this ought to get them keymar's and co going Gregory Clark is a former Australian diplomat and government adviser At last count we had been given six different reasons for invading Iraq, some of them false and the rest contradictory. The current favorite -- seeking to change an obnoxious regime -- might carry weight if it was not contrary to international law and if in the past both the United States and Britain had not gone out of their way to support the Iraqi regime when it was far more obnoxious. Given all this duplicity, the critics assume that a lust to control Iraqi oil must be the main reason. That factor cannot entirely be ruled out. But whether it is dominant is more doubtful. During the Vietnam War, many on the left mistakenly assumed that the U.S. motive was to control Indochina's resources, until the cost of the war began to exceed any possible value those resources might ever have had. Pumping gas through Afghanistan was supposed to be a motive for the U.S. attack there last year, except that no one wants to build a pipeline in that fractious nation. What the critics fail to realize is the power and mentality of the military/intelligence complexes that create these various conflicts. Armed with enormous budgets and freed from normal controls, they have become a world unto themselves. Their sole raison d'etre is finding and obliterating enemies. If enemies do not exist, they will create them. Economic motives for conquest came well down in their list of priorities. Inventing enemies is a much easier way for them to get funds and power. Democracies are highly vulnerable to these people. Firms dependent on the military cooperate willingly. Politicians, academics, think tanks and the media can easily be bought, infiltrated, created or overwhelmed. Precisely because our societies are democratic, they can then easily be persuaded to go along with these arbiters of popular opinion. The few who try to oppose can easily be ignored or ridiculed. Working in Canberra during the 1960s, I saw time and time again how easily these people could push through their palpably false threat-mongering that China was an aggressive monster, that the civil war in Vietnam was really a Chinese thrust into Asia, and so on. Even worse was watching them at work under the progressive Whitlam government of the mid-1970s. Skillful use of covert information, much of it from Echelon decoding of Japanese cables, gave them credentials with an initially hostile administration. In the space of just one year, 1975, they were able to sabotage a planned commerce treaty with Japan by pumping in false information about Japanese plots to dominate Australia's economy, to justify a cruel Indonesian takeover of East Timor by inventing communist conspiracies on that unhappy island, and to thwart moves to open a relationship with Hanoi. No one around me in the bureaucracy was willing to stand up against these efforts to distort the policies of a democratically elected government. In the context of Iraq, some of the critics have mentioned the way the U.S. military in August 1964 not only invented a mythical North Vietnamese attack on the U.S. Navy in the Gulf of Tonkin, and then rushed a resolution through Congress approving full-scale war on North Vietnam. Equally impressive was the ease with allegedly impartial media such as Time and Newsweek then rushed in with lurid and detailed accounts of this nonevent. Even more blatant was Operation Mongoose, the U.S. 1962 attempt to create excuses to invade Cuba, even after the failure of the ludicrous Bay of Pigs expedition in 1961. In the official documents that have since come to light, possible pretexts for the "attack" included everything from inventing alleged Cuban attacks on U.S. spacecraft to organizing mock Cuban invasions of Guatemala. The Iraqi stuff, and before that the mythical Serbian ethnic cleansers in Kosovo or the evil Taliban in Afghanistan, look tame by comparison. Sometimes these people do not even have to invent pretexts. A favorite technique is to have their government violate a crucial part of an agreement with some alleged enemy. Then when said enemy retaliates in anger, that is then used to justify full-scale confrontation. The U.S. denial of the 1954 Geneva Agreements for the reunification of Vietnam, leading to more than a decade of brutal U.S. intervention, is one tragic example. Another with equal scope for tragedy is the way the U.S., almost from the start, made it clear that it never intended to abide by the 1994 Agreed Framework under which North Korea was supposed to suspend nuclear ambitions in exchange for normalized relations, and now uses Pyongyang's reaction to that duplicity as an excuse for yet another round of confrontations. And we have yet to see an end to the many confrontations, some of them nuclear, caused by U.S. backtracking on President Harry Truman's 1949 promise to see the Beijing-Taipei conflict as an internal Chinese problem in which the U.S. would not intervene. The new doctrine of preemptive war makes it even easier for pretexts to be invented. This says that the U.S. (and now Japan, it seems) can assume the right to attack anyone whom it arbitrarily decides is evil and plans aggression. How do we decide that we face evil planners of aggression? When these people try to defend themselves from our threats of preemptive attack? So when North Korea buzzes a U.S. spy plane whose only purpose can be to prepare for a U.S. attack on North Korea, we are warned darkly that North Korea is behaving in aggressive ways that could amply justify a future U.S. attack. Needless to say, many in our media are happy to go along with this nonsense. There is only one way out of this morass: In the future, for every dollar spent on people whose sole interest is to create wars and conflicts, let's spend another dollar on the people who seek to create a better world without wars and conflicts. Gregory Clark is a former Australian diplomat and government adviser. A Japanese translation of this article can be accessed at www.gregoryclark.net The Japan Times: March 15, 2003 http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo20030315gc.htm
