THE LATE, GREAT FREE WORLD. If it is not obvious by now, the UN vote makes war a certainty, absent an upsurge of citizen outrage in the U.S. The UN is no obstacle at all. George Bush has destroyed it. When there is only one superpower, that power can choose to supercede the authority of any mere consultative body. That's what Bush did in his speech before the General Assembly. He said the U.S. is not bound by any collective decisions. You either go along or be rendered irrelevant in name as well as fact.
No longer is there cause to assign any measure of legitimacy to whatever the UN takes into its head to resolve. A noted economist, the late Rudy Dornbusch, once described the International Monetary Fund as the plaything of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. So goes the UN.
In essence we have a kind of world government now. Where some right-wingers go astray, or deliberate try to mislead, is in the implication that this world government is rooted in some elite council of European financiers and collectivists. No, the capital of world government is Washington, D.C. Its ruling ideology says that corporativism and protectionism are o.k. for the U.S., but economic liberalization is required for everyone else. Selective exemptions will be granted by the U.S. on a case-by-case basis, if the U.S. needs the nation's cooperation in some enterprise.
One consequence is that we will see the emptiness of many Democratic critiques of the Bush war plans, namely that the problem is the Administration's so-called unilateralism. Or that inspections have not been given a chance to work. In a world with one superpower, multilateralism is simply a matter of cracking the whip with sufficient seriousness. And the Administration can decide any time it likes when the Iraqis have failed to cooperate with UN inspectors. War is just a shot away.
In short, imperial overstretch is now on the agenda. I heard one commentator suggest that going by historic ratios, it would be reasonable for the U.S. to have thirty million persons under arms, as opposed to one and a half million. There's a lot of world to subjugate.
What the empire builders fail to appreciate is the dissent of the governed, here and abroad. Encouraged by the newest generation of weapons, they reduce everything to military force. They think a compliant press, a cowering UN, and 52 senators are a lever that can move the world. I think not.
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<http://maxspeak.org/gm/archives/00000668.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>