A Canadian citizen living in the U.S. under a NAFTA work permit, social activist Peter Welch recently spoke at UW-Eau Claire about U.S. global power of the present, and the resistance to its future. He spoke most notably about how the United States, and specifically the Bush Administration, seeks to control the entire world economy through any means necessary. The Progressive Student Association (PSA) hosted the event on Thursday, November 13, and for those of you not able to make it I offer a summary of Mr. Welch's main points.

In 2002, Welch visited Iraq as part of a humanitarian mission when it was a felony to bring aid to the country due to United Nations induced sanctions. He was first inspired to take action back in 1998 when Denis Holladay (a former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq) spoke at Welch's university about the sanctions. Since getting involved with humanitarian causes, Welch has traveled to such countries as Armenia, Mexico, El Salvador, and Indonesia. After such travels, Welch could not ignore the U.S. government's moving other countries around like pieces on a chessboard.

In 1983, as part of the Middle East envoy for Ronald Reagan, current Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld met cordially with U.S. ally Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, while Hussein was using chemical weapons against his own people and the Iranians. This of course has been excusable. Even today we remain in support of other dictatorships in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Yemen. We do not want democracy in these places as long as they still provide us with oil.

Control of the world's resources and economy are central to U.S. policies abroad. Regionally strong areas such as the Middle East threaten to control their own resources, rather than the U.S. Welch cited the Middle East as the most important region due to oil and the fact that it is so central geographically, especially in terms of trade through the Suez Canal. The Koreas are also important geographically when it comes to trade and the encirclement of China, which by 2020 is estimated to be using more oil than even us. Why isn't the Bush Administration moving in to North Korea you ask? As Welch put it, North Korea is "a genuinely dangerous regime," and therefore we do not want to fight it because we would rather fight those who are helpless.

A more dangerous war after all would not go unnoticed and unopposed by the American people; therefore Welch considers Iran or perhaps Columbia or Venezuela to be the site of U.S. aggression in the near future. Columbia and Venezuela have a flourishing drug trade and prominent rebel groups and death squads which could be considered terrorists in need of eradication. Most importantly however, they have oil, and they could be attacked with minimal risk of protest.

After Welch's initial talk, a student asked him if protesting really works. His answer was, "I think it does a lot more than not protesting." Arguably Welch is right, and lately the people of the world and many countries have become less reluctant to stand up against war, against global domination, and against unilateralism by the United States. The largest antiwar protest in history, numbering over 20 million participants worldwide, took place even before the Iraq War began last spring. Now, after no sign of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, and while a dozen Americans die there each week, Bush is finally looking insecure.

What Welch pointed out as the most bothersome to him about this was that most people in the U.S. started to care about the war in Iraq only once American soldiers started to come home dead in large numbers. Why must it always seem to take direct catastrophe or crisis to make people pay attention, and even then not even have that attention lead to action? I suppose we may just have to take what we can get, build solidarity, and do ourselves what we think everyone should do to improve this situation.