Blood is renewable, oil is not

George Monbiot, Guardian News Service, London

We are a biological weapon. On Saturday the anti-war movement released some 70,000 tons of organic material on to the streets of London, and similar quantities in locations all over the world. This weapon of mass disruption was intended as a major threat to the security of western governments.

Our marches were unprecedented, but so far unsuccessful. The immune systems of the U.S. and British governments have proved to be rather more robust than we had hoped. They leave the world with a series of unanswered questions.

Why, when the most urgent threat arising from illegal weapons of mass destruction is the nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan, is the U.S. government concentrating on Iraq?

Why, when the U.S. is cutting taxes just as its social provision begins to collapse, has it suddenly been so concerned for the Iraqi people? Why is it funding the oppression of the Algerians, the Uzbeks, the Palestinians and the Colombians? Why has the bombing of Iraq, rather than feeding the hungry, become the world's most urgent humanitarian concern? Why has it become so much more pressing than any other that it should command a budget four times the size of America's annual spending on overseas aid?

In his packed lectures in Oxford, David Harvey, one of the world's most distinguished geographers, suggests that the U.S. government's determination for war has less to do with weapons of mass destruction and nothing to do with helping the oppressed.

The underlying problem the U.S. confronts is the one which periodically afflicts all successful economies: The over- accumulation of capital. Just as it was in the early 1930s, the U.S. suffers from surpluses of commodities, manufactured products, manufacturing capacity and money.

It also faces a labor surplus, yet the two surpluses have not been profitably matched since 1973. It has now tried every available means of solving it and maintaining its global dominance. The only viable option is war.

In the 1930s, the U.S. government addressed the problems of excess capital and labor through the New Deal. Its vast investments in infrastructure, education and social spending mopped up surplus money, created new markets for manufacturing and brought hundreds of thousands back into work. In 1941, it used military spending to the same effect.

After the war, its massive spending in Europe and Japan permitted America to offload surplus cash, while building new markets. This strategy worked well until the early 1970s.

Then three inexorable processes began to mature. As the German and Japanese economies developed, the U.S. was no longer able to dominate production. These new economies stopped absorbing surplus capital and started to export it. Investments began to pay off. The 1973 crisis began with a worldwide collapse of property markets, which were regurgitating the excess money they could no longer digest.

The U.S. urgently required a new approach. The first solution was to switch from the domination of global production to the domination of global finance. The U.S. Treasury, working with the International Monetary Fund, began to engineer new opportunities in developing countries for America's commercial banks.

The IMF started to insist that countries receiving its help should liberalize their capital markets. Speculators on Wall Street could enter and raid their economies. The financial crises caused forced the devaluation of those countries' assets.

This had two beneficial impacts for the U.S. economy. Through the collapse of banks and manufacturers in Latin America and East Asia, surplus capital was destroyed. The bankrupted companies in those countries could then be bought by U.S. corporations at rock-bottom prices, creating new space into which American capital could expand.

The second solution amounted to robbery. Land was snatched from peasant farmers, public assets were taken from citizens through privatization, intellectual property was seized from everyone through the patenting of information, human genes, and animal and plant varieties.

These processes, alongside the depredations of the IMF and the commercial banks, brought the global justice movement into being. New territories were created into which capital could expand and in which its surpluses could be absorbed.

But as the East Asian countries whose economies were destroyed by the IMF five years ago have recovered, they have begun, once more, to generate vast capital surpluses of their own.

America's switch from production to finance domination, and the government's resulting economic mismanagement, has made it more susceptible to disruption and economic collapse.

Corporations now encounter massive public resistance as they seek to expand their opportunities through dispossession. The only peaceful solution is another New Deal, but that option is blocked by the political class in the U.S.: The only new spending it will permit is military spending.

Attacking Iraq offers the U.S. three additional means of offloading capital while maintaining its global dominance. The first is the creation of new geographical space for economic expansion. The second is military spending.

The third is the ability to control other nation's economies by controlling the supply of oil. This, as global oil reserves diminish, will become an ever more powerful lever. Happily, just as legitimation is required, scores of former democrats in both the U.S. and Britain have decided that empire isn't such a dirty word, and that the barbarian hordes of other nations really could do with some civilization at the hands of a benign superpower.

Strategic thinkers in the U.S. have been planning this next stage of expansion for years. Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary for defense, was writing about the need to invade Iraq in the mid-1990s.

The impending war will not be fought over terrorism, anthrax, VX gas, Saddam Hussein, democracy or the treatment of the Iraqi people. It is, like almost all such enterprises, about the control of territory, resources and other nations' economies.

Those who are planning it have recognized that their future dominance can be sustained by means of a simple economic formula: Blood is a renewable resource; oil is not.