Wny do you hate Amerika???

[Guest guest]

The USA saved Europe from the Nazis, defeated communism and keeps the West rich. Bryan Appleyard analyses why it has become the land of the loathed.

 

Why do they hate America?

 

We have seen Pakistanis waving pictures of Osama Bin Laden and wearing T-shirts celebrating the death of 6,000 Americans. We have seen Palestinians dancing in the streets and firing their Kalashnikovs in glee. We have heard Harold Pinter and friends pleading with the West to stop a war we didn't start. A few of us have read a New Statesman editorial coming perilously close to suggesting that bond dealers in the World Trade Center had it coming.

 

Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal from Beirut. She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets. Then she went into a fashionable cafe. "The cafe's sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked or moved. They were excited, very excited," she writes.

 

"Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved," she is told. "An exaggeration?" she comments. "Rather an understatement."

 

It is horrifying but not entirely surprising; we have seen it before. I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage anti-Americanism. In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans. In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud - indeed, my contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as they attempted to storm the American embassy. I saw many of those who now weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes.

 

How strange, I thought, even then. They wore Levi jeans, drank Coke, watched American television and listened to American music. Something inside them loved America, even as something outside them hated her. They were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam - the whisky, in Samuel Beckett's words, that bore a grudge against the decanter. Like the Beirut elite, they wanted to have their hamburgers and eat them, to bite the Yankee hand that fed them.

 

But there is something more terrible, more gravely unjust here than 1960s student stupidity, more even than the dancing of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

 

Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling - we hope - of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered.

 

Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world.

 

"People should think," David Halberstam, the writer, says from the blasted city of New York, "what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past 60 years." Probably, I think, a bit like hell.

 

There is a lot wrong with America and terrible things have been done in her name. But when the chips are down all the most important things are right. On September 11 the chips went down.

 

The Yankophobes were too villanously stupid to get the message. Barely 48 hours after thousands of Americans are murdered, we see the BBC's Question Time with its hand-picked morons in the audience telling Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, that "the world despises America". The studio seethes with ignorance and loathing. Lader looks broken.

 

Or we have the metropolitan elite on Newsnight Review sneering at Dubya Bush. "So out of touch," Rosie Boycott, the journalist, hisses, "there was no sense of his feeling for people." Alkarim Jivani, the writer, wades in by trashing Bush's response when asked how he was feeling: "Well, I'm a loving guy; also I've got a job to do." Jivani thinks this isn't good enough, no emotion.

 

Hang on; I thought the bien- pensant left wanted restraint from Bush. And that "loving guy" quote was the most beautiful thing said since September 11. Poetically compressed, rooted in his native dialect, it evoked duty and stoicism. But these are not big values in Islington.

 

Or here's George Monbiot in The Guardian: "When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities." I see; so the United States, the victim of this attack, is to be condemned for somehow deviously making money out of it. I'll run it up the flagpole, George, but I suspect only the Question Time audience will salute.

 

Or here's Suzanne Moore in The Mail on Sunday: "In this darkest hour my heart goes out to America. But my head knows that I have not supported much of what has been done in its name in the past. As hard as it is, there are many who feel like this. Now is not the time to pretend otherwise." So, Suzanne, how many corpses does it take for it to be a good time to pretend otherwise? Do you laugh at the funerals of people with whom you disagreed?

 

Or here are two more venomous voices, both quoted in The Guardian. Patricia Tricker from Bedale: "Now they know how the Iraqis feel." And Andrew Pritchard from Amsterdam: "If the US's great peacetime defeat results in defeating America's overweening ego as the world's sole remaining superpower, it will be a highly productive achievement." Would that achievement be the dead children, Andrew, or the crushed firemen?

 

 

Anti-Americanism has long been the vicious, irrational, global ideology of our time. "It combines," says Sir Michael Howard, the historian, "the nastiest elements of the right and left." It is dangerous and stupid and, in the days after September 11, shockingly distasteful.

 

In the name of God, more than 6,000 noncombatants are dead, more than 6,000 families bereaved. From what dark wells of malevolence springs this dreadful reflex desire to dance on their graves?

 

From history, says Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington: "There's an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and ultimately anti-modern theme that always emerges to criticise the dominant power of the day. It was directed at the cities of northern Italy, then in the 17th century at the Netherlands, then at Britain when she picked up the torch of capitalism, and now it's the US."

 

So at the most basic level America is loathed simply because she's on top. The world leader is always trashed simply for being the leader. The terms of the trashing are remarkably consistent. Nineteenth-century Germans, Lind points out, responded to Britain's dominance by saying, in effect, "they may be rich but we have soul". That is exactly what many Europeans and all anti-Americans are now saying: we're for God or culture or whatever against mammon. This is inaccurate - America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics - but it is the predictably banal rhetoric of envy.

 

This form of "spiritual" anti-Americanism has close links with anti-semitism. "Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism are closely interwoven historically," says Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University. "Not because there are so many Jews here - there weren't always - but because both are in part about fear of openness, rootlessness, change, the modern anomic world: Jews as a placeless people, America as a history-less land."

 

As Jon Ronson recently demonstrated in his book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, almost every crazed cult in the world believes there is a global Jewish conspiracy run from Hollywood and Wall Street. Those bien-pensant chatterers are, I'm sure, anti-racists all, but they are swimming in deeper, darker, crazier waters than they imagine.

 

Judt's word "openness" is important. The fanatic - in Islington or Kabul - hates openness because he finds himself relativised and turns on the very society which permits his freedom of expression.

 

George Orwell noted in 1941: "In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi." Elsewhere he wrote of the "unadmitted motive" of pacifism as being "hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism".

 

So bog-standard anti-Americanism in the developed world is a dark, irrational combination of hate-the-father/leader and infantile fantasies of rebellion and control. It is a reflex hatred of home - the place that provides succour or, in this case, Levi's. But of course there are local nuances. The French have, in contrast to the British, been consistently anti-American at governmental and diplomatic levels.

 

"It is a long-standing resentment born of 1940," says Judt. "A sense that France was once the universal, modern reference or model and is now just a second-class power with a declining international language to match. There is a loose analogy with British complexes about the US - us in decline, them over-mighty - but in France it is complicated by a layer of hyper-revolutionism among the intelligentsia in the years between 1947 and 1973, precisely the time when the US rise to world domination was becoming uncomfortably obvious."

 

In Britain we did not have the Sartres and the Derridas leading us to political and philosophical extremes. But members of the British left had something simpler: a burning hatred for America for disproving almost everything they ever believed. They so wanted rampantly capitalist America to be wrong that even Stalin hadn't quite turned them off Russia.

 

There was, admittedly, a pause in this crude British form of anti-Americanism. When Bill Clinton was elected president, the British left suddenly constructed a fantasy America as co-pioneer of the Third Way. The new mandarins - Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie - said that America was where it was all happening. It was a fantasy because Clinton, even to himself, was window-dressing. Capitalist, religious America had merely put on this smiling mask. When Bush was elected the left felt betrayed.

 

Much of the present wave of anti-Americanism, and especially the awful contempt for Bush, springs from this sense of betrayal. It also springs from an inability to escape from post-cold war attitudes. "The anxiety about American behaviour now," says Hugh Brogan, research professor of history at Essex University, "is a hangover from cold war anxiety about nuclear war."

 

Fear of the bomb was such that it provoked in some an abiding belief that at any moment we would be fried or irradiated because of the miscalculation of some mad American in a cowboy hat - an image burnt into many brains by Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic film Dr Strangelove.

 

Somehow the Soviet Union, probably because of ignorance, escaped our disapproval. It was all wrong, if

 

just about understandable, then. Now it has become a pernicious and destructive failure to know a friend when we see one.

