http://www.babelmagazine.com/issue92/newworld.html
The New World Order and Iraq: Towards World Empire or World Government?
by Dexter Raymond III
The drums of war in the Middle East are beating ever louder as the Bush Administration signals that its “patience” is running out with Iraq. Speaking last Sunday at that most recent convocation of global planners, the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, Secretary of State Colin Powell left no doubt that “time was running out” for Iraq. Warning that if Iraq “does not disarm peacefully,” it “will be disarmed” anyway, as the U.S. “will not shrink from war” to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction (BBC News, 01/26/03). President Bush’s State of the Union address also erased any uncertainty that war is coming. His soothing statement to U.S. troops that “some crucial hours may lay ahead” revealed that rather than it being a case of “If war is forced upon us…” that war will shortly be forced on Iraq. Bush and Powell’s warnings also brazenly confirmed a Reuters (01/22/03) report, citing a source in Russia’s armed forces that the U.S. plans to invade Iraq in mid-February once an attack force of 150,000 had been assembled. War is close, probably closer than we think.
The obvious question is to what end this imminent war? What is the real purpose of this invasion, and the suffering it will surely cause not just in Iraq but also across the Middle East, which has emerged out of the “War on Terror”? There are two explanations that go against the Bush Administration’s propaganda.
The first explanation is imperial greed, or more precisely, greed for oil. According to Reuters anonymous Russian source, for instance, the motive behind the imminent invasion of Iraq is control of oil: “[Saddam] Hussein is a pretext. The real aim of the military action is to secure U.S. control over Iraqi oilfields.” This fits into many leftist criticisms of Bush’s plans, which present it as little more than a push to establish a global empire. To quote Professor William Tabb from City University of New York, writing in the Marxist periodical Monthly Review (November 2002): “This war is focused on oil and the assertion of an American Empire – the right of the hegemonic sector of U.S. capitalism to rule the world.”
The other prevalent view, particularly in the what-we-might-term “real” alternative media, given that mainstream outlets are less restrained in their contempt for it, is that the invasion is part of plans to establish world government. Thus in this magazine in mid-January, (Babel 01/19/03) Paul Walker of Aftermath News wrote:
“American Imperialism” is the biggest misnomer going around right now. It’s a UN-sponsored, UN-approved and UN-Orchestrated War on Humanity to keep everybody in line, dancing to the drumbeat of the New World Order … Bush is simply carrying out the UN’s mandate for global transformation. That’s all.”
So which is it to be? But then again, must it be one or the other? Could Bush’s rampant imperialism merely be a step towards the establishment of a system of global domination; or is it a step that must be overcome? We can find the answer by looking at one of the less well-observed oddities of the current crisis, namely the opposition of much of the Eastern Establishment to Bush’s agenda. The overt reasons for this opposition are clear: Bush’s approach is unilateralist, not multilateralist, he is contemptuous of the UN and other international institutions, and he threatens to destabilize international order. There are numerous examples of these sentiments.
Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace writing in the London Review of Books (11/3/02) described Bush’s plan to invade Iraq as “destructive of international order”, as well as “profoundly reckless.” Lieven blamed “neo-conservative nationalists” among Bush’s team, especially Vice President Cheney, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and head of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, for pursuing a plan for “unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority.” This now dominant group in the Bush Administration, observed Lieven:
…have now openly abandoned the underlying philosophy and strategy of the Clinton Administration, which was to integrate the other major states of the world in a rule-based liberal capitalist order, thereby reducing the threat of rivalry between them.
Instead of the U.S. leading “the rest of the world by example and consensus,” Lieven concluded, America has now become “a menace to itself and mankind.”
