[Dialogue] PILGER

[David & Lin Zahrt]

A chilling article by British investigative journalist John Pilger 
about Bush, Kerry, Iraq and the American Empire.

Will There Be A War Against The World After November 2?

By John Pilger http://www.zmag.org/ Znet
October 27, 2004

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 'insurgents', 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 Darwinian 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.

About the Author: 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.


-- 
David Zahrt
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