Bevin Society Statement
Pax Americana: Perpetual War
War on Iraq is inevitable because Ameranglia needs a secure base-country from which to combat popular anti-Globalist sentiment in neighbouring Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria and beyond. Control of the Middle East underpins the geopolitical pincer movement on the former Soviet Union as well as—with its Pacific strongholds—building power against Asia.
Increasing democratisation in the Middle East also poses a threat to America’s interests. It is to be combatted by displays of destructive Power—both military and economic.
This will not be a war with Iraq, as it is described in the British media. Unprovoked attacks on peaceful countries cannot be described as wars with them. This phrasing is a subtle way of justifying military, superpower aggression.
During the last 11 years Iraq has been at peace with its neighbours, while Ameranglia has engaged in multiple military aggressions and intimidations around the world. If Iraq’s past military adventurism is to be held against it, so must that of those who would snuff it out as an independent State. An examination of the post-war period will show that America and Britain, with their chemical, biological and conventional weapons of mass destruction (WMD), killed more people and devastated greater areas than Saddam Hussein. On an economic level too, the spread of the world market and the disruption of natural economies have wrought destruction, laying waste people’s lives. Indeed, eleven years of hyper-strict sanctions on a modern economy, Iraq—a supposed weapon of peace—have been as destructive as Hussein’s wars.
When apologists for the unprovoked war on Iraq declare that it is not about oil, they are in a sense right. It is about Pax Americana—America as the sole Super-power, setting the parameters of international ‘morality’ for the 21st century.
A by-product of Pax Americana is to give America overall control of world resources, human and economic (including oil).
Britain participates as micro-partner, partly out of Imperial reflex and partly to further its economic interest. The Blair Government, as junior Gauleiter, hopes to maintain the City of London as a major world financial centre. With manufacturing in relative and absolute decline, the surplus generated by financial manipulation staves off social cataclysm. The position of Sterling as a world currency and the profits of City traders mean that Britain is able to buy real goods from around the world and pay them with paper. Such are the benefits of ‘Free Trade’ in the Globalist era.
Pax Americana is an Imperial venture, and like the last world Empire—the British—justifies itself in the language of humanitarianism and rights. These are always defined from a Western, and a market, standpoint, but the ‘rights’ of democracies are a poor substitute for the freedoms of people in natural societies or different civilisations.
To further Pax Americana, whilst disarmament is forced on the rest of the world, America develops ever more weapons of mass destruction. It does not hide the fact that it breaches the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by developing new types of nuclear weapons and by seeking to establish a ‘Star Wars’ missile shield, which will enable it to attack other nuclear nations with impunity.
Yet America is the only country in the world which has ever devasted cities with nuclear bombs. It is also the only State to brag that it will use nuclear weapons in a First Strike—not in response to nuclear attack, but initiating nuclear war. And it is softening up world opposition to its deploying of nuclear weapons as a matter of routine by using depleted uranium shells which, though having a small fall-out, still damage civilian health and will continue to do so for thousands of years. Finding that the world has condoned this breach of international conventions, it will proceed to the use of larger weapons.
Though already in breach of Nuclear Disarmament Treaties by failing to disarm and by deploying new nuclear weapons, America treats as a cause for war breaches by other States for what they might do. But any country wishing to avoid social sterilisation and homogenisation under Pax Americana must start developing nuclear self-defence, for States without nuclear weapons can have no independent existence under Pax Americana.
In the new era, National Sovereignty appears as a brief 40-year aberration—a device to hold back the spread of Communism after World War 2. Now National Sovereignty is to be sacrificed for world Gleichschaltung—for uniformity under Pax Americana.
Yet National Sovereignty remains the most effective way of protecting and furthering popular rights now, as it has in the past. Maintaining National Sovereignty means that States must have WMD: this is the world as America-Britain want it. The more Weapons of Mass Destruction a State has, the more sovereign it is.
The United Nations can never be what in the popular dream it is supposed to be: an international force for good. So long as individual countries vote according to their short-term self-interest—rather than on the true issues in individual cases judged by some general standard—they can be bribed or intimidated into assisting the imposition of Pax Americana on ‘rogue States’—even though that vote runs counter to their own longer-term aspirations.
