The United States' will to war

A U.S. Marine in the Kuwaiti desert. A file picture. Perhaps the most disheartening fact about the U.S. is the absence of an organised and sustained anti-war movement despite the mounting human costs of the Iraq war. -

What drives the `sole superpower' inexorably towards perpetual warfare?

THE United States claims that it is bringing democracy to West Asia. We shall first summarise the contrasting results of four elections that have indeed taken place recently in the core crisis region of West Asia. We shall then examine at some length the prevailing situation within the U.S. itself and the reason behind the inexorable drive toward perpetual warfare, regardless of human and financial costs.

There was, first, the surprising electoral upset that brought the ascetic and efficient but not entirely prudent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the popular former Mayor of Teheran, to the presidency of Iran in the teeth of opposition from the whole of the so-called "reformist bloc" and the westernised middle class that had held power for eight years under Mohammad Khatami; even more formidable opposition of the pro-American, neoliberalist, corrupt and clerical tycoon, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who had been President for eight years earlier and had been tipped to win by every media pundit; and opposition even from sections of the clerical elite ensconced in the Guardians' Council, which oversees the functioning of government in Iran.

Expecting Rafsanjani to win and then to do business with him, the U.S. and its Western allies were outraged when Iranians defied predictions and elected an underdog. Having declared Iran as one of the three countries that comprise an "Axis of Evil" even while the reformist Khatami was in power, the U.S. now declared - as this year's National Security Document puts it - that in today's world Iran poses the principal threat to the U.S. We have documented in much detail in the previous pieces how the preparations for invasion of Iran have been unfolding inexorably, on the non-issue of nuclear enrichment to which Iran has a right according to the very terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and despite the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) own finding that even with its best efforts Iran is still a decade away from production of a credible nuclear weapon, let alone a delivery system that could launch an attack on the U.S. 10,000 miles away.

The war machine rolls on anyway, and has now arrived in the Security Council in the shape of a resolution sponsored by the U.S. and its European allies, under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which forbids Iran to exercise its legal right, which Iran is expected to reject. And the rejection would then be used for imposing sanctions and even invasion at a time of America's choosing. Even if either Russia and/or China veto the resolution, the Euro-American West can grumble about "inaction" by the "international community" and proceed with sanction, invasion and so on, if and when it so chooses.

Iranians are thus to be punished for electing a government of their choice and wanting to exercise their rights under international law. The vilification of Ahmadinejad as an anti-Semite and another Hitler - just as Saddam Hussein was once described - now abounds in the Western media. When the Iranian President wrote directly to U.S. President George W. Bush offering comprehensive dialogue, the latter did not even reply. So much for respect for law, democracy and elementary diplomatic norms when it comes to the elected government of Iran.

Then there was, in the Israeli Occupied Territories provisionally administered by the Palestine Authority (P.A.), the equally astonishing margin of victory for Hamas, which picked up 74 of the 132 seats, compared to the 45 for Fatah, in an election that was certified by 900 foreign observers to be fair and free, and which ended 40 years of Fatah's dominance of Palestinian politics, not to speak of the dominance of the Oslo crowd of functionaries and collaborators who had been assigned the task of getting the Palestinians to accept the U.S.-Israeli formulas for "peace", on the latter's terms. Considering that Israel has assassinated most of the prominent Hamas leaders and incarcerates the remaining few in its prisons, Ismail Haniyeh, a relatively less experienced member, became the Prime Minister. Hamas had actually offered to form a national unity government which would include Fatah as well as other factions in Palestinian politics, but President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's favourite politician among the Palestinians and a veritable leader of that corrupt crowd, refused and set about collaborating with Israel and the U.S. to bring down the Hamas government as soon as possible. This is a deadly game, but, if Hamas and the dissidents within the Fatah can have their way, a historic restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), much more representative of current Palestinian realities and national aspirations, is very much in the offing.

As for the sturdiness of Palestinian democracy even under conditions of murderous occupation, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter had this to say in the International Herald Tribune of May 7:

"It is almost a miracle that the Palestinians have been able to orchestrate three elections during the past 10 years, all of which have been honest, fair, strongly contested, without violence and with the results accepted by winners and losers. Among the 62 elections that have been monitored by us at the Carter Centre, these are among the best in portraying the will of the people " (emphasis added).

Regarding the U.S. reaction to this exercise of democracy, Carter said in the same piece:

"Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life."

