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The WARLORDS of
AMERICA
"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'...whose leaders commit capital
crimes in faraway
places, unhindered, and then...invite the thug
they install to address {them}."
MIDDLEEAST.ORG - MER - Washington - 21
Oct: Regardless
of what happens on 2 November in the U.S. election, one group or
another of "the Warlords of America" will be in power in
Washington. And the years now immediately ahead, regardless if
the President is named Kerry or Bush, are quickly shaping up as likely
to be the most dangerous in modern history.
The establishment corporate-sponsored media only discusses such matters
obliquely and with considerable hesitation. Even so both Foreign Policy Magazine in the
U.S. and The Guardian in the
U.K. have published mildly informative and interesting articles about
what to really expect from "George W. Kerry" if impowered.
But no one in official Washington, and no one allowed to discuss these
issues on the TV and radio talk-shows of corporate-controlled America,
discusses the realities of U.S. foreign policy as boldly and
insightfully as John Pilger. The overall historical
context, as well as the interconnections with Israel and powerful
Jewish-Israeli interests, are crucial to really understand what the
Americans are up to with the 'New World Order'. And though
Pilger is an extraordinarly accomplished journalist -- and one very
well known and respected in Britian, Europe and Australia -- he is
hardly ever invited to appear on any major programs or in major
publications in the United
States. MER
THE WARLORDS OF AMERICA
by John
Pilger*
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
"bi-partisan" 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 neo-conservative 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
de-colonisation 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 Geo-strategic 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
geo-strategy 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 multi-lateralism or "muscular
internationalism" that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's
uni-lateralism 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 was born
and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent,
filmmaker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many
countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of
"Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. This
article was first published in the New Statesman. (c) John Pilger 2004
- 21 August 2004]
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October 2004
Iran Next - Part 1
(October 31, 2004)
In a few days the American election itself will be history. The likelihood is the Bush/Cheney/neocon regime will remain in power; hard as that still is for so many to imagine and understand. Should the Democrats win the White House Middle East policies will be largely in the hands of the neoliberals and the super money-men like Haim Saban who when it comes to the Middle East and Israel have far more in common with the neocons than has yet been realized by many who will vote for them. Whatever happens on Tuesday next the build-up to attacking and if at all possible regime changing Iran is well underway and the showdown increasingly imminent.
Osama, Bush, Kerry - Past, Present, Future
(October 30, 2004)
Few Middle East realities have been heard during this long grueling American election campaign. Most of the rhetoric has been extraordinarily self-righteous and self-serving, disingenuous and dishonest. Sad and tragic as it is to have to say, for many in the Middle East and around the world beyond American shores, tactics aside, the words of Osama Bin Laden ring more true to their experience and perspective regarding U.S. foreign policy than those of either George Bush or John Kerry.
Fahrenheit 9/11 - Watch It On Your Computer This Weekend
(October 30, 2004)
Who would have imagined on 9/11 more than three years ago now that the top front-page story in the Washington Post Saturday before the 2004 election would be a picture of Osama Bin Laden addressing the American people! Reality keeps trumping fiction time after time in our era!
Escalating War Against the World after November 2nd?
(October 29, 2004)
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.
ARAFAT - Pathetic Symbolism for the 'Grand Old Man' of the Palestinians
(October 29, 2004)
There is often such pathetic symbolism surrounding Yasser Arafat even as many of his people cling to his legacy as the 'symbol of Palestinian nationalism' -- itself nearly as tattered and frail as the Grand Old Man has himself become.
Bush Uncensored; Cheney Unauthorized
(October 28, 2004)
MAKE SURE TO WATCH THESE TWO VIDEOS
ABOUT GEORGE BUSH and DICK CHENEY
Gaza Scam + Dem Party Emails American Jews
(October 27, 2004)
The price for the past political trickery has already been very high. The poison of the Israeli-Arab conflict has spread continually for decades now and played a substantial role in bringing about today's 'Clash of Civilizations' whose end is yet in sight. The eventual future price for what is happening these days threatens to be higher yet, potentially catastrophic.
IRAN Attack Imminent?
