On 6 May
last, the US House
of Representatives passed a resolution which, in effect, authorised a
"pre-emptive" attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the
accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one
commentator, "once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of
American power".
The joining of hands across America's illusory political
divide has a long history. The native Americans were slaughtered, the
Philippines laid to waste and Cuba and much of Latin America brought to
heel with "bipartisan" backing. Wading through the blood, a new breed
of popular historian, the journalist in the pay of rich newspaper
owners, spun the heroic myths of a supersect called Americanism, which
advertising and public relations in the 20th century formalised as an
ideology, embracing both conservatism and liberalism.
In the modern era, most of America's wars have been launched
by liberal Democratic presidents - Harry Truman in Korea, John F
Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan.
The fictitious "missile gap" was invented by Kennedy's liberal New
Frontiersmen as a rationale for keeping the cold war going. In 1964, a
Democrat-dominated Congress gave President Johnson authority to attack
Vietnam, a defenceless peasant nation offering no threat to the United
States. Like the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, the justification was a
non- existent "incident" in which, it was said, two North Vietnamese
patrol boats had attacked an American warship. More than three million
deaths and the ruin of a once bountiful land followed.
During the past 60 years, only once has Congress voted to
limit the president's "right" to terrorise other countries. This
aberration, the Clark Amendment 1975, a product of the great anti-
Vietnam war movement, was repealed in 1985 by Ronald Reagan.
During Reagan's assaults on central America in the 1980s, liberal
voices such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times,
doyen of the "doves", seriously debated whether or not tiny,
impoverished Nicaragua was a threat to the United States. These days,
terrorism having replaced the red menace, another fake debate is under
way. This is lesser evilism. Although few liberal-minded voters seem to
have illusions about John Kerry, their need to get rid of the "rogue"
Bush administration is all-consuming. Representing them in Britain, the
Guardian says that the coming presidential
election is
"exceptional". "Mr Kerry's flaws and limitations are evident," says the
paper, "but they are put in the shade by the neoconservative agenda and
catastrophic war-making of Mr Bush. This is an election in which almost
the whole world will breathe a sigh of relief if the incumbent is
defeated."
The whole world may well breathe a sigh of relief: the Bush
regime is both dangerous and universally loathed; but that is not the
point. We have debated lesser evilism so often on both sides of the
Atlantic that it is surely time to stop gesturing at the obvious and to
examine critically a system that produces the Bushes and their
Democratic shadows. For those of us who marvel at our luck in reaching
mature years without having been blown to bits by the warlords of
Americanism, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, and for
the millions all over the world who now reject the American contagion
in political life, the true issue is clear.
It is the continuation of a project that began more than 500
years ago. The privileges of "discovery and conquest" granted to
Christopher Columbus in 1492, in a world the pope considered "his
property to be disposed according to his will", have been replaced by
another piracy transformed into the divine will of Americanism and
sustained by technological progress, notably that of the media. "The
threat to independence in the late 20th century from the new
electronics," wrote Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism,
"could be greater than was colonialism itself. We are beginning to
learn that decolonisation was not the termination of imperial
relationships but merely the extending of a geopolitical web which has
been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the power to
penetrate more deeply into a 'receiving' culture than any previous
manifestation of western technology."
Every modern president has been, in large part, a media
creation. Thus, the murderous Reagan is sanctified still; Rupert
Murdoch's Fox Channel and the post-Hutton BBC have differed only in
their forms of adulation. And Bill Clinton is regarded nostalgically by
liberals as flawed but enlightened; yet Clinton's presidential years
were far more violent than Bush's and his goals were the same: "the
integration of countries into the global free- market community", the
terms of which, noted the New York Times,
"require the United States to be involved in the plumbing and wiring of
nations' internal affairs more deeply than ever before". The Pentagon's
"full-spectrum dominance" was not the product of the "neo-cons" but of
the liberal Clinton, who approved what was then the greatest war
expenditure in history. According to the Guardian, Clinton's
heir, John Kerry, sends us "energising progressive calls". It is time
to stop this nonsense.
Supremacy is the essence of Americanism; only the veil changes or
slips. In 1976, the Democrat Jimmy Carter announced "a foreign policy
that respects human rights". In secret, he backed Indonesia's genocide
in East Timor and established the mujahedin in Afghanistan as a
terrorist organisation designed to overthrow the Soviet Union, and from
which came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was the liberal Carter, not
Reagan, who laid the ground for George W Bush. In the past year, I have
interviewed Carter's principal foreign policy overlords - Zbigniew
Brzezinski, his national security adviser, and James Schlesinger, his
defence secretary. No blueprint for the new imperialism is more
respected than Brzezinski's. Invested with biblical authority by the
Bush gang, his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American primacy and
its geostrategic imperatives
describes American priorities as the economic subjugation of the Soviet
Union and the control of central Asia and the Middle East.
