Pilger on intervention

[Mark Pavlick]

>
>  >New Statesman
>>November 26, 2001
>>
>>The truths they never tell us
>>Behind the jargon about failed states and
>>humanitarian interventions lie thousands of dead
>>
>>John Pilger
>>
>>
>>Polite society's bombers may not have to wait long for round two.
>>The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, warned last week that America
>>could take action against '40 to 50 countries'. Somalia, allegedly a
>>'haven' for al-Qaeda, joins Iraq at the top of a list of potential
>>targets. Cheered by having replaced Afghanistan's bad terrorists
>>with America's good terrorists, the US defence secretary, Donald
>>Rumsfeld, has asked the Pentagon to 'think the unthinkable', having
>>rejected its 'post-Afghanistan options' as 'not radical enough'.
>>
>>An American attack on Somalia, wrote the Guardian's man at the
>>Foreign Office, 'would offer an opportunity to settle an old score:
>>18 US soldiers were brutally killed there in 1993 . . .' He
>>neglected to mention that the US Marines left between 7,000 and
>>10,000 Somali dead, according to the CIA. Eighteen American lives
>>are worthy of score-settling; thousands of Somali lives are not.
>>
>>Somalia will provide an ideal practice run for the final destruction
>>of Iraq. However, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Iraq presents
>>a 'dilemma', because 'few targets remain'. 'We're down to the last
>>outhouse,' said a US official, referring to the almost daily bombing
>>of Iraq that is not news. Having survived the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam
>>Hussein's grip on Iraq has since been reinforced by one of the most
>>ruthless blockades in modern times, policed by his former amours and
>>arms suppliers in Washington and London. Safe in his British-built
>>bunkers, Saddam will survive a renewed blitz - unlike the Iraqi
>>people, held hostage to the compliance of their dictator to
>>America's ever-shifting demands.
>>
>>In this country, veiled propaganda will play its usual leading role.
>>As so much of the Anglo-American media is in the hands of various
>>guardians of approved truths, the fate of both the Iraqi and Somali
>  >peoples will be reported and debated on the strict premise that the
>  >US and British governments are against terrorism. Like the attack on
>>Afghanistan, the issue will be how 'we' can best deal with the
>>problem of 'uncivilised' societies.
>>
>>The most salient truth will remain taboo. This is that the longevity
>>of America as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists
>>surpasses all. That the US is the only state on record to have been
>>condemned by the World Court for international terrorism and has
>>vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to
>>observe international law is unmentionable. Recently, Denis
>  >Halliday, the former assistant secretary general of the UN who
>>resigned rather than administer what he described as a 'genocidal
>>sanctions policy' on Iraq, incurred the indignation of the BBC's
>>Michael Buerk. 'You can't possibly draw a moral equivalence between
>>Saddam Hussein and George Bush Senior , can you?' said Buerk.
>>Halliday was taking part in one of the moral choice programmes that
>>Buerk comperes, and had referred to the needless slaughter of tens
>>of thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, by the Americans during
>>the Gulf war. He pointed out that many were buried alive, and that
>>depleted uranium was used widely, almost certainly the cause of an
>>epidemic of cancer in southern Iraq.
>>
>>That the recent history of the west's true crimes makes Saddam
>>Hussein 'an amateur', as Halliday put it, is the unmentionable; and
>>because there is no rational rebuttal of such a truth, those who
>>mention it are abused as 'anti-American'. Richard Falk, professor of
>>international politics at Princeton, has explained this. Western
>>foreign policy, he says, is propagated in the media 'through a
>>self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen with positive images of
>>western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a
>>campaign of unrestricted political violence'.
>>
>>The ascendancy of Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and
>  >associates Richard Perle and Elliot Abrams means that much of the
>>world is now threatened openly by a geopolitical fascism, which has
>>been developing since 1945 and has accelerated since 11 September.
>>
>>The present Washington gang are authentic American fundamentalists.
>>They are the heirs of John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles, the
>>Baptist fanatics who, in the 1950s, ran the State Department and the
>>CIA respectively, smashing reforming governments in country after
>>country - Iran, Iraq, Guatemala - tearing up international
>>agreements, such as the 1954 Geneva accords on Indochina, whose
>>sabotage by John Foster Dulles led directly to the Vietnam war and
>>five million dead. Declassified files now tell us the United States
>>twice came within an ace of using nuclear weapons.
