Hideous Idols.

 

Democracy by Airstrike.

We might, in synoptic terms, see the invasion of Iraq as leading ultimately to the elections of an Iraqi government. This is not to take a teleological view of the invasion as undertaken in order to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq. It was a teleological calculation that led a great many Iraqi leftists to support the intervention. Similarly, David Aaronovitch argued that the prospect of free elections is good reason to bomb Afghanistan as well as the justification for, and ultimately the function of the intervention. It's democracy by airstrike. It can be said that this is not only highly mistaken, it is almost a bastardisation of historical materialism. Karl Marx would remind us that history progresses by its bad side. If we take this too literally then we might come to the conclusion that injustice now is necessary for justice later. The point is actually more subtle: The advent of democracy in Iraq is inseparable from the violence of the invasion and occupation, but it is not a justification of the aforementioned horrors. In this sense Iraq is not unique.

The evils of the war were not perpetrated for the good of Iraqis. But it is the case that the Iraqi people should make the best of their country now that they are free of Saddam. It is precisely because the war was not fought to free Iraq that another intervention was necessary. This time it came from the Iraqi people, including from those who had supported the invasion to remove Saddam Hussein from power. We shouldn't sneer at the Iraqis who supported the intervention, in their minds the invasion didn't have to lead to an occupation. In his writing on India Karl Marx likened progress to "that hideous, pagan idol," who drinks the nectar "from the skulls of the slain." He did so not to claim that there is no progress, but to emphasise the horrifying price that has to be paid for it. In the same line Marx writes that it's only when "a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production," and subjected them to the control of the people will we have broken with progress as a monstrous god.

It's worth noting that Marx was writing about British colonial rule in India, particularly with regard to the economic composition there. So it should be stressed that the ultimate emancipation of Iraq will come out of the economic conditions. As Terry Eagleton comes out with it, the moral and the material dance hand-in-hand, while at the same time the moral and the material are at daggers drawn. Material development equates to moral development insofar as the advance of productive forces promotes the unfolding of creative power and capacities in man. Yet every advance in civilisation is an advance in barbarism, as Walter Benjamin would remind us, if it brings in its wake new possibilities of emancipation it also arrives coated head to foot in blood. Once again in synoptic terms, we can see the processes of productive advance as a general movement onwards and upwards as generations amass the material preconditions for the new world, as Marx put it, through miserable toil. Capitalism was born indebted to feudalism and slavery in this way.

Defeating an Empire.

The US wanted to avoid any concessions as the resistance in Iraq wanted to end the occupation, in an attempt to hold-off the inevitable Washington managed to prevent elections for the first couple of years. In the meantime a series of market reforms were imposed to destroy Iraq's civil society, opening the country to multinational corporations and privatising everything in sight - the only law of Saddam's left in place was to prevent unionisation. These reforms were illegal until they could be ratified by an Iraqi government of some kind. The first moves towards a new government for Iraq were made for this reason. This included a new constitution, which was quickly typed up by unelected officials. As the Iraq war went on the US had to back down from its war aims, to the extent of trying to block free elections in Iraq. The grass-roots movement for democracy could not be suppressed because it had mass support in the country. It was Iraq's intervention in the US occupation.

Eventually the elections could not be avoided given the strength of the support for democracy in Iraq. So the US first tried to manipulate the elections and when that failed the US came out with its war aims explicitly in 2007. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the conditions were that the US have privileged access to Iraqi oil and that the US can continue its combat operations in Iraq indefinitely. The Bushites were determined to maintain these conditions in January of 2008, but the US government had to back down within a couple of months in the face of Iraqi nationalism. It was in 2009 that the US government finally conceded defeat and began to move to withdraw troops from the country. The privileged access of American corporations to Iraqi oil has been lost, that's not to say that the US has not plundered Iraq - but it does say that Iraq may finally be making the first steps towards independence. By 2010 the Obama administration had to give in to Iraqi "obstructionism" and initiated military withdrawal from Iraq.

