Imposing the New World Order
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the ‘Atlantic to the Urals’ was suddenly a real possibility for the first time since 1948. In this climate, observers in the City of London noted a dramatic increase in the number of French and British informal contacts, on the level of senior business and diplomatic persons. British strategy was to play on latent French fears of a strong Germany. Mitterrand, the socialist French president with a lifelong personal Anglophile inclination, was a ready listener. Britain began quietly to rebuild the old dual alliance of the pre-1914 era and to set the stage for a new Entente Cordiale against the ‘German threat.’ But the actual strategic battle was to be waged far from central Europe. The decision had been made sometime during 1989 to make a bold offensive, using the Middle East and its vast oil reserves as the staging ground. Again, as during the 1970s, U.S. and British strategists determined that the serious threat of an economically expanding Continental Europe must be countered through using the AngloAmerican ‘oil weapon.’ But the form this was to take was soon to astonish the entire world. SADDAM AND OPERATION DESERT STORM Senior circles in the Thatcher and Bush governments had determined to create a manufactured pretext which would allow the United States and Britain to establish a direct military presence at the choke point of the world’s, and especially Continental Europe’s, petroleum supplies. The domestic economic and financial plight of both Britain and the United States during early 1990 added a special note of desperation to the plan. Thatcher’s economic ‘revolution’ was rapidly collapsing, after the October 1987 stock market debacle and rising British interest rates forced the worst real estate, industrial and banking crisis of the postwar period. In the United States, George Bush faced an out-of-control federal budget deficit, collapsing banks, soaring unemployment and an overall depression, privately likened by some inside the White House to the 1930s Great Depression. Iraq, a nation of 16 million people, had just emerged from eight years of a fruitless war against Iran, which had accomplished little other than to provide Western arms manufacturers with a vast market for arms sales to the Middle East. Washington had secretly encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1980, falsely feeding him intelligence data indicating early success. By 1989, the economy
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