If Ahmadinejad was not meant to win in Iran, Hamas was not supposed to win a Palestinian election. When the Palestinians elected a government of their choice, Israel immediately froze payments that it owed the Palestine Authority and demanded that the West unilaterally cancel its aid commitments to that Authority. The West - the U.S., Canada, the European Union (E.U.) - complied, and the ban was broken only by a handful of countries such as Sweden. Under pressure from such countries and on pleas from their Arab clients, the U.S./E.U. combine has partially relented but with the proviso that the aid shall not be given to the Hamas government directly. Two demands have been put forward: that Hamas commits itself never to use violence, and that it recognises Israel. This is odd. There is no government in the world that would be willing to forego the use of violence as such. Even Max Weber knew that monopoly over the means of violence was the chief characteristic of the authority of any state. As for the recognition of Israel, the answer from Hamas is simple: "Which Israel? Let Israel declare what its borders are, and we shall see if those borders are acceptable to us."

We shall return to the issue of Israel's borders when we discuss the recent elections there, below. As for the actual use of violence, the fact is that Hamas declared a unilateral ceasefire in March 2005 which Israel itself has not observed and has indeed violated through repeated bombings, assassinations and so on. In 2004, when the senior Hamas leader Abdelaziz Rantissi offered a 10-year truce with Israel if it withdrew to its 1967 borders and allowed establishment of a Palestinian state, he and the even more senior leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin were assassinated by Israelis within three months of making that offer. Responding to the latest demands, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has published many articles under his own signature where the essential message is that there can be peace, normalisation of relations and mutual recognition if, and only if, Israel vacates the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967. In an article in the Al-Ahram Weekly, he said:

"We would like to know why the U.N. has allowed Israel to repeatedly fly in the face of more than 100 U.N. resolutions aimed at ending the illegal occupation of my country? We are not demanding the impossible. We only challenge the world community to be faithful to the U.N. Charter and international conventions that prohibit the acquisition of land by force."

In another piece that appeared in The Guardian on April 2, he wrote:

"We in Hamas are for peace and want to put an end to bloodshed. We have been observing a unilateral truce for more than a year without reciprocity from the Israeli side. The message from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to the world powers is this: talk to us no more about recognising Israel's `right to exist' or ending resistance until you obtain a commitment from the Israelis to withdraw from our land and recognise our rights."

In effect, then, Hamas is actually advocating a reasonable settlement, in accordance with over a 100 U.N. resolutions: Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, and mutual recognition of two sovereign states, Israel within its borders of 1967 and a new Palestinian one on those vacated territories. This is what runs counter to Israel's annexationist designs that the U.S. backs, in the teeth of international law.

Be that as it may. What these elections show is that, with the single exception of partly European Turkey, Iran and Palestine are the only places in West Asia where electoral democracy is thriving and has thrown up results unforeseen by any section of the national or international establishments. The related point is that men like Ahmadinejad and Ismail Haniyeh represent a new framework of politics in West Asia, Islamist yes, but neither collaborationist nor neoliberal, closer to the gutter and the street, to the wretched of the earth, to a politics of resistance as well as a politics of providing schools and clinics and sweeping the streets of overcrowded cities and ghettos ("oil wealth on the table of the poor," as Ahmadinejad puts it), than to plutocracies of corruption and collaboration, and deeply opposed to neo-colonialist designs.

Elections in U.S.-occupied Iraq and U.S.-funded Israel stand in sharp contrast. Before the occupation, Iraq had a militantly secular state, even though sectarian divisions continued under the surface. As an occupying power and as the one that drafted a "constitution" for the occupied country, the U.S. has introduced into Iraqi politics a constitutional arrangement and an electoral system which is based on, perpetuates and intensifies confessional and ethnic divisions; there is a Shia list of candidates, a Sunni list of candidates, a Kurdish list, and so on. Spoils of office, not only at the heights of government but down to appointments in Ministries, are arranged in accordance with sectarian and ethnic belonging, which has resulted in the unfolding communal civil war. It is very doubtful that fair and free elections can be held in an occupied country and in the midst of a war and manufactured ethnic conflicts that take dozens of lives each day. Even so, elections were held on December 15, 2005 and, as I write these lines, news is that a Cabinet may by be announced on May 20, 2006 - five months later and after stunning manipulations.

