April 21, 2003
By Global Beat Syndicate (KRT) & Jeremy Brecher
After euphoria over the rolling victories in Iraq subsides, the Bush administration and its supporters will be faced with the reality that much of the world considers the U.S. and British war in Iraq a cruel, illegal and unnecessary slaughter. Much of the world fears that when the Bush administration claims the right to launch unilateral “preventive war” against any country it chooses, it is a barely-concealed pretext for American global domination.
President Bush and his advisors may not care much at all what the rest of the world thinks, but our security and well being depend on it.
Without cooperation from the rest of the world, we cannot establish a legitimate government in Iraq that can lawfully spend Iraq’s oil money – nor can that government then survive without unending U.S. military occupation. Nor can we go it alone in preventing North Korea and other countries from developing nuclear weapons, or in resolving conflicts between countries like India and Pakistan before they explode into nuclear war.
More broadly, without global cooperation and positive support, our government cannot unilaterally protect us from devastating epidemics like AIDS and SARS, from the threat of international terrorism, or from environmental threats like global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer. Mighty though our economy may seem, we cannot deal alone with global financial meltdown, which is increasingly a looming threat as well.
The Bush administration has accomplished in just over two years what the Soviet Union was unable to accomplish in half-a-century: the splitting of the United States from its European allies and the transformation of worldwide respect and admiration for America into fear and loathing. Long seen as the world’s “honest broker,” we are now the feared problem.
Much of the world would no doubt like to return to a more comfortable relationship with the United States, but that is made far more difficult by the Bush administration’s disregard for the consensus and will of the United Nations, the expressed concerns of our NATO allies, and U.S. willingness to walk away from international agreements and arms control treaties. People everywhere now fear that superpower America will next carry through on threats of unilateral attacks against North Korea, Iran, Syria and other countries, which will only magnify global fear and opposition.
If the rest of the world feels threatened enough that it decides to act in concert to contain U.S. power and aggressiveness, we will pay a heavy price, with new economic pressures, political isolation and collective United Nations actions against us.
Economic pressures are already mounting because the Iraq war has spawned protest boycotts of U.S. products all over the world. If governments and institutions dumped the dollar it could send our economy into a catastrophic tailspin. If other countries simply bought oil in euros instead of dollars, it could cut our Gross Domestic Product by about 1 percent. Other countries can easily block U.S. policy initiatives in the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization.
Political isolation is occurring. Important recent elections in Germany, South Korea and elsewhere have turned on the question of U.S. military aggressiveness. In U.S.-allied Turkey and South Korea, street confrontations and political struggles in parliament forced governments to reverse course and oppose the Iraq war. Political supporters of Washington increasingly face declining support and political retribution.
The United States suffered a significant blow when the U.N. Security Council refused to back its Iraq war. Little noticed in recent days, the Iraq war nearly came up for condemnation in the U.N. General Assembly, where there is no veto and where a majority of countries might well have supported the initiative. The Bush administration fought vigorously against bringing the issue to the floor, but its next preventive war may find the coalition that blocked a pro-war vote in the Security Council has expanded and solidified against it in the U.N. General Assembly.
President Bush and his advisers seem oblivious to these dangers, and may even use the long string of catastrophes that will result from their policies to justify even more unilateral aggression.
Sooner or later, the American people will recall a truth we once understood well: We are only five percent of the world’s people, and we will court disaster if we try to dictate to the other 95 percent against their will.
If we don’t remember that soon, the rest of the world is all too likely to remind us.