The American Empire: 1992
to present
from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum
2004 edition
Following its bombing of Iraq in 1991,
the United States wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Following its bombing of Yugoslavia in
1999, the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo,
Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.
Following its bombing of Afghanistan in
2001-2, the United States wound up with military bases in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia,
Yemen and Djibouti.
Following its bombing and invasion of
Iraq in 2003, the United States wound up with Iraq.
This is not very subtle foreign policy.
Certainly not covert. The men who run the American Empire are
not easily embarrassed.
And that is the way the empire grows-a
base in every neighborhood, ready to be mobilized to put down
any threat to imperial rule, real or imagined. Fifty-eight years
after world War II ended, the United States still has major bases
in Germany and Japan; fifty ears after the end of the Korean War,
tens of thousands of American armed forces continue to be stationed
in South Korea.
"America will have a continuing interest
and presence in Central Asia of a kind that we could not have
dreamed of before," US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared
in February 2002. Later that year, the US Defense Department announced:
"The United States Military is currently deployed to more
locations then it has been throughout history."
Equally unsubtle are the announcements
beginning in the early 1990s-coinciding with he pivotal demise
of the Soviet Union-and continuing to the present, trumpeting
Washington's desire, means, and intention for world domination,
while assuring the world of the noble purposes behind this crusade.
These declarations have been regularly put forth in policy papers
emanating from the White House and the Pentagon, as well as from
government-appointed commissions and think tanks closely associated
with the national security establishment.
Here is the voice of the empire in 1992
"Our first objective is to prevent
the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the
former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order
of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union.... we must account
sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations
to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking
to overturn the established political and economic order.... we
must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors
from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."
1996: "We will engage terrestrial
targets someday-ships, airplanes, land targets-from space....
We're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space
and we're going to fight into space.
1997: "With regard to space dominance,
we have it, we like it, and we're going to keep it."
2000: "The new [military preparedness]
standard is to maintain military superiority over all potential
rivals and to prepare now for future military rivalries even if
they can not yet be identified and their eventual arrival is only
speculative.... Military requirements have become detached from
net assessments of actual security threats. Generic wars and generic
capabilities are proffered as the basis for planning.... Particularities
of real threat scenarios have become secondary to the generalized
need to show raw U.S. power across the globe.
2001: "The presence of American forces
in critical regions around the world is the visible expression
of the extent of America's status as a superpower and as the guarantor
of liberty, peace and stability."
2001: "If we just let our own vision
of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't
try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions
to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants,
I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great
songs about us years from now."
2001: The Bush administration's "Nuclear
Posture Review", directing the military to prepare contingency
plans to use nuclear weapons against at least seven countries-
China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya and Syria-and to
build smaller nuclear weapons for use in certain battlefield situations.
2002: In September, the White House issued
its "National Security Strategy", which declared:
Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade
potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes
of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States....
America will act against such emerging threats before they are
fully formed.... We must deter and defend against the threat before
it is unleashed.... We cannot let our enemies strike first....
To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries,
the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.
Preemptiveness is essentially the rationale
imperial Japan, without being overly paranoid, used to justify
its attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and which Nazi Germany, as
a sham pretext, used to justify its invasion of Poland in 1939.
To one observer, the meaning of the "National
Security Strategy" was this:
It dashes the aspirations of those who had hoped that the world
was moving toward a system of international law that would allow
for the peaceful / resolution of conflicts, through covenants
and courts. In place of this, a \, single power that shuns covenants
and courts has proclaimed that it intends to dominate the world
militarily, intervening preemptively where | necessary to exorcise
threats.... Those who want a world in which no | power is supreme
and in which laws and covenants are used to settle conflicts will
begin a new debate-about how to contend with imperial America.
So intoxicated with the idea of dominance
is the US national security state that when it announced, in November
2002, the formation of a public affairs group that would travel
to battlefields "to interact with journalists, assist U.S.
commanders and send news and pictures back to headquarters for
dissemination," it described the operation as an attempt
at "information dominance".
