A-Infos (en) Nuclear paranoia in the Persian gulf

[Ilan Shalif <gshalif@netvision.net.il>]

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From: BobNenwOgb@aol.com who FWD billw@echonyc.com
by Bill Weinberg GOGOL BOULEVARD NEWS SERVICE
In the media saturation about oral sex in the Oval Office, it has gone
almost unnoticed that Bill Clinton is considering use of nuclear weapons
against Iraq--to take out Saddam's underground complexes, or retaliate for
an Iraqi chemical or biological attack.

Every president since Truman has considered the nuclear option--that's
what Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam was. This time it
only took two months for November's Presidential Policy Directive 60,
defining circumstances for use of nuclear weapons against Iraq, to appear
in the press. But PPD 60 has not become a household name like "Monica
Lewinsky."

Following a brief, sparse flicker of PPD 60 coverage in early February,
Boris Yeltsin warned that escalation in the Persian Gulf could lead to
World War III. The US press portrayed the statement as irresponsible
alarmism. PPD 60 is already down the memory hole.

Threatening nuclear strikes to fight weapons of mass destruction is a
concept straight out of Orwell. True to the principles of doublethink, we
remain blind to Desert Storm's 400,000 civilian casualties in 1991. The
violence of Desert Storm dwarfed that of Saddam's troops in Kuwait.
Saddam's torching the oilfields and dumping crude into the Gulf were
vengeance--and, as a secret Energy Department study leaked to Science News
in 1991 revealed, Bush knew that Saddam would retaliate with that kind of
environmental terrorism. Saddam's gassing of the Kurds at Halabja, his
most clearly genocidal act, was back in 1988--when he was still a US
client. A bill calling for sanctions in the wake of the atrocity never
made it out of Congress.

Saddam is not "this generation's Hitler." Like Noriega, Saddam is a
US-groomed client supposedly gone bad. Does the White House really want
him overthrown? Saddam humbled and distracted the Iranian Revolution for
eight grueling years of war. Then, when the price of oil and George Bush's
political fortunes needed a jolt, he conveniently invaded Kuwait.

Now, developments in post-Soviet Central Asia threaten to bring down the
price of oil by bringing a new global supplier on line in Kazakhstan. The
latest flare-up of the permanent Gulf Crisis will jack up oil prices,
allowing the Saudis and Kuwaitis to infuse vulnerable global financial
institutions with petrodollars. These infusions will stabilize the
turbulent Asian fiancial markets, propping up the teetering US-supported
Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, where riots are now spreading across
the country in response to the economic chaos, and quieting the labor
unrest which threatens the regime in South Korea. The oil shock will also
effectively sideline environmentalist or other opposition to the Central
Asia oil developments, as well as those planned for Alaska's North Slope,
and the James Bay hydro-projects in Canada.

Saddam's violations of UN resolutions against his bio-chem weapons
capabilities are real. So is Israel's violation of resolutions against the
West Bank occupation. We could also mention Indonesia's bloody occupation
of East Timor in defiance of the UN.

To state the fact that Saddam Hussein is a brutal tyrant requires no
courage outside the borders of his tyranny. What takes some guts is to
view our own leaders with a ruthless disregard for double standards.

Clinton took the oath of office as US warplanes were bombing Iraq. He has
aerial-bombed civilian neighborhoods in Mogadishu, Somalia. He has done
nothing to diminish the Pentagon's titanic arsenals or expansion of the
federal prison archipelago, while "ending welfare as we know it" (read:
dismantling the New Deal) in the name of the victory over fiscal excess.
He has overseen an eroding of civil liberties in the name of bogus wars on
drugs, terrorism and cyber-smut. From Baghdad to Waco to the death
chambers of Arkansas, Clinton is a murderer. Apply your own logic to the
Enemy's perspective and you start to see through the propaganda charade.

Einstein warned that our leaders are motivated by the same instincts as
Iron Age kings--"and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
Perhaps we citizens are little developed beyond Iron Age peasants. We are
more interested in sex scandals, Seinfeld and the Spice Girls as the world
takes a step closer to its end. The war drive has neither, this time, our
jingoistic approval nor our outraged protest. It has merely our
indifference--another spectacular distraction, if less titillating than
recent ones.

Where are the voices pointing out that Clinton has crossed a dangerous
threshold? This is the normalization of nuclear warfare.

What was "unthinkable" in the Cold War--because it assumed a 20-minute war
that would leave the Earth in cinders--is now thinkable, a continuation of
policy by other means. Today's "tactical" nukes--the kind fitted onto a
Cruise missile for use against an Iraqi bunker--deliver the kind of punch
that wiped out Hiroshima. Today's "strategic" nukes--the kind on the
ICBMs--are ten times more powerful. Even a battlefield "mini-nuke,"
dropped from a plane, would release deadly fallout.

After use of tactical or battlefield nukes, the next threshold in the
acceptable level of global violence is use of strategic nukes. So
Clinton's nuclear threat brings us a step closer to that Earth in cinders.

If the Cold War was a dualistic balance of terror, now globalized
violence, mirroring the Internet and market forces, is also
atomized--everywhere and nowhere. There is no monolithic enemy; nuclear
capabilities are no longer the exclusive domain of superpower brass and
bureaucracy. Breakdown of command and control over the Soviet arsenal is
well-advanced.

And now, with nuclear materials available to the highest-bidding militia
or terrorist group, the US has crossed the first line, legitimizing
nuclear warfare--thus increasing the likelihood that someone, whether a
jihad extremist or an Arkansas boy who made good, will cross the next
terrible threshold within our lifetimes.

Bill Weinberg is author of War On the Land: Ecology & Politics in Central
America (Zed 1991).
(HE'S ALSO THE CRABIEST MEMBER OF NEITHER EAST NOR WEST-NYC,
BUT WE LOVE HIM ANYWAY!  - "b"oB)




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