[A-List] How to Keep the War from Starting

["annewilliamson" <annewilliamson@xxxxxxx>]

                Gary North's REALITY CHECK

Issue 223                                    March 14, 2003


             HOW TO KEEP THE WAR FROM STARTING

     It is clear that the United States will invade Iraq
within the next few days.  Jockeying for position in the
United Nations Security Council may delay things a bit, as
would a decision by Turkey to take another vote regarding
the use of Turkey as a base by American troops.  But the
war is going to take place.

     The war needn't take place.  It could be stopped by a
few phone calls.  Let me describe the scenario of peace.

     The senior decision-makers of the Saud family call an
emergency meeting.  They meet together in private, discuss
the situation, and gain agreement to issue this statement:

     Upon the invasion of Iraq by the United States,

     1.   The nation of Saudi Arabia will withdraw all
          of its deposits in American banks.

     2.   These deposits will not be transferred to
          commercial banks in those nations that vote
          with the United States in the Security
          Council.

     3.   Saudi Arabia will henceforth sell oil for
          euros.  Dollars will no longer be accepted.

     The head of the Saudi central bank would then call the
head of the Bank for International Settlements in Basle.
He tells the BIS's senior representative that this
statement will be issued to the wire services within three
hours unless the Saudi head of state hears from President
Bush personally, assuring him that the troops will begin
being removed from Kuwait within two days.  The BIS is also
told that if American troops should leave the compound
where they are stationed in Saudi Arabia, the statement
will be released to the wire services immediately, and the
withdrawal of Saudi funds will begin.

     Within 30 minutes Alan Greenspan would call President
Bush and explain things to him.  Eddie George would call
Tony Blair at the same time.

     If the Saudi head of state gets no phone call from Mr.
Bush, he then issues the statement to the news wire
services.  Simultaneously with this announcement, the Saudi
foreign minister begins calling the heads of all other oil-
exporting Middle Eastern nations to line up joint support.
Also, the head of the Saudi central bank begins calling the
heads of all other Arab central banks, starting with the
oil-exporters.  The callers will remind the listeners of
the probable consequences of a TV broadcast on al-Jazeera
regarding those heads of state that refused to cooperate
with Saudi Arabia in challenging the invasion of an Arab
country.  The words "Serbian Prime Minister" will be used
discreetly.

     By the third phone call, the dollar would be lock-
limit down in America's domestic currency futures markets.
The margin calls would go out.

     If the other oil-exporting Arab nations (excluding
Kuwait and possibly Qatar) were then to issue their own
statements to this effect, by the end of the day, Colin
Powell would be holding a press conference praising the
progress that Hans Blix's UN inspection team has
accomplished so far, and denying any suggestion that his
reversal of opinion has anything to do with the fact that
the dollar was down against the euro by 15% for the day in
foreign markets.

     For my scenario to work, there would have to be
cooperation within the Arab League.  But the phrase, "Arab
League," has been the supreme political oxymoron of the
last eighty years.  The rival clans that make up the Arab
League agree only on one thing: the Palestinians inside
their borders must eventually return to Palestine.

     This war is about oil.  It's also about the
international value of the dollar.  Iraq a year ago began
selling oil only for euros.  Had the other Middle Eastern
oil-exporting states followed suit, there would be no war
clouds today.

     All of this is obvious, or should be.  But people
refuse to discuss the obvious in public.  What is obvious
is that individual oil-exporting Arab nations are acting as
income-seeking individuals, not as members of a regional
cartel that has the ultimate lever of power in
international markets.  In a world that runs on oil, Arab
politicians are in it only for the money.  Some of them are
named in honor of Muhammed, but not one of them thinks the
way he did.  He understood strategy.  They don't.

     The day that America invades Iraq, the Friends of
Osama will figure this out, once and for all.  The pace of
recruiting will escalate.  Their targets will include the
existing power structure of the oil-exporting Arab nations.

     What happened in Serbia on March 12 is a taste of
things to come.  The Friends of Osama will become the
region's 800-pound guerilla.

     Meanwhile, back in the Security Council. . . .


WHO'S GOT THE FIG LEAF?

