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Reason Wafawarova on Monday
IT is time international affairs are looked at from a perspective that is beyond the obsession often created by the glorious crusade of Pentecostal democracy, it powered by the hysterical fires of absolute and limitless liberties and freedoms that are often packaged in the West as “human rights”, before being fervently disseminated by donor-powered political and civic fanatics and activists.

We hear there is a human rights crisis in Venezuela now, and the world is now divided in two halves, with the West and some South American countries backing a self-imposed “president” Juan Guaido on the one hand; and countries like China, Russia, South Africa, Zambia, Cuba and others backing the incumbent Nicolas Maduro.

We know the real geo-political game at play is oil, and we know for a fact that Donald Trump does not care about anyone’s human rights, not even the rights of those around him.

Celebratory or flag-waving democracy is what has entranced worshipful journalists and intellectuals into cataleptically reducing themselves to mere street activists, much to the disrepute of the concept of ethics and professionalism.

When former US president Barack Obama took over the White House on January 20, 2009, there were sticking issues in international relations and many looked up to this “apostle of change” with the optimism to see a world order far different from the one that had been created by the political lunacy of George W. Bush.

The perennial Israeli-Palestinian conflict was crying for change as Bush had just presided over his farewell massacres of the Palestinian people, well executed by Ehud Olmert, who was equally on an exit mission from the premiership of the murderous Israeli state.

Another perennial hotspot, North Korea, was waiting to see how Obama was going to relate to the long-suffering people of Korea.

It appears Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, has had better luck dealing with North Korea, at least for now.

George W. Bush’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan were also waiting for a new turn with the coming of the Obama era, as was the stand-off between Iran and Washington.

Venezuela and Bolivia were just asserting their resolve in showing Washington that Hugo Frias Chavez and Evo Morales brook no nonsense with the empire’s hegemonic tendencies — this by the simultaneous expulsion of US ambassadors to the two countries just as Bush was winding up his ruinous occupancy of the White House.

In Central America today, only Bolivia openly stands with Venezuela as a combined onslaught to oust Maduro’s socialist government keeps burning from Washington.

When Israel was wreaking havoc in Gaza in December 2008, Obama was busy working on a parallel economic rescue package for the troubled United States economy, and he was giving interviews on how his administration was going to tackle the economic recession that was brought about largely by George W. Bush’s reckless military expenditures, among other factors.

When asked to comment on the murderous Israeli campaign that Olmert’s Defence Minister described as “a time to fight”, Obama said “there is only one United States president at a time” and he refused to comment any further.

There was no way Obama was going to violate the script and go against the dictates of the US sabre-rattling foreign policy, especially in Palestine.

When he finally took office he praised the Saudi peace plan and urged all Arab states to note the “constructive engagement” proposal in the resolution, and to normalise relations with Israel.

That was a falsified version of the Saudi peace plan, which in essence called for the normalisation of relations with Israel on condition that all parties concerned honoured the long-standing two-state settlement.

This called for an obligation on the United States which for more than 40 years has been standing alone with Israel against the whole world in blocking this internationally agreed settlement plan.

Obama endorsed the Condoleezza Rice-Tzipi Livni agreement to close the Egyptian-Gaza border, which was quite an act of imperial arrogance.

It was not their border, and in fact, Egypt strongly objected to that.

But Obama continued.

He said the US had to make sure that no arms were smuggled through the tunnels into the Gaza Strip.

Obama did not say anything about the vast dispatch by the US of far more lethal arms to Israel.

Although Obama did say the West Bank border needed to be opened, he did maintain the Bush position of refusing to recognise or talk to the Palestinian elected government, Hamas, precisely perpetuating the punishment of Palestinians for voting the way the United States did not want them to.

Democracy has a script, and it really has to be obeyed, otherwise we will see regime change offensives like we are seeing in Venezuela today. Someone in Venezuela is violating the diktats of the democracy script, pursuing independent nationalism as introduced by Hugo Chavez.

The White House under Obama, just like under George W. Bush, did not comment much on the killings of people through US cross-border attacks from Afghanistan into Pakistan.

These were killings perpetrated by United States soldiers under the Bush doctrine that said the US can bomb Pakistan freely, and Obama actually endorsed this doctrine by adding more troops to the Bush cause.

The US did not report in any of its media that the exacerbating factor for the Afghan-Pakistani cross-border killings was the US bombing of a Madrassa school in Pakistan’s Bajaur Province, a bombing that killed 95 civilians.

Such events are an embarrassment to the script, just like we saw Donald Trump refusing to condemn Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant after he massacred 50 worshippers in New Zealand. Like democracy, terrorism has a script that does not allow a Caucasian to be a terrorist, especially a Western one. Trump believes terrorists are Muslims by definition.

The democracy script is driven by this overriding principle that says only others can commit sins and crimes, while the US and her Western allies are only culpable for genuine errors and oversights.

Obama’s administration did not only adopt the Bush doctrine of installing a puppet leader in Afghanistan, but also went further to propose the addition of one more puppet to the set-up.

Washington’s man in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, had become less than impressive to the US since he had asked that infamous “withdrawal timetable” message to Obama.

Not only did Karzai tell Obama that he no longer wanted bombings in his country, but he also demanded a timetable for the withdrawal of US troops. To the rest of the world the official US position was that the bombing of Afghanistan was a “democratisation” process.

Obama suggested the amendment of the Afghan constitution so that the US could install “a CEO” by way of a prime minister; so the troublesome Karzai could be side-stepped in Washington’s bid to escalate the mass killing war started by Bush in the name of coming after Osama bin Laden, way back in 2001. Laden’s head later became Obama’s end of Term One trophy.

