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society's bombers may not have to wait long for round
two. The U.S. 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
U.S. 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 U.S. soldiers were brutally
killed there in 1993 . . .' He neglected to mention
that the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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
U.S. 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 Secretary 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 U.S. 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
percent was mentioned. A U.S. 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.
[©
2001 New Statesman - London, UK - Monday, November
26, 2001
Reference by Hasan Zaidi |
