Sunday, August 14, 2005
(8:01 PM) | it:
a naive question
[cross-posted from infinite thought]Capitalism's "genius" is that it seeps into every pore and scrapes every desire under its grimy fingernails, subsequently flooding the world with infinite demands and cute commodities. As Marx and Engels put it: 'The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere' (Communist Manifesto).
There was a point, perhaps primarily in the 1990s, when war did in fact seem 'so last century' (as a Shoreditch graffito had it) - the communist (or even post-communist) project was to harness the communicative properties of contemporary capitalism and its agents for egalitarian and redistributive ends. Ok, so Clinton could bomb Sudanese pharmaceutical plants to distract from domestic indiscretions, but major military campaigns and nationalistic jingosim were secondary questions compared to the 'markets without borders' fluxes and flows of capitalism. We can track a Nike t-shirt from one end of the earth to the other, uncover the inherent injustice of the system, use our people power, and make the world a better place. Hell! we could even use capitalism's indifference against it for progressive ends: 'Capitalism doesn't care if you're a woman, black, gay!'. Let's go to work....However...
I have a profoundly naive question to ask in the wake of a grinding Iraq campaign that shows no signs of coming to a close: wouldn't it have been better to let capitalism work its magic in the Middle East, for the 'west' to support internal democratic reform, heck - assassinate Saddam if ousting him took too long. After all, Iraq was unusually secular in its composition, with a relatively economically advanced and educated population (despite sanctions). Of all the places in the world, wasn't Iraq precisely ripe for the quicksilver rush of capitalist investment? Would it have been so hard to diplomatically and economically burrow into the heart of a pre-invasion Iraq?
If all this is unbearably gauche (ha), look where the alternative has led: it's not clear that the US can maintain much of an economic presence in the region if every office gets bombed and contractors are slaughtered with extreme regularity; the increasing Islamification of ethnic groups and Iraq's identification with other Muslim countries in the region (surely the last thing the US wanted); increased insecurity "at home" and abroad as those that suspect a global campaign against Muslims take matters into their own hands...
What was it for? Did nobody suspect things might turn out like this? Or did they indeed know and then do it anyway?
