Stan Goff vs Near East expert

To: Retort


There's No There There: Debating a Neocon
Stan Goff

When I was first invited by Dr. Stephen Smith to speak at Winthrop
University in South Carolina, I was  preparing a trip to Haiti and I didn't
give much thought to how  I would handle the engagement. I'd just finished
being pole-axed  by a bout of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and it was
everything I could do to just pull the Haiti trip together. So I didn't  pay
much attention to the person who would appear with me   one Patrick Clawson
to represent "the other side"  in a forum/debate billed as "What Next in
Iraq? A Post-Election  Perspective."

While I was in Haiti, a full  blown intifada had broken out against the de
facto US puppet  government of Gerard Latortue, so I had extended my trip
for  a week. The problem was, I was scheduled to speak to a group  at
Binghamton NY on November 4th, and had only just arrived from  Haiti the
night of the 3rd (missing my opportunity to go to the  polls and refuse to
vote for either Bush or Kerry), and I had  a weekend planned with my family
and my 23-month-old grandson  from Friday night (the 5th) through Sunday
night (the 7th) and  the debate with Dr. Clawson was on the 8th. So I didn't
really  check out who this guy was until Sunday afternoon when I was
exhausted (a condition exacerbated by the acquisition of an amoeba  while I
was in Haiti).

It was with less than a day  to prepare, as well as drive from Raleigh to
Rock Hill, South  Carolina, that I web-searched "patrick clawson" and
discovered that he is a serious neocon heavyweight. Here is  his bio from
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where  he is deputy director:

"Patrick Clawson is deputy  director of the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy. He  is the author of more than thirty scholarly articles on the
Middle  East, which have appeared in, among other scholarly media, Foreign
Affairs, International Economy, Oxford Bulletin of Economics  and Statistics
and Middle East Journal. Dr. Clawson  has also published op-ed articles in
the New York Times, Wall  Street Journal, Washington Post, among other
newspapers.  Dr. Clawson is currently senior editor of Middle East
Quarterly.  He has testified before congressional committees more than a
dozen times and was co-convenor of the Presidential Study Group  organized
by The Washington Institute, which published its recommendations  to the new
Bush administration in the form a monograph, Navigating  Through Turbulence:
America and the Middle East in a New Century  (The Washington Institute,
2001).

 "From 1993 to 1997, Dr.  Clawson was a senior research professor at the
Institute for  National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University
in Washington, D.C., where he was the editor of the Institute's  flagship
annual publication, Strategic Assessment. From  1981 to 1992, he was a
research economist for four years each  at the International Monetary Fund,
World Bank, and Foreign Policy  Research Institute, where he was also editor
of Orbis,  a quarterly review of foreign affairs.
 "His most recent authored and edited works include:

How to Build a New Iraq  after Saddam, editor  (The Washington Institute,
2003)
The Last Arab-Israeli Battlefield? Implications of an Israeli Withdrawal
from Lebanon, co-editor (The Washington Institute, 2000)
Dollars and Diplomacy: The Impact of U.S. Economic Initiatives on
Arab-Israeli Negotiations, co-author (The Washington Institute,  1999)
Iran Under Khatami: A Political, Economic, and Military Assessment,
co-author (The Washington Institute, 1998)
Iraq Strategy Review: Options for U.S. Policy, editor  (The Washington
Institute, 1998)
U.S. Sanctions on Iran (Emirates Center for Strategic  Studies and Research,
1997)
Energy Security in the Twenty-First Century (NDU Press,  1995, edited)
Iran's Strategic Intentions and Capabilities (NDU Press,  1994, edited)
How Has Saddam Hussein Survived? Economic Sanctions 1990-93  (NDU Press,
1993)
Iran's Challenge to the West: How, When, and Why (The Washington Institute,
1993)

 "Dr. Clawson graduated  with a doctoral degree from the New School for
Social Research  and a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College. He speaks
Persian  (Farsi), French, Spanish, German, and Hebrew."

Well...

My silent reaction to viewing  this information was, "Holy Shit! I've got
maybe four hours  to prepare to debate in front of God-knows-how-many people
with  this six-language-speaking, ultra-curriculum-vitaed,
foreign-policy-PhD'ed  Near East scholar who had,  according to the ads for
the debate, just driven 2,000 miles around Iraq. The guy's got Richard Perle
and Paul Wolfowitz  on his advisory board, and turns out to personally know
the vice-prez.  How in the hell do I prepare for the subtly-crafted,
super-erudite,  arcanely-justified arguments that I am about to face Me,
with  a degree I got by correspondence in the Army, whose never been  to
Iraq, and who frequently reads his remarks in public presentations  to
counteract a tendency to wander completely off into things like what is the
best way to season collards? Holy shit!"

