STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Start Your Own FREE Email List at http://www.listbot.com/links/joinlb ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Strangelove rides again In the early hours of this morning, the United States launched a missile that could smash through 30 years of global arms control. Here our foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont condemns the 'Big Dog' diplomacy of George W. Bush Special report: George Bush's America Sunday July 15, 2001 The Observer In the summer of 1999, in the closing hours of the Kosovo war, an angry exchange took place in Macedonia's capital, Skopje, between Nato's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Wesley Clark and Mike Jackson, the British general given the job of leading Nato's troops into Kosovo. A planeload of Russian soldiers, earmarked for the peacekeeping force for Kosovo, KFor, had landed at Pristina's airport even before the first Nato troops had crossed the border stealing an embarrassing march on Nato. Clark was furious and ordered Jackson to take the airfield, by force if necessary, and block the runway to prevent the Russians reinforcing with any extra troops. Jackson, Clark recalls in his memoirs, called him aside and told him: 'I am not taking orders from Washington.' As Clark tried to prevail by reminding Jackson of his senior rank, Jackson cut him short. 'Sir,' he added with cold fury: 'I am not starting World War Three for you!' The significance of that Clark/Jackson exchange took on an urgent new meaning last week as the United States set itself on collision course with international opinion by announcing further tests in Alaska for its proposed National Missile Defence (NMD) umbrella that even its own officials concede would lead America into 'conflict' with the 30-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty 'within months'. What that exchange represented, according to analysts like Dan Plesch of the British-American Security Information Council, was the most practical demonstration to date of America's emerging new military doctrine. It is a doctrine that threatens to abandon the two cornerstones of western security policy - multilateralism and deterrence - and replace them with a set of assumptions based on selfishness and self-belief. Instead, it offers Big Dog diplomacy. This 'Big Dog' world view - held by old Reaganites and right-wingers flapping like moths around the overheated beacon of the Bush administration - is arrogant, unilateralist and aggresive. Since the US is the pre-eminent world military and economic power, goes the Big Dog argument, there is no need for negotiated consensus where it is not in America's direct interest - for example, Bush's rejection of the Kyoto agreements to cut global warming. The US is the Big Dog, so it should set the rules for international engagement, from nuclear disarmament to conventional weapons proliferation, on its own terms. 'What the incident between Clark and Jackson showed,' said Plesch last week, 'was just how ready people in the US were to get into a potential shooting match with the Russians even before Bush came into power. They were not bothered about the risk of engaging the Russians because as the world's only remaining superpower, it was a shooting match they assumed that they would inevitably win.' This sentiment exposes the lie at the heart of Bush's National Missile Defence programme. For, while President Bush's envoys have been assiduously selling the 'son of Star Wars' as a primarily defensive umbrella that would protect America and its allies from surprise missile strikes by pariah states such as North Korea or Iraq, the reality is very different. NMD, far from being a passive defensive system, is emblematic of America's shift towards being a more aggressively threatening military power - albeit at long range. The hard sell will have been continuing early this morning. With President Bush already committed to deploying his 'son of star wars' within four years, the latest test of the troubled system - a missile intercept scheduled for 2.00 am British time - was as much a PR exercise aimed at convincing the doubters among America's European allies that shooting down rogue missiles is all that his missile defence programme is about. The real issue, experts insist, is not whether an anti-missile system is feasible or desirable, but what kind of military and diplomatic policies a United States, already enjoying a massive military advantage in terms of conventional forces, would enact under a protective umbrella able to neutralise the threat of a nuclear strike on the US mainland. What those policies might be is described in unequivocal terms by military thinkers in a series of papers that the Bush administration has embraced wholeheartedly. Key among them is the discussion document produced by the US National Institute for Public Policy in January - 'Rationale and Requirements for US Nuclear Forces and Arms Control', whose contributors include figures long associated with the hierarchy of America's nuclear weapons labs - the Strangeloves de nos jours. The missile defence programme, as that report makes clear, is only one element in a transformed US military landscape that, taken to its logical conclusion, would extend the notion of casualty-free warfare way beyond operations like the US bombing missions over Kosovo. They are now beginning to believe they can have a casualty-free (on the US side at least) nuclear war. The document nails the lie of missile defence as a purely defensive system by recommending that the US should adopt it as part of an integrated 'counterforce' strategy against both major powers and regional rivals. The National Missile Defence programme, put bluntly, is a system designed to enhance America's war-fighting capability, reducing the risk of US casualties while optimising conditions for US cruise missiles and jets to hit their targets. But what targets. And where? On this point at least, the same hawks who have insisted that a NMD system should be an act of faith for Bush's Republican administration have been considerably less coy. The enemy-in-waiting - as numerous officials and fellow travellers of the Republican right have made clear is China, a country ideologically repulsive to the True Believers of the Republican right and marked out as an economic and military rival which will inevitably come into conflict with the US over dominance of the Pacific. Frighteningly, these same hawks have become eager students of the military history of the last century, reading up on everything from the Dreadnought race between Britain and Germany to the causes of Pearl Harbour. What their reading has persuaded them is that when war is inevitable, timing is everything. America may have to strike first. By that twisted logic they need their missile umbrella to do it. So let's be clear about what Bush's big new idea adds up to. It is not about a safer world. It is about a creeping doctrine of pre-emption in pursuit of remaining the Big Dog. It is the diplomacy of the Dreadnought made modern. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001 ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