Michale Hirsh, formerly of Newsweek, writing in the Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) periodical Foreign Affairs (September/October 2002), took aim at “Bush’s stunted vision” and the “unilateralist ideologues” behind it, noting that:
While Bush talks of defending civilization, his administration seems almost uniformly to dismiss most of the civilities and practices that other nations would identify with a common civilization … The yearly round of talks at institutions such as the G-7 group of major industrialized nations, NATO or the World Trade Organization, are the social glue of global civilization … But Bush, to judge by his actions, appears to believe in a kind of unilateral civilization. NATO gets short shrift, the United Nations is an afterthought, treaties are not considered binding, and the administration brazenly sponsors protectionist measures at home such as new steel tariffs and farm subsidies. Any compromise of Washington’s freedom to act is treated as a hostile act.
In the same issue of Foreign Affairs, Professor G. John Ikenberry, from Georgetown University, made this criticism of Bush’s strategy:
[I]t threatens to rend the fabric of the international community and political partnerships, precisely at a time when that community and those partnerships are urgently needed.
There are two obvious ways this can be interpreted. The first, and probably most in line with what thinking there is (which isn’t much) on this CFR/Establishment opposition to Bush is that it merely fits into a broader scheme in which people are being encouraged to embrace the UN and by extension, what David Rockefeller once called the “super-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers,” as the sane alternative to Bush’s “recklessness” and “stunted vision”. According to this reasoning Bush is yet another fall guy, the ultimate back-up plan to Osama Bin Laden and the other perpetrators of 9/11. Basically should the need for a “War on Terror” fail to convince people of the need for international government then the fear of the world’s last remaining superpower, the United States, under the lunatic leadership of Bush and his war-mongering cronies should serve as a more terrifying incentive.
Exploring this further we can see that such reasoning motivates much of the anti-war movement. For instance, articles in one of the leading progressive publications in the U.S., The Nation, have attacked Bush not just for imperialism but of “subverting the UN” and its “vicious undermining of multilateralism and international law in general, and of in the United Nations in particular.” The authors of these words, David Krieger and former CFR member Richard Falk (Nation, 4/11/02), also noted that most anti-war protestors “perhaps do not realize that they are also fighting to retain an international order based on multilateralism, the rule of law and the United Nations itself.” We might note that most recent polls of Americans indicate that support for unilateral U.S. intervention in Iraq is not only small, but it is falling. Indeed an increasing number of Americans would only support a military invasion of Iraq that had been approved by the United Nations.
The other explanation, one that does not presuppose the level of absolute control over the U.S. government as imagined by David Icke (Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster) and Michael Schelstrate (PrisonPlanet.com) for example; is that the architects of Bush’s plan for world domination actually believe in it and are not puppets being manipulated by hooded Higher Masters in the dark nooks and crannies of Washington D.C. As detailed by David Armstrong in Harper’s Magazine (October 2002) and elsewhere, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalizad and other members of the current Bush Administration had developed a plan for U.S. military global domination at the end of the Cold War under Bush Sr. It was a plan that sought to maintain U.S. dominance while keeping the UN and other international organizations weak and ineffectual. Only the defeat of Bush Sr. prevented that plan from being enacted – then. But times have changed and Bush Jr. is now in control and the designers of the original blueprint have returned to finish the job.
That makes Establishment opposition to Bush real. But that is no cause for celebration or complacency, for the outcomes will still be the same, only that the New World Order will be established through Bush’s global defeat not his victory. Whether Bush believes it or not, the military act of “regime change” in Iraq will have disastrous consequences in the region and the world. Attempts by the U.S. to actually dominate the world will lead to conflict with other nations, conflicts that neither the U.S. economy nor the American people will support. In the long run Bush’s unintended legacy will be a massive strengthening of the system of institutionalized international order, all at the expense of our individual rights and liberties.
It was a common cliché in the aftermath of the terrible events of September 11 that the “world had changed” and things would “never be the same.” We are seeing the results of that now. Over the next few years we can anticipate that the changes will be more profound, as well as painful, as a global civilization emerges from the wreckage of Bush’s doomed drive for world domination…