The Cold War is Over. Long live the Cold
War.
It is remarkable indeed that in the 21st
century the government of the United States is still going around
dropping huge amounts of exceedingly powerful explosives upon
the heads of innocent and defenseless people. It wasn't supposed
to be this way.
In the mid 1980s, Michael Gorbachev's
reforms instituted the beginning of the end for the Soviet police
state. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down, and people all over
Eastern Europe were joyfully celebrating "a new day".
The United States then joined this celebration by invading and
bombing Panama, only weeks after the Wall fell. At the same time,
the US was shamelessly intervening in the election in Nicaragua
to defeat a leftist government.
Soon thereafter, South Africa freed Nelson
Mandela and apartheid began to crumble, and before the year 1990
was over Haiti held its first free election ever and chose a genuine
progressive as president. It seemed like anything was possible,
optimism was as widespread as pessimism is today.
However, when Bulgaria and Albania, "newly
freed from the grip of communism", as the American media
would put it, dared to elect governments not acceptable to Washington,
Washington just stepped in and overthrew those governments.
The same period found the US bombing Iraq
and its people, 40 days and nights without mercy, for no good
or honest reason.
And that was that for our hope for a different
and better world.
But the American leaders were not through.
In 1993 they were off attacking Somalia, trying to rearrange the
country's political map, more bombing and killing.
They intervened to put down dissident
movements in Peru, Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador, just as if it
were the Cold War in the 1950s in Latin America, and the 1960s,
the 1970s, the 1980s, still doing it in the 1990s, and into the
new century.
In the latter part of the 1990s, Washington
could be found engaged in serious meddling in the elections in
territories which had once been part of the Soviet sphere: Russia,
Mongolia, and Bosnia.
In 1999, they bombed the people of Serbia
and Kosovo for 78 seemingly endless days, the culmination of Washington's
master plan of breaking up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia,
demonized as "the last of the Communists".
And once again, in the fall of 2001, grossly
and openly intervened in an election in Nicaragua to prevent the
left from winning.
At the same time, bombarding Afghanistan,
and in all likelihood killing more innocent civilians than were
killed in the United States on 11 September 2001,~3 as well as
taking the lives of countless "combatants" (i.e., anyone
who defended against the invasion of the land they were living
in). Most of the so-called "terrorists" of foreign nationality
residing in Afghanistan at the time, including those training
at al Qaeda camps, had come there to fight against the Soviet
forces or to help the Taliban in their later civil war; for them
these were religious missions, nothing to do with terrorism or
the United States. Amongst the thousands of victims of the American
invasion, not one has been identified as having a connection to
the events of that tragic day. The 11 September terrorists had
chosen symbolic buildings to attack and the United States then
chose a symbolic country to retaliate against.
While continuing to savage Afghanistan
in 2002, Washington found time to lend its indispensable support
to a plot to overthrow Hugo Chavez and his populist government
in Venezuela, Chavez having made it abundantly clear that Venezuela
was not prepared to become a foreign outpost of the empire.
And all these years, still keeping a choke
hold on Cuba; still, after a century of imperialist occupation,
refusing to vacate Guantanamo Base in Cuba, converting it in 2002
to a modern Devil's Island for the illegal and grim imprisonment
of men, as well as several children, kidnapped in various localities
of the world in the so-called War on Terrorism.
There was none of the "peace dividend"
that had been promised for the end of the Cold War, not for Americans
nor for the rest of the world.
What do we have here? The American people
had been taught for nearly half a century that the Cold War, including
the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the huge military budgets, all
the US invasions and overthrows of governments-the ones they knew
about-they were taught that this was all to fight the same menace:
The International Communist Conspiracy, headquarters in Moscow.
But then the Soviet Union was dissolved.
The Warsaw Pact was dissolved as well. The East European satellites
became independent. The former communists even became capitalists.
And nothing changed in American foreign
policy.
Even NATO remained, NATO which had been
created-so we were told-to protect Western Europe against a Soviet
invasion, even NATO remained, ever increasing in size and military
power, a treaty on wheels which could be rolled in any direction
to suit Washington's current policy-acting as a US surrogate ruling
over the Balkans as a protectorate, invoking its charter to justify
its members joining the US in the Afghanistan invasion.
