"a lot of world to subjugate" (from www.maxspeak.org)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   11/10/2002 Entry: "THE LATE, GREAT FREE WORLD"

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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-- 
Yoshie

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