U.S. WAR
Against the World
After November 2nd?
"Never have so many liberal hands been wrung over a
candidate whose only
memorable statements seek to out-Bush Bush....
The most enduring silence is that which guards the system that
has
produced these catastrophic events... Americanism, the
ideology, has meant democracy at home, for
some,
and a war on democracy abroad."
"From Guatemala to Iran, from Chile to Nicaragua, to the struggle
for
freedom in South Africa, to present-day Venezuela, American
state
terrorism, licensed by both Republican and Democrat
administrations,
has fought democrats and sponsored totalitarians.
Most societies
attacked or otherwise subverted by American power
are weak and
defenceless, and there is a logic to this. Should a small
country
succeed in breaking free and establish its own way of
developing, then
its good example to others
becomes a threat to Washington."
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 29 October: Whether
the Americans are lead by Bush and the neocons, or by Kerry and the
neoliberals, the reality is that both of the great American political
parties are today dominated by their super-hawkish Israeli-connected
elements and that both are heavily mortgaged to major, however
competing, segments of the Israeli-Jewish lobby in Washington.
If Bush/Cheney and the
largely Jewish neocons (aligned ironically with the Christian
evangelicals) remain in power as seems likely, expect even more
militant and aggressive policies in the years ahead. This go around
they will likely and loudly proclaim a mandate and they will use it
ruthlessly.
If Kerry along with Biden,
Lieberman, and the 'Committee on the Present Danger' crowd take power
expect different rhetoric, frantic attempts at internationalization,
but policies that may be far closer to those of Bush/Cheney then many
of their fervent supporters may be able to easily tolerate.
Remember after all that Democrat John Kerry, greatly encouraged by
likely Secretary of State Senator Joseph Biden, pushed hard to make non
other than soft-spoken hard-hitting Republican John McCain his
Vice-Presidential running mate.
Sometimes it takes a foreign observer to be able to
more clearly see, and to dare to clearly articulate, the actual realities
and failings of a great super power like the United States. Two of those who do so best are British
journalists, Robert Fisk and in this case John Pilger in the following article he published this week.
Pilger is a well-known, widely published, and much-acclaimed British
journalist from Australia -- throughout much of the world that
is. He remains quite unknown in the crucial USA however where the corporate
media and those who control the talk-show circuit rarely give him the forum he so rightly deserves.
Will there be a war against the world
after November 2?
By
John Pilger
10/28/04 -- There is a
surreal quality about visiting the United States
in the last days of the presidential campaign. If George W Bush
wins,
according to a scientist I met, who escaped Nazi-dominated Europe,
America will surrender many of its democratic trappings and succumb to
its totalitarian impulses. If John Kerry wins, according to most
Democrat voters, the only mandate he will have is that he is not
Bush.
Never have so many liberal hands been wrung over a candidate whose only
memorable statements seek to out-Bush Bush. Take Iran. One of Kerry's
national security advisers, Susan Rice, has accused Bush of 'standing
on the sidelines while Iran's nuclear programme has been advanced'.
There is not a shred of evidence that Iran is developing nuclear
weapons, yet Kerry is joining in the same orchestrated frenzy that led
to the invasion of Iraq. Having begun his campaign by promising another
40,000 troops for Iraq, he is said to have a 'secret plan to end the
war' which foresees a withdrawal in four years. This is an echo of
Richard Nixon, who in the 1968 presidential campaign promised a 'secret
plan' to end the war in Vietnam.
Once in office, he accelerated the slaughter and the war dragged on for
six and a half years. For Kerry, like Nixon, the message is that he is
not a wimp. Nothing in his campaign or his career suggests he will not
continue, even escalate, the 'war on terror', which is now sanctified
as a crusade of Americanism like that against communism. No Democratic
president has shirked such a task: John Kennedy on the cold war, Lyndon
Johnson on Vietnam.
This presents great danger for all of us, but none of it is allowed to
intrude upon the campaign or the media 'coverage'. In a supposedly free
and open society, the degree of censorship by omission is
staggering.The New York Times, the country's liberal standard-bearer,
having recovered from a mild bout of contrition over its abject failure
to challenge Bush's lies about Iraq, has been running tombstones of
column inches about what-went-wrong in the 'liberation' of that
country.
It blames mistakes: tactical oversights, faulty intelligence. Not a
word suggests that the invasion was a colonial conquest, deliberate
like any other, and that 60 years of international law make it 'the
paramount war crime', to quote the Nuremberg judges. Not a word
suggests that the American onslaught on the population of Iraq was and
is systematically atrocious, of which the torture of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib was merely a glimpse.
