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To: Retort

Bogus war on terrorism
by John Pilger
New Statesman
October 29, 2001

>--------------------------------------------------------------
>There is no war on terrorism. If there were, the SAS would be storming
>the beaches of Florida
>--------------------------------------------------------------
>
>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.