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John Pilger - A war in the American tradition

[<http://www.johnpilger.com/>]

Monday 15 October, 2001

New Statesman
=============================
The Anglo-American attack on Afghanistan crosses new boundaries. It means
that America's economic wars are now backed by the perpetual threat of
military attack on any country, without legal pretence. It is also the first
to endanger populations at home. The ultimate goal is not the capture of a
fanatic, which would be no more than a media circus, but the acceleration of
western imperial power. That is a truth the modern imperialists and their
fellow travellers will not spell out, and which the public in the west, now
exposed to a full-scale jihad, has the right to know.
In his zeal, Tony Blair has come closer to an announcement of real
intentions than any British leader since Anthony Eden. Not simply the
handmaiden of Washington, Blair, in the Victorian verbosity of his
extraordinary speech to the Labour Party conference, puts us on notice that
imperialism's return journey to respectability is well under way. Hark, the
Christian gentleman-bomber's vision of a better world for "the starving, the
wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor
from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain
ranges of Afghanistan". Hark, his unctuous concern for the "human rights of
the suffering women of Afghanistan" as he colludes in bombing them and
preventing food reaching their starving children.
Is all this a dark joke? Far from it; as Frank Furedi reminds us in the New
Ideology of Imperialism, it is not long ago "that the moral claims of
imperialism were seldom questioned in the west. Imperialism and the global
expansion of the western powers were represented in unambiguously positive
terms as a major contributor to human civilisation". The quest went wrong
when it was clear that fascism, with all its ideas of racial and cultural
superiority, was imperialism, too, and the word vanished from academic
discourse. In the best Stalinist tradition, imperialism no longer existed.
Since the end of the cold war, a new opportunity has arisen. The economic
and political crises in the developing world, largely the result of
imperialism, such as the blood-letting in the Middle East and the
destruction of commodity markets in Africa, now serve as retrospective
justification for imperialism. Although the word remains unspeakable, the
western intelligentsia, conservatives and liberals alike, today boldly echo
Bush and Blair's preferred euphemism, "civilisation". Italy's prime
minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and the former liberal editor Harold Evans
share a word whose true meaning relies on a comparison with those who are
uncivilised, inferior and might challenge the "values"of the west,
specifically its God-given right to control and plunder the uncivilised.
If there was any doubt that the World Trade Center attacks were the direct
result of the ravages of imperialism, Osama Bin Laden, a mutant of
imperialism, dispelled it in his videotaped diatribe about Palestine, Iraq
and the end of America's inviolacy. Alas, he said nothing about hating
modernity and miniskirts, the explanation of those intoxicated and neutered
by the supercult of Americanism. An accounting of the sheer scale and
continuity and consequences of American imperial violence is our elite's
most enduring taboo. Contrary to myth, even the homicidal invasion of
Vietnam was regarded by its tactical critics as a "noble cause" into which
the United States "stumbled" and became "bogged down". Hollywood has long
purged the truth of that atrocity, just as it has shaped, for many of us,
the way we perceive contemporary history and the rest of humanity. And now
that much of the news itself is Hollywood-inspired, amplified by amazing
technology and with its internalised mission to minimise western
culpability, it is hardly surprising that many today do not see the trail of
blood.
How very appropriate that the bombing of Afghanistan is being conducted, in
part, by the same B52 bombers that destroyed much of Indochina 30 years ago.
In Cambodia alone, 600,000 people died beneath American bombs, providing the
catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot, as CIA files make clear. Once again,
newsreaders refer to Diego Garcia without explanation. It is where the B52s
refuel. Thirty-five years ago, in high secrecy and in defiance of the United
Nations, the British government of Harold Wilson expelled the entire
population of the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in order to
hand it to the Americans in perpetuity as a nuclear arms dump and a base
from which its long-range bombers could police the Middle East. Until the
islanders finally won a high court action last year, almost nothing about
their imperial dispossession appeared in the British media.
How appropriate that John Negroponte is Bush's ambassador at the United
Nations. This week, he delivered America'sthreat to the world that it may
