jim writes:

"The War That May End the Age of Superpower"

Henry C.K. Liu (05.04.2003)

The United States, like ancient Rome, is beginning to be
plagued by the limits of power. This fact is tactically
acknowledged by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard B Myers that the war
plan should not be criticized by the press because it has
been framed in a diplomatic and political context, not merely
pure military considerations in a vacuum. They say that it
is the best possible war plan politically, though it may be
far from full utilization of US military potential. America's
top soldier has criticized the uniformed officer corps for
expressing dissent that seriously undermines the war effort.
Such criticism is characterized by Myers as "bearing no
resemblance to the truth", counterproductive and harmful
to US troops in the field.Only time will tell who will have the last laugh. The
US Central Command (Centcom) has announced that the next
phase with an additional 120,000 reinforcements will not
begin until the end of April. That is three times the
duration of the war so far. In Vietnam, the refrain of all
is going as planned was heard every few weeks with self-comforting
announcements that another 50,000 more troops would
finish the job quickly.

There is no doubt the US will prevail over Iraq in the
long run. It is merely a question of at what cost in
lives, money and time. Thus far, a lot of pre-war estimates
have had to be readjusted and a lot of pre-war myths about
popular support for US "liberation" within Iraq have had to
be re-evaluated. Time is not on America's side, and the cost
is not merely financial. America's superpower status is at stake.

This war highlights once again that military power is but a
tool for achieving political objectives. The pretense of this
war was to disarm Iraq of weapons of massive destruction (WMD),
although recent emphasis has shifted to "liberating" the
Iraqi people from an alleged oppressive regime. At the end
of the war, the US still needs to produce indisputable evidence
of Iraqi WMD to justify a war that was not sanctioned by the
United Nations Security Council. Overwhelming force is
counterproductive when applied against popular resistance
because it inevitably increases the very resolve of popular
resistance it aims to awe into submission.

To dismiss widespread national resistance against foreign
invasion as the handiwork of coercive units of a repressive
regime insults the intelligence of neutral observers. All
military organizations operate on the doctrine of psychological
coercion. No-one will voluntarily place him/herself in harm's
way unless they are more apprehensive of what would appen
were they to do nothing. Only when a nation is already occupied
by a foreign power can the theme of liberation by another
foreign power be regarded with credibility. A foreign power
liberating a nation from its nationalist government is a very
hard sell. The US manipulates its reason for invading Iraq like
a magician pulling color scarves out a breast pocket. First it
was self defense against terrorism, then it was to disarm
Iraq of WMD, now it invades to liberate the Iraqi people
form their demonic leader. Soon it will be to bring prosperity
to the Iraqi people by taking control of their oil, or to
save them from their tragic fate of belonging to a
malignant civilization.

There is no point in winning the war to lose the peace.
Military power cannot be used without political constraint,
which limits its indiscriminate application. The objective
of war is not merely to kill, but to impose political control
by force. Therein lies the weakest part of the US war plan
to date. The plan lacks a focus of what political control
it aims to establish. The US has not informed the world of
its end game regarding Iraq, beyond the removal of Saddam
Hussein. The idea of a US occupational governor was and
is a laughable non-starter.

Guerrilla resistance will not end even after the Iraqi
government is toppled and its army destroyed. Drawing upon
British experiences in Malaysia and Rhodesia, the force
ratio of army forces to guerilla forces needed for merely
containing guerilla resistance, let alone defeating a
guerilla force, is about 20 to 1. US estimates of the size
of Iraq's guerilla force stands at 100,000 for the time being.
This means the US would need a force of 2 million to contain
the situation even if it already controls the country.

At the current rate of war expenditure at $2.5 billion a day,
the war budget of $75 billion will be exhausted after 30 days,
or until April 20, ten days before the projected arrival
of all reinforcements to the front. Nobody has asked how a
doubling of forces will win a guerilla war in Iraq. The US
is having difficulty supplying 120,000 troops now, how will
doubling the supply load over a 300 miles supply line help
against an enemy that refuses to engage face to face?
Domestic political opposition in the United Kingdom has
started to demand that Prime Minister Tony Blair should
pull British troops out now, based on the grounds that
the US war plan has changed.

The White House is trying to protect Bush by feeding the
media video clips of his old speeches warning against high
casualties and a long war: a grand total of three times
in the past six months. Bush aides are also trying to
deflect attention from Vice President Dick Cheney's
excessive optimism, in which he said confidently that
the war would be over in a matter of weeks, not months.

There seems to be a link between the war on Iraq initially
going badly for the US and a lull in terrorist threats in
the US, despite heightened fears of terrorism risks at the
start of the war. No mainstream or anti-war commentators
have pointed this out, despite it seeming to be empirical
evidence that terrorism is only a weapon of last resort.

