International Socialist Review Issue 27, January–February 2003 The "war on terror": Washington's war on the world BY THE time you read this editorial, the U.S. may be at war against Iraq. If so, it won’t be because United Nations weapons inspectors found “smoking gun” evidence of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.” It won’t be because Iraq obstructed the inspectors. It won’t be because the U.S. found proof of collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. It will be because the U.S. wanted this war and made sure it happened. Even as United Nations weapons inspectors raided numerous Iraqi sites, the U.S. made no secret of its military preparations in the Gulf or its sponsorship of “Iraqi exiles” in their planning for a postñSaddam Iraq. Nor did it hold out much hope for the UN inspections it says it backs. Superhawk Bush adviser Richard Perle, who has been advocating war against Iraq since before 1991, told shocked British parliamentarians in November that even if the UN gave Iraq “a clean bill of health,” the U.S. would still go to war. Thus, the weapons inspections have been an elaborate charade orchestrated to give Bush the international cover he wants to wage his war on the world. It’s easier to sell an invasion and overthrow of the Iraqi government as an exercise in curbing weapons of mass destruction than it is to admit the real agenda. Or to admit that administration predictions of a quick victory and bringing democracy to Iraq are simply talking points to sell the war. The hypocrisy of all of this came into greater relief after the U.S. provoked a crisis with North Korea. The U.S. asserts that North Korea already has nuclear weapons in violation of international agreements. But it pursues diplomacy with North Korea while beating war drums against Iraq. If the war against Iraq isn’t really about disarming Iraq, then what is it about? One has to look no farther than the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy document, issued last September, for the answers. This document, the formal statement of what might be called a “Bush Doctrine” makes clear the desire of the U.S. to maintain its position of unquestioned world military superiority. It commits the U.S. to a policy of preventing the rise of any “peer competitor.” At the same time, it announces the right of the U.S. to wage “preemptive” war—invading at will countries that fall out of U.S. favor. After reading the document, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Deputy Editor Jay Bookman concluded that: The official story on Iraq has never made sense.... It [the threatened invasion of Iraq] is not about weapons of mass destruction, or terrorism, or Saddam or UN resolutions. This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. Crucial to this strategy of global hegemony is control over capitalism’s most valuable resource—oil. Global demand for oil will increase from 77 billion barrels a day to more than 120 barrels a day, with the bulk of increased demand coming from China and the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Petroleum-based energy not only drives the world economy, it also powers the military machines of the largest powers. When the Bush Doctrine speaks about preventing the emergence of a rival to the U.S., U.S. control over Middle East oil is a crucial part of the plan. If the U.S. military rules unchallenged in the Middle East and maintains the world’s leading oil producers as vassals to it, the U.S. increases its already enormous power over China, Japan and its European allies. So while it’s certainly true that Bush’s oil industry friends will benefit from increased U.S. dominance in the region, it’s a mistake to see the war in Iraq as some sort of Bush family escapade or “settling of scores” with Saddam Hussein. Much bigger issues are at stake. Because the ambitions of Bush’s empire builders are so big, they must go to war against Iraq. Engineering a “regime change” in Iraq is a stepping-stone to their imperial project. If they succeed in Iraq, will other “rogue nations” such as North Korea or Iran be far behind on the war planners’ drawing boards? Whatever happens in Iraq, the Bush administration appears committed to making endless war a permanent fixture of its global agenda. This will only make more miserable the lives of billions of people around the world, including in the U.S. The antiwar movement that must be built needs to understand what we are up against. It is no less than stopping a rampaging American imperialism. Antiwar activists in the U.S. bear the crucial responsibility of building a powerful protest movement inside the belly of this imperialist beast. The potential for doing so is enormous. A mid-December Los Angeles Times›poll showed two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bush administration has failed to make the case that war against Iraq is justified. The poll also showed that support for a ground war has fallen since the summer—to 58 percent, down from 64 percent in August. The antiwar movement demonstrated its potential on October 26, when well over 200,000 activists protested the war in Washington, San Francisco and cities across the U.S. The January 18 protests, again called by International ANSWER in Washington and San Francisco, will provide another opportunity for a massive outpouring of opposition. Antiwar activists across the U.S. should make every effort to make these protests as large and broad-based as possible, to show the