ZNet Special

ZNet | U.S.

Return Of People Power

by John Pilger; August 30, 2006

In researching a new film, I have been watching documentary archive from the 1980s, the era of Ronald Reagan and his "secret war" against Central America. What is striking is the relentless lying. A department of lying was set up under Reagan with the coy name, "office of public diplomacy". Its purpose was to dispense "white" and "black" propaganda - lies - and to smear journalists who told the truth. Almost everything Reagan himself said on the subject was false. Time and again, he warned Americans of an "imminent threat" from the tiny impoverished nations that occupy the isthmus between the two continents of the western hemisphere. "Central America is too close and its strategic stakes are too high for us to ignore the danger of governments seizing power with military ties to the Soviet Union," he said. Nicaragua was "a Soviet base" and "communism is about to take over the Caribbean". The United States, said the president, "is engaged in a war on terrorism, a war for freedom".

How familiar it all sounds. Merely replace Soviet Union and communism with al-Qaeda, and you are up to date. And it was all a fantasy. The Soviet Union had no bases in or designs on Central America; on the contrary, the Soviets were adamant in turning down appeals for their aid. The comic strips of "missile storage depots" that American officials presented to the United Nations were precursors to the lies told by Colin Powell in his infamous promotion of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction at the Security Council in 2003.

Whereas Powell's lies paved the way for the invasion of Iraq and the violent death of at least 100,000 people, Reagan's lies disguised his onslaught on Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. By the end of his two terms, 300,000 people were dead. In Guatemala, his proxies - armed and tutored in torture by the CIA - were described by the UN as perpetrators of genocide.

There is one major difference today. That is the level of awareness among people everywhere of the true purpose of Bush and Blair's "war on terror" and the scale and diversity of the popular resistance to it. In Reagan's day, the notion that presidents and prime ministers lied as deliberate, calculated acts was considered exotic; Nixon's Watergate lies were said to be shocking because presidents did not lie outright.

Almost no one believes that any more. In Britain, thanks to Blair, a sea-change in public attitudes has taken place. No less than 80 per cent regard him as a liar; 82 per cent believe his warmongering was a principal cause of the London bombings; 72 per cent believe he has made this country a target. No modern prime minister has been the object of such informed opprobrium. In addition, a majority remain sceptical about the veracity of a "plot" to blow up aircraft flying from Heathrow. The recent, thuggish self-promotion of the Home Secretary (Interior Minister) John Reid is rejected by a clear majority, along with the media-promotion of Treasurer Gordon Brown as the man who brought economic prosperity to Britain while acting as paymaster for various imperial adventures. More than three-quarters of the population believe Brown and Blair have merely made the rich richer (YouGov and Guardian/ICM).

In my experience, this critical public intelligence and moral sense have always been ahead of those who claim to speak for the public. What Vandana Shiva calls an "insurrection of subjugated knowledge" is on the rise in Britain and across the world, perhaps as never before, thanks to a revived internationalism aided by new technologies. Whereas Reagan could get away with many of his lies, Bush and Blair cannot. People know too much. And there is the presence of history; no imperial power has been able to sustain three simultaneous colonial wars indefinitely.

That is already true of the United States and Britain in Afghanistan, where the "democratic" puppet regime is in predictable trouble and the besieged British army is having to call in American bombers, which, on 26 August, killed 13 fleeing civilians, including nine children, a
common atrocity.

In Iraq, in contrast to the embedded lie that the killings are now almost entirely sectarian, 70 per cent of the 1,666 bombs exploded by the resistance in July were directed against the American occupiers and 20 per cent against the puppet police force. Civilian casualties amounted to 10 per cent. In other words, unlike the collective punishment meted out by the US, such as the killing of several thousand people in Fallujah, the resistance is fighting basically a military war and it is winning. That truth is suppressed, as it was in Vietnam.