 

With the cold war confrontations gone, the anti-capitalism, anti- globalisation movements abandoned potentially rational, cultural and environmental anxieties in favour of a monstrous random bag of anti-American loathing. And, of course, the Middle East seemed to provide a clear case of the arrogant, bullying superpower persecuting the poor.

 

The idea of the bully fits neatly with one of the most grotesquely enduring of all anti-American beliefs: that Americans are all dumb Yanks. This is a delusion of the right as much as the left and it began with Harold Macmillan's absurd aspiration, later taken up by Harold Wilson, that somehow Britain should play Athens to America's Rome.

 

The idea was that America was this big, blundering lummox and we were these terribly refined deep thinkers. Precisely the same attitude inspires the raised eyebrows and condescending tut-tutting of leftish dinner party opinion. They're so naïve, say the chatterers, so innocent - and this, sadly, leads them to do such terrible things.

 

Well, I've spent some time among the American intelligentsia and I have been awestruck and humbled. They are, without doubt, the best educated, most cultivated and cleverest people in the world. They are also the most humane. There are 30 or more American universities where our best and brightest would be struggling to keep up. Apart from that, how could we be so dumb as to accuse the nation of Updike, Bellow, Roth, DeLillo, Ashbery, Dylan, of Terence Malick, The Simpsons, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of stupidity, let alone innocence?

 

The roots of this are obvious. We want the bully to be thick for the same reason as we want the beautiful model to be thick. We can't bear the possibility of somebody having strength or beauty as well as brains.

 

In fairness, the stupidity charge is partly fuelled by one of the odder forms of anti-Americanism: American anti-Americanism. There has always been, within the US, cultivated East and West Coast elites who take the charge of stupidity seriously and feel they have to apologise for the embarrassment of the unsophisticated masses of the Midwest or deep South.

 

At its best this produces the brilliant satire of Randy Newman, at its worst the mandarin, Europhile posing of Gore Vidal. The masses bite back with their own form of anti-Americanism - a hatred of the elites. The Rev Jerry Falwell has already made common cause with the terrorists by blaming the attack on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians". To Falwell modern America really is the Great Satan.

 

However, it is Middle Eastern anti-Americanism that is the burning issue of the moment. Again this is deeply misunderstood by the chatterers of the West. For them it is simply a matter of Israel, apparently a clear case of a surrogate bullying on America's behalf, and of oil, a clear case of American greed swamping all other human considerations.

 

In fact, America has always had more allies in the region than it has had enemies - although, this being the Middle East, allies become enemies and vice versa with bewildering rapidity. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and her allies worked to subvert the secular Arab nationalist power of President Nasser of Egypt by backing Islamicist groups. Good idea, bad tactics. These groups started out pro- American and became anti. The unwelcome result was the more or less total destruction of nationalism and the creation of the powerful religious movement that now haunts Arab politics.

 

Israel forms a part but not the whole of this picture. Islamicism makes it a larger part because of an ancient enmity that goes back to the story of the prophet's betrayal by Jewish tribes and, more recently, to the defeat and expulsion of the Moors from Christian Europe.

 

In this context, Arab hardliners see Israel as a further Christian-backed offensive against the Islamic world. Even without Israel, the idea of such an offensive would still be a powerful imaginative force.

 

People who suggest September 11 would never have happened if America had pulled back from her support for Israel are almost certainly wrong. Israel is not even in the foreground of Bin Laden's murderous imagination. The Palestinians have actually complained that he cares nothing for them. For Bin Laden and for many more moderate Muslims, the turning point was the Gulf war in 1990-91.

 

"Contrary to popular belief that was the first real build-up of American military force in the region," says Dr Clive Jones at Leeds University. "This was in Saudi Arabia, a country with the holiest sites in Islam at Mecca and Medina. This created a new form of anti-Americanism that cannot in any way be related to Israel."

 

To these newest and most savage anti-Americans, Israel is secondary. The primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. One widely circulated picture of two women GIs in a Jeep, their shirts unbuttoned to their waists, driving across the Arabian desert, was enough to inflame the sensibilities of thousands of devout Muslims and to fling the most unstable of them into the arms of the extremists. They had a point but not one that justifies murder. Islam, at heart, is as peaceful a creed as Christianity.

 

The truth about the Gulf war was that the Americans saved an Arab state, Kuwait, from Saddam Hussein, the most savage oppressor in the region. They would have been as surely damned for not doing this as much as they are now damned for doing it. Now they are also damned by the chatterers for keeping the pressure on Saddam. Do the chatterers know what Saddam is still doing? I do and I'm with the Americans.

 

Of course America has made terrible mistakes in the Middle East. Much resentment would have been and may still be prevented by a humane settlement with the Palestinians. But America was usually trying to do the right thing, always with the collusion of large sections, if not the majority, of the Arab population. As Winston Churchill said, the Americans usually do the right thing once they have tried all the alternatives.

 

Yet anti-Americanism has become the savage reflex of the entire region. It is the result of cynical manipulation by, mostly, appalling Arab governments and by extremists who wish to relaunch a medieval war of civilisations between Christianity and Islam.

 

 

This is the anti-Americanism that informs the ignorant dinner party guests of the West who, in their comfortable stupidity, pretend to have more in common with fanatical theocrats than they do with the land of The Simpsons and John Updike.

 

Perhaps worst of all is the deep vacuity of this reflex malevolence. In truth there is little that can be said about the attack on America. Our "thinkers" are trapped in a history they do not understand. They can grasp global conflict only as a series of confrontations between competing humanist ideologies - most obviously capitalism and communism. But this is something different. It is a confrontation between civilisation and an atavistic savagery that has no time for the delicate ways of life we have, at such terrible cost, constructed. Unable to see this, the chatterers must search for something to say.

 

"It's not for nothing they're called the chattering classes," observes Brogan.

 

So they blame the victim. It is a heartbreaking spectacle of delusion turned to savagery. What has America done wrong? In the days since September 11, its president and people have done nothing but demonstrate dignity and restraint. Bush will lash out, the chatterers said. But he hasn't yet. Bush is a bumbling hick, they sneered. But he isn't. Even CNN, that usually incomprehensible tumult of undigested events, has been steady and calm, devoid of all trace of prejudice, xenophobia or empty emotion.

 

Civilisation? It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins. I just wish it was closer.

 

I am sick of my generation's whining ingratitude, its wilful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves. But I am heartened by something my 19- year-old daughter said: "America has always been magic to us, we don't understand why you lot hate it so much."

 

Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be. Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse. But this is not one of them. This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embarrassing - a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked. So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted.

 

Whose side are you really on?

 

 

[Tarun]

AMERICA by Bhakta Simon & Garfunkel Prabhu

 

Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together

I've got some real estate here in my bag

So we bought a pack of yogi bars and Devidasi's pies

And we walked off to look for America

KathA I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

Michigan seems like a dream to me now

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus playing games with the faces

She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy

I said be careful his bowtie is really a camera

Toss me a yogi bar I think there's one in the raincoat

We honored the last one an hour ago

So I looked at the scenary she read BTG magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

KathA I'm lost I said though I knew she was sleeping

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They've all come to look for America

All come to look for America

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Originally posted by Tarun:

Whose side are you really on?

 

 

 

[recruit]

Originally posted by rand0M aXiS:

Anti-Americanism has long been the vicious, irrational, global ideology of our time. "It combines," says Sir Michael Howard, the historian, "the nastiest elements of the right and left." It is dangerous and stupid and, in the days after September 11, shockingly distasteful.

 

In the name of God, more than 6,000 noncombatants are dead, more than 6,000 families bereaved. From what dark wells of malevolence springs this dreadful reflex desire to dance on their graves?

