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from Japan Today March 11, 2003 http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=comment&id=358 The war lovers by Chalmers Johnson The Bush administration is marching off to a "preventive" war against Iraq. It has invented a series of pretexts to disguise its behavior from the American public and to try to achieve some degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the world. But senior figures in the Bush administration have actually been planning a war against Iraq for many years. In the hours immediately following the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked for plans to be drawn up for an American assault on Iraq. The following day, in a cabinet meeting at the White House, Rumsfeld again insisted that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism." The president was advised that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible" and he instead chose Afghanistan as a much easier target. According to press reports, the president made the final decision to go to war against Iraq during August 2002 in Crawford, Texas, when he accepted a war proposal that called for an invasion force of at least 150,000 troops rather than an Afghan-type force of approximately 75,000. He was told that assembling that many troops and weapons in the Persian Gulf would take about seven months. According to this schedule, the war would begin on or about March 1. Once Bush knew that he had to wait until the invasion force was in place, he ordered Colin Powell to proceed with the diplomatic efforts at the United Nations. However, he and his closest advisers have nothing but contempt for international law, multilateral organizations, allies, and any other constraints on America's unilateral power. He has demonstrated this on many other occasions-for example, his undercutting of the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the International Criminal Court. Nonetheless, regardless of the duration or outcome of the war, Bush's action will destroy the system of international order built up since the end of World War II. By setting itself up as the sole judge of the legitimacy of its own preemptive strikes, and taking unilateral action outside the framework of the U.N., the United States violates the three most basic principles of international behavior established in the 17th century following the Thirty Years' War. These are the maintenance of order through deterrence, that is, a balance of power rather than war, the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of sovereign states, and the requirement that a nation obtains international legitimation for undertaking military action. The Bush administration argues that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has links with terrorist groups, but none have been found. It says that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, although these were all demolished after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and new ones cannot be built so long as the U.N. inspectors are there. These pretexts are similar to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of August 7, 1964, through which the U.S. informally declared war on North Vietnam. We now know that President Lyndon B Johnson lied to the Congress and the public in order to continue waging his private foreign policy. The same thing is happening today. That the issue of Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction is phony is underscored by the case of North Korea, which really does possess such weapons. The U.S. rightly understands that it cannot go to war in Korea without destroying South Korea and therefore must negotiate a mutually acceptable outcome. Moreover, North Korea is offering reasonable terms: it wants an internationally recognized statement by the U.S. that it will not wage preventive war against it. In return, North Korea will shut down its processes for producing plutonium and weapons-grade uranium and will allow international inspections. South Korea and China have offered extensive economic assistance. Iraq is a small country, with a population almost exactly the same size as North Korea's (22.6 million versus 21 million). It can easily be disarmed and deterred by international inspectors, as has been demonstrated since its defeat in the first Gulf War. It would not have been able to wage war against Iran in the 1980s if the U.S. and other Western countries had not armed it with a vast array of modern munitions, including chemical and biological agents. There is simply no legitimate reason to go to war against Iraq at the present time. The actual reasons for America's belligerence are its desire to control Iraq's oil, bolster the warlike strategy of Ariel Sharon and the Likud Party in Israel, and distract the American public from domestic issues. These domestic issues include the questionable way in which George W Bush became president, his offers of tax breaks for the very wealthy, huge and growing U.S. government deficits, corporate corruption (e.g., Enron) and the looting of workers' pension funds, and the attempt to reverse decades of environmental protection laws. The blowback from a war in Iraq is incalculable. It is likely to include much more terrorism - not just by al-Qaida but by many localized Islamic groups; the break-up of Iraq and the attempt by Kurds in Iraq and Turkey to form an independent state; a possible war between Pakistan and India and a rise in Hindu fundamentalism in India; and a genuine holocaust against the Palestinians by the Israelis. Meanwhile, the most significant developments on the Korean Peninsula are anti-Americanism among the South Korean people, the election of Roh Moo Hyun as president, and the repeated statements that South Korea is willing to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea rather than allow a return of war between the two halves of Korea. South Korea today is a confident country with over twice the population of North Korea. It has recovered from the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-caused economic crisis of 1997, its leading trading partner is China, and it no longer fears North Korea's tentative efforts to end its isolation. There are over 100 U.S. military bases in South Korea and a Status of Forces Agreement that puts South Korea in the position of a dependency of the American empire. However, if a solution can be found to North Korea's current demands, it is likely that the new South Korea government will ask that the U.S. begin a gradual withdrawal of troops from its soil. When this happens, it may unravel the entire American military position in East Asia. It will have the same effect on America's military bases in East Asia that the breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had on the Soviet Union's empire in Eastern Europe. At a bare minimum, the people of Okinawa will once again demand that U.S. forces in Japan leave their overcrowded islands. The Japanese public itself may begin to question seriously why there are still 91 U.S. military bases in their country 58 years after the end of World War II. The U.S.'s military stance in East Asia is anachronistic. The major trends in the area are commercial, including China's decisive turn toward capitalist economic development, free trade agreements between the Southeast Asian countries and China, and the growing economic integration between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. As China begins to achieve levels of wealth comparable to those of the rest of East Asia, a basis for genuine stability, not one imposed by military force, is created. The main cause for pessimism in East Asia is the political and economic situation in Japan. After Japan's tremendous postwar economic growth, it made several decisive errors. Instead of enlarging domestic demand and establishing mutually beneficial trading relations with the other countries of East Asia, it continued to rely on its old Cold War relationship with the U.S. During the 1990s Japan's political system failed to reorient the country's economic strategy, and thus Japan began a long decline until it may soon become the Argentina of East Asia - a once-rich country that has lost its way. The most optimistic development in world politics is the emergence of public protest movements against undemocratic organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization and, most recently, against imperialist wars launched by the world's self-proclaimed "indispensable nation." The mobilization of masses of people in virtually every democratic country on earth is creating new political forces. If American and British politicians continue to ignore and subvert the will of their own and their allies' electorates, they face retaliation at the polls and international isolation economically and politically. --------------------------- The writer received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1962, he began teaching political science at Berkeley, and did so until 1988, when he moved to the San Diego campus of the University of California. He retired in 1992. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies from 1967 until 1972. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. Johnson has penned many articles, reviews and some twelve books on Asian subjects. His latest books include "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire" (2000) and "The Sorrows of Empire: How Americans Lost Their Country," which will be published later this year. __________________________ http://www.japantoday.com/ ===== LMNOP http://lmno4p.org "No War for Oil!" __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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