Bombings in Africa raise many questions
By Monica Moorehead
The number of dead continues to rise from a
powerful bomb that exploded near the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi,
Kenya, on Aug. 7. After six days, 217 bodies have been
recovered and some 5,000 people are reported to have been
wounded. Many more bodies have yet to be pulled out of the
rubble.
Another bombing the same day at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania, resulted in 11 deaths and 80 wounded. The
overwhelming majority of wounded and dead in both blasts are
Africans.
The U.S. big business media are much more interested in the
two dozen U.S. Embassy and military personnel who perished than
in the hundreds of Africans. As in so much coverage of Africa,
the people are viewed only as statistics instead of as human
beings.
When so many innocent people lose their lives or are maimed
or psychologically scarred for life, it is easy for the media
to avoid the hard political questions raised by focusing on a
mass of details about the human suffering involved.
But these extraordinary events, like any others that reveal
the enormous antagonisms in the contemporary world, should be
examined within the political context of the history of U.S.
imperialist intervention and its impact today.
Why does U.S. control
investigation?
The media are speculating on who was responsible for the
bombing. Were they from Iran? What about Iraq? Just as in the
Oklahoma City bombing and the explosion of TWA flight 800 , the
"experts" are leaping to connect these bombings with Arab
countries that have long been struggling to keep the U.S. from
getting control of their oil resources.
Cable News Network reported that about 30 people have been
detained so far in Tanzania for questioning on the bombings.
Referring to them as the "usual suspects," CNN said they were
Sudanese, Iraqis, Somalis and Turks.
An estimated 120 FBI agents are in the two African capitals
to investigate the bombings. Why is the U.S. running the
investigation when the great majority of people killed were
Africans? Is this not a violation of both Kenya's and Tanzania'
s sovereignty?
Would Washington allow another country to dominate an
investigation here? Many of the passengers killed on the TWA
flight were from France, but the U.S. didn't allow France to
participate in the investigation.
What the media are carefully avoiding is the main question:
Why are there so many forces around the world who might have a
reason for attacking U.S. embassies? Why is the U.S. so
hated?
The answer lies in the nature of U.S. imperialism, the
biggest terrorist in the world.
Why U.S. is hated around world
Ever since the U.S. emerged as the most powerful imperialist
country in the aftermath of World War II, oppressed peoples,
workers and revolutionary movements the world over have labeled
U.S. imperialism their greatest enemy, and rightfully so.
The U.S. has a bloody, sordid history of overthrowing
left-wing, progressive and anti-imperialist governments and
arming right-wing counter-revolutionary mercenaries. It's all
in the name of upholding the virtues of "freedom"-but that
freedom is really for the super-rich capitalist class to
super-exploit the workers in search of greater profits.
But it is not only progressive movements that view the U.S.
government as their enemy. The Oklahoma City bombing and many
other acts have shown that virulently right-wing organizations
and individuals are on the loose. Then there are anti-communist
religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan and right-wing Cubans
who have never forgiven the U.S. for what they view as
abandonment after many years of being faithful puppets.
In many parts of the world-like Afghanistan-U.S.
intervention for its own anti-communist, geopolitical motives
has brought chaos and immense suffering.
Creating crises
It is also part of the historical record that the U.S.
government will create a crisis when it needs one to go to
war.
The mysterious bombing of the battleship Maine in Havana
harbor was the pretext for the U.S. to declare war on Spain in
1898 in order to grab Spain's colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico and
the Philippines.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, later admitted to be phony,
allowed the Johnson administration to push a resolution through
Congress widening the Vietnam War.
Operation Mongoose, while not carried out, was a package of
possible pretexts dreamed up by the CIA for an invasion of
Cuba. It included the U.S. carrying out a bombing of its own
naval base in Guantanamo and/or an attack on Cuban
counter-revolutionaries in Miami that would be blamed on the
Castro government.
State terror apparatus
strengthened
In recent years, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Waco,
Texas, incident-where many people were burned alive after the
FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attacked
the Branch Davidian religious compound-became the excuse to
strengthen the repressive apparatus of the state.
The U.S. government and media will cull out every
opportunity to deepen national chauvinism and racism,
especially against the peoples of the Middle East. Right after
the bombings in Africa, the New York Times published a long
list of bombings beginning in the 1980's that targeted the
U.S., mainly in the Middle East. While the media demonizes
oppressed countries and their leaders, like in Iran and Iraq,
the U.S. government has called in the Israeli military to
investigate the bombing in Kenya.
There is an erroneous notion that there is a struggle
between "us" and "them." "Us" is supposedly U.S. citizens and
"them" is supposedly anyone originating from outside this
country. This phony struggle disguises the real objective of
the U.S. imperialist ruling class: to maintain its geopolitical
and economic domination of whole regions like the oil-rich
Middle East.
It's a tactic devised to keep people divided and fighting
among themselves, to keep the pressure off the real enemy: the
capitalist class. The one thing the capitalists fear more than
anything else-except for losing profits-is the potential for
unity of the worldwide, multinational working class.
One thing is for sure: bombings and other desperate acts
will not go away as long as U.S. imperialism rules the earth
for the benefit of a super-rich few.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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