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What Price American Primacy?
by Stephen Gowans
January 14, 2002
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What price are Americans willing to pay to
preserve the world as it is, with the US as the sole superpower and the
country's preeminence unchallenged? Americans, for the most part, have
accepted a few thousand dead Afghans as an acceptable price to hunt down
Osama bin Laden and members of his al-Qaeda network. Over a million Iraqis
dead from sanctions is considered an acceptable price to bottle up Saddam
Hussein. "We think it's worth it," said former Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright. So, would it be any surprise if Washington decided a
few thousand American lives was an acceptable price to preserve America's
primacy?
Marc Herold, a University of New Hampshire economics
professor who has been monitoring press reports from around the world,
estimates that almost 4,000 Afghan civilians have been killed by US bombs,
to mid-December.
"Civilian casualties? That's not news," explodes
a US media grandee, a transparent rationalization for burying a story that
tarnishes America's good guy image. "Civilian casualties are a normal part
of war." So too are car crashes a normal part of highway driving. So why
is my newspaper littered with endless stories about traffic fatalities?
Herold says, "US officials again have demonstrated their ability
to manage the news and the US media have shown their willingness to be
managed." Stenographers for those in power, as one critic puts it.
Human Rights Watch, a virtual front for the US State Department,
and, alternately, George Soros's Open Society Foundation, dismisses
Herold's estimates, and his thoughts. Somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000
civilians have died, says HRW, and the only reason the US media isn't
paying more attention is because the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the
rebuilding of Afghanistan have crowded the news agenda. A vaguely
plausible explanation on the surface, but a nanosecond of reflection
breaks the bonds on fettered reason. How does the foreign press manage to
fit stories of civilian casualties into the same crowded news agenda? Are
they more efficient? Or is it that it's only the US media's sense of
national do-goodism that's at stake? The foreign press, with less invested
emotionally in the military campaign, can afford to be a little more
dispassionate.
"Times have changed. We're at war, now," says the
gate keeper of one normally critical Web site, to justify the filtering of
views that may shake blind, unthinking support of the "commander in
chief," America's own version of "Il Duce." Wasn't it Mussolini who
ordered the bombing of a desperately poor country (Ethiopia), and then
crowed about his great military victory?
HRW's job is to establish
its credentials by mildly criticizing the government, so that it can let
Washington off the hook for big crimes, while masquerading as an impartial
NGO. After NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in the spring of 1999, HRW
reported 500 civilian deaths, a ridiculously low estimate considering the
scope of the bombing campaign, and lower than anyone else's estimate.
Five hundred. That's not too bad, against the 100,000 dead in
Kosovo, a number that, under scrutiny, was later to shrink faster than
icicles in a Chinook. One-hundred thousand became 10,000, then 2,000, then
"We can't find the bodies; they must be cleverly hidden." In the end, HRW
let NATO off the hook for civilian deaths, with an admonition to be more
careful.
Treating Washington with kid gloves may have just a
little to do with the fact that the US foreign policy establishment is as
firmly tethered to the New York-based organization as a puppeteer's
strings are to a marionette. Did you ever wonder who pays for HRW's
expensive and professional Web site? A gaggle of directors with links that
snake through the State Department and Washington's propaganda arm, Radio
Free Europe, offers a clue. Another clue: Speculator George Soros is known
as HRW's financier. (See Paul Treanor's, Who is behind
Human Rights Watch?)
A Force for Good in the
World?
Whenever the media want to assuage inchoate
concern about dropping high explosives on starving Afghans they make some
off the cuff remark about how the excesses of the Taliban have been
blessedly expunged by a few daisy cutters, the slaughter of prisoners of
war, and the obliteration of whole Afghan villages. Hell, that's a bargain
to see soccer being played again at the Kabul stadium, in place of the
regular beheadings and amputations. I'd give my life for that, wouldn't
you?
That's why when the same kind of ugly, theocratic behavior
flourishes in the lap of US allies, it either has to go unremarked upon,
or be relegated, as this Jan. 2 squib was, to filler, to be squeezed
between ads for men's underwear and stories about the latest millinery
fashions in Upper Volta.
"Riyadh. A man who gunned down a fellow
Saudi was beheaded yesterday in the city of Najran, raising the number of
executions to seven in the first two weeks of the year. At least 113
executions were announced in the country in 2000.
