When it talks of "export competitiveness", the United Nations is using the language of fashionable economic dogma. When you compete, you win or you lose, so in its annual look at economic development the UN is looking at how to get to the finishing line first. But, as the UN explains in its introduction, this has little to do with countries lining up for a race. It’s not, say, like New Zealand sailing against Switzerland. It’s more like Team New Zealand’s sponsors racing a biotechnology billionaire based in Geneva. Biotech had been a winner in the 90’s. This time round, the UN reports, the winner industries have been telecommunications and media.

"Export competitiveness" has to do with the workings of markets and can be understood within the context of global capitalism, a force which is very much interested in winning and losing but is not at all interested in the fate of those nation states that comprise the UN. "In terms of market shares, only 20 economies together account for over three-quarters of the value of world trade," the UN notes, meaning places like the US, Japan and Europe. These states are offered no advice. As winner economies they make the rules. The use of a term like "economy" to designate the activities within developed countries is bad news for those nations that are not in the top 20. An economy is something you have when you live in a country whose government enacts financial and trade policies as well as all the range of social policies that citizens expect. But apart from a brief introductory reference to the rich countries, this UN report does not refer to economies.

This seems to be because the rest of the world is being advised to adapt to the needs of global capital without being able to pursue whatever domestic policies its peoples might chose. The UN is content that the top 20 national economies make the rules and the rules decree that a nation state in the developing world cannot afford to have an economy. The UN notes that regions with dynamic production "tend to be concentrated by country, region and activity. It is possible that the export dynamism seen in the ‘winners’ will spread to other developing countries". The Report is a long lecture on how to get the nod from the rich investing countries. Investment goes to the places with the policies which the TNCs like.

These corporations seek resources globally but "to date the bulk of such TNC-related export activity - especially in the most dynamic segments of world trade - is concentrated in a handful of countries, mainly in East and South-East Asia and in regions contiguous to North America and the European Union" (p. xxiii). For all the pages of advice, it comes down to geography. African and Pacific governments, for instance, will read nothing to encourage them.

Semiconductors were the big winners in the last year of the 20^th Century, so, to make its point, the Report looks at Intel, identified as "the market leader, [the corporation that] has set the pace. It has adapted better to the evolution of the industry in which there was a long period of fast growth (1982-1995), followed by consolidation (1995-1998), followed by a short boom and then a sharp fall" (p128). In this ruthless Darwinian struggle the winners are said to have included Ireland, Israel, Costa Rica, Malaysia and the Philippines. That is because Intel set up plants in these places. But for every winner in the game of life there is a loser, and according to the UN the biggest loser in Intel’s evolutionary struggle, the dinosaur, was the US, followed at some distance by its Neanderthal mates, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Hong Kong and the UK.

At this stage the analysis has become arcane. An international public body welcomes the success of an American private company insofar as it is based on the lack of success of the Americans who once worked for it but who have now been laid off. Higher profits have made a winner of Intel, the UN is saying, by making losers of American workers, and Group of Seven (G7) countries are deemed losers too because they have successful, high-wage economies. If you were a shareholder of Intel and read this in the company’s annual report, you’d be happy enough. But the UN is the voice of all the world’s nation states. Little wonder the Report sometimes refers to winners and sometimes to "winners". It’s as though it’s not sure what it means or whom it’s talking to.

While world trade keeps increasing, the immediate trend in 2002 was sharply down as recession gripped the big economies. Acting as cheerleader for the TNCs, the UN wants to say that the more, the better. Throughout its Report are variations on the theme that you can’t do better than cosy up to the big money. The basic assumption is that the more you receive Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), the faster you will grow. Yet the figures do not back this. They reveal an erratic correlation. Sometimes more FDI and faster Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates happened to coincide, as they did between 1982 and 1984, but often they do not.

Global FDI has increased every year since 1980 (where the UN statistics in this Report begin) except 2001. And it has done so at breathless pace, from about an annual $US50 billion to about $US1,500 billion in 20 years. Yet during those 20 years GDP growth rates fell in 11 years and they have trended down since 1984 (p6). Despite the talk, developing countries get only a minor - and diminishing - share of total FDI. The poorest countries, without the means to market themselves competitively, actually received less than half as much of their share of all FDI in 2001 than they had ten years earlier.

When consumers at home are feeling the pinch, you sell overseas. When profits are squeezed by falling demand, companies have to cut costs by laying off workers at home and hiring cheaper labour in poorer countries. In other words, it’s business as usual. In keeping with its hope that all FDI is good and that all FDI is increasing, the Report welcomes this trend. But the bumps in the graph can be taken as evidence that investment goes to the developing world when TNCs want to cut costs and according to the needs of their more complex domestic economies. If so, FDI will continue to trap the poorer world in dependence on the whims of large foreign companies. Despite repeated assurances that FDI necessarily makes everyone better off, the evidence points elsewhere.

It would be as easy to say that none of the world’s peoples benefit from a system that plays them off against each other. For them, competitiveness means that whoever loses most, in a literal sense of being paid less and working more, is picked to play by the winning captain. The UN wants national governments to provide "coherent and consistent policy support", which will not be easy because the essence of the mobile capitalism under review is such that it is "difficult to sustain competitiveness as ... wages rise and market conditions change".

