Campo Antiimperialista
Tuesday, 09 February 2010
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| Six Years After the Beginning |
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| Sunday, 24 February 2008 | |
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Political document adopted by the International Conference of the Anti-Imperialist Camp Vienna, February 2-3-4, 2008 Over six years have gone by since the beginning of the Unending War (or, if one prefers, the Permanent Unending War) declared by Bush after September 11, 2001, but which was already on the neocon agenda before that date. This is a good moment to make an overview of the situation, update our analysis and try to identify the possible developments of an aggressive strategy which marks, and will continue to mark, our epoch. We are dealing here with a strategy and a policy which do not just belong to the “Bush gang” – clearly going through a crisis now in terms of consensus – but to the whole US establishment, which is divided as to the means, but not as to the goal: that of consolidating US dominion around the world, as it came into place after 1945, but especially after 1989. A look at these first six years of the new century should not, however, be limited to analysing US imperialism, though the latter still sets the agenda of the planet. Its initiative has created fault lines, realignments and especially resistances, which we shall try to investigate. The US imperial project, from which the White House took its cue, is certainly a planet-wide design, but it has a definite heart: the Near East. Its success or failure will depend on whether it can reshape this piece of the puzzle. The game is open, and will not be a short one. Just as we opposed the notion of a “quick war”, that is of an easy victory in Iraq – an idea which was all the fashion among pacifists in Spring 2003 – today we oppose the groundless idea of the end of the Unending War. An end roughly expected to coincide with the coming US presidential elections in November 2008. Supporters of this thesis would like to file away the aggressions of these years as accidents, due to a special power group, which eventually even turned out to be quite incompetent. This is not what we think. Fortunately, Bush met with defeat and with a quagmire, the result of forces which are generally ignored (in the best hypothesis) by those who uphold the thesis we mentioned, but US imperialism not only cannot accept defeat; it cannot even accept the possibility of slowly beginning to play a role almost on the same level as other partners in a new polycentric layout of world power. Should a new polycentrism arise – and it is reasonable to suppose that this will happen sooner or later – it could only be the outcome of a stormy phase, which we are probably seeing only the beginning of. Our problem, therefore, is not that of imagining quick changes of scenario, but rather the more concrete one of identifying the new lines of growth of a sort of “phase 2” of the Unending War. This of course is an operation which historians will be able to do much better in a few decades’ time… We are simply called upon today to undertake a political analysis, to identify the main trends, to formulate hypotheses and possible scenarios. This is by no means an easy operation, and we must of course take approximations and errors into account; however, it is absolutely indispensable for providing orientation for action in the near future. |
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