Saudi Arabia
applies a strict version of the sharia laws of Islam, imposing the death
penalty on people found guilty of murder, rape, apostasy, armed robbery,
drug trafficking and repeated drug use." (1)
Did you catch that? Stray from the true faith,
and the religious authorities will see to it that your head strays from
your neck. If it wasn't for oil, and geopolitics, the Saudis wouldn't be
so cuddly. Come to think of it, if it wasn't for oil, and geopolitics, the
Taliban, none too different from the Saudi monarchy, wouldn't be so
rebarbative.
Ah, but the Taliban weren't always so. Like Noriega
and Saddam Hussein and, yes, even Osama bin Laden, they were Washington's
guys once, sort of. That is, when it appeared the Taliban would accept its
role as vassal, without protest. Back then, the State Department was
perfectly willing to live with Mullah Omar and his band of zealots and
opportunists as another repressive, theocratic regime, "just like Saudi
Arabia." But fundamentalist Islam's most notorious Cyclops mis-stepped. He
flirted with ideas above his designated station as head of a dependent
elite of a subject country. That, if he's ever captured alive, may get him
shipped to Guantanamo Bay (the US military base in Cuba where Washington
plans to hold Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners), to face trial for, what?
Telling the American empire to piss off? If so, he should consider himself
lucky. For the same crime, Bill Clinton sought to make former Yugoslav
president Slobodan Milosevic's brief acquaintance with a cruise missile
courteously delivered through Milosevic's bedroom window one spring night
almost three years ago. Of course, the meeting would be ever so brief.
Milosevic was sleeping elsewhere on the appointed night, showing, once
again, his contempt for his betters in imperial Washington. Missing his
own execution -- the effrontery! He sleeps now, when his jailers turn off
his lights, in his own version of Gauntanamo Bay - a UN prison in the
Netherlands. The charge sheet reads: Genocide, expulsion, murder, cover
for the real charge: resisting the New World Order.
At times when
the optics are not so delicate, exposés of Saudi Arabia pop up, though
only now and then, like the occasional acne pimple on a twenty-something
that reminds her puberty was not so far off. Except these eruptions remind
us the truth can still be glimpsed, every once in a while, though only
when it doesn't threaten to undermine Washington's pursuit of Pinky and
the Brain's unrelieved obsession – taking over the world.
"Secrecy
and fear permeate every aspect of the state structure in Saudi Arabia.
There are no political parties, no elections, no independent legislature,
no trade unions, no Bar Association, no independent judiciary, no
independent human rights organizations. There is strict censorship of
media within the country and strict control of access to the Internet,
satellite television and other forms of communication with the outside
world.
Anyone living in Saudi Arabia who criticizes this system is
harshly punished.
Torture is endemic...Executions, flogging and
amputations are imposed and carried out with total disregard for the most
basic international fair trial standards.
Saudi Arabia has one of
the highest executions rates in the world....Most of those who are
executed are beheaded in public." (2)
And you thought the Taliban was bad. Now that the Pentagon has
obliterated a benighted, misogynist, medieval, intolerant, theocratic
regime, when will it turn its attention to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the
Islamists who have thrown the Balkans into chaos -- also benighted,
misogynist, medieval, intolerant, theocratic? Since all of them are firmly
ensconced in the White House's good books for helping, or at least, not
getting in the way of, Washington's illimitable imperial ambitions, who
knows? Maybe never.
Dealing with Insubordinate
Vassals
Washington criticizes one-party states for
totalitarianism. Disliked governments that win multi-party elections are
accused of election fraud. Milosevic was accused of stealing an election
two weeks before the first voters went to the polls. He was ousted in a
coup that saw the Empire's sponsored and paid for "pro-democracy" forces
take over the reins of power. "Coup" and "pro-democracy." Kind of reminds
you of "oxy" and "moron." Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko,
branded "the last European dictator," is said to win elections because he
cheats. Neither Milosevic nor Lukashenko are as enamoured of the
free-market, privatization policies that US investors so richly desire,
and that people so richly suffer from, as Washington would like. Nor are
they entirely on board Washington's plans to surpass Hitler's imperial
designs. They're paying the price. Already the witches and warlocks at
Langley are hunched over their cauldron, cooking up a story about Belarus
being Islamist terrorism's main arms supplier. (3) That contradicts the words of Snake, a terrorist
operating in Macedonia under the flag of the bin Laden-connected NLA. (4) "God bless America and Canada too
for all they have provided to us," he told Canadian journalist Scott
Taylor. Snake and his comrades brandish arms marked "Made in the USA." (5)
On the other hand,
leaders who aren't so renitent and are willing to let the US juggernaut
roll over them, can buy votes, stuff ballot boxes, miscount, and get up to
all sorts of mischief without a peep of protest from Washington. It's how
well you serve US interests that counts. Not what kind of government you
have. Or whether you cheat. Leaders Washington can't do much about because
their country is too large to easily subordinate get let off the hook,
too.
