In August 2002 George W. Bush and his crony Tony Blair were talking up their intention to attack Iraq, going on like a broken record about its “efforts to create weapons of mass destruction”, hypocritically ignoring the facts that (a) it is the U.S. which leads the world in the manufacture and use of such weapons (Japan 1945, Kosovo 1999 and Afghanistan 2001 not all weapons of mass destruction are nuclear) and (b) it is Israel, America’s client state in the Middle East, which already possesses “weapons of mass destruction” and is entirely willing to use them against its neighbours.

Iraq’s immediate neighbours do not consider Iraq a military threat, so why should the U.S.? Iraq’s missiles can reach parts of Europe and Russia but neither Europe nor Russia considers Iraq a threat; indeed, in mid-2002 Russia signed a multi-billion dollar trade deal with Iraq. Only Israel considers Iraq a threat (consistent with the pan-Arab hatred of Israel for its brutality toward the Palestinians), and in the US Congress and in the Bush Administration what Israel wants Israel gets.

As British elder statesman Tony Benn has said, the American desire for a war against Iraq is based not on any concern over what weapons Saddam Hussein might possess but springs from the desire of the U.S. to grab Iraq’s oil.

Bush's “War on Terrorism” is not about terrorism (except insofar as staged terrorist acts are an important part of the propaganda campaign). It’s about control of all of the Earth’s economic resources, not just oil.

The United States government wants economic control and exploitation of the vast oil and mineral wealth of Central Asia, and if a pan-Asian war is required to achieve this then so be it. American foreign policy makers believe that American military power will enable them to win such a war and that (a) a war would enable them to remain in power indefinitely (elections will become a thing of the past or will be rigged), (b) would be good for American (and British) weapons manufacturers and (c) would avert the looming economic depression in the U.S. (since, many believe, it worked before in the 1930s military build-up to World War II).

If Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are allowed to proceed with their plan to attack Iraq it will lead to the overthrow of those Arab regimes whose leaders are in the pay of the Americans (in the case of Egypt, to the extent of a good chunk of the two billion dollars per year military “aid”). Will Middle Eastern oil continue to flow to the Western industrial societies and to Japan and to China? What might be the consequences for those countries (especially as regards feeding their people and keeping them warm in winter) if oil supplies are cut off for an extended period of time?

World War III will involve the nuclear- and CBW-armed countries of India, Pakistan, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel and the U.S. itself, and it will mean that millions of soldiers and civilians will die: shot, burnt, blasted, asphyxiated, crushed, incinerated, poisoned. Nor will all these civilians be Asian; this war will also extend to the U.S. mainland and probably to Europe, despite what the Pentagon planners intend. Violence will lead to more violence, and wars will escalate until eventually nuclear weapons are used first “low-yield”, later the big ones, in the megaton range, whose detonations (if there are enough of them, and we don’t know how many will be used) will produce high levels of radiation in the atmosphere of (mainly) the Northern Hemisphere, leading to millions of cases of cancer among the populations of Western countries.

And what if the U.S. warmongers achieve their aims of gaining control of all sources of oil in Asia (and the Middle East and North Africa), and of the mineral wealth of Central Asia? Will the Europeans, Japanese and Chinese feel secure in the knowledge that the United States will surely sell them whatever they need to maintain their industrial economies and their military capabilities? (The Russian and Chinese leaders surely understand the long-term threat to their national sovereignty, and are acting accordingly.)

Or is there something even more sinister going on? Is the goal “at the highest level” the extinction of the human species? If so, will the American people prove to be “useful idiots” facilitating the attainment of this goal? Or, on the contrary, might they yet awaken from their ignorance, their stupidity, their greed and their egoism, take a hard look at themselves, understand what their lying, vicious, rapacious, hypocritical government is doing in the name of “freedom and democracy”, and rein in and reform that government, reconstitute their nation as a republic as the authors of the Constitution intended, and save the world, as they believe (or used to believe) is their manifest destiny?