2007-03-14
2007 posts
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The invasion of Iraq was a natural extension of US Foreign Policy
Iraq descends into chaos. Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and co. target Syria and Iran, possibly Libya, North Korea and Cuba. It is time to address the long-standing collective amnesia of Western governments and media in relation to American war crimes and geo-political machinations.
Let us begin with the reasons for attacking Iraq. It was for oil. The US possesses only 2% of the world’s oil reserves whilst consuming 26% of global oil production. The Bush family fortune is in oil. Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have both sat on the boards of oil companies. Condoleezza is so revered by the oil companies that Chevron named an oil tanker after her. The oil companies funded Bush’s Presidential campaign to the tune of $26m and Republican candidates in last year’s Senate elections to the tune of $18m. Of course it was about oil.
Secondly, after 9/11 Bush, the FBI and the CIA were accused of incompetence for not having prevented the attack. What better way of sweeping all that away than having a glorious little war – one that you think you can’t lose? So it’s about oil and it’s about Bush’s electoral needs, but it’s about much more than that – it’s about fulfilling an American project to become the new Roman Empire, bestriding the world, bullying countries at will to hand over their raw materials.
A history of interventions
This is not new, the project for first regional, and later global world dominance has been operative since the turn of the century. Throughout the last 100 years the United States has invaded countries, it has overthrown governments, it has assassinated foreign leaders and installed puppets in their place, and it has instigated and assisted in massacres and genocides in order to maintain those puppets in power.
In 1900 the US seized the Philippines from Spain, an estimated 600,000 civilians died. In 1901 they occupied those parts of Panama needed to control the canal. In 1903 they marched into Honduras to protect a dictator from a popular uprising. Between 1912 and 1933 they occupied Nicaragua. They created the Nicaraguan National Guard and installed dictator General Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. In 1935, General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua, said: "[I was] a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism – I helped purify Nicaragua for [an] international banking house." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it another way. "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
Between 1914 and 1934 the US occupied Haiti. Between 1916 and 1924 they occupied the Dominican Republic. Between 1917 and 1933 they occupied Cuba. In 1925 the Marines suppressed a general strike in Panama. In 1932 they sent warships to El Salvador to assist dictator General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in quelling a peasants’ revolt - the massacre of some 30,000 peasants followed.
None of this was done to protect the US from potential terrorists or global communism, all of it was done to keep open the flow of raw materials from these countries to the US.
Of course, in WW2 the US was on the side of the angels, helping to defeat the fascism of Nazi Germany and the militarism of Hirohito’s Japan. But self-interest continued to be a driving force. In March 1943, as the genocide of the Jews reached new heights, the US State Dept., at this time in full knowledge of the final solution, refused to open their borders to 70,000 Rumanian Jewish children under the age of 14 under a deal brokered by the World Jewish Congress and the Gestapo Chief in Bucharest. The 70,000 children went to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In May 1944, Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Gestapo’s Bureau for Jewish Affairs offered the lives of a million Hungarian Jews to the US and the UK if they would but open their frontiers. Again, both governments refused. Those one million Hungarian Jews also ended their days in the crematoria at Auschwitz - to much hand wringing form the Allies. In his memoirs, as he stood trial for mass murder, Eichmann wrote: ‘The plain fact was that there was no place on earth that would have been ready to accept the Jews.’
In 1953 the CIA, active as ever, overthrew a democratic government in Iran and installed a puppet dictator. In 1954, after the Guatemalan government nationalised the fruit industry, thus threatening the profits of the US-owned United Fruit Company, the US invaded, overthrew the country’s constitutional democracy and installed another dictator.
Genocide on a massive scale example 1: Vietnam
In 1960 the US moved first military advisers, then troops in to South Vietnam to prop up an unpopular dictatorship. Between 1965 and 1973 Two million Vietnamese died – the vast majority being civilians. The Americans lost 57,000 men to those 2m Vietnamese. That is not war, it is genocide. For good measure they also carpet-bombed neighbouring Cambodia – murdering another 2m innocent civilians. So that’s 4m dead in Vietnam & Cambodia.
