As usual, Pilger's piece is brilliant if biased critical anlaysis is your cup of tea.

Chris Lewis.It all depends upon whose bias has your ear.The truth is slowly emerging and there are big changes germinating in the USA.They are broke and the temptation will be to pursue more wars in an attempt to steal what they cannot create.They have their eyes on the vast reserves of oil and gas in central Asia above Afghanistan.

The banks have doubled the money supply in 12mths and when this filters down to the consumer,the US $ will collapse.John Pilger is right,it could go either way in the US.Congress may get the courage to subdue the military industrial complex financed by the banks,or there could be anarchy.

Obama has the power under the Patriot Act to suspend the constitution and declare martial law.

We must all become more aware,since the madmen will drive us all into really serious wars to shore up their bottom lines.Watch Zimbigniew Brezezinski,he was Bush's foreign policy maker and now Obama's.He openly brags about sucking the Russians into Afghanistan for their Vietnam.He hates them with a passion and sees himself as the grand chess master of geo-politics.

Obama has surrounded himself with the same old Bush baggage for more of the same.

Great piece by Pilger

There are many Americans who speak out about global intervention by their government. They usually receive a caning in the media just as Rosie O'Donnel did after the Iraq comments.

Americans seem more than many to be easy fodder for a manipulative media. The concept of patriotism has been so misconstrued to suit the vested interests of large corporations. The invasion of Iraq so irreconceivably fraught with contradiction and hypocrisy that people still spout the "bringing democracy" line no matter the evidence.

The media does have the power to shape or influence society - throw in fear to the equation and the formula is set. How many times do you see ordinary people being whipped into a frenzy by an eloquent speaker without reading between the lines. I don't know whether it is because people no longer have the time to look between the lines or whether it is massive peer pressure - and patriotism is a big drawcard in the US.

Look at the drivel the Palins, Bushes and Cheneys dished up that was lapped up at the time.

The biggest spin trick ever pulled was to cloak the interests of ruling powers in the cloak of democracy.

Pilger recites the litany of the past misdeeds of the United States and by association blames Obama for them. Obama is tackling problems that previous presidents have ignored and has stopped some bad practices of past presidents. He is concerned with global warming, energy independence, the health care system, nuclear proliferation and the failures in the US education system. One of the great things he has done is to stop the practice of torture. It is just plain wrong. He has cancelled a wasteful missile defense system that the US military did not want. Its purpose was to provide jobs for electoral districts do congressmen can get re-elected. He is also working for peace in the Middle East. In so doing he disagrees with the Israeli government. I think it is necessary to disagree with the current Israeli government if one wants peace.

However, Pilger in a past article criticised Obama for only devoting 17 words to Gaza. It wasn't enough for Pilger that Obama criticised Israel. The criticism wasn't enough. He wanted Obama's Cairo speech to be an exercise in finger pointing rather than a step to peace.

It also is not enough for Pilger that Obama has apologised for past misdeeds of the US. Pilger apparently wants the president of the United States to condemn his country. Unlike Pilger Obama is reasonable and looks to me as though he is doing what he can do to make a better world.

Go for it, Pelican.

However, the trouble is Pilger can never find a way out for this Anglo exceptualism.

Just re-read a book by Paul Kennedy called Preparing for the Twenty First Century.

His page 210 is interestung reading.

He points out how this thrusty Anglo exceptionalism could be the prime cause of the Islamic terrorist problem today.

His long paragraph begins by stating that it is difficult to know whether the reason for the Muslim's world trouble is cultural or historical?

Clearly, as he says, Islam suffers many self-inflicted problems, but the major problem, appears to be the fear of being swallowed up by the West.

He intimates how the former barbarian West was enlightened so much by an Arab Middle East intelligentsia who had first gained so much from Hellenistic Reasoning, feeling generous and diplomatic enough to advise Thomas Aquinas how to help the early Christian West escape from the effects of the earlier Christian Dark Ages.

Professor Kennedy does not openly say it, but it seems the former barbarian West has virtually forced the Arabic Islamics down into their own Dark Ages, hatred for the West, replacing the Enlightening gift that the Early ME Islamics themselves had so generously offered.

I'm not a huge Pilger fan - he's too polemic to carry much oomph - but any reminder that the behaviour of superpowers rarely matches their rhetoric is a good reminder.