Yes, so out of touch with reality. To condone or praise the dastardly acts of 9-11 is partaking in the evil of it, to be sure. Still, there is nothing irrational about protesting the abuses our Corporations inflict upon the world, especially exploiting the poorest of mankind and destroying the environment.

 

America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics - but it is the predictably banal rhetoric of envy.

In Krsna We Trust!

God bless Amerika!

 

Fear of the bomb was such that it provoked in some an abiding belief that at any moment we would be fried or irradiated because of the miscalculation of some mad American in a cowboy hat - an image burnt into many brains by Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic film Dr Strangelove.

It really doesn't matter who pushes the button or whether said button-pusher is wearing a hat of any kind. Nuclear destruction is still a reality to be wary of!

 

For Bin Laden and for many more moderate Muslims, the turning point was the Gulf war in 1990-91.

 

Well, my dear prabhus, I have it on tape that we gave Saddam his helicoptors with guns which he then used to murder innocent throngs of people, people demonstrating for freedom and the Amerikan way. That was betrayal, not only of the innocents Saddam was then able to murder, but of the Amerikan People who believe our military is fighting for liberty and justice everywhere.

 

The truth about the Gulf war was that the Americans saved an Arab state, Kuwait, from Saddam Hussein, the most savage oppressor in the region.

Ahem. The truth is also that although we won the war we did not take the necessary step of removing this despot. In the words of his emminence General Schwarttzkappfenogger, 'I want the country to be controlled by a dictator who overthrows Saddam from within'. I have this on tape. Straight from his mouth, our top general in charge of the war, did not want to liberate the Iraqui people from totalitarianism. How many Amerikans know this?

 

Do the chatterers know what Saddam is still doing? I do and I'm with the Americans.

And why? Because the General left him in power, even though we won the war hands down. Think about it.

 

Whose side are you really on?

 

I'll go with Krsna and Arjuna!

[gopal]

I'll side with Krsna and Arjuna too. Any other "siding" necessitates a fanatical stance in order to stick with it. That's why the simplistic unfair charges are continually made against those who are not "with us". Very scary, these types. Unless in God you trust.

[paul108]

I don't know that I can call this country the U.S.A. anymore after the scandal that passed as the most recent presidential election. I wonder why the news agencies will not release the results of their in-depth investigation into the ballot counting.

[Tarun]

Recruitji: Thanks for the tactical support.

ZrIla JIva GosvAmIpAd explains how in any debate, the marginal position/fence is the starting point.

Just because I'm born in Amerika, doesn't mean I have to follow the president no matter what he says.

I don't believe 1/2 of what commercial media is spewing out.

After hearing from PrabhupAd & ZrIdhardev, its not difficult to dissect anything any conditioned soul proclaims, no matter how convoluted.

1) Bin Laden denied having anything to do with 11Sep01.

2) Bush said he'd show us the evidence.

3) Meanwhile Bush invades Afghanistan.

3) As of today, still no evidence.

4) Bush doesn't want Amerika's 5 principle media stations to broadcast bin Laden's speeches.

Or they should be edited first.

What could be more obvious than this?

Same thing he did with Noriega.

Before 11Sep01, Bush spent 42% of his presidency on vacation or going to a vacation spot.

Should he be paid for such obviously intense vigilance?

Or should he be fined somewhere in the order of, let's say $10 billion for starters?

After 11Sep01, Bush goes to Langley to congratulate CIA for a job well done.

What was well done?

That they flew those 4 planes into WTC & Pentagon?

Out of 12 rasas, Bush + CIA have mastered only 2:

hAsya & bhayanaka = comedy & horror

And he's not the only Bush we have to contend with.

Less we forget.

Even if Tallahassee, Florida's State Gov't officials botched up on Anthrax & Flight Schools, let's remember how well they handled our Nov-Dec2000 'Extended' Presidential Election.

[gopal]

Originally posted by paul108:

I don't know that I can call this country the U.S.A. anymore after the scandal that passed as the most recent presidential election. I wonder why the news agencies will not release the results of their in-depth investigation into the ballot counting.

Payola or threats. Got to be.

 

 

[paul108]

[Tarun]

Do people who want to protect our environment hate Amerika?

Do people who want to stop violence & its reactions hate Amerika?

I've lived most of my life in Queens, New York City.

I was only held at gunpoint once: in Houston, Texas.

Siddhavidya & I were doing door to door sankIrtan in saffron.

The apartment complex owner didn't appreciate our presence.

Too much beef in his blood.

So far all 11Sep WTC attack evidence points to Mosad.

All of it.

Not 90%, 99%!

Bushala (as he's known amongst Yiddish speakers, accent on 1st syllable) is playing right into their hands.

Whether he knows it or not? That I cannot say.

Maybe Randomji can ask him face to face.

 

 

[Tarun]

Good question: why does GW Bushel Hate Amerika?

Why would someone who hates Amerika so much want to be President?

Could it be...

 

[darkangel]

 

Originally posted by rand0M aXiS:

The USA saved Europe from the Nazis, defeated communism and keeps the West rich. Bryan Appleyard analyses why it has become the land of the loathed.

 

Why do they hate America?

 

As a Historian I have to point out that the USA didn't save Europe from the Nazis. They weren't even interested in getting involved in the war (officially that is) until Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in 1942 and Japan was linked to the Nazis and therefore the Nazis became an enemy by proxy.

 

As for defeating Communism, that defeated itself, it didn't need American help, it was destined to fall eventually, there is only so much of "Everyone is equal but some more equal than others" that can be stomached by millions of people. America might have been an itch that communism couldn't scratch but I think to say that America defeated Communism is an amusing misnomer if anything!

 

And keeping the West rich? Oh boy that thought made me chuckle for quite a while, most European Countries are still paying back debts to America from World War I, as well as World War 2!

 

Yes the west is rich but America is exacting its pound of flesh. No one country is innocent, democratic or human loving. All countries especially the super-powers have skeletons in their closet that rattle dangerously when shook. America is no different from the UK, China, Russia, Germany, etc, etc, etc.

 

And as for why America is hated? Why is anyone, anything, or anywhere hated? It is hated simply because it is powerful and basks in that power. And we as human beings with egos, different religions, ideals and patriotism can't stand that.

 

So America, you have to take the rough with the smooth. There will always be people who love you but then there will always be people who hate you too.

 

 

------------------

Diversity is the Spice of Life...

[valaya]

Originally posted by darkangel:

 

 

And as for why America is hated? Why is anyone, anything, or anywhere hated? It is hated simply because it is powerful and basks in that power. And we as human beings with egos, different religions, ideals and patriotism can't stand that.

Those dependent on others generally resent it in some way, especially if it's constantly waved in their face. Forced co-operation by a greater power breeds frustration and therefore repressed anger, as well. All this becomes evident in our own relationship not only with each other, but with the Supreme Power that we identify as God.

 

Variety may be the spice of life, however you might say that co-operation is the splice of life! Unfortunately, for many of us it remains elusive and often must be forced...

 

------------------

Radhe Radhe always Radhe!

amanpeter@hotmail.com

 

[This message has been edited by valaya (edited 01-20-2002).]

[Tarun]

Dr Martin Luther King Jr said 3 evils exist today:

1) War

2) Economic injustice

3) Racial injustice

He further stated: 3 words exist to correct these evils:

All, Here, Now.

All means no compromize.

Here means here in Amerika.

Now means no post-dated check.

[Tarun]

I Pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of Amnesia, and to the Repression for which it Stands, one Invasion (after another), under Siege, with Liberty & Justice for all (those who can pay for it).

[Guest guest]

You wonder why people hate Amerika and Amerikans, well I can tell you that sence 11 september people have only started to hate you even more, even in Sweden. Why, you ask It´s because you don´t seem to care about the rest of the world. Why cant Amerikan soldiers be put in to justise in an internationell curt of law? Why does your goverment refuse to sign it, it´s becasuse they know that they are war-criminals.

