Many critics of the ongoing Euro-US wars in the Middle East and, now, North Africa, have based their arguments on clichés and generalizations devoid of fact. The most common line heard in regard to the current US-Euro war on Libya is that it’s “all about oil” – the goal is the seizure of Libya’s oil wells.

On the other hand Euro –U.S, government spokespeople defend the war by claiming it’s “all about saving civilian lives in the face of genocide”, calling it “humanitarian intervention”.

Following the lead of their imperial powers, most of what passes for the Left in the US and Europe, ranging from Social Democrats, Marxists, Trotskyists,Greens and other assorted progressives claim they see and support a revolutionary mass uprising of the Libyan people, and not a few have called for military intervention by the imperial powers, or the same thing, the UN, to help the “Libyan revolutionaries” defeat the Gaddafi dictatorship.

These arguments are without foundation and belie the true nature of US-UK-French imperial power, expansionist militarism, as evidenced in all the ongoing wars over the past decade (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.). What is much more revealing about the militarist intervention in Libya is that the major countries, which refused to engage in the War, operate via a very different form of global expansion based on economic and market forces. China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and Germany, the most dynamic capitalist countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are fundamentally opposed to the self-styled “allied” military response against the Libyan government - because Gaddafi represents no threat to their security and they already have full access to the oil and a favorable investment climate. Besides, these economically dynamic countries see no prospect for a stable, progressive or democratic Libyan government emerging from the so-called ‘rebel’ leaders, who are disparate elites competing for power and Western favor.

The principle imperial powers and their mass media mouthpieces claim they are bombing Libya for “humanitarian reasons”. Their recent past and current military interventions present a different picture: The intervention in Iraq resulted in well over a million civilian deaths, four million refugees and the systematic destruction of a complex society and its infrastructure, including its water supplies and sewage treatment, irrigation, electricity grid, factories, not to mention research centers, schools, historical archives, museums and Iraq’s extensive social welfare system.

A worse disaster followed the invasion of Afghanistan. What was trumpeted as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to liberate Afghan women and drive out the Taliban resulted in a human catastrophe for the Afghan people.

The road to imperial barbarism in Iraq began with ‘sanctions’, progressed to ‘no fly zones’, then de facto partition of the north, invasion and foreign occupation and the unleashing of sectarian warfare among the ‘liberated’ Iraqi death squads.

Equally telling, the imperial assault against Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, trotted out as the great “humanitarian war” to stop genocide, led to a 40-day aerial bombardment and destruction of Belgrade and other major cities, the imposition of a gangster terrorist regime (KLA) in Kosovo, the near-total ethnic cleansing of all non-Albanian residents from Kosovo and the construction of the largest US military base on the continent (Camp Bondsteel).

The bombing of Libya has already destroyed major civilian infrastructure, airports, roads, seaports and communication centers, as well as ‘military’ targets. The blockade of Libya and military attacks have driven out scores of multi-national corporations and led to the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Asian, Eastern European, Sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and North African skilled and unskilled immigrant workers and specialists of all types, devastating the economy and creating, virtually overnight, massive unemployment, bread-lines and critical gasoline shortages. Moreover, following the logic of previous imperial military interventions, the seemingly ‘restrained’ call to patrol the skies via “no fly zone”, has led directly to bombing civilian as well as military targets on the ground, and is pushing to overthrow the legitimate government. The current imperial warmongers leading the attack on Libya, just like their predecessors, are not engaged in anything remotely resembling a humanitarian mission: they are destroying the fundamental basis of the civilian lives they claim to be saving – or as an earlier generation of American generals would claim in Vietnam, they are ‘destroying the villages in order to save them’.

The ‘critical’ Left’s favorite cliché is that the imperial invasion is all about “seizing control of Libya’s oil and turning it over to their multi-nationals”. This is despite the fact that US, French and British multinationals (as well as their Asian competitors) had already “taken over” millions of acres of Libyan oil fields without dropping a single bomb. For the past decade, “Big Oil” had been pumping and exporting Libyan oil and gas and reaping huge profits. Gaddafi welcomed the biggest MNC’s to exploit the oil wealth of Libya from the early 1990’s to the present day. There are more major oil companies doing business in Libya than in most oil producing regions in the world. These include: British Petroleum, with a seven-year contract on two concessions and over $1 billion dollars in planned investments. Each BP concession exploits huge geographic areas of Libya, one the size of Kuwait and the other the size of Belgium (Libyonline.com). In addition, five Japanese major corporations, including Mitsubishi and Nippon Petroleum, Italy’s Eni Gas, British Gas and the US giant Exxon Mobil signed new exploration and exploitation contracts in October 2010. The most recent oil concession signed in January 2010 mainly benefited US oil companies, especially Occidental Petroleum. Other multi-nationals operating in Libya include Royal Dutch Shell, Total (France), Oil India, CNBC (China), Indonesia’s Pertamina and Norway’s Norsk Hydro (BBC News, 10/03/2005).

Despite the economic sanctions against Libya, imposed by US President Reagan in 1986, US multinational giant, Halliburton, had secured multi-billion dollar gas and oil projects since the 1980’s. During his tenure as CEO of Halliburton, former Defense Secretary Cheney led the fight against these sanctions stating, “as a nation (there is) enormous value having American businesses engaged around the world” (Halliburtonwatch.com). Officially, sanctions against Libya were only lifted under Bush in 2004. Clearly, with all the European and US imperial countries already exploiting Libya oil on a massive scale, the mantra that the “war is about oil” doesn’t hold water or oil!

In the run-up to the current military assault on Tripoli,the US Treasury Department’s (and Israel’s special agent) Stuart Levey, authored a sanctions policy freezing $30 billion dollars in Libyan assets on the pretext that Gaddafi was a murderous tyrant (Washington Post, 3/24/11). However, seven years earlier, Cheney, Bush and Condoleezza Rice had taken Libya off the list of terrorist regimes and ordered Levey and his minions to lift the Reagan-era sanctions. Every major European power quickly followed suite: Gaddafi was welcomed in European capitals, prime ministers visited Tripoli and Gaddafi reciprocated by unilaterally dismantling his nuclear and chemical weapons programs (BBC, 9/5/2008). Gaddafi became Washington’s partner in its campaign against a broad array of groups, political movements and individuals arbitrarily placed on the US’ “terror list”, arresting, torturing and killing Al Qaeda suspects, expelling Palestinian militants and openly criticizing Hezbollah, Hamas and other opponents of Israel. The United Nations Human Rights Commission gave the Gaddafi regime a clean bill of health in 2010. In the end Gaddafi’s political ‘turnabout’, however much celebrated by the Western elite, did not save him from this massive military assault. The imposition of neo-liberal ‘reforms’, his political ‘apostasy’ and cooperation in the ‘War on Terror’ and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, only weakened the regime. Libya became vulnerable to attack and isolated from any consequential anti-imperialist allies. Gaddafi’s much ballyhooed concessions to the West set his regime up as an easy target for the militarists of Washington, London and Paris, eager for a quick ‘victory’.

The Left, including the mainly electoral social democrat, green and even left-socialist parties of Europe and the US swallowed the entire mass media propaganda package demonizing the Gaddafi regime while lauding the ‘rebels’. Parroting their imperial mentors, the ‘Left’ justified their support for imperial military intervention in the name of the “revolutionary Libyan people”, the “peace-loving” masses “fighting tyranny” and organizing peoples’ militias to “liberate their country”. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The center of the armed uprising is Benghazi, longtime monarchist hotbed of tribal supporters and clients of the deposed King Idris and his family. Idris, until he was overthrown by the young firebrand Col. Gaddafi, had ruled Libya with an iron fist over a semi-feudal backwater and was popular with Washington, having given the US its largest air base (Wheeler) in the Mediterranean. Among the feuding leaders of the “transitional council” in Benghazi (who purport to lead but have few organized followers) one finds neo-liberal expats, who first promoted the Euro-US military invasion envisioning their ride to power on the back of Western missiles .They openly favor dismantling the Libyan state oil companies currently engaged in joint ventures with foreign MNCs. Independent observers have commented on the lack of any clear reformist tendencies, let alone revolutionary organizations or democratic popular movements among the ‘rebels’.

While the US, British and French are firing missiles, loaded with depleted uranium, at the Libyan military and key civilian installations, their ‘allies’ the armed militias in Benghazi, rather than go to battle against the regime’s armed forces, are busy rounding up, arresting and often executing any suspected members of Gaddafi’s “revolutionary committees”, arbitrarily labeling these civilians as “fifth columnists”. The top leaders of these “revolutionary” masses in Benghazi include two recent defectors from what the ‘Left’ dubs Gaddafi’s “murderous regime”: Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Justice minister, who prosecuted dissenters up to the day before the armed uprising, Mahmoud Jebri, who was prominent in inviting multi-nationals to take over the oil fields (FT, March 23, 2011, p. 7), and Gaddafi’s former ambassador to India, Ali Aziz al-Eisawa, who jumped ship as soon as it looked like the uprising appeared to be succeeding. These self-appointed ‘leaders’ of the rebels who now staunchly support the Euro-US military intervention, were long-time supporters of the Gaddafi’s dictatorship and promoters of MNC takeovers of oil and gas fields. The heads of the “rebels” military council is Omar Hariri and General Abdul Fattah Younis, former head of the Ministry of Interior. Both men have long histories (since 1969) of repressing democratic movements within Libya. Given their unsavory background, it is not surprising that these top level military defectors to the ‘rebel’ cause have been unable to arouse their troops, mostly conscripts, to engage the loyalist forces backing Gaddafi. They too will have to take ride into Tripoli on the coattails of the Anglo-US-French armed forces.

The anti-Gaddafi force’s lack of any democratic credentials and mass support is evident in their reliance on foreign imperial armed forces to bring them to power and their subservience to imperial demands. Their abuse and persecution of immigrant workers from Asia, Turkey and especially sub-Sahara Africa, as well as black Libyan citizens, is well documented in the international press. Their brutal treatment of black Libyans, falsely accused of being Gaddafi’s “mercenaries” , includes torture, mutilation and horrific executions, does not auger well for the advent of a new democratic order, or even the revival of an economy, which has been dependent on immigrant labor, let alone a unified country with national institutions and a national economy.

The self-declared leadership of the “National Transitional Council” is not democratic, nationalist or even capable of uniting the country. These are not credible leaders capable of restoring the economy and creating jobs lost as a result of their armed power grab. No one seriously envisions these ‘exiles’, tribalists, monarchists and Islamists maintaining the paternalistic social welfare and employment programs created by the Gaddafi government and which gave Libyans the highest per-capita income in Africa.

The greatest geographical concentration of suspected terrorists with links to Al Qaeda just happens to be in the areas dominated by the “rebels” (see Alexander Cockburn: Counterpunch, March 24, 2011). For over a decade Gaddafi has been in the forefront of the fight against Al Qaeda, following his embrace of the Bush-Obama ‘War on Terror’ doctrine. These jihadist Libyans, having honed their skills in US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, are now among the ranks of the “rebels” fighting the much more secular Libyan government. Likewise, the tribal chiefs, fundamentalist clerics and monarchists in the East have been active in a “holy war” against Gaddafi welcoming arms and air support from the Anglo-French-US “crusaders” - just like the mullahs and tribal chiefs welcomed the arms and training from the Carter-Reagan White House to overthrow a secular regime in Afghanistan. Once again, imperial intervention is based on ‘alliances’ with the most retrograde forces. The composition of the future regime (or regimes, if Libya is divided) is a big question and the prospects of a return to political stability for Big Oil to profitably exploit Libya’s resources are dubious.

Unlike all ongoing mass popular Arab uprisings, the Libyan conflict began as an armed insurrection, directed at seizing power by force. Unlike the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Tunisia, Gaddafi has secured a mass regional base among a substantial sector of the Libyan population. This support is based on the fact that almost two generations of Libyans have benefited from Gaddafi’s petroleum-financed welfare, educational, employment and housing programs, none of which existed under America’s favorite, King Idris. Since violence is inherent in any armed uprising, once one picks up the gun to seize power, they lose their claim on ‘civil rights’. In armed civil conflicts, civil rights are violated on all sides. Regardless of the Western media’s lurid portrayal of Gaddafi’s “African mercenary forces” and its more muted approval of ‘revolutionary justice’ against Gaddafi supporters and government soldiers captured in the rebel strongholds, the rules of warfare should have come into play, including the protection of non-combatants-civilians (including government supporters and officials), as well as protection of Libyan prisoners of war in the areas under NATO-rebel control.

The unsubstantiated Euro-US claim of “genocide” amplified by the mass media and parroted by “left” spokespersons is contradicted by the daily reports of single and double digit deaths and injuries, resulting from urban violence on both sides, as control of cities and towns shifts between the two sides.

Truth is the first casualty of war, and especially of civil war. Both sides have resorted to monstrous fabrications of victories, casualties, monsters and victims.

Demons and angels aside, this conflict began as a civil war between two sets of Libyan elites: An established paternalistic, now burgeoning neo-liberal, autocracy with substantial popular backing versus a western imperialist financed and trained elite, backed by an amorphous group of regional, tribal and clerical chiefs, monarchists and neo-liberal professionals devoid of democratic and nationalist credentials – and lacking broad-based mass support.

If not to prevent genocide, grab the oil or promote democracy (via Patriot missiles), what then is the driving force behind the Euro-US imperial intervention?

A clue is in the selectivity of Western military intervention: In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Qatar and Oman ruling autocrats, allied with and backed by Euro-US imperial states go about arresting, torturing and murdering unarmed urban protestors with total impunity. In Egypt and Tunisia, the US is backing a conservative junta of self-appointed civil-military elites in order to block the profound democratic and nationalist transformation of society demanded by the protesters. The ‘junta’ aims to push through neo-liberal economic “reforms” through carefully-vetted pro-Western ‘elected’ officials. While liberal critics may accuse the West of “hypocrisy” and “double standards” in bombing Gaddafi but not the Gulf butchers, in reality the imperial rulers consistently apply the same standards in each region: They defend strategic autocratic client regimes, which have allowed imperial states to build strategic air force and naval bases, run regional intelligence operations and set up logistical platforms for their ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their future planned conflict with Iran. They attack Gaddafi’s Libya precisely because Gaddafi had refused to actively contribute to Western military operations in Africa and the Middle East.

The key point is that while Libya allows the biggest US-European multi-nationals to plunder its oil wealth, it did not become a strategic geo-political-military asset of the empire. As we have written in many previous essays the driving force of US empire-building is military - and not economic. This is why billions of dollars of Western economic interests and contracts had been sacrificed in the setting up of sanctions against Iraq and Iran – with the costly result that the invasion and occupation of Iraq shut down most oil exploitation for over a decade.

The Washington-led assault on Libya, with the majority of air sorties and missiles strikes being carried out by the Obama regime, is part of a more general counter-attack in response to the most recent Arab popular pro-democracy movements. The West is backing the suppression of these pro-democracy movements throughout the Gulf; it finances the pro-imperial, pro-Israel junta in Egypt and it is intervening in Tunisia to ensure that any new regime is “correctly aligned”. It supports a despotic regime in Algeria as well as Israel’s daily assaults on Gaza. In line with this policy, the West backs the uprising of ex-Gaddafites and right-wing monarchists, confident that the ‘liberated’ Libya will once again provide military bases for the US-European military empire-builders.

In contrast, the emerging market-driven global and regional powers have refused to support this conflict, which jeopardizes their access to oil and threatens the current large-scale oil exploration contracts signed with Gaddafi. The growing economies of Germany, China, Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil rely on exploiting new markets and natural resources all over Africa and the Middle East, while the US, Britain and France spend billions pursuing wars that de-stabilize these markets, destroy infrastructure and foment long-term wars of resistance. The growing market powers recognize that the Libyan “rebels” cannot secure a quick victory or ensure a stable environment for long-term trade and investments. The “rebels”, once in power, will be political clients of their militarist imperial mentors. Clearly, imperial military intervention on behalf of regional separatists seriously threatens these emerging market economies: The US supports ethno-religious rebels in China’s Tibetan province and as well as the Uyghur separatists; Washington and London have long backed the Chechen separatists in the Russian Caucuses. India is wary of the US military support for Pakistan, which claims Kashmir. Turkey is facing Kurdish separatists who receive arms and safe haven from their US-supplied Iraqi Kurdish counterparts.

The North African precedent of an imperial invasion of Libya on behalf of its separatist clients worries the emerging market-powers. It is also an ongoing threat to the mass-based popular Arab freedom movements. And the invasion sounds the death knell for the US economy and its fragile ‘recovery’: three ongoing, endless wars will break the budget much sooner than later. Most tragic of all, the West’s ‘humanitarian’ invasion has fatally undermined genuine efforts by Libya’s civilian democrats, socialists and nationalists to free their country from both a dictatorship and from imperial-backed reactionaries.

Juan Manuel Santos, notorious Defense Minister in the regime of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe and closely identified with high crimes against humanity “won” the recent Presidential elections in Colombia, June 2010. The major electronic and print media CNN, FOX News, Washington Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the once liberal Financial Times (FT) hailed Santos election, as a great victory for democracy. According to the FT, “Colombia not Venezuela is (the) best model for Latin America” (FT 6/23/2010 p. 8). Citing Santos “overwhelming” margin – he garnered 69% of the vote, the FT claimed he won a “strong mandate” (FT 6/22/2010). In what has to be one of the most flagrant cover-ups in recent history, the media accounts exclude the most egregious facts about the elections and the profoundly authoritarian policies pursued by Santos over the past decade.

Elections are a process (not merely an event) in which prior political conditions determine the outcome. During the previous eight years of outgoing President Uribe’s and Defense Minister Santos’ rule, over 2 million, mostly rural poor, were forcibly uprooted and driven from their homes and land and displaced across frontiers into neighboring countries, or to urban slums. The Uribe-Santos regime relied on both the military and the 30,000 member paramilitary deathsquads to kill and terrorize entire population centers, deemed “sympathetic” to the armed insurgency, affecting several million urban and rural poor. Over 20,000 people were killed, many, according to the major Colombian human rights group, falsely labeled “guerrillas”. Santos as Defense Minister was directly implicated by the Courts in what was called “false positives”. The military randomly rounded up scores of poor urban youth, shot them and claimed a resounding victory over the FARC guerrillas.

Several of the most important captured paramilitary deathsquad leaders testified that over 60 of the congress people backing Uribe – Santos were on their payroll and they “ensured” votes from regions under their control. Faced with damaging testimony, Uribe-Santos double-crossed their narco-deathsquad comrades and “extradited” them to the U.S. where the judicial process excluded evidence linking them to the mass killings at the behest of Uribe-Santos.

Over two thousand trade unionists, human rights activists, journalists and congress- people critical of Uribe-Santos were murdered by deathsquad hit-men serving the regime. The world’s major trade union confederations have sent missions and published reports condemning Colombia as the most dangerous country for workers’ representatives.

In other words all the social sectors with social and political grievances against the regime were terrorized, many of their local opinion leaders, killed, displaced or driven into exile … undermining the possibility of sustained independent socio-political organization.

Pervasive state terror led to few local leaders surviving, undermining the electorate’s capacity to exercise a free and independent organization.

On election day, the regime mobilized over 350,000 military and police officials, many involved in the decade long repression, to “oversee” the elections and to remind the voters of the force behind the “official candidate” (La Jornada 5/30/2010).

The electoral outcome was far from the “mandate” of the Colombian people as claimed by the mass media. The ‘winner’ was the “abstentionists” with 56% of the electorate, the position advocated by the FARC. Now clearly the majority of the abstentionist vote did not reflect support or sympathy for the FARC; rather it reflected disaffection with the regime’s violent repression, massive dispossession of millions and its total failure to deal with the under and unemployment affecting 40% of the economically active population.

In fact Santos received 30% of the vote of the electorate, hardly a mandate. If we examine the social-ecological background of the voters, it is clearly a mandate from the elite. The highest levels of abstention were among several distinct groups. Among the shanty towns and rural areas suffering from repression and neglect, abstention rose to over 80%. In contrast, in the middle and upper class sectors of the major cities, over 60% voted for the candidate of the regime. Uribe-Santos tried to explain away the massive abstention by citing the weather (rain) and the World Cup soccer matches .However the low turnout took place throughout the country, in dry and inclement weather. And the games did not occupy the entire day of voting. The mass media systematically ignored the horrendous crimes under Defense Minister Santos, his indictment in the “false positive” murders, his long term large scale association with the death squads and with the Uribe regimes promotion of narco trafficking. They ignored his support for de-regulating the financial system, resulting in the defrauding of hundreds of thousands of Colombian small investors.

Yet the Financial Times (6/23/2010) favorably compares Colombia under Uribe-Santos against Venezuela under Chavez, “Crackers about Caracas? Latin American should be bonkers about Bogota instead”. According to the FT Venezuela under Chavez is said to be unsafe, authoritarian and economically in decline. The editors of the FT, echoing the rest of the media, claim Colombia is a prosperous democracy, with a system of checks and balances; with safe and peaceful neighborhoods … except when the neighborhoods of the poor protest unemployment or the rural villagers march against land grabs by the landlord funded gunmen. The FT fails to mention the resurgence of paramilitary gangs terrorizing the Colombian countryside, (La Jornada 5/28/2010) but instead they focus on street crime in Caracas.

The Venezuelan government, contrary to the US media, promotes community based social movements which would be targets of military raids in Bogota.

The only “paramilitary” groups in Venezuela are cross-over’s from Colombia, pursued and punished by the Venezuelan National Guard. In Venezuela trade unions participate in the management of major industrial plants, unlike Colombia where they are murdered including workers in the major Coca Cola,coal, oil and banana industries.

Behind the media lies and falsifications abut Colombia’s election and its political leaders are several basic considerations.

1.) Uribe-Santos are feverent free market advocates, eagerly pursing a free trade agreement held up in the US Congress because of their killing fields.

2.) Uribe-Santos are unconditional clients of the Pentagon, receiving $6 billion in aid and handing over 7 military bases, under US jurisdiction to threaten Venezuela, Ecuador and any other country the Obama regime deems a hostile to US domination.

3.) Uribe-Santos recognized the Honduras regime, product of a US backed military coup in mid 2009 – contrary to the rest of Latin America.

The fact that the mass-media have so enthusiastically embraced a regime with the worst human rights record since the fall of the military dictators of the 1970’s - 1980’s (La Jornada 6/17/2010) is indicative of the right turn under the Obama Wall Street regime. According to the White House and media, deathsquad democracies like Colombia now qualify as “role models” for Latin America. The problem is that neither the vast majority of Latin America citizens, nor most of the democratic parties in the region are buying: they prefer democracies without deathsquads, foreign military bases and narco-dealing Presidents. At present, the White House’s three leading allies in the region, Colombia, Peru and Mexico produce and sell 80% of the cocaine in the region. Will this appear in the media’s salutations to newly elected presidents?

Despite almost a decade of warfare, including an invasion and occupation, the US military and its allies and client state armed forces are losing the war in Afghanistan. Outside of the central districts of a few cities and the military fortresses, the Afghan national resistance forces, in all of their complex local, regional and national alliances, are in control, of territory, people and administration.

The prolonged unending war has become a major drain on the morale of the US armed forces and undermined civilian support in the US, limiting the capacity of the White House to launch new imperial wars. The annual multi-billion dollar military expenditures, are exacerbating the out-of-control budget deficit and forcing harsh unpopular cuts on social programs, at all levels of government. There is no end in sight, as the Obama regime keeps increasing the number of troops by the tens of thousands and military expenditures by the dozens of billions but the resistance advances, both military and politically.

Faced with rising popular discontent and demands for fiscal restraint by a wide spectrum of banking and citizen groups, Obama and the general command have sought “partial exit” via the recruitment and training of a large scale long term Afghan mercenary army and police force under the direction of US and NATO officers.

Between 2001-2010 the US military expenditures total $428 billion dollars; the colonial occupation has led to over 7,228 dead and wounded as of June 1, 2010. As the US military situation deteriorates, the White House escalates the number of troops resulting in a greater number of killed and wounded. During the past 18 months of the Obama regime more soldiers were killed or wounded than in the previous eight years.

The White House and Pentagon strategy is premised on massive flows of money, arms and an increase in the number of surrogates, mainly subsidized warlords and puppet western educated ex-pats. The White House “development aid” involves, literally, purchasing the transient loyalties of clan leaders. The White House attempts to give a veneer of legitimacy by running elections, which enhance the corrupt image of the incumbent puppet regime in Kabul and its regional associates.

On the military front, the Pentagon launches one “offensive” after another, announcing one success after another, followed by a retreat and return of the Resistance fighters. The US campaigns disrupt trade, agricultural harvests and markets, while the air assaults targeting “Taliban” and militants, more frequently than not end up killing more civilians celebrating weddings, religious holidays and shoppers at markets than combatants. The reason for the high percentage of civilian killings is clear to everyone except the US Generals: there are no distinctions between “militants” and millions of Afghan civilians since the former are an integral part of their communities.

The key and ultimately decisive problem facing the US occupation is that it is a colonial enclave in the midst of a colonized people. The US, its local puppets and its NATO allies are a foreign colonial army and its Afghan military and police recruits are seen as mere instruments perpetuating illegitimate rule. Every action, whether violent or benign, is perceived and interpreted as transgressing the norms and historical legacies of a proud and independent people. In everyday life, every move by the occupation is disruptive; nothing moves except by command of the foreign directed military and police. Under threat of force, people fake co-operation and then provide assistance to their fathers, brothers and sons in the Resistance. The recruits take the money and turn their arms over to the Resistance. The paid village informants are double agents or identified by their neighbors and targeted by insurgents.

The Afghan collaborators, Washington’s closest allies, are seen as corrupt traitors; transient rulers who have their bags packed and US passports in hand, ready to flee when the US is forced to exit. All the programs, “reconstruction” funds, training missions and “civic programs” have failed to win the allegiance of the Afghan people, now as in the past as well as in the future, because they are seen as part of the US military occupation ultimately based on violence.

1.) The Resistance has deep roots in the population – family community, linguistic and cultural ties which the US does not possess nor can “invent”; nor can these ties be bought, traded or replicated by their Afghan ‘collaborators’ or imposed by propaganda.

2.) The Resistance has fluid borders and broad international support especially with Pakistan but also with other anti-imperialist, Islamic groups who provide arms and volunteers and who engage in actively attacking the logistical transport supply lines of US-NATO military in Pakistan. They also pressure overseas US client regimes like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia opening multiple fronts.

3.) Widespread infiltration, voluntary, active and passive support of the Resistance among the US recruited and trained Afghan military and police results in crucial intelligence on troop movements. Desertions and absenteeism undermines “military competence”.

4.) The scope and breadth of Resistance activity over extends the imperial armies at its current strength and causes it to rely on unreliable Afghan security, who have no stomach for killing their brethren, especially when directed against communities with relatives or ethnic kin.

5.) Resistance allies are more loyal, less corrupt and reliable because of deeply shared beliefs. US allies are loyal only because of ephemeral monetary gratification and the temporary presence of US military force.

6.) The Resistance appeals to the people in the name of a return to law and order in everyday life, which preceded the disruptive invasion. The US promise of positive outcomes following a successful war, have no popular resonance after a decade long destructive occupation.

7.) The US has no belief system that can compete with the religious-nationalist-traditionalist appeal of the Resistance to the vast majority of village, small town and displaced rural population.

8.) The Resistance’s support of Iraqi, Palestinian and other anti-imperialist forces has a positive appeal among the Afghan people who have seen the destructive results of US wars in Iraq and proxy wars in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The US backed Israeli assault of Lebanon and the humanitarian ship destined for Palestine and the highly visible presence of Zionist militants in the US government, repels the more politically aware opinion leaders in Afghanistan.

9.) Afghans have, by force of circumstances, longer staying power in resisting the US military occupation, than the US people who have other, far more pressing needs and the US military with growing commitments in the Gulf.

10.) The Afghan Resistance does not normally kill civilians in combat missions since the US troops and NATO are clearly identified. Whereas, the opposite is not true. The Afghans who are part of the villages in occupied communities are subject to assassinations by “Special Forces” and drone bombings. In these circumstances ordinary people suffer the same military assaults as Resistance fighters.

