The New Rulers of the World by John Pilger

Author:John Pilger
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books

These challenges are to be met by ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’, allowing ‘the medium of space, the fourth medium of warfare – along with land, sea and air – to close the ever-widening gap between diminishing resources and increasing military commitments.’46

The planners of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ realise that a great deal still has to be done on earth before the torch is passed to General Howell M Estes III, the Space Commander in Chief. Following the end of the cold war and the justification for American military dominance, the United States staged three ‘demonstration wars’. The first came at the end of the valedictory year of 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. The target was Panama, a small Central American country known for its canal and poverty.

The United States invaded Panama with helicopter gunships and special forces, killing thousands of people in the poorest barrio of Panama City. The American reporter Martha Gellhorn, who went to investigate a year later, estimated ‘at least 8,000 dead’.47 These deaths, which received almost no media attention, were the price paid for the arrest of General Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader whose crime was running drugs (the United States was then testing its ‘war on drugs’ as a replacement for the cold war).

In circumstances less tragic, this would have been hilarious. Noriega was an old pal of George Bush Senior, who knew him when he was director of the CIA and Noriega was an Agency ‘asset’. Drugs have long been a CIA currency. Like other client dictators, Noriega became uppity and stopped taking orders. His country was invaded and thousands were killed, so that he could be kidnapped. He is now serving life in a Florida prison. This terrible pantomime was no more than an excuse. The US was anxious to reimpose its sovereignty over the Panama Canal through a stooge more reliable than Noriega. The invasion was, perhaps above all, a demonstration of American resolve to others contemplating going their own way in the post-cold war years. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, ‘Sometimes the US, in its wisdom, has to demonstrate its military prowess at crucial junctions of its history.’

The second demonstration war was the response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The aim was to show US dominance of the oilfields of the Middle East (see above, ‘Paying the Price’). It was followed, at the end of 1992, by the invasion of Somalia. Code-named ‘Operation Restore Hope’, this road-tested a strategy called ‘humanitarian intervention’, which was designed to replace the ‘war on drugs’. When US Marines came ashore in Somalia ‘to feed the starving’, Time published a two-page colour photograph showing Somali children reaching out to a US Marine for ‘the gift of hope’.48 This was fake; the famine was by then well over.

A convenient Noriega-type demon appeared, in the person of General Mohammed Farah Aidid. A ‘warlord’ who had previously agreed to negotiate with the UN, Aidid became the principal bad guy whom the Marines set out to capture ‘dead or alive’.

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