>>
>>The parallels are there in Cheney's threat to '40 to 50' countries,
>>and of war 'that may not end in our lifetimes'. The vocabulary of
>>justification for this militarism has long been provided on both
>>sides of the Atlantic by those factory 'scholars' who have taken the
>>humanity out of the study of nations and congealed it with a jargon
>>that serves the dominant power. Poor countries are 'failed states';
>>those that oppose America are 'rogue states'; an attack by the west
>>is a 'humanitarian intervention'. (One of the most enthusiastic
>>bombers, Michael Ignatieff, is now 'professor of human rights' at
>>Harvard). And as in Dulles's time, the United Nations is reduced to
>>a role of clearing up the debris of bombing and providing colonial
>>'protectorates'.
>>
>>The twin towers attacks provided Bush's Washington with both a
>>trigger and a remarkable coincidence. Pakistan's former foreign
>>minister Niaz Naik has revealed that he was told by senior American
>>officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would
>>go ahead by the middle of October. The US secretary of state, Colin
>>Powell, was then travelling in central Asia, already gathering
>>support for an anti-Afghanistan war 'coalition'. For Washington, the
>>real problem with the Taliban was not human rights; these were
>>irrelevant. The Taliban regime simply did not have total control of
>>Afghanistan: a fact that deterred investors from financing oil and
>>gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea, whose strategic position in
>>relation to Russia and China and whose largely untapped fossil fuels
>>are of crucial interest to the Americans. In 1998, Dick Cheney told
>>oil industry
>>executives: 'I cannot think of a time when we have had a region
>>emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the
>>Caspian.'
>>
>>Indeed, when the Taliban came to power in 1996, not only were they
>>welcomed by Washington, their leaders were flown to Texas, then
>  >governed by George W Bush, and entertained by executives of the
>>Unocal oil company. They were offered a cut of the profits from the
>>pipelines; 15 per cent was mentioned. A US official observed that,
>>with the Caspian's oil and gas flowing, Afghanistan would become
>>'like Saudi Arabia', an oil colony with no democracy and the legal
>>persecution of women. 'We can live with that,' he said. The deal
>>fell through when two American embassies in east Africa were bombed
>>and al-Qaeda was blamed.
>>
>>The Taliban duly moved to the top of the media's league table of
>>demons, where the normal exemptions apply. For example, Vladimir
>>Putin's regime in Moscow, the killers of at least 20,000 people in
>>Chechnya, is exempt. Last week, Putin was entertained by his new
>>'close friend', George W Bush, at Bush's Texas ranch.
>>
>>Bush and Blair are permanently exempt - even though more Iraqi
>>children die every month, mostly as a result of the Anglo-American
>>embargo, than the total number of dead in the twin towers, a truth
>>that is not allowed to enter public consciousness. The killing of
>>Iraqi infants, like the killing of Chechens, like the killing of
>>Afghan civilians, is rated less morally abhorrent than the killing
>>of Americans.
>>
>>As one who has seen a great deal of bombing, I have been struck by
>>the capacity of those calling themselves 'liberals' and
>>'progressives' wilfully to tolerate the suffering of innocents in
>  >Afghanistan. What do these self-regarding commentators, who witness
>>virtually nothing of the struggles of the outside world, have to say
>>to the families of refugees bombed to death in the dusty town of
>>Gardez the other day, long after it fell to anti-Taliban forces?
>>What do they say to the parents of dead children whose bodies lay in
>>the streets of Kunduz last Sunday? 'Forty people were killed,' said
>>Zumeray, a refugee. 'Some of them were burned by the bombs, others
>>were crushed by the walls and roofs of their houses when they
>>collapsed from the blast.' What does the Guardian's Polly Toynbee
>>say to him: 'Can't you see that bombing works?' Will she call him
>>anti-American? What do 'humanitarian interventionists' say to people
>>who will die or be maimed by the 70,000 American cluster bomblets
>>left unexploded?
>>
>>For several weeks, the Observer, a liberal newspaper, has published
>>unsubstantiated reports that have sought to link Iraq with 11
>>September and the anthrax scare. 'Whitehall sources' and
>>'intelligence sources' are the main tellers of this story. 'The
>>evidence is mounting . . .' said one of the pieces. The sum of the
>>'evidence' is zero, merely grist for the likes of Wolfowitz and
>>Perle and probably Blair, who can be expected to go along with the
>>attack. In his essay 'The Banality of Evil', the great American
>>dissident Edward Herman described the division of labour among those
>>who design and produce weapons like cluster bombs and daisy cutters
>>and those who take the political decisions to use them and those who
>>create the illusions that justify their use. 'It is the function of
>>the experts, and the mainstream media,' he wrote, 'to normalise the
>>unthinkable for the general public.' It is time journalists
>>reflected upon this, and took the risk of telling the truth about an
>>unconscionable threat to much of humanity that comes not from
>>faraway places, but close to home.
>>
>>www.johnpilger. com
>>
>>
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