The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on September 8, 2008, Printed on July 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/97913/

AlterNet is resurfacing some of the best and most popular articles published in 2008 as the year comes to a close. First, Tom Engelhardt's essay on the spread of American military bases and global empire, published this September.

Here it is, as simply as I can put it: In the course of any year, there must be relatively few countries on this planet on which U.S. soldiers do not set foot, whether with guns blazing, humanitarian aid in hand, or just for a friendly visit. In startling numbers of countries, our soldiers not only arrive, but stay interminably, if not indefinitely. Sometimes they live on military bases built to the tune of billions of dollars that amount to sizeable American towns (with accompanying amenities), sometimes on stripped down forward operating bases that may not even have showers. When those troops don't stay, often American equipment does -- carefully stored for further use at tiny "cooperative security locations," known informally as "lily pads" (from which U.S. troops, like so many frogs, could assumedly leap quickly into a region in crisis).

At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military "sites" abroad.

The fact is: We garrison the planet north to south, east to west, and even on the seven seas, thanks to our various fleets and our massive aircraft carriers which, with 5,000-6,000 personnel aboard -- that is, the population of an American town -- are functionally floating bases.

And here's the other half of that simple truth: We don't care to know about it. We, the American people, aided and abetted by our politicians, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media, are knee-deep in base denial.

Now, that's the gist of it. If, like most Americans, that's more than you care to know, stop here.

Where the Sun Never Sets

Let's face it, we're on an imperial bender and it's been a long, long night. Even now, in the wee hours, the Pentagon continues its massive expansion of recent years; we spend militarily as if there were no tomorrow; we're still building bases as if the world were our oyster; and we're still in denial. Someone should phone the imperial equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But let's start in a sunnier time, less than two decades ago, when it seemed that there would be many tomorrows, all painted red, white, and blue. Remember the 1990s when the U.S. was hailed -- or perhaps more accurately, Washington hailed itself -- not just as the planet's "sole superpower" or even its unique "hyperpower," but as its "global policeman," the only cop on the block? As it happened, our leaders took that label seriously and our central police headquarters, that famed five-sided building in Washington D.C, promptly began dropping police stations -- aka military bases -- in or near the oil heartlands of the planet (Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait) after successful wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Persian Gulf.

As those bases multiplied, it seemed that we were embarking on a new, post-Soviet version of "containment." With the USSR gone, however, what we were containing grew a lot vaguer and, before 9/11, no one spoke its name. Nonetheless, it was, in essence, Muslims who happened to live on so many of the key oil lands of the planet.

Yes, for a while we also kept intact our old bases from our triumphant mega-war against Japan and Germany, and then the stalemated "police action" in South Korea (1950-1953) -- vast structures which added up to something like an all-military American version of the old British Raj. According to the Pentagon, we still have a total of 124 bases in Japan, up to 38 on the small island of Okinawa, and 87 in South Korea. (Of course, there were setbacks. The giant bases we built in South Vietnam were lost in 1975, and we were peaceably ejected from our major bases in the Philippines in 1992.)

But imagine the hubris involved in the idea of being "global policeman" or "sheriff" and marching into a Dodge City that was nothing less than Planet Earth itself. Naturally, with a whole passel of bad guys out there, a global "swamp" to be "drained," as key Bush administration officials loved to describe it post-9/11, we armed ourselves to kill, not stun. And the police stations Well, they were often something to behold -- and they still are.



Let's start with the basics: Almost 70 years after World War II, the sun is still incapable of setting on the American "empire of bases" -- in Chalmers Johnson's phrase -- which at this moment stretches from Australia to Italy, Japan to Qatar, Iraq to Colombia, Greenland to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, Rumania to Okinawa. And new bases of various kinds are going up all the time (always with rumors of more to come). For instance, an American missile system is slated to go into Poland and a radar system into Israel. That will mean Americans stationed in both countries and, undoubtedly, modest bases of one sort or another to go with them. (The Israeli one -- "the first American base on Israeli territory" -- reports Aluf Benn of Haaretz, will be in the Negev desert.)

There are 194 countries on the planet (more or less), and officially 39 of them have American "facilities," large and/or small. But those are only the bases the Pentagon officially acknowledges. Others simply aren't counted, either because, as in the case of Jordan, a country finds it politically preferable not to acknowledge such bases; because, as in the case of Pakistan, the American military shares bases that are officially Pakistani; or because bases in war zones, no matter how elaborate, somehow don't count. In other words, that 39 figure doesn't even include Iraq or Afghanistan. By 2005, according to the Washington Post, there were 106 American bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny outposts to mega-bases like Balad Air Base and the ill-named Camp Victory that house tens of thousands of troops, private contractors, Defense Department civilians, have bus routes, traffic lights, PXes, big name fast-food restaurants, and so on.

Some of these bases are, in effect, "American towns" on foreign soil. In Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base, previously used by the Soviets in their occupation of the country, is the largest and best known. There are, however, many more, large and small, including Kandahar Air Base, located in what was once the unofficial capital of the Taliban, which even has a full-scale hockey rink (evidently for its Canadian contingent of troops).

You would think that all of this would be genuine news, that the establishment of new bases would regularly generate significant news stories, that books by the score would pour out on America's version of imperial control. But here's the strange thing: We garrison the globe in ways that really are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- unprecedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, you basically wouldn't know it; or, thought about another way, you wouldn't have to know it.

In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so taken for granted that no one seems to blink when billions go into a new base in some exotic, embattled, war-torn land. There's no discussion, no debate at all. News about bases abroad, and Pentagon basing strategy, is, at best, inside-the-fold stuff, meant for policy wonks and news jockeys. There may be no subject more taken for granted in Washington, less seriously attended to, or more deserving of coverage.

Missing Bases

Americans have, of course, always prided themselves on exporting "democracy," not empire. So empire-talk hasn't generally been an American staple and, perhaps for that reason, all those bases prove an awkward subject to bring up or focus too closely on. When it came to empire-talk in general, there was a brief period after 9/11 when the neoconservatives, in full-throated triumph, began to compare us to Rome and Britain at their imperial height (though we were believed to be incomparably, uniquely more powerful). It was, in the phrase of the time, a "unipolar moment." Even liberal war hawks started talking about taking up "the burden" of empire or, in the phrase of Michael Ignatieff, now a Canadian politician but, in that period, still at Harvard and considered a significant American intellectual, "empire lite."

On the whole, however, those in Washington and in the media haven't considered it germane to remind Americans of just exactly how we have attempted to "police" and control the world these last years. I've had two modest encounters with base denial myself:

In the spring of 2004, a journalism student I was working with emailed me a clip, dated October 20, 2003 -- less than seven months after American troops entered Baghdad -- from a prestigious engineering magazine. It quoted Lt. Col. David Holt, the Army engineer "tasked with facilities development" in Iraq, speaking proudly of the several billion dollars ("the numbers are staggering") that had already been sunk into base construction in that country. Well, I was staggered anyway. American journalists, however, hardly noticed, even though significant sums were already pouring into a series of mega-bases that were clearly meant to be permanent fixtures on the Iraqi landscape. (The Bush administration carefully avoided using the word "permanent" in any context whatsoever, and these bases were first dubbed "enduring camps.")

Within two years, according to the Washington Post (in a piece that, typically, appeared on page A27 of the paper), the U.S. had those 106 bases in Iraq at a cost that, while unknown, must have been staggering indeed. Just stop for a moment and consider that number: 106. It boggles the mind, but not, it seems, American newspaper or TV journalism.

TomDispatch.com has covered this subject regularly ever since, in part because these massive "facts on the ground," these modern Ziggurats, were clearly evidence of the Bush administration's long-term plans and intentions in that country. Not surprisingly, this year, U.S. negotiators finally offered the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki its terms for a so-called status of forces agreement, evidently initially demanding the right to occupy into the distant future 58 of the bases it has built.

It has always been obvious -- to me, at least -- that any discussion of Iraq policy in this country, of timelines or "time horizons," drawdowns or withdrawals, made little sense if those giant facts on the ground weren't taken into account. And yet you have to search the U.S. press carefully to find any reporting on the subject, nor have bases played any real role in debates in Washington or the nation over Iraq policy.

I could go further: I can think of two intrepid American journalists, Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post and Guy Raz of NPR, who actually visited a single U.S. mega-base, Balad Air Base, which reputedly has a level of air traffic similar to Chicago's O'Hare International or London's Heathrow, and offered substantial reports on it. But, as far as I know, they, like the cheese of children's song, stand alone. I doubt that in the last five years Americans tuning in to their television news have ever been able to see a single report from Iraq that gave a view of what the bases we have built there look like or cost. Although reporters visit them often enough and, for instance, have regularly offered reports from Camp Victory in Baghdad on what's going on in the rest of Iraq, the cameras never pan away from the reporters to show us the gigantic base itself.

More than five years after ground was broken for the first major American base in Iraq, this is, it seems to me, a remarkable record of media denial. American bases in Afghanistan have generally experienced a similar fate.

My second encounter with base denial came in my other life. When not running TomDispatch.com, I'm a book editor; to be more specific, I'm Chalmers Johnson's editor. I worked on the prophetic Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which was published back in 2000 to a singular lack of attention -- until, of course, the attacks of 9/11, after which it became a bestseller, adding both "blowback" and the phrase "unintended consequences" to the American lexicon.

