BY ROHAN PEARCE
Has the world gone mad? The months since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have shown how brutal and callous the terribly misnamed "war on terrorism" is. Now we see the "Bush Doctrine" expanded to include "first strike" rights for the world superpower. A June 10 Washington Post report, that stated under the new policy "nuclear first strikes would be considered weapons of last resort", offers little comfort.
In a June 1 speech at the West Point military academy, US President George Bush began to spell out his aim of removing the need to justify US attacks on anyone it chooses. "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies", the president of the world's greatest possessor of nuclear weapons told the audience. "If we wait for threats to fully materialise, we will have waited too long."
If the speech had been made by someone other than the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force in the world, it might be easy to laugh it off as the product of a crank. But as Bush said: "The attacks of September 11th required a few hundred thousand dollars in the hands of a few dozen evil and deluded men. All of the chaos and suffering they caused came at much less than the cost of a single tank." We can only imagine what one evil and deluded man can do with a military machine funded to the tune of $396 billion in the 2003 financial year.
So are the lunatics running the asylum? Quite possibly, but underneath Bush's Orwellian doublespeak, and at times incoherent rambling, lies the twisted logic of imperialism, underpinned by First World governments' need to suppress dissident Third World populations to enable greater and greater corporate exploitation.
The aims of this imperialist war have nothing to do with preventing terrorism — individual acts of politically motivated violence. Rather, under the new doctrine, terrorism is defined as any expression of dissent against US global hegemony.
Almost every speech made by a representative of an imperialist country regarding the implementation of neo-liberal economic and social policies has at least a token reference to combating terrorism. Bush's May 23 speech in Germany's Bundestag, thanking the German government for its support for the US-led rampage in Afghanistan, even referred to "class struggle"! For the rulers in the US and other imperialist countries, "democracy" equals the "free" market and "fighting terrorism" means enriching the world's corporate elite.
Policy change?
The "first strike" policy has to be understood in the context of there being just one world superpower, the USA. It is not so much a "shift" in policy as an escalation of, and attempt to publicly legitimise, the policy that US imperialism has always followed: increasing its military and economic control of the globe.
It's not, as one essay published by the US Center for Defense Information maintains, a policy which "runs completely against US political and strategic culture". It is, in fact, the logical conclusion of US imperialist policy being freed from the constraints previously imposed on it by the existence of a counter-balancing superpower, and strengthened by the shift in US public opinion in support of US military interventions overseas.
Always the loyal lieutenant, the Australian government has pledged support for Washington's policy of "pre-emptive" mass destruction. Defence minister Senator Robert Hill told a defence and strategic studies class at the Australian Defence Force (ADF) on June 18 that the US "is clearly no longer going to allow problems to fester and threats to remain unresolved.
"The need to act swiftly and firmly before threats become attacks is perhaps the clearest lesson of 11 September, and is one that is clearly driving US policy and strategy. It is a position which we share, in principle."
Hill reaffirmed the Australian government's support in a June 20 interview with the 7.30 Report's Kerry O'Brien: "A key lesson of the events of September 11 is that when a threat is seen to be emerging, that you don't wait for the attack before you respond."
The Australian government's support for "first strike" comes as no surprise. Australia is part of the "great crusade", not just as deputy to the US, but also as a minor imperialist power with its own sphere of influence in Asia and the South Pacific, and its own political and economic interest in "regional stability".
After his ADF speech, Hill was quizzed by the audience about his government's support for a US assault on Iraq, even if Iraq didn't strike first. Hill said, "Yes, we are not waiting for attacks any longer."
According to a June 16 New York Times article, however, "The United States does not know whether Iraq has acquired nuclear or biological weapons, but [Bush] suggests that the only prudent course is to assume it has". The June 10 Washington Post quoted a Pentagon consultant: "I think the president is trying to get the American people ready for some kind of preemptive move" against Iraq. The report stated, "He said it would not necessarily be against Iraqi weapons sites but might instead involve a seizure of Iraqi oil fields".
No proof required
The 1998 US bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and the mass destruction unleashed on Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent bombings, indicate the probable horrendous consequences of a new US attack. But then chemical weapons/medicines: what's the difference? After all, the US/UN sanctions on Iraq, which are being enforced with the help of the Australian navy, don't make the distinction.
Bush said in his West Point speech, "We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants who solemnly sign non-proliferation treaties, and then systemically [sic] break them". He obviously didn't have himself in mind; Bush doesn't so much break non-proliferation treaties as destroy them.
In his speech to the Bundestag, the US president told German parliamentarians: "We have moved beyond an ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] treaty that prevented us from defending our people and our friends. Some warned that moving beyond the ABM treaty would cause an arms race."
Of course, there is still an arms race, but it is now very much a one-horse race. In January, a classified report — the Nuclear Posture Review — was submitted to the US Congress. It examined a variety of options for developing the US nuclear arsenal, including canvassing ways to integrate nuclear weapons into the conventional army.
Equally worrying is the claim in the June 10 Washington Post report that, since 1998, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency has been studying how to "attack and destroy hardened and deeply buried bunkers containing chemical, biological and radiological weapons with advanced conventional bombs, low-yield nuclear devices and even high-yield nuclear weapons".
The "first strike" doctrine helps legitimatise pre-emptive attacks against US targets even if, according to US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a NATO meeting on June 6, there is no "absolute proof" of a planned attack on the US or the development of weapons of mass destruction by dissident states. This is particularly convenient for the US rulers when applied to Iraq, where there is no proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
The "war on terrorism" is far from over, according to Bush. However, "In Afghanistan it was begun well", Bush told his West Point audience. There have now been more civilians killed in that war than were people killed on September 11. Warlords with as bloody a reputation as the Taliban are now in control.
We can be sure that Prime Minister John Howard and the Australian government will stand "proud" with the US in the next bloody instalment of this war.
Even before Hill's "all the way with GWB" speech at the ADF, Howard had been busy in Washington with the White House war-mongers assuring them that Australia was just waiting for the call to arms.
On June 12, addressing the US "chamber of democracy" (Howard's misnomer for Congress), Howard stated that the US "has over recent months led a great reaffirmation of all of those great values and principles on which both of our societies are based".
Howard and Bush: a true "axis of evil" if ever there was one!
From Green Left Weekly, June 26, 2002.
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