In Lebanon, the pattern continues. An armed resistance a few thousand strong has humbled the fifth-most powerful army in the world, which is supplied and backed by the superpower. That much we know. What is not known is the extraordinary and decisive part played by the unarmed people of southern Lebanon. Reported as a trail of victims, the spectacle of people heading back to their homes was an epic act of defiance and resistance. On 13 August, as the Israeli army advanced in southern Lebanon, they warned people not to return to their homes. This was defied almost to a man, woman and child, who abandoned the refugee centres and headed south, jamming the roads and flashing victory signs.

An eyewitness, Simon Assaf, described "gangs of local men along the route clear[ing] paths by dragging away the piles of electrical cable, rubble and twisted metal that littered the highway. A new stream of cars would rapidly form through every breach in the rubble. There were no army or police . . . it was the locals who directed traffic, guided cars past dangerous craters and pushed buses up dirt tracks around collapsed bridges. As they neared their homes, the refugees would form great processions. Town after town, village after village was reclaimed. Powerless to confront this human wave, the Israelis abandoned their positions and began fleeing to the border. This flood of people emerged out of an unprecedented mass movement that grew up across the country as the bombs rained down."

The Lebanese resistance, armed and unarmed, is from the same wellspring as other movements throughout the world. Each has learned to put aside its sectarian differences in the face of a common enemy - rampant empire and its proxies. In Bolivia, Latin America's poorest country, the first government of indigenous people since their enslavement by Spain was elected by a landslide this year, after hundreds of thousands of unarmed campesinos and former miners faced the guns of an army sent by the oligarchic dictator, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Marching on La Paz, the capital, they forced him to flee to the United States, where he had sent his millions. This followed a mass resistance to the privatising of the water supply of Cochabamba, Bolivia's second city, and its takeover by a consortium dominated by the mighty Bechtel company. Now Bechtel, too, has been forced to flee.

Throughout Latin America, mass resistance movements have grown so fast that they now overshadow traditional parties. In Venezuela, they provide the popular support for the reforms of Hugo Chávez. Having emerged spontaneously in 1989 during the Caracazo, an eruption of political rage against Venezuela's subservience to the free-market demands of the IMF and World Bank, they have provided the imagination and dynamism with which the Chávez government is attacking the scourge of poverty.

Here in the west, as people abandon the political parties they once thought were theirs, there is much to learn from resistance movements in dangerous places and their tactics of informed direct action. We have our own examples in Britain, such as the achievements of the growing resistance to Blair and Brown's privatising of the National Health Service by stealth. An American giant, United Health Europe, has been prevented from taking control of GP (local medical) services in Derbyshire, after the community was not consulted and fought back. Pat Smith, a pensioner, took the case to court and won. "This shows what people power can do," she said, as if speaking for millions.

There is no difference in principle between Pat Smith's campaign of resistance and that of the people of Cochabamba who refused to pay almost half their income to an American company for their water. There is no difference in principle between the people's movement that saw off the Israeli invaders and the stirring of people everywhere as they become aware of the real meaning of the ambitions and hypocrisy of Bush and his vassal, who want us to be ever fearful of and cowed by "terrorism" when, in truth, the greatest terrorists of all are them.

www.johnpilger.com

The John Pilger Film Festival is at the Barbican,
in London, from 14-21 September. John Pilger's most famous documentaries will be shown.
Box Office 0845 120 7500 or book online at www.barbican.org.uk

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=72&ItemID=10852

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ZNet | Anti War

Empire, And Resistance To It, Is The Central Issue Of Our Time

From Iraq and Lebanon to Afghanistan, the Anglo-American attempt to remake the world by force is failing

by Andrew Murray; The Guardian ; August 30, 2006

'How goes the empire?" Perhaps Tony Blair will be tempted to repeat King George V's dying words as he prepares to shuffle off his own political coil. It is a measure of the extent to which the prime minister's foreign policy has restored imperialism to the political vocabulary of the country that, when his legacy is debated, the state of empire will be the main issue.

The answer is that it goes pretty badly. The new imperialism which will for ever be linked to the names Bush and Blair has taken just five years to hit the buffers of popular opposition and moral ignominy. Imperialism has moved from the realm of political jargon to be the central issue of our time - and is seen as such everywhere beyond the ramparts of the neoconservative-New Labour alliance.