world that a large segment of the population stands in firm opposition to the bloodbath Bush has planned for Iraq. REPUBLICAN CONGRESS No mandate for Bush’s war at home In January, conservatives will see their dreams come true. For the first time since the early days of the Bush administration, Republicans will hold all the reins of institutional power in Washington. This state of affairs resulted from the November elections, when Bush and the Republicans defied historical precedent to increase their margin in the House of Representatives and take the Senate back from the Democrats. So the stage is set for the Republican wish list—from more tax cuts for the rich to putting hard-right judges on the federal bench—to pass with little opposition. At least, that’s what conservatives hope for, and liberals fear. Bush won the elections after following the only script that’s worked for him since September 11. He shamelessly exploited the “war on terrorism” to preempt any criticism or opposition to his policies. First, he turned attention away from corporate scandals and a sinking economy with a constant drumbeat for war against Iraq. He then leveraged his war-inflated popularity to fire up his conservative base in order to push his desired candidates over the finish line. Bush has used the “national security” club to beat down Democratic opposition. He has also used it to advance his right-wing agenda on all fronts. His administration has used national security as an all-purpose cover for a host of unpopular policies, from opening the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling to closing down public access to government documents. Under similar guise, he has waged a war on organized labor, from using the Taft-Hartley Act to send West Coast dockworkers back to work to asserting his right to ban unionization for hundreds of thousands of federal workers. An incredibly craven and inept Democratic “opposition” helped Bush at every turn. Considering the economic conditions that Bush and the GOP faced in the election, American Prospect editor Harold Meyerson pointed out: “In a nation where economic insecurity is routine; where anxiety over jobs, retirement and health coverage is widespread; the failure of the Democrats to connect on any of these causes is astonishing.” After the Democrats fumbled the questions of the war and the economy, it should be no surprise that voter turnout in many Democratic strongholds plunged. In Georgia, Florida and Maryland, Black voters—who usually vote overwhelmingly Democratic—stayed home in droves. In this climate, the GOP got out its most committed supporters, while the Democrats alienated theirs. Meanwhile, union leaders ducked fights with Bush and the employers that could have pushed back Bush’s offensive. The West Coast dockworkers swallowed the Taft-Hartley injunction and then resolved to campaign for Democrats—ignoring the fact the Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) called for Bush to invoke Taft-Hartley. In the face of mass layoffs at Boeing, machinist union leaders spent more time predicting dire consequences if machinists struck than preparing for a fight. As a result, machinists failed to gain the necessary two-thirds support to reject a rotten contract—despite the fact that the majority of machinists opposed it. Although Bush will claim that the election delivered a “mandate” for his policies, he would be advised to listen to his cousin, conservative commentator John Ellis: “The 2002 result is a strong vote of confidence for the Bush administration. It is not a mandate. The great danger that now looms for the GOP is that it will mistake the vote of confidence for a mandate.” In fact, if 75,000 of the more than 75 million votes cast in the November election shifted from Republican to Democrat, the Democrats would have won both houses of Congress. The programs the GOP actually wants to push through are unlike any they campaigned on. They campaigned as opponents of privatization of Social Security and supporters of adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. If they press what they really stand for—privatization of both popular government programs—they will immediately ignite a backlash. Taxes are another case in point. Bush’s 2001 $1.35 trillion tax cut was heavily weighted toward the upper 1 percent, which received 43 percent of the windfall. But Bush sold it as a tax cut for middle America. Now his administration is openly talking about the need to shift the “tax burden” from the rich to the poor. According to the December 16 Washington Post report, the Bush administration is “refining arguments for why it may be necessary to shift more of the tax load onto lower-income workers.” The Treasury Department is currently drawing up plans to do just that. True to form, Bush in early January announced a $674 billion “stimulus package” whose centerpiece is the elimination of taxes paid on stock dividends. “[Y]ou have to admire GOP chutzpah . . . Republicans are gambling that ordinary Americans are too numb or too dumb—either one works—to go beyond the 20-second sound bites to see who gets the meringue and who gets the filet mignon” in this latest gift to the rich, wrote Kevin Phillips in the Los Angeles Times. “They’re gambling that John and Jane Q. Public won’t comprehend a thinly disguised bailout of upper-income stock investors as another round of old GOP trickle-down economics.” But Americans caught a glimpse of the “unmasked” GOP