A Failed Mission: The Incapacity to Build a Reliable, Effective Afghan Mercenary Army

A US government audit published in late June of this year demolished the Obama regime’s claims that it is succeeding in building an effective Afghan mercenary army and police capable of buttressing the current client regime in Kabul. The Report, based on a detailed analysis and field observations argues that the Obama Pentagon relies on “standards [which are] woefully inadequate, inflating the abilities of Afghan units that Mr. Obama called “core to our mission” (Financial Times, June 7, 2010, p1). In other words, Obama continues to play the con game, which he inaugurated during his electoral campaign with his phony promises of ‘change’ and “ending the wars”, and continued with his bail out of Wall Street in the name of ‘saving the economy’. He followed up by escalating the war in Afghanistan by sending 30,000 more troops and increasing military and police expenditures to $325.5 billion, approximately 132% higher than the last year of the Bush Administration (Congressional Research Service, FY 2010 Supplemental for Wars … June 2010).

The Obama regime’s phony claims of progress were based on self-serving bureaucratic and technical criteria, rather than the actual fighting performance and behavior of the Afghan mercenary army. The military command’s reports and progress reports were based on how many courses were taught, the length and breadth of training and the amount and quality of arms and equipment supplied to the Afghan troops. As the number of Afghan units passing the “training missions” increased from zero to 22, between 2008 - 2009, the Pentagon claimed extraordinary progress. To correct the errors, the Pentagon has turned to “field assessments by commanders” – which is also failing, since the officials have a vested interest in inflating the performance of the Afghans mercenaries under their command in order to secure promotions and merit badges. The Obama regime plans to increase the Afghan military from 97,000 in November 2009 to 134,000 in October 2010, to 171,000 in October 2011 a 75% increase in two years (Congressional Research Service 2010, p 13). The same increase occurs with the police: from 93,800 in November 2009 to 134,000 in October 2011 a 43% increase.

Obama’s claim that the war is gradually being handed over to the US “trained” Afghan army is fully belied by two other basic facts. The White House has requested $1.9 billion – double the 2009 level under Bush – for military construction of new bases and installations for a “long term presence” (which the con-man Obama claims does not mean a “permanent presence”). Secondly, using the familiar double-talk of the Obama regime, Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff now argue that Obama’s campaign promise of beginning the retirement of troops in July 2010 really means “a day we start transitioning … not a date we’re leaving”, which would be based on “conditions on the ground … a several year process” (Gates Testimony before Senate Armed Services Committee, December 2, 2009). In plain English “transitioning” is not “leaving”. It means staying, fighting and occupying Afghanistan for decades. It means adding more troops, building more bases. It means spending another $400 billion over the next 5 years. And it means doubling the number of American soldiers killed and wounded over the next 3 years, from over seven thousand to fourteen thousand.

The criteria of ‘success’ in Afghanizing the war is belied by the growing Americanizing of the bases, combat troops and expenditures. The reason is that the Afghan army figures are as phony as Obama’s promises. The number of US personnel is growing because the Afghan political puppets are so corrupt, ineffective and despised by their people that Washington has to surround them with “monitors”, “advisers” and “operatives” who in turn are totally incapable of relating to the needs and practices of the communities. Increased US “aid” has led to greater corruption, more unfulfilled promises and greater animosity from the would be popular recipients.

The fundamental problem is that this is an American war and that is why Afghan units suffer a 50% reduction of strength due to at a minimum, a 20% desertion rate, admitted by US military officials (Congressional Research, op cit, p.14). In other words, the Afghan recruits, take the money and their arms and return to their villages, neighborhoods, families, and perhaps not a few, use their military training, joining with the National Resistance. With such high levels of disaffection among Afghan recruits and even officials it is not surprising that the Resistance has such high quality intelligence on US troop movements. Given the degree of disaffection it is not surprising that some of the US intelligence collaborators are double agents or vulnerable to exposure and execution. Faced with a billion dollar recruitment program with high rates of desertion and the “turning of guns on their mentors,” the White House, Pentagon and Congress refuse to recognize the reality that the imperial occupations is the source of the resistance of almost the whole people. Instead they call for more trainees, more funds for “training programs”, more “transparent” mercenary contractors.

The reality is that with a bigger American occupation, with escalating military expenditures, the Resistance is growing, surrounding the major cities, targeting meetings in the center of Kabul and rocketing the biggest US military bases around the country. It is clear that the US has lost the war politically and is in the process of losing it militarily.

Despite the most advanced military technology, the drones, the Special Forces, the increase in the number of trainees, advisers, NGOers and the building of more military bases, the Resistance is winning. The White House by adding to the millions of displaced and murdered and maimed Afghans is increasing the hostility of the vast majority of the Afghans. Civilian killings are turning more and more of their military recruits into deserters and “unreliable” soldiers. Some of whom are ‘turned’ into committed combatants for the ‘other side’. As in Indo-China, Algeria and elsewhere, a popular, highly motivated guerrilla resistance army, deeply embedded in the national-religious culture of an oppressed population is proving more resistant, enduring and victorious over an alien high tech imperial army. Obama’s ‘rule or ruin’ Afghan War, sooner rather than later, will ruin America and end his shameful presidency.

The Major Jewish American Organizations Defend Israel’s Humiliation of America

“The Government of Israel has insulted the Vice President of the United States, and spat in the face of the President … they wiped the spit off their faces and smiled politely … as the saying goes: when you spit in the face of a weakling, he pretends that it‘s raining” Uri Avnery Israeli Jewish journalist 13/3/2010.

“We (Israel) possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets … most European capitals are targets of our air force … the Palestinians should all be deported. Two years ago, only 7 or 8 per cent of Israelis were of the opinion that this would be the best solution, two months ago, (January 2010), it was 33 percent and now according to a Gallup poll, the figure is 44 percent”. Martin Van Crevel Israeli, professor of military history at Hebrew University at Jerusalem and top adviser to the Israeli Armed Forces, March 2, 2010.

When Israel announced a major new Jews-only building project of 1600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem, it was not only “spitting in the face” of visiting Vice President Biden, it was demonstrating its power to humiliate America and Americans. Netanyahu was sending a message to world: Israel backed by its billionaire-financed Presidents of the 51 Major American Jewish Organizations, leads the US by the nose. The Jewish State can make an agreement with the White House one day and revoke it the next (with characteristic arrogance), US public opinion be damned. No sooner did the Obama Administration react to this most public show of impudence with Biden privately telling the Israeli Prime Minister that, “What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.", than Netanyahu openly called on the “American Jewish community” (the major Zionist organizations) to come to the defense of Israel and its claim on all of Jerusalem. And respond they did: turning the insulted victim (America) into the bully and blaming the US, not the Israeli government, for the “crisis” and for the breakdown of Israel’s agreement not to expand colonial settlements on occupied Palestinian land. As we shall describe, the entire Zionist power configuration in the United States (with a few notable exceptions) defended Israel’s effrontery and condemned any attempt by the US government to peacefully resolve a conflict, which threatened US lives, economic interests and prestige. This just confirmed world public opinion, which sees an American electorate willing to be humiliated by this economically insignificant state.

Whatever the insults and crimes of the moment, the conflict between Israel and the US is not about Netanyahu’s hyper-arrogance or a new series of Jerusalem land grabs, or even the frothy spittle on Vice President Biden’s face. It is, in essence, about the relation between states or, better still, the relation between peoples where one group (Israeli Jews and their powerful one percent fifth column agents in the US) exacts tribute and imposes wars in its own interests on another group (the US tax payers, soldiers, workers and businessmen). It arrogates power, not merely yesterday or today, but for the last 50 years.

In a broader historic context, the public humiliation of Vice President Biden in Tel Aviv pales in comparison to the Israeli’s cold blooded sneak attack, which killed and wounded over 200 American servicemen on the USS Liberty in June 1967. An arrogant and homicidal Israel humiliated the US through this attack, confident that then-President Lyndon Johnson would not retaliate but would even silence the survivors from ever telling their story to the American people. When Netanyahu calls on the “Jewish Communities” in the US he is not referring to the majority of American Jews. He, in fact, is addressing the Zionist power configuration whose strategically-placed members designed and promoted the Iraq war policy, which has caused the deaths and mutilation of thousands of US soldiers as well as over one million Iraqi civilians. In essence, the US soldier victims of the invasion of Iraq lost their lives, limbs and sanity for the interests of the Zionist “homeland”.

It is not merely that American Zionists defend the illegal construction of another Jews-only neighborhood in the middle of Palestinian East Jerusalem; the announcement was calculated to humiliate the visiting US Vice President. It’s not just a matter of US Zionist support for Netanyahu’s sabotage of a US peace initiative; nor is it about the unconditional ZPC support for Israeli crimes as they were being denounced by the United Nations and the peoples of the world. The fundamental issue is that the ZPC in the United States is turning our country and its people into defenders of Israel’s sordid crimes, casting the American people as accomplices to ethnic cleansing and degrading our moral sensibilities before the whole world.

Netanyahu’s symbolic spitting in Biden’s face was a calculated act of grave significance. It marked out Israel’s ‘will to power’ – its willingness to publicly humiliate US leaders and flaunt its power over the US before the world. Israel exposed US impotence in the Middle East and beyond. This incident has world-historic consequences for anyone who is not blind. The US is a declining power, which cannot create a secure environment for its soldiers, corporations and citizens anywhere in the Middle East or beyond. No European, Asian, Latin American or Muslim country can look at the US and its citizens without thinking, “Here is a country at the feet of Israeli leaders and at the throat of Israel’s designated ‘enemies’. It is an understatement to say that the US, as a nation and as a people, has “lost prestige”.

Israel has a long and ignoble history of sabotaging peace talks in favor of grabbing land. From its very foundation, Tel Aviv undermined peace offers through unprovoked military attacks. Israel, along with Britain and France, launched a full-scale surprise invasion of Egypt to grab the Suez Canal, after it had promised to consider Egyptian President Nasser’s proposal to negotiate. In more recent times, as soon as Arafat agreed to formally recognize Israel as a state and sign a peace agreement, Jewish tanks and jets attacked the West Bank killing hundreds and surrounding Arafat’s headquarters for months. At the same time it increased the number of the Jews-only settlements in the West Bank ten fold to accommodate over 500,000 fanatical paramilitary Jewish settlers. When the elected Hamas administration implemented a unilateral cease fire, Israel launched a major military assault, ultimately devastating Gaza and killing 1400 mostly unarmed Palestinians.

Israel’s actions, past and present, including land grabs, Jews-only apartheid roads and settlements and military invasions of Palestinian refugee camps and towns have destroyed the possibility of a negotiated peace agreement, which would compromise the Zionists’ vision of an ethnically-cleansed “Greater Israel”.

Given this spiteful history, it not surprising that Israel’s current apologists claim that the current land grab to build more Jews-only apartment blocks in Jerusalem is “nothing new”, that it is “part of our history”, that Jews “need the living space” and that “three thousand years of Biblical history tells us that all this land is ours” (quotes from the Daily Alert, March 15 -17, 2010, official mouthpiece of the Conference of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations).

The humiliation of Biden was not the first time that Israel acted publicly to embarrass the Obama Administration. In his first meeting with President Obama, Prime Minister Netanyahu openly rejected any freeze in new settlements. Indeed, Israel escalated its settlement building right after Obama addressed the Muslim-Arab world in his ‘Cairo Speech’.

What is behind Netanyahu’s perverse behavior and his US supporters’ overweening arrogance? How can the US media, hundreds of Congressional Representatives and all the leading Jewish American organizations, support an extremist racist regime, which attacked and humiliated our country with impunity? How can the American Zionists side with a foreign country over issues detrimental to basic US security interests and not be viewed as traitors by other Americans?

In the first place, Netanyahu has the support of 80% of the Israeli-Jewish population as he pursues the policy of evicting the Palestinians and expanding exclusively Jewish settlements on occupied lands despite US President Obama’s ‘peace overtures’. Humiliating the visiting US Vice President on a ‘peace mission’ from Obama only increased Netanyahu’s popularity with Israelis.

Secondly, this impudent projection of Israeli power over the reputed American ‘superpower’ appeals to the self-image of the far-right religious settlers whose leaders form the backbone of the current governing coalition (especially the Shas party).

Thirdly, insulting a gentile President and Vice President would find approval among the supporters of Netanyahu’s gangster Foreign Minister, Avi Lieberman and with the tough Eastern European Hasidic youth who routinely spit on elderly Christian monks and priests in their ancient Armenian and Greek quarters of Jerusalem.

It might seem strange for Israelis, who face increasing isolation throughout the Middle East and are condemned throughout Europe for their brutal colonial crimes, to glorify their thuggish leader as he heaps contempt on their most important military ally and economic supporter, its elected leaders and its citizens. Accumulated Israeli political resentment against world condemnation for their war crimes found an emotional outlet by identifying with Netanyahu’s antics: His relentless brutality against the ‘Untermenschen’ of Palestine and his willingness to openly defy the US Administration, even as Israel extracts $3 billion dollars a year from the Americans, re-enforces their sense of superiority. It is clear that Netanyahu’s totalitarian policies have a mass popular base among Israelis and his swaggering arrogance faithfully reflects the national psyche of Israel.

Netanyahu and his ministers calculated that no matter how hard they squeeze the hapless US taxpayers, themselves caught in the a profound economic crisis, and no matter how often the Israelis threaten to provoke a wider regional war and cause more American soldier casualties, they can always count on the unconditional support of the Zionist Power Configuration in the US to promote Israel’s interest. The entire US mass media applauded the Great Humiliator and even attacked the few American public figures as they (at least temporarily) defended American dignity against Israeli insults. The major Zionist leaders all rushed to support Israel’s humiliation of the US and to denigrate its critics. An endless parade of US politicians, editorial writers, columnists, opinion-makers, “think” tankers, and TV commentators demonstrated their special loyalty to Israel against an American president who was timidly seeking a negotiated peace in the Middle East.

The recent ‘conflict’ between Israel and America over peace in the Middle East –brought on by a crude Israeli provocation – exposed far more profound issues: At the center of power in America, there is an influential group of power-brokers willing to exploit and humiliate the American people in the service of a foreign power. In the past, patriots would have called them ‘traitors’.

In response to the official Washington show of anger, Netanyahu issued a half-hearted “explanation”: The problem was not the policy of building new settlements in violation of their agreement with Washington; the problem was the timing of the announcement. It was a regrettable “error” by a minor functionary in the Israeli Interior Ministry who made his announcement right after US Vice President Biden had finished groveling at Netanyahu’s feet and was busy pressuring the Palestinian Authority collaborators to rejoin the ‘peace’ charade sponsored by Washington. According to the Israeli media and their US mouthpieces it was a public relations breakdown, not a matter of strategic political and military significance affecting the US in the Middle East. In other words: With Biden out of Israel and collaborator Abbas back at the ‘table’, any announcement violating the “freeze on settlements” would be merely an Israeli “internal policy” and a “continuation of past practices”.

Netanyahu, fresh from spitting on Vice President Biden in Tel Aviv, administered a series of humiliating ‘back-handed’ slaps in the smiling face of President Obama, right under the glaring lights of the mass media in the US capital.

Bibi Netanyahu delivered a rabble rousing speech to over 7,000 cheering Zionists at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington, DC. He asserted Israel’s will to construct Jews-only housing throughout occupied Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank, repeating Israel’s illegal claim that Jerusalem was the undivided capital of the Jewish people. He then demanded and secured a two-hour meeting with Obama, despite his arrogant insult against the US Administration. Adding further humiliation to the already weak US President, the Israel government announced another Jews-only housing project in Arab East Jerusalem to be built on confiscated Palestinian property. This announcement, just hours before the planned Bibi-Barack meeting, carried an additional threat that the White House charade of ‘peace negotiations’ would be put off the table if the Americans protested this new round of illegal construction. Netanyahu, demonstrating his utter contempt for the White House and the America people, went straight to the Zion-colonized US Congress and secured the House Majority leader Pelosi’s ‘unconditional support…’ for Israeli expansion. And, as if to celebrate its victory and establish its own definition of ‘peace’, the Israeli military assassinated four un-armed Palestinians, two impoverished job-seekers and two young teenage protesters.

Loyalty to the Israeli masters was evident when thousands of Zionists fanatics jumped to their feet and cheered Bibi Netanyahu’s crude repudiation of the American efforts to protect its soldiers’ lives by promoting a peace initiative. Hillary Clinton’s call for a ‘peace settlement based on two states for two people’ was met with dead silence. The entire Zionist-dominated media and all the leading Jewish organizations backed an unprecedented series of humiliations directed against the elected US Administration and the American people. Netanyahu’s demagogic display of Israeli power over the US Congress and the American mass media and his crude willingness to degrade US political leaders in the nation’s capital mocks the very notion of the American people having any voice in their nation’s policies and subordinates America’s military high command over issues of war and peace in the Middle East.

For Pelosi and the Zionized Congress, the thousands of campaign shekels from the AIPAC crowd to fund their re-elections are far more crucial to their careers than the lives and limbs of thousands of US soldiers lost to an agenda of Israel and its domestic Fifth Column.

Israel’s leaders not only raised their domestic prestige by undermining the US Administration’s peace initiatives, they also managed to extract billions of dollars from the US taxpayers. The humiliation of the Obama regime derailed efforts by the Pentagon and the State Department to regain influence and credibility among the conservative Arab regimes, non-Arab Muslim nations and among hundred of millions of Muslims around the world. This humbling of the US Administration by a sneering Netanyahu further jeopardizes the work and security of American businessmen and officials operating in the Middle East and undermines relations with their Muslim and Arab counterparts.

There will be major setbacks for the US in its efforts to gain support for its wars in the Middle East and South Asia and its propaganda campaign to discourage young Muslims from joining the anti-US resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. The symbolic image of Vice President wiping away Israeli spittle during an official visit will encourage thousands of young Muslims to resist US occupation, which they view as promoting Israel’s agenda. If an economically insignificant Israel state can defy the superpower, why can’t they? The logic is simple: The greater the Israeli land-grab, the more submissive the Obama regime, the more extended and profound the hostility of the Muslim people against the Americans, the more emboldened the armed resistance movements and the greater the number of dead and maimed American soldiers stuck in wars promoted by the Zionists.

While the losses of American soldiers in the Middle East have never figured in Tel Aviv’s policy moves, nor influenced the activities of its Fifth Colum in the USA, these losses do affect millions of American families and over 200 million American taxpayers. Even an occasional American General finds the courage to point out that Israel’s colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people has prolonged the war, tied up hundreds of thousands of US troops and undermined the capacity of the US armed forces to successfully operate on multiple fronts to promote US imperial interests.

When the head of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), General Petraeus’ team of senior officers, identified “Israeli intransigence” as “jeopardizing US standing and the lives of American solders in the region (Middle East)” in a briefing before the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on January 16, 2010, Petraeus met an onslaught of severe questioning from the ZPC. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullens received the same rebuke from the powerful Israel-Firsters. This was not the first time US military and security considerations were subsumed to Israel’s agenda. Only two years earlier in 2007, the ZPC denounced and successfully buried the annual National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) prepared by 16 US military and civilian intelligence agencies, which had concluded that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons and did not pose a major threat to the US, in favor of Israeli disinformation arguing the opposite. And the same ZPC has been taking the Obama regime to task for daring to criticize Netanyahu.

Over 300 members of the US Congress signed an extraordinary letter supporting Israel against their own Administration, pledging their commitment to "the unbreakable bond that exists between [U.S.] and the State of Israel". Hundreds of congress men and officials joined the over 7,000 participants at the March 2010 AIPAC conference to cheer Netanyahu and witness the US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton hail the leader of the Israeli settler state – who had pledged “to continue building in all of Jerusalem just as it does in Tel Aviv”.

General David Petraeus, whose senior officers had expressed his concern about Israel’s policies undermining US military interests to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullins, was no match for the AIPAC. The CENTCOM commander contacted his Israeli counterpart General Gabi Ashkenazi to repudiate his own criticism of Israeli policies and, in effect, pledge his unconditional support to the Jewish state even when it jeopardizes US troops.

In January, General Petraeus correctly identified how Israeli intransigence had damaged US interests and operations in the Middle East, infuriated Arabs and ultimately increased attacks on American troops. But in March, the politically ambitious General hastened to retract his briefing before the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There are few more cravenly disloyal spectacles in US military history than this bemedaled American general prostrating himself for the Zionist lobby.

And yet, for a brief moment, a few desperate anti-Zionists leftists, looked to General Petraeus and Admiral Mullen as potential allies against Israeli-Zionist control of US policy in the Middle East. They ignored the fact that these are the commanders in charge of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and were preparing to confront Iran. Petraeus’ difference with Israel was over specific policies as they undermined the smooth operations of the US war machine in the Middle East and his ‘recantation’ before the Israelis has certainly thrown cold water of this romantic fantasy of a ‘nationalist’ US General.

The tradition of ‘civilian supremacy’ in the US ensures that the military will never confront the issue of Zionist control over the Congress and White House. Petraeus’ briefing will be soon forgotten and the General’s subsequent repudiation is an eloquent example of the grotesquely opportunistic nature of the American high military command.

When civilian leaders point out how Israel’s oppression of 5 million Palestinians jeopardizes American lives and interests in the Middle East, the Zionist power configuration deflects attention from Israel and blames the US (and its ‘permissive’ society) for having instigated the growing Islamist movement, Arab hostility and attacks. When American military leaders, strategists and intelligence officers assert that Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians is a leading cause of regional conflict based on their decades of field expertise, the arm-chair Generals among the Zionists re-interpret this straightforward identification of Israeli policy with attacks on American interests and troops as “another point of view”. In the meantime the ZPC rounds up the usual Congressional or White House Israel Firsters to “disown” their own military.

Israel’s narrowly conceived colonial policy, the eviction of massive numbers of Palestinians and the land grabs to construct Jews-only colonial settlements, undermines US authority in the Middle East among its allies. Israel’s brazen willingness and ability to openly bash President Obama, thoroughly discredits the contention among liberal Zionist apologists like Noam Chomsky that Imperial Washington is “in command” of Western policy in the Middle East and is acting on behalf of much broader Euro-American interests.

In a wider context, Israel’s arrogance damages attempts by US private investors to broker oil deals for multi-national corporations. Arab oil countries, which see themselves as threatened by a regional militarist power like Israel, with its colonial expansion and hegemonic ambitions, are unlikely to cooperate with the American, especially when the superpower is impotent to curb Israel’s worst excesses.

For Israel and its Fifth Column backers none of the US strategic concerns are as important as the Jewish state’s colonial conquests and its regional projections of power. Nor are the interests of the American people given much consideration when they come in conflict with Israeli expansionist colonial goals. The ZPC never considers or even discusses the fact that Americans have suffered major losses as a result of Israel’s relentless pursuit of military-driven power in the Middle East.

Israel’s primary goal of grabbing land and dispossessing Palestinians goes against the post-colonial ethos of the American people, who experience increased hostility overseas. The only beneficiaries of Israel colonial expansion are the small but powerful 51 American Jewish Zionist organizations which identify with and are loyal to the Israeli state.

Israel’s unilateral military aggression and threats against neighboring countries, including Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and its cross-border covert assassinations, most recently in Dubai, are of great importance to Israeli militarists as Israel projects power in the Middle East. The self-esteem of Israel’s militarized citizens is directly linked to their policy of aggression and assassinations without regard to national sovereignty. On the other hand, Israeli power projections have undermined the US efforts to diplomatically expand its own sphere of influence and negotiate multi-billion dollar military sales, trade and investment agreements in the Middle East. The fact that Israeli policies have jeopardized millions of jobs for American workers is an issue of no importance to the Jewish state and its affluent Israel First backers in the US.

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon forced the pro-US Harari faction to form a coalition with the anti-imperialist Hezbollah political-military movement. Israel’s attempt to impose its will on Lebanon through its bombing campaign, torpedoed US diplomatic and political efforts to consolidate its influence with President Harari.

Netanyahu’s successful bullying of Obama and Biden simply reinforced the ties between the pro-Western Lebanese and the anti-colonial Muslim left, in the face of Washington’s incapacity to constrain the Israeli ‘wildmen’ or resist the ‘internal rot’ eroding an independent American initiative: Better to join forces with Hezbollah, which after all fought Israel to a standstill in 2006.

Israel’s loyal accomplices in the US government have caused enormous damage to the US economy and threaten even greater loss of American lives, as the Israel seeks to direct US policy toward Iran. Under the forceful and aggressive direction of Israel Firsters and the powerful Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Stuart Levey, every major US oil and gas company, bank, petroleum exploration and drilling firms and countless other business concerns have given up hundreds of billion dollars in lucrative economic trade an investment deals in the interest of Israel, which has extracted over $60 billion dollars of US taxpayer money and handouts and aid during the last decade.

Iran, which backed the US imperial attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, provided the US military with far more strategic assistance than all the Israeli advisers, ‘experts’ and contracted ‘interrogators’ in Baghdad and Iraqi ‘Kurdistan’ put together. Despite the US recognition of Iranian assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is demonized as ‘the enemy’ by Israeli agents within the US because Tehran opposes Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Israel’s Fifth Column churns out hundreds of articles a month demanding brutal economic sanctions against Iran and a pre-emptive military blitz aimed at destroying the Iranian economy and a nation of over 70 million. Every US military commander in the Middle East has acknowledged that an attack on Iran will expand the war, cut vital shipping of oil in the Persian Gulf plunging the world economy into recession, and threaten the lives of scores of thousands of American soldiers. They also are aware that the prospect of thousands of American casualties would not deter the 51 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, the AIPAC-controlled US Congress members, or the likes of Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey from promoting or provoking a war with Iran. The leading Israel-First advocates for war with Iran are unconcerned with the inevitable thousands of US military casualties and the millions of American jobs lost, as they promote the expansion and supremacy of “Greater Israel” in all its arrogance and glory throughout the Middle East.

Is it any wonder that, when visiting American leaders are openly insulted by the racist regime of Prime Minister ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, American Zionists automatically side with Israel and condemn those who protest in defense of American dignity?

The Daily Alert, principle bulletin of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, provides a useful compilation of the articles, editorials and government documents, defending Israel against the US Administration’s efforts to seek diplomatic solutions. From March 15 – 19, 2010 the Israeli-ZPC juggernaut released a remarkable propaganda offensive, vividly underscoring the immense power of the Zionist power configuration in the US. As soon as the White House publicly rebuked Prime Minister Netanyahu for insulting Vice President Biden during his official visit to Israel, the Zionist power configuration, claiming to speak for all the “Jewish communities”, came out in defense of Israel and attacked the Obama Administration. A barrage of articles, editorials and press conferences materialized overnight, with the usual parade of zombie-like Congressional mouthpieces parroting the Zionist line and applying direct pressure on the White House. This multi-prong Zionist offensive, under Netanyahu’s direction, was successful in persuading the White House to return to its characteristic belly-crawl: Clinton, Biden and the rest of their gang retreated, reasserting the US “unconditional defense of Israel”, declaring the ‘non-existence’ of the crisis and asserting the ‘rock solid’ American relation with Israel. The chain of command is revealing: The Israeli state orders the Zionist power configuration into action; the mass media disseminates the line; Congress marches lock-step for the Zionists and the White House retreats. Delighted with their success, Zionist propagandists roll out their own polls claiming the US public support for Israel -- a public saturated with Israeli manufactured and American Zionist trumpeted propaganda. Clearly what such “polls” measure is the effectiveness of a monolithic mass media campaign.

The propaganda tactics utilized in this blitzkrieg media campaign involved placing blame on the insulted victim and attacking “the Administration for sparking a full blown crisis” (Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2010). It went on to denounce the US Administration officials for “condemning” and “pushing” Israel (Washington Post, March 15 – 19, 2010). Other publications accused President Obama of ‘playing into the hand’ of Arab extremists and “fanning the flames” ,(Fox News and Christian Science Monitor, March 18, 2010). It was the US President, who had been “hindering the peace talks” by “encouraging Palestinian intransigence”. Haaretz, the Israeli’s liberal newspaper, which has published articles critical of the Israeli Occupation, released a series of articles, opinion pieces and editorials by ‘experts’ and ‘military strategists’ accusing the US Administration of “orchestrating the crises” (March 14, 2010) and called for the Israeli government not to ‘grovel’ by apologizing to the US Vice President (March 15). CBS claimed that “Obama was pushing the US-Israeli alliance to the brink” (March 15). And on March 17, the Boston Globe accused Obama of “aggravating Israel’s mistake”. AIPAC methodically contacted its usual Congressional flunkeys to denounce the White House for rebuking the Israeli government.

By March 19, the Washington Post had published over a dozen diatribes calling for US acceptance of Israel’s settlement expansion. Zionist think tanks and front groups with deceptive names, like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, blamed the displaced Palestinians for sabotaging “the peace process” by protesting the accelerated Israeli land confiscation and settlements (Scripps – Howard and Fox News, March 18, 2010). Predictably, the New York Times provided a slightly liberal gloss by calling for reconciliation and an end to the crises, while never mentioning the public Israeli humiliation of Vice President Biden or considering how Israel’s latest grab of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem might endanger US lives and interests. The Times ignored General Petraeus testimony before Congress and his briefing, critical of Israeli policy, before the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, while giving prominence to Netanyahu’s “peace talks” (March 18, 2010).