So I dredged up every bit of  research I had used to write about the region,
printed the stuff out, and started reading. During a break in the reading at
around  midnight the day of the debate, I battered my keyboard to produce
15 minutes of opening remarks. At midnight, I am about as sharp  as a
bowling ball, so I went with combative simplicity and the  stuff I've
repeated until it has become a mantra.

He might red bait me, so I'd  just claim my politics up front and take that
away from him.  Don't get tangled up in arcane minutiae; stick to arguing
what  the real reason are likely to be for the war  I couldn't  argue about
specific developments anyway, because I'd been out  of touch for a month.
Denounce Kerry early and often so he can't  turn it into a post-election
debate about Bush's "mandate."  Don't claim the war is about "stealing" oil
(a favored  bit of nonsense among liberals that can be easily demolished).
Talk about it as a crisis of capitalism, because they never  want to discuss
this. Hit him in his Zionism because it's basically  indefensible any time a
couple of actual facts are deployed and  if he gives me any shit, bring up
the USS Liberty (A low blow  I know, but I didn't have to go there, as it
turned out). Imply  that the re-election of Bush might actually be a better
situation  than the election of Kerry on account of the Bush
administration's  propensity to be the bull in the China-shop (Fallujah is
proving  this yet again), and bait him into defending the list of failures
so far in Iraq. Finally, mention Haiti and see if he bites.
 
My opening remarks were:

...In most of the debates we  have heard about the war in Iraq during the
election campaign,  debates that are now thankfully past, we heard the usual
point/counterpoint  about weapons of mass destruction, about who could more
competently  carry out the military occupation of Iraq, about who could
convince  what allies to help carry this burden, about what has or hasn't
been done about Osama bin Laden, or about who was more competent  to carry
out the War on Terrorism.

I will depart from these  formulae. I think these arguments are red
herrings, that is,  the fallacious method of introducing irrelevant topics
to divert attention away from the real one.

I don't believe the war  is the exclusive product of the delusional thinking
of the islamophobic  clique that surrounds our current presidential
mediocrity, as many liberals suggest. I don't believe the war ever had
anything  at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. I don't believe
the very people who call this a War on Terrorism believe it for  one minute,
and moreover I believe they know perfectly well that  the term "war on
terrorism" is oxymoronic inasmuch  as one cannot prosecute a war against a
tactic. I don't believe  it is a war to steal anyone's oil, though it has
everything to  do with oil and more. The fact that half the people in the
United  States believed at some point that a shattered nation like Iraq
constituted a threat to the United States does not compel me  for a moment
to refrain from pointing out that this is a proposition  that was and is
idiotic on its face and it is not at all unusual  for half of a national
population to believe something that is  patently idiotic. I am not a
conservative, and I am not a liberal,  and I am not a politician, and I am
not a pacifist, and I am  not religious, so I am not in the least compelled
or constrained  to prop up the polemical foundations of any of the agendas
that  might be associated with these kinds of affiliations.

I believe that the war in  Iraq is symptomatic of a much deeper global
crisis, and that  it foreshadows a period in which that crisis  a crisis of
global capitalism  will manifest itself not only in war  but in rapidly
widening social destabilization, the further militarization  of the world
system, and simultaneous economic and environmental  collapse.

Just in case there is a  temptation to resort to red-baiting to avoid
responding to the  content of my arguments, let me save you the trouble. I
am on  record as a severe critic of capitalism as an inherently destructive
system built on genocide and slavery, sustained by misogyny,  racism,
poverty, and war, and bound to undermine its own material  basis through
ecocide. I do not, however, believe as some leftists  seem to, that a more
sensible system will inevitably replace  it. If progressives continue to
whine and wring their hands instead of fighting back, we could very well end
up with a century  or so of anarchy and warlords in the context of a mass
human  die-off on a ruined and toxified planet.

Present-day imperialism  is a real system, and it is currently directed by
the American  state. The war in Iraq was probably the inevitable action of
this state in response to an impending and inexorable erosion  of the very
basis of American global power. The war in Iraq,  while deeply morally
repugnant, is not a failure of morality,  but the action of a system that
can't help it, because like the  scorpion, it is that system's nature.

Republicans and Democrats  can't tell you this. Pacifists and most true
religious believers  won't tell you this. Politicians, who will tell you
only what you want to hear, won't tell you this. But I believe that it  is
irresponsible to delay telling the patient who will die of  gangrene the
unpleasant fact that the leg must be amputated.

