THE
NEW MUSSOLINI
During
the Kosovo war Blair aspired to play the part of Lady Thatcher
to Clinton's George Herbert Walker Bush, supplying the backbone
when the Americans seemed to go all wobbly and urging
the introduction of ground troops. But at least Thatcher
– for all her warmongering and her lecturing the US
as if the American Revolution had never happened –
is a patriot: Blair is a man who so hates the concept of
national independence – from the former Yugoslavia
to the Middle East – that he is now embarked on a campaign
to abolish his own country's sovereignty by submerging
it in the European Union.
NUMBERS
GAME
Protesters
shouted as Blair flounced onto the campus of the City of
Bristol College: "How many Iraqi children have you killed?"
The answer to this question varies, depending on how the
measure of mass death is taken, but the most conservative
estimate is around 600,000 – and rising. This figure
is arrived at by multiplying the estimated number killed
by malnutrition and diseases brought on by the lack of essential
items – 5,000 children and old people per month –
by the number of years the sanctions have been in force.
Naturally, the Western powers, or at least some of them,
assert that Saddam is responsible for the cruel decimation
of his own people – after all, he insists to this day
on Iraqi sovereignty over its "nineteenth province" (Kuwait),
and recently
compared the US and the NATO powers to Dracula.
IN
DEFENSE OF VAMPIRES
This
latest Iraqi epithet, I feel, is a slur on Dracula,
and all the other vampires of human legend: they had
to drink blood in order to survive, or so the story
goes. Uncle Sam, however, is not gaining anything by starving
Iraqi children to death and keeping Iraqi oil off the market.
Or, at least, the American people have nothing to
gain from such a perverse, morally inverted policy, one
that stands common sense – and common decency –
on its head. I
know a couple of Californians who sure could use some
of that Iraqi oil right about now, not to mention the freezing
inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia, whose energy grid
was bombed by NATO's "humanitarian" warlords.
PLEASE
SHUT UP
Two
unidentified women and a man were arrested in the Bristol
incident, and if the Tories are a bit slow to come to their
defense then perhaps the rest of the world will take up
their cause. I say: Free the Rotten Tomato Three –
and drop all the charges! After all, the protesters acted
out of necessity: their goal was to prevent the Prime Minister
from speaking, and thus continuing to embarrass both himself
and the nation. Alas, the protest failed in this respect,
as Blair wiped tomato off his back and spoke to Labor party
bigwigs and business executives, defending sanctions on
the grounds that Saddam Hussein had "committed an act of
barbarism" when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Over half a million
children murdered by US-British sanctions – and they
are the "barbarians"? Somebody tape Tony's mouth shut before
he starts a worldwide wave of Anglophobia.
GOOD
NEWS
Perhaps
that tomato had its effect: the news that the Brits
want out of the continuing air assault on southern Iraq
certainly comes at a propitious time. While official denials
are fast and thick, various "senior officials" are quoted
anonymously as confirming that Bush will be met by British
and Saudi demands for an end to the bombing campaign. "We
want out," said one British official: meanwhile the Foreign
Office was continuing its fulminations against opponents
of sanctions, termed "apologists for Saddam." But with the
changing of the guard in Washington, said a report in the
Guardian, "the whole of U.S.-British policy
towards Iraq is under review." As the essentially Eurocentric
foreign policy of the Clinton administration gives way to
the petro-centric
foreign policy of Team Bush, this seemingly obscure bit
of diplomatic maneuvering begins to make some sense. For
if the US is now embarked on a policy that puts oil, instead
of Europe – or America – first, then the new focus
of policymakers will be on the Middle East and the Caucasus,
where ominous signs and alarming portents of the impending
crises have already appeared.
IRAN
LOVES DUBYA
The
prospect of a Bush presidency has elicited a wide range
of reactions in the Middle East, from fire-and-brimstone
denunciations to declarations of friendship, and perhaps
the two extremes are best represented by Iraq and Iran:
while the
former denies that any change in US-Arab relations will
come with the new administration, in
Iran Dubya's election is being hailed as the beginning
of a new era. The World-Tribune [January 8] reported
the very interesting comments of Iranian Deputy
Foreign Minister Ali Ahani, in charge of European and
U.S. affairs, who recently said.
"'An
impression which is taking a momentum in American circles
is that the policy of inhibition has not born[e] expected
results and that was the case while the American oil companies
had intensified their pressures on the US administration
to lift sanctions against Iran.' . . . Ahani told the official
Islamic Republic News Agency that Bush appears ready to
launch confidence-building measures that would eventually
allow US oil companies to invest in Iran. He predicted an
intensified lobbying campaign by the US energy sector in
the wake of a withdrawn bid by the Chevron company to develop
the giant South Pars gas field in the Gulf. 'By this goodwill
gesture, the oil companies intend to convince the new administration
to lift sanctions and open a door for resumption of Iran-U.S.
economic cooperation,' the minister said."
