Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 13:56:22 -0800
Subject: M-G: Gulf War: Opening Guns of World War III


[The following is a seletion from an article by Jack Barnes, National
Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States in the
journal "New International" (No. 7, 1991).  The articl, entitled
"Opening Guns of World War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq," raises
some points which I think bear consideration and discussion in light of
the current political situtation.  I reproduce these, in extenso, below,
with a couple of notes added.]
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   OPENING GUNS OF WORLD WAR III: WASHINGTON'S ASSAULT ON IRAQ

The Gulf war revealed that important chnages have occurred in what
appeared to be the continuing pattern of world politics coming out of
the initial consequences of World War II.
Given the glbal picture that emerged in the second half of the twentieth
century, imperialist war was expected to be largely limited for the
foreseeable future to the use of military power against the colonial
revolution, as well as threats against the workers' states.
This was the period of the so-called Cold War.  At least from some point
in the 1960s, the U.S. rulers operated on the assumption of a nuclear
stalemate with Moscow.  Meanwhile, the privileged castes in the Soviet,
Eastern European, and Chinese workers's states...combined police-state
repression with political disorientation to push working people at home
increasingly out of politics and keep them isolated from the
international class struggle.
On the basis of this post-World War II pattern, most revolutionists
concluded that the international class struggle was not heading toward
increased interimperialist military conflicts, but toward a standoff
between U.S. imperialism and the Soviet Union--and their allies.  A
third world war, it was assumed, would necessarily find the imperialist
powers aligned behind Washington in a conflict with the USSR.  The rival
capitalist ruling classes would avoid military conflicts among
themselves that would leave them vulnerable and lead to the loss of
additinal portions of the world to anticapitalist revolutions.

But none of these political assumptions hold any longer in the world
situation today--one whose advent was most explosively marked bythe 1987
crash of the world's stock markets.  The crash was further evidence that
the 1974-75 worldwide recession and the sharp and sudden slump of
1981-82 [1] were not simpy two more periodic downturns in the capitalist
business cycle; they also signaled the end of an ascending segment in
the broader curve of capitalist development and the ushering in of a
descending segment heading toward intensified class battles on a
national and international scale, including among the imperialist
powers.
The world today is characterized by capitalism's tendency toward
economic stagnation, instability, and vulnerability to breakdowns that
can precipitate a global depression and social crisis.  It is a world of
intensifying interimperialist competition and conflicts.  Capitalism
will not be able to open a new period of accelerated economic
development and improving social conditions to the peoples of the Third
World under bourgeois regimes. Conflicts between capitalist governments
in the Third World will also increase.  In the face of these volatile
conditions, the imperialists will be driven time and time again to use
their military might to defend their power and their profits.
Washington's assault against Iraq is the first of a number of such wars
that imperialism will continue fighting against peoples and governments
in the Third World.  They will ne more and more intertwined with
intensifying conflicts among the rival imperialist powers themselves.

So Washington's war in the Gulf is not, as the U.S. rulers pretend, the
harbinger of a new world order based on peaceful solutions to strife
among states.  Instead, in a world of mounting economic crisis and
breakdowns, social instability, political conflicts, and unfulfilled
demands for national liberation, it can much more accurately be
described as the opening guns of World War III.
That is inexorable historic logic of imperialism in its decline--the
class logic that will culminate in world war if the capitalists prevail
inthe decisive struggles that are ahead.

Today, as the political consequences of Washington's military "victory"
in the Gulf continue to unfold, we need to recognize that this is not
primarily a *post*war period, but a *pre*war period.  It is in this
context that we say that the slaughter in the Gulf is the first in a
number of conflicts and wars that will be initiated by the U.S. rulers
in the 1990s, and the opening of a new stage of accelerating imperialist
preparations--at home and abroad--for those wars.
But Washington's resort to military power will increasingly set
unanticipated and uncontrolled forces into motion that make its
"victories" destabilizing and more phyrric than lasting in their
results.[2]  The U.S. government has--and will--become more vulnerable,
not more invincible.

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1. To these we can now add the recent crash in Asia's stock markets and
the ripple-effect it having in the West.

2. For example, Germany and Japan's drives to find ways to be able to
act militarily abroad despite constitutional bans on such action, such
as through a "EuroForce."  Or the weakening of Israel's role in the
Middle East, a peace agreement between Iraq and Iran, the unmasking of
imperialist wars' economic roots ("Blood for oil"), willingness of
former staunch allies such as France to go their own way as in Bosnia,
Central Africa, etc.


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