Re: oil

Besides Kosovo, etc. as others have pointed out, Indonesia also had a major oil connection, and that had a lot to do with the military coup that quickly killed a half million and probably resulted in consequential deaths from 30 years of fascist-type politics and economics of another million or more. And didn't fascist/imperialist Japan use an oil embargo as its excuse for bringing WWII on in the Pacific.

The root is capitalism (imperialism) and its need to maximize its profits, especially when the rate of profit is dropping. Oil profits are a major way of doing this. Not the only way, but a major way. Oil is available in many parts of the world, but Saudi and other "Middle East" oil is cleaner and currently potentially cheaper than most other oil. But at this point, just about anyone can get oil if they have enough money.

Controlling the flow of oil via pipelines would allow the U.S. to control the economies of those countries that need that oil, especially Germany and Japan. Setting up "pro-US oil interests" governments therefore both serve to protect the immediate profits and ALSO to strategically position those U.S. oil interests to exert control over the ability of other imperialist/capitalist competitors to maximize profits.

The U.S., especially the "Rockefeller-dominated" Exxon-Mobil group (today) always has a dual policy, sometimes supporting dictators (Marcos/South African apartheid/Haiti-Duvalier/Suharato-Indonesia) sometimes dumping them later (Marcos/South African apartheid/Haiti-Duvalier/Suharto-Indonesia). There is no point in looking for philosophical consistency. They are looking for immediate profits as well as strategic positioning (which do sometimes come in conflict, which is one place we see splits in policy proposals develop among the capitalist ruling-elite politicians and intellectuals.)

On the other hand, there is the contingent, the immediate. If this bombing were carried out by a Latin American group, for example (and there are reasons why it wasn't), the U.S. government would still have been forced to respond. Failure to respond at all would have been a signal to every group all over the world that now is the time to step up their attacks against U.S. capitalist interests. So in that sense, the immediate military action might not be to specifically secure some oil wells. But the fundamental process driving all this is capitalism's need to increase its profits, intensified by increasing competition among existing imperialist powers and potential ones. And oil profits have been central to this for the past sixty years or more.

Some people speak of the current disintegration and reformation of nation states as if this is a new stage in history that transcends imperialism as described by Lenin and many others. There are many changes going on. But look at history. One could see the period from 1800 to 1850 and from 1890 to 1915 as similar, as many nations disintegrated, new borders were created, new nations formed and new empires struggled to form out of the disintegration. And between the World Wars. And immediately after World War II. There is disintegration. There is also agglomeration (new things forming out of the old disintegration).

It is curious to me that so many people who (especially through the 1970's-1990's), on the one hand, wanted/want to assert a rather strong "autonomy of the State" from economics in order to delink politics from economics and say that politics are overwhelmingly primary and only critique political forms---are often the same people who recently now say that the processes of capitalism are now overwhelmingly primary---delinked from the political structures of States and military-- and are simply rolling forward creating one giant capitalist class that transcends all political-military-national considerations.

Actually there is a common thread, and both are anti-revolutionary. One implies that the political forms can be changed without confronting the capitalist system, including the market system, while the other says that the economic processes can be changed without having to confront the political-military power of the State. Delinking politics and economics too much (of course politics is NOT simply a mechanistic reflection of economics) provides a common ground for those who believe that they system can be reformed.

Marxism does not appear as a viable alternative to the obvious oppression of capitalist imperialism to many people, especially youth, in the world today. In fact, that has probably been true for the past twenty years or so. Furthermore, even the idea of "human progress" does not seem viable to many of the very poor (nor many of the so-called "middle classes" either!). Fundamentalist religions of all sorts grow in times like this especially if political leaders can use the sentiments of despair to position themselves as leaders of the oppressed. Using the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist anger of the masses and channelling it into anti-U.S.-Europe sentiment strategically lays the basis for overthrowing the local pro-US/European rulers and beginning the formation of a new world power. In hundreds of villages, activists allied with one or another politically oriented Muslim organization provide visiting nurses, or food, or soccer leagues, or schooling for hundreds of thousands of youth. They are winning over a base not with a so-called "fanatical appeal to irrational people" but because they are there on a day to day basis. Much the way many fundamentalist Christian churches provide marriage counseling, youth groups, soup kitchens, etc. in U.S. communities, by the way. (There should be a lesson there for anti-capitalist organizers--get involved in the lives of real people to make the ideas come alive!)

It is, however, important to understand the specifics of the religious ideology as it intertwines with the daily material lives of people, and any serious analysis must see that interconnection in order to understand why specific people believe the destructive ideologies that only serve various camouflaged capitalist interests.

But let's not get carried away with the "unified Islam" theory. The fanatical-fundamentalist Taliban Muslim clerics, for example, are hated by the fanatical-fundamentalist Iranian Muslim clerics. And by the way, one could easily do a documentary film showing Christian men in the U.S. hysterically, or calmly, declaring their willingness to die for Christ in order to keep Jerusalem under Jewish-Christian control. (After all, U.S. pilots bombed a hospital in Panama and killed many dozens, and Christ wasn't even involved in that one!)

It is easy to focus on the anger of the oppressed (whether poor Muslims, or black working class youth in the U.S. or women in many subordinated situations, including the U.S.---"Why are you losing your temper and acting so irrationally?" says the boss after he has just done something damaging to his subordinates.... )

and make the oppressed appear more irrational than the calm bean-counting, button-pushers who can kill a thousand people simply by lifting a finger in the trading floor of a modern office building and manipulating the commodies exchange in Chicago, for example, and in one day, wiping out thousands of small farms.

Science cannot tell you what the exact weather will be on a particular day ten years in the future, but it can do a pretty good job predicting average temperatures and "middle range" trends. (If it is good science, of course.) Marxist analysis cannot predict when or where a terrorist attack will take place. But it is still a powerful tool for understanding the general processes and how they will unfold, not just a hundred years in the future, but also in the not to distant future.