6-28-05, 10:00 am

The illegal and criminal invasion of Iraq continues to be a drain on US imperialism complicating its ability to respond more forcefully to North Korea, Zimbabwe and other perceived 'outposts of tyranny.'

One of the principal reasons why Washington is failing in Iraq is because, increasingly, the US people themselves are turning against this imbroglio. The Army is straining to meet recruitment goals, not least since volunteers among African Americans have fallen by a whopping 41 percent. Black soldiers enrolled in the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program is down 36 percent. The Marine Corps also reports a drop in Black recruits. In fiscal 2000, African Americans represented almost a quarter of Army recruits. That percentage fell to 22.7 in 2001, 19.9 in 2002, 16.4 in 2003, 15.9 in 2004 and 13.9 through the first four months of fiscal 2005. Strikingly, no such decline has been found among Latino or 'non-Hispanic white' recruitment, though there has been a general decline among women of all ethnicities. On March 14, 2005, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that

only 36 percent of Black youth felt that the war was justified, compared with 61 percent of whites. Meanwhile, 80 percent of Blacks and 71 percent of women reported that the war made them less likely to join the military … In April 2003, one year after the invasion of Iraq, a Gallup Poll reported that while 78 percent of whites supported the war, only 29 percent of Blacks did.

This is no surprise to acute observers. 'I have not found a Black person in support of this war in my district,' says Harlem congressman, Charles Rangel. 'The fact that every member of the Congressional Black Caucus, emotionally, politically and vigorously, opposes this war is an indication of what Black folks think throughout this country,' he argues.

Part of this decline is no doubt due to antiwar activism. The Coalition Against Militarism in Schools in Los Angeles has been crusading successfully against recruiting for soldiers in area high schools and their efforts are being emulated nationally.

This activism is also leading to the shining of a bright spotlight on those who are profiting handsomely from the war. This growing list includes William 'Bucky' Bush, brother of one president and uncle to the current White House occupant. He is a major investor and sits on the board of St. Louis-based Engineered Support Systems Incorporated, whose shares just hit an all-time record high, not least due to its Pentagon contracts derived from the war.

Increasingly, activists are focusing their attention on these 'merchants of death.' Two years ago 23-year old Rachel Corrie of the US was killed while trying to block the demolition of a home in a refugee camp in the illegally-occupied Gaza Strip. Now her parents have filed lawsuits in Seattle and Israel seeking compensation for their daughter’s death. Intriguingly, their prime target is Caterpillar Inc. which, they claim, violated state and international law by selling specially designed bulldozers to the Israeli military knowing that they would be used to demolish homes and endanger civilians, such as their daughter who was crushed. She was wearing a bright vest at the time indicating she was a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a group working against demolitions. These bulldozers have been used to destroy about 10,000 buildings in the West Bank and Gaza, leaving 50,000 people homeless. The Corrie lawsuit is part of a growing trend of attorneys suing corporations for their alleged complicity in the acts of foreign nations’ human rights violations.

The religious community also has begun to target Caterpillar. They are bringing shareholder resolutions against this firm for reasons similar to the Corrie lawsuit. Four Roman Catholic orders of nuns and the Berkeley-based group Jewish Voices for Peace argue that Israel has used these bulldozers for illegal home demolitions and they are demanding an investigation into whether such use conformed with the company’s code of business conduct. Supporters of the shareholder resolution include two major Protestant denominations, the 3.6 million-member Presbyterian Church U.S.A. and the 8.4 million-member United Methodist Church. In July 2004 the former denomination became the first mainline Protestant denomination to vote to begin a process of divestment from US firms that support the occupation by Israel. In recent months the World Council of Churches has asked Christian churches to consider similar measures and Episcopalians, Methodists and United Church of Christ members are among those discussing the issue. Still, the Presbyterians have been in the vanguard as their general assembly voted 431 to 62 to examine their $8 billion stock portfolio for the purpose of divestment.

Needless to say Caterpillar is hardly the only corporation profiting from existing technologies or creating new ones. Thus, according to the March 3, 2005 Daily Telegraph of London, the Pentagon is developing a weapon that delivers a jolt of excruciating pain from afar and is researching avidly the question of how much pain can be induced in individuals hit by electromagnetic impulses created by lasers, without killing them. Tests on animals showed that such laser pulses produced 'pain and temporary paralysis.' Concerns about the ethical dimensions of such research, and weapons, have been dismissed peremptorily by the Pentagon.

Indeed, the April 1, 2005 New York Times reports that the 'costs of the Pentagon’s arsenal could soar by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. The Pentagon has said it is building more than 70 major weapons systems at a cost of at least $1.3 trillion this at a time when the health care system is enduring extreme duress and colleges are raising tuition costs sharply.

