NEIL LEWIS, who was the New York Times diplomatic correspondent in the early 1990s, was once quoted as saying: "The yearning to see American-style democracy duplicated throughout the world has been a persistent theme in American foreign policy."

No belief concerning US foreign policy is more entrenched than what Lewis expressed, and the same is true for Western foreign policy in general, often so sabre rattling in a way that can only be described as appalling.

In fact, the thesis of duplicating US values across the world is hardly ever contested, and it is commonly not even expressed, merely presupposed as the given basis for reasonable discourse on the role of the US in world affairs.

It is the usual what we say goes philosophy.

It is amazing to encounter the amount of faith placed in this doctrine across the world, and the US in this regard considers itself obligated to pass its opinion on whatever happens in each nation state on this planet.

As noted so many times by Noam Chomsky and other progressive writers, it only takes a cursory inspection of the historical record to confirm that the persistent theme in American foreign policy has been the subversion and overthrow of parliamentary regimes.

The US is notorious for its traditional resort to violence when destroying popular organisations that threaten to offer the majority of the population an opportunity to enter the political arena in general, or to have a say on matters related to the wealth of their respective nations.

One such popular organisation that has been targeted for destruction by Washington is Zanu-PF and its leader Robert Gabriel Mugabe.

Nothing was ever the matter with this Zimbabwean political party until they introduced sweeping changes to land ownership in the country, ousting a vast empire of white commercial farmers whose privilege to occupy 75 percent of Zimbabwe's arable land was based on nothing more than colonial privilege and the colour of their skin.

Since 2000, there is undoubtable determination from the US, the EU and other Western outposts to end the life within Zanu-PF, to criminalise the legacy of that revolutionary party, and indeed to condemn whatever Zanu-PF stands for — even hunting down and persecuting its membership to the last man.

This writer was once served with draft charges based on alleged contraventions of the Rome Statute 1998, and the spurious allegations were all centred on establishing a link between this writer and Zanu-PF, a link supposedly meant to be criminal by its mere definition.

Despite the clear fact that the puerile allegations had no legs to stand on, it was revealing to see that there are some officials in the Australian administration system who baselessly define Zanu-PF as an illegal and criminal entity.

The Zanu-PF leadership seems to be aware of what the West is planning and the party seems ready to save its legacy and to thwart all forms of external meddling in the affairs of Zimbabwe.

While the ideological resolve within Zanu-PF is undoubtable, the economic strategy to sustain the subsequent ideological warfare seems to be dangerously elusive, exposing the party as somewhat an easy punch-bag where even dwarfs like New Zealand with its 4 million people and 65 million sheep can boast of a powerful sting on Zimbabwe.

Zanu-PF largely took Western economic punches without reply for close to a decade, and the only notable reaction has been the plea for a stop to the attacks — expressed so well in the numerous calls for the West to "remove all forms of sanctions on Zimbabwe".

With a massive Chinese and Indian market ready to do business, and with a massive agricultural and mineral resource base across the country, there are no logical bases for the illegal Western economic sanctions to have been allowed to be as ruinous as they became in the last decade.

It is true that credit lines were blocked by Western countries, but instead of waiting for these lines to be reopened as what clearly was the case, Zimbabwe needed to show more initiative by way of policies that would have lured alternative players in the investment sector of the economy.

Efforts to make the Look East Policy work seemed to be louder verbally than they were in practice, and the West only seemed to panic in the beginning, before they convinced themselves that there was no point panicking over what clearly looked like harmless rhetoric.

This argument about Zanu-PF's shortcomings on matters to do with busting the Western economic sanctions that were illegally imposed on the country is for another day, in its full context with various other factors like corruption and lack of initiative.

What is important for now is to note that the West is trying its best to kill Zanu-PF by economic strangulation because the imperial crusaders have hopelessly lost the ideological war against this revolutionary party.

Zanu-PF has scored countless diplomatic victories against the West at the UN, at the EU-Africa summit, at Sadc, at the AU, at NAM and at many other forums.

Even the most powerful propaganda model executed by Western media has failed to alienate Zanu-PF from other African liberation movements, totally failing to bury the party as a tyrannical organisation.

There is a sense in which the conventional doctrine of Western democracy is somehow tenable and this is what Morgan Tsvangirai is pinning his hopes on.

Western-style democracy effectively means a political system with regular elections but no serious challenge to business rule, or to the rule of Western capitalist corporations.

Western policymakers doubtless yearn to see this system established throughout the world, and Zimbabwe is by no means an exception.

The doctrine is somehow not undermined by the fact that it is routinely violated under a different interpretation of the concept of democracy: as a system in which citizens do not only supposedly enjoy glorious freedoms and rights, but also supposedly play a meaningful part in the management of public affairs.

This facade is maintained by the propaganda model; a powerful machinery that sidelines the majority of the people so that they will be contented with ratifying the decisions of a few elites.

Noam Chomsky once said, "All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume."

The US has conditions and strategic interests they want met before they endorse any political system as a democracy.

