Speak Now Or......?
By Jeff Berg
09 October, 2004
Countercurrents.org
Once
again America invades a country on the pretext of instituting democracy
and once again America, at best, promises to deliver the worse kind
of military terror state. In case any of you missed it, on national
television, during the Vice Presidential debate Dick Cheney extolled
the virtues of the strategy used to turn El Salvador into hell on earth
and promised the same for Iraq. If any doubt that he means what he says
remember that John Negroponte has been appointed Viceroy of Iraq. This
in most ways, as horrible as it is, comes as no surprise given what
we know of the Wolfowitz/Bush doctrine and the track record of the reconstituted
Reaganites that today control Americas foreign policy.
What is still surprising,
to me at least, is after decades of replaying the same mythology followed
by the same results that American journalism has not tired of reporting
the tired old shibboleth of "good intentions gone wrong" to
explain the horror. Even more risible is the pathetic refrain laying
claim to the problem being American naivety and idealism in a
complex and dangerous world." The New York Times has lately come
up with a new variant on the theme by spinning the problem of the Iraq
invasion as Kerry does as incompetence. Let me posit an alternative
explanation.
Supposition: The
top level planners in America are very well educated and on the whole
rather intelligent.
Reasoning: What
else would one expect given the most powerful society in the world?
One whose power thereby allows it to offer to the 'best and the brightest'
a chance to use their talents in ways that will meaningfully impact
the world. Not to mention offering them access to the revolving door
between government and corporate America which provides opportunities
for making extraordinary amounts of money. Dick Cheney being the most
glaring and recent example of this phenomena.
Supposition: American
planners have access to the most extensive and well funded information
gathering systems and technologies in the history of the world.
Reasoning: Again
no surprise as America is the richest society in the history of mankind
and has the most advanced and well staffed sciences and information
gathering systems in the world.
This being said
I think we can safely dispense with the fairy tale naiveté
and misplaced good intentions explanation for Americas 200+
military interventions since the second world war and their failure
to further democracy. (this number does not include covert operations)
For any American living in the real world the question then is not,
How can this keep happening to us? but, Why do we
keep doing this to them? The difference between these two questions
being that the second one allows us to safely obviate having to refute
the change of course mythology in favour of looking for
patterns of cause and effect.
One thing that
we know for sure from the historical record is that U.S. intervention
and the resulting destabilization has been used unfailingly as a justification
for the U.S. to back a 'strongman' so as to return 'stability' to the
destabilized region. Furthermore these strongmen have invariably been
more amenable to U.S. business interests than the political movements
that they repressed. (Branco over Goulart in Brazil, Pinochet over Allende
in Chile, Reza Shah Pahlavi over Dr. Mossadeq in Iran, Suharto over
Sukarno in Indonesia) The story does not end there. Here's a further
list of America's 'democracy exercises' and their results. (by no means
complete) Haiti, once the jewel in the crown of the Caribbean, now the
poorest country in the hemisphere. Nicaragua under the Sandinistas experienced
the greatest increase in literacy and health in her history thereby
earning a UNESCO prize, today she is the second poorest country in the
hemisphere where 50% of two year olds suffer from neurological disorders
due to malnutrition. Honduras today is third poorest with El Salvador
and Guatemala the slowest growing. The latter two are now thanks to
America democracies. Places described by INCAP as countries where
half the population live under conditions of extreme poverty.
Not to belabor the point but countries where, ...even "the
right to dignity does not exist." Then of course there is
Cuba.
Cuba is the one
society on this list where the U.S. strongman failed to take control.
Cuba today has universal dental care, universal Medicare, universal
education and housing and provides more doctors to the world than does
the entire W.H.O. and 60% of Cubas doctors are women. (Though
of course this achievement in no way measures up to the magnificence
of Lynn Cheney and Laura Bush's touching concern for the plight of Taliban
women. Women incidentally who we haven't heard much about lately. Mission
accomplished?)
Today the way that
the people of these countries remember the losers and interpret U.S.
intentions differs markedly from U.S. leaders and most of the U.S. press.
For example of Dr. Mossadeq it is written that, Dr. Mossadeq
remains a figure of tremendous stature in the history of modern Iran.
As an individual he had a reputation for honesty, integrity, and sincerity.
He strongly opposed British and, later, American influence in Iran.
He was an eloquent, impassioned orator, and his speeches are still widely
read in Iran. It is no surprise then given the U.S. support for
Israel, the U.S. support of anti-democratic monarchies in Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait, and U.S. support for sanctions that were called genocidal
by Hans Von Sponeck the man who refused to remain in charge of them,
that the Iraqi people may have some skepticism about U.S. motives and
intentions. And how does the U.S. respond to a skepticism they know
about far better than I (see assumptions 1 & 2) in the battle for
hearts and minds?
"Bush administration
officials smile when they talk about Allawi, then marvel at how aggressive
he is. Allawi believes that his government has to establish its authority
if it, or any future government, is to do its job." (David Brooks,
NYT, Oct. 6/04) I also refer you to Naomi Kleins brilliant piece
of journalism, Baghdad: Year Zero in Harpers magazine. To
paraphrase her amply supported findings, Not because there was
no plan but because of the plan there was. The plan being a reified
version of Milton Friedmans theoretical ramblings. Theories that practice
has thoroughly discredited in every part of the world but corporate
and banking boardrooms. An empirical verity Greg Palast has very ably
documented in his brilliant book 'The Best Democracy Money can Buy'.
