THE
EMPEROR IS DEAD! Long Live The Empire!
Peace Researcher 38 – July 2009
-
Murray Horton
As this is the first Peace Researcher since the 2008 New
Zealand and American elections (which only coincide every 12 years and which,
very unusually, took place within days of each other), we need to start by
stating the obvious – there has been regime change in both countries. The
extremely unlamented George Bush has gone home to Texas
and Helen Clark has set up a new home in New
York. In the eight long dark years of Bush’s
Presidency much has been written, including by us, about what a disaster it was
for the US
and the world. I don’t think we need say any more, frankly, because it’s all
been said. I’ll sum it up in five words: Good riddance to bad rubbish!
Wearing my Campaign Against Foreign
Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA) hat I wrote a long and detailed analysis of the NZ
election result in Foreign Control
Watchdog 119, February 2009 (“Heeeere’s Johnny!!”, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/19/02.htm),
so I refer you to that, rather than rehash it all here. It concentrated heavily
on economic matters but did include a little about foreign policy: “Labour
prided itself in ‘rebuilding’ the alliance with the US, sucking up to the war
criminal Bush and his cronies. Yes, NZ stayed out of Iraq (well, almost) but it
enthusiastically plunged into the Afghanistan War and the ‘War On Terror’ –
Ahmed Zaoui was NZ’s unique contribution to that chamber of horrors. The covert
State of spies and spybases, such as Waihopai, had no more passionate champion
than Helen Clark. And now that’s she’s abruptly gone Labour is headed by Phil
Goff who, as Minister of Trade Negotiations, trumpeted that one of the
greatest benefits of a US Free Trade Agreement would be that NZ businesses
could get their snouts into the trough of US military contracts (he
specifically singled out the big money to be made in the US Pacific territory
of Guam, preparing infrastructure for the relocation of US Marines from Okinawa
in Japan, where massive anti-bases protests over many years have forced the US
and Japanese governments to make some concessions to overwhelming public
opinion). Goff has been personally affected by the ‘War on Terror’ – his
nephew, serving in the US
military, is the only New Zealander to have been killed in Afghanistan. Yes, it was a terrible
tragedy for the family but the Rightwing media sickeningly milked this for all
it was worth, for the propaganda value of New Zealand ‘doing its bit’”.
The election of Barack Obama as
the first black President is historic in its own right (and it could just as
easily have been Hillary Clinton as the first woman President). He brings a
whole different approach and style to that of the Bush Administration. He has
inherited an economic crisis unprecedented since the 1930s’ Great Depression
(some of it being fuelled by the enormous spending required to fight
imperialist wars in countries such as Iraq). Peace Researcher is not the appropriate journal to analyse that
crisis, nor Obama’s attempts to cure it; that is more Watchdog’s territory. One point of economic policy difference is
that, in March 2009, Obama indefinitely postponed the start of negotiations on
any NZ/US Free Trade Agreement (to the enormous chagrin of both National and
Labour who see such a deal as the Holy Grail of NZ’s childlike obsession with
free trade deals with anyone who will have us), while his officials review the
whole US trade policy inherited from Bush. If you want to learn more about that
subject, check out any recent Watchdog
(www.converge.org.nz/watchdog)
or the New Zealand Not For Sale Website (http://www.nznotforsale.org/),
which is dedicated to fighting an NZ/US Free Trade Agreement.
