Washington’s war is going a la carte. Each passing week brings new targets and new justifications for attack on the menu for military action. There is now not the slightest pretence that the scope of the United States’s regime-change wish list is in any way tethered to September 11. Instead, the world is witnessing the rapid emergence of a plan to dispose of any government hateful to American ultra-conservatism.
First there was the Taliban. Beyond them lay the improbable “axis of evil” – with Iraq at its apex. Now the administration’s planning has moved “beyond the axis of evil”, in the words of John Bolton, one of the creatures of the night occupying sub-Cabinet rank in the Bush regime.
Bolton identified Syria, Libya and, above all, Cuba as states that needed to come round to Washington’s world-view before Washington comes round to them, guns blazing.
The rationale is that the latest “rogue” trio are preparing to threaten the US with weapons of mass destruction.
Bolton’s boss, Secretary of State Colin Powell, was at the same time asserting that weapons of mass destruction were no longer really here nor there, and that the issue of weapons inspection was now “separate and distinct and different” from the need for “regime change”.
Why not make it clear that justifications are no longer required? Rumours of weapons of mass destruction may be sufficient to get a regime on to the “must change” list, but the provable absence of them will not remove it.
Everyone but the British government has twigged that this is an open-ended war to make the world congenial for the most chauvinistic elements in US public life. Every government they dislike is to be removed, every grudge they have nursed from the Cold War is to be exorcised. Military force may be used in some cases; the well-tried methods of destabilisation, sanctions and coup in others.
Where evidence and argument fail, the administration relies on effrontery. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice demanded that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez “respect the Constitution” on the day he was restored to office, following the failure of the US-backed military coup against the Constitution.
Optimistic Europeans have clung to the illusion that September 11 would help President George W Bush rediscover the rest of the world. If it has, that world is to be called Texas. Even governments and peoples who admire the US increasingly fear the brazen lawlessness of this administration, and worry at the implications of endless war, with its ever- expanding list of governments to be ousted.
Andrew Murray is chairperson of Britain’s Stop the War Coalition