THE ROGUE STATE
John Pilger
published in The Mirror, 04 July 2002
FOR 101 days, Royal Marines have been engaged in a
farcical operation as mercenaries of the United States whose
lawlessness now qualifies it as the world's leading rogue state.
Shooting at shadows, and the occasional tribesman,
blowing up mounds of dirt and displaying "captured" arms for the media, all have been part of the Marines' humiliating role
in Afghanistan - a role foisted upon them by the Blair government, whose deference to and collusion with the Bush
gang has become a parody of the imperial courtier.
Gang is not an exaggeration. The word, in my dictionary, means "a group of people working together for criminal,
disreputable ends". That describes accurately George W Bush and
those who write his
speeches and make his decisions and who, since their rise to power,
have undermined the very
basis of international law.
In Afghanistan, their
record is beyond question. The killing on Monday of some 40 guests at
a wedding was not a
"blunder" but the direct result of a policy of shoot and bomb first
and
find out later, as
announced by George W Bush in the weeks following September 11.
The capacity of the
American military machine to smash impoverished countries was never
in dispute - conditional,
that is, on the absence of American ground troops and their
substitution by "allied"
forces, like the Royal Marines. (During the heyday of the British
Empire, Indian and other
colonial troops were used in a similar role, although the British,
unlike the Americans, were
also prepared to sacrifice their own soldiers).
Since last October, Afghan
leaders have reported American aircraft destroying villages "too
small to be marked on any
map" with "more than 300 people killed" in one night. In a family
of 40, only a small boy
and his grandmother survived, reported Richard Lloyd Parry of the
Independent.
Out of sight of the
television cameras "at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs
between October 7 and
December 10...an average of 62 innocent deaths a day", according
to a study carried out at
the University of New Hampshire in the US. This is now estimated
to have passed 5,000
civilian deaths: almost double the number killed on September 11.
There is no evidence that
a single leader of al-Qaeda has been captured or, to anyone's
knowledge, killed. Neither
has the leader of the Taliban. The change in Afghanistan is
minimal compared with the
murderous feudalism that ruled during the 1990s, and before the
Taliban came to power.
FOR all the cosmetic
changes in Kabul, the capital, women still dare not go unveiled. "The
Taliban used to hang the
victim's body in public for four days," quipped the new
American-installed
regime's Minister of Justice. "We will only hang the body for a short
time,
say fifteen minutes, after
a public execution."
Describing this as a
"triumph of good over evil", as Bush has said, with an echo from
Blair, is
like lauding the
superiority of the German war machine in 1940 as a vindication of
Nazism.
Not only the Marines but
the British public ought to feel duped. Both Washington and
Whitehall knew long ago
al-Qaeda was finished in Afghanistan. Apart from the element of
revenge, for home
gratification, the Americans have set out to reassert the control of
their
favourite warlords: people
responsible for thousands of deaths in their stricken country.
In October, the US planned
to install a regime dominated by members of the Pashtun tribe,
who, they predicted, would
desert the Taliban. But the split in the Taliban never happened
and the Americans have
since changed tack and tried to put together a "coalition" of Tajik
and Uzbek warlords. The
current "interim president", Hamid Karzai, although a Pashtun, has
neither a tribal nor
military powerbase. He is simply America's man.
The presence of the Royal
Marines, leading the so-called "International Security Assistance
Force", is for reasons
straight out of the nineteenth century. At the Americans' bidding, the
Marines were meant to keep
the favoured warlords from each other's throats until the region
could be "stabilised" for
American oil and other strategic interests.
Potential vast energy
sources in Central Asia have become critical for the deeply troubled
US economy, and for the
Bush administration, which is dominated by oil industry interests,
notably the Bush family
itself. An investigation by the Hong Kong-based Asia Times in
January found that the US
was frantically developing "a network of multiple Caspian
pipelines".