Global capitalism runs on  fossil energy, but the United States does not
have to take oil  from anyone. Every oil producing nation, including Iraq,
has  been perfectly willing to sell oil to the United States. It  is cheaper
to buy oil that it is to steal it with military action.  The issue of oil is
an issue not of production but of increasing  demand between competitors in
a period when we have nearly reached  the peak of production output.

 Global demand now is at  79.5 million barrels of oil a day. The
International Energy  Agency and the Department of Energy predict global
demand of  115 mbd by 2020, but that is based on demand rising at 1-1.25%
per year. In fact, demand is rising at twice that rate. Yet  industry
experts who are not spinning figures to reassure stockholders  tell us that
with massive improvements in infrastructure and  perfect political
stability, the highest output achievable is  around 85 mbd. This year, China
passed Japan as the world's  second largest importer of crude oil.

If anyone believes that  Dick Cheney's energy task force, on which Dr.
Clawson served,  did not review these figures as part of their long-term
strategic  energy assessment and how it related to the continued
possibilities for the accumulation of capital, I have a mountaintop retreat
to sell you in Miami.

So the question of oil is  not a question of taking it. It's the question of
the mathematics  of it when global capitalist competition continues to trend
toward  100 mbd by the end of the decade, when there's not adequate flow
pressure to meet that demand. Someone gets cut. And someone  decides who
gets cut. Establishing permanent military bases  in the very region where
over half the remaining easily accessible  reserves exist goes a long way
toward putting the power that  controls those bases in the driver's seat. As
a friend of mine  once said, "Oil is not a normal commodity. No other
commodity  has five US Navy battle groups patrolling the sea lanes to secure
it."

Iraq's pre-invasion production  was around 2.5 mbd, but even with heroic
effort to restore it,  production has not risen above 1.8 mbd today  a net
loss of 700,000 barrels a day  and the US military effort alone  is
calculated to have an energetic cost of 350,000 barrels a  day.

This is not business math.  This is geopolitical and military math. What is
being sought  is a new foundation, a military one, upon which to base US
global  supremacy as the current one is beginning to crumble. And reliance
on direct military violence to achieve one's national aims is  not a sign of
strength, but a sign of weakness  a sign that  there is a fundamental
failure of hegemony. Hegemony is not  direct control, but internalization of
control by those who are  dominated.

In 1968, Richard Nixon inherited  the hair-raising collapse of the US
Treasury's gold pool and  the un-winnable occupation of Vietnam that had
caused it. Within  the next four years, Nixon would abandon fixed currency
exchange  rates and the gold standard, then allow a 20% devaluation of  the
dollar that wiped out billions of dollars in US debts to  Western Europe and
Japan. Since oil payments were denominated  in dollars, the consequent jump
in the price of oil was a harsh  blow for Europe, Japan, Africa, and Latin
America.

The US, on the other hand,  owned the dollar printing press, and it was able
to recycle the  crisis, via petrodollars, through these regions. US puppet
governments  in Iran and Saudi Arabia helped underwrite this system with
their  ability to swing oil production.

This game of economic chicken  by Nixon set the stage for a new method to
assure US supremacy,  since the post World War II industrial boom had run
aground on  the rocks of the Marshall Plan nations' export capacity and on
Vietnam.

The currency speculation  that this abandonment of the gold standard and
fixed exchange  rates stimulated led inevitably to currency crises in weaker
nations, whereupon the Reagan administration in response to the  Mexican
currency crisis of 1982 gave the US its first crack at  loan-sharking
through the International Monetary Fund, in which  it held controlling
plurality and exclusive veto power. This  loan-sharking is called
"structural adjustment," and  it not only bleeds 70 different nations white
with an un-payable  external debt, paid in dollars by the way, these loans
are contingent  on allowing US investors to penetrate national economies to
take  over key economic sectors. This system is now referred to as
neoliberalism but I just call it debt-leverage imperialism. [I later found
out that Dr. Clawson  once worked for the IMF.]

It is augmented by a Treasury  Bill standard by which the US is able to
force its key capitalist  competitors  who have the lion's share of their
central  bank reserve currencies in dollar-denominated T-Bills, loans  to
the United States that they know and the US knows it can never  pay back 
to continue to accept the dollar at its over-printed,  overvalued current
levels out of fear that they will wipe out  the value of their own central
banks.

