########################################################################## # If Goanet stops reaching you, contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # Want to check the archives? http://www.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
From: http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/article.jsp?content=20041122_93416_93416 A review of Gwynne Dyer's book. Gwynne is a respected war commentator of CBC. Interesteing reading. ============= Consider Gwynne Dyer's disturbing Future: Tense (McClelland & Stewart), an ultimately more convincing explanation for Iraq. You don't have to invade oil-producing countries--at a cost of US$120 billion and 1,100 American lives (and counting)--to get oil, Dyer points out, "You just write them a cheque." Most OPEC economies are so dependent on foreign exchange that they peddle their oil to anyone; in fact, half of Iraq's oil exports went to the U.S., of all countries, in the month before Bush's invasion. Dyer finds the root of the assault in what he calls the neo-conservative project, "a half-crazed manifesto for American world domination." While its more radical proponents are found in the Republican party, there is considerable support across American public life for the idea that the U.S. should seize the unipolar moment--the respite between the implosion of the Soviet Union and the inevitable rise of China--to cement its currently unchallengeable global superiority. That means the U.S. must break free of the multilateral restraints it helped foster after the Second World War--including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty--and find a new justification for the immense military might built up during the Cold War. "Rogue nations" and the terrorist attacks of 2001 providentially provided the pretext. And in the electrified post-9/11 atmosphere, "Iraq practically nominated itself" as a means of showing the world that all the rules had changed. The danger in the situation is far greater than a possible surge in Islamist terrorism, according to Dyer, who insists: "The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq." If the Americans are still there five years from now, still engaged in their "adventure in unilateralism," what's now left of international institutions will be shredded. "The UN will start to die," Dyer warns, as the other great powers start to take the old, bad steps to protect their interests that they took in the generation before 1914. Inherently dangerous alliances and arms races will follow.
