This article has been reproduced from the <\/strong>Socialist Standard<\/strong><\/em> (April 2002), the monthly journal of The Socialist Party of Great Britain<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat the Pentagon has done with this is sound military conceptual \nplanning.\u201d This was the US Secretary Colin Powell commenting on the \nleaked 50 page Pentagon report entitled: \u201cNuclear Posture Review\u201d \u2013 \nproof, if ever it was needed, that the lunatics have finally taken over \nthe asylum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What was so special about this \u201cReview\u201d? It contained contingency \nplans for the use of nuclear weapons on seven countries that the US \nclaim are the biggest threat to world peace: China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, \nNorth Korea, Syria and Libya. It orders the US military to plan for the \nuse of smaller nuclear weapons, suggests the arming of Cruise missiles \nwith nuclear warheads and identifies four instances when the US must \nlaunch a nuclear attack: an Arab-Israeli conflict, war between China and\n Taiwan, an attack by North Korea on South Korea and an attack by Iraq \non any of its neighbours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coming within a year of the US trashing of numerous international \ntreaties regarding weapons proliferation and, bearing in mind the US \nresponse to the 11 September attack on mainland USA and the belligerent \ntone of President Bush’s recent State of the Union Address, this is news\n to be taken seriously. It hints at US unilateralism and a new era of \nunchecked US aggression in defence of the interests of its corporate \nelite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such US aspirations, however, are not recent, for they can be traced \nright back to the 1820s and the \u201cMonroe Doctrine\u201d, which announced that \nthe Americas belonged to the USA. Now, all US excesses can be \nrationalised by a quick thumb over the shoulder in the direction of \nGround Zero. The US, having suffered considerable loss of life in the 11\n September attack last year, have found in that atrocity the pretext to \npursue their goal of \u201cfull spectrum dominance\u201d \u2013 military domination of \nthe world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n No sooner was this news out, when US vice president Dick Cheney flew \noff for a ten-day tour of the Middle East. Though ostensibly the trip \nwas an attempt to iron out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, few \ncommentators did not suggest that the real reason for the visit was to \ndrum up support for a full-scale attack upon Iraq . Prior to his visit \nto the Middle East he stopped over in Britain to ask a complacent Tony \nBlair whether he could afford any US attack on Iraq 25,000 British \ntroops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The signs of a coming US attack upon Iraq have been visible for some \ntime now. For months, US military instructors have been in northern Iraq\n training Kurdish fighters. Five thousand mothballed military vehicles \nin Kuwait have been overhauled and 24 Apache attack helicopters have \narrived in Kuwait. Moreover, In the wake of the recent anthrax scare, \ninvestigators worked round the clock in a desperate and futile bid to \nfind the Saddam link, before concluding it was probably the work of a \nhome-grown crank. And in recent weeks, Washington has continually \nreminded us that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and must be \nprevented from using them, whilst negligent of reports from the UN \nSpecial Commission that Iraq’s arsenal is now down to 5 percent of its \n1990 level and seemingly oblivious to questions relating to how he has \namassed such deadly weapons, considering the stringent sanctions which \neven outlaw the export of ping-pong balls to Iraq.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Twelve years after the war with Iraq, the US now looks serious about \n\u201cregime change\u201d. Back then though the overthrow of Saddam was not part \nof the US agenda. Having initially led the Kurds of northern Iraq and \nthe Marsh Arabs of the South into believing that they would get US \nsupport if they rose up against Saddam, they then sat back and watched \nas Saddam almost annihilated them. It had occurred to them that Saddam \nmight be holding the country together, stopping the spread of militant \nIslam, and that an Iraq minus Saddam might divide into warring factions \nand further threaten US interests in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n US allies in the Middle East \u2013 Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait \u2013 have \nshown little enthusiasm for US plans for Iraq, all voicing reservations \nand fearful of the consequences. Turkey, another US ally, who has many \ntimes loaned its airfields to the US for its operations against Iraq, \nbelieves its economy could be damaged by any such conflict, and King \nAbdullah of Jordan has warned of the \u201ccatastrophic effect\u201d that any \naggression towards Iraq would have on the Middle East. Seemingly, only \nTony Blair, George Bush’s cheerleader, has agreed that Saddam must be \nstopped, citing, in Republican fashion, Saddam’s elusive weapons of mass\n destruction and, like the true political amnesiac, never querying the \nweapons of mass destruction the US and Britain have stockpiled or the \nnuclear weapons in the hands of another Middle Eastern aggressor \u2013 \nIsrael.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the defenders of \u201cfreedom\u201d attempt to whip up support for \nanother Gulf War, on the pretext that Saddam Hussein is a terrorist, the\n rest of us can recall that both the US and Britain backed Iraq in its \nwar with Iran, even providing it with arms, and that they were silent \nwhen Iraq used chemical weapons on Iranians in 1984 (four months later \nthe US even reopened its embassy in Baghdad) and again when Saddam used \nchemical weapons on the Kurdish village of Halabjah in 1988, killing 5, \n000 civilians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And remember the ferocity of the first US war with Iraq, when Saddam \ninvaded Kuwait and threatened US oil interests in the region? It lasted \n42 days, during which time 110,000 \u201cCoalition\u201d aerial sorties were flown\n and 88,500 tons of bombs were dropped. It left an estimated 100,000 \ndead, including tens of thousands burnt to death retreating from Kuwait \nalong the Basra Road. Sanctions imposed since then have devastated Iraqi\n civil society and have killed over 1.5 million including 500,000 \nchildren under the age of five \u2013 results the 1948 UN Convention on \nGenocide classifies as \u201cgenocidal conduct\u201d and a convention the US \nrefuses to comply with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When asked what he estimated the number of Iraqi dead were after the \nfirst Gulf War, Colin Powell remarked: \u201cFrankly, that’s a number that \ndoesn’t interest me much\u201d. His predecessor, Madeline Albright, when \nasked to comment on the half a million Iraqi children that had died of \nstarvation disease and replied: \u201cthe price is worth it.\u201d These are the \ntype of people calling the shots in Washington, working closely with the\n Pentagon and the White House and in the interests of world peace!<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we recall the horror of the first Gulf War and juxtapose it with\n the statements of successive US Secretaries of State and indeed the \nrecent revelation that the US will hit with a nuclear weapon whoever it \nwishes, regardless of international opinion, we realise that the job of \nsecuring world peace can never be left to politicians. Defending the \nbelligerent stance of the US, George Bush recently said that \u201cinaction \nis not an option.\u201d It’s a sentiment shared by socialists. For it is the \ninaction and complacency of the working class that enables such \nhorrendous injustices to go on. For almost a century we have warned of \nthe dangers of political apathy, of trusting in leaders, of accepting \nall that governments say without question. Our silence, more than \nanything, is what Bush and Blair and Co. will depend on in coming \nmonths, that same silence the master class toasts each day. Our inaction\n is an important element in our continuing exploitation, for the master \nclass see in it our consent for their excesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the saying goes, it takes two to tango. Capitalism may well breed \nwar, but our apathy is very much a part of the process. Bear the above \nin mind in coming months when the US fleet heads off to the Gulf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back to the Politics Index<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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