October 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Understanding and Resisting the War Economy

Joseph Gerson is a Director of Programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England. This article is based on a speech given at the Toward A World Without Violence Conference in Barcelona in June 2004.

I have long appreciated the law of unintended consequences. A half century ago, explaining why Columbus, Magellan, Cortez, Drake, and Hudson ventured forth to conquer "the new world," my fourth grade teacher Miss Banghart helped me to understand why the US will be at war and preparing for war for the next several years regardless of this November's election results.

As difficult as it may be to believe, Miss Banghart taught us the mercantile theory of history: The nation that controlled the most of the world's most essential resources, would be the world's most powerful country. Then it was gold and silver. Now it is oil, gas, and water. Technology and industrial and financial capitalism have fundamentally transformed the human condition. Yet, in the tradition of Spain, Portugal, Britain, and other colonial empires, the US is hard at work to consolidate and expand its em-pire in the Middle East and across Asia and the Third World.

Demonstrators in Capetown, South Africa, February 2003. From 2/15: The Day the World said NO to War, AK Press, www.akpress.org.

Trade and markets have become essential to US global power and to "the American way of life"; so, too, the military bases needed to conquer markets, to enforce US control over resources, and to maintain the stability and order required for most forms of international trade.

As a college senior, Professor Jules Davids -- the principal ghost writer of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage -- taught us US diplomatic history.

With compassion, he explained that the 1890s -- the high point of the global colonial era -- were at the same time a period of great economic depression. In the US there was social and political turmoil. Farmers, manufacturers, workers, and unemployed were increasingly desperate, and this demanded the conquest of markets for jobs, profits, economic security, and wealth. Latin American markets were important, but the Chinese market with its hundreds of millions of potential consumers, was seen as the holy grail of capitalism, and thus of "social peace" in the US.

Ships then, Davids reminded us, were fueled by coal, and to cross the Pacific they had to stop from time to time to take on more coal. In the pursuit of wealth and power, colonial powers would deny their competitors access to ports that they controlled. So, to gain the coaling stations the US needed to fuel its warships and the merchant ships that would follow, our government conquered Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, and other strategically located harbors.

But with the European powers and Japan having already carved out "concessions" (or mini-colonies) on the Chinese coast, more than military power was needed to compete for access to the profitable Chinese market. So, as we learned in high school, Secretary of State Root played the colonial powers against one another, calling for fairness and an "Open Door" to China -- which not coincidentally gave the US footholds along the Chinese coast. A century later the China market remains the last best hope of market capitalism -- even as Chinese capitalists begin to turn some of the tables on the West and Japan.

The catastrophic war and occupation of Iraq have not only been over oil. While it certainly was not the Bush Administration's primary goal, privatizing the Iraqi economy -- opening it to foreign investment, in violation of international law -- has thus far been one of the occupation's crowning achievements. Even as they have pressed the expansion of the World Trade Organization and global free trade, US governments since the Cold War have been concerned about the possible division of the world into rival trade zones. The math is simple. Even if Washington wins approval of the Central American Free Trade Area and goes on to create the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the FTAA's population will be smaller than those of the EU and East Asia. By more deeply integrating the potential markets of the Middle East and their financial capital into a US-dominated trade zone, the US will secure important competitive advantages against Europe and Asia. So, in addition to serving as a source of oil, Iraq and the wider Middle East (which the Bush Administration has made clear it seeks to transform) has been seen as an important market for the United States. The Americas plus the Middle East and perhaps Africa might be able to compete with the European Union and a China-dominated trade zone.

Military-Industrial Complex

Another motor force of US militarism and its wars is the growth of the US military-industrial complex. With its roots in the growth of military industries and the arms trade during the first World War, the military-industrial complex became a dominant force in US political (and to a lesser degree economic) culture as a result of its massive expansion during World War II. With the US military budget now roughly equal to the rest of the national budget and to the military spending of all the world's other nations combined, the Pentagon wields disproportionate power in Washington's halls of power as well as in state legislatures and communities across the country.

