July 19, 2006

gowans.blogspot.com/2006/07/jungle-law.html

Less than a week after North Korea test fired missiles, sparking an explosion of histrionic warnings about a gathering threat to the United States and its allies from an “unpredictable dictator” [1] who was “amassing the world’s most dangerous weapons” (though in nowhere near the quantities of the United States or any other permanent member of the UN Security Council) “India test-fired its longest range nuclear capable missile…for the first time.” [2]
 
In these days of missile mania, you would think the UN Security Council would immediately spring to action to issue a condemnatory resolution.
 
After all, that’s what it did to North Korea after that country test fired a few, not so menacing missiles, that “American officials had never considered…a serious threat.” [3]
 
Pyongyang, which has long existed under a US nuclear sword of Damocles, was ordered in no uncertain terms to abandon its nuclear program. And all other countries were commanded to abjure trade in missile-related items with the DPRK.
 
But the professedly proliferation-adverse Security Council remained silent on India’s missile test. Worse, the Bush administration announced plans to sign a deal with New Delhi to allow US nuclear technology to be transferred to India, even though India refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. [4]
 
The gullible were assured the transferred technology would only be used for civilian purposes, but even if you believed this hollow assurance, there remained the niggling matter of explaining how nuclear technology could be transferred to a country that refuses to renounce nuclear weapons, when at the same time, Iran, which has signed the treaty banning proliferation, is being hounded, demonized and threatened for wanting to develop its own civilian nuclear power industry.
 
It’s instructive to note that the US was perfectly willing to countenance nuclear power in Iran when the US-backed Shah was in power and the profits were to be reaped by a Westinghouse-led consortium of US corporations. [5]
 
A clue to the reasons behind the inconsistency may be glimpsed in this:
 
A. Iran has a lot of oil, but doesn’t seem to be all that interested in handing the concessions over to US or British oil companies. Plus, its independence from US control and domination is getting in the way of US plans to control Western Asia, the world’s oil spigot.
 
B. India doesn’t have a lot of oil, but does sit on the doorstep of China, a country the United States would dearly like to keep from growing strong enough to challenge its primacy. The New York Times thought it significant enough to mention that the range of the Agri 3, the missile India tested, “would put … China’s major cities within striking distance.” [6]
 
Japan, as much as India a part of Washington’s plans to surround a rising competitor with biddable attack dogs, was not without its own fulminations over North Korea’s missile launchings, using the event to justify its continued inching toward the militarism of an early era, this time under the aegis of its patron, the United States.
 
Fukushiro Nukaga, head of the country’s defense agency, went so far as to publicly muse about “acquiring the military capacity to make pre-emptive strikes.” [7]
 
Shinzo Abe, the chief cabinet secretary and expected successor to Prime Minister Koizumi, allowed as how “there is an argument that attacking the (North Korean) missile base would be within the legal right of self-defense.”  [8]
 
The hysteria is contrived. It hands Japan’s economic elite an excuse it needs to shed the country’s limiting anti-militarist constitution and the US to pursue “the end of North Korea,” what John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, once described as Washington’s policy toward Pyongyang [9].
 
At the heart of the mania lies in an implicit assumption for which there is neither a scintilla of evidence, nor even a jot of a reason to suppose it’s true: that North Korea’s test firings mean the country intends to attack the United States and Japan.
 
Or is it Montreal?
 
Canada’s The National Post, one of the loopiest newspapers on the planet, once claimed that North Korea posed an immense danger to Canada. Fearing an annihilating retaliatory strike, Pyongyang would never send a warhead hurtling toward an American city. Instead, it would target Montreal.
 
The New York Times, hardly better, did its own part to advance the campaign of anti-North Korea fear-mongering. “American intelligence officials,” the newspaper’s June 19th edition warned, believe “that a three-stage version” of North Korea’s Taepodong 2 missile “could strike all of the United States.”
 
Run for cover. And while you’re at it, counsel your aunt on the wisdom of having regular check-ups for testicular cancer, now that she has balls. While a three-stage version of the Taepodong 2 may be able to reach the continental United States, it has never been tested and wasn’t on the launch pad.
 
Instead, it was a two-staged version the North Koreans tested, one that couldn’t reach the US mainland, and even if it could, doesn’t automatically mean it would be used as a first strike weapon.  Any pistol-packing police officer can blow your head off. Does that mean you should walk down the street carrying a bazooka, ready to launch a pre-emptive strike on every cop who draws near? Why then would the New York Times draw attention to the range of a missile that has never been tested and wasn’t being launched?
 
To be sure, countries don’t acquire weapons without recognizing that one day they may have to use them (or, at the very least, make the plausible case that they will use them if necessary.) 
 
But weapons can serve two functions. They can be used as a deterrent. Or they can be used as instruments of aggression. There are probably very few instances in history of aggressive intentions being made as plain as Madeline Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, did when she asked Colin Powell “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” [10]
 
You can be pretty sure that North Korea has no intention of using its rudimentary nuclear weapons (that is, if it really has any) and basic missile technology to start a war. North Korea is a weakling, and weaklings don’t start wars. Its air force can’t fly, for lack of fuel. Its navy is puny, and built for self-defense. And while it has a large army, at any one time, half its personnel are engaged in construction and agriculture. South Korea’s military budget is many times larger. And the North doesn’t have a militarist super-power backing it up.
 
Moreover, if the propaganda weren’t so obvious, Washington’s and Tokyo’s depiction of North Korea as an aggressive menace would be a textbook example of the Freudian concept of projection.
 
