Soical Problem

6 newstatesman q 17 May 2004

ns leader

www.newstatesman.com/leader

Flaws in the American way of life

hat the New Statesman and several of its commentators such as John Pilger and Ziauddin Sardar have said for the past two years is now being accepted across the political spectrum. The Independent’s ex-editor Andreas Whittam Smith compares George W Bush and Tony Blair to Stalin – a comparison at which even the most dedicated anti-Americans would have baulked until now. In the London Evening Standard, the political commentator Peter Oborne calls the US “a rogue state”. The editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, acknowledges that, to much of the world, the US is “an international outlaw”. The proposition that America had the slightest interest in the welfare of the Iraqi people, and that a humanitarian mission could piggyback on its invasion, now looks wholly absurd. Attacked by Arabs on 9/11, it wanted to take the battle to Arab territory (that they were different Arabs was neither here nor there); alarmed by China’s growing demand for oil, it wanted to strengthen its position in the oil-rich Middle East; dedicated to aggressive capitalism, it wanted to impose its ideology on the only region still largely resisting it. As always, US leaders try to present America’s crimes as an aberration. What happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, we are told, does not represent “American values”. Yet as Stephen Grey shows in our cover story, the only exceptional thing is that Americans did the torturing themselves. More often, over the past two years, the US has used secret

W

Internal conduct is a good guide to how a country behaves abroad. It may treat foreigners worse than its own people, but it won’t treat them better

planes to move prisoners to allied regimes that have more skill and experience in torture. Again, the deaths of hundreds in Fallujah must be another aberration – or perhaps they didn’t die at all or perhaps they were all armed...