"require" to attack more and more countries. As US ambassador to Honduras in
the early 1980s, Negroponte oversaw American funding of the regime's death
squads, known as Battalion 316, that wiped out the democratic opposition,
while the CIA ran its "contra" war of terror against neighbouring Nicaragua.
Murdering teachers and slitting the throats of midwives were a speciality.
This was typical of the terrorism that Latin America has long suffered, with
its principal torturers and tyrants trained and financed by the great
warrior against "global terrorism", which probably harbours more terrorists
and assassins in Florida than any country on earth.
The unread news today is that the "war against terrorism" is being exploited
in order to achieve objectives that consolidate American power. These
include: the bribing and subjugation of corrupt and vulnerable governments
in former Soviet central Asia, crucial for American expansion in the region
and exploitation of the last untapped reserves of oil and gas in the world;
Nato's occupation of Macedonia, marking a final stage in its colonial
odyssey in the Balkans; the expansion of the American arms industry; and the
speeding up of trade liberalisation.
What did Blair mean when, in Brighton, he offered the poor "access to our
markets so that we practise the free trade that we are so fond of
preaching"? He was feigning empathy for most of humanity's sense of
grievance and anger: of "feeling left out". So, as the bombs fall, "more
inclusion", as the World Trade Organisation puts it, is being offered the
poor - that is, more privatisation, more structural adjustment, more theft
of resources and markets, more destruction of tariffs. On Monday, the
Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Patricia Hewitt, called a meeting
of the voluntary aid agencies to tell them that, "since 11 September, the
case is now overwhelming" for the poor to be given "more trade liberation".
She might have used the example of those impoverished countries where her
cabinet colleague Clare Short's ironically named Department for
International Development backs rapacious privatisation campaigns on behalf
of British multinational companies, such as those vying to make a killing in
a resource as precious as water.
Bush and Blair claim to have "world opinion with us". No, they have elites
with them, each with their own agenda: such as Vladimir Putin's crushing of
Chechnya, now permissible, and China's rounding up of its dissidents, now
permissible. Moreover, with every bomb that falls on Afghanistan and perhaps
Iraq to come, Islamic and Arab militancy will grow and draw the battle lines
of "a clash of civilisations" that fanatics on both sides have long wanted.
In societies represented to us only in caricature, the west's double
standards are now understood so clearly that they overwhelm, tragically, the
solidarity that ordinary people everywhere felt with the victims of 11
September.
That, and his contribution to the re-emergence of xeno-racism in Britain,
isthe messianic Blair's singular achievement. His effete, bellicose
certainties represent a political and media elite that has never known war.
The public, in contrast, has given him no mandate to kill innocent people,
such as those Afghans who risked their lives to clear landmines, killed in
their beds by American bombs. These acts of murder place Bush and Blair on
the same level as those who arranged and incited the twin towers murders.
Perhaps never has a prime minister been so out of step with the public mood,
which is uneasy, worried and measured about what should be done. Gallup
finds that 82 per cent say "military action should only be taken after the
identity of the perpetrators was clearly established, even if this process
took several months to accomplish".
Among those elite members paid and trusted to speak out, there is a lot of
silence. Where are those in parliament who once made their names speaking
out, and now shame themselves by saying nothing? Where are the voices of
protest from "civil society", especially those who run the increasingly
corporatised aid agencies and take the government's handouts and often its
line, then declare their "non-political" status when their outspokenness on
behalf of the impoverished and bombed might save lives? The tireless Chris
Buckley of Christian Aid, and a few others, are honourably excepted. Where
are those proponents of academic freedom and political independence, surely
one of the jewels of western "civilisation"? Years of promoting the jargon
of "liberal realism" and misrepresenting imperialism as crisis management,
rather than the cause of the crisis, have taken their toll. Speaking up for
international law and the proper pursuit of justice, even diplomacy, and
against our terrorism might not be good for one's career. Or as Voltaire put
it: "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong." That does
not change the fact that it is right.
[<http://www.johnpilger.com/>]

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