(October 24, 2004)
Though few in the world may fully realize it, international society is now at a historic moment and the future, even a potential World War III, is in the balance. Hence the leaks coming from Washington from those trying to warn, and to prevent, what the top neocons and Israeli operatives are pushing hard to bring about. Hence last month's extremely unusual 'Israeli Spy Scandal' which had officials in the FBI charging people working on the Iranian attack in coordination with the Israeli-Jewish lobby with espionage for Israel. Hence, as this article by a former National Security Council operative suggests: "Intelligence circles report that both intelligence agencies (CIA and Pentagon) are in open revolt against the Bush White House." It appears to have been quickly written and then quickly internet published using LebanonWire in the Middle East.
Cheney Uncovered - An Unauthorized Documentary by the CBC
(October 23, 2004)
Reporter Jean Heller presented Soviet satellite photos which did not show Iraqi troops amassed on the Saudi border to the Pentagon.
"It's what it (the photos) didn't show that's more important. What you expected to see were tanks on the border. There was none that we could see.
I said, look, if you can prove to me that our story isn't true, we won't run it. And they just ignored it.
They have never shown those (U.S. satellite images) photos. Not then and not since."
New CIA 'Shocking' Cover-Up
(October 22, 2004)
Completed in June, mandated by Congress nearly
two years ago, the CIA Report that names names
is being suppressed until after the election.
"What all the other reports on 9/11 did not do is point the finger at individuals, and give the how and what of their responsibility. This report does that," said the intelligence official. "The report found very senior-level officials responsible."
Talk about American Imperialism and Chutzpah!
(October 22, 2004)
The reaction in many quarters must be 'Oh My God'. Bill, Hillary, and Tenet all seek higher office! Talk about American Imperialism and Chutzpah!
The WARLORDS of AMERICA
(October 21, 2004)
Regardless of what happens on 2 November in the U.S. election, one group or another of "the Warlords of America" will be in power in Washington. And the years now immediately ahead, regardless if the President is named Kerry or Bush, are quickly shaping up as likely to be the most dangerous in modern history.
America on the Edge
(October 20, 2004)
The amazing thing about this American election is that in view of what has happened in the U.S. and in the world the Democrats should be running away with it -- and yet they are struggling everywhere and likely to go down to defeat.
Israel on Road to being Pariah State
(October 15, 2004)
Indeed Israeli policies and attitudes have for some time now seriously poisoned political relations throughout the Middle East, substantially helped bring about the era of the 'Clash of Civilizations', and through the powerful Israeli/Jewish lobby in Washington pushed the United States into the invasion of Iraq and other militarist isolated policies whose dangerous and destructive ramifications will be felt for many years to come
The Next Generation of Palestinians
(October 13, 2004)
If what has happened in Gaza in recent years would have happened in the USA (adjusted for population size) more than 100,000 Americans would have been killed and more than a quarter million homes destroyed by a foreign occupying army using battle tanks and attack helicopters against small resistance groups in cities and towns.
AMERICAN SECRET GULAG EXPANDING
(October 14, 2004)
THE CIA has greatly expanded its activities throughout the Middle East including in Jordan and Egypt as well as Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other countries throughout the region. Of course the CIA and the Mossad are working more closely together than ever to control the region and enforce what is now essentially the militarily imposed 'new world order' first announced during the current President father's days in the White House. Before President Bush I became President he was in fact the Director of the CIA, whose main headquarters is now named after him.
AOL Censors MER
(October 20, 2004)
AOL -- one of the largest internet service providers -- is blocking and censoring MER. Persons who subscribe to MER using an AOL email address can not receive MER -- it is being secretly censored from their mailboxes by AOL without notice of any kind. It is believed persons working for AOL may be censoring MER in coordination with Jewish Zionist groups. It may be that AOL has a special relationship with Jewish.com and other Israeli-connected groups in some way. It is all being done in secret with no notice of any kind to either AOL users or MER.
A few of the messages we have received from AOL subscribers to MER follow:
Major Iraq Attacks on Hold Until After U.S. Vote
(October 11, 2004)
The Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld made an unannounced visit to Iraq in recent days. And soon after the American election the superpower military will be much more fully unleashed throughout the country preparing to push the U.S.-appointed strong-man Iyad Allawai forward in the carefully staged 'election' that will proceed if 'conditions are right'. In other words, just as Hamid Karzai was U.S. -installed and then essentially U.S.-elected in Afghanistan, the same template is now planned for Iraq.