It's true that Obama has attempted to maintain and expand the bloated US embassy in Iraq, there have been signs that the US have given up on the diplomatic presence in Iraq. In Febuary 2012 the Obama administration opted to initiate a reduction of funding and staff for the US embassy, which has over 16,000 people in staff and runs on an annual subsidy of $6 billion. More so the embassy will find itself hiring Iraqi staff and source goods and services from the Iraqi economy. Even still this event signifies the ongoing decline of American influence in Iraq. The war has been a disaster for the US overall, specifically in terms of its strategic goals for the region. The invasion had failed to reverse the increasing isolation of Israel on the world stage while Iranian influence in Iraq has only been increased. Elections have empowered Shi'ite conservatives and nationalists in Baghdad, the new Iraq will have peaceful relations with Iran. Washington can continue to dream of an isolated Iran that can be readily cowed.

At History's End.

In defence of the suggestion that it is preferable to export democracy by military intervention, Christopher Hitchens would point to the French role in the American Revolution to throw-off the British rule. So in his mind it remained possible to spread democracy by armed force. Democracy in India came as a by-product of British colonial rule, it was not an indigenous invention. The defeat of European Fascism is what led to the emergence of democracy in Germany and Italy. This still falls short of a justification for the criminal invasion of Iraq, as British rule in India was hardly about nurturing a democracy with a socialist constitution. At the same time, we may safely say that the defeat of Hitlerism in Germany only came about once 'appeasement' had failed and German expansionism came to threaten British interests abroad. Churchill's real concern was that the Fascists would seize the Suez Canal before moving on to India. In the end the British empire was lost in the war and frankly it was the best way to lose it.


The official line of the Communist Party in China is that the accumulative processes of capitalism are necessary in order to create the preconditions for historical change. So the capitalist revolution under Deng Xiaoping required such an ideological justification, the idea is that the Communist Party can push Chinese society through capitalist development to socialism and then to communism. Mao had tried to bridge the chasm between partially post-feudal China and socialism without giving ground to the burgeoning forces of capitalism; whereas Deng sought to "cross the river by feeling the stones". The teleology rears it's head once again in the guise of capitalism with Asian values, where capitalism can and must be drawn upon to construct socialism it is in place for that purpose. It is almost theodicy - vindication through the existence of evil. This really represents the victory of the capitalist roaders, the ultimate revenge of the anti-Maoists after the Cultural Revolution - that was made crystal clear in Tienanmen Square!

At the same time, it's worth acknowledging that, the historical materialist conception of history could be used to justify a non-interventionist stance. The US was not in favour of overthrowing Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and even after it US policy remained supportive of Hussein's regime. So it shouldn't be forgotten that it isn't necessarily the case that history tends towards liberation. The US allowed Saddam Hussein to crush the massive uprising against him in 1991, specifically providing the authorisation for Hussein to use airstrikes against the Iraqi people. It's also not consistently non-interventionist to suggest that the US should've allowed Saddam to be overthrown by his own people. The economic sanctions imposed on the country by the US strengthened Saddam and devastated the population, leaving hundreds of thousands of people dead in the end. This devastation prevented an uprising which would have removed Saddam Hussein from power. A ruination of all is not out of the question at history's end.

Thanking Monica.

In Praise of Sex Scandals.

What can we say of the economics of the New Democrats? Well, it wasn't too soon after the election Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan met with Bill Clinton and told the President that his election promises of social reform could not be carried out without increasing the deficit, which would lead to higher interest rates that would undermine economic growth. The dinosaur libertarian Greenspan advised the Clinton administration to slash spending in order to convince the bond markets to lower interest rates and growth would ultimately be generated. Surprising Greenspan the President swallowed this theory without a fight. Clinton made the case for austerity in order to achieve greater long-term economic growth. The prescription was a significant cut in public spending coupled with minor tax increases to fill the koffers left ransacked by 12 years of Republican government. It displeased the middle-class he had pledged to cut taxes for and further diminished the standard of living for the American working-class.

Out of a triangulated politics the Clinton administration implemented welfare reform which was much harsher than anything the GOP ever rammed through a complacent Democratic Congress in previous decades. As the boom emerged there was a widespread belief that it would not all come crashing down because of the innovations in computer technology. The guarantee of stability and stupendous rates of growth came with the advances in computer technology, equations and mathematical models could now be used to bring order to a chaotic marketplace. The state was not needed to intervene either. In theory, it would ensure long-term growth and the confidence in the midst of deregulation produced from this led to an orgy of lending. The banks could now throw money at millions of new lenders. High levels of competition and productivity were now within reach of a self-stabilising order. This is what became known as the New Economy.