And as Russia closed down its Cold War
bases in Eastern Europe, Vietnam and Cuba, the United States was
opening military bases in the territories of the former Soviet
Union and in other regions of the world. While Russia closed down
its radio intelligence station at Lourdes, Cuba, the United States
was building a powerful communications listening station in Latvia,
on the Russian border, as part of Washington's worldwide eavesdropping
system.
The whole thing had been a con game. The
Soviet Union and something called communism per se had not been
the object of Washington's global attacks. There had never been
an International Communist Conspiracy. The enemy was, and remains,
any government or movement, or even individual, that stands in
the way of the expansion of the American Empire; by whatever name
the US gives to the enemy-communist, rogue state, drug trafficker,
terrorist .
Is the United States Against Terrorism?
Are we now to believe that the American
Empire is against terrorism? What does one call a man who blows
up an airplane killing 73 civilians for political reasons; who
attempts assassinations against several diplomats; who fires cannons
at ships docked in American ports; who places bombs in numerous
commercial and diplomatic buildings in the US and abroad? Dozens
of such acts. His name is Orlando Bosch, he's Cuban and he lives
in Miami, unmolested by the authorities. The city of Miami once
declared a day in his honor-Dr. Orlando Bosch Day. He was freed
from prison in Venezuela in 1988, where he had been held for the
airplane bombing, partly because of pressure from the American
ambassador at the time, Otto Reich, who in 2002 was appointed
to a high position in the State Department by President Bush.
After Bosch returned to the US in 1988,
the Justice Department condemned him as a totally violent terrorist
and was all set to deport him, but that was blocked by President
Bush, the first, with the help of son Jeb Bush in Florida. So
is President Bush, the second, and his family against terrorism?
Well, yes, they're against those terrorists who are not allies
of the empire.
The plane that Bosch bombed, in 1976,
was a Cuban plane. He's wanted in Cuba for that and a host of
other serious crimes, and the Cubans have asked Washington to
extradite him. To Cuba he's like Osama bin Laden is to the United
States. But the US has refused. Imagine the reaction in the United
States if bin Laden showed up in Havana and the Cubans refused
to turn him over. Imagine the reaction in the United States if
Havana proclaimed Osama bin Laden Day?
Washington's commitment to fighting terrorism
can be further questioned in light of its support of the ethnic
Albanians in Kosovo who comprised the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The KLA, in furtherance of its political-ethnic agenda, have carried
out numerous terrorist attacks for years in various parts of the
Balkans, but they've been US allies because they've attacked people
out of favor with Washington. This despite the fact that the KLA
has had ideological and personal ties to Osama bin Laden and al
Qaeda, and despite being categorized as a terrorist organization
by the US State Department.
Moreover, in the 1980s and 90s, anti-communist
Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians resident in the United States
financed and instigated their countrymen abroad in bombings and
other attacks on their governments and citizens, hoping to destabilize
those governments; at times they traveled from the US to those
countries to carry out attacks themselves; these actions-terrorism
by definition-were carried out with the tacit approval of the
American government, which turned a blind eye to the Neutrality
Act, which prohibits American citizens or residents from using
force to overthrow a foreign government.
George W. Bush has also spoken out vehemently
against harboring terrorists-"those who harbor terrorists
threaten the national security of the United States". Does
he really mean that?
We must ask: Which country harbors more
terrorists than the United States? Orlando
Bosch is only one of the numerous anti-Castro
Cubans in Miami who have carried out many hundreds of terrorist
acts, in the US, in Cuba, and elsewhere; all kinds of arson attacks,
assassination attempts and bombings. They have been harbored in
the US in safety for decades; as have numerous other friendly
terrorists, torturers and human rights violators from Guatemala,
El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia and elsewhere, all allies of the
empire.
The CIA was busy looking for terrorists
in caves in the mountains of Afghanistan at the same time as the
Agency sat in bars in Miami having drinks with terrorists.
