THIRD WORLD WAR vs Iraq in 1991 and 2003

A decade ago I wrote a long detailed piece arguing why that War Against
Iraq was the beginning of THE THIRD WORLD WAR. The present war is a
continuation, and so were the ones against Yugoslavia and
Afghanistan.  Below are the opening paragraphs of the 1991 essay
copied here as an abstract of the whole thing, which is at

http://csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/gulf_war.html



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               ANDRE    GUNDER      FRANK

Senior Fellow                                      Residence
World History Center                    One Longfellow Place
Northeastern University                            Apt. 3411
270 Holmes Hall                         Boston, MA 02114 USA
Boston, MA 02115 USA                    Tel:    617-948 2315
Tel: 617 - 373 4060                     Fax:    617-948 2316
Web-page:csf.colorado.edu/agfrank/     e-mail:franka@fiu.edu

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INTRODUCTION TO THIRD WORLD WAR

The Gulf War may be termed THIRD WORLD WAR in two senses of this title:
First, this war aligned the rich North, the rich oil emirates or kingdoms,
and some bribed regional oligarchies against a poor Third World country.
In that sense, the Gulf War was a THIRD WORLD war by the North against the
South. It was massively so perceived throughout the Third World South, not
only in Arab and Muslim countries but also elsewhere in Asia, Africa and
Latin America. Masses of people in the Third World manifested their
opposition to this war and the North, even if it meant taking sides with
the dictator Saddam Hussein, for whom little love was lost. Indeed, the
popular expressions of racism and xenophobia in the North also were
manifestations of this same perception that this was a war between "us" in
the North and "them" in the Third World South.

The second sense of THIRD WORLD WAR is that the Gulf War may dangerously
mark the brutal beginning of a THIRD World War, following upon the First
and Second World Wars. Not only was the tonnage of bombs dropped on Iraq
of world war proportions. The Gulf War and the New World Order it was
meant to launch signify the renewed recourse by a world wide "coalition of
allies" to mass destruction of infrastructure and mass annihilation of
human beings. The allies led by the United States chose to wage a major
destructive, brutal and unnecessary war and renounced dialogue and
negotiation as their preferred instrument to settle a relatively minor
international dispute. In so doing moreover, they clearly signalled their
threat to build the New World Order on repeated recourse to this same
military force and annihilation against any other recalcitrant country or
peoples -- as long as they are poor, weak, and in the Third World South.

With the conclusion of the cold war, the Third World [Hot] War is not to
be fought between East and West, or West and West, but between the North
and the South. Since the Second World War, West- West wars have been
obviated, and the East-West cold war has been fought out in regional hot
wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, and other parts of the Third
World. Now, West-West cold conflicts are also to be transmuted, as in the
Gulf War against Iraq, into the ever existing North-South conflict and
into Third World War at the expense of Third World peoples on Third World
soil. Of course, the North-South gap and conflict itself is also becoming
ever acuter. The Gulf War signals that in the New World Order the North
reserves the right and threat to turn any Old World Order North-South cold
conflict into a North-South hot war at the expense of Third World people
on Southern soil at any time of Northern choosing. Therefore, the world is
threatened with THE THIRD WORLD WAR.

This essay examines the Gulf War and the New World Order in this global
context. However, it also concentrates on the political economic motives,
actions and their consequences of the major actors in the unfolding of this 
tragic drama. THE major actor in the Gulf War for a New World Order
certainly was President George Bush. However, he has never told the truth
about his reasons, actions, or purposes in promoting and fighting the Gulf
War. Indeed, George Bush deceived the American public and the world already 
earlier on....