State of the Eulogy

By David Simmons

“America is back,” Barack Obama proclaimed in his State of the Union address on January 24. But it’s only back doing what it does best, starting wars and rumours of wars.

The US president spoke of “the enduring power of our moral example”. Earlier in January, three men who had experienced that moral example first-hand stood together in a joint nose-thumbing at the superpower, the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, bastion of capitalism and democracy. The occasion was the swearing-in of Daniel Ortega to a third term as president of Nicaragua, a tiny country that – led by Ortega’s Sandinistas – was one of the first in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban revolution to break the shackles of US-client dictatorship and enforced poverty, and paid dearly for its affront with the mining of its harbours and debilitating attacks on its people, its infrastructure and even its schools by the Contra terrorists trained and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Back then, Washington was mostly worried about the spread of Sandinista-style land reform throughout Latin America, cutting into the profits of US corporations and, worse, driving up the price of bananas and incurring the wrath of the American housewife. Nowadays, it’s all about oil, which is where the other two men accompanying Ortega in January come in – Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ten years ago Chavez, the socialist president of one of the United States’ major oil suppliers, was overthrown in a coup d’état after he tried to bolster government control of the state oil company, PDVSA. Washington immediately applauded the coup and threw its support behind the new pro-US government. Before the George W Bush administration could get the corks out of the celebratory champagne bottles, the new pro-US government had collapsed, and Chavez went on to institute major social reforms and mock Bush in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly. “The devil came here yesterday,” he said. “And it smells of sulphur still today.”

But the US campaign against the nation of the third man on the stage, Ahmadinejad, has been far more ferocious and drawn-out than those against Nicaragua and Venezuela. As with Nicaragua, Cuba and a few others, Iran brought American wrath upon itself by overthrowing a US-backed (and installed to some extent, in partnership with Britain) dictator, the Shah. Foolishly, the new theocracy squandered the support it may otherwise have enjoyed from other nations weary of US hegemony by taking over America’s embassy in Tehran and holding its occupants hostage for more than a year. In retaliation, Washington backed and partly funded one of the bloodiest conflicts the Middle East has ever seen, the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.

What has happened since in that unhappy arena is well known and need not be dwelt on here; Iran’s mortal enemy Saddam Hussein was helpfully overthrown by the Americans, leaving an unstable but pro-Tehran Shiite regime in charge. As America’s most loyal allies in the Middle East, the Sunni dictatorships in Arabia, wallowed in corruption and Israel continued to soak up billions of dollars in military aid to brutalize the Palestinians, Iran’s influence and terrorist activity intensified.

Today, of course, we have the looming spectre of yet another war in the region justified by the objection of the world’s most militarized and most heavily nuclear-armed nation to Iran’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction”. Washington’s lapdogs in Brussels, in a move bound to worsen their already parlous economic situation, have banned European Union members from buying Iranian oil. The US has also led an attack on the Iranian central bank, pushing the clerics who run the regime even harder against the wall.

“Through the power of our diplomacy,” Obama declared, “a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one.” Well, except for Russia. And China and its ASEAN client states. And probably India, and possibly Japan and South Korea, the latter two of which depend on Iranian oil and are more concerned about the genuine nuclear threat in North Korea than the imagined one in far-off Iran. And then there’s Turkey, which stands ready to serve as a middleman for Iranian oil flowing into defiant (or simply desperate, like Greece) European states. And such deals, because of the sabotage against the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran, will likely be transacted in gold, yen, maybe yuan – anything but the US dollar and the increasingly irrelevant euro.

The rise of China’s global control is the most important and far-reaching event of our time, but it is not the only consequence of failed US economic, foreign and military policy. Despite the dirty wars of the Reagan era, Ortega, Chavez and people very much like them – not necessarily philosophic soul-mates, but united against servitude to Washington and Wall Street – have prevailed in Central and South America. In East Asia, US-backed strongmen like Suharto, Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-Shek are gone, their autocratic regimes replaced by home-grown political systems that, with widely varying sincerity and success, attempt to put their people’s needs first. In North Africa, pro-US tyrants have been replaced by Islamists related in spirit if not (yet) in deed to the fanatic criminals of September 2001.

With all this in mind, Obama’s address, despite his characteristic eloquence, sounded like a eulogy, singing the praises of a corpse. I take no comfort in this. I am a Canadian, defined as an American with long johns, health care and the letter zed. I’ve lived high on the US-led system of fattening the West at the expense of the rest of the world, and I have enjoyed the genuine freedoms that democracy brings, however corrupt it becomes. So I don’t look forward to a world led by the Chinese Communist Party.

The United States of America and we its allies had the power to make things otherwise. We now prepare to reap the whirlwind of our failure to do so.