A few fissures have appeared in the pro-Israel monolith: David Axelrod, Obama’s chief adviser, condemned Netanyahu’s provocation as an “insult”; New York Times top columnist, Thomas Friedman, described the Israeli leaders as “drunken drivers”; and a leading US rabbi called for a building freeze in Jerusalem. These few liberal Zionist critics were overwhelmed by scores parroting ZPC ‘talking points’: Bronner and Sanger of the New York Times, Walter Mead of American (SIC) Interest and Goldberg of the New Yorker, among others.

The craven capitulation, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was inevitable. On March 16 Secretary Clinton declared that, “we have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security. We have a close unshakeable bond between the United States and Israel and between the American and Israeli people”. To prove her fealty to Israeli and Zionist interests, Clinton became featured speaker at the APAC Conference, March 21 – 26, 2010, sharing the platform with a triumphant Bibi Netanyahu.

Israel had to openly humiliate the US as a show of its power. Given Israel’s strategic domination of the US political system and the ZPC control over mass media and their enormous wealth, a Zionist-controlled administration, like Obama’s, would have to capitulate. Israeli and US Zionist pressure forced the American leaders to subordinate their international image and national self-respect and accept the unlimited expansion of Jews-only settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, no matter how this might undermine US standing in the region and jeopardize US troops. By ‘whipping’ the Obama Administration into line, Israel has set the stage for the launching of its top priority: Forcing a direct US military confrontation with Iran in Israel’s strategic interests. It is clear that the entire ZPC will stand with Israel as it promotes its militarist agenda against Iran, regardless of the consequences to the United States.

It has been proven beyond a doubt by the recent events, that the ZPC has the ultimate say with the Obama Administration, against the advice of top US military officials and against the basic interests of the American people. In plain English, we are a people colonized and directed by a small, extremist and militarist ‘ally’ which operates through domestic proxies, who, under any other circumstance, would be openly denounced as traitors.

Can the ZPC be defeated? They are the “most powerful lobby in Washington”, to whom Presidents, Administration officials, Generals and Congress people must submit or risk having their careers ruined and being ousted from public office. Meanwhile,outside of the United States, the international community openly despises Israel as a brutal, racist colonial state, a war criminal and chronic violator of human rights and international law. The Middle East Quartet, made up of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, has condemned Israel’s plan to build another 1,600 homes exclusively for Jewish extremist settlers in Arab East Jerusalem. The Quartet demanded “the speedy creation of a Palestinian state and the end to provocative actions”. But the ‘Quartet’ is powerless to stop Israeli plans. The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations tell their followers that global “anti-Semitism” motivates the ‘Quartet’. The huge AIPAC “Hail Israel” Conference in Washington D.C. in late March celebrated the triumph of unfettered Israeli expansionism.

Nevertheless, some Israelis are beginning to express unease. After their initial euphoria over Netanyahu’s slap-down of Biden and face-up to Clinton, there is growing fear of Israeli being ‘weaned’ away from the American treasury and losing their unfettered access to the US latest military technology. A poll published on March 19 in Yedroth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s biggest dailies, revealed that 46% of their readers responded that the government should freeze settlement building in East Jerusalem, much to the chagrin of the US Israel Firsters, who might in other circumstances, have labeled these Jews anti-Semites.

Fissures in the Zionist monolith are beginning to appear. These would deepen if and when the American public realizes that Israel’s’ dispossession of Palestinians is raising havoc with American lives and with American interests in a vital part of the world populated by 1.5 billion Muslim. As more issues arise, the critical choice between following the lead of the ZPC in pledging unconditional allegiance to Israel and enduring its provocations and humiliations, or standing up for the dignity, basic interests and integrity of America, will have to be made. More fissures will appear and the AIPAC and other members of the ZPC will be seen for what they are: Swaggering bullies acting on behalf of a foreign power.

US – China: Provoking the Creditor, Hugging the Holy man (Washington’s Road to Ruin)

The Obama Administration has heightened tensions with China through a series of measures which can only be characterized as major provocations designed to undermine relations between the two countries. These provocations include political support for separatist movements, such as the US-funded theocratic-monk led Tibetan secessionists and the Washington-based Uyghur secessionists, as well as through the $6.4 billion-dollar advanced arms sales to Taiwan, a virtual protectorate of the US Navy. President Obama has publicly met with and openly backed these separatist and secessionists groups, flaunting Washington’s refusal to recognize China’s existing borders. This is part of the US strategy of encouraging the physical break-up of independent nations, which are viewed as ‘obstacles’ to its program of global military empire building.

In addition to continuing and escalating the hostile policies of his predecessor, the Obama Administration has exploited several other issues in order to rally American public opinion and mobilize overseas allies behind its confrontational posture. First, the Obama Administration claims that China’s currency (the Renminbi) is artificially undervalued to give Chinese exports an unfair price advantage, thus undercutting US manufacturing exports and costing “millions of American jobs”. And secondly, the Administration claims that, after the US had opened its domestic manufacturing market to Chinese firms, the Chinese would not ‘reciprocate’ and open their financial sectors to Wall Street investment banks.

In retaliation for growing Chinese exports, Washington has raised protective tariffs on steel pipes and automobile tires, and issued Congressional threats of further protectionist measures.

The US has insists that other nations support its aggressive policy toward Iran, including imposing trade, investment and financial sanctions, supporting the provocative US naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and backing Israel’s bellicose threats to bomb Teheran. In contrast, China rejects economic sanctions, in favor of negotiations, while increasing its trade and investments in strategic sectors of the Iranian economy. In the United Nations Security Council, the US has exerted diplomatic and mass media pressure to force China to vote for a Zionist-authored proposal of wide-reaching sanctions against Iran. Obama refuses to accept China’s rejection of the US military-driven policy of regime change and the Chinese pursuit of free trade with Iran.

The US Administration’s selective definition of “self-determination” includes giving support to secessionist ethno-religious regional movements in China, while, at the same time, invading and occupying independent states, like Iraq and Afghanistan, ordering missile attacks on other states, like Pakistan and Somalia, establishing over 700 military bases world-wide with extra-territorial jurisdiction and engaging in assassinations of its opponents abroad via the CIA and Special Forces.

In contrast, China is not at war and opposes military invasions of sovereign states. China does not have overseas military bases and is menaced by the US policy of encircling China’s frontiers with American bases in client states in Northeast, Southeast and Central Asia.

While US military occupation forces brutally violate human rights of millions of citizens in occupied or targeted countries, and threaten the civil rights of critical Americans with arbitrary rulings, secret trials and the suspension of habeas corpus, the Obama regime excoriates China for its prosecution of opposition activists.

The Obama regime has latched onto a conflict between a private US corporation, Google, and Chinese hackers, which it alleges are state sponsored, turning the issue into a major struggle for “internet freedom” at the level of state to state relations. Despite the expanding presence of scores of US-owned IT companies in China, the Obama regime has raised the issue of “internet censorship” to the level of a major ideological confrontation.

Climate change is another source of aggravation between the states. At the Copenhagen summit in December 2009, Obama rejected any formal agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions while deflecting criticism and blame on to China and other developing countries, which had agreed to informal substantive targets on CO2 reductions.

Of all these points of contention, the most serious is Washington’s financial, diplomatic and political support for ethnic secessionist groups in China, threatening the security and territorial integrity of the Chinese state. This paramount issue has re-awakened painful memories of earlier imperialist carving up of China, its rich port cities and territories and has forced the Chinese authorities to consider retaliatory measures.

The Obama regime’s political and diplomatic provocations against China in pursuit of its military-driven empire, come at a very high real and potential price. We cannot assume that China will remain a stoic punching bag for the US, absorbing territorial threats, economic pressures and gratuitous diplomatic insults without taking counter-measures especially in the economic sphere.

Obama’s provocative militarist posturing toward China endangers major US private and public economic interests, including China’s financing of the burgeoning US debt.

China is the world’s largest and fastest growing investor in US securities. According to a detailed study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) (July 30, 2009), China holds a vast amount of long-term treasury debt, US agency debt, US corporate debt, US equities and short-term debt estimated at over $1.2 trillion. China’s investment in US Treasury securities were used to help finance the economic ‘recovery’ (such as it is). If the Obama regime persists in its provocations, China may decide to unload a large share of its US securities holdings, inducing other foreign investors to also sell off their holdings (CRS op cit). This would lead to a sharp depreciation of the dollar and force Washington to raise interest rates, which could drive the US into a deeper recession/depression. Economists, who claim Chinese economic interests would suffer from such a sell off, overlook the fact that for Beijing, national sovereignty is more important than short-term economic losses, especially in view of US support for secessionist movements. Moreover, the Chinese have a high rates of savings, huge foreign reserves and increasingly diverse markets and suppliers of essential commodities. China is in a better position to absorb the ‘shock’ of a decline in US economic relations resulting from American bellicosity than the debt-ridden, negative-saving, military-driven North American economy.

Almost all of the 400 biggest US multi-national corporations, listed in Forbes, have major profitable investments in China, which are growing. The Obama regime’s increasingly confrontational position toward China puts these investments at risk.

US foreign investments in China far exceed the latter’s investments in the US, according to a report published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. In 2006, China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) in the US was $600 million, while US investments in China were $22.2 billion. The Report goes on to state “…the complaints by many American businesses and politicians that China can invest in US companies with relative ease while China still tightly restricts access to Chinese markets and companies appear not to be borne out by the numbers”. The US government has, in fact, blocked several large scale investments by Chinese companies, including the multi-billion dollar purchase of an oil company (UNOCAL), an appliance company (Maytag) and computer company (3Com Corp). Chinese investments in the US are not always profitable. The Sovereign Wealth Fund (a Chinese government-run investment fund) lost over 50% of its $8 billion-dollar investment in the finance groups, Blackstone Group and Morgan Stanley, in less than a year.

The Obama regime’s complaints about China’s “restrictive” treatment of US companies fly in the face of economic reality. The attacks are part of a political strategy of anti-Chinese propaganda to heighten the American public’s antagonism against China and rally domestic support for any military confrontation. Even as US companies in China reap profits a thousand times greater than Chinese investments in the US, and the leading investment houses swindle Chinese sovereign investors of billions, the White House claims foul play!.

China’s much-maligned policy of restricting financial takeovers by Wall Street firms was one of the reasons the US speculative collapse did not impact its economy. And still Washington continues to attack Beijing on the issue of “opening Chinese financial markets to Wall Street”.

The Obama regime has repeatedly raised the issue of China’s ‘undervalued’ currency, conveniently ignoring the fact that China’s imports from the US are growing faster than its exports to the US. Between 2006 – 2008 US annual exports to China grew 32%, 18%, 9.5%, while its imports of Chinese goods grew 18.2%, 11.7%, 5.1%. Moreover top US exports included electrical machinery and equipment, power generation equipment, oil seeds and oleaginous fruits, aero-space products, optical equipment and iron and steel – a broad spectrum of American industrial products with high value-added, well-paying skilled employment and lucrative profits.

Moreover, the fact that US exports to China include a diverse array of manufacturing sectors and are competitive at the current exchange rate, suggests that the vast US trade deficit with China has less to do with China’s currency policy and more to do with US public and private investment policies and the relative strengths of the productive forces of each economy. In large part, the majority of exports from China to the US are the result of US multi-national corporate decisions to produce and sub-contract in China. In other words, the trade deficit with China is directly related to US corporate global investment strategy, which, in turn, flourished after the US government liberalized it rules and deregulated US corporate conduct. Liberal investment policies under the US government, and not Chinese “unfair trade rules”, are a major cause of the trade deficit.

The angry posture adopted by the Obama regime toward China’s “undervalued” currency is a political ploy to deflect attention from its disastrous liberal economic policies and its support for the investment conduct of large US corporations.

The US annual trade deficit with China has grown almost four fold between 1999 – 2008, from $68.7 billion to $266.3 billion. The growth of the trade deficit coincides with the massive shift of US investment from manufacturing to speculative financial, real estate and insurance activities. In other words, the US re-directed its investment strategies from producing useful, quality commodities for domestic consumption and export to importing manufactured goods from abroad at a greater profit for the corporations. The weakening of US productive capacity - its productive forces - was reflected in its declining competitive position and its deepening trade imbalances. Given the tight relations between the White House and Wall Street, policy makers sought to blame Chinese monetary officials for an undervalued currency, rather than confront the bubble economy stimulated by the policies of the Federal Reserve and generated by the Wall Street investment houses, whose executives go on to occupy key economic posts in the US government and who provide substantial funding for electoral campaigns.

In those economic sectors where US investment has led to increased efficiency, like agriculture, the US has competed successfully. China is the leading buyer of American soybeans and cotton – accounting for over half world sales of the former and between almost a third of the latter according to the U.S. International Trade Commission and the US Department of Commerce.

China’s economic relations with the US have been extraordinarily lucrative and favorable to the big US capitalists and the American government. By purchasing low-interest US Treasury notes, China has financed US trade and budget deficits, which are the result of exorbitant military spending, multiple imperial wars and occupations, and unproductive speculative investments. The US multi-nationals have reaped high rates of profit from their investments in China, profits far in excess of what they would have gained in the US, and many times more than what a few Chinese firms earn in the more restrictive US climate. Important US economic sectors in aerospace, agro business, port facilities, transport and giant commercial retailers and importers depend on and profit from trade with China. US speculators have been able to rake in huge profits from the Chinese Sovereign Funds by pumping and dumping speculative US stocks.

As China’s dynamic growth and rate of consumer demand continue to race ahead of the US, American exports to China outpace its imports from China.

The growing political antagonism and reckless diplomatic actions against China taken by the White House and Congress serve to undermine the basic economic interests of a broad swath of US capitalist enterprises as well as the credibility of the US economy. What is even more striking is that many of the charges leveled against Beijing, including its ‘unfair treatment’ of investors and ‘closed economy’ – apply with greater force to Washington.

The key to understanding this paradox of economic gain and political hostility lies in the fundamentally different political and economic structures and global strategies of the two countries. The US economy has been driven by its financial and speculative capitalist classes, which in turn wield decisive political influence over state economic policy. At the same time, the commercial capitalist class is more attuned to importing manufactured goods, rather than in long-term investment in research, development in the American manufacturing sector. Neither commercial nor financial capital has a stake in stimulating US exports and in investing in the productive forces of the country. The design and implementation of US global strategy is controlled by the civilian militarists and imperial ideologues, (especially the Zionists) in government and their counterparts in sectors of the military high command.

In contrast to the Chinese market-driven quest for global power, US imperialism is built around military conquest and appropriation of economic wealth. The disproportionate influence exercised by the civilian militarists in the US government has resulted in a series of foreign wars, which have severely strained the US economy and led to a military definition of US global objectives. Faced with China’s growing economic relations and influence in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East and Beijing’s opposition to US military-driven imperial policies against Iran, the Washington has escalated its political provocations, diplomatic pressures and interference in Chinese internal affairs. As these external pressures increase, Chinese public opinion turns more nationalistic, which in turn serves as a basis for US mass media charges of “xenophobia” and “chauvinism” on the part of the Chinese. The irrational nature of the recent anti-China propaganda promoted by the US mass media is most evident in the shrill warnings of a Chinese military threat to Asian security, especially when the US continues to expand its chain of military bases encircling China from South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Australia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. China has neither military bases abroad nor naval fleets off the coasts of any US or allied territory.

The greater the US reliance on military force, brutal economic sanctions and outright blockades to overthrow regimes and extend its network of client regimes, the greater its hostility toward China, which is expanding its economic ties with US ‘adversaries’, such as Iran, Venezuela, Sudan, Nicaragua, etc.

The US has severely weakened its productive forces in the process of funding a global military machine. China, on the other hand, has sought to become a world power on the bases of the long-term, large-scale development of its productive forces, even in the face of US opposition. At each and every turn, Washington has passed up enormous opportunities for the US economy from China’s dynamic growth, booming market and overseas economic expansion, in favor of petty provocations.

Ultimately what we have is a conflict between two diametrically opposing political economic systems.

On the one hand, a United States military driven empire, which focuses on conquering Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran, backs the ambitions of a militarist Israel, seeks marginal client states in Latin America and militarizes Pakistan, Colombia and Mexico.

On the other hand, China deepens its economic ties with dynamic Asian countries; increases its oil links with Saudi Arabia, Iran, the Gulf States, Venezuela, Russia and Angola; displaces the US as the leading trading partner of Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Chile; and increases its trade and investment links with Southern Africa in minerals and related infrastructure projects. The contrast is striking.

China’s global economic expansion is confronted by US military encirclement, diplomatic provocations and a massive anti-Chinese propaganda campaign designed to deflect US public attention from the extreme imbalances in its domestic economy. Instead of looking inward to understand why the US is declining, the Obama regime encourages the public to blame China’s supposedly unfair trade policies, its ‘restrictive’ investment policies, its manipulated currency rate and its tough response to secessionist movements funded by the US.

In the end the US will not resolve its budget deficits and trade imbalances, not to mention its endless imperial wars, by pandering to self-described divine rulers, like the Dali Lama, and provoking a dynamic economic power such as China. Nor can Washington escape its profound economic imbalances by catering to Wall Street speculators and ignoring the decline of America’s productive forces. Drones, military surges and surrogate puppet armies engaged in endless wars are no match for the surging investments, robust developing markets and joint ventures linking China with the dynamic emerging economies of the world.

The principle propaganda mouthpiece of the Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO), the Daily Alert (DA), has come out in full support for Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassination.

In the face of world-wide governmental condemnation (except from the Zionist-occupied White House and US Congress), the PMAJO slavishly backs any brutal murder committed by the Israeli secret police anywhere in the world and at anytime. The recent assassination of Hamas leader, Mahmoud Mabhouh, in Dubai is a case in point. The PMAJO has defended all of Mossad’s criminal actions leading up to the murder, including extensive identity theft and the stealing or falsification of passports and official documents from several European countries, presumably allied to the Zionist state. Among the Mossad agents who entered Dubai to kill Mabhouh, twelve agents used stolen or forged British passports, three Australian, three French, one German and six Irish. These agents assumed the identity of European citizens in order to commit murder in a sovereign nation.

Once again the PMAJO demonstrate that its first loyalty is to the Israeli secret police, even when they violate the sovereignty of major US allies. No doubt the PMAJO would readily support the Israeli Mossad, even if it were shown to have used U.S. documents to assassinate Mabhouh. In fact, two of the 26 Israeli assassins, carrying fake Irish and fake British passports, are known to have entered the United States after the killing and may still be here.

The position adopted by the Daily Alert and the PMAJO in defense of Israel’s international terrorist act followed several lines of attack, which will be discussed below. These include: (1) blaming the victim, (2) claiming that extra-judicial, extra territorial murders are legal, (3) minimizing the murder of ‘one’ individual, (4) deflecting attention from the Zionists by blaming ‘other Arab’s, (5) favorably comparing Mossad assassinations to US killings in Afghanistan, (6) trivializing and relativizing world condemnation, (7) citing “self-defense”, (8) praising the high tech ‘operational details’ of the assassination and (9) discrediting the Dubai police investigators rather than the Israeli perpetrators.

Abridged articles, cited in the Daily Alert, have appeared in the op-ed pages of several US, UK, Canadian and Israeli newspapers, as well as in rightwing magazines like Forbes and Commentary. The mainline Zionist propaganda technique is to avoid any discussion of Israel’s egregious crimes against sovereignty, due process, international law and the personal security of individuals. In doing so, the Daily Alert adopts the propaganda techniques common to all totalitarian regimes practicing state terrorism.

On February 22, the Daily Alert (DA) headlined two articles, which were entitled: “Killed Hamas Official betrayed by Associates says Dubai Police Chief” and “Hamas: Assassinated Operative put Himself at Risk”. The DA forgot to mention that Israeli secret police had been tracking their prey for over a month (having failed to assassinate him on six previous attempts) and that the Dubai Police Chief was not blaming Hamas officials but was in the process of accumulating evidence, witness statements, videos and documents proving the Israeli identities of the assassins. Needless to say, if we were to accept the American Zionists’ argument that any leading opponent of Israel, who travels without an army of bodyguards, is “putting himself at risk”, then we must acknowledge that ours is a lawless world where Israeli hit squads are free to commit murder anywhere, any time.

(2) Extra-Judicial, Extra territorial Murder is “Legal” (At least if the killers are Mossad)

The February 22 and February 24 issues of the DA include two articles arguing that Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial murder is legal. One article is entitled, “The Legality of Killing of Hamas Mahmoud al Mabhoud” and the other, “The Proportionate Killing of Mahmoud al Mabhoud”. These avoid any reference to international law, which emphatically rejects cross-border, state-sponsored murders. Legality, for the PMAJO, is whatever the Israel’s secret police apparatus deems expedient in pursuit of its goal of eliminating leaders who oppose its colonial occupation and expropriation of Palestinian lands. If Israel’s extra-judicial, extra-territorial murder of an adversary in Dubai is legal, why not assassinate opponents in the US, Canada, England or any other country where they might travel, live, work or write? What if the critics and opponents of Israel decided that it was now “legal” to murder Israel’s supporters wherever they lived citing the Daily Alert’s definition of legality? We would then find ourselves in a lawless world of “legal” murder and totalitarian cross-border surveillance.

The Feb 22, 24, and 25 issues of the Daily Alert deflect attention from the Mossad murder by making comparison to the hundreds of Afghan civilians killed by US drone attacks. The claim is that “targeting individuals” is less a crime than mass killings. The problem with this argument is that for decades Mossad has “targeted” scores of opponents overseas and killed thousands of Palestinians in the occupied territories (where they work with the domestic secret police, Shin Bet, and the military, IDF). Moreover, this argument linking Israel’s extra judicial assassinations with US colonial killing of Afghans is hardly a defense of either. By implicating the US in its defense of state terror, Israel is holding up the worst aspects of American imperialism as a standard for its own political behavior. One state’s crimes are no justification for another’s.

The DA Feb. 22 article entitled “The Assassination Heard Around the World” insinuates that the murder was a “result of a Hamas power struggle” or by one of “many Arab groups who loathes the Islamist Hamas”.

In other words, all the forged or stolen European passports of Israeli dual citizens, and the Dubai security videos of Mossad operatives in various costumes, not to mention the jubilant affirmation by top Israeli leaders of the killing, was in reality ‘Arab tricks’. This crude propaganda ploy by the most prominent Jewish American organization reveals their own descent into a fantasy land of self-delusion, possible only in the closed world of US Zionist politics.

The DA published several articles praising the technical details of the Mossad assassination in Dubai, an aspect of the operation, with which few Israel security experts would agree. The Feb. 24 DA article entitled, “Assassination Shows Skillful Planning” chastises Israel’s critics for not recognizing the high quality of the “operational aspects” of the killings and recommends its “lessons for all intelligence services around the world”. Like sociopaths and serial killers, US Zionists openly promote Israeli death squad techniques to all fellow state terrorists. In the DA, professional techniques of assassination are far more important than universal moral repugnance of political murders.

The DA on Feb. 25 cited a long and tendentious attack on the Dubai police, published in Forbes Magazine, which ridiculed their meticulous investigations uncovering Mossad’s roles in the murder. In this article, the Dubai authorities were condemned for uncovering Israeli involvement while not investigating the source of the murder victims’ … Iraqi passport! Instead of encouraging the Dubai police pursuit of justice, the Daily Alert published a long diatribe implicating Dubai in the attacks of 9/11/2001, its continued trade with Iran, its ‘involvement’ in international terrorism etc. There was no mention of Dubai’s relatively friendly position to Israel and Israelis prior to Mossad’s blatant violation of its sovereignty.

The American Zionist propaganda campaign in defense of Israeli state terror and, specifically, Mossad’s murder of a Hamas leader in Dubai, relies on lies, evasions and specious legal arguments. This “defense” violates all precepts of a civilized society as well as the most recent American federal laws prohibiting all forms of support for international terrorism. The PMAJO can pursue its defense of Mossad’s acts of international terrorism with impunity in the US because of its power over the US Congress, the Obama White House and the American mass media. This ensures that only its version of events, its definition of legality and its lies will be heard by legislators, echoed by Zionist activists and embellished by its solemn defenders in academic and journalistic circles. To counter the American Zionist defense of Israel’s practice of extra-territorial, extra-judicial executions by the Mossad, we need American writers and academics to step forward. It is time to expose their flimsy arguments, bold-face lies and audacious immorality. It is time to speak out against their impunity, before another Israeli secret police murder takes place, possibly inside the USA itself and with the shameless complicity of Zionist accomplices.

The authorities in Dubai have found clear evidence that the Mossad assassination team received support from European Zionists. The hotels, air tickets and expenses were paid with credit cards issued in the US. Two of the killers may be in the US now. Will a time come when American Zionists, who are unconditional public defenders of Mossad killings, cross the line between propaganda for the deed to become accomplices of the deed? The robust American Zionist defense of Mossad’s overseas assassinations does not augur well for the security of Americans in the face of Israel’s willing U.S. accomplices.

On January 19 Israel’s international secret police, the Mossad, sent an eighteen member death squad to Dubai using European passports, supposedly ‘stolen’ from Israeli dual citizens and altered with fake photos and signatures, in order to assassinate the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud al Mabhouh.

The evidence is overwhelming: The Dubai police presentation of detailed security videos of the assassins was corroborated by the testimony of Israeli security experts and applauded by Israel’s leading newspapers and columnists. The Mossad openly stated that Mabhouh was a high priority target who had survived three previous assassination attempts. Israel did not even bother to deny the murder. Furthermore, the sophisticated communication system used by the killers, the logistics and planning surrounding their entry and exit from Dubai and the scope and scale of the operation have all the characteristics of a high-level state operation. Furthermore, only Mossad would have access to the European passports of its dual citizens! Only Mossad would have the capacity, motivation, stated intent and willingness to provoke a diplomatic row with its European allies, knowing full well that Western European governments’ anger would blow over because of their deep links to Israel. After meticulous investigation and the interrogation of 2 captured Palestinian Mossad collaborators, the Dubai police chief has stated he is sure the Mossad was behind the killing.

Israel’s policy of overseas assassination raises profound issues that threaten the basis of the modern state: sovereignty, rule of law and national and personal security.

Israel has a publicly-stated policy of violating the sovereignty of any and all countries in order to kill or abduct its opponents. In both proclamation and actual practice, Israeli law, decrees and actions abroad supersede the laws and law enforcement agencies of any other nation. If Israel’s policy becomes the common practice world-wide, we would enter a savage Hobbesian jungle in which individuals would be subject to the murderous intent of foreign assassination squads unrestrained by any law or accountable national authority. Each and every state could impose its own laws and cross national borders in order to murder other nation’s citizens or residents with impunity. Israel’s extra-territorial assassinations make a mockery of the very notion of national sovereignty. Extra-territorial secret police elimination of opponents was a common practice of the Nazi Gestapo, Stalin’s GPU and Pinochet’s DINA and has now become the sanctioned practice of the US “Special Forces” and the CIA clandestine division. Such policies are the hallmark of totalitarian, dictatorial and imperialist states, which systematically trample on the sovereign rights of peoples.

Israel’s practice of extra-judicial, extra-territorial assassinations, exemplified by the recent murder of Mahmoud al Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room, violates all the fundamental precepts of the rule of law. Extra-judicial killings ordered by a state, mean its own secret police are judge, jury, prosecutor and executioner, unrestrained by sovereignty, law and the duty of nations to protect their citizens and visitors. Evidence, legal procedures, defense and cross examinations are obliterated in the process. State-sponsored, extra-judicial murder completely undermines due process. Liquidation of opponents abroad is the logical next step after Israel’s domestic show trials, based on the application of its racial laws and administrative detention decrees, which have dispossessed the Palestinian people and violated international laws.

Mossad death squads operate directly under the Israeli Prime Minister (who personally approved the recent murder).The vast majority of Israelis proudly support these assassinations, especially

when the killers escape detection and capture. The unfettered operation of foreign state-sponsored death squads, carrying out extra-judicial assassinations with impunity, is a serious threat to every critic, writer, political leader and civic activist who dares to criticize Israel.

The precedent of Israel killing its adversaries abroad, establishes the outer boundaries of repression by its overseas supporters in the leading Zionist organizations, most of whom have now and in the past supported Israel’s violation of national sovereignty via extra-judicial killings. If Israel physically eliminates its opponents and critics, the 51 major American Jewish organizations economically repress Israel’s critics in the US. They actively pressure employers, university presidents and public officials to fire employees, academics and professionals who dare to speak or write against Israeli torture, killing and systematic dispossession of Palestinians.

