirty, primitive parcel of uranium.
* * *
So here it is, come soon upon us: the first crisis after the Cold War. At one level it
all has a deadly familiarity to it, and yet of course there are some comforting landmarks
that seem to have been overtaken by the sand — Gorby is not even pretending to resist
any longer, the U.N. sheds its cutaneous rhetoric about Imperialism and rallies overnight
to the new (read: old) world order, Deng is forgiven, and of course we understand about
those “advisors” in Baghdad. (Contracts are contracts. And who else but the
“advisors” are going to tell us where Saddam’s mistress lives?) Even the
Cuban delegate stumbles over his script.
Luckily for Bush, there is one ideological landmark that stays constant in the suspect
terrain: those goddamn Arabs, those oil-smooth sheiks and unshaved terrorists, that
bristling, degenerate, hate-filled Other to civilization as we know it. No doubt it is on
the bedrock of this bar-stool Orientalism that the polls’ support for U.S. policy is
founded — for a while, until the going gets tough. Ignorant demonizing of the East
will not, we suspect, prove a sufficient basis for policy once its costs become clear
— as they did in Beirut and Teheran. One minute it will be: “Let’s pay
those bastards back, finally, for all the humiliations they’ve inflicted on us
through the years. Now’s our chance. Let’s take out the Dome of the Rock”
(the Dugan scenario). And the next it will be: “Let the bastards fight it out among
themselves, that’s all they’re fit for. Let ’em go down to darkness
together.”
It has a good, specious ring to it: “the first crisis after the Cold War.” Of
course it was predictable that such a state of affairs has put the intellectual Right at
sixes and sevens, and had them immediately descend to name-calling. They’ve found
their level. It worries us more that so much of the Left seems almost as bewildered, as if
it did not want to believe that its East-West dramaturgy had turned out to be a mirage all
along; and as if the tone that had gone with that dramaturgy — the sneering, carping,
eternally aggrieved monotone, the fretting and frothing at U.S. “hypocrisy” (as
if anyone believed the elderly rubbish was for real in the first place), the doomsday
muckraking and the Now-it-can-be-revealed — as if all this were still somehow
indispensable to Left politics. As if there were no other tone on offer. (Not that we
think the question of tone is immediately soluble in the present desperate circumstances,
or fool ourselves that we have solved it. The sneering and carping are there in our text
too, we recognize; and they have to be. Any text that fails at least to try to approximate
the guffaw that issues these days from the coffeehouses of Cairo — even if it knows
full well that the guffaw cannot be ventriloquized from where we stand, safe inside the
capitalist heartland — has not begun to face up to the real horror of the times.)
For us, this moment is a (dismal) opportunity. What the first crisis after the Cold War
makes clear is surely this: the ideological contest of the superpowers, lasting apparently
for the past forty years, was never the shaping structure of world events, still less of
those events called “crises.” The essential dynamic was always, and still is,
that of a world capitalism in search of lebensraum — the room it needed,
that is to say, to keep the center from slowing down and seizing up. This was the force
that made the late-twentieth-century world, and goes on making it in the Middle East. The
image that stays in our minds from the usual aimless, numbing media blitz is that of the
Bangladeshi workers sitting inside the shell of some transport plane in the desert, eyeing
the camera for a moment before the hatches slam shut and they are flown back to the chaos
from whence they came. We were supposed to be chastened by the bareness of the
airframe’s gaping interior. It was the plushest ride these men had ever had. We were
supposed to be sorry for the wreckage of their hopes. What hopes? What were they doing in
Kuwait in the first place? How many months would it have been before some other, maybe
“milder” crisis of capitalism — a downturn in oil prices, a change of
regime, a surge in xenophobia — had sent them on their way, this time without even a
free ride in a C-5? The image was only misleading in the glamor of its desolation: have
these people’s uprootedness and fear be a bit more ordinary, a bit less noticeable,
happening somewhere that cameras don’t go, and you’ll have an approximation of
capitalism at work.
We have to say something, then, about what we think it is in capitalism that goes to
make the Middle East crisis, and many more like it to come. Our language will be general,
but it seems to us a level of abstraction that the present moment makes necessary: nothing
will be possible on the Left if we do not take the opportunity, after the Cold War, to
stand back from the pile of bodies and look again at what produces them; that is, at the
peculiar form of capitalism’s building and organizing of its world economy.
