A timely warning

The allusion in the title of Slavoj Zizek's recent damnation of the Iraq war is to Freud's parable of a borrower who returns a kettle with the mutually incompatible excuses. "I never borrowed a kettle from you, I returned it to you intact, the kettle was already broken when I borrowed it from you."

This, he suggests, is comparable to Bush and Blair's contradictory reasons for going to war with Iraq. "The problem," he writes, "was that there were too many reasons for going to war."

Zizek is senior researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana and a disciple of Lacan, a psycho-analyst whose roots are grounded as much in Marx as in Freud.

His purpose, in this book, is to highlight the psychotic nature of the West's engagement with the world, analysing it in Lacanian terms.

Despite his populist references to movies like The Searchers, Taxi Driver and The Usual Suspects and to weird synchronicities like the fact that Saddam Hussein used I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, virtually the only prominent Bushist in today's music scene, as his theme song in the October 2002 presidential election, in which he obtained 100 per cent of all votes cast, this book is not an easy read.

He takes us through Lacanian theory as an algebraic equation, demolishing in passing other theorists who differ with his interpretation and also touching on the works of Theodor Adorno, Derrida, even justifying Heidegger's flirtation with nazism, because, in his opinion, anything could be preferable to communism, since the gulag pre-dated Auschwitz, quoting also from Marxists like Althusser, Gramsci and Lukacs.

He also propagates some ugly myths, like the tale of Colonel Kurz in Coppola's Apocalypse Now that NLF forces in Vietnam amputated the arms of children who had received US vaccinations.

John Pilger has disposed of this legend. When a US journalist wrote to Coppola's screenwriter John Milius, asking where the children's severed arms story had originated, her letter was returned by Milius with the US Special Forces death's head drawn on it, together with the words: "No dialogue with communist criminals."

For anyone whose understanding of contemporary thought is limited by going back to the sources of the Marxist method, in which dialectics has been virtually ignored since Tommy Jackson engaged with the subject in the 1930s, most of Zizek's argument will seem like the equivalent of medieval monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but, in the course of his philosophical discourse, Zizek has some valuable things to say, especially to the peace movement.

He makes the interesting suggestion that the real target for the US attack was Europe, pointing out that the most significant crime of Saddam was in selling his oil for euros rather than dollars.

"The true economic aim of the war was not primarily the control of oil resources but the strengthening of the US dollar, the prevention of the dollar's defeat against the euro, the prevention of the collapse of a dollar which is less and less 'covered' by 'real' value.

"Today, a united Europe is the main obstacle to the New World Order that the US wants to propose."

Zizek is not much impressed by the Franco-German opposition to the war, which he dismisses as an attempt to assert their hegemony over the rest of the EU, especially since they are now trying to get their snouts into the trough. What is needed, he says, is what he calls "leftist Euro-centrism."

"To put it bluntly," he writes, "do we want to live in a world in which the only choice is between the US civilisation and the emerging Chinese authoritarian-capitalist one?

"If the answer is no, then the true alternative is Europe."

He has no illusions that the current European bureaucracy can achieve this, noting that the strongest supporters of the US programme are the former communists of eastern Europe. He says that Europe must reinvent itself.

He also has words for the anti-capitalist movement. "What is happening today is not merely that the anti-capitalist struggle is getting stronger, but that it is once again assuming the central structuring role.

"The first step is already accomplished. From the multitude of struggles for recognition to anti-capitalism, what lies ahead is the next 'Leninist' step - towards politically organised anti-capitalism."

The quotes around the word Leninist are significant. It does not appear that he is suggesting a democratic centralist reversion to the politics of The State and Revolution.

Nor does he appear to recognise the dialectic of US power, that it is driven to increasingly panic-struck adventures because of its innate weakness rather than its enormous strength.

Clearly, Bush would like to attack Iran before it emulates North Korea and obtains the potential for massive retaliation.

But US forces are already over-stretched, which is why Bush is now so keen on the UN getting involved, despite the disdain with which he treated it in the run-up to his aggression.

For all its complexity, sloppy acceptance of myths as facts and occasional obfuscation, this is a valuable though frequently daunting intellectual exercise.

All should take on board his main conclusion that the target of the Iraq adventure was not Iraq, nor even, as he suggests, Europe, but the US itself.

"What if the true target of the war on terror is not only a global rearrangement in the Middle East and beyond, but also US society itself, namely, the repression of whatever remains of its emancipatory potential?

"We should, therefore, be very careful not to fight false battles. The debates about how evil Saddam was, even about the cost of the war and so forth, are red herrings.

"The focus should be on what actually transpires in our societies, on what kind of society is emerging here and now as the result of the war on terror.

"The ultimate result of the war will be a change in our political order."

It is a salutary warning.

But we should not be over-impressed by the supposed strength of the new US order.

It should always be remembered that the most significant outcome of German fascism was the raising of the red flag over the Brandenburg gate.