UNITED STATES: The world's leading rogue state

BY JOHN PILGER

LONDON — For 101 days, British 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 tribespeople, 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 British Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, 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 accurately
describes US President George 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 July
1 of more than 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 Bush in the weeks following September 11.

The capacity of the US military machine to smash impoverished countries
was never in dispute — conditional, that is, on the absence of US 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 US 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 3767 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 5000 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 US-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.

Duped

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 tribes, 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 power base. 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 19th 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 US 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 US$2.5 billion oil pipeline being built
across the Caspian Sea. Top current and former US officials, including
vice-president Dick 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 US 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 British defence secretary 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 US press in May of children
gunned down in wheat fields and as they slept. For four hours, US 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 US 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.

Desperate edge

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
US food subsidies by 80% are designed to secure US domination of the world
food grains 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 US$34 billion. Foreign purchases
of the huge US debt are falling rapidly. The US stock market 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. 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 US, 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 50 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 US “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 governments won't, we must.

[From <http://www.johnpilger.com>.]

From Green Left Weekly, July 17, 2002.

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