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<h2><b>Powell declares tsunami aid part of global war on
terror</b></h2><font size=3><a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/powl-j061.shtml" eudora="autourl">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/powl-j061.shtml<br>
</a></font><h4><b>Imperialism in Samaritan’s clothing<br><br>
<br>
</b></h4><h5><b>By Bill Van Auken<br>
6 January 2005<br><br>
</b></h5><font size=3>During his whirlwind tour of the tsunami-devastated
nations of South Asia, US Secretary of State Colin Powell let slip that
the begrudging and belated funding offered by Washington to the ongoing
relief effort is all part of its “global war on terror.”<br><br>
Speaking of US aid and the participation of the American military in
relief efforts, Powell declared: “It dries up those pools of
dissatisfaction that might give rise to terrorist activity. That supports
not only our national security interest but the national security
interests of the countries involved.”<br><br>
Noting that the majority of the victims of the tsunami were Muslims, the
US Secretary of State continued: “We’d be doing it regardless of
religion, but I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the
world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in
action.”<br><br>
Powell’s trip is largely an exercise in damage control. It is aimed at
overcoming the well-founded international perception that the government
of the most powerful imperialist country in the worldand specifically
its president, George W. Bushreacted with appalling indifference to the
worst natural catastrophe in living memory.<br><br>
The US Secretary of State has been accompanied by Florida’s Governor Jeb
Bush, who seems to be acting as a personal emissary for his older
brother, while exploiting the international tragedy to further his own
political ambitions by appearing to be grappling with a global
crisis.<br><br>
What of the claim that Washington’s reaction to the massive destruction
and lost of life wrought by the tsunami is an expression of “American
generosity, American values in action”?<br><br>
Generosity implies selflessness, hardly a characteristic of US foreign
policy. On the contrary, the successive decisions to increase US aid from
an obscene $15 million, to $35 million and finally $350 million were
taken with a calculated view toward the immense damage that Washington’s
miserliness was inflicting upon US imperialism’s global image.<br><br>
As Powell acknowledges, the aid is part and parcel of a “war on terror”
that is directed at furthering US global economic and political hegemony
by means of military power and aggression.<br><br>
No doubt, the shock of the tsunami’s devastation and the unimaginable
loss of human life have led to expressions of what might genuinely be
described as “American values,” but not from the administration in
Washington.<br><br>
The open-heartedness and political naiveté associated with the generosity
of the American people has been on display across the United States, with
students and youth organizing bake sales and other activities to raise
money for the victims, and many thousands donating to fund
appeals.<br><br>
It is noteworthy that US television and newspapers have accurately
portrayed the scale of the disaster. Once American ruling circles
determined that the Bush administration’s initial disdain for the
suffering caused by the Indian Ocean earthquake was untenable, the
corporate media conglomerates swung into action, providing non-stop
coverage of the catastrophe. Graphic and chilling images of rows of
corpses, parents carrying the bodies of their young children and villages
reduced to rubble have been shown nightly to US viewing
audiences.<br><br>
One cannot help contrast this coverage to the media’s cowardly and
complicit silence in response to the human catastrophe created by the US
invasion and occupation of Iraq. Images of the dead, of sobbing parents
clutching the bodies of children killed by US bombardments and of blocks
reduced to rubble are readily available, but rigorously censored by
America’s vaunted free press.<br><br>
Describing a helicopter flight over Banda Aceh in Indonesia, Powell said
he had “never seen anything like it” in his military and government
career.<br><br>
“I cannot imagine the horror that went through the families and all of
the people who heard this noise coming and then had their lives snuffed
out by this wave,” he said. “The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to
destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy
everything in its path is amazing.”<br><br>
Perhaps the US Secretary of State would have benefited from a low-flying
helicopter ride over the Iraqi city of Fallujah, though continued
resistance to the US occupiers there would no doubt have precluded such a
tour.<br><br>
Such a flight would have afforded a view of what a man-made tsunami has
left of one of Iraq’s principal urban centers. The fabled “city of
mosques” lies in ruins as the result of a tidal wave of fire and steel
unleashed by US warplanes, artillery and tanks.<br><br>
What of the horror of the Iraqi families who heard the roar of ceaseless
US aerial bombardment and the thunder of cannon barrages for days before
American tanks finished laying waste to their city? Does Colin Powell try
to imagine what went through their minds? How many of their lives were