The US has overwhelming strategic superiority in the sense
that given enough time, the sheer military and economic
power of the US will prevail. But the problem is that the
political objectives of the US do not lend themselves to
unrestrained use of military power. The need of presenting
the US invasion as a liberating force prevents the full
application of both "shock and awe" and US air superiority.
"Smart" bombs are both expensive and ineffective because
they need specific targets. Yet such targets are also
ones that the Iraqis expect the US to hit. These weapon
can easily be neutralized with a tactic of preemptive
dispersal. What is the point of firing 40 cruise missiles
costing a total of $1 billion to hit a few empty
buildings in one night.

If the Iraqis manage to hold out past the summer, the
war is going to be a new ball game. The other Arab
governments in the region can manage to stand by if the
US scores a quick victory, but Arab governments would have
to come to yield to popular demand to come the aid of Iraq
if the war drags on for months, even if the US makes steady
military progress, but fails to bring the war to a convincing
close. Syria and Iran are at risk of becoming part of the
war. The prospect of Russian intervention is not totally
out of the question. Bush already has had to warn Russian
President Vladimir Putin about alleged Russian military
aid to Iraq, which Moscow summarily dismissed.

For the US, it is not a matter of winning the war eventually,
it must win a quick and decisive victory, or its image of
superpower invincibility will suffer. An offensive war
must conclude within a short time, while a defensive war
only needs to continue. This is particularly true with a
superpower. Every day that passes without a decisive victory
for the invader is an incremental victory for the defender.
Stalingrad did not need to destroy the German Wehrmacht.
It only needed to hang on without surrendering. Despite
orchestrated denial, the US has failed to deliver on its
original war scenario of a quick and easy win with both
military and moral superiority. Claiming that it had always
anticipated a long war now only adds to the credibility
gap on new assurances of the reliability of any new war plan.

Globally, two traditional allies of the US, France and
Germany, will now want to be treated with more equal status
with more political independence. The European Union may
even begin to claim the moral high ground in world affairs
over the US, promoting more tolerance for diversity of
cultural values and historical conditions, over the
impositions of US values as a universal standard for the
whole world, for which no non-US citizens will be willing
to die to implement. Even US citizens may only be willing
to die to defend the US, but not to project by force US
values all over the world, particularly if this war should
show that even with much sacrifice in the form of American
soldiers' lives, success remains elusive.

The US must bring the war to a successful conclusion within
a matter of weeks, or it will be fighting a defensive war
on all fronts. There is only one thing worse than an empire,
and that is an empire that fails to conquer a small nation.

The "collateral damage" from this war is not limited to
Iraqi civilians. The US economy will also be considered
collateral damage - and by extension global economy as well.
The first Gulf War, notwithstanding its military success
due to clear political objectives, the uncertainty over
oil prices further weakened an US economy already in
recession. Despite the Federal Reserve's aggressive
cutting of short-term interest rates, the economic
slowdown persisted and cost the first President George
Bush his re-election in 1992.

Today, the Fed again faces the impact of war against Iraq
on the global economy, coupled with what chairman Alan
Greenspan calls a "soft patch" at home. Business
confidence may remain low for some reasons not related
to the war, even if the war should end quickly - an
unlikely prospect at best. Unemployment has continued to
climb, industrial production remains stagnant and the
economies of Europe and Japan are slumping even more
than that of the US. Much of the Third World, except
China, is gripped by economic and financial distress.

If the war drags on further, or if the economy does not
bounce back when the fighting ends, Fed officials have
suggested they are prepared to pump money into the
economy by reducing interest rates even more than they
have done already.

Despite its institutional role as an central bank that
is independent of political influence, the Fed is
constitutionally obliged to support the White House on
national security issues that affect the economy. Thus
Greenspan has not made public any anxiety he may have
about the endless costs of war or the risks of disruption
to world oil supplies, in aquiescence of Bush's war plans.
Greenspan was reported to have been at the White House
at least three times in the first 10 days of the war,
and he met with Bush on Monday to review the
US economic outlook.

The impact of war costs on the federal budget deficit
played a part in Congress' gutting of the proposed Bush
tax cut package. Some have even accused the White House
of denying the military adequate troops in Iraq for fear
of its adverse impact of the budget deficit, which would
jeopardize chances of congressional passage of the tax
package. Charges of exposing US soldiers to unnecessary
danger merely to protect tax cuts for the rich have been
heard. In the end, Congress cut the Bush tax cut proposal
by half anyway. Former White House chief economist
R Glenn Hubbard argued that the country could afford
both the war on Iraq and the Bush tax cut plan, which
had been largely put together by himself.