Impunity For Torturers
Obama
swept into office in a landslide, propelled by a genuine grassroots movement of
the American people who yearn for change in so many facets of the way things
are done in that country. He promised big changes to central planks of the Bush
foreign policy, for example, issuing an order to close the infamous Guantanamo
Bay prison for “War on Terror” detainees within 12 months, and outlawing the
use of torture on detainees in places like Guantanamo, Irag, Afghanistan and
the network of secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prisons dotted around
the world (filled with people kidnapped in CIA “renditions” in third countries
and flown to those hellholes). But action has not matched Obama’s lofty
rhetoric. The closure of Guantanamo
and the release (or relocation to other prisons) of its inmates is looking
increasingly shaky. The wave of euphoria among its inmates which greeted
Obama’s election has been replaced by anger, despair, hunger strikes and an
upsurge in attempted or successful suicides. All of which is dealt with by the
same brutal US
methods – solitary confinement, beatings, torture, the use of riot squads, and
forced feeding. In short, nothing has changed at Gitmo. Obama has allowed the
release of Bush Administration memos authorising torture but backed away from
his promise to publicise photos of US
military abuse and torture of prisoners in countries such as Iraq, saying that they would endanger the lives
of any US
soldiers who were captured by “the enemy”. There is no suggestion of
prosecuting anyone (only a few of the lowest level American prison guards were
punished for their abuse of Iraqi prisoners; they were the fall guys, the “few
bad apples”). What’s that old maxim about do unto others as you would have them
do unto you? And he has continued the Bush policy of allowing the vastly
increased US
intelligence apparatus to spy on the American people, especially the National
Security Agency, which is the Big Brother of the network of spybases to which
Waihopai belongs.
Quite
the most bizarre and disgusting debate to have been waged in the US during the
past few years is whether or not what it has been doing to those in its custody
constitutes torture. This viciousness is a real symptom of a declining empire
in a state of terminal decadence, so very similar to the end of the Roman
Empire which the powers that be in the US have always admired (particularly its
military prowess and dominance) and upon which they have modelled themselves. Murderers
and torturers throughout history have always tried to pervert the language to
sanitise their crimes so, in the past few decades, the US has given us phrases
such as “to terminate with extreme prejudice” (to murder); “collateral damage”
(the murder of innocent civilians) and, currently, a whole host of phrases such
as “stress positions” to sanitise torture.
The US
torture method that has attracted the most attention has been “waterboarding”,
which basically means continually pouring water onto and into the victim to
bring them to the point of drowning (and sometimes beyond it). Torturers have
always justified torture as essential to extract vital information from
“terrorists” (which is what everyone always calls their enemies). The brilliant
movie “Battle Of Algiers”, about the 1950s and 60s’ Algerian war of
independence against France,
matter of factly depicted routine French use of torture. The US has justified the torture of
“high value War on Terror” detainees, including the self-confessed mastermind
of the 9/11 terrorist attacks who was waterboarded hundreds of times, as being
the only way to get vital information from them and prevent further such
atrocities. Torture became so fashionable that top rating US TV series such as 24 glorified it. Experts have pointed
out that information extracted under torture, quite apart from being unable to
be used in any court, is totally useless, because the victim will tell the
torturer anything to get it to stop.
More to
the point, those in the know have said that the routine use of waterboarding
was accelerated, not in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks on the US but in the cause of futilely and falsely trying to prove a
link between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda (which, like those “weapons of
mass destruction”, existed only in the imagination of those tasked with
“selling” the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. Saddam was a mortal
enemy of al Qaeda and its ilk – one of the great ironies of his overthrow is
that it allowed al Qaeda and other militant Islamists to flourish in Iraq).
By a strange coincidence, New
Zealand has very recently had a case of
fatal waterboarding before one of our courts – the one where a group of family
members drowned a relative in the course of trying to rid her of “demonic
possession” by means of sluicing it out of her with huge quantities of water.
There was no official hesitation on the question of whether this was right or
wrong, let alone splitting hairs about whether it constituted torture – all
parties involved were charged with manslaughter.
