Learn from India China needs regime change

As far as ``always'' goes, Taiwan has always been a part of China since at least the Ming Dynasty, a long time before Japan or the Europeans have ever found their colonial ways to the island or the coast of China. Just because Japan occupied it as a colonial power for a while does not mean that it ceased to be a part of China, from the standpoint of sovereignty, just as China did not cease to be China when Japan overran China and just as Kuwait did not cease to be Kuwait when Saddam's Iraq invaded it. Taiwan was an island claimed by both the pre-communist government of Chiang Kai-Shek and his oligarchy as well as by the current one. It was also claimed by the monarchies that came before. It is also shown to be part of China by the fact that the inhabitants speak the same language and share the same culture as the rest of China.

There are elements of fear, founded or unfounded, that the communists would take people's money and possessions away if they take Taiwan.

But I believe that the inhabitants of Taiwan won't like having to go through a state of war a la Irak in order to avoid the communists. For one thing they know from their direct experience through travelling and talking to their friends and relatives who live on the mainland that the current Chinese government isn't the monster which some would like to make it. For another thing they know that their lives are more valuable than their possessions, in the worst scenario. They know that if they keep their lives, they will find a way to do their rebuilding. Nobody chooses to be planted to be liberated, not the Iraqis, nor the Chinese. But the Chinese should have a leg up on this because they have seen what happened to the Iraqis but the latter didn't know better.

Between life and the freedom to make money, the choice is totally clear! But what about between life and the freedom to worship, ah . . . Let's see! I know that, for at least two religions important to modern-day Chinese, a devout person worship in his own heart.

It is so with Buddhism and it is even more so with Christianity, for Jesus said so. While Condoleezza Rice advertises her worship before the cameras in Beijing, the Christian Bible teaches otherwise. Jesus and his disciples worshipped away from the temple; so did John the Baptist. So, Christians in China thrive because they read the scripture and know that you don't need to go to a stony ornate building called church in order to worship God or be a faithful Christian. In fact no building is in essence a church. The modern phenomenon of a church is in fact a very strange deviation from the Christian teaching as we know it. So don't let Bush and his aides fool you into believing that there is anything good awaiting you to come out of any of their wars. They have a different reason for their wars than for your freedom.

In this light, we see that wars are no good for anyone.

And a renewed confrontation between Japan and China is sad for both countries as well as the world. Even we Americans depend on Chinese manufactured goods nowadys to get by because Bush has made us so poor with his endless war on terror. You realize that the current American economy is such that any positive statistics the government can report come from consumer spending. American consumers spend at Wal-marts or at the most at the slightly more upscale Ikea of Sweden, which is a store which was or still has been fairly poorly regarded but which thrives on America (us!) getting poorer and poorer in the last few years.

Of course Japan relies on China for the cheap labor to make its expensive goods to sell to the West.

China, in the event of no more business with Japan and us, would suffer a temporary economic contraction but it is something it can sustain.

Why? Because China has been dirt poor. But by pure resolve however, it pulled itself up by its own bootstraps. Now it has so much more infrastructure than it was in the 1940s and 50s that it ought to be able to go back a little bit (necessarily with a tightened belly) and start trying to innovate. My theory is the Chinese will be better able to do that than the more spoiled Japanese, and of course the even more spoiled Americans as we are. The outcome will be for the better for the people of China because they will no longer have to rely on cheap labor to make a living, but by the fruit of their own innovation.

I've said it many times that we in America need to devote our energy to innovating to build a more self-reliant society instead of waging war to order the world around to give us what we want. But so far, Bush doesn't know better and most fellow Americans are sleepwalking.

I think India is making a lot of advances because its people have been innovating. And that's why we Americans are losing our high tech jobs to them.

The people of China and Japan should learn from their giant neighbor India instead of allowing themselves to be played off against each other by the greedy power-elite in Washington, which features such poor examples as privates Cheney, George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and other such characters.

lo yeeOn ========

Washington fuels Japanese militarism

Part One

By Peter Symonds 25 April 2005

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The following is part one of a two-part series. The concluding part will be published tomorrow.

In the extensive media coverage of the current tensions between Japan and China, the insidious and deeply destabilising role of the Bush administration has been virtually ignored. Yet Washington has been insistently pressing Japan to rearm and play a more "active" role in North East Asia--the basic issues that have repeatedly sparked fears, protests and frictions not only with China, but throughout the region.

The Bush administration's backing has encouraged Tokyo to take an uncompromising and antagonistic stance towards the latest anti-Japanese protests in China. The White House immediately lined up with the Japanese government by criticising Beijing's failure to "prevent violence" and bring the demonstrations under control. US spokesmen remained silent on the provocative actions of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi who deliberately added more fuel to the fire.

