New Statesman
Monday 15th October 2001

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John Pilger - A war in the American tradition

War on Terror: The Big Picture - The ultimate goal of the
attacks on Afghanistan is not the capture of a fanatic, but
the acceleration of western power, argues 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
travellers 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, it
is hardly surprising that many today do not see the trail of
blood.

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 resource as precious
as water.

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 career. Or as Voltaire
put it: "It is dangerous to be right when the government is
wrong." That does not change the fact that it is right.

[http://www.johnpilger.com]