OUR EMPIRE: COLLECTED DOCUMENTS

OUR EMPIRE: COLLECTED DOCUMENTS.

For an analysis of the empire see OUR EMPIRE; Its Nature and Maintenance.

CONTENTS:

SUPPORT BY RICH COUNTRIES FOR OPPRESSION AND TERROR.

A selection of the more impressive quotes.

Additional quotes.

"WE ARE ONLY RESISTING COMMUNIST SUBVERSION"

SEPTEMBER 11^th, 2001.

COUNTRIES.

Afghanistan

East Timor

El Salvador

Guatemala

Indonesia

Iraq

Iran

Israel

Nicaragua

Vietnam

SOME REFERENCES

________________________________________________________

RICH COUNTRY SUPPORT FOR OPPRESSION AND TERROR.

Following is a selection of the more forceful exposures and condemnations of the actions rich countries undertake to maintain their empire. (Some of these occur again in later sections on specific countries.)

The US "…is the greatest source of terror on earth."

Pilger, http://www.theherald.co.ukl/news/archive/;13-9-19101-0-24-43.html

… the US state, as part of its foreign policy strategy, has long been using terrorist networks, and carrying out acts of terror itself.

Ed Deak, Economic Theories more destructive than terrorists, Gold River Record, 21 Sept, 2001.

"The US has rained death and destruction on more people in more regions of the globe than any other nation in the period since the second world war…it has employed its military forces in other countries over 70 times since 1945, not counting innumerable instances of counter insurgency operations by the CIA."

The Editors, "After the attacks…the war on terrorism", Monthly Review Nov. 53, 6, 2001, 1-9. P. 1.

Twenty years ago the United States launched a war against Nicaragua. That was a terrible war. Tens of thousands of people died. The country was practically destroyed. ... They went to the World Court with a case, the World Court ruled in their favour and ordered the United States to stop its "unlawful use of force" (that means international terrorism) and pay substantial reparations. Well, the United

States responded by dismissing the court with contempt and immediately

escalated the attack. At that point Nicaragua went to the UN Security

council which voted a resolution calling on all states to obey

international law. ... Well, the United States vetoed it. Nicaragua then

went to the General Assembly which, two years in a row passed a similar

resolution with only the United States and Israel opposed.

Wed, 10 Oct 2001 11:01:02 -0500

From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>

"There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism, and on a scale that puts its rivals to shame."

N. Chomsky, 1991, "International terrorism; Image and reality in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity,, p. 15.

"The greatest source of terrorism is the US itself and some of the Laltin American countries."

E. Said, "What they want is my silence", Third World Resurgence, 131/132;, 2001, 68.)

"…the US is itself a leading terrorist state."

N. Chomsky, "The US is a leading terrorist state", Monthly Review, 53, 6, Nov, 2001, p. 16.

"We are the target of terrorists because in much of the world our government stands for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation…We are the target of terrorists because we are hated… And we are hated because our governments have done hateful things….Time after time we have outsted popular leaders who wanted the riches of the land to be shared by the people who worked it…We are hated because our government denies (democracy, freedom, human rights) to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations."

Bowman, "Who would hate a pious America?, http:..www.rmbowman.com

"Many of the world's most brutal dictatorships "…are in place precisely because they serve US interests in a joint venture with local torturers at the expense of their majorities."

E. S. Herman, The Real Terror Network,1982, p. 15.

After documenting supply of aid to 23 countries guilty of "human rights abuses", Trosan and Yates say, "Without US help they would be hard pressed to contain the fury of their oppressed citizens and US businesses would find it difficult to flourish.," Whenever their people have rebelled and tried to seize power, thereby threatening foreign investments, the US has on every occasion actively supported government repression and terror, or has promoted coups to overthrow popular governments."

Trosan and M. Yates, 1980, "Brainwashing under freedom", Monthly Review, Jan. p. 44.

…contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. ..

… This document, which was partially declassified but unpublicized in 1995, can be found on the Pentagon's web site at www.gulflink.osd.mi

… As these documents illustrate, the United States knew sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality.