Hubbard reasoned that the tax cut would add one percent
to the US gross domestic product (GDP) for the next two
years and would help to pay for the war, the expenditure
for which is a fraction of the GDP. One percent of the
GDP would be $100 billion. The budget revenue boost
from $100 billion of GDP would be $30 billion a year.
The war is costing $2.5 billion a day at current
engagement levels. In the past 11 days, the war cost
is already over $30 billion. Perhaps the
Harvard-educated Hubbard should brush up on his arithmetic.

It is true that the Persian Gulf now accounts for a
smaller share of world oil production than in 1990,
and the major industrial economies have become more
efficient in oil consumption than a decade ago. Yet
the global economy now operates in a globalized market
so efficient that its vulnerability comes not from an
industrial slowdown caused by a disruption of oil supply,
but from oil price volatility in an uncertain market.
For Japan and Germany, even a slight rise in oil prices
would do great damage to their respective prospects of recovery.

Greenspan's reputation was built mostly on his response
to financial crises. When the stock market crashed on
October 19, 1987, two months after Greenspan became
chairman, the Fed lent tens of billions of dollars to
financial institutions and pushed down overnight lending
rates. The moves flooded financial markets with money,
which helped preserve liquidity and restore confidence
in the financial system, but it started the bubble
economy of the 1990s.

After the attacks on September 11, 2001, the Fed pumped
$100 billion into the monetary system in four days. On
September 12 alone, the Fed lent a handful of key banks
$46 billion unconditionally. The Federal Reserve Bank
of New York, which runs the Fed's trading operations,
flooded the banking system with additional billions
of dollars by buying up treasury securities at record
volumes throughout the week.

Greenspan's record has been blemished since the stock
market bubble burst in 2000. He was stubbornly late in
recognizing the excesses of the "new economy" in the
stock market bubble by hailing it as a spectacular rise
in productivity. Since 2001, the Fed has lowered
interest rates 12 times and reduced its benchmark federal
funds rate to the lowest level in 41 years. When talk of
war escalated last year, raising anxiety levels in
business and among investors, the Fed reduced the federal
funds rate in November by an additional one-half
percentage point, to 1.25 percent from 1.75.

Fear of deflation provides the argument is that if oil
prices move up, the Fed could easily reduce interest
rates further, without causing inflation. Yet the
ramifications of higher oil prices go beyond inflationary
effects. Higher oil prices distort the economy by siphoning
consumer spending away from non-oil sectors, which at
the moment are holding up much of the economy.

If the war drags on, depressing business confidence
further and tilting the country toward a new recession,
the Fed has little room for further cutting interest rates,
since it cannot reduce the federal funds rate for overnight
loans to below zero.

But Greenspan and other Fed officials have recently
insisted that even if the overnight Fed funds rate is
lowered to zero, they still have other tools to stimulate
the economy. The Fed can buy longer-term Treasury securities,
such as two-year or five-year or even ten-year securities.
By paying cash for such securities, the Fed would essentially
be pumping money into the economy and pushing long-term
interest rates even lower from the current 4.5 percent to
2.5 percent. But that would be virgin territory for the Fed,
and officials have acknowledged that the precise impact
would be unpredictable.

There are other issues as well. The Fed's easy-money policies
have already stimulated home buying and refinancing,
prompting consumers to convert the appreciated equity in
their homes to cash by so-called cash-out refinancing, to
buy big-ticket consumer goods. But this easy money has done
nothing to rejuvenate business spending, which had been held
down by overcapacity and poor earnings, as well as war jitters.
Furthermore, abrupt changes in interest rates, particularly
long-term rates, does violence to structured finance
(derivatives) which is already exceedingly precarious.
The Fed may fall into the trap of setting off an implosions
of derivative defaults, what Warren Buffet has called
"financial weapons of mass destruction".

The militant right in the US has committed suicide with
the war on Iraq. It has given itself a fatal dose of
poison in an attempt to cure the Saddam virus.

The link between war expenditure and the Federal budget
and the Bush tax cut is complex. The size of the invasion
force was arrived at more by the constraints of logistics
and the new "trasnsformational" doctrine, championed by
Rumsfeld, behind the war plan. The myth upon which the
war plan was based was that there would be instant domestic
rebellion against Hussein, at least in the Shi'ite
south - not concerted Iraqi guerilla resistance. The plan
for a two-front, north-south attack on Baghdad was
foiled by Turkey, the support from whom the US had been
overconfident and did not secure with sufficient bribing.
Washington was also unwilling to pay the political
price of accommodating Turkish interests in a post-war
Iraq at the expense of the Kurds. The Rumsfeld war
plan was a fast moving, light forward force to enter
Baghdad triumphantly with little resistance after a
massive "shock and awe" air attack and wholesale
surrender by the Republican Guards.

