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CounterPunch
August
30, 2002
Clueless at
the State Department
by Kurt Nimmo
Since the day Dubya was installed in the White
House by court appointment, not a week has passed, it seems,
that his administration has not said or done something at odds
with reality as understood by most of the world. From Kyoto to
Columbia, Saudi Arabia to North Korea, the Bush administration
continually misreads or simply ignores facts and conditions "on
the ground" and elbows forward with the neoconservative,
belligerent, and imperialistic agenda of Pax-Americana, which
is accompanied by the shrill insistence, as vocalized by the
likes of Paul Wolfowitz and William Kristol, that we will get
what we want, or else a few hundred thousand people will die.
Now comes word the State Department will
hold a two-day conference designed to "explore the roots
of anti-Americanism worldwide." According to Richard Boucher,
scholars will "share their thoughts" with State Department
types and, hopefully, some of the dunderheads will come to a
better understanding of why people across the world find the
US loathsome. Naturally, for a huge number of people outside
of the State Department, and beyond America itself, the reasons
are obvious. As Gore Vidal wrote in The Guardian earlier this
year, "Our imperial disdain for the lesser breeds did not
go unnoticed by the latest educated generation of Saudi Arabians
and by their evolving leader, Bin Laden, whose moment came in
2001 when a weak American president took office in questionable
circumstances." No longer are the "lesser breeds"--as
many Arabs, Asians, Central and South Americans are viewed by
our managers--so easily deceived or intimidated. More and more,
the victims of US foreign policy are beginning to fight back,
and even on occasion respond violently, if often ineffectually.
"American foreign policy has invited everybody, actually,
to try to humiliate America, and to give it a bloody nose,"
Abu Hamza al-Masri, a radical Muslim cleric, arrested in March
by Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorism squad, told Peter Ford of The
Christian Science Monitor last September. "When a president
stands up before the planet and says an American comes first,
he is only preaching hatred."
Nobody likes a bully. Yet, in spite of
the painful lessons of 911, large numbers of Americans do not
consider the US an insolent and violent bully lording over "lesser
breeds," but rather as a "peacekeeper," a generous,
selfless friend willing to rescue helpless and endangered innocents
from Nazism, Communism, and from evil men such as Slobodan Milosevic
and Saddam Hussein. The long and brutal history of US intervention
in the private affairs of other nations is rarely mentioned,
let alone explained. Our government and military--exactly one
hundred years after the vicious and deadly US subjugation of
the Philippines, which resulted in the death of one million Filipinos--is
still practicing "Benevolent Assimilation," as Mark
Twain called it, "which is the pious new name of the musket."
Few Americans know anything about our support of Suharto in Indonesia,
or the 500,000 killed during his CIA-supported coup, or the 120,000
to subsequently die when Indonesia invaded East Timor. Or does
the average American know anything about our support, under Reagan,
for Jonas Savimbi of UNITA in Angola, which resulted in the murder
of 750,000 humans, two-thirds of them children.
Precious little is mentioned of direct
US military intervention in Nicaragua (1912), the Dominican Republic
(1965), Grenada (1983), and Panama (1989). Or the CIA-engineered
coup against the popular and democratically elected leader of
Iran, Mossadegh, or of CIA involvement in the overthrow of the
democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
Henry Kissinger is now consulted on how best to deal with terrorism
and Iraq--yet the media never broaches the subject of his complicity
in the violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Popular
Unity government of Salvador Allende in Chile. So removed is
the American media from the past (and present) misdeeds of its
government that when the idea of extradition proceedings against
Kissinger for his role in the 1973 military coup in Chile--and
his possible connection to the murder of the American film-maker
and journalist Charles Horman--the US media hardly covered the
story.
In general, these are historical non-events
in the United States, seldom mentioned or provided the attention
and public examination due. So blinkered is the American public
to the role its government has played in subverting the political
process of nations around the world that when "blowback"
finally arrives--as it surely did on 911 and will continue to
do in the future--the people will have no contextual frame of
reference. The corporate media--as an intellectual handmaid to
more than fifty years of US imperialism and self-serving crimes
in the third world--serves the assigned and largely automatic
role of generating historical amnesia. For instance, in the days
following the bombings of the WTC and the Pentagon, MSNBC asked:
"To the question 'Why do the terrorists hate us?' Americans
could be pardoned for answering, "Why should we care?"
Intellectuals in the mainstream just
don't seem to get it. "Anti-Americanism can be mere shallow
name-calling," opined Salman Rushdie in The Washington Post.
"Anti-Americanism can be hypocritical: wearing blue jeans
or Donna Karan, eating fast food or Alice Waters-style cuisine,
their heads full of American music, movies, poetry and literature,
the apparatchiks of the international cultural commissariat decry
the baleful influence of the American culture that nobody is
forcing them to consume." It is obviously no matter to Rushdie--who
had his own close call with Muslim extremists--that the "baleful
influence" he mentions may arrive in Iraq or Iran via a
Tomahawk cruise missile. Chances are the unfortunate inhabitants
of the El Chorrillos slum in Panama--nearly 4000 of whom died
under a barrage of American bombs for the crime having lived
in close proximity to Manuel Noriega--knew little of Donna Karan.
Mindless consumerism aside, Rusdie may wish to consider something
written by another Pakistani, Mushahid Hussain, before he pens
another article for The Washington Post: "The problem is
that American goodness is hardly ever exported, remaining confined
to its shores. This gap between what America says at home--liberties,
rule of law and democracy--is rarely practiced in American foreign
policy."
Chances are Richard Boucher and his coterie
of hand-picked intellectuals at the State Department will not
waver greatly from official conclusions already reached on anti-Americanism.
Our unelected leader has already pronounced these on numerous
occasions: they are envious, they hate democracy and civilization,
they are evil. Of course, the State Department approved intellectuals
will not characterize anti-Americanism in those precise words--and
they may even throw in a few mild and entirely flaccid criticisms
of the way we conduct business around the world--but they will
surely not take Dubya, Clinton, Reagan, et al, to task, or will
they dare vilify in any significant manner the machinations of
Empire.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
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