So far, most critical comments, in Israel and elsewhere, of Mossad’s recent murder in Dubai focus on the agents’ “incompetence”, including allowing their faces to be captured on numerous security videos as they clumsily changed their wigs and costumes under the camera gaze . Other critics complain that the bungling Mossad is “tarnishing Israel’s image” as a democratic state and providing ammunition for the anti-Semites. None of these superficial criticisms have been repeated by the US Congress, White House or the Presidents of the Major Jewish American organizations, where the mafia rule of Omerga, or silence, reigns supreme and criminal complicity is the rule

While the critics bemoan the clumsy Mossad job, making it harder for Western powers to provide Israel with diplomatic cover for its operations abroad, the fundamental issue is never addressed: The Mossad’s acquisition and alteration of official British, French, German and Irish passports of dual Israeli citizen’s underscores the cynical and sinister nature of Israel’s exploitation of its dual citizens in the pursuit of its own bloody foreign policy goals. Mossad’s use of genuine passports issued by four sovereign European nations to its citizens in order to murder a Palestinian in a Dubai hotel room raises the question of to whom ‘dual’ Israeli citizens really owe their allegiance and just how far they are willing to go in defending or promoting Israel’s overseas assassinations.

Thanks to Israel’s use of British passports to enter Dubai and murder an adversary, every British businessperson or tourist traveling in the Middle East will be suspected of links to Israeli death squads. With elections this year and the Labor and Conservative parties counting heavenly on Zionist millionaires for campaign funding, it remains to be seen whether Prime Minister Gordon Brown will do more than whimper and cringe!

Historically Latin America has been of great importance to the United States on numerous counts: the region has in the past, provided the US with a trade surplus; its outflows of licit and ill-begotten funds to US banks, numbers annually in the tens of billions; the US has been, up to recently, the major trading partner in the region; Latin America has provided a lucrative outlet for US buyouts of oil, telecoms, banking and related strategic mining companies during the golden age of imperial pillage (1975 – 1999). Throughout most of the 20^th century the US could rely on the vote of its client regimes in the United Nations (UN), the Organization of American States (OAS) and in the international financial institution (IMF, WB, IDB) to back its efforts to sustain its global political and economic expansion.

In the latter half of the 20^th century Latin America was an important target for the expansion of US based agro-mineral, transport (Ford, General Motors and Chrysler), farm machinery and other multi-national manufacturers. Within this regional pattern of US empire building, each country played a different role: Argentina, Mexico, Brazil and Columbia were targeted by manufacturing multi-national corporations (MNC) banks and exporters; Central America and the Caribbean for tropical fruits, tourism and export platforms, Bolivia, Peru and Chile for minerals; Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador for oil and gas. Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, were principle suppliers of cheap labor in the agricultural, construction and low paid service sector.

Within this imperial matrix, Venezuela was of special importance as the most important provider of petroleum. This was especially true in times of heightened US and Israeli induced political hostility and military warfare in the Middle East, with the onset of the US invasion of Iraq and sanctions against Iran, Sudan and other Muslim oil suppliers.

Under US hegemony Venezuela was a major player in the US effort to isolate and undermine the Cuban revolutionary government. Venezuelan client regimes played a major role in support of the successful US led effort to expel Cuba from the OAS; in 1961 and brokering a deal in the early 1990’s to disarm the guerillas in El Salvador and Guatemala without regime or structural changes in exchange for legal status of the ex-combatants. In short, Venezuelan regimes played a strategic role in policing the Central American-Caribbean region, a supplier of oil and as an important regional market for US exports.

For Venezuela the benefits of its relations with the US were highly skewed to the upper and the affluent middle classes. They were able to import luxury goods with low tariffs and invest in real estate, especially in south Florida. The business and banking elite were able to “associate” in joint ventures with US MNC especially in the lucrative oil, gas, aluminum and refinery sectors. US military training missions and joint military exercises provided a seemingly reliable force to defend ruling class interests and repress popular protests and revolts. The benefits for the popular classes, mainly US consumer imports, were far outweighed by the losses incurred through the outflow of income in the form of royalties, interest, profits and rents. Even more prejudicial were the US promoted neo-liberal policies which undermined the social safety net, increased economic vulnerability to market volatility and led to a two decade long crises culminating in a double digit decline in living standards (1979 – 1999).

Several key concepts are central to the understanding of US-Venezuelan relations in the past and present Chavez era.

These include the notion of ‘hegemony’ in which the ideas and interests of Washington are accepted and internalized by the Venezuelan ruling and governing class. Hegemony was never effective throughout Venezuelan class and civil society. “Counter-hegemonic” ideologies and definitions of socio-economic interests existed with varying degree of intensity and organization throughout the post 1958 revolutionary period. In the 1960’s mass movements, guerilla organizations and sectors of the trade unions formed part of a nationalist and socialist counter-hegemonic bloc.

Venezuelan-US relations were not uniform despite substantial continuities over time. Despite close relations and economic dependence especially during the 1960’s counter-insurgency period, Venezuela was one of the original promoters of OPEC, nationalized the oil industry (1976), opposed the US backed Somoza regime and White House plans to intervene to block a Sandinista victory (in 1979). The regression from nationalist capitalism to US sponsored neo-liberalism in the late 1980’s and 1990’s reflected a period of maximum US hegemony, a phenomena that took place throughout Latin America in the 1990’s. The election and re-election of President Chavez beginning in 1998 through the first decade of the new century marked a decline of US hegemony in the governing and popular classes but not among the business elite, trade union officials (CTV) and sectors of the military and public sector elite especially in the state oil company (PDVSA). The decline in US hegemony was influenced by the change in the power configuration governing Venezuela, the severe economic crises in 2000 – 2002, the demise and overthrow of client regimes in key Latin American countries and the rise of radical social movements and left center regimes. Accelerating the ‘loss of presence of the US’ and ‘policing’ of Latin America, were the wars in the Middle East, Iraq, South Asia (Afghanistan, Pakistan) and the expanding economic role and trading relations between Latin America and Asia (mainly China). The commodity boom between 2003 –2008 further eroded US leverage via the IMF and WB and enhanced the counter-hegemonic policies of the center-left regimes especially inVenezuela.

A key concept toward understanding the decline of US hegemony over Venezuela are “pivotal events”. This concept refers to major political conflicts which trigger a realignment of inter-state relations and changes the correlation of domestic socio-political forces. In our study President’s Bush’s launch of the “War on Terror” following 9/11/01 involving the invasion of Afghanistan and claims to extra territorial rights to pursue and assassinate adversaries dubbed “terrorists” was rejected by President Chavez (“you can’t fight terror with terror”). These events triggered far reaching consequences in US-Venezuelan relations.

Related to the above, our conceptualization of US-Venezuelan relations emphasizes the high degree of inter-action between global policies and regional conflicts. In operational terms the attempt by Washington to impose universal/global conformity to its war on terrorism led to a US backed coup, which in turn fueled Chavez’ policy of extra hemispheric alignments with adversaries of the White House.

Historical shifts in global economic power and profound changes in the internal make-up of the US economy have necessitated a reconceptualization of the principal levers of the US empire. In the past dollar diplomacy, meaning the dominant role of US industry and banks, played a major role in imposing US hegemony in Latin America, supplemented via military interventions and military coups especially in the Caribbean and Central America. In recent years financial capital “services” have displaced US manufacturing as the driving force and military wars and intervention have overshadowed economic instruments, especially with the surge of Asian trade agreements with Latin America.

We reconceptualize US-Venezuelan relations in light of a declining US economic and rising military empire, as a compensatory mechanism for sustaining hegemony especially as a tool for restoring client domestic elites to power.

The relation between past imperial successes in securing harmonious hegemonic collaborating rulers in the 1990’s and the profound political changes resulting from the crises of and breakdown of neo-liberalism, led Washington to totally misread the new realities. The resulting policy failures (for example Latin America’s rejection of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) and isolation and defeat of US policy toward Venezuela, Cuba and Honduras reflects what we conceptualize as “romantic reaction”, a failure of political realism: nostalgia for the imperial “golden age” of hegemony and pillage of the1990’s. The repeated failure by both the Bush and Obama regime to recognize regime changes, ideological shifts and the new development models and trade patterns has lead to mindless threats and diplomatic incapacity to develop any new bridges to the centrist regimes in the key countries of South America, especially toward Mercosur (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay).

The gap between past (1975 – 2000) dominance and present declining hegemony, in Latin America establishes the parameters for understanding US-Venezuelan relations and in particular the ten years of political confrontation and the incapacity of Washington to restore its client elites to power, despite repeated efforts. Likewise despite Venezuela’s dependence on single product exports (petrol) and bureaucratic inefficiencies and corruption, its external policies have gotten around selected US boycotts and hostile diplomatic moves, while expanding regional ties and forging new trade and investment networks.

The full story of the emergence of this hemispheric and extra hemispheric polarization between Washington and Caracas which follows tells us a great deal about the future of US-Latin American relations and equally so of the prospects for US empire at a time of financial crises and rising militarism.

Our study draws on interviews in the US and Venezuela, published government documents, newspaper and journal articles, press releases and speeches by principals in both the Venezuelan and US government and informed sources covering the period from the 1990’s to 2010.

Several propositions inform our research and form the bases for developing hypothesis about the relations between empire and anti-imperial regimes.

1.) Financial and military driven empires (like the US) have few economic partners (in Latin America) to counter radical counter hegemonic regimes (like Venezuela’s President Chavez).

2.) Multiple counter-hegemonic strategies can effectively limit the efforts by imperial powers to boycott, destabilize and reverse an anti-imperialist regime.

3.) In some cases, like Venezuela, external confrontations can induce and hasten radical domestic socio-economic changes (i.e., including nationalizations, agrarian reform and mass oriented social programs).

4.) Paradigmatic crises (collapse of neo-liberalism) and the subsequent defeat or overthrow of collaborating regimes can lead to a variety of alternatives (from left to center-left to hard right regimes) and multiple imperial policy options (restoration, accommodation, confrontation).

5.) The pursuit of policies reflecting a unipolar world of absolute imperial hegemony (US – Latin America in the 1990’s) becomes a major obstacle to adaptation and strategizing in a world of declining hegemony and a multi-polar context (2000 – 2010).

6.) Extremist imperial policies, including coups (Honduras 2009, Bolivia 2008) and military bases (seven in Colombia 2009) in pursuit of regaining imperial dominances, may exacerbate diplomatic and political isolation with major regional powers even as they regain influence over marginal countries.

7.) Commodity based, export strategies may provide economic resources for extending social welfare and financing capital growth but over the medium run it opens progressive regimes to volatile fluctuations in revenues and political instability.

8.) Strong leaders (Chavez) can be a powerful antidote to imperial aggression and create social cohesion over the short and medium run but may weaken successor leader’s capacity to sustain counter-hegemonic policies and followers.

Our discussion of US-Venezuelan relations will begin with an overview of the period between 1990 – 2010, initially focusing on the impact of the neo-liberal ascendancy and low commodity prices during the Bush Sr. – Clinton years. This will be followed by an account of the post 9/11/01 global and regional offensive accompanying the “War on Terror” launched by the Bush Jr. regime at a time of the commodity boom. We will conclude this section with a discussion of the Obama’s regime politics of conciliatory gestures and the practice of the ‘big stick’ at a time of escalating wars, militarization and global recession.

In the second section, we will be discussing the trajectory of the Chavez regime’s foreign policy in light of the decade long neo-liberal crises preceding its rise to government and the significant political events which marked a shift in its dealings with Washington, Latin America and its turn toward a global realignment in times of the commodity boom.

The third section will detail the abrupt shifts in US policy from accommodation, confrontation to intervention and multiple track policies. This section will discuss US political collaborators or “assets” and the efficacy of their operations as instruments of a larger strategy of regime change and political rollback (restoration of the pre-Chavez neo-liberal order).

The fourth section will discuss Washington’s insider and outsider strategies in destabilizing and isolating the Chavez regime including unilateral measures on arms embargos, regional approaches, including proposals to the Organization of American States and global polices linked to the “war on terror”.

The fifth section will detail the Chavez’ regimes responses to US moves at the domestic level (disarticulation of power moves by US assets), regional countermoves (at the OAS, Ibero-American Summit as well as new regional alliances such as Petrocaribe and ALBA) and global realignments (in the Middle East, China, Russia, OPEC).

The sixth section will analyze the success and failures of US strategy. In particular we will discuss the shifts in global economic conditions (the commodity boom), the relative decline of the US economy and its turn to military empire building, the relative autonomous economic growth and diversification of economic relations of center left regimes in Latin America. Central to our analysis will be the demise of neo-liberal ideology, the principle ideological wedge for US influence, and the decline of its principle institutional weapons for projecting ‘hegemonic policies’, the IMF and world Bank.

Central to the US quest for hegemonic rule in Latin America and, in particular in Venezuela, was the Free Trade of the Americas treaty - a proposal which ran counter to Chavez project of a strictly ‘Bolivarian’ integration proposal later embodied in ALBA. We will evaluate the outcomes of this contest of competing integration projects in light of their successes, failures and limitations. Specifically, we will evaluate the failure of both projects to incorporate major economies (Brazil, Argentina) as well as (Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay) and the resort to bilateral free trade linkage and long term trade and investment agreements.

The increasing turn of the Obama regime toward military instruments as policy tools against Chavez, as well as overt and military coups and thinly veiled threats against his allies, is analyzed in the penultimate section of the paper. The US backed military coup against elected president Zelaya in Honduras, the securing of seven military bases in neighboring Colombia, the undiplomatic threats of Secretary of State Clinton to retaliate against Latin America economic ties with Iran, all add up to increased militarization as a compensatory tool for declining economic leverage. The resort to unilateral policy decisions even at the cost of alienating the most powerful political regimes in the region and at the expense of lucrative economic ties suggests the extremist nature of the Obama regime, contrary to the original conciliatory rhetoric.

In the next section we will investigate the internal debates over US-Venezuelan relations, to determine the divergences and consensus within policy bodies (the Executive) and between institutions (Executive-Congress). We expect greater opposition to official policy in Venezuela where long standing economic elites and their political representatives have long-term linkages to the US government and private sector elites and where they control the vast majority of the print and electronic media. Most of US dissent is found outside governmental officialdom in civil society groups and among a thin layer of Congressional and staff officials.
In the concluding section will sum up the consequences of US militarist policies toward Venezuela, their radicalizing effects and the net ‘cost/benefit’ consequences in a time of crises and in a context of a multi-polar global economy.

We will consider the probable outcome of the radicalization of US policy in a time of declining economic capacity to offer a sustainable political economic alternative – given the abject failure and universal rejection of the neo-liberal US centered project of the 1990’s.

We will reflect on the capacity of the Venezuelan regime to construct a viable new economic strategy that goes beyond oil dependence to a diversified economy in line with its ‘counter-hegemonic’ foreign policy.

The 1990’s were the “golden years” for US hegemony in Latin America and Venezuela was no exception. Under President’s Carlos Andres Perez and Rafael Caldera, extensive privatizations took place in strategic oil, gas and other extractive sectors resulting in lucrative joint ventures. Both Presidents closely towed the line of the IMF and World Bank, pursuing “structural adjustment policies” (SAP) which impoverished wage and salaried workers and enriched the foreign and domestic elites. Severe declines of oil prices and reduced revenues resulting from low taxes led to the savaging of social programs, while the liberalizing of prices led to sharp declines in living standards, leading to mass protests, urban riots and an aborted military coup.

Washington could count on the Venezuelan regimes for support in regional (OAS) and global forums (United Nations). While Venezuela remained in OPEC it was one of the ‘moderates’ on oil pricing and negotiations with the major oil importing countries. Venezuela remained in the Andean Pact but at no point moved toward any deeper integration such as a transpired among the southern cone countries which formed MERCOSUR. Venezuela supported the US policy toward the Middle East, backing Washington in the first Iraq war and its subsequent sanction policies in the 1990’s, but established diplomatic relations with Cuba.

US policy perceptions of Venezuela in the 1990’s had a profound impact on how it related to the changes which ensued under President Chavez. The extremely favorable conditions for US bankers, oil investors, exporters and the high levels of subservience to US global and regional foreign policies and the general collaboration of the military and intelligence agencies with their US counterparts ensconced in the country formed the bases for US judgment and responses to the Chavez government. Washington ignored the mass uprising of 1989 and widespread opposition against the SAP, the rejection of the Washington Consensus, popular sympathy for the Chavez military uprising of 1992 and the rising tide of nationalist discontent against its close collaborators in the Democratic Action and COPEI (social christian) parties. The Clinton Administration’s hegemonic position over Venezuela was confined to its ruling economic elites and political class, sectors of the military command, the trade union confederation elite (CTV), the Catholic hierarchy and the executives in the public oil company PDVSA. Hegemony was extensive but lacked depth among the middle classes and was totally absent among the sixty percent of the population living in the poor ‘ranchos’ and employed in the ‘informal sector’ – the electoral majority.

Convinced of the stability of its hegemony based on forty years of alternating rule by the two major collaborating parties, the Clinton regime saw no reason for large scale intervention in the elections of 1998 (won by Hugo Chavez). This was especially the case since most US diplomats and policymakers discounted his national popular appeals as so much campaign rhetoric, common in all previous electoral contests. Even after taking office, US policymakers remained relatively satisfied with the economic, foreign policy and defense ministers appointed as well as the Congressional leaders in his electoral coalition, many drawn from defectors of the traditional parties and known as long time collaborators with Washington.

Several regional factors reinforced Washington’s initial “neutral” stance to Chavez’ first electoral victory. The election took place (1998) at a time in which US hegemony reigned supreme throughout the continent. Neo-liberal rulers continued to win elections, Menem, (Argentina), Cardoso (Brazil), Sanchez de Losada (Bolivia), Fujimoro (Peru), Zedillo (Mexico), Sanguinetti (Uruguay), Pastrana (Colombia), and elsewhere. In the minds of the Clinton elite there was no reason to think that the pattern would not repeat itself in Venezuela. Moreover Washington was by now familiar with the ideological ruse used by its collaborators spouting nationalist-populist rhetoric on the campaign trail and then once in office offering up the jewels of the economy to foreign purchase at bargain basement prices. In fact most of the neo-liberal presidents of the period promised ‘populist’ measures and attacked ‘neo-liberalism’ even as they imposed a most virulent variant. Menem cited the Peronest legacy, Cardozo played on his ‘radical’ past, Fujimori’ denounced the ‘white European elite’. Populist demagoguery flourished even as they handed over to foreign investors the most lucrative oil, gas, iron, copper, tin, mineral and telecom sectors.

Washington’s relative ‘tolerance’ of Chavez’ electoral victory could be understood in this context of demagogic populism and practical neo-liberalism, a pattern especially familiar and practiced by the incumbent US President William Clinton.

The second factor which influenced Washington’s initial policy toward Venezuela was the growing concern with the major military-political-diplomatic advances of the leftist guerilla movements in Columbia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) which controlled over one-third of the country, were closing in on the major cities and successfully pressing for peace and justice negotiations in a substantial demilitarized zone. Washington, based on its long-standing ties to military and intelligence officials, was hoping to secure Venezuelan collaboration in its counter-insurgency program. The relative stability of hegemony in Latin America, the information technology bubble growth inside the US, the growing effort to impose a settlement to the Israeli-Palestine conflict and the periodic bombing and sanctions policies against Iraq received priority in Clinton’s foreign policy agenda.

Since Washington was deeply satisfied with the status quo in the region, since it was accustomed to dismiss inconsequential populist demaguery in the region and since Washington believed it controlled strategic ‘assets’ (clients) in the Venezuelan state, economy and society which it could leverage to limit any substantive changes, Washington saw no reason to intervene.

During the first period of the Chavez presidency, he was pre-occupied with constitutional, legal and political changes. He argued that the existing legal and political framework was a major obstacle to popular participation, subject to rampant corruption and an obstacle to “structural changes”, which he promised would follow a reordering of the political, judicial and legal system. During this initial period, faced with a President who sought to democratize the political system, and who was engaged in open and free elections, but who still embraced orthodox fiscal, monetary and neo-liberal economic policies, the Bush administration retained the main features of the Clinton administration, of “watchful tolerance”, holding more forceful action if any contingency warranted it. Moreover, Bush’s Latin American policymakers inherited the social explosions which rocked the continent beginning in 2000 and 2001 in Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Peru followed later by the electoral defeat of ruling military backed parties in Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. The collapse of the US IT bubble and the profound recession which ended the ultra neo-liberal era in Latin America caught the Bush administration off guard: like the Clinton regime it too envisioned perpetual US hegemonic supremacy, based on alternating collaborator presidents dually elected by conformist electorates. The depth and scope of the mass uprisings in Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia was impressive and engaged over three quarters of the population. The abrupt and total collapse of the client regimes precluded any direct US intervention on behalf of a coup, especially in light of the discredited role of the military during its previous dictatorial reign.

The initial period of ‘peaceful coexistence’ in US-Venezuelan relations was fraught with latent tensions given the Bush administrations appointment of several extremists to influential Latin American positions, including the notorious Otto Reich, Manuel Noriega and others. Moreover, the entire neo-conservative cohort which included notorious militarists like Cheney and Rumsfeld and rightwing Zionists Wolfowitz, Feith and Abrams to top positions in the White House, Pentagon and National Security Council, were primed to launch a more virulent global military driven empire building project to counter declining US influence in the Middle East and Latin America.

The pretext for the launch of the ‘global war’ was the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and damage to the Pentagon on 9/11/2001. Through subsequent controversy has severely tested the official versions of the events of 9/11, the far reaching political consequences were undeniable.

The Bush administration announced a “global war on terrorism” which included the right to engage in cross border military activities throughout the world against alleged adversaries, a rejection of the Taliban regimes’ offer to negotiate the surrender of “Al Queda” activists if the US could demonstrate their complicity in 9/11, and a subsequent military invasion of Afghanistan, (followed 18 month later) by an invasion of Iraq. The White House’s ‘War on Terrorism’ was effectively a grandiose launch of the neo-conservative manifesto (PNAC) for military driven empire building. The ‘War on Terror’ sought to subordinate allies (NATO – European Union) and Third World countries to US global hegemonic aspirations: Washington quickly and emphatically made it clear that any questioning of the global projection of military power was to “effectively aid the terrorists” and become an adversary to the US.

President Chavez was the first and only head of state to reject the methods and consequences of the Bush Administrations policy. Chavez declared, “you cannot fight terror with terror”.

The Bush global offensive and Chavez forthright defense of diplomacy over war, and self-determination over military intervention (in Afghanistan) was the trigger event which drastically altered US policy toward Venezuela and in particular set in motion events which hastened the emergence of an adversarial relation.

Shortly after President Chavez took sharp exception to Bush’s claim of extra territorial military powers throughout the world, relations deteriorated sharply. Despite Chavez’s moderate domestic economic policies and the full play of democratic electoral politics and procedures, his declaration of an independent critical foreign policy detonated a series of public criticisms from the far right members of the Bush administration.

From the late fall of 2001 neo-conservatives began to mount a media campaign in the US and Venezuela calling into question the democratic credentials of the Chavez government and insinuating hemispheric security dangers explicit in Chavez opposition to the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Several considerations seems to have agitated the militarists in the White House.

First, Chavez’s declaration of independence from US policy resonated with mass movements engaged in major uprisings and widespread revolts against client regimes in many countries in Latin America. The neo-conservatives feared that Venezuela’s example would encourage the emerging social movements and emerging leftist regimes to follow suite.

Secondly, the militarists counted on their assets in the business organizations, legislature and state apparatus to reverse Chavez’ policy, destabilize and perhaps topple the elected government.

Thirdly, the militarists were deeply influenced by events in the nineties during which Latin America regimes generally conformed to US global and regional policies, especially when pressured by Washington.

Fourthly, within the US a multi-million member peace movement was emerging (especially between 2001 – 2003) protesting war preparations against Iraq and Chavez was perceived as a possible point of reference.

Washington adopted a two-track policy toward Venezuela: a diplomatic track, which included dire threats if Chavez did not retract his position on the US global war (“War on Terror”) and a covert track of consultation, support and organization of a military-civilian coup to overthrow the elected government.

In the late fall of 2001 the State Department sent Grossman on a mission which essentially relayed to the Venezuelan President the seriousness with which Washington took his dissent. The visit, according to Venezuelan officials present during the encounter, ended with Grossman issuing dire threats if Chavez remained adamant in opposition to the US resort to military resolutions of international conflicts:

“If you persist in opposing our war on terror, you and future generations of Venezuelans will pay the consequences”.

The predictable failure of Grossman’s big stick” diplomacy accelerated the shift to ‘track-two’ – the overthrow of the Chavez regime via a civilian-military coup backed by a combination of a mass media blitz, the business confederations, the trade union bureaucracy, sectors of the military and the political party opposition.

Contrary to conventional opinion, the big US oil companies do not appear to have taken the initiative nor to have played a leading role in Washington’s move to unify its Venezuelan assets toward destabilizing and overthrowing the Chavez government. Big US oil companies had not been adversely affected by Chavez oil policies. His “oil reform” policies during his first three years in power were to slightly increase royalty and tax payments. He had yet to reverse the previous regimes privatization policies. There is little doubt, however, that the oil companies were knowledgeable of US efforts to destabilize the regime and certainly did not object, especially if the forthcoming “regime change” would result in the restoration of a neo-liberal regime less prone to potentially nationalist policies. The cautious public posture of ‘Big Oil’ probably reflected unease over the possible risks and spill over effects of a failed coup in which the US government was complicit. The risk attending a failed coup, might have serious consequences for the oil companies standing with the Chavez government, a point, however, which did not seem to have motivated them to try to put the brakes on Washington’s plotting with the Venezuelan opposition.

Washington’s primordial interest in overthrowing Chavez was political, not economic, revolving around his opposition to the Bush regime’s War on Terror and his specific condemnation of the US Afghan invasion and strong opposition to Washington’s plans to invade Iraq. Moreover, Chavez was a thorn in the side of the Clinton-Bush “Plan Colombia” with its military approach to the civil conflict in that country. Chavez proposed a continuation of the peace negotiations between the Colombian regime and the FARC, recognition of a state of belligerency and the FARC as a legitimate interlocutor. Chavez position was directly opposed to Washington’s push to end the peace negotiations and Bush’s labeling the FARC as a “terrorist organization”.

Parallel to Washington’s activization of “track two” destabilization cum military coup strategy toward Venezuela, Washington backed Alvaro Uribe for President of Colombia a notorious paramilitary organizer and State Department designated narco-traffiker.

The view in Washington was that Chavez’ opposition to its global military offensive might provide an alternative point of reference for the newly emerging ‘center-left’ regimes in Latin America and as an elected democratic government undermine the neo-conservative propaganda claims that the ‘war on terror’ was part of a democratic mission only opposed by “Islamic dictatorships”.

With Latin American policy in the hands of what in Washington was known as the “Cuban Mafia”, diplomacy implicit in “track one”, was shunted aside and the “regime change” track two, was fully and unquestionably embraced, whatever the possible lingering, unexpressed doubts which might exist among foreign service professionals.

On April 12, 2002, a sector of the military backed by the entire big business elite and the corrupt trade union bureaucracy arrested Chavez and seized power. Immediately Ambassador Shapiro backed by the Bush White House and far right Spanish Prime Minister Aznar, congratulated the self-appointed new president Carmona – head of the business confederation Fedecameras and moved to recognize the illicit regime.

In the lead up to the coup, Bush administration officials were in constant consultation with the coup-makers while escalating a propaganda war against Chavez’ supposedly “strongman rule” and above all “lack of co-operation in the War against Terror”. Washington’s policy of promoting tension and internal polarization was directed at creating the appearance of an isolated regime, with deteriorating public support. The Bush policy encouraged the coup makers to believe that they had the full backing of the US and because of that support, the likelihood of Washington’s backing for the post-coup regime.

US intelligence officials believed that their political, military and media assets were sufficient to overthrow the regime and defeat any restorationist efforts. Therefore, they did not plan or organize a US military expeditionary force to intervene to buttress the coup-makers in case of a successful democratic constitutional restoration.

Several factors entered into Washington’s calculus on the low risk of a coup failure.

