From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap Edward Said Bloomsbury, 323 pp, £18.99 ISBN 0747573433 Wars of the 21st Century: new threats, new fears Ignacio Ramonet Ocean Books, 192pp, £11.99 Killing Hope: US military and CIA interventions since World War II William Blum Zed Books, 480pp, £12.99

In From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap, Edward Said is at his most brilliant: analytical, yet steadfastly compassionate, he unravels the years of hope and deceit that marked the "Oslo peace plan" in Palestine.

For the readers of Le Monde diplo-matique, the wisdom of Wars of the 21st Century by Ignacio Ramonet, the paper's iconoclastic editor, will come as no surprise.

Killing Hope is William Blum's tour de force: a worthy successor to Rogue State, it is an essential manual to the empire of the United States, which has now moved to the mainstream of public discourse in the west. Read, consider and mark the litany of "our" bloody interventions in the world: no information is more important than this.

Extract from Killing Hope

"The men who run the American Empire are not easily embarrassed . . . announcements beginning in the early 1990s trumpet[ed] Washington's desire, means and intention for world domination . . .

1996: 'We will engage terrestrial targets someday-ships, airplanes, land targets from space . . . We're going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to fight into space.

1997: 'With regard to space dominance, we have it, we like it, and we're going to keep it.'

2001: 'If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.'

[This] dashes the aspirations of those who had hoped that the world was moving toward a system of international law that would allow for the peaceful resolution of conflicts, through covenants and courts.

Are we now to believe that the American Empire is against terrorism? What does one call a man who blows up an airplane killing 73 civilians for political reasons; who fires cannons at ships docked in American ports; who places bombs in numerous commercial and diplomatic buildings in the US and abroad? . . . His name is Orlando Bosch, he's Cuban and he lives in Miami, unmolested by the authorities. The city of Miami once declared a day in his honour - Dr Orlando Bosch Day . . . in 1988, the Justice Department . . . was all set to deport him, but that was blocked by President Bush, the first.

The plane that Bosch bombed . . . was a Cuban plane . . . the Cubans have asked Washington to extradite him. To Cuba, he's like Osama Bin Laden is to the United States. But the US has refused. Imagine the reaction in the United States if Bin Laden showed up in Havana and the Cubans refused to turn him over. Imagine the reaction in the United States if Havana proclaimed Osama Bin Laden Day? . . . We must ask: Which country harbours more terrorists than the United States?

US foreign policy has no moral factor built into its DNA . . . [But] it's rather difficult for most Americans . . . to accept such a notion. They see American leaders on television smiling . . . hear them speak of God and love . . . and . . . baseball. They have names like George and Dick and Donald, not a single Mohammed or Abdullah. And they all speak English. People named Mohammed or Abdullah cut off people's hands as punishment for theft. Americans know that that's horrible. But people named George and Dick and Donald drop cluster bombs on cities and villages. But these men are . . . not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering . . . they just don't care. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire."

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website