Margaret Lynch argues that if the world is to be spared being bullied into submission by America, we have to reach out to the people of America

Every now and then it is good to stand back and try to think outside your normal box. To explore an issue, to question and challenge from vantage points that are not normally your own. I went on the peace demo in Glasgow with everyone else. Had a great day – saw many old friends and we rounded it off with a visit to the fairground in George Square, a decent meal and a few bottles of wine in a local eatery. All very comfortable. On top of the battlebus in the carpark at the SECC were all the usual suspects, except this time they were surrounded by 100,000 Scots. All across Europe Joe Soap and the Pope (on this occasion quite literally) were raising their voices against the dogs of war. So why did I feel uneasy?

There were a number of things bothering me. First of all it was the idea that had the Americans been more succesful in purchasing the votes of Angola, Cameroon, several other desperate African nations and blackmailing Putin over Chechnya then this anti war coalition would have collapsed. Would a UN vote have made the war any more legitimate? If the US had demonstrated that it was able to bribe or bully the Security Council into submission – and get a result – then the integrity of the UN system would have suffered a terminal challenge. As it was they were not able to do this and the war went ahead anyway demonstrating that in a unipolar world only one vote counts. And the trump card is held by the US. The fact that George Robertson has more influence than Kofi Annan is something that should keep us all awake at night. But either way the UN was a busted flush.

Secondly, and more substantively, my conscience was bothering me. I knew that any chance of a Ceaucesculike toppling of Saddam at the hands of his own people was not remotely likely, that a decade of economic sanctions had served only to weaken the people, not the regime. The Iraqi opposition was deeply divided and most of it was now operating outwith Iraq and to my knowledge no-one else had come up with a strategy for effecting Saddam’s removal. If the Iraqi people were not able to get this dictator off their backs shouldn’t we be intervening? How many of his own people does a dictator have to despatch before his removal by an external power becomes legitimate purely on the grounds of respect for human life, dignity and freedom? I don’ t pretend to know the exact size of the body count in Iraq but it had to be in the hundreds of thousands. If you take the conscript soldiers that he sent to war aged 13 and 14 during the Iran-Iraq war (estimated one million dead on both sides), the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs who were ethnically cleansed, indiscriminate thousands of Iraqi’s who were thought to be lying in mass graves littered throughout Iraq, the 8,000 or so old men, women and children gassed at Halabja – and not forgetting most of the Ba’ath party and some close personal friends and family members – it puts him in the same league as a Ceaucescu, a Suharto or a Pinochet.

So why was the British left getting squeamish about going in and toppling Saddam? The blanket opposition to the war derived not from what was being done but who was doing it and the fact that the reasons which were being put forward by the Bush/Blair governments in justification of the war just didn’t stack up.

Why is it now that the Congo is on the brink of genocide and the UN is being asked to send in troops to protect the Pygmies who are being massacred that nobody gives a toss? There is not enough oil and no strategic advantage in the Congo for the US so they can’t be arsed. And because the US doesn’t give a damn the rest of the world is disinterested. Iraq has oil – and lots of it – and this fixated the US (who for the last 40 years has had as a core foreign policy objective the control of the Gulf’s oil fields).

There was a lot of debate just before the war started about the war aims. Jack Straw said twice on television that regime change was not a war aim, the focus was on the removal of the weapons of mass destruction! The aptly named US Brigadier General William Looney knew better when he said

“They know we own their country. We own their airspace.. we dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need” (Quoted in Rouge State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum).

I do not intend to dignify the ‘we’re going to war to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction’ argument with a rebuttal. What everyone missed was the fact that the US has shown themselves only too willing to use chemical and biological weapons abroad. In the 1940s and 50s in Bahama Islands they released an unkown bacterium which killed thousands of animals (the incident is still classified, no-one knows how many people died); in China and Korea in the 1950s plague, anthrax and encephalitis not to mention naplam and Agent Orange; in Vietnam they used Dioxin – one of the most toxic substances in the world; in Laos they used Sarin nerve gas in 1970; they tested mustard gas, VX, sarin, hydrogen cyanide and other nerve agents in Panama from the 1940s to the 1990s; in Cuba they deployed weather modification technology to destroy the sugar crop; in 1969 and 1970, the CIA provided a virus which causes swine fever to Cuban exiles – some weeks later 500,000 pigs had to be slaughtered to prevent a national epidemic; 10 years later the target may have been humans as an epidemic of dengue hemorragic fever (DHF) swept across the island – the US had bred Aedes aegypti mosquitos to carry DHF as agents of biological warfare; US crop dusters spread plant-eating insects never before seen in Cuba – Thrips palmi which then went onto destroy corn and bean crops. The US are the only state ever to have dropped atomic bombs on cities – Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And if poisoning foreigners wasn’t bad enough, the American military has experimented on its own people.