Jumping Out Of The Iraq
Frying Pan
Doubtless,
Obama’s biggest change of foreign policy emphasis has been to announce that the
US will wind down and nearly (but not quite) quit its illegal occupation of Iraq,
a war that has done such terrible damage to that country and its people,
destabilised the whole region and played a major role in the decline of the US
Empire, militarily, economically and in terms of its position in the world. It
was Bush’s greatest international crime (his lack of response to the distress
of his own people devastated by Hurricane Katrina was his greatest domestic
crime). This act of criminal folly left Iran as the one clear winner, which
is setting things up for another war further down the track. Even Bush was not
stupid enough to attack Iran
but Israel is twitching to
have a go, having been humiliated by Iran’s
Hezbollah ally in the 2006 Lebanon
war. Comparisons have been made between the Vietnam
and Iraq wars and there are
some, particularly the crippling economic cost to the US. But the contrasts are greater –
the US, while it bombed the shit out of North Vietnam, never actually tried to
invade it; it was fighting a much better organised opponent, who was fighting
for an independent country governed by a clearly articulated ideology, namely
Communism; and it paid a much, much higher price in terms of dead, wounded and
decades-long trauma to the American psyche (the “Vietnam syndrome” has been a
fixture of US foreign policy since the 1970s).
Vietnam was a catastrophic US
defeat (of course, from the Vietnamese perspective, it was the greatest thing
that had ever happened in their bloodstained history); Iraq is a stalemate and has been
for years. It is the quicksand bog in which the arrogant hopes and dreams of
the most extreme, naked US
imperialism became inextricably stuck. Following in the footsteps of centuries
of militarists and madmen (“the war will be over by Christmas”, “the thousand
year Reich”, etc, etc) Bush and his henchmen invaded Iraq as only the
proclaimed first step in their mission to “sort out the Middle East”. They
proved adept at destroying and pillaging the place but completely useless at
even the rudiments of running an occupation – the Americans have never, to this
day, got the economy back up and running, with the basics like the supply of
electricity and water dysfunctional. Ironically they have never got the place
secure enough to steal Iraq’s
oil which was one major aim of the exercise. God help me, they even fucked up
the judicial murder of Saddam Hussein (if you support the death penalty, then a
monster such as him was a prime candidate for it, but those tasked with hanging
him achieved the difficult feat of making him look like a man and themselves
like gutless thugs. In the case of one of the others hanged with him, they
managed to stuff it up to the extent of ripping off his head. Decapitation by
hanging – that’s a new one).
Iraq has been a “bad news story” for so long that it has
dropped out of the headlines of the papers that once breathlessly trumpeted
that the invasion was right and necessary and that those mysterious “weapons of
mass destruction” were going to be found the next day. It’s become so much part
of the furniture that even Peace
Researcher hasn’t written about it for several years. Now, of course, some
factions of the chattering classes and powerbrokers in the US are worrying out loud that Iraq could yet be “lost” if Obama
doesn’t have an “exit strategy”. To which Obama’s response seems to be: “We
haven’t lost Iraq,
just misplaced it”.
Only To Jump Into The Fire
Of Afghanistan & Pakistan
But, of
course, Obama isn’t quitting (or rather, partly quitting) Iraq because he has renounced the
American imperial adventure. Oh no, he is just reprioritising which one of its
wars is more important in his view, and that is Afghanistan. So the first of Bush’s
wars (dating from shortly after the September 11 attacks) has now become
Obama’s war. He has even mimicked Bush’s Iraq strategy by ordering a “surge”
of more American troops into that benighted country. If Iraq is a stalemate, a quagmire, Afghanistan
is a war where the Americans and their allies are being actively defeated by
the resurgent Taliban. This follows the pattern of all foreign invaders into Afghanistan since recorded history began, the
most recent, of course, being the Russians – defeated, in a wonderfully ironic
twist, by an earlier version of the same Islamic fanatics and feudal warlords
who were armed to the teeth by the US
as part of its Great Game with the former Soviet Union.
Poetic justice really does exist. If the US
can make the tenuous claim that Iraq
is a work in progress, things haven’t got started in Afghanistan. The so-called
“government” has no mandate outside the capital, Kabul;
what there is of a “state” is irredeemably corrupt; the warlords have carved
the country up again into feudal fiefdoms (thiefdoms might be a more accurate
description); and Afghanistan
is once again the world’s top opium grower and heroin supplier.
