[Peace-discuss] Obama's Orwellian lies

[C. G. Estabrook]

	January 2, 2010     	
	Welcome to Orwell’s World 2010
	Inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth"
	by John Pilger

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, 
whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. 
‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who 
controls the present controls the past’.”

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the 
close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no 
longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan 
and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”. He called this 
“global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which 
America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in 
occupying your country.”

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American 
attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security 
Council. There was no UN authority. He said the “the world” supported the 
invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all but three of 37 countries 
surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America 
invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin 
Laden”. In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, 
reported Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored. Even Obama’s 
mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than two 
months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign minister, 
Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an American military assault 
would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton 
administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as “stable” enough 
to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It 
had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for 
al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser, General James 
Jones, said in October that there were “fewer than 100” al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. 
According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at 
all, but “a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US 
because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud. Only the terminally 
gormless remain true to the Obama brand of “world peace”.

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing 
General Stanley McCrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads 
in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most impoverished countries is a model for 
those “disorderly regions” of the world still beyond Oceania’s reach. This is a 
known as COIN, or counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, 
aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public 
relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, its aim 
is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite civil war: Tajiks and 
Uzbecks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed 
and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically 
cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media 
reported this as “peace”, and American academics bought by Washington and 
“security experts” briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the 
good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into 
“target areas” controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans and the opium 
trade. That these warlords are infamous for their barbarism is irrelevant. “We 
can live with that,” a Clinton-era diplomat said of the persecution of women in 
a “stable” Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers 
and agricultural specialists will attend to the “humanitarian crisis” and so 
“secure” the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the 
ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it failed in 
Vietnam where the CIA’s “strategic hamlet program” was designed to corral and 
divide the southern population and so defeat the Viet Cong -- the Americans’ 
catch-all term for the resistance, similar to “Taliban”.

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in 
both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, 
checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance – these are claimed 
as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from 
its native people. And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not 
been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize 
winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that 
failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in 
the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and 
were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their 
memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed 
beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky 
was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the 
people under the sky were also very much the same, everywhere, all over the 
world … people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of 
hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same people who … were storing up in 
their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the 
world.”

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