 

Excuse my English but I am only 16 years old and I only have a VG in English. Anyway in our school young people like me (and me) have started to hate you, of course you attacked Irak because of oil. Sweden is the greatest countrey in the world, and we really dont understand why Bush refuse to signt the papers that is ment to slow down the poisining (?) of the earth.

 

Yes you helped us in world war two, but what is the . about saving us from communism, my god do you even know what that is? Communism is a hundred times better than fascism (were you are).

 

You Amerikans should listen to what other people have to say, dont be so god damn stupid, listen.

 

Im waiting for an answer

[I_love_krishna_]

Guest : "Why, you ask It´s because you don´t seem to care about the rest of the world."

 

Dude, where were you when America was in Persian Gulf war?

 

Where were you when American Peace Corps were established?

America helped somalia, Isreal, Afghanistan... and so many more.

 

America tried to prevent Islamic Fundamentalism from taking over Iran by helping the Iranian Shah.

 

America provides millions of people all over the world with Jobs -

 

The businesses such as Colgate, At&t and verizon take away jobs from Americans and give it to people all over the world.

 

Hating such a country as this is not a wise thing to do.

 

I am not saying that America is the best and Americans are all saints, but America is far better than other countries.

 

All countries from all over the world have some ridiculous things in their history.

 

Germans - holocaust, Spain- Spanish Inquisition... britain-Woah don't even go there...

 

America is far better when compared to these countries. Many people all over the world depend on America.

 

It is the only nation that gave huge amounts of money to countries that suffer in heavy poverty.

 

Americans pay their taxes and their country spends it on building Afghanisthan.

 

The Americans have freedom with Bill of Rights, so we can say whatever we want! I can say "Bush is gay" and no body will take me to jail for it.

 

In communism, you are controlled so that your free will is destroyed. You find inner harmony in the community but harmony is also bad when taken to an extreme.

 

I am not saying sweden sucks... Swedish people have an excellent administration and the swedish are very clever in keeping peace and harmony and maintaining order in the nation.

 

Anyway, the point is , all nations are both good and bad, America is far better off from most of the nations of the world...

 

 

 

[I_love_krishna_]

Dear friend,

 

This statement of yours troubles my heart, people here are not idiots conversing over world topics...

 

They are very educated and wise, they have Doctorates, phds and other degrees in many subjects including political science...

 

Even though some people are idiots like me- who is only a teen but anyway... may be you should "chill it" in your words.

[Jagat]

<center><h2>Preventive War 'the Supreme Crime'</h2>

<h3>Iraq: invasion that will live in infamy</h3>

by NOAM CHOMSKY ; August 11, 2003

http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm</center>

 

SEPTEMBER 2002 was marked by three events of considerable importance, closely related. The United States, the most powerful state in history, announced a new national security strategy asserting that it will maintain global hegemony permanently. Any challenge will be blocked by force, the dimension in which the US reigns supreme. At the same time, the war drums began to beat to mobilise the population for an invasion of Iraq. And the campaign opened for the mid-term congressional elections, which would determine whether the administration would be able to carry forward its radical international and domestic agenda.

 

The new "imperial grand strategy", as it was termed at once by John Ikenberry writing in the leading establishment journal, presents the US as "a revisionist state seeking to parlay its moment ary advantages into a world order in which it runs the show", a unipolar world in which "no state or coalition could ever challenge it as global leader, protector, and enforcer" (1). These policies are fraught with danger even for the US itself, Ikenberry warned, joining many others in the foreign policy elite.

What is to be protected is US power and the interests it represents, not the world, which vigorously opposed the concept. Within a few months studies revealed that fear of the US had reached remarkable heights, along with distrust of the political leadership. An international Gallup poll in December, which was barely noticed in the US, found almost no support for Washington's announced plans for a war in Iraq carried out unilaterally by America and its allies - in effect, the US-United Kingdom coalition.

Washington told the United Nations that it could be relevant by endorsing US plans, or it could be a debating society. The US had the "sovereign right to take military action", the administration's moderate Colin Powell told the World Economic Forum, which also vigorously opposed the war plans: "When we feel strongly about something we will lead, even if no one is following us" (2).

President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair underscored their contempt for international law and institutions at their Azores summit meeting on the eve of the invasion. They issued an ultimatum, not to Iraq, but to the Security Council: capitulate, or we will invade without your meaningless seal of approval. And we will do so whether or not Saddam Hussein and his family leave the country (3). The crucial principle is that the US must effectively rule Iraq.

President Bush declared that the US "has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security", threatened by Iraq with or without Saddam, according to the Bush doctrine. The US will be happy to establish an Arab facade, to borrow the term of the British during their days in the sun, while US power is firmly implanted at the heart of the world's major energy-producing region. Formal democracy will be fine, but only if it is of a submissive kind accepted in the US's backyard, at least if history and current practice are any guide.

The grand strategy authorises the US to carry out preventive war: preventive, not pre-emptive. Whatever the justifications for pre-emptive war might be, they do not hold for preventive war, particularly as that concept is interpreted by its current enthusiasts: the use of military force to eliminate an invented or imagined threat, so that even the term "preventive" is too charitable. Preventive war is, very simply, the supreme crime that was condemned at Nuremberg.

That was understood by those with some concern for their country. As the US invaded Iraq, the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote that Bush's grand strategy was "alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at the time of Pearl Harbor, on a date which, as an earlier American president [Franklin D Roosevelt] said it would, lives in infamy". It was no surprise, added Schlesinger, that "the global wave of sympathy that engulfed the US after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism" and the belief that Bush was "a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein" (4).

For the political leadership, mostly recycled from the more reactionary sectors of the Reagan-Bush Senior administrations, the global wave of hatred is not a particular problem. They want to be feared, not loved. It is natural for the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, to quote the words of Chicago gangster Al Capone: "You will get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone." They understand just as well as their establishment critics that their actions increase the risk of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and terror. But that too is not a major problem. Far higher in the scale of their priorities are the goals of establishing global hegemony and implementing their domestic agenda, which is to dismantle the progressive achievements that have been won by popular struggle over the past century, and to institutionalise their radical changes so that recovering the achievements will be no easy task.

It is not enough for a hegemonic power to declare an official policy. It must establish it as a new norm of international law by exemplary action. Distinguished commentators may then explain that the law is a flexible living instrument, so that the new norm is now available as a guide to action. It is understood that only those with the guns can establish norms and modify international law.

The selected target must meet several conditions. It must be defenceless, important enough to be worth the trouble, an imminent threat to our survival and an ultimate evil. Iraq qualified on all counts. The first two conditions are obvious. For the third, it suffices to repeat the orations of Bush, Blair, and their colleagues: the dictator "is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons [in order to] dominate, intimidate or attack"; and he "has already used them on whole villages leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or transfigured. If this is not evil then evil has no meaning." Bush's eloquent denunciation surely rings true. And those who contributed to enhancing evil should certainly not enjoy impunity: among them, the speaker of these lofty words and his current associates, and all those who joined them in the years when they were supporting that man of ultimate evil, Saddam Hussein, long after he had committed these terrible crimes, and after the first war with Iraq. Supported him because of our duty to help US exporters, the Bush Senior administration explained.

It is impressive to see how easy it is for polit ical leaders, while recounting Saddam the monster's worst crimes, to suppress the crucial words "with our help, because we don't care about such matters". Support shifted to denunciation as soon as their friend Saddam committed his first authentic crime, which was disobeying (or perhaps misunderstanding) orders, by invading Kuwait. Punishment was severe - for his subjects. The tyrant escaped unscathed, and was further strengthened by the sanctions regime then imposed by his former allies.

