A ‘peace’ based on war
October 9th, 2002
Former U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Stephen Bosworth says the United States will attack Iraq “between now and the end of February” 2003.
The chances for such an attack are now 70 percent, said Bosworth, which is not to say much that’s new.
A U.S. attack on Iraq appears certain, given the increasingly strident war rhetoric that’s emanating from George W. Bush and company, the ongoing military exercises U.S. forces are undertaking in Kuwait, and the resumption of U.S. and British bombing of selected Iraqi military facilities for Iraq’s supposed violations of the “no fly zone” created after the Gulf War.
Beyond these, there is also an increasing amount of evidence that the Bush administration has its eye on Iraqi oil, both as a major source of its energy needs, as well as a rich resource for exploitation by U.S. oil companies.
Access to, and control of Iraqi oil, however, would be only incidental to the larger Bush strategy of consolidating American power over the entire planet, to achieve which regimes hostile to U.S. interests will have to be eliminated one by one.
Conservative U.S. think tanks and analysts, many of whom now occupy key advisory and policy-, and decision-making posts in the Bush administration, have argued since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 that the United States seize the opportunity for total world dominance through the use of its military power.
Some of these analysts, before they joined the Bush team, were openly using the word “imperial” and “empire” to describe the role that history has supposedly thrust on the United States.
In their view the United States must seize the moment to assert total supremacy over the entire globe. Claiming that U.S. supremacy would be for the benefit of all of humanity — the United States, said one such analyst, is “the most benevolent” empire in all of history — these analysts say the chance to do so may never come again.
They base their views on the world developments that closed the 20th century. The most significant of this was the fall of the Soviet Union, whose end meant America’s absolute military dominance over the globe.
Unprecedented in all of human history, this dominance has no credible challenge to it. No rival or group of rivals can deter the United States at this time because it has a military machine armed with the most advanced conventional, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. This makes a Pax Americana — in the manner of the “Roman Peace” of ancient times, but unlike it in terms of its total reach — achievable in this century, and, quite possibly, sustainable beyond it.
The trouble with an “American Peace” is that it can be achieved and maintained only with incessant war, as all past empires — Roman, British, Napoleonic — have been.
The U.S. government has not only refused to even categorically say that Iraq would be the last country it would target for regime change. It has also implied that it has other countries in its gunsights, among them Iran and North Korea — part of the “axis of evil” Bush said in his State of the Union address this year was threatening U.S. security — as well as countries like Syria, Sudan, and Libya.
Bush has said more. Justifying what has since become known as the Bush Doctrine during his 2002 graduation speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Bush argued that the United States will launch preemptive strikes — using nuclear weapons if necessary — against any country it perceives likely to pose a threat to America.
Under the terms of this doctrine, the United States arrogates unto itself the right to attack and remove any regime in anticipation of, for example, its developing weapons of mass destruction.
The doctrine undermines the principles on which the United Nations was founded, which, among others, includes the defensive use of force, collective action, and the use of negotiations as the primary means for settling international disputes.
The Bush Doctrine would demolish the U.N. and these principles as well as the current laws that govern the relations between states, and erect in their place a global system of U.S. military dominance based on American interests and the rest of humanity’s interests as interpreted by the United States.
Conservative U.S. analysts describe the United States as “benevolent.” The experience of the Philippines when the U.S. expanded to Asia at the turn of the 20th century, of Vietnam when it sought to bring the former French colonies of Indochina into its orbit, as well as of the Latin American countries where it installed and supported a rogues’ gallery of despots, and through its economic and political hegemony doomed the poor countries to even worse poverty, contradict that claim.
U.S. dominance has for the most part meant a level of misery across the planet as unprecedented as the extent of U.S. power. Three hundred million people all over the globe, current estimates say, go to bed hungry daily. The International Red Cross estimates that over 1.5 million Iraqi children have died in Iraq from the U.S. and British economic blockade as a result of malnutrition and lack of medicine. Thousands of Iraqi civilians have died in the continuing bombing of Iraqi “military facilities” by American and British warships.
Extended to all parts of the globe via “regime change,” the empire would thus invite resistance, and create conditions of perpetual conflict and war throughout the world. Proceeding from the assumption that the expanded U.S. empire would be benevolent, however, conservative U.S. analysts naturally do not include resistance to the empire in their reckoning, and the possibility that a Pax Americana is likely to be, like its other empire predecessors, a period of war rather than peace.
In any event, Bosworth predicted an American attack within the next four months yesterday (October 
in Manila, where he was to meet President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, presumably in his capacity as a member of her so-called international advisory council.
Why the Philippines should have such a council with members from other countries with interests to protect in the Philippines we can set aside for now, although that does deserve scrutiny.
Bosworth is now dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, which does not detract from the fact that he’s a U.S. national, and a former ambassador at that, whom one can expect to be protective of American interests.
Bosworth’s prediction, because it contributes nothing new to what the Philippine government presumably knows by now, is in fact not as important as what his “advice” to Mrs. Arroyo on the conduct of the Philippines’ foreign relations would be. Will it be along the lines of the Philippines’ further expressions of support for the war that Bush is likely to launch to demonstrate and test the impact and consequences of the new Bush Doctrine?
If it is — and it is more than likely — then we can expect within the next few months the country’s being rapidly sucked into increasing involvement, no matter in how minor a capacity, in the U.S. drive for world dominance. In doing so the Philippine state would only be acting true to form as a dependable lapdog of U.S. interests — except that this time, it would be in furtherance of the coming of a new stage in world history in which our children and grandchildren are likely to witness, and to even be part of, a period of perpetual conflict as the United States consolidates and defends the empire.
(ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, October 9, 2002)