After the Invasion of Iraq

With the occupation of Iraq by the American and British armies, a completely new stage has been reached in international relations and in individual states' internal relationships; it is dominated by powerful destructive forces disintegrating civil functions within the states and by hypertrophic military functions. Both the sphere of politics and the state gravely risk being governed by an ever-growing warmongering tendency. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that the American government is capable of deploying an immense destructive power without any principle of moderation, either internal or external, and that this will be the general pattern of its strategy for a long time to come. Due to a series of historical circumstances, which should be considered attentively, a technical-military elite without rivals has concentrated in the United States and has convinced the U.S. government that it can act exclusively on the basis of pure, uncontested power.

In reality, no unconditional power does exist: everything can be transformed into its contrary, and all pretence to omnipotence has its equivalent in absolute impotence.¹ However, if this tendency continues to be uncontested, in the next few years U.S. strategy will be a succession of military campaigns to deploy its power without any specific aim except that very same deployment. At present—notwithstanding every explicitly or implicitly declared aim, such as exporting democracy or controlling sources of energy—the deployment of American military power is not a means to obtain specific ends, but rather an end in itself. In other words, for the U.S. administration, war is not a means to impose a peace but a means to produce more war.

The gravity of the situation requires efforts for new thinking, both in analytical skills and in modes and forms of political organization, capable of confronting the dominant tendency, of circumscribing it, and, in the end, of completely transforming it. This work needs to be seen as a long-term task, with a political vision solid in principles and capable of grasping the singularity of each situation.

The Extremism and Adventurism of the U.S. Government

The main objectives of the Iraq war have been not only the elimination of an unruly ex-vassal—let all vassals beware of how easy this is—but also the total destruction of the Iraqi state apparatus and the installation of a regime of foreign military domination, which, with regard to its brutality, competes with the worst colonial traditions. The destructive rage against the life of the common people (their markets and housing) and against symbols of the state's civil functions (its museums and hospitals) has been infinitely greater than the rage directed against the military threat that Iraq supposedly posed, at least according to the bellicose propaganda of the invaders.²

The war against Iraq achieves the deregulation of the interstate international relationships established after World War II, which had become more and more precarious since the end of the 1980s. Principles such as the self-determination of peoples or nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states had already been trampled down by the wars of the 1990s—especially the "humanitarian" war against Serbia—and are now being annihilated by the deployment of the pure power of the U.S. military apparatus. Democracy, prostituted at the service of this destructive aggression, now signifies the decomposition of contemporary statehood. The winner can even promise reprisals against those who have obstructed its plans and threaten those who it thinks might not agree with it in the future.

Today, interstate relations are dominated by the fear created by American military power and by the determination proclaimed by the U.S. government with impunity to use this power against whomsoever it decides is its enemy without any justification outside its own decision. In this situation, any connivance with the military occupation—whether to provide humanitarian aid or peacekeeping, or to secure business advantages and oil profits—endorses the...