TODAY’S world, as was yesterday’s, is a threatening place. Death, injury, hunger and destruction are being inflicted on huge numbers of people in the Middle East.
We are witnessing a still more inhuman and gruesome version of the Nakba dispossession and expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948.
If we focus our minds painfully on the mass killing that is currently taking place in Gaza and added to on the West Bank, our understanding may be helped by resorting to the formidable writings of Robert Fisk for some historical background.
Fisk, whose Middle East reportage over many years was remarkable, and who made graphic sense of much of the prolonged nightmare run-up to today’s horrors, died in late 2020.
John Pilger, sadly also no longer now with us, and equally missed, edited a major collection of articles just 20 years ago (updated a year later) into the book Tell Me No Lies. One piece was by David Armstrong, Washington bureau head of the National Security News Service. Armstrong’s article had first appeared a couple of years earlier in Harper’s magazine under the title “Drafting a plan for global dominance.”
Armstrong examined the plans of the US Establishment as developed over the previous decade. Early in 1992, he wrote, general Colin Powell, then chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, had told the House armed services committee that the US required “sufficient power” to “deter any challenger from ever dreaming of challenging us on the world stage.”
Playing the character of the US in the role of street hoodlum, Powell emphasised: “I want to be the bully on the block.” This ambition has been fulfilled, but without cause to congratulate the bully.
Such an objective had been made easier to proclaim in consequence of the break-up and disintegration into disaster-capitalism of the Soviet Union, which at its core had been socialist, however over-centralised its direction, however over-privileged its ruling bureaucracy, however depoliticised its population, and despite its misguided military intervention in Afghanistan from 1979.
In this more comfortable international context, boldness became the dear friend of US aggression in the destructive adventures that were to put their stamp on the decades that followed.
