LUSAKA — Africa is very rich in natural resources, but she never prospers, the log jam to prosperity being conflicts. African conflicts are a lucrative business. They are, in the main, sponsored by European thugs. Those are the real warlords, but who, sadly, never feature at war crime tribunals.

Look at Angola. The country is endowed with vast deposits of diamonds. But the country is aflame. Raped. Poor. Bleeding. And festering with disease and death. Who sells the Angolan diamonds? UNITA. To whom? No one knows. But veiled media reports abound on Angolan diamond sales. Sierra Leone is aflame, too. Scout for the European perpetrators; you will find them. In the Great Lakes region [of central Africa] bloodbath, France is accused of complicity. Some French politicians have testified to this effect.

The U.S. is renowned for backing coups, always muddying waters everywhere. It is only Saddam Hussein, Muamar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro who they have lamentably failed to bring down. But they have inflicted a great deal of misery on their peoples.

The U.S. can install you, no matter how much blood is shed in the process, and they can turn against you in the twinkling of an eye if you differ with them. Ask Saddam Hussein and Laurent Kabila [leader of the Congo since Mobutu’s ouster].

Europeans come for wealth while the U.S. and other powers want bases, bastions of influence. America fights other countries away from her home, inflicting damage and untold misery. Only Japan has tried to take war to American soil. Hiroshima and Nagasaki tell the story of the Japanese mistake.

The warlords—the sponsors of insurgency—work in tandem with the twofold gadfly: the IMF and World Bank. An economy is blown up, and then the financial oppressors stride in briskly and unsmilingly. They bring you the dollar and throw you into a furnace and lock it up. It is only the financial institutions that walk away with a profit, the behind-the-scenes muggers aside.

Look at the Asian financial crisis. How in God’s name can an economy like Japan’s go into recession? Economic war. The next to nosedive economically is China. Be sure the economic microbes are at work there. Don’t for a moment think it is impossible to bring a country like China to her knees. Where is the USSR?

The U.S. reigns supreme. She is the international law, the jury, the prosecutor and the executioner—all neatly rolled into one. But, really, nobody should spend sleepless nights over America. There have been mighty empires before like Tyre, Babylon, and Rome. The tragedy, however, would be for Africa if Christ came before she triumphed over poverty, disease and war.

On March 12, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic officially joined NATO. American officials were jubilant—as were American arms makers. Here’s why, from an article written a few months ago:

For a really, really bad idea, try expanding NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. You may wonder how such a bad idea has gotten so far. Simple: The U.S. arms lobby wants this one real, real bad, and it has put a huge slug of money into buying it through Congress.

Expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the product of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc. In fact, Lockheed Martin’s Vice President Bruce L. Jackson is also president of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO—isn’t that nice? Bernard L. Schwartz, another top gun at Lockheed, has been a top individual soft-money donor to Democratic Party committees, contributing a generous $601,000 in 1995–96. Lockheed as a whole put $2.3 million into the political system campaign in the same period.

The Clinton administration and the Pentagon claim that expanding NATO will cost $400 million, which is nonsense. Try tens of billions—the United States has already spent $1.2 billion when you count all the arms-export subsidies over the last three years, according to the World Policy Institute.

You see, we taxpayers subsidize the arms manufacturers; programs to promote arms exports are squirreled away all over the Pentagon, the State Department and the Commerce Department. Boeing, Lockheed and others have been all over Eastern Europe touting NATO, running seminars, buttering up officials.

How come? The weapons makers stand to make billions. Jet fighters, choppers, guns, tanks, missiles. The United States loans money to these countries so they can in turn buy weapons from U.S. manufacturers.

SIACHEN GLACIER, Indo-Pakistani Border—In this frozen wasteland, the historic rivalry between India and Pakistan seems as enduring as the glacial ice. On the Siachen Glacier, where temperatures drop to 50 below zero, the frostbitten armies of two implacable foes have faced each other for 15 years in a conflict both bloody and surreal.Cold and crevasses kill more troops than opposing armies. In the high, frigid air, skin bonds with metal, sweat turns to ice, and there’s not enough oxygen to light a match. Artillery shells, freed from the normal laws of ballistics, sail for miles.

The fight for Siachen has cost two of the world’s poorest countries a combined 3,500 dead and 10,000 injured, and an estimated $1 million a day. Now, after a meeting between the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, both governments are signaling that they may be willing to pull back from their high-altitude fight. A growing number of voices say neither nation should sacrifice another life to hold on to a block of prehistoric ice.

Siachen, the world’s largest glacier outside the polar regions, straddles the Himalayan territory where India, China and Pakistan collide. A spectacular river of congealed snow, the 48-mile-long Siachen forms the eastern edge of the Karakoram Mountains, where five peaks reach higher than 26,000 feet.