Genocide on a massive scale example 2: Indonesia
In 1965 a leftist government in Indonesia promised land reform. The CIA instigated and assisted in a coup which left over 1 million people dead. Another genocide. The CIA and American Embassy staff were daily giving lists of people they wanted executing to the newly installed puppet rulers. Reports at the time tell of rivers being unpassable for months because they were full of bloated bodies, and of off-shore fishermen stopping work, too distressed at having to cut away bodies tangled in their nets.
Terminating the threat of a good example 1: Chile
Chile, 1973, is a particularly instructive case. Why? Well at the moment the Bush regime are talking about using a ‘liberated’ Iraq to create a bastion of democracy in a sea of dictatorship, which will then hopefully spread democracy to neighbouring countries throughout the Middle East. In 1973 Salvadore Allende was elected as the Socialist President of Chile – there was dancing in the streets. The Allende government was committed to a programme of social reform, to wrestle economic power from the very wealthy few whilst providing education and social welfare for the poor. This was hailed as a model for the whole of Latin America. A wonderful opportunity for democracy to spread throughout the region. Tens of British MPs and hundreds of British students and trade unionists went over to Chile to join in the celebrations.
What was the response of the USA to this? Did they rejoice in this new democracy? Henry Kissinger, then chief advisor to President Nixon vowed not to rest until Salvador Allende was removed from power. The US sent in the CIA and eventually the Chilean military overthrew the democratic government. They murdered Allende and herded thousands of students, trade unionists and supporters of his government into the national soccer stadium, many for summary execution. Amongst those who died was Chilean educator, theatre director, poet, folk singer-songwriter, and political activist Victor Jara. Jara was repeatedly beaten and tortured; the bones in his hands were broken as were the bones of his ribs. The generals then ruled the country with an iron rod – dissent routinely brought the military or a death squad to the door. It took 20 years for democracy to return to Chile. And of course, the model for democracy was lost – dictators in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala continued to repress their populations and all continued to be good friends of the US.
Terminating the threat of a good example 2: Nicaragua
In 1979 the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua in a relatively bloodless revolution which overthrew the vicious dictator & tyrant, Somosa. The Sandinistas increased the meagre wages of urban workers and brought in land reform to assist the rural poor. They installed a literacy campaign the likes of which had never before been seen in Latin America, teaching the nation’s youth to read and write for the first time. As with Chile a decade earlier, across the region poor and oppressed peoples began to look to Nicaragua as a beacon of comparative modernity and prosperity and they began to question their own repressed and impoverished condition. The Response of Reagan’s America was to mine Nicaraguan harbours and create an army of torturers, murderers and rapists, the Contras, who from 1981-1990 continuously invaded areas of the country.
The School of the Americas: Murder incorporated.
Much of the training of the contras took place at Fort Benning, Georgia, at ‘The School of the Americas’ where since 1946 the American Green Berets have trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and police. Among its graduates are Central and South America’s most notorious dictators, torturers and mass murderers. Next door to Nicaragua lies El Salvador – where between 1981 and 1992 US trained death squads murdered 75,000 people - trade unionists, students, priests, nuns, children anyone who questioned the dictatorship and many just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. US trained death squads operated throughout central America over the last 2 decades – countless dead in Guatemala & Honduras, 800,000 people displaced from their homes freeing the terror.
And this is not, as they would have us believe, something regrettable but in the dim and distant past. The school for torture at Fort Benning, Georgia, remains fully operational and it’s doing a roaring trade. The CIA remains by far and away the largest terrorist organisation in the world, it has operatives in virtually every country in the world. The death squads continue across Latin America and the CIA continues to covertly overthrow foreign governments – in April 2002 the Observer Newspaper reported that the failed coup against the Chavez government in Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials (including Elliot Abrams) in the US government who had given the nod to the Venezuelan military to go ahead. It appears that little changes. Indeed, one of the key reasons that popular leftist movements have been able to regain ground in Latin America is because the US has over extended itself in military adventures elsewhere.
