The coming war against humanity
October 12th, 2002
Defending her administration’s support for the United States determination to make war on Iraq as well as her government’s subservience to US interests, President Arroyo told the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of the Philippines the other day that “we are not doing this to please the United States.”
The Philippine government is in violation of the Constitution, and has denied the painful lessons of its history. It has undermined its own frail sovereignty by allowing foreign troops to intervene in its domestic affairs, and this October is welcoming an additional 1,000 others. It is supporting the US demand for a new UN Security Council resolution that would make war against Iraq automatic if Iraq does not meet near-impossible US conditions.
It is doing all these, said Mrs. Arroyo, “for humanity”—in concert with the United States, which is trying to rid the world of terrorism.
Apparently from her viewpoint the United States now represents, as George W. Bush, US Big Oil and their gang of Neanderthal empire builders would have us believe, humanity’s best hope for a better world as they continue their—dare we use the word?—crusade against terrorism.
Fortunately not everyone is as foolish, least of all the 16,000 American signatories to a statement, “Not in Our Name,” protesting the new Bush Doctrine of preemptive war. The statement has appeared in several US newspapers, and includes among the signatories the best and brightest in US intellectual and cultural life: novelists and academics, poets and artists.
“The Bush administration,” says the statement in part, “has not only attacked Afghanistan but arrogated to itself and its allies the right to rain down military force anywhere and anytime. The brutal repercussions have been felt from the Philippines to Palestine. The government now openly prepares to wage all-out war on Iraq—a country that has no connection to the horror of September 11. What kind of world will this become if the US government has a blank check to drop commandos, assassins and bombs wherever it wants?”
In the United States itself, says the statement, “the government has brought down a pall of repression over society.” Dissent is under attack, the rights of those accused of involvement in terrorism have been suspended. The police have sweeping new powers of arrest, search and seizure. An executive order is enough to declare any group terrorist.
“War and repression,” says the statement, “has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral and illegitimate. We choose to make common cause with the people of the world.”
Not only US intellectuals are making common cause with the world. Speaking in the city of Cincinnati on October 7 in a supposed effort to get US public opinion behind his determination to wage war on Iraq, US President George W. Bush instead received opposition from some 5,000 demonstrators from nearly all walks of life— in one of the most conservative cities in the United States.
There is in fact a vast peace movement building in the United States, which should have an impact not only on the November 5 US congressional elections, but also on the Bush administration’s attempt to broaden and consolidate US global dominance.
Opposition is also rising in Europe, with one of the decade’s biggest demonstrations having taken place in London two weeks ago, when 350,000 people protested the British government’s support for war on Iraq and in affirmation of the right of men and women everywhere to live without the threat of annihilation from the world’s biggest bully.
Mrs. Arroyo’s claim that she and her patron represent humanity is in fact so outrageous that not even George W. Bush—who was supported in 2002 by the most backward tendencies, including racism, in US society—has made that claim. What Bush and his lap dogs do represent are the forces of wealth, power and privilege that have made the world into the domain, not of the billions who call it home, but of the very few who control its resources and who command its armies.
Mrs. Arroyo could put her Ph.D. to good use by doing some relevant research. She could do worse, for example, than to read William D. Hartung, Frida Berrigan and Michelle Ciarocca’s “Operation Endless Deployment,” (The Nation, issue of October 21, 2002), which has found that “the preparations for Gulf War II are part of a larger plan to promote the most significant expansion of US global military presence since the end of the Cold War.”
“Since September 2001,” say Hartung et al., “US forces have built, upgraded or expanded” military facilities including forward bases all over the world, in among others, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
At the same time, the United States has “authorized extended training missions or open-ended troop deployments in Djibouti, the Philippines and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.” It has also “negotiated access to airfields in Kazakhstan; and engaged in major military exercises involving thousands of US personnel in Jordan, Kuwait and India.”
“Thousands of tons of military equipment” have also been shipped and added to stockpiles in the Middle Eastern and Persian Gulf states, including Israel, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar.
“And discussions are still under way with Yemen about increasing military access to facilities there and establishing an intelligence-gathering installation aimed at monitoring activities in Sudan and Somalia.”
The US forward bases, “many of which have been arranged through secretive, ad hoc arrangements,” now house some 60,000 military servicemen, including 25,000 in the Persian Gulf who could constitute the first wave of an attack on Iraq.
The breadth of the US’ continuing global military deployment—apparently planned by the Bush administration before September 11, which in any case proved a convenient pretext for its current war policy—is “not a return to the cold war,” say Hartung, Berrigan and Ciarocca.
Instead, it is “an elaboration of a new, more flexible infrastructure for intervening in—or initiating—‘hot wars’ from the Middle East to the Caucasus to East Asia.” This infrastructure, say Hartung et al., will outlast Bush and Saddam Hussein himself, which means that it will be there for US use in the decades to come.
In short, the deployment is in anticipation of the launch of the “preemptive strike” which is now the basis of US military policy.
The extent of the global military infrastructure the US is building is documented in detail in the Hartung, Berrigan and Ciarocca article. The documentation suggests that the purpose is not to enhance US defenses against terrorism, but to broaden and consolidate US control over vast regions of the planet.
Iraq is in fact not the only country that could be at the receiving end of US preemptive, or “anticipatory” strikes—meaning in response to conditions that could occur, but which have not. In March this year the US press reported that Iraq, Iran and North Korea (later labeled by Bush as “the axis of evil”), as well as China and Russia, were among the countries that the new US policy of preemptive strikes that could include the use of nuclear weapons has identified as potential targets.
Philippine involvement in the making of the “new infrastructure” of global intervention thus goes beyond the Arroyo administration’s short-sighted and parochial focus on the elections of 2004. It could very well mean involvement in a continuing war against all of humanity, in which the Philippines would be a minor but enthusiastic pawn in the US drive for total world dominance.
(ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, October 12, 2002)