This journal has consistently opposed Britain's war on Iraq because we believe that Britain should decide on its own defence and war-fighting priorities, not tag along on Uncle Sam's coat-tails. But now that the war has come and (almost) gone we, as Britons, must ask whether we will ultimately benefit from its aftermath or not.

Should the Right oppose America's war on Iraq because the US is a neo-colonialist, occupying or imperialist power? Here we should beware of knee-jerk labels used entirely by the Left.

Colonisation and imperialism mean that foreign nationals enter your country, get into positions of enormous cultural and political power, and impose alien ideologies upon you without your consent. The only peoples that have suffered this fate in modern times on a massive scale are white, western peoples, who themselves are reduced to being only 10 per cent of the world's population.

Coloured people have colonised America and Europe in a way that would be totally unacceptable to ‘orthodox’ opinion if we Whites were to do the same to Third World countries. Non-European people have now obtained enormous influence in the media, politics, and academe, and have imposed the ideology of multi-culturalism on us whether we like it or not. Every non-white person you see in the street or on television tells you one thing: "You are now living in a multi-cultural society because we have made it so, and there is sod-all you can do about it." ‘The war on Iraq’ on BBC TV news is presented by George Alagiah (a man with a name which sounds African but who in fact is Sri-Lankan) who dialogues with Ragih Owah, who sounds like an Iraqi himself but looks like a black man, while another black man, John Pienaar, deigns to pontificate on the political implications of it all. The important point is that none of them is actually British. The Iraqis, allegedly living under a brutal dictatorship, at least had the privilege of being broadcast to by genuine indigenous Arabs!

Not nations

This brings me to Iraq, the Middle East, and coloured people across the whole of the Third World. There is one thing that differentiates them from us Europeans: very few of them live in proper ethnic nations; they dwell in entirely arbitrary territorial states. Different religious and language groups were thrown together through accidents of history and have no common cultural denominator. Therefore there is no ‘Iraqi people’, any more than there is a ‘Zimbabwean’, ‘Pakistani’ or ‘Peruvian’ people.

The Americans will have one hell of a job trying to ‘rebuild’ Iraq when the fighting is finally over because the region consists of Arabs, Turkomens, Kurds and other minorities. Most of them speak Arabic, but then again so does the rest of the Middle East. You could take an Iraqi out of Iraq and put him in Egypt and no one would be any the wiser. One reason why Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 was because he said that after World War I Kuwait was originally allocated to ‘Iraq’, which itself before the war was ‘Mesopotamia’. There is a certain logic to that.

This brings me to America's and Britain's war on ‘Iraq’. President George W. Bush is on a roll: he is not only roaring his mighty military motor into the festering fly-blown Middle East, with the British tagging along in the jet-stream, he has thrown away the steering wheel! If it means, after Iraq, sorting out the next country on the ‘axis-of-evil’ short list then he might well do it.

By shaking up the world order and undermining international treaties, perhaps Bush and his gang will inadvertently bust up or weaken permanently the ‘liberal’ institutions which have done enormous social harm to the West. ‘Multi-culturalism’ is destroying the West in a way that no other world ideology or religion has ever done - because it involves the transfer of populations across international borders; and the transfer is all one way: westwards. It is the closest thing you can get to political criminality.

Hence we in Britain are suffering from the ‘liberal internationalism’, not so much of America but of the United Nations, the EU and the all-powerful home-grown liberal lawyers and politicians - the New Élites that control commerce, media and public opinion and who owe allegiance not to the people they govern but to each other - so that they ensure they remain in power.

Re-ordering the world

If America is part of the New World Order, then Bush, whether intending to or not, is about to re-order it. He has by-passed its main institution, the UN, and its Security Council, with its bunch of hypocritical human-rights abusers like Syria, China, Pakistan, and Angola.