The Project for the New American Century
The thinking of the American Government is now dominated by a think tank called The Project for the New American Century. Who’s in this think tank? There’s Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb, Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff), and convicted Iran-Contra felon Elliot Abrams (National Security Council). And what are their aims and principles for the new century? Nothing less than US global domination - a ‘global Pax Americana.’ A confidential report leaked from the Think Tank in September 2000 called for the toppling of Saddam Hussein as the starting point:
‘While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein’.
The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, proposes the wider strategic aim of ‘maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'. The report also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission' and describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'.
Assistant Secretary of State, Elizabeth Jones, mirrored these views: “When the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long term plans and interests in this region”. So the US now has bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan – all bordering the former Soviet Bloc., all potential future flashpoints.
In January the US moved into Djibouti, ostensibly to widen its war against terror, whilst, surprise, surprise, gaining strategic control over the Bab alMandab – one of the world’s two most important oil shipping lanes. It already controls the other one, the straits of Hormuz. Last year it began negotiations to establish a military base in Sao Tome and Principe, from which it can, if it chooses, dominate West Africa’s principal oilfields. By pure good fortune, the US government now exercises strategic control over almost all the world’s major oil producing regions and oil transporting corridors.
There are some very good people in America opposed to all that Bush is doing: Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, human rights organisations such as The Americas Watch, and the tens of thousands of people marching against the war from North to South – the biggest demonstrations since the Vietnam War. Unfortunately they are not in control of the American Body Politique.
So where does that leave us today? Since Bush came to power the US administration has wilfully turned its back on a host of military and environmental treaties so that its armed forces and industrial giants can continue to act as they deem necessary to maintain American military and economic dominance.
It has walked away from the Kyoto accords which aimed to limit Greenhouse gas emissions, it has torn up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and it is pushing forward with its designs for a star wars capability, so threatening a new arms race. U.S. military spending ($343 billion in the year 2000) is 69 percent greater than that of the next five highest nations combined. Russia, which has the second largest military budget, spends less than one-sixth what the United States does. Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and Syria spend $14.4 billion combined. The current US administration is developing ‘mini nukes’ to use on conventional battlefields. It has blocked a treaty to ban biological weapons and has effectively neutered international agreements on chemical weapons by insisting on a veto of inspections of US facilities and it has adopted an aggressive pre-emptive strike policy against those states it either considers a future potential threat or those whose way of life or form of polity it simply does not like.
Perhaps most telling of all, it has refused to join the rest of the civilised world in ratifying the International Criminal Court whose role it is to try war criminals – hardly surprising given the excesses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the illegal practice of extraordinary rendition, to say nothing of the deaths of 600,000 Iraquis, the majority being civilians killed by indiscriminate bombing and shelling. Considering the course on which the administration appears bent, the last thing Bush and his team want to see is the effective prosecution of war criminals. Henry Kissinger might also be a tad concerned. The United States has become the world’s number one rogue state.
References
John Stockwell, The Secret Wars of the CIA at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Stockwell/John_Stockwell.html
Philip Agee, Inside the Company, Penguin, 1975.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/Cards_Index.html
Christopher Hitchins, The Trial Of Henry Kissinger, Verso Press, 2001. (Download excerpts at: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Trial_Kissinger_Hitchins.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/
Pearce, Jenny, Under the Eagle: US Intervention in Central America and the
Caribbean, London: Latin America Bureau, 1981.
Barry, T.. B. Wood and D. Preusch. 1983. Dollars and Dictators: A Guide to Central America. Grove Press, Inc. New York.
Bertrand Russell, War Crimes in Vietnam. London, Allen & Unwin, 1967.
