Imperialism is alive and well

When the Western powers shed their colonies after WWII, the world breathed a sigh of relief. The reign of imperialism seemed at an end. Half a millennia of Europeans swaggering about the globe, enslaving, murdering, conquering and stealing, in general getting in the face of everyone else on the planet, was over.

Not so. With U.S. military bases ringing the Earth, and the Brits and Americans waging a couple of wars in Islam, clearly not all Western nations have given up on running the world just yet. Now the French want to get in on the act. Maybe they're feeling left out.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy called the West's stand-off with Iran regarding its nuclear ambitions, "the greatest crisis" of recent times (not global warming, mind you), and French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner added, "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war." The French are sounding like Bush and Cheney, and we all know how badly they want to bash Iran.

Let us hope cooler heads prevail over this imperial madness. The United Nation's chief nuclear weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, issued a timely reminder, saying, "I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons." Indeed.

The irony of course is that while the U.S., Britain and France complain about Iran's nuclear efforts, they violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty every day by not ridding themselves of nuclear weapons. They seem to feel they have the right to retain imperial power and the attendant responsibility to keep the wogs in their place.