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October
15, 2001
Marwan
Bishara
Clash
of Civilizations? Hardly
Patrick
Cockburn
Modern
War in
A Medieval Village
October
13, 2001
Carl
Estabrook
Letters
to Editors
Molly
Secours
War:
The Procter and Gamble Perspective
Alexander
Cockburn
War
Can't Save the Economy
October
12, 2001
Imran
Khan
Try
Them in Court
Vijay
Prashad
War
in a Passive Voice
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombing
the Taliban
October
11, 2001
David
Vest
Bob
Dylan and 9/11
Amb.
Edward Peck
Bush
War Plan "Dumb"
Hani
Shukrallah
West
Is As West Does
Patrick
Cockburn
Looming
Humanitarian Crisis
October
10, 2001
Tom
Turnipseed
Earth
is Our "Homeland"
Steve
Perry
What
Is To Be Done?
Simon
Jenkins
The
Dumbest Weapon
Tariq
Ali
The
Pakistan Maelstrom
Cockburn/St.
Clair
The
Empire Strikes Back
October
9, 2001
David
Vest
The
Rout That Wasn't
Michael
Mandel
This
War Is Illegal
Patrick
Cockburn
Bombs
Weaken Taliban
Lenni
Brenner
Powell
the Owl
Zha
Marginalization
and Terror
Steve
Perry
It
Begins
October
8, 2001
Zbigniew
Brzezinski
How
Jimmy Carter and
I Started the Muj
Philip Agee
The
USA and Terrorism
Mahajan
and Jensen
A
War of Lies
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance
Builds an Airport
October
7, 2001
John Pilger
Hitchens'
Slurs
Tariq
Ali
Who
Said History
Stopped Being Ironical?
Resources:
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Diary
Ashcroft's Onslaught
on
Civil Liberties
Ridge Long Groomed
for
Cheney's Job
Those CIA Killing
Bids
Never Stopped
The Not-So-Great
Mayor Giuliani
Crop Duster
Ban
Will Save Lives
Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
Laden Women
Fled Bel Air
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Vietnam
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to Ramallah
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James
Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
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Valentine
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October 15,
2001
The Great Power
Game
War American Style
By 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.
John
Pilger is an award-winning
investigative journalist.
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