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A war in the American tradition
John Pilger, Monday 15th October 2001
War on Terror: The Big Picture - The ultimate goal of the attacks on
Afghanistan is not the capture of a fanatic, but the acceleration of
western power, argues John Pilger
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's threat 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, is the 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]
New Statesman Ltd. 2001. All rights reserved. Please contact the
publisher. The New Statesman is registered as a newspaper in the UK
and the USA