     It's time to review a little history.  The United
Nations Organization (UNO), better known as the UN, was
granted the right to use the name of the anti-Nazi military
alliance.  The United Nations, 1942-45, were a loosely
associated federation of military powers, not a single
bureaucratic entity.  The term "United Nations" was a
valuable asset, one which carried legitimacy in the eyes of
the victors.  The decision by the heads of state of the
original United Nations to allow the phrase to be
transferred to the UNO involved a major transfer of
legitimacy.

     In 1945, four of the five nations that had been the
primary targets of the Axis powers -- The United States,
the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France -- had been pre-war
empires.  The fifth nation, China, had lost its status as
an empire.  The Big Four had controlled nations and ethnic
groups outside their geographical borders.

     The war's losers had also been empires.  There was in
1945 a crucial question as to which of the victorious
empires would maintain control over their existing domains,
plus pick up the domains of the losers.  Japan had sought
to expropriate the British and Dutch in Southeast Asia.
The Soviet Union had appropriated half of Poland and the
three Baltic states during its treaty period with Nazi
Germany (1939-41).  Who would pick up the vanquished
empires' pieces?  Who would drop its pre-war pieces?

     In 1945, the victorious empires divvied up the
defeated empires' land holdings with the same enthusiasm
that they divvied up Middle Eastern oil after 1945.

     None of the victors in 1945 was about to allow the
UNO's General Assembly to replace them as the decision-
makers of the world.  They knew that these nations would
resist the control of one or more of the five empires that
now controlled the post-war world.  This is why the five
major powers transferred control over the decision to
authorize wars to the Security Council.  They retained for
themselves permanent membership on the Council, and each of
them retained a veto over the Council, which meant the UNO
in matters of war.

     This is why the General Assembly is not consulted in
matters of war and peace.  The General Assembly is the UNO
in its capacity as a growing conglomeration of independent
nations, now at 191 members.  It is more like the United
Tribes.  It is the third world's official welfare
distribution center.  (Just for the record, the Bush
Administration has begun to send tens of millions a year to
UNESCO, which that liberal, pinko cad, Clinton, had refused
to do.)  But the big boys, who now possess nuclear weapons,
are not about to hand over to the fuzzy-wuzzies the right
to say whose nation gets invaded legitimately and whose
doesn't.

     There is no doubt that the Soviet Union demanded the
veto as the price of its participation.  Stalin was not
about to surrender to the West the crucial political asset
of military legitimacy.

     The Soviet Union feared the influence of the United
States in the Security Council.  The Security Council in
turn feared the General Assembly.  The existence of the
veto, possessed solely by the victors, has been the crucial
emblem of meaningful multi-national sovereignty in a
swelling sea of meaningless national sovereignties.

     The reason why the UNO went to war in 1950 in Korea
was because the USSR was conveniently boycotting the
Security Council when its ally and surrogate, North Korea,
crossed the 38th Parallel.  It did not exercise the veto
over the Security Council's decision to back up the United
States in defending South Korea.  It told North Korea and
the United States, "Let's you and him fight."

     Then, as soon as the vote was taken, the Soviet Union
re-joined the Security Council and continued to use its
veto to make sure that the UNO would not produce a
peninsula-wide victory for South Korea.  This stalemate
established the legitimacy of North Korea, which ironically
has outlived the Soviet Union.  Prior to the war, the North
Koreans had refused to allow UNO inspectors in to monitor
elections, and therefore the UNO had called into question
the legitimacy of Kim Il Sung's regime.  That opposition
ended in 1953, when the cease fire (there has never been a
peace treaty) was signed.

LEGITIMATE WAR

     Aging souls like myself, who were educated in a school
system that actually required courses in modern European
history, were subjected in high school to textbooks and
film strips that told the story of Japan's walk-out of the
League of Nations in 1933, matched by walkout by Italy in
1937.  In each case, the departing nation was pursuing its
own plan of empire.  The League of Nations condemned these
acts of naked aggression, but to no effect.  It had no
sanctions.  The moral lesson, according to our instructors:
"A toothless League of Nations revealed the inability of
world government without the force of arms."  In short, we
students were all supposed to embrace the UNO, the Security
Council, and the transfer of both national sovereignty and
nuclear weapons to the UNO.

     The reaction of most of us to this propaganda barrage
was the reaction of General McAuliffe at Bastogne, when the
Germans demanded his surrender: "Nuts."  (I regard that
statement as the most profound one-word military assessment
in the history of warfare.)  But the one-worlders had a
point: no bombs -- no authority.  Legitimacy, maybe;
authority, no.