Ibrahim Jaafari, the incumbent representative of Dawa party, won a narrow majority among the new `parliamentarians' to return as Prime Minister, but he was unacceptable to the U.S. and the United Kingdom (U.K.) as well as to the Kurds and the Sunnis who sit in this colaborationists' Parliament - perhaps because of his close personal ties with Iran, where Jaafari had lived in exile between 1982 and 1989. In an extraordinary move, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the then British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had to fly to Baghdad and encamp there jointly to enforce a change, bestowing the premiership on Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, also member of the confessional Dawa party and scion of the prominent Muhasins family, who had been head of Iraq's de-Baathification Committee set up by Paul Bremer, the American Proconsul and head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, in 2003. Even about Maliki, though, there are doubts; some Americans allege a close connection between him and Moqtada al-Sadr, the young Shia cleric who is biding his time before he again unleashes his militia against the occupiers, and others allege a connection between Maliki and the Syrians. The point, in any case, is that the U.S. claims to have brought "democracy" to Iraq but cannot accept the results of the very elections it has controlled, its highest officials have to come down and twist arms to get a Prime Minister who would be acceptable to the various local clients in Iraq but then cannot trust the man so chosen; in the process, even a Cabinet of stooges cannot be put together over as much as five months. So much for the much-brandished American gift of "democracy" to the Iraqi people.

And yet, the U.S. does need the fig leaf of an "elected" and "constitutionally legitimate" Iraqi government with which to sign all those multi-billion dollar oil contracts that have been waiting in the wings, and which have not been signed by any "provisional" or "interim" government because only agreements signed by a constitutionally legitimate government can have the force of international law. How "legitimate" a government, that is "elected" under foreign occupation under a Constitution drafted by the occupiers can be, is anybody's guess.

The most frightening are the elections, and the consequent government, in Israel, though there is nothing surprising about them. The new government is in fact simply the continuation of the Sharon government minus Sharon whose health has collapsed, and a continuation also of the bi-partisan, "national" government which includes the main Opposition party, the Labour Party, in it, as junior partner of Likud party previously and now as junior partner of the Kadima party which Sharon confected in the last year of his power by drawing elements from both Likud and Labour so as to enforce a "final solution" for the Palestinians through a broad national consensus in Israel. The new Prime Minsiter, Ehud Olmert, who was Sharon's deputy when Kadima was formed, is committed to, and now has his Cabinet's mandate, to implement a policy of what in Hebrew is called "hitkansut" which has the connotations of "convergence", "consolidation" and "ingathering". In practice, what that means is that some 60,000 Israeli settlers shall be withdrawn from some of the settlements that Israel established in the peripheral areas of the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967, to be resettled elsewhere in Greater Israel, while all the principal settlements, with some 360 settlers in them, shall remain in place and Israel shall unilaterally annex areas covered by those settlements and their environs, including most of the fertile land and water resources of the Palestinian territory, so that Israel expands its own size while the remaining Palestinian areas, surrounded by fences and walls and checkpoints are handed over as so many Bantustans. After all these annexations, Israel may declare what its eventual borders really are.

So, yes, Israeli elections have been free and fair, and Olmert's plan has broad backing from the great majority of the Israeli population and is consistent with all the policies that successive Israeli governments have pursued since the early 1970s: annexation of those parts of the Occupied Territories which Israel considers necessary for its security, and the return of the rest to an emasculated, besieged Palestinian entity. The only problem is that it is a classically colonial plan, in violation of all international law, not to speak of the rights of the subjugated population. This is what the U.S. supports.

Any discussion of the situation in core crisis regions of West Asia must first take into account the intentions and contradictions of the U.S., the unrivaled superpower determined to conquer the region while it also sinks deeper into crisis and desperation.

Perhaps, the most disheartening fact about the U.S. (and about the Euro-American West in general) is that - with financial and human costs of the Iraq war mounting by the day, with an economy deep in social crisis and spectacular debt, with most of the elder statesmen of the Democratic Party as well as many retired generals and CIA stalwarts (McNamara and Carter downwards) in blistering opposition, with a majority of Americans now opposed to the Iraq war, with popularity ratings for Bush and Tony Blair plummeting, with millions of immigrants organising the largest labour protest in U.S. history - there is no organised and sustained anti-war movement of the kind we witnessed during the Vietnam War. Moreover, the current leadership of the Democrats (Hillary Clinton and the like) stand firmly with the Bushies, in deed somewhat to the right of them, and Europe is cooperating with the U.S. more closely on the war plans against Iran that it was doing in the run-up to the Iraq war. The U.S. Left seems to be thriving on the Internet, some demonstrations are impressive and others not, but the streets of America seem to be largely quiescent. Postmodernist forms of politics, which have turned a whole generation of Americans against organised forms of politics, seem to be taking their toll.