That bleak
analysis doesn’t even include the security situation where the Taliban, who
were routed out of power in 2001, now control large areas of the country and
are taking the fight to the Americans and co. Afghanistan does resemble the
Vietnam War in that the American and allies are fighting a very well organised
guerrilla movement, which enjoys substantial local support. More ominously, the
other parallel with the Vietnam War (which spilled over into neighbouring Cambodia and Laos,
leading to American defeats in all three Indochinese countries) is that it has
spread into neighbouring Pakistan,
which is far more important to the US than its medieval neighbour ever
will be. In the same way that the US war on Cambodia greatly strengthened the
genocidal Communist fundamentalists of the Khmer Rouge, leading to them winning
that war and seizing power, the US war on Afghanistan has led directly to the
birth of a native Pakistani Taliban which is now fighting a civil war with the
American-backed Pakistan government (very ironic as the Afghan Taliban was
partly the creation of Pakistani Intelligence in the 1990s, as part of their
incessant meddling in Afghan affairs). The usual heavy handed American military
methods that have so alienated Afghans – namely air strikes by bombers or
missiles fired by unmanned drones that have killed thousands of innocent
civilians over the years – are achieving exactly the same result in Pakistan.
The
original major rationale for the Americans to invade and occupy Afghanistan
was to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, the Afghan-based al Qaeda leader
responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Neither of those has happened, eight years
later, and bin Laden has been elevated to mythic status. The capture and
judicial murder of Saddam did nothing to damp down the Iraqi war of
independence against the Americans; there is nothing to suggest that a similar
fate for bin Laden would make any difference to the “War on Terror” (or
whatever euphemism it is now called).
All
that has happened is that both al Qaeda and the Taliban have been driven across
the border into the sympathetic tribal territories, which is a natural
stronghold for them. Just as in Vietnam,
where the US military
invaded the neighbouring countries in an attempt to destroy their enemy (they
actually believed that there was a “Viet Cong headquarters” just across the
Cambodian border, a sort of jungle Pentagon), so they keep bombing and
attacking across the Pakistan
border. Result – they have stirred up a hornet’s nest of indigenous Islamic militants,
who are now fighting the Pakistani military not too far away from the country’s
capital. The Western media has suddenly got all agitated about Pakistan’s
nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of those Islamic fanatics (it has no
such reservations about Israel’s far larger nuclear arsenal falling into the
hands of that country’s Zionist fanatics, nor was it worried about the Big
Daddy of them all, the US nuclear arsenal, when it was controlled by Bush’s warmongering
fanatics and Christian fundamentalists).
Wars With Unintended
Consequences
What is
happening in Pakistan
is a classic example of the law of unintended consequences. It is not the only
one confronting the US
at present. Global shipping is being menaced by pirates operating out of the failed
state of Somalia.
Earlier this decade an indigenous Islamic militant movement fought its way to
power in Somalia and set about restoring order to that most chaotic of
countries. That was not to the liking of the US, so it used the proxy military
of neighbouring Ethiopia (an ancient enemy of Somalia) to invade, overthrow the
Islamic regime and then proceed to allow the country to revert to its previous
chaos, one dominated by warlords, criminals and, now, pirates. Good work, boys.
There
are other examples – ever since the end of the Cold War, which saw the demise
of the Soviet Union and the ascendancy of the US as the sole superpower, it has
relentlessly worked to recruit the newly independent states that arose out of
the Soviet Union and use them as buffer to surround and contain Russia, which
is still seen as a rival and a threat, if not any more an outright enemy. These
countries have simply swapped allegiance from being Russian satellites to being
American ones. The limitations of that policy were vividly demonstrated in 2008
when Georgia, one of the most grovelling of the new American vassals, foolishly
invaded breakaway territory which was defended by the Russian military. In very
short order the Georgians were routed, evicted and found themselves dealing
with a Russian invasion. The Americans’ stood by and watched while their
satellite was humiliated by its old master.