Chomsky Year 501: The Conquest Continues (download free on:
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-contents.html)
Michael Moore, Stupid White Men Harper/Collins 2002.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
Why do People hate America? Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies, Icon Bookds ltd, Cambridge, 2002.
Reagan for Beginners, David Smith & Melinda Gebbie, Writers & Readers Publishing Coop, London, 1984.
LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.,1983.
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
Americas Watch at http://www.peacenowar.net/Americas/
http://www.zmag.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html
George Monbiot, Backyard terrorism (Fort Benning) The Guardian,
Tuesday October 30, 2001.
George Monbiot A wilful blindness (The Project for The New American Century) The Guardian, Tuesday March 11, 2003
Neil Mackay, Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President [Scottish] Sunday Herald - 15 September 2002
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm
Ed Vulliamy, Venezuela coup linked to Bush team, The Observer, Sunday April 21, 2002
http://www.wakeupmag.co.uk/articles/cia.htm
‘US and Chile During the Allende Years’, Hearings, Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, US Government Printing Office 1975: 302
‘The ITT Co. and Chile 1970-71’, Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, June 21, 1973: 1-20
‘Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973,’ Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, Senate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Jara
Forged in Fury, Chapt 4, Michael Elkins, Piatkus, Essex, 1981.
From Statesofunrest.com
The invasion of Iraq was a natural extension of US Foreign Policy
Iraq descends into chaos. Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and co. target Syria and Iran, possibly Libya, North Korea and Cuba. It is time to address the long-standing collective amnesia of Western governments and media in relation to American war crimes and geo-political machinations.
Let us begin with the reasons for attacking Iraq. It was for oil. The US possesses only 2% of the world’s oil reserves whilst consuming 26% of global oil production. The Bush family fortune is in oil. Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice have both sat on the boards of oil companies. Condoleezza is so revered by the oil companies that Chevron named an oil tanker after her. The oil companies funded Bush’s Presidential campaign to the tune of $26m and Republican candidates in last year’s Senate elections to the tune of $18m. Of course it was about oil.
Secondly, after 9/11 Bush, the FBI and the CIA were accused of incompetence for not having prevented the attack. What better way of sweeping all that away than having a glorious little war – one that you think you can’t lose? So it’s about oil and it’s about Bush’s electoral needs, but it’s about much more than that – it’s about fulfilling an American project to become the new Roman Empire, bestriding the world, bullying countries at will to hand over their raw materials.
A history of interventions
This is not new, the project for first regional, and later global world dominance has been operative since the turn of the century. Throughout the last 100 years the United States has invaded countries, it has overthrown governments, it has assassinated foreign leaders and installed puppets in their place, and it has instigated and assisted in massacres and genocides in order to maintain those puppets in power.
In 1900 the US seized the Philippines from Spain, an estimated 600,000 civilians died. In 1901 they occupied those parts of Panama needed to control the canal. In 1903 they marched into Honduras to protect a dictator from a popular uprising. Between 1912 and 1933 they occupied Nicaragua. They created the Nicaraguan National Guard and installed dictator General Anastasio Somoza Garcia in power. In 1935, General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua, said: "[I was] a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the banks. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism – I helped purify Nicaragua for [an] international banking house." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it another way. "Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."
Between 1914 and 1934 the US occupied Haiti. Between 1916 and 1924 they occupied the Dominican Republic. Between 1917 and 1933 they occupied Cuba. In 1925 the Marines suppressed a general strike in Panama. In 1932 they sent warships to El Salvador to assist dictator General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in quelling a peasants’ revolt - the massacre of some 30,000 peasants followed.
None of this was done to protect the US from potential terrorists or global communism, all of it was done to keep open the flow of raw materials from these countries to the US.