"Last year, a six-month investigation by a Moscow newspaper
found evidence of large-scale fraud in (Russian president) Vladimir
Putin's presidental-election victory. It concluded that Russian officials
had used tactics such as ballot-stuffing, vote-buying, bribery and
administrative pressure, and it said at least 2.2 million votes had been
falsified – enough to ensure that Mr. Putin captured a
first-round victory." (6)
That's more than
Lukashenko and Milosevic were accused of, and both men are regularly
decried as "dictators," "autocrats," and "strongmen." US Senator Jesse
Helms is sponsoring a bill that would see Belarus slapped with sanctions,
on top of funnelling $30 million in aid to Lukashenko's
opponents. (7) Imagine China funnelling campaign money to
the Democrats. (Oh yeah, that's illegal.) And the US ambassador to Belarus
openly talks of organizing Lukashenko's ouster. So why does none of this
apply to Putin? You'd think he was the Teflon man. Months before Putin was
to bomb Grozny, the Chechen capital, a civil war raged in the Serb
province of Kosovo. US president Bill Clinton sprang to the Russian
president's defense, invoking Lincoln and the Civil War. Putting down a
violent secession is only what Lincoln did, Clinton assured us. Milosevic,
on the other hand, who hadn't bombed Kosovo's capital, Pristina, (that
would be left to NATO), was struggling with what turned out to be a
terrorist campaign carried out by the KLA, an ugly Islamist organization
the US State Department had condemned for drug running and connections to
Osama bin Laden (before being rehabilitated overnight into freedom
fighters against ethnic oppression, just in time for NATO to kick-off its
campaign of terror over Belgrade). Milosevic was tarred as a hate-filled
monster and ethnic cleanser. There would be no comparisons to Lincoln for
him. Only a war crimes indictment from a tribunal controlled by war
criminals.
Now, Boris Berzovsky, one of the oligarchs who
plundered assets once collectively owned by Russians -- that is, before
Russia's hasty descent into Third World poverty, courtesy of Washington's
and the IMF's "economic reform" programs -- says, "the Russian secret
services are the masterminds behind a series of violent events that led to
Mr. Putin's rise in 1999, including deadly apartment bombings and a
Chechen rebel attack on a neighboring region." (8) Berzovsky isn't the first to make these allegations. And
the entire story that links Chechen terrorists to the bombings has more
holes than a colander. Chechen guerillas denied responsibility for the
attacks, even though they had been quite happy to own up to other attacks.
And Sergei Stepashin, who served briefly as prime minister, said the
Chechen campaign had been planned six months in advance of the terrorist
bombings.
Sound familiar?
Let's see. Afghanistan has
immense geostrategic significance. The presumed mastermind of the Sept. 11
attacks repeatedly denies responsibility. And this:
"A former
Pakistani diplomat told the BBC that the US was planning military action
against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban," before the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The wider objective...would be to topple the Taliban regime and
install a transitional government of moderate Afghans in its place....Mr.
Naik (the Pakistani diplomat) was told that Washington would launch its
operations from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisors were already
in place."
That was reported on Sept. 18, by the BBC. As prophesy,
it's not too bad.
And The Village Voice, in its January
8th edition, says, "Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié write in
their book, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, that the Bush administration
went so far as to consider waging war against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban
last summer."
"If true, Mr. Berezovsky's allegations (about
Russian security services masterminding the Moscow apartment bombings)
suggest that the Russian authorities were willing to kill their own
citizens," says The Globe and Mail. Couldn't it also be said, "If
true, Mr. Naik's allegations suggest US authorities may have engineered
the Sept. 11 attacks to provide a pretext for the pre-planned attack on
Afghanistan; US authorities may have been willing to kill their own
citizens?" George W. Bush's refusal to accept the Taliban's offer to turn
over bin Laden to a third country in return for seeing the evidence
against the Saudi exile hardly helps refute the thesis (nor, admittedly,
does it prove it.) But have US authorities any more respect for human life
than Russian authorities have, that uttering these words is so
indefensible? Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Korea. Indonesia. Three million dead in