Inasmuch as the Korean peninsula has been attacked, bombarded, occupied and colonized by both countries in succession, it’s obvious where the history of aggression lies.
 
And insofar as the US has revivified the Nazi doctrine of preventive war, attacked and occupied three countries since 1999, virtually declared war by designating North Korea part of an “axis of evil”, repeatedly turned down Pyongyang’s entreaties to hold bilateral talks, normalize relations and sign a peace treaty (”We don’t do non-aggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature,” said former Secretary of State Colin Powell at one point [11]), it would be a gross inversion of the truth to declare North Korea, and not the United States, the aggressor.
 
As for an unprovoked North Korea lobbing a missile at Japan, or — to admit the more surreal of the possibilities regularly considered by the US media as having more substance than the fairytale it is — the United States, what would be the point? Would the United States and Japan back off, lift the sanctions, and normalize relations?
 
Fittingly – and I say fittingly, because the United States can always be counted on to do something to make its double standards plain – at the very moment the alarm-o-meter was being ratcheted up to code red over a few North Korean missiles, the US Air Force was firing off a few of its own Minutemen III missiles. One “travelled 4,800 miles towards the Central Pacific, and three test warheads landed near the Marshall Islands.” [12]
 
There’s not a lot that is black and white, but it’s obvious that there was not the barest hint of illegality or menace in North Korea’s missile launchings.
 
Equally plain is that the UN Security Council acts as a caucus for approving US foreign policy and maintaining the dominance of great powers over the weak. The purpose of the UN Security Council is to bludgeon poor countries to keep them down, and ideally open to exploitation.
 
Hence, despite Iran acting within the bounds of international law, it is to be denied its sovereign right to civilian nuclear power, because Washington has decided it must be so, and has managed to cajole, horse-trade and pressure other veto-wielding members into cooperating.
 
North Korea is to be denied the sovereign right of self-defense, because Washington wants to bring the country’s anti-colonial, anti-imperialist regime down, to replace it with the kind of neo-liberalizing puppet regimes that have been installed in Serbia, Iraq, and Georgia and, if Washington had its way, Cuba.
 
It might be recalled that Paul Bremer, the US proconsul in Iraq, issued four orders before quitting the country and ceding nominal sovereignty to Iraqi politicians: “the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits…the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and … the elimination of nearly all trade barriers.” [13]
 
“Strikes were effectively forbidden in key sectors and the right to unionize restricted. A highly regressive ‘flat tax’ … was also imposed.” [14]
 
In Georgia, the US trained Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the so-called “pro-democracy” forces in the first color revolution, “has gone on a binge of privatization, selling off the country’s energy sector and hydroelectric industry.” [15]
 
Saakashivili envisions NATO becoming an “alliance that plays a strategic role in the Caucasus, one that would serve Western interests in the competition for oil and gas resources, and provide a foothold close to the Middle East.” [16]
 
As for Cuba, Washington’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, proposes to privatize all aspects of Cuba’s post-Castro economy, including health care and education.
 
Were the United States to bring down North Korea’s regime, the end result would be the coerced conversion of the country to a program of soaking up the US’s surplus capital.
 
Except as a façade behind which lurk so many great power interests, international law doesn’t exist, and never has.
 
What does exist is “the jungle law,” a law which operates according to one principal: “You are backward, you are weak. Therefore, you are wrong. Hence, you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty, therefore, you are right. Hence, we must be wary of you.” [17]
 
North Korea’s reaction to the UN Security Council resolution ordering it to abandon its nuclear program and give up its missiles, that is, to give the US an open path to invade, has been to reject the resolution and redouble its resolve to strengthen itself against the predations of the jungle law.
 
Pyongyang has noted that “Only the strong can defend justice …where the jungle law prevails” and that “Neither the U.N. nor anyone else can protect us.” History, it says, shows “that only a country with its powerful force can defend the national dignity and its sovereignty and independence.” [18]
 
1. It is standard journalistic practice to refer to North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il as unpredictable, if not insane, to make the claim hang together that the country is prepared to undertake the irrational and insane act of attacking the United States, a provocation that would invite its instant annihilation in a shower of US nuclear missiles. “Figuring out the motives…of Kim Jong Il has stymied diplomats for years,” the 19 June 2006 edition of New York Times declares. This is more an unintended comment on the perspicacity of diplomats than on Kim’s mental health.
 
2. New York Times, July 10, 2006.
 
3. New York Times, July 5, 2006.
 
4. New York Times, July 10, 2006.
 
5. Washington Post, March 25, 2005.
 
6. New York Times, July 10, 2006.
 
7. New York Times, July 11, 2006.
 
8. Ibid.
 
9. Asked by the New York Times what US policy on North Korea is, Bolton “strode over to a bookshelf, pulled off a volume and slapped it on the table. It was called “The End of North Korea’.” “’That,’ he said, ‘is our policy.’” New York Times, September 2, 3003.
 
10. BBC Documentaries 4. Colin Powell: Profile, www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/profile/colin-powell.shtml
 
11. New York Times, August 14, 2003.
 
12. Workers World, July 5, 2006.
 
13. A. Juhasz, “Ambitions of Empire: The Bush Administration Economic plan for Iraq (and Beyond?), Left Turn Magazine, 12 (Feb./Mar 2004), 27-32, cited in David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, 2005, p 6.
 
14. Harvey, p 6.
 
15. International Herald Tribune, July 5, 2006.
 
16. New York Times, July 17, 2006.
 
17. Joseph Stalin, Problems of Leninism, International Publishers, 1934.
 
18. KCNA, July 16, 2006.