In Iraq, the great testing ground for "liberal interventionism", the pitch of resistance to the armies of occupation, along with the failure of a parade of hand-picked premiers to deliver even a facade of stability, is, according to the New York Times, leading George Bush to consider abandoning his "democratic" experiment in favour of, presumably, a dictatorship.

In Afghanistan, to which British troops were rushed nearly five years after regime change was imposed, the Karzai government is floundering in epic levels of corruption. It has reinstated the power of opium-funded warlords, the suppression of whom was perhaps the Taliban's only popular achievement. The consequence has been a conflict of a ferocity that the British army has not seen since the Korean war, according to Lieutenant-General David Richards, the commander on the spot.

And despite Blair's determined green light to Israel's attack on Lebanon, the "long, strong arm of the US" in the region - as the Israeli commentator Sima Kadmon describes his country - has had to retreat with its objectives unmet. No one seems to be rushing to pick up the white man's burden there either.

British troops are now back "east of Suez" with a vengeance. According to the foreign-policy establishment thinktank Chatham House, the big winner from five years of them rampaging around the region is Iran. Presumably that was not the plan. Even in the Balkans, the occupations of Bosnia and Kosovo fester, with the underlying conflicts in no way resolved.

The Blair years have been a study in the failures of the Anglo-Saxon powers' capacity to remake the world in their own interests by force. Even the prime minister seemed to acknowledge that wearily in California earlier this month. Of course, the policy has had its friends. The rightwing historian - and proponent of a genetics of racism - Niall Ferguson has taken the case for empires back on to the television, while the chancellor of the exchequer has insisted it is time Britain stopped apologising for empire. As the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, pointed out in response: if only we had ever started doing so.

But the opponents of imperialism are by far the more numerous. Nearly two-thirds of the public believe British foreign policy is too subservient to the US and that the foreign occupations are a failure. The strength of the anti-war movement over the past five years, drawing fresh support during the Lebanon war, testifies that this sentiment goes much further than opinion polls.

Against this renewed left, there has coagulated a coalition of the brazen conservatives in Washington and their transatlantic admirers, including the two parliamentary frontbenches and a pseudo-social-democratic "new right" addicted to the spread of its values at the point of the imperial bayonet. They have set aside the left's traditional support for international law and the UN in favour of backing Bush's endless war.

We can now see where making "anti-anti-imperialism" your touchstone leads. The pro-war bloggers and lecturers who produced the Euston manifesto earlier this year have recently been reduced to providing a platform for Blairite ministers to promote privatisation, just as their stateside superhero Christopher Hitchens backed George Bush's re-election in 2004. They have resuscitated the gloomy traditions of the Fabian Colonial Bureau, whose doyenne Rita Hinden patronised Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, when he came to London to rally support for his country's freedom, with the thought that "British socialists are not so concerned with ideals like independence and self-government".

But it is the tradition of the socialist pioneer William Morris which has come to dominate the left. Morris's support for the Mahdi's rebellion in the Sudan, on the grounds that he at least restored his country to its own people, is detailed in John Newsinger's new history of Britain's empire, The Blood Never Dried.

Empire is of course no longer something that simply happens "over there". Its fault lines run through every British community, with the wars in the Middle East and south Asia now accompanied by a campaign against the new "enemy within", the Muslim peoples of Britain.

One consequence of this has been a serious political engagement by the left with the Muslim communities, united in opposition to war and support of civil liberties. This is also a worldwide alliance. Seven Lebanese Communist fighters died resisting Israel's attack alongside Hizbullah, which has also had the support of the leaders of the Latin American left.

Fifty years on, the alliance of unequals forged between the US and Britain in the aftermath of Suez is once again unravelling in the Middle East.

* Andrew Murray is chair of the Stop the War Coalition

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=10854

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ZNet | Iraq

America Is Losing Iraq: Is Anybody Watching?

by Danny Schechter; MediaChannel.org; August 30, 2006

New York, August 29: In the world of mainstream media, there is always something "breaking." Who wants to hear about old news when there are so many new disasters to keep up with? As a new hurricane threatens, the watch is on and reporters get out their storm gear. JonBenet is still getting massive coverage, and Tom Cruise is back in the news-always good for a story or three. And this is the week of the Katrina anniversary and every news organization in America is doing specials and recycling footage.