Also easy to suppress are the reasons why the US returned to support Saddam immediately after the Gulf war, as he crushed rebellions that might have overthrown him. The chief diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman, explained that the best of all worlds for the US would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein", but since that goal seemed unattainable, we would have to be satisfied with second best (5). The rebels failed because the US and its allies held the "strikingly unanimous view [that] whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression" (6).

All of this was suppressed in the commentary on the mass graves of the victims of the US- authorised paroxysm of terror of Saddam Hussein, which commentary was offered as a justification for the war on "moral grounds". It was all known in 1991, but ignored for reasons of state.

A reluctant US population had to be whipped to a proper mood of war fever. From September grim warnings were issued about the dire threat that Saddam posed to the US and his links to al-Qaida, with broad hints that he had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Many of the charges that had been "dangled in front of [the media] failed the laugh test," commented the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, "but the more ridiculous [they were,] the more the media strove to make whole-hearted swallowing of them a test of patriotism" (7). The propaganda assault had its effects. Within weeks, a majority of Americans came to regard Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the US. Soon almost half believed that Iraq was behind the 9/11 terror. Support for the war correlated with these beliefs. The propaganda campaign was just enough to give the administration a bare majority in the mid-term elections, as voters put aside their immediate concerns and huddled under the umbrella of power in fear of a demonic enemy.

The brilliant success of public diplomacy was revealed when Bush, in the words of one commentator, "provided a powerful Reaganesque finale to a six-week war on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on 1 May". This reference is presumably to President Ronald Reagan's proud declaration that America was "standing tall" after conquering Grenada, the nutmeg cap ital of the world, in 1983, preventing the Russians from using it to bomb the US. Bush, as Reagan's mimic, was free to declare - without concern for sceptical comment at home - that he had won a "victory in a war on terror [by having] removed an ally of al-Qaida" (8). It has been immaterial that no credible evidence was provided for the alleged link between Saddam Hussein and his bitter enemy Osama bin Laden and that the charge was dismissed by competent observers. Also immaterial was the only known connection between the victory and terror: the invasion appears to have been "a huge setback in the war on terror" by sharply increasing al-Qaida recruitment, as US officials concede (9).

The Wall Street Journal recognised that Bush's carefully staged aircraft carrier extravaganza "marks the beginning of his 2004 re-election campaign" which the White House hopes "will be built as much as possible around national-security themes". The electoral campaign will focus on "the battle of Iraq, not the war", chief Republican political strategist Karl Rove explained : the war must continue, if only to control the population at home (10).

Before the 2002 elections Rove had instructed party activists to stress security issues, diverting attention from unpopular Republican domestic policies. All of this is second-nature to the re cycled Reaganites now in office. That is how they held on to political power during their first tenure in office. They regularly pushed the panic button to avoid public opposition to the policies that had left Reagan as the most disliked living president by 1992, by which time he may have ranked even lower than Richard Nixon.

Despite its narrow successes, the intensive propaganda campaign left the public unswayed in fundamental respects. Most continue to prefer UN rather than US leadership in international crises, and by two to one prefer that the UN, rather than the US, should direct reconstruction in Iraq (11).

When the occupying coalition army failed to discover WMD, the US administration's stance shifted from absolute certainty that Iraq possessed WMD to the position that the accusations were "justified by the discovery of equipment that potentially could be used to produce weapons" (12). Senior officials then suggested a refinement in the concept of preventive war, to entitle the US to attack a country that has "deadly weapons in mass quantities". The revision "suggests that the administration will act against a hostile regime that has nothing more than the intent and ability to develop WMD" (13). Lowering the criteria for a resort to force is the most significant consequence of the collapse of the proclaimed argument for the invasion.

Perhaps the most spectacular propaganda achievement was the praising of Bush's vision to bring democracy to the Middle East in the midst of an extraordinary display of hatred and contempt for democracy. This was illustrated by the distinction that was made by Washington between Old and New Europe, the former being reviled and the latter hailed for its courage. The criterion was sharp: Old Europe consists of governments that took the same position over the war on Iraq as most of their populations; while the heroes of New Europe followed orders from Crawford, Texas, disregarding, in most cases, an even larger majority of citizens who were against the war. Political commentators ranted about disobedient Old Europe and its psychic maladies, while Congress descended to low comedy.

At the liberal end of the spectrum, the former US ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrooke, stressed the "very important point" that the population of the eight original members of New Europe is larger than that of Old Europe, which proves that France and Germany are "isolated". So it does, unless we succumb to the radical-left heresy that the public might have some role in a democracy. Thomas Friedman then urged that France be removed from the permanent members of the Security Council, because it is "in kindergarten, and does not play well with others". It follows that the population of New Europe must still be in nursery school, at least judging by the polls (14).

Turkey was a particularly instructive case. Its government resisted the heavy pressure from the US to prove its democratic credentials by following US orders and overruling 95% of its population. Turkey did not cooperate. US commentators were infuriated by this lesson in democracy, so much so that some even reported Turkey's crimes against the Kurds in the 1990s, previously a taboo topic because of the crucial US role in what happened, although that was still carefully concealed in the lamentations.

The crucial point was expressed by the deputy Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who condemned the Turkish military because they "did not play the strong leadership role that we would have expected" - that is they did not intervene to prevent the Turkish government from honouring near-unanimous public opinion. Turkey had therefore to step up and say, "We made a mistake - let's figure out how we can be as helpful as possible to the Americans" (15). Wolfowitz's stand was particularly informative because he had been portrayed as the leading figure in the administration's crusade to democratise the Middle East.

Anger at Old Europe has much deeper roots than just contempt for democracy. The US has always regarded European unification with some ambivalence. In his Year of Europe address 30 years ago, Henry Kissinger advised Europeans to keep to their regional responsibilities within the "overall framework of order managed by the US". Europe must not pursue its own independent course, based on its Franco-German industrial and financial heartland.

The US administration's concerns now extend as well to Northeast Asia, the world's most dynamic economic region, with ample resources and advanced industrial economies, a potentially integrated region that might also flirt with challenging the overall framework of world order, which is to be maintained permanently, by force if necessary, Washington has declared. ______

* Noam Chomsky is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(1) John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs, Sept.-Oct. 2002.

(2) Wall Street Journal, 27 January 2003.

(3) Michael Gordon, The New York Times, 18 March 2003.

(4) Los Angeles Times, 23 March 2003.

(5) The New York Times, 7 June 1991. Alan Cowell, The New York Times, 11 April 1991.

(6) The New York Times, 4 June 2003.

(7) Linda Rothstein, editor, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, July 2003.

(8) Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, 2 May 2003; transcript, 2 May 2003.

(9) Jason Burke, The Observer, London 18 May 2003.

(10) Jeanne Cummings and Greg Hite, Wall Street Journal, 2 May 2003. Francis Clines, The New York Times, 10 May 2003.

(11) Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, April 18-22.

(12) Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 1 June 2003

(13) Guy Dinmore and James Harding, Financial Times, 3/4 May 2003.

(14) Lee Michael Katz, National Journal, 8 February 2003; Friedman, The New York Times, 9 February 2003.

(15) Marc Lacey, The New York Times, 7/8 May 2003.

 

[Jagat]

<center><h3>Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who's The Biggest Rogue Of All?</h3>

by Richard Du Boff; August 07, 2003 http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm</center>

 

1. Comprehensive [Nuclear] Test Ban Treaty, 1996. Signed by 164 nations and ratified by 89 including France, Great Britain, and Russia; signed by President Clinton in 1996 but rejected by the Senate in 1999. The US is one of 13 nonratifiers among countries that have nuclear weapons or nuclear power programs. In November 2001, the US forced a vote in the UN Committee on Disarmament and Security to demonstrate its opposition to the Treaty, and announced plans to resume nuclear testing for development of new short-range tactical nuclear weapons.