Meanwhile, the human costs of the Iraq war keep mounting, with the number of the American dead increasing by the day, inexorably inching toward the figure of 3,000, while the maimed and injured can be counted now in tens of thousands; no one is counting the Iraqi dead but the number is now in hundreds of thousands. As for the financial costs of the war, Linda Bilmes of Harvard University and the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz have jointly authored a lengthy and scholarly report, the abstract of which is worth quoting in full:

"This paper attempts to provide a more complete reckoning of the costs of the Iraq War, using standard economic and accounting/budgetary frameworks. As of December 30, 2005, total spending for combat and support operations in Iraq is $251 billion, and the CBO's [Congressional Budget Office] estimates put the projected total direct costs at around $500b. These figures, however, greatly underestimate the War's true costs. We estimate a range of present and future costs, by including expenditures not in the $500b CBO projection, such as lifetime health care and disability payments to returning veterans, replenishment of military hardware, and increased recruitment costs. We then make adjustments to reflect the social costs of the resources deployed (e.g., reserve pay is less than the opportunity wage and disability pay is less than forgone earnings). Finally, we estimate the effects of the war on the overall performance of the economy. Even taking a conservative approach and assuming all U.S. troops return by 2010, we believe the true costs exceed a trillion dollars. Using the CBO's projection of maintaining troops in Iraq through 2015, the true costs may exceed $2 trillion. In either case, the cost is much larger than the administration's original estimate of $50-$60b. The costs estimated do not include those borne by other countries, either directly (military expenditures) or indirectly (the increased price of oil). Most importantly, we have not included the costs to Iraq, either in terms of destruction of infrastructure or the loss of lives. These would all clearly raise the costs significantly."

As elections to the U.S. Congress later this year draw closer, the Bush Administration is again talking of withdrawing some troops from Iraq but its own estimates suggest that even under the most favourable circumstances 100,000 of the currently deployed 136,000 shall still remain after 2007, for the next several years. The "favourable" circumstances are in any case not in hand: there is no mercenary Iraqi army to take over from the Americans, no other nations are coming forth to take over the burden, and attacks by the resistance are increasing; reliable sources suggest that the resistance forces are now, in fact, more unified and better organised. Moreover, the "super-bases" the U.S. is building in Iraq, each of them sprawling over 15-20 square miles, hardly promise a foreseeable end to the occupation. So, the estimate by Bilmes and Stiglitz, that the occupation shall still be there 10 years from now and that the costs shall exceed $2 trillion, seems reasonable.

This estimate needs then to be correlated with a host of other economic indicators, of which we shall mention only two, related to military expenditure in general and to debt formation. Winslow T. Wheeler, the Director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Centre for Defence Information who spent 31 years working for U.S. Senators from both parties and the Government Accountability Office, says that even though the official U.S. military budget for the current year is said to be $538 billion, "if you count all these [unacknowledged] costs, the total is $669.8 billion. This amount easily outdoes... the $509 billion the entire rest of the world spends" on its military budgets. This ratio is a good indicator of the level of U.S. military superiority. However, this level of military spending and constant increases in such spending in an otherwise stagnant economy also produces major imbalances which are well indicated by the fact that as of mid-2005, foreign investors, including foreign central banks, held an estimated $6.6 trillion worth of U.S. bonds and equities, up from less than $4 trillion in mid-2004. Costs of the Iraq war and the escalating military expenditures do not altogether explain the level of U.S. indebtedness but do contribute to it, and it is by no means insignificant that a third of U.S. debt has been accumulated since Bush was re-elected in 2002, only to accelerate greatly the military misadventures.

