Why US Juggernaut is so Dangerous by Guy Rundle Published by The Age 2:12pm 4th Apr, 2003   April 4 2003.    If the US wins overwhelmingly, it will feel it has the right to act unilaterally anywhere, writes Guy Rundle.    Writing after the end of the Second World War, George Orwell canvassed the various possibilities for the postwar order. At one end was nuclear annihilation in a third world war. At the other was democratic Socialist (Orwell always capitalised "Socialist" in that phrase) revolution in both the West and the USSR.    In the middle was the prospect of a deadlocked system of power blocs, with no war, but no prospect of radical change.    "This almost seems a worse result than war," Orwell concluded. "Such a system could remain stable for hundreds of years." Today many of us are in a similar quandary about what to hope for in the Iraq war.    The most humane result would be a quick end to the actual war, with the collapse of the Iraqi army and leadership, and a perfunctory and rapid battle for Baghdad. Pockets of organised resistance would continue in the north and east, but they would be subdued quickly. Of course, once Iraq has been conquered, an intifada of sorts will continue for as long as US coalition forces occupy the country.    Yet in another way this would be one of the worst results possible. It would confirm the belief held by the Bush Administration, and the ultra-right think tanks that advises it, that the US can exercise unilateral power in just about any area of the world it sees fit, and meet with little resistance.    If you think they're bad now, you ain't seen nothing yet. Hence there is some truth in Tony Parkinson's charge ("When opposition to the war goes one step too far", on this page on Wednesday) that there is some straw-clutching going on among opponents of the war. Iraqi resistance has been more solid than the US coalition expected, but it has hardly constituted a real challenge, to date. Arab and Muslim anger across the world is growing, but it has not yet reached the point where cautious Arab regimes feel threatened, or see the need to adopt a more aggressive policy. The atrocities against civilians are growing, but they are not yet at the level of the first Gulf War.    Of course, much of the received opinion that the war is going badly for the US coalition has been due to the media, and its need for new story angles - and especially due to the practice of "embedding" journalists in coalition units, a strategy that is proving highly ambivalent for the Pentagon's spinmeisters.    "Embedding" has meant that there are not one or two anonymous military sources, but thousands - the soldiers with whom the journalists are travelling. Thus we have heard of the army's contempt for Donald Rumsfeld; we've heard a British soldier denounce an American soldier as "an animal, with no respect for human life".    And for the past few days we have all been poring over the details of seven people being shot dead at a checkpoint - an atrocity that would hardly register otherwise but which is now having an impact on support for the war, especially in the non-US parts of the coalition.    Yet ultimately this has all been a curtain-raiser to the battle of Baghdad - an event that, whatever its outcome, will be the pivot upon which international relations turn for quite some time.    If it is a fizzer, it will mark the beginning of an era of uncompromised imperial arrogance on the part of America - one that extends to every area of life, from military invasion to "free" trade agreements, whereby smaller nations are blackmailed into surrendering local industries and markets to American multinationals.    The US will impose an American military governor on Iraq for up to two years, against the wishes of its allies and the Iraqi population. It has already given the contract for running the port of Basra to a US company and the contract for cleaning up Iraq's burning wells to - guess who? - Halliburton, once headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney.    If on the other hand Baghdad - its soldiers, its militias, its civilians - resists and there is a slaughter of some duration, then the Arab world may well tip over into a new stage.    Exactly contrary to coalition hopes, expatriate Iraqis are now streaming into, rather than out of, Iraq to fight for their homeland. It is not impossible that substantial sections of Iran and Syria - with or without their governments - will join the fight. Bloody as such a result may be, it may be for the best in the long run, because it is the only result that would set limits to future adventures.    In either circumstance, the only moral response here to this illegal and corrupt war is continued non-violent civil disobedience, as a testament, however limited, against the American juggernaut.    Guy Rundle is a co-editor of Arena. Visit the related web page
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