 

2. Antiballistic Missile Treaty, 1972. In December 2001, the US officially withdrew from the landmark agreement--the first time in the nuclear era that the US renounced a major arms control accord.

 

3. Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, 1972, ratified by 144 nations including the US. In July 2001 the US walked out of a London conference to discuss a 1994 protocol designed to strengthen the Convention by providing for on-site inspections. At Geneva in November 2001, Undersecretary of State for arms control John Bolton stated that "the protocol is dead," at the same time accusing Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Sudan, and Syria of violating the Convention but offering no specific allegations or supporting evidence to substantiate the charges. In May 2002 Bolton accused Cuba of carrying out germ-warfare research, again producing no evidence. The same month, three Pentagon documents revealed proposals, dating from 1994, to develop US offensive bioweapons that destroy materials ("biofouling and biocorrosion"), in violation of the Convention and a 1989 US law that implements the Convention.

 

4. UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms, 2001: the US was the only nation in opposition. Undersecretary Bolton said the agreement was an "important initiative" for the international community, but one that the US "cannot and will not" support, since it could impinge on the Constitutional right of Americans to keep and bear arms.

 

5. International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty, 1998. Set up in The Hague to try political leaders and military personnel charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Concluded in Rome in July 1998, the Treaty was signed by 120 countries. Although President Clinton signed the Treaty in December 2000, he announced that the US would oppose it, along with 6 others (including China, Russia, and Israel). In May 2002 the Bush administration announced that it was "unsigning"--renouncing--the Treaty, something the US had never before done, and that it will neither recognize the Court's jurisdiction nor furnish any information to help the Court bring cases against any individuals. In July 2002 the ICC went into force after being ratified by more than the required number of 60 nations, including Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Spain (Russia now having signed but not ratified).

 

Throughout 2002 and 2003, the US worked to scuttle the treaty by signing bilateral agreements not to send each other's citizens before the ICC. By mid-2003 the US had signed 37 mutual immunity pacts, mostly with poor, small countries in Africa, Asia, Central America, and Eastern Europe. Threatened with the loss of $73 million in US aid, for example, Bosnia signed such a deal. In July 2003 the Bush administration suspended all military assistance to 35 countries which refused to pledge to give US citizens immunity before the ICC.

 

6. Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969, which the US signed but did not ratify. In May 2002, as the US was unsigning the ICC Treaty, it simultaneously announced that it will not be bound by the Vienna Convention, which outlines the obligations of nations to obey other treaties. Article 18 requires signatory nations not to take steps to undermine treaties they sign even if they do not ratify them.

 

7. The American Servicemen's Protection Act, 2002. The Bush administration has been working overtime to nullify the ICC. In November 2002 the President signed this Act, which not only bars cooperation with the ICC and threatens sanctions for countries that ratify it, but authorizes the use of "all means necessary" to free any US national who might be held in The Hague for trial before the ICC.

 

8. Land Mine Treaty, 1997. Banning the use, production or shipment of anti-personnel bombs and mines, the treaty was signed in Ottawa in December 1997 by 123 nations. President Clinton refused to submit it for ratification, claiming that mines were needed to protect South Korea against North Korea's "overwhelming military advantage," a proposition denied by the heads of North and South Korea in June 2000. In August 2001 President Bush rejected the treaty.

 

9. Kyoto Protocol of 1997, for controlling greenhouse gas emissions and reducing global warming: declared "dead" by President Bush in March 2001. No other country has chosen to abandon the treaty completely. In November 2001 the Bush administration shunned negotiations in Marrakech (Morocco) to revise the accord, mainly by watering it down in an attempt to gain US approval. In February 2002 Mr. Bush announced a new plan to limit emissions--by measures that are to be strictly voluntary. The US is the largest single producer of emissions, generating 20 percent of the world's total.

 

10. International Plan for Cleaner Energy, 2001. The US was the only nation to oppose this Plan, put forth by the G-8 group of industrial nations (US, Canada, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, UK) in Genoa in July 2001. It would phase out fossil fuel subsidies and increase financing for nonpolluting energy sources worldwide.

 

11. UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982, and the 1994 Agreement relating to Implementation of Part IX (Deep Seabed Mining), establishing a legal framework for management of marine resources and preservation of the marine environment for future generations (including fish stocks, minerals, international navigation, marine scientific research and marine technologies). President Clinton submitted these treaties to the Senate in 1994, but they have not been ratified, as they have been by 135 and 100 countries respectively. The primary obstacle to applying them remains the absence of US ratification.

 

12. Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, 2000: an international treaty sponsored by 130 nations, seeking to protect biological diversity from risks posed by genetically modified organisms resulting from biotechnology. To date, it has been ratified by 13 countries and signed by 95 more, including United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, both Koreas, China, India, Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico. The US has long argued that there is no reason for such a protocol, has not ratified it, and is not expected to do so.

 

13. European Union (EU) Talks on economic espionage and electronic surveillance of phone calls, e-mail, and faxes, May 2001. The US refused to meet with EU nations to discuss, even at lower levels of government, these activities carried out under its Echelon program. Meanwhile, the US escalated its opposition to the EU's Galileo project, a global satellite navigation system that would rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS), funded and controlled by the Department of Defense and serving thousands of corporate and individual users worldwide, all monitored and recorded by the US. In December 2001 Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the EU that Galileo would have "negative consequences for future NATO operations" and would interfere with GPS (in fact it is planned to be compatible). In March 2002 the EU announced that it would proceed with Galileo, slated to be operational in 2008.

 

14. Multilateral talks sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, May 2001, on ways to end "Harmful Tax Competition"-- tax evasion and money-laundering operations carried out through off-shore tax havens. The US refused to participate. The US, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill stated, "will not participate in any initiative to harmonize world tax systems."

 

In negotiations in Vienna under the auspices of the UN, the US and the EU are also battling over a proposed global Convention Against Corruption. Europe wants the pact to cover businesses and governments; the US wants it restricted to governments.

 

15. World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, September 2001, convened by UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the UN High Commission for Human Rights and bringing together 163 countries. The US withdrew from the conference, alleging anti-Israel and anti-semitic politics on the part of many delegations. The final declaration of the Conference expressed "concern about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation" and "recognized the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and . . . the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel."

 

16. The illegal embargo against Cuba by the US, now 39 years old: under Bush II, it has been tightened. In November 2002, the UN General Assembly passed, for the eleventh consecutive year, a resolution calling for an end to the boycott by a vote of 173 to 3, the largest majority since the General Assembly first debated the issue in 1992. As usual, the US, Israel, and the Marshall Islands voted against the resolution.

 

17. The US quit UNESCO and ceased its payments for UNESCO's budget, 1984. The pretext was the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), which was not a UNESCO project but a proposal, backed by several groups including UNESCO, for change in global communications designed to lessen dependence of developing countries on Western media, news agencies, and advertising firms. The NWICO proposal was dropped in 1989; the US nonetheless refused to rejoin UNESCO. In 1995 the Clinton administration proposed rejoining; the move was blocked in Congress. In February 2000 the US finally paid some of its arrears to the UN but excluded UNESCO. President Bush stated that the US would rejoin UNESCO in September 2002, when he appeared before the UN to ask for a resolution authorizing him to attack Iraq.

 

18. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague held the US in violation of international law for "unlawful use of force" in Nicaragua, 1986, through its own actions and those of its Contra proxy army. The US refused to recognize the Court's jurisdiction. A 1988 UN resolution that "urgently calls for full and immediate compliance with the Judgment of the International Court of Justice of 27 June 1986 in the case of 'Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua' in conformity with the relevant provisions of the Charter of the United Nations" was approved 94-2 (US and Israel voting no).

