The Gulf War was [a] war waged by coalition forces from 35 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait arising from oil pricing and production disputes.[1]

I call it the Empire of Disorder, structured by strictly military self-concept, without any vision that would enable it to address the genuine problems of the humanity.[2]

The general populations on earth thought that the Gulf war was the notion of national liberation, in this case was the Kuwait, was simply mistaken. First, the claim that the liberation of the Kuwait will give the light for justice for the people was in reality a trap set by Washington into which Saddam Hussein had fallen. In invading Kuwait, Saddam Hussein destroyed the equilibrium that guaranteed the regimes of the Gulf which is make the U.S (and the rest of the Western’s coalition) position into a trouble.[3] The idea that the Iraq’s invasion will bring injustice for the Middle East brotherhood over the oil pricing and let the war amongst them was an extravagant propaganda during the nineteenth century of the mankind. Secondly, on the contrary, the Western powers will prolong and reaffirm an order that create more misery of the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This never-ending story of the war has been an excuse to let the U.S put recognition of the military concept in the Arab World that of overshadowed with the necessity to protect the peoples—or can we see as social, economic, and also political control.

The control over the Middle East which presented with numerous contributions to financing the war only perpetuates the conflict. In this case, Samir Amin called it the North-South conflict that is fundamental to the actual existing capitalism.[4] On the world scale, capitalism has been polarizing the world especially for the popular classes in the periphery as already mentioned above that of the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Not just the polarization does create misery, but also gives rise to the South countries to contempt for national rights, the lack of democracy, and the perpetual resources domination in the hand of the North. The argument was based on the fact that the intensification of international capital’s offensive, in order to restore the comprador rule in the Third World, has initiated the prologue to the collapse of the USSR and the communist regimes of Eastern Europe.

Samir Amin a thinker who always comes up with creative solutions. In the case of the Gulf war, Amin proposed an ideal world: a truly polycentric world. Its solution comprises on the one hand the unity of the European economics and politics and on the other hand an Arab unity accompanied by gradual integration of the Arab States.[5] The Arab unity is politically essential in terms of collective continuance of the Third World, while the unity of the European economics and politics is vitally important as the European politics in the long period of the Gulf war has been stirred up by the United States. In this way, Samir Amin underlined the idea that the hostility of Europe to Arab unity is the product of its Atlantic perspective, and of its support for the expansionist objectives of Zionism.[6]

This article structurally we can categorize into three levels of abstraction; 1). the so-called historical moment of the Gulf war, but Samir Amin only put a little attention, 2). the political discourses over the North-South relation, in this case was the conflict relation amongst them, 3). the imagination of a solution. In the end, the three levels of abstraction nevertheless left me some questions to be answered: international capital was a battle ground of the working class around the world. How does the international capital to working class’ relation play a role in the Third World countries? In articles other than this, Samir Amin emphasized the importance of the capital over the people’s consumption at international level. How does the geopolitical power of the North posit an impact to the people’s consumption around the world?

[1] Please look around your Wikipedia.

[2] Samir Amin, “The Real Stakes in the Gulf War”, Monthly Review, Vol. 43, No.3: July-August 1991.

[3] Ibid. Page 15.

[4] Ibid. Page 17.

[5] Ibid. Page 13.

[6] Ibid. Page 22.