The militarization of outer space is a cardinal principle of these dangerous dreams. On March 1, 2005, Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld, signed a new National Defense Strategy paper that said the use of space 'enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation.' The Pentagon is developing a suborbital space capsule that could hit targets anywhere in the world within two hours of being launched from US bases. According to the March 29, 2005, Washington Post, the Pentagon is also developing systems that could attack potential enemy satellites, destroying them or temporarily preventing them from sending signals.

Increasingly, these plans are targeting the world’s most populous nation, China, though US imperialism finds it difficult to accept that it may have committed the strategic blunder of the millennium when it aligned with Beijing against the former Soviet Union, thus opening the door to massive inward foreign investment that has transformed this Asian nation into the planet’s dynamo.

Increasingly, the conflict between Washington and Beijing is beginning to resemble, in part, the cold war conflict with Moscow. Thus, in early 2004 in its annual report the US State Department scored China’s human rights record. Premier Wen Jiabao hit back hard scorning Washington’s own record at home, the death penalty, racially motivated killings, etc., not to mention its record abroad including complicity in torture.

Also, like the cold war, US imperialism is seeking to encircle China with a string of unfriendly regimes and bases bristling with weaponry. Certainly that is the import of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the US bases in former Soviet Central Asia. That is also suggested by the US-Japan agreement to challenge China concerning its rebel province of Taiwan, which was the unspoken catalyst of the enormous anti-Tokyo demonstrations that rocked China in April 2005.

US imperialism also has been courting India, which was attacked by China in 1962. However, Beijing has been scrambling to improve relations with this South Asian giant, an effort that culminated in a recent successful trip to New Delhi by Wen Jiabao. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was effusive and uttered words that will echo through the century. 'India and China can together reshape the world order,' he exclaimed in words that were not greeted happily in the capital of the world’s self-proclaimed 'sole remaining superpower,' the so-called 'indispensable nation.'

Already China is foiling the plans of US imperialism to maintain the existing 'world order.' Though Washington is straining mightily to destabilize the regime of oil-rich Venezuela, China is seeking simultaneously to bolster it, developing 15 oil fields in the eastern region of this South American nation and providing President Hugo Chávez with a $700 million line of credit to build housing. In neighboring Brazil, China has inked a $1 billion deal to build a gas pipeline across the continent’s largest nation.
Last year China stymied US efforts to levy sanctions on Sudan, but it is in Zimbabwe, increasingly the target of an Anglo-American crusade, that Beijing has been noticeably active. This is no surprise. During the liberation war in this southern African nation, Beijing was the most avid backer of the eventual victor and now ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU-Patriotic Front), and Washington was not necessarily upset by this since the alternative was the Soviet-backed Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU).

But now as Washington strains to assist its chief ally, London, in destabilizing the regime of President Robert Mugabe, these imperialists find that Beijing is a major stumbling block, as Harare is rapidly implementing a 'Look East' policy that seeks to reorient its policies away from the Atlantic and toward Asia, especially China. This is part of China’s overall policy toward resource-rich Africa. Between 2002 and 2003 China-Africa trade jumped 50 percent to $18.5 billion and is expected to grow to $30 billion by 2006. By way of comparison, US-Africa trade was $44.5 billion in 2004 but is not expected to match the exponential growth of China’s commerce on this continent. China has oil interests in Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Angola and Gabon.

China also has begun to encroach on traditional US turf, i.e. Israel. An angry Washington barred Israel from participating in developing the Join Strike Fighter because of this nation’s purported violations of agreements about arms sales to China. Israeli intelligence no doubt has been paying close attention to global trends and espies that China is ascending just as US imperialism is buffeted by a falling dollar, a questionable stock market and spiraling trade and budget deficits.

In response, Washington is striving mightily to crackdown on Beijing but the integration of these nations’ economies makes this tack problematic at best. For example, Wal-Mart is a principal trading partner of China; the yuan is pegged to the dollar to say nothing of the purchase of US Treasury bills to keep this government afloat by the Chinese central bank. Thus, though the White House has tried to blame China’s sizeable entry into the global petroleum market as a cofactor in the rise of gasoline toward $3 per gallon, in 2000 Sinopec, the Chinese state-owned oil and gas giant, raised some $3.5 billion by selling shares on the New York Stock Exchange, with Exxon-Mobil buying a large stake. Halliburton, the patron of Vice President Dick Cheney, has since provided Sinopec with a design for a new chemical plant; Bechtel, a major funder of GOP political campaigns nationally, has helped it build a petrochemical complex in China; ConocoPhillips, the Texas oil corporation, has aided Sinopec in oil and gas exploration. And, as was pointed out in the February 25, 2005 New York Times, in 2002 'Sinopec received a $429,000 grant from the United States Trade and Development Agency. The purpose was to help an import-export subsidiary to develop an electronic procurement system,' even though a Sinopec subsidiary was then under sanctions for sales to Iran or that 'Sinopec ranked among the 100 richest firms in the world….'

