STRANGE TIMES 2: FOREIGN POLICY AND THE LAWS OF PHYSICS
“Americans….. were convinced two decades ago that their best interests lay
in supporting Islamic fundamentalists battling a Soviet-backed in
Afghanistan. The ascendancy of the Taliban, and the shelter it offers Osama
bin Laden, shows how well that strategy turned out in the long run.” (New
York Times, 2/9/01, quoted in the UK magazine Private Eye 21/9 – 4/10/01).
Quite. And as the ramifications of that policy continue to unfold, another
guiding principle of foreign policy becomes ever more apparent: To each and
every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. From the pre- and
post-WWII Middle East when the British government co-ordinated a series of
puppet fiefdoms in the Gulf from Egypt through to the Yemen, to protect the
Suez Canal and vital oil fields, to the takeover in the region by the US,
pre- and post-Suez in 1956, an increasingly worn piece of elastic has been
wound and wound until it has nowhere else to go. Just as the overthrow of
the Shah in Iran in 1977 and the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein
showed, from the beginning, the much-vaunted ‘dual containment’ policy of
the State department and the CIA has contained nothing, and served only to
give the worst forms of Islamic extremism a fertile recruiting ground. Or,
rather, it has contained one thing of overwhelming political importance; the
price of petrol, which as we saw from the previous posting has changed
little in real terms since the 1950s. Now, however, the real price of that
petrol is becoming obvious, in terms of the civilian casualties in the WTC
and the lives of US serving men and women, who are about to pay the bill;
one wonders if Mr and Mrs Middle-America wouldn’t have preferred slightly
more expensive petrol if they had realised the cost to them would be their
children. But then, they were never given the information to choose or the
opportunity, were they? And in that respect nothing is going to change……..
truly, the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.
Take, for instance, the much-vaunted clamp-down announced by Mr Bush on
organisations and banks alleged to have acted as conduits for Al-Qaeda
money; in the UK alone some £47 million of assets were frozen. Seemingly Mr
Bush has taken an effective step to at least block terrorist funding. And
yet, and yet…. Contrast this initiative with the following lines: “An
international drive to crack down on offshore tax havens is at risk of
foundering amid growing pressure in Washington on the Bush administration to
withdraw US backing for the initiative……… Dick Armey, one of the strongest
figures on the right wing of the Republican party…… urged the US to withdraw
its support. He said the OECD initiative would create "a global network of
tax police". The statement followed a meeting on Thursday of conservative
lawmakers with Larry Lindsey, the top White House economic adviser, and Mark
Weinberger, Treasury assistant secretary for tax policy.” (‘Bid to curb
offshore tax havens falters’ By Christopher Adams and Michael Peel in London
and Edward Alden in Washington Published: April 27 2001 19:04GMT). These
wouldn’t be the same right-wingers and ‘free market’ enthusiasts who are now
so keen on the bombing of Afghanistan and any other target of convenience,
would they? Some mistake, surely – the purveyors of coldly clinical
neo-liberal social dictats could never be guilty of such intellectual
ambivalence, could they? I mean, ‘globalization’ and ‘liberalisation’ are
automatically good for us, aren’t they?
Similarly, apparently we are now all either ‘with’ the US or ‘against’ the
US in the newly-declared global war against terrorism, and so subsequently
here in the UK we might expect that as a loyal ally of the US, that nice Mr
Bush would help us by clamping down on NORAID, the funding organisation for
the IRA (and who allegedly are still helping out the ‘Real IRA’ who killed
29 people with the bomb in Omagh); but I expect we’d be better off not
holding our breath, wouldn’t we? After all, there are all those
Irish-American votes to count on, and politics is just so complicated and
confusing, isn’t it?
And anyway, these days you just don’t know who’s a friend and who’s an
enemy, do you? For instance, that nice bunch of people at Lockheed, whose
shares are doing so well out of the declaration of war, one of the three
main contractors for the US ‘Son of Star Wars’ missile defence system, were
fined $13 million in July 2000 for breaking arms export laws and selling
rocket technology to China, one of the countries against whom one might
expect the SOSW defence system to be used….. so does that make them
traitors, or patriots for doing business and protecting US jobs? So
confusing….. just like that nice man Olly North, who as Hunter Thompson
pointed out was busy selling arms to the government of Iran at the same time
that Iran was busy arming the Hizbollah in the Lebanon, and the other nice
President Bush had delcared them enemies of the US. It would be ironic,
wouldn’t it, if some of those weapons Olly gave the Iranians had ended up
with the Hizbollah group that blew up so many marines in the US embassy…….
And so to that conundrum of US politics; “What do you do to a serving
officer who arms an enemy government that is responsible for the deaths of
hundreds of men from his own unit? Why, you run him for Senate, that’s
what!”
Yours in Confusion,
Jon Cloke
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