when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), toasting the 100-year-old cracker Senator Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), waxed nostalgic for segregation, the main plank of Thurmond’s racist 1948 presidential campaign. Lott outraged millions, forcing his resignation. Bush and the GOP will be under pressure from their ideological hard-core of religious conservatives to pack the courts with far-right judges who support outlawing abortion, among other reactionary policies. These payoffs to the Christian Right will no doubt stoke opposition among the broad population that doesn’t support their narrow agenda. More obstacles stand in the way of the GOP agenda than the superficial post-election analysis granted. It’s worth remembering what happened the last time the GOP seized Congress and proclaimed a “mandate”—following their huge 1994 congressional sweep. New House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) proclaimed a “Republican Revolution” and vowed to implement the “Contract with America,” a laundry list of conservative policy positions. But when the GOP actually started to push through those programs—such as slashing Medicare and closing down the federal government to force President Clinton to accept its program—the revolution self-destructed. No one can count on Bush and his minions to be as foolish as Gingrich was. Even more, no one can count on the Democrats to put up a major fight as the GOP grinds away at its agenda. We can only count on ourselves to organize and to protest around the issues that matter to the majority of people—from the war in Iraq to labor struggles. And if the union officials won’t defend jobs or benefits, rank-and-file workers must. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION We won’t go back IF YOU believe you have been a victim of racial discrimination, don’t bother appealing to the Center for Equal Opportunity—unless you happen to be white. Despite its progressive sounding name, the Center is single-mindedly dedicated to overturning affirmative action. Affirmative action was a victory of the civil rights movement, along with school desegregation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—which were aimed at combating institutional racism. The civil rights struggle also benefited women in the workforce, with the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, requiring equal pay for “substantially equal” work performed by men and women. The ideological battle against affirmative action as a symbol of victory for the civil rights movement has been raging ever since. Opponents of affirmative action have succeeded in gutting diversity programs of all kinds by virtue of role reversal—in which they claim the mantle of civil rights in a mythical battle against “reverse racism” toward whites. A byproduct of this ideological assault has been to subvert the overriding purpose of affirmative action programs—combating discrimination—by popularizing the characterization of equal opportunity as “preferential treatment” for minorities and women. For the last 25 years, affirmative action programs have been under attack. First the use of quotas as a measure of diversity was defeated, and, more recently, the goal of diversity itself. In 1978, the Supreme Court made its first landmark affirmative action decision, ruling in favor of Allan Bakke, a white man who claimed he was a victim of “reverse discrimination” after he was rejected by the University of California at Davis medical school. At the time, the medical school set aside 16 of its 100 annual openings for non-white students. But several important facts about the Bakke case never surfaced in the mass media. The first is that the medical school at Davis also set aside a certain number of places each year for the sons and daughters of wealthy (white) alumni. Second, 36 of the 84 white students admitted the year Bakke applied had lower test scores than Bakke. Bakke, meanwhile, had been turned down by 10 other medical schools. Most important, as late as 1948, 26 of the 27 medical schools in the U.S. openly practiced racial segregation. In the year that Bakke applied to medical school, Blacks made up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but just over 2 percent were doctors and under 3 percent were medical students. Racial quotas were needed because segregation was alive and well. Nevertheless, the Bakke case firmly established reverse racism as the basis for undermining affirmative action programs, setting the stage for the attacks to escalate in the 1990s. In 1993, the Supreme Court ruled against an attempted voter redistricting in North Carolina—where there had not been a Black member of Congress since Reconstruction—that would have modestly increased Blacks’ voting power. Ruling in favor of five white voters in Shaw v. Reno, the Court claimed the redistricting would result in “an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid.” Characterizing affirmative action policies as unfair to white students, opponents of affirmative action campaigned vigorously for Proposition 209 in 1996—a referendum that passed, completely eliminating affirmative action admissions policies from the University of California system. In December 2000, after an election in which Black Florida voters were disenfranchised and intimidated by the thousands, the Supreme Court halted Florida’s presidential ballot recount—handing Bush the election—absurdly citing the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in