First, they exaggerated the degree of support for the coup among top and middle level military officials, refusing to recognize Chavez’ own military ties and loyalty among the military. Secondly, they over-estimated the military’s loyalty to the business elite and the influence of US missions and overseas training programs in establishing US hegemony. Thirdly, they ignored the impact of over 40 years of constitutionalism on the military outlook toward coups. Fourthly, they exaggerated the impact of the oligarchy’s monopoly of the mass media with regard to mass popular opinion toward Chavez and his social welfare and nationalist appeals. The mass media were influential among those privileged classes already disposed to deny the legitimacy of the elected President.

The over confidence of the State Department in the success of the coup makers was demonstrated by the premature salutations and recognition of the junta prior to the consummation of the coup. While the event was still in progress a mass outpouring of support for Chavez was surrounding the Presidential Palace and there were indications of strong military opposition to the coup and uncertainty among many other top military officials.

In summary the Bush administration’s policy was based on intelligence linked to and dependent on its convinced assets/clients, which merely reinforced desired outcomes rather than the high risks and the views and loyalties of the mass of the population and strategic groups in the military.

The coup triggered a huge outpouring of over a million supporters from the “ranchos” marching on the Presidential palace where the coup makers were holed up.

Military officials and middle ranking commanders of troops took up positions in defense of the restoration of Chavez to power, which precipitated, a shift in the balance of power within the military. Within forty-eight hours, Chavez was released from captivity and restored to power as the coup collapsed under the combined weight of mass mobilization and military power.

Washington’s precipitous support for the coup makers and their subsequent defeat, resulted in political losses of strategic assets and a sharp turn in Chavez foreign policy. In the immediate aftermath of the failed coup, several top business leaders involved led the coup fled, the business federation (FEDECAMERAS) was discredited (but not dissolved), the head of the opposition led trade union confederation (CTV) went into exile and the organization was discredited in the eyes of the trade union rank and file. Equally important, Chavez arrested or discharged the top military officials involved in the coup and some of their middle level supporters.

The coup and its defeat triggered a realignment of forces within Venezuela, strengthening the national and populist forces within the state apparatus and depriving the imperial state of strategic levers of power. Equally, the mass role in restoring Chavez to power established the popular barrios and their improvised organizations as a power center in determining national politics and endowed them with a ‘privileged’ place in Chavez future policies. The upper middle class, the business and landholding elite, which backed the coup, staunch US allies, were the big political losers. They were designated as the enemies of democracy and the constitutional order. The mass media which played a central role in the lead-up to the coup and the celebration of the illegal seizure of power as well as the fabrication of a Chavez “resignation”, was discredited in the eyes of the mass public. Venezuelan and US media propaganda charging Chavez with “dictatorial rule” lost credibility in light of their support of the ephemeral junta, whose first measure was to close parliament, ban electoral parties and arrest the political opposition.

The coup and restoration of Chavez resulted in a major diplomatic victory. The coup was universally condemned in Latin America and, with the exception of Spain, by the European Union. The restoration of the constitutional order was applauded everywhere. The US in an attempt to save face and retain a diplomatic foothold weakly praised the restoration.

However, the coup plot and Washington’s tacit and overt complicity in the context of a center-left electoral turn in Latin America isolated and eroded Washington’s influence in the region. Moreover, Washington’s long term strategic goal of replacing Chavez with a more pliant client was severely undermined by the loss of key levers of power.

Nevertheless, the defeat of Washington based clients did not lead to a reassessment of the relationship of forces within Venezuela, even less to a ‘moderation’ in policies. Instead Washington turned to an even riskier or “adventurous” policy, trying to cover its losses by throwing its last strategic assets into a frontal confrontation with the regime, nine months later, backing a “bosses lockout” (December 2002 – February 2003) in a desperate attempt to destabilize the Chavez government.

Chavez’s initial response to the coup upon returning to the Presidential palace, was to search for a new direction in domestic and foreign policy. He looked for advice from those of his senior advisors in the foreign office who advocated a policy of “reconciliation” and “national unity”. He invited his adversaries both among the business elite and those in the armed forces to join with him in a new consensus based on a policy of consultation; Chavez showed himself generous even to those deeply involved in the coup particular the media moguls, as well as the deeply entrenched senior officials in the public sector enterprises, who retained allegiances toward the leaders of the opposition who appointed them. Chavez extended his hand to the conservative hierarchy of the Catholic church, willing to forgive and forget the blessing they extended to the ephemeral coup. Many of his mass supporters and leaders as well as leftist advisers were disappointed, thinking that the defeat of the elite backed coup was an opportunity to deepen “the revolution”, by expropriating the property of the media moguls and the business elite as well as purging the police, military and intelligence agencies of right wingers who were ideologically hostile and administratively obstructionist.

The response of the business elite was cool to hostile, though they quickly took advantage of Chavez reconciliation offer to quickly regroup and re-launch their intransigent opposition.

The US followed suit – most likely interpreting Chavez concessions as a sign of weakness and vulnerability. Both Washington and the local elite felt that Chavez appeals failed to include the kinds of concessions which would warrant any political pact.

In the case of Washington, Chavez still refused to back Washington’s global military interventionism and in particular the ouster of President Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, the Afghan war and the war preparations against Iraq.

Apart from the arrest (and flight) of a handful of top coup plotters, the rest of their entourage escaped any judicial prosecution – they went scott-free to return to practice the destabilization and demonization of the Chavez government. In other words leniency toward the coup makers, many on the verge of committing lese majesty, led to another go at knocking out a nemesis of the White House. The Bush Administration made another risky attempt to restore hegemony in a region, slipping to the left. The most formidable asset that remained in the US and elites’ hands were their control over the major, private and public economic media institutions of the country.

Even as the US lost important assets in the state apparatus and its political control of the legislative and executive branch was weakened, Washington retained close collaborators in the financial, banking, agricultural sectors and most important of all the top and middle management of the nominally “public” state oil and gas company PDVSA were closely linked to Washington and Big Oil.

Undaunted by Chavez’ defeat of the civilian-military coup, a US backed employers lockout was launched in December 2002, led by the senior officials of the oil industry, which paralyzed the entire economy. Since oil revenue accounted for over 70% of Venezuela export earnings and over 30% of its GNP the lockout threatened to bring-down the government, which was precisely the intention of its instigators.

The lockout continued into the new year, peaking in late January, until it was decisively beaten back thanks to the massive intervention of management, technical and skilled workers backed by the armed forces.

After a period of negotiations and hesitation, Chavez realized this was not an economically motivated lockout but a politically driven effort to topple the government. He took two decisive measures: he called on the engineers, loyalist managers and the working class to take over and run the oil wells, refineries, port and transport and he fired 15,000 oil executives, managers, technicians and employees who organized and backed the lockout. With the aid of oil shipments from abroad (Brazil) and pressure from below, the oil industry slowly returned to production. The rest of the capitalist class fearing expropriation and worker takeovers grudgingly and reluctantly returned to production, transportation, banking. The lockout was defeated but at a heavy cost to the economy which declined by 10% in 2002 and only began to recover pre lockout levels by the end of 2003 thanks to rising oil prices.

Once again Washington played a risky game – pushing it strategic assets in an essential sector into an unequal fray … and losing. Another layer of Venezuelan society linked to US hegemony was stripped and replaced by Chavez loyalists. Having lost key elements in the state apparatus, the White House tried to compensate and recover leverage by putting at risk its strategic economic collaboratus and lost. The “bosses’ lockout” and its defeat by the working class had far reaching consequences for both Venezuelan domestic and foreign policy. It served to radicalize Chavez’ socio-economic agenda, turning him toward massive social investments in the poor barrios, toward far reaching diversification of trade, investment and military procurement and intensified his effort to build a new regional foreign policy which excluded the US. The combined efforts of the failed coup and lockout triggered the domestic radicalization of Chavez, his turn toward ‘socialism’, his advocacy of ‘Bolivarian’ regional integration and an opening to China, Russia and Iran.

Washington’s double defeats gravely weakened its domestic leverage to overthrow or destabilize Chavez forcing a rethink along the lines of adopting a two track approach: an external strategy based in strengthening ties with the far-right Columbian regime, its military and paramilitary force as a platform for launching a military confrontation and an internal electoral strategy.

The insider strategy was launched by the US at a time of greatly depleted assets,and rising oil prices, (and state revenues). It essentially involved financing NGO’s for street and electoral confrontations and a referendum/recall and a legislative boycott. The external strategy attempted to isolate Chavez in Latin America through the Free Trade Agreement of the Americans and securing military bases in Colombia.

Despite the loss of assets in both the state apparatus and the strategic petroleum industry, US policymakers still retained a formidable array of supporters in civil society through well financed non-governmental organizations (NG), a powerful propaganda apparatus in the private mass media (over ninety percent backing the opposition and Washington) and a network of weakened but still active political parties, political activists and wealthy political financial backers.

Since the US could not count on executing any new extra-parliamentary adventures, it backed and financed a referendum to impeach President Chavez. Once the signatures were collected and the campaign was underway, Chavez turned to his mass popular base, till then very extensive but loosely organized, to organize at the barrio level, independently of the existing party structures.

The coup and lockouts and the popular mobilization which defeated them, triggered massive social welfare programs, new government sponsored “missions”, providing universal free health programs via barrio based clinics, a massive literacy campaign and heavily subsidized food distributed by state grocery stores in the poor neighborhoods. Chavez signed on to a huge oil for doctors and professionals deal with Cuba, compensating for the unwillingness of many Venezuelan doctors to work in the popular clinics.

The refusal of the ‘Right’ and its professional class supporters to back the social programs, strengthened popular support for Chavez. The presence of Cuban doctors in social programs provided Chavez with mass support for his strategic alliance with Cuba. Rising oil prices and the double digit growth in 2004 – 2005 provided windfall profits to finance the social programs and the campaign against the referendum-recall.

The referendum was defeated by a huge 20 point margin (60% to 40%), demoralizing the US supported coalition and leading to the further fracturing of the opposition parties. Clearly the timing and the content of the referendum was an extra- ordinarily high risk operation, which demonstrated how clearly out of touch US strategists were with Venezuelan realities.

Clearly the Bush White House and the right wing ideologues were substituting their animus for Chavez for the political realities on the ground. Still, despite all signs to the contrary, Washington persisted in believing that even under the most favorable conditions for Chavez, they could discredit him – Washington supported and publicized an opposition promoted boycott of the legislative election of 2005 (?), resulting in the election of over ninety percent pro-Chavez congress people … and a free hand in pursuing a new and more radical political and socio-economic agenda. The US and its allies lost one of the last institutional platforms to criticize the government and regroup the opposition to his policies.

If Washington’s insider strategy was a political disaster, the outsider strategy was close behind. Washington’s apparent strategy was to consolidate its regime supporters on the right, influence the regimes on the center left and isolate the Chavez regime.

This policy faced several major constraints in its implementation. First and foremost, events and political changes in Latin America led to the coming to power of center-left regime opposed to US interventionism backed by social movements highly favorable to Chavez. Secondly, with the commodity boom well underway, fueled in large part by an enormous increase in demand from China (and the rest of Asia), Latin America was diversifying its trading and investment partnerships. The US was no longer Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina’s main trading partner. Hence, Washington no longer had the economic leverage of the past.

Thirdly, because of the trade surpluses and the onerous terms imposed by the IMF, Latin America totally marginalized the IMF from any financing agreements, paying off their debts to the IMF. As a result, US leverage via the IFI (International Financial Institutions) was curtailed.

Fourthly, because of huge oil revenue surpluses, Venezuela signed a series of oil trade and investment agreements with Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador diminishing any hope that the White House could impose a diplomatic blockade on Venezuela.

Fifthly, blind to the new realities, Washington went ahead seeking Latin American support for the Clinton initiated Free Trade of the Americas Treaty, an agreement which favored US protectionism and subsidized exporters at the expense of highly competitive Latin American exports. The Treaty was almost unanimously rejected striking a blow to US hegemonic aspirations and raising the political stock of Chavez’ regionalist ‘Bolivarian agenda’.

Washington’s ‘War on Terror’, its military-driven empire building did not resonate with the economic developmentalism and (post dictatorial) anti-militarism pervasive in Latin America. Washington’s heavy emphasis on costly military expansionism evidenced in two wars and ballooning military expenditures left little room for new economic initiatives (like the Alliance for Progress) toward Latin America actively rebuilding their economies from the neo-liberal debacle of the lost decade of the 1990’s and the ensuing crash.

Moreover, Washington was closely identified with the so-called “free market” neo-liberal ideology which was widely seen by most Latin Americans and their new leaders as responsible for the economic crash of 2000 – 2002 and widely and intensely detested. Yet Washington oblivious to the new realities continued to hold up free market ideology and policies as the panacea for the region, giving Chavez an enormous ideological advantage.

Venezuela’s ideological edge over Washington was based more on Chavez’s critique of neo-liberalism than in his advocacy of socialism or Boliviarianism. Most of the new Latin American rulers were themselves deeply immersed in pursuing a decidedly capitalist agenda – albeit with greater diversity, a modicum of state regulation and without any structural changes in property and class relations.

Chavez in response to Washington’s (failed) efforts to isolate him, turned toward a multi-pronged international strategy. (1) He launched ALBA a regional integration project which included Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, several Caribbean island states and briefly Honduras (before the coup of 2009). (2) He organized Petrocaribe a trade agreement to sell oil at subsidized prices to poor Caribbean states in exchange for political support. (3) He turned to Russia and China to sign multi-billion dollar arms purchases, joint ventures in oil and gas exploitation and increased sales and purchases of energy and manufactured goods. (4) Chavez signed off on extensive diplomatic trade and investment agreements with Iran, on the bases of their facing a common enemy. (5) Chavez championed the resistance of the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon against Israel attracting a positive response from the Moslem countries, the Arab “street” and opening the door to ties with other North African regimes (Libyan, Algeria).

Parallel to his new regional plans, Chavez petitioned to be included as a member of MERCOSUR, the four country (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay) regional free trade bloc, thus opening up new trade and joint venture opportunities, to offset any US moves to “embargo” the country.

Nevertheless, despite Washington’s overt hostility and Chavez’s anti-imperialist policies, Venezuela remained the US’s third biggest supplier of oil and Venezuela depended on the US market for eighty percent of its oil exports – its biggest single trading partner.

While for the most part Washington’s “outsider” strategy failed to isolate Chavez and was unsuccessful in winning over the ‘center’ or center-left to its overall policies, it more or less did succeed in consolidating its ties with right wing regimes, notably Columbia, Peru, Mexico and Costa Rica. The major gain was Columbia’s active co-operation in putting pressure on Venezuela, creating cross border attacks and provocations and even allowing over a hundred paramilitary combatants to enter Venezuela for a (failed) clandestine operation. As Washington’s internal and regional policy options diminished, Washington concentrated on building up a strategic presence in Columbia and weakening, destabilizing or overthrowing Chavez political allies.

US: Military Offensive 2008 – 2009: Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and the Seven Bases

By late 2008, Washington was a lonely presence in regional meetings, suffering a series of serious diplomatic losses on Cuba (a unanimous vote in favor of readmission to the OAS), exclusion from a proposed regional defense force and a refusal by the entire region to condemn Venezuela.

Lacking economic leverage and witnessing the rejection of its diplomatic initiatives, Washington resorted to what it most excelled – clandestine intelligence and military operations in an attempt to weaken Chavez’ allies.

Despite the weakening of US hegemony at the national governmental level, it still retained levers of powers at the sub national level among economic elites, regional governors and local political officials as well as among the rulers of the right wing regimes.

Washington’s attempt to regain hegemony focused on destabilizing the elected democratic governments most closely allied with President Chavez. This strategy was pursued by both the Bush and Obama regimes and focused on Bolivia, Ecuador and Honduras with mixed results. In each case, Washington resorted to different strategies .

From even before Morales’ election as President of Bolivia (December 2005) Washington maintained close political and economic ties with the ruling class centered in Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni and to a lesser degree in Cochabamba. The Bush White House through the DEA, AID and NED financed rightist NGOs and movements who promoted separatist and electoral campaign against Morales’ center-left agenda.

Through its activist Ambassador Goldberg, Washington took an active role in the attempted Sta Cruz violent power grab in September – October 2008, funding and giving political support to a separatist referendum and a campaign of terror organized by the provincial governor. Thanks to a massive popular mobilization which threatened civil war and the loyalty of the military, the regional putsch was just put down, Goldberg was declared persona non grata and the US temporarily pulled in its horns.

The election of Rafael Correa and his decision to terminate the US military base at Manta at the conclusion of the treaty (2009) and ally with Chavez, started bells ringing in the White House. A regional movement in Guayaquil fizzled out, but a US backed Columbia military intrusion into Ecuador against the FARC, was one of a series of threatening gestures designed to destabilize the center-left regime. Columbia’s threats to repeat the violation of Ecuador’s territorial integrity had the overt and tacit support of the US.

The most blatant reassertion of US hegemony was the Obama White House support for the civilian-military junta which overthrew the elected Zelaya regime – for aligning with Chavez’ regional alliance ALBA.

In all three cases Washington exploited a different set of assets and tactics: regional rightist elite in Bolivia; a client regime (Colombia) against Ecuador; a military-congressional junta in Honduras. The thrust of policy was to restore hegemony by resorting to illegal, violent, means.

Alongside with violent regime changes, Washington’s policy under Obama took a decidedly military turn toward Venezuela: Washington secured a seven military base agreement with Columbia, including one on the border, less than 30 minutes from Caracas. The Pentagon expanded base facilities in Panama, Aruba, Curacao and Honduras. In addition, Obama added a nuclear powered aircraft carrier to the Fourth Fleet cruising off the Atlantic shore of Latin America.

The military destabilization strategy failed in both Bolivia and Ecuador – eroding the power of strategic regional assets in Bolivia, diminishing the US presence and stoking up popular anti-imperialist sentiments. In the case of Ecuador it led to a temporary break in relations between Ecuador and Colombia. In the Presidential elections of 2009, Morales won over 60% of the vote. In the case of Honduras the White House succeeded in ousting Zelaya but at an enormous diplomatic cost. The pro US junta was ostracized, failing to secure recognition. The entire OAS opted for policies contrary to US intent. The overall result was greater diplomatic isolation and a greater sense that, Obama’s democratic rhetoric not withstanding, the US was no longer viewed as a country moving forward from his predecessors military posturing. If anything Bush’s “neglect” of Latin America was being ‘changed’ toward a more aggressive interventionism and greater reliance on Colombian militarism as a vehicle for its anti-Chavez crusade.

What is striking about the Obama regimes’ policies toward Latin America and Venezuela are several contrasts: The contradictions between the diplomatic rhetoric of “change” and the continued and even escalating militarization of policy; the contrast between multiple overtures and opportunities to open a ‘new chapter’ of improved relations and the pursuit of policies which worsened relations and increased US isolation; the contrast between a US policy designed to bail out the financial sector and Latin America policies designed to activate its productive and export sector; the contrast between a deep US recession and slow recovery and a mild recession (except Mexico) and a quicker recovery in Latin America; the contrast between the US relative decline as a trading partner with Latin America and the latter’s’ increased trade with China and Asia; the contrast between Washington’s pursuit of politically driven boycotts of Iran and other countries and Latin America’s emphasis on increasing trade and investment across the political spectrum; the contrast between the US military definitions of global security threats and Latin America’s emphasis on free trade and pursuit of “economic developmentalism”.

If these sharply contrasting structural and programmatic differences mark a divergent foreign policy approach, between the US and Latin America, the differences between the US and Venezuela are even more acute, defined by the US military build-up in the Caribbean and Venezuela’s growing national security concerns.

For a President like Obama who promised a new more open relation with Latin America and who received a strong endorsement of all Latin American leaders including the ‘radical trio’ of Castro, Chavez and Evo Morales, his subsequent continuation of Bush era policies rapidly evaporated the good will and in some cases led to public repudiation. In the first OAS meeting, Secretary of State Clinton was the lone vote still backing the boycott and non-recognition of Cuba. Obama and Clinton still retained the Bush rhetoric of Venezuela being a ‘danger to democracy in Latin America’, securing US diplomatic isolation.

By mid 2009 the Obama regime took a bigger step toward alienating its neighbors by covertly supporting the military coup in Honduras, then initially denying it was a coup, then refusing to follow Latin America and the OAS by retaining relations, then replacing the OAS as mediator by pushing Costa Rican client Arias and finally recognizing the electoral process organized by the military junta against the position of all Latin regimes except the narco-president of Colombia.

Washington’s recognition and support of the overturn, its constant reference to the illegal authoritarian regime as an “interim regime” spelled out, a return to the use of military coups to overthrow democratically governments which diverge from US foreign policy. In the case of Honduras the ‘divergence’ was over foreign policy – namely President Zelayn’s decision to join ALBA and Petrocaribe and reap the benefits of subsidized oil prices and Venezuelan foreign aid. Zelaya, a member of the big landholding elite had not expropriated any domestic or foreign property holdings nor redistributed land or wealth, though he did encourage trade union organizing and increased expenditures on social programs.

The Washington’s backing of the Honduran junta, cost it regional support and dissipated sympathy throughout the region. The key point is that Obama valued restoring control over a client banana republic in Central America to an improvement of relations with Brazil, Argentina and the rest of the region. The key to Obama’s decision is his over riding priority to erode Chavez influence, by overthrowing allied regimes and establishing political-military beachheads for any future military operations.

The centralality of military driven policies against Chavez was dramatically evident in the seven base military treaty signed by Obama and Alvaro Uribe, Colombia’s infamous narco-president. Colombia ceded several naval, air and special forces bases to the US, including one proximate to the Venezuela boundary. Once again neither Uribe nor Obama consulted with the rest of the OAS: it was presented with a fait accompli, a unilateral violation of the regional organizations’ charter. The reaction from Latin America was almost universally negative, varying in intensity between Brazil’s demand for details on the agreement, the purpose of the bases and guarantees that the bases would not be used to invade neighboring countries to Venezuela’s robust denunciation that the bases were a platform for an invasion. Once again Obama brushed off the negative response and proceeded with the militarist option as a top priority over diplomatic isolation in the hemisphere.

As the US ‘outsider strategy’ turned toward a massive and sustained military buildup of Colombia – over $6 billion in military aid over the decade – with the introduction of modern fighter planes, drone reconnaissance planes and several thousand advisers and sub-contracted private “security” mercenaries, Chavez turned to Russia for a massive $4 billion dollar purchase of small arms, armored vehicles and warplanes. A US induced ‘arms race’ was on. Chavez described his large scale arms purchases as a deterrent, an effort to increase the cost of an armed intervention.

Washington’s military driven foreign policy in the Middle East and its boycott and sanctions policies toward Iran were rejected by most of the rest of Latin America. Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia in particular signed multiple trade and investment agreements, worth, in the case of Brazil, several billion dollars.

Secretary of State Clinton responded with thinly veiled threats of “consequences” for economic ties to Iran, particularly toward Bolivia, provoking a denunciation of meddling in internal relations.

US – Latin America’s policy has failed to open a new relationship and certainly has deepened US isolation. Obama has increased the degree of alienation and failed to recover hegemony. In large part for the same reason that the Bush administration failed: Washington policymakers retain as the “model”, Latin American submission to US supremacy during the “golden years” of the 1990’s. Undersecretary Arturo Valenzuela during his visit to Argentina revealed this reactionary nostalgia when he recalled the “good times” during the Menem regime (1989-1999), a period of pillage, plunder and monumental corruption, universally condemned. This gaffe provoked a storm of protest and further soured Argentine-US relations beyond what existed under Bush.

Rising militarization under Obama as evidenced in the US-Colombia-Venezuela triangle is out of sync with the Latin America’s big push for greater trade diversification, higher growth and increased regional integration, including countries targeted by Obama. Chavez, despite his defense spending, fits into the Latin American pattern, looking toward greater trade with Argentina, Brazil, China, Iran while freezing trade relations with Colombia and attempting to lower dependence on the US market.

The Bush-Obama policy of confrontation and intimidation to force a break between Latin America’s center-left and centrist governments and the “radicals” has boomeranged, exacerbating conflicts across a series of diplomatic and economic issues. The strategy of isolating Cuba and Venezuela has highlighted Washington’s lone vote on each occasion.

Washington’s resort to a military strategy reflects its global policy but one that is out of tune with the changing priorities and political complexion of Latin regimes. As much as anything, the Obama regimes’ military position reflects the decline of economic leverage, in part a reflection of the primacy of finance over manufacturing, in part a result of the demise of the empire-centered neo-liberal ideology which greased the wheels of US hegemony. It is clear that Washington has failed to recognize that the restoration of the type of client regimes of the previous decade is a highly dubious proposition; efforts to that effect are likely to provoke greater regime and mass rejection of any overtures to ‘new relations’.

Washington’s double discourse of “free trade for your markets” and “protectionism for ours” does not fly. Brazil under Lula, a staunch free marketer has said as much in the face of US tariffs on ethanol and other competitive exorts.

What is striking about US-Latin American relations is that the deterioration occurs at a time when the so-called center-left regimes have embraced capitalism, foreign investment, moderate regulations on capital flows, co-opted radical social movements and trade unions, retained the bulk of the dubious privatizations and the agro-mineral export model. That the US and particular the Obama regime have failed to build a new positive relationship in these eminently democratic capitalist circumstances can only be attributed to its extremism, its deep-going commitment to military driven empire building.

Even in the case of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador, joint economic ventures with foreign capital continue to thrive; the private sector still controls the mass media, banking, agriculture, commerce and transport. Positive investment and trade relations thrive with other economic blocs including the EU and the emerging dynamic capitalist countries of China, South Africa, Russia as well as the Middle East. Chavez’ rejection of US military policies and interventionism has solid popular backing and is supported by polls in the EU and even in the US. If Washington proceeds toward a proxy war with Venezuela using Honduras as a dress rehearsal, (in addition to its overstretch today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen) can it win a prolonged offensive war? A highly dubious proposition. More likely it will re-radicalize the continent and certainly turn Venezuela toward socialization of the economy and deepen its ties to radical social movements elsewhere. As it stands today, Venezuela eschews ties to radical social movements, favoring ties with social liberal and even conservative regimes willing to sign trade and investment treaties and friendly diplomatic relations.

As it stands, recent history teaches us that each military and diplomatic move against Chavez has radicalized the regime not intimidated it. Each effort to pressure or to coerce center-left regimes to break with Venezuela has failed or boomeranged. Given Washington’s policy of rule or ruin it has interpreted each diplomatic rebuff as a “reason” to bunker down with the most retrograde regimes as is the case of militarizing Colombia.

The diplomatic factions of the State Department, to the extent that they exist and retain any positions of influence, have been rebuffed, as every expression of moderation and possible negotiated solutions is undercut by the ultimatums and unacceptable conditions. Clinton, Obama and Gates set the conditions for good relations on accepting US global interventionism (the war on terror) and regime change (client power). Those policy conditions have only strengthened the nationalist and democratic credentials of Chavez and weakened Washington’s appeals for regional realignment.

Asian capitalism, notably China and South Korea are competing with the US for global power. Asian global power is driven by dynamic economic growth, while the US pursues a strategy of military-driven empire building.

Even a cursory read of a single issue of the Financial Times (December 28, 2009) illustrates the divergent strategies toward empire building. On page one, the lead article on the US is on its expanding military conflicts and its ‘war on terror’, entitled “Obama Demands Review of Terror List”. In contrast, there are two page-one articles on China, which describe China’s launching of the world’s fastest long-distance passenger train service and China’s decision to maintain its currency pegged to the US dollar as a mechanism to promote its robust export sector. While Obama turns the US focus on a fourth battle front (Yemen) in the ‘war on terror’ (after Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan), the Financial Times reports on the same page that a South Korean consortium has won a $20.4 billion dollar contract to develop civilian nuclear power plants for the United Arab Emirates, beating its US and European competitors.

On page two of the FT there is a longer article elaborating on the new Chinese rail system, highlighting its superiority over the US rail service: The Chinese ultra-modern train takes passengers between two major cities, 1,100 kilometers, in less than 3 hours whereas the US Amtrack ‘Express’ takes 3 ½ hours to cover 300 kilometers between Boston and New York. While the US passenger rail system deteriorates from lack of investment and maintenance, China has spent $17 billion dollars constructing its express line. China plans to construct 18,000 kilometers of new track for its ultra-modern system by 2012, while the US will spend an equivalent amount in financing its ‘military surge’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as opening a new war front in Yemen.

