Critical
Analysis
Bush Vs. Kerry: The Fake Debate
By John Pilger
Oct 18, 2004
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On 6 May last, the US
House of Representatives passed a resolution which,in effect, authorised a
"pre-emptive" attack on Iran. The vote was 376/3. Undeterred by the
accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one
commentator, "once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of
American power."
The joining of hands
across America's illusory political divide has along history. The native
Americans were slaughtered, the Philippines laid to waste and Cuba and
much of Latin America
brought to heel with "bi-partisan" backing. Wading through the blood, a
new breed of popular historian, the journalist in the pay of rich
newspaper owners, spun the heroic myths of a super sect called
Americanism, which advertising and public relations in the 20th century
formalised as an ideology, embracing both conservatism and liberalism.
In the modern era,
most of America's wars have been launched by liberal Democratic presidents
- Truman in Korea, Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam, Carter in Afghanistan.
The fictitious "missile gap" was invented by Kennedy's liberal New
Frontiersmen as a rationale for keeping the cold war going. In 1964, a
Democrat-dominated Congress gave President Johnson the authority to attack
Vietnam, a defenceless peasant nation offering no threat to the United
States. Like the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, the justification was a
non-existent "incident" in which two North Vietnamese patrol boats were
said to have attacked an American warship. More than three million deaths
and the ruin of a once bountiful land followed.
During the past 60
years, only once has Congress voted to limit the president's "right" to
terrorise other countries. This abberation, the 1975 Clark Amendment, a
product of the great anti-Vietnam war movement, was repealed in 1985 by
Ronald Reagan. During Reagan's assaults on Central Amercia in the 1980s,
liberal voices such as Tom Whicker of the New York Times, doyen of the
"doves", seriously debated whether or not tiny, impoverished Nicaragua was
a threat to the United States. These days, terrorism having replaced the
red menace, another fake debate is under way. This is lesser evilism.
Although few
liberal-minded voters seem to have illusions about John Kerry, their need
to get rid of the "rogue" Bush administration is all consuming.
Representing them in Britain, the Guardian says the coming presidential
election is "exceptional". "Mr Kerry's flaws and limitations are evident,"
says the paper, "but they are put in the shade by the neo-conservative
agenda and catastrophic war-making of Mr Bush. This is an election in
which the whole world will breathe a sigh of relief if the incumbent is
defeated."
The whole world may
well breathe a sigh of relief; the Bush regime is both dangerous and
universally loathed; but that is not the point. We have debated lesser
evilism so often on both sides of the Atlantic that it is surely time to
stop gesturing at the obvious and to examine critically a system that
produces the Bushes and their Democratic shadows. For those of us who
marvel at our luck in reaching mature years without having been blown to
bits by the warlords of Americanism, Republican and Democrat, conservative
and liberal, and for the millions all over the world, who now reject the
American contagion in political life, the true issue is clear. It is the
continuation of a project that began more than 500 years ago.
The privileges of
"discovery and conquest" granted to Christopher Columbus in 1492, in a
world the Pope "considers his property to be disposed according to his
will", have been replaced by another piracy transformed into the divine
will of Americanism and sustained by technological progress, notably that
of the media. "The threat to independence in the late 20th century from
the new electronics," wrote Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, "could
be greater than was colonialism itself. We are beginning to learn that de-colonisation
was not the termination of imperial relationships but merely the extending
of a geo-political web which has been spinning since the Renaissance. The
new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a "receiving"
culture than any previous manifestation of western technology."
Every modern
president has been, in large part, a media creation. Thus, the murderous
Reagan is sanctified still; Murdoch's Fox Channel and the post-Hutton BBC
have differed only in their forms of adulation. And Clinton is regarded
nostalgically by liberals as flawed but enlightened; yet Clinton's
presidential years were far more violent than Bush's and his goals were
the same: "the integration of countries into the global free market
community", the terms of which, noted the New York Times, "require the
United States to be involved in the plumbing and wiring of nations'
internal affairs more deeply than ever before". The Pentagon's "full
spectrum dominance" was not the product of the "neo-cons" but of the
liberal Clinton who approved what was then the greatest war expenditure in
history. According to the Guardian, John Kerry sends us "energising
progressive calls". It is time to stop this nonsense.
Supremacy is the
essence of Americanism; only the veil changes or slips. In 1976, the
Democrat Jimmy Carter announced "a foreign policy that respects human
rights". In secret, he backed Indonesia's genocide in East Timor
and established the muhajideen in
Afghanistan as a terrorist organisation designed to overthrow the Soviet
Union, and from which came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was the liberal
Carter, not Reagan, who laid the ground for Bush. In the past year, I have
interviewed Carter's principal foreign policy overlords, Zbigniew
Brezinski, his national security advisor, and James Schlesinger, his
defence secretary. No blueprint for the new imperialism is more respected
than Brezinski's. Invested wtih biblical authority by the Bush gang, his
1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic
imperatives, describes American priorities as the economic subjugation of
the Soviet Union and the control of Central Asia and the
Middle East.