Alan Greenspan was concerned when he found little evidence for any rise in productivity, yet he did find signs of "irrational exuberance". In 1996 Greenspan argued that the markets might be overvalued and that a dangerous speculative bubble was beginning inflated. The press attacked Greenspan and he buckled to the pressure. He now claimed that the advances in computer technology had been so significant as to ensure rates of productivity that could not be measured in the traditional way. Greenspan told Clinton it was like "discovering a new planet". The high-tech boom itself had come out of huge amounts of public investment over many years which culminated in the dotcom bubble. This was all going on as deregulation opened up the financial sector to run amok. It would all later blow up in the form of subprime mortgages. The financialisation that began in the 1970s and was intensified under Reagan and Clinton led to the economic disaster that we're still living with.

If we want to take the glass to be half-full then we might take the view that the Lewinsky scandal which saved social security from Clinton's prescribed privatisation as Robin Blackburn has noted. It was in the mid 1990s that the widespread attitude was that the social security system required radical reform. The privatisation lobby basked in the popular perception that an aging population would soon make social security unsustainable in its current form. As Clinton had just sold the workless down the river it was expected that the administration could well do the same to the retired and soon to be retired. Clinton had a top secret "Special Issues" coterie - with Larry Summers at the helm - to go over the minute details of the basis for a "bipartisan policy" on social security that would splice individual accounts into the program. Note the emphasis on unity in American politics runs constant, the preference is always for consensus rather than dissensus.

The New Democrats had snuffed the life out of the welfare program that had been established with the New Deal, now it was social security to be asphyxiated. It just needed to be harsh enough to win over the Republicans without appearing to be Draconian in order to keep the support of a fair chunk of the American public. It soon looked like it was going to be triangulation par excellence. So what went wrong? At the time the Republicans and the media were engaged in a moral crusade against Bill Clinton over a variety of accusations regarding his personal, sexual and political conduct. By 1998 the "Special Issues" agenda had developed seriously over the years and Clinton attended a meeting to review the project. This was in July, shortly before he was handed a subpoena and it wouldn't be long before he was confessing to an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Now Clinton could not be seen to be trashing a long-standing institution of American society. Social security reform was put on ice, the reform would have to be reformed quickly in order for it to be saleable.

It was not the time for a radical overhaul of the system as it had been founded during the New Deal. As one member of the "Special Issues" team would later put it "Toward the end of 1998, as the possibility that the President would be impeached came clearly into view, the policy dynamic of the social security debate changed dramatically and it became clear to the White House that this was not the time to take risks on the scale that would be necessary to achieve a deal on an issue as contentious as social security reform." Quickly the plan was reoriented to strengthen social security through a rare recourse to the budget surplus that the austerity had attained, of course a portion would be invested in equities. Clinton came to propose that 62% of the budget surplus be used to build up the social security trust fund. He promised to veto any attempts to divert social security funds to other uses while calling for 15% of the trust fund to be invested in the stock market.

The investment would be overseen by the social security administrators. It had the potential to create a powerful new lever over economic policy, naturally Alan Greenspan became an opponent of investing social security funds on the stock market. Nevertheless the reform was well received among the American public, the pessimism around social security was supplanted for optimism and the GOP had to concede that social security should be prioritised. And as the sex scandal deepened President Clinton fully endorsed the system. It set back the privatisation lobby in the form of right-wing think tanks as well as the corporate wing of the Democratic Party which Clinton had nursed so well. The consensus was now that social security had to be preserved, even George Bush pledged to prioritise it. The service remained untouchable until the recent economic crisis. This is probably the only reason to praise Clinton's promiscuity that had in the past led to so much misery for others. Fucking Monica Lewinsky may be the only worthwhile decision Bill Clinton ever made.

The 'Masterful' Bill Clinton.

On the Perils of Clintonism.