By the time The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, the second volume in his Blowback Trilogy, came out in 2004, reviewers, critics, and commentators were all paying attention. The heart of that book focused on how the U.S. garrisons the planet, laying out Pentagon basing policies and discussing specific bases in remarkable detail. This represented serious research and breakthrough work, and the book indeed received much attention here, including major, generally positive reviews. Startlingly, however, not a single mainstream review, no matter how positive, paid any attention, or even really acknowledged, his chapters on the bases, or bothered to discuss the U.S. as a global garrison state. Only three years later did a major reviewer pay the subject serious attention. When Jonathan Freedland reviewed Nemesis, the final book in the Trilogy, in the New York Review of Books, he noticed the obvious and, in a discussion of U.S. basing policy, wrote, for instance:

"Johnson is in deadly earnest when he draws a parallel with Rome. He swats aside the conventional objection that, in contrast with both Romans and Britons, Americans have never constructed colonies abroad. Oh, but they have, he says; it's just that Americans are blind to them. America is an 'empire of bases,' he writes, with a network of vast, hardened military encampments across the earth, each one a match for any Roman or Raj outpost."

Not surprisingly, Freedland is not an American journalist, but a British one who works for the Guardian.

In the U.S., military bases really only matter, and so make headlines, when the Pentagon attempts to close some of the vast numbers of them scattered across this country. Then, the fear of lost jobs and lost income in local communities leads to headlines and hubbub.

Of course, millions of Americans know about our bases abroad firsthand. In this sense, they may be the least well kept secrets on the planet. American troops, private contractors, and Defense Department civilian employees all have spent extended periods of time on at least one U.S. base abroad. And yet no one seems to notice the near news blackout on our global bases or consider it the least bit strange.

The Foreshortened American Century

In a nutshell, occupying the planet, base by base, normally simply isn't news. Americans may pay no attention and yet, of course, they do pay. It turns out to be a staggeringly expensive process for U.S. taxpayers. Writing of a major 2004 Pentagon global base overhaul (largely aimed at relocating many of them closer to the oil heartlands of the planet), Mike Mechanic of Mother Jones magazine online points out the following: "An expert panel convened by Congress to assess the overseas basing realignment put the cost at $20 billion, counting indirect expenses overlooked by the Pentagon, which had initially budgeted one-fifth that amount."

And that's only the most obvious way Americans pay. It's hard for us even to begin to grasp just how military (and punitive) is the face that the U.S. has presented to the world, especially during George W. Bush's two terms in office. (Increasingly, that same face is also presented to Americans. For instance, as Paul Krugman indicated recently, the civilian Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] has been so thoroughly wrecked these last years that significant planning for the response to Hurricane Gustav fell on the shoulders of the military's Bush-created U.S. Northern Command.)

In purely practical terms, though, Americans are unlikely to be able to shoulder forever the massive global role the Pentagon and successive administrations have laid out for us. Sooner or later, cutbacks will come and the sun will slowly begin to set on our base-world abroad.

In the Cold War era, there were, of course, two "superpowers," the lesser of which disappeared in 1991 after a lifespan of 74 years. Looking at what seemed to be a power vacuum across the Bering Straits, the leaders of the other power prematurely declared themselves triumphant in what had been an epic struggle for global hegemony. It now seems that, rather than victory, the second superpower was just heading for the exit far more slowly.

As of now, "the American Century," birthed by Time/Life publisher Henry Luce in 1941, has lasted but 67 years. Today, you have to be in full-scale denial not to know that the twenty-first century -- whether it proves to be the Century of Multipolarity, the Century of China, the Century of Energy, or the Century of Chaos -- will not be an American one. The unipolar moment is already so over and, sooner or later, those mega-bases and lily pads alike will wash up on the shores of history, evidence of a remarkable fantasy of a global Pax Americana.

[Note on Sources: It's rare indeed that the U.S. empire of bases gets anything like the attention it deserves, so, when it does, praise is in order. Mother Jones online launched a major project to map out and analyze U.S. bases worldwide. It includes a superb new piece on bases by Chalmers Johnson, "America's Unwelcome Advances" and a number of other top-notch pieces, including one on "How to Stay in Iraq for 1,000 Years" by TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan (the second part of whose Pentagon expansion series will be posted at this site soon). Check out the package of pieces at MJ by clicking here. Perhaps most significant, the magazine has produced an impressive online interactive map of U.S. bases worldwide. Check it out by clicking here. But when you zoom in on an individual country, do note that the first base figures you'll see are the Pentagon's and so possibly not complete. You need to read the MJ texts below each map to get a fuller picture. As will be obvious, if you click on the links in this post, I made good use of MJ's efforts, for which I offer many thanks.]

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/97913/

How Constant War Became the American Way of Life

By David Bromwich, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 22, 2009, Printed on July 23, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141503/

On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the "central question" for the defense of the United States was how the military should be "organized, equipped -- and funded -- in the years ahead, to win the wars we are in while being prepared for threats on or beyond the horizon." The phrase beyond the horizon ought to sound ominous. Was Gates telling his audience of civic-minded business leaders to spend more money on defense in order to counter threats whose very existence no one could answer for? Given the public acceptance of American militarism, he could speak in the knowledge that the awkward challenge would never be posed.

We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think war itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war -- and no end of wars.

For anyone born during World War II, or in the early years of the Cold War, the hope of international progress toward the reduction of armed conflict remains a palpable memory. After all, the menace of the Axis powers, whose state apparatus was fed by wars, had been stopped definitively by the concerted action of Soviet Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. The founding of the United Nations extended a larger hope for a general peace. Organizations like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the Union of Concerned Scientists reminded people in the West, as well as in the Communist bloc, of a truth that everyone knew already: the world had to advance beyond war. The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut called this brief interval "the Second Enlightenment" partly because of the unity of desire for a world at peace. And the name Second Enlightenment is far from absurd. The years after the worst of wars were marked by a sentiment of universal disgust with the very idea of war.

In the 1950s, the only possible war between the great powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, would have been a nuclear war; and the horror of assured destruction was so monstrous, the prospect of the aftermath so unforgivable, that the only alternative appeared to be a design for peace. John F. Kennedy saw this plainly when he pressed for ratification of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty -- the greatest achievement of his administration.

He signed it on October 7, 1963, six weeks before he was killed, and it marked the first great step away from war in a generation. Who could have predicted that the next step would take 23 years, until the imagination of Ronald Reagan took fire from the imagination of Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik? The delay after Reykjavik has now lasted almost another quarter-century; and though Barack Obama speaks the language of progress, it is not yet clear whether he has the courage of Kennedy or the imagination of Gorbachev and Reagan.

Forgetting Vietnam

In the twentieth century, as in the nineteenth, smaller wars have "locked in" a mentality for wars that last a decade or longer. The Korean War put Americans in the necessary state of fear to permit the conduct of the Cold War -- one of whose shibboleths, the identification of the island of Formosa as the real China, was developed by the pro-war lobby around the Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. Yet the Korean War took place in some measure under U.N. auspices, and neither it nor the Vietnam War, fierce and destructive as they were, altered the view that war as such was a relic of the barbarous past.

Vietnam was the by-product of a "containment" policy against the Soviet Union that spun out of control: a small counterinsurgency that grew to the scale of almost unlimited war. Even so, persistent talk of peace -- of a kind we do not hear these days -- formed a counterpoint to the last six years of Vietnam, and there was never a suggestion that another such war would naturally follow because we had enemies everywhere on the planet and the way you dealt with enemies was to invade and bomb.

America's failure of moral awareness when it came to Vietnam had little to do with an enchantment with war as such. In a sense the opposite was true. The failure lay, in large part, in a tendency to treat the war as a singular "nightmare," beyond the reach of history; something that happened to us, not something we did. A belief was shared by opponents and supporters of the war that nothing like this must ever be allowed to happen to us again.

So the lesson of Vietnam came to be: never start a war without knowing what you want to accomplish and when you intend to leave. Colin Powell gave his name to the new doctrine; and by converting the violence of any war into a cost-benefit equation, he helped to erase the consciousness of the evil we had done in Vietnam. Powell's symptomatic and oddly heartless warning to George W. Bush about invading Iraq -- "You break it, you own it" -- expresses the military pragmatism of this state of mind.

For more than a generation now, two illusions have dominated American thinking about Vietnam. On the right, there has been the idea that we "fought with one hand tied behind our back." (In fact the only weapons the U.S. did not use in Indochina were nuclear.) Within the liberal establishment, on the other hand, a lone-assassin theory is preferred: as with the Iraq War, where the blame is placed on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, so with Vietnam the culprit of choice has become Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

This convenient narrowing of the responsibility for Vietnam became, if anything, more pronounced after the death of McNamara on July 6th. Even an honest and unsparing obituary like Tim Weiner's in the New York Times peeled away from the central story relevant actors like Secretary of State Dean Rusk and General William Westmoreland. Meanwhile, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger seem to have dematerialized entirely -- as if they did nothing more than "inherit" the war. The truth is that Kissinger and Nixon extended the Vietnam War and compounded its crimes. One need only recall the transmission of a startling presidential command in a phone call by Kissinger to his deputy Alexander Haig. The U.S. would commence, said Kissinger, "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia [using] anything that flies on anything that moves."

No more than Iraq was Vietnam a war with a single architect or in the interest of a single party. The whole American political establishment -- and for as long as possible, the public culture as well -- rallied to the war and questioned the loyalty of its opponents and resisters. Public opinion was asked to admire, and did not fail to support, the Vietnam War through five years under President Lyndon Johnson; and Nixon, elected in 1968 on a promise to end it with honor, was not held to account when he carried it beyond his first term and added an atrocious auxiliary war in Cambodia.

