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Professor of politics at La Trobe University Robert Manne criticized Monday the Bush Doctrine as hegemony claims or jungle law.
The professor published on The Sydney Morning Herald an article titled "Kill first, ask questions later," in which he said the new idea of the pre-emptive strike in reality is a strategy not of pre-emptive strike but of preventive war because the Bush doctrine proposes military action against "rogue states" when no threat to the United States is imminent.
"For a preventive war to be launched, a state needs only imagine itself to be under threat. With such an idea, the line between self-defense and aggression becomes hopelessly blurred," he said.
The professor analyzed, "The danger of this conflation of pre-emptive strike and preventive war is aggravated precisely by the fact that the Bush doctrine makes it clear that the United States reserves to itself the right to strike unilaterally, without mandate from the established processes of the United Nations. Under the new doctrine, then, the United States may not only go towar on the basis of an imagined threat. It also arrogates to itself the right to decide alone when such a threat exists."
"At the center of the doctrine, a huge conceptual hole appears.Does the United States, as the world hegemony, alone possess the sovereign right to act unilaterally against a supposed threat to its security by prosecuting a preventive war, or does an identicalright exist for other states?" he asked and concluded "If the right does not exist for others, the Bush doctrine amounts to an almost formal claim to US world hegemony. If, on the other hand, all states possess the same right, the Bush doctrine opens the warto the return of the jungle, where the powerful have the capacity to impose their will."
As the United States steps up its war preparation against Iraqand the Australian government inclines to support it, anti-war voice gets higher in the country. On Saturday, about 1,000 Sydney residents launched a large-scale protest warning the government not to involve in any war on Iraq. On Friday, a group of 450 activists announced they had formed a "No War On Iraq Coalition." On Thursday, three former prime ministers and one former governor-general along with other former political and military officials issued a public letter opposing a US unilateral military action against Iraq.
(Xinhua News Agency September 30, 2002)
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