The Middle East is the classic one. An American-backed
Israeli policy of militarily destroying Yasser Arafat’s secular Palestinian
Liberation Organisation over several decades led to it being replaced with a
far more formidable foe, namely Palestinian Islamic groups such as Hamas, which
now controls Gaza and is implacably opposed to any deal with Israel, and Hezbollah,
which gave the Israeli military a fright by fighting it to a standstill in the
2006 Lebanon war. Israel has
to use heavier and heavier force, such as its cynically murderous attack on Gaza in the January 09
interregnum between Bush and Obama, just to maintain its status quo as a
Western settlement in the Arab world.
NZ Back In Bed With Uncle
Sam
New Zealand is not an innocent bystander in any of this. Despite our
nuclear free policy meaning that we haven’t been a formal member of any
military alliance with the US since the 1980s, New Zealand is a very active
American ally, and becoming more so. Ever since David Lange claimed that he was
duped by the spies that he was nominally in charge of into approving Waihopai as
providing NZ with its own “independent intelligence gathering capacity” (yeah,
right), that spybase has been this country’s most important contribution to the
US military and each and every war that fights. Electronic intelligence, of the
sort provided by Waihopai and its sister bases in the global network that
comprise the ears of the UKUSA Agreement (the electronic and signals
intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ), is absolutely
critical to the modern, “smart” warfare being waged by the US in countries such
as Iraq and Afghanistan (so “smart” that it routinely kills hundreds of
innocent civilians in its attacks on “the bad guys”; meaning that NZ has blood
on its hands thanks to Waihopai). That, of course, is our contribution to the
covert alliance. But NZ’s overt support for the US has increased markedly in recent
years. From 2005 to 2008 the US
had no more loyal cheerleader (certainly none so immaculately dressed and
coiffed) than Winston Peters in his
capacity as Helen Clark’s Minister of Foreign Affairs (of course, for his
pains, he and his party were voted out of Parliament and into political
oblivion, in 2008).
It is
correct that Iraq was the first American war that New Zealand stayed out of
(Don Brash, the then National Leader, made it clear that he would have followed
Bush to war if he’d been Prime Minister at the time) and Helen Clark was
justifiably proud of that. But it also needs to be remembered that she did send
a small NZ military contingent into Iraq once Bush had proclaimed the war “won”
– a contingent of Army engineers was sent to join the British occupation forces
in Basra, in the Shi’ite south of the country, to help in “reconstruction”. For
a while the NZ media was full of feel good stories about the good work being
done by “our boys”, then the propaganda machine went quiet and within short
order, “our boys” were withdrawn from Basra (and Iraq) before they got shot out
of it by the rapidly growing Shi’ite insurgency that has more recently got rid
of the British military also, leaving the Americans to deal with the mess that
they created.
By
contrast, Clark committed NZ to military
involvement in the Afghanistan War from the start, in 2001. Basically that has
involved the Special Air Service (SAS) doing a couple of tours of duty there
(which has led to one much ballyhooed Victoria Cross being awarded, the first
to an NZ soldier since World War 2) and a feel good Provincial Reconstruction
Team, made up of personnel from the Army, Navy and Air Force, based in low risk
Bamiyan Province, well away from the fighting (although the war is now
intruding into there too). As a result of this low key approach, NZ has
suffered no combat deaths. That benign scenario may soon be about to change.
Obama has proclaimed Afghanistan
to be “his” war and has put the hard word on satellites such as NZ to provide
combat troops for the intensified fighting that the US plans to conduct. At the time of
writing, John Key hasn’t announced any decision, saying that the Government
wants to think about it.
War Exercises & Access
To A Secret US Military Internet
Military
ties have got closer in recent years. In 2008 it was revealed that a secret
2005 meeting at the NZ Embassy in Bangkok,
involving US and NZ officials, was where the ice was broken and a range of
military and political meetings and exchanges took place as a result of that.
By the time Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, visited NZ in July
2008, she formalised the new reality by referring to New Zealand as a friend and ally.