The Imperial Mafia
What are we to make of all this? How are
we to understand United States foreign policy? Well, if one were
to write a book called "The American Empire for Dummies",
page one should say: Don't ever look for the moral factor. US
foreign policy has no moral factor built into its DNA. One must
clear one's mind of that baggage which only gets in the way of
seeing beyond the clichés and the platitudes.
It's rather difficult for most Americans
and Americophiles throughout the world to accept such a notion.
They see American leaders on television smiling and laughing,
telling jokes; they see them with their families, hear them speak
of God and love, of peace and law, of democracy and freedom, of
human rights and justice, and even baseball. These leaders know
how to condemn the world's atrocities in no uncertain terms, with
just the right words that decent people love to hear, just the
right catch in their throat to show how moved they are. How can
such people be monsters, how can they be called immoral?
They have names like George and Dick and
Donald, not a single Mohammed or Abdullah in the bunch. And they
all speak English. People named Mohammed or Abdullah cut off people's
hands as punishment for theft. Americans know that that's horrible.
Americans are too civilized for that. But people named George
and Dick and Donald drop cluster bombs on cities and villages,
and the many unexploded ones become land mines, and before very
long a child picks one up or steps on one of them and loses an
arm or a leg, or both arms or both legs, and sometimes their eyesight;
while the cluster bombs which actually explode create their own
kind of high-velocity, jagged steel horror.
But these men [ American leaders] are
perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that
they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's
that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about
a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda
of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations
gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the
death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to
them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other
people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars
and who come home-the ones who make it back alive-with Agent Orange
or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders
would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered
by such things.
When I was writing my book Rogue State
during 1999-2000 I used the term "American Empire" with
some caution because it was not in common usage and I wasn't sure
the American public was quite ready for the idea. But I needn't
have been so cautious. The idea of United States world hegemony
has come to be discussed not only openly, but proudly, by supporters
of the empire-prominent American intellectuals such as Dinesh
D'Souza of the Hoover Institution, who wrote an article entitled
"In praise of American empire", in which he argued that
"America is the most magnanimous imperial power ever."
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer
has spoken of America's "uniquely benign imperium.
Michael Hirsch, editor of Newsweek magazine,
added to the chorus of self-love songs with this: "U.S. allies
must accept that some U.S. unilateralism is inevitable, even desirable.
This mainly involves accepting the reality of America's supreme
might-and truthfully, appreciating how historically lucky they
are to be protected by such a relatively benign power. "
Robert Kagan, a leading light of the American
foreign policy establishment, had written earlier: "And the
truth is that the benevolent hegemony exercised by the United
States is good for a vast portion of the world's population. It
is certainly a better international arrangement than all realistic
alternatives."
In this way are people who are wedded
to American foreign policy able to live with it-they conclude,
and proclaim, and may even believe, that such policies produce
a humane force, an enlightened empire, bringing order, prosperity
and civilized behavior everywhere, and if the US is forced to
go to war it conducts it in a humanitarian manner.
... the present book documents in minute
detail the exact opposite, showing the remarkable violence and
cruelty, the suppression of social change, and the many other
abhorrent consequences of US interventions for people in every
corner of the globe for half a century.
The empire's scribes appear to be as amoral
as the officials in the White House and the Pentagon. After all,
the particles of depleted uranium are not lodging inside their
lungs to radiate for the rest of their lives; the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund are not bankrupting their economy
and slashing their basic services; it's not their families wandering
as refugees in the desert.
The leaders of the empire, the imperial
mafia-George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Colin Powell,
Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, et al.- and their
scribes as well, are as fanatic and as fundamentalist as Osama
bin Laden. Allah Akhbar! God is great! ... USA! USA! USA!
[Robert] Kagan, an intellectual architect
of an interventionism that seeks to impose a neo-conservative
agenda upon the world, by any means necessary, has declared that
the United States must refuse to abide by certain international
conventions, like the international criminal court and the Kyoto
accord on global warming. The US, he says, "must support
arms control, but not always for itself. It must live by a double
standard."
