New Statesman (London)

29 October 2001

There is no war on terrorism
If there was, the SAS would be  storming the beaches of Florida

By John Pilger

 http://www.johnpilger.com/

If people were not being killed and beginning to starve, the
American attack on Afghanistan might seem farcical. But
there is a logic to what they are doing. Read between the
lines and it is clear that they are not bombing large
numbers of the Taliban's front-line troops. Why? Because
they want to preserve what the US secretary of state, Colin
Powell, calls the "moderate" Taliban, who will join a "loose
federation" of "nation builders" once the war is over. The
moderate Taliban will unite with "elements of the
resistance" in the Northern Alliance, the bomb-planters,
rapists and heroin dealers, who were trained by the SAS and
paid by Washington.


This is known as divide and rule, a strategy as old as
imperialism. It will allow the Americans - they hope - to
reassert control over a region they "lost". Other countries,
such as Pakistan and the neighbouring former Soviet
republics, are being bribed into submission. The "war on
terrorism", with its Rambo raids, is merely a circus for the
folks back home and the media.


It takes me back to the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher
announced there were "reasonable" Khmer Rouge. The aim was
to bolster a Khmer Rouge-led coalition, in exile, which
Washington wanted to run Cambodia and so keep out its recent
humiliator, Vietnam, and the influence of the Soviet
Union. The SAS were sent to train Pol Pot's killers in
Thailand, teaching them how more effectively to blow people
up with landmines.  They got on so well together that when
the United Nations finally turned up, the Khmer Rouge asked
for their old British comrades to join them in the zones
they controlled. The same thing may happen in Afghanistan
when the UN turns up as the facilitator for America
"building" an obedient regime.


Among the international relations academics who provide the
jargon and apologetics for Anglo-American foreign policy,
divide and rule is known as "containment". The aim is to
destroy the capacity of nations to challenge US dominance
while allowing their regimes to maintain internal order. The
nature of the regime is irrelevant. Thus, people all over
the world have been divided, ruled and "contained", often
violently: the destruction of Yugoslavia is a recent
example; the territory administered by the Palestinian
Authority is another.


Real reasons for the actions of great power are seldom
reported. A morality play is preferred. When George Bush
Senior attacked Panama in 1990, he was reportedly "smoking
out" General Noriega, "a drug runner and a child
pornographer". The real reason was not news. The Panama
Canal was about to revert to the government of Panama, and
the US wanted a less uppity, more compliant thug than
Noriega to look after its interests once the canal was no
longer officially theirs.


Likewise, the real reason for attacking Iraq in 1991 had
little to do with defending the territorial sanctity of the
Kuwaiti sheikhs and everything to do with crippling, or
"containing", increasingly powerful, modern Iraq. The
Americans had no intention of allowing Saddam Hussein, a
former "friend" who had developed ideas above his imperial
station, to get in the way of their plans for a vast oil
protectorate stretching from Turkey to the Caucasus.


Undoubtedly, a primary reason for the attack on Afghanistan
is the installation of a regime that will oversee an
American-owned pipeline bringing oil and gas from the
Caspian Basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel
on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet
America's voracious energy needs for 30 years. Such a
pipeline can run through Russia, Iran, or Afghanistan. Only
in Afghanistan can the Americans control it.


Also, stricken Afghanistan is an easy target, an ideal place
for a "demonstration war" - a show of what America is
prepared to do "where required", as the US ambassador to the
United Nations said recently. The racism is implicit. Who
cares about Afghan peasants? No Paul McCartney concert for
them. Moreover, people can be sprayed with bomblets that
blow the heads off children, and we in the west are spared,
or denied, the evidence. It is clear that most of the media
are suppressing horrific images, as was done in the Gulf
slaughter. With honourable exceptions, the coverage is, as
ever, the opposite of Claud Cockburn's truism: "Never
believe anything until it is officially denied." The Sunday
papers carry little more than fables straight from the
Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence. Talking up a land
invasion is an important media task, as it was in the Gulf
and Yugoslavia. Talking up Iraq as a source of the anthrax
scare, and the next target, is another. Mark Urban,
Newsnight's diplomatic correspondent, told Jeremy Paxman
recently that the Americans were studying "secret
information" that Saddam Hussein was about to "fire off a
missile". Evidence? Urban said nothing; Paxman did not press
him.


There is no "war on terrorism". If there was, the SAS would
be storming the beaches of Florida, where more terrorists,
tyrants and torturers are given refuge than anywhere in the
world. If the precocious Blair was really hostile to
terrorism, he would do everything in his power to pursue
policies that lifted the threat of violent death from people
in his own country and third world countries alike, instead
of escalating terrorism, as he and Bush are doing. But these
are violent men, regardless of their distance from the
mayhem they initiate. Blair's enthusiastic part in the
cluster bombing of civilians in Iraq and Serbia, and the
killing of tens of thousands of children in Iraq, is
documented. The Bush family's violence, from Nicaragua to
Panama, the Gulf to the death rows of Texas, is a matter of
record. Their war on terrorism is no more than the
continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with
new excuses, new hidden imperatives, new lies.


The problem for people in the west who do not see the
violence of Bush and Blair and their predecessors is that
they cannot appreciate the reaction. "We have sown the wind;
he is the whirlwind," wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his preface
to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, "and all that
is stirred up in them is a volcanic fury whose force is
equal to that of the pressure upon them [and] the same
violence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes
forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror."


The great people's historian Howard Zinn, Boston University
professor and former Second World War bomber pilot, helps us
to understand this in his new book, Howard Zinn on War. The
attack on the twin towers in New York, he writes, has a
moral relation to American and Israeli attacks on the Arab
Middle East. If the actions of the west's official enemies
receive enormous attention as terrorist atrocities while the
terrorist atrocities of the US and its allies and clients
are starved of political and press attention, "it is
impossible to make a balanced moral judgement", to find
solutions to the cycle of revenge and reprisal and to
address the underlying issue of global economic inequality
and oppression.


Propaganda is the enemy within. "By volume and repetition",
a barrage of selective, limited information is turned out by
tame media, information isolated from political context
(such as the bloody record of the superpower throughout the
world). In the absence of alternative views, it is no
surprise that people's "reasonable reaction" is that "we
must do something". This leads to the quick conclusion that
"we" must bomb "them". And when it is over, and the corpses
are piled high, "only Milosevic stands in the dock, not
Clinton. Only Saddam Hussein is outlawed, not Bush
Senior. Only Bin Laden has a $50m price on his head, not
Bush Junior and his predecessors." It is, says Zinn, "a
tribute to the humanity of ordinary people that horrible
acts must be camouflaged [with words] like security, peace,
freedom, democracy, the 'national interest'."


One of Bush and Blair's oft-repeated lies is that "world
opinion is with us". No, it is not. Out of 30 countries
surveyed by Gallup International, only in Israel and the
United States does a majority of people agree that military
attacks are preferable to pursuing justice non-violently
through international law, however long it takes. That is
the good news.


http://www.johnpilger.com/