… For more than ten years, the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing filll well the cost in Iraqi lives.

Extracts from, T. J. Nagy, “How the US deliberately destroyed Iraq’s water”, posted at www.globalresearch.ca on29 August 2001. For detailed documentation see www.gulflink.osd.mil

There has been a blackout on the subject of the role of the United States as arguably the leading terrorist force in the world. In 1998, for example, Amnesty International released a report which made it clear that the United States was as responsible for extreme violations of human rights around the globe—including the promotion of torture and terrorism and the use of state violence—as any government or organization in the world.

Amnesty International, The United States of America: Rights for AII (London: Amnesty International, 1998), see especially chapters 7 and 8. Available online at: <http://web.amnesty.org>.

American foreign policy since World War II has been conducted in an aggressive indeed, at times, terroristic fashion.

From CIA assassinations of key political figures in the Third World, to the carpet bombing of Indochina; from the My Lai massacre (not, we now know, an isolated event) to the bombing of a pharmaceutical company in Sudan in 1998; from the invasion of Grenada to the support given to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan (known in the west at the time as "freedom fighters"); from the backing of Israeli policy against the Palestinians to the bombings of Lebanon and Libya; from the 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed during the Gulf War, to the 500,000 who have died as a result of America's economic blockade - the legacy of American foreign policy is littered with blood and bodies.

G. Monbiot, How the rule the world, ERA Newsletter, 2.21.2001,

In 1937 George Orwell said “…the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon keeping a tight hold on the Empire - in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream."

G. Monbiot, How the rule the world, ERA Newsletter, 2.21.2001.

How power is exercised… Britain accept the US proposals at the Bretton Woods conference.

Britain was forced to accept the US plan for the global financial system at the Breton Woods conference.

In Britain there was a great deal of informal dissent about the agreement, but Parliament had been informed that a condition of the latest US war loan to Britain was acceptance of the conference proposal, and this was duly carried.

Editorial, “An era of error ends in terror”, ERA Newsletter, 2, 21, Nov-Dec, 2001.

Since 1812… the US virtually exterminated the indigenous population, conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. The same is true, even more dramatically, of Europe.

Interview of N. Chomsky, Radio B92, Belgrade. Sept. 2001.

During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there.

… The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos…

Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in1953…

Extracts from "Folks out there have a "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values", Edward Herman, 2001. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HER109A.html

Pilger refers to UK Prime Minister "… Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia…

John Pilger, "Inevitable ring to the unimaginable", Sept, 2001, Full article at:

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/13-9-19101-0-24-43.html

An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth.

In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion: from the illegal blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to its trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central banks, and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US "Vietnam" in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North going Bold South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status).

Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism,…

John Pilger, "Inevitable ring to the unimaginable", Sept, 2001, Full article at:

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/13-9-19101-0-24-43.html

'In September 1974 President Ford confirmed the fact that the Nixon administration had authorised the CIA to spend 9 million between 1970 and 1973 to weaken Allende and strengthen his opposition.'

S. Baily, The U.S. and the Development of South America 1945-1975, 1976, p. 206.

"All national economies in the North are engaged in international forms of accumulation which are in essence predatory."

R. Biel, The New Imperialism, Zed., 2000, p. 72.

'The impoverished and long abused masses of Latin America ... will not stay quietly on the farms or in the slums unless they are terribly afraid. As in Stroessner's Paraguay, the rich get richer only because they have the guns. The rich include a great many U.S. companies and individuals, which is why the United States has provided the guns, and much more.' 'The economic model of Third World development favoured by the West does not say "use terror", but the policies that are favoured, which would encourage foreign investment and keep wages and welfare outlays under close control, could often not be put into place without it. Privilege cannot be maintained and enlarged from already high levels if "the people" are allowed to organize, vote, and exercise any substantial power.'

E.S. Herman, Real Terror Network, 1982., c. p. 126.

