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News you won't find on CNN
John Pilger
Bush Versus Kerry: The Fake Debate
August 25, 2004 -- 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
"bi-partisan" 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 super sect 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 - Truman in Korea, Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam,
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
the 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 two North
Vietnamese patrol boats were said to have 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 abberation, the
1975 Clark Amendment, a product of the great anti-Vietnam war movement,
was repealed in 1985 by Ronald Reagan. During Reagan's assaults on
Central Amercia in the 1980s, liberal voices such as Tom Whicker 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 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 neo-conservative
agenda and catastrophic war-making of Mr Bush. This is an election in
which 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 "considers 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 de-colonisation was not the termination of
imperial relationships but merely the extending of a geo-political 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; Murdoch's Fox Channel and the
post-Hutton BBC have differed only in their forms of adulation. And
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, 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 muhajideen 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 Bush. In the past year, I have
interviewed Carter's principal foreign policy overlords, Zbigniew
Brezinski, his national security advisor, and James Schlesinger, his
defence secretary. No blueprint for the new imperialism is more
respected than Brezinski's. Invested wtih 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, Clinton's secretary of state, who described the
death of half a million infants in Iraq under the American-led embargo
as "a price worth paying", and John Negroponte, the mastermind of
American terror in Central
America under Reagan and 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 and its 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 Bus
h 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 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 west Africa,
from Nigeria to Angola, and in the Higleig Basin in 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,
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. Bush, having given the American elite its greatest
disaster since Vietnam, writes
the historian Gabriel Kolko, "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 applaud 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,
then, like the ruthless Tony Blair, invite the thug they install to
address the British Labour Party conference.
The real debate is the subjugation of national economies to a system
dividing humanity as never before and sustaining 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
August 2004 |
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