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About 65% of the world’s oil reserves are concentrated in the
Persian Gulf and in only five countries, while more than 50% of
natural gas reserves are controlled by three countries.
World Oil & Gas Review 2001
The threat
continues to increase of this war that junior feels he just has to
have, just like Daddy had one. It makes a mockery of the fig leaf of
week’s of UN arms inspections, which have shown if anything that
Iraq is rather less dangerous than many another regional power, with
their Islamic, Hindu and Jewish bombs, to say nothing of the French
and the British. Inspection should have been extended at the very
least to all nuclear powers, and covered all weapons subject to UN
conventions. Instead of which we have the unedifying and disturbing
spectacle of the world’s sole superpower acting as judge, jury and
executioner at large. One might be forgiven for thinking this
represents a worrying precedent.
And so now
the US is preparing to open fire with its `weaponsofmassdestruction’
with a view to inflicting 500,000 hapless innocent casualties as a
means to the end of removing their tyrant, who the Americans have
been finding uncooperative in the petroleum stakes. Talk about
overkill (an American term for an American practice.) Already the `waronterrorism’
has had its My Lai. The Pentagon is stonewalling investigation of
the role of its Special Forces in the execution of 3000 `terrorist’
prisoners buried in a mass grave a kilometer square in northern
Afghanistan. What will happen as 350,000 doughboys take possession
of Iraq, managing the media as they go ? When it comes to human
slaughter, American ruthlessness leaves the Romans for dead. But
then the Romans were running a smaller outfit.
Oil wars
like Opium wars represent imperialism at its most sanctimonious and
unscrupulous. This will be the most designer capitalist war in human
history. Already Bush has delivered a tax cut to the plutocracy
which will benefit from the conquest of Iraqi oil revenue. The
American citizenry is being recruited economically and by propaganda
to do the fighting, in accordance with Machiavelli’s advice about
not using mercenaries. By relying on firepower the Presidency will
be able to make all the war it can finance, thus avoiding what the
political right considers was the sole problem with the Vietnam war:
the excess number of body bags which undermined consensus.
The polls
show that the oligarchs of three continents have failed to carry
their people with them, despite their best efforts to manage the
media. In Africa and Asia there would hardly be a man, woman or
child who would endorse this war. It is possible that quick military
success might bring a majority in behind the warlords. By the same
token if the war drags on as long as it did in Jugoslavia, the
minority in favour of the war could dwindle. Opponents of war will
of course fight on regardless.
The United
States was born flying a revolutionary flag asserting the principles
of self determination and democracy in the rocket’s red glare. Now
the bombs bursting in air are American and the victims are primarily
civilian hostages to a quarrel between the US oligarchy and a self
willed nationalist tyrant whom the Bush administration proposes to
replace with it’s own military nominees and civilian political
clients. The rhetoric of liberation and democracy providing
political coverage for this unscrupulous operation is an obscene
farce.
History is
a saga of the decline and fall of empires, which have risen only to
find their imperial vocations unsustainable. Conquest and hegemony
traditionally generate revenues and success legitimises the elites
which promote them, but at great social cost which cannot be
indefinitely borne. It is war which upholds empires and the lymph of
war are blood and treasure. Given the technological and economic
superiority of the US in this uneven struggle, it is the Iraqis who
will do the bulk of the bleeding. But the United States, already
heavily indebted, will find that it hemorrhages treasure at a rate
that will not prove so readily financed in the years to come as it
would like. The Great War broke the British empire financially above
and beyond the appalling cost in lives, a fact which the British
ruling class only reluctantly came to realise after World War II.
Foreign creditors will demand punctual payment, and they too will
cut their debtor only so much slack as suits them, as US investors
did in respect of British obligations in their day. So Wall Street
will be brought in due course to its knees, however successfully US
military planners prove to be in containing casualties among their
own ranks.
Intervention in Korea, Kuwait, the Caribbean and Bosnia did not come
cheaply, anymore that the long mauling in Vietnam and Indochina
which humiliated the conservative regime in the US militarily and
psychologically with the spectacle of a defeat which they still
cannot admit to themselves and the world. The financial price to be
paid for imperium, for maintaining elephantine armed forces and
intelligence services and a permanent war economy represents the
socioeconomic entropy of imperialism. As American power represents
ever more clearly the greatest danger to world peace it will
generate ever greater resentment and resistance throughout the
world. Ultimately this is a prospect no which true friend of the
American people can think acceptable.
To look
forward to the end of the American empire, as American thinkers like
Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg do, is not to be
anti-American. The American Revolution was progressive if
oligarchically inspired. The US is still the State which under the
firm leadership of the last great Republican President, Abraham
Lincoln, suppressed a reactionary rebellion in favour of racial
exploitation. Under Roosevelt the US gave the example of the New
Deal to a world staggering under Depression and laissez faire dogma.
Under this patrician democrat American ambition was placed at the
service of global democracy in its hour of crisis and safe haven was
given to Brecht and other illustrious and humble refugees from
fascism. America has given us all much that is now an integral part
of ourselves in the literature and the arts, from theatre and cinema
to Cole Porter, Gershwin, Bernstein, jazz and the blues. It is
impossible to be anti-American without spiting ourselves. We desire
only the best for the people of the United States: democracy and
prosperity at home, peace abroad, and a government worthy of their
support. These are precisely the things we desire for ourselves as
Australians, the things which are frustrated by the conservative
international oligarchic consensus which rules over our heads by
misinformation and the abuse of executive power.
Now is not
the time to despair. If we are not able to prevent this war, our
protest may yet serve to shorten it as the Kuwaiti war was shortened
by disgust at the slaughter wrought by unrestrained supremacy. And
we are laying the groundwork for ever more successful opposition to
the next war and the next and the next, and we will go on opposing
every unjust war until the troops come home and stay home for good,
if we have to pledge our lives and the lives of our children’s
children’s children to achieve a lasting peace. Ultimately we cannot
be defeated because we are right and it would take a multitude of
Hitler’s and Mussolini’s and Gualtieri’s and Pinochet’s and Marcos’s
to stop us. In the end it is a matter of Peace or Barbarism, and the
future is in our hands. There is much to do and now. The warlords
Shall Not Pass.
David
Faber is a freelance historian completing a PhD at Adelaide.
When
war breaks out it may be appropriate to adjust the tense at a few
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