-->Sent: Friday, March 14, 2003 1:50 PM
Subject: How To Keep the War From Starting


> 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.
>