Regime change
by Christopher Hitchens
(Penguin)
ere is a book to make your blood boil. It is an account of the cynical misuse of power, the destruction of sovereign states, the undermining of democracy, contempt for basic human rights, and the relegation of the vast majority of humanity to the status of ‘unpeople’. And who is the chief perpetrator of these atrocities? The United States of America, with assistance from the United Kingdom and complicity of other European countries, Australia and the many local presidents, generals, commanders of commerce and industry and assorted thugs who do the dirty work of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The latter, IMF and World Bank are equally and primarily servants of US interests.
Of course, one might argue, this is John Pilger – radical Australian journalist and campaigner for historically unfashionable causes like Cambodia, East Timor and Aboriginal rights in his own country. After all, Pilger hates the West, hates capitalism, hates globalisation, hates all the features of ‘liberal realism’, the political doctrine which he sees as a mask for old-fashioned imperialism with a bemused George Bush stare (or a toothy Tony Blair smile). Why, one might ask, does Pilger beat that same boring old drum – US intervention and subversion of sovereign states like Indonesia, vindictive use of force and sanctions against Iraq and Kosovo, globalisation’s condemnation of millions to subhuman existence in sweatshops, ongoing racism and the denial of justice in Australia? A short negative answer might be: because Pilger has not embraced ‘reality’ and moved with the times. Alternatively, Pilger has managed to expose the seamier, brutal side of globalisation and Great Power foreign policy.
In four densely-packed chapters, many of them based on his television documentaries, Pilger examines countries like Indonesia, Iraq and Australia, as well as the relationship between globalisation and terrorism. He presents the terrible contrasts of Indonesia, on one level a model of IMF/World Bank ‘structural adjustment’, on another a sweatshop economy where multinationals have since the 1960s divided up the countries natural resources (with the blessing of former dictator General Suharto and under the ‘guidance’ of the United States). Working conditions are atrocious, with corporations glibly sidestepping both labour laws and their own codes of conduct. What has made this possible has been decades of political repression following the 1965-6 military coup, a coup based upon a US/UK ‘black propaganda’ campaign that claimed an imminent Communist revolution – but was more to do with their disapproval of the politically independent line taken by former President Sukarno.
This intolerance of independent Third World countries, in particular any signs of a socialist or social democratic shift, have played out in other times and places, in Central America, Africa and Asia. When a popular socialist government gained power in Afghanistan in 1978 and set about improving the conditions of the populace (and in particular the situation of women) , the US intelligence agencies (with successive White House approval) set up, trained and encouraged Islamic fundamentalist mujahiddeen rebels. This led to Soviet intervention to support the established Kabul government, creating a situation that Washington gleefully (and correctly) saw as a way of creating the Soviet Union’s own Vietnam and undermining the USSR as the only viable world superpower to the USA. Paradoxically, Pilger reports, the USA ‘created’ the Taliban and Al-Qaida, backing them for as long as it as expedient, then sought to destroy their own creations after the events of September 11th, 2001. The new rulers of Kabul, Pilger concludes, are merely a rival faction, a new version of the mujahiddeen.
US government hypocrisy, for Pilger, knows no bounds. The rhetoric of the ‘war on terrorism’ is no more than a front for establishing total US domination in the interests of multinational capitalism. In fact, if one looks honestly at terrorism, he concludes that the USA is in fact the world’s No.1 terrorist state – supporting and training terrorists in countries around the world and committing widespread military atrocities against civilians with the purpose of terrorizing nations into submission. Even what seem to be ‘just’ wars and military ‘humanitarian interventions’ – the 1991 war with Iraq and the Kosovo crisis – are acts of calculated barbarism against civilians.
200 000 to 250 000 Iraqis were killed in the Gulf War, only 100 000 of them were Iraqi troops. Despite claims, only 7% of US bombs were ‘smart bombs’ and 70% of all bombs dropped missed their targets. Similarly, the majority of Serbs killed in Kosovo were civilians, mostly women and children. Even if one does not want to define these acts as terrorism, they certainly violate any normal received notion of a ‘just war’, where one of the most fundamental tenets is the non-targeting of the innocent.
The deepest hypocrisy, and the most emotionally shattering chapter in this book, is Pilger’s account of life (perhaps one should say death) in post-Gulf War Iraq. Saddam Hussein, a vicious tyrant Pilger admits, was for many years the West’s tyrant – until he got uppity. He was largely armed by Western countries, enjoyed excellent trade deals with countries like Britain, and was even supplied with chemical weapons (as late as 1994). The post-war sanctions imposed by the UN – under pressure from George Bush Senior and carried on by Clinton and Bush Junior – have had no effect on those they were aimed to dislodge: Saddam and his ruling elite. They have however caused the death of 500 000 Iraqi children, and destroyed the social infrastructure of a Middle Eastern State which was in the top 20% standard of living in the world. Education is in ruins. Basic health care has collapsed. And thousands of civilians have been killed in regular US and British bombing raids (illegal even under UN Security Council Resolution 688). Military targets having been largely destroyed, its time to ‘soften up’ civilians. Of course, it’s not the people of Iraq that the USA is out to get, as numerous US politicians have insisted.
Perhaps the most trenchant remark that Pilger quotes comes from a US air force brigadier who directed the bombing raids: ”They [the Iraqis] know we own their country…It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.” Needless to say, this chapter provides a useful context for understanding Dubya’s current rush to invade Iraq.
When I first read it, I must confess to finding the chapter on Australia oddly out of place in this book. Not to say that it is inferior to other chapters, but rather its focus is much more on domestic racism and the destruction of Aboriginal culture in Australia. It is nasty stuff, one must admit, and will resonate with South African readers who remember the worst aspects of apartheid: wars of dispossession, racism, segregation, Bantustans, forced removals, apartheid in sport. Having reread it, the chapter still feels oddly placed, unless one sees it as an attempt by Pilger to show how a mentality of empire, intolerance of difference and cultural superiority can be domesticated. Perhaps he sees Australia as the ‘outcome’ of the policy of the new world rulers.
Is this book just another leftist rant? Or is there something we need to learn from what Pilger argues? It would be easy to charge the former and dismiss it with a condescending shrug. Similarly, it would be easy to call it rabid anti-Americanism, even though what Pilger is attacking is not so much the USA as its foreign policy and the interest groups that so often seem to run the country. Early in the book Pilger insists that the slaughter of 3000 people on September 11th was utterly wrong, in the same way as the deaths of 500 000 Iraqi children; what he does point out is how, given what he describes, some people (including many Americans) might find September 11 thoroughly understandable.
Dramatic, unashamedly biased, profoundly angry, this is a book that deserves our attention. Whether we agree with some or all of its contents; whether we think that though Pilger has highlighted problems but offers no viable solutions; or even if we think Pilger is living in La-La-Land, we need to read this book. Ordinary decent Americans in particular should read this book (though I suspect that it will get quietly ignored by the media empires, against whom Pilger takes a swipe on numerous occasions). The rest of us should read it in the light of Bush Junior’s current warplans and with a long-term critical eye on how we read and address the links between foreign policy, political violence and globalisation. Perhaps some should read it as a cautionary tale: what happens if we step out of line.