But there is one word missing, and that word is, class?

Iraq!

Watch the Katrina specials and see how many references there are to the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guards bringing "freedom' to Iraq when they should have been helping with relief and rescue in their home towns. How many references will there be to the costs of the war compared to the costs of the monies allocated to reconstruction but not yet sent or spent? One recent report placed the costs of the war at $1.75 billion per week. The Cost of Iraq War calculator is set to reach $318.5 billion September 30, 2006. With the skyrocketing costs of the war in Iraq, worldwide military spending soared. Wouldn't you think that that alone would have our news media all over the story? If you think that, think again.

Flashback to March 2003 and remember the 24 hour war-a-thon with round the clock coverage and all the war all the time. Remember all the "experts" who to told us how we were going to "go in and get it over with." Remember President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech. It felt so great to be American when we seemed to be winning.

And then look at most of our news reporting today. What do you see just three short years later?

Iraq has been reduced to a litany of bloody incidents and body counts. For many, it is both boring and hard to follow, and so they tune out. Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, terrorists, insurgents, private militias…whatever happened to 'us' and 'them?' No wonder that when the JonBenet Ramsey story resurfaced the TV channels flocked to it like flies to a flame. When I worked for network TV, we had a term for stories we lost interest in. We would say, "Been there, done that!"

In the nation's newsrooms, the triage has begun-with Iraq sounding more and more like something that happened long ago. Get ready for more History Channel specials and somber retrospectives that help us to believe that we can be forgiven for thinking of the Iraq War in the past-tense.

Besides, covering Iraq is so dangerous. Few reporters want to take so many risks for so little "face time" on TV. And there are hardly any "positive" stories to report-even though the conservative media keep beating the bushes for them. Their latest ploy, now that Zarqawi and Al Qaeda are supposedly out of action, is to blame it all on Iran. In that way, they take the US off the hook and start getting us ready for the next war.

Meanwhile, the death count rises with the Iraqi summer heat.

To read this whole sordid story in gripping black and white, check out Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber's new book "The Best War Ever." It is filled with facts but reads like fiction because it's hard to believe that Americans have put with this abysmal, disastrous failure. All the flag waving and 911 cheerleading can't put this tragic Humpty Dumpty together again.

And part of the reason is that much of our media has been asleep at the switch, still taking the President's and Rumsfeld's pronouncements at face value. The Defense Secretary visited Baghdad last month and, with a straight face, talked about the 'great progress' made since last year. How many times can that broken, out of tune record be played?

Thankfully, it's been several months since Cheney has re-declared that the insurgency is in its 'last throes,' and it appears that 'winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Iraqis' has been dropped from the official Whitehouse list of talking points.

Isn't time for the networks to pull the plug on presidential press conferences and Bushian blather like they have on political party conventions? If there was ever a case for admitting the Emperor has no clothes, this is it. Who in the press corps(e) will have the courage to turn their backs on the Rumsfeld Comedy Hour once and for all?

Now there are some media outlets beginning to draw these lessons and tell the truth.

The NY Times which shamefully did so much to sell the war is now returning to its senses with more stories than can no longer be suppressed of setbacks in the field and corruption at home.

But even it seems more caught up with "perception" and image" stories than connecting the dots about demoralized and ineffective military effort and the continuing erosion of US influence and "progress" in a country devolving into a civil war US policies contributed to-without accountability.

Many Democrats are starting to hammer at the incompetence of those fighting the war without being willing to admit that the whole pre-emptive adventure is as flawed as the Vietnam War before it.

So here we are in the last week of the summer of '06. Much of America is on vacation along with the news media that seems to have withdrawn from Iraq before the government has the guts to.

Now is the time for all good news consumers to come to the aid or their media and demand coverage and courage to stop the blood letting and save what's left of our national honor. We need to find the news which is there to be found and keep the Iraq war issue alive.


News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He wrote "When News Lies" about Iraq media coverage (Newsdissector.org/store.htm.)
Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

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