U.S. Forces IMF into secret Iraqi debt 'forgiveness' scheme
(October 11, 2004)
But maybe most of all in the longer run, and unspoken now for all of these reasons by the powers that be, once Iraq's prior debt to other countries is 'off the books', the new U.S.-installed and CIA-controlled government in Baghdad is free to sign agreements with the Americans -- secret or otherwise -- that will essentially mortgage Iraq's future oil revenues to the U.S.A. and those it approves.
Chomsky on American Force and Pre-emption
(October 10, 2004)
"Bush planners know as well as others that the
resort to force increases the threat of terror,
and that their militaristic and aggressive posture
and actions provoke reactions that increase
the risk of catastrophe."
IRAN - Targeted by U.S. and Israel
(October 9, 2004)
You would think after the Iraq debacle that the ability of the U.S. to blackball, sanction, and then attack, occupy and regime-change another country would be considerable reduced. Not so however as this article in Z Magazine helps explain with regard to Iran. Indeed, soon after the American election the situation will quickly escalate.
The Debates - Fixed and Controlled
(October 8, 2004)
The moderators -- both from the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) -- could have, and should have, asked hard, probing, unexpected questions like this:
Israeli AIPAC Spy Scandal - Update
(October 7, 2004)
It was just a month ago that the latest Washington spy scandal involving the very heart of the Israeli-Jewish Lobby had everyone buzzing. Then it faded from view as the corporate media moved on, as CBS News which originally broke the story found itself under assault, and as the election campaign and debates took center stage. Interesting, not one question from the PBS moderators about Israeli spying, nor even about the U.S. veto of the Security Council resolution condemning Israel, nor the International Court of Justice decision doing the same. Here's an update -- however inadequate -- from yesterday's L.A.Times. Though the real heart of the story should be AIPAC and the influence, tactics, and status of the Israeli-Jewish lobby; instead they focus on just the individual and not as they should on the large group of support persons and organizations. This should especially include, of course, the current cabal of largely Jewish neocons in top positions...including the one who hired Larry Franklin (Douglas Feith), and the ones who hired him (Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle).
AOL Blocks and Censors MER Articles
(October 6, 2004)
AOL is blocking and censoring MER articles because of pressures originating with Jewish and Israeli groups.
Emergency U.N. Security Council Meeting on Israel
(October 4, 2004)
The Springsteen 'Vote For Change' Concerts
(October 5, 2004)
"The press has let the country down. It's taken a very amoral stand, in that essential issues are often portrayed as simply one side says this and the other side says that. I think that Fox News and the Republican right have intimidated the press into an incredible self-consciousness
about appearing objective and backed them into a corner of sorts where they have ceded some of their responsibility and righteous power." - Bruce Springsteen
Israel's Peacenik - Uri Avneri: Realities
(October 5, 2004)
"Uri Avneri, along with many Israelis and Jews, rightly fears that at some point Israel will be the direct target of blame for it's major contribution to having brought about such terrorism in the world and pushing the U.S.
into invading Iraq. It is an understandable fear;
for it is to a significant degree true."
Iraq is a "disaster...that will haunt the U.S. for decades" - Wall Street Journal Reporter
(October 2, 2004)
Iraq is a "disaster" that has deteriorated "into a
raging barbaric guerilla war" that will haunt the
United States for decades.
The Passion of the Bush
(October 2, 2004)
As the modern-day American-Israeli led Christian-Jewish crusade to remake the Middle East in the name of 'democracy and freedom' proceeds, this new documentary is telling indeed. It was first shown at the Republican Convention in New York a few weeks ago; and now, as a kind of Bush-loving counter to Fahrenhite 9/11, the DVD is being rushed out in advance of the upcoming election.
U.S. and Israel Prepare for Iran +
(October 1, 2004)
Even as the two branches of the American political establishment semi-debated last night who would fight the new wars better than the other, even as U.S. and Israeli battle tanks and attack aircraft bombed and killed in Iraq and Palestine worse than ever, preparations to either force compliance or attack Iran, Syria, Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Palestine), and North Korea soon after the American election are fast proceeding at the Pentagon and the CIA.
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