Re: Contemporary Geopolitics

Steven Sherman wrote:

> Ganesh raises the question of the relation of the financial expansion >to 
> the warmaking of the US.  I don't pretend to understand finance all >that 
> well, but here's my thought--the US dollar is very strong because >the US 
> is central to world geopolitics, the maintainer of order.  If >it fails in 
> this role, and faith in it declines, the dollar will start >to tank.  Given 
> the ramshackle state of the US polity, this could >plausibly lead to 
> substantial domestic turmoil. War on Iraq is partly-->maybe largely--a way 
> of saying 'we matter, you need us.'  It is a dumb >way, a self-destructive 
> way, but adjusting to a lower profile role >could be economically painful 
> for the US, and people often do dumb things in the short term to avoid 
> pain.
I now write:

There's sort of a scissors problem for the U.S. imperium here. The U.S. 
averts continued dollar free-fall -- and all of its associated byproducts, 
such as a higher prime lending rate that will strangle economic recovery -- 
if and only if the Pentagon's "shock and awe" strategy yields a quick and 
decisive military victory in Iraq. It very most likely will, it very most 
likely will. But of course fighting a war in accord w/the Powell Doctrine 
(at first, massive aerial bombardment, offshore missile strikes, and special 
ops, followed by mopping up and occupation operations on the ground), 
necessitated by
domestic opposition to young American men and women coming home in body 
bags, is damn expensive. And this time around Bush 43 and company are
having to bribe continental Europeans, Russians, and possibly even Japanese 
and Chinese to provide diplomatic cover. In Desert Storm, of course, the 
U.S. acted the well-compensated mercenary. In other words, the U.S. 
preemptive attack on Iraq works as a self-financing venture if and only if 
the U.S. doesn't have to honor (or redivide) the oil field claims and 
drilling rights of TotalFinaElf, Yukos, Sinopec, and so on.
But the price of a Security Council rubber stamp is the loss of 
Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz's vision of the U.S. petro-oligarchs exercising direct 
control over occupied Iraq's oil output (as well as the circulation of oil 
revenues). The U.S. suffers tremendous global legitimacy loss (such as it 
has any lingering legitimacy at all) if it circumvents the U.N., ratcheting 
up rivalry between the regional blocs,
but if it greases palms through the U.N., then the _raison d'etre_ of
the mission is compromised and the bleeding of the dollar is not stanched.

John Gulick

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