The world is, rather understandably, disconcerted by the inaction of Burma’s military junta with regards to their response to the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis. As many of you are aware, the regime has been hindering international aid efforts, causing the humanitarian crisis to worsen. As it stands now, some 78,000 to 100,000 people have been killed and a further 60,000 are thought to be missing.

While shocking to the layman, the Burmese regime has some cause for trepidation. We are, after all, talking about a military dictatorship that has imprisoned the country’s democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, on and off since 1989. The very same regime was also responsible for using lethal force against non-violent protestors last year, among a variety of other transgressions during their tenure.

No matter how many people have to suffer in the wake of the disaster, the retention of control is, to the regime, of the utmost importance. While they might be megalomaniacal, they’re not so far gone as to not realize that organizations, such as USAID, have been used in similar situations to provide foreign powers with covert footholds. Thus, their number one fear is very probably the consequences of allowing foreign agencies and their employees access to not just those suffering, but the people themselves. In doing so, such a connection could lead to the infusion of anti-government sentiment that is backed by foreign interests. And while I hate to admit it, foreign aid agencies that are federally funded have been used repeatedly in the past to do just that.

The bottom line here is that politics, power, and agenda have no place when it comes to a disaster of this magnitude and such immense loss and endangerment of human life. Not when the number one threat to those trapped in the affected area is a lack of clean drinking water.

While brutal at the best of times, the Burmese junta is by no means completely daft. They are well aware of the dangers of allowing foreign aid agencies unrestricted access and movement. Because with them comes conditions, the sort that they are not willing to meet. And while, on the surface, such matters are viewed as simply exercises in good will on the part of major world powers, conditions are always present when their assistance is accepted.

Lost, as always, in the political haze, are the tens of thousands of people that are now facing the onset of disease and starvation. In the end, international politics will hammer the death nails into their coffins, not a lack of global, public compassion. Ultimately, through their inability to accept foreign assistance, the Burmese regime could very well find itself guilty of crimes against humanity. Their inaction could also very well lead to renewed efforts by members of the National League For Democracy and Burma’s Buddhist monks to challenge their authority. Given that that movement is steeped in the tenets of non-violent non-cooperation, perhaps, after some time, they will finally secure a free and independent Burma without the assistance of the likes of the CIA, MI6, and others who would use this terrible disaster to plant seeds of their own.

We are all human. When one of us suffers, we all suffer. When one of us is faced with disparity we must all take responsibility for allowing it to happen. Governments are simply ‘things’, they are not, nor have they ever been, the masters of human compassion or at all accurate moral compasses. What is transpiring right now in Burma in the wake of Cyclone Nargis is a human matter, and therefore governments, nor politics, have no business usurping such fundamental truths.

Updated*

May of this year was the deadliest for US forces in Iraq since November of 2004, a fact that the Pentagon conceded yesterday while trying to explain it away by sighting greater operational risks.

Things on the Iraqi side of the equation are, obviously, no better. In fact, they remain constant, with 169 Iraqi’s killed on Tuesday and a further 146 wounded. Yesterday saw, thankfully, a decrease, with 66 Iraqi’s killed and 97 wounded.

Equally as troubling, today’s Herald Sun in Australia ran a story about comments made by Tony Snow with regards to comparing Iraq to the long standing US presence in South Korea…

“The half-century US military presence in South Korea may be a model for a future in which US forces play a support role in Iraq rather than a frontline combat role, the White House said.

“The Korean model is one in which the United States provides a security presence, but you’ve had the development of a successful democracy in South Korea over a period of years, and therefore, the United States is there as a force of stability,” said spokesman Tony Snow today.

“You get to a point in the future where you want it to be a purely support model,” said Mr Snow, who sought to ease concerns among US allies, war critics in the United States, and Iraqis over prospects of permanent US bases in Iraq.”