Yet ever since Senator Joe McCarthy accused the Democrats of "twenty years of treason" -- the charge that, under presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the U.S. had lost a war against Communist agents at home we did not even realize we were fighting -- it has become a folk truth of American politics that the Republican Party is the party that knows about wars: how to bring them on and how to end them.

Practically, this means that Democrats must be at pains to show themselves more willing to fight than they may feel is either prudent or just. As the legacy of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton attests, and as the first half year of Obama has confirmed, Democratic presidents feel obliged either to start or to widen wars in order to prove themselves worthy of every kind of trust. Obama indicated his grasp of the logic of the Democratic candidate in time of war as early as the primary campaign of 2007, when he assured the military and political establishments that withdrawal from Iraq would be compensated for by a larger war in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

We are now close to codifying a pattern by which a new president is expected never to give up one war without taking on another.

From Humanitarian Intervention to Wars of Choice

Our confidence that our selection of wars will be warranted and our killings pardoned by the relevant beneficiaries comes chiefly from the popular idea of what happened in Kosovo. Yet the eleven weeks of NATO bombings from March through June 1999 -- an apparent exertion of humanity (in which not a single plane was shot down) in the cause of a beleaguered people -- was also a test of strategy and weapons.

Kosovo, in this sense, was a larger specimen of the sort of test war launched in 1983 by Ronald Reagan in Grenada (where an invasion ostensibly to protect resident Americans also served as aggressive cover for the president's retreat from Lebanon), and in 1989 by George H.W. Bush in Panama (where an attack on an unpopular dictator served as a trial run for the weapons and propaganda of the First Gulf War a year later). The NATO attack on the former Yugoslavia in defense of Kosovo was also a public war -- legal, happy, and just, as far as the mainstream media could see -- a war, indeed, organized in the open and waged with a glow of conscience. The goodness of the bombing was radiant on the face of Tony Blair. It was Kosovo more than any other engagement of the past 50 years that prepared an American military-political consensus in favor of serial wars against transnational enemies of whatever sort.

An antidote to the humanitarian legend of the Kosovo war has been offered in a recent article by David Gibbs, drawn from his book First Do No Harm. Gibbs shows that it was not the Serbs but the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that, in 1998, broke the terms of the peace agreement negotiated by Richard Holbrooke and thus made a war inevitable. Nor was it unreasonable for Serbia later to object to the American and European demand that NATO peacekeepers enjoy "unrestricted passage and unimpeded access" throughout Yugoslavia -- in effect, that it consent to be an occupied country.

Americans were told that the Serbs in that war were oppressors while Albanians were victims: a mythology that bears a strong resemblance to later American reports of the guilty Sunnis and innocent Shiites of Iraq. But the KLA, Gibbs recounts, "had a record of viciousness and racism that differed little from that of [Serbian leader Slobodan] Milosevic's forces." And far from preventing mass killings, the "surgical strikes" by NATO only increased them. The total number killed on both sides before the war was about 2,000. After the bombing and in revenge for it, about 10,000 people were killed by Serb security forces. Thus, the more closely one inquires the less tenable Kosovo seems as a precedent for future humanitarian interventions.

Clinton and Kosovo rather than Bush and Iraq opened the period we are now living in. Behind the legitimation of both wars, however, lies a broad ideological investment in the idea of "just wars" -- chiefly, in practice, wars fought by the commercial democracies in the name of democracy, to advance their own interests without an unseemly overbalance of conspicuous selfishness. Michael Ignatieff, a just-war theorist who supported both the Kosovo and Iraq wars, published an influential article on the invasion of Iraq, "The American Empire: The Burden," in New York Times Magazine on January 5, 2003, only weeks before the onset of "shock and awe." Ignatieff asked whether the American people were generous enough to fight the war our president intended to start against Iraq. For this was, he wrote,



"a defining moment in America's long debate with itself about whether its overseas role as an empire threatens or strengthens its existence as a republic. The American electorate, while still supporting the president, wonders whether his proclamation of a war without end against terrorists and tyrants may only increase its vulnerability while endangering its liberties and its economic health at home. A nation that rarely counts the cost of what it really values now must ask what the 'liberation' of Iraq is worth."

A Canadian living in the U.S., Ignatieff went on to endorse the war as a matter of American civic duty, with an indulgent irony for its opponents:



"Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state... Regime change also raises the difficult question for Americans of whether their own freedom entails a duty to defend the freedom of others beyond their borders... Yet it remains a fact -- as disagreeable to those left wingers who regard American imperialism as the root of all evil as it is to the right-wing isolationists, who believe that the world beyond our shores is none of our business -- that there are many peoples who owe their freedom to an exercise of American military power... There are the Bosnians, whose nation survived because American air power and diplomacy forced an end to a war the Europeans couldn't stop. There are the Kosovars, who would still be imprisoned in Serbia if not for Gen. Wesley Clark and the Air Force. The list of people whose freedom depends on American air and ground power also includes the Afghans and, most inconveniently of all, the Iraqis."

And why stop there? To Ignatieff, the example of Kosovo was central and persuasive. The people who could not see the point were "those left wingers" and "isolationists." By contrast, the strategists and soldiers willing to bear the "burden" of empire were not only the party of the far-seeing and the humane, they were also the realists, those who knew that nothing good can come without a cost -- and that nothing so marks a people for greatness as a succession of triumphs in a series of just wars.

The Wars Beyond the Horizon

Couple the casualty-free air war that NATO conducted over Yugoslavia with the Powell doctrine of multiple wars and safe exits, and you arrive somewhere close to the terrain of the Af-Pak war of the present moment. A war in one country may now cross the border into a second with hardly a pause for public discussion or a missed step in appropriations. When wars were regarded as, at best, a necessary evil, one asked about a given war whether it was strictly necessary. Now that wars are a way of life, one asks rather how strong a foothold a war plants in its region as we prepare for the war to follow.

A new-modeled usage has been brought into English to ease the change of view. In the language of think-tank papers and journalistic profiles over the past two years, one finds a strange conceit beginning to be presented as matter-of-fact: namely the plausibility of the U.S. mapping with forethought a string of wars. Robert Gates put the latest thinking into conventional form, once again, on 60 Minutes in May. Speaking of the Pentagon's need to focus on the war in Afghanistan, Gates said: "I wanted a department that frankly could walk and chew gum at the same time, that could wage war as we are doing now, at the same time we plan and prepare for tomorrow's wars."

The weird prospect that this usage -- "tomorrow's wars" -- renders routine is that we anticipate a good many wars in the near future. We are the ascendant democracy, the exceptional nation in the world of nations. To fight wars is our destiny and our duty. Thus the word "wars" -- increasingly in the plural -- is becoming the common way we identify not just the wars we are fighting now but all the wars we expect to fight.

A striking instance of journalistic adaptation to the new language appeared in Elisabeth Bumiller's recent New York Times profile of a key policymaker in the Obama administration, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. Unlike her best-known predecessor in that position, Douglas Feith -- a neoconservative evangelist for war who defined out of existence the rights of prisoners-of-war -- Flournoy is not an ideologue. The article celebrates that fact. But how much comfort should we take from the knowledge that a calm careerist today naturally inclines to a plural acceptance of "our wars"? Flournoy's job, writes Bumiller,



"boils down to this: assess the threats against the United States, propose the strategy to counter them, then put it into effect by allocating resources within the four branches of the armed services. A major question for the Q.D.R. [Quadrennial Defense Review], as it is called within the Pentagon, is how to balance preparations for future counterinsurgency wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, with plans for conventional conflicts against well-equipped potential adversaries, like North Korea, China or Iran.

"Another quandary, given that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted far longer than the American involvement in World War II, is how to prepare for conflicts that could tie up American forces for decades."

Notice the progression of the nouns in this passage: threats, wars, conflicts, decades. Our choice of wars for a century may be varied with as much cunning as our choice of cars once was. The article goes on to admire the coolness of Flournoy's manner in an idiom of aesthetic appreciation:



"Already Ms. Flournoy is a driving force behind a new military strategy that will be a central premise of the Q.D.R., the concept of 'hybrid' war, which envisions the conflicts of tomorrow as a complex mix of conventional battles, insurgencies and cyber threats. 'We're trying to recognize that warfare may come in a lot of different flavors in the future,' Ms. Flournoy said."

Between the reporter's description of a "complex mix" and the planner's talk of "a lot of different flavors," it is hard to know whether we are sitting in a bunker or at the kitchen table. But that is the point. We are coming to look on our wars as a trial of ingenuity and an exercise of taste.

Why the Constitution Says Little About Wars

A very different view of war was taken by America's founders. One of their steadiest hopes -- manifest in the scores of pamphlets they wrote against the British Empire and the checks against war powers built into the Constitution itself -- was that a democracy like the United States would lead irresistibly away from the conduct of wars. They supposed that wars were an affair of kings, waged in the interest of aggrandizement, and also an affair of the hereditary landed aristocracy in the interest of augmented privilege and unaccountable wealth. In no respect could wars ever serve the interest of the people. Machiavelli, an analyst of power whom the founders read with care, had noticed that "the people desire to be neither commanded nor oppressed," whereas "the powerful desire to command and oppress." Only an appetite for command and oppression could lead someone to adopt an ethic of continuous wars.

In the third of the Federalist Papers, written to persuade the former colonists to ratify the Constitution, John Jay argued that, in the absence of a constitutional union, the multiplication of states would have the same unhappy effect as a proliferation of hostile countries. One cause of the wars of Europe in the eighteenth century, as the founders saw it, had been the sheer number of states, each with its own separate selfish appetites; so, too, in America, the states, as they increased in number, would draw external jealousies and heighten the divisions among themselves. "The Union," wrote Jay, "tends most to preserve the people in a state of peace with other nations."

