By 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
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