New
York Times And Bush’s
Threat Of World War III
By Bill Van Auken
30 October, 2007
WSWS.org
When President Bush used an October
17 White House press conference to threaten that the escalating US confrontation
with Iran posed a danger of “World War III” his remark was
passed over in silence by most of the media. Those that did report it
seemed, for the most part, to accept the White House claim that the
president was engaging in hyperbole and merely making a “rhetorical
point.”
In the nearly two weeks since,
Bush’s remark has been followed up by a menacing speech by Vice
President Dick Cheney, whose vow that the US would not “stand
by” as Iran allegedly pursued a nuclear weapons program constituted
an implicit threat of war. The heated war rhetoric has also been accompanied
by the imposition of another round of sweeping economic sanctions backed
by the unprecedented US designation of sections of Iran’s security
forces as “proliferators” of weapons of mass destruction
and as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Given the Bush administration’s
claim to be engaged in a permanent “global war on terrorism,”
this designation is tailor-made for justifying a US military assault
on Iran.
These events, undoubtedly
accompanied by behind-the-scenes preparations for military action, have
led to a somewhat belated reaction to Bush’s invocation of a third
world war. Over the weekend, several Democratic legislators took issue
with the president’s ominous statement. Senator Barbara Boxer
of California, for example, called Bush’s World War III statement
“irresponsible.”
“I’ve been briefed
by the Pentagon who say if there were to be a conflagration with Iran,
which we all hope to avoid, it would be generations of jihad right here
on our shores,” she said. “We don’t want to go that
way, so let’s calm down the rhetoric.”
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan,
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also warned of the
implications of a war against Iran, including the potential closing
of the strategic Strait of Hormuz. He made clear that he believed that
the military option should be kept “on the table,” but urged
the White House to stop talking about it.
“Don’t give them
the weapon that they use against us that we’re trying to bully
them, that we’re trying to do dominate them,” he said. “And
that’s what this hot rhetoric does when it’s just constantly
repeated, about World War III or that we’re going to use a military
option.”
Mohamed El Baradei, director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), also warned
against the confrontational approach taken by Washington.
“My fear is that if
we continue to escalate from both sides that we will end up into a precipice,
we will end up into an abyss,” he said. “The Middle East
is in a total mess, to say the least. And we cannot add fuel to the
fire.”
Perhaps the most extraordinary
response from within the political establishment came on Monday in the
form of a lead editorial in the New York Times entitled “Trash
Talking World War III.”
The Times writes: “America’s
allies and increasingly the American public are playing a ghoulish guessing
game: Will President Bush manage to leave office without starting a
war with Iran? Mr. Bush is eagerly feeding those anxieties. This month
he raised the threat of ‘World War III’ if Iran even figures
out how to make a nuclear weapon.
“With a different White
House, we might dismiss this as posturing—or bank on sanity to
carry the day, or the warnings of exhausted generals or a defense secretary
more rational than his predecessor. Not this crowd.”
The implications of this
assessment, coming as it does from the America’s newspaper of
record, the voice of erstwhile establishment liberalism, deserve the
most serious consideration.
Not this crowd. In other
words, a remark about World War III from another administration might
have been written off, in the words of Senator Boxer, as “irresponsible,”
but in the mouths of Bush, Cheney & Co. it becomes a palpable threat.
With the US military already
mired in two colonial-style wars with no end in sight, the Times indicates
that there exist no grounds for believing that the White House will
not pursue the seemingly insane course of launching yet a third war,
which—far more than those already underway—carries with
it the danger of spreading into a global conflagration.
Reflected in the tone of
this editorial is a profound political crisis within American ruling
circles. Its unstated implication is that US policy is presently determined
by a militarist camarilla which is out of control and subject neither
to constitutional restraints nor international law.
Such a statement would not
appear in the leading US daily paper unless there were deep concerns
within the political establishment that America is on the brink of a
war that poses catastrophic consequences.
But what the Times editorial
cannot explain and does not even attempt to elucidate is how this crowd
has remained in control of the US government going on eight years now,
and how the seemingly insane escalation of American militarism has become
Washington’s predominant policy on a world scale, supported and
funded by both major parties. This cannot be rationalized as the outcome
of Bush’s or Cheney’s supposed dementia.
Instead, the editorial makes
the following toothless criticism of Bush: “Four years after his
pointless invasion of Iraq, President Bush still confuses bullying with
grand strategy. He refuses to do the hard work of diplomacy—or
even acknowledge the disastrous costs of his actions.”
Since when was the invasion
of Iraq “pointless?” The point to attempting to subjugate
Iraq was clear from the outset. As former US Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan wrote in his recently published book—describing
it as “what everyone knows”—the war against Iraq “is
largely about oil.”
That is, behind all of the
propaganda lies about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, the
war was launched in pursuit of definite imperialist aims. Washington
consciously decided to utilize its military might as a means of offsetting
US capitalism’s economic decline relative to its major rivals
in Europe and Asia. Placing an American hand on the oil spigots of the
Persian Gulf was seen as a means exerting decisive pressure on these
rivals and preserving US hegemony in the affairs of world capitalism.
This war was not pointless,
it was criminal. To pursue its aims, US imperialism was prepared to
unleash destruction on a scale that has now claimed the lives of over
a million Iraqis and laid waste to an entire society.
The same “point”
lies behind the present escalation of US aggression against Iran, pursued
once again in the name of curtailing weapons of mass destruction and
combating terrorism. The results of such a new war will prove far bloodier.
The Times—as in the
run-up to the Iraq war—is once again advocating the use of diplomacy
to secure legitimization for the predatory imperialist interests that
Washington is pursuing against Iran. Its differences with the Bush administration,
like those of the Democrats, are merely of a tactical character.
The supposed insanity of
the Bush and Cheney crowd is in the end shared, at least in its essential
symptoms, by all sections of the American ruling elite. The fundamental
source of this malady lies not in the psychology of those presently
in the White House—however unstable it may be—but rather
in the underlying contradictions of world capitalism, above all the
subordination of the powerful forces of globally integrated capitalist
production to the private profit interests of the ruling elites of competing
national states.
It is these contradictions,
which are objectively driving the eruption of American militarism, that
threaten a new war against Iran and a broader conflagration, as other
major powers are inevitably compelled to defend their own access to
strategic energy supplies and markets. Mounting economic instability
will only accelerate this process.
The Times editorial constitutes
a serious warning. A far wider war is now seen within the US ruling
elite as a real and imminent danger to which no section of the present
political establishment has a viable alternative. Such a war poses the
real threat of a nuclear conflagration and the extermination of hundreds
of millions.
The decisive question is
that class-conscious workers and youth grasp both the immense dangers
and the emerging revolutionary possibilities in the present situation.
Mankind is threatened with wars that will reproduce and eclipse the
catastrophes inflicted by the two world wars of the last century. But
this threat is itself a manifestation of the profound crisis of the
capitalist system.
Nothing could make clearer
the hopelessness and bankruptcy of a perspective of ending the war in
Iraq or halting an even bloodier catastrophe in Iran by means of pressuring
Congress or supporting the Democratic Party against the Republicans.
A genuine struggle against
war must waged by politically uniting working people worldwide based
on a common socialist and internationalist program aimed at putting
an end to economic and political domination of a financial oligarchy
that pursues its profit interests by means of military slaughter.
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