 

19. Optional Protocol, 1989, to the UN's International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), aimed at abolition of the death penalty and containing a provision banning the execution of those under 18. The US has neither signed nor ratified and exempts itself from the latter provision, making it one of five countries that still execute juveniles (with Saudi Arabia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria). China abolished the practice in 1997, Pakistan in 2000.

 

20. UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979, ratified by 169 nations. President Carter signed CEDAW in 1980, but the Senate blocked it. The only countries that have signed but not ratified are the US, Afghanistan, Sao Tome and Principe.

 

21. UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989, which protects the economic and social rights of children. The US has signed but not ratified. The only other country not to ratify is Somalia.

 

22. Cairo Action Plan, adopted by 179 nations at the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development in 1994, for establishing "reproductive health services and health care" as a means for curbing population growth in developing countries. In July 2002 the US cut off its $34 million annual contribution to the UN family-planning program, and in November withdrew its support of the Cairo Action Plan. The State Department's population office stated that the Plan implied a right to abortion and undermined the US international campaign for sexual abstinence to avoid pregnancy. "This hit like a bombshell. People were stunned," the senior UN official stated.

 

23. UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948. The US finally ratified in 1988, adding several "reservations" to the effect that the US Constitution and the "advice and consent" of the Senate are required to judge whether any "acts in the course of armed conflict" constitute genocide. The reservations are rejected by Britain, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Estonia, and others.

 

24. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 1987, ratified by the US in 1994. In the UN Economic and Social Council in July 2002, the US tried to stop a vote on a protocol to reinforce the Convention. The protocol would establish a system of inspections of prisons and detention centers worldwide to check for abuses. The US claimed that the new plan would allow monitors to gain access to American prisoners and detainees--including, presumably, those held in US detention camps in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, and now Iraq.

 

25. Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and Optional Protocols, 1963. The US is a long-time violator, by detaining foreign nationals and failing to notify their governments. In 1999 two German citizens, Walter LeGrand and his brother Karl, were put to death in an Arizona gas chamber. When arrested in 1984 for the murder of a bank teller, the LeGrands were not informed of their right to contact the German embassy, and German officials were unable to provide legal aid. In 1998 the World Court (the ICJ) ruled that the US had violated international law in the case and asked the US Supreme Court to stay the execution; the Supreme Court dismissed the request. In 2002 Mexico petitioned the ICJ to grant stays of execution for 54 Mexicans held on death row in the US, arguing that US municipal and state officials are violating the Vienna Convention. In August 2002 Mexican President Vicente Fox cancelled a meeting with President Bush at his Texas ranch to protest Alabama's execution of Mexican citizen Javier Suarez Medina, who was denied the right to seek help from his government when arrested in 1988.

 

After September 11, 2001 US violations of the Convention multiplied, with more than 600 "unlawful combatants" detained in Guantanamo and elsewhere without charges, denied all legal rights, and held for possible trial before closed military tribunals.

 

26. Agreement among all other 143 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to help poor nations buy medicines to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases, by relaxing patent laws which keep prices of drugs beyond their reach, concluded at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar in November 2001. In December 2002, the US single-handedly destroyed the agreement. Sources at the WTO in Geneva said that the US decision came directly from the White House, following intense lobbying from US pharmaceutical companies.

 

27. Is the status of "we're number one!" Rogue overcome by generous foreign aid given to less fortunate countries? The three best foreign aid providers in 2002, measured by the aid percentage of their gross domestic products, were Denmark (1.01%), Norway (0.91%), and the Netherlands (0.79). The worst was the US (0.10%) followed by the UK (0.23%). A 2003 index, put together by the Center for Global Development and Foreign Policy magazine and ranking the contribution made by 21 developed nations to growth in the developing world, placed the US 20th; only Japan ranked lower.

 

 

The foregoing record of the biggest Rogue of all excludes . . . the use of armed force against other nations. According to the Congressional Research Service (Report 96-119F, "Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad"), from 1798 through 1995 there were 251 instances, of which only five were declared wars, when the US used its armed forces abroad, in situations of military conflict or potential conflict or for other than normal peacetime purposes. For an account of US intervention abroad since the Second World War, see William Blum, Rogue State (Common Courage Press, 2000). Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the level of US military activism abroad has been "unprecedented.Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has embarked on nearly four dozen military interventions [during 1989-1999] as opposed to only 16 during the entire period of the Cold War. Many of these interventions, such as those in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, were launched into areas traditionally considered marginal to US interests" (United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, New World Coming. American Security in the 21st Century, September 1999).

[Jagat]

Democracy at home, imperial power abroad.

[Jagat]

<h3><center>A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles</h3>

 

By Dan Morgan

The Washington Post

 

Sunday 10 August 2003</center>

 

At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?

 

Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.

 

For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.

 

"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."

 

The stirrings among Republicans are still muted. Most in the GOP -- as well as a large number of Democrats -- support bigger military budgets and see no alternative to a forceful U.S. role abroad. But those leading the debate say it is, at the very least, bringing in voices across the ideological spectrum for a long overdue appraisal of what the nation's role should be.

 

After World War II, the United States was instrumental in setting up a web of international economic, military and political organizations founded on American principles of democracy and free markets. To combat communist influence, real or imagined, the United States also used covert operations to undermine or topple governments in Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Chile and other countries.

 

While U.S. influence was vast, many scholars deny that it constituted an "empire," which the dictionary defines as a group of countries or territories under a single sovereign power.

 

The U.S. invasion of Iraq with few allies may be the immediate cause of heightened interest in the topic of empire. But there is broad agreement that the United States' drift toward empire -- if it has occurred -- long predates the Bush administration.

 

According to Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, which espouses libertarian views, the United States should have faced this issue when the Soviet Union collapsed.

 

"That's when we should have had a discussion," he said. "Instead, we maintained all our Cold War commitments and added new ones, without much of a debate at all."

 

The United States retained its worldwide network of spy satellites, ballistic missile submarines and aircraft carriers, and stationed several hundred thousand troops in dozens of countries. After dipping sharply in the early 1990s, the military budget began rising after Bill Clinton was reelected president in 1996.

 

Between the end of the Cold War and the start of the current presidency, the U.S. military intervened in Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia and Kosovo. In Panama and Haiti, the United States ousted dictators and installed its handpicked successors. In Somalia, a humanitarian mission to protect relief supplies for famine victims became a hunt for a warlord that led to U.S. deaths and withdrawal. In the former Yugoslavia, the United States intervened on humanitarian grounds but has remained to keep order and provide civic stability.

 

Preble considers the U.S. ouster of the Taliban from Afghanistan a legitimate response to the terrorist threat after Sept. 11, 2001. But the longer the United States remains in Afghanistan and Iraq, he says, the more it looks like an "occupier" -- a term associated with imperial powers.

 

For ideological conservatives, the United States' vast global commitments should pose a difficult philosophical dilemma, Preble said. "You cannot be for a system of limited government at home and for maintaining military garrisons all over the world," he said.

 

Not so, say many "neoconservatives," members of an amorphous political group that has its origins in the defection of left-wing Democrats to the GOP during the Cold War. Neoconservatives tend to favor the use of U.S. power to spread American political values, preempt hostile nations' ability to threaten the United States with weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild nations in America's image.

 

Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has put forward the idea of a U.S. "empire of liberty" to spread democracy around the world. On National Public Radio's "Diane Rehm Show" last month, Boot called for a doubling of U.S. military spending to carry out America's global commitments.

 

The label of empire does not bother William Kristol, a neoconservative leader and editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. "If people want to say we're an imperial power, fine," he has stated.