Indochina. Costa Rica. El Salvador. Nicaragua. Panama. Two hundred
thousand dead in the Gulf War. Over a million dead from sanctions against
Iraq. Thousands killed in the 1999 NATO attack on Yugoslavia. Four
thousand Afghan civilians dead, and more to come. Hardly a record that
points to American leaders having much respect for foreign lives. Over
50,000 American GIs perishing in Vietnam, in an ugly, vicious, inhumane
war, to advance US geostrategic goals, hardly affirms Washington's respect
for American lives, either. "Our government is the greatest purveyor of
violence on the planet," said civil rights leader Martin Luther King, in
1967. Sadly, nothing has changed.
Dealing with Aspirants
to a Larger Global Role
Washington's war on Afghanistan
has provided the grounds for establishing a US military presence in
Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, to say nothing of
Afghanistan. And don't expect the presence to be temporary. Foreign
deployed US troops are like cockroaches: once you've got them, it's next
to impossible to get rid of them. Ask the Koreans, or people in the
Balkans, or the Cubans, who've had to put up with a US military presence
at Guantanamo Bay for a century, or the Saudis for that matter, and not
the monarchy, but the subject people to whom al-Qaeda, with its mission of
driving the American military out of the Middle East, appeals. William
Arkin, writing in The Los Angeles Times, points out that "from
Bulgaria and Uzbekistan, Kuwait and beyond, more than 60,000 US military
are stationed in these forward bases." The Guardian, on January
10, said, "The US military build-up in the former Soviet republics of
central Asia is raising fears in Moscow that Washington is exploiting the
Afghan war to establish a permanent, armed foothold in the region."
From a geostrategic perspective, establishing a military footprint
in Central Asia makes sense. US primacy rests in no small measure on its
military primacy. And protecting its position as the world's lone
superpower means holding Russia and China in check. Blocking the two Asian
giants from subordinating their energy rich Central Asian neighbours must
figure prominently in the foreign policy deliberations of a country intent
on maintaining its hegemony.
In June, Russia and China drew four
Central Asian countries -- Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan -- into the Shanghai cooperation organization. The purpose of
the organization? "To foster world multi-polarization," said China's Jiang
Zemin. In other words, to thwart US primacy. At about the same time,
Pentagon planners were busily at work organizing their Central Asia
intervention, with Afghanistan as the focal point. Today, with US troops
in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the Shanghai co-operation
organization is a wreck, and Russia's and China's plans for
multilateralism lie in pieces. America's primacy remains undiluted.
There's no question that Sept. 11 smoothed the way for American
foreign policy wonks to project US military power into Central Asia,
thereby bringing the Shanghai cooperation organization, either by design
or incidentally, down in a heap. The only question is, was Sept. 11 a
serendipity, handing the Pentagon a reason to intervene in Central Asia,
or did elite Washington follow the old aphorism: winners create their own
chances? The reply to the charge that Sept. 11 was contrived by a US
foreign policy establishment looking for a casus belli, much as it's
alleged the Moscow apartment bombings imputed to Chechens was contrived by
the Russian government to justify war on Chechnya, is that "Washington
would never kill its own citizens," a view that betrays a naive, and
trusting, simplicity, one not extended when considering the lengths
foreign, especially non-Western governments, are capable of going to; as
we've seen, that the Kremlin would murder Russian citizens to advance
Russia's own strategic aims is not considered unthinkable. But what price
would the inhabitants of the White House, the State Department and the
Pentagon consider too high to preserve US primacy? China growing stronger,
challenging US interests in Southeast Asia. Russia, recovering its might,
to one day match the influence of the old Soviet Union. Is that the kind
of world the US foreign policy establishment wants? Against the dangers of
an emerging China and a revivified Russia, the death of fewer than 4,000
US civilians must seem a trifle to those engaged in preserving America's
role as the world's "indispensable" nation. Far more lives have been
sacrificed on the altar of promoting American primacy in the world, in the
past. Far more, sad to say, will yet.
Notes
1.
Globe and Mail, January 2, 2001 (back)
2. Globe and Mail, April 17,
2000 (back) 3.
Mark Lenzi and Jakob Lemke, Belarus seen as top supplier of arms to Moslem
extremists, DPA, January, 5, 2002 (back) 4. See The Washington Times, June 22,
2001 (back) 5.
Scott Taylor, "Macedonia's Civil War: 'Made in the USA'," August 20, 2001,
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/taylor1.html
(back) 6.
Globe and Mail, January 1, 2001 (back)
7. Radio Free Europe. Dec. 25, 2001
(back) 8.
Globe and Mail, January 1, 2002 (back)
Stephen Gowans is a writer and political activist who
lives in Ottawa, Canada. He writes a regular column for Canadian Content and is also a
frequent contributor to the Media
Monitors Network. In addition, Gowans maintains his own Web site, What's Left in Suburbia?,
that is filled with relevant information.
Please, DO NOT steal,
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