In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes
the increasing American war front across the world: from Afghanistan to
Africa and Latin America. This is the Third World War in all but name,
waged by the only aggressive “ism” that denies it is an ideology and
threatened not by introverted tribesmen in faraway places but by the
anti-war instincts of its own citizens.
Here is news of the
Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have
entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan
to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on
Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states,
and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the
British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the
sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind
underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal
siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven
bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the
popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay.
Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the
general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war
they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the
March Hare.
According to an American general, the invasion and
occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a “war of
perception”. Thus, the recent “liberation of the city of Marja” from the
Taliban’s “command and control structure” was pure Hollywood. Marja is
not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic
liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise,
it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the
folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and
patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped
coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical
propaganda exercise.
“War is fun”, the helmets in Vietnam used to
say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no
purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative
fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons.
This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair
in 1997 as one “who wants to create a world [where] ideology has
surrendered entirely to values” (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with
today’s public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.
Western
war-states such as the US and Britain are not threatened by the Taliban
or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the
anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian
sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested
Israel?s assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations
in which paramilitary police “kettled” (corralled) thousands,
first-offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor
offences that would not normally carry custodial sentences. On both
sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a
serious crime.
Silence in other high places allows this moral
travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal
elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama,
continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of
western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their
convenient demons, like Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try
compiling a list of famous writers, artists and advocates whose
principles are not consumed by the ?market? or neutered by their
celebrity. Who among them have spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq
during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has
been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency
predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically
destroy Iraq?s clean water system and lead to ?increased incidences, if
not epidemics of disease?. So the US set about eliminating clean water
for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, noted Unicef, of the deaths
of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this
extremism apparently has no name.
Norman Mailer once said he
believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and
domination, had entered a “pre-fascist era”. Mailer seemed tentative, as
if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. “Fascism” is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents,
conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On
the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the cultural critic Henry
Giroux pointed out recently, is “more nuance, less theatrical, more
cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with
manipulative modes of consent.”
This is Americanism, the only
predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of
tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of
a military that is now a state with the state, set behind the façade of
the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular
culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More
nuanced perhaps, but the results are both unambiguous and familiar.
Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior United Nations officials
in Iraq during the American and British-led blockade, are in no doubt
they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious,
undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the
Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.
In
the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to
this war only to laud “our boys”. The candidates are almost identical
political mummies shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes.
As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite loves
America because America allows it to barrack and bomb the natives and
call itself a “partner”. We should interrupt their fun.