 

There are echoes of President John F. Kennedy -- and of the more zealous elements of President Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy -- in the neoconservative vision, said Ivo H. Daalder, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kennedy pledged in his 1961 inaugural address to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." Wilson believed World War I could "make the world safe for democracy."

 

But Daalder said there is a key difference. Kennedy and Wilson believed in the benefits of working through international organizations, while neoconservatives want the United States to act alone. "They're democratic imperialists," Daalder said of the neoconservatives.

 

Oxford University historian Niall Ferguson, author of "Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power," says the United States should stop denying its imperial role and study the good the British Empire did in spreading prosperity and progressive thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ferguson recently took the pro-empire case before a packed auditorium at the American Enterprise Institute, where he debated scholar Robert Kagan on the proposition, "The United States is and should be an empire." At the conclusion, the audience was polled and rejected the proposition.

 

Broadening this debate is the goal of the infant Committee for the Republic, whose members include Gray; former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles W. Freeman Jr.; Stephen P. Cohen, president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development in New York; William A. Nitze, son of Paul Nitze, the Reagan administration's top arms control negotiator; and John B. Henry, a Washington businessman and descendant of Revolutionary War patriot Patrick Henry. Members have met over lunch and are drafting a manifesto. A draft of the mission statement says, "America has begun to stray far from its founding tradition of leading the world by example rather than by force."

 

Henry said the group may set up a nonprofit organization and could sponsor seminars examining how imperial behavior weakened earlier republics, such as the Roman Empire. "We want to have a great national debate about what our role in the world is," Henry said.

 

James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says the United States veered away from the founders' notion of avoiding foreign entanglements more than a century ago, when it went to war with Spain in 1898. "America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy," a book by Lindsay and Daalder, finds parallels with the past in the foreign policy disputes taking place inside the Bush administration.

 

After World War I, Wilson fought for U.S. membership in the League of Nations but was outmaneuvered by Senate Republicans led by Henry Cabot Lodge (Mass.). Wilson and Lodge wanted the United States to exercise power overseas, but Lodge feared the league would limit the United States' freedom of action.

 

Lindsay sees some of the same conflicts in the dispute between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and "aggressive nationalists" in the Bush administration led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney. The nationalists, Lindsay contends, "believe that killing bad guys is the way to create democracy, not building institutions."

[Jagat]

<center><h3>Limited War In Iraq Is Illusion</h3>

Jimmy Breslin, August 10, 2003

 

http://www.newsday.com/mynews/ny-nybres103409213aug10,0,1582960.column </center>

 

George Harrison, age 88, sat in his Brooklyn apartment and recited lines from Irish poet Patraic Pearse who, upon standing at the grave of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, executed by the British, wrote these lines, and Harrison wishes the Lord would make everyone in Washington read them:<blockquote>"The fools, the fools.

They have left us our Feinian dead.

While, where grass grows or water flows

Ireland unfree will never be at peace."</blockquote>This was in 1916 and it has kept them going until now, when the British finally are getting out.

 

"The displaying of the bodies of Saddam's sons was unnecessary." George says. "I heard Pearse as I watched our people show them off. There are people of Iraq who have not come out of the mother's womb yet who will come to ask questions of us 50 years from now. The women are the worst. They will come and they will ask. We think it will all go away. Time makes no difference."

 

Harrison is an example. He was indicted for gun running to the IRA in a famous trial in Brooklyn federal court a few years ago. At the outset, the federal prosecutor told the jury, "George Harrison has been running guns to Ireland for the last six months."

 

At which point, Harrison squirmed in anger and had his attorney, Frank Durkan, rise and announce:

 

"My client is insulted by the prosecutor's statement of six months. George Harrison has not been gun running for six months. He has been gun running to Ireland for the last 25 or 30 years."

 

The other day, Durkan went to Europe. For the first time in his life he went on a British ship, the Queen Elizabeth 2. Everybody had to hide this from George Harrison, who would neither forgive nor forget if he found out. It seems like a small amusing thing. But fighting the British is a living thing with Harrison, and the problem with this is that he is a reminder of all those others everywhere. I don't know much about Iraq at all. But George Harrison's Irish emotion on behalf of the long dead is a passing argument when placed alongside the feelings in Tikrit.

 

We called this incursion into Iraq "Operation Iraqi Freedom" or was it "Operation Iraqi Liberation"? The tough chins in Washington said that once the people knew that Saddam was gone, they would welcome us with open arms. Instead, they look on sullenly, and murder one of our soldiers every day or so. And they do nothing to improve things. Somebody pointed out yesterday that many weeks after the incursion, there still is no electricity in Iraq.

 

In Ridgewood on Friday, we buried a soldier, Spc. Wilfredo Perez Jr., 24, at St. Matthias church on Catalpa Avenue. On Monday there was a funeral in Deer Park for Pfc. Raheen Tyson Heighter. Right before that, Marine Cpl. Roberto Marcus was buried out at Blessed Sacrament church in Cypress Hills and there was a funeral for Marine Riayan Tejada at St. Elizabeth's church in Washington Heights.

 

Already reported here was the Saturday night service at St. Barbara's church in Bushwick, when the ushers passed out a sheet that said to pray for the men in Iraq. There was a list of 75 Latino names from the one parish.

 

From a distance, from watching television news and reading, I hear and see a general or Defense Department politician skipping over words or mumbling and saying that there now is a "limited guerrilla war."

 

There doesn't seem to be any such thing. I can tell you a little bit about a guerrilla war I know something about, the one in Northern Ireland. There were once 1,000 people in the IRA and that got cut down to maybe 75 men in three-man units, one not knowing the other. One of the IRA leaders insisted that 12 people would be all that was needed. Whatever, the British asked the IRA what it would take to make them stop.

 

That was another guerrilla war lost by a major country. While Britain cut up Muslims in Malaysia so that they never came back, the rest of their colonial history is filled with being slaughtered in Iraq and Afghanistan. See Rudyard Kipling. The French could not win in Vietnam. The United States had 58,000 of our young killed there. And you keep reading of how well we are doing against Filipino guerrillas, keep hearing of it every year. Russia tried Afghanistan and caught a frightful beating. Russia now cannot handle Chechen guerrillas. The car bomb in Indonesia tells you how much helicopters and tanks can stop young men with bombs.

 

The worst part is that these are Arabs who don't let venom be ruled by a calendar. George Harrison, in his living room, is a small illustration of how long anger can be carried. In Iraq and the Middle East, surely somebody can come out of a dust storm to try revenge in a half-century or so.

 

2003, Newsday, Inc.

[theist]

The USA is not an imperialist power in the traditonal sense of taking over by force and keeping other lands.

 

But it is acting as a cultural imperialistic force. McDonalds everywhere. Movies all over spreading our low class pop culture. Rap music polluting the ethers now world wide. But the problem is the demand is there in the rest of the world. They seem to want or garbage.

 

Militarily I could get behind the 'America as the Global policeman' concept. I wouldn't fight that at all. Do we just ignore the atrocities rulers of smaller states choose to perpetuate on their citizens and neighbors?

 

What I would like the USA do is raise that to the level of karma-yoga as a nation. Just be honest of the reality that forces have brought about the situation that the US is set up to be the worlds protecting force, and then purify that activity.

 

Arjuna choice was to fight under Krsna's direction or the modes would force him to fight. he could work under the agency of the spiritual energy of the modes but act he surely would.

 

The world would be better off to cooperate and we would all be better off to debate in what way this force will be apllied rather then if it will be applied or not. For it will be applied.

 

Godly principles or the lower material modes seems to be the only real choice.

 

 

[Guest guest]

Amerika is no.!

The Greatest of them all

Bigger Better Heavier

Amerika has them all

 

So don't mess with

Uncle Sam

Or He'll Blow you away in a fight

He's No 1 Bully

Cause his might makes right