I find that a very interesting statement, even though Snow claimed that the United States would adhere to, at any time, requests by either the Iraqi or South Korean governments to remove themselves from their respective countries. The truth is, the United States does have permanent military bases in South Korea, among them Camp Bonifas, Camp Casey, Camp Castle, Camp Hovey, Camp Humphreys (which South Korean citizens themselves have protested the expansion of), Camp Red Cloud, Camp Stanley, Camp Sears, Kunsan Air Base, and Osan Air Base. They even have their own golf course - Sungnam Golf Course (for a complete list of US instillations in South Korea, click here).

At present, the United States has over 75,000 troops in Asia, not including the Middle East and Central Asia. Of that number, and despite the fact that they are currently fighting two wars, there are over 20,000 US troops in South Korea, down from just under the 40,000 stationed there prior to the invasion of Iraq. Since 2004, the US military has transferred some of their personnel from South Korea to combat theatres elsewhere as the demands on the Armed Forces have increased.

As Mr. Snow eluded to, the United States would, at the request of the South Korean government, remove its forces. But the truth is that there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening any time soon. The US military provides far too convenient a deterrent, not to mention the fact that their presence in South Korea is not solely focused on the North Koreans but, to an extent, the Chinese as well. It should also be pointed out that the US maintains a considerable presence in Japan.

As for Iraq, Think Progress’ look at the US Embassy being built in the Green Zone in Baghdad is an eye opener for those of you unfamiliar with its size and accoutrements. It should be noted that while parts of Baghdad itself are in ruins and have little access to proper civic services, such as decent sewage and water, Think Progress points out…

“The complex “will include two office buildings, one of them designed for future use as a school, six apartment buildings, a gym, a pool, a food court and its own power generation and water-treatment plants.”

The U.S. embassy is likely to create even greater Iraqi resentment toward the U.S. occupation. While Americans will be living in posh quarters, the citizens of Baghdad are forced to survive with just 5.6 hours of electricity a day. Baghdad was also recently rated the world’s worst city in which to live.”

Who says hegemony doesn’t have its perks?

Now watch this drive.

*June 1st, 2007: US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has also commented about US permanence in the Iraq along the lines of the US garrisoning of the South Korean border.

Last night I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life. Laying in bed at two in the morning I turned on the television and came across Michelle Malkin filling in on the O’Reilly Factor. Now, usually I wouldn’t write an entry about O’Reilly, but at the point when I tuned in she was showing footage of an old interview that O’Reilly did with with Whoopie Goldberg about an anti-war protest that she had attended in Washingtion along with Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda, and Tim Robbins, among others.

The interview itself was rather benign, until, that is, O’Reilly started to take issue with Jane Fonda and her belief that a withdrawal from Iraq was warranted. During his diatribe O’Reilly referenced the genocide in Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and claimed that Fonda had mentioned that what took place in Cambodia was, ultimately, due to US military involvement in South East Asia, an assertion that was actually correct. Between 1969 and 1972, 600,000 civilians were killed in Cambodia by American carpet bombing, which also produced millions of refugees, many of whom were then forced to combat disease and starvation, and endure a rapidly declining economy. Cambodians, rightly so, blamed the US and their support for the regime of Lon Nol for the devistating effects to their coutry, which in no small way contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge who toppled the government of Lon Nol in 1975.

Pol Pot’s reign of terror that followed devisted Cambodia further, producing one of the most significant genocides of the latter half of the twentieth century. It was not until the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in November of 1978 to stop Khmer Rouge incursions into Vietnam and to protect Vietnamese living inside the Cambodian border that the Cambodian holocaust was slowed, ultimately ending when Vietnamese forces ousted the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979.

Bill O’Reilly routinely claims that his information is backed by fact, an assertion that has always perplexed me. Even more, that his knowledge is so limited on the subject that he didn’t even bother to have anyone research the fact that after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, Washington made efforts to preserve the Khmer Rouge as a counter to the Vietnamese. They strong armed international aid agencies to provide humanitarian assistance to the Khmer Rouge after it fled into Thailand, where they provided it military assistance. Even as recently as 1982, the US forced three major anti-Vietnamese factions, one of them being the Khmer Rouge (still led by Pol Pot) into a single group. Because of that, the Khmer Rouge still has a presence in Cambodia to this day.