The form is this:
On the one hand, no one is in any doubt that capitalism ever since its inception could
not have sustained itself for a moment if it had not gone on constantly extending and
intensifying its hold on the world — its hold on resources, on markets, on cheap and
disorganized labor, on terms of trade, on new sources of investment. Capitalism as a
system is coincident — maybe synonymous — with the urge to world economy, and
the urge has been by and large irresistible. More and more of the world has been drawn
into capitalism’s orbit; by which we mean not just a matter of geographical access or
occupation, but a wholesale irruption of capitalism into the texture of everyday life
— the pattern of buying and selling, the organization of production, the shape of the
labor force. If this forced entry had not happened, and if it did not go on happening
at an accelerating rate, the capitalist heartlands would grind to a halt in a matter
of years.
The political and economic forms this process has taken hardly need cataloguing, they
are laid out before us in the Gulf with such clarity: client states, more or less grisly;
wholesale export of high tech; wholesale war against the least sign of a popular politics
in the making; the production of instant consumer culture in places where, by and large,
the images of consumption are all most people can afford to consume; ecological nightmare;
corruption; bureaucracy; “aid”; debt; the rhetoric of free enterprise. This last
in particular takes on more and more mystical sanctimoniousness the further it gets from
capitalism’s evident truth: the truth, that is, of bailout and subsidy, of price
fixing and “market management,” of the whole hopeless entanglement of the State
with those whose “freedoms” it means to serve. Not that the system, sclerotic as
it is, is lacking in brute effectiveness. It does better than any other system on
offer; most everyone wants to join. But it is a system of control which by its very nature
— its very mechanics — is erratic and conflict-ridden: not merely ramshackle and
indirect in its hold on its empire, but producing as part of itself the “factors of
instability” that have the policymakers wringing their hands.
In the Middle East, again, these factors could hardly be more on the surface. It does
not take enormous powers of political analysis to see that the Saddams, the Mubaraks, the
Khadaffis, and the Sauds are a necessary result of capitalism’s determination to
crush even the most rudimentary forms of political modernization in the area.
Dictatorships are a necessity of the system, above all in a part of the world where
popular government, however makeshift and backward-looking, might for once not be rooted
in economic debility — where democracy might be able to make capitalism pay up. No
doubt the dictatorships will want to gobble bits and pieces of each other’s
territory. No doubt their version of Westernization is so transparently vile that it plays
into the hands of the most desperate and atavistic forms of popular resistance. No doubt
the mad saturation of the place with high technology, military and corporate, is what has
the experts guessing which bunch of hoodlums will be next to go nuclear (and what the
chances are of them not using their bomb in the next crisis). But this is the system that
serves our interests, as at present defined.
* * *
This is, as we say, a generalizing sketchmap of a system that is — that’s the
point — barely organized chaos. It is not meant as a substitute for
particular histories, some comic, some tragic, most a mixture of both. We are not such
fools as to make believe, for example, that the Cold War simply never happened or did not
have specific effects — mostly beneficial from capitalism’s point of view. Least
of all do we mean to pass judgment on the USSR’s rapaciousness and duplicity in the
period in question; what concerns us is its power — its power to generate empire
— in comparison to that of the West. That power was always nugatory, and known to be.
(Nor do we even mean to deny that “Marxism” was somehow or other a player, or a
counter, in the weird global game of ideological checkers; but only insofar as it had
become, in the wake of Bolshevism, the ideology of “development” for
those national bourgeoisies who dreamt of an end run round capitalism — to a
miraculously “stabilized” commodity economy. The versions of Marxism those
dreams gave rise to were, putting it mildly, a bit exotic. There may be differences of
opinion among us as to whether, in the light of this history, the old dog of Marxism has
any life left in it. How could there not be, after half a century of hearing Marxism out
of Ulbricht’s mouth, or Kadar’s, or Mugabe’s? But one thing we agree upon:
if Marxism is to be retrieved at all as a critical force against capitalism, it has
everything to gain from being thus “discredited” — that is, with most of
the people who previously gave it credit. It may still prove to be an idiom of use to
those for whom it was first meant. It’s not as if such people have gone away.)
