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\nBush boldly announced that the \u201cwar on terror\u201d was \u201conly beginning\u201d and \nannounced an enormous hike in military spending. This year’s military \nbudget is up $36 bn to $379 bn and next year the US war machine will \nreceive an extra $48 bn, with a further $120 bn promised over the next \nfive years, bringing the total spent on the military by 2007 to $ 2 \ntrillion. To get some estimate of this level of spending it is worth \nnoting that this year’s increase alone is higher than the joint military\n spending of Europe, and larger than China’s existing military budget. \nThough just how such an awe-inspiring arsenal of state of the arts \nweaponry is to stop 11 September type attacks on the USA is yet to be \nexplained. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/bush.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nAmerica has at last declared that the \u201cwar on terror\u201d has replaced the threat of the \u201cinternational communist conspiracy\u201d and found in this the pretext to set the agenda for the coming century. The Bush administration has embedded its flag in what it believes is the moral high ground. From now on it is a war of good against evil \u2013 evil being anyone standing directly in the way of the US and its aspirations of global domination, with the \u201cwar on terrorism\u201d allowing it to intervene anywhere and whenever and to deem who it likes a terrorist. Clearly this new \u201cwar\u201d will involve countless military interventions with no regard whatsoever for international sensibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are now bogeymen under every rock and the world needs \nprotecting from them. Bush identified an \u201caxis of evil\u201d in his State of \nthe Union Address, pointing to the threat the world faced from North \nKorea, Iraq and Iran. Vice-President Dick Cheney would later remark that\n the US is considering military action against 50 countries and that \nthis ongoing conflict could last 50 years, without seeming to question \nwhether this would be sustainable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bush’s adviser Richard Perle commented: \u201cThis is total war. We are \nfighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there . . . if\n we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it \nentirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just \nwage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from\n now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of this has naturally left political analysts wondering just who \nwill be next. Somalia (on a key oil export route and with untapped oil \ndeposits off its coast and with whom the US has a score to settle \nfollowing the botched \u201cRestore Hope\u201d operation of a decade ago, which \nleft thousands of innocents dead), or Yemen, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, \nSyria or Libya? All harbour bogeymen whose existence sullies the notion \nof American hegemony. Any could be the next target for a war machine \ndrunk with its recent victory in Afghanistan. And what a victory! \u2013 \nOsama bin Laden still not caught (the entire campaign was about catching\n him), 5 thousand civilians dead and 7 million facing starvation in \nrefugee camps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A key element in the US game plan for global hegemony is clearly \ncontrol of the Caspian’s rich oil reserves \u2013 estimated to be able to \nproduce 3.3 million gallons of crude oil per day and 4850 billion cubic \nfeet of natural gas per year. Hence US military manoeuvring in the \nstates surrounding Afghanistan and thus the attaching of the \u201cbogeyman\u201d \nlabel to any state perceived as standing in the way of these profits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Already Kyrgistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are under US military \ndomination and there are US military tent cities in 13 states \nsurrounding Afghanistan, with the map of US bases mirroring the route of\n a possible oil pipeline which would take oil through Iran to the Indian\n ocean. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pretext for the US invasion of Iraq would be Iraq’s refusal to \nagree to terms laid down by a US-led weapons inspectorate into the \ncountry, hence Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union Address that \nIraq \u201ccontinues to flaunt its hostility towards the US\u201d and that \u201cthis \nis a regime that has something to hide from the civilised world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The above may sound like so much scare-mongering, but when it is \nconsidered the US now accounts for 40 percent of global military \nspending, that it spends more on its war machine than the next 19 \nstates, that in the past year it has discarded numerous international \ntreaties, including those pertaining to weapons control, that the space \ntaken up by its military hardware covers an area the size of Sweden, \nthat it has served notice on all countries opposing the notion of US \nhegemony that their days are numbered, we can’t but conclude that \nwarfare will be as much a part of life in this century as the one we \nhave just emerged from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have every reason to be fearful for the future of humanity. War is\n competition for profits (either via trade routes, mineral wealth, \nresources or areas of influence) writ large, and to safeguard its future\n profits, its control of world resources the world’s greatest and \nlargest military power is accumulating an unimaginable array of \nweaponry, rolling up its sleeves and marching forward to stamp underfoot\n all it perceives as being a threat to its interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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