This long-term war economy and its ill effects, maintained by the U.S. since the 1950s and strengthened by every administration, and most so by the Bush administration, cannot be sustained without fundamental distortions of society and polity as a whole. Ideologically, the U.S. population is held together in an odd set of schizophrenias: overwhelming fear psychosis (you are perennially threatened by a powerful enemy, be it the communists of yesteryears or the terrorists of today) and sheer arrogance of power (you do have the power to beat to pulp anyone you want); as well as the accompanying belief that the U.S. is a "Land of the Free" but is forever beset by a whole host of internal enemies and external enemies who must be hunted down, incarcerated, even tortured. No country in the world holds as many prisoners as the U.S., in all a quarter of the world's prison population with mere 5 per cent of the world's people. And the numbers keep escalating: 300,000 prisoners in 1972 but two million by 2000. And the U.S. has introduced the world to a brand new institution: state prisons run by private business. There were five such prisons a decade ago; but more than 100 now, with 62,000 prisoners.

These are not unrelated facts. A society that accepts the idea that prisons can be run by private businesses would also be so much more willing and keen to have mercenaries fight the war for the nation; 40,000 to 60,000 mercenaries are now said to be performing all sorts of military duties for the U.S. in Iraq, alongside roughly three times as many men in actual uniform. A populace gripped by the fear psychosis shall be so much more willing to give its government unlimited power to wage war; if less than 40 per cent Americans now support the ongoing war in Iraq, more than half of the population supports the idea of invading Iran if Iran is found, by the U.S. government, to be making nuclear weapons. If two million can be imprisoned as criminals, what could possibly be wrong with the tapping of phones of another 10 or 20 or 30 million, just to make sure that criminality - terrorism, in particular - is not lurking in other hearts as well. Criminalisation of a couple of million paves the way for the making of a society of universal surveillance for the population as a whole, with widespread consent.

Thus it is that hardly a day passes without news of the Bush administration breaking yet another national or international law but the only real investigation under way is related to the White House officials leaking a CIA operative's name to the media. A group of former military officers painstakingly compiled and posted on the Internet quite recently a list of some two dozen national and international law that the administration has broken. From Amnesty International to the Human Rights Watch, there is no internationally respected human rights organisation which has not repeatedly held the U.S. in violation of the most elementary rules of international law; and the same is true of any number of lawyers' groups, health professionals and atomic scientists, retired army and intelligence officers as well as academic professionals. Any number of prestigious journalists have documented the war profits made by corporations associated with key members of the current Administrators (Halliburton for Vice-President Dick Cheney, Chevron for Secretary of State Rice, and so on). None of it makes any difference. Why not?

There are essentially three reasons. The schizophrenic combination of a fear psychosis and permanent swagger of power makes the average American particularly responsive to the Bush argument, repeated ad infinitum on TV that America is at war - permanent war - and all is fair in war so long as the U.S. wins. Second, the utter refusal of the Democrats to mount any serious opposition to any of the Bush administration's policies means that Bush actually speaks for a bi-partisan consensus, regardless of the lack of his own popularity or the support for the Iraq war. Every law passed to facilitate war against Iraq or Iran or Syria, every action taken to buttress Israeli lawlessness, every budgetary allocation for warfare or the research and production of new nuclear weapons, not to speak of the entire regime of kidnapping and torture, has had Democrats standing behind Bush; in deed, some of those policies were adopted and laws passed during the Clinton administration. In effect, the two-party system no longer functions. That reduction of the U.S. to a one-party state is itself connected with the fact that the U.S. capitalist class is now wholly dominated by the petrodollar-weapon dollar complex which has emerged as the dominant fraction in the class as a whole. The U.S. media, and all its transmission belts internationally, are currently gripped by this dominant fraction.

The interests of this complex are two in number: pushing up oil prices, so as to contribute to the accumulation for the oil corporations on a world scale, and more and more investment to be diverted into weapons production, for sales not only to the U.S. government but also in the global weapons market as a whole.

The more war there is, the more weapons are purchased by all parties concerned; and if wars are concentrated in oil-producing regions, it serves the interests of the oil corporations as well as the weapon producing corporations. Oil does not have to be actually scarce; just the fear of its becoming scarce pushes up the prices, speculatively, which adds to the profits, and the prospect that the U.S. shall eventually capture the oil-producing countries, as it has done in the case of Iraq, holds out the promise of future investment opportunities and resource monopolisation.