Of course, in WW2 the US was on the side of the angels, helping to defeat the fascism of Nazi Germany and the militarism of Hirohito’s Japan. But self-interest continued to be a driving force. In March 1943, as the genocide of the Jews reached new heights, the US State Dept., at this time in full knowledge of the final solution, refused to open their borders to 70,000 Rumanian Jewish children under the age of 14 under a deal brokered by the World Jewish Congress and the Gestapo Chief in Bucharest. The 70,000 children went to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. In May 1944, Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Gestapo’s Bureau for Jewish Affairs offered the lives of a million Hungarian Jews to the US and the UK if they would but open their frontiers. Again, both governments refused. Those one million Hungarian Jews also ended their days in the crematoria at Auschwitz - to much hand wringing form the Allies. In his memoirs, as he stood trial for mass murder, Eichmann wrote: ‘The plain fact was that there was no place on earth that would have been ready to accept the Jews.’
In 1953 the CIA, active as ever, overthrew a democratic government in Iran and installed a puppet dictator. In 1954, after the Guatemalan government nationalised the fruit industry, thus threatening the profits of the US-owned United Fruit Company, the US invaded, overthrew the country’s constitutional democracy and installed another dictator.
Genocide on a massive scale example 1: Vietnam
In 1960 the US moved first military advisers, then troops in to South Vietnam to prop up an unpopular dictatorship. Between 1965 and 1973 Two million Vietnamese died – the vast majority being civilians. The Americans lost 57,000 men to those 2m Vietnamese. That is not war, it is genocide. For good measure they also carpet-bombed neighbouring Cambodia – murdering another 2m innocent civilians. So that’s 4m dead in Vietnam & Cambodia.
Genocide on a massive scale example 2: Indonesia
In 1965 a leftist government in Indonesia promised land reform. The CIA instigated and assisted in a coup which left over 1 million people dead. Another genocide. The CIA and American Embassy staff were daily giving lists of people they wanted executing to the newly installed puppet rulers. Reports at the time tell of rivers being unpassable for months because they were full of bloated bodies, and of off-shore fishermen stopping work, too distressed at having to cut away bodies tangled in their nets.
Terminating the threat of a good example 1: Chile
Chile, 1973, is a particularly instructive case. Why? Well at the moment the Bush regime are talking about using a ‘liberated’ Iraq to create a bastion of democracy in a sea of dictatorship, which will then hopefully spread democracy to neighbouring countries throughout the Middle East. In 1973 Salvadore Allende was elected as the Socialist President of Chile – there was dancing in the streets. The Allende government was committed to a programme of social reform, to wrestle economic power from the very wealthy few whilst providing education and social welfare for the poor. This was hailed as a model for the whole of Latin America. A wonderful opportunity for democracy to spread throughout the region. Tens of British MPs and hundreds of British students and trade unionists went over to Chile to join in the celebrations.
What was the response of the USA to this? Did they rejoice in this new democracy? Henry Kissinger, then chief advisor to President Nixon vowed not to rest until Salvador Allende was removed from power. The US sent in the CIA and eventually the Chilean military overthrew the democratic government. They murdered Allende and herded thousands of students, trade unionists and supporters of his government into the national soccer stadium, many for summary execution. Amongst those who died was Chilean educator, theatre director, poet, folk singer-songwriter, and political activist Victor Jara. Jara was repeatedly beaten and tortured; the bones in his hands were broken as were the bones of his ribs. The generals then ruled the country with an iron rod – dissent routinely brought the military or a death squad to the door. It took 20 years for democracy to return to Chile. And of course, the model for democracy was lost – dictators in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala continued to repress their populations and all continued to be good friends of the US.
Terminating the threat of a good example 2: Nicaragua
In 1979 the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua in a relatively bloodless revolution which overthrew the vicious dictator & tyrant, Somosa. The Sandinistas increased the meagre wages of urban workers and brought in land reform to assist the rural poor. They installed a literacy campaign the likes of which had never before been seen in Latin America, teaching the nation’s youth to read and write for the first time. As with Chile a decade earlier, across the region poor and oppressed peoples began to look to Nicaragua as a beacon of comparative modernity and prosperity and they began to question their own repressed and impoverished condition. The Response of Reagan’s America was to mine Nicaraguan harbours and create an army of torturers, murderers and rapists, the Contras, who from 1981-1990 continuously invaded areas of the country.