To win Congressional approval for new weapons systems, from stealth bombers to Stryker tanks, munitions makers sub-contract their research, development, and manufacture for their weapons in Congressional districts across the country. With the lure of jobs and profits for their states and communities, Congressional representatives support nearly every new weapons system and military spending proposal.

In recent years, the military-industrial complex has taken on another dimension with the increasing privatization of warfare. We see it in Halliburton's role as a private profiteering agency of the Pentagon -- as well as of the Vice Presidency. Blackwater Industries provided Washington's Proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremmer, with armed guards. And of course, it was private contractors who oversaw much of the interrogation and torture of prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay.

Resource Wars

The lesson that Miss Banghart taught me half a century ago still applies today. We find ourselves in an era of intensified economic wars, "resource wars" as Michael Klare calls many of them. While the Bush Administration's global "War on Terrorism" is obviously a struggle between North and South, between Christianity/Judaism and Islam, between colonialists and the resistance, it is at the same time a war to ensure
US dominance over its Northern competitors: Europe, Japan, China, and Korea.

This reflects continuity more than change. For decades the focus on the Cold War obscured the continuity of the US drive for global empire, and that of the dominant capitalist powers to maintain and to extend their privilege.

It is in this context that we can best understand the centrality of the Middle East -- and now Central Asia, Africa, Venezuela, and other sources of oil -- to the project of "Full Spectrum Dom-inance." As Noam Chomsky has long maintained, "Political Axiom Number One" of US foreign and military policy since the end of the second World War has been to ensure that neither Washington's enemies nor its allies gain independent access to Middle East oil. Kennedy-era Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor put it cogently in 1976, when he wrote that Middle East oil is the "jugular vein of western capitalism." With its hand on Europe's and Japan's -- now also China's and Korea's -- primary sources of fuel, the US has had its hand on the jugular vein of global capitalism.

Sources of Hope

Another world and another United States are indeed possible, and necessary. Our goal should be political cultures that put people and security before profits and power. A range of options exists beyond the narrow confines of empire and mercantile capitalism.

In the US, building rail systems along the lines of European, Japanese, and Chinese models, or reinstating President Jimmy Carter's US tax policies that encouraged conversion from fossil fuel to renewable energy systems could take us toward energy independence and environmental sustainability. Cleaning up six decades of nuclear and other poisons that pollute the nation and threaten future generations would provide non-military Keynesian stimuli to the economy, jobs for millions of engineers, scientists, and other workers, and greater security for our children's children's children.

Remember John Lennon's challenge: "Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can?" Consumer culture and related materialist values are killing us and degrading our lives. Over the past year I have been deeply moved by what I have learned and re-learned from courageous Native Hawaiians and Native Americans who have opted to root their lives in respect for Creation, and to revive non-Western, sustainable ways of living. While these may not prove to be the models most easily embraced by those of us in the dominant culture, we can learn from them to create more holistic, creative, and non-destructive ways of living.

In the tradition of Gandhi, we need to plant and nourish the seeds of new alternative economies and ways of being, but they cannot thrive until our nation casts aside its preferences for militarism and empire.

Regardless of the outcome of the November election, we have a long and difficult struggle ahead of us. If we are to prevail, we need to become clear about our most deeply held values. Then our challenge is to live life in ways that fully embrace what is, indeed, most important to us.

Peace and democratic forces within the US have yet to do the analysis, to build the counter-cultures, and to create the organized movements necessary to prevail. But we do not have to do it alone. We can work in alliance with the world's nations and peoples to help us transform our country: from opposing CAFTA and the Iraq war to collaborating creatively in the run-up to next spring's Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference at the United Nations. Life is dynamic. Change is the one constant in the human experience. We may be stumbling toward fascism, but we can also humbly rejoin the community of nations as an equal partner in a new era of common human security. The war system itself must be ended if we are to make way for a peace economy.

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