Our map is intended to pick out certain structural features of capitalism and point to
them at work in the Middle East. It has a good old-fashioned look to it, for which we do
not apologize. What could be more old-fashioned than the present jargon of build-up,
blockade, stalemate, preemptive strike? What faces could look at us from deeper in the
past than those of the Bangladeshis on the airplane? This past is capitalism’s
present; the past it needs to keep its miserable “postmodernity” alive. Is the
Left supposed to abandon the explanatory term “capitalism” because capitalism
has won: is that the line of reasoning? Sure, capitalism has won: the present crisis is a
picture of its victory. It is a crisis of capitalism’s strength; which is to say, the
worst kind.
* * *
None of this, need we say it, provides a picture of how opposition to capitalism in the
U.S. could be given effective political form — in this crisis or the crises to come.
We haven’t been talking tactically. It will be opposition to capitalism as a
world system or it will be nothing: that is what we think needs saying, “after
the Cold War.” Putting our faith in the good works of the Security Council seems to
us like running around with buckets of water trying to start a fire. And dreams of a
scaled-down, fuel-efficient, self-sustaining, home-boy capitalism are based, in our view,
on a deep misreading of what capitalism is, and what it needs to keep going. There is a
“crisis of resources,” yes, and the events in the Middle East can be understood
to be part of it, but only if we take the word “resources” to mean something
else than faraway fuel and raw materials; what is at stake in the Gulf, as always, is a
struggle for control — over markets and labor power and terms of trade as
much as oil per se. Capitalism cannot do without these resources; it cannot even learn
to scale down its appetite for them; and its appetite leads always to war.
And do not let our occasional, somewhat lofty references to “future crises”
make it be thought that we don’t see war as imminent, maybe weeks or months away, and
liable to spin out of anyone’s control. Nobody really knows (or is saying) what
Saddam has in his arsenal and what it will take for him to use it. Shamir’s bomb is
ready for launching. We have had a glimpse of General Dugan (ret.)’s vision of the
future. Which of the several available eco-genocides is it going to be — chemical,
biological, nuclear, you name ’em, all totally unpredictable in their wider,
long-term effects? We believe that mounting a real resistance to these possible futures
involves a recasting of the language in which crises are described. We haven’t talked
tactics; but we know it is a race against time.
IAIN A. BOAL, JAMES BROOK, JEFFREY I. CARTER,
T. J. CLARK, GLORIA FRYM, EDUARDO GUTENTAG,
R. DENNIS HAYES, ANNE M. WAGNER, LINDA J. WIENS
3 October 1990
Before the Dedication of His New Memorial
It is the air of atrocity
An event as ordinary
As a President.
A plume of smoke, visible at a distance
in which people burn.
So wrote the poet George Oppen in 1968 as the U.S. attacked Indochina. The government
and its media spokespersons justified that slaughter with the refrains of “stop
Communism,” “defend freedom,” and “stop aggression.” Now you must
be wondering why you have been sent to war in the Middle East.
The collapse of the Cold War has deprived the ruling elite of the old saw of
“stopping Communism.” And no one can find much “freedom” or
“democracy” to “defend” in the Middle East. Who are you protecting?
The Emir of Kuwait? The King of Saudi Arabia? The fascist Shamir? And the hypocrisy of the
aim of “stopping lawless aggression” is all too clear to anyone with a faint
remembrance of the U.S. invasion of Panama. Be assured that Arabs are keenly aware of
America’s long-standing support for Israel, including its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
With no compelling public reason for the threat of war, the Bush
administration constantly changed its story as the massive military build-up in the Middle
East continued: depending on how the politicians read the public-opinion polls,
“we” (not including the president, members of Congress, or their immediate
families) were supposed to be over there for “jobs,” “peace,”
“oil,” and “the new world order.” Only these last two reasons hint at
the real motivations for Bush’s rush to war and why he gave short shrift to
international sanctions against Iraq and sabotaged diplomatic efforts to resolve the
crisis.