In 1998 Amnesty International released a report which made it clear that the US was at least as responsible for extreme violation of human rights around the globe as -- including the promotion of torture and terrorism and state violence -- as any government or organisation in the world."

E. C Collier, Instances of Use of United States Forces Abroad 1798 - 1993, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Oct. 7., 1993. See Amnesty International, 1998, The United States of America; Rights for All, http://web.amnesty.org

"From any objective standpoint, Israel and the United States more frequently rely on terrorism, and in forms that inflict far greater quantums of suffering on their victims than do their opponents."

R. Falk, 1991, "The terrorist foundations of recent US foreign policy", in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, 1991.p.108.

That the existence and functioning of our empire has been clearly understood for decades by critical students of American Foreign Policy is evident in the following quotes from the late 1970s and early 1980s. "..the US and its allies have armed the elites of the Third World to the teeth;, and saturated them with counterinsurgency weaponry and training… Hideous torture has become standard practice in US client fascist states … Much of the electronic and other torture gear, is US supplied and great numbers of …interrogators are US trained…"

N. Chomsky and E. S. Herman, (1979), The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Sydney, Hale and Iremonger., pp. ix, 9, 10.

The Editors, Monthly Review, op cit, p. 3.

It’s a zero sum game.

The crucial role of oppression within the empire is made clear in the following quotes.

"To maintain its levels of production and consumption…the US must be assured of getting increasing amounts of the resources of poor countries. …This in turn requires strong support of unpopular and dictatorial regimes which maintain political and police oppression while serving American interests, to the detriment of their own poor majorities. If on the other hand Third World people controlled their own political economies,…they could then use more of their resources themselves…much of the land now used to grow export cash crops…would be used to feed their own hungry people for example."

W. Moyer, 1973 (source not recorded).

"It is in the economic interests of the American corporations who have investments in these countries to maintain this social structure ( whereby poor masses are oppressed and exploited by local elites) It is to keep these elites in power that the United States has …provided them with the necessary military equipment, the finance and training."

F. Greene, 1980, The Enemy; Notes on Imperialism and Revolution, New York, Vintage, p. 125.

"The impoverished and long abused masses of Latin America…will not stay quietly on the farms or in the slums unless they are terribly afraid…the rich get richer only because they have the guns. The rich include a great many US companies and individuals, which is why the United States has provided the guns…."

N. Chomsky and E. S. Herman, (1979), The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Sydney, Hale and Iremonger., p.3.

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

____________________________________________________________

OTHER STATEMENTS ON RICH WORLD ACTION

While decrying human rights abuses in countries like China, the US and its allies support or at least ratify abuses elsewhere—notably where economic and or military aid has been extended. In the case of Yugoslavia, the 79 days of US-engineered NATO bombings not only severely damaged the Serb infrastructure and killed hundreds of people, but assaulted virtually every canon of international law and order, even the NATO Charter itself which prohibits military attacks against sovereign nations not engaged in aggression. At this juncture we quickly encounter yet another definition of globalization. The US, exercising its self-granted right as military superpower, has consistently expressed contempt for global bodies, meetings, procedures that do not buttress its own policies.

The deadly attack on Yugoslavia justified as a moral campaign against 'ethnic cleansing', might well turn out to be the first 'war' fought strictly for the purpose of extending the international market economy presided over by the US .

T. Fotopoulos,”Globalisation , the reformist left and the anti-globalisation movement, Democracy and Nature, 7, 2, July 21001.p.249.

Confirmed by documents of the US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), "the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway."

…Over the last two years, I've discovered documents of the Defense Intelligence Agency proving beyond a doubt that, contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. ..

The document notes that the importation of chlorine "has been embargoed" by sanctions. "Recent reports indicate the chlorine supply IS critically low."…

Food and medicine will also be affected, the document states. "Food processing, electronic, and particularly, pharrnaccutical plants require extremely pure water that is free from biological contaminants," it says. _

In cold language, the document spells out what is in store: "Iraq will suffer increasing shortages of purified water because of the lack of required chemicals and desalination membranes. Incidences of disease, including possible epidemics, will become probable unless the population were careful to boil water."