This continually growing  glut of fiat dollars created the conditions for
the precarious  Asian meltdown of 1998, for the dotcom bust of 2000, and for
the real estate bubble that will burst next. US private and  public debts
are at record levels, and if  or should I say  when  there is a
deflationary crisis around a falling dollar,  the US middle class will sink
to the bottom like the Titanic.

At the same time, the external  debts of underdeveloped countries imposed
upon them by IMF loan-sharking  are creating increasing anger and unrest
around the world that  is already translating into political upheavals.

Just as the post World War  II US-dominated global architecture began to
crumble toward the  end of the Vietnam invasion, the neoliberalism that
underwrote  the bacchanalia of the 90's is reaching its endgame. This is
the deeper reason that something has to be done, and what we  are witnessing
right now is the particular neocon version of  how that global architecture
will be rebuilt  by dint of  arms actually  and it's faltering badly in
Southwest Asia,  where its ignorant and racist Orientalism, its overwhelming
hubris,  and its devotion to and trust of the Apartheid state of Israel,
have led it into a deep and increasingly hostile labyrinth.

The region is now a hot  cauldron of competing and contradictory interests:
the aspirations  of Kurdistan opposed to the interests of Iran, Syria,
Turkey, and the thug Allawi; the continuing expansionary aims of the
settler state of Israel tied irrevocably to the aims of the US  who
desperately needs some street cred in a region where US prestige  is the
lowest in living history; the connections being forged  between Iran,
Russia, and China; the internal destabilization  of Pakistan by its alliance
with the United States; the refusal  of the Iraqi resistance to conform to
the US script; and the  potential destabilization of the Saudi regime  the
ultimate  goal of bin Laden all along  where living standards have  gone
into steep decline, aquifers are being depleted to squeeze  out more oil,
and where the masses become more restive each day.

None of us can predict exactly  how and when this pot will boil over, only
that it will.

So in closing, I have good  news and I have bad news.

The good news is that the  results of this election may not have been as
terrible as thought  by those who allowed their revulsion to George W. Bush
and his  coterie to cloud their view of the larger global conjuncture.  But
the reality is that this crew is proving much more likely  to run the
locomotive of imperialism off the tracks than their  Hamiltonian realist
counterparts.

The specific crisis in Iraq  is not the crisis of military defeat  which is
not, at any  rate, ultimately determined by tactical outcomes, but by
political outcomes.

The US crisis in Iraq is  that one goal of that occupation was to
demonstrate a fictional  US military invincibility  to shock and awe the
world. The crisis is not simply the very real tactical crisis that we  can
smell emanating from the podium of every Pollyanna briefing  from Rumsfeld's
War Department. The deeper crisis is that the  shock-and-awe bluff is being
successfully called, and the rest  of the world is now alive to the fact
that the great power bleeds.

So we see now, for example,  the continental drift of Latin America, from
the Chavista popular  democracy in Venezuela, to the current Haitian
intifada, to the  popular rebellions in Bolivia and Ecuador, to the recent
election  of a leftist government in Uruguay a development that is
accelerated  by the fact that the US state has gotten itself bogged down in
a swamp of military and political contradictions in Southwest  Asia. The
collapse of imperialism was going to be difficult  in any case, but I have
to say that it is a good thing in the larger scheme of things, and we should
welcome it. That's the  good news.

The bad news is that we  have not reconstituted a vital, militant left that
is clear on  its responsibility to seek political power in this country yet.
And I'm not talking about Howard Dean, folks. Anyone who considers  the
Democratic Party as a left party needs to pull their face  away from that
bottle of spot remover. We need to refound the  left in this country that
has a fighting spirit and that does  not limit its activities to the fetish
of elections  and  one that can forge a program that does not shy away from
the  difficult but necessary work of incorporating not just class,  but
gender, oppressed nationality, and environmental justice  into that program.

That's the bad news, but  that can be corrected, starting now, and starting
with the sisters  and brothers right here in this room. We cannot afford the
luxury  of crying about an election. We are in a struggle for the soul  of
our own society, a struggle against black-shirted reaction  on every front,
and there can be no rest, no retreat, no compromise,  and no surrender. We
cannot back down in the face of either  their patriot-baiting or their
Patriot Act. As Irish revolutionary  James Connolly said, "The great only
appear great because  we are on our knees. Stand up."

Now is our time to stand  up.

In fact, I was second to present  my opening remarks. While I was pretty
nervous before he started  to talk, by the time he'd taken his 15 minutes to
open, I grew  more and more relaxed. We were not being treated to either
subtlety  or erudition. His pitch was barely above the level of a carnival
barker  a rehash of what you might hear at any Centcom briefing.  The gist
of it was and this was telling well, we made some mistakes,  at least the
'intelligence community' did, but now we are there,  and it would be a
disservice to the Iraqi people for us to leave  the place and allow the
'terrorists' to take over.

