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The French strike back
By
Julio Godoy
PARIS - Intellectual force has
arrived to back the political and popular French
opposition to the United States over the question of
Iraq.
In new debates, books and columns, French
analysts are going back to the days before September 11,
2001 to recall US interventions from Chile to Guatemala
to Vietnam. Historian Christine Durandin argues in La
CIA en Guerre (The CIA at war) that the US secret
services intervened in all Latin American countries
since the 1950s, and that "everywhere these
interventions prepared the way for brutal military
dictatorships".
The interventions never led to
"nation building", Durandin said by way of challenging
US claims that the "war against terrorism" can be used
to build the foundation of modern societies in the Arab
world. Durandin's book has become a bestseller. The
first edition published earlier this month is already
sold out.
Other books look at the background of
many US leaders, particularly the Bush family.
Prize-winning investigative journalist Eric Laurent
looks at the dealings of the Bush family since the 1930s
in La Guerre de Bush (Bush's War). Laurent digs
up dealings with Nazi industries in Germany, and with
Saudi Arabian business houses accused of financing
Islamic terrorist groups. Bush "dined with the devil",
Laurent says.
Based on his own investigations
and on material published in the US, Laurent says that
President George W Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush,
was a banker who invested in industries rearming Nazi
Germany. Laurent says that in 1942 the US government
placed sanctions on four companies of the Bush family -
the Union Banking Corporation, the Holland-American
Trading Corporation, the Seamless Steel Equipment
Corporation and the Silesian-American Corporation.
Former
president George Bush senior, he says, did business with the
family of Osama bin Laden for 20 years, much of it
through the Carlyle Group, an investment company. And
the Halliburton enterprise in Texas, a leading provider
of engineering services, has been a partner of the bin
Laden group since 1994, Laurent says. Halliburton's CEO
until the end of 2000 was Dick Cheney, now vice
president.
In the late 1980s, Saudi Arabian
banker Khalid bin Mafouz, Osama bin Laden's
brother-in-law and main shareowner of the now closed
Bank of Credit and Commerce International, saved one of
President George Bush's several unsuccessful oil
enterprises from insolvency, Laurent says.
Other
new books point to the demise of the US empire. Emmanuel
Todd's Apres l'empire (After the empire) looks at
what the author calls the "decomposition of American
hegemony".
Todd, a renowned social scientist who
predicted the end of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s,
bases his conclusions on the US dependency on foreign
capital. Todd says that the US commercial deficit more
than quadrupled during the 1990s. "In the period from
1973 to 2000, during which the US enjoyed its longest
economic expansion, the commercial deficit went up from
$100 billion to $450 billion," Todd says.
"To
pay for this deficit, the US needs to keep importing
foreign capital," he says. "If this capital flow were to
stop, the US economy would collapse. Despite the
repeated claims about US power, the truth is that this
country is both a beggar and predator. This cannot last
very long."
Todd says that US militarism is
nothing more than "fuss" aimed to impress the world.
"When you think that the US government only dares to
wage war against military gnomes such as Iraq, you have
to realize that the whole thing is only to pretend that
they are mighty."
Todd says that the US
isolation in its war plans against Iraq (give or take a
few not so might nations) is an indicator that the world
has begun to see the US decline as a superpower. "The
fact the Germany, for the first time since World War II,
has dared oppose a US military project especially shows
this awareness."
Bernard Henri Levy, sometimes
reviled as the "jet-set philosopher" who supported US
military action in Somalia, Serbia and most recently
Afghanistan, now opposes the war on Iraq. "Saddam
Hussein is certainly one of the most brutal dictators of
our days," Levy says. "But he doesn't represent a danger
for the West. A real danger is Pakistan, a dictatorship
with clear links to Islamic terrorism, and which has the
nuclear bomb. Rather than attacking Iraq, the US should
worry about Pakistan. Instead, Washington sees Pakistan
as an ally."
(Inter Press Service)
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