NP? A war in the American tradition

[Doug Millison]

ZNet Commentary
A war in the American tradition October 16, 2001
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 travelers 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
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 reso
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 care.

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