snuffed out is something that neither the US government nor the US mass
media even bothers to consider.<br><br>
While the Pentagon and the media continuously spoke only of US forces
killing “rebels” and “terrorists” in Fallujah, the reports emerging from
initial attempts at recovery in the city tell a very different
story.<br><br>
The director of Fallujah’s main hospital has reported that an emergency
team from the facility has thus far recovered more than 700 bodies from
the city’s rubble. More than 550 were women and children, while the
majority of the men were elderly. Babies have been found dead in their
homes from malnutrition. The search has thus far only extended to a
fraction of the city, with other areas still inaccessible because of
fighting.<br><br>
The deaths in Fallujah are not included in the credible estimate made in
a study published last October in the British medical journal
<i>Lancet</i> of over 100,000 additional violent deaths in Iraq since the
US invasion, the majority the result of US bombardments. The figure,
which equals two thirds of the current estimated death toll from the
tsunami, has received scant attention in the American media.<br><br>
In addition to these violent deaths, there are many thousands
moreparticularly among young childrencaused by the destruction of the
country’s infrastructure, resulting in a lack of safe drinking water and
the unavailability of refrigeration and basic medicines. Taken together,
this human toll represents a manmade calamity that is on a par with the
natural disaster that has struck South Asia.<br><br>
As for “American values,” it is fair to ask whose values were expressed
in the vile torture chambers created by the US military and the CIA in
Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and many lesser-known American detention
facilities serving the “war on terror”?<br><br>
Whose values led military interrogators and guards to shock Iraqi
prisoners with electrodes, light them on fire and subject them to sexual
abuse and humiliation?<br><br>
It is now clear that the orders that gave riseand continue to
sanctionsuch atrocities came from the White House itself, embraced by
Bush and given a pseudo-legal justification by the man he has nominated
to serve as US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales.<br><br>
Behind these depraved actions lie the “values” of a predatory and corrupt
ruling elite that is prepared to carry out mass murder and torture in
order to further enrich itself. It has been able to continue the criminal
enterprise in Iraq only by systematically lying to the American people
and, with the media’s collaboration, covering up the scale of its
crimes.<br><br>
The hopes, more or less openly expressed by various leading figures in
Washington, that the participation of the US military in relief efforts
in South Asia will somehow erase the searing images of torture that
emerged from Abu Ghraib or of the mass destruction in Fallujah, will
prove vain. Few will be convinced that US imperialism has suddenly become
a philanthropic institution.<br><br>
Even after twice raising its aid pledge, Washington’s spending on tsunami
relief would barely cover two days of its continuing war in Iraq. On the
scales of American capitalism, “values” are measured in dollars and
cents, and the whole world knows it.<br><br>
A little over a century ago, the great revolutionist Rosa Luxemburg wrote
an imperishable essay on the reaction of the great powers to another
devastating natural disaster, the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pelee that
wiped out 40,000 people, virtually the entire population of the French
Caribbean colony of Martinique. [<i>See</i> “Martinique”
<a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1902/05/15.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1902/05/15.htm</a>]<br><br>
She brilliantly exposed the hypocritical expressions of sorrow over the
loss of life and pretensions of humanitarianism emanating from the
capitals of France, Britain, the US, Germany and Russia. The governments
of each of these countries, she pointed out, were responsible for
bloodbaths carried out either against their own working class or in
savagely repressing anti-colonial resistance from Africa to the
Philippines.<br><br>
Luxemburg wrote: “And now they have all turned to Martinique, all one
heart and one mind again; they help, rescue, dry the tears and curse the
havoc-wreaking volcano. Mt. Pelee, greathearted giant, you can laugh; you
can look down in loathing at these benevolent murderers, at these weeping
carnivores, at these beasts in Samaritan’s clothing. But a day will come
when another volcano lifts its voice of thunder: a volcano that is
seething and boiling, whether you need it or not, and will sweep the
whole sanctimonious, blood-splattered culture from the face of the earth.
And only on its ruins will the nations come together in true humanity,
which will know but one deadly foeblind, dead nature.”<br><br>
In the light of recent events, these words remain evergreen. The
juxtaposition of massive human suffering and imperialist hypocrisy that
has characterized the aftermath of the South Asian tsunami is symptomatic
of a society rent by inequality and oppression and ripe for social
revolution.<br><br>
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