THE
US-IRAN CONNECTION
The
next day, Teheran
was rocked by explosions, the result of a new bombing
campaign purportedly set off by the Iraqi-backed Mujahadeen-Khalq:
The London-based A-Sharq
Al Awsat reports that, according to Iranian sources,
the renewed terrorism was a message from Iraq that an informal
ceasefire between the two countries had ended. As the
Iranian minister so helpfully points out, several US (and,
no doubt, British) oil companies are looking to Iran for
lucrative franchises – and likewise looking forward
to the dismemberment of Iraq. The 8-year Iran-Iraq
war, in which 1.5 million were killed, was inconclusive,
and only stopped on account of US intervention – on
the Iraqi side. This time around, however, the Iranians
think they have a new friend in Washington – and, who
knows but that some of their old friends from the days of
Iran-Contra
will stage a reunion in Washington presided over, perhaps,
by secretary of state Colin
Powell, who told congressional investigators that he
didn't know a thing about sending arms to the Ayatollah
until it was too late to stop it.
COLIN
POWELL, AND FRIENDS
But
as I point out in my book, Colin Powell and the Power
Elite, the General's testimony that he was merely acting
as then-defense secretary Caspar
Weinberger's "faithful Indian companion" simply doesn't
hold water. As Ollie North points out, Iran-Contra would
never have happened without Weinberger's knowledge and consent,
and if the defense secretary knew then so did Powell, his
lieutenant and protégé. Aside from Mr. Ahani's
boasting and his own sense of self-importance as a fount
of inside information, there is no doubt much to what he
says: with the re-entry of such old hands as Powell and
Donald
Rumsfeld – a hawk
on the Iraq question – into key policymaking positions,
old conduits are now reopened and the time for an overt
US-Iranian alliance against Iraq is at hand.
THE
BALKANS WRIT LARGE
Meanwhile,
in Georgia – in the former Soviet Union, not the former
Confederacy – tensions
with Russia are on the rise, with the
West's favorite ex-Communist, Eduard
Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister who presided
over the dissolution of the Soviet empire, crying foul over
alleged Russian attempts to subvert his rule. The Russians
claim the Georgians are obstructing their efforts to fight
terrorism in the breakaway "republic" of Chechnya. In addition,
both have an interest in the outcome of the Azerbaijani-Armenian
conflict, with Russia accusing the Georgians of providing
Azeris with aid and sanctuary on Georgian territory. The
Georgians, for their part, demand the removal of Russian
military bases from Georgian soil: the Russians are reportedly
shipping aid to the Armenians via these bases. Bubbling
just beneath the surface of all this intrigue is potentially
the largest source of oil and natural gas in the world.
The petro-centric policy that is driving US war preparations
against Iraq is already operating in the Caucasus: clearly,
the incoming administration will escalate a trend begun
by the Clintonians. With its toxic mixture of ethnic and
religious animosities, the Caucasus resembles the Balkans
– writ much larger, however, both geographically and
in its potential dangers.
OUR
TRANSYLVANIAN FOREIGN POLICY
Back
to the Dracula analogy, because the Iraqis are on to something
here. In response to the news that the US had poisoned half
of the former Yugoslavia with depleted uranium, the official
newspaper of the Iraqi government, Al-Iraq, declared:
"America
is a country without roots which relies on terrorism –
as did Dracula who sucked blood from humans and pillaged
their riches – to impose itself as a great power. The
leaders of this terrorist country commit the most atrocious
crimes against humanity by using banned weapons of mass
destruction, not only with the goal of extending its colonial
hegemony but also exterminating humanity to impose its domination,
as was the case with the Red Indians."
ATTACK
OF THE CORPORATE BLOODSUCKERS
America
is a country that has severed itself from its republican
roots and taken on all the accouterments – the military
forces, the bombastic self-regard, the pomp and circumstance
– of an empire. The real power behind the government
is, indeed, rootless, in that the Money Power recognizes
no boundaries and owes allegiance to no authority other
than itself. This Money Power is, indeed, vampiric, in that
it fastens itself on a victim – Iraq, in this instance
– and literally sucks the sustenance out of it, growing
fat on skyrocketing oil prices while Iraqi children shrivel
and die. Big Oil profits from the government-created shortage:
the end of Iraqi sanctions would mean that the profits would
dry up – which is why this administration will never
lift them. As long as government is the instrument of corporate
power in America, US foreign policy can never be
peaceful. War is built into a system in which the two "major"
(state-privileged) parties are up for sale to the highest
bidder, and, insofar as we have a choice it is between a
Eurocentric policy of "humanitarian" intervention versus
a petro-centric policy of open aggrandizement. We are now
in transition from eight years of the former to at least
four years of the latter – and all indications are
that we are out of the frying pan and straight into the
fire.
