The state of the world
A counter-report
THE Clinton generation, the Clinton effect; a mighty publicity machine is working overtime to create a myth around the "sax-symbol" who has just become president of the United States of America, the most
International Viewpoint # 242 February 1993 powerful state on earth.
led "international legality".
However, the selection of Somalia is not arbitrary. It also has a strategic significance in relation to the Gulf oilfields and their geo-political environment. Somalia is
Right now, the US establishment needs myths. Faced with persisting recession and the spectre of a worldwide depression, American decision makers are still drifting in the wind, as they have been for a long time now.
HIS is a textbook scenario.
T
The range of rational choices open to the capitalists are all equally uninviting. Each option seems likely to produce a malign counter-effect which will cancel the intended result (a budget deficit plus high interest rates or budget cuts plus deflation).
Furthermore, the US economy lies at the heart of a world capitalist system in which interdependence is greater than ever and whose key locomotives are all sputtering alarmingly at the very time when the world economy's need for financing is at an all time high.
At such a moment, the worshippers of the money god have little else to rely on than blind faith. Today blind faith is called
The hope is that his relative youth will be mysteriously infused into the veins of a capitalism which is showing growing signs of senility. However, even where economics are concerned, more than a belief in miracles is needed for miracles to actually occur. In reality, the new president has little room for manoeuvre, even assuming that he is planning to do anything very radical. As our correspondent David Finkel explains this is far from being the case; behind the appearances, Clinton has little new to offer in terms of economic and social policy.
The appointment of Washington insider Warren Christopher to head US foreign policy is a clear signal that there will be no surprises in store in that department. The foreign policy ambitions of the new tenants of the White House are modest - summed up in the term "continuity".
This is already being put into practice.
As one satirical journalist put it, William Clinton's inauguration ceremony cost a lot less than the fireworks of the real bombs falling on Iraq - George Bush's farewell gift to his successor.
This last minute escalation - which has caused tensions in the anti-Iraqi Holy Alliance between Washington, Moscow and Paris - expressed the concern of the outgoing president to ensure the preservation of what history will see as his administration's main "achievement" — the renewal of American military interventionism.
Aim of Somali intervention
This is also the unstated but main objective of the sending of US troops to Somalia. Bush has left his successor to deal with the complexities of the Yugoslavia issue (analyzed here by Catherine Samary). Here, intervention involves far greater risks than in Somalia or even Iraq — if only because Yugoslavia and orthodox Serbia" are close to the hearts of Russia's "conservatives" for whom pan-Slavism appears as a means of propping up their dilapidated army. Thus, Bush made do with Somalia to continue on the path first entered on in Panama.
Somalia was chosen as a target because here maintaining "continuity" will not present Clinton with too many problems. The real impact on Somalia of this suppo sedly humanitarian intervention, rubber stamped by the United Nations, is discussed in the article by two experts on that country, Rakiya Omar and Alex de Waal, that we have translated for this issue. The final bouquet of Cruise missiles for Baghdad is a further demonstration of the real extent of Washington's concern for so-calon the frontline of the advance of Islamic fundamentalism, as François Piguet emphasizes. The US has chosen this mighty movement to replace "Communism" in the role of the new world "enemy number one".
This is why Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin thought he could get away with the deportation of 417 Palestinians suspected of being fundamentalist activists. To his surprise the operation has backfired. Far from isolating the fundamentalists, he has given them an unhoped for internatio nal platform while his government has found itself internationally isolated.
What Rabin failed to understand, and what the dossier in this first number of our new formula IV clearly demonstrates, is that the rise of fundamentalism is first and foremost the result of the failure of other currents who have laid claim to lead natio nal struggles. In Palestine, the fundamentalists have made their spectacular comeback by returning to the national terrain which they had previously abandoned. By singling them out for repression, Rabin, the embodiment of the national oppression of the Palestinians, has only served to increase the fundamentalists' prestige and popularity among the Palestinians.
A time of troubles
If there is a common factor in the resurgence of fundamentalism in the Muslim world, as well as the proliferation of a multitude of other forms of fanaticism across the globe, it is the great political weakness of the workers' movement as the century draws to a close. As the "objective conditions" begin to rot and the "subjective factor" of historical progress is in crisis, menacing clouds gather over our planet.
We will do our utmost to assist our readers to better understand this world so that they can act more effectively to change it.*
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EDITORIAL
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