The contempt of the Ameranglia for the UN is shown by the way it was made clear that it retains its freedom of action to ignore the UN if it does not sanction war—whilst binding the UN to war if sufficient ‘evidence’ of Iraq weaponry can be rustled up.
The Security Council has the choice of allowing a war it does not believe in or being pushed aside by the United States as an international instrument of order. In a desperate attempt to retain credibility, the Security Council may pass a form of words which will allow Ameranglia to annex Iraq. It has long been clear that the United Nations is only effective when it does Ameranglia’s bidding. The Iraqi Crisis has made this obvious to civil society around the world.
With the UN devalued, the only viable way of regulating international affairs and minimising war is a system of smaller alliances. Regional associations should regulate the international relations in their own areas. Africa, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia are best fitted to keep order in their own regions according to their own lights and without external interference. There may be other alliances formed for particular purposes—such as Non-Aligned, Islamic, Francophone or Commonwealth associations. Particular countries should be free to follow their own interests by associating in various alliances on a long-term or short-term basis. Complexity of this kind is needed to set bounds to the domineering pretensions of a sole-Superpower.
To justify an Imperial conquest, Iraq is demonised as a rogue State which is a menace to its neighbours and gasses its own people. In fact, Saddam Hussein—the secular Moslem Socialist—was encouraged to make war on his Moslem Fundamentalist neighbour by an America smarting under the humiliation of its Embassy by revolutionary Islamic militancy, which it had been nurturing as a weapon against the Soviet-backed Moslem secular Afghanistan Government. The meddling backfired when the Fundamentalists deposed the Shah and turned on their American backers. Promoting Saddam’s war was America’s revenge by proxy.
The war on Kuwait—a historical part of Iraq, detached from it by Imperial Britain for its own purposes—was a by-product of the Iran war. The points at issue (including the slant drilling of Iraqi oil by Kuwait) could easily have been settled by peaceful means: Bush Senior and Margaret Thatcher managed to avert a non-violent resolution of the dispute and to bring about the First United Nations’ War as the opening event of the New World Order. (The Korean War was made a United Nations War only by Western cheating on the Veto system.)
It is true that Saddam repressed his own people, just as the American North repressed a would-be breakaway South in its Civil War. However, he has not treated his minorities as badly as Britain did Ireland down the centuries and he has formed a broad-based government. Moreover, the weapons used by Saddam did not differ from those used by Imperial Britain, which gassed and bombed the people of Iraq when it had the power to do so, calling its colonial administration “good government”. But, whilst real-politik standards are applied to Imperial actions, morality is used to judge those of others.
Since the Iran and Kuwait wars, Iraq has been at peace with its neighbours, weakened as it has been by vicious aerial bombardment and vindictive sanctions, which continue to degrade an economy unusually dependent on the world market.
It may be that Iraq—a would-be sovereign State—has some hidden WMD. But the war on an armed but peaceful Iraq will be just as wrong as a war on an unarmed but peaceful Iraq.
Saddam Hussein has been given a bad reputation in the ‘West’, but his Ba’ath regime has always provided the best social welfare for his people that resources have allowed. Even now, the regime has an excellent rationing system which is totally free of corruption, and keeps people alive despite the genocidal sanctions.
Whatever ideals may be harboured in the ‘West’, the government of Iraq is a matter for the people of Iraq. Neither leadership change nor regime change is the business of any other force.
A different world might have been possible after Gorbachev collapsed the communist system in Eastern Europe. But Ameranglia has made it clear that this is not the world it wants. The New World Order has turned out to be one, not of perpetual peace, but perpetual war.
Bevin
Society
28 February 2003
The Bevin Society has asked the managers of this website to point out to those who may not be aware of it that "Ameranglia" is Britain and America. We feel we must go further and read it as "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and its former colonies now organised as The United States (E Pluribus Unum—One Nation Under God) of America". Sort of, the little worm in the BIG APPLE kind of thing.
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