There is nothing "defensive" about sending 300,000 soldiers to the other side of the world, and attacking a nation that has not attacked us. And not legitimate, as the world is telling us. Pre-emption is an act of aggression, it means going out into the world, seeking out anyone and everyone who might attack us, and doing violence to them before they have done violence to us. The new doctrine of Pre-emption, which has replaced the Cold War's Containment and Deterrence, has made us the Rogue State that everyone else is trying to Deter and Contain. There is an endless list of nations who might attack us, so the doctrine of Pre-emption means an unending series of wars of aggression. The Hawks are trying to control the world through unilateral unlimited force. This is impractical, a refusal to see the world as it is. They are Hammers who see only Nails. The NeoCons are Utopians who see some glorious transformed perfect world, right after the U.S. Army does Regime Change #47. We are fighting the WarOnTerror, the way we fought and lost the WarOnDrugs. Same mindset, same tactics, same results. no rest for the wicked
Pre-emption is an act of survival, and damn right it means taking out the enemy before they take us out. As far as legitimacy, since when should the means by which we ensure our very survival depend on the whims of other nations, especially those who have used "illegitimate" means throughout their own histories to further their own national interests? That you and those like you will have no choice but to watch as we ensure the survival of this generation and those to come fills me with enormous glee.
hapaboy:`Pre-emption is an act of survival, and damn right it means taking out the enemy before they take us out.´ sick
What drives the peaceniks? Fear, simply fear. It distorts all their thinking, to the point that they begin to construct arguments against removal of a monster from power like Saddam Hussein.
The desire for peace. The IQ to understand a deadly threat. The understanding that there are few people on this planet capable of deadly destruction, and they must be stopped now. saddam is one of those people. I, for one, will sleep much better knowing a dirt bag like saddam, loaded up with chemical and biological weapons, can STILL BE ROUTED by the US military, without spreading massive destruction on the globe. When saddam is routed with minimal damage, the odds of a sudden chemical and/or biological attack go WAY DOWN. And then I, and millions others, can sleep better at night. Anyone with a normal mind can see this.
In his point of view, along with all the you-have-invaded-our-holy-lands-and-I-hate-Big-Macs philosophy, yes. Does that mean we should not ensure our own survival merely because our enemy has his own beliefs?!?
This is not at all surprising, really. The intelligentsia were dead against standing up to Hitler in the '30s. The idea of war to them was vulgar, and appeasement was simply the morally correct path. This is happening again. We have Hollywood stars, singers, and other peripheral people declaring that war with Iraq is wrong. We have a deadly killer, hell bent on getting and increasing his access to terribly destructive weapons. He is sitting on piles of oil which he can trade for money to accomplish this aim. We have already seen him attack Iran, then Kuwait, then his own people (the Kurds). We know that UN inspections don't work. After all, he was given a clean bill of health. Then through a defector the world realized that it had been hoodwinked. It is only a matter of time that either he himself or after him one of his sick sons, gets nuclear weapons. What is incredibly dangerous is that this mad man has friends in the civilized world. Even more dangerous men who are only too happy to sell him the rope with which he will turn around and hang them and the rest of the world. French, German, Russian, Chinese enterprises are biting at the bits to deal with Saddam. No one is more hungry than the French. They have a contract (through Elf Total) for oil exploration and export. That company has tightly tied its fortunes with the fortunes of the current regime in Iraq. They sell him military equipment (Mirage jets). And provide infrastructure (Alcatel won a $700 M contract for phone equipment in Baghdad). France knows that they have the best relationship with Saddam. That is why, in the 12 years since 1991 that he has evaded and frustrated the conditions of his surrender, France has been at the for front pushing desperately to have sanctions removed. There were several times were they came very very close. I dare not imagine where we would be had they succeeded. So what drives those who feel war is correctin this case? A correct perception of reality.