The Winds of War

international | anti-war / imperialism | opinion/analysis Wednesday January 21, 2004 20:07 by Bob The Builder.

History is not an inevitable progression.

Left wing and right wingers who scream at each other about the Iraq war should sober up. It may well be that within the borders of nation states issues of law are in the camp of "right" and "wrong" but in the International stage there is no only "necessity."

We all know the history of the twentieth century post 1945. The sabre rattling between two camps, the capitalist West and the Communist East.
Could it have been avoided?
Of course.
Suppose Stalin had pre-empted the Nazi Germany's invasion of Russia and attacked Germany instead of pinning his hopes on the Non-Agression pact? Germany would surely have been defeated and the rest of Europe.
What would Britain and France have done?
They would have joined Germany and Italy in an alliance against the Soviets.
The U.S. would have meanwhile defeated Japan sooner without having to fight a war in Europe.
Suppose Germany and its weaker allies had been able to defeat Russia and taken Moscow, the truth about the extensive gulag prisons would have been discovered by the advancing armies and the horrors of Soviet Russia would have been exposed for all the world to see.
Germany would have expanded its living space and cleaned out eastern Europe and European Russia of "subhumans" and replaced them with German settlers.
Meanwhile Western European states would have adopted extreme right wing governments and formed the European Union as satelites of the Third Reich.
Both the U.S. and Third Reich would have developed huge arsenals of nuclear weapons and through out the world both superpowers would have sponsered client states through out Asia, Africa and South America.
Perhaps the wars in Korea and Vietnam would have been between fascists sponsered by Nazi Germany and communists backed by the U.S?

The U.S. only supported Saddam Hussein because Iraq was fighting a war against Soviet backed Islamic Iran.
Meanwhile Soviet Russa fought Islamic fighters in Afghanistan backed by the U.S.
The U.S. backed Israel because it was fighting fascist regimesin the Middle East backed by Soviet Russia who also tried to court Israel into their fold.

The Cold War is over except for the stand off between the U.S. and North Korea and Cuba and a frosty relationship which persists with China.
Rogue states such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, North Korea and many more authocratic regimes thought rightly that when the U.S. cut back on military spending and retreated into their borders, Russia a basket case fighting wars in Chechnya and Europe unable to deal with Milosevic that they could come out to play.
They began agressively developing weapons of mass destruction programmes and sponsering terrorists.

America was not attacked for the first time on 9/11. The WTC was attacked in 1993 by Al-Qaida, in 1998 in Kenya when its embassy in Nairobi was destroyed and in the Gulf of Eden when the U.S.S. Cole was almost sunk.
Clinton and Bush after him failed to act and reaped the whirlwind on 9/11.
Now the poker games have commenced again.
The U.S. is forming new alliances with old enemies and distancing itself from old friends in order to safeguard its own security.
Because it wants to?
Rather because it needs to.
If America stands up to authoritarian regimes around the world it will remain strong.
If Europe, Russia and others do not do the same they will be destroyed like they were destroyed by allowing the evils of the Nazis and Soviets to overcome them sixty years ago.
Terrorism and rogue nations have only become a danger because the U.S. let them be.
In the same way Britain almost sealed its doom by failing to fight Hitler in the 1930's when he first began his expansion of Germany.