A democratic and constitutional union, he went on to say in Federalist 4, would act more wisely than absolute monarchs in the knowledge that "there are pretended as well as just causes of war." Among the pretended causes favored by the monarchs of Europe, Jay numbered:



"a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts; ambition or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families, or partisans. These and a variety of motives, which affect only the mind of the Sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice, or the voice and interests of his people."

When, thought Jay, the people are shorn of their slavish dependence, so that they no longer look to a sovereign outside themselves and count themselves as "his people," the motives for war will be proportionately weakened.

This was not a passing theme for the Federalist writers. Alexander Hamilton took it up again in Federalist 6, when he spoke of "the causes of hostility among nations," and ranked above all other causes "the love of power or the desire of preeminence and dominion": the desire, in short, to sustain a reputation as the first of powers and to control an empire. Pursuing, in Federalist 7, the same subject of insurance against "the wars that have desolated the earth," Hamilton proposed that the federal government could serve as an impartial umpire in the Western territory, which might otherwise become "an ample theatre for hostile pretensions."

Consider the prominence of these views. Four of the first seven Federalist Papers offer, as a prime reason for the founding of the United States, the belief that, by doing so, America will more easily avert the infection of the multiple wars that have desolated Europe. This was the implicit consensus of the founders. Not only Jay and Hamilton, but also George Washington in his Farewell Address, and James Madison and Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams as well as John Quincy Adams. It was so much part of the idealism that swept the country in the 1780s that Thomas Paine could allude to the sentiment in a passing sentence of The Rights of Man. Paine there asserted what Jay and Hamilton in the Federalist Papers took for granted: "Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace."

Have we now grown too used to the employment of our army, navy, and air force to be long at peace, or even to contemplate peace? To speak of a perpetual war against "threats" beyond the horizon, as the Bush Pentagon did, and now the Obama Pentagon does, is to evade the question whether any of the wars is, properly speaking, a war of self-defense.

At the bottom of that evasion lies the idea of the United States as a nation destined for serial wars. The very idea suggests that we now have a need for an enemy at all times that exceeds the citable evidence of danger at any given time. In The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson gave a convincing account of the economic rationale of the American national security state, its industrial and military base, and its manufacturing outworks.

It is not only the vast extent and power of our standing army that stares down every motion toward reform. Nor is the cause entirely traceable to our pursuit of refined weapons and lethal technology, or the military bases with which the U.S. has encircled the globe, or the financial interests, the Halliburtons and Raytheons, the DynCorps and Blackwaters that combine against peace with demands in excess of the British East India Company at the height of its influence. There is a deeper puzzle in the relationship of the military itself to the rest of American society. For the American military now encompasses an officer class with the character and privileges of a native aristocracy, and a rank-and-file for whom the best possibilities of socialism have been realized.

Barack Obama has compared the change he aims to accomplish in foreign policy to the turning of a very large ship at sea. The truth is that, in Obama's hands, "force projection" by the U.S. has turned already, but in more than one direction. He has set internal rhetorical limits on our provocations to war by declining to speak, as his predecessor did, of the spread of democracy by force or the feasibility of regime change as a remedy for grievances against hostile countries. And yet we may be certain that none of the wars the new undersecretary of defense for policy is preparing will be a war of pure self-defense -- the only kind of war the American founders would have countenanced. None of the current plans, to judge by Bumiller's article, is aimed at guarding the U.S. against a power that could overwhelm us at home. To find such a power, we would have to search far beyond the horizon.

The future wars of choice for the Defense Department appear to be wars of heavy bombing and light-to-medium occupation. The weapons will be drones in the sky and the soldiers will be, as far as possible, special forces operatives charged with executing "black ops" from village to village and tribe to tribe. It seems improbable that such wars -- which will require free passage over sovereign states for the Army, Marines, and Air Force, and the suppression of native resistance to occupation -- can long be pursued without de facto reliance on regime change. Only a puppet government can be thoroughly trusted to act against its own people in support of a foreign power.

Such are the wars designed and fought today in the name of American safety and security. They embody a policy altogether opposed to an idealism of liberty that persisted from the founding of the U.S. far into the twentieth century. It is easy to dismiss the contrast that Washington, Paine, and others drew between the morals of a republic and the appetites of an empire. Yet the point of that contrast was simple, literal, and in no way elusive. It captured a permanent truth about citizenship in a democracy. You cannot, it said, continue a free people while accepting the fruits of conquest and domination. The passive beneficiaries of masters are also slaves.

David Bromwich, the editor of a selection of Edmund Burke's speeches, On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, has written on the Constitution and America's wars for The New York Review of Books and The Huffington Post.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141503/

Imagine and then Act: A Parecon/Parsoc Perspective

July 14, 2009
By Michael Albert

Introduction

Imagine twenty tentative claims about vision and strategy for a participatory society.

Imagine each tentative claim is massaged and refined, altered or augmented, made more eloquent, compelling, and clear, or even replaced in full, until the remaining list is valid and important enough that 40 countries each send from 5 to 50 activists to a five day gathering of roughly 1,000 activists who further refine and then broadly agree on the massaged, refined, augmented or replaced claims.

Imagine that that conference in turn conceives and promotes a proposal for an International Organization for a Participatory Society (or, if you think it communicates the intent more effectively, an International Organization for Participatory Socialism), including an interim structure, program, and methods of recruitment and action based on starting with 40 national chapters and proceeding from there.

Imagine that a year later 3,000 - 5,000 delegates from 60 countries representing 75,000 - 125,000 members, or more, gather to finalize and celebrate the broadly shared vision, structure, process, broad strategy, and initial program of the now firmly established and rapidly growing International Organization.

It's a nice image. Can the Reimagining Society Project actualize the first steps? Can its members participate with diverse partners and proceed together?

I hope so, but I am not going to offer twenty claims. Instead, I particularly appreciate the work of Stephen Shalom and Julio Chavez regarding participatory politics, of Cynthia Peters and Lydia Sargent regarding participatory kinship, and of Justin Podur and Mandisi Majavu regarding participatory culture, among many others contributing to the Reimagining Society Project around domains such as ecology and international relations.

I only offer the above image of possible future gains in hopes that the whole project can generate the needed twenty, or however many, shared claims. For myself, I want to offer ten tentative claims - mostly about participatory economics.



Claim 1: Elevate Vision

Escaping the mainstream view that "there is no alternative" and transcending the left view that even if an alternative is possible, clearly describing it is not a priority, requires working hard to produce a convincing practical vision. Only substance can counter cynicism. Only by knowing aspects of the future can we embody its seeds in our present structures. Finally, only by knowing where we want to arrive can we take steps able to take us there.

People who reject developing and sharing vision of a better society do not rebut the above arguments but instead rightly argue that vision might inflexibly fuel sectarianism, might over extend our knowledge, might divert attention from important concerns, and - worst - might be monopolized by an elite using knowledge to accrue power.

Nonetheless, Claim 1 is that we should not jettison vision, nor leave vision to narrow academic groups or other elite formations. These ways of dealing would virtually ensure the above listed bad outcomes. We should instead develop, advocate, and use vision flexibly and widely. We should welcome constructive criticism and seek continual innovation.

Our antidote to stultifying, misleading, and elitist vision must be inspiring, confident popularly shared vision shared welcoming continual innovation, and rejecting jargon or posturing.

Claim 1 advocates vision that is widely shared by many advocates able to judge, assess, refine, and utilize it without elite guidance. Claim 1 rejects vision that is monopolized by a few, no matter how intelligent and plausible it may be, because narrowly held vision will centralize confidence and authority and obstruct participatory aspirations.



Claim 2: Elevate Ethics

To compellingly favor a new society we must describe the key institutional features that make it libratory. But before settling on institutional aims comes settling on values.

Institutions are worthy if they attain our values but are not worthy if they don't. Our values therefore provide a measuring stick. They guide us when we initially conceive, then carefully assess, and finally flexibly advocate new institutions. So our values come before institutions, as a moral and intellectual foundation.

Additionally, social life is endlessly diverse and complex. While we can sensibly and morally seek core institutions to constitute the foundation of new society - we cannot sensibly or morally seek a detailed map of all features of a new society. To try to specify details that transcend basic essentials would exceed what we can reasonably know. More, it would create a single cookie cutter image of the future though we should be acknowledging a kaleidoscopic variation of features among desirable future societies as well as within each.

In other words, most decisions about policies and structures in a better future, beyond the most basic essential features, are for future people to determine in future times in light of their evolving circumstances and preferences. It would overstep what we can now know, and also overstep our rights and responsibilities, to propose, much less to demand, too much for tomorrow. Getting too detailed about the future we desire would impose uniformity on it rather than welcoming diversity to it. It would determine future outcomes based on current insights and preferences, not on the likely far more mature and insightful insights and preferences of future citizens.

All that we need, therefore, is a reasonably clear picture of essential structures - but then the question arises, what makes an aspect of future society essential?

The features we need to conceive, test, and then advocate are those that will guarantee that future citizens are free to decide as they desire, not to live as we decide in advance.

And why do we need to advocate even those essential institutions now? Why can't they too be decided later?

Because, only if we attain institutions essential to freedom, will future citizens be free to determine their own destiny. And before that, only if we envision essential institutions to guide movements, will movements attain them, or even attract sufficient support to win change at all.

