[R-G] Steer Clear of Iran Central Bank, Says US

[CeJ]

>  I would love to read an indepth careful study of the commitment of the U S
>  government to forcing sovreign countries to do what the U S wants them to do
>  juxstaposed with the international laws that spell out such forcing as acts
>  of war, if there are such laws as well as any international laws that would
>  support one country behaving, harrasementwise, as we do.

Who would fund someone doing such an in-depth study? The works of
Pilger are often a near endless catalogue of this.

The US is a classic empire in quite a few ways. It invokes the spirit,
language and laws of international cooperation and justice at its
convenience,  and it uses multi-lateral groupings to get what it
wants, so long as it gets what it wants. That would be, for example,
dominating the UN (on behalf of Israel, or on the issue of WMD in
Iraq, etc.), working with NATO (to get them to help pay for the new
occupations, in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan) .

But recourse to international law is weak because there is no god-like
power that is going to enforce some alternative version of it other
than the dominant US's.

The US relentlessly pursues 'bilateral relations' when it is serious
about getting something (defense agreements, trade agreements, etc.).
Often this is to get extra-territorial arrangements, such as what it
has in the UK, Europe (especially Germany and Italy),  and E. Asia
(Japan, Okinawa, S. Korea), but has worked to expand since the end of
the Cold War (with the Philippines being the most notable
re-trenchment, but the current Bush regime has done much to get the US
military back to the Philippines too).

 For example, the way US gets Japan to cooperate with 'security
arrangements' in the Pacific and Asia. Yet the US's transshipping and
storage of nuclear weapons violates Japan's laws, and yet no one does
anything about it. There is no one to enforce international law over
it. And if you are a Japanese nationalist politician, it would be
political suicide to admit you don't have much autonomy over relations
with the US and have no say whatsoever about what actually goes on in
the US military complex of bases and 50,000 personnel here in Japan.

CJ