There is also Robert Cooper, a senior
British diplomat and advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blalr. Cooper
writes:
The challenge to the postmodern world
is to get used to the idea of double standards. When dealing with
more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent
of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier
era-force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary
to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world
of every state for itself.
His expression, "every state for
itself", can be better understood as any state not willing
to accede to the agenda of the American Empire and the school
bully's best friend in London.
So there we have it. The double standard
is in. The golden rule of do unto others as you would have others
do unto you is out.
The imperial mafia, and their court intellectuals
like Kagan and Cooper, have a difficult time selling or defending
their world vision on the basis of legal, moral, ethical or fairness
standards. Thus it is that they decide they're not bound by such
standards.
The Liquid Gold, Again
The American occupation of Afghanistan
served the purpose of setting up a new government that would be
sufficiently amenable to Washington's international objectives,
including the installation of military bases and listening stations
and the running of secure oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan
from the Caspian Sea region once the country had been pacified.
For years, the American oil barons had
had their eyes on the vast oil and gas reserves around the Caspian
Sea, envisioning an Afghanistan-Pakistan route to the Indian Ocean.
The oilmen had been quite open about this, giving frank testimony
before Congress on the matter.
After Afghanistan, they turned their lust
to the even greater oil reserves of Iraq. Once again, the American
public had to be primed. Renowned espionage novelist John le Carre
has observed: "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting
America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the
great public relations conjuring tricks of history."
As this is written in April 2003, the
United States has just completed the bombing, invasion and takeover
of the beleaguered Iraqi society, causing great destruction, killing
thousands of innocent people-civilians and soldiers-in the process,
leaving countless others maimed and otherwise ruined. "It
looks like it's a bombing of a city, but it isn't," declared
US Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld, in defense of American "precision
bombing."
Washington looked at the results of its
military actions, which others would call horrific, and labeled
it "liberation", because the Saddam Hussein regime had
been overthrown.
Prior to this, the imperial mafia had
staged a year-long propaganda show to convince Americans and the
world that the world's only superpower had no choice but to attack
a sovereign and crippled country that had not attacked the United
States, that had not threatened to attack the United States, that
knew it would mean instant mass suicide for them if they attacked
the United States. The imperial mafia's thesis was odd not simply
because Iraq was not a threat-as the war's easy military victory
demonstrated-but because the imperial mafia knew that Iraq was
not a threat, at all. They'd been telling the world one story
after another about why Iraq was a threat, an imminent threat,
a threat increasing in danger with each passing day, a nuclear
threat, a chemical threat, a biological threat, that Iraq was
a terrorist state, that Iraq was tied to al Qaeda ... only to
have each story amount to nothing. They insisted repeatedly that
Iraq must agree to having the UN weapons inspectors back in, and
when Iraq agreed to this the imperial mafia declared that it wasn't
good enough and proceeded to disparage the effort.
For it was war that the White House yearned
for, and it was war that they got, as they thumbed their nose
at the greatest anti-war protests the world has ever seen as well
as the sweeping opposition of the United Nations and humanity's
hard-won concepts of international law and collaboration for a
more peaceful planet. It remains to be seen whether and how the
world body will survive being relegated to humiliating irrelevance
on the most important question that it can face, the UN being
an institution which declared in the very first sentence of its
Charter the determination "to save succeeding generations
from the scourge of war, which twice in our life-time has brought
untold sorrow to mankind."
Did any of Washington's policy make sense?
This sudden urgency of fighting a war in the absence of a fight?
It did if one understood that the invasion was not about Sadaam
Hussein's evilness or his alleged weapons of mass destruction.
When weeks of US military occupation of Iraq failed to uncover
any such weapons, the White House declared that WMD were not,
after all, the real reason for the invasion. What they were really
doing, they assured the world, was delivering various blows to
terrorism. "We were not Iying," said one official. "But
it was just a matter of emphasis."