Even essential core institutions, however, which is to say only those needed to establish the minimum necessary conditions of future freedom, shouldn't be conceived and advocated inflexibly. It is not just that we may have to refine our understanding as we learn more, though that is certainly true. Rather, it is also that even when our images of future essential institutions are overwhelmingly excellent, there will nonetheless likely be situations and occurrences that violate our general prevalent priorities and expectations and call for exceptional options. In those cases we will, in a better future, sometimes have to refine, bend, alter, augment or even substitute for what we quite sensibly most often advocate and maintain, our favored core institutions.

We therefore need clear values to inform not just our initial advocacy of sought essential institutions, and not just our continuing refinement of our views of those institutions as we learn more about their practical implications, and not just to guide our constant renovations and innovations regarding the kaleidoscope of variations in the multitude of social venues and relations that surround any society's core institutions, but also to inform our actions when core institutions don't work as hoped so they need to be temporarily amended or abridged.

Okay, so we need values to provide a moral foundation, a basis for logical conception and assessment of core institutions, a guide for correction of those core institutions when they require adaptation, and a guide for massive design activity beyond those institutions. But what values can help us with all this? And how do we get a list of desirable values down to a workable length?

Each person has dozens, maybe even hundreds of values he or she favors. Some of these not all people agree on. Even more often, not all people prioritize lists similarly. Everything from broad aspirations for justice or self-management may be on people's lists, to more narrow aspirations for, say, patience or even sobriety. If movements are going to utilize some manageable number of desirable values to guide vision and then also practice, then what should that manageable list include?

Undoubtedly there is no single answer to picking among all values a manageable subset that adroitly encompasses the depth and breath of our central desires. Different short lists can each establish worthy choices. In fact different lists can even have the same social implications, rather than only one list being "correct," so movements and organizations could arrive at the same final destination starting with different prioritized values in the forefront.

Still, the need for coherence in thought and communication does militate for having a shared set of guiding values, even though many possible sets might fulfill this function - so we ought to try and agree. It is a bit like a group working together on anything. It could favor working in one pattern or in another or a third, all equally able to succeed. It needs to settle on one, however, so there is coherence. Luckily, the history of struggles for liberation, both in the past and more recently, does pose some obvious choices for entries on such a list.

Would any leftist deny that people should have control of their lives up to the point of diminishing the same level of influence for others? We should have influence over the decisions that affect us, proportionate to the effect on us,

Would any leftist contest that societies should deliver a fair allocation of the benefits and costs of social life, including just resolution of disputes and effective use of assets to meet needs and develop potentials?

Would any leftist deny the central importance of mutual aid and solidarity, of diversity in outcomes and methods including ideas, lifestyles, life choices, etc.?

Would any leftist deny the need for ecological balance and wisdom, even beyond the rather timid desire for sustainability?

And at least in our modern times, once it is stated and clarified, would any leftist deny the importance of horizontal and welcoming participatory relations in place of hierarchical and top down elitist relations in all spheres of social life so as to remove institutionally created and maintained groups or sectors or classes of people arrayed in hierarchies of social reward, influence, and status?

Of course people in different countries, with different histories and different backgrounds, may use different words than those that appear above, but as advocates of freedom and liberty they will likely have in mind very nearly the same themes.

Similarly, people might prepare a list of values based on the above sentiments in one order or another, and altered to be more precise as it bears on different sides of life, but Claim 2 says that the above list, no doubt modified, augmented, and refined as well as made more compelling in its language, can provide a good taking off point. It is unlikely that there are many critics of injustice and advocates of liberation who would reject any of the indicated values and, in addition, it does seem clear that together the values listed closely summarize our highest aspirations.


Claim 3: Be Multi-Focused

A new and better world will include new and better production, consumption and allocation; new and better law, adjudication, and collective action; new and better relations of kin, family, sexuality, and nurturing; new and better relations of community religion, race, and culture; new and better ecological relations and practices; and new and better international relations; as well as, of course, new relations in more specific parts of life such as innovations specific to science, art, sports, education, health, and so on.

Given that we need social vision to rebut cynicism, learn, inspire, and guide practice, and given the importance of all sides of life, it follows that we need vision for economics, kin relations and socializing, cultural and community relations, political legislative and juridical relations, ecology, and international relations, not just for one or another of these.

Claim 3 not only says all these realms are centrally important, but that there is nothing to be gained by trying to prioritize them. Our vision and strategy for each of these aspects of life will inevitably provide a context that successful vision and strategy regarding other aspects must abide and augment.

For example, our economic vision and strategy will provide a context that feminist vision and strategy, cultural vision and strategy, political vision and strategy, ecological vision and strategy, and global relations vision and strategy must abide and augment, but so too, the same will hold in reverse. Feminist, cultural, political, ecological, and global relations vision and strategy will each provide a context that economic vision and strategy, and the other focuses too, must abide and augment, for all permutations.

In every case, to have a desirable and stable new society new arrangements in one realm will have to fit compatibly with new arrangements in other realms. Movements serious about attaining a new world will therefore combine vision and strategy across spheres of social life. They will not prioritize one focus above the rest because that would be both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The same urgency and standards that we apply to developing vision, strategy, and then program for any one key area of life we must apply as well, to the other key areas. It is not, however, that each person must address all relations all the time - an impossibility - it is that our overall movement must by summing all its components, address all sides of life, even as it does indeed have components prioritizing attention to one focus or another, as well. In that way movements can generate compatible activism in all key areas and welcome and elevate key sectors of population to leadership regarding their priorities even as those sectors are moved primarily (though not exclusively) by one or another (gender, race, class, war and peace, ecology) concern.

Claim 3 is thus that a worthy movement for a new society will address all centrally important spheres of social life, each in their own right as well as together in their mutual interactions, with movement components highlighting and taking the lead in one area or another, but overall without elevating any one area above the rest, instead merging them in a movement of movements addressing all sides of life. Thus, the Reimagining Society Project as a whole, as but one example, but not each individual participant in it in every personal allocation of his or her energies, has to accomplish this degree of multi-focus attention.


Claim 4: Win Classlessness

To have classes means to have groups that by their position in the economy have different access to income and influence, benefiting at one another's expense.

Attaining classlessness means establishing an economy in which everyone by their economic position is equally able to participate, utilize capacities, and accrue income, and in which no one can accrue excessive income or influence at the expense of others.

We cannot eliminate the distinction between those who own means of production and those who do not own means of production, unless no one owns means of production, or, conversely, unless everyone owns means of production equally. That much is an obvious tenet of advocating a classless economy beyond capitalism.

But class division can also arise from a division of labor that affords some producers, who I call the coordinator class, far greater influence and income than other producers, who I call the working class. Taking for granted the obvious need to eliminate private ownership of the means of production; Claim 4 focuses on this latter point that even many socialists fail to accept.

A modern capitalist economy has owners who we call capitalists as well as people who have no economically structurally built-in power other than owning their own ability to do work. These people must sell that ability, and are called workers.

The controversial and important thing about Claim 4 is that it notices that capitalism also has a third class, the coordinator class, who, though they sell their ability to do work like workers, unlike workers have great power and status built into their structural position in the economic division of labor.

These coordinator class members, including lawyers, doctors, engineers, managers, accountants, elite professors, and so on, work at overwhelmingly empowering tasks. Their position in the economic division of labor gives them information, skills, confidence, energy, and access to means of influencing daily outcomes. They largely control their own tasks and largely define, design, control, or constrain the tasks of workers below. They utilize their empowering conditions to enhance their income and decision making influence at the expense of workers below and, as well, when they can manage it, at the expense of capitalists above.

Capitalism is by this pareconish account a three-class system. Seeking classlessness therefore means not just eliminating capitalist class rule, but also eliminating coordinator class rule.

To eliminate private ownership but retain the distinction between the coordinator class and the working class ensures, by the structure of the coordinator/worker relationship, that the coordinator class will rule the working class. This change can end capitalism, and has done so on occasion, but this change cannot attain classlessness, and it has not done so, not even on one occasion.

Claim 4 says by way of rejection that our economic aims must take us beyond 20th century "market socialism" and "centrally planned socialism" (which systems have in fact been what we might more accurately call "market coordinatorism" and "centrally planned coordinatorism").

Claim 4 says by way of assertion that our movements and projects must not only be anti-capitalist, they must also be pro-classlessness. They must prioritize both eliminating the monopoly of capitalists on productive property and also the monopoly of coordinators on empowering work.



Claim 5: New Economic Values

Beyond getting rid of economic classes, we also ought to seek positive economic values including, at least in the parecon perspective, equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, ecological balance, and economic efficiency in utilizing assets to meet needs and develop potentials.

To be against something bad - such as class division and class rule - is desirable. But rejecting bad features does not generate clear and inspiring positive goals. To transcend dissent and become constructive requires positive values that we can measure new institutions against. Claim 5 is about positive economic values.

To massage the broad values noted earlier into the economic realm means looking at the key things economics does, and asking what our aims are for those key functions.

First, economics affects how much we each get from what we all produce. So what do we favor for remuneration? What is our value regarding distribution of income?

We want equitable distribution and in a pareconish perspective what's equitable is that each person who is able to work receives back from society in proportion to what he or she expends at a cost to him or her self in production.

We should be remunerated, that is, for the duration, intensity, and, when it varies from person to person, the onerousness of conditions of our socially valued work - and not for our property, our bargaining power, or even for our personal output. Of course, if we cannot work, or we have special medical needs, then we get product simply to provide for our well being.

