PARIS - Intellectual force has arrived to back the political and popular
French opposition to the United States over the question of Iraq.
In new debates, books and columns, French analysts are going back to the
days before September 11, 2001 to recall US interventions from Chile to
Guatemala to Vietnam. Historian Christine Durandin argues in La CIA en
Guerre (The CIA at war) that the US secret services intervened in all
Latin American countries since the 1950s, and that "everywhere these
interventions prepared the way for brutal military dictatorships".
The interventions never led to "nation building", Durandin said
by way of challenging US claims that the "war against
terrorism" can be used to build the foundation of modern societies
in the Arab world. Durandin's book has become a bestseller. The first
edition published earlier this month is already sold out.
Other books look at the background of many US leaders, particularly the
Bush family. Prize-winning investigative journalist Eric Laurent looks at
the dealings of the Bush family since the 1930s in La Guerre de
Bush (Bush's War). Laurent digs up dealings with Nazi industries in
Germany, and with Saudi Arabian business houses accused of financing
Islamic terrorist groups. Bush "dined with the devil", Laurent
says.
Based on his own investigations and on material published in the US,
Laurent says that President George W Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush,
was a banker who invested in industries rearming Nazi Germany. Laurent
says that in 1942 the US government placed sanctions on four companies of
the Bush family - the Union Banking Corporation, the Holland-American
Trading Corporation, the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation and the
Silesian-American Corporation.
Former president George Bush senior, he says, did business with the
family of Osama bin Laden for 20 years, much of it through the Carlyle
Group, an investment company. And the Halliburton enterprise in Texas, a
leading provider of engineering services, has been a partner of the bin
Laden group since 1994, Laurent says. Halliburton's CEO until the end of
2000 was Dick Cheney, now vice president.
In the late 1980s, Saudi Arabian banker Khalid bin Mafouz, Osama bin
Laden's brother-in-law and main shareowner of the now closed Bank of
Credit and Commerce International, saved one of President George Bush's
several unsuccessful oil enterprises from insolvency, Laurent says.
Other new books point to the demise of the US empire. Emmanuel Todd's
Apres l'empire (After the empire) looks at what the author calls
the "decomposition of American hegemony".
Todd, a renowned social scientist who predicted the end of the Soviet
Union in the late 1970s, bases his conclusions on the US dependency on
foreign capital. Todd says that the US commercial deficit more than
quadrupled during the 1990s. "In the period from 1973 to 2000,
during which the US enjoyed its longest economic expansion, the
commercial deficit went up from $100 billion to $450 billion," Todd
says.
"To pay for this deficit, the US needs to keep importing foreign
capital," he says. "If this capital flow were to stop, the US
economy would collapse. Despite the repeated claims about US power, the
truth is that this country is both a beggar and predator. This cannot
last very long."
Todd says that US militarism is nothing more than "fuss" aimed
to impress the world. "When you think that the US government only
dares to wage war against military gnomes such as Iraq, you have to
realize that the whole thing is only to pretend that they are
mighty."
Todd says that the US isolation in its war plans against Iraq (give or
take a few not so might nations) is an indicator that the world has begun
to see the US decline as a superpower. "The fact the Germany, for
the first time since World War II, has dared oppose a US military project
especially shows this awareness."
Bernard Henri Levy, sometimes reviled as the "jet-set
philosopher" who supported US military action in Somalia, Serbia and
most recently Afghanistan, now opposes the war on Iraq. "Saddam
Hussein is certainly one of the most brutal dictators of our days,"
Levy says. "But he doesn't represent a danger for the West. A real
danger is Pakistan, a dictatorship with clear links to Islamic terrorism,
and which has the nuclear bomb. Rather than attacking Iraq, the US should
worry about Pakistan. Instead, Washington sees Pakistan as an ally."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EC21Aa03.html