The plan was flawed from the start, a victim of
Washington's own propaganda of the war being one of
liberation for the Iraqi people. Instead, the invasion
acted as a unifying agent for Iraqi and pan-Arabic
nationalism and elevated Saddam to the role of hero
and possibly martyr for the Arab cause in a defensive
battle by a weak nation against the world's sole superpower.

The Democrats can do nothing, for it is their party that
cut the Bush tax cut by half, and with the exception
of a few brave voices, the Democrats went along with
the fantasy war plan.

Geographically, without the northern front, Iraq is a
big bottle with a narrow bottleneck in the south and
one lone seaport which could be easily mined. The long
supply line of over 300 miles from the port to Baghdad
is along open desert, vulnerable to easy guerilla
attacks at any point. The US war machine requires
massive supply of fuel, water, food and ammunition.
The fuel trucks are 60 feet long and cannot be missed
by even an untrained fighter with a long range rifle
with an explosive bullet. As the weather turns hot
this month, US troops will find nature a formidable
enemy. If these factors weren't enough to frustrate
US war plans, even Lieutenant General William Wallace
has openly admitted that US troops were not
effectively prepared for the enemy it is now fighting.

Now the war is threatening to spill over to Syria and
Iran and is creating political instability in all Arab
regimes in the region. NATO is weakened and the
traditional transatlantic alliance is frayed. This war
has succeeded in pushing Russia, France, Germany and
China closer, in contrast if not in opposition to US
interests worldwide, a significant development with
long term implications that are difficult to assess at
present. Globalization is dealt a final blow by this
war. The airlines are dead and without air travel,
globalization is merely a slogan. The freezing of
Iraq foreign assets is destroying the image of the
US as a financial safe haven. The revival of Arab
nationalism will change the dynamics in Middle East
politics. The myth of US power has been punctured.
The geopolitical costs of this war to the US are
enormous and the benefits are hard to see.

This war will end from its own inevitable evolution,
even without anti-war demonstrations. It will not be a
happy end. There is yet no discernible exit strategy
for the US. After this war, the world will have no
superpower, albeit the US will remain strong both
economically and militarily. But the US will be forced
to learn to be much more cautious, and more realistic,
about its ability to impose its will on other nations
through the application of force. The UK will be the
big loser geopolitically. The British military has
already served notice to Blair that Britain cannot
sustain a high level of combat for indefinite periods.

The invasion of Iraq represents a self-inflicted blow
to US imperialism. Anti-war demonstrations all over
the world and within the US will raise public consciousness
on what the war really means, and for what it really
stands. The aim is not to simply stop this war, but
the forces behind all imperialistic wars.

Saddam is not insane, his record of rule is not pretty,
but it is typical of all regimes afflicted with garrison
state mentality. That mentality has been created by a
century of Western, and most recently US, imperialism.

Americans, even liberals and radical leftists, cannot
possibly sympathize with the natural need for violence
in the political struggle of nationalists in their
struggle against imperialism. They harbor a genuine
sense of repugnance for political oppression unfamiliar
to their own historical conditions. Be that as it may,
only Iraqis are justified in trying to rid Iraq of any
leader not to their liking, not a foreign power, no matter
how repugnant the regime may seem to foreigners.
Moral imperialism is imperialism nonetheless.

Further, this invasion is transforming Saddam into a
heroic fighter in defense of Iraqi and Arab nationalism
and as a brave resistance fighter against the world's
sole superpower. The only people in the entire world buying
the liberation propaganda are Americans, and even many
Americans who supported the idea of regime change in
Iraq are rethinking its need and feasability. The
populations in most Arabic nations are increasingly
wishing they had Saddam as their leader.

In a world order of nation-states, it is natural
for all citizens to support their troops, but only
on their own soil. Support for all expeditionary or
invading forces is not patriotism. It is imperialism.
All nations are entitled to keep defensive forces, but
offensive forces of all countries must be condemned by
all, socialists and right-wing libertarians alike.
Some of the most rational anti-war statements and a
rguments in the US at this moment are coming from the
libertarian right, not the left.

The real enemy is neo-liberalism. The war on Iraq is
part of a push to make the world safe for neo-liberalism.
This war is a self-destructive cancer growing inside US
neo-imperialism. Just as the Civil War rescued Abraham
Lincoln from the fate of an immoral segregationist
politician and projected him in history as a liberator
of slaves, this war will rescue Saddam from the fate
of a petty dictator and project him in history to the
ranks of a true freedom fighter. That has been Bush's
gift to Saddam, paid in full by the blood of the best
and bravest of Iraqi, American and British citizens.