ISRAEL has haughtily rejected the latest UN Security Council resolution, calling upon it to vacate its military occupation of the Palestinian towns as well as the trashed compound of Yasser Arafat in Ramallah. Ariel Sharon, justifying his moniker of a ‘butcher’, is pouring scorn on the UN by launching a ferocious attack on the Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel, thus, is in clear breach of a UN resolution, which also had Washington’s tacit endorsement, although US abstained from voting for it in the end. This makes Israel’s tally of UN resolutions rejected or not implemented by it, since 1973, at 29. The count of Israeli arrogance would have looked even taller if scores of those still-born resolutions vetoed by US to save its protege from embarrassment were taken into account.
George W. Bush has been faulting Iraq for its failure to implement, according to his count, 16 UN resolutions, and because of it, threatening to punish it militarily, with or without UN coming on board the American juggernaut.
Will Washington contemplate meeting out the same treatment to Israel as it is feverishly threatening to unleash against Iraq? Certainly not. To Bush, Ariel Sharon is “a man of peace”. He pinned this medal on Sharon’s chest after the Israelis had slaughtered hundreds of Palestinians in Jenin in April this year in cold blood, and then blocked Kofi Annan’s attempt to send a toothless fact-finding team to unearth the massacre.
Fittingly, the only comment from Washington on Sharon’s latest ‘pox on the UN’ antic is that this behaviour “is not helpful” to bring peace to Palestine. But Washington is not prepared to challenge, or even inconvenience, Sharon’s strategy to sabotage any attempt at peace-making.
His grand design for a ‘Greater Israel’ has no room for the Palestinians on the West Bank. Therefore, he has been relentlessly implementing his blueprint to spawn a situation where he would be able to expel all the Palestinians from occupied territories and annex them to Israel. US has been helping him to realize his life-ambition with five billion dollars in military aid annually. So, the world is witnessing a strange phenomenon in the making. Bush is not prepared to accept the Iraqi ‘yes’ for an answer because this ‘yes’ is likely to upset his plans to administer on Iraq another dose of American military might, the third in eleven years. Yet, this self-proclaimed ‘crusader’ in his declared war on terrorism feels quite at ease with Israel thumbing its nose at the UN and international community because that fits into his avowed objective to re-design the map of the Middle East.
As the Senate majority leader, the Democrat Tom Daschle, said the other day on the Senate floor blasting the Bush jingoism, “Our founding fathers would be embarrassed by what they are seeing going on right now.” Earlier, Nelson Mandela, a globally-respected icon of peace, had described the American bellicosity as a “threat to peace”.
However, the Mandelas of a world governed by the rule of law, or respect for international conventions, are not going to deter Bush and the war-mongers around him, sworn to transforming the world in their image. They have an agenda they are determined to pursue at all costs, whether the world likes it or not.
Bush’s speech at the UN General Assembly on September 12 was a naked display of raw arrogance and hubris. Focused entirely on Iraq, he taunted the UN to either measure up to his design or become irrelevant. He has since been holding a gun at the head of the Security Council, badgering it to come up with a “strong resolution” tailored to his specific requirement to declare war on Iraq; or, else, he is leaving no doubt that he will go it alone, against the saner advice of some elder statesmen of his Republican Party, such as former Secretary of State James Baker.
Bush has already set the ball rolling in Congress to bypass the UN, if it fails to come up to his expectations, and unleash the dogs of war on Iraq, armed with a legislation to take ‘pre-emptive’ military action against Iraq and Saddam Hussain.
A model of unilateralist ‘success’ is already there to instil confidence in the Bush team. Ariel Sharon’s relentless terror against unarmed Palestinians may look repulsive to the rest of the world, but inspires the likes of Donald Rumsfeld who is prepared to defy the world, and describes the Occupied Lands as “the so-called occupied territory.” Rumsfeld has justified the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian lands because, to him, Israel captured “this piece of real-estate” in 1967 and is entitled to keep it for good.
It is not hard to read the minds of the Bush team and decipher why they are behaving in so cavalier a fashion which is causing deep concern, even among America’s committed friends and allies in Europe. The stand taken by the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, puts Europe’s angst over a belligerent American on rampage in a sharp perspective.
The ‘Bushites’ are a cabal of people who have spent a life-time serving the interests of America’s military-industrial complex. Their first and foremost loyalties are to their patrons in the powerful lobbies, extolling US control over the sources of energy in the world because, failing that, it would be hard to maintain the American way of life. The Zionist lobby, too, has a chokehold on these people because it has bankrolled their political careers.
These ‘Bushites’ are an empire-oriented lot. They believe that September 11 has endowed the US a unique opportunity to fashion the world in its own image and colours. To these zealots, the time to do that is now or never. To them, Imperial Rome is a tempting and apposite model to emulate. They have long been saying that the US is the most powerful country in the world since the Roman Empire. The technological and other advancements have made United States the only power in the world with a global reach, just the way Rome was in its heyday. There is no power on earth which could stand up to the awesome military prowess of US, and none is likely to in the foreseeable future. Therefore, they argue, the world must start acknowledging the greatest military power on this planet and fashion its lives on the pattern laid down by US.
