Destroyer of worlds
January 26th, 2003
As more and more people, including Americans, are finding out, it’s not so much the “axis of evil” the world has to fear as the people who made up that phrase.
An “axis of evil” was how US President George Bush referred to Iraq, Iran and North Korea last year, identifying those countries as “rogue states” whose alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction threatens the world.
Eventually the United States zeroed in on Iraq, which it unsuccessfully tried to link to the international terrorist network al-Qaeda, as first on its list of countries that have to be bombed to remove the “threat.”
Re-bombed and bombed further are the more accurate words, however. In 1990 the US and Britain, with mostly token support from a global coalition backed by the United Nations, bombed Iraq back to the Middle Ages by destroying sewage treatment and water purification plants, as well as schools and hospitals among other targets. (Before the Gulf War Iraq had been one of the most advanced secular states in the Middle East.) That war has since ended, but British and American warplanes continue to bomb the “no-fly zone” that comprises much of Iraqi air space.
Most of the world was convinced about the necessity for that war, Saddam Hussein having invaded Kuwait. It’s not as convinced now, almost every major power other than the US and the UK being opposed to what would amount to a war of aggression intended to remove Saddam from power.
Saddam, the US says, is a dictator armed with weapons of mass destruction—i.e., with biological and chemical, but minus nuclear weapons. Allowing him to remain in power can mean Iraq’s developing a nuclear weapon within a few years, thus enhancing its capacity to threaten both the Middle East (read Israel) and the rest of the world, especially—most especially—the United States.
The Butcher of Baghdad is no doubt a dictator, but how dangerous he is to either his neighbors or the rest of the world is at best debatable. Some observers say it’s a settled question: he isn’t much of a threat to anyone outside Iraq, the Iraqi military having been weakened by the Gulf War, and the Iraqi economy being in tatters as a result of a decade of UN sanctions.
So full of holes is the US argument for “regime change” in Baghdad that it has provoked hundreds of thousands of its own citizens as well as Europeans and others into building a movement opposed to war. The US obsession with attacking Iraq regardless of the UN and the findings of its weapons inspectors—its massive deployment of troops and materiel to the Middle East at a cost of $1 billion a day can only mean war—has caused the major churches to issue statements questioning the morality of an attack on Iraq. It has also split the Western alliance, with France and Germany insisting on a mandate from the UN before any war is waged against Iraq.
It is almost certain that the United States will attack Iraq anyway. This determination has nothing to do with Iraq’s possessing weapons of mass destruction. It has even less to do with combating international terrorism.
The US’ immediate interest is oil, which under its current energy policy has to be increasingly sourced from foreign sources, both to support the profligate American lifestyle and to keep its vast military machine running. Securing those sources and ensuring access through the use of military power, and incidentally opening them to the exploitation of US multinationals, is a major policy plank of the second Bush administration.
(It is not a coincidence that both Bush junior and senior have extensive oil interests, as do US Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. “National interest” is too often only the sum of the personal, familial and class interests of those who run governments.)
Oil is only a component of US intentions, however. The US government, now in the hands of those fringe lunatic elements that US historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. say had previously never wielded national power, intends to redraw not only the Middle Eastern map, but also the structure of its societies. As usual it will do that in the guise of bringing democracy to the region, but with the real goal of securing it for US interests.
In turn this aim is a component of the larger aim of achieving total global domination, which apparently the current US leadership intends to achieve via measured steps by eliminating “problematic” regimes. Not only in the Middle East, but also in Latin America and Asia is the United States deploying military forces and building military bases in preparation for the military initiatives that this long-term goal requires.
The current crisis over North Korea was immediately precipitated by the US’ reneging on an agreement between the Clinton administration and Kim Jong Il under which North Korea would decommission its nuclear reactors in exchange for the US’ providing it with heavy oil, as well as by Bush’s declaring that country part of the “axis of evil.”
North Korea announced the recommissioning of its nuclear reactors to make up for the power shortfalls—disastrous in view of the severity of North Korean winters—that the US action created. It also pointed out that, in view of the Bush doctrine—which declared preemptive strikes with the possible use of nuclear weapons as US policy—that it has a right to self-defense, as it indeed it has.
By indeed announcing that it intends to wage aggressive wars without discounting the use of nuclear weapons, the United States has forced other countries to rush their own weapons development programs, although North Korea says it intends to use its nuclear reactors only for power generation and not for the development of nuclear weapons.
Despite the catastrophic possibilities this policy has brought upon the world, the US nevertheless will not be deterred, in either Iraq or elsewhere, in the furtherance of its effort to refashion the world into its own image even if it means destroying much of it in the process.
The goal has been described as empire-building, but the empire has been in place for over a hundred years. It began in earnest in the final years of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when the US Asiatic Fleet steamed into Manila Bay to begin the brutal campaign that finally transformed the Philippines into its colony. It accumulated strength during and in the aftermath of the Second World War, eschewing the formal acquisition of colonies, but imposing its will through subterfuge, military power and support for local despots in Asia (Korea, Vietnam the Middle East), Latin America (Cuba, Santo Domingo, Chile, Panama, etc.), and in the last two decades, in Africa.
Over the last 50 years the empire has amassed riches for its multinationals, which traverse the world at will and extract vast profits from its exploitation of 60 percent of the world’s resources and labor. US prosperity is based on the growing poverty and misery of the rest of the world. But by allowing its citizens a share of the profits via a comfortable lifestyle, it has secured their silent complicity, ignorant as most of them are of what their government is doing.
The only thing that has changed is the brazenness and arrogance of the Bush government, which some commentators have described as “breath-taking.” This is the first time in the post-World War II history of the American empire when it has openly claimed the right to attack any country it considers a potential threat, with or without UN sanction, and regardless of what anyone else, including its own citizens, may think.
Although this hubris is based on its confidence in its vast military power (might makes right), it grossly underestimates the human spirit to resist. The Bush government is indeed provoking exactly the kind of resistance every empire in history has faced.
Unlike the Roman, Napoleonic, or Nazi empires, the United States does have the capacity to destroy not only this world but several, armed as it is with all the weapons of mass destruction it condemns in others. This power is in the hands of a leadership whose sanity has not been established and may not be certifiable (“The United States has gone mad,” says the novelist John le Carré). The United States has thus made the planet a much more dangerous place for humanity than it has ever been.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, January 25, 2002)