Respect Your Enemies: The First Rule for Peace

This essay is addressed to the US antiwar movement that dismisses the Bush administration as a crew of short-sighted, right-wing cranks toadying to the big oil companies and who don’t deserve any serious intellectual consideration. However, the Bush administration deserves “respect” (i.e., a “second appraisal”) because it is responding quite resolutely to the five-year-old global crisis of neoliberalism. Its solution is to use the US Army to enforce the rules of the neoliberal economy while billions of people and their governments have been made so destitute by these rules that they simply cannot abide by them any longer. This is the “Fourth World War” the Zapatistas were referring to at the beginning of the crisis. In this broader fight, the war with Iraq is the first “unilaterally US” theater of action. To stop the war with Iraq, the antiwar movement must prove to US workers ? white, black, and immigrant ? that the Bush administration’s effort to overcome the neoliberalism crisis is bound to harm their bodies and welfare much more than Saddam Hussain ever could.