China builds a transport system linking producers and labor markets from the interior provinces with the manufacturing centers and ports on the coast, while on page 4 the Financial Times describes how the US is welded to its policy of confronting the ‘Islamist threat’ with an endless ‘war on terror’. The decades-long wars and occupations of Moslem countries have diverted hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds to a militarist policy with no benefit to the US, while China modernizes its civilian economy. While the White House and Congress subsidize and pander to the militarist-colonial state of Israel with its insignificant resource base and market, alienating 1.5 billion Moslems (Financial Times – page 7), China’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 10 fold over the past 26 years (FT – page 9). While the US allocated over $1.4 trillion dollars to Wall Street and the military, increasing the fiscal and current account deficits, doubling unemployment and perpetuating the recession (FT – page 12), the Chinese government releases a stimulus package directed at its domestic manufacturing and construction sectors, leading to an 8% growth in GDP, a significant reduction of unemployment and ‘re-igniting linked economies’ in Asia, Latin America and Africa (also on page 12).

While the US was spending time, resources and personnel in running ‘elections’ for its corrupt clients in Afghanistan and Iraq, and participating in pointless mediations between its intransigent Israeli partner and its impotent Palestinian client, the South Korean government backed a consortium headed by the Korea Electric Power Corporation in its successful bid on the $20.4 billion dollar nuclear power deal, opening the way for other billion-dollar contracts in the region (FT – page 13).

While the US was spending over $60 billion dollars on internal policing and multiplying the number and size of its ‘homeland’ security agencies in pursuit of potential ‘terrorists’, China was investing $25 billion dollars in ‘cementing its energy trading relations’ with Russia (FT – page 3).

The story told by the articles and headlines in a single day’s issue of the Financial Times reflects a deeper reality, one that illustrates the great divide in the world today. The Asian countries, led by China, are reaching world power status on the basis of their massive domestic and foreign investments in manufacturing, transportation, technology and mining and mineral processing. In contrast, the US is a declining world power with a deteriorating society resulting from its military-driven empire building and its financial-speculative centered economy:

1. Washington pursues minor military clients in Asia; while China expands its trading and investment agreements with major economic partners – Russia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.

2. Washington drains the domestic economy to finance overseas wars. China extracts minerals and energy resources to create its domestic job market in manufacturing.

3. The US invests in military technology to target local insurgents challenging US client regimes; China invests in civilian technology to create competitive exports.

4. China begins to restructure its economy toward developing the country’s interior and allocates greater social spending to redress its gross imbalances and inequalities while the US rescues and reinforces the parasitical financial sector, which plundered industries (strips assets via mergers and acquisitions) and speculates on financial objectives with no impact on employment, productivity or competitiveness.

5. The US multiplies wars and troop build-ups in the Middle East, South Asia, the Horn of Africa and Caribbean; China provides investments and loans of over $25 billion dollars in building infrastructure, mineral extraction, energy production and assembly plants in Africa.

6. China signs multi-billion dollar trade and investment agreements with Iran, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia, securing access to strategic energy, mineral and agricultural resources; Washington provides $6 billion in military aid to Colombia, secures seven military bases from President Uribe (to threaten Venezuela), backs a military coup in tiny Honduras and denounces Brazil and Bolivia for diversifying its economic ties with Iran.

7. China increases economic relations with dynamic Latin American economies, incorporating over 80% of the continent’s population; the US partners with the failed state of Mexico, which has the worst economic performance in the hemisphere and where powerful drug cartels control wide regions and penetrate deep into the state apparatus.

China is not an exceptional capitalist country. Under Chinese capitalism, labor is exploited; inequalities in wealth and access to services are rampant; peasant-farmers are displaced by mega-dam projects and Chinese companies recklessly extract minerals and other natural resources in the Third World. However, China has created scores of millions of manufacturing jobs, reduced poverty faster and for more people in the shortest time span in history. Its banks mostly finance production. China doesn’t bomb, invade or ravage other countries. In contrast, US capitalism has been harnessed to a monstrous global military machine that drains the domestic economy and lowers the domestic standard of living in order to fund its never-ending foreign wars. Finance, real estate and commercial capital undermine the manufacturing sector, drawing profits from speculation and cheap imports.

China invests in petroleum-rich countries; the US attacks them. China sells plates and bowls for Afghan wedding feasts; US drone aircraft bomb the celebrations. China invests in extractive industries, but, unlike European colonialists, it builds railroads, ports, airfields and provides easy credit. China does not finance and arm ethnic wars and ‘color rebellions’ like the US CIA. China self-finances its own growth, trade and transportation system; the US sinks under a multi trillion dollar debt to finance its endless wars, bail out its Wall Street banks and prop up other non-productive sectors while many millions remain without jobs.

China will grow and exercise power through the market; the US will engage in endless wars on its road to bankruptcy and internal decay. China’s diversified growth is linked to dynamic economic partners; US militarism has tied itself to narco-states, warlord regimes, the overseers of banana republics and the last and worst bona fide racist colonial regime, Israel.

China entices the world’s consumers. US global wars provoke terrorists here and abroad.

China may encounter crises and even workers rebellions, but it has the economic resources to accommodate them. The US is in crisis and may face domestic rebellion, but it has depleted its credit and its factories are all abroad and its overseas bases and military installations are liabilities, not assets. There are fewer factories in the US to re-employ its desperate workers: A social upheaval could see the American workers occupying the empty shells of its former factories.

To become a ‘normal state’ we have to start all over: Close all investment banks and military bases abroad and return to America. We have to begin the long march toward rebuilding industry to serve our domestic needs, to living within our own natural environment and forsake empire building in favor of constructing a democratic socialist republic.

When will we pick up the Financial Times or any other daily and read about our own high-speed rail line carrying American passengers from New York to Boston in less than one hour? When will our own factories supply our hardware stores? When will we build wind, solar and ocean-based energy generators? When will we abandon our military bases and let the world’s warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists face the justice of their own people?

Neoliberalism and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development in Latin America

An analysis of the dynamics of capitalist development over the last two decades has been overshadowed by an all too prevalent “globalization” discourse. It appears that much of the Left has bought into this discourse, tacitly accepting globalization as an irresistible fact and that in many ways it is progressive, needing only for the corporate agenda to be derailed and an abandonment of neoliberalism. This is certainly the case in Latin America where the Left has focused its concern almost exclusively on the bankruptcy of “neoliberalism”, with reference to the agenda pursued and package of policy reforms implemented by virtually every government in the region by the dint of ideology if not the demands of the global capital or political opportunism. In this concern, imperialism and capitalism per se, as opposed to neoliberalism, have been pushed off the agenda, and as a result, excepting Chavéz’s Bolivarian Revolution, the project of building socialism has virtually disappeared as an object of theory and practice.

In this paper we would like to contribute towards turning this around—to resurrect the socialist project; to do so by deconstructing the discourse on “neoliberal globalization” and reconstructing the actual contemporary dynamics of capitalist development.

This is a major task requiring a closer look at the issues. The modest contribution of this paper is to bring into focus the imperialist dynamics of capitalist development in Latin America. To this end, we present an analytical framework for an analysis of the dynamics of capitalist development and imperialism. We then summarize these dynamics in the Latin American context. Our argument is that the dynamics of capitalist development and imperialism have both an objective-structural and a subjective-political dimension and that a class analysis of these dynamics should include both. This means that it is not enough to establish the workings of capitalism and imperialism in terms of their objectively given conditions that affect people and countries according to their class location in this system. We need to establish the political dynamics of popular and working class responses to these conditions—to neoliberal policies of structural adjustment to the purported requirements of the new world order. The politics of the Left might so be better informed.

Capitalist development in Latin America can be periodized as follows: (1) an initial phase of primitive accumulation and national development dating more or less from the Independence Movement in the 1860s and crystallizing in the Porfiriato, an extended dictatorship of the big landowners and incipient bourgeoisie in Mexico; (2) a period of modernization, incipient industrialization (in the form of “Fordism”) and social reform, dating from the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century; (3) a period of state-led capitalist development with “international cooperation” (technical and financial assistance) dating from the end of the Second World War and the construction of the Bretton Woods world order (1945-70); (4) a period of transition (1971-82) characterized by an extended crisis in the global system of capitalist production and diverse efforts to restructure the system; and (iv) the construction of a new world order designed so as to free the “forces of freedom” from the constraints on capital accumulation imposed by the system of sovereign nation states. This phase, which can be dated from the onset of a region-wide debt and an ensuing “development” crisis, is characterized by dynamic processes of neoliberal globalization and imperialism – the institution of a neoliberal policy framework (the structural adjustment program, as it was termed at the time), a renewed imperial offensive, and the decline but then partial recovery of the capital accumulation process and the self-styled “forces of economic and political freedom”.

The latest period of capitalist development has two dimensions (globalization in theory / imperialism in practice, forces of opposition and resistance), both of which can also be broken down into four phases.

Neoliberalism and Imperialism in Practice: A Framework of Analysis

Phase I (1975-82) of the neoliberal project is associated with the bloody Pinochet regime in Chile constituted with a military coup in 1973. The “bold reforms” implemented by this regime and extended into Argentina and Uruguay were subsequently implemented by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and used by economists at the World Bank as a model for the structural reforms set as the price of admission into the new (neoliberal) world order.

Phase II (1983-90) of neoliberalism (imperialism masked as globalization) includes the foundation stones of renewed process of capital accumulation on a global scale; setting the parameters for a new configuration of economic and political power; implementation of a second round of neoliberal “structural reform”; launch of an ideology (globalization) designed to legitimate this reform process, and the first wave of privatizations as part of this reform process; and a process of redemocratization designed as a means of securing the political conditions of structural adjustment—a marriage of strategic convenience between capitalism /economic liberalism and democracy / political liberalism (Dominguez and Lowenthal, 1996).

Phase III (1990-2000) entails what might be viewed as a “golden age” of massive transfers of public property to the “private sector” (capitalists and their enterprises); an enormous net outflow of capital (“international resource transfers”) in the form of profits on investments, debt payments and royalty charges; virtually no economic growth—less than one percent per capita over the decade and a growing divide in the distribution of society’s wealth and income; huge bailouts of the banks and investors in corporate stock in a situation of financial crisis; and another round of neoliberal policy reform (“structural reform”), this time with a “human face” (adding to the reform process a “new social policy” targeted at the poor,); a second wave of privatizations and an associated denationalization of the banks and strategic economic enterprises; and a post-Washingron Consensus on the need for a more inclusive form of neoliberalism designed to empower the poor (Craig and Porter, 2006; Ocampo, 1998; Van Waeyenberge, 2006).

Phase IV (2000-09) begins with an involution in the system of capitalist production and the collapse of foreign direct investment inflows; and the onset of political crisis viz. widespread disenchantment with neoliberalism, and a process of regime change (Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela—a coup against and the restoration of Chávez to power—and Uruguay. In 2003, the production crisis gives way to a mild economic recovery for a number of countries in the region and a sweeping realignment of political forces into four blocs. The basis of this process of economic and political development is a realignment of global production—a primary commodities boom fueled by the growing demand in China and India for new sources of energy, natural resource industrial inputs and consumption goods for a rapidly growing middle class.

Opposition to Imperialism, Class Rule and Neoliberalism: Forces of Resistance

Phase 1 (1973-82) of the anti-neoliberal project includes a major counter-offensive of the landed proprietors and big capital against the incremental advance of the workers and peasants; a double-offensive of the state against the rural poor and landless peasants in the form of the “Alliance for Progress” (“rural development”) and use of the state’s repressive apparatus against the guerrilla armies of national liberation; the counter-offensive of capital, with the support of the state, against the working class, resulting in a disarticulation of the labor movement, cooptation of its leadership and a weakening in its capacity to negotiate for higher wages and better working conditions; and, with the agency and support of U.S. imperialism, the institution of military coups and the institution of military rule and a war against “subversives” under the aegis of a Washington-designed “Doctrine of National Security”.

Phase II (1983-99) was characterized by a reorganization of the popular movement, particularly in the countryside—in the indigenous communities and among the masses of dispossessed, landless workers and peasant producers; the mobilization of the forces of popular opposition and resistance against the neoliberal policies of the governments of the day; various uprisings of indigenous peasants in Ecuador, Chiapas and Bolivia, resulting in the ouster of several presidents if not regime change, and in the blocking of governments efforts to extend the neoliberal agenda; the division of the indigenous movement (in Bolivia and Ecuador) into a social and political movement, allowing it to contest elections as well as mobilize the forces of resistance in direct action against the state; a general advance in the popular movement with the growth of new offensive and defensive class struggles.

Phase III (2000-03), corresponding to a crisis in production and ideology vis-à-vis neoliberalism, was characterized by the emergence of various offensive struggles and social mobilizations that led to the overthrow of regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez came to power, inciting the complex dynamics of a class struggle characterized by a series of counter-offensives by the ruling class (attempted coups, referendums), growing demands for radical reforms and the institution of the “Bolivarian Revolution” based on an anti-imperialist strategy designed to take the country along a socialist path.

As for Phase IV (2003-09) it saw the rise of a bloc of pragmatic neoliberal, quasi-populist democratic socialist regimes oriented towards the post-Washington Consensus, an ebb in the flow of the popular movements, the radicalization of Chávez’s project of “21st Century Socialism” and the reflux of the popular movement.

Four Cycles of Neoliberalism

“Neoliberalism” in this historic context denotes a national policy—or rather, reform of the then-existing policy of state-led development (“structural reform” or “structural adjustment”)—justified with a neoclassical theory of economic growth and development and an ideology of globalization. In this context, we can identify four cycles of neoliberal “structural reform”. The first cycle, initiated by the Chicago Boys in Chile under Pinochet . After this first round of neoliberal experiments in policy reform, extended to Argentina and Uruguay, crashed in the early 1980s, a second round of neoliberal policy reforms was implemented under conditions of redemocratization, an external debt crisis and the political leverage that this crisis provided the World Bank and the IMF, the agencies that assumed primary responsibility for implementing the Washington Consensus on needed policy reform.

The third cycle of neoliberal policies was implemented in the 1990s. At the outset only four major regimes had failed to fully embrace the “discipline” of structural adjustment. But serious concerns had surfaced as to the sustainability of the neoliberal model and the associated Washington Consensus. For one thing, neoliberalism had utterly failed to deliver on the promise of economic prosperity and mutual benefits to countries north and south of the global development divide. For another, structural reforms had not only released the “forces of freedom” but also forces of resistance that threatened the survival not only the viability of the neoliberal model but the survival of the state itself. To avert an impending crisis the ideologues of globalization and neoliberal architects of policy reform came up with a revised model: structural adjustment with a human face (UNICEF, 1989) in one formulation, productive transformation with equity (ECLAC, 1990) in another, and “sustainable human development” (UNDP, 1996) in yet another. The common feature of these and other such models was a continuing commitment to a neoliberal program of “structural reform” at the level of national policy, the design and adoption of a “new social policy” that “targeted” social investment funds at the poor and their communities, and specific policies that helped shelter the most vulnerable groups from the admittedly high “transitional” social costs of structural adjustment.[1]

The discourse on “globalization” emerged in the 1980s in the context of efforts in policymaking circles to renovate the ailing Bretton Woods world order—to create a “new world order”. Under widespread systemic conditions of a capitalist production crisis and an associated fiscal crisis, economists at the World Bank and its sister “international financial institutions”, all adjuncts of the U.S. imperial state, formulated a program of policy reforms designed to open up the economies of the developing world to the forces of “economic freedom”, to integrate these societies and economies into the new world order. These policy reforms included various IMF stabilization measures such as currency devaluation and import restrictions, and policies of structural adjustment: (1) privatization of the means of social production and associated economic enterprises (reverting thereby the nationalization policies of the earlier model of state-led development); (2) deregulation of diverse product, capital and labor markets; (3) liberalization of capital flows and trade in products and services; and (4) and administrative decentralization, attempting to “democratize” thereby the relation of civil society to the state, transferring to local governments in partnership with civil society responsibility for economic and social development; that is, privatizing “development” (allowing the poor to “own” and be responsible for improving their lives, changing themselves rather than the system.

By the end of the 1980s, this package of policy reforms had transformed the economic and social system of many Latin American societies. The state-led reforms of the 1960s and 1970s (nationalization, regulation of capitalist enterprise and capital inflows, protection of domestic producers, rural credit schemes, land and income redistribution market-generated incomes, etc.) had been reverted, effectively halting, where not reversing, the process of development and incremental change.

The outcome and social impacts of this social transformation were all too visible and apparent, especially to those groups and classes that bore the brunt of the adjustment and globalization process. With a significant reduction in the share of labor (and households) in society’s wealth and national income, and an equally significant concentration of asset-based incomes and its conversion into capital, Latin American society became increasingly class divided and polarized between a small minority of individuals capacitated and able to appropriate the lion’s share of the new wealth and a large mass of producers and workers who had to bear the costs of this “structural adjustment” and excluded from its benefits. The economic and political landscape of Latin American society was, and is, littered with the detritus of this development process. The objectively given conditions of this process are not only reflected in the all too evident deterioration in living and working conditions of the mass of the urban and rural population. They are also reflected in the evidence of a process of massive outmigration, the export of labor as it were, and an equally massive process of capital export—a net outflow or transfer of “financial resources” estimated by Saxe-Fernandez and Núñez (2001) to amount to over USD 100 million for the entire decade of the 1990s. Recent studies suggest that if anything the process, fuelled by the financialization of development and policies of privatization, liberalization and deregulation, has continued to accelerate, putting an end to any talk, and much writing, about a purported “economic recovery” based on a program of “bold reforms” and “sound economics.” Neoliberalism is in decline if not dead.

It is commonplace among many intellectuals, pundits and policy makers both in Latin America as elsewhere to discuss “globalization” as of it were a process unfolding with an air of inevitability, the result of forces beyond anyone’s control—at worst allowing policymakers to manage the process and at best to push it in a more ethical direction; that is, allow the presumed benefits of globalization to be spread somewhat more equitably. This is, in fact, the project shared by the antiglobalization movement in their search for “another world” and the pragmatic centre-left politicians currently in power in their search for “another development”.

In this discourse, globalization appears as a behemoth whose appetites must be satisfied and whose thirst must be quenched at all costs—costs borne, as it happens but not fortuitously, by the working class. In this context to write, as do so many on the Left today, of the “corporate agenda” and “national interests”, etc. is to obfuscate the class realities of globalization—the existence and machinations of the global ruling class (Petras, 2007) and what Jeffrey Faux (2006) terms a “global class war”.

Faux’s book allows us to view in a different way the globalizing economy, the politics and economics of free trade, and soaring corporate profits on the one hand, and, on the other hand, deteriorating standards of living and the continuing (and deepening) poverty of most of the world’s people. What is behind this reality? A dynamic objective process, working like the invisible hand of providence through the free market to bring about mutual benefits and general prosperity? Or a class of people who in their collective interest have launched a global war with diverse features and theaters. One feature of this class war, one of many (on its manifestation in the European theater, see Davis, 1984; and Crouch and Pizzorno, 1978) entails ripping up the social contract that had allowed the benefits of capitalism to be broadly shared with other social classes. Another feature was the use of the state apparatus to reduce the share of labor in national income waken its organizational and negotiating capacity, and repress any movement for substantive social change.

The globalization discourse hides the class realities behind it. The press, for example, consistently talks about national interests without defining whom exactly is getting what and how, under what policy or decision-making conditions. Thus, American workers are told that the Chinese are taking their jobs. But the China threat, in fact, is but another global business partnership, in this case between Chinese commissars who supply global capital cheap labor and the U.S. and other foreign capitalists who supply the technology and much of the capital used to finance China’s exports. Workers in Latin America are told that it is their inflexibility and intransigence, and government interference in the free market, that hold them back from engaging meaningfully or at all in the many benefits of globalization. Many, including on the Left, view “globalization” in this way. However, it would be better to see it for what it is: a class project vis-à-vis the accumulation of capital on a global scale; and as “imperialism” vis-à-vis the project of world domination, a source and means of ideological hegemony over the system.

Neoliberalism is the reigning ideology of the global elite, a transnational capitalist class that holds its annual meeting in the plush mountain resort of Davos, Switzerland. Hosted by the multinational corporations that dominate the world economy (Citigroup, Siemens, Microsoft, Nestlé, Shell, Chevron, BP Amoco, Repsol-YPF, Texaco, Occidental, Halliburton, etc.), some 2000 CEOs, prominent politicians (including former and the current presidents of Mexico), this and other such meetings allow this elite to network with pundits and international bureaucrats, discuss policy briefs and position papers on the state of the global economy, and to strategize abut the world’s future – all over the best food, fine wine, good skiing and cozy evenings by the fire among friends and associates – fellow self-appointed and nominated members and guardians of the imperial world order.

Davos is not a secret cabal, although it is surrounded by meetings and workings of a host of groupings, meetings and committees and extended networks that is. Journalists issue daily reports to the world on the wit and informal charm of these unelected, self-appointed or nominated members of the class that runs and manages the global economy. In this sense it is a political convention of what Fauz dubs “the Davos Party” that includes solid representation from the economic and political elite in Latin America. The mechanism and dynamics of class membership are unclear; as far as we know it has not been systemically studied. But it likely involves “people” like Henrique Fernando Cardoso, former dependency theorist and later neoliberal president of Brazil, upon or before completion of his term in office, being invited to give a “talk” or address members of the imperial brain trust, the global elite, at one of its diverse foundations and “policy forums”, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a critical linchpin of the imperial brain trust and its system of thinktanks, policy forums and geopolitical planning centers. Certainly this is how former Mexican presidents Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo were appointed and assigned specific responsibilities on diverse working “committees” designed to identify and redress fissures in and threats to the system. It is evident that listing in Forbes’ listing of the world’s biggest billionaire family fortunes, such as Bill Gates, George Soros and Carlos Slim, is sufficient in itself to ensure automatic membership in the club.

The New World Order system easily identifies those members of the global elite in each country that, as Salbuchi (2000) notes, are “malleable, controllable and willing to subordinate themselves to the system’s objectives”. Their careers are then launched so that they may rise to become presidents of their countries or ministers of finance and central bank governors. This was the case, for example, for Argentina’s Domingo Cavallo, Chile’s Alejandro Foxley and Brazil’s Henrique Cardoso, each of whom received suitable local and international press coverage; were honored with “prestige-generating” reviews, interviews, conferences and dinners, etc.; and then invited to address the Council on Foreign Relations, the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, so that the key New World Order players in New York and Washington could evaluate them. If and when they pass muster their election campaigns are generously financed by the corporate, banking and media infrastructure of the “establishment” that has the resources and means to bring them to power legally and democratically—to do the bidding of their masters and colleagues.[2] Some are even invited to join elite circles and organizations such as Trilateral Commission and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), or one of the CRC’s working committees.

Throughout the 1990s the dominant popular response to neoliberal globalization and associated regimes and policies was in the form of social movements that represented and advanced most effectively the struggle against what Ron Chilcote (1990) called a “plurality of resistances to inequality and oppression”. These movements placed growing pressure from below on the regime and the “political class”. However, by mid-decade, well into the left’s general retreat from class politics, a number of these movements followed Brazil’s labor movement (The PT or Workers’ party) in establishing a party apparatus to allow them to contest both national and local elections—to pursue an electoral strategy. This political development did not require or mean an abandonment of the social movement strategy of social mobilizations, etc. but it did open up a broader opportunity to participate in the electoral process, allowing the populace to participate in party politics.

Local Politics and Community Development

The mobilization of the electorate via the institutional trappings of liberal democracy provided a new impetus to the political left—the segment that opted for party politics over social mobilization as a strategy for achieving state power: influencing government policy from within rather than outside the system. However, a large swath of the Left seem to have heeded Jorge Casteñeda’s call for the Left to switch its electoral ambitions to the municipality, local politics and community development. His argument, advanced in Utopia Unarmed, was that “municipal politics should be the centre-piece of the left’s democratic agenda…because it typifies the kind of change that is viable…a stepping stone for the future” (1994: 244). Engagement in local politics, he argued –and much of the left seemed to have followed this line—would provide the basis for a consolidation of the Left after the so-called “democratic transition” from 1979 (Bolivia, Ecuador) to 1989 (Chile). In addition it would help re-articulate the civil society-local state nexus and restore legitimacy to the Left’s relationship with the popular sector (Lievesley, 2005: 8).

An example of the approach proposed by Casteñeda, and in fact widely pursued by the Left even before his book (the World Bank’s strategy in this regard was already quite advanced) had already is the PT’s experience with municipal government in Porto Alegre, the capital city of Brazil’s state of Rio Grande do Sul (1989-2004). The PT administration opened up municipal institutions with a stated commitment to accountability and transparency, as well as citizen participation in the budget planning process via the mechanism of public meetings (Orçamento Participativa).

The Porto Alegre experience with participatory budgeting was hailed by the World Bank and the International Development “community” of multilateral institutions and liberal academics as a good example of collective decision-making for the common good, a model of grassroots participatory development and politics, and it continues to serve as a guide to similar practices and experiences elsewhere (Abers, 1997). Other examples of this “participatory” approach towards local politics and community development, widely adopted by the Left in the 1990s in its retreat from class, can be found in Bolivia and Ecuador, both countries a laboratory for diverse experiments to convert the municipality into a “productive agent” (the “productive municipality”)[3] and exertions by the Left to bring about social change via local politics (North and Cameron, 2003). On the left this shift from macro-politics and development (national elections versus social movements) to micro-politics and development (local politics, participatory development) was viewed as a salutary retreat from a form of analysis and politics whose time had come and gone. Within academe the dynamics of this process has been viewed in some circles as the harbinger of a “new tyranny” (Cooke and Kothari, 2001).

On January 3, 2007, Caracas, the capital city of an epicenter of social and political transformation in the region was concerted into the Mecca of the international left. Thousands of activists (100, 00 according to the organizers) arrived in Caracas from some 170 countries to participate in the sixth edition of the World Social Forum (WSF), a process initiated in Porto Alegre, Brazil, six years earlier. It was the first of a then thereafter annual event, extended to and replicated in other regional settings from India, Europe and most recently Nairobi, Kenya in the African subcontinent. In each place and in each annual event, the organizers would bring together hundreds of nongovernmental and civil organizations committed to the search for a more ethical form of globalization, a more human form of capitalism. The process brings together diverse representatives of a self-defined new left committed to the belief in the necessity and possibility of a “new world”, an alternative to globalization in its neoliberal form.

There are, of course, defined limits to this new political process: participants are invited and expected to explore diverse proposals for bringing about “another world” but to limit this search to reforms to the existing system, reforms that no matter how “radical” are expected to leave the pillars of the system intact. This liberal reform orientation to the process is ensured by explicit exclusions—any political organizations that include armed struggle or violent confrontation and class struggle in its repertoire, that are oriented towards revolutionary change.

ATTAC, a Paris-based social democratic organization is the most visible representative of this approach towards social change, but the World Social Forum from its inception morphed into and became a significant expression of what emerged as the “antiglobalization movement”. This movement had its origins in the encounter of diverse forces of resistance formed in middleclass organizations in the “global north” and mounted against the symbols of neoliberal globalization such as the World Trade Organization and the G-7/8 annual summit. A defining moment in this movement, rooted in the organizations of the urban middle class—NGOs, unions, students, etc.–in both Europe and North America, included the successful mobilization against the MAI in Seattle. This mobilization was the first of a number of serialized events scheduled to unfold at important gatherings of the representatives of global capital—Genoa, Quebec, Melbourne, Dakar….

In Latin America the World Social Forum process, is the basic form taken by the “antiglobalization movement” in the search for “another world” (the latest event in this process was hosted by Lula, taking place in Bélem towards the end of January 2009). Apart from the absence of an internal division between the advocates of moderate reform (ethical globalization) and more radical change the antiglobalization process is designed to define and maintain the outer limits of permitted change; that is, controlled dissent from the prevailing model of global capitalist development. Not anti-globalization but a more ethical form. Not anti-capitalism but a more humane form of capitalism, a more sustainable human form of development. Not anti-imperialism because imperialism is not at issue.

In the shape and form of class struggle the path towards social change in the 1960s and 1970s was paved with state power. That is, the forces of resistance, at the time based in the countryside, in the organizations and movements of the landless and near landless peasants, and in the urban-based organized labor movement; and for the most part led by petit-bourgeois middle class intellectuals, were concerned with the capture of state power. In the 1990s, in a very different context—neoliberal globalization—and in the wake of the Zapatista uprising in January 1994, there emerged on the left a postmodern twist to the struggle for social change: “social change without taking state power” (Holloway, 2002).