     President Bush has been running up his long-distance
phone bill trying to persuade, bribe, threaten, embarrass,
or otherwise cajole the support of a majority of nine
members of the Security Council.  Tony Blair says that he
will soon submit another resolution to the Security
Council.

     Of course, nobody says anything about the General
Assembly, which would vote against this war overwhelmingly
if given the opportunity.  Everyone knows what the outcome
of that vote would be, so the United States ignores the
General Assembly, mankind's "voice of democracy."

     What about that international voice of the people?
What about majority rule?  Representatives of the veto-
holding nations would never say in public what they have
always believed: "Buncha wogs."  So, there is no world
democracy.  There is only the Security Council.  The veto
in the Security Council is at the heart of liberalism's
process of identifying an illegitimate war, 1945-2003.

     It is worth noting that the member nation that has
exercised the veto most often is the United States, which
has used it 76 times, 35 in defense of the state of Israel.
The Soviet Union used it 118 times.  The Russian
Confederation has used it twice, and one of these was to
veto any suggestion that the Security Council renounce the
veto.  The United Kingdom has used it 32 times, France 18
times, and China five times.

     Bush and Blair are trying to transform nine votes on
the Security Council into a substitute for legitimacy.
They know the French will veto the war.  They think the
Russians will, too.  But they are running up those phone
bills for the purchase of an ersatz fig leaf of what has
always been ersatz legitimacy: the ersatz legitimacy of the
Security Council to speak on behalf of the world.

     But as for a majority of the 191 members of the
General Assembly -- where the USSR had three votes in the
good old days -- Bush and Blair say nothing.

     This politicking for votes is all about empire.  It
was all about empire when Japan and Italy walked out in the
1930's.  It was all about empire back in 1945, when the
veto was handed out to the victors.

     So, it's fig leaf time.  Any fig leaf will do in a
sand storm.  Nobody mentions the substantive issue, namely,
whether one nation or any group of nations has the moral
authority to invade a sovereign nation that has been at
peace for a dozen years, and which went to war back then
only after having been given a green light by its supplier
of weapons, agricultural aid, and money: the United States,
i.e., the July 23, 1990, meeting between Saddam Hussein and
America's Ambassador, April Glaspie.

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie.html

     The President's timetable is being imposed by the
weather, not by compelling issues of international law.  It
is about sand, not the moral high ground.

     The oil-exporting Arabs could pull the plug on this
war in a matter of hours.  This would take only a few phone
calls and a strategy of economic resistance.  But they
won't do it.  They prefer to wring their hands in public --
"What can we poor, weak Arabs do?" -- mainly for the
benefit of their domestic populations.  They much prefer to
live in luxury with their oil revenues denominated in
dollars.  When it's a question of the honor of Islam vs. a
new Lexus, there is no hesitation.

     This is not unknown to the Arab in the street.
America is about to light the fuse.


JAPAN, ITALY, AND THE UNITED STATES

     President Bush has warned the United Nations
Organization that any refusal by the Security Council to
join with this nation in its invasion of Iraq will
undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations.  Can you
imagine General Tojo or Mussolini announcing to the League
of nations, "If the League does not back us in our decision
to invade, it will lose all legitimacy"?  Would anyone have
taken such an announcement seriously?

     The members of the General Assembly know what is going
on.  They have known since 1945.  Almost three-fourths of
these member nations became sovereign states after 1945.
Many of them are the heirs of geographical entities that
were controlled by the pre-war empires that now exercise
the right of the veto.  They know exactly what the veto
represents: Bwana Nuke.  They all want in on the deal.
That's because Bwana Nuke has a veto, whether a member of
the Security Council or not.

     These people are not blind.  Ask them this question:
"What's the #1 difference between Kim Jong-il and Saddam
Hussein?"  Answer: "Kim Jong-il really does possess weapons
of mass destruction."

     Kim Jong-il has issued a series of announcements to
the United States, which all boil down to the same thing:
"Kiss my critical mass."  He finds that he is dealing with
Scarlett O'Hara: "Well, fiddle-dee-dee.  I'll think about
it tomorrow."