It pales in comparison to the figures allotted US domestic propaganda, of course, but $76,000 dollars in 2006 is still a considerable amount of money given that Canada has but 2,600 soldiers in Afghanistan. As the Toronto Star’s Allan Woods pointed out in today’s issue, Mr. Harper has made attempts to link Canada’s military participation in the war in Afghanistan with the 24 Canadians killed on September 11th, with Mr. O’Connor going so far as to call our contribution to NATO efforts ‘retribution’ for those 24 deaths. Leave it to an ex-arms lobbyist turned Defense Minister not to realize that we’ve lost 45 people over there, almost double the number who were lost in the collapse of the World Trade Center, to make such an idiotic statement.

With the Pakistani ISI allegedly aiding the Taliban in Baluchistan Province, and al-Qaeda’s command infrastructure re-located to the Pashtun tribal belt along Afghanistan’s frontier with Pakistan (where it’s attracting everything from disgruntled local tribesmen to foreign radicals), it should come as no surprise to anyone that what is occurring in Afghanistan is anything but a small conflict between a handful of fringe radicals and NATO’s military leftovers, eager to placate the administration in Washington.

By way of Ali Mohammed Jan Aurakzai, the governor of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, and The Associated Press…

“Taliban-led insurgents are winning ever-greater public support in Afghanistan for a struggle that is taking on the character of a “liberation war” against foreign troops, a senior Pakistani official claimed Friday.

The remark by the governor of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province could inflame further a war of words between Kabul and Islamabad about who is responsible for the resurgence of militant activity in Afghanistan.

It could also dismay U.S. and NATO commanders who say their beefed-up military operation is designed to pave the way for badly needed reconstruction aid.

Ali Mohammed Jan Aurakzai, whose province includes areas where many Taliban and al-Qaeda militants fled after a U.S.-led military coalition drove them from Afghanistan five years ago, said cross-border attacks accounted for only a fraction of the insurgency in Afghanistan.

The main reason for the Taliban’s return was the frustration of ethnic Pashtuns seeking more political say in Kabul and resentment of ongoing military operations and the lack of economic aid in the south and east of Afghanistan, he said.

“Today, they’ve reached the stage that a lot of the local population has started supporting the militant operations and it is developing into some sort of a nationalist movement, a resistance movement, sort of a liberation war against coalition forces,” Aurakzai told reporters at a news conference.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and some U.S. military officials have suggested that Pakistani security forces are secretly aiding militants crossing into Afghanistan to mount attacks.�?

Ironically, Afghanistan receives the least amount of US aid of all the countries that it has militarily interfered with since 2001, focusing most its resources on efforts in Iraq. In fact, in 2003, Colombia received more military training by US personnel than any other country.

In light of the complexities, and dare I say ‘realities’ of the conflict in Afghanistan, one which, despite 9/11, stretches back longer than anyone cares to remember (especially the British), the government of this country would have you believe that it is a far simpler situation. In fact, the head of this country’s military even remarked that the situation in Afghanistan was difficult because local fighters were blending in with the local populace. That mindset, in and of itself, should be sounding the loudest of alarm bells because that sort of one-dimensionality isn’t new when it comes to statements made by this country’s military leadership – statements that childishly accuse an enemy fighting a guerrilla resistance to come out in the open and fight like men. I mean, while they’re at it, why don’t they wear giant targets on their backs as well? Surely such vibrato isn’t necessary when dealing with largely uneducated peasants from the world’s poorest country.

It’s as if the French and American experiences in South East Asia taught us nothing. Even more to the point, that the success of the Afghan resistance in the 1980’s wasn’t enough to gift us some respect for the commitment and fortitude of those now faced. Call them what you will – evil, religious zealots, whatever – the reality is that they’re fanatically dedicated to their beliefs, and if one of those beliefs is driving foreign forces out of Afghanistan then that is something that should be seriously considered rather than arrogantly disregarded. A friend, who is an officer if the Canadian Armed Forces, and has served in Afghanistan, told me that the difference between Western troops and Afghans was that they were willing to die, en mass if need be, for their beliefs. Their commitment, which seemingly surpasses the fear of death, makes them far more powerful than anything that we might throw at them, and the rebuking of British Marines on the 5th of December speaks to that. During that encounter the Taliban endured repeated air strikes and artillery fire, including attacks by Apache attack helicopters and 500 lbs bombs dropped by American B-1 Bombers. And yet they were successful in keeping the Royal Marines from achieving their objectives.