History is buffeted by abrupt changes in direction, and powerful leaders are thrown up who have an inordinate influence on world affairs. Bush is one of those unusual men who are about to do just that. He talks in gunslinger language and has no time for verbal niceties. One consequence of the flood of Civil Rights and permissive open-door legislation forced on America by the Democrats in the 1960s - and which the Republicans did nothing to reverse - has been to allow Islamic suicide bombers to check in at US hotels, take flying lessons, and assault with impunity the economic and military symbols of the most powerful country in the world.

America seeks revenge

The American military, as well as the intelligence services, now seek revenge on that part of the world that has humiliated it: the Middle East. After September 11, the Americans have lost their innocence and have become brutal in a brutal world. Iraq is a handy target because the Americans have been strafing and blitzing it for the last 12 years, so they might as well finish the job once and for all and get the ‘regime-change’ they have wanted all along.

The present Republican administration is unlike any of its predecessors. George Bush's cohorts like Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Richard Perle were hawks before they reached the White House, and were planning to boost American military power greatly in the 1990s. None of the Bush crew are liberals in the European sense. "My job is to protect America, and that is exactly what I'm going to do," says Bush, and he has being saying that over and over for the past 18 months so that the other countries get the message.

Bush has set up the Homeland Security Department that is already tightening up its lax immigration and visa regime. He has a long way to go, since there remain powerful liberal bureaucrats who will do their best to stymie any restrictive laws, but he has changed America's liberal direction in a way that will be difficult to reverse in the long run, since the Democrats are going to have to go along with it.

Bush couldn't care less about Europe or NATO, and won't brook any restraints on US power as have happened in the past. From Bush's point of view America has suffered too long from the humiliation of Vietnam, and US troops have actually been thrown out of tinpot countries like Haiti, Lebanon and Somalia when they thought they were acting for humanitarian, not imperialistic, reasons.

Some on the Right believe that the present liberal world order cannot be broken without a violent disruption to the status-quo - and it doesn't matter how it happens or who does it. If the old order is rocked to its foundations, social violence may take place on a wider scale than at present. This is to be deplored of course; but if it happens it will be a bit like chickens coming home to roost.

The war in Iraq will turn the ratchet up a bit further: it will screw up the Middle East Moslems who have taken it upon themselves to colonise European cities. Demographically, Europe is now a province of Islam, hosting some 16 million Moslem immigrants, very few of whom have any affinity with European peoples or its traditions. They are already blazing with anger at America - which they consider to be run by fundamentalist Christians and Jews - and are ready at the drop of a hat to go on the rampage.

Likely backlash

If Europe is flooded with yet more Arab refugees in the aftermath of the war - and they will use every excuse to get to Europe - then at the very least the ensuing cultural chaos and lawlessness in a Europe already overflowing with illegal foreigners could result in an almighty backlash. Europe will become a Third World charnel house, and gun crime and Moslem terrorism is bound to increase.

When the bombs start going off and the pinko liberal police forces - whose members occasionally get stabbed to death by asylum seekers - can no longer cope, then indigenous European peoples will get very angry indeed.

In the meantime the recent turmoil in the EU, NATO and the UN - all anti-nationalist institutions - means that those institutions will all lose credibility. The current crisis among European governments is because Bush is preparing to break up the UN veto system. The US intends to retaliate against those countries that have opposed it on the Iraq issue - France, Germany, Belgium and Turkey.

Most intellectuals in the ‘New Europe’ that Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld referred to are nationalists who have campaigned for their own separate nations or enclaves within Europe. The ‘Old Europe’ that America has collided with is the bankrupt ideological world of enforced multi-culturalism and the liberal authoritarianism of Chirac, Blair, Schroder and their Scandinavian hangers-on. The EU has become a softer version of communism, complete with the politicisation of police and local authorities. Many of those in Eastern European countries like Poland are beginning to resent the Warsaw Pact Mark II which they have just entered, with its rigged markets, and its thousands of onerous rules and anti-race laws.