[iwar] [fc:Is.US.in.danger.of.being.viewed.as.a.rogue.state?]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-07-12 07:14:50
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 07:14:50 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Is.US.in.danger.of.being.viewed.as.a.rogue.state?]
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THE ROGUE STATE
Legendary foreign correspondent JOHN PILGER on America's bid to 
control the world
The Mirror
July 9, 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.

*John Pilger's new book, The New Rulers of the World, is published by Verso.

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