its decision. Attorney Ted Olsen of the Center for Individual Rights argued the case on Bush’s behalf. Olsen is the same attorney who in 1996 won a lawsuit against the University of Texas law school that ended affirmative action there. Now Olsen has set his sights even higher. On December 2, the Supreme Court agreed to review two cases brought by the Center for Individual Rights with the goal of outlawing affirmative action altogether. As Solicitor General, Olsen will represent the Bush administration if they decide to weigh in against affirmative action in these cases. The lawsuits, both against the University of Michigan, contend that three white applicants who were rejected by the University of Michigan law school and the undergraduate program were victims of “a race-based two-track admissions system” that denied them the constitutional right to “equal protection.” In other words, the suits charge the University of Michigan with racial discrimination against whites, in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—legislation explicitly intended to combat discrimination against Blacks. The Center for Individual Rights recruited the three unsuccessful white applicants to act as plaintiffs in the two cases. Both undergraduate applicants were B students in a pool of more than 25,000 applicants for 5,187 slots. Apparently, some Black and Latino high school students with similar or lesser academic records than the three whites were admitted to the university. Yet Blacks and Latinos remain grossly underrepresented in the student body at the University of Michigan. The law school has a student body that is only 6.7 percent Black and 4.4 percent Latino. Among undergraduates, just 8.4 percent are Black and only 4.7 percent are Latino. Rather than representing preferential treatment toward racial minorities, this seems clear evidence of continued discrimination. Far from a “level playing field,” as opponents of affirmative action claim, racial discrimination is pervasive throughout U.S. society—as evidenced by a recent report on racial disparities in school funding by the Education Trust. In densely-populated New York, for example, districts with the highest proportion of minority students receive over $2,000 less per student annually than those with the highest concentration of whites. Studies have also shown that outright racial discrimination continues to be a factor in grading policies in schools. According to America by the Numbers: A Field Guide to the U.S. Population, “African American students receive lower grades than their white counterparts even when completing work at the same level.” And because of racism, Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately represented in the working class, with the least opportunity for advancement. According to the Web site inequality.org, the typical Black household possesses only 12 percent of the wealth of the typical white household; excluding housing, the figure falls to just 3 percent. A Black man with a master’s degree typically earns $17,854 less per year than a white man with a master’s. Moreover, gender discrimination has continued to segregate the majority of women in low-paid, low-status jobs. When the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, working women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by men. Today, that figure has advanced to only 73 cents for every dollar earned by men—and not because women’s salaries are getting higher, rather, because men’s salaries are shrinking. Firms employing predominantly men workers generally pay wages that are 40 percent higher than firms employing mainly women. Affirmative action should be criticized not because it has “gone too far” but because it hasn’t gone nearly far enough to combat racial discrimination in U.S. society. Without it, discrimination will return to levels not seen in decades. In the first two years after the passage of Proposition 209 in California, acceptance rates for disadvantaged minority students to the University of California system dropped by more than 24 percent. In its legal brief defending its affirmative action admissions policy, the University of Michigan administration predicted that, without it, “the percentage of African American students enrolled would almost certainly fall below 3 percent.” The Bush administration plans to submit a brief opposing affirmative action to the upcoming Supreme Court review of the University of Michigan case. Those plans were temporarily put on hold after Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott waxed nostalgically for Strom Thurmond’s failed 1948 presidential bid on a segregationist platform at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party on December 5. Lott, a lifelong racist himself—with a congressional record to prove it—claimed to now be in favor of affirmative action (“absolutely across the board”) in a sudden conversion to the teachings of Martin Luther King, in a desperate attempt on Black Entertainment Television to salvage his political career. The Bush Administration abandoned Lott not because he was pro-segregation but because he exposed the full racist agenda of the right wing of the Republican Party. And as ISR went to press, the administration appeared ready to file the anti-affirmative action brief with the Supreme Court after all. Affirmative action programs should be defended, while fighting to reclaim the battle against racism from the bigots who have turned it on its head.