The Real Story Behind America's War - John Pilger

["Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxx>]

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Subject: [R-G] The Real Story Behind America's War - John Pilger


http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2001-12/27pilger.cfm

Znet December 27, 2001

The Real Story Behind America's War

     By John Pilger

Since 11 September, the "war on terrorism" has provided a pretext for the
rich countries, led by the United States, to further their dominance over
world affairs.

By spreading "fear and respect", as a Washington Post reporter put it,
America intends to see off challenges to its uncertain ability to control
and manage the "global economy", the euphemism for the progressive seizure
of markets and resources by the G8 rich nations.

This, not the hunt for a man in a cave in Afghanistan, is the aim behind US
Vice-President Dick Cheney's threats to "40 to 50 countries". It has little
to do with terrorism and much to do with maintaining the divisions that
underpin "globalisation".

Today international trade is worth more than £11.5bn a day. A tiny fraction
if this, 0.4 per cent, is shared with the poorest countries. American and G8
capital controls 70 per cent of world markets, and because of the rules
demanding the end of tariff barriers and subsidies in poor countries while
ignoring protectionism in the west, the poor countries lose £1.3bn a day in
trade.

By any measure, this is a war of the rich against the poor. Look at the
casualty figures. The toll, says the World Resources Institute, is more than
13 million children every year, or 12 million under the age of five,
according to United Nations estimates.

"If 100 million have been killed in the formal wars of the 20th century",
wrote Michael McKinley, "why are they to be privileged in comprehension over
the annual [death] toll of children from structured adjustment programmes
since 1982?"

McKinley's paper, "Triage: a survey of the new inequality as combat zone"
was presented to a conference in Chicago this year and deserves wider
reading (he teaches at the Australian National University. It vividly
describes the acceleration of western economic power in the Clinton years,
which, since 11 September, has passed a threshold of danger for millions of
people.

Last month's World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha in the Gulf state of
Quatar, was disastrous for the majority of humanity. The rich nations
demanded and got a new "round" of "trade liberalisation", which is the power
to intervene in the economies of poor countries, to demand privatisation and
the destruction of public services.

Only they are permitted to protect their home industries and agriculture;
only they have the right to subsidise exports of meat, grain and sugar, then
to dump them in poor countries at artificially low prices, thereby
destroying the livelihoods of millions.

In India, says the environmentalist Vandana Shiva, suicides among poor
farmers are "an epidemic".

Even before the WTO met, the American trade representative Robert Zoelliek
invoked the "war on terrorism" to warn the developing world that no serious
opposition to the American trade agenda would be tolerated.

He said: "The United States is committed to global leadership of openness
and understands that the staying power of our new coalition.[against
terrorism]. depends on economic growth." The code is that "economic growth"
(rich elite, poor majority) equals anti-terrorism.

Mark Curtis, a historian and Christian Aid's head of policy, who attended
Doha, has described "an emerging pattern of threats and intimidation of poor
countries" that amounted to "economic gunboat diplomacy".

He said: "It was utterly outrageous. Wealthy countries exploited their power
to spin the agenda of big business. The issue of multinational corporations
as a cause of poverty was not even on the agenda; it was like a conference
on malaria that does not discuss the mosquito."

Delegates from poor countries complained of being threatened with the
removal of their few precious trade preferences.

"If I speak out too strongly for the rights of my people," says an African
delegate, "the US will phone my minister. They will say that I am
embarrassing the United States. My government will not even ask, 'What did
he say?' They will just send me a ticket tomorrow. so I don't speak for fear
of upsetting the master."

A senior US official telephoned the Ugandan government to ask that its
ambassador to the WTO, Nathan Irumba, be withdrawn. Irumba chairs the WTO's
committee on trade and development and has been critical of the
"liberalisation" agenda.

Dr Richard Bernal, a Jamaican delegate at Doha, said his government had come
under similar pressure. "We feel that this [WTO] meeting has no connection
with the war on terrorism," he said, "[yet] we are made to feel that we are
holding up the rescue of the global economy if we don't agree to a new round
[of liberalisation measures]."