His analysis says that "local wars" are merely the beginning
of a final conflict leading inexorably to world domination by the US.
"To put it in a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of
ancient empires," he writes, "the three grand imperatives of imperial
geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence
among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to
keep the barbarians from coming together."
It may have been easy once to dismiss this as a message from
the lunar right. But Brzezinski is mainstream. His devoted students
include Madeleine Albright, who, as secretary of state under Clinton,
described the death of half a million infants in Iraq during the US-led
embargo as "a price worth paying", and John Negroponte, the mastermind
of American terror in central America under Reagan who is currently
"ambassador" in Baghdad. James Rubin, who was Albright's enthusiastic
apologist at the State Department, is being considered as John Kerry's
national security adviser. He is also a Zionist; Israel's role as a
terror state is beyond discussion.
Cast an eye over the rest of the world. As Iraq has crowded
the front pages, American moves into Africa have attracted little
attention. Here, the Clinton and Bush policies are seamless. In the
1990s, Clinton's African Growth and Opportunity Act launched a new
scramble for Africa. Humanitarian bombers wonder why Bush and Blair
have not attacked Sudan and "liberated" Darfur, or intervened in
Zimbabwe or the Congo. The answer is that they have no interest in
human distress and human rights, and are busy securing the same riches
that led to the European scramble in the late 19th century by the
traditional means of coercion and bribery, known as multilateralism.
The Congo and Zambia possess 50 per cent of world cobalt
reserves; 98 per cent of the world's chrome reserves are in Zimbabwe
and South Africa. More importantly, there is oil and natural gas in
Africa from Nigeria to Angola, and in Higleig, south-west Sudan. Under
Clinton, the African Crisis Response Initiative (Acri) was set up in
secret. This has allowed the US to establish "military assistance
programmes" in Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Benin, Algeria, Niger,
Mali and Chad. Acri is run by Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, a Cuban exile
who took part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs landing and went on to be a
special forces officer in Vietnam and Laos, and who, under Reagan,
helped lead the Contra invasion of Nicaragua. The pedigrees never
change.
None of this is discussed in a presidential campaign in which
John Kerry strains to out-Bush Bush. The multilateralism or "muscular
internationalism" that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism
is seen as hopeful by the terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even
greater dangers. Having given the American elite its greatest disaster
since Vietnam, writes the historian Gabriel Kolko, Bush "is much more
likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so
crucial to American power. One does not have to believe the worse the
better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy
consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate . . . As dangerous as it
is, Bush's re-election may be a lesser evil." With Nato back in train
under President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American
ambitions will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush
gang.
Little of this appears even in the American papers worth reading. The Washington
Post's
hand-wringing apology to its readers on 14 August for not "pay[ing]
enough attention to voices raising questions about the war [against
Iraq]" has not interrupted its silence on the danger that the American
state presents to the world. Bush's rating has risen in the polls to
more than 50 per cent, a level at this stage in the campaign at which
no incumbent has ever lost. The virtues of his "plain speaking", which
the entire media machine promoted four years ago - Fox and the Washington
Post
alike - are again credited. As in the aftermath of the 11 September
attacks, Americans are denied a modicum of understanding of what Norman
Mailer has called "a pre-fascist climate". The fears of the rest of us
are of no consequence.
The professional liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have played a
major part in this. The campaign against Michael Moore's Fahrenheit
9/11
is indicative. The film is not radical and makes no outlandish claims;
what it does is push past those guarding the boundaries of
"respectable" dissent. That is why the public applauds it. It breaks
the collusive codes of journalism, which it shames. It allows people to
begin to deconstruct the nightly propaganda that passes for news: in
which "a sovereign Iraqi government pursues democracy" and those
fighting in Najaf and Fallujah and Basra are always "militants" and
"insurgents" or members of a "private army", never nationalists
defending their homeland and whose resistance has probably forestalled
attacks on Iran, Syria or North Korea.
The real debate is neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they
exemplify; it is the decline of true democracy and the rise of the
American "national security state" in Britain and other countries
claiming to be democracies, in which people are sent to prison and the
key thrown away and whose leaders commit capital crimes in faraway
places, unhindered, and then, like the ruthless Blair, invite the thug
they install to address the Labour Party conference. The real debate is
the subjugation of national economies to a system which divides
humanity as never before and sustains the deaths, every day, of 24,000
hungry people. The real debate is the subversion of political language
and of debate itself and perhaps, in the end, our
self-respect.
John
Pilger's new book, Tell Me No
Lies:
investigative journalism and its triumphs, will be published in
October by Jonathan Cape
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