Will
There Be A War
Against The World?
By John Pilger
29 October, 2004
Information Clearing
House
There
is a surreal quality about visiting the United States in the last days
of the presidential campaign. If George W Bush wins, according to a
scientist I met, who escaped Nazi-dominated Europe, America will surrender
many of its democratic trappings and succumb to its totalitarian impulses.
If John Kerry wins, according to most Democrat voters, the only mandate
he will have is that he is not Bush.
Never have so many
liberal hands been wrung over a candidate whose only memorable statements
seek to out-Bush Bush. Take Iran. One of Kerry's national security advisers,
Susan Rice, has accused Bush of 'standing on the sidelines while Iran's
nuclear programme has been advanced'. There is not a shred of evidence
that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, yet Kerry is joining in the
same orchestrated frenzy that led to the invasion of Iraq. Having begun
his campaign by promising another 40,000 troops for Iraq, he is said
to have a 'secret plan to end the war' which foresees a withdrawal in
four years. This is an echo of Richard Nixon, who in the 1968 presidential
campaign promised a 'secret plan' to end the war in Vietnam.
Once in office,
he accelerated the slaughter and the war dragged on for six and a half
years. For Kerry, like Nixon, the message is that he is not a wimp.
Nothing in his campaign or his career suggests he will not continue,
even escalate, the 'war on terror', which is now sanctified as a crusade
of Americanism like that against communism. No Democratic president
has shirked such a task: John Kennedy on the cold war, Lyndon Johnson
on Vietnam.
This presents great
danger for all of us, but none of it is allowed to intrude upon the
campaign or the media 'coverage'. In a supposedly free and open society,
the degree of censorship by omission is staggering.The New York Times,
the country's liberal standard-bearer, having recovered from a mild
bout of contrition over its abject failure to challenge Bush's lies
about Iraq, has been running tombstones of column inches about what-went-wrong
in the 'liberation' of that country.
It blames mistakes:
tactical oversights, faulty intelligence. Not a word suggests that the
invasion was a colonial conquest, deliberate like any other, and that
60 years of international law make it 'the paramount war crime', to
quote the Nuremberg judges. Not a word suggests that the American onslaught
on the population of Iraq was and is systematically atrocious, of which
the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was merely a glimpse.
The coming atrocity
in the city of Fallujah, in which British troops, against the wishes
of the British people, are to be accessories, is a case in point. For
American politicians and journalists - there are a few honourable exceptions
- the US marines are preparing for another of their "battles".
Their last attack on Fallujah, in April, provides a preview. Forty-ton
battle tanks and helicopter gunships were used against slums. Aircraft
dropped 500lb bombs: marine snipers killed old people, women and children;
ambulances were shot at. The marines closed the only hospital in a city
of 300,000 for more than two weeks, so they could use it as a military
position.
When it was estimated
they had slaughtered 600 people, there was no denial. This was more
than all the victims of the suicide bombs the previous year. Neither
did they deny that their barbarity was in revenge for the killing of
four American mercenaries in the city; led by avowed cowboys, they are
specialists in revenge. John Kerry said nothing; the media reported
the atrocity as 'a military operation', against 'foreign militants'
and 'insugents', never against civilians and Iraqis defending their
homes and homeland.
Moreover, the American
people are almost totally unaware that the marines were driven out of
Fallujah by heroic street fighting. Americans remain unaware, too, of
the piracy that comes with their government's murderous adventure. Who
in public life asks the whereabouts of the 18.46 bn dollars which the
US Congress approved for reconstruction and humanitarian aid in Iraq?
As Unicef reports,
most hospitals are bereft even of pain-killers, and acute malnutrition
among children has doubled since the 'liberation'. In fact, less than
29m dollars has been allocated, most of it on British security firms,
with their ex-SAS thugs and veterans of South African apartheid. Where
is the rest of this money that should be helping to save lives? Non-wimp
Kerry dares not ask.
Neither does he
nor anybody else with a public profile ask why the people of Iraq have
been forced to pay, since the fall of Saddam, almost 80m dollars to
America and Britain as 'reparations'. Even Israel has received an untold
fortune in Iraqi oil money as compensation for its 'loss of tourism'
in the Golan Heights - part of Syria it occupies illegally. As for oil,
the 'o-word' is unmentionable in the contest for the world's most powerful
job. So successful is the resistance in its campaign of economic sabotage
that the vital pipeline carrying oil to the Turkish Mediterranean has
been blown up 37 times. Terminals in the south are under constant attack,
effectively shutting down all exports of crude oil and threatening national
economies. That the world may have lost Iraqi oil is enveloped by the
same silence that ensures Americans have little idea of the nature and
scale of the blood-letting conducted in their name.
The most enduring
silence is that which guards the system that has produced these catastrophic
events. This is Americanism, though it dares not speak its name, which
is strange, as its opposite, anti-Americanism, has long been successfully
deployed as a pejorative, catch-all response to critical analysis of
an imperial system and its myths. Americanism, the ideology, has meant
democracy at home, for some, and a war on democracy abroad.
From Guatemala to
Iran, from Chile to Nicaragua, to the struggle for freedom in South
Africa, to present-day Venezuela, American state terrorism, licensed
by both Republican and Democrat administrations, has fought democrats
and sponsored totalitarians. Most societies attacked or otherwise subverted
by American power are weak and defenceless, and there is a logic to
this. Should a small country succeed in breaking free and establish
its own way of developing, then its good example to others becomes a
threat to Washington.
And the serious
purpose behind this? Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's secretary of
state, once told the United Nations that America had the right to 'unilateral
use of power' to ensure 'uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies
and strategic resources'. Or as Colin Powell, the Bush-ite laughably
promoted by the media as a liberal, put it more than a decade ago: "I
want to be the bully on the block." Britain's imperialists believed
exactly that, and still do; only the language is discreet.
That is why people
all over the world, whose consciousness about these matters has risen
sharply in the past few years, are 'anti-American'. It has nothing to
do with the ordinary people of the United States, who now watch a Darwanian
capitalism consume their real and fabled freedoms and reduce the 'free
market' to a fire-sale of public assets. It is remarkable, if not inspiring,
that so many reject the class and race based brainwashing, begun in
childhood, that such a class and race based system is called 'the American
dream'.
What will happen
if the nightmare in Iraq goes on? Perhaps those millions of worried
Americans, who are currently paralysed by wanting to get rid of Bush
at any price, will shake off their ambivalence, regardless of who wins
on
2 November. Then, will a giant awaken, as it did during the civil rights
campaign and the Vietnam war and the great movement to freeze nuclear
weapons? One must trust so; the alternative is a war on the world.
John Pilger is
currently a visiting professor at Cornell University, New York. His
latest book is "Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and
its triumphs "