That is the reason the UN report goes on to urge the establishment of more export processing zones [EPZs]. An EPZ is a huge factory or encampment set up only so that the export sector is de-linked from the rest of the economy. That is what it is. When we read about super-exploitation in the developing world, we are usually reading about an EPZ. EPZs are set up in "competitive" countries by TNCs and their client governments. They are winners all. Almost by definition, it is only the more successful global corporations and the more established winner states that have the clout to pull off what amounts to a form of legal slavery - and then be congratulated for it. EPZs have been invented so that the biggest and richest corporations, those with the most sophisticated, de-skilled and extensive production lines, can make their standardised products with the most efficiently quiescent and automated human labour that the world has yet devised. Think semiconductors.

The Report seeks to educate: "It is less well known that there is a growing tendency for firms, even large TNCs, to specialise more narrowly and to contract out more and more functions to independent firms, spreading them internationally, to take advantage of costs and logistics. Some are even opting out of production altogether, leaving contract manufacturers to handle it while they focus on innovation and marketing" (p117. Emphasis in the original). Watchdog readers will not share the UN’s stated surprise at the dominance of TNCs in the world economy. The way TNCs operate might be news to the writers of the Report but the process is in fact well documented, not least because it follows a classic pattern that was first described by one Karl Marx, an eminent economist writing in Victorian London. Big corporations specialise because that is more cost-efficient. When they do, they price craftsmen out of the production market. Production becomes de-skilled, standardised and specialised, a process that has reached a climax in EPZs. Once dominance is established, the winner corporations can squeeze local suppliers and exploit local workers. Then the branders and logo people push the product to the world.

To cling, in the face of this tendency, to a hope that the same TNCs will bail out client states with help so that they can start "diversifying the export basket" (p117) to develop rounded economies is perverse. To establish EPZs, and the policies they entail, is to legislate against diversity. If TNCs are to rule the world, then all the trendy abstractions that go along with this rhetoric, the mantras to do with "innovation", are false. Smaller economies will be mere suppliers for markets they have no part in creating, and whose needs they will be unable, independently, to satisfy. The Report, ever ambivalent, admits as much when it suggests that "first movers tend to build strong cumulative advantages, reaping economies of scale and scope and drawing upon clusters of suppliers and institutions. Even ‘insiders’ to international production systems face uncertainty about their prospects" (p119).

Only the biggest players, the elites in the countries that decide who the winners will be, will make the rules. But even they will not be certain. Having prospered from instability, TNCs know better than anyone that bust follows boom. The Report tells us that Mexico came fourth among all winners over the last 15 years. The global economy is said to "have worked very much in Mexico’s favour". This is because Mexico is a populous cheap labour source bordering the world’s dominant economy. The Report is full of good news to do with the local version of EPZs, the maquiladora. Established during the integration of the North American economies in the 1980s into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the maquiladora was touted as the way of the future, where Mexicans would get secure jobs at decent wages by working for modern companies. There was talk from opinion elites about how US and Canadian workers might lose jobs but they were lectured not to be selfish. Mexico would be happy.

For countries like New Zealand EPZs are not feasible. Although few of the Report’s specifics are directed at more developed countries, we are given an indication of what an established modern economy might enact if it were to follow this version of conventional wisdom. For us, the UN Report admits (again turning momentarily from corporate-speak to humdrum reality) "[t]here is a risk of intense competition for export-oriented FDI translating into a race to the bottom (in social and environmental standards) and a race to the top (in incentives)" (p244. Emphasis in original). The models here, apparently, are Ireland and Singapore, which have branded themselves as up-market EPZs. The advice is for national governments to provide "first-class infrastructure for investors", for an "upgrading of skills", for "public support to private investment" in all its forms. If it follows this advice, the NZ government will see its role as ensuring that its citizens work for low wages while it subsidises business. The Report points out the obvious and ineluctable truth: corporations won’t invest in better transport or schools, which are a cost. Their role is to tell the governments how to spend public funds for their own private benefit. The Government’s role is to "address market failures", the market being better able to build semiconductors in Asia and cars in Mexico than to build a healthy and educated citizenry.

There is much to worry about in this Report. Perhaps most pressing, for New Zealanders, is the UN advocacy of what it dubs "corporate international production systems" (p121). These would include not just computer parts and basketball shoes but all "goods, services and ideas". Already the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) threatens NZ’s remaining public institutions. Yet as far as the authors of this Report are concerned, there is nothing to be said against this corporatising of the globe. To sum up, the UN quotes itself: "The issue is no longer whether trade leads to FDI or FDI to trade; whether FDI substitutes for trade or trade substitutes for FDI; or whether they complement each other. Rather it is: how do firms access resources - wherever they are located - in the interest of organising production as profitably as possible for the national, regional or global markets they wish to serve? In other words the issue becomes: where do firms locate their value-added activities?" (WIR 1996, p. xxiv, p125). If it were to continue down this track, New Zealand would complete the running down of its social structures begun when the neoliberal project was launched in 1984. We would be left not so much an economy as much as an export processing zone.

