Abstract

This essay is addressed to the US antiwar movement which dismisses the Bush Administration as a crew of short-sighted right-wing cranks toddying to the big oil companies who don’t deserve serious intellectual consideration. But the Bush Administration deserves « respect » because it is responding quite resolutely to the five- ear old global crisis of neoliberalism. Its solution is to make the US military the enforcer of the rules of neoliberal economics while billions of people and their governments have been made so destitute by them that they simply cannot abide by these rules any longer. This is « the Fourth World War » the Zapatistas named at the beginning of the crisis. A war with Iraq is the first application of the US’s unilateral role in this larger struggle. To stop the war with Iraq, the antiwar movement must show to US workers - white, black and immigrant - that the Bush Administration’s effort to overcome the crisis of neoliberalisrn is bound to harm their bodies and welfare much more than Saddam Hussain ever could