The Countdown to War

The world is in countdown mode, like the scenes in NASA before a gigantic rocket is about to blast off.  All eyes are focused on the UN Security Council.  Suddenly countries like Angola and Guinea are in the limelight.  Will they support a resolution to go to war with Iraq?  The real question, of course, is how much has the US offered them to endorse their demands for bloodshed?  These are tiny countries drenched in blood themselves and dependent on American largess.  They have always been pawns in the game of trans-global power. What irony that they now have the power to influence the course of history!  How curious that the fate of a world movement for peace is in the hands of war-weary African nations whose economic survival depends on grants and loans from Bush’s America.  So in the end we suspect it will be up to France to decide whether or not to use its veto.  It doesn’t matter as far as the war itself is concerned – America and Britain have already begun their invasion.  But it will affect the course of the post-war struggle.  And so the world waits to see whether France, once again, will become a beacon for the radical imagination, that force which provides the final resistance to regimented minds, giving those who defy the global bully-boys the courage to say ‘non!’

But this war that looms just over the horizon like a blackening dawn, isn’t the same as other tricky conflicts over the last few years.  The analogies to Kosovo and Afghanistan are not really appropriate here.  There is a very different feeling in the air – the mood is one of determination, of people who have had more than enough stale rhetoric and cant and are fed up with baleful politicians trying to convince them that black is white and wrong is right.  They see their own economies poised on the brink of disaster and they are tired of being told to look elsewhere, as if the bread and circuses now have come to an end for lack of interest and the new show promises buckets of blood to keep the crisis at home in perspective next to the sight of Baghdad being carpet bombed.  

Will it work this time as it has done so well in the past?  But did it really work before?  Was Kosovo or Afghanistan successful wars or simply delaying tactics?  No great armies marched into either of them.  Yes, they were bombed into submission.  Yes, the governments were brought down.  But what has really been accomplished?  The Balkans are still a mess – especially the areas whose roots are in the East rather than the West.  And Afghanistan has been ring-fenced to include just the vicinity of Kabul.  There are still vast areas of both regions that are hungry and lawless, under the rule of home-grown mafias whose regime is just as bad as that which came before them. 

The real question the world is waiting to answer is not whether Iraq is obliterated from the face of the map but whether the world community will go meekly along with Bush’s madmen.   Most Americans, like most Europeans, Asians and Africans, are horrified at this thought of entering an era of permanent warfare to make the world safe for the oligarchy who currently inhabit their self-appointed seat of world power.  We cannot stop those who are so determined from invading Iraq but we can make the price of blood very expensive indeed for the political Quislings who collaborate with them.