His analysis says that "local wars" are merely the beginning of a final
conflict leading inexorably to world domination by the US. "To put it in a
terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of ancient empires," he
writes, "the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to
prevent collusion and maintan security dependence among the vassals to
keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from
coming together".
It may have been easy
once to dismiss this as a message from the lunar right. But Brzezinski is
mainstream. His devoted students include Madeleine Albright, Clinton's
secretary of state, who described the death of half a million infants in
Iraq under the American-led embargo as "a price worth paying", and John
Negroponte, the mastermind of American terror in Central America under
Reagan and currently "ambassador" in Baghdad. James Rubin, who was
Albright's enthusiastic apologist at the State Department, is being
considered as John Kerry's national security adviser. He is also a zionist;
Israel and its role as a terror state, is beyond discussion.
Cast an eye over the
rest of the world. As Iraq
has crowded the front pages, American moves into
Africa have attracted little attention.
Here, the Clinton and Bush policies are seamless. In the 1990s, Clinton's
African Growth and Opportunity Act launched a new scramble for Africa.
Humanitarian bombers wonder why Bush and Blair have not attacked Sudan and
"liberated" Darfur, or intervened in
Zimbabwe
or the Congo. The answer is that they have no interest in human distress
and human rights and are busy securing the same riches that led to the
European scramble in the late 19th century by traditional means of
coercion and bribery known as multilateralism. The Congo and Zambia
possess 50 per cent of world cobalt reserves; 98 per cent of the world's
chrome reserves are in Zimbabwe and South Africa. More importantly, there
is oil and natural gas in west Africa, from
Nigeria
to Angola, and in the Higleig Basin in Sudan. Under Clinton, the African
Crisis Response Initiative (Acri) was set up in secret. This has allowed
the US to establish "military assistance programmes" in Senegal, Uganda,
Malawi, Ghana, Benin, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Chad. Acri is run by
Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 Bay of
Pigs landing, and went on to be a special forces officer in Vietnam and
Laos, and, under Reagan, helped lead the contra invasion of Nicaragua. The
pedigrees never change.
None of this is
discussed in a presidential campaign in which John Kerry strains to
out-Bush Bush. The multilateralism or "muscular internationalism" that
Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism is seen as hopeful by the
terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even greater dangers. Bush, having
given the American elite its greatest disaster since Vietnam, writes the
historian Gabriel Kolko, "is much more likely to continue the destruction
of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power.
One does not have to
believe the worse the better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign
policy consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate. As dangerous as it is,
Bush's re-election may be a lesser evil." With Nato back in train under
President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American ambitions
will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush gang. Little of
this appears even in the American papers worth reading. The Washington
Post's hand-wringing apology to its readers on 14 August for not "pay[ing]
enough attention to voices raising questions about the war [against Iraq]"
has not interrupted its silence on the danger that the American state
presents to the world. Bush's rating has risen in the polls to more than
50 per cent, a level at this stage in the campaign at which no incumbent
has ever lost. The virtues of his "plain speaking", which the entire media
machine promoted four years ago, Fox and the Washington Post alike, are
again credited. As in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, Americans
are denied a modicum of understanding of what Norman Mailer has called "a
pre-fascist climate". The fears of the rest of us are of no consequence.
The professional liberals on both sides of the Atlantic
have played a major part in this. The campaign against Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11 is indicative. The film is not radical and makes no
outlandish claims; what it does is push past those guarding the boundaries
of "respectable" dissent. That is why the public applaud it. It breaks the
collusive codes of journalism, which it shames. It allows people to begin
to deconstruct the nightly propaganda that passes for news: in which "a
sovereign Iraqi government pursues democracy" and those fighting in Najaf
and Fallujah and Basra are always
"militants" and "insurgents" or members of a "private army", never
nationalists defending their homeland and whose resistance has probably
forestalled attacks on Iran, Syria or north Korea.
The real debate is
neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they exemplify; it is the decline
of true democracy and the rise of the American "national security state"
in Britain and other countries claiming to be democracies, in which people
are sent to prison and the key thrown away and whose leaders commit
capital crimes in faraway places, unhindered, then, like the ruthless Tony
Blair, invite the thug they instal to address the British Labour Party
conference.
The real debate is
the subjugation of national economies to a system dividing humanity as
never before and sustaining the deaths, every day, of 24,000 hungry
people. The real debate is the subversion of political language and of
debate itself and perhaps, in the end, our self respect. AxisofLogic
Bulatlat
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