The US Invasion of Iraq: The Military Side of Globalization?
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1020-28.htm
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by Mark Engler
Are the War and Globalization Really Connected?
To be radical, in the oldest sense of the word, is to go to the root. One strength of truly progressive analysis is that it places what appear to be isolated events in a larger context. It seeks to make connections between seemingly disparate political issues by revealing underlying ideological frameworks. And so it has been a central task, in the post 9-11 era, for activists to demonstrate how the war against terror and the drive for corporate globalization are one and the same--how peace and global justice movements share vital common ground. That these two issues are connected, in a fundamental way, is an article of faith on the political left, reinforced by the fact that many participants in globalization protests have also mobilized against the Bush administration's militarism. All such articles of faith deserve a bit of critical skepticism, so I would like to offer a constructive challenge. Many of the arguments wedding the war in Iraq with a strategy for neoliberal expansion are not readily convincing. They risk reading causality into tangential relationships. And, in their drive to connect, they overlook important disjunctures between the Bush administration's foreign policy and the policy preferred by many business elites. Activists have good reason to look again at the neoconservative hawks now in power and to consider whether they have outdone the corporate globalists of earlier years or whether they have betrayed them....
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Engler1022.htm
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by Mark Engler
Are the War and Globalization Really Connected?
To be radical, in the oldest sense of the word, is to go to the root. One strength of truly progressive analysis is that it places what appear to be isolated events in a larger context. It seeks to make connections between seemingly disparate political issues by revealing underlying ideological frameworks. And so it has been a central task, in the post 9-11 era, for activists to demonstrate how the war against terror and the drive for corporate globalization are one and the same--how peace and global justice movements share vital common ground. That these two issues are connected, in a fundamental way, is an article of faith on the political left, reinforced by the fact that many participants in globalization protests have also mobilized against the Bush administration's militarism. All such articles of faith deserve a bit of critical skepticism, so I would like to offer a constructive challenge. Many of the arguments wedding the war in Iraq with a strategy for neoliberal expansion are not readily convincing. They risk reading causality into tangential relationships. And, in their drive to connect, they overlook important disjunctures between the Bush administration's foreign policy and the policy preferred by many business elites. Activists have good reason to look again at the neoconservative hawks now in power and to consider whether they have outdone the corporate globalists of earlier years or whether they have betrayed them....
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Oct04/Engler1022.htm
Starmail - 21. Okt, 17:19