In the discourse of Subcomandante Marcos, the Zapatismo came to symbolically—or theoretically, in the writings of Holloway and others (for example, Burbach, 1994)—represent a “new way of doing politics”: to bring about social change without resort to class struggle or the quest for state power (Holloway, 2002). However, much of the Latin American Left appeared all o ready to retreat from class politics and engage the new way of “doing politics”. Some of the Left joined the struggle for change at the level of local politics and community development–to bring about social change by building on the assets of the poor, their “social capital” (Portes, 1998, 2000; Ocampo, 2004). Another part joined the “situationists” and other militants of “radical praxis” in an intellectual engagement with the forces of social and political disenchantment in the popular barrios of unemployed workers—in Gran Buenos Aires and elsewhere (Besayag and Sztulwark. 2000; Colectivo Situaciónes, 2001, 2002). This was in the early years of the new millennium. In the specific conjuncture of economic and political crisis, a generalized rejection of the “old way” of doing politics (“que se vayan todos”), the search for redemption and relevance left a large part of the left without a political project, without a social base for their politics.

With the advent of the new millennium, it was clear that the neoliberal model even in its revamped form, had failed to deliver on its promise of economic growth and general prosperity. Instead it had deepened existing class and global divides in wealth and income, and regime after regime was pushed towards its limits of endurance by the forces of popular mobilization. In this context, the political class in each country turned to the left, opening up new opportunities for groups that had hitherto concentrated their efforts on local politics and community development. Governments of the day, many of them neoliberal client regimes of the US, fell to the forces of resistance and opposition.

Political developments in the region regarding this regime change led to a concern in the US, and widespread hopes and expectations on the Left, about a tilt to the left in national politics and what the press (Globe & Mail) has termed a “disheartening” triumph of politics over “sound economics”. A lot of this concern revolves around Hugo Chávez, who appears (to the press and U.S. policymakers) to be taking Venezuela down a decidedly anti-US, anti-imperialist and seemingly socialist path–and taking other governments in the region with him.

Chávez’s electoral victory was seen by many as the moment when a red tide began to wash over the region’s political landscape. In the summer of 2002, the Movement to Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia, led by militant coca growers’ leader Evo Morales, became the second largest party in the Congress while in December it achieved huge victories in municipal elections—in what was billed by the MAS itself as “la toma de los municipios”. The election to state power of Lula da Silva in Brazil (October 2002) wa followed by Nestor Kirchner in Argentina (May 2003), Tabaré Vasquez in Uruguay (November 2004), Evo Morales (December 2005), (December 2006) Rafael Correa in Ecuador (December 2006) and most recently Lucas Longo in Paraguay. The tide was checked in Mexico in the summer of 2006 when Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate of the PRD, fell just short of victory, and in Peru, where the nationalist Humala lost out to Alan Garcia, the once disgraced social democrat but reborn neoliberal. But it appeared to swell again with Daniel Ortega’s victory in Nicaragua—although, given his opportunism and religious rebirth, Ortega could hardly be viewed as on the Left notwithstanding his friendship with Chávez and Fidel Castro—and Rafael Correa.

Thus it appeared that Latin America had turned against the US-inspired—and dictated—neoliberal policies of structural adjustment and globalization by electing to state power a number of parties on the political left—although “moderate” or “pragmatic”. Centre-left regimes, some of which cherish their links with Cuba and relish throwing it in the face of the U.S. administration, which has shown itself to be extraordinarily ideological and non-pragmatic, now outnumber right-of-centre governments in the region. The days of the US-supported and instigated right-wing dictatorships and military rule are over, having long disappeared in the dustbins of history and replaced by a new breed of neoliberal regimes.

These regimes in appearance (that is, as constructed in the rhetoric of public discourse) have changed or are changing economic course, ostensibly moving away from the neoliberal policies pushed by the US. This was the case in Argentina, for example where the Kirchner administration was compelled by the most serious economic and political crisis in its history to confront the IMF and the World Bank, and the US, by halting payments on the country’s external debt, redirecting import revenues towards productive and social investments, including short-term work projects demanded by the mass of unemployed workers that at the time constituted over 25% of the laborforce and who had taken to the streets, picketing highways in protest. The result: some three years later is an annual growth rate of 8%, the highest in the region.

Another example of apparent regime change was in Brazil, where and when in October 2002 the electorate after his third attempt voted Ignacio [Lula] da Silva, leader of the PT, into power, re-electing him in 2006 to a second term in office. The first President on the “left” voted into power since Allende in 1970, Lula is nevertheless (and for good reason, it turns out) very well received by Wall Street, if not Washington, which tends to view him as a thorn in the U.S. side. Indeed Lula played a major role in defeating the White House plan for a hemispheric free trade zone, and continues to annoy the U.S. with his support of Chávez-Morales-Correa axis in Latin American politics. In this context, the intellectual Left associated with the antiglobalization movement choose to see Lula as an opponent of neoliberal globalization. In fact, Lula, on behalf of Brazil’s agribusiness and other capitalist producers simply has been playing and continues to play hardball in negotiations over access to the U.S. market.

Elections of centre-left governments followed in Uruguay (2004), Chile (2005), Ecuador (2006) where the electorate was polarized between a business magnate, Alvaro Noboa, the richest man in the country and a committed neoliberal ideologue; and Rafael Correa, head of a centre-left coalition that appears to be taking Ecuador down the same path as Evo Morales is taking Bolivia, particularly in regard to a constituent assembly that might well, or is expected to, change the economic and social system as well as the correlation of class forces in the country’s politics. In this regard, elements of the political left in Ecuador, especially those associated with the “Coordinadora de Movimientos Sociales” (CMS), see a political opportunity to build a “radical bloc” on the basis of combined action “from above” (the government) and “from below” (the indigenous and popular movement). Whether this will happen (see Saltos, 2006)[4] remains to be seen. For one thing, it hinges on the capacity of the popular movement for active mobilization – to pressure the Correa government from below towards the left. On this the historic record is fairly clear. As observed by Pedro Stedile, leader of the MST, “without active mobilization the government gives nothing”.

With the election of Rafael Correa over Alvaro Noboa the popular and indigenous movement in Ecuador at least placed on the agenda of government action issues such as national sovereignty, nationalization of the country’s natural resources, agrarian reform, indigenous rights, subordination of payment on the external debt to social programs, renegotiation of oil contracts will the multinationals, the ending of the military bases in Manta, and Latin American (vs. continental) integration. Whether the government will act on these issues remains to be seen.

The conflict that ensued over the Constituent Assembly (CA) in Ecuador and Bolivia, where the CA was finally approved) is symptomatic of the profound legitimation crisis in the system of class domination in these and other countries (Saltos, 2006). Earlier and other forms of hegemony, such as “globalization” and the trappings of representative “democracy”, have lost their hold over people, having been totally undermined by the all too tangible and visible signs of the negative effects of neoliberal policies. The reign of Washington in the region appears to be in serious decline. Nor can Washington, in its efforts to preserve the status quo or the status quo ante, revert to the use of force—to bring back the Armed Forces to restore order. Its only recourse is to engage “civil society” in the project of “good governance”—to restore political order by means of a broad social consensus that reaches well beyond the state and the political class (Blair, 1997; OECD, 1997; UNDP, 1996; World Bank, 1994b).

What we saw in Quito and La Paz in regard to the Constituent Assembly went beyond a conflict between two branches of government. At issue was that those who elected Correa and Morales had come to the point of refusing to be subordinated to a state controlled by the dominant class and servile to Washington and the interests of global capital. On achieving political representation with the election of Morales and Correa, and Chávez for that matter, the forces in the popular movement were all too aware that the legislature was dominated by the “oligarchy” (the ruling class is understood in Bolivia and Ecuador). In this situation, Morales and Correa were compelled to construct a multi-class alliance and mobilize the forces of resistance to class rule and the neoliberal agenda of previous governments under the post-Washington Consensus. The result is the construction of a multi-ethnic or pluri-national state oriented towards what the Vice-President of Bolivia, Alvaro Garcia, conceives of as an Andean form of capitalism, and a new anti-american axis of regional politics and trade.

These and other such political developments in Bolivia and Ecuador are illustrative of what appears to be a regional trend. For example, in neighboring Colombia in October 2003 the voters elected a former union leader Luis Garzón as mayor of Bogotá. The election marked a swing to the left in Colombia’s second most important elective office, a clear challenge to the pro-US, scandal-ridden right-wing government of Alvaro Uribe. If we take these and other such developments together, especially in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, there does indeed seem to be a leftward swing in the political winds of change, leading …to declare that democratic elections are not enough: governments in the region also have to “govern democratically”, i.e. place no constrictions on the forces of opposition to the new agenda in national and regional politics.

A serious discussion of the prospects for socialism in Latin America today must take into account world economic conditions in the current conjuncture, the state of US-Latin American relations relative to the project of world domination and imperialism, the specific impact on Latin American countries of these conditions and relations, the conditions deriving from the correlation of class forces within these countries, and the class nature and agency of the state relative to these forces.

Latin America’s “restructured” capitalist economy emerged from the financial crisis of the 1990s and the recession of the early years of the new millennium with its axis of growth anchored in the primary sector of agro-mineral exports (Cypher, 2007; Ocampo, 2007). From 2003 to 2008 all Latin American economies, regardless of their ideological orientation or political complexion, based their economic growth strategy on the “re-primarization” of their export production, to take advantage thereby of the expanding markets for oil, energy and natural resources and the general increase in the price of primary commodities on the world market. The driving force of capitalist development in this period was agribusiness and mineral exports, export-oriented production of primary commodities leading to an increased dependence on diversified overseas markets and a change in the correlation of class forces, strengthening the right and, notwithstanding a generalized tilt to the Left at the level of the state, a weakening of the Left. Ironically, the primarization of exports led to the revival and strengthening of neoliberalism via the reconfiguration of state policy to favor agro-mineral exporters and accommodate the poorest section through populist clientelistic “poverty programs”. In the context of a primary commodities boom and the emergence of a range of democratically elected centre-left regimes, trade union leaders were coopted and the social movements that had mobilized the forces of resistance to neoliberalism in the 1990s were forced to beat a retreat from the class struggle (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2009).

The link between U.S. finance capital, the growth of industry and the domestic market in Asia, and the primary commodities boom, was responsible for the period of high growth in Latin America from 2003 to 2008, when the boom went bust and most economies in the region succumbed to a financial crisis of global proportions and a system-wide deep recession that threatened to push the U.S. economy, at the centre of the gravitational force of this crisis, towards collapse. With the U.S. empire’s “over-extension” and the exceedingly high costs of prosecuting imperialist war in Iraq and maintaining its enormous military apparatus—military expenditures on the Iraq war alone increasing by millions each minute (as of February 17, 2009 US$ 597.7 billion) and likely to cost well over a trillion dollars before it is over—the capacity of the U.S. to weather the storm of financial crisis and a deepening recession has been seriously diminished. Given the absorption of the U.S. state in the Iraq war, governments in Latin America in the latest phase of capitalist development managed to achieve a measure of “independence” and “relative autonomy” in their relations with the United States. And this has given leaders like Hugo Chavez a free hand in his efforts to push Venezuela in a socialist direction.

Impact of World Recession and U.S. Imperial Revivalism in Latin America

Latin America is feeling the full brunt of the world recession. Every country in the region, without exception, is experiencing a major decline in trade, domestic production, investment, employment, state revenues and income. The projected growth of Latin America’s GDP in 2009 has declined from 3.6% in September 2008 to 1.4% in December 2008 (Financial Times, January 9, 2009). More recent projections estimate Latin America’s GDP per capita as falling to minus two percent (-2%).[5] As a result state spending on social services will undoubtedly be reduced. State credit and subsidies to big banks and businesses will increase; unemployment will expand, especially in the agro-mineral and transport (automobile) export sectors. Public employees will be let go and experience a sharp decline in salaries. Latin America’s balance of payments will deteriorate as the inflow of billions of dollars and euros in remittances from overseas workers, a major source of “international financial resource” for many countries in the region, declines. Foreign speculators are already withdrawing tens of billions of investment dollars to cover their losses in the U.S. and Europe. A process of foreign disinvestment has replaced the substantial inflow of “foreign investment” in recent years, eliminating a major source of financing for major “joint ventures”. The precipitous decline in commodity prices in 2008, reflecting an abrupt drop in world demand, has sharply reduced government revenues dependent on export taxes. Foreign reserves in Latin America can only cushion the fall in export revenues for a limited time and extent.

The recession also means that the economic and social structure, the entire socioeconomic class configuration on which Latin America’s growth dynamic in recent years (2003-2008) was based, is headed for a major transformation. The entire spectrum of political parties linked to the primary commodity export model and that dominate the electoral process will be adversely affected. The trade unions and social movements oriented toward an improvement in their socioeconomic conditions and wages, social reforms and increased expenditures of fiscal resources and social spending within the primary commodity export model will be forced to take direct action or lose influence and relevance.

The initial response of the left of center regimes that came to power in the context of a primary commodities boom and neoliberalism in its demise has largely focused on: (i) financial support for the banking sector (Lula) and lower taxes for the agro-mineral export elite (Kirchner/Lula); (ii) cheap credit for consumers to stimulate domestic consumption (Kirchner); and (iii) temporary unemployment benefits for workers laid off from closed small and medium size mines (Morales). The response of the Latin American regimes to date (up to the beginning of 2009) could be characterized as delusional, the belief that their economies would not be affected. This response was followed by an attempt to minimize the crisis, with the claim that the recession would not be severe and that most countries would experience a rapid recovery in “late 2009”. It is argued in this context that the existing foreign reserves would protect their countries from a more severe decline.

According to the IMF, 40% of Latin America’s financial wealth ($2.200 billion dollars) was lost in 2008 because of the decline of the stock market and other asset markets and currency depreciation. This decline is estimated to reduce domestic spending by 5% in 2009. The terms of trade for Latin America have deteriorated sharply as commodity prices have fallen sharply, making imports more expensive and raising the specter of growing trade deficits (Financial Times, January 9, 2009, p. 7).

The impact of these “developments” can be traced out not only in regime politics but on the class structure and the correlation of forces associated with this structure. Thus, the fall in the demand and price of primary commodities is resulting in a sharp decline in income, the power and the solvency of the agromineral exporters that dominated state policy in recent years. Much of their expansion during the “boom years” was debt-financed, in some cases with dollar and euro-denominated loans (Financial Times, January 9, 2009, p.7). But many of the highly indebted “export elite” now face bankruptcy and are pressuring their governments to relieve them of immediate debt obligations. And in the course of the recession/depression there will be a further concentration and centralization of agro-mineral capital as many medium and large miners and capitalist farmers are foreclosed or forced to sell. The relative decline of the contribution of the agro-mineral sector to the GDP and state revenues means they will have less leverage over the government and economic decision making. The collapse of their overseas markets and their dependence on the state to subsidize their debts and intervene in the market means that the “neoliberal” free market ideology is dead – for the duration of the recession. Weakened economically, the agro-mineral elite are turning to the state as its instrument of survival, recovery and refinancing.

In this new context, the “new statism” in formation has absolutely nothing “progressive” about it, let alone any claim to “socialism”. The state under the influence of the primary sector elites assumes the primary task of imposing the entire burden of the recession on the backs of the workers, employees, small farmers and business operators. In other words, the state is charged with indebting the mass of people in order to subsidize the debts of the elite export sector and provide zero cost loans to capital. Massive cuts in social services (health, pensions and education), and salaries will be backed by state repression. In the final analysis the increased role of the state will be primarily directed to financing the debt and subsidizing loans to the ruling class.

If the U.S. suffered a severe loss of influence in the first half decade of the early 2000s due to mass mobilization and popular movements ousting its clients, during the subsequent four years the U.S. retained political influence among the most reactionary regimes in the region, especially Mexico, Peru and Colombia. Despite the decline of mass mobilizations after 2004, the after-effects continued to ripple through regional relations and blocked efforts by Washington to return to relations that had existed during the “golden decade” of pillage (1990-1999).

While internal political dynamics put the brakes on any return to the 1990s, several other factors undermined Washington’s assertion of full scale dominance: (i) The U.S. turned all of its attention, resources and military efforts toward multiple wars in South Asia (Afghanistan), Iraq and Somalia and to war preparations against Iran while backing Israel”s aggression against Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Because of the prolonged and losing character of these wars, Washington remained relatively immobilized as far as South America was concerned. Equally important Washington’s declaration of a intensified worldwide counter-insurgency offensive (the “War on Terror”) diverted resources toward other regions. With the U.S. empire builders occupied elsewhere, Latin America was relatively free to pursue a more autonomous political agenda, including greater regional integrations, to the point of rejecting the U.S. proposed “Free Trade Agreement”.

In this new context the spectrum of international relations between the U.S. and Latin America runs the gamut from “independence” (Venezuela), “relative autonomy” within competitive capitalism (Brazil), relative autonomy and critical opposition (Bolivia) to selective collaboration (Chile) and deep collaboration within a neoliberal framework (Mexico, Peru and Colombia). Venezuela constructed its leadership of the alternative nationalist pole in Latin America, in reaction to U.S. intervention. Chávez has sustained its independent position through nationalist social welfare measures, which has garnered mass support. A policy of “independence” was made possible, and financed as it were, by the commodity boom and the jump in oil prices. The “dialectic” of the US-Venezuelan conflict evolved in the context of U.S. economic weakness and over-extended warfare in the Middle East on the one hand and economic prosperity in Venezuela, which allowed it to gain regional and even international allies, on the other.

The autonomous-competitive tendency in Latin America is embodied by Brazil. Aided by the expansive agro-mineral export boom, Brazil projected itself on the world trade and investment scene, while deepening its economic expansion among its smaller and weaker neighbors like Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay and Ecuador. Brazil, like the other BRIC countries, which include Russia, India and China, forms part of newly emerging expansionist power center intent on competing and sharing with the U.S. control over the region’s abundant resources and the smaller countries in Latin America. Brazil under Lula shares Washington’s economic imperial vision (backed by its armed forces) even as it competes with the U.S. for supremacy. In this context, Brazil seeks extra-regional imperial allies in Europe (mainly France) and it uses the “regional” forums and bilateral agreements with the nationalist regimes to “balance” its powerful economic links with Euro-US financial and multi-national capital.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the “imperial collaborator” regimes of Colombia, Mexico and Peru, which remain steadfast in their pro-imperial loyalties. They are Washington’s reliable supporters against the nationalist Chávez government and staunch backers of bilateral free trade agreements with the U.S.

The other countries in the region, including Chile and Argentina, continue to oscillate and improvise their policies in relation to and among these three blocs. But what should be absolutely clear is that all the countries, whether radical nationalist or imperial collaborators operate within a capitalist economy and class system in which market relations and the capitalist classes are still the central players.

Socialism and the Latin American State in the Current Conjuncture of the Class Struggle

Control of the state is an essential condition for establishing socialism. But it is evident that a more critical factor is the composition of the social forces that have managed to achieve state power by one means or the other. From 2003 to 2008, in the context of a primary commodities boom and a serious decline in the mobilizing power of neoliberal globalization, one state after the other in Latin America has tilted to the Left in establishing a nominally anti-neoliberal regime. However, the only regime in the region with a socialist project is that of Chávez, who has used the additional fiscal resources derived from the sale of oil and the primary commodities boom—specifically the growing world demand for oil – to turn the state in a socialist direction under the ideological banner of the “Bolivarian Revolution”. All of the other center-left regimes formed in this conjuncture for one reason or the other, and regardless of their national sovereignty concerns vis-à-vis U.S. imperialism, have retained an essential commitment to neoliberalism, albeit in a more socially inclusive and pragmatic form as prescribed by the post-Washington Consensus (Ocampo, 1998). A surprising feature of these centre-left regimes is that not one of them—again Venezuela (and of course Cuba) the exception—use their additional fiscal revenues derived from the primary commodities boom to reorient the state in a socialist direction, i.e. to share the wealth or, at least, in the absence of any attempt to flatten or eliminate the class structure to redirect fiscal revenues toward programs designed to improve the lot of the subordinate classes and the poor. Again, Chávez” is the exception in the use of windfall fiscal revenues derived from the primary commodities boom (oil revenues in the case of Venezuela) to improve conditions for the working class and the popular classes. The statistics regarding this “development” (see Weisbrot, 2009) are startling. Over the entire decade of Chávez rule, social spending per capita has tripled and the number of social security beneficiaries more than doubled; the percentage of households in poverty has been reduced by 39%, and extreme poverty by more than half. During the primary commodities boom (2003-2008), the poverty rate in Venezuela was cut by more than half, from 54% of households in the first half of 2003 to 26% at the end of 2008. Extreme poverty fell even more (by 72%). And these poverty rates measure only cash income, and do not take into account increased access to health care or education. However, in the other countries in the region governed by a centre-of-left regimes, not one of which is oriented towards socialism, conditions were and are very different. In a few cases (Chile, Brazil) the rate of extreme poverty was cut, but in all cases, despite recourse to an anti-poverty program following the PWC, government spending was relatively regressive. In only one case (Venezuela) is per capita PSE greater today than it was in 2000 in the vortex of a widespread crisis and a zero growth (Clements, Faircloth and Verhoeven, 2007). In many cases social programs and government spending was allocated so as to distribute more benefits to the richest stratum of households and the well to do than to the working class and the poor.[6] Even in the case of Bolivia, where the Morales-Garcia Lineres regime has a clearly defined anti-neoliberal and anti-US imperialist orientation, not only has the government not expanded social program expenditures relative to investments and expenditures designed to alleviate the concerns of foreign investors but the richest stratum of households benefited more from fiscal expenditures on social programs than the poorest (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2009). All of the centre-left regimes that have came to power in this millennium, especially Brazil and Chile, elaborated anti-poverty programs with reference to the PWC. In the case of Bolivia fiscal expenditures on social programs defined by the “new social policy” of the post-Washington Consensus have been supplemented by a populist program of bonuses and handouts, and popular programs in health and education, but these have been almost entirely financed by Cuba and Venezuela. As for the fiscal resources derived from Bolivia’s participation in the primary commodities boom they have been allocated with a greater sensitivity to the concerns of foreign investors than the demands of the working class and the indigenous poor.

In this situation what is needed is not only access to state power, which the social movements managed to ostensibly achieve via the election of Evo Morales, but an ideological commitment of the government to socialism – to turn the state in a socialist direction. In this connection the Chávez regime is unique among Latin American heads of state. Even so the road ahead for the Bolivarian revolution in bringing about socialism of the twenty-first century promises to be long and “rocky”, as in the case of Cuba littered with numerous pitfalls but unlike Cuba with the likely growth in the forces of opposition.

1. The basic elements of the new post-Washington Consensus policy agenda under the model of “sustainable human development (UNDP, 1996) are: (1) a neoliberal program of macroeconomic policy measures, including privatization, agricultural modernization and labor reform; (2) a “new social policy” supported by a “social investment fund” targeted at the poor; (3) specific social programs (policies related to health, education and employment) designed to protect the most vulnerable social groups from the brunt of the high “transitional” social costs of structural adjustment—and to provide a “human face” to the overall process; and (4) a policy of administrative decentralization and popular participation designed to establish the juridical-administrative framework for a process of participatory development and conditions of “democratic governance.

2. Of course, this also applies to the U.S. as in the run-up to George W. Bush’s campaign for a second term in office. On 28 July, 2004, a caravan of fifty multi-billionaires met in Boston to defend and secure the electoral victory of the president. In the words of Count Mamoni – to a reporter of La Jornada (Jul 28, 2004) “We are the rich who wish to ensure that the president who we bought [paid for] stays in the White House”. He adds that “those of us who were born to wealth and privilege . . .[are] owners of the country [and must continues as such].” One of the participants in the “Join the Limousine” tour added that “we are all winners under this government, just some a lot more than others”.

3. On this see De la Fuente (2001), Sánchez (2003) and Terceros and Zambrana Barrios (2002).

4. Napoleon Saltos, Director of the CMS sees political developments in Ecuador as somewhere between Venezuela, which is implementing from above a sort of socialist plan without pressure from below, and Bolivia, where the government to some extent is subject to the pressures of a mobilized population.

5. The onset of the recession in Latin America is evident in the 6.2% fall in Brazil’s industrial output in November 2008 and its accelerating negative momentum (Financial Times, January 7, 2009 p. 5).

6. On this point see the IMF as in Alier and Clements (2007: 4-5): “Reallocating social spending to programs that most benefit the poor … [are] important for forging a more equitable society… [but] the distributive incidence of social spending varies greatly across programs, with primary education and social assistance programs having the most favorable impact, while higher education and social insurance programs tend to benefit middle and upper-income groups. Because of the low share of spending in pro-poor programs – such as social assistance – the majority of social spending benefits accrue to those that are relatively well off.”

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The unimpeded growth of Euro-American capitalism following the collapse of Soviet and European communism, the conversion of China and Indochina to state capitalism, and the rise of US backed, free market military dictatorships in Latin America give new impetus to Western empire building, labeled “globalization”.

The process of globalization was the result of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ conditions and class coalitions embedded in the social structure of both the imperial and ‘recipient’ or targeted countries. The expansion of capital was neither a linear process or continual expansion (accumulation) nor of sustained collaboration by the targeted countries. Crises in the imperial centers and regime transformations in collaborator regimes affected the flow of capital, trade, rules and regulations.

One of the unintended consequences of the ascendancy of global ruling classes was the rise of large scale and tumultuous social movements, especially in Latin America, which challenged the rulers, ideology and institutions sustaining the global empire.

The relations between imperial globalization and social movements are complex, changing and subject to reversals or advances. This study, with its focus on Latin America, addresses several hypotheses exploring the relation of globalization and social movement over a thirty-five year period: from the onset of the free market doctrine which is the motor force of globalization (1975) to the present 2010. This time frame provides us with a sufficient period to observe the long term operations of global capital and the historical trajectories of social movements. By including Latin America as a whole, we incorporate an entire continent and lessen the possibility of idiosyncratic developments specific to a single country.

Our inquiry is guided by a specific set of hypothesis that will be tested through a historical analysis of global economic tendencies and the trajectory of social movements. We will proceed by providing a brief overview of the dynamics of globalization and the growth of social movements in Latin America and then proceed to specify our key hypothesis regarding the relationships between globalization and social movements.

The onset of a new and dynamic phase of imperial capital expansion, which we will call globalization, owes a great deal to the favorable political outcome of the capital – labor struggle on a world scale. The defeat and retreat of the working class in the West, particularly in the US and England, and the self-destruction of the Communist regimes of the East laid the groundwork for an aggressive global crusade against leftwing regimes and movements in the Third World, especially in Latin America. The ‘rollback’ of the working class movements was particularly vicious and successful in Latin America, where the major part of the continent experienced the onset of military dictatorship, which dismantled the national constraints on capitalist flows and trade tariffs.

Within this new global framework of imperial empire builders and authoritarian collaborater regimes, several factors enhanced global economic expansion.

(1) Technological innovations, especially information technologies accelerated the flows of capital and commodities.

(2) Large scale accumulation of capital in the imperial states, a relative decline in rates of profits and the growing role of finance capital spurred the drive for overseas investments, speculation and buyouts of privatized firms.

(3) Intensified competition between the US – EU – Asia drove MNC to seek advantages by securing banks, resources; market shares within Latin America.

(4) The rise of pro-western rightist dictatorships provided exceptionally favorable socio-economic conditions for buyouts and acquisitions of local enterprises and resources, extraordinary returns on financial speculation and minimum opposition from repressed trade unions and nationalist and leftist parties.

As a consequence of these structural changes, free market doctrines and neo-liberal policies were put in practice resulting in bilateral free trade agreements (NAFTA),and deregulation of the economies. The growth of speculative activity took root and prospered, at the same time that social safety nets was dismantled.

After over two decades of highly polarized development and mediocre growth the neo-liberal economies stagnated and went into crises: commodity prices fell, the financial bubbles burst, large scale banking swindles impoverished middle class depositors, investors were defrauded, leading to a virtual economic collapse and mass unemployment. By the beginning years of the new millennium, Latin America faced a systemic crisis in which neo-liberal regimes were overthrown, social movements were in ascent and economic bankruptcies were multiplying. Center-left parties and coalitions were elected and moved to implement ameliorative measures which lessened the impact of the crises. Stimulus packages were passed to revive the economies. The vertical rise of agro-mineral prices in world market facilitated economic recovery which lasted till the onset of the world recession of 2008.
Social Movements

Growing out of the polarized growth, intensified exploitation of labor and displacement of peasants and farm workers, endemic to free market policies, social unrest spread in rural areas, especially among the landless rural workers, peasants and Indian communities. A new generation of militant leaders emerged, with a capacity to link local grievances to national and international structural policies. By the early 1990s mass movements took hold and launched a series of mass campaigns and mobilizations which spread to the cities and engaged the growing mass of unemployed urban workers, public sector employees and impoverished downwardly mobile middle class business people and professionals.