Much nonsense gets published on the question of oil prices these days. The fact of the matter is that oil prices over the past three decades have fluctuated widely and today's prices look very high if compared with some point when prices were especially low. However, if calculated in constant dollars, a price of $100 a barrel now would barely catch up with prices prevailing in 1980 and any slowdown in world economy as a whole can be feared realistically only if that benchmark is exceeded. Meanwhile, short of that possible global recession in the future, the oil corporations have made and are still making immense profits, posting historic highs virtually every quarter each year. One might add that the Iraq war has made scarcely any difference to the supply of oil on the world market, although it has made enormous difference to the prospect of who will eventually come to own and/or profit from Iraqi oil. Even so, the fact of that war and its possible repercussions have been touted as factors that contribute greatly to "uncertainty", and nothing helps speculation as much as "uncertainty", so that recent price rises have been mainly speculative in character, regardless of the explosive demand in China and elsewhere. Thus, the Iraq war itself but also the war psychosis, and the sort of propaganda this psychosis has made possible, has been good business.

Perpetual war, especially in West Asia, is thus certainly in pursuit of the oil resources and attendant profits but is also perfectly compatible with the enduring interests of the dominant fraction of U.S. capital, namely the petrodollar-weapon dollar complex; and rising oil prices are perfectly compatible with the interests of this class fraction and the state which represents it. Moreover, the pursuit of a policy of perpetual war that favours particular fractions of U.S. capital but exacts heavy price from the U.S. state, financially and socially as well as in the diplomatic arena, requires that the U.S. act much more lawlessly on the international plane than is usual for it and that it act much more coercively for the manufacturing of consent at home.

This does not mean that warmongering and lawlessness of this kind is good for the U.S. as a whole, or is favourably regarded by some of those former U.S. leaders who are no longer in the race for office, are not associated with the oil and weapons industries, and can therefore speak more freely. This is not the place to document the numerous instances in which the Bush administration has violated national and international laws, even as it declares that the Geneva Conventions are now merely "quaint" and irrelevant while its Attorney-General does acknowledge that torture is forbidden in international law but still opines that the President of the United States has the legal right to condone "torture" when he deems it in the national interest. What is very striking in any case is that the word "totalitarianism" and the attendant perception that the U.S. government has departed significantly from democratic norms has now arrived even in newspapers like The New York Times where an Op-Ed writer, had this to say:

" ..we've kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition programme; and we've incarcerated people at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we're allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we're listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on. . . . This is a road map to totalitarianism."

The above indictment refers mostly to the ongoing war and policies already in place. Regarding the one yet to come, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Adviser to President Carter and the man who continues to be proud of having ordered the assembling of jehadists in Afghansitan against the Soviets, had this to say in The Los Angeles Times:

"in the absence of an imminent threat (and the Iranians are at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war. If undertaken without a formal congressional declaration of war, an attack would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the President. Similarly, if undertaken without the sanction of the United Nations Security Council, either alone by the United States or in complicity with Israel, it would stamp the perpetrator(s) as an international outlaw(s)."

That is correct but Brzezinski should have added that this applies equally to the invasion of Iraq where there was no threat to the U.S., no Congressional declaration of war, no backing from the Security Council. As for the nuclear issue which involves not just other countries but also the U.S. itself, former President Jimmy Carter, whom Brzezinski had served and who gave us the Afghanistan war from which all the jehadi activities have followed, wrote in The Washington Post:

"While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons."

The clear implication here is that the U.S. itself is in gross violation of the NPT while the U.S. and its European allies have now jointly proposed a resolution in the Security Council which forbids Iran to enrich uranium even under international supervision, to which Iran has the right under the terms of that treaty.

Robert McNamara, the 87-year-old former head of the World Bank and Kennedy's Defence Secretary, who gave us the Vietnam War and has been trying to repent ever since, was more blunt: "I would characterise current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous."

I have deliberately not written here of the very widespread dissent in the expected quarters and concentrated, instead, on major newspapers and famous leaders who have directly supervised anti-Communist jehads in Vietnam and Afghanistan. When such publications and persons start saying that the U.S. is heading towards "totalitarianism", that its President is doing things that may be impeachable and in violation of international laws, and that the U.S. policies are immoral and illegal - then you know that there actually are influential leaders of the U.S. bourgeoisie who are unconnected with the oil-weapon fraction and who find the current policies of their government "dangerous" from the standpoint of the class as a whole.

Such voices would matter much more if they were influential with the current leaders of the Democratic Party, but they are not, precisely because politicians still holding high office or seeking re-election must align themselves much more closely with the dominant fraction of U.S. capital, regardless of which party they belong to. This is what makes more and more war-mongering inevitable.