To favor a value such as equitable remuneration is a matter of preference, not proof, of course, but this particular conception of what constitutes equitable distribution is certainly consistent with the most morally enlightened left practice.

In enlightened moral logic, luck in the parent lottery (as in having property owning parents), luck in the genetic lottery (as in being born with particularly productive talents and capacities), or luck in having better tools or even more productive workmates or in happening to be producing items of greater value than others are producing, should not accrue to one, on top of the lucky condition, excess income. Morally, instead, what we should be remunerated for is just our duration, intensity, and the harshness of our situation at socially valued labor.

Moreover, remunerating people's duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor also provides appropriate incentives to elicit what each individual has the ability to withhold or to provide: his or her socially valuable time, intensity of action, and willingness to endure unavoidable hardship while contributing to the social product.

Thus our first economic value is equitable remuneration.

Second, economies affect not just income, but also relations among people. So what is our value for economic ties among people?

Anyone who isn't pathological would presumably prefer to have people concerned with and caring about one another in a cooperative social partnership - rather than seeking to fleece one another in an anti social competitive shoot out. No further case needs to be made because no leftist would deny this aspiration.

Our second economic value is therefore uncontroversially solidarity and mutual aid.

Third, economies also affect our range of available options. So what do we value vis a vis this function?

Humans are limited beings who have neither time nor means to each do everything. Humans are also social beings who can enjoy vicariously what others do that we cannot. And finally humans are thinking and pragmatic beings who can benefit from avoiding over-dependence on narrow options that leave us stranded if those narrow options are flawed. Homogeneity of options delimits possibilities and risks over dependence on flawed scenarios. Diversity of options enriches possibilities and protects against errors.

Our third value, also uncontroversial, is therefore diversity.

Fourth, economies also affect how much say we each have over what is produced, in what quantities, by what methods, with what apportionment of people to tasks, and what product allotted to people. So what do we value vis a vis decision making?

Economic decisions determine outcomes that affect us. For that matter, the act of decision making itself also affects us by influencing our mood, our sense of involvement and efficacy, and our sense of personal worth. What norms governing decision making will make most likely that decisions and the processes of arriving at those decisions will accord with our desires for a new society?

Save in exceptional cases, there is no moral or operational reason for any one person to have excessive say compared to how much they are affected, nor is there any moral or operational reason for any one person to have insufficient say compared to how much they are affected.

Following that observation, it turns out that one decision-making norm can apply to all people equally, exceptional cases aside, yet can also respect the variation of specific operational needs from case to case, even while incorporating expert knowledge, careful deliberations, etc. Parecon's fourth value is called self-management. It means we should each have a say in decisions in proportion as those decisions affect us.

Clearly means of developing, discussing, debating, tallying, and acting on preferences are context dependent. No single approach such as dictatorship, majority vote, two-thirds vote, consensus, as well as various methods of information dissemination and deliberation, will apply optimally to all situations. Sometimes one of these approaches will be desirable, sometimes another. These are "tactical" means to some end. Describing them as matters of "principle" confuses rather than reveals. What will however suit all cases, as a principle, is the overarching norm by which we choose among possible means of decision making in each instance, sometimes choosing majority rule, sometimes, consensus, and so on, which is to agree on the degree of influence that we in principle think our modes of decision making should convey to each participant.

Thus, our fourth value is self-management, people having a say in decisions in proportion as they are affected by them.

Fifth, economies also affect relations to our natural surroundings. What is our value for economics and ecology?

An economy should not compel us to destroy our natural habitat leaving ourselves a decrepit environment to endure. But nor should an economy compel us to so protect the natural habitat that we are left no means with which to fulfill ourselves in its embrace.

What an economy should instead do is reveal the full and true social costs and benefits of contending economic choices, including accounting for their impact on ecology, and convey to workers and consumers control over what choices to finally implement. In that way in the future we can cooperatively care for both our environment and ourselves, in relative proportions that we freely choose.

Our fifth value is therefore ecological balance or perhaps husbandry is the proper word, which of course goes way beyond "sustainability," and is understood in this broad manner of incorporating ecological attentiveness into economic decisions.

Sixth, economics finally of course also affects the social output we have available for people to enjoy. Indeed, this is the reason economies exist. So what is our value for generating social product?

If an economy honors the above preferred values but wastes our energy and resources by producing output that fails to meet needs and develop potentials, by producing harmful byproducts that offset the benefits of intended products, or by splurging what is valuable in inefficient methods thereby wasting assets needlessly, it unnecessarily diminishes our prospects. Even as an economy operates in accord with equity, solidarity, diversity, self-management, and ecological balance, it should also efficiently utilize available natural, social, and personal assets to meet needs and develop potentials without undo waste, avoidable byproduct problems, or misdirection of purpose.

So our sixth value is efficiency, understood as meaning meeting needs and developing potentials in accord with self managed choices without wasting assets or incurring avoidable costs along the way.

These six values together require classlessness ala Claim 4, since having class rule would violate these values, but the values also go beyond seeking classlessness to provide positive guidelines for institutional choices.

Claim 5 is that other things equal, in any economy more equity, solidarity, diversity, self management, ecological husbandry, and productive efficiency at meeting needs and developing potentials is good - and less of any or all of these qualities is bad. Economic institutions should by their operations as well as their outcomes advance these qualities, not violate much less obliterate them.


Claim 6: Reject Capitalism and 20th Century Socialism

Seeking classlessness and our other core values of participatory economy, as well as accommodating economic relations to gains in other spheres of social life and vice versa, compels us to reject private ownership of productive property, corporate divisions of labor, top down decision making, markets, and central planning.

Without belaboring the obvious, each of these institutional possibilities is ubiquitous in the world around us yet intrinsically violates one or more (and usually all) of the norms set forth above.

For example, noting just the most obvious violations, private ownership produces capitalist class rule over coordinators and workers. It obliterates equity by remunerating property and power. It obliterates self-management by vesting primary power in the hands of owners.

Corporate divisions of labor produce coordinator class rule over workers. This negates self-management by disempowering some and aggrandizing power to others, as does top-down decision making.

Markets obscure true social costs and benefits of all items that involve positive or negative effects transcending immediate buyers and sellers. Markets misallocate assets, particularly ecological, not to mention orienting output to maximizing surpluses rather than enhancing human well-being. Markets also impose anti social behavior. In market relations nice guys finish last. Finally, markets also produce class division between coordinators and workers even if owners aren't present. Elevating coordinator class rule, which the only subtle assertion about markets, occurs because firms must compete by cutting costs and because to cut costs, firms will hire an elite trained to that purpose and will free that elite from the implications of their cost cutting choices so they can remain callous to the immediate human implications of their choices.

Central planning also intrinsically violates self-management and imposes coordinator class rule to ensure obedience and in so doing typically also aggrandizes the ruling coordinator class at the expense of workers below, including centralizing control in ways that yield ecological imbalance.

For all these economic institutions, the propensity to produce class division in turn homogenizes options within classes thereby violating diversity, and creates a war of class against class thereby violating solidarity.


Claim 7: Win Self-Managing Workers and Consumers Councils, Equitable Remuneration, Balanced Job Complexes, and Participatory Planning

Rejecting capitalist and otherwise oppressive economic structures leaves us needing to advocate new economic institutions that will become the defining structures of participatory economics. These include self managing workers and consumers councils, remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued work, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning.

First, for workers and consumers to influence decisions in proportion as the decisions affect them requires venues through which they can express and tally their preferences. We call these venues self-managing councils, the first defining institutional component of participatory economics, and familiar throughout the history of anti capitalist movements and, as a result, not particularly controversial, I suspect, for reimagining society participants.

Second, equity requires equitable remuneration under workers and consumers own auspices and in accord with accurate valuations. Equitable remuneration has two primary purposes. On the one hand, ethically, workers are compensated for the personal contribution of their participation in time, intensity of effort, and harshness of conditions. On the other hand, economically, remunerated work must be socially useful, which ensures that income provides workers and workplaces incentives consistent with eliciting fulfilling output. Equitable remuneration is parecon's second defining institutional component, also probably not very controversial among reimagining society participants.

Third, self-managed decisions require confident preparation, relevant capacity, and ample participation. Self-managed decisions therefore require parecon's third defining institutional feature, balanced job complexes, in which each actor has a fair share of empowering work so that no sector of actors monopolizes empowering work while others are left disempowered and unable to even arrive at, much less manifest, a will of their own. Balanced job complexes eliminate the monopoly on empowering labor that differentiates coordinators from workers. Balanced job complexes ensure that all workers are enabled by their work related conditions to participate in self-management.

But what does this entail, in practice? It isn't complicated, though it may be controversial. If we consider all the tasks that compose the work of a society, currently in capitalism and also in 20th century socialist workplaces, about 20% of the work is more or less empowering - conveying to those who do it a degree of self control, control of others, confidence, social skills, knowledge of the work situation, etc. The other 80% is rote, repetitious, and otherwise disempowering, diminishing confidence, social skills, knowledge of the work situation, etc. If we allot the empowering work to one group and the disempowering work to another, as occurs in both capitalism and 20th century socialism, the first group will have a different economic situation than the second - that will guarantee the first group's relative dominance over the second, and if there is no capitalist class above, their ruling status.

If, however, we divide up labor with each participant getting a mix of empowering and disempowering tasks, so that each participant is comparably empowered and thus comparably prepared to participate in self-management as the rest, the division of labor basis for class division is removed.

