Obama, The Prince Of Bait-And-Switch

By John Pilger

Thursday, July 24, 2008

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On 12 July, the London Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the "high drama" and "meticulously practised routine" of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, "saving a life took precedence over [their] security". Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that "47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday".

Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. There was no "enemy" nearby. I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball caused by another "precision" bomb. Inside were nine people - his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband. Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes: "Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while The Times man was discomforted. Most were guests at the wedding party. Wedding parties are a "coalition" speciality. At least four of them have been obliterated - at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the British and American military.

The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. "The most frequently used bombs," the Air Force Times reports, "are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided . . ." Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America's and Britain's puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA's payroll.

The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W Bush's former spokesman Scott McClellan has called "complicit enablers" - journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a "good war", the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.

In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power - because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, "bait-and-switch" Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.

Those who write of Obama that "when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush" demonstrate the same wilful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton - and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, "ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values' . . . there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain . . ."

Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.

Comment On This Commentary See All Comments (3)

RE: Interesting Piece

By Borda, Joey at Aug 10, 2008 20:25 PM

RE: Interesting Piece

I find Fred Pierce’s comment condescending and patronizing, starting with its very title. “Interesting,” as in so interesting as to be deservingly suppressed, sequestered. “Did Mr. Pilger really have to say all that discomfiting stuff, and out loud too?!”

I wonder what Fred found so interesting. I’ll bet it’s Pilger’s statement that by now “a million people lie dead.”

He expologizes [sic] for the necessity of such “atrocities” with “... someone always lies,” as though somehow that could un-bury the dead and bring them all back to life. Yep, that makes it all OK. We can all sleep easy now.

It’s the bombs Fred. The countless bombs. The bombing even of bombs. It makes no difference how they came to fall where they weren’t supposed to. They shouldn’t be falling at all. And whether or not any wedding party was a cover for a group of terrorists since when do we knowingly ever kill innocents along with the “guilty,” and go about recklessly smashing mosquitoes with hammers.

While you may admire Mr. Pilger’s courage, though somehow I doubt that, it would seem that you don’t much admire Mr. Pilger himself.

My first reaction to your comment was to run to the bathroom and throw up. For me, the detached callousness evident is poisonous. Instead, I manged to convert that nausea into this comment.

You finish trivializing, more or less, before dismissing Mr. Pilger altogether with “Please keep up the good work Mr. Pilger,” with “Another 9/11 has not occurred here in the US, though several attempts have been made but thwarted. The rest of the world would prefer the war taking place on US soil, but those of us living here are happy it is not.”

What American exceptionalist arrogance, nonsense and victor presenting as victim?! None of your assertions are provable, and worse are erroneous. The 9/11 that did occur was not perpetrated by the people we have been bombing into oblivion, a small technicality for you no doubt. What’s a little truth to do with a million dead? After all, “The rest of the world would prefer the war taking place on US soil.”

What visited us on 9/11 doesn’t even begin to compare with the destruction that we have visited on so much of the rest of the world over the last 100 years. How dare you?!

I take enough exception to virtually all that you’ve written that I find myself about to make an American exceptionalist kind of exception to my standing policy of never letting things get personal. To not make that exception for me would be idly standing by, which at the peril of my own life, I will never do while you spout off your nonsense.

And that is, my friend, in saying, you are a certifiable nut case! Now THIS was a truly interesting commentary, n\'est-ce pas?

/s/ Joey

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Interesting Piece

By Pierce, Fred at Jul 24, 2008 06:57 AM

An enlightening piece. Those of us in the US closely following reports from "the field of battle" in some form or fashion have a first rule when reading these reports: What is the political orientation of the writer? After having read hundreds of first hand reports from the victims of the wedding party bombings, things aren\'t always too clear regarding the cause of the atrocity. On the one hand you always have the possibility of an incompetent decision to bomb in the first place, then that of the person responsible of pulling the lever to drop, etc, which can lead to innocent civilians being obliterated. But then we read where the "wedding party" was just a cover for a group of terrorists to be together...and regardless of the information coming out of the event, someone always lies. Please don\'t misunderstand...I admire Mr. Pilger\'s courage to be there in the first place and applaud those who go to report the facts. Killing is a bloody business and sometimes covering such business can be very uncomfortable...I wonder what a reporter succombing to the elements and then being rescued by troops thinks when those troops are killed in their effort? Were the troops brave or stupid? I mean, really...it seems to me that a reporter covering any battlefield should first and foremost accept their fate should they have initially failed to accurately gauge their own physical and mental toughness required to survive in such a hostile environment and strive to avoid becoming an added burden to the troops.

Obama is simply reading what his analysts and managers are writing...and they are writing/scripting a message that will get him elected. He knows not what he is doing. Just as Mr. Pilger has actual experience in reporting from the "field of battle" and can write first hand about what it is he has witnessed...Obama can not offer experience in foreign affairs because, other than the photo opportunities he is now taking, he has no experience and he appears to be unable, as Mr. Pilger points out, to determine which side of the issues he will take a permanent stand. And, unfortunately for us in the US, Mr. McCain is not much better.

With regards to the relentless bombings in Afghanistan: it appears the strategy all along was to draw Muslim extremist to Afghanistan and Iraq from all over the world to an area that could be defined as a "killing field". While I personally know first hand that troops there make an effort to avoid civilians fatalities and often put themselves at risk trying to protect the innocents, I can\'t say the same for the Iraqi troups. If the aforementioned strategy is accurate, then it has worked and is working. Another 9/11 has not occurred here in the US, though several attempts have been made but thwarted. The rest of the world would prefer the war taking place on US soil, but those of us living here are happy it is not.

Please keep up the good work Mr. Pilger...those of us who devour news from that part of the world count on an abundance of coverage and opinions to help form our own.

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