Amongst other reasons, the war was about
the US replacing Hussein and installing a puppet government, as
it did in Afghanistan; in this case an American occupation government,
enabling American oil companies to move into Iraq to enjoy a laissez-faire
feast; at the same time opening the country to all manner of transnational
corporations as Iraq takes its place in the new world order of
globalized economies, and the American Empire adds another country
and a few more bases from which to further control and remake
the Middle East in the imperial mafia's endearing amoral style,
for which, presumably, the children of the region will sing great
songs in years to come.
US agreement to allow the UN weapons inspectors
to return to Iraq in December 2002 had been no more than a bluff
to cater to unexpectedly strong world opposition to Washington's
planned invasion. Three months of inspections before the invasion
began turned up nothing in the way of unambiguously prohibited
weapons. Over the course of about seven years in the 1990s the
UN inspectors had found and destroyed huge amounts of chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq. Scott Ritter, chief UN
weapons inspector in Iraq, stated in 2002 that:
Since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally
disarmed; 90-9S% of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been
verifiably eliminated. This includes all of the factories used
to produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and long-range
ballistic missiles; the associated equipment of these factories;
and the vast majority of the products coming out of these factories.
In the same period, the director general
of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei,
reported that his agency had:
dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related
facilities. We neutralized Iraq's nuclear program. We confiscated
its weapon-usable material. We destroyed, removed or rendered
harmless all its facilities and equipment relevant to nuclear
weapons production.
This, then, was the alarming threat of
Iraq which had to be wiped out, a society already terribly enfeebled
by 12 years of sanctions, which US National Security Advisor Samuel
Berger called "the most pervasive sanctions ever imposed
on a nation in the history of mankind".
US Foreign Policy: A Laboratory for Growing
the Anti-American Terrorism Virus
"We leveled it. There was nobody
left, just dirt and dust."
US Army Major Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck,
speaking of the destruction of three villages in the Shahikot
Valley in Afghanistan.
The American bombing of Afghanistan, begun
on 7 October 2001 and followed by a military occupation of much
of the country, gave rise to dozens of terrorist actions against
American individuals and institutions, as well as Christian and
other Western targets, in South Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere;
a dozen or so attacks in Pakistan alone (including the kidnapping
and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pear and
the most disastrous one in Bali, Indonesia, on 12 October, which
killed more than 180 people, almost all Australians, Americans,
or British; the two leading suspects arrested in that case each
stated that he had acted in retaliation for the US attack on Afghanistan
and Muslims.
The subsequent attack on Iraq-a war nobody
wanted except the imperial mafia-may have recruited thousands
more throughout the Muslim world as the next generation of terrorists
to carry out the jihad against The Great Satan.
Has the American power elite learned anything
from being the frequent target of terrorism over the years? Here's
James Woolsey, former Director of the CIA and member of the Defense
Department's Policy Board, speaking two months after the beginning
of the US bombing of Afghanistan, advocating an invasion of Iraq
and unconcerned about the response of the Arab world: The silence
of the Arab public in the wake of America's victories in Afghanistan,
Woolsey said, proves that "only fear will re-establish respect
for the U.S."
In a similar light, a phrase attributed
to various leaders of the Roman Empire has been used by Bush administration
officials: oderint dum metuant-"Let them hate so long as
they fear."
The State Department may have learned
something. At the time of the first anniversary of the 11 September
2001 terrorist attack and subsequently as well, the Department
held conferences on how to improve America's image abroad in order
to reduce the level of hatred. But it's image they were working
on, not change of policies. And the policies scorecard reads as
follows: From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow
more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist
movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process,
the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several
million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of
agony and despair.
"The idea is to build an antiterrorist
global environment," a senior Defense Department official
told the New York Times in 2003, "so that in 20 to 30 years,
terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited."
The world can only wonder this: When will
American wars of aggression, firing missiles into the heart of
a city, and using depleted uranium and cluster bombs against the
population become completely discredited?
They already have become such, but the
United States, which wages war on the same scale other nations
apply to mere survival, does not yet know it. Instead, it practices
perpetual war for perpetual peace.
Killing
Hope
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