Since Bill Clinton made his rather glib speech at the Democratic National Convention the BBC has been running a three-part series of documentaries called The Clintons. It's subject is Bill Clinton, post-Reaganite America and the Clinton era of the rise of Third Way politics in the 1990s. Clinton was the first of the business Democrats who reconstructed the Democrats as a right-wing force of reaction and not of reform. The moderation of Dukakis and Mondale was jettisoned, after 12 years of Reaganism nothing short of a sharply conservative redirection of the Democratic Party. It had been in the works for a very long time, as the Kennedys and Carter had played a major role in the degeneration of New Deal liberalism into an electoral husk. The Kennedy liberals oversaw the expansion of the national security state as part of the launch of a criminal war in Indochina, while they took a knife to the top rate of tax for the wealthiest Americans.

After the creature of Nixon had been chased out of the White House it was Carter who initiated the first deregulatory measures on industry while he anointed Paul Volcker - who would soon become the hammer with which the poor would be battered. With that in mind Jimmy Carter was the last concession made to the grass-roots radicals of the 60s, before him there was George McGovern and since him there have been none. To get a feel of Bill Clinton's soul one only has to look to the 1992 campaign trail. The first sex scandal to preempt the Lewinsky scandal erupted with Gennifer Flowers coming forward to put it to the press that she had had a 12-year relationship with Clinton. The immediate response from the Clinton campaign was to act as though Clinton had anything to do with Flowers and only admitted to sleeping with her once several years later. The first objective was to change the subject for the press as it looked as though the story wouldn't just go away.

This is what The Clintons didn't include in its first episode. Clinton saw to it that Ricky Ray Rector was put to death in 1992. At the time, Rector was "seriously mentally impaired", to say the least as he had survived shooting himself in the head after he had shot a police officer in the back. But the court rejected the claim of grave mental impairment and gave Rector the death penalty. Clinton could have pardoned Rector, but instead he flew over to Arkansas to exploit Rector's execution to appear "tough on crime". On the night of his execution, Rector saved a slice of pecan pie to eat later, not understanding his death would come first. The sad irony is that Ricky told his incompetent lawyer that he would like to vote for Clinton. It took 45 minutes for the state's murderers to find a vein in Rector's arm into which they would shoot sodium thiopentol. Meanwhile Bill Clinton had dinner with Mary Steenburgen. And as for Clinton's way with women he has been accused of rape on more than one occasion.

As Christopher Hitchens saw, at the time, Bill Clinton demonstrated a willingness to pander to the racist subconscious of the electorate. On top of this, it was a presentation of ruthless harshness on Clinton's part and the ability to keep liberals on his side even when he stoops to this abysmal low. No one should've been surprised that Clinton would be willing then to bomb the only aspirin factory in Sudan to deflect media attention away from the notoriously semen-stained dress. Once again, the people who have to pay the price for Clinton's sexual conduct are not white and do not have the same privileges of a man of his economic and political status. Hitchens was right to conclude that the public and private face of Bill Clinton are one in the same, that the infidelities of this President was in tune with his most appalling political decrees. Not just Sudan, we shouldn't lose sight of Iraq where the Clintonites used sanctions to starve hundreds of thousands of people. Nor should we forget about the Turkish crimes committed against the Kurds with US arms supplied by Clinton.

The primary legacy of Clinton is the approach he pioneered - that of triangulation specifically. Basically, it amounted firstly to the looting of supportable planks from the Republican platform in order to bag the corporate funding that follows it. Secondly comes a series of psephological measures to "test the water" such as polling to see when it would be best to adopt the proposals. All the while the liberal Left are to be kept on board with the "lesser evil" allure of the Democratic platform. The extent to which the Clinton White House was able to coopt the Left into its base no matter what it did was quite incredible. Not just Ricky Ray Rectar and the aspirin factory in Sudan. Think Waco, where the FBI incinerated 82 people with the broad approval of the liberal Left. This is what convinced a network of lunatic right-wingers that something had to be done. In fact it ultimately led to the Oklahoma City bombing, its perpetrator had come out of the emergent militia movement and its hardline anti-political purism. Still, at least it wasn't for a blowjob.