BY
JOHN PILGER
How have we got to the point where a handful of Western governments take us into an illegal and immoral war against Iraq, a stricken country with which we have no quarrel and offers no threat: an act of aggression opposed by almost everybody and whose charade is transparent?
How can they attack, in our name, a country already crushed by more than 12 years of an embargo aimed mostly at the civilian population — of whom 42% are children — a medieval siege that has taken the lives of at least 500,000 children and is described as genocidal by the former United Nations humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq?
How can those claiming to be “liberals” disguise their embarrassment and shame, while justifying their support for US President George Bush's plans to launch hundreds of missiles in the first days of the attack as “liberation”? How can they ignore two UN studies which reveal that some 500,000 people will be at risk? Do they not hear their own echo in the words of the US general who said famously of a Vietnamese town he had just levelled: “We had to destroy it in order to save it?”
“Few of us”, Arthur Miller once wrote, “can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.”
These days, Miller's astuteness applies to a minority of warmongers and apologists. Since September 11, 2001, the consciousness of the majority has soared. The word “imperialism” has been rescued from agitprop and returned to common usage. The USA's and Britain's planned theft of Iraq's oilfields, following historical precedent, is well understood. The false choices of the Cold War are redundant, and people are once again stirring in their millions. More and more of them now glimpse US power, as Mark Twain wrote, “with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot basket and its butcher knife in the other”.
What is heartening is the apparent demise of the charge of “anti-Americanism” as a respectable means of stifling recognition and analysis of US imperialism. In the US itself, there are too many “anti-Americans” filling the streets now: those who veteran reporter Martha Gellhorn called “that life-saving minority who judge their government in moral terms, who are the people with a wakeful conscience and can be counted upon”.
Perhaps for the first time since the late 1940s, “Americanism” as an ideology is being identified in the same terms as any rapacious power structure; and we can thank Bush and US vice-president Dick Cheney and US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld and US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice for that.
“My guess”, wrote the famous US writer Norman Mailer recently, “is that,
like it or not, or want it or not, we are going to go to war because that
is the only solution Bush and his people can see. The dire prospect that
opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic
where the army will have more and more importance in our lives. And, before
it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way...
Indeed, democracy is the special condition that we will be called upon
to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because
the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture
of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascist atmosphere
in America already.”
World domination
In the military plutocracy that is the US state, with its unelected president, venal Supreme Court, silent Congress, gutted Bill of Rights and compliant corporate media, Mailer's “pre-fascist atmosphere” makes common sense. The dissident US writer William Rivers Pitt pursues this further. “Critics of the Bush administration”, he wrote, “like to bandy about the word 'fascist' when speaking of George. The image that word conjures is of Nazi storm troopers marching in unison towards Hitler's Final Solution. This does not at all fit. It is better, in this matter, to view the Bush administration through the eyes of [former Italian dictator] Benito Mussolini. Dubbed 'the father of fascism', Mussolini defined the word in a far more pertinent fashion. 'Fascism', he said, 'should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.'”
Bush himself offered an understanding of this on February 26 when he addressed the annual dinner of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He paid tribute to “some of the finest minds of our nation [who] are at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation. You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds. I want to thank them for their service.”
The “20 such minds” are crypto-fascists who fit Pitt's definition. The AEI is the biggest, most important and wealthiest US “think-tank”. A typical member is John Bolton, US undersecretary for arms control, the Bush official most responsible for dismantling the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which is arguably the most important arms control agreement of the late 20th Century. The AEI's strongest ties are with extreme Zionism and the Israeli regime of Ariel Sharon.
In February, Bolton was in Tel Aviv to hear Sharon's view on which country in the region should be next victim after Iraq. For the expansionists running Israel, the prize is not so much the conquest of Iraq but Iran.
Richard Perle is the AEI's star. Perle is chairperson of the powerful Defence Policy Board at the Pentagon, and author of the insane policies of “total war” and “creative destruction”. The latter is designed to finally subjugate the Middle East, beginning with the US$90 billion invasion of Iraq.
Perle helped to set up another crypto-fascist group, the Project for the New American Century. Other founders include Cheney, Rumsfeld and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The institute's Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, released in 2000, is an unabashed blueprint for world conquest. Before Bush came to power, it recommended an increase in arms spending by $48 billion so that the US “can fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars”. Such an increase has been approved.
The blueprint urged that US nuclear war-fighting capability be given
priority. This too has come true. Long before 9/11, it said that Iraq should
be a primary target. And so it is. And it dismissed the issue of Saddam
Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" as a convenient excuse, which it
is.
'New order'
Written by Wolfowitz, this guide to world domination puts the onus on the Pentagon to establish a “new order” in the Middle East under unchallenged US authority. A “liberated” Iraq, the centrepiece of the new order, will be divided and ruled, probably by three US generals, and after a horrific onslaught, known as “Shock and Awe”.
In the future, this Pax Americana will be policed with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons used “pre-emptively”, even in conflicts that do not directly engage US interests. In August, the Bush administration will convene a secret meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, to discuss the construction of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including “mini-nukes”, “bunker busters” and neutron bombs.
Such is Mailer's “pre-fascist” state. If appeasement has any meaning today, it has little to do with a regional dictator and everything to do with the demonstrably dangerous men in Washington. It is vitally important that we understand their goals and the degree of their ruthlessness.
One example: General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator, was last year deliberately allowed by Washington to come within an ace of starting a nuclear war with India — and to continue supplying North Korea with nuclear technology — because he agreed to hand over al Qaeda operatives. The other day, John Howard, Australian prime minister and Washington mouthpiece, praised Musharraf for his “personal courage and outstanding leadership”.
In 1946, Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials,
said: “The very essence of the Nuremberg charter is that individuals have
international duties which transcend national obligations of obedience
imposed by the state.”
Bush, Howard and Blair can be stopped
With the attack on Iraq, the millions who filled the streets of the world on February 15-16, and the millions more who cheered them on, now have these transcendent duties. The Bush gang, Howard and British Labour PM Tony Blair, cannot be allowed to hold the rest of us captive to their obsessions and war plans. They must be stopped now, for the reasons long argued in these pages and on hundreds of platforms.
There is only one form of opposition now: it is mass civil disobedience leading to what the police call civil unrest. The latter is feared by undemocratic governments of all stripes.
The revolt has already begun. In January, Scottish train drivers refused to move munitions. In Italy, people have been blocking dozens of trains carrying US weapons and personnel, and wharfies have refused to load arms shipments. US military bases have been blockaded in Germany, and thousands have demonstrated at Shannon which, despite Ireland's neutrality, is being used by the US military to refuel its planes en route to Iraq.
If the protest movement sees itself as a world power, as an expression of true internationalism, then success need not be a dream. That depends on how far people are prepared to go. The young female employee of Britain's top-secret Government Communications Headquarters, who was charged this month with leaking information about US dirty tricks operation against members of the Security Council, shows us the courage that is required.
In the meantime, the new Mussolinis are on their balconies, with their virtuoso rants and impassioned insincerity. Reduced to wagging their fingers in a futile attempt to silence us, they see millions of us for the first time, knowing and fearing that we cannot be silenced.
[Abridged from .]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, March 26, 2003.
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