The war on the Siachen Glacier seems part Ice Age and part Flash Gordon. Village-born troops on both sides roam the frozen wastes with the most modern equipment, darting through mile-deep gorges in $1-million helicopters and firing at enemies they cannot see.

Guns freeze here; so do cameras. Pick up a rifle without a pair of gloves, and the skin peels from the fingers. If he strays from one of the designated footpaths, a soldier risks being swallowed by a hidden, snow-covered crevasse. One ravine cuts straight through Pakistani headquarters, bridged only by three wobbly switches of bamboo. "Fall into there, and you go to God," said one soldier, pointing into the abyss.

A lone terrorist creates a designer microbe deadly enough to annihilate most of Manhattan. After it's unleashed into the air, the virus will jump, silently, from person to person, infecting millions of unknowing victims. Air travelers will spread the microbe across the nation--and thousands will die within weeks. It hasn't happened yet, but it could.

The compelling tale is fiction, but presents a potentially very real scenario, said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who gave the keynote address at the start of a meeting on bioterrorism.

The effects of chemical warfare are often obvious immediately after an attack, allowing public-health officials time to mobilize and clean up the area within hours or days. But a biological attack might not be evident until weeks after the initial infection. And by then, the silent microbes could have spread to thousands, killing most in their wake.

While there are any number of organisms that bioterrorists could use as weapons, smallpox and anthrax are the big two that are capable of causing disease and death sufficient to cripple a city, even a country, experts said.

And if you thought smallpox was eradicated, think again, they said. Yes, the World Health Assembly announced in 1980 that smallpox had been obliterated and recommended that all countries cease vaccination. But that same year, the Soviet government embarked on an ambitious program to grow smallpox in large quantities and adapt it for use in bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

"We now know unequivocally that the former Soviet Union continued to produce biowarfare agents even in the face of the 1970s ban on such weapons," said Dr. Christopher Davis, director of the ORAQ Consultancy Group in Marlborough, U.K. "The questions now are, What happened to the seed stocks? What about the planning documents? The equipment?"

Some of the reasons bioterrorists prefer smallpox are its high fatality rates--it kills some 30 percent of its victims--and its long incubation periods--up to 14 days. While the victims do not experience symptoms during these two weeks, they can infect others.

There is no treatment and it is easily spread from person to person. And since no one in the United States has been vaccinated during the past 25 years, even those immunized before that time are unlikely to still be protected.

Anthrax could also be used by terrorists. Given appropriate weather and wind conditions, 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of anthrax released from an aircraft along a 2 kilometer (1.2 mile) line could create a lethal cloud of anthrax spores that would extend beyond 20 kilometers (12 miles) downwind. The aerosol cloud would be colorless, odorless and invisible. And given the small size of the spores, they are as likely to infect people indoors as those on the street.

An analysis by the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress estimated that 130,000 to 3 million deaths could occur following the release of 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of aerosolized anthrax over Washington D.C., making such an attack as lethal as a hydrogen bomb.

It was the early 1990s and then-Presidential candidate Bill Clinton was on the campaign trail making promises: "I expect to review our arms sales policy and to take it up with the other major arms sellers of the world as a part of a long-term effort to reduce the proliferation of weapons."

Ah, campaign promises. But the economy was in the doldrums, and the prospect of cutting arms sales didn't thrill either labor or corporate America. What's more, the Gulf War had just ended the previous year, and it was the best extended commercial an arms salesman could ask for. (Indeed, some arms manufacturers incorporated bombing videos into their promotional materials.) Countries were clamoring for the high-tech weapons that made for such good TV.

So, once elected, Bill Clinton did what he does best: He took advantage of the opportunity. Rather than insert human-rights concerns into the arms-sales equation, as did his Democratic predecessor President Carter, Clinton decided to aggressively continue the sales policies. The results were immediate: During Clinton's first year in office, U.S. arms sales more than doubled. From 1993 to 1997, the U.S. government sold, approved, or gave away $190 billion in weapons to virtually every nation on earth.

The arms industry, meanwhile, has greased the wheels. It filled the Democratic Party coffers to the tune of nearly $2 million in the 1998 election cycle.

The Clinton administration has not been shy about arming potential foes in regional conflicts. For example, two of America's biggest arms customers are Greece and Turkey, which have been threatening to go to war with each other for decades over the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Though barred by Congress from selling offensive weapons to Cyprus itself, in 1997 the U.S. sold (or allowed American corporations to sell) more than $270 million worth of weapons to Greece and nearly $750 million worth to Turkey. Now if there's a war, the two NATO allies can blast away at one another with far greater efficiency, thanks to the U.S. defense industry and its cheerleader, Bill Clinton.

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