http://www.mediareviewnet.com Media Review Editorial - US policies build huge reservoir of resentment, bitterness and hatred by Firoz Osman - August 18, 2003 Pretoria, South Africa: It is disturbing how skewed Condoleezza Rice, the American National Security Adviser, views the events after the United States ' illegal invasion of Iraq , and the Middle East situation as a whole. Citing Germany as an example in her attempt to paint all US actions post-World War II as altruistic, is untenable and disingenuous. Portraying the United States as the world's savior, Rice must be aware that almost the entire world and the Arab masses in particular, despise the United States ' utter disregard for international norms. Has she paused to consider that the United States itself has carried out and supported some of the worst acts of terrorism? Ever since the US army massacred 300 Lakotas in 1890, American forces have intervened elsewhere around the globe more than a hundred times. Indeed since independence from Britain , the US has displayed itsimperialistic ambitions by sending troops abroad or militarily struck other countries' territory over 200 times. Since 1945 the United States has intervened in more than 20 countries throughout the world. Furthermore, since World War II, the US dropped bombs on 23 sovereign countries. Post World War 2, the US assisted in over 20 different coups throughout the world, and it is documented that the CIA has been responsible for half a dozen assassinations of political heads of states. The policies of the US government in the Middle East in the last 50-odd years, and especially in the last decade, has created so much frustration and desperation among the Arab masses that it has set the stage for what Rice terms as "a fertile ground for ideologies of hatred". Palestine , more than any other conflict, epitomizes this sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Because of the United States ' intimate relationship with Israel , Palestinians and Arabs are convinced they cannot expect even a modicum of justice. The brutal suppression of the second intifada in the last few months which witnessed Zionist Israel unleash the full fury of state terror upon a humiliated and subjugated people was perhaps 'the last straw that broke the camels back'. The road map can only lead to a blind alley. In the eyes of the victims of Israeli aggression and occupation, the Zionist oppressor could not have embarked upon such merciless suppression of the Palestinians without the support and solidarity of the US . The F-16 attack aircrafts, Tomahawk missiles, Apache helicopters, ( ironically named after the indigenous Indians decimated by the Americans), the 1000 kilometer Apartheid wall costing $2,5 million dollars a kilometer and the billions of American dollars to set up illegal Jewish-only Settlements on occupied Palestinian land is certainly no "recipe for regional stability". Add to this, the unending suffering of the Iraqi people who endured the cruel sanctions imposed by the United Nations at the behest of the US and Britain . One-and-a-half million innocent people were killed twelve years after the end of the first Gulf war. What has the "liberation of Iraq " brought them, besides ten thousand dead and scores continuing to die everyday because of an acute shortage of essential medicines and water, a decaying infrastructure, depleted uranium and a disintegrating health care system. This has created a huge reservoir of resentment, of bitterness, of hatred towards the US in the Middle East . As to Rice's stated objective to achieve "greater security for the people of America and throughout the world", it may be illuminating to recollect that US hegemony began on 6 August 1945 with the bombing of Hiroshima which obliterated thousands of innocent people from the face of the earth. It is estimated that 3 million people died in Vietnam and Indochina so that the US could maintain its hegemonic power. And in Panama , El Salvador , Nicaragua , Chile , indeed the whole of Latin America , from the fifties to the early eighties, tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children had perished as a result of a superpower's desire to perpetuate its control and dominance through covert operations, espionage activities, assassination squads, economic strangulation and organized political subversion. This rapacious imperial power has now secured huge reserves of oil and gas, the lifeblood of its military industrial complex to further dominate, rape and plunder the rest of the world. In Apartheid South Africa too, lest we forget, the US and British governments and their business and military elite, covertly and overtly supported the white racist regime. Without their help, this inhuman social system that denied and denigrated blacks would not have been sustained for decades. The myth that Rice so beguilingly projects of the US as a country determined to expand freedom and peace lies shattered in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. Perhaps in the post-911 era, Condoleezza Rice and her Neo-Conservative clique at the White House ought to reflect on the scripture which tells us "What you sow, you shall reap." In the context of the terrible tragedy that has befallen the US, nothing is perhaps more apt than that wise Confucian saying, "Do not do to others what you do not want othersto do to you." America's impulse to pulverize impoverished nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq on mendacious claims such as harboring an alleged "terrorist", links with Al-Qaeda or possessing weapons of mass destruction, all of whichhas been adequately exposed as fabrications. The world needs a new world order in which no single country dominates and dictates to others, where countries are guided by the principles of justice, rather than the imperative of power. ---------------------------------------- * Dr. Firoz Osman is the secretary of the Media Review Network, [http://www.mediareviewnet.com ] an advocacy group based in Pretoria , South Africa . He can be contacted on 082 337 6976 or by e-mail at: info@mediareviewnet.com