Obama appointed an envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell. He was a man credited with super negotiating skills as he helped end the Britain-North Ireland conflict by making Britain stop its resort to violence. He pushed Britain to address the grievances and concerns that had caused the conflict in the first place.

There was no way Mitchell was going to be allowed to use the same skills in making Israel stop its preference for primitive violence.

No one can ever successfully convince Israel to address the grievances and concerns of the Palestinian people.

The democracy script does not allow for such an obligation.

The grievance and concern of the Palestinian people is not grantable because it comes back to the long-standing two-state solution which both the US and Israel will not even hear about.

In the West the script has for a long time been sustained by sheer propaganda, deception, outright lies and instilling fear into ordinary people.

The democracy script created the infamous legacy of Hitler, the lunatic tyrant, while absolutely absolving Roosevelt and Churchill of any wrongdoing during World War II.

This was despite the fact that the two collectively killed millions of civilians through indiscriminate aerial bombings of European cities.

The democracy script created the murderous monster in Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that the man was nurtured, groomed and armed by Washington before he mistook the strength of his master for his own. Of course Hussein was a nasty piece of work, especially to those who differed with his views.

The democracy script gave us this all-elusive Osama bin Laden, who until he was captured and killed, was the monster that wanted to single-handedly obliterate America, if not the whole of the Western world.

We were never told that Osama bin Laden had been groomed, trained and nurtured by the CIA against the Russians in the seventies.

When Ronald Reagan wrecked the US economy, creating stagnant and declining salaries, he naturally became unpopular.

He turned to the script for salvation and he did a wonderful job instilling heart-stalling fear in ordinary Americans.

By November 1981, Libyan hitmen were roaming the streets of Washington to assassinate the US president who was supposedly courageously facing “the scoundrel” Muammar Gaddafi.

The Reagan administration knew from the onset that Libya was no match for the US military capacity, but they continued to set up confrontations in which many Libyans would be killed, hoping for retaliation from Libya so that the response could be exploited to instil fear in Americans.

Americans were told that Gaddafi was marching past helpless Western Allied Forces across 1 000 kilometres of desert on his unilateral march to invade Sudan.

The whole world was told that Gaddafi was so powerful and sophisticated that he had concocted a plot to overthrow the Sudanese government in such a subtle way that the Sudanese and Egyptian intelligence had no idea of what was going on.

Ironically, this plot was common knowledge among the few US reporters who had taken the trouble to investigate.

Thirty  years later, Barack Obama joined hands with Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron to invade Libya and murder Gaddafi on the pretext they were protecting Libyan civilians from the brutality of tyrant Gaddafi. Up to today Libya has never known peace, and will probably be super chaotic for decades.

As Americans and the rest of the world were freezing with awe at the invincibility of Gaddafi, Reagan revealed an even more dangerous threat.

He said Grenada had a deadly airbase that the Russians could use to bomb the US out into eternal oblivion.

Grenada offered a peaceful settlement of this matter on US terms but Washington descended on the tiny country with 7 000 elite troopers, whose awesome skills were too good for the resistance of a few dozen lightly armed, middle-aged Cuban construction workers, and Reagan proudly boasted that he had acted in the nick of time and saved Americans from this enormous threat to their existence.

Reagan was not done yet.

Just after Grenada, Nicaraguans were looming on the horizon, just “two days’ drive from Texas”. Gaddafi was once again conjured up as being the supplier of the weapons meant to “expel America from the world”.

Libya was then pushed into irritating provocations, and subsequently bombed an airline jet on in 1986, killing dozens; this time on no credible allegations.

The European tourist industry slumped, as Americans were too frightened to travel to European cities because they feared to be attacked by crazed Arabs or other demons.

We Zimbabweans know too well how tourism can be paralysed by a mere flagging of a country as an unsafe destination, and we know how much we have suffered under ZDERA and other Western-imposed sanctions over the last 20 years.

Donald Trump continues to sign the sanctions law against our country every year, and our opposition dearly hope to benefit from the ruin of our country.

The fact that Emmerson Mnangagwa has replaced Robert Mugabe has not changed the thinking in Washington. Mnangagwa does not fit well in the democracy script. He does no exactly make the grade as an impressive African puppet president. We are lucky the West has not done a Pinochet on Robert Mugabe, and we hope that will not happen.

We hear President Mnangagwa needs to be good enough to be praised by his power- hungry political opponents, otherwise the White House will continue renewing the sanctions law.

Chavez once reminded Obama that the United States had been the biggest exporter of terrorism in 200 years; but that version of events belongs to another script, the script of populist despots who fail to appreciate the value of America’s exceptionalism.

The US only fights just wars, and any excesses by the empire are just a matter of inadvertent errors or genuine oversights.

The challenge for Zimbabwe is the way forward.

The script is not going to change on the part of the Western alliance.

Zimbabwe cannot avoid punishment because nationalistic policies like the Land Reform Programme have been absolutely unforgivable under the script.

We cannot possibly try to appease the authors of the democracy script by dispossessing our resettled black of the land on which they were resettled in 2000.

It is extremely dangerous for any political leader to even imagine that they can successfully benefit investors by kicking our own people from their land of heritage.

After the fall of the Taliban, Hamid Karzai religiously obeyed Bush’s benchmarks, but Afghanistan did not develop better because of that. Poverty continued unabated despite having a Washington pleaser for a president.

Obeying Western benchmarks is not going to guarantee Zimbabwe prosperity and happiness. That myth hails from the world of tomfoolery.

There is simply no evidence to support the possibility of a successful donor-funded economy.

Zimbabweans we are one and together we will overcome.

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in SYDNEY, Australia