CAFCA has the Roger Award. Tobacco’s opponents have the Marlboro Man Awards, named after the iconic cowboy astride his horse. The Marlboro Man’s steely gaze surveyed the horizon, it seemed forever, his cigarette curling smoke against a clean western sky. While the Marlboro Man rode, his brand became the world’s leader, and his company, Philip Morris, became the biggest of "the big five" global tobacco corporations. The image is said to be have been one of the most successful in the history of advertising, possibly because, in Hollywood’s golden age, the ad linked smoking, the wild open spaces, America and freedom. It was an especially powerful myth.

In its battle against independent states Big Tobacco deploys the rhetoric of freedom. The richer world now takes for granted warnings on cigarette packets, but in Thailand Philip Morris warned the health ministry that planned picture warnings would "impose an undue burden on the Company" and "impair the use of the Company’s valuable trademarks by obscuring the marks on the pack face". Philip Morris can bully the Thai government because it has much more money to waste on court battles. New Zealanders will recognise the company’s whinging as a version of the rhetoric to do with the supposedly terrible burden of "compliance costs" with which business greets any public attempt to regulate its activities.

In Malawi, Government officials were bribed, but, most often, the tobacco lobby prefers more polite methods. It talks of having a "dialogue", of imposing "voluntary" standards and "self-regulation". It advocates "partnership". In Canada, where Government regulation of smoking is stiff, Philip Morris is trying to subvert controls over the use of misleading language like "light" and "mild" on the packs. INFACT points out that Big Tobacco wants to challenge the Government’s public health promotion as a violation of its rights under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a "free trade" treaty which binds Canada and Mexico to the needs of US corporations.

This is the battleground of the future. The Foreword of "The Tobacco Atlas" is by the Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Gro Harlem Bruntland, formerly Prime Minister of Norway, and a public health scientist. Bruntland has identified tobacco as the world’s worst health threat. She wants a ban on all tobacco advertising and a hefty increase in taxes on tobacco. To combat Big Tobacco Bruntland advocates "partnerships with a purpose". UN officials live by such concepts. Bruntland says she wants WHO to fight the cigarette trade by working with outfits like the World Bank. It won’t happen. The World Bank – and the other worldly organisations like the World Trade Organisation - (should that more properly be otherworldly organisations? Ed.) exist to open markets to global corporations. Their officials might privately endorse anti-smoking. But they will oppose the WHO. Their role is to ease the passage of Big Business. Bruntland knows this but might think that she has no alternative in what amounts to a war between public opinion and global capital.

In richer Western countries smoking is trending down. Now 35% of men smoke in developed countries compared to 50% of men in developing countries. In the richer world only 9% of women smoke, while 22% of women in poorer countries do so. An exception to global trends is Japan, where the proportion of women smokers has remained roughly constant over 40 years - at about 14%. This might reflect Japan’s post-WW2 history as a modernising, developed and thus "Western" country. Perhaps in the first decades women took up smoking to be "liberated", and in the latter decades, like their European counterparts, they began to quit. The balance so far is even - but the numbers smoking will almost certainly fall.

The appeal of "The Tobacco Atlas" is that it is attractive, being mostly graphics, maps, charts and pithy quotes. It would be a handy educational aid. Its disadvantages are that some of its facts (at least some incidental information that I could readily check) are wrong. Another problem is that, being a series of factoids, the booklet has no space to explain. It claims that of all countries the greatest decrease in smoking is to be expected in New Zealand. 24.9% fewer of us will smoke by 2008. Where does this happy news come from? How do we reconcile it with the other big statistic - one that does not appear here - that the demographic of the heaviest smokers in the world is of Maori women? The numbers for the bad news are as precise as those expressing WHO’s hopeful news. 65% of Maori women from the bottom income decile smoke, as do 77% of young Maori women. If these two sets of rival numbers are anywhere close to being accurate they say a lot more than that we have unequal and dangerously volatile rates of smoking. Maybe our public heath advocates need to remind us that the Marlboro Man is long dead, the actor who posed for the photo having succumbed to lung cancer.

Already by September 12, 2001, as US President Bush first responded to the New York and Washington DC atrocities, there was talk of cowboys. As Bush had yet done little more than circle the country in Air Force One, he could not yet be said to have earned the insult. Bush, the cowboy president: the tag was so immediate that it seemed a kneejerk response. We just knew that the US would act rashly in its hunt for Osama bin Laden. In the rest of the world, whether pro or con, we have fixed views on the US. On the other side of this old debate, America’s apologists say that critics of US foreign policy are "anti-American", as though for a Kiwi to be seen as "pro-American" was a self-evident mark of virtue. But when you define yourself as being against something, you are seeing yourself in the very narrow and idiosyncratic terms of a particular period. The "anti-American" tag now sounds absurd. But it has been enduring, and it is only recently that it had faded from popular usage. Since about 1945 it had been a favourite term of popular Rightist invective.

The attack on Iraq has brought back the "anti-American" rhetoric, which is doubtless one reason why the Pentagon’s war propaganda has been notably unsuccessful overseas. For a New Zealander to be told by a fellow New Zealander that she is "anti-American" should be as helpful to understanding national policy as if she had been deemed to be, say, "anti-Peruvian". The phrase is a code. "Anti-Americanism" has always had little to do with culture, or with whether people actually like American life or whether we should care what each other think about such matters. To be "American" was to be "anti-Communist". This usage has become obsolete, even as the US has sought to enlarge cold war institutions like the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) that marked its global power. Since the Berlin Wall fell and there has been no single agreed threat to American interests, the world has been waiting to see how the next stage would develop. There was one certainty: that the US was now the only superpower.

In the 18 months since the planes hit New York and Washington DC, Bush has squandered widespread sympathy. The war that he has unleashed, with only one real ally, might turn out to be one of the least successful ever waged. Of course Arab and Islamic states are hostile. But so are many of the US’s usual allies, including most of "old" NATO. The attack on Iraq has been condemned as illegal, unnecessary and almost certain to end with its stated aims unachieved - even if we’re not quite sure what these are. George W Bush has certainly used the time since September 11 to earn his cowboy’s spurs. He’s a cowboy not because he’s Texan or because he likes to pretend he’s just rolled into the Oval Office from a day of cattle branding. It’s not personal, and it’s not because foreigners resent Americans.

Dubya represents the Republican strain of American ideology, a tradition that has always kept the world at a distance while asserting the American right to act in its own interests anywhere. To the George W brand of conservatives the UN has always been a nuisance. The first Bush, George HW, had a more subtle emphasis. He was more of a systems man, more attuned to the liberal Establishment and its preferred way of operating through conventional diplomacy and an alliance with Europe. Some observers note that, politically, George W is more of a Reagan man than his father’s son. Not that there’s much difference. The people around Dubya, the ones running his defence policy, are old timers from the days of GHW and even from the Reagan era. In the background are hard-core cold warriors and purist neoliberals. They think their day has come at last. For 50 years, they have been frustrated by what they see as an old-style elitist compromise with lesser countries which insisted on their US playing by others’ rules. The post-September 11 world is a place, they hope, which America can openly dominate.

The British author, Will Hutton, thinks that Tony Blair, forever projecting himself as a bridge between Europe and the US, has not noted this shift in emphasis in Washington. Hutton talks of an American "pre-emptive unilateralism and the wilful disregard of the UN" (Press, 31/3/03, from the Observer). In Gulf War 1 Saddam Hussein fired a smoking gun at GHW, who mustered support from key allies. This time round, Saddam did not oblige but W went ahead anyway. He acts as though he had to have a war. There are a variety of motives for the Iraq War, all much discussed, but the opportunity to shunt aside the UN - and its nagging demand that states be accountable - is probably one of them. The UN is the US’ only potential rival to global political legitimacy. It’s full of undeserving bureaucrats from undeserving countries who want the US to fund their whining dependence. Such is the apparent worldview of the Cheneys and Rumsfelds. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put down "Old Europe" was he conscious that, what the UN is politically, the EU is economically - a potential threat to US hegemony? (see Jeremy’s review, above, of the UN Conference on Trade and Development’s " World Investment Report 2002". Ed.).

"Domestically", Hutton goes on, "the rise and rise of American conservatism ...offers disproportionately aggressive tax cuts for the rich and for business, reforms that shrink America’s already threadbare social contract, and a carte blanche for the increasingly feral, unaccountable character of US capitalism". The GW Bush administration has also seen Richard Perle regain an influence he last enjoyed under Reagan. Then Perle advocated first-strike nuclear war. Now he advises on Middle East policy. And so on. In his article Hutton notes that the hard-Right has been champing on the sidelines for a generation. He is right to note that the second Bush presidency has offered them greater influence than they had previously enjoyed. And the opportunity to extend policy from the thinktanks has never been more obvious.

 It is no coincidence that Qatar served as the venue for the launching of the current so-called Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The tiny conservative Arab state also serves today as the regional command post for the US's terroristic blitzkrieg on Iraq. For the new resurgence of globalisation in its most imperial mode, free trade/investment and militarism go hand in hand, i.e. according to how the Bush Administration defines it in line with its openly broadcast plan to dominate the planet. More specifically in the case of Iraq, the Administration's post-war plan will mean complete American control to shape the economy of the country to its wishes. "Spoils of War: The Human Cost of America's Arms Trade" ("SOW") by John Tirman is a book that helps explain the history, context and key factors driving these aims of empire.

Along with the National and ACT parties, Rightwing commentators are blatant about the military-trade connection: see for example The Press business editor, Neil Birss, and economist Gareth Morgan (Press, 22/3/03). Their message is that Aotearoa/NZ will pay dearly for its lack of direct assistance to America's war; and this warmongering/free trade policy is keenly endorsed even in the face of the inherent contradiction posed by militarism and its undermining of the conditions for trade in the longer term. Meantime, a joint US-NZ business and political lobby group - including the US-NZ Business Council and a number of American politicians - is pressing for a free trade deal between the two countries to complement a US-Australia deal (Radio NZ & Press, 2/4/03). It cites NZ participation in the war on Afghanistan, and NZ practical support (however qualified) for the invasion of Iraq as among this country's selling points. On the other hand, nowadays, WTO bureaucrats are worried that the Bush Administration is turning to increased protectionism, to more emphasis on "go-it-alone" unilateralism, in keeping with its militarist posture and general ideology (Agribusiness Examiner, 20/3/03, no. 231).

American foreign policy commentators and decision makers use the instability experienced by so called "failed states" (serving as a breeding-ground for terrorism, etc.) as a pretext for further military intervention, an instability that the US's own globalised militarism and other policies have been so influential in creating. "Spoils of War" provides both a general background and a specific case study for a better understanding of this process. When he wrote his book, John Tirman was the executive director of the Winston Foundation for World Peace in Washington, DC. Before that, among other roles, Tirman had worked as a Time reporter, and had once been the director of communications for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The current war on Iraq is the culmination of a long and fateful history of capitalist penetration of the Middle East. Fittingly enough, former Director General of the WTO, Mike Moore, has shown himself willing and eager to get Iraqi blood on his hands. On a visit to Aotearoa/NZ in February 2003, he strongly criticised the peace movement over Iraq (Radio NZ, Nine To Noon With Linda Clark & NZ Herald, 20/2/03). Moore, who has close connections with some American thinktanks, avowed that he is "not frightened by American unilateralism". Indeed, he even openly articulates the fundamentalist "clash of civilisations" ideology: on his visit, he made clear his view that war on Iraq could be necessary because this action would be part of the struggle of modernisation against religious medievalism, "a battle between modernism and a medieval religious order". Bin Laden's jihad strategy is certainly working for him. Like other extremists, bin Laden counts on the long run to be worth the costs on the way to the envisaged utopia.

It is evidently no matter for Mike Moore then that Saddam Hussein's regime has been a very secular affair. Or that the linchpin of Western strategy so far has been support for the medieval fundamentalist Saudi Arabian regime and Gulf states, etc. Or that the injustice of the US-backed Israeli suppression of the Palestinians goes on. Or that, even again as Moore is prepared to acknowledge, past actions of Western agents have fomented conditions for the worst in the Middle East, including the aptly labelled "blowback" phenomena like the rise of al Qaeda and similar groups. Moore's "modernism" is, in fact, a code word for an extreme Rightwing fundamentalism driven by the Bush Administration. It is pervaded by an ideological zeal, which legitimates capitalist imperialism in terms of a crusading Christian mission to civilise the Islamic world through the inroads of both McDonalds and the Cruise missile. Its leadership is passionately committed to military power and violence as the major means to overcome any strong opposition to its goals, which revolve around control of the region's fossil energy reserves. Any such competition is to be mercilessly crushed.

As Tirman encapsulates in reviewing the historical record in "Spoils of War", this latest revival of Western phobia and aggression towards Islam is part of a long tradition. There was the original expansion of Islam, the Crusades, the wars in Spain, Eastern Europe, and other places. Then: "Later, as Europe came to dominate the Middle East in the 1800s, religious fervour was reawakened, now taking on a conspiracy phobia: Muslim resistance to Europeans was seen as an attack on, or hatred of, civilisation, and any expression of pan-Islamism was seen as stemming from Satanic influence" (ibid.p18). Mike Moore's own maxim is obviously that of the Bush Administration and the British Blair government: if you can't zap them with goods and services, then bomb them into modernity! At least then the West can grab the region's oil and gas. Welcome to what Mike cheerfully calls the "brave new world" of the 21st Century. Moreover, Moore himself is digging these days into the historical record in order to show us how the US is not really "the bad guy" painted by its critics. He will deliver his thinking to us on this by the end of the year (from global security issues, through Islam, to the "war on terrorism"). Mike does tend to take himself a little too seriously. Meantime, he can gloat over his income of $5000 to $6000 a week (Press, 24/2/03).

While Moore, of course, again reveals his true political colours, his crude simplistic views certainly serve to illustrate the evils of crusading capitalism. In another laudatory comment on Tirman's book, Gar Alperovitz condemns the "arms-selling militarisation of American strategy as it tries to bulldoze its way through the complex realities of 'modernising' nations" ("SOW", see blurb). Tirman's particular focus is an examination of the axis (axis of evil?) between the helicopter-building communities of Connecticut, the nexus of Congressional politics, and the resulting devastation suffered by Kurdish villagers in Turkey. What Mike Moore represents is brought to life (or rather death) in the affliction of Kurdistan, just one of many similar killing fields in the Middle East and around the world where the US war machine operates - most dramatically and horrifically, of course today, in Iraq. Meanwhile, in churning out book after book of his inane, rambling and very confused thoughts, Mike is comprehensively upstaged by his namesake, American activist Michael Moore of "Bowling for Columbine" fame. The latter is also author of the bestselling and incisive "Stupid White Men" (enough said about his namesake!).

Writing in 1997, Tirman described the Turkish war on its Kurdish minority as "one of the world's massive human rights violations. Some two and a half million villagers (some estimates now put this figure at three million) have been displaced and thousands have been killed by Ankara's fitful attempt to defeat a small rebel army. This war has accelerated an Islamic revival in Turkey that now threatens to usher in precisely what US policy was so determined to prevent - a Muslim leadership hostile to the West. It is eerily reminiscent of the catastrophic failure of America's fervent support of the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, and may foreshadow the collapse of pro-American regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well" (ibid. p4). The latest war on Iraq has increased the potential for further blowback.

US support for the suppression of the Kurds in Turkey has been aimed at protecting American interests by containing both Soviet influence and Islamic fundamentalism. Support for Turkey became a priority after the Shah, the region's strongman, failed so abjectly in acting as the local American policeman, and indeed, ushered in the critical turning point of 1979 with the fundamentalist capture of Iran. Most importantly, too, and revealingly enough, 1979 was also the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in reaction to its similar failure to control the militant growth of this Muslim movement on its very borders. As a consequence, Turkey became a key bulwark for the protection of the West's oil supply. In 1980, the Turkish military implemented one of its periodic coups. Its prime goal was to brutally crush a Kurdish guerrilla movement, the Marxist Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK (Partiya Karkari Kurdistan). Yet, with all the gross hypocrisy that the Bush Administration excels so well at, the US has been using the parallel unfortunate situation of the Kurds of Iraq as ammunition in its propaganda for war on Saddam Hussein's regime.

Tirman succinctly summarises some relevant history. In the course of pointing out how the US policy of containing Islamic fundamentalism by violence and repression has gone so wrong, he observed that, after the fall of the Shah: "the US then shored up the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq; two wars and hundreds of thousands of dead were the result . . . Democracy and human rights have rarely been at stake during the quarter-century that the policy has been pursued. No pretence of democracy existed in the Shah's Iran, Saddam's Iraq, or the oil sheikdoms of the Arabian peninsula. Human rights are derisively ignored in Turkey and Egypt. No, the stakes are summed up in one word: oil. Black gold was the linchpin of American involvement in the Persian Gulf for a half century; it was the bottom line of every calculation of US politicians" (ibid. p5).

The US's supposed intention to liberate Iraq and to implant democracy in the Middle East is a claim echoed positively in the more corrupted organs of the media, and by the morally bankrupt National Party and ACT. In some important respects, we have most certainly reached the age now that George Orwell once predicted for 1984. As the bombs and missiles rained down on Baghdad and other towns, the ultimate nadir in black humour was reached when US war leader, General Tommy Franks, reeking with the blood of Afghani and Iraqi civilians, complained that Iraqi suicide bombing was "terrorism". It is clear that the human capacity for ideological perversion and absurdity is endless. But then previous American Administrations have been ready to raze the world in the name of their own version of freedom, a freedom built on an exorbitant plunder of planetary resources.

As an aside here, political discourse and political twists and turns are endlessly fascinating. The commentator Christopher Hitchens once indicted Henry Kissinger as a war criminal and has just written a book extolling the relevance of Orwell's legacy. Now he would prefer not to mention the "war" in regard to Iraq but instead promotes the term "intervention" (Radio NZ, Nine To Noon With Linda Clark, 11/2/03). He now talks in incendiary language of the need to clean out "the political slum" of the Middle East with military action against Iraq a start against dictatorships and corrupt regimes. Meantime, the mess in Afghanistan is not the US's responsibility but that of the Afghani people. Referring to Iraq, Hitchens commented that the world's oil reserves are at stake and that it is not shameful to fight for oil.

As Tirman pertinently expounds for the enlightenment of the new imperialists: "Nowhere in the world . . . is there more attention from American government and business than in the Middle East, and nowhere has American engagement been more consistent, and more consistently a disaster" (ibid. p8). In the 21st Century, the disasters and blunders of previous US foreign policy (and British foreign policy) as illustrated in "Spoils of War" are yet set to be replayed on a scale that will confound the Earth at a level deeper than ever before. Unless the international mass mobilisations against the war can bear fruit for the future . . .

Modernisation a la Mike Moore failed in Iran because it was so obviously built on the self-interest of a small ruling class. Interestingly enough, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) coup in 1953 that overthrew the Mossadegh Iranian government, which had nationalised the oil industry, was originally planned by the British. After the reinstatement of the Shah, Iran went on to assist in quelling rebellions in Oman and Pakistan. In 1974, the Shah supported a Kurdish uprising in Iraq at the request of the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. "He also seized islands belonging to the United Arab Emirates, with no protest from Washington" [compare Iraq and Kuwait!] (ibid. p35). However, in accordance with the objectives of the CIA and State Department, the Shah soon betrayed the Iraqi Kurds, leaving them to the mercy of the Iraqi Army.

In light of the unexpectedly strong nationalist resistance so far in 2003 to the US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq, Tirman has some highly relevant observations with regard to Iran. In explication of the Iranian experience, he has this to say: "The reading of the religious ferment in Iran was being undertaken in Washington by illiterates" [Mike Moore take note!]. The reasons were "laid to the encroachments of the Shah's modernisation". Modernisation had evidently meant "growing economic development, penetration of useful technologies, the maturing of a political system based on law, and the like. It also meant the waning of 'superstition', including religion, and the triumph of rationalism" (ibid. p36).

But, in actuality: "At work - invisibly to American political and opinion leaders - was a resentment, a wounding, many decades in the making. Foreign dominance of the country's finances, resources, and diplomacy stretched back to the 18th Century. Now, this wholesale revamping of Iranian society to serve the interests and tastes of an elite modeling itself in every way on European secular (and often decadent) culture and explicitly subservient to Western security interests was a sheer insult to Shi'ism and its uniquely nationalistic character and was intolerable to the Iranian people. It was this set of grievances that animated the revolution and swept the Shah from power and into exile" (ibid.). The 2003 American plan to dominate and remodel Iraq is on a far more brutal, traumatic, rapid and cruder scale than its treatment of Iran under the Shah.

Before the Turkish military moved in September 1980 to take over complete control of Turkey, there was a state of widespread unrest in the country. It was the terrorism of the extreme Right which prevailed. As well as direct action, the military dictatorship used shadowy terrorist/death squad groups like the Gray Wolves to help impose its rule. In particular, the PKK and its support base in the southeast were targeted. Fierce punishment was exacted on Turkey's Kurdish minority, some 20% of the total population. All this got the connivance if not the direct encouragement of Washington (ibid. pp77/8). Significantly, in March 1980, only half a year before the coup, a new arms deal had been signed between Turkey and the US.

Ever since the establishment of the Turkish State in the early 1920s under Kemal Ataturk, the Kurds have been the victims of official policy. "Kemal Ataturk's nationalism was in fact a version of fascism" (ibid. p68). The denial of Kurdish identity was a fundamental part of this. Kurdish names and folk songs were actually banned and systematic efforts made to wipe out any sense of Kurdish cultural identity. A Kurdish revolt was crushed in 1925. Later, in the 1930s, the Army's reprisals may have taken some 40,000 lives. While repression has always been State policy, the Kurdish southeast formally came under martial law in the late 1970s as local resistance grew. As earlier indicated, following the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, Turkey became a vital Western bastion against socialism and the Islamic movement. After the 1980 coup, "the mere recognition of a distinct Kurdish identity was made a crime, and the Kurdish language was in effect outlawed" (ibid. p138).

Arms funneled to Turkey by the new military agreement of March 1980 were employed to destroy Kurdish nationalism and counter any Islamic fundamentalism. These arms took the form of Black Hawk helicopters, armoured fighting vehicles, F-16 fighters, and other military materiel. Actually, the 1980 military agreement reinforced what had already been happening for a quite a long time. Some key weapons like the F-16s were even being co-produced in Turkey as its regime tried to build up its own military industry. Militarisation got another big boost from the 1980 agreement. "Turkey in the mid-1980s was the arms market" (ibid. p124).

Kurdistan, the region which is homeland to the Kurdish people, is centred on Turkey but overlaps with bordering areas in Iraq, Iran and Syria. All these countries fear the potential for Kurdish nationalism to disrupt their boundaries and have victimised the Kurdish minorities under their rule. Altogether, there are today about 26 million Kurds with a claim to nationhood as good as many another people. Indeed, the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 under the umbrella of the League of Nations "provided a draft scheme for Kurdish independence, which Britain and France reneged on, instead dividing Kurdish territory between their Middle Eastern client states. When in 1922 the Kurds rebelled, they were bombed by the Royal Air Force" ("The Hutchinson Dictionary of World History", Helicon, 1993, p341). "And the British maintained an ostentatious role of political management and oil extraction in Iraq for nearly four decades" ("SOW", p99).

In time, this imperial control reaped its reward. "To the growing numbers of Arab nationalists in Iraq, the repeated and blatant using of their country by the West was becoming intolerable. At the very least, they argued, Iraq needed to recreate itself as a truly independent state. In July 1958, the pro-Western Iraqi monarchy was overthrown by a band of military officers in the name of nationalism and republicanism" (ibid. p100). Thus the scene was set for the rise of the Ba'ath Party, and then later its strongman, Saddam Hussein. Democracy never got a chance.

1978 saw a particularly savage period of repression by Saddam Hussein's regime, and there was much further brutality in the 1980s when the Kurds supported the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraqi war. There has often been close collaboration, too, between Turkey and Iraq in attacks on the Kurds. After the 1991 Gulf War, international public opinion obliged the first Bush Administration to enforce a no-fly zone in the Kurdish north of Iraq to protect communities there from Hussein's reprisals. But US-British forces have also obligingly allowed the Turkish government to intervene against the PKK in hot pursuit missions into Iraqi territory. The only consistent line taken by the US and the West generally to the Kurds has been to use them for their own ends.

A protection zone was instituted as well for the Shi’ites in the south of Iraq. But in the 1991 Gulf War a Shi’ite uprising was cynically sold out by the coalition forces, and to date things have gone differently in the latest war with little rebellion against Saddam shown by the Shi’tes (at least to the time of writing). A major reason in 1991 for the Western betrayal of the Iraqi Shi’ites was the fact that Iran had militant Iraqi Shi’ite refugees poised to return to Iraq. This is still very much the situation in 2003. "Iran has trained an Iraqi Shi’ite army to seize power in the south" (NZ Herald, 1-2/2/03). Already the US has had to warn Shi’ite nationalist Iran against making or aiding any incursions into Iraqi territory. An Iranian Revolutionary Guard General has been reported as saying if the Americans stay for more than a few weeks in Iraq, then the Iranian authorities will issue fatwas, religious edicts, to kill them (ibid.). In addition, the US has warned Syria against any assistance for Hussein's regime. The process of dangerous destabilisation is already proceeding throughout the region.

By the mid-1990s the US dominated the world's commerce in weapons, accounting for as much as 70% of the trade to Third World countries. The Middle East was particularly favoured. Besides Turkey, arms have poured into Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Jordan. Since the waning of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc, the Middle East has had an arms bazaar. The "most salient feature of American globalism", demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf War, was the projection of US military power driven by the political economy of oil ("SOW", p170). US international security objectives intertwined with the country's growing dependence on oil, similarly fuel the 2003 war on Iraq. Again, the trades in arms and oil have combined in destructive fury. Operation Desert Storm [in 1991] "demonstrated with total clarity that the imperatives of economic growth at home would necessitate military activism abroad, even if the two were not coordinated as such. Ordinarily the link was mainly visible in the arms trade; in the Gulf in the winter of 1991, it was visible as war" (ibid. p171). A decade or so later war is raging again.

More ominously this time, 2003 sees an invasion that brings it all together on a whole new level of brutality. War has been unleashed with consequences certain to wreck the region further, and to further radicalise many of its people. The central theme of Tirman's book is the self-destructive nature of fostering military solutions for political problems. This is what the US has done, is doing, and is set to do, and the whole world will go on suffering the consequences and, most of all, the Third World victims of these policies.

In 1997 Tirman was very prescient of the implications: "The 'blowback' phenomenon was not limited to the spread of weapons, however, as the bombing of US military facilities in Saudi Arabia proved. Islamic fighters all over the region, trained by the CIA in Pakistan, are now turned against the pillars of US interests in the Middle East. Said one Reagan Doctrine enthusiast: 'I don't think the United States realised what the consequences might be', that is, the consequences of providing millions of weapons to the most ferocious, most anti-Western Muslim fighters in the world" (ibid. pp148/9). Stupid white men (with a few token brown faces and even a very unpleasant female National Security Adviser), obsessed with power, greed, and related ideological delusions, are threatening the future as never before.

While it would be simplistic to draw out clear chains of cause and effect stemming from American and British policy, Tirman points to an obviously very substantially interlinked pattern of factors and events. The lavish arming of the Shah with its consequent corruption and abuse of power led to revolution in Iran. "That revolution stirred a coup in Afghanistan and an attack on Iran from Iraq" ("SOW", p179). The US backed Saddam's attack which began in 1980 after Saddam, "retaliating against Iran's assistance to the Kurds fighting for independence from Iraq, repudiated a 1975 border agreement which gave Iran an area north of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway ("Reader's Digest Family Encyclopedia of World History", 1996, p318). As John Pilger has pointed out, "this war had been started at the behest of Washington. The Americans supplied Iraq with satellite intelligence, battle plans and, as files now reveal, a blueprint for the use of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons" (Sunday Star Times, 30/3/03).

Over a million people died as a result of the war. Predictably, " . . . the US persisted with its policy of promoting military 'solutions' - arming the mujahedin rebels in Afghanistan and supporting Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Those manoeuvres eventually led to a bloody takeover by Islamist militants in Afghanistan and the second Persian Gulf War [in 1991] on the Arabian peninsula. Militarism begot militarism. The American policy was a near-total failure. But the brains trusts in Washington were eager to give it another chance" ("SOW", p179).

Next, there was the terrible death toll exacted by this war and the subsequent sanctions, taking well over a million lives. "Some 50,000 deaths and many more permanent psychological and physical traumas were visited upon Iraqi children" as a direct immediate result of the 1991 war" (ibid. p172). As well, several million children have been adversely affected throughout the Middle East as a whole, not only in Iraq itself (as estimated by the United Nations, ibid.). Taliban rule in Afghanistan - the outcome of Soviet and American interventions in the region - facilitated the outrage of September 11, 2001. This in turn provided the opportunity for the American Administration's wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, its interventions across the Middle East and Central Asia, and its bid to dominate the whole world. The humanitarian disaster of the present war will be enormous and this is just the start of the new era of so-called preemptive war.

"Turkey has threatened military action to stop the Kurds of northern Iraq from seizing the oil capital of Kirkuk" (NZ Herald, 1-2/2/03). The status quo is dearly appreciated by Ankara. The Turks "worry that a post-Saddam government might grant greater powers to Iraq's minority Kurds. That in turn could lead to similar demands for self-rule by Turkey's own Kurdish population" (Press, 27/1/03). Iraqi and Turkish Kurds might join hands in creating a state carved out of both Iraq and Turkey. The US has therefore had to exert a lot of pressure to date to keep the Turks from clashing with the Iraqi Kurds, and so from foiling American war objectives. A joint US-Kurdish attack was mounted on the Hussein regime.

Back in the 1980s, the Reagan Doctrine "conveyed to all the unmistakable message that the challenges to Western 'interests' should and could be defeated by the ruthless application of military power. The United States of America, moreover, would be the first in line to supply it" ("SOW", p88). Well, they're back - the recycled Republican hawks like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Richard Allen and co., more ambitious and malevolent than ever. It is appropriate here to let our own Mike Moore have the last word. Talking of New Zealanders he has remarked, " . . . we don't know how to deal with evil. We are not used to dealing with bad guys. You want never to accept evil and corruption, but you have to deal with it, otherwise it'll wipe out the world" (Press, 24/2/03).