BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol I, No. 8
Oct 27, 2004
social criticism by
Vicente-Ignacio de Veyra III
America Not
War?
SECOND OF TWO
PARTS
GIVEN ALL THE INTERESTING facts surrounding the Bush family's businesses and its partnerships with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family, one is bound to reserve space for the questions about George W. Bush's decisions during the so-called "war against terror". Could it have been true that he gave a month's duration to allow Usama bin Laden to escape the clutches of the American forces in Afghanistan, which meager force by the way would pale compared to the number of policemen in Manhattan? Would it be radical to think that perhaps Bush and the bin Laden families created the Usama myth to service their common arms manufacturing interests through United Defense? Would it be insane to think that perhaps, as the American black poet Amiri Baraka proposed, a certain Texas-Saudi conspiracy paved the way for the WTC bombing as a rationale for creating a magnificent market in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world? Will we one day wake up to an investigation on the role President Bush played in the World Trade Center plane bombing, absolving those who presently think this from the position labeled by mainstream thought as radically insane? Could it be that it is President Bush who is insane and that his war with Saddam Hussein (enemy of British and American oil interests in the MidEast) was/is personal, his friendship with the bin Laden family (inclusive of Usama) eternal, and that the war on Iraq was indeed what John Kerry labeled the "great diversion" from the world indictment on Usama Bush, if you will? Or could it be that allowing Usama to be captured would risk Usama's spilling some beans that Bush wouldn't like? How many more data are out there beyond the clutches of such investigative documentary filmmakers as the Cannes Film Festival-honored Michael Moore, he who has been constantly debased as a propagandist by the Republican propaganda machine called Fox News Channel via Fox's brilliant and highly-paid, sophisticated Republican propagandists and lie-peddlers Bill O'Riley, Sean Hannity, etc.? Fox's news department, by the way, has been headed by a G.W. Bush cousin.
There are more things in the world beyond our understanding, in the way that yuppies still can't understand why earthlings stopped sending astronauts to the moon. It would be easier, however, for them to understand why the US takes exception to the Saudi royal empire's beheadings (and America's own execution of blacks) while it bullies China with the latter's supposedly unacceptable human rights violations. After all, virtually 7% of Wall Street investments involve Saudi money, and that includes funds that help to maintain all-American symbols like AOL/Time-Warner and Citibank. So much for human rights violations and America's moral authority to criticize.
The leftists of the world have one operative word to describe First World oppressions in the Third World. It's actually an acronym: CIA. Even Americans themselves, and Hollywood, allow the use by politicians and their corporate sponsors of the traditionally silent intelligence institution as a ready scapegoat, object of a blame theory principle, recently manifest in the US Congress' report on the failures of the intelligence institution regarding the country's war on terror---this, even with the knowledge lying in the sidelines that GW Bush allowed the Saudi government to keep the relatives of suspected WTC attackers from talking to CIA/FBI operatives. Like heroes who did a very good job from the day they delivered a report that Condeleeza Rice admitted had a very serious title, the CIA-FBI took the blame. Who, after all, would like to risk his life trying to come out with the stuff that White House removed from the Congressional inquiry into the September 11 bombing? No one. CIA-FBI took the public's ire and impatience with the tag on their persons as nincompoops, even with knowledge data lying in the sidelines that former acting FBI director Thomas Pickard was asked by Bush's Attorney General to stop already with his reports on impending terror attacks.
Yes, the CIA and the FBI will always be a mystery and the subject of mystery novels and tele-series. But to those who have patience with the constantly-derided alternative American and European presses, or the alternative news in the mainstream press, America itself comes out as a puzzlement, to say the least. For example, when Palestinians send a suicide bomber to Israel, the US government goes silent on Israel's UN right to a missile rebuttal, perhaps as its way of regarding Islamic terrorism as deserving of such an Israeli treatment. Yet when a suicide bomber sneaks into the side of a USS Cole to mark that ship with a gaping hole, Governor Bush of Texas invites a Taleban official to visit his cowboy state and talk to Unocal executives even while the USS Cole attackers were reported (by CIA operatives doing their job) to be hiding in Afghanistan. Was this America's way of regarding Islamic terrorists as possible partners for certain US corporate interests, such as Unocal's building a pipeline across Afghanistan through to Pakistan from the Caspian Sea, with Dick Cheney's Halliburton given the contract to dig, and Bush chief campaign contributor Kenneth Lay's Enron's operations given the corollary benefit from the project? So much for America's rage against terrorism.
There is one other value that America preaches to the peoples of the world: hope. Well, hope has been with the rest of us since the beginning of the American empire. Presently, Afghanistan can also hold on to this attitude of hope, hoping their new President-elect Ammad Karzai, former Bush-appointed OIC of Afghanistan and also former adviser to Unocal, wouldn't end up as another US-entrenched Saddam Hussein, US-entrenched Ferdinand Marcos, US-entrenched Shah of Iran, US-entrenched Noriega, US-entrenched Batista, or US-offered Stalin for East Europe. Hope has been valuable to a world that has suffered so much from America's corporate-sponsored judgments, political good intentions, or unilateral dealings with despots. At the rate America is still supporting Republican values, I doubt whether there is still hope with America to become a true model of morality (beyond the preachings of Hollywood and cable TV). Look at our own politicians, who have all looked up to American values!
Only a week or so ago, respected Asian leader Mahathir Mohammad reaffirmed his belief in the virtues of democracy and the American example. He, however, offered a more intelligent option of doing away with things American that do not work for Asian values. I say if we are to be doubly intelligent, it is not entirely Mahathir's choices that we should follow but our own guts and knowledge about the society we were, the society we have become, and the society we intend to become. Obviously, America is not the end-all and be-all of democratic values.
But how can we even begin to depart from the simplest thing that's American if we cannot seem to whisk off the ill-informed belief (which is probably also the delusion of 1/3 of America) that America has been the most virtuous nation in the world, killing more than a million Filipino males during the occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the century? We continue to deny the reality that everything wrong today with our country's self-serving politicians and generals/colonels is everything that's wrong with America's own corporate-serving world politics. How can we even begin to participate in the United Nations as an active Third World voice when we cannot begin to argue that arms proliferation was made possible by America's own arms manufacturing corporate interests? How can we even begin to act as an independent intelligent self-governing republic when we cannot even begin to wring the lie that the world's most feared warlords and cult leaders were made possible by America's imperial missions? And you say imperialism is an obsolete leftist word of the 70s? Think again. Or, if you will, go ahead -- hope again.
(END OF TWO-PART SERIES)
Posted at the Bananacue
Republic website 10/26/04.
"We continue to
deny the reality that everything wrong today with our country's self-serving
politicians and generals/colonels is everything that's wrong with America's own corporate-serving
world politics."
The Bradley armored fighting vehicle in action in Iraq. The vehicle
is
manufactured and supplied by United Defense, a company owned by the Bush and bin Laden
families.