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08/12/2007
American Democracy: Rhetoric versus Practice
Tesfaye H. H.
" Because of its power and global interest U.S. leaders have committed crimes as a matter of course and structural necessity. A strict application of international law would ---have given every U.S. president of the past 50 years Nuremberg treatment" (Edward Herman, Z magazine Dec.1999, p.38)
While watching some of the international news channels, U.S. Republican Senators seemed to suggest that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was justifiable because of that fiendish beheading of an American citizen by an Iraqi militant group. This is an eye-opener to all those who supported the invasion of Iraq. The only credible reason that can still be advanced was that regime change was necessary so that the Iraqis could enjoy their freedom. That is no longer the case. It is official; the occupiers are not better than the old regime.
The Americans should also understand that the Iraqi groups that carry out these atrocities have never claimed to be the good guys; they have not forced government changes because of human rights and have not invaded another country in a quest to give freedom to its inhabitants. We have always known that these are bad guys. Suggestions that America had regained the moral high ground because of the murder carried out by the Iraqis are preposterous, to say the least.
Whether it is the beheading of an American or the despicable treatment of Iraqi prisoners, it is all crime.
As they say, fate is a great joker; it always laughs last. United States
(US) President George Bush stood before the American people and the world on July 12,2003 and announced that with the fall of Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, the dictator's "torture chambers will no longer cause grief to Iraqis". Today, sadly, we know that Saddam's torture chambers have been replaced by U.S. and British torture chambers in Iraq.
Just to recap: U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, told Congressional Committee hearing on May 7,2004 that the U.S. public has not yet seen the worst pictures of torture of Iraqis by American soldiers in Iraq.
He described the unseen pictures as " sadistic, cruel and inhuman" adding that "words cannot describe it; the pictures give a vivid
realization of what actually took place."
A CNN Pentagon correspondent said there are even video pictures of U.S. soldiers forcing Iraqi prisoners to masturbate before them. Reports by the International Committee of the Red Cross even talked of an American soldier raping an Iraqi prisoner. In some instances, the reports said, torture led to death.
In am shocked, but certainly not surprised by this. What do you expect from a pig but a grunt? What do you expect from a colonial authority but dehumanization, torture and oppression? Bush promised to " build democracy in Iraq" adding that Iraq would then become the springboard for democratic movements throughout the Middle East.
With the pictures of torture in Iraq prisons the people of Iraq and the Middle East are certainly better off without democracy--at least not the one from Bush.
America's involvement in other countries has always been troubling. The U.S. is a democracy that in many cases has promoted and propped some of the most brutal and corrupt dictatorships in other countries--the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Baby Doc Duvalier of Haiti and Marshal Mobutu Setse Seko of former Zaire being the eminent examples. The U.S. has also helped create, finance and arm some of the worst terrorist groups in this world, the
Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Contras in Nicaragua, and UNITA in Angola being in the top of the list.
However, Bush's America is taking this game too far. Other administrations in the U.S. have run dictatorships by proxy.
Bush is running his own in Iraq directly, complete with an appointed colonial governor in the name of the U.S. Iraq administrator.
The Bush administration runs its own prisons in Iraq complete with torture chambers.
The U.S. military have powers to arrest, detain and interrogate prisoners. U.S. prisoners in Iraq rot in jail without appearing in court to be formally charged.
There is a reported instance where a 19-year-old American soldier pulled out his gun and shot an Iraqi whose only crime was to ask why they were searching him up to his underwear.
In this case, the person who was killed was a member of the U.S.-appointed governing council for some city in Iraq, a clear case of impunity.
Bush's America is even more troubling because it has created a legal regime that threatens
civilized jurisprudence like categorizing some prisoners as "illegal combatants." These "illegal combatants" in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are detained without trial for years on end and without access to attorneys.
Although these people are primarily civilians from different countries across the globe suspected of being terrorists, the U.S. says it will try them before a military court.
The choice of detaining people without trial and of categorizing them as "illegal combatants" carries a strong undercurrent. Why? Because U.S. citizens arrested under such circumstances like John Walker Lindh are not detained in Guantanamo Bay, will not be tried by military courts, have access to an attorney, etc.
What is the United States telling the world? That its citizens are more human than other human beings and therefore deserve to be treated under more civilized legal regimes?
If you have read Prof. Mahmoud Mamdani's book, Citizen and Subject, Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, then you get to see the rolling American imperial and colonial project in Guantanamo Bay. Mamdani's thesis is that late colonialism was defined by the creation of a bifurcated state with two legal regimes: one civil and governing the
colonizing race who were considered " civilized;" the other customary, governing the natives considered barbaric.
Those governed under the civil law enjoyed civil rights; the right to an attorney, right of appeal, etc. while those governed under customary law faced administratively driven justice-- the chief who administered the customary law was the judge, the prosecutor and the person who executed the sentence in Mamdani's words, customary law was a
"decentralized despotism."
That is the system of justice, President Bush introduced first in Guantanamo Bay, and now in Iraq--i.e. colonial justice.