Haiti and the Dominican Republic were threatened that their special trade
preferences with the United States would be revoked if they continued to
object to "procurement", the jargon for the effective takeover of a
government's public spending priorities.

India's minister for commerce and industry, Murasoli Maran, said angrily,
"The whole process is a mere formality and we are being coerced against our
will.the WTO is not a world government and should not attempt to appropriate
to itself what legitimately falls in the domain of national governments and
parliaments."

What the conference showed was that the WTO has become a world government,
run by the rich (principally Washington). Although it has 142 members, only
21 governments in reality draft policy, most of which is written by the
"quad": the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan.

At Doha, the British played a part similar to Tony Blair's promotion of the
"war on terrorism". The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, Patricia
Hewitt, has already said that "since 11 September, the case is very
overwhelming for more trade liberalisation". In Doha, the British delegation
demonstrated, according to Christian Aid, "the gulf between its rhetoric
about making trade work for the poor" and its real intentions.

This "rhetoric" is the speciality of Clare Short, the International
Development Secretary, who surpassed herself by announcing £20m as "a
package of new measures" to help poor countries.

In fact, this was the third time the same money had been announced within a
year. In December 2000, Short said the government "will double its support
for trade-strengthening initiatives in developing countries from £15m over
the past three years to £30m over the next three years".

Last March, the same money was announced again. Short, said her press
department, "will announce that the UK will double its support
for.developing countries' trade performance."

On 7 November, the £20m package was announced all over again. Moreover, a
third of it in effect is tied to the launch of a new WTO "round".

This is typical of the globalisation of poverty, the true name for
"liberalisation". Indeed, Short's title of International Development
Secretary is as much an Orwellian mockery as Blair's moralising about the
bombing. Short is worthy of special mention for the important supporting
role she has played in the fraudulent war on terrorism.

To the naïve, she is still the rough diamond who speaks her mind in the
headlines: and this is true in one sense. In trying to justify her support
for the lawless bombing of civilians in Yugoslavia, she likened its
opponents to Nazi appeasers.

She has since abused relief agency workers in Pakistan, who called for a
pause in the current bombing as "emotional" and has questioned their
integrity. She has maintained that relief is "getting through" when, in
fact, little of it is being distributed to where it is most needed.

Around 700 tonnes are being trucked into Afghanistan every day, less than
half that which the UN says is needed. Six million people remain at risk.
Nothing is reaching those areas near Jalalabad, where Americans are bombing
villages, killing hundreds of civilians, between 60 and 300 in one night,
according to anti-Taliban commanders who are beginning to plead with
Washington to stop. On these killings, as on the killing of civilians in
Yugoslavia, the outspoken Short is silent.

Her silence, and her support for America's $21bn homicidal campaign to
subjugate and bribe poor countries into submission, exposes the sham of "the
global economy as the only way to help the poor", as she has said
repeatedly.

The militarism that is there for all but the intellectually and morally
impaired to see is the natural extension of the rapacious economic policies
that have divided humanity as never before. As Thomas Friedman wrote
famously in the New York Times, "the hidden hand" of the market is US
military force.

Little is said these days about the "trickle down" that "creates wealth" for
the poor, because it is transparently false. Even the World Bank, of which
Short is a governor, has admitted that the poorest countries are worse off,
under its tutelage, than ten years ago: that the number of poor had
increased, that people are dying younger.

And these are countries with "structural adjustment programmes" that are
meant to "create wealth" for the majority. It was all a lie.

Giving evidence before a House of Commons select committee, Clare Short
described the US as "the only great power [that] almost turns its back on
the world". Her gall deserves a prize. Britain gives just 0.34 per cent of
GNP in aid, less than half the minimum laid down by the United Nations.

It is time we recognised that the real terrorism is poverty, which kills
thousands of people every day, and the source of their suffering, and that
of innocent people in dusty villages, is directly related. and educational
purposes.




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