“For decades after the end of World War II, the US Government conducted experiments with literally millions of human subjects, both civilian and military, for the purposes of measuring the effects upon them of a) sundry chemical and biological materials including nerve agents b) nuclear radiation, including injecting many with plutonium c) a host of mind control drugs : LSD and other hallucinogens as well as assorted other exotic chemical concoctions.” (again, from Rouge State)

Most people knew that America and not Saddam posed the greatest threat to peace and security worldwide. Saddam may have been a huge problem for his own people but he was not threatening to invade, bomb or effect ‘regime change’ in any other country near or far. America, on the other hand, has an impressive record of bombing foreign countries – China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Guatemala (again) Congo, Peru, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala (again), Grenada, Lebanon (twice), Libya, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan (again) and Iraq. They also managed to bomb Bulgaria, Macedonia and Pakistan by mistake. People are already taking bets on which country is next – Iran, Syria and North Korea have all been shortlisted. It’s unlikely to be North Korea because they don’t have oil and they do have weapons of mass destruction.

The US drive for full spectrum dominance is widely acknowledged. What is not as well known is that they don’t always get what they want. Take the recent attempt at ‘regime change’ in Venezuela. Hugo Chavez as well as being the President of Venezuela was also the President of OPEC. He fell foul of the oil companies when he doubled royalty taxes paid by ExxonMobil and others from 16 per cent to 30 per cent on all new finds and committed Venezuela to adhere to OPEC sales quotas thus doubling worldwide oil prices to $20 a barrel. He then used the revenue gained from these two measures to provide ‘bricks and milk’ for the urban poor – many of whom left behind cardboard shacks in shanty towns for their first brick built homes as a result. Iraq and Libya were trying to organise an OPEC boycott on oil exports to the US to protest against Americas support for Israel. The US needed Venezuelan oil – badly. On April 12 a good old fashioned Chilean-type coup was launched (with the usual backing and support of the CIA and American Embassy) and Chavez was kidnapped – Pedro Carmona the chief of Fedecamaras, Venezuela’s CBI, was installed as President. One million Venezuelans surrounded the Presidential palace and demanded Chavez’ return to office. Chavez had been tipped off about the coup and installed loyal troops in the basement of the Palace. Faced with no alternative Carmona gave up the ghost. We should be grateful – we have been spared decades of standing outside Venezuelan Embassies in the pissing rain holding placards of desparacidos and searching for Venezuelan produce to boycott.

My point is, let’s not then entertain the notion that the US adventure in Iraq was to make the country safe for democracy since spreading democracy is clearly not high on the agenda of the Bush Government. In fact quite the opposite – does anyone remember the farce that passed for the ‘election’ of President Bush? He won the Presidential election by taking the State of Florida by a margin of 537 votes after his brother Governor Jeb Bush ordered a purge of the Florida electoral register robbing 57,700 mainly Black and Hispanic Americans of their right to vote. Ninety per cent of them were Democrats. Added to this, voting machines which are programmed to reject ballot papers which are not properly filled in were either not available or not switched on in precincts with a high concentration of Black and Hispanic electors. The result was that in predominantly white (and republican) counties rejected ballot papers amounted to between one and two per cent of votes cast and in predominantly Black and Hispanic counties up to 12 per cent of ballot papers were not counted. If Gore had won Florida State (which he would have done – he got 93 per cent of the Black and Hispanic votes cast) he would automatically have won the Presidency. I find this strangely comforting.

Where is all this leading ?

In order to truly liberate the people of Iraq, Palestine, Burma, Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan and to protect the human rights and civil liberties of all of us elsewhere, we have to deal with the bully boys of the new world order first (and it goes without saying their bosom buddies in the British establishment and by that I mean the upper echelons of the Labour Party). The achilles heel of Pax Americana is the American people themselves. We should reach out to them. Demand that UN Peacekeeping budgets, the European Unions Democracy and Human Rights budget and every penny we can get our hands on is spent on voter education and empowerment programmes.

Let’s start with Florida – voter registration and education campaigns in Gadsen, Madison, Hamilton and Jackson counties. Anti racism campaigns in Citrus, Pasco, Sata Rosa and Sarasota. Let’s fund delegations of single mothers who can’t afford health insurance to fly to Venezuela and learn from the people’s movement that got the government they wanted to deliver what they needed – bricks and milk. And lets not stop there – Enron pensioners and workers to meet with the trade unions and Catholic Church in Cochabamba in Bolivia where thousands mobilised when the Government was forced to privatise the water board and water was priced out of the pocket of the urban poor. Let’s take some Americans from the Bible Belt who gave money to Pat Robertson’s ‘Operation Blessing’ planespotting to see the flights they paid for bring diamond cutters not medical supplies to the Congo (the profits of the diamond operation helped pay for Bush’s election campaign). Let’s bring Palestinians, Latin Americans and Africans to teach-ins at American campuses. We can set up pro-democracy radio and cable stations, organise visitors programmes for black and Hispanic inner city youth taking the American soldiers of tomorrow to the bombed aspirin factory in Sudan, on a tour of the Ibn Sina hospitals in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq – or better still on a walk through any African or American slum where large numbers of young boys have been christened Saddam or Osama. (They might begin to wonder why?)

OK – so I’m out of my box.

However there is a kernel of a truth here. Until the American people wake up and start to exercise some of their democratic rights, people everywhere will serve the market. The fight for justice and peace cannot be won unless we build social movements – robust peoples organisations who can force politicians to put people before profit. There is a worldwide majority for change but it is not organised. Sporadic protests lead nowhere. There are large institutions – the churches and trades unions – present in every country which need to start talking to each other and thinking strategically around how we go about achieving the liberation of the American people. And then the rest of us might have a look in.

Margaret Lynch is Director of SCIAF. She is writing in a personal capacity