The School of the Americas: Murder incorporated.
Much of the training of the contras took place at Fort Benning, Georgia, at ‘The School of the Americas’ where since 1946 the American Green Berets have trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers and police. Among its graduates are Central and South America’s most notorious dictators, torturers and mass murderers. Next door to Nicaragua lies El Salvador – where between 1981 and 1992 US trained death squads murdered 75,000 people - trade unionists, students, priests, nuns, children anyone who questioned the dictatorship and many just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. US trained death squads operated throughout central America over the last 2 decades – countless dead in Guatemala & Honduras, 800,000 people displaced from their homes freeing the terror.
And this is not, as they would have us believe, something regrettable but in the dim and distant past. The school for torture at Fort Benning, Georgia, remains fully operational and it’s doing a roaring trade. The CIA remains by far and away the largest terrorist organisation in the world, it has operatives in virtually every country in the world. The death squads continue across Latin America and the CIA continues to covertly overthrow foreign governments – in April 2002 the Observer Newspaper reported that the failed coup against the Chavez government in Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials (including Elliot Abrams) in the US government who had given the nod to the Venezuelan military to go ahead. It appears that little changes. Indeed, one of the key reasons that popular leftist movements have been able to regain ground in Latin America is because the US has over extended itself in military adventures elsewhere.
The Project for the New American Century
The thinking of the American Government is now dominated by a think tank called The Project for the New American Century. Who’s in this think tank? There’s Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), George W Bush's younger brother Jeb, Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff), and convicted Iran-Contra felon Elliot Abrams (National Security Council). And what are their aims and principles for the new century? Nothing less than US global domination - a ‘global Pax Americana.’ A confidential report leaked from the Think Tank in September 2000 called for the toppling of Saddam Hussein as the starting point:
‘While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein’.
The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, proposes the wider strategic aim of ‘maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests'. The report also calls for the US to 'fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars' as a 'core mission' and describes American armed forces abroad as 'the cavalry on the new American frontier'.
Assistant Secretary of State, Elizabeth Jones, mirrored these views: “When the Afghan conflict is over we will not leave Central Asia. We have long term plans and interests in this region”. So the US now has bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan – all bordering the former Soviet Bloc., all potential future flashpoints.
In January the US moved into Djibouti, ostensibly to widen its war against terror, whilst, surprise, surprise, gaining strategic control over the Bab alMandab – one of the world’s two most important oil shipping lanes. It already controls the other one, the straits of Hormuz. Last year it began negotiations to establish a military base in Sao Tome and Principe, from which it can, if it chooses, dominate West Africa’s principal oilfields. By pure good fortune, the US government now exercises strategic control over almost all the world’s major oil producing regions and oil transporting corridors.
There are some very good people in America opposed to all that Bush is doing: Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, human rights organisations such as The Americas Watch, and the tens of thousands of people marching against the war from North to South – the biggest demonstrations since the Vietnam War. Unfortunately they are not in control of the American Body Politique.
So where does that leave us today? Since Bush came to power the US administration has wilfully turned its back on a host of military and environmental treaties so that its armed forces and industrial giants can continue to act as they deem necessary to maintain American military and economic dominance.
It has walked away from the Kyoto accords which aimed to limit Greenhouse gas emissions, it has torn up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and it is pushing forward with its designs for a star wars capability, so threatening a new arms race. U.S. military spending ($343 billion in the year 2000) is 69 percent greater than that of the next five highest nations combined. Russia, which has the second largest military budget, spends less than one-sixth what the United States does. Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and Syria spend $14.4 billion combined. The current US administration is developing ‘mini nukes’ to use on conventional battlefields. It has blocked a treaty to ban biological weapons and has effectively neutered international agreements on chemical weapons by insisting on a veto of inspections of US facilities and it has adopted an aggressive pre-emptive strike policy against those states it either considers a future potential threat or those whose way of life or form of polity it simply does not like.
