Page 2 of 4 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The case for imperial
liquidation By Chalmers Johnson
structural and cultural problems within
the US system as it exists today. In an interview
with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for 40 years one
of America's leading investigative reporters, put
the matter this way:
All of the institutions we thought
would protect us - particularly the press, but
also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress
- they have failed ... So all the things that we
expect would normally carry us through didn't.
The biggest failure, I would argue, is the
press, because that's the most glaring ... What
can be done to fix the situation? [long pause]
You'd have to fire or execute 90% of the editors
and executives.
Veteran analyst of the
press (and former presidential press secretary)
Bill Moyers, considering a classic moment of media
failure, concluded: "The
disgraceful press reaction to [then US secretary
of state] Colin Powell's presentation at the
United Nations [on February 5, 2003] seems like
something out of Monty Python, with one key
British report cited by Powell being nothing more
than a student's thesis, downloaded from the Web -
with the student later threatening to charge US
officials with 'plagiarism'."
As a result
of such multiple failures (still ongoing), the
executive branch easily misled the US public.
A made-in-America human catastrophe
Of the failings mentioned by Hersh, that
of the US military is particularly striking,
resembling as it does the failures of the Vietnam
era, 30-plus years earlier. One would have thought
the high command had learned some lessons from the
defeat of 1975. Instead, it once again went to war
pumped up on America's own propaganda - especially
the conjoined beliefs that the United States was
the "indispensable nation", the "lone superpower",
and the "victor" in the Cold War; and that it was
a new Rome the likes of which the world had never
seen, possessing as it did - from the heavens to
the remotest spot on the planet - "full-spectrum
dominance". The idea that the US was an
unquestioned military colossus athwart the world,
which no power or people could effectively oppose,
was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country
into deep trouble - as it did - and bring the US
Army to the point of collapse, as happened in
Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and
Afghanistan).
Instead of behaving in a
professional manner, the US military invaded Iraq
with far too small a force; failed to respond
adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and
Ba'ath Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy
of looting and lawlessness throughout the country;
disobeyed orders and ignored international
obligations (including the obligation of an
occupying power to protect the facilities and
treasures of the occupied country - especially, in
this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other
archeological sites of untold historic value); and
incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency
against the US occupation, committing numerous
atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.
According to Andrew Bacevich, "Next to
nothing can be done to salvage Iraq. It no longer
lies within the capacity of the United States to
determine the outcome of events there." The former
US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas W Freeman,
says of Bush's recent "surge" strategy in Baghdad
and al-Anbar province: "The reinforcement of
failure is a poor substitute for its correction."
Symbolically, a certain sign of the
disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26
posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni
woman who has, since August 2003, published the
indispensable weblog Baghdad Burning. Her family,
she reported, was finally giving up and going into
exile - joining as many as 2 million of her
compatriots who have left Iraq. In her final
dispatch, she wrote:
There are moments when the injustice
of having to leave your country simply because
an imbecile got it into his head to invade it is
overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to
survive and live normally, we have to leave our
home and what remains of family and friends ...
And to what?
Retired US General Barry
McCaffrey, commander of the 24th Infantry Division
in the first Iraq war and a consistent cheerleader
for Bush strategies in the second, recently
radically changed his tune. He now says, "No Iraqi
government official, coalition soldier, diplomat,
reporter, foreign NGO [non-governmental
organization], nor contractor can walk the streets
of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Basra, nor
Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily
armed protection." In a different context,
McCaffrey has concluded: "The US Army is rapidly
unraveling."
Even military failure in Iraq
is still being spun into an endless web of lies
and distortions by the White House, the Pentagon,
military pundits, and the now-routine reporting of
propagandists disguised as journalists. For
example, in the first months of 2007, rising
car-bomb attacks in Baghdad were making a mockery
of Bush administration and Pentagon claims that
the US troop escalation in the capital had brought
about "a dramatic drop in sectarian violence". The
official response to this problem: the Pentagon
simply quit including deaths from car-bombings in
its count of sectarian casualties. (It has never
attempted to report civilian casualties publicly
or accurately.) Since August 2003, there have been
more than 1,050 car-bombings in Iraq. One study
estimates that through June 2006 the death toll
from these alone has been a staggering 78,000
Iraqis.
The war and occupation George W
Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably
lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the
true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of
the direct US role in it, was for a long time
virtually taboo in the US media. As late as last
October, the journal of the British Medical
Association, The Lancet, published a study
conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya
University in Baghdad estimating that, since March
2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths
from violence than would have been expected
without a war. The British and US governments at
first dismissed the findings, claiming the
research was based on faulty statistical methods -
and the US media ignored the study, played down
its importance, or dismissed its figures.
This March 27, however, it was revealed
that the chief scientific adviser to the British
Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, had offered a
more honest response. The methods used in the
study were, he wrote, "close to best practice".
Another British official described them as "a
tried and tested way of measuring mortality in
conflict zones". More than 600,000 violent deaths
in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million
- that is, one in every 45 individuals - amounts
to a made-in-America human catastrophe.
One subject that the US government,
military and news media try to avoid like the
plague is the racist and murderous culture of
rank-and-file US troops when operating abroad.
Partly as a result of the background racism that
is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and
the propaganda of US imperialism that is drummed
into recruits during military training, they do
not see assaults on unarmed "ragheads" or "hajis"
as murder.
The cult of silence on this
subject began to slip only slightly this month
when a report prepared by the US Army's Mental
Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego
Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and
focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447
marines, the study revealed that only 56% of
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