- Monday, March 10th begins a week whose importance could
possibly, even probably, prove as significant, in its own way, as the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis. This memorandum serves to summarize the following
crucial issues of the present crisis.
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- 1 - The Root of the Crisis -
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- The first factor, the root of this crisis, is a Classical
quality of existential crisis within the institutions of the U.S. government.
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- The pivotal issue of the crisis is, as France's representative
said, implicitly, the issue of war or peace as such. Is not Saddam Hussein
or Iraq, but primarily two distinct but converging features of the current
U.S. Bush Administration:
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- a. The influence of the imperialist followers of the
late fascist ideologue, Professor Leo Strauss, in creating the core of
those war-mongers known variously as the "Chickenhawks" or "neo-cons."
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- b. The convergence among those pro-imperialist "neo-cons"
inside the Bush Administration, with the thoughtless, stubborn, barnyard-style
unilateralism expressed by President George W. Bush.
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- An added feature of the crisis, on the U.S. side, is
that Cheney's and Wolfowitz's lunatic tribe of neo-con "Chickenhawk"
fanatics, is reenforced by those organized-crime-linked, pro-imperialist
hard-core DLC Democrats who are typified by the circle of cronies of right-wing
ideologue and war-monger Senator Joseph Lieberman.
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- What this bipartisan combination of imperialists and
Bush's unilateralism has done, is to exploit the frightening effects of
Sept. 11, 2001 to unleash a policy which currently sets the United States
against, in fact, the most vital interests of every other sovereign nation-state
of the planet.
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- Summarily, if the U.S.A. is allowed to use the UNO-outlawed
threat of unilateral force, even the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear
states, to blackmail the UN Security Council into tolerating an attack
on Iraq, that precedent will either:
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- *soon establish a U.S. world-empire modelled upon the
ancient Roman Empire
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- *force the nations of the world to undermine the power
of the U.S.A. to conduct such policies, or
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- *send the world to spend a few generations in Hell as
punishment for failing to prevent the proposed war.
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- In effect, as I, my wife, and others associated with
me have warned on earlier occasions, the current Iraq policy of the Bush
Administration is a caricature of the same hubristic folly which led ancient
Athens into the tragic Peloponnesian War.
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- Unfortunately, "Education President" Bush,
is not notably strong on the subject of history.
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- For the U.S. to declare itself on the brink of launching
unilateral, imperial warfare when there is no objective need to go to war,
especially when we have all the power and support we would require did
a need exist, is not only a great folly, as the case of the Peloponnesian
War attests; To launch such a war under such unlawful pretexts, including
the pretext of the fraudulent reports transmitted from Israeli and other
origins, through British channels, into an address of Secretary of State
Colin Powell and the UNO Security Council, is also a crime against humanity,
under the implications of those precedents accumulated since the 1648 Treaty
of Westphalia. These are precedents freshly acknowledged, in 1945-1946,
as the lessons adduced from the combined experience of two preceding World
Wars.
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- In fact, the unilateral Anglo-American warfare threatened
by the bipolar froth from certain official and mass-media Washington and
London sources, is not a war prompted by any action by Iraq itself. It
is the use of wildly exaggerated allegations of external threats from Iraq
as a pretext for launching what has been called by some relevant circles
"A Clash of Civilizations" war, a war against not only the Arab
world as a whole, not only the Islamic populations as a whole, but also
China, and targets beyond. This threatens the outbreak, even during the
month of March, of the third geopolitical world war launched by imperial
maritime (and aerial) power against continental Eurasia as a whole.
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- That, in summary, supports the case which France has
presented against the arguments presented by the U.S. and British spokesmen.
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- In effect, the current U.S. Administration has declared
an imperial war policy against the world. The events of Sept. 11, 2001,
have been mis-used as a cover for reviving this imperial "preventive"
nuclear war policy, first pushed during the mid-1940s by the evil Bertrand
Russell and his pack of utopians, and later pushed during the 1991-1996
interval by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and by Israel's right wing.
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- The saner, and less purchasable majority among the world's
governments are now saying to the current U.S. Administration: "True
friends do not encourage a stubborn ally in such a piece of lunatic folly
as the present strategic posture. We oppose your foolishness for your own
good. You need our advice, desperately, much more than we need yours."
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- 2 - An Accelerating Economic Collapse -
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- The second aspect of the present crisis is that the Bush
Administration pushes this imperialist folly under the conditions of the
2000-2003 plunge of the economies of the Americas and Europe into an now
accelerating economic collapse of the world's present monetary-financial
system.
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- As I have said frequently: Rome launched its drive to
empire when Rome was at its relatively great strength; President Bush's
Administration has launched its campaign at precisely the point the U.S.A.'s
economy is disintegrating internally at an accelerating rate. As James
Carville said in 1992, so today, the problems of President Bush's desire
for re-election are summed up essentially as, "It's the economy, stupid!"