Just in case I
am not being clear let me sum up. The reason America keeps creating
military terror states and charnel houses is because the alternatives
do not serve her smash and grab operations near as well. And despite
what William Safire and George Will write it really doesn't matter to
the people on or under the ground by what name the geostrategists call
their dictator. No, instead what matters is that the dictators will
be equally hated regardless of America's branding exercise and the carnage
and inevitable blowback will be just as horrifying regardless of the
labels attached to the combatants and victims. After all wasnt
it Ronald Reagan who said, One mans terrorist is another
mans freedom fighter.?
Perhaps the darkest
irony of this 'shock treatment' of Iraq is that the majority of Iraq's
people now believe that the best they can hope for within a decade is
getting back to living as they did under Hussein. Which again, in case
I am not making myself clear, is a completely intended consequence of
America's 'Strongman Strategy' redux. Intended because it serves the
overarching purpose of resource and profit extraction that motivated
this group of very intelligent and well informed strategists in the
first place. Intended because anything that gets in the way of the primary
aspect of the mission, like for example national self-determination
for the citizens of the country, must be suppressed according to the
political calculus being used by the planners. Unfortunately for us
all, most especially the people of Iraq, John Kerrys single idea
seems to be to turn this from an intended plan to a UN-intended one.
I say this because given the UN's behaviour during the sanctions period
we should all be less than sanguine about the end result of such a change.
Contrary to popular belief as bad as things currently are in Iraq any
change is not synonymous with better. At least not sufficiently better
to stop the escalation of the resource wars that this war has sparked
and that peak oil will fan.
None of what I
am saying of course is very controversial to anyone who lives in the
real world and pays the slightest attention to Anglo-American history.
Still perhaps a slight recap of the history of the region would not
be completely redundant. A region that the U.S. State Department sixty
years ago described as "a stupendous source of strategic power,
and one of the greatest material prizes in world history," "probably
the richest economic prize in the world in the field of foreign investment."
1917 Britain 'liberates'
Baghdad, before and after WWII U.S. and Britain back Saudi Arabia and
Kuwaits autocratic regimes, 1953 Iran's Mossadeq is overthrown
for the Shah and SAVAK, 1980 America arms both sides of the Iran-Iraq
conflict, 1967 to today America arms Israel to the teeth and shields
her politically from World opinion with a world record in Security council
vetoes, etc.
Unfortunately most
Americans for the most part do not live in the real world. They live
in a world created by the glitter of Madison Avenue, the fantasies of
television and Hollywood and the propaganda of the right wing and mainstream
media echo chambers. But whether or not they are paying attention oil
and gas will reach peak production. This will have enormous ramifications
for capitalism and all that entails to America's and Europes conception
of society, agriculture, international trade, and capital flows. For
now America's currency is absurdly advantaged by being the reserve currency
of the world and the one denominated by OPEC for oil purchases. With
a 7 trillion dollar national debt (13 trillion when States, municipalities
and consumers are added in to the equation) America's grotesque orgy
of consumerism and energy consumption is set to trigger the greatest
economic storm the world has ever seen. At the same time Americas
elites are leading the way by ensuring that it's own citizens
are misinformed and armed to the teeth both personally and as a society.
And their plan for meeting the new world of resource depletion and the
implosion of capitalism is to build more jails, hire more cops, and
virtually guaranteeing that the world follows their violent example
by spending hundreds of billions on the Pentagon and using military
might to control the worlds diminishing resources. This is a recipe
for a return to the rule of thug and barbarism.
We need not return
to barbarism, we need not allow for unlimited plunder by those who believe
that might makes right and that all of life is but a zero sum game.
We need not, but we are. And principle among the reasons why we are
is that those who have the platform and the ability to speak out are
failing in their duty. Yes I know Sey Hersh was booted from the New
York Times, and Dan Rather is being publicly flogged as an object lesson,
and therefore anyone can be booted or flogged. But by the same token
a black African woman environmentalist just won the Nobel Peace prize.
Quite simply it is 'stand up and be counted time. Or as they say
in western wedding ceremonies, Speak now or forever hold your
peace. For if we all do not start bailing with all of our collective
might right now civilizations ship will surely capsize and we
all will remember back upon this and many other 'I told you so's' with
despair when we look into the questioning eyes of your children and
grandchildren. And please, please, please, always remember that they
are by no means omnipotent, are ludicrously short of omniscient, and
that we have numbers and the power of collective rights on our side.
The task before
us is as ever Camus' famous call to arms, "It is the job of thinking
people not to be on the side of the executioners." Americas
vision of a consumerist Nirvana no longer has a future and the future
only belongs to those who have one. To paraphrase Stan Goff, America
is hurtling them and us at an ever increasing speed towards an unbreachable
thermodynamic wall. It is time that we took her foot off the accelerator.
Her debt and addiction to consumerism give us the leverage that we need
to humble her ambitions, to bring her to back to the understanding that
we are all in this together, that we are a community of nations, and
most especially to remind her that we hold this planet not in our portfolio
but in trust for the future of all.
Jeff Berg lives
in Canada and he can be reached at [email protected]