     The United Nations cannot stop an American invasion of
Iraq.  Nevertheless, there is a liberal-awarded halo of
moral legitimacy attached to the UNO.  Somehow, all good
people are supposed to worry what the UNO does or doesn't
do.  We old-time conservatives have never been taken in by
any of this, but the liberal textbook writers and film-
strip creators got their message across to their successors
back in my high school days.  Therefore, Mr. Bush is
running up the phone bill.

     The Bush Administration is now caught in a web spun by
two generations of liberal foreign policy.  The
Administration thinks that it has to play the UNO game.
Because it is playing the game, it persists in the great
myth, namely, that the Security Council in some way speaks
for the General Will of the world.  Americans are still
trying to get the rotting corpse of Jean Jacques Rousseau
off our backs, he of General Will fame.  Jacques Chirac now
has the legal authority to shut the mouth of the General
Will.  Like it or not, the General Will must honor the
veto.  George Bush won't.

     When American troops cross the borders of Iraq, in the
eyes of the world, or at least the General Assembly, the
United States will forfeit legitimacy.  What the third
world has murmured in the shadows for decades will become
the basic foreign policy position of the dispossessed: "The
United States is an aggressor nation."

     The United States cannot be stopped by conventional
weapons or conventional politics.  It can be stopped only
by the Arab oil-exporting clans, whose senior
representatives are too greedy and too gutless to stop this
war.  Bush's action will, overnight, baptize the use of
unconventional weapons.

     The United States will soon find itself on the wrong
side of the great strategic debate.  The debate I'm
speaking of is the debate that now goes on in the third
world.  The debate is basically this: "How long will we
have to take orders from these people?"  Kim Jong-il has
supplied the correct answer: "Until we have weapons of mass
destruction."

     We have MOAB: the Mother of All Bombs.  We have tested
it in Florida, to the cheers of anti-ecologists around the
nation.  But there is a far worse bomb: the aerosol bomb.


THE MOST UNCONVENTIONAL WEAPON

     This brings me back to the story I have mentioned from
time to time for a decade.  My friend, Dr. Arthur Robinson,
is a chemist by training and a biochemist by profession.
He and I wrote a book promoting civil defense back in 1986,
FIGHTING CHANCE.  He has said publicly that a terrorist
with a Ph.D. in biology, assisted by a pair of M.A.-level
biologists, could create weapons-grade anthrax in less than
two years.  The cost?  If purchased retail, the equipment
would cost $250,000; wholesale: $25,000.  In aerosol form,
he says, a person could kill up to 90% of the population of
New York city if the wind was blowing right.  This weapon
could be concealed in a mini-van, released into the air by
anthrax-immunized terrorists, who would have 48 hours to
escape before the deaths would begin.

     Relentlessly, capitalism keeps lowering the costs of
production.  It will get cheaper and cheaper for a
terrorist group to do this -- not once or twice, but
repeatedly, in cities across America or around the world.

     Have you ever heard the phrase, "the technological
imperative"?  Here is the technological imperative: "If it
can be done, it must be done."  It will be done.

     Bwana Nuke will be replaced by Bwana Bug.  When you
have Bwana Bug in aerosol cans, you can tell the rest of
the world to take a hike.

     What do you think would happen to the economy of the
West after the third release of anthrax in (say) New York
City, Los Angeles, and London's banking district (the
City)?  Explain to me how the derivatives network ($130
trillion of interconnected short-term debts, held mainly by
money-center banks) will work then.

     Urban voters and retirement fund investors reassure
themselves: "It can't happen here!"  In my day, we called
this "whistling past the graveyard."


CONCLUSION

     Whatever the decision of the Security Council, America
will invade Iraq.  There are old family scores to settle,
old oil wells to commandeer.  But the costs of this war for
Americans will be higher than every any war in American
history.  With this war, we will send a message to the
General Assembly: "Imitate Saddam, and you get invaded.
Imitate Kim Jong-il, and you get deference."

     American foreign policy is officially based on an
assumption: "Weapons of mass destruction require an
expensive, traceable infrastructure that only a nation-
state can finance."  Yet it is also officially based on the
opposite assumption: "Saddam Hussein has hidden all of his
weapons of mass destruction, which are untraceable, thereby
requiring a military invasion of Iraq."

     Here is my assumption: "Capitalism will lower the cost
of production of biological weapons of mass destruction."

     Economics teaches that when the price of anything is
reduced, more is demanded.


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