Perhaps most telling of all, it has refused to join the rest of the civilised world in ratifying the International Criminal Court whose role it is to try war criminals – hardly surprising given the excesses at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and the illegal practice of extraordinary rendition, to say nothing of the deaths of 600,000 Iraquis, the majority being civilians killed by indiscriminate bombing and shelling. Considering the course on which the administration appears bent, the last thing Bush and his team want to see is the effective prosecution of war criminals. Henry Kissinger might also be a tad concerned. The United States has become the world’s number one rogue state.
References
John Stockwell, The Secret Wars of the CIA at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Stockwell/John_Stockwell.html
Philip Agee, Inside the Company, Penguin, 1975.
http://home.iprimus.com.au/korob/fdtcards/Cards_Index.html
Christopher Hitchins, The Trial Of Henry Kissinger, Verso Press, 2001. (Download excerpts at: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Kissinger/Trial_Kissinger_Hitchins.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/
Pearce, Jenny, Under the Eagle: US Intervention in Central America and the
Caribbean, London: Latin America Bureau, 1981.
Barry, T.. B. Wood and D. Preusch. 1983. Dollars and Dictators: A Guide to Central America. Grove Press, Inc. New York.
Bertrand Russell, War Crimes in Vietnam. London, Allen & Unwin, 1967.
Chomsky Year 501: The Conquest Continues (download free on:
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/year/year-contents.html)
Michael Moore, Stupid White Men Harper/Collins 2002.
http://www.michaelmoore.com/
Why do People hate America? Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies, Icon Bookds ltd, Cambridge, 2002.
Reagan for Beginners, David Smith & Melinda Gebbie, Writers & Readers Publishing Coop, London, 1984.
LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.,1983.
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
Americas Watch at http://www.peacenowar.net/Americas/
http://www.zmag.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html
George Monbiot, Backyard terrorism (Fort Benning) The Guardian,
Tuesday October 30, 2001.
George Monbiot A wilful blindness (The Project for The New American Century) The Guardian, Tuesday March 11, 2003
Neil Mackay, Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President [Scottish] Sunday Herald - 15 September 2002
http://www.newamericancentury.org/publicationsreports.htm
Ed Vulliamy, Venezuela coup linked to Bush team, The Observer, Sunday April 21, 2002
http://www.wakeupmag.co.uk/articles/cia.htm
‘US and Chile During the Allende Years’, Hearings, Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, US Government Printing Office 1975: 302
‘The ITT Co. and Chile 1970-71’, Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, June 21, 1973: 1-20
‘Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973,’ Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, Senate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Jara
Forged in Fury, Chapt 4, Michael Elkins, Piatkus, Essex, 1981.
I have just found your site in searches. From a few things you said it seems you deal with the same kind of comments from the sleeping ones. I am sorry if they seem to be stupid and rude when they post attacks on those that think for themself and speak the sad truth. Keep spreading the word they have to wake up sometime. I hope so anyway I have said that for so many years.
I have a page at IraqVideos.net if you want to link to or use anything there. Good luck with things here,
Leigh
66No war is pleasant. If it wasn't a war, it would be called something else. Innocent people, i.e. women and children, dying is horrible in all accounts. However, we (U.S.A.) have lost 3,000+ in an effort to limit the amount of these loses. Keeping the civilian loss to a minimum is all political and restrains our military might and ergo we lose our own in the effort. What we should have done, from the get "go" is to have delt them an iron fist. With that, this war would have been long over.
And, in addition to my last entry, who are you people to cry about world affairs? What does Canada do internationally? You're as respondant as the country of Chad! Everyone has something bad to say about the U.S. but you all want our aid when something in your pathetic country goes awry.
