by John Pilger
[As Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter said of unmentionable crimes: "It never
happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't
happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United
States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few
people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It
has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while
masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty,
highly successful act of hypnosis."]
The current economic crisis, with its threat
to jobs and savings and public services, is the direct consequence of a
rampant militarism comparable, in large part, with that of the first half of
the last century, when Europe's most advanced and cultured nation committed
genocide. Since the 1990s, America's military budget has doubled. Like the
national debt, it is currently the largest ever. The true figure is not
known, because up to 40 per cent is classified "black" - it is hidden.
Britain, with a weapons industry second only to the US, has also been
militarised. The Iraq invasion has cost $5trn, at least. The 4,500 British
troops in Basra almost never leave their base. They are there because the
Americans demand it. On 19 September, Robert Gates, the American defence
secretary, was in London demanding $20bn from allies like Britain so that
the US invasion force in Afghanistan could be increased to 44,000. He said
the British force would be increased. It was an order.
In the meantime, an American invasion of Pakistan is under way, secretly
authorised by President Bush. The "change" candidate for president, Barack
Obama, had already called for an invasion and more aircraft and bombs. The
ironies are searing. A Pakistani religious school attacked by American drone
missiles, killing 23 people, was set up in the 1980s with CIA backing. It
was part of Operation Cyclone, in which the US armed and funded mujahedin
groups that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The aim was to bring down the
Soviet Union. This was achieved; it also brought down the Twin Towers.
On 20 September the inevitable response to the latest invasion came with the
bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad. For me, it is reminiscent of
President Nixon's invasion of Cambodia in 1970, which was planned as a
diversion from the coming defeat in Vietnam. The result was the rise to
power of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Today, with Taliban guerrillas closing on
Kabul and Nato refusing to conduct serious negotiations, defeat in
Afghanistan is also coming.
It is a war of the world. In Latin America, the Bush administration is
fomenting incipient military coups in Venezuela, Bolivia, and possibly
Paraguay, democracies whose governments have opposed Washington's historic
rapacious intervention in its "backyard". Washington's "Plan Colombia" is
the model for a mostly unreported assault on Mexico. This is the Merida
Initiative, which will allow the United States to fund "the war on drugs and
organised crime" in Mexico - a cover, as in Colombia, for militarising its
closest neighbour and ensuring its "business stability". Britain is tied to
all these adventures - a British "School of the Americas" is to be built in
Wales, where British soldiers will train killers from all corners of the
American empire in the name of "global security".
None of this is as potentially dangerous, or more distorted in permitted
public discussion, than the war on Russia. Two years ago, Stephen Cohen,
professor of Russian Studies at New York University, wrote a landmark essay
in the Nation which has now been reprinted in Britain.* He warns of "the
gravest threats [posed] by the undeclared Cold War Washington has waged,
under both parties, against post-communist Russia during the past 15 years".
He describes a catastrophic "relentless winner-take-all of Russia's
post-1991 weakness", with two-thirds of the population forced into poverty
and life expectancy barely at 59. With most of us in the West unaware,
Russia is being encircled by US and Nato bases and missiles in violation of
a pledge by the United States not to expand Nato "one inch to the east". The
result, writes Cohen, "is a US-built reverse iron curtain [and] a US denial
that Russia has any legitimate national interests outside its own territory,
even in ethnically akin former republics such as Ukraine, Belarus and
Georgia. [There is even] a presumption that Russia does not have fully
sovereignty within its own borders, as expressed by constant US
interventions in Moscow's internal affairs since 1992 . . . the United
States is attempting to acquire the nuclear responsibility it could not
achieve during the Soviet era."
This danger has grown rapidly as the American media again presents
US-Russian relations as "a duel to the death - perhaps literally". The
liberal Washington Post, says Cohen, "reads like a bygone Pravda on the
Potomac". The same is true in Britain, with the regurgitation of propaganda
that Russia was wholly responsible for the war in the Caucasus and must
therefore be a "pariah". Sarah Palin, who may end up US president, says she
is ready to attack Russia. The steady beat of this drum has seen Moscow
return to its old nuclear alerts. Remember the 1980s, writes Cohen, "when
the world faced exceedingly grave Cold War perils, and Mikhail Gorbachev
unexpectedly emerged to offer a heretical way out. Is there an American
leader today ready to retrieve that missed opportunity?" It is an urgent
question that must be asked all over the world by those of us still unafraid
to break the lethal silence.
FULL TEXT
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Smedley Butler, "'War Is a
Racket'," The Wisdom Fund, September 11, 2008
Katrina Vanden Heuvel, "The Enormous
Cost of War," The Nation, August 17, 2007
