Rob Gowland
The gall and hypocrisy of the US government and its NATO buddies continues to beggar belief. Using their own “special forces” and assorted mercenaries from such bastions of democracy as Saudi Arabia, they invaded Libya without even bothering to find a pretext.
Arming and financing a motley crew of “pro-democracy fighters”, amongst whom you can be sure are a plentiful number of US, British, French and Saudi agents, they subjected the country to a savage bombing campaign. After all, it worked in Yugoslavia.
Libya, which under Gaddafi had an excellent public hospital system funded from oil revenues, suffered thousands of casualties thanks to NATO’s war. Its hospital system was simply overwhelmed. But while Libya’s Health Minister appealed desperately to NATO to stop its war against his country, US politicians and media alike congratulated themselves on “overthrowing the dictator Gaddafi”.
As if the US government ever cared tuppence about whether a foreign leader was a dictator or not. The US has armed and supported more dictators than any other country on Earth. Being slave-owning, brutal barbaric dictators has never harmed the Saudis’ relationship with the US, has it?
The US, which has made assassination state policy, sent its special forces to kill bin Laden as a macabre PR exercise. (Imagine the embarrassing revelations that could have come out if he’d been captured and put on trial!)
Not to be outdone, the USA’s junior partner in NATO’s military adventures – Britain – has followed suit. As I write this, a headline in The Sydney Morning Herald reads “British SAS hunt for Gaddafi”.
I caught an American news commentator congratulating President Obama for the US “getting” bin Laden and Gaddafi: “and they both happened on his watch”.
This is the modern day version of “gunboat diplomacy”: in the old days, when an imperial power wanted something from a smaller country, they sent a gunboat to its port and threatened to reduce the place to rubble unless they got what they wanted. The US has refined the practice by adding the rider: “Leave no witnesses”.
Morally we are assuredly in a new age of barbarism.
And yet there are causes for optimism, still. Imperialist powers once could send a gunboat at will, almost on a whim, and get away with it.
Today, they must seek to morally justify their barbarous actions. The world holds them accountable and they must explain away their war mongering as supporting people’s democratic aspirations – their rightful and legitimate democratic aspirations, at that.
They still get away with murder, but they have to jump through a lot of hoops and squeeze through a lot of narrow places to do it, and it’s getting harder all the time (I know it doesn’t look like it some of the time but it is true for all that).
There was a time when imperialism had things entirely its own way always. That is no longer the case and it will never be the case again.
Meanwhile, the US spends a mint of money every year on wars, in pursuit of that strange policy President Bush enunciated as “continuous war”. There is no doubt that a particular coterie of companies involved in arms, oil, electronics and related fields make a gargantuan amount of money out of this policy. But the USA as a whole slides back further into the depths with each passing year.
For instance, only a small amount of the money that goes into the pockets of the arms industry would be sufficient to finally make good the ravages of hurricane Katrina. Yes, Katrina. I know, it was six years ago, but the US, that wealthiest of nations, has still not recompensed thousands of people for the damage that was done, the homes that were lost, the jobs that vanished.
And let’s not forget the ever-present racism. The current population of the city of New Orleans is about 110,000 less than when Katrina hit. The majority of those that have left the city permanently are poor African Americans.
Over 3,000 public housing apartments occupied before Katrina plus another thousand under renovation were bulldozed after Katrina. Only half of the 3,000 plus families displaced from the public housing have even made it back to New Orleans. All were African-American.
Seventy percent more people are homeless in New Orleans today than before Hurricane Katrina, which – let us remember – was six years ago.
And here’s a statistic that really gets me: according to the US charity the Annie Casey Foundation 34 percent of the children in New Orleans today live in poverty compared to the US national average of 20 percent. That’s a whopping indictment of the US Bush and Obama administrations’ failure to cope with a national crisis.
Not to mention that other statistic buried in that paragraph: 20 percent of all US children live in poverty. They don’t boast about that too often when they are trying to convince us all that the US leads the world.
Meanwhile, a year after the massive spill from BP’s Deep Horizon deep-water oil-rig off the US Gulf Coast, the New York Times and National Geographic report that more people in the area are reporting medical and mental health problems. At the same time, environmental groups monitoring the health of the Gulf report evidence of new spills possibly coming from around the “capped” well.
Even disregarding the evidence of new spills, the US Gulf Coast is now heavily polluted from offshore deep water oil drilling. What do you reckon are the prospects that the US government will compel the oil companies to pay to restore the Gulf environment? Yes, remote, to say the least.
