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Issue No. 154 | 27 September 2002 |
War On The Collective
Interview: Still Flying International: President Gas Politics: Australia: A Rogue State? Unions: Welfare Max Bad Boss: Welcome to Telstra! Health: Fat Albert: The Grim Reaper Satire: Iraq Pre-empts Pre-emptive Strike Poetry: A Man From the East And A Man From The West Review: The Sum Of All Fears
Murray�s Millions Dwarfs Workers Wages Rogue MP Faces Grassroots Backlash Harry Bridges Speaks from the Grave Councils Deny Multi-Lingual Workers Ansett Ticket Levy Not Reaching Workers International Shame for Aussie IR Sydney Trade Talks Face Backlash
Legends The Locker Room Bosswatch Awards Week in review Activists
Weapons of Destruction Tears From Tom Good Hearts
Labor Council of NSW |
Editorial War On The Collective
In pursuing his ill-defined War on Terror, Bush has already wreaked the most destructive of collateral damage before a single bomb has dropped on Baghdad. Faced with an ultimatum from the leader of the world's remaining super-power to yield to an attack on Iraq or be side tracked, UN delegates are now in a fatally compromised position. Even if the UN grants George Dubya his wish and approves military action on the grounds of a breach of UN resolution, they still face the sad reality that dozens of other resolutions - notably those pertaining to Israel - have been ignored for decades. After ignoring the UN, failing to pay billions of dollars in dues and walking away from the attempt to forge a global partnership on the environment, the United States has now told the UN its future is contingent on it bowing to America's will. Whatever the outcome, the era of a central world body with the moral authority to rise against bi-lateral disputes is in the balance. All in the name of fighting Terror - an amorphous concept that casts anyone desperate enough to load themselves up with explosives as the equivalent to a rogue state. Bush's overriding problem is that he is fighting a war that can never be won: terrorism is globalisation applied to geo-politics - the collapse of the power of the nation state means that new rules of engagement need to be written. The tragedy of the current power play is that in recent years the United Nations has attempted to adapt to this new world - Koffi Annan has been fighting hard to establish a Global Compact that would entrench core environmental and labour standards into all legal systems. But the corporations that fund and prosper from the Bush War juggernaut have conspired to frustrate these efforts to recast the United Nations for a new century on the grounds that it infringes of the national sovereignty that they now have. And now the UN faces its killer blow - a new form of global diplomacy where the umpire has a gun to its head. Some would call it terrorist tactics. And this is the ultimate Bush Doctrine as enunciated this week: the USA will take whatever steps necessary to ensure its position of global dominance is not threatened. As for Australia, how far we have travelled from Doc Evatt's triumph in 1945 where he successfully fought for rights of small nations at the UN founding conference, in a way never envisaged by the big powers who had intended to carve the world up in their own image, establishing for the first time an independent foreign policy for Australia? While we get caught up in the intricacies of weapons inspections in Iraq, we should not lose sight of the broader picture - the collective decision-making processes of the global community are being subverted to the will of its most powerful individual member. Peter Lewis Editor
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