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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
preoccu-pied 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 preeminence, 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 f*** 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’état in Washington and its stated goal of "full spectrum
dominance." As for Bush’s "preemptive" 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 honors "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] event-ually triumphed in the cold war.
President Kennedy epitomized 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 nonexistent "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 antiwar 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 recognize 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 commen-tator 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 authorized 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’ antiwar 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. Savor 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 mesmerizing 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 internatio-nalism" received a long line of media and Blair
people who hailed him as a lost leader, "a champion of the center 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 "defense" 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, nonmilitary 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 "peace-keeping," "humanitarian
intervention" and "liberal intervention," the Clintonites can boast a far more
successful imperial record than Bush’s neocons, 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 "never-theless, all
Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does, indeed, pose a serious threat."
Like Blair, what Gore wanted was an "interna-tional 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 southeast 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 destabilizing
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... Noth-ing 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 filmmaker, 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." March 5, 2004
John Pilger was born
and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, filmmaker
and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has
twice won British journalism’s highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year,"
for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. This article originally appeared in The
New Statesman.
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