As William Blum in his book, Rogue State, explains:
"Most Americans find it difficult in the extreme to accept the proposition that terrorists' act against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington's policies abroad. They believe that the U.S. is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, and its wealth. The Bush administration, like its predecessors following other terrorist acts, has pushed this as the official line ever since the attacks." But how misguided the American public is can easily be deduced from the above innocent and shallow contention. American government officials know better about their sinister policy of " global apartheid," as Alexander Titus dubs it Or, as Howard Zinn sarcastically puts it:
"In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows
Machiavellian." Former president Jimmy Carter, some years after he left the White House, was unambiguous in his agreement with this:
"We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United states because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent
villagers women and children and farmers and housewives__ in those villages around Beirut--- As a result of that ---we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful..."
Not only Lebanon, Syria or Jordan but countless nations such as Viet Nam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, Haiti, Colombia, Honduras, Laos, Afghanistan, Korea, Cambodia, Somalia, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, etc. faced the same wrath of American power. Let us, for instance, cite what befell Laos in the 1970s. From 1964 through 1973, the United States flew 580, 000 bombing runs over Laos--one every p minutes for 10 years. The United States dropped 80 million cluster bomblets on Laos. Ten percent to 30% did not explode, leaving 8 million to 24 million scattered across the country; 15 of Laos's 18 provinces are contaminated with UXO. Three decades after the bombing stopped, two or three Laotians are killed every month and another six or seven are maimed by unexploded ordnance, called UXO, left over from the war. The presence of unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance limits economic development in Laos, one of the poorest countries in Asia. Savannakhet (1 of 18 provinces) is the most heavily bombed province in the one of the most bombed countries in the history of warfare. "Certainly, on a per capita basis, Laos remains the most heavily bombed nation in the history of warfare," says Martin Stuart-Fox, a historian at
Queens land University in Australia and author of " A History of Laos. Cluster bombs, known as "bombies," account for about half the unexploded ordnance on the ground and most of the casualties. Since the bombing ended in 1973, 5,700 Laotians have been killed and 5,600 have been injured by UXO. Through the end of August, 14 of the 30 Laotians reported killed this year and 33 of the 58 injured by UXO have been children. The situation in Laos is worse than in Iraq, where U.S. forces used far fewer cluster bombs with much lower dud rates than the ones used in the Vietnam
war. [USA Today]
And what are American soldiers doing in Iraq today? Bringing peace, democracy and prosperity to the Iraqi people, or dehumanization, colonization, mass destruction and havoc upon millions and millions of innocent civilians day in, day out since they invaded Iraq?
The U.S. public should know that the rest of the world does not hate Americans but the arrogant and satanic policies of successive U.S. governments. As correctly observed by a Vietnam veteran, Robert Bowman,
"We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multi-national corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism" (Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran, presently bishop of the United Catholic Church in Melbourne Beach, FL., from The National Catholic Reporter, October 2,1998)
The U.S. public has a great challenge, but also a duty and opportunity because America is a democracy.
Whatever its flaws, American democracy gives U.S. citizens power to challenge crimes against humanity committed by its armed forces abroad, ostensibly on behalf of " the American people."
Humiliating people, after conquering their state and occupying their territory, can only build resentment against Americans as a people. Yet the American people are as appalled by the
behavior of their armed forces as the victims of these acts.
Equally so, when elections in a democratic country are openly rigged in Florida, and the government that comes to power through such fraud, arrests prisoners without trial in military detention centers, invades other countries in complete disregard to international law, establishes a naked colonial administration over another sovereign country, has its military torturing and killing prisoners in the conquered country, then such a government becomes a shining example of dictators everywhere and, surely, not democracy at all.
President Robert Mugabe must be smiling along with his guest the notorious dictator and former military ruler of Ethiopia, Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, in Zimbabwe and will now grab more white- owned farms (if any are still remaining) and beat his opponents more brutally than ever before into submission.
Our own immediate neighbor, President Isaias Afewerki, will now increase the number of underground prisons or dungeons, and secret houses across the Eritrean lowlands and add hyenas and wolves to crocodiles and snakes in his great arsenal of torture instruments in the Eritrean deserts.
Whenever we talk of democracy, we love to quote America as an example. What a misguided notion, what an ignoble folly!
The challenge-- and opportunity-- for the American people is to redeem or recapture the image of their country by asking their government to account.
Bush and his hawks should be reined in for the good of America and for the good of humanity by the American people. Bush never stood for and believed in democracy and he will never care for peace and democracy at home and abroad but for American hegemonic control of the whole world. His arrogant position was eloquently addressed to the world by himself in 1992 when he stated thus:
" A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America. And they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair, and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what's right."
Is this what the Americans want to portray to the rest of humanity and in turn expect love and admiration from the vanquished peoples of the earth? Is this the sort of government many Third World nationals in the Diaspora expect to implant or impose democracy on their respective countries? What an illusion! Anyway, history will be the ultimate judge.
Many great empires have crumbled in human history because of their power-mongering adventures and sheer arrogance. As they say, pride always precedes failure. I wish the Americans could learn some lessons from world history of the past.
Any comments via e-mail: habisso@yahoo.co.uk
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