I do not write these things to praise the Taliban, or any other faction fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan, though a healthy respect for one’s enemy is a fundamental principle of conflict. Rather, to illustrate that (yet again) Western arrogance, along with confused policy objectives, has created a mess that is not as one dimensional as Mr. Harper, Mr. O’Connor, Mr. Bush, or Mr. Blair would have you believe.

When this country pledged its support for the NATO mission in Afghanistan, something that still perplexes me given the mandate of the organization itself, one wonders what Canadians thought they were buying into? Obviously the shock and anger felt post 9/11 had a great deal to do with it, but it surprises me that the current government would even attempt to have Canadians believe that what is happening in Afghanistan is a conflict that is at all easily explained, or that there are simple, traditional lines to be drawn. When the United States initially invaded the country in 2001 (and our very own Joint Task Force 2 was operating under US command in a combat capacity unbeknownst to most Canadians), it reconstituted its tenuous relationship with the Northern Alliance, and yet we’re surprised to learn that opium production has skyrocketed since 2001. Even the abandonment of Afghanistan by the Americans in the months before the invasion of Iraq, which is by no means an understatement, lends weight to fears that Canada has become little more than an American proxy in Afghanistan.

So last year, the government (your government) spent $76,000 dollars of your money in an attempt to convince you that that isn’t the case.

There comes a time when one has to make a choice about the country in which they live. In the case of Canada, or the United States, that choice is between true democracy or the plutocratic faux democracy that has crookedly grown out of a truly remarkable idea. Unfortunately, when it comes to making this choice, there is no middle ground. There exist no factors that must, or should, be taken into consideration before one decides which they are to support. That is the trick of the easy conscience, that there is middle ground to be found in our hearts and minds between what is inherently right and what is easy.

The Constitution of the United States, for example, is a living document, one that has been amended, challenged, and even disregarded. But it remains the basis of an idea, one which promises something truly revolutionary, perhaps outdone only by the Magna Carta itself – that all people, no matter their creed or religious inclinations, no matter their class or pedigree, have equal rights under the law, are protected from persecution for their beliefs and, most importantly, count equally when it comes to their voice being represented in the houses of government.

At what point is the power of the people diminished to such an extent that it becomes a meaningless thing? What would your reaction be were you to discover that the belief of many supposedly learned individuals throughout modern democratic history is that the people are, and always have been, too ignorant to trust, let alone be fully granted their representational rights? What if the basis of our supposed democracies are simply based on the recreation of a society in which aristocrats guide policy and complicate the waters of government to such an extent that only they can navigate them? Most importantly – why is it considered naïve to view government in base terms, those in which it was initially created? In the case of the United States, the creation of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency following the Second World War speaks to the ability of democratic governments to use national security justifications not to simply further dilute the public’s role in the democratic process, but begin the accelerated erosion of democracy itself by employing protectionism as justification for it. That, in and of itself, greatly effects the landscape of the Canadian military establishment, which has certainly been demonstrated since our role in Afghanistan began, not to mention throughout the Cold War.

But what if Americans were to discover that both the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency actually operate outside of the Constitution? That, in fact, since their inception, they always have? Chalmers Johnson address this very point in Sorrows Of Empire, so I’ll not do it here, but it is a revelation that can also be addressed by the afore mentioned question: why is it considered naïve to view government in base terms?

Because both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense were created to fulfill protectionist rolls (or at least carry on where earlier, less developed, departments had once existed), then how can they really be challenged simply by asking straightforward questions about their activities? Beyond being branded a traitor (and tarred and feathered), why is it that ordinary citizens, whose roll in government is, according to the function of democracy itself, paramount, cannot ask to have the unaltered spending of these government apparatuses disclosed to their elected representatives?

National security has, and will always be, the response of those that do not possess the vision to see the democratic process for what it must be – transparent. The United States remains the foremost global model of a police state that operates, for lack of a better term, ‘in the black’. It is a nation of, for the most part, highly insulated people who, despite their government being the most influential and militaristic in the world, are oblivious to the majority of its actions and the operations of its foreign services. What your average American cannot contextualize becomes justification for both anger and vengeance – look no further than the repercussions of 9/11 for proof positive.

There has always been a great deal of talk about the use of fear as a controlling mechanism. What there has rarely ever been are serious discussions about overcoming that fear, of deconstructing the apparatuses that currently exist to facilitate the ability of those in power to influence. Ironically, it took the greatest terrorist attack in US history to wake many Americans up to the fact that fear is the most valuable currency to any government, be it democratic or otherwise, the world over. 9/11 succeeded on so many different levels that it’s difficult to examine them without spending a considerable amount of time doing it, but it should not be overlooked that the reaction at the highest and most influential levels of government, almost immediately after the attacks, was to attack a country that had nothing to do with it while exonerating one from which the majority of the attackers came.

Again, the use of fear as political currency is something not interrupted, only amplified if the possibility presents itself. The attacks of September 11th did just that, providing individuals within the Bush administration the ability to start spending it on the convolution of not only the American people, but their very rights.

In a recent article for Harpers, Daniel Ellsberg, writing about the responsibility of employees within the defense establishment to come forward with information that could possibly avert disastrous military actions (in the case of the article, plans for attacking Iran), mentioned something that Richard Clark had exclaimed…

“Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor.�?

Both Ellsberg and Clark possessed enough information before military action commenced (Vietnam and Iraq respectively) to expose the government’s true intentions. Of his own inaction Ellsberg writes…

“My own failure to act, in time, to that effect in 1964 was pointed out to me by Wayne Morse thirty-five years ago. Morse had been one of only two U.S. senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution on August 7, 1964. He had believed, correctly, that President Lyndon Johnson would treat the resolution as a congressional declaration of war. His colleagues, however, accepted White House assurances that the president sought “no wider war�? and had no intention of expanding hostilities without further consulting them. They believed that they were simply expressing bipartisan support for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam three days earlier, which the president and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had told them were in “retaliation�? for the “unequivocal,�? “unprovoked�? attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on U.S. destroyers “on routine patrol�? in “international waters.�?

Each of the assurances above had been false, a conscious lie. That they were lies, though, had only been revealed to the public seven years later with the publication of the Pentagon Papers, several thousand pages of top-secret documents on U.S. decision-making in Vietnam that I had released to the press. The very first installment, published by the New York Times on June 13, 1971, had proven the official account of the Tonkin Gulf episode to be a deliberate deception.�?

With regards to Iran, Ellsberg goes on to write…

“We face today a crisis similar to those of 1964 and 2002, a crisis hidden once again from the public and most of Congress. Articles by Seymour Hersh and others have revealed that, as in both those earlier cases, the president has secretly directed the completion, though not yet execution, of military operational plans—not merely hypothetical “contingency plans�? but constantly updated plans, with movement of forces and high states of readiness, for prompt implementation on command—for attacking a country that, unless attacked itself, poses no threat to the United States: in this case, Iran.

According to these reports, many high-level officers and government officials are convinced that our president will attempt to bring about regime change in Iran by air attack; that he and his vice president have long been no less committed, secretly, to doing so than they were to attacking Iraq; and that his secretary of defense is as madly optimistic about the prospects for fast, cheap military success there as he was in Iraq.

Even more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported in The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President Cheney’s office had directed contingency planning for “a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons�? and that “several senior Air Force officers�? involved in the planning were “appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objection.�?

Daniel Ellsberg is right when he says…

“Simply resigning in silence does not meet moral or political responsibilities of officials rightly “appalled�? by the thrust of secret policy.�?

The thing is, it doesn’t begin and end with people who happen to be in the position to leak sensitive materials that expose government fraudulence. It is the responsibility of us all, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, to never forget that the base reality of any democracy is that the people, for better or worse, are the masters of their own destiny, and not simply numbers used to help propagate the policies of elites. Unless, that is, you would rather rely on an easy conscience to help navigate you through the ever muddying waters of this profound dissolution of ours. Then, by all means, grab a shovel and start helping dig the grave that must, inevitably, accommodate us all.

In January of 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis remarked “If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died Of A Theory�?.

Interestingly put.

From Scott Horton’s recent post on the Antiwar blog…

“…one of the most sickening, but as far as I can tell, unremarked upon bits of hearsay in Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, is about the blood-lust of Henry Kissenger, apparently as relayed to Woodward by former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson. From page 408:

“Why did you support the Iraq war?�? Gerson asked him.

“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,�? Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.�?

The lesson is fairly obvious, no?

The problem again is collectivism. “We,�? “they.�? It is irrelevant that the government and people of Iraq were innocent of the crimes of September 11th, and in fact had nothing to do with “radical Islam.�? They are “they�? to Henry Kissinger, and so now they’re dead - in order to “send a larger message.�?

The George Washington University’s National Security Archive has the recently declassified documents on the CIA’s LITEMPO project in Mexico…

“The declassified U.S. documents reveal CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverría. The documents detail the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named “LITEMPO.” Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide “an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges.”

Also see Kate Doyle’s ‘Tlatelolco Massacre: Declassified US Documets On Mexico And The Events of 1968‘.

From The World Policy Institute’s Iran: War Or Rumors Of War…

“But as Bill Berkeley notes in a well-argued piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, neither the Bush administration rhetoric comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler nor his tirades about wiping Israel off the map can be taken at face value: “For all the recent rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map, which is hardly new, the Iranians are not Nazis. For one thing, Iran is not the dominant military power in the region, Israel is. Iran can harass Israel through its proxies . . . but it lacks the military capacity to attack Israel itself. Moreover, Iran lacks a rational motive for doing so, since Israel would surely respond to such an attack with massive force that could jeopardize the Iranian regime’s survival in power.” With an estimated 100 to 200 nuclear weapons in Israel’s arsenal, would an Iranian bomb change this calculation? And to the extent that it could shift the military balance in the region, shouldn’t the Bush administration finally break down and engage in open and direct talks with Tehran?”

From the Institute For Public Accuracy: President Bush has claimed that a recent study suggesting that over half a million Iraqis have perished since the 2003 invasion is ‘not credible’. Benetech’s Patrick Ball remarks…

“Ball is a co-author of the book State Violence in Guatemala, 1960-1996, and wrote the chapter “On the Quantification of Horror: Field Notes on Statistical Analysis of Human Rights Violations” in the book “Repression and Mobilization.” Questioned about the disparity between the Lancet study and figures from media reports and efforts like IraqBodyCount.net, Ball said: “I’ve found a similar disparity between reported deaths and likely deaths in other conflicts that I’ve studied in Guatemala, Kosovo, Peru and Timor-Leste. Methods such as media reports typically capture violence well when it is moderate, but when it really increases, they miss a great deal. There are a series of biases regarding what gets reported — we get very good reports about journalists killed, but not rural peasants; we know about big landowners, but not grassroots union organizers.”

The future is bright. When it comes to fear and arms proliferation it hasn’t looked this bright since the MacNamara era. Nuclear arms proliferation, in particular, seems to be the Bell of the ball, with evilly aligned states, such as Iran and North Korea, working like ants to produce weapons with which to end civilization as we know it - presumably so that they can rule over the toxic remains of a planet engulfed by nuclear winter and populated by a handful of pissed off survivors dying of radiation poisoning, hunger, and exposure.

What more can you really ask for? Evaporating entire cities is far less time consuming than having to go door to door in an attempt to weed out enemies of the state. Why bother when you can simply liquefy them in one go?

Because it would be wrong? Because the obscene loss of life would be too much for the fragile conscious of the West to bear? Someone have the guts to truthfully explain why Western nations have considerable nuclear programs then, or, for that matter, overlook the fact that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal despite the fact that it has never admitted it? Jefferson’s ‘wolf by the tail’ scenario comes to mind.

The only known application of nuclear weapons was by the United States in the summer of 1945 against two Japanese cities. At the time, Japan lacked a nuclear deterrent, which would have obviously deterred the United States from using the bomb. Not long after the US deployment of those two weapons at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union developed and tested their own device and, as luck would have it, the era of nuclear proliferation began.

Over the years, of course, there have been treaties signed to limit the development of new weapons, to try and stop developing world powers from acquiring nuclear capabilities, but the truth of the matter is that helping developing powers acquire nuclear capabilities is far too lucrative a practice, be they enemies or allies.

North Korea, a member of the dreaded ‘Axis of Evil’, may be facing unilateral action by China (conveniently based on the precedent set by the United States in 2003), though there will surely be a rather enjoyable diplomatic row between the two prior to China acting preemptively against North Korea, if indeed it does. We could sit here and argue the fact that the United States is trading nuclear technologies with India even though it has not signed the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, but I’ve mentioned that so many times that I’m actually tired of bringing it up. There’s also Israel’s supposedly ‘non-existent’ nuclear program, the only Israeli to ever have openly divulged its existence having been thrown in prison for some 29 years by the Israeli government for leaking information about it to the press in 1986. Of course, Israel’s in contravention of numerous UN resolutions, but no one much cares about that because, let’s face it, everyone else in the region has been so demonized that we might as well be talking about cannibalistic psycho maniacs when referring to the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Iranians, and so forth.

So, just for fun, let’s take a look at a list of nations that possess the ability to produce nuclear weapons if they so desired…

Australia, Argentina, South Africa: All three are considering programs to sell fuel to states that want to use nuclear power for energy needs.

Ripe for regime change?

Canada, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Taiwan, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Lithuania: All eleven of these countries have the ability to produce weapons-grade plutonium, could build the technology to do it, or could weaponize plutonium waste.

Again, candidates for regime change?

Egypt, Bangladesh, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, Namibia, Moldova, Nigeria, Poland, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam and Yemen: According to the United Nations, all 13 of these nations are currently considering developing nuclear programs. Of course, they’re going to need hardware and technical assistance, which will most likely be provided them by extremely expensive multi-nationals who, once finished, will exit just in time to avoid preemptive invasions bent on regime change.

Prior to the Islamic revolution in Iran in the 70’s, the United States was working with the Shah’s government to help develop an Iranian nuclear program.

Now Secretary of State Rumsfeld’s old company sold the nuclear reactors to North Korea that are currently being used in its weapons development process.

Mutually assured destruction is a two way street. In the post Cold War era, it is not one on which established nuclear powers that have taken to storming into other countries on a propaganda based whim have the right to declare themselves the only ones responsible enough to be stupid enough to possess devices that can, quite convincingly, end the world. Mutually assured destruction means that the possession of a nuclear deterrent makes anyone possessing a nuclear capability think twice (or possibly three million times) before being idiotic enough to use it knowing that the repercussions will ultimately mean their own destruction. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of the few that possesses the power to use nuclear weapons in a world in which their ownership is highly restricted. Then, I am sorry to say, you have the ability to openly court hypocrisy whilst grinning at those watching you do it.

This is where things get interesting…

“The Chinese are openly debating “regime change” in Pyongyang after last week’s nuclear test by their confrontational neighbour.”

I’m skeptical of a détente or entente in this situation. The thought of the United States aggressively operating so close to mainland China might be the impetus for Beijing’s willingness to unilaterally effect regime change in P’y�?ngyang. Where the United States militarily involves itself, military bases follow, and I certainly doubt that the Chinese government is going to be open to US military instillations existing north of the 38th Parallel when not too long ago they were all in favour of the Uzbek government revoking America’s use of the airbase in Karshi-Khanaba.

Opening salvos, new age of empires. It’s not entirely unlike placing your pieces at the beginning of a game of risk