[A-List] America's War with Itself

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bush's attempt to wreck the climate talks follows an established pattern of
self-destruction

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (December 21 2004)

I have a persistant mental image of US foreign policy, which haunts me even in
my sleep. The vanguard of a vast army is marching around the globe, looking for
its enemy. It sees a mass of troops in the distance, retreating from it. It
opens fire, unaware that it is shooting its own rear.

Is this too fanciful a picture? Both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were
groomed and armed by the United States. Until the invasion of Iraq, there were
no links between the Baathists and Al Qaeda: now Bush's government has created
the monster it claimed to be slaying. The US army developed high-grade
weaponised anthrax in order, it said, to work out what would happen if someone
else did the same. No one else was capable of producing it: the terrorist who
posted envelopes of anthrax in 2001 took it from one of the army's laboratories.
<1>  Now US researchers are preparing genetically modified strains of smallpox
on the same pretext, and with the same likely consequences. <2>  The Pentagon's
space-based weapons programme is being developed in response to a threat which
doesn't yet exist, but which it is likely to conjure up. The US government is
engaged in a global war with itself. It is like a robin attacking its reflection
in a window.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in its assaults on the multilateral
institutions and their treaties. Listening to some of the bunkum about the
United Nations venting from Capitol Hill at the moment, you could be forgiven
for believing that the UN was a foreign conspiracy against the United States.
It was, of course, proposed by a US president, launched in San Francisco and
housed in New York, where its headquarters remain. Its Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, characterised by Republicans as a dangerous restraint upon
American freedoms, was drafted by Franklin D Roosevelt's widow. The US is now
the only member of the UN Security Council whose word is law, with the result
that the UN is one of the world's most effective instruments for the projection
of American power.

The secret deals in Iraq for which the United Nations is currently being
attacked by US senators were in fact overseen by the US government. It
ensured that Saddam Hussein could evade sanctions by continuing to sell oil
to its allies in Jordan and Turkey. <3>  Republican congressmen are calling
on Kofi Annan to resign for letting this happen, apparently unaware that it
was approved in Washington to support American strategic objectives. The United
States finds the monsters it seeks, as it pecks and flutters at its own image.

So we could interpret the activities of Bush's government in Buenos Aires last
week as another vigorous attempt to destroy its own interests. US economic
growth depends on the rest of the world's prosperity. The greatest long-term
threat to global prosperity is climate change, which threatens to wreck many
of America's key markets in the developing world. Coastal cities in the United
States - including New York - are threatened by rising sea levels. Florida
could be hit by stronger and more frequent hurricanes. Both farms and cities
are likely to be affected by droughts.

In February, a leaked report from the Pentagon revealed that it sees global
warming as far more dangerous to US interests than terrorism. <4>  As a result
of abrupt climate change, it claimed, "warfare may again come to define human
life ... As the planet's carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern
reemerges: the eruption of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy
supplies".  The nuclear powers, it suggested, are likely to invade each other's
territories as they scramble for diminishing resources.

So how does Bush respond to this?  "Bring it on".  The meeting in Buenos Aires
was supposed to work out what the world should do about climate change when
the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. Most of the world's governments want the
protocol to be replaced by a new, tougher agreement. But the Bush administration
has been seeking to ensure both that the original agreement is scrapped, and
that nothing is developed to replace it.

"No one can say with any certainty", George Bush asserts, "what constitutes
a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided". <5>
As we don't know how bad it is going to be, he suggests, we shouldn't take
costly steps to prevent it. Now read that statement again and substitute
"terrorism" for "warming". When anticipating possible terrorist attacks,
the US administration, or so it claims, prepares for the worst. When
anticipating the impacts of climate change, it prepares for the best.
The "precautionary principle" is applied so enthusiastically to matters
of national security that it now threatens American civil liberties.
But it is rejected altogether when discussing the environment.

The Kyoto protocol is flawed, the Bush team says, because countries such
as China and India are currently exempted from cutting their emissions. But
instead of helping to design a treaty which would eventually bring them in,
the US teamed up with them in Buenos Aires to try to sink all international
cooperation. It even supported Saudi Arabia's demand that oil-producing
countries should be compensated for any decline in the market caused by
carbon cuts. <6>

The result is that the talks very nearly collapsed. On Saturday, thirty-six
hours after they were due to have ended, and while workmen were dismantling
the rooms in which the delegates were sitting, the other countries managed
to salvage the barest ghost of an agreement. The US permitted them to hold
an informal meeting in May, during which "any negotiation leading to new
commitments" is forbidden. <7>  According to the head of the US delegation,
the time to decide what happens after 2012 is "in 2012". <8>  It's like saying
that the time to decide what to do about homeland security is when the plane
is flying into the tower.

Wrecking these talks is pretty good work for a country which, as it refuses
to ratify the protocol, doesn't even have negotiating rights. But this is now
familiar practice. The US tried to sink the biosafety protocol in 1999, even
though, as it hadn't signed, it wasn't bound by it. It sought to trash the 2002
Earth Summit, though Bush failed to attend. This isn't, as some people suggest,
isolationism. It is a thorough and sustained engagement, whose purpose is to
prevent the world's most pressing problems from being solved.

And the result, of course, is that the catastrophe described by the Pentagon is
now more likely to happen. The US has just spent millions of dollars in Buenos
Aires undermining its own peace and prosperity. Of course we know that its
delegation was representing the interests of the corporations, not the people,
and that what's bad for America is good for Exxon. But this does not detract
from the sheer, self-immolating stupidity of its position.

The United States has every right to beat itself up. But unfortunately,
while chasing itself around the world, it tramples everyone else. I know that
appealing to George Bush's intelligence isn't likely to take us very far, but
surely there's someone in that administration who can see what a monkey he's
making of America.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. George Monbiot, 21st May 2002. Riddle of the Spores. The Guardian. Also
available at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/05/21/riddle-of-the-spores/

2. Leading article, 20th November 2004. Engineering the smallpox virus is dicing
with death. New Scientist.

3. Leading article, 5th December 2004. The UN Oil Scandal. The New York Times;
Susan Sachs and Judith Miller, 13th August 2004. Under Eye of UN, Billions for
Hussein In Oil-for-Food Plan. The New York Times.

4. David Stipp, 9th February 2004. The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare. Fortune
magazine; Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, 22nd February 2004. Now the Pentagon
Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us. The Observer.

5. George W Bush, 11th June 2001. President Bush Discusses Global Climate Change.
Transcript of speech. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House.

6. Geoffrey Lean, 19th December 2004 US Fails in Bid to Kill off Kyoto Process.
The Independent.

7. No author, 19th December 2004. Deal opens small door to climate talks.
USA Today.

8. Dr Harlan L Watson, Senior Climate Negotiator and Special Representative,
US Department of State, 7th December 2004. Press Briefing, Buenos Aires.
http://usinfo.state.gov/gi/Archive/2004/Dec/08-68436.html


http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/12/21/americas-war-with-itself-/

Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/