[Peace-discuss] re: Kerry support premature

[C. G. Estabrook]

[A good piece by the UK-based Australian reporter who uncovered recordings
of Powell and Rice saying that Saddam Hussein was no threat to anyone.  
Altho' what he says here is generally true and important, I still think
it's necessary to vote against the incumbency this fall, and unfortunately
the only way to do that effectively is to vote for the Democrat nominee.
But once we do that, there'll be much to do.  --CGE]

Bush or Kerry? No difference
Cover story
New Statesman/UK
John Pilger
Monday 8th March 2004

***The man who, after Super Tuesday, is all but certain to become the
Democrats' candidate for president is as dedicated as any Republican to
the American empire. By John Pilger***

A myth equal to the fable of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is gaining
strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers a
world-view different from that of George W Bush. Watch this big lie grow
as Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the "anyone but Bush"
movement becomes a liberal cause celebre.

While the rise to power of the Bush gang, the neoconservatives, belatedly
preoccupied the American media, the message of their equivalents in the
Democratic Party has been of little interest. Yet the similarities are
compelling. Shortly before Bush's "election" in 2000, the Project for the
New American Century, the neoconservative pressure group, published an
ideological blueprint for "maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding
the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security
order in line with American principles and interests". Every one of its
recommendations for aggression and conquest was adopted by the
administration.

One year later, the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the Democratic
Leadership Council, published a 19-page manifesto for the "New Democrats",
who include all the principal Democratic Party candidates, and especially
John Kerry. This called for "the bold exercise of American power" at the
heart of "a new Democratic strategy, grounded in the party's tradition of
muscular internationalism". Such a strategy would "keep Americans safer
than the Republicans' go-it-alone policy, which has alienated our natural
allies and overstretched our resources. We aim to rebuild the moral
foundation of US global leadership . . ."

What is the difference from the vainglorious claptrap of Bush? Apart from
euphemisms, there is none. All the Democratic presidential candidates
supported the invasion of Iraq, bar one: Howard Dean. Kerry not only voted
for the invasion, but expressed his disappointment that it had not gone
according to plan. He told Rolling Stone magazine: "Did I expect George
Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did." Neither
Kerry nor any of the other candidates has called for an end to the bloody
and illegal occupation; on the contrary, all of them have demanded more
troops for Iraq. Kerry has called for another "40,000 active service
troops". He has supported Bush's continuing bloody assault on Afghanistan,
and the administration's plans to "return Latin America to American
leadership" by subverting democracy in Venezuela.

Above all, he has not in any way challenged the notion of American
military supremacy throughout the world that has pushed the number of US
bases to more than 750. Nor has he alluded to the Pentagon's coup d'etat
in Washington and its stated goal of "full spectrum dominance". As for
Bush's "pre-emptive" policy of attacking other countries, that's fine,
too. Even the most liberal of the Democratic bunch, Howard Dean, said he
was prepared to use "our brave and remarkable armed forces" against any
"imminent threat". That's how Bush himself put it.

What the New Democrats object to is the Bush gang's outspokenness - its
crude honesty, if you like - in stating its plans openly, and not from
behind the usual veil or in the usual specious code of imperial liberalism
and its "moral authority". New Democrats of Kerry's sort are all for the
American empire; understandably, they would prefer that those words
remained unsaid. "Progressive internationalism" is far more acceptable.

Just as the plans of the Bush gang were written by the neoconservatives,
so John Kerry in his campaign book, A Call to Service, lifts almost word
for word the New Democrats' warmongering manifesto. "The time has come,"
he writes, "to revive a bold vision of progressive internationalism" along
with a "tradition" that honours "the tough-minded strategy of
international engagement and leadership forged by Wilson and Roosevelt . .
. and championed by Truman and Kennedy in the cold war". Almost identical
thoughts appear on page three of the New Democrats' manifesto:

"As Democrats, we are proud of our party's tradition of tough-minded
internationalism and strong record in defending America. Presidents
Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman led the United
States to victory in two world wars . . . [Truman's policies] eventually
triumphed in the cold war. President Kennedy epitomised America's
commitment to 'the survival and success of liberty'."

Mark the historical lies in that statement: the "victory" of the US with
its brief intervention in the First World War; the airbrushing of the
decisive role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War; the American
elite's non-existent "triumph" over internally triggered events that
brought down the Soviet Union; and John F Kennedy's famous devotion to
"liberty" that oversaw the deaths of some three million people in
Indo-China.

