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T. C. A. Ramanujam

"How to be free from arrogant nationalism is today the chief lesson to be learnt. Tomorrow's history will begin with a chapter on Internationalism, and we shall be unfit for tomorrow if we retain any manners, customs, or habits of thought that are contrary to universalism."

— Rabindranath Tagore

AN ANCIENT nation is being humiliated. The world is a mute witness to the brazen arrogance of a country, which thinks it can ride roughshod over everyone, including the European Union, the UN, NATO and the people of West and South East Asia.

The US President, Mr George Bush, has no patience for the UN. Since NATO fiddled and the UN failed, Washington has openly declared that strategies and policies and institutions built to deal with 20th century conflicts may not be the right ones to deal with the threat America imagines it is facing today. It has concluded that the people of Iraq have to be freed and will have to be taught the American ways of governance.

Mr Tony Blair is already being called the American Prime Minister. What brings Mr Bush and Mr Blair together is a shared Christian faith (in the words of Time magazine). The tens of thousands of American forces that streamed into southern Iraq rely on the world's most impressive weaponry, a combination of the latest in battlefield technology and overwhelming firepower.

And what is Iraq before the might of the sole superpower of the world today? In terms of arms, Iraq is no match; its alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction is yet to be discovered. Yet, it represents an ancient civilisation.

History records that Mesapotamia was the cradle of the world's first civilisation. It has archaeological riches. The Sumerians settled in South Mesapotamia around 4000 BC to cultivate the alluvial land left by flooding of the rivers Tigris and Euphretes. Babylon became Mesapotamia's capital under Hammurabi, whose Code of Laws showed existence of civilised conduct and government. Invasions and pestilence are not new to Iraq.

Over the centuries, the Kassites, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the British have overrun it. The Arabs conquered Iraq in the 7th Century A.D. It was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1534 till the First World War. And yet, the current war is unique.

What motivates this naked aggression? The Milan Technical University has choreographed the back stage of the American attack against Iraq as part of the material for the course, "Models and Natural Resources Management". It points out that 75 per cent of the $40-billion bill of the First Gulf War was picked up by the Arab world, specifically Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with the US footing the rest. Where did they find the money?

Before the Gulf War I, the oil price was $15 a barrel. After the wars, it zoomed to$ 42. The extra $60 billion was shared by the Arab states and the multinationals that control the oil industry. The extraction and trading of oil in West Asia is in the hands of what has come to be known as the Seven Sisters (Shell, Tamoil, Esso, etc), all of them American.

As far as the Arab nations are concerned, the profit from oil price spike was just sufficient to meet the expenses on the war. For Washington and the MNCs, there was a clean profit of $20 billion after meeting the expenses of Gulf War I. Comments an expert of the Milan Technical University: "Now all is clear. The US made a profit of $ 20 billions from the war. It had nothing to do with `Free Kuwait'. They were only after the `cheese'!"

Gulf War I was finally paid for by oil-users across the globe. Apart from the oil profit, the US made $49 billion from sale of weapons. The armament industry in America profited hugely.

The Afghan War: Why did the US target the tiny mountainous, barely developed state? A puppet government in Kabul would sanction the construction of a 2,500-km American pipeline that would run across its territory. It is much easier to arm-twist a country tormented by 30 years of war with the offer of constructing and managing such a pipeline.

Gulf War II: Why has the US attacked Iraq again? The goal is to find an alternative supplier of oil to Saudi Arabia, a state known to be sympathetic to Osama bin Laden. The and the UK want to unabashedly occupy the oil-rich Iraq so that they are not at the mercy of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

In a recent publication, Henry Kissinger poses the question if the US at all needs a foreign policy. "Money," he says Kissinger, "is like manure: It only works if you spread it around". Global support is unnecessary for ensuring global supremacy. "America swears by the good old rule, that simple plan: For him to take who has the power, for him to keep who can." The Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin, called it the Law of the Fist.

Marxists had long ago realised the economic basis of imperialism. The US is in deep recession. The war is a simple solution to boost its economy. MNCs are gleeful, as can be seen from the way stock prices went up on the declaration of war.

Way back in 1941, Gandhiji dreamt of London being bombed, and Churchill took offence. America has invaded Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Cambodia, Guatemala, Cuba, Chile, and a host of other small countries in the past fifty years, all with the object of making the world safe for democracy. We know the results. The biggest casualty of the latest such offensive is the UN.

Today it is Iraq; what will be the target tomorrow? For, as the former US President, Mr Bill Clinton, pointed out at a conclave in Delhi recently, because of what he chose to designate as negative interdependence, "our fates are tied together and we cannot escape each other".

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