The crises precipitated large scale uprisings led by the new social movements, demanding systemic changes but settling for the election of center-left regimes. The first decade of the 21^st century witnesses the ebb and flow of movement activity eventually settling into varying niches in the new order presided over by the center-left regimes.

The expansion of ‘globalization’ or the imperial centered development model was accompanied by the growth of mass social movements. This raises the fundamental question of the relationship between the two processes. We set out several hypotheses to explore the relationship.

(1) The greater the deregulations of the economy leads to the acceleration of globalization and spurs the growth of the social movements.

(2) The crises and breakdown of deregulated globalization leads toa greater role and radicalism of the social movements up to and including social upheavals overthrowing incumbent regimes.

(3) The stronger the regulatory regime controlling the globalizing process the lesser the impact of the crises, the more moderate the activities of the social movements and the less likely a popular rebellion.

(4) The weaker the social safety net in time of crises the bigger the social movements and the more radical their demands. Conversely, the stronger the social safety net in time of crises the slower the growth of the social movements and the more reformist their demands.

(5) Depressed world commodity prices are more likely to engender radical social movements than periods of buoyant prices.

By combining our four principle variables into a single hypothesis on the relation of globalization and social movements, we come up with the following two propositions.

The optimal conditions for radical mass social movements occur when an economy is highly deregulated, in times of financial crises and productive recession, when commodity prices are depressed in the context of a weak social safety net.

Conversely, radical mass social movements are less likely to emerge under a highly regulated economy with a strong social safety net when world commodity prices are rising and the economy is buoyant.

Between 1980 – 1990, Latin America experienced a period of moderate growth and stable world prices for its commodities. This was a period of major dismantling of state regulations of the economy and weakening of the social safety net. Yet there were not major social uprisings nor mass social movements, except in Chile between 1985 – 1986, which ended with a US backed political pact between the Pinochet dictatorships and the Socialist-Christian Democratic parties and their subsequent ascent to government in 1990.

During the first half of the 1990’s world commodity prices declined to historic lows, the social safety net continued to deteriorate; capitalist profits soared in an orgy of privatizations and foreign takeovers, while overall growth stagnated. Social movements grew, mass mobilization, extended from the countryside to the cities but few popular rebellions occurred.

The period between the late 1990’s to the early 2000’s (roughly 1999 – 2003) experienced a major socio-economic and political crisis, including economic and financial crises in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay. After over twenty years of free market policies accompanying the globalization process, the social safety net was in tatters. Commodity prices remained low and financial deregulation deepened the vulnerability of the economies to the US recession.

Between 2000 – 2005, neo-liberal regimes were overthrown or replaced in Argentina (3 regimes in 2 weeks) 2001 – 2002, Bolivia (2003, 2005) Ecuador (2000, 2005), Peru, Uruguay, Brazil, Venezuela (coup regime 2002 lasted 48 hours). Social movements grew precipitously throughout the region and their demands radicalized, including fundamental structural changes. The Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) led massive land occupation movements throughout the country. Worker, peasant, Indian uprisings in Bolivia ousted two incumbent electoral regimes. In Ecuador, Indian –urban movements in coalitions overthrew an incumbent neo-liberal regime in 2000 and a broad based urban citizens movement ousted a corrupt neo-liberal regime in 2005. In Argentina, a popular rebellion led by unemployed workers impoverished middle class neighborhood organizations ousted neo-liberal presidents and dominated politics throughout 2001 – 2003. In Venezuela a mass popular mobilization with military allies ousted the US backed business – military junta of April 2002 and restored President Chavez to power.

The period between 2003 – 2008 witnessed a sharp rise in commodity prices to record levels; the ascent of center-left regimes was accompanied by capital controls and the partial restoration of the social safety net, rapid economic recovery and relatively high growth. Social movements receded, their demands focused on immediate reforms, mobilizations were more infrequent and some of their key leaders were co-opted.

The period between 2008 – 2010 witnessed a sharp decline of growth, reflecting the impact of the world recession and the decline of commodity prices. While most countries entered a recession, the financial system did not experience a collapse comparable to the earlier period (2000 – 2002), in part because of the capital controls in place since the earlier part of the decade. While unemployment grew and poverty levels increased, the improved social net ameliorated the impact of the recession. The social movements increased their activity and experienced mild growth but with few if any direct challenges to state power, at least during the first two years of an ongoing crises.

Our historical survey demonstrates that single factors such as implantation of neo-liberal changes and deepening globalization in and of themselves do not lead to the growth of massive, radical social movements: witness the period of 1980 – 1990. Nor do low commodity prices a weak social safety net and declining state revenues provoke popular uprisings and radical mass social movements. Likewise an economic crises, such as the recession of 2008 – 2010 has not led to a resurgence of mass radical social movements and popular rebellions.

Only when a combination of internal factors, such as a weak social safety net and a deregulated economy and an external crises such as a global recession and declining world commodity prices do we have optional conditions for the growth of dynamic mass radical social movements.

Writers who focus or start from a ‘world system’ or other ‘globalist’ perspectives’ in attempting to address the rise of social movements as a function of the ‘operations’ of the market fail to take account of the internal political and social struggles and the resultant state social polices as determining factors.

We should note that social movement rebellions do not suddenly occur because all of the contingencies are in place. The social upheavals at the end of the nineties and early half years of the new millennium had a decade of gestation: organizing, accumulating social forces, creating alliances with institutional dissidents – like radical church people – and developing leaders and cadres. Economic crises, at best, was a “trigger” event which severely discredited the ruling class, undermined the dominant ‘globalization’ ideology, that allowed the movements to make a qualitative leap from protest to political rebellion and regime change.

Finally though, it is not central to this paper, we should note that while social movements at their height were able to oust incumbent neo-liberal regimes, they were not able to take political power and revolutionize society: to their upheavals allowed center-left politicians to come to power. Ironically, once in power they passed sufficient social economic reforms to fend off the re-radicalization of the movements when the world economic crises struck again at the end of the first decade of this century.

The deep and ongoing crises of leading capitalist countries, especially the United States, has provoked a debate over the causes, consequences and appropriate policies to remedy it.

The debate has revealed a deep division over the causes and remedies, with Anglo-Franco American (AFA) politicians, columnists and economists on one side and their Asian-German (AG) counterparts on the other. In general terms the AFA spokespeople put the blame for the crises on external factors, or more specifically they point their finger at the positive trade surpluses, dynamic export sectors and high investment rates in productive sectors and low levels of consumption in the AG countries as the cause of ”unbalances” or “disequilibrium” in the world economy[1].

In contrast, the AG countries reject this argument which speaks to prejudicial external practices. They emphasize the internal “imbalances” within the AFA countries, which has weakened their international, commercial and financial position.

In this paper I am going to argue that both internal economic policies and external empire building strategies of the AFA countries have been the driving force for global imbalances. The structural differences between the two regions and the differences in class structure and economic configurations in each bloc precludes any easy or immediate solution. On the contrary for the forseable future, the conflict between dynamic emerging export powers and the declining western bloc is likely to intensify, leading to greater trade conflicts and possible military confrontations.

The AFA charges against China’s commercial ‘imbalances’ conflates trade with the West with Beijing’s relations with the rest of the world. China has balanced trade or even trade deficits with Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. Moreover, the AFA countries have trade imbalances with other regions including the Middle East and Germany. Even if the AFA countries curtailed imports from China, it is most likely that other Asian countries would replace them, including Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh and India. The resulting trade deficits of the AFA would remain about the same.

The AFA countries blame China’s “undervalued” currency, and claim that Beijing authorities manipulate the exchange rate to under price exports and beat out competitors (namely producers within the AFA). Yet China’s currency has been revalued steadily upward over 20% the past five years, and yet the AFA still run a deficit, suggesting that their domestic producers have still not been able to compete with Chinese manufacturers[2]. More recently AFA writers have complained about low interest rates set by the Chinese government as a “subsidy” to its exporters. Yet AFA interest rates are at zero percent or even negative, to no avail. Moreover, the AFA have provided over 1.5 trillion in bailout funds and over 1.3 billion in stimulus spending – a subsidy five times greater than China’s stimulus package, without improving their trade balance. What is telling, given the sectoral allocations, of each regime’s bailout – subsidy – stimulus packages, China has fully recovered and is growing at 8% by mid 2009, while the AFA continue to wallow in negative territory and continue running up trade deficits. This points to the centrality of internal factors, namely, the economic sectors which receive the state subsidies and how they invest it and as a result how their decisions affect trade balances.

The AFA charge that China’s low cost labor, its exploitation of workers accounts for trade imbalances. Yet an increasing percentage of China’s exports are based on technological advances, not cheap labor. This is because low labor cost competitors are emerging in Asia.

The AFA complain that China over emphasizes its ‘export’ strategy at the expense of producing for the domestic market. Yet nearly half of China’s exports to the US are made by US owned multi-nationals who have invested, subcontracted and co-produced with Chinese counterparts. In other words, US internal policy, the deregulation of capital flows, has facilitated the movement of US manufactures abroad resulting in a decline of local production, an increase in imports and greater trade deficits.

The most obvious and striking correlation with the growth of AFA trade imbalances is the growth and dominance of the financial sector[3]. The financialization of the AFA economies and Wall Street’s CEOs dominant role in the strategic economic positions of the state is transparent to the mass of the people and has even been acknowledged by most private economists and academics. Trade deficits increased in direct proportion to the growing political and economic power of the financial sector. In large part, this was due to the transfer of capital from manufacturing to financial services, leading to the decline of the manufacturing sector’s investments in innovations and competitive management strategies. The financial sector’s, high salaries, bonuses and quick returns attracted most of self-styled “best and the brightest”. MBA graduates multiplied while advanced engineering school graduates diminished. Advanced skilled worker training programs disappeared while low skill retail sales recruitment grew.

The problem was that financial services did not, could not replace the overseas earnings which formerly accrued to the country through manufacturing sales. Least of all in the highly regulated financial markets of China, Japan, India and the rest of Asia, where banking was subordinated to the expansion of manufacturing -namely financing industries targeted by state officials. The dominance of finance capital and the related sectors of real estate and insurance, led to a highly polarized class structure: in which billionaire and millionaire investment bankers presided at the top and an army of low paid service workers (retail employees, cleaners and sweepers, etc.) immigrant and non-union workers occupied the bottom. Presently income inequalities in the US exceed those of any other “advanced” capitalist country. The inequalities in Manhattan exceed those of Guatemala. The growing concentration of wealth is accompanied by decline of median wages over the past three decades. As a result the purchasing power of US workers is declining, thus reducing the demand for locally produced quality goods. The purchase of imported cheap textiles, shoes and other accessories results. The result was a decline in local saving and domestic investment in manufacturing leading to a decline in competitiveness. Moreover, the competition among financial lenders furthered consumer spending and greater individual indebtedness at a time when manufacturing exports were declining, starved of investments.

Most manufacturing firms transformed themselves into financial corporations, channeling investment funds in sectors not earning foreign exchange. Worst of all in pursuit of higher profits, manufacturers turned into commercial vendors, closing down plants and sub-contracting production to China and other Asian countries and importing final products into the US creating the trade imbalances. The large scale relocation of US multi-nationals abroad further exacerbated the trade imbalances.

The key role of the state in creating domestic imbalances leading to global disequilibrium is a result of the financial sector’s takeover of the state,and the deregulation of financial markets. The result was the long term promotion of an economic policy, in which the central bank (the Federal Reserve) and Treasury encouraged the growth of finance ,real estate and insurance sectors over manufacturing. The finance based strategy was justified by a large army of academics and publicists who spoke of a “post industrial”, or “service” or “information” economy as a “higher stage”, rather than a perversely unbalanced, unsustainable and unjust economy.

Financial supremacy coincided with the growing militarization of US foreign policy. Throughout the last thirty years, US overseas economic expansion was gradually eclipsed by the growing reliance on military intervention, and the build-up of military bases in hundreds of sites. As financialization weakened the productive capacity of US manufacturing exporters’ efforts to capture markets, US policymakers increased their reliance on the supremacy of military power. The channeling of billions into military spending drained resources from efforts to upgrade the competitiveness of US civilian industry and was a major factor-in its declining share of export markets. The end result of militarization was a loss of export earnings and the growth of trade deficits.

If we combine the three great internal imbalances in the AFA economics, but especially in the US, the financialization of the economy, the militarization of foreign policy and the concentration of wealth at the top, we can best understand why the US has such a huge and growing trade deficit.

China’s emphasis on an export driven strategy and the resultant growing class inequalities is largely a result of the class composition of the state and its social structure. In other words internal factors are the driving force of its pursuit of trade surpluses. What is ironic is that some of the AFA critics, who rightly point to the internal ‘imbalances’ in China, overlook similar problems in the West. Namely no mention is made of the absence of a national health plan in the US, the growth of inequalities and declining mass purchasing power – even as they point to these deficiencies in China. What Western advocates of greater social welfare in China do not discuss, is the capitalist class power, privilege and profits which hinder greater mass consumption. Least of all do they discuss the motor force for lifting working class and peasant living conditions, namely the class struggle. Instead they rely on technocratic appeals to Chinese elites for greater social spending.

The Chinese state has evolved into a powerful machine for manufacturing goods and billionaires. Today China has the highest growth, the highest rate of exploitation and the greatest class inequalities in Asia. Increasing wages to stimulate local consumption means reducing profits, anathema to all capitalists including Chinese. Increasing public spending on universal health coverage especially for the 700 million uninsured peasants and rural workers means higher taxes on the rich, including the families and colleagues of the governing elite. In contrast, producing for export markets does not require increasing domestic consumer power, on the contrary it requires lower wages.

A shift from an export-driven to a domestic market driven strategy, requires not only a ‘change in policy’ but a deep shift in class power, from the current capitalist class and its state backers to the workers and peasants. To realize large scale, long term commitments of public revenues to social services for the rural poor and higher wages for exploited workers requires sustained popular mobilizations, uprisings, strikes to secure the independent trade unions and peasant associations necessary to secure a shift in state allocations toward domestic consumption.

China’s “imbalances” are largely internal, social and political. An imbalance of social power between an all powerful capitalist state and a repressed powerless mass of workers and peasants; an imbalance in income between a super-rich banking, real estate, manufacturing export elite and a low paid working class and subsistence peasantry;an imbalance between a highly organized state linked by family, ideology and economic interests to the capitalist class and a dispersed, fragmented and isolated mass of working people.

China’s ruling class, its outward billion dollar investments in western capitalist enterprises via its sovereign wealth funds, its billion dollar investments in overseas extractive enterprises, is driven by the mass of capital accumulated that is extracted via intense levels of labor exploitation and the elimination of state funded pensions, health plans and education. China’s role as an emerging imperial power is rooted in the imbalance between global power and social welfare decay.

The fact that western capitalist writers, policymakers and their academic camp followers point to the same social imbalances in China as its domestic working class critics should not obscure a basic point. The Wall Street critics are defending the AFA financial elite against China’s export industrialists’ greater productivity; while the domestic working class critics are criticizing the capitalists and the state for their high rates of exploitation and concentration of wealth.

The key to reducing imbalances in world trade is reducing socio-economic inequalities within each region. The US requires a profound shift from a finance dominated economy to a manufacturing economy, where finance, high tech and higher education is directed to creating a competitive, productive economy based on skilled labor. The link at the top between Wall Street and the Pentagon must be replaced by a link from below between the industrial working class, low paid service workers and public sector employees and professionals.

The structural transformation of the US economy is necessary but not sufficient. If US efforts to pursue a military driven empire persist, this will divert resources away from domestic and overseas economic priorities. Military driven empires alienate trading partners, have high costs and low returns, isolate economic investors and traders from productive partnerships and are destructive of domestic and overseas civilian productive facilities.

The way out of the massive imbalances is for the US to engage in a large scale, long term domestic structural transformations – namely de-financialization and de-militarization. But the political and economic forces benefiting from the current configuration are deeply entrenched, in control of both major parties and dominate the mass media and its message. Yet, despite their profound institutional power they suffer several fatal flaws. In the first instance they have created unsustainable global imbalances, which will sooner or later lead to a collapse of the dollar and renewed and more virulent and costly financial bubbles. Secondly, the free market which is the main ideological prop of the deregulated financial power elite is totally discredited as evidenced by the single digit support and trust of Wall Street. Thirdly, military driven empire building has run its course: after nine years of war in Afghanistan the vast majority of the US public has sent a message to the political elite of both parties, the White House and Congress, that its time to shift from funding failed overseas adventures to solving the problem of 20% under and unemployed Americans (30 million), the 100 million or 33% of Americans with no or costly and inadequate health coverage. No amount of media and political pundit scapegoating of China for our own self-induced “imbalances” can divert American opinion from their direct experiences with our own internal inequalities and policy failures.

[1] Martin Wolf “ Why China must do more to rebalance its economy” Financial Times, September 23, 2009, p 11. See also Financial Times October 3, 4, 2009. p 3 and Financial Times September 21, 2009 p 9.

[2] Financial Times October 9, 2009 p 1.

[3] Gerald Davis Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (New York: Oxford University Press 2009).

The US seven-year war and occupation of Iraq is driven by several major political forces and informed by a variety of imperial interests. However these interests do not in themselves explain the depth and scope of the sustained, massive and continuing destruction of an entire society and its reduction to a permanent state of war. The range of political forces contributing to the making of the war and the subsequent US occupation include the following (in order of importance):

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.

Top pro-Israeli policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.

The second powerful political force behind the Iraq War were civilian militarists (like Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney) who sought to extend US imperial reach in the Persian Gulf and strengthen its geo-political position by eliminating a strong, secular, nationalist backer of Arab anti-imperialist insurgency in the Middle East. The civilian militarists sought to extend the American military base encirclement of Russia and secure control over Iraqi oil reserves as a pressure point against China. The civilian militarists were less moved by Vice President Cheney’s past ties with the oil industry and more interested in his role as CEO of Halliburton’s giant military base contractor subsidiary Kellogg-Brown and Root, which was consolidating the US Empire through worldwide military base expansion. Major US oil companies, who feared losing out to European and Asian competitors, were already eager to deal with Saddam Hussein, and some of the Bush’s supporters in the oil industry had already engaged in illegal trading with the embargoed Iraqi regime. The oil industry was not inclined to promote regional instability with a war.

The militarist strategy of conquest and occupation was designed to establish a long-term colonial military presence in the form of strategic military bases with a significant and sustained contingent of colonial military advisors and combat units. The brutal colonial occupation of an independent secular state with a strong nationalist history and an advanced infrastructure with a sophisticated military and police apparatus, extensive public services and wide-spread literacy naturally led to the growth of a wide array of militant and armed anti-occupation movements. In response, US colonial officials, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agencies devised a ‘divide and rule’ strategy (the so-called ‘El Salvador solution’ associated with the former ‘hot-spot’ Ambassador and US Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte) fomenting armed sectarian-based conflicts and promoting inter-religious assassinations to debilitate any effort at a united nationalist anti-imperialist movement. The dismantling of the secular civilian bureaucracy and military was designed by the Zionists in the Bush Administration to enhance Israel’s power in the region and to encourage the rise of militant Islamic groups, which had been repressed by the deposed Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Israel had mastered this strategy earlier: It originally sponsored and financed sectarian Islamic militant groups, like Hamas, as an alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization and set the stage for sectarian fighting among the Palestinians.

The result of US colonial policies were to fund and multiply a wide range of internal conflicts as mullahs, tribal leaders, political gangsters, warlords, expatriates and death squads proliferated. The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the US occupation forces. Iraq became a pool of armed, unemployed young men, from which to recruit a new mercenary army. The ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ provided a pretext for the US and its Iraqi puppets to discharge hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and functionaries from the previous regime (especially if they were from Sunni, mixed or secular families) and to undermine the basis for civilian employment. Under the cover of generalized ‘war against terror’, US Special Forces and CIA-directed death squads spread terror within Iraqi civil society, targeting anyone suspected of criticizing the puppet government – especially among the educated and professional classes, precisely the Iraqis most capable of re-constructing an independent secular republic.

The Iraq war was driven by an influential group of neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues with strong ties to Israel. They viewed the success of the Iraq war (by success they meant the total dismemberment of the country) as the first ‘domino’ in a series of war to ‘re-colonize’ the Middle East (in their words: “to re-draw the map”). They disguised their imperial ideology with a thin veneer of rhetoric about ‘promoting democracies’ in the Middle East (excluding, of course, the un-democratic policies of their ‘homeland’ Israel over its subjugated Palestinians). Conflating Israeli regional hegemonic ambitions with the US imperial interests, the neo-conservatives and their neo-liberal fellow travelers in the Democratic Party first backed President Bush and later President Obama in their escalation of the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan. They unanimously supported Israel’s savage bombing campaign against Lebanon, the land and air assault and massacre of thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza, the bombing of Syrian facilities and the big push (from Israel) for a pre-emptive, full-scale military attack against Iran.

The US advocates of sequential and multiple simultaneous wars in the Middle East and South Asia believed that they could only unleash the full strength of their mass destructive power after they had secured total control of their first victim, Iraq. They were confident that Iraqi resistance would collapse rapidly after 13 years of brutal starvation sanctions imposed on the republic by the US and United Nations. In order to consolidate imperial control, American policy-makers decided to permanently silence all independent Iraqi civilian dissidents. They turned to the financing of Shia clerics and Sunni tribal assassins, and contracting scores of thousands of private mercenaries among the Kurdish Peshmerga warlords to carry out selective assassinations of leaders of civil society movements.

The US created and trained a 200,000 member Iraqi colonial puppet army composed almost entirely of Shia gunmen, and excluded experienced Iraqi military men from secular, Sunni or Christian backgrounds. A little known result of this build up of American trained and financed death squads and its puppet ‘Iraqi’ army, was the virtual destruction of the ancient Iraqi Christian population, which was displaced, its churches bombed and its leaders, bishops and intellectuals, academics and scientists assassinated or driven into exile. The US and its Israeli advisers were well aware that Iraqi Christians had played a key role the historic development of the secular, nationalist, anti-British/anti-monarchist movements and their elimination as an influential force during the first years of US occupation was no accident. The result of the US policies were to eliminate most secular democratic anti-imperialist leaders and movements and to present their murderous net-work of ‘ethno-religious’ collaborators as their uncontested ‘partners’ in sustaining the long-term US colonial presence in Iraq. With their puppets in power, Iraq would serve as a launching platform for its strategic pursuit of the other ‘dominoes’ (Syria, Iran, Central Asian Republics…).

The sustained bloody purge of Iraq under US occupation resulted in the killing 1.3 million Iraqi civilians during the first 7 years after Bush invaded in March 2003. Up to mid-2009, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has officially cost the American treasury over $666 billion. This enormous expenditure attests to its centrality in the larger US imperial strategy for the entire Middle East/South and Central Asia region. Washington’s policy of politicizing and militarizing ethno-religious differences, arming and encouraging rival tribal, religious and ethnic leaders to engage in mutual bloodletting served to destroy national unity and resistance. The ‘divide and rule’ tactics and reliance on retrograde social and religious organizations is the commonest and best-known practice in pursuing the conquest and subjugation of a unified, advanced nationalist state. Breaking up the national state, destroying nationalist consciousness and encouraging primitive ethno-religious, feudal and regional loyalties required the systematic destruction of the principal purveyors of nationalist consciousness, historical memory and secular, scientific thought. Provoking ethno-religious hatreds destroyed intermarriages, mixed communities and institutions with their long-standing personal friendships and professional ties among diverse backgrounds. The physical elimination of academics, writers, teachers, intellectuals, scientists and professionals, especially physicians, engineers, lawyers, jurists and journalists was decisive in imposing ethno-religious rule under a colonial occupation. To establish long-term dominance and sustain ethno-religious client rulers, the entire pre-existing cultural edifice, which had sustained an independent secular nationalist state, was physically destroyed by the US and its Iraqi puppets. This included destroying the libraries, census bureaus, and repositories of all property and court records, health departments, laboratories, schools, cultural centers, medical facilities and above all the entire scientific-literary-humanistic social scientific class of professionals. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals and family members were driven by terror into internal and external exile. All funding for national, secular, scientific and educational institutions were cut off. Death squads engaged in the systematic murder of thousands of academics and professionals suspected of the least dissent, the least nationalist sentiment; anyone with the least capacity to re-construct the republic was marked.

Independent, secular Iraq had the most advanced scientific-cultural order in the Arab world, despite the repressive nature of Saddam Hussein’s police state. There was a system of national health care, universal public education and generous welfare services, combined with unprecedented levels of gender equality. This marked the advanced nature of Iraqi civilization in the late 20th century. Separation of church and state and strict protection of religious minorities (Christians, Assyrians and others) contrasts sharply with what has resulted from the US occupation and its destruction of the Iraqi civil and governmental structures. The harsh dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein thus presided over a highly developed modern civilization in which advanced scientific work went hand in hand with a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist identity. This resulted especially in the Iraqi people and regime’s expressions of solidarity for the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli rule and occupation.

A mere ‘regime change’ could not extirpate this deeply embedded and advanced secular republican culture in Iraq. The US war planners and their Israeli advisers were well aware that colonial occupation would increase Iraqi nationalist consciousness unless the secular nation was destroyed and hence, the imperial imperative to uproot and destroy the carriers of nationalist consciousness by physically eliminating the educated, the talented, the scientific, indeed the most secular elements of Iraqi society. Retrogression became the principal instrument for the US to impose its colonial puppets, with their primitive, ‘pre-national’ loyalties, in power in a culturally purged Baghdad stripped of its most sophisticated and nationalistic social strata.

According to the Al-Ahram Studies Center in Cairo, more that 310 Iraqi scientists were eliminated during the first 18 months of the US occupation – a figure that the Iraqi education ministry did not dispute.

Another report listed the killings of more than 340 intellectuals and scientists between 2005 and 2007. Bombings of institutes of higher education had pushed enrollment down to 30% of the pre-invasion figures. In one bombing in January 2007, at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University 70 students were killed with hundreds wounded. These figures compelled the UNESCO to warn that Iraq’s university system was on the brink of collapse. The numbers of prominent Iraqi scientists and professionals who have fled the country have approached 20,000. Of the 6,700 Iraqi university professors who fled since 2003, the Los Angeles Times reported than only 150 had returned by October 2008. Despite the US claims of improved security, the situation in 2008 saw numerous assassinations, including the only practicing neurosurgeon in Iraq’s second largest city of Basra, whose body was dumped on the city streets.

The raw data on the Iraqi academics, scientists and professionals assassinated by the US and allied occupation forces and the militias and shadowy forces they control is drawn from a list published by the Pakistan Daily News (www.daily.pk) on November 26, 2008. This list makes for very uncomfortable reading into the reality of systematic elimination of intellectuals in Iraq under the meat-grinder of US occupation.

The physical elimination of an individual by assassination is an extreme form of terrorism, which has far-reaching effects rippling throughout the community from which the individual comes – in this case the world of Iraqi intellectuals, academics, professionals and creative leaders in the arts and sciences. For each Iraqi intellectual murdered, thousands of educated Iraqis fled the country or abandoned their work for safer, less vulnerable activity.

Baghdad was considered the ‘Paris’ of the Arab world, in terms of culture and art, science and education. In the 1970’s and 80’s, its universities were the envy of the Arab world. The US ‘shock and awe’ campaign that rained down on Baghdad evoked emotions akin to an aerial bombardment of the Louvre, the Sorbonne and the greatest libraries of Europe. Baghdad University was one of the most prestigious and productive universities in the Arab world. Many of its academics possessed doctoral degrees and engaged in post-doctoral studies abroad at prestigious institutions. It taught and graduated many of the top professionals and scientists in the Middle East. Even under the deadly grip of the US/UN-imposed economic sanctions that starved Iraq during the 13 years before the March 2003 invasion, thousands of graduate students and young professionals came to Iraq for post-graduate training. Young physicians from throughout the Arab world received advanced medical training in its institutions. Many of its academics presented scientific papers at major international conferences and published in prestigious journals. Most important, Baghdad University trained and maintained a highly respected scientific secular culture free of sectarian discrimination – with academics from all ethnic and religious backgrounds.

This world has been forever shattered: Under US occupation, up to November 2008, eighty-three academics and researchers teaching at Baghdad University had been murdered and several thousand of their colleagues, students and family members were forced to flee.

James Petras Articles and Essays

Neoliberalism and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development in Latin America

Neoliberalism and Imperialism in Practice: A Framework of Analysis

Opposition to Imperialism, Class Rule and Neoliberalism: Forces of Resistance

Four Cycles of Neoliberalism

Local Politics and Community Development

Impact of World Recession and U.S. Imperial Revivalism in Latin America

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