"Perhaps the most repulsive section of [his] book," writes Mark Hand,
editor of Press Action, the American media monitoring group, "is where
Kerry discusses the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement." Self-promoted
as a war hero, Kerry briefly joined the protest movement on his return
from Vietnam. In this twin capacity, he writes: "I say to both
conservative and liberal misinterpretations of that war that it's time to
get over it and recognise it as an exception, not as a ruling example of
the US military engagements of the 20th century."

"In this one passage," writes Hand, "Kerry seeks to justify the millions
of people slaughtered by the US military and its surrogates during the
20th century [and] suggests that concern about US war crimes in Vietnam is
no longer necessary . . . Kerry and his colleagues in the 'progressive
internationalist' movement are as gung-ho as their counterparts in the
White House . . . Come November, who will get your vote? Coke or Pepsi?"

The "anyone but Bush" movement objects to the Coke-Pepsi analogy, and
Ralph Nader is the current source of their ire. In Britain, seven years
ago, similar derision was heaped upon those who pointed out the
similarities between Tony Blair and his heroine Margaret Thatcher -
similarities which have since been proven. "It's a nice and convenient
myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers,"
wrote the Guardian commentator Hywel Williams. "But the imperialism of the
liberal may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature - its
conviction that it represents a superior form of life."

Like the Blairites, John Kerry and his fellow New Democrats come from a
tradition of liberalism that has built and defended empires as "moral"
enterprises. That the Democratic Party has left a longer trail of blood,
theft and subjugation than the Republicans is heresy to the liberal
crusaders, whose murderous history always requires, it seems, a noble
mantle.

As the New Democrats' manifesto rightly points out, the Democrats'
"tough-minded internationalism" began with Woodrow Wilson, a Christian
megalomaniac who believed that America had been chosen by God "to show the
way to the nations of this world, how they shall walk in the paths of
liberty". In his wonderful new book, The Sorrows of Empire (Verso),
Chalmers Johnson writes:

"With Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual foundations of American imperialism
were set in place. Theodore Roosevelt . . . had represented a
European-driven, militaristic vision of imperialism backed by nothing more
substantial than the notion that the manifest destiny of the United States
was to govern racially inferior Latin Americans and east Asians. Wilson
laid over that his own hyper-idealistic, sentimental and ahistorical idea
[of American world dominance]. It was a political project no less
ambitious and no less passionately held than the vision of world communism
launched at almost the same time by the leaders of the Bolshevik
revolution."

It was the Wilsonian Democratic administration of Harry Truman, following
the Second World War, that created the militaristic "national security
state" and the architecture of the cold war: the CIA, the Pentagon and the
National Security Council. As the only head of state to use atomic
weapons, Truman authorised troops to intervene anywhere "to defend free
enterprise". In 1945, his administration set up the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund as agents of US economic imperialism. Later,
using the "moral" language of Woodrow Wilson, John F Kennedy invaded
Vietnam and unleashed the US special forces as death squads; they now
operate on every continent.

Bush has been a beneficiary of this. His neoconservatives derive not from
traditional Republican Party roots, but from the hawk's wings of the
Democratic Party - such as the trade union establishment, the AFL-CIO
(known as the "AFL-CIA"), which received millions of dollars to subvert
unions and political parties throughout the world, and the weapons
industry, built and nurtured by the Democratic senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson. Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's leading fanatic, began his Washington
political life working for Jackson. In 1972 an aberration, George
McGovern, faced Richard Nixon as the Democrats' anti-war candidate.
Virtually abandoned by the party and its powerful backers, McGovern was
crushed.

Bill Clinton, hero of the Blairites, learned the lesson of this. The myths
spun around Clinton's "golden era of liberalism" are, in retrospect,
laughable. Savour this obsequious front-page piece by the Guardian's chief
political correspondent, reporting Clinton's speech to the Labour Party
conference in 2002:

"Bill Clinton yesterday used a mesmerising oration . . . in a subtle and
delicately balanced address [that] captured the imagination of delegates
in Blackpool's Winter Gardens . . . Observers also described the speech as
one of the most impressive and moving in the history of party conferences.
The trade and industry secretary, Patricia Hewitt, described it as
'absolutely brilliant'."

An accompanying editorial gushed: "In an intimate, almost conversational
tone, speaking only from notes, Bill Clinton delivered the speech of a
true political master . . . If one were reviewing it, five stars would not
be enough . . . What a speech. What a pro. And what a loss to the
leadership of America and the world."

No idolatry was enough. At the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, the leader of
"the third way" and of "progressive internationalism" received a long line
of media and Blair people who hailed him as a lost leader, "a champion of
the centre left".

