IN THE STATE OF WAR (II)

By Erhard Crome

[This article (In tempore belli) published in: Das Blattchen, 5/2/2006 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, www.linksnet.de/artikel.php.]

The next war approaches. The speculators are already counting. The oil price is at an all-time high of $70 a barrel and talk is of eighty dollars. If Iran’s oil supplies or considerable amounts are kept off the world market, the price will be a hundred dollars. Supply bottlenecks will arise on the international markets, experts say.

In Moscow, talks occurred between the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany. There were no final documents according to the Russian foreign minister. The US Secretary of State spoke of the “necessity of a hard answer.” But Russia and China are against sanctions. The basic constellation of the diplomatic discussions is clear: the US conducts discussions to produce grounds for war. Russia and China want to prevent war.

Iran is moving “in the wrong direction,” Germany says. The current German government would rather assist the US than the other.

A former secret service expert of the US military told the Washington Post the US is now playing through different plans of an Iran war from attacks with – nuclear armed – missiles to the invasion of ground troops. These plans were already commissioned in 2002, long before the beginning of the Iraq war. The war threats of the US and others are consequences of the escalation of the conflict with Iran. This conflict was started to convert the war plans four years in construction.

This also casts a clearer light on the overall plans of the Bush men in the region. The Iraq war should create a massive military and political base of the US in the region from which further attacks against Iran and Syria can be launched. Tensions are kept at a certain minimum level. Some military-political commentators now think the Iraq war is skidding into a fiasco. A civil war is arising and stabilization is obviously a long way off. The US should reach an understanding with Iran and Iraq should settle down. But from Bush II’s view, depending on anyone whom one hates would not be an imperial stabilization. Thus the opposite happens. The conflict is escalated and regionally expanded. The US already did this once. When they saw they could not win the Vietnam War, they expanded it to Laos and Cambodia. But they could not prevail and at the end withdrew broken. The number of casualties climbed.

Bush II’s present action is analogous to the time of escalation in preparation for the Iraq war. At that time, one lie followed another. None of the grounds for war was well founded. The commander-in-chief did not apologize for the lies. The dictator was overthrown. Democracy was introduced. That was a beautiful event. The US may not lose face and therefore cannot withdraw.. The main characteristic of the hairsplitter is “reversal of the burden of proof.” Iran must prove that it does nothing and renounces on uranium enrichment. The accuser, here he US, need not prove Iran did anything illegal. That Iran has the right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy is faded out. If Iran does not fulfill the demands of the US, it will be attacked militarily.

Thus we are at the next stage of the suspension of international law created after 1945 and its replacement by the “right of the stronger” that goes along with self-authorization covered up in a democratic or human rights way. This is the empire’s own procedure. The Roman Empire assumed that its wars were “just” (bella justa) because the Pax Romana, the peace imposed by the empire according to its liking, was the natural order of the world. Therefore every war against the empire was an “unjust” war (bella injusta) authorizing the masters of the empire to the most drastic measures that razed the once rich Carthago to the ground. The idea of “just war” was spirited about through the Christian Middle Ages as war in God’s mission, not for the empire. (In Leninism, as everybody knows, the “just” war was in the service of the working class. The respective general secretary decided what was just.) In his famous treatise “On Eternal Peace,” Immanuel Kant proposed creating an international legal order that secured peace. In the 5th article, he explicitly rejected violent intermeddling in the internal affairs of another state: “No state should interfere violently in the constitution and government of another state.”

This approach was also the foundation of the UN Charter. Article I says the goal of the United Nations is “maintaining world peace and international security” and “developing friendly relations between the nations based on respect of the principles of equal rights and the right of self-determination of the nations.” Article II outlines the principles for realizing the goals of Article I. The “principle of sovereign equality” of all states and the regulation of their “international disputes with peaceful means” are vital. Imperial policy generally and the imperial policy of war are the opposite of these principles of international law. The defense of peace is the challenge of the day even if the Mullah regime is very strange to us.

Immanuel Kant emphasized that the legal order may not depend on the moral improvement of people but must insure a state of peace “for a people of devils.” Now we could speak about the mental state of intermeddling devils.