[mgj-discuss] Will there be a war against the world after November 2?

[MSRB Admin]

By John Pilger

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 Darwanian
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.

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 (Jonathan Cape)

ZNet Commentary, Oct 27, 2004
http://www.zmag.org