These conditions and strategic interests have everything to do with Washington needs and rarely do they ever have anything to do with the aspirations and needs of the people within the affected countries.

In the client states established by the US across the developing world, the so-called Third World, the preference for democratic forms is often largely a matter of public relations, except in a few cases where the society might be stable and privilege for capital is secure.

Corporations want developing states to subsidise research and development, production and export, to rely on foreign aid programmes, to have their markets regulated regulate by the likes of the IMF, to ensure a favourable climate for business operations abroad, and in many ways to serve as welfare states for the wealthy investors within them.

What the Western elites do not want is for the state to have the power to interfere with the prerogatives of owners and managers of corporations. That is defined as "tyrannical policies".

The concerns about the security of corporations lead to support for democratic forms, as long as business dominance over the political system is secure.

There cannot be any democratic forms in Zimbabwe by Western standards for as long as the people-based economic empowerment policies introduced by Zanu-PF are in place.

If a country satisfies certain basic conditions required by the West, then, the US and its allies are tolerant on that country's democratic forms.

This tolerance is barely predictable in African countries, where a proper outcome is hard to guarantee, mainly because of the unpredictable political characters that occasionally arise and fall within the African political system.

Relations by the US to the industrialised world show clearly that the US is not opposed to democratic forms as such.

In the stable business-dominated Western democracies we do not see the US carrying out programmes of subversion, terror, or military assault as we see the US doing in developing countries.

There are a few exceptions, and a good example of that was noted by Noam Chomsky when he wrote about "the abundant evidence that the CIA was fully involved in a virtual coup that overturned the Whitlam Labour government in Australia in 1975, when it was feared that Whitlam was likely to interfere with Washington's military and intelligence bases in Australia".

Perhaps the WikiLeaks document revealing that the US regarded Kevin Rudd as "a control freak" who had "an overriding hand" over foreign affairs when he was Australian Prime Minister may be indicating that the US could have done another Whitlam on Rudd, especially when one considers that Rudd was going for 40 percent taxation on mining corporations that are making super profits in Australia.

He was downed by a backstabbing coup led by his then Deputy, Julia Gillard, who is now Prime Minister.

Other examples include the large scale CIA interference in Italian politics once.

The congressional Pike Report was leaked in 1976, citing a subsidy of over US$65 million to approved political parties and affiliates from 1948 through the early 1970s.

In 1976, the Aldo Moro government fell in Italy after revelations that the CIA had spent US$6 million to support anti-communist candidates.

This was the time European Communist parties were moving towards independent pluralistic democratic tendencies.

Close links between Washington and the Italian ultra-right can be traced back to the strong US support for Mussolini's Fascist takeover in 1922.

Then the US strategic interests were centred on the fight against the "evil" communists.

After the Cold War, the general trend has been that of the US support for industrial democracies, with all acts of hostilities and subversion now targeted at developing countries like North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela or Zimbabwe — countries ordinarily persecuted for putting the interests of their own people ahead of those of Western corporations.

When we evaluate historical evidence, due care must always be taken.

It is one thing to overthrow the democratic government of Guatemala as what happened to Jacobo Arbenzi Guzman, before the US maintained the rule of an array of murderous gangsters for over three decades.

Or as what happened when the US helped lay the groundwork for a coup and successful mass slaughter in Indonesia.

It is a totally different thing to duplicate these brutal successes in well-established societies.

It is not only the lack of means that stops the US from establishing military dictatorships and death squads in industrial societies.

Largely these societies do comply with the demands of White House in terms of US strategic interests.

And most, if not all of these industrial democracies do follow the US in all of Washington's murderous aggressions on countries considered to be of lesser peoples, the Iraqs and Afghanistans of this world.

The US does not have enough power to overthrow the Chinese Government but will try to curtail Chinese influence by spreading American-style democracy in as many of the smaller states as possible, and this explains why the US wants to have a say over about each and every government that gets into power across the world.

There is always a comment from the White House after each election and this is by imperial design.

For Zanu-PF, the only democracy that will be acknowledged by the US and her Western allies is a democracy that will allow Western capital to dominate all industry in Zimbabwe; short of that there cannot be any democracy in the country. In the absence of a background of Western economic dominance, the West will never respect whatever form of government may come up in Zimbabwe.

When MDC-T talks of bringing change, what they mean is a change to compliance with Western dictates and direction — all in line with the sabre-rattling goals of US foreign policy.

The leaked diplomatic cables are very clear about these goals and about the role of MDC-T in trying to achieve them.

It is incumbent upon Zimbabweans to choose for themselves a democracy that suits the needs and aspirations of the Zimbabwean people, needs as was the land before it was redistributed to the masses.

MDC-T claims each day that what the people of Zimbabwe want are not resources and wealth but "freedom and democracy", and Zanu-PF's ideology is always based on the economic empowerment of the indigenous person.

The people of Zimbabwe have a choice to make.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.uk or reason@ rwafawarova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com

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