The coming atrocity in the city of Fallujah, in which British troops,
against the wishes of the British people, are to be accessories, is a
case in point. For American politicians and journalists - there are a
few honourable exceptions - the US marines are preparing for another of
their "battles". Their last attack on Fallujah, in April, provides a
preview. Forty-ton battle tanks and helicopter gunships were used
against slums. Aircraft dropped 500lb bombs: marine snipers killed old
people, women and children; ambulances were shot at. The marines closed
the only hospital in a city of 300,000 for more than two weeks, so they
could use it as a military position.
When it was estimated they had slaughtered 600 people, there was no
denial. This was more than all the victims of the suicide bombs the
previous year. Neither did they deny that their barbarity was in
revenge for the killing of four American mercenaries in the city; led
by avowed cowboys, they are specialists in revenge. John Kerry said
nothing; the media reported the atrocity as 'a military operation',
against 'foreign militants' and 'insugents', never against civilians
and Iraqis defending their homes and homeland.
Moreover, the American people are almost totally unaware that the
marines were driven out of Fallujah by heroic street fighting.
Americans remain unaware, too, of the piracy that comes with their
government's murderous adventure. Who in public life asks the
whereabouts of the 18.46 bn dollars which the US Congress approved for
reconstruction and humanitarian aid in Iraq?
As Unicef reports, most hospitals are bereft even of pain-killers, and
acute malnutrition among children has doubled since the 'liberation'.
In fact, less than 29m dollars has been allocated, most of it on
British security firms, with their ex-SAS thugs and veterans of South
African apartheid. Where is the rest of this money that should be
helping to save lives? Non-wimp Kerry dares not ask.
Neither does he nor anybody else with a public profile ask why the
people of Iraq have been forced to pay, since the fall of Saddam,
almost 80m dollars to America and Britain as 'reparations'. Even Israel
has received an untold fortune in Iraqi oil money as compensation for
its 'loss of tourism' in the Golan Heights - part of Syria it occupies
illegally. As for oil, the 'o-word' is unmentionable in the contest for
the world's most powerful job. So successful is the resistance in its
campaign of economic sabotage that the vital pipeline carrying oil to
the Turkish Mediterranean has been blown up 37 times. Terminals in the
south are under constant attack, effectively shutting down all exports
of crude oil and threatening national economies. That the world may
have lost Iraqi oil is enveloped by the same silence that ensures
Americans have little idea of the nature and scale of the blood-letting
conducted in their name.
The most enduring silence is that which guards the system that has
produced these catastrophic events. This is Americanism, though it
dares not speak its name, which is strange, as its opposite,
anti-Americanism, has long been successfully deployed as a pejorative,
catch-all response to critical analysis of an imperial system and its
myths. Americanism, the ideology, has meant democracy at home, for
some, and a war on democracy abroad.
From Guatemala to Iran, from Chile to Nicaragua, to the struggle for
freedom in South Africa, to present-day Venezuela, American state
terrorism, licensed by both Republican and Democrat administrations,
has fought democrats and sponsored totalitarians. Most societies
attacked or otherwise subverted by American power are weak and
defenceless, and there is a logic to this. Should a small country
succeed in breaking free and establish its own way of developing, then
its good example to others becomes a threat to Washington.
And the serious purpose behind this? Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's
secretary of state, once told the United Nations that America had the
right to 'unilateral use of power' to ensure 'uninhibited access to key
markets, energy supplies and strategic resources'. Or as Colin Powell,
the Bush-ite laughably promoted by the media as a liberal, put it more
than a decade ago: "I want to be the bully on the block." Britain's
imperialists believed exactly that, and still do; only the language is
discreet.
That is why people all over the world, whose consciousness about these
matters has risen sharply in the past few years, are 'anti-American'.
It has nothing to do with the ordinary people of the United States, who
now watch a Darwanian capitalism consume their real and fabled freedoms
and reduce the 'free market' to a fire-sale of public assets. It is
remarkable, if not inspiring, that so many reject the class and race
based brainwashing, begun in childhood, that such a class and race
based system is called 'the American dream'.
What will happen if the nightmare in Iraq goes on? Perhaps those
millions of worried Americans, who are currently paralysed by wanting
to get rid of Bush at any price, will shake off their ambivalence,
regardless of who wins on
2 November. Then, will a giant awaken, as it did during the civil
rights campaign and the Vietnam war and the great movement to freeze
nuclear weapons? One must trust so; the alternative is a war on the
world.
* John
Pilger is a well-known, widely published, and much-acclaimed British
journalist from Australia -- throughout much of the world that
is. But he remains relatively unknown in the United States, about
which he often writes boldly and courageously. Other than
occasional university appearances in the U.S., the American corporate
media and talk-show circuit rarely are willing to give Pilger the forum
he most definitely deserves.
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