In September and October 2008, NZ troops spent a month with US forces at a high
tech combat centre in Germany,
the first time this had happened in decades. They joined troops from Britain,
Canada and Australia (the same five nations that comprise the UKUSA Agreement,
the Anglo-Saxon victors of World War 2 from which this relationship dates) in
training for warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq. “A group of New Zealand soldiers are practising
breaking into buildings and then making instant decisions on whether the
occupants are friendly or hostile. The Kiwis are taking apart in joint exercise
with four other English-speaking nations designed to help them operate together
and work out any kinks before they hit the battlefield” (Associated Press, 25/9/08). Doesn’t sound too much like
provincial reconstruction to me – and this took place under the Labour
government. The likely resumption of
joint US/NZ military exercises was indicated in a statement from the US Air
Force’s Pacific Commander, published on the US Air Force Website in October
2008.
Most
fascinating was a Rand Corporation study into intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaked in March 2009,
which revealed that NZ is “quietly plugged into the world’s most secret
internet, allowing access to the Pentagon’s battle plans at strategic and
tactical level. It’s known as the ‘Secret Internet Protocol Router Network’ or
SIPRINET, a sophisticated alternative to the Internet which allows even New
Zealand frigates and armoured vehicles access to material seen on generals’
desks in Washington, London and Canberra…Last year, Colonel Mike Convertino of
the US Air Force Cyber Command told computer media that SIPRINET was completely
separated from the public Internet. ‘We conduct wars on SIPRINET’, he said. ‘So
it’s very important that there is little to no chance that it can be interfered
with’” (Stuff, 6/3/09; “NZ plugged
into secret internet”, Michael Field).
So the
stage is being set for an intensified war in Afghanistan (with Iraq having been
downgraded to a “manageable occupation” that the US hopes to painlessly exit
from, once it’s got a puppet regime firmly in control - which doesn’t appear to
be likely any time soon). The propaganda machine is working overtime – indeed
you could be forgiven for thinking that the reason for invading Afghanistan
was to liberate that country’s terribly oppressed women. Nothing is said about
any base motives – there is a whole literature about what some experts have
renamed Pipelineistan, meaning the complex politics of securing access to, and
control or ownership of, the region’s rich deposits of natural gas and the
pipelines needed to transport it across the various “stans” of Central Asia,
including Afghanistan, to the energy hungry West, comprising the same countries
which occupy it today. Indeed the much reviled Taliban was hosted in the US by
the same Bush Administration (which soon afterwards overthrew it) when they
wanted to talk pipeline deals.
Stay Out Of America’s Wars
It
would be better for all concerned for those foreign countries, including New Zealand, to get out of Afghanistan, and leave it to sort
out its own problems. That doesn’t mean endorsing the Taliban, a bunch of
medievalists, flat Earth obscurantists and misogynists who are a singularly
repulsive demonstration of why theocracy is the worst possible kind of
government. The Americans went in there, with considerable international
support and sympathy, as a kneejerk reaction to serious terrorist attacks
plotted by Arabs who were based in that country (let’s not forget that there
were no Afghans, or Iraqis, on those planes on 9/11. In fact, on the basis of
the nationality of most of the hijackers, a good case could have been made for
the US to invade Saudi Arabia,
which shares an uncanny number of similarities to the Taliban). They achieved
their immediate goal of rooting out those terrorists and the Taliban regime –
then they made the mistake of deciding to stay indefinitely “to finish the
job”. The trouble is, nobody knows now just exactly what that job is. And the
international support and sympathy for the US has long since evaporated, mainly
because Bush used 9/11 as an excuse for his real agenda of getting rid of
Saddam, the “unfinished business” from his father’s Presidency. Far better to
cut the losses, before they get any worse, and get out now. At the very least,
if there is going to be a stepped up war, then New Zealand should stay out of it. We
shared the bitterness of the American defeat in Vietnam, so why go through it all
over again? Let the Americans fight their own wars and let New Zealand resume building a truly
independent foreign policy, one which doesn’t involve being the eager servant
to whichever imperial master happens to be in the ascendancy at the time.
.