This document, which was partially declassified but unpublicized in 1995, can be found on the Pentagon's web site at www.gulflink.osd.mil. (I disclosed this document last fall. But the news media showed little interest in it.

The third document in this series, "Medical Problems in Iraq," is dated March 15, 1991. It says:

“According to a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNlCEF)/World Health Organization report, the quantity of potable water is less than 5 percent of the original supply, there are no operational water and sewage treatment plants, and the reported incidence of diarrhoea is four times above normal levels. Additionally, respiratory infections are on the rise. Children particularly have been affected by these diseases.

As these documents illustrate, the United States knew sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality. And it was more concerned about the public relations nightmare for Washington than the actual nightmare that the sanctions created for innocent Iraqis.

The Geneva Convention is absolutely clear. In a 1979 protocol relating to the "protection of victims of international armed conflicts," Article 54, it states: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive."

But that is precisely what the U.S. government did, with malice aforethought. It "destroyed, removed, or rendered useless" Iraq's "drinking water installations and supplies." The sanctions, imposed for a decade largely at the insistence of the United States, constitute a violation of the Geneva Convention. They amount to a systematic effort to, in the DIA's own words, "fully degrade" Iraq's water sources.

At a House hearing on June 7, Representative Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, referred to the document "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities" and said: "Attacking the Iraqi public drinking water supply flagrantly targets civilians and is a violation of the Geneva Convention and of the fundamental laws of civilized nations."

Over the last decade, Washington extended the toll by continuing to withhold approval for Iraq to import the few chemicals and items of equipment it needed in order to clean up its water supply.

Last summer Representative Tony Hall, Democrat of Ohio, wrote to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright "about the profound effects of the increasing deterioration of Iraq's water supply and sanitation systems on its children's health." Hall wrote, "The prime killer of children under five years of age--diarrhoreal diseases--has reached epidemic proportions, and they now strike four times more often than they did in 1990.... Holds on contracts for the water and sanitation sector are a prime reason for the increases in sickness and death. Of the eighteen contacts, all but one hold was placed by the U.S. government. The contracts are for purification chemicals, chlorinators, chemical dosing pumps, water tankers, and other equipment.... I urge you to weigh your decision against the disease and death that are the unavoidable result of not having safe dnnking water and minimum levels of sanitation."

For more than ten years, the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing filll well the cost in Iraqi lives. The United Nations has estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions, and that 5,000 Iraqi children continue to die every month for this reason.

Extracts from, T. J. Nagy, “How the US deliberately destroyed Iraq’s water”, posted at www.globalresearch.ca on29 August 2001. For detailed documentation see www.gulflink.osd.mil

Ellen C. Collier, Instances of Use of United States Forces Abroad, 1798-1993, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, CRS Issue Brief, October 7, 1993— available online at <http://www.fas.org/man/crs/crs 931007.htm>.

The Congressional Research Service lists sixty six instances of the employment of U.S. military forces abroad over the period 1945-1993 (245 over the period 1798-1993). This list can be updated for the -

last eight years, bringing the total since 1945 to over seventy.

The U.S. role in propping up corrupt regimes in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and its appalling record of supporting and bankrolling the Israeli assault on the Palestinians are outside the purview of most U.S. residents.

Amnesty International, The United States of America: Rights for AII (London: Amnesty International, 1998), see especially chapters 7 and 8. Available online at: <http://web.amnesty.org>.

Hence in Britain, empire was justified as a benevolent "white man's burden." And in the United States, empire does not even exist; "we" are merely protecting the causes of freedom, democracy, and justice worldwide.

The Editors, "After the attacks…the war on terrorism", Monthly Review, 53, 6, Nov., 2001. P 7 .

It needs to be acknowledged at the outset that American foreign policy since World War II has been conducted in an aggressive indeed, at times, terroristic fashion.

No amount of sanctimonious moralising and patriotic breast-beating can obscure the terrible impact that US foreign policy has had on many people throughout the world.

