The New Rulers of the World by John Pilger, Verso, $19/拢10, ISBN 185984393X Reviewed by Rob Edwards
ASSUMING US propaganda is accurate, President George W. Bush is intending to bomb Iraq as part of his war on terrorism. If you want to know just how big a mistake that would be, read John Pilger鈥檚 latest tour de force.
Iraq鈥檚 22 million people are already the victims of a 12-year 鈥渕edieval blockade鈥� imposed by the US and British governments, argues the campaigning journalist. The UN Children鈥檚 Fund says that these sanctions are the main reason why up to 6000 Iraqi children die every month.
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And the justification put about by US intelligence for an attack on Iraq is a myth: there is no evidence that it has any weapons of mass destruction. According to Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, the threat the country poses is 鈥渮ero鈥�.
Pilger also condemns the US bombing of Afghanistan, which one study said killed 3800 civilians between 7 October and 10 December last year. The overthrow of the Taliban regime has brought only minimal change, he says. The amount of time that corpses are hung out in public, for example, has reduced from four days to 15 minutes.
As well as essays on Iraq and Afghanistan, The New Rulers of the World includes writing based on Pilger鈥檚 TV documentaries about corporate power carving up Indonesia and the apartheid suffered by Aborigines in Australia. They are all empirical, angry and well-referenced; they illustrate his essential argument that the imperial power wielded by rich states and multinational corporations, led by the US, is far more destructive than any terrorist organisation.
The terrible irony is that the US bombing of Afghanistan, and the proposed bombing of Iraq, create and reinforce the very conditions which breed extremism. In the aftermath of 11 September, Pilger points out, the point was powerfully made by Robin Theurkauf, a lecturer in international law at Yale University.
鈥淭errorist impulses ferment in poverty, oppression and ignorance,鈥� she wrote. 鈥淭he elimination of these conditions and the active promotion of a universal respect for human rights must become a priority.鈥� Her husband, Tom, had been killed in the attack on the Twin Towers.