They do not talk of the US being an empire, but their recurrent allusion to Rome at its prime leaves little to doubt that they are anxious to follow in the footsteps of imperial Rome.
Rome, at its prime, asserted its supremacy by force and torched any pocket of resistance to its imperial claim. Carthage was driven into ruin because it had the gall to defy Pax Romana. Saddam Hussain’s Iraq is in defiance of America, and its ‘God-given’ right to reconstruct the world to suit its convenience. Therefore, Iraq must be destroyed, the way Carthage was.
Imperial Rome was unilateralist. It did not seek consent of, and advice from, others. It would not be Rome if it did. The word of Caesar was the ‘word of God’. Caesar’s edict had to be respected and honoured; it was a command, not a request. Therefore, the UN is irrelevant to America’s imperial ambitions. In fact, it is an encumbrance for Pax Americana, and amounts to interference in the world’s sole superpower’s authority to act on its own steam.
The empire-promoters like Rumsfeld, or his ultra-hawkish deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, or Richard Perle, chairman of Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board (who recently god-fathered the special study that denigrated Saudi Arabia as the “kernel of evil”), have been advocating the use of all means — and all weapons, including nuclear — to force the ‘rogue states’ to recognize the US imprimaturs and fall in line, whether they like it or not.
Rome not only crushed enemies, but also rewarded its satraps and proxies. Israel is the principal satrap of Imperial America in a part of the world which is of prime import to its global interests. Hence, Israel must be made so powerful and impregnable as to inspire awe and terror in the hearts of the ‘rogues’ surrounding it.
Israel has been cast in a fortress of military strength. It possesses, by independent accounts, at least two hundred nuclear warheads, in addition to huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. But these are assets to Pax Americana, and are, therefore, kosher and untouchable. But Iraq’s impugned and perceived weapons of mass destruction, despite independent outcries to the contrary, are a ‘threat’ and must be liquidated.
Finally, Imperial Rome decided how the resources of its vast domains had to be harnessed and apportioned in the service of the Empire. Its North African colonies (today’s Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) were extensively cultivated to become Rome’s granaries and bread-baskets.
When France occupied these lands, in the 19th century, the granaries were turned into vineyards. So, Imperial America has every right to lay claim to the rich oil deposits of Iraq (with proven reserves second only to Saudi Arabia). After all, the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had advocated, in 1973, when faced with the first oil embargo from OPEC, to seize the oil fields of Arabia because the embargo was “choking” the prosperity of Western economies.
Apologists defending the past one year’s record of the ‘Bushites’ deny that US is on an empire-mode. They say the US was founded in opposition to an empire (British) and will never be one itself. They also discount America’s potential to become another Rome because, unlike Rome, it does not have colonies abroad. But their defence, on both counts, is weak and unconvincing.
Yes, America was a reaction to an empire; it was also a noble experiment in asserting the rights of man to be independent and free. But it began badly by not granting freedom to its bonded (coloured) slaves for another hundred years, and conceded their rights only after a bloody civil war. And this noble experiment is going awry as the right of free men to speak freely is being rapidly circumscribed and wrested back from them in the shadow of September 11.
Those who knew the freedom of American press are dismayed and shocked by its abject surrender to the establishment since September 11, which is not surprising, as practically all major newspapers and television channels are owned by those hydra-headed corporations and big businesses that are principal bankrollers of the ‘Bushites.’ How would the kettle call the pot black.
So, McCarthyism along with its witch-hunts is raising its ugly head in today’s US at an alarming pace. It is looking frighteningly close to George Orwell’s macabre society of 1984. The Nobel Peace Laureate, and a venerated advocate of global understanding and harmony, Desmond Tutu, currently in Canada, has called it simply “scary”. The US is showing increasingly scant regard for international law, civility and decorum by arrogating to itself the right to decide the destiny of those too weak, or too poor, to stand up to it. As the gutsy Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, observed recently on the eve of the first anniversary of September 11, America, and the West on the whole, is being consumed by unbridled “greed”.
And it does not matter that the US has no colonies in the world. It has fully functional military bases in at least 40 countries — and some sort of basing facilities, landing rights et al in 132 countries out of the 190 member-states of the United Nations, giving it a global military reach that even Imperial Rome could never dream of.
Colonies may have become history (though not to Israel), but ‘basing right’ is a modern version of it which makes Pax Americana a living and viable reality. So if George W. Bush is threatening to sideline the UN, and devour Iraq “pre-emptively”, it is his right as a modern-day Caesar.
ISRAEL has haughtily rejected the latest UN Security Council resolution, calling upon it to vacate its military occupation of the Palestinian towns as well as the trashed compound of Yasser Arafat in Ramallah. Ariel Sharon, justifying his moniker of a ‘butcher’, is pouring scorn on the UN by launching a ferocious attack on the Palestinians in Gaza.