The problem for US imperialism is that the fateful 1970s decision to align with China against the former USSR means that Beijing now has considerable leverage in Washington. Thus, Semiconductor Manufacturing International, China’s largest maker of computer chips, created enormous problems in Washington when it threatened to buy billions of dollars of chipmaking equipment from Japan instead of the US after failing to secure a loan guarantee from the US Export-Import Bank. The failure was due to lobbying by Micron Technology, the Idaho-based chipmaker whose supporters include a conservative Congressman from this state. Yet, indicative of how Beijing has split the US ruling elite, making action against China difficult at best, nearly two dozen members of Congress from California objected strenuously to this Idaho démarche on behalf of Applied Materials, yet another megacorporation, which is allied with China, along with the New York based Citigroup.

The extensive involvement of US corporations with China has complicated the attempt to inveigle the European Union into maintaining an arms embargo against Beijing. If China is such a danger, wonders the EU, then why are US high-tech firms so deeply enmeshed in this Asian nation’s economy? Increasingly, the EU is not tailing after the US, which is undermining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the very concept of the 'West,' an amorphous term in any event. Thus, despite US efforts to isolate Venezuela, Total, the French oil company, is involved in a multi-billion dollar joint venture in Caracas. Meanwhile, Spain has decided to sell arms to Venezuela, despite strenuous objection by the US and Colombia.

Though Washington still steadily maintains its embargo against socialist Cuba, cracks in this mighty edifice are also beginning to surface. Louisiana, a relatively conservative state, has been in the forefront, as Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and Pedro Alvarez, director of the Cuban firm Alimport recently signed a $15 million trade deal for rice, dairy products, soya, fish feed stock and other goods. Since December 2001, Cuba has paid a hefty $1 billion in cash to US businesses for food purchases. Governor Blanco was effusive during her Havana visit. According to the March 20, 2005, Granma, [Cuba] she chortled, 'The people of Louisiana wish to say to the people of Cuba … much love and respect is extended across the Gulf of Mexico.' The astute Governor was following in the footsteps of chief executives of Illinois, Minnesota and North Dakota, all of whom have made pilgrimages to Havana of late.

Governor Blanco no doubt recognizes that US imperialism finds it harder and harder to issue diktats in a world where communist parties in Havana and Beijing are gaining in influence. This is so even in the erstwhile 'backyard' of imperialism, as evidenced by the historic meeting between Caribbean and African nations that recently occurred in Jamaica. In a concrete manifestation of Pan-Africanism that would have made W.E.B. Du Bois proud, the 15 nation Caribbean Community (Caricom) decided to grant observer status to the African Union and the latter reciprocated the gesture. Exchanges in culture, sports and education were cemented, along with abolition of visas in the two regions. South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma announced that the time had long since passed for closer collaboration between Africa and its diaspora. In that regard, Pretoria recently announced that former Haitian leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, driven from office into exile in South Africa as a result of a 2004 coup, had been appointed minister of the diaspora, to coordinate efforts in this all-important realm, a development that excited and intrigued African-American groupings.

This kind of solidarity is critical nowadays as US imperialism has not relinquished its historic role as devastator of Africa, an ignominious role that stretches back to the heyday of the hated African slave trade. Just recently, Titan, the US-based military communications company, was fined $28.5 million after pleading guilty to criminal charges that it violated legislation barring the bribery of foreign officials, in this case, the West African nation, Benin. The company had channeled $2 million to the 2001 re-election campaign of Matthieu Kerekou, the then president. These funds were used to buy votes and in turn Kerekou was expected to support Titan’s attempt to establish a wireless telephone project in Benin. This comes in the wake of revelations reported in the April 25, 2005 edition of The New Republic that former Liberian leader, Charles Taylor, now in exile in Nigeria, and reviled for his horrific role that led to the virtual dissolution of the state, was for years on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Thus, US imperialism finds itself besieged on all fronts, at home and abroad. Overstretched in Iraq, unable to provide a robust response to Beijing’s challenge, with Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America embarking on a path of independent development and quarreling with erstwhile allies in Europe, US imperialism is inevitably facing a severe crisis.



--Gerald Horne is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and author of Red Seas: Ferdinand Smith and Black Radical Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York University Press).