THE disgraced Enron
Corporation, one of Bush's biggest campaign backers, conducted a
feasibility study for a
$2.5billion oil pipeline being built across the Caspian Sea. Top
current and former American
officials, including Vice President Cheney, "have all closed major
deals directly and indirectly on
behalf of the oil companies", says the Asia Times.
If there was a map of
American military bases established in the region to fight "the war on
terrorism" what would be
immediately striking is that it would follow almost exactly the route
of the projected oil
pipeline to the Indian Ocean.
Blair and the voluble Geoffrey Hoon have, of course, offered none of this vital information to the British people, let
alone to the British soldiers sent to play America's imperial game.
Fortunately, the troops
suffered only gastric flu. The Afghan people have not been as lucky.
Any doubt about the systematic murderous way the US military has operated in Afghanistan is dispelled by a report
in the American press in May of children gunned down in wheat fields
and as they slept. For
four hours, American helicopter gunships saturated the fields and a
village with bullets and
rockets before landing to disgorge US troops who shot survivors and
detained other "suspects".
In fact, the area was renowned for its opposition to the Taliban and the governor of Oruzgan province confirmed that those murdered "were ordinary people. There were no al-Qaeda or Taliban here."
In recent months, the
American rogue state has torn up the Kyoto treaty, which would
decrease global warming
and the probability of environmental disaster. It has threatened to
use nuclear weapons in
"pre-emptive strikes" (a threat echoed by Hoon). It has tried to
sabotage the setting up of
an international criminal court, understandably, because its
generals and leading
politicians might be summoned as defendants.
It has further undermined
the authority of the United Nations by allowing Israel to block a
UN committee's
investigation of the Israeli assault on the Palestinian refugee camp
at
Jenin; and it has ordered
the Palestinians to get rid of their elected leader in favour of an
American stooge.
It ignored the World Food
Summit in Italy; and at summit conferences in Canada and
Indonesia it has blocked
genuine aid, such as clean water and electricity, to the most
deprived people on earth.
Proposals to increase American food subsidies by 80 per cent are
designed to secure
American domination of the world foodgrains market.
("When we get up from the breakfast table every morning," said the chief executive of the Cargill corporation, the world's biggest food company, "much of what we have eaten - cereals, bread, coffee, sugar and so on - has passed through the lands of my company." Cargill's goal is to
double in size every five to seven years).
There is a desperate edge to most of America's rogue actions. The Christian "free market" fundamentalists running
Washington are worried. The US current account deficit is running
at a record $34billion.
Foreign purchases of the huge US debt are falling rapidly. The US
stockmarket is heavily
over-valued, and the dollar is uncertain.
As one commentator has put
it, the "Bush doctrine" looks like "one last attempt to order the
world entirely around the
requirements of US monopoly capital, before it can long hope to do
so".
IN other words this may well be the last throw of the dice before the US economy goes into serious decline - as yesterday's dramatic fall in the stock markets indicated.
This means controlling the oil and fossil fuel riches in Central Asia. It means attacking Iraq, installing a replacement
Saddam Hussein and taking over the world's second-largest source
of oil. It means
surrounding a new economic challenger, China, with bases, and
intimidating the leaders of its
principal economic rival, Europe, by undermining NATO, and setting
off a trade war.
I have just visited the
United States, and it is clear many people there are worried. And
many dare not say so.
Their views are seldom reported in the American mainstream media,
which is self-censored and
controlled, perhaps as never before.
Instead, the air is thick with the views of the likes of Charles Krauthammer, of the Washington Post.
"Unilateralism is the key to our success," he wrote, in describing
the world
of the next fifty years: a
world without protection from nuclear attack or environmental
damage for the citizens of
any country except the United States; a world where "democracy"
means nothing if its
benefits are at odds with American "interests"; a world in which to
express dissent against
these "interests" brands one a terrorist and justifies surveillance
and repression.
There is only one way such rogue power can be resisted. It is by speaking out and urgently.
If our government won't, we must.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12005343&method=full&siteid=50143
http://pilger.carlton.com/print/109955
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