… The American myths have been difficult to explain in other countries where I have lived, because their vitality depends on … our sense of our system as a moral enterprise.’
Pravda used to publish similar drivel. Compare it with a remarkable book, just published, by Chalmers Johnson, a famous conservative name in American academic life, the emeritus professor of political science at the University of California. As professor of East Asian studies at Berkeley in the 1960s, Johnson supported the American war in Vietnam and dismissed its opponents as ‘self-indulgent’. His subsequent work convinced him that not only was he wrong, but American foreign policy had not changed since Vietnam, and is potentially more dangerous than ever.
In Blowback: the costs and consequences of American empire (Metropolitan Books), he writes: ‘I did not realise that my research would inadvertently lead me to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire which I had so long uncritically supported’. He defines empire as policies that ‘normally lie beneath some ideological or judicial concept [such as] ‘free world’ and ‘the west’ and disguise the actual relationships among its members. [It is] an empire based on the projection of military power to every corner of the world and on our terms, at whatever cost to others’.
The immediate danger, he says, is that the Pentagon has slipped beyond civilian control and is now running not only the arms trade, but most American covert operations through its Special Operations Division. Pentagon officials are currently pressuring Japan to rearm as part of a ‘regional defence system’, which will be a direct provocation to China. The American goal is not to tolerate any powers capable of resisting Washington, while maintaining numerous pawn states, sites for Ameri-can bases that ‘guarantee their protection’ (e.g. Kosovo).
These are not new warnings, but they are rarely heard in the mainstream. Writing in Economic and Political Weekly, the author Samir Amin remarked that the American media are ‘sufficiently controlled for the government’s strategic objectives never to be subject to debate; freedom of expression, a freedom which often reaches the burlesque, applies only to matters involving individuals and, beyond them, to conflicts within the ruling class’.
During the burlesque of the Bush and Gore show, journalists gave the public no sense of the true sources and contours of American power, of which the White House is only a showcase. This silence allowed accredited Mafiosi, such as the violent Bush clan, to pose as pillars of a democratic system. Why? Is it because the American academic factories have long determined the intellectual terms for the study of great power? For example, the discipline of international studies (known in Britain as international relations) was set up largely by the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in conjunction with a network drawn from the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the Council on Foreign Relations.
The effect has been brainwashing by the incessant use of what Johnson calls ‘comforting rubrics’. Now and then, the rubrics are discarded. Last year, Thomas Friedman of the The New York Times, and inspiration for Madeleine Albright, wrote: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-l5. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps’. Succinctly put. John Pilger, article December 2000, ‘US Foreign Policy Has Not Changed Since Vietnam and Potentially it is More Dangerous than Ever’
This film is about the punishment of a whole nation. The killing of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them young children. These are the people of Iraq, silent victims not only of Saddam Hussein their dictator but of an endless war against civilians waged by western governments. John Pilger, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, ITV 2000
This is the security council: centre of power of the United Nations in New York. In 1996 the Council allowed Iraq to sell some of its oil reserves in order to buy food and other basic needs. This is known as oil for food. All the money from the sale of Iraq’s oil is controlled by the Security Council, which the United States dominates, and with Britain takes a hard line on Iraq. Everything that goes to Iraq must be approved by a special sanctions committee run by the council. This committee has consistently blocked restoration of basic services in Iraq – power, light and clean running water ... The Department of Trade and Industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines. ibid.
Sanctions are still in place, and the United Nations reports widespread chronic malnutrition and death among young children. An unprecedented human rights disaster. ibid.
The latest United Nations study says that the death rate of children has doubled under sanctions. That’s half a million dead in eight years. ibid.
In Britain the same relationship blossomed between the Thatcher government and Saddam Hussein. Cabinet ministers lined up to pay their respects and offer him trade deals and loans, almost everything he wanted. ibid.
Most of the Iraqi soldiers and civilians who died in the Gulf War belonged to the Kurdish and Shia peoples. The very people President Bush called upon to rise up against Saddam Hussein, and when they did rise up in February 1991 they were brutally betrayed. ibid.
Why has the suffering of the Iraqi people been allowed to go on year after year? Is there another agenda? Smashing Iraq gives the United States greater control over the Middle East. As the West expands across a vast new oil protectorate, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the former Soviet Union, Iraq may be the blueprint for policing this new order with the weapons of sanctions and bombing ... The sheer scale of the bombing of Iraq is a well-kept secret. Between May 1998 and January this year, the American Air Force and Navy flew 36,000 sorties over southern Iraq. That includes 24,000 combat missions. ibid.
At the dawn of the new millennium how is Western civilisation to be judged by the fine words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, words like the Right to Life? Or by the denial of that right to a whole nation? Do the representatives of the powerful who sit here in the Security Council ever think beyond their so-called interests and manoeuvres, and about their victims, small children dying needlessly half a world away? And do those politicians who tell us about their ethical policies and moral crusades ever ask the question, By whose divine authority do they punish 21,000,000 people for the misconduct of a dictator? We think the price is worth it, says Madeleine Albright. No it is not. And it never will be. And it’s time we reclaimed the United Nations. ibid.
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured ‘formal approval’ from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to ‘secure’ roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in a US naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.
The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now a US military base and relief flights have been rerouted to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US air force dropped bottled water to people suffering dehydration.
The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter dispatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyper-ventilating as he brayed about the ‘violence’ and need for ‘security’. In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens’ groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even a US general’s assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that ‘looting is the only industry’ and ‘the dignity of Haiti’s past is long forgotten.’
Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. ‘There's no doubt,’ reported Frei in the aftermath of America’ bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, ‘that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East ... is now increasingly tied up with military power.’
In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W Bush’s policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700bn. He has become, in effect, the spokes man for a military coup.
For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed Bush to the ‘relief effort’: a parody lifted from Graham Greene’s The Comedians, set in Papa Doc’s Haiti. Bush’s relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans’ black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him to Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti’s sweatshops.
When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing binding machines at the Superior baseball plant in Port-au-Prince. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti’s sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the town and jerry-built housing. Year after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their speciality from the Philippines to Afghanistan. Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as ‘Mr Nice Guy ... bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land’, Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer, demanding deregulation that benefits the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed ‘tourist playground’.