The
Warlords Of America
By John Pilger
24 August, 2004
Counterpunch.org
Most
of the US's recent wars were launched by Democratic presidents. Why
expect better of Kerry? The debate between US liberals and conservatives
is a fake; Bush may be the lesser evil.
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a product of the great anti- Vietnam war movement, was repealed in 1985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 in Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond
the Lesser of Two Evils, 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.