That was it!?!?

This guy had boarded a plane  from DC to the Land of Strom to debate a
burned-out commie vet  emaciated with an amoeba, and the best he could come
up with  in front of around 300 people was "stay the course?"

That's when it occurred to  me, there's no there there. These people have no
arguments they  can state. His opening remarks were a rehash of why John F.
Kerry was less fit to run Iraq than George W. Bush. Once anyone  refuses to
engage in this speciousness, the neoconservatives  flounder like beached
mullets.

We don't need the heavy artillery  of superbly crafted argument to face them
down. The simplest  facts that were excluded from the presidential debates
out of  political expediency (dare I call it opportunism) can shoot these
guys down like sparrows lined up on a fence.

(During a mini-engagement in  a class on Women and Global Politics,
21-year-old students were  handing Dr. Clawson his head.)

As the debate went forward,  Dr. Clawson:

(1) Claimed that 'the market'  can create natural resources.
 (2) Said that Democrats wanted to attack Iraq, too.
 (3) Recommended Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations"  to the audience.
 (4) Said that Democrats wanted to attack Iraq, too.
 (5) Consistently refused to reply to any of the facts about Israeli
Apartheid and Palestinian Bantustans, or about Israeli violations  of UN
resolutions (though we heard repeatedly that Saddam was  in violation of UN
resolutions), or about Israeli weapons of  mass destruction.
 (6) Said that Democrats wanted to attack Iraq, too.
 (7) Referred four times to the 'Pottery Barn rule,' that 'you break it, you
buy it,' as an argument for staying in Iraq.
 (8) Said that Democrats wanted to attack Iraq, too.
 (9) Claimed that the hydrogen-economy was on the horizon and  that coal
might replace gasoline (in coal-burning airplanes, I assume).
 (10) Said that Democrats wanted to attack Iraq, too.
 (11) Said that the US has the responsibility to help 'weak and fragile
nations,' and that our disengagement with weak and fragile  Haiti was an
example of what happens when we don't.

Whoa! He didn't say that last  one! Ah, but he did, and it was like a
double-shot espresso.  With this target of opportunity squarely in a cleared
field  of fire, the audience was treated to a detailed account of how  the
US State Department orchestrated the February 29 coup d'etat  in Haiti, and
about how badly THAT occupation is going, too.
 He actually blushed after that one.

In every case, I agreed with  him that Democrats wanted to attack Iraq, too,
and that they  had attacked it as often as possible throughout the
eight-year administration of Bill Clinton  who by the way had killed  more
Iraqis than George W. Bush. I also pointed out that Democrats,  not
Republicans, were the most vocal in calling for a return  of military
conscription, and that Kerry not only said he wouldn't  withdraw from Iraq,
but that he would expand the troop numbers   making him the Lyndon Baines
Johnson of Southwest Asia. Not only that but any smart Democrat right now
would be whooping  for joy that they won't get the next four years hung
around their  necks, because the forces in motion  including maybe
stagflation  and the deepening defeat in Iraq  are bigger than either
party of the rich.

It is truly remarkable how  easily KO'ed these neocons are once you step
outside the tight  little ring of the Republicrats. They've got maybe three
combinations,  and they are slow as a cow. Everything inside has been ritual
combat, so they do very badly when someone actually intends to  hit them.

One might think the audience  was put off by all this; that the
conservatives were offended  when I called George W. Bush "Dick Cheney's
meat puppet," or worse, that those who had desperately voted Kerry would be
offended by my speaking the unspeakable about him being another  bourgeois
war-candidate.

Not so. People on both sides  were anxious to talk after the debate, asking
for references  and links to some of the information, seeming suddenly
stimulated  to ask new questions in the face of information to which many
had obviously never been exposed. They weren't angry. They  seemed almost
relieved, like they'd been locked in and suddenly  found a key.

Take whatever moral from this  story you like. For this burned-out commie
vet, it's keep battering  away because these people are weaker than they
seem, even if  they DO have state power. (I'm ready for my IRS audit, sir.)
And quit accepting their premises, or you'll never end up with  anything
except their conclusions.

 Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous  Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US
Invasion of Haiti"  (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and "Full  Spectrum Disorder"
(Soft Skull Press, 2003). He  is a member of the BRING  THEM HOME NOW!
coordinating committee. His periodic essays  on the military can be found at
http://www.freedomroad.org/home.html.  Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is
bthn0

Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan0