Tightening the Grip on the Slippery Pole: The Globalisation of Control from the New World Order to the War on Terror
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Conference Contributions - Published
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Publisher
University of Canterbury. School of Educational Studies and Human Development
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Date
2005
Authors
Small, D.
Abstract
Description
The Iraqi referendum has been great news for the US, which has been very short on good news since it invaded the country 2,000 American lives and heaven knows how many Iraqi lives ago. It is the closest they have got to a retrospective rationalisation of the invasion that alienated them from many of their close allies and attracted widespread condemnation around the world. But it falls far short of a genuine justification because it was not the reason for attacking in the first place. The rationale for the invasion was that Saddam Hussein’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was a threat to the security of the entire region.
Critics doubted these claims and UN inspectors could not verify them. Still the US and its allies insisted they were absolutely true and acted accordingly. The US was eventually forced to concede that not a single WMD was found, let alone stockpiles of them.
The whole sorry affair raises a number of significant questions that will be explored in this paper. First, there are the issues of the accuracy of the intelligence upon which the US and its allies rely, and also about the nexus between those who generate the intelligence and those who deploy it to advance their political aims. These are matters that go to the heart of the War on Terror. It also raises issues about the genuine significance of weapons of mass destruction, a term in constant use before the invasion that has barely rated a mention since. It also raises questions about the relationship between fighting military wars and the more multi-dimensional and metaphorical war on terror. There is also the issue of the nature and strength of various alliances among the parties to the war on terror, an issue that will be discussed with reference to New Zealand, a country well down the military intelligence food-chain.
Citation
Small, D. (2005) Tightening the Grip on the Slippery Pole: The Globalisation of Control from the New World Order to the War on Terror. University of Warwick, UK: Translating Terror: Globalisation and the New Planetary Wars, 12 Nov 2005.
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ANZSRC fields of research
Field of Research::16 - Studies in Human Society::1606 - Political Science::160604 - Defence Studies