Moreover, no amount of tub-thumping jingoistic rhetoric can bypass the reality that the US sowed many of the seeds which have spawned a spate of terrorist acts, culminating in last week's attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

US policy in the Middle East has generated enormous resentment among ordinary people in the region. This resentment does not only concern American support for the state of Israel, but also its backing of certain corrupt and brutal Arab regimes. Undeniably, however, the Palestinian cause is central.

Here we have a dispossessed people fighting for land and justice, a people who have suffered for more than 50 years at the hands of state terrorism, a people desperate for the US to rein in Israel but who watch on helplessly as American policy reinforces their status as a dispossessed people.

…

The best effort our Government can make is to try to influence the international community to work on helping remove some of the underlying causes of terrorism.

Those causes are not simply irrational fundamentalist faith but feelings of dispossession, of marginalisation, of victimhood; feelings of being subjected on a daily basis to the arrogance of power. Behind the apparent madness of the recent events, there lies a history of injustice and oppression,…

…we in the rich world live in comparative comfort only because of the inordinate power our governments wield, and the inordinate wealth which flows from that power We acquiesce in this system every time we buy salad …

G. Monbiot, How the rule the world, ERA Newsletter, 2.21.2001, p.

How power is exercised… Britain was forced tO accept the US proposals at the Bretton Woods conference.

In Britain there was a great deal of informal dissent about the agreement, but Parliament had been informed that a condition of the latest US war loan to Britain was acceptance r of the conference proposal, and this was duly carried.

Editorial, “An era of error ends in terror”, ERA Newsletter, 2, 21, Nov-Dec, 2001.

International affairs commentators Michael Albert and Stephen Shalom point out that the US government's current approach violates international law, which provides for international courts, established by the United Nations, to try persons who are accused of crimes against humanity such as the massacre in the US. According to UN doctrine, a nation is entitled to act in self-defence but - in Albert and Shalom's words - this "does not allow countries themselves to launch massive reprisal raids - precisely because to allow such reprisals would lead to an endless cycle of unrestrained violence." (from "Five Reasons Not to Go to War", www.zmag.org)

The sad fact is that the US state, as part of its foreign policy strategy, has long been using terrorist networks, and carrying out acts of terror itself. Notorious examples include: US support for the military coup that overthrew the Allende government in Chile in the early 1970s; US support for fighters who used terrorist methods in ousting the former Soviet Union‚s occupying forces from Afghanistan in the 1980s.

There are billions of people in the world who have nothing to lose and the only thing they own is their burning hate against us, the so called "wealthy countries".

Ed Deak, Economic Theories more destructive than terrorists, Gold River Record, 21 Sept, 2001.

…this relentless pursuit of terrorism is, in my opinion, almost criminal. It allows the United States to do what it wishes anywhere in the world. Take, for example, the 1998 bombing of Sudan. That was done because Bill Clinton was having trouble with Monica Lewinsky. There was a paper-thin excuse that they were bombing a terrorist factory, which turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory producing half the pharmaceutical supply for the country, which a few weeks later was in the grip of a plague. Hundreds of people died as a result of the plague because there were no pharmaceuticals to treat them because of the willful bombing by the United States…

Any threat to its interests, whether it's oil in the Middle East or its geostrategic interests elsewhere, is labelled as terrorism, which is exactly what the Israelis have been doing since the mid-1970s in response to Palestinian resistance to their policies. ..

The French used the word terrorism for everything that the Algerians did to resist their occupation, which began in 1830 and didn't end until 1962. The British used it in Burma and in Malaysia. Terrorism is anything that stands in the face of what we want to do.

This focus obscures the enormous damage done by the United States, whether militarily, environmentally, or economically, on a world scale, which far dwarfs anything that terrorism might do.

The greatest source of terrorism is the US itself and some of the Latin American countries, not at all the Muslim ones.

The Iraqi civilian population has suffered enormous harm, genocidal harm, thanks to the United Kingdom and the United States.

