LOST IN SPACE
Bush Launches Star Wars
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Murray Horton
The 2000 Presidential election left Florida in particular, and the US in general, as the laughingstock of the world. The insufferable American habit of lecturing other people about democratic elections will lack a certain credibility next time around. Of course, it brought to office none other than GI (Grinning Idiot) George, along with a phalanx of retreads from the Administrations of his father and Ronnie Reagan.
GI has two big ideas. The first is to cut
taxes for his rich friends, (who lavishly bankrolled his campaign and are
reaping the benefits as Bush puts exploitation and profits ahead of everything
else, such as the environment). The second big idea is a rehash of Ronnie
Reagan’s Star Wars dream, now called the National Missile Defense (NMD). PR detailed it in # 22 (December 2000),
so we refer you to that, rather than rehash it all here.
NMD involves huge amounts of money –
more than $US100 billion – and has the added burden of not actually working.
The field trials of the missile interception systems (using a missile to hit an
incoming one) have been unsuccessful. Unless the proposed nuclear umbrella can
guarantee 100% protection from all incoming missiles, it is useless. To
paraphrase the old saying, one nuclear missile can definitely ruin your day.
The White House cannot articulate successfully just who might be firing these
missiles at an increasingly paranoid and armed to the teeth US. “Rogue states”,
apparently. As soon as Bush was in office, he mounted the obligatory attack on
Iraq, to prove that his was bigger than Clinton’s or Saddam’s. But there’s no
sign that Iraqi missiles will be heading towards the US anytime soon. In the
last few months of Clinton’s Administration, the half century of hostilities
between the US and North Korea started to thaw out, following in the train of
the peace initiatives of the two rival Korean states themselves. All that has
been put on hold under Bush. But there’s still no sign that Pyongyang will be
attacking the US anytime soon.
The real enemy is, of course, China (it
is described as a rival, not an enemy). Russia no longer poses a threat to the
self proclaimed American role to be the world’s sole superPower. But China
won’t follow the script. It humiliated Bush by forcing him to say sorry before
it would release the crew of the captured US spy plane; the plane itself
remains firmly in Chinese hands. China is prone to get very bellicose indeed
about American involvement with Taiwan. There are two contradictory schools of
thought about China in American ruling circles – one wants to demonise it as
the enemy, possibly fight a real war with it and make plenty of money for the
arms industry in the process; the other wants to be friendly to China because
of the huge profits that US corporations stand to make there. Bush is offering
reductions in the US nuclear arsenal, as a trade off for Star Wars, but is
unlikely to get any takers from a deeply suspicious Russia and China. Instead,
it is likely to lead to a new nuclear arms race.
NMD will abrogate the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which is the cornerstone of all nuclear
arms agreements in the following 30 years. It will involve a major expansion of
detection and tracking systems in America’s global chain of spybases,
specifically Fylingdales and Menwith Hill, in Britain, and the massive Pine Gap
base in Australia. It is the latter that drags us into it – Pine Gap is
regularly serviced through the US military base at Christchurch Airport. So
little old “nuclear free” New Zealand becomes part of the burgeoning Star Wars
machine. Successive Australian governments since WWII have bent over backwards
to accommodate the US military and spy agencies (remember “All the way with
LBJ”?). The Howard Liberal government has committed itself to NMD; there is no
reason to believe that anything will change if a Beazley Labor government is
the result of the forthcoming general election. Pine Gap is crucial to American
intelligence gathering worldwide; it has played a key role in every American
war and military operation in the recent past. And it is shrouded in secrecy –
three years ago the Australian Parliament set up the Joint Standing Committee
on Treaties, for the sole purpose of scrutinising the extension of the Pine Gap
treaty. It wanted assurances that Australia has some say in what Pine Gap is
used for. The Australian Department of Defence brushed aside the committee’s
inquiries with vague platitudes; and its request to inspect the spy base was
rejected (even though US legislators were able to do so and were provided
classified briefings which were denied to the Australian committee).
NMD is just part of the American
militarisation of space that has been gathering momentum since the Reagan
years. The US Space Command has as its mission statement: “…dominating the
space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investments.
Integrating Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full spectrum
of conflict” (US Space Command, “Vision For 2020”, 1996; quoted in Covert Action Quarterly [CAQ],
April-June 2001; “Space Corps: The dangerous business of making the heavens a
war zone”, Karl Grossman). General Joseph Ashy, then commander in chief of the
US Space Command said, in 1996: “It’s politically sensitive but it’s going to
happen. Some people don’t want to hear this and it sure isn’t in vogue, but –
absolutely – we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and
we’re going to fight into space” (Aviation
Week & Space Technology, 5/8/96; quoted in CAQ, ibid). “Master of Space” is the motto of the US Space Command.
American triumphalism is breathtaking in its childlike naivety. The 1996 book
“The Future Of War: Power, Technology & American World Domination in the 21st
Century” by George and Meredith Friedman concludes: “Just as by the year 1500
it was apparent that the European experience of power would be its domination
of the global seas, it does not take much to see that the American experience
of power will rest on the domination of space…Just as Europe expanded war and
its power to the global oceans, the United States is expanding war and its
power into space …Just as Europe shaped the world for half a millennium, so too
the United States will shape the world for at least that length of time. For
better or worse, America has seized hold of the future of war” (ibid).
Wow. This evangelistic rhetoric is
right up there with the premature ejaculation that the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the defeat of Communism signalled the end of history. It would be
impressive if the colossus didn’t have feet of clay. Quite apart from all the
inherent weaknesses and failures in the proposed NMD, look at the reality of
American military power projection. Within the very recent past, one of its
most modern warships was crippled, in Aden – not by any “rogue” missile – but
by suicide bombers with a small boat packed full of explosives. And the CIA
contractors flying the Amazonian skies to stem the airborne flow of cocaine to
the insatiable American market most recently mistakenly directed the Peruvian
Air Force to shoot down a plane carrying US missionaries, killing a woman and
her baby (one wonders how that rated in the Bible Belt, one of GI’s core
constituencies).
All empires develop grandiose
delusions, building castles in the air, while all around them the Empire is
quietly rotting away, not because of barbarian hordes or “rogue” States – but
because of the inherent contradictions acquired in becoming an empire in the
first place. NMD is a colossal waste of money and human resources, one which
threatens the fabric of hard won agreements from the Cold War and will start a
new arms race. It will drag US satellite States, such as Britain and Australia,
along with it. Even little old NZ will get involved. Bush is determined to go
back to the future, one of nuclear confrontation, massive arms spending, and
the militarisation of the “last frontier”. Global domination is a very old
concept and one which carries within it the seeds of its proponent’s own
destruction. There’s no reason to believe that the American Empire’s grand
folly will end any differently from those of all the other empires which have
previously “conquered the world”. Where are they now? They ended; history
continued without them.
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