Author: Tathagata Bhattacharya
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 13, 2000
We are progressively
heading towards a unipolar world and only the laws of electromagnetics
debar us from calling it so. Today, the American tag can legitimise
almost anything under the sun, even poverty alleviation and human rights.
'He who rules East Europe,
rules the heartland. He who rules the heartland, rules the world
island. And he who controls the world island, rules the world.'Mc
Iver's prophecy was the driving force behind the conscious structuring
of the US military as well as foreign doctrine throughout the course of
the Cold War.
The communist threat
receded with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The West called
it the 'end of history.' Communism ceased to be a major foe. But
in 45 years (1946-1991), the US had made sure that for years to come, its
policies, as regarding security issues, would depend on nurturing a fear
psychosis.
In the post-1991 period
came the Islamic threat. Had it not been there, the US would have
created one. You can't be too sure that it actually didn't do so.
The CIA has had a history of countless sabotage operations. Gerald
Prosner had clearly demonstrated that the Kennedy assassination case is
not as crystal-clear as it was made to look like. That he was not
moving in accordance with the instructions of the CIA, is clearly evident
today. Kennedy's attempts at establishing a dialogic relationship
with the civil rights activists (blacks, gays, anti-war protestors) was
highly resented by CIA top functionaries as also by the arms-manufacturing
lobby.
Another instance was
cited by the celebrated scholar Noam Chomsky in his work Deterring Democracy.
While ascertaining the cause of the thumping victory of the US land forces
over their Iraqi counterparts in the only land engagement of the war, Chomsky
came across a secret file of the defence department.
Before the war broke
out, the US machinery had fed the international Press with information
that the Iraqi Air Force possessed the most modern Russian fighters including
the Sukhoi class deep interceptors and long range strategic bombers of
the likes of Tupolev Blackjack and Blinders. There were also reports
about the invincibility of the Iraqis on the ground. All this was
deliberately done, keeping in mind that the war-terrain was essentially
a flat one, where no number of decoys could possibly protect the actual
hardware from being hit by the USAF's relentless carpet exercises.
The most modern Iraqi
fighters happened to be the MiG-27s and MiG-29s and they did not possess
a single long-range bomber. The famous land engagement, where 100,000
Iraqi soldiers lost their lives as against 80 on the US side saw no fighting
at all. The entire barrage of Iraqi hardware had already been destroyed
by air attacks. The said file also detailed how the Iraqi foot soldiers
had even run out of bullets when the land assault was mounted. Casualties
could not be more on the US side because the hungry, bombarded and ammunition-less
Iraqis did not face either the marines or the general infantrymen.
Huge bulldozers and battle tanks were pushed in towards the fleeing Iraqi
infantry (most of them on foot). Thus they were ripped apart under
tanks and the bulldozers gave them a sand-burial.
India is today poised
at a critical juncture vis-a-vis relations with the US. Soon after
India opened up her markets, the US promptly shed the Cold War jinx and
registered an almost overnight break with its longstanding ally, Pakistan.
But it must, however, be noted that the US has been constantly pressing
the international community to persuade India as well as Pakistan to sign
the CTBT.
In reality, US happens
to be the only state which has in effect used nuclear weapons in the history
of warfare. After Rita Haywarth came down the sky on August 2, 1945,
to usher Hiroshima into a halo that was brighter than a thousand suns,
it gave Japan a three-day respite before the 'Fat Man' struck at Nagasaki.
The US explained the
necessity to ensure Japan's quick surrender. But that Japan was in
no position to fight back has been demonstrated time and again by experts.
So the only plausible reason for the show of the nuclear might was to threaten
communist Russia. It has to be remembered in this connection that
right then the US had the nuclear monopoly.
Although MacArthur's
repentance at the use of weapons of mass destruction was highlighted by
the Western media, his behaviour during the Korean War (1950-53) did not
echo similar concerns. MacArthur did his utmost to persuade President
Truman to resort to the use of the nuclear option, on Manchuria in particular.
At that time US troops
had been cut into ribbons on the banks of the Yalu river and been pushed
back deep into South Korea.
President Truman did
not oblige and thankfully so, as the former USSR had also come to possess
nukes by then and retaliation could be a possible reality. The era
of US nuclear monopoly was over. By then, the US had developed the
hydrogen bomb, the true 'capitalist' weapon. The speciality of this
bomb lay in the fact that it was not capable of causing harm to any non-organic
substance. It meant that an entire city could be wiped out of its
human-population without a single glass being damaged.
During the Vietnam conflict,
it was clearly a colonising mission that the US had envisaged upon.
President Kennedy attributed the failure of the campaign to mass participation.
Here also, the US forces led in execution of women and children, of which
the My Lai massacre is just one example. The role of the infamous
napalm bomb is now part of GK texts.
Outside Europe, all the
powerful agencies of the US had been ranged on the side of repressive regimes
and against social reform. The justification for overthrowing the
democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz government of Guatemala on June 18,
1954 was that international communism had gained a 'political base' in
that hemisphere.
The reality, however,
lay somewhere else. The Communist Party of Guatemala, even at its
height in 1954, was hardly a mass organisation, having a membership of
about 3500 in a country of 3 million people. It had only four seats
out of a total of 56 in Congress; not enough to threaten the democratic
fabric that the series of previous dictatorships had so meticulously created
under US patronage.
It was the interest of
the United Fruit Company that got hampered by Arbenz's sudden decision
to introduce land- reforms. It found the compensation inadequate
and the US Government characteristically endorsed the capitalist cause.
The US role in the dispute was aptly brought forward by the generally pro-US
El Pais of Montevideo on 29 May, 1954. 'The North American Government,
in pressuring the government of Guatemala to accept the conditions demanded
by the United Fruit Company...under a leprous contract, concluded on the
30th of April 1923 under the dictatorship of General Lazaro Chacon...is
returning to a policy which will alienate the sympathy of the continent
and rouse a clamour of disapproval.'
The US followed this
up by dislodging the popularly elected socialist government of Chile in
the 1970 coup-d- etat. The esteemed poet Pablo Neruda happened to
be a part of the ousted government.
There are also file pictures
of US Navy and USAF gunships throwing young Left students of Argentina
into high seas with both limbs tied. Those people who vanished into
the vast expanse of the South Atlantic Ocean, have since then been dubbed
as 'disappearance cases.' Not that our own nation has had a merry-go-round
relationship with the US. During the Indo-Pak conflict of 1971, the
US Navy's Seventh Fleet (meant to protect Formosa from Chinese communists)
entered the Bay of Bengal, only to be sent back by a couple of Soviet nuclear
submarines.The Afghan problem has its origins in the Oval Office too.
It was USA that financed and trained the Afghan militants. Probably,
they had not foreseen the trouble they could mount after the communist
threat receded. History never ends. It is an ever-evolving
phenomenon. The WTO summit at Seattle in 1999 clearly brought out
the US actual agenda: food and medicine production would be shifted to
the West and all other manufacturing would take place in the Third World
states. Once the 'North' has the monopoly over food, then everything
is going to be over soon. Aggression thus has not stopped.
It has only changed its character.
US interest in India
is purely concentrated on the latter's market. What else can really
explain the over- night change in US stance towards India as soon as we
opened our markets. India has to be careful in dealing with such
an inscrutable quantity. It has to understand that the White House
does not stand for liberty. It has never done so.
On the contrary, it is
a land which alongside housing the Statue of Liberty, is actually one in
which, 'liberty is a statue,' as described by the great Chilean poet Nicanor
Para.