The power and wealth of the United States is such that most people have no awareness of the damage that has been caused in its name - or the hatred that has been built up against it throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world.

Edward Said, “What they want is my silence”, Third World Resurgence, 131/132, 2001, 68.

As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process.

Noam Chomsky and I reported back in1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.

The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.

Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in1953, trained his secret services in "methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation).

The Iraqis then had their turn. Saddam moved from valued ally in the 1980s, whose use of "weapons of mass destruction" against Iran and the Iraqi Kurds caused no problem at all with his U.S. and British friends, to "another Hitler" upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Suddenly his possession of "weapons of mass destruction" became an extremely urgent matter as the man had demonstrated an inability to follow orders. The war and "sanctions of mass destruction" that followed have killed more than a million Iraqis, and in the well-know words of Madeleine Albright, questioned on whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified by the U.S. policy ends, replied, "it is worth it." No doubt, but an objective observer would recognize that there may be many Iraqis who feel with some justification that the United States is an evil force.

The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas -- uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy.

All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions--perhaps even billions--of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are prepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire.

Extracts from "Folks out there have a "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values", Edward Herman, 2001. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HER109A.html

…during the Korean War, terror bombing of civilians

was the policy of the US Air Force's Far Eastern Command, which was

instructed to pulverize anything that moved in enemy territory. So

successful was the policy that in the summer of 1951, the commander was able

to report that "there is no structure left to be targeted." In Vietnam, where the US was frustrated by the fact that combatants and civilians were indistinguishable,

indiscriminate killing of civilians was a central part of a "counterinsurgency war" in which 20,000 civilians were systematically assassinated under the CIA's Operation Phoenix Program in the Mekong Delta.

…the underlying issues are the twin pillars of US policy in the Middle East. One is subordination of the interests of the peoples of the region to the US' untrammeled access to Middle East oil in order to maintain its petroleum-based civilization. To this end, the US overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, cultivated the repressive Shah of Iran as the gendarme of the Persian Gulf, supported anti-democratic feudal regimes in the Arabian peninsula, and introduced a massive permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia, which contains some of Islam's most sacred shrines and cities.

The war against Saddam Hussein was justified as a war to beat back

aggression, but everybody knew that Washington's key motivation was to

ensure that the region's most massive oil reserves would remain under the

control of pro-Western elites.

The other pillar is unstinting support for Israel. That Arab feelings about

Israel are so elemental is not difficult to comprehend. It is hard to argue

against the fact that the state of Israel was born on the basis of the

massive dispossession of the Palestinian people from their country and their

lands. It is impossible to deny that Israel is a European settler-state,

one whose establishment was essentially a displacement from European

territory of the ethnocultural contradictions of European society. The

Holocaust was an unspeakable crime against humanity, but it was utterly

wrong to impose its political consequences--chief of which was the creation

of Israel--on a people who had nothing to do with it.

It is hard to contradict Arab claims that it was essentially support from

the United States that created the state of Israel; that it has been massive

US military aid and backing that has maintained it in the last half century;

and that it is deep confidence in perpetual US military and political

support that enables Israel to oppose in practice the emergence of a viable

Palestinian state.

Unless the US abandons these two pillars of its policies, there will always

be thousands of recruits for acts of terrorism such as that which occurred

last week.

There is simply too much distrust, dislike, or just plain hatred of a

country that has become so callous in its pursuit of economic power and

arrogant in its political and military relations with the rest of the world

and so brazen in declaring its cultural superiority over the rest of us.

The only response that will really contribute to global security and peace

is for Washington to address not the symptoms but the roots of terrorism.

Focus on The GlobalSouth, A Program of Development Policy Research, Analysis and Action, Issue # 31, September 18, 2001.

What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination.

Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is

synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a

narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.

There has been terror of course, and nearly every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on terror. This was as

Edward Said, Many Islams, 17^th Sept., 2001.

(John Pilger argues that we can't be surprised at the attacks, given Western treatment of the Third World, and the Arab world in particular, such as killing of civilians in Iraq.