The truth is that Clinton was little different from Bush, a
crypto-fascist. During the Clinton years, the principal welfare safety
nets were taken away and poverty in America increased sharply; a
multibillion-dollar missile "defence" system known as Star Wars II was
instigated; the biggest war and arms budget in history was approved;
biological weapons verification was rejected, along with a comprehensive
nuclear test ban treaty, the establishment of an international criminal
court and a worldwide ban on landmines. Contrary to a myth that places the
blame on Bush, the Clinton administration in effect destroyed the movement
to combat global warming.

In addition, Haiti and Afghanistan were invaded, the illegal blockade of
Cuba was reinforced and Iraq was subjected to a medieval siege that
claimed up to a million lives while the country was being attacked, on
average, every third day: the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign in
history. In the 1999 Clinton-led attack on Serbia, a "moral crusade",
public transport, non-military factories, food processing plants,
hospitals, schools, museums, churches, heritage-listed monasteries and
farms were bombed. "They ran out of military targets in the first couple
of weeks," said James Bissett, the Canadian former ambassador to
Yugoslavia. "It was common knowledge that Nato went to stage three:
civilian targets." In their cruise missile attack on Sudan, Clinton's
generals targeted and destroyed a factory producing most of sub-Saharan
Africa's pharmaceutical supplies. The German ambassador to Sudan reported:
"It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor country died as a
consequence . . . but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess."

Covered in euphemisms, such as "democracy-building" and "peacekeeping",
"humanitarian intervention" and "liberal intervention", the Clintonites
can boast a far more successful imperial record than Bush's neo-cons,
largely because Washington granted the Europeans a ceremonial role, and
because Nato was "onside". In a league table of death and destruction,
Clinton beats Bush hands down.

A question that New Democrats like to ask is: "What would Al Gore have
done if he had not been cheated of the presidency by Bush?" Gore's top
adviser was the arch-hawk Leon Fuerth, who said the US should "destroy the
Iraqi regime, root and branch". Joseph Lieberman, Gore's running mate in
2000, helped to get Bush's war resolution on Iraq through Congress. In
2002, Gore himself declared that an invasion of Iraq "was not essential in
the short term" but "nevertheless, all Americans should acknowledge that
Iraq does, indeed, pose a serious threat". Like Blair, what Gore wanted
was an "international coalition" to cover long-laid plans for the takeover
of the Middle East. His complaint against Bush was that, by going it
alone, Washington could "weaken our ability to lead the world in this new
century".

Collusion between the Bush and Gore camps was common. During the 2000
election, Richard Holbrooke, who probably would have become Gore's
secretary of state, conspired with Paul Wolfowitz to ensure their
respective candidates said nothing about US policy towards Indonesia's
blood-soaked role in south-east Asia. "Paul and I have been in frequent
touch," said Holbrooke, "to make sure we keep [East Timor] out of the
presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian
interests." The same can be said of Israel's ruthless, illegal expansion,
of which not a word was and is said: it is a crime with the full support
of both Republicans and Democrats.

John Kerry supported the removal of millions of poor Americans from
welfare rolls and backed extending the death penalty. The "hero" of a war
that is documented as an atrocity launched his presidential campaign in
front of a moored aircraft carrier. He has attacked Bush for not providing
sufficient funding to the National Endowment for Democracy, which, wrote
the historian William Blum, "was set up by the CIA, literally, and for 20
years has been destabilising governments, progressive movements, labour
unions and anyone else on Washington's hit list". Like Bush - and all
those who prepared the way for Bush, from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton -
Kerry promotes the mystical "values of American power" and what the writer
Ariel Dorfman has called "the plague of victimhood . . . Nothing more
dangerous: a giant who is afraid."

People who are aware of such danger, yet support its proponents in a form
they find agreeable, think they can have it both ways. They can't. Michael
Moore, the film-maker, should know this better than anyone; yet he backed
the Nato bomber Wesley Clark as Democratic candidate. The effect of this
is to reinforce the danger to all of us, because it says it is OK to bomb
and kill, then to speak of peace. Like the Bush regime, the New Democrats
fear truly opposing voices and popular movements: that is, genuine
democracy, at home and abroad. The colonial theft of Iraq is a case in
point. "If you move too fast," says Noah Feldman, a former legal adviser
to the US regime in Baghdad, "the wrong people could get elected." Tony
Blair has said as much in his inimitable way: "We can't end up having an
inquiry into whether the war [in Iraq] was right or wrong. That is
something that we have got to decide. We are the politicians."

***