by John Pilger
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 a long
history. The native Americans were slaughtered, the Philippines laid to
waste and Cuba and much of Latin America brought to heel with "bipartisan"
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
supersect 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 . . .
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 considered "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to his will", have been replaced by another piracy transformed into the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. . . .
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 mujahedin 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
George W Bush. In the past year, I have interviewed Carter's principal
foreign policy overlords - Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security
adviser, and James Schlesinger, his defence secretary. No blueprint for the
new imperialism is more respected than Brzezinski's. Invested with 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. . . .
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, and then, like the
ruthless Blair, invite the thug they install to address the Labour Party
conference. The real debate is the subjugation of national economies to a
system which divides humanity as never before and sustains 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.
FULL TEXT
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Eric Margolis, "Not So Fast, Sen.
Lott," Toronto Sun, February 16, 1998
Enver Masud, "Deadly Deception, Pretexts for
War," The Wisdom Fund, July 30, 2001
Enver Masud, "A Clash Between Justice and
Greed, Not Islam and the West," The Wisdom Fund, September 2, 2002
M. Shahid Alam, "Pauperizing the
Periphery: Two Decades of Neoliberal Policies," The Wisdom Fund, June
10, 2003
Lutz Kleveman, "The New Great Game,"
The Guardian, October 20, 2003
Chalmers Johnson, "America's Empire of Bases,"
Nation Institute, January 15, 2004
Robert C. Byrd, "Losing
America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency," W. W.
Norton & Company (July 2004)
Niranjan Ramakrishnan, "Byrd's Eye
View: When the Extraordinary Becomes the Norm," Nation Institute,
September 8, 2004
Francisc Catalin, "Wars Against 74
Nations...and Counting: An ABC of American Interventions," CounterPunch,
September 11, 2004
John Brown, "The
Return Of The World Warriors," TomPaine.com, October 7, 2004
Zbigniew Brzezinski, "How to
Make New Enemies," New York Times, October 25, 2004
Mark Curtis, "The
growing brutality and deception of the Iraq war mirrors Britain's recent
imperial history," Independent, October 26, 2004
Kevin Rafferty, "Last
gasp of U.S. hegemony," The Japan Times, November 15, 2004
James Petras, "Latin America: The
Empire Changes Gears," CounterPunch, December 7, 2004
Fred Anderson, Andrew Cayton, "The
Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000," Viking
Adult (December 29, 2004)
William A. Cook, "Bush, Osama and Israel:
Concealing Causes and Consequences," CounterPunch, January 10, 2005
[In "Code
Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the
9/11 World," Arkin discloses and briefly defines 3,000 military code names.
. . . Each one represents a discrete dot in the ever-growing clandestine
world of Delta Force and SEAL commandos, of spy satellites and electronic
worldwide eavesdropping.--Dana Priest, "
Book of U.S. Code Names Challenges Secrecy," Washington Post, January
23, 2005]
VIDEO: "Gore
Vidal on Bush's Inaugural Address: 'The Most Un-American Speech I've Ever
Heard'," Democracynow.org, January 25, 2005
[Andrew Bacevich warns of a dangerous dual obsession that has taken hold of
Americans, conservatives and liberals alike. It is a marriage of militarism
and utopian ideology--of unprecedented military might wed to a blind faith
in the universality of American values. This perilous union, Bacevich
argues, commits Americans to a futile enterprise, turning the US into a
crusader state with a self-proclaimed mission of driving history to its
final destination: the world-wide embrace of the American way of life. This
mindset invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of US
policy.--Andrew Bacevich, "The
New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War," Oxford
University Press (February 28, 2005)]
[The inner circles of the U.S. national security community - members of the
National Security Council (NSC), a select number of their deputies, and a
few close advisors to the president - represent what is probably the most
powerful committee in the history of the world, one with more resources,
more power, more license to act, and more ability to project force further
and swifter than any other convened by king, emperor, or president.--David
J. Rothkopf, "Inside the
Committee that Runs the World," Foreign Policy, March/April 2005]
Paul Craig Roberts, "The Last Throes of US
Dominance," Antiwar.com, June 28, 2005
[Meeting in the Kazakh capital of Astana, the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO) - which includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan, China, and Russia - issued a joint statement saying the active
military phase of the Afghan operation was coming to an end and calling on
the US-led coalition to agree to a deadline for ending the temporary use of
bases and air space in member countries.--Matthew Clark, "Will US be asked
to leave key military bases?," Christian Science Monitor, July 5, 2005]
Peter Spiegel, "Iranians to train
Iraq's military," BBC News, July 7, 2005
Simon Tisdall, "US
forces should take a lesson from the Persian kings," Guardian, September
7, 2005
Hywel Williams, "The US
could learn from the Achaemenid dynasty's policy of tolerance,"
Guardian, September 10, 2005
Rupert Cornwell, "This
Won't Be the American Century," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 3, 2006
[The plug line for the "War on Terror" is that America wants to finish the
fight it didn't start and get on with the peaceable pursuit of happiness.
The reality is that 9/11 and ensuing so-called WOT actually provides the
U.S. with many different short-cuts towards hanging on to and expanding
whatever control it has over the world. The Gwubya administration isn't
going to easily let go of these levers and neither is any succeeding U.S.
President.--Ruchir Joshi, "When Bush comes to shove," The Hindu, March 12,
2006]
[. . . the invasion
of Iraq "was the culmination of a 110-year period during which Americans
overthrew fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological,
political, and economic reasons.--Stephen Kinzer, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii
to Iraq," Times Books, April 4, 2006]
["The reason that many of us suspect the U.S. is opposed to this is more
fundamental," the independent Arms Control Association's Daryl G. Kimball
told OneWorld. "This is a very strategic region. The U.S. is reticent to
give up the option of deploying nuclear weapons in this region in the
future."--Aaron Glantz, "Five Former Soviet
Republics Give Up Nukes," oneworld.net, September 14, 2006]
