[R-G] Pilger: Bush or Kerry? No difference

[Tim Murphy]

Monday, 8th March , 2004
New Statesman (UK) 
www.newstatesman.co.uk


Bush or Kerry? No difference  

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."

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