The worry some may have that the approach will lose some productivity from folks who might have done only empowering tasks is true. However the approach gains more than offsetting productivity from folks freed from learning to endure boredom and take orders rather than developing their capacities, who then do empowered tasks, as well as fostering real self management and classlessness. This approach, that we call balanced job complexes, is thus the third key feature of participatory economics.

All the economic values of Claim 7 plus classlessness together imply that allocation should be accomplished in accord with the freely expressed will of self managing workers and consumers councils and that it should be undertaken not to competitively aggrandize a ruling class against its subordinates, but by cooperative and informed negotiation in which all people's wills are proportionately actualized and in which operations, mindsets, and structures further the logic of self managing councils, balanced job complexes, and equitable remuneration rather than violating each.

All this implies the fourth and last defining institutional feature of participatory economics, participatory planning. Workers and consumers councils cooperatively negotiate compatible inputs and outputs, without a center and periphery, or a top and bottom, and also without destructive competition. Full descriptions of this fourth feature, and of all others as well, are available many places online and in print - please see the parecon section of ZNet, for example, where there are full books, instructionals, interviews, videos, question and answer essays, and much more.

Insofar as workers and consumers self managing councils, equitable remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued work, balanced job complexes, and participatory planning, treat all actors economically identically, they counter any for material hierarchies among actors that may be generated outside the economy, and insofar as they properly value ecological effects and convey decision making power to those affected by outcomes, and insofar as writ large, internationally, they steadily eliminate inequality of wealth and power between nations, parecon also seems well oriented to accommodate and even augment aims sought in other spheres of social life, though this is a determination which can only be fully evaluated when vision and strategy for those other domains exists in sufficient detail to permit evaluation of mutual compatibility.


Claim 8: Revolutionary Organization and Strategy

Insofar as the above noted claims are found valid, requirements for our own projects, organizations, and movements ought to include patiently incorporating the seeds of the envisioned future in present practice, including, when possible, using self managed decision making, balanced job complexes, equitable remuneration, and cooperative negotiated planning, as well as central features of other features characterizing the new world we seek.

Creating institutions in the present that incorporate seeds of the future makes sense partly as an experiment to learn more about our aims, partly as a model to inspire hope and support, partly as a way to do the best possible job of fulfilling participants now, and partly to begin developing tomorrow's infrastructure today.

Of course, we need to recognize that we cannot have perfect future structures now, both because of surrounding pressures and because of our own emotional and behavioral baggage. But the fact that we need a sense of proportion about what future seeds we can experimentally harvest now is not the same as calling for entirely rejecting immediate harvesting.

Just as movements should foreshadow a future that is feminist, poly cultural, and politically free and just lest they are internally compromised in these aspects and incapable of inspiring diverse constituencies or even prone to alienate them, while also being incapable of overcoming cynicism, and weak in their comprehension even of current flaws and potentials - so should movements for the same reasons foreshadow a future that is classless, including incorporating council organization, balanced job complexes, equitable remuneration, and self management.

Put strategically, if we construct movements that embody coordinator class assumptions, mannerisms, and aspirations, our procedures will violate our aims and cripple our prospects just as horrifically as if we constructed movements that embody sexist, racist, or authoritarian assumptions, mannerisms, and aspirations.

Our movements should no more slavishly reproduce the features of a class divided economy, than they should slavishly reproduce racist, sexist, or authoritarian contemporary relations. They should instead patiently and carefully adopt the features of classlessness.


Claim 9: Programs for Today

Seeking participatory economic institutions requires that we not only create in the present experimental and exemplary pareconish institutions as described earlier, but that we also fight for changes in capitalist institutions. Demands made against existing institutions ought to enhance people's lives, advance the likelihood of further successful struggle, and advance the consciousness and organizational capacity to pursue those further aims. These aims together provide a yardstick for measuring success.

As valuable as experiments in creating pareconish (or gender, race, or politically inspired) organization in the present are, if we were to only prioritize creating forward oriented experiments in our present activism we would be consigning those who work in existing institutions to peripheral observer status as well as callously ignoring pressing needs of the moment. The path to a better future includes creating experiments embodying its features in the present, yes, but it also includes a long march through existing institutions, battling for changes there that improve people's lives today even as the immediate victories auger and prepare for more fundamental changes tomorrow.

Changes in existing institutions that do not replace those institutions down to their defining core features are by definition reforms, however the effort to win reforms need not accept that only reforms are possible. On the contrary, efforts to win reforms can be premised on seeking desired immediate economic changes always as part of a process to win a new economy. Efforts to win reforms can choose demands, language, organization, and methods, in accord not only with winning sought short term gains that improve people's lives in the present, but also with increasing the inclination and capacity of people to seek still more victories in the future, up to winning a new economic order.

Rather than presuming system maintenance, battles around income, work conditions, the division of labor, decision-making, allocation, and other facets of economic life should be undertaken to enlarge and empower future-oriented desires and capacities. The rhetoric employed should advance comprehension of ultimate values. The organization employed should embody future based norms and it should persist after new gain to fight for the next.

The same should hold for economics as for other spheres of life, and vice versa. Win change now not only to enjoy the benefits today, but also to win more change in the future. This is a non-reformist approach to winning reforms.



Claim 10: Today's Tasks

At some point in the future vast movements will have features such as those noted above, however refined, improved, and augmented by new lessons they may be, and will, based on their merits, become vehicles toward winning gains and also conceiving and then winning the infrastructure of a new world. This will not happen, however, until people self-consciously make it happen.

This last claim is, to me, a truism, but it is also arguably the most powerful claim of all. Change will not come via an unfolding inevitable tendency in current relations that sweeps us, uncomprehending, into a better future. Change will come, instead, only via self conscious actions by huge numbers of people bringing to bear their creativity and energy in a largely unified and coherent manner that will incorporate continuous and lively internal debate, of course, but will also develop overarching shared aims and steadfast purpose.

If we travel into the future in our minds, and if we imagine looking into the past, we will see a relatively brief period, at some point, during which people in one nation or another, or perhaps in many at once, formed projects, organizations, and movements, that thereafter persisted to become centrally important vehicles for fighting for, constructing, and finally merging into a new world.

Whether we look forward or we imagine looking back, we can reasonably ask what attributes such a lasting project, organization, or movement would incorporate at its outset and thereafter. We can also reasonably act on our answers, once we feel we have them more or less in hand, to try to create such vehicles of change. Might we get these efforts wrong? Yes, we might. But if we don't try, then we have no chance of getting it right. And if we do get it wrong, we can take lessons from our mistakes, and try again.

The implication is that building such vehicles not just of current opposition, but also for self-conscious long-term creation of a new world, must become our agenda. We should act without exaggerated images of instant success, of course, but we should also refuse to succumb to cynical or excessively patient delay.

When a capable and caring group agrees on claims more or less like those enunciated above, Claim 10 is that it becomes incumbent on them to collectively seek wider agreement from a still larger group, to add additional dimensions bearing on other spheres of social life, and to solidify their inspiring intellectual unity into a more practical organizational and programmatic unity, in accord with their shared views.

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21994

Is Iraq Doomed to Become Just Another Mideast Petro State?

By Michael T. Klare, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 15, 2009, Printed on July 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141322/

Has it all come to this? The wars and invasions, the death and destruction, the exile and torture, the resistance and collapse? In a world of shrinking energy reserves, is Iraq finally fated to become what it was going to be anyway, even before the chaos and catastrophe set in: a giant gas pump for an energy-starved planet? Will it all end not with a bang, but with a gusher? The latest oil news out of that country offers at least a hint of Iraq's fate.

For modern Iraq, oil has always been at the heart of everything. Its very existence as a unified state is largely the product of oil.

In 1920, under the aegis of the League of Nations, Britain cobbled together the Kingdom of Iraq from the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul in order to better exploit the holdings of the Turkish Petroleum Company, forerunner of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC). Later, Iraqi nationalists and the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein nationalized the IPC, provoking unrelenting British and American hostility. Hussein rewarded his Sunni allies in the Baath Party by giving them lucrative positions in the state company, part of a process that produced a dangerous rift with the country's Shiite majority. And these are but a few of the ways in which modern Iraqi history has been governed by oil.

Iraq is, of course, one of the world's great hydrocarbon preserves. According to oil giant BP, it harbors proven oil reserves of 115 billion barrels -- more than any country except Saudi Arabia (with 264 billion barrels) and Iran (with 138 billion). Many analysts, however, believe that Iraq has been inadequately explored, and that the utilization of modern search technologies will yield additional reserves in the range of 45 to 100 billion barrels. If all its reserves, known and suspected, were developed to their full potential, Iraq could add as much as six to eight million barrels per day to international output, postponing the inevitable arrival of peak oil and a contraction in global energy supplies.

Nailing Down the Energy Heartland of the Planet

Iraq's great hydrocarbon promise has been continually thwarted by war, foreign intervention, sanctions, internal disorder, corruption, and plain old ineptitude. Saddam Hussein did succeed for a time in elevating oil output, in the process raising national income and creating a well-educated middle class. However, his ill-conceived invasions of Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 led to devastating attacks on Iraqi oil facilities, as well as trade embargoes and crippling debt, erasing much of his country's previous economic gains. The trade sanctions imposed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the wake of the First Gulf War only further eroded the country's oil-production capacity.

When President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, his overarching goals all revolved around the geopolitics of oil. He and his top officials were intent on replacing Saddam Hussein's regime with one that would prove friendly to American oil interests. They also imagined that, greeted as liberators by a grateful population, they would preside over a radical upgrading of Iraq's petroleum capacity, thereby ensuring adequate supplies for American consumers at an affordable price. Finally, by building and manning a constellation of major military bases in a grateful Iraq, they saw themselves ensuring continued American dominance over the oil-soaked Persian Gulf region, and so the energy heartland of the planet.