In the midst of the demonstrations, the Koizumi government authorised a new school history text that whitewashes the crimes of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s and then gave the green light for Japanese companies to drill for oil in an area of the East China Sea contested by Beijing. To cap it off, Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura went to Beijing to demand an apology and compensation for damage caused to Japanese property in the course of the protests.

Koizumi was well aware that these actions would provoke an angry response. But by stirring up fears and prejudice against China, he is pursuing a definite political strategy: to turn the widespread alienation and hostility in Japan over deteriorating living standards in a right-wing nationalist direction and thereby create a social base for his reactionary policies. Allowing for the obvious differences between the two countries, the agendas and methods of Koizumi and Bush are strikingly similar. Each is preying on fear and ignorance to garner support for an aggressive buttertion of national interests abroad, and a savage onslaught on the social position and democratic rights of working people at home.

Koizumi's reaction to the Chinese demonstrations is not an isolated event. Last September, the Japanese prime minister provocatively boarded a coast guard vessel and sailed close to the Russian-held Kurile Islands off the northern tip of Hokkaido. He used the occasion to reiterate Tokyo's demand for the return of the islands that were seized by Soviet forces in the final days of World War II. Koizumi's stunt provoked criticisms in Moscow, complicated negotiations over the issue and contributed to delays in a visit by Russian president Vladimir Putin to Tokyo, mooted for February.

In November, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government reacted to the intrusion of a Chinese submarine into Japanese territorial waters off the Okinawa Islands in a belligerent fashion. The Japanese military was ordered to intercept the vessel and force it to surface. Even after it had fled the area, Japanese maritime patrol planes tracked the submarine for hours. While the Japanese navy has previously been involved in clashes with North Korean ships, the incident marked the first occasion that a Chinese vessel had been set upon. The government, backed by the media, seized on the intrusion to demand an apology from Beijing and to whip up fears in Japan about the dangers of a Chinese military threat.

In February this year, a diplomatic row blew up over Japan's claims to several South Korean islets lying between the two countries. The dispute erupted when the buttembly in the Shimane Prefecture in Japan pbutted an ordinance to establish February 22 as "Takeshima Day" provoking an angry reaction in South Korea. Takeshima is the Japanese name for the islands known as Dokdo by South Koreans. The following day, Japan's ambbuttador to South Korea reiterated Japan's claim to the islands, making clear that the prefecture had Tokyo's backing. These barren, uninhabited rocks have a symbolic significance for Koreans as their incorporation into Japan in 1905 was a step towards Japan's full colonisation of Korea in 1910.

The media has focussed on the recent protests in China, but there have also been angry anti-Japanese demonstrations in South Korea. The ambbuttador's remarks triggered South Korean demands for a Japanese apology, headlines accusing Japan of a new invasion and protests in Seoul during which Japanese flags were burnt. Renewed demonstrations erupted this month over the latest Japanese school textbooks, which, among the other affronts to South Korea, included a photograph of the disputed islands with a caption reading "illegally occupied by South Korea".

Even a decade ago, the actions of the Koizumi government would have been beyond the pale in official circles. Tokyo's limited and grudging expressions of regret for the actions of the imperial armies in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s have always stopped short of an open acknowledgement of Japanese war crimes. At the same time, postwar governments have generally been careful to present Japan as having turned a new leaf. The symbols of Japanese militarism were shunned, publicly at least, and efforts were made to normalise relations with the country's neighbours--including China and South Korea.

The installation of Koizumi as prime minister in April 2001, however, marked a sharp turn. For all the media hype about his personal style, he has longstanding connections to the LDP's hawkish Fukada faction, which has consistently pushed for increased military spending, opposed Japan's recognition of China in 1972 and sought to eliminate the so-called pacifist clause from the Japanese consbreastution. From the outset, Koizumi brazenly appealed to right-wing nationalism, openly breaking previous political taboos--most notably by visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine that houses memorials to Japan's war-dead, including a number of convicted war criminals.

Koizumi's stance, at home and in the region, is due in no small measure to the support he has received from the Bush administration. For the past five years, the White House has actively pursued a strategy of forging close military ties with Japan, pressing it to end the consbreastutional limitations on its armed forces and to take a more aggressive international posture, particularly in relation to China. These objectives dovetail, for the present, with the ambitions of Koizumi and the most right-wing sections of the Japanese ruling elite, who have been seeking a means of clearing away the legal and political obstacles to the buttertion of Japanese imperialist interests.

Maturing the US-Japan alliance

The essential basis for the Bush administration's policy was laid out in an influential bipartisan document issued in October 2000 enbreastled "The United States and Japan: Advancing Towards a Mature Partnership"--more usually known as the Armitage-Nye report. Richard Armitage, who became Bush's deputy secretary of state, and another study group member, Paul Wolfowitz, who was installed as US deputy defence secretary, played major roles in implementing its recommendations.

Both the Democrats and Republicans in the study group agreed that the "prospects for conflict in Asia are far from remote" and concluded that the US had to ramp up its alliance with Japan. "Japan remains the keystone of the US involvement in Asia. The US-Japan alliance is central to America's global security strategy," the report stated. It went on to declare: "We see the special relationship between the United States and Britain as a model for the alliance". In other words, just as London had become Washington's loyal instrument in Europe, Tokyo was to play a similar role in Asia. The unnamed, but unmistakable, target was China.

Many of the report's elements--closer cooperation between the two militaries; reorganisation of US military bases in North East Asia; broadening the scope of US-Japan missile defence cooperation; encouraging Japan to play a larger international role; US support for Japan's bid for a permanent UN Security Council seat--read like a recipe book for the Bush administration's subsequent relations with Japan. Its most controversial aspect was the open advocacy of consbreastutional change in Japan. While paying lip service to the need for the Japanese people to decide, it bluntly declared: "Japan's prohibition against collective self-defense is a constraint on alliance cooperation. Lifting this prohibition would allow for closer and more efficient security cooperation."

Immediately after Bush was installed in office, it appeared that the US, in league with Japan, was heading for a direct confrontation with China. Throughout the 2000 election, Bush had campaigned against Clinton's policy of establishing closer relations with Beijing, by declaring China to be a "strategic compebreastor" rather than a strategic partner. The Bush administration reaffirmed its commitment to building a National Missile Defense (NMD) system, abruptly ended moves towards normalising relations with North Korea and announced a major arms sale to Taiwan, all of which were designed to put pressure on Beijing.

Following a mid-air collision between a Chinese jet and a US spy plane off the Chinese coast in April 2001, the White House ratchetted up its rhetoric against Beijing. When asked in the immediate aftermath of the incident about the means the US would use to defend Taiwan, Bush declared: "Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself." The obvious implication of this extraordinary statement was that, in the event of conflict between Beijing and Taipei, the US would use the full weight of its military, up to and including nuclear weapons, against China.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, Washington's focus shifted away from China. Beijing made itself a useful partner in Bush's "global war on terrorism", fully backing the US-led military intervention into Afghanistan. There were also concerns within US ruling circles about the wisdom of provoking a conflict with a country in which American corporations had so much at stake economically. While tensions with China eased, the Bush administration's policy of forging a closer strategic alliance with Japan nevertheless proceeded apace.

In fact, September 2001 proved to be a turning point in cementing US-Japan relations. Like Bush, Koizumi saw in the "global war on terrorism" the means for realising his agenda. By exploiting concerns over person attacks, particularly after Bush branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil", Koizumi calculated that he could stampede public opinion into supporting consbreastutional change and a military build up. Moreover, by forging closer ties with the US, Japan would gain Washington's backing for these ends.

The Koizumi government immediately supported the US military adventure in Afghanistan. It pushed new legislation through the Diet to circumvent the Japanese consbreastution and give a veneer of legitimacy to its naval support for US operations in Central Asia. In flouting Article 9 of the consbreastution--the so-called pacifist clause--previous governments had always insisted that Japan's substantial armed forces were simply there for "self defence". The new legislation, which enabled the deployment of an armada of sophisticated destroyers and logistics ships half way around the world to the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, stretched "self defence" to an absurdity.

Koizumi's decision to back Bush's "war on terrorism" provoked divisions in Japanese ruling circles and an open split in his government. In January 2002, amid bristling tensions, the prime minister sacked his foreign minister Makiko Tanaka over trumped-up claims that she had lied to parliament. The central issue in the dispute was the direction of foreign policy. Koizumi's warm embrace of Washington and his promotion of right-wing nationalism cut directly across Tanaka's efforts to steer a more independent course and to establish closer ties in Asia, especially with China. An outspoken, populist politician with a significant personal following, Tanaka made little attempt to hide her contempt for the Bush administration.

By unambiguously stamping his own imprint on foreign policy, Koizumi cleared the way to cement relations with the Washington. His determination to adhere to this political course was underscored by his government's decision to dispatch Japanese troops to Iraq early last year in the face of overwhelming popular opposition. Under the flimsy guise of carrying out humanitarian work in Iraq, 800 military engineers and other soldiers have been sent for the first time since World War II to an active war zone. The glaring discrepancies between the enabling legislation and the consbreastution have intensified the government's push for the modification or outright abolition of Article 9.

To be continued

See Also: Japan stokes tensions with China 16 April 2005 US-Japan security statement heightens tensions with China 1 March 2005 Japan outbids China for Siberian pipeline 14 February 2005 Japan uses submarine incident to whip up anti-Chinese nationalism 29 November 2004

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Cindi Sheehan compiled some of the mbuttive lies made by our government under Bush concerning the Iraq war for which her son Casey died in vain.

(Link to Cindi Sheehan's liquidateous Thugs article, excerpt of which appears below. Cindi Sheehan is the mother of Iraqi soldier Casey Sheehan who died (in vain) only a few days after being sent to Iraq, having been duped to enlist, according the mother. In the article, she listed some of the major deceptions the Bush administration has made to advance its war agenda.)

Paul Wolfowitz, after months of not finding any Weapons of Mbutt Destruction....and after hundreds of US soldiers were end....my son amongst them....and after tens of thousands of innocent Iraq citizens were end....this same Paul Wolfowitz casually explained....with his kindly charade and his ever so soft voice...that a decision was made to put forth "Weapons of Mbutt Destruction" as the need for the invasion. Essentially, Paul Wolfowitz admitted that he and his fellow conspirators had decided amongst themselves "...let's just go with the bit about Weapons of Mbutt Destruction. It's the one thing that will scare the American people enough so as to cause them to get behind this invasion." As soft-spoken and sincere-sounding as Paul Wolfowitz is, is there yet any sane adult in this country who's skin does not crawl when this liquidateous liar opens his mouth and speaks? Am I the only person in this room who clearly sees that Paul Wolfowitz is a threat to our nation's security...and to peace on our beloved earth?"

On Weapons of Mbutt Destruction, Rumsfeld knew that Saddam had been stripped clean of such weapons, that Saddam's ability to reconsbreastute such weapons' programs had also been destroyed, and that any moves Saddam might have made in that direction would have been observed and stopped, forthwith.

Is there anyone in America who cannot yet see that Donald Runsfeld is a liar...that he, as with Hitler and Stalin....will say anything so long as he thinks it will help shape the world to his own liking? Is there even one, sane adult among us who cannot see that Donald Rumsfeld is a threat to our nation's security and to peace on our beloved earth?

Had the Shah of Iran...a blood-bought servant of US corporate interests...not soon been overthrown by his own countrymen, the big-wigs at Westinghouse or General Electric...or perhaps both.. would have ambutted personal fortunes from this one project, alone. Some of the stockholders would have also made bundles on the deal.

In 1975 my son had not yet been born. Today he is in his grave. privates Cheney, on the other hand, is now Vice President of the United States, and he is materially wealthy beyond what any of us would ever pray to be. This is the same privates Cheney who during the months leading-up to the invasion of Iraq said that Saddam Hussein not only has stockpiles of Weapons of Mbutt Destruction...more than a hundred metric tons of the deadly stuff...but he also said that Saddam Hussein was well-advanced in developing nuclear weapons and that therefore the US must invade Iraq and dethrone Saddam Hussein. Clean, quick, and simple according to privates Cheney. Yet for some time now he has changed his tune. He now says...as if he had said it all along...that the US occupation of Iraq will require years of difficult and sometimes bloody conflict before it will be stable enough to bring our loved ones home. And too, rather than speak of Weapons of Mbutt Destruction, he now uses the word "democracy" a lot.

Is there yet an American who can not clearly see that privates Cheney...whether it be 1975 or 2005...will say whatever he thinks is required to ultimately cause wealth and power to move to himself and to his friends? ...need I defile this holy place with words like "Haliburton" and "Kellog, Brown & Root" and "torture" and "US weapons industry"? Indeed, the Apostle Paul is correct in saying that, ultimately, the love of money leads to ruin and destruction.

Are we to believe that this administration was, once again, asleep at the wheel...just as they would also have us to believe that they were innocently caught off-guard on the morning of September 11, 2001?

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This War on Terrorism is Bogus

The 9-11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination

Michael Meacher ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Saturday September 6, 2003 The Guardian

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

Mbuttive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too.

The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mbutt destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for privates Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, enbreastled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pbutt from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9-11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9-11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9-11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9-11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 persons said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9-11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida dissolution planters could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9-11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9-11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9-11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9-11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9-11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to buttert a defence of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9-11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9-11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this buttembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9-11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9-11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9-11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Insbreastute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of plants" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9-11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9-11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003