Did the U.S. encourage Iraq to invade Kuwait? When speaking with Saddam Hussein one
week before the invasion, Ambassador Glaspie said: “We have no opinion on the
Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” Was the U.S. looking
for a rationale to establish a garrison in Saudi Arabia? This is not to excuse
Hussein’s ambitions — which American officials may have thought limited to some
of Kuwait — but to suggest that the U.S. was in search of a new Absolute Enemy of
Convenience — and that it found one in this particular vicious dictator, who for
years had America’s enthusiastic support in his aggression against Iran. Today the
bombs fall on Iraq and Kuwait, and the empire wears no clothes.
Bush’s impatience with sanctions and diplomacy stems from a desire to impress
America’s nominal allies, its unstable client-states, and those on the lowest rung of
the economic ladder with the ruthlessness of its response to any challenge. Sanctions do
not sufficiently terrorize, and negotiations would inevitably lead to discussion of the
Palestinian problem and Israeli nuclear weapons, taboo topics as far the U.S. and Israel
are concerned.
The U.S. has made it plain that it considers Middle Eastern oil among its “vital
interests,” as was the case decades before American oil production declined. The
foreign policy elite intends to control that oil in order to gain leverage over the
economies of Europe and Japan, America’s competitors.
Since the end of World War II the United States has pursued a strategy of establishing
world hegemony, tying the devastated allies and defeated enemies ever closer to the
imperatives of the American economy. The peripheral nations were to remain in their
assigned places as suppliers of markets, raw materials, and cheap labor.
As the leader and protector of the “free world” that served it so well, the
United States relied on its liberal anti-Communist ideology, economic strength, and
overwhelming military superiority. The U.S. corralled its allies under the “nuclear
umbrella” and, when it deemed such action necessary, regularly fought to suppress
revolutionary nationalist movements in the periphery. In the 1970s, with the American
withdrawal from Vietnam and the weakening of the economy — as capital fled into
overseas investments, war industries, and financial speculation — this power went
into evident decline.
Now the world’s largest debtor nation, America’s political domination of
Japan, Europe, and the periphery has become problematic. With the end of “the Soviet
threat” the United States has lost its most valuable and reliable enemy. Gone is the
elite’s favorite justification for intervention in “underdeveloped”
countries, gone the apparent necessity for Pentagon budgets, gone the ideological glue
that bound Europe to the U.S. And yet the United States has gained the opportunity to
assert its military power in the Middle East without fear of Soviet “strategic
response” — “de-linking” the Middle East from superpower rivalry made
this regional war all the more possible.
Enter “the new world order,” a new phase in the protection racket in which
the United States attempts to exact economic concessions from the industrial nations while
forcing them to finance its policing of the Third World. East-West conflict now mutates
into more serious North-South conflict.
* * *
The attack on Iraq brought hundreds of thousands of antiwar demonstrators into the
streets of scores of cities and towns across America and Europe — demonstrators of
all colors and walks of life. In the face of orchestrated disinformation, agents
provocateurs, deployment of the spectacle of terrorism in a preemptive strike against
dissent, and FBI interrogations of Arab-Americans, demonstrators reclaimed the
traffic-clogged streets as public space, subjecting automobilism to a practical critique.
Shouting “No Blood for Oil!” they thought of your lives and the lives of Arabs
and Israelis sacrificed to a cynical “resource war.” The second half of their
chant was always “Bring the Troops Home!”
Contrary to what you may have heard, most in the peace movement have not seen
you as the enemy. Rather, most consider you “economic draftees” and not
volunteers — people who looked to the military for a job and an education, not for a
chance to become mercenaries.
But you did sign up, and in the end you must be held accountable for your actions.
There is no honor possible in this war, there is no glory and nothing to fight for. If you
“do your job,” following criminal orders and joining in the slaughter, do not
expect to come home to a hero’s welcome.
16 January 1991, from deep inside “a city of the
corporations,”
by a writer who must remain anonymous
(revised 1/23/91)
stationed on land:
Any Servicemember
Operation Desert Storm
APO New York 09848-0006
stationed on ships:
Any Servicemember
Operation Desert Storm
FPO New York 09866-0006
The pamphlet “All Quiet on the Eastern Front” was published in the San
Francisco Bay Area two months after Saddam’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when it
was uncertain whether this would lead to a full-scale war. The anonymous leaflet
“Letter to an Unknown Soldier” was circulated upon the outbreak of the Gulf war
in January 1991.
No copyright.
[The War and the Spectacle]
[CROSSFIRE]
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