On my wall is the Daily Express front page of September 5 1945 and the words: "I write this as a warning to the world." So began Wilfred Burchett's report from Hiroshima. It was the scoop of the century. For his lone, perilous journey that defied the US occupation authorities, Burchett was pilloried, not least by his embedded colleagues. He warned that an act of premeditated mass murder on an epic scale had launched a new era of terror.

Almost every day now, he is vindicated. The intrinsic criminality of the atomic bombing is borne out in the US National Archives and by the subsequent decades of militarism camouflaged as democracy. The Syria psychodrama exemplifies this. Yet again we are held hostage by the prospect of a terrorism whose nature and history even the most liberal critics still deny. The great unmentionable is that humanity's most dangerous enemy resides across the Atlantic.

John Kerry's farce and Barack Obama's pirouettes are temporary. Russia's peace deal over chemical weapons will, in time, be treated with the contempt that all militarists reserve for diplomacy. With al-Qaida now among its allies, and US-armed coupmasters secure in Cairo, the US intends to crush the last independent states in the Middle East: Syria first, then Iran. "This operation [in Syria]," said the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas in June, "goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned."

When the public is "psychologically scarred", as the Channel 4 reporter Jonathan Rugman described the British people's overwhelming hostility to an attack on Syria, suppressing the truth is made urgent. Whether or not Bashar al-Assad or the "rebels" used gas in the suburbs of Damascus, it is the US, not Syria, that is the world's most prolific user of these terrible weapons.

In 1970 the Senate reported: "The US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity of toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to six pounds per head of population." This was Operation Hades, later renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand - the source of what Vietnamese doctors call a "cycle of foetal catastrophe". I have seen generations of children with their familiar, monstrous deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked war record, will remember them. I have seen them in Iraq too, where the US used depleted uranium and white phosphorus, as did the Israelis in Gaza. No Obama "red line" for them. No showdown psychodrama for them.

The sterile repetitive debate about whether "we" should "take action" against selected dictators (ie cheer on the US and its acolytes in yet another aerial killing spree) is part of our brainwashing. Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and UN special rapporteur on Palestine, describes it as "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence." This "is so widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable."

It is the biggest lie: the product of "liberal realists" in Anglo-American politics, scholarship and media who ordain themselves as the world's crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. Stripping humanity from the study of nations and congealing it with jargon that serves western power designs, they mark "failed", "rogue" or "evil" states for "humanitarian intervention."

An attack on Syria or Iran or any other US "demon" would draw on a fashionable variant, "Responsibility to Protect", or R2P - whose lectern-trotting zealot is the former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, co-chair of a "global centre" based in New York. Evans and his generously funded lobbyists play a vital propaganda role in urging the "international community" to attack countries where "the security council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time."

Evans has form. He appeared in my 1994 film Death of a Nation, which revealed the scale of genocide in East Timor. Canberra's smiling man is raising his champagne glass in a toast to his Indonesian equivalent as they fly over East Timor in an Australian aircraft, having signed a treaty to pirate the oil and gas of the stricken country where the tyrant Suharto killed or starved a third of the population.

Under the "weak" Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before. With not a single tank on the White House lawn, a military coup has taken place in Washington. In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried their eyes, Obama accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor, George Bush: its wars and war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by an emerging police state, those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe, piled up the rubble in Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian nightmare, are ascendant across the US administration. Behind their beribboned facade, more former US soldiers are killing themselves than are dying on battlefields. Last year 6,500 veterans took their own lives. Put out more flags.

The historian Norman Pollack calls this "liberal fascism": "For goose-steppers substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while." Every Tuesday the "humanitarian" Obama personally oversees a worldwide terror network of drones that "bugsplat" people, their rescuers and mourners. In the west's comfort zones, the first black leader of the land of slavery still feels good, as if his very existence represents a social advance, regardless of his trail of blood. This obeisance to a symbol has all but destroyed the US anti-war movement - Obama's singular achievement.

In Britain, the distractions of the fakery of image and identity politics have not quite succeeded. A stirring has begun, though people of conscience should hurry. The judges at Nuremberg were succinct: "Individual citizens have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity." The ordinary people of Syria, and countless others, and our own self-respect, deserve nothing less now.
(c) 2013 John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia.

ISRAEL LOVES anniversaries. The media fill up with revelations and memories of the event commemorated, eye-witnesses recite their stories for the umpteenth time, old photos flood the pages and the TV screens.

In the coming days, two main memorial dates will play this role. True, the Yom Kippur war broke out only in October (1973), but already the newspapers and TV programs are full of it.

The Oslo agreement was signed on September 13 (1993). Hardly any mention. It has been almost expunged from the national memory.

Oslo? Oslo in Norway? Anything happened there? Tell me about it.

ACTUALLY, FOR me the historic date is September 10. On that day, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat exchanged letters of mutual recognition.

The State of Israel recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representative of the Palestinian people, and the PLO recognized the State of Israel.

It is one of the historic achievements of Oslo that today nobody can possibly grasp the immensity of this recognition.

The Zionist movement aimed officially at the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Unofficially, it wanted to turn Palestine - all of it - into a Jewish State. Since Palestine was already inhabited by another people, the existence of this people - as a people - had to be denied. Since the Zionist movement was, in its own eyes, a moral and idealistic endeavor, this denial was a basic tenet of the Zionist creed. A land without a people for a people without a land. Golda Meir famously declared that there was "no such thing as a Palestinian people." I myself have spent hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of my life trying to convince Israeli audiences that there really exists a Palestinian nation.

And here was the Prime Minister of Israel signing a document that recognized the existence of the Palestinian People, demolishing a central pillar of Zionism after almost a hundred years.

Yasser Arafat's declaration was no less revolutionary. For every Palestinian, it was a fundamental truth that the Zionist state was the illegitimate child of Western imperialism. Palestine was an Arab land, inhabited by Arabs for many centuries, until a bunch of foreign settlers took it over by force and guile, expelled half its population and terrorized the rest.

And here was the founder and leader of the Palestinian liