Cop of the world

Cop of the world

It didn't get a lot of media coverage — being nowhere nearly as interesting
as the ongoing Washington soap opera, Monicagate — but US
President Bill Clinton has proposed an increase in the US government's
military spending.

Clinton wants to increase the military budget by US$12 billion in 2000,
taking the total for that year to US$268 billion. He wants further increases
of US$110 billion over six years.

Figures like that are hard to comprehend. What they mean is that the
US will be spending on its military each year more than the entire gross
domestic product of Australia. Huge sums of wealth, the product of hundreds
of millions of hours of human labour, which could be expended on providing
clean water and health care for those who lack them, or solving a myriad
of other social problems, will instead be devoted to further death and
destruction in a world that already has too much of them.

At the end of the Cold War in 1990-91, western governments and media
briefly promoted the idea of a "peace dividend": supposedly, military
spending would be diverted to peaceful purposes.

That was always a lie. The developed capitalist governments weren't
going to stop being imperialist just because they had outlasted one of
their enemies. On the contrary, that success has encouraged them to throw
their economic and military weight around all the more.

The United States in particular, as the militarily and economically
strongest power, is seeking to establish itself as the global enforcer
of imperialist interests, especially its own. Where it can obtain the backing
of the United Nations Security Council for its use of force, it is happy
to do so for propaganda purposes, but the US-British attack on Iraq in
December makes clear that Washington will ignore the United Nations whenever
it suits its interests.

The stunning hypocrisy of waging an eight-year war on the civilian population
of Iraq under the pretext of preventing the Iraqi government from building
"weapons of mass destruction" is matched by Washington's little-noticed
threat to bomb North Korea because of its suspicions that North Korea is
attempting to assemble an atomic bomb.

In fact, North Korea has as much or as little right as India, Pakistan,
Israel or the United States to manufacture nuclear weapons. The US, still
the only country to have used that particular weapon of mass destruction,
has no right to decide which other countries are entitled to obtain them.

After a campaign of US threats in 1993-94, North Korea agreed to freeze
construction of two graphite-moderated nuclear reactors and implement a
safeguards accord, in exchange for the US supplying North Korea with two
light-water reactors by 2003 and 500,000 tons of fuel oil a year until
the new reactors are in operation. The US reneged on its side of the deal,
but is still trying to exercise control over North Korea's power program,
including the threat to bomb what it claims is an underground nuclear facility.

The fact that Iraq and North Korea are both ruled by grotesque dictators
makes it politically easier for Washington to justify its aggression. But
the US is not in the business of protecting the defenceless against brutal
dictators; it is in the business of protecting its own interests, in alliance
with anyone, including brutal dictators, who is useful.

Thus in Kosovo, the US is strangely powerless to do anything to defend
the civilian population from the onslaught of Slobodan Milosevic's war
machine.

It may yet happen that Milosevic so outrages world opinion that Washington
will feel it politically useful to drop a few bombs on Serbian targets.
But the simple truth is that the US and Milosevic share a common goal of
keeping Kosovo part of Serbia, and they are unlikely to come to serious
blows over a minor disagreement about means.

Massive military spending by the US government reflects it intention
to be "cop of the world". Defenceless civilians are simply the small
change of its propaganda. Like corrupt cops everywhere, it serves only
the wealthy few.