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- Under such economic conditions, unless there were a type
of direct present threat by Iraq to the U.S.A. or other relevant nations,
which does not presently exist in fact, the launching of such a war by
the U.S. would be criminal, because it would be axiomatically unjustified
under the modern natural law of nations.
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- Under the presently bankrupt economic policy thinking
of the presently bankrupt U.S. Bush Administration, the U.S. has no means
for carrying through the regional Middle East and broader war detonated
by its assault on Iraq to a successful "exit" toward durable
peace.
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- The currently demonstrated folly of the most recent of
the U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan, where the threat today, created
by "a successful war," is worse than at the outset of that war,
illustrates the point.
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- The demonstrated folly of the operations in Afghanistan,
if repeated in the Middle East, would be a degree of negligent misconduct,
like that of Ariel Sharon, which future courts might adjudge as having
been criminal.
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- On the subject of Middle East peace, note the exemplary
lesson from the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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- During the past two decades, circles associated with
Ariel Sharon and others have been conducting wars into Lebanon, against
Syria, and others, for the purpose of stealing water from such aquifers
as those of the Litani River and Golan Heights, in addition to looting
the supplies along the Jordan. This was done as part of a continuing "Eretz
Israel" policy of driving the Palestinians from their traditional
habitation, to make way for immigrants lured into Israel by larcenous real-estate
speculators associated with Sharon et al. In fact, there is no possibility
of establishing and maintaining peace in any part of this and adjoining
regions, without an aggressive policy of developing new sources of potable
water which are sufficient for the needs of all of the present and foreseeable
populations of the region.
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- The lack of that and related economic development of
basic economic infrastructure of the Middle East region becomes, in and
of itself, a source of increasing conflict among the region's populations,
whether or not any of those populations desire such conflict. When the
consequences are considered, opposition to, or even failure to promote
such development, partakes of a criminal quality of negligence.
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- Thus, the current U.S. Administration's fanatical extension
of those economic policies of the 1971-2003 interval, which have produced
the economic crisis of the present, failed world monetary-financial system,
is itself a cause of those homicidal conflicts which could become a major
threat to the U.S.A. as well as Europe and the Americas. Under such present
circumstances, wasting precious, scarce economic resources on a needless
and bottomless expenditure for warfare, is not the practice of sane governments.
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- 3 - The Strategic Triangle Alternative -
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- There are urgent and available alternatives to the folly
of the U.S. "Chickenhawks'" proposed Middle East war.
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- Look at the present situation in Eurasia defined by the
onrushing economic collapse of the world's 1971-2003 monetary-financial
system.
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- Happily, under the present conditions of the world economic
crisis which "Education President" Bush is unable to recognize,
there has emerged a set of overlapping blocs of transcontinental cooperation
in continental Eurasia. In western Europe, the "European Triangle"
of opposition to the Middle East war, built around France, Germany, and
Russia, is implicitly a growing partner in technology-sharing with the
set of nations grouped around the Eurasian Strategic Triangle of Russia,
China, India, et al.
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- This includes the North Asia Triangle of Russia, China,
and Korea, and, hopefully, the participation of industrial Japan. It includes
the nations of the ASEAN group, now brought closer together by the new
phase of the Mekong River development project.
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- Western continental Europe's neighbors have a vital interest
in the success of those multi-triangular systems of cooperation for mutual
security and development. Every sane, informed member of the British Isles
opposes Prime Minister Blair's wild-eyed rush to war, partly because they
know, even instinctively, that the economic future of those Isles depends
crucially upon integration in continental Eurasian economic development.
Turkey, similarly, looks forward to integration within the European Union.
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- We in the U.S.A., should be partners in the success of
such emerging new systems of cooperation. We should be applying the same
principles of progress to reviving those republics of Central and South
America which U.S. economic, monetary, and financial policies of 1971-2003
have done the most to ruin.
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- We do not lack solutions for the crises looming before
us this ominous week or two to come. The fault lies, in part, in the packs
of leaders in the present government, in the present leadership of our
principal political parties, of whom it could be said, as Shakespeare wrote:
"The fault, dear Brutus, lies in ourselves, that we are underlings."
The fault lies in those fools, fools of all ranks, but all mentally of
the state of mind of "underlings," who whimper, "But the
war is inevitable."
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- The fault lies, in large part, in the common men and
women who choose such leadership as that.
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- Small-minded men and women, give the name of "tradition,"
"popular opinion," and the like, to their folly, and thus, by
choice or negligence, select the small-minded leaders who reward the people
for that support as the leaders of fabled lemmings do: over the cliff to
a monstrous folly such as that proposed presently by the U.S.A. and U.K.
governments.
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- It is time to pull back from the brink of absolute lunacy.
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