>The Media are probably a fairly good representation of the ruling class.
>Hence the main question that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq
>present, it seems to me, is _why_ is the ruling class going along with
>what seems on the surface to be an utterly mad and self-destructive
>foreign policy.

The Bush doctrine may well turn out to be self-destructive, and
certainly there is enormous arrogance in the administration, but
there is also a rational core to current policy. A huge increase in
the military budget, "pre-emptive" wars, and generally a much more
aggressive and unilateralist foreign policy is a big gamble-but it
can be rational to take a gamble if the potential payoff is high
enough and if the alternatives contain risks of their own.

The big problem facing the US ruling class is that the globalization
of finance, investment and trade over the last three decades has left
US capitalism increasingly vulnerable to events in other parts of the
world. The Bush doctrine represents an attempt to gain more control
over those events and to leverage its massive military superiority
into economic advantage over its main competitors (the EU, Japan and
in the medium term China). The increase in the defense budget can
give the US greater control over trade (most obvious in the case of
the seizure of Iraq's oil fields), provide a boost to the domestic
economy, finance hi-tech R&D, and give the US greater ability to push
its competitors around. And for the time being, everything is paid
for by those same competitors, who are investing $500 billion in the
US economy every year.

The problem (from the ruling class's own point of view) is that this
more aggressive stance commits the US to endless wars to maintain its
hegemony, any one of which may blow up in its face, and obviously the
administration has already provoked resistance from the people of
Iraq, other ruling classes, and even domestically, including
considerable discontent in the armed forces--and that's only after
two quick wars. And while the US gets a big boost from foreign
investment, that also continues to leave it highly vulnerable if
significant sectors of European and Japanese capital decide to pull
out.

But from the perspective of the US ruling class, alternatives which
saw the US continuing to lose ground economically to Europe and
China, and in which US military spending was not translating into
economic advantage (which was the complaint at the end of the Clinton
administration), were equally risky. It hopes that the resistance can
be managed, and that as a result of its aggressive posture the US
will be able to grab a bigger slice of the world's surplus value. At
any rate, no other coherent strategy for maintaining US dominance
emerged before 9/11, and now the entire ruling class is locked into
the new policy, since retreat from Iraq is unthinkable. The
neo-conservative ideologues who pushed this policy are not mad--they
are rational administrators of a system which is itself insane.

--PG