U.S. Meeting Envisions Rebuilding Afghanistan read the headline in the Washington Post of November 21. After a one-day meeting in Washington of leaders from two dozen nations and international organizations, US and Japanese officials said they had developed an action program for the long-term rebuilding of the war-ravaged country.

This well may have thrown another log on the feel-good-about-America fire that has been warming the frazzled citizenry since September 11. But like much of that fuel, there was likely a lot more propaganda here than substance.

Its a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didnt kill. And afterward doing nothing to repair the damage.

Though it was promised in writing that the US would pursue its traditional policy of postwar reconstruction , no compensation was given to Vietnam after a decade of devastation. During the same war, Laos and Cambodia were equally wasted by US bombing. They, too, qualified to become beneficiaries of Washingtons traditional policy of zero reconstruction.

Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington-controlled Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, for just compensation for the damage caused by Operation Just Cause (this being the not-tongue-in-cheek name given to the American invasion and bombing). They got nothing, as did the people of Grenada.

It was Iraqs turn next, in 1991: 40 days and nights of relentless bombing; destruction of power, water and sanitation systems and everything else that goes into the making of a modern society. Everyone knows how much the United States has done to help rebuild Iraq.

In 1999 we had the case of Yugoslavia: 78 days of round-the-clock bombing, transforming an advanced industrial state into virtually a third world country; the reconstruction needs were awesome. Two years later, June 2001, after the Serbs had obediently followed Washingtons wishes to oust Slobodan Milosevic and turn him over to the international court in the Hague, a donors conference was convened by the European Commission and the World Bank, supposedly concerned with Yugoslavias reconstruction. It turned out to be a conference concerned with Yugoslavias debts more than anything else.

Serbian premier Zoran Djindjic, regarded as highly pro-Western, said, in a July interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, that he felt betrayed by the West, declaring:

It would have been better if the donors conference had not taken place and instead we had been given 50 million DM in cash...In August we should be getting the first instalment, 300 million Euro. Suddenly we are being told that 225 million Euro will be withheld for the repayment of old debts which in part were accumulated during Titos time. Two-thirds of that sum are fines and interest, accrued because Milosevic refused for ten years to pay back these credits. We shall get the remaining 75 million Euro in November at the earliest. Such are the principles in the West, we are being told. This means a seriously ill person is to be given medicine after he is dead. Our critical months will be July, August and September. 14

By the end of 2001 it was 2% years since Yugoslavian bridges had fallen into the Danube, the countrys factories and homes destroyed, its transportation torn apart. Yet Yugoslavia has still not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United States.

Whoever winds up ruling Afghanistan will find it conspicuously difficult to block the US military from building what it wants to build there for its own purposes. As for the United States doing some building for the Afghan people, they may have a long wait. In marked contrast to the Washington Post headline of November 21 noted above was the report in the same newspaper five weeks later: The Bush administration has made clear that because it has paid for most of the military campaign that made the new government possible, it expects other countries, especially Japan and European nations, to lead the way in rebuilding the country. 15

As if the American bombing campaign had been carried out at the request of, or for the benefit of, Japan and Europe, and not for Washingtons own interests!

Following their bombing of Iraq, the United States wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf region.

Following their bombing of Yugoslavia, the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.

Following their bombing of Afghanistan, the United States appears on course to wind up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and perhaps elsewhere in the area.

The bombing, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were conducted-apart from the primitive lashing out in blind revenge against...somebody-primarily for the purpose of ensuring the instal-lation of a new government that would be sufficiently amenable to Washingtons international objectives, including the siting of bases and electronic communications intercept stations and the running of oil and gas pipelines through the country from the Caspian Sea region.

The welfare of the people of Afghanistan, by contrast, can have counted for little, considering that the elements put in power by US military might are largely those whose

earlier rule before the Taliban was so depraved that many Afghans welcomed the accession of the Taliban to power; their newest atrocities, carried out under cover of American firepower, show they havent lost their touch. The prime minister of the interim government, Hamid Karzai, though himself not seeming too villainous, may have a credibility problem, given his long close contact with the US State Department, National Security

Council, Congress, and other pillars of the American foreign policy establishment. 16 Yet the connection may work only one way, for when leaders of the interim government asked the United States to halt its bombing in December because of the frequent deaths of innocent people, Washington refused, saying it had its own timeline. This does not bode well for the future Afghan government and society; neither does Karzais appointment of General Rashid Dostum as deputy defense minister, a man amongst whose charms is the habit of punishing his soldiers by tying them to tank tracks and then driving the tanks around his barracks square to turn them into mincemeat.17

Terrorist scares

In the Introduction which follows, written in 1999, the point is made that the specter of dangerous and threatening enemies of one kind or another has been highly exaggerated for decades in order to intimidate the American public into accepting the national security state, that was all the while being molded, and to persuade the citizenry to surrender their power to the authorities who can save them from what they have been manipulated into fearing. The national security state, with its accompanying immense budgets, multiple benefits for its managers, and justification for increased police powers to keep the doubters in line is a state of affairs much desired by the elites.

In light of what happened on September 11, 2001 it may appear to some that the threat was not in fact exaggerated, but rather very real. But the Introduction to this book does not imply that there will never be a major attack on the United States for which a certain level of military and other preparedness is necessary. Given the constant belligerence and destructiveness of US foreign policy, retaliation has to be expected, at one time or another, somewhere.

For close on fifty years the imminent threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe or nuclear attack upon the United States was drummed into the American consciousness. Nothing of the sort ever happened, of course. Nothing of the sort was ever seriously contemplated by the Soviets, for obvious reasons of self-preservation. Then, with the demise of the Soviet Union, multiple new enemy countries were found, along with the drug threat and the terrorist threat. The very occasional terrorist attacks on the United States, almost always abroad and in response to Washingtons policies, were used to fan fears and expand budgets. The attack of September does not justify more than fifty years of lies. Indeed, what has taken place in the United States since the attack lends great credence to the proposition that the purpose of all the fear-mongering was what its critics always charged-in fact, understated.