All of this, of course, proved to be a mirage. The U.S. invasion and ensuing occupation policies provoked a bitter Sunni insurgency that quickly overshadowed all other American concerns, including oil. As a result, no matter how much money they poured into the task, the Bush administration and its Baghdad agents found themselves incapable of boosting petroleum output even to the levels of the worst days of Saddam Hussein's regime -- and so their plans to use oil revenues to pay for the war, the occupation, and the reconstruction of the country all vanished into thin air.

The data provided by BP on yearly production tallies cannot be starker when it comes to the impact on oil output of the insurgency, rampant corruption, the loss of the nation's oil professionals (many of whom fled into exile amid sectarian warfare), and other related factors. Prior to the American invasion, Iraq was pumping 2.6 million barrels of oil per day, already significantly below its pre-invasion peak of 3.5 million barrels per day. In the first year of the ill-starred U.S. occupation, production quickly plunged to a paltry 1.3 million barrels per day. Only in 2007 did it finally top the two million mark and, with improved security, 2.4 million in 2008. Assuming conditions continue to improve, Iraqi output could, for the first time, exceed pre-invasion levels, though barely, in 2009 or 2010 -- six years or more after Baghdad fell to American forces.

A Sea Change in Iraqi Oil Production?

Until recently, most analysts assumed that Iraq would continue, at best, to make modest progress in its efforts to increase daily output. There were too many obstacles, it was argued, to achieve dramatic breakthroughs. These included continued insurgent attacks on pipelines and production facilities; corruption in the Oil Ministry and major energy production enterprises; the failure of parliament to adopt a national hydrocarbons law; differences between the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) and the central government over who has the right to award what sort of oil contracts in Kurdish-controlled territories; and the reluctance of major foreign oil firms to venture into, or invest in a major way in such a dangerous and unstable place.

Recently, however, the Oil Ministry has made noticeable progress in overcoming at least some of these obstacles. Under the leadership of Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, a former nuclear scientist who was jailed and tortured by Saddam Hussein for refusing to assist in the development of nuclear weapons, corruption has been substantially reduced and various production bottlenecks eliminated. Shahristani has also won support from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for the participation of foreign firms in the development of Iraqi oil fields, even though this has alienated many in Iraq who oppose any such involvement. Once derided for ineptitude, the Oil Ministry is beginning to be viewed as a functioning, professional operation.

As a result, there are clear indications that Iraq's oil industry could be poised for a major turnaround. Among the most significant recent developments:

* Late last year, Iraq's state-owned North Oil Company signed a $3.5 billion, 20-year service contract with the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) to develop the Adhab oil field in Wasit province, southeast of Baghdad. Originally negotiated under the Saddam Hussein regime, the deal was put on hold after the 2003 invasion and only given final approval in November 2008. This is the first major contract the government in Baghdad has signed with a foreign oil firm since the Iraq Petroleum Company was nationalized in the 1970s. It also represents the first significant investment by a company from China in Iraq. Under the agreement, CNPC and its partners will develop the Adhab field and deliver all resulting crude oil to state refineries; as the field's main operator, CNPC will be paid a fee by the Iraqi government for its engineering work and all delivered petroleum.

* In May, the Oil Ministry reached an accord with the Kurdistan Regional Government that, for the first time, will allow the Kurds to export oil from fields under their control. Previously, the Baghdad government had refused to recognize any contracts signed by the KRG with private oil firms to develop fields in their territory and had prevented the Kurds from exporting oil from these fields through pipelines controlled by the central government. Under the accord, the KRG will initially be allowed to export 100,000 barrels per day from the Tawke and Taq Taq fields, with higher rates expected in the future; 73% of the resulting revenues will go to the central government, 15% to the Kurds, and 12% to the foreign oil companies that signed production contracts directly with the KRG, bypassing the central government in Baghdad. This agreement paves the way for a significant increase in output from Kurdish-controlled areas, which are thought to hold substantial reserves of untapped petroleum.

* In June, the Oil Ministry conducted its first auction of rights to operate existing fields in the country's major producing areas. This represented a major -- even staggering -- shift in policy, opening the door for the first time in three decades to the participation of major international oil companies in the operation -- if not the ownership -- of the country's nationalized oil fields. Although opposed by many key groups in Iraq, ranging from the oil workers' union to significant factions in parliament, the move was taken to secure outside expertise in modernizing and upgrading the country's crumbling oil infrastructure, thereby boosting output in a country that still relies on oil for more than 75% of its gross domestic product and about 95% of its revenues. In fact, many foreign companies chose not to bid in the auction's opening round, finding the returns being offered insufficiently attractive. Nevertheless, one Western firm, BP, won the right (in partnership with CNPC) to operate the giant Rumaila field, Iraq's largest. The Oil Ministry has since indicated that it will conduct additional auctions, including one for the right to explore for oil, on terms as yet unrevealed, in the country's undeveloped south and west -- possibly laying the groundwork for significantly more intrusive participation by foreign firms.

Taken together, these steps -- aimed at securing the necessary external financing and expertise to achieve a significant boost in production -- represent a genuine sea change in the way the Oil Ministry has been overseeing the country's hydrocarbons industry. If all goes as planned, it intends to increase output by 1.5 million barrels per day, and another four to five million barrels by 2017. These efforts, if successful (and given recent history, that remains a big "if"), would place Iraq among the world's top four or five oil producers, along with Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States.

A New Petro-State Servicing the Global Economy?

No one should underestimate the potential obstacles in the way of this objective. Any number of factors -- a rise in opposition to giving away any part of the national "patrimony" to foreigners, a significant increase in insurgent violence, heightened factional fighting in Baghdad, a sharpening of tension between Baghdad and the Kurds, an increase in corruption -- could prevent the realization of these ambitious goals. Moreover, pending the passage of a national oil and gas law (a goal pursued by U.S. officials for years), the major foreign oil companies will remain reluctant to sink too much money into Iraq, fearful that their assets will not be protected.

Nevertheless, it appears that, for the first time since the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, the stars in the energy firmament are aligning in ways that may favor Iraq's reemergence as a major oil producer. Whereas the major powers once competed among themselves for influence in Iraq or backed one or another of Iraq's local rivals in efforts to weaken or contain that country, all now seem inclined to invest in, and benefit from, the reconstruction of its energy infrastructure. The Bush administration, which looked with alarm at Saddam Hussein's growing ties to Russia and China, invaded the country in part to reassert American dominance in the Persian Gulf region and diminish the role played by Moscow and Beijing. Today, Washington appears to welcome the growing role of Chinese and Russian firms in the rehabilitation of Iraq's dilapidated energy infrastructure.

It's a reasonable assumption that behind this unprecedented shift lies an acknowledgement of the inescapable reality of peak oil. As things stand now, the world will soon reach a maximum level of sustainable daily oil output, followed by an inevitable contraction in available supplies. Many experts believe that the peak in conventional (liquid) oil output is likely to occur in the very near future, perhaps in the 2010-2015 timeframe, with global output topping out about 5 to 10 million barrels per day higher than today's 85 million barrels.

Hitting the peak moment in that timeframe, and at that level, would prove devastating to the world economy, as global energy demand is expected to climb far higher, thanks to rising consumption patterns in China, India, and other dynamos of the developing world. It's not hard, then, to do the math. An addition of perhaps six million supplemental barrels per day from Iraq would make a striking difference in the energy equation. In fact, it might prove the difference between squeaking by and a catastrophic worldwide shortage. Under such circumstances, it is understandable that -- no matter what their governments felt about the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq -- the major powers now share a common interest in facilitating that country's recovery as a major oil exporter.

For devastated Iraq, of course, these last years were a disaster and real reconstruction of the country still remains a long way off. For the United States, gone are expectations of converting Iraq into a model Middle Eastern democracy, or of inserting a Western-trained, pro-U.S. regime in Baghdad. Nor is there any expectation that the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company will be completely privatized -- once the dream of Bush-era neocons. Nonetheless, the (re)emergence of a functioning Iraqi petro-state working closely with foreign energy firms to boost global oil supplies (with American troops, whether based in Iraq or neighboring countries, providing ultimate security) would be an outcome that could be sold to Congress and, presumably, a majority of the American public.

Within Iraq itself, conditions may favor such an outcome. Although various Iraqi factions have enormous differences, all recognize that their future prosperity rests on the successful development of the nation's hydrocarbon reserves. While Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds may each hope to benefit disproportionately from this great treasure, they all realize that some degree of cooperation -- for example, in the construction and maintenance of export facilities -- is essential to their ambitions, however disparate. While the bargaining over the terms of cooperation may seem endless, and violence may sometimes accompany these negotiations, it is likely that some sort of collaborative structure will, in the end, emerge. A gradual drawdown, if not total departure, of American forces will, in all likelihood, only accelerate this process.

So it has finally come to this dismal possible end point: after all the blood and tears, all the death and destruction, almost all interested parties seem to be returning to the only vision of the country, however depressing, that has demonstrated any viability. In the future, Iraq is likely to be an oil-fueled petro-state with no function other than to service global markets and enrich local elites as well as the technocrats that assist them. This may be not be an inspiring vision -- especially for Iraqis who have suffered so much -- but it might possibly be the only reality available that will circumvent the horrific bloodletting of the past 30 years.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency.
© 2009 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141322/