Hello,
I think that you as a citizen are entitled to your own opinion, i respect that.I do not think that all of amereica is infected with racism and nationalism as you do.I am 17 years old serving in the army.I do not view iraqi deaths as a trophy or an achievement.I fight for the freedom of every citizen and i fight due to the fact that the iraqi citizens are under immense torture because of the factions that dominate their country. If America were in iraq's place we would want someone to deliver us from the hands of oppression. My creed states that i am a gaurdian of freedom, Freedom is not restrained to the borders of the united states. wether my comment gets posted or not, i have spoken my mind i will continue to fight and kill,if necessary to ensure that freedom is a taste on every persons tongue in the world.Despite the fact that i disagree with your forum i would give my life for your right to have it.
God Bless
The war is a waste of money and time its a waste of life and a waste of everything people need to survive. STOP THE WAR to learn more on the war go to www.freewebs.com/freetobeme95 and after you learn about the war dont forget to blog your opinion on tne war then read what othetrs have to say.
I believe some of your information may be correct. But the generalization that all members of the U.S army are killers and criminals are false. I enlisted in the army because it has been a family tradition for generations in my family. I enlisted to defend my country. I am sorry but some of your information is incorrect. I am now nearing deployment for my second tour in iraq and am sure when i say that in my 111th airbourne division has never directly killed a civilian. We do not target inocent civilians. We are ordered to give warning shots and to never fire upon an unarmed person. Nobody likes war, I am not over there to kill and plunder but only because my commander in chief has ordered me over there. I believe that some of your information is incorrect and believe that this website should be established to inform of the wrongdoings in iraq. Not to generalize about the soldiers in iraq and to sway citizens from enlisting. CPL Brosius
STOP THIS WAR!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=f3BavMIdqFg
Great site! It's so great to be in good company, with folk who are against this bogus "war on terror". I recently exposed the link between Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch adn teh Saudi regime. Psst, he is being funded by hte Saudis to spread black propaganda and he is in fact a Wahabi extremist. Jihadwatch are going crazy over it. I've exposed him!
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020482.php#comments
thank you for the pics of the victims of this evil war. I guess it doesn't really matter because the world is going to end on 12-21-12. You better believe it, 5 different prophecies predict the same date. We have no control over evil, god will handle these evil bastards.
There are thousands of prophesies of the end of the world, and all have been wrong so far. Silly people give away all their possessions. Yet how would anyone really know? On the other hand, there is the self-fulfilling prophesy. We have all kinds of American fruitcakes trying to make hideous biblical prophesies about Israel and Armageddon come to pass. Some of Bush's questionable decisions in Iraq can be explained by delusions of grandeur about being a key figure in biblical prophesy.
Now we are leaveing Iraq and have set an exzample to
the world.We now embark on Obamas war wheres the outrage ? yesterday 06-24-09 we killed sixty people at a Taliban funeral, were they all inocent. I think not ! Just sixty years ago 30 million were killed decideing right from wrong
The human male is an animal
a born warrior , turn the electric and water off to L.A. for five days and watch what happens! And bye the way, Where do you get your Moral soap box if not from God
The Iraqis are celebrating today the withdrawal of the US troops out of the cities. Americans are leaving behind "advisors" (shades of Viet Nam) but it is a step in the right direction.
At the same time, the USA is is putting all the Iraqis oil assets up for auction for sale to US and European corporations -- the reason for the invasion in the first place. I find the whole business as sordid as Hitler's invasion of Poland.
What's so terrible about Iraqis killing solidier and mercenenaries who illegally invaded their country? Would you have them to roll over like the French at Hitler's invasion?
Surely you would be a patriot and slit the throats of any bastards who invaded your country, tortured, bombed, raped children and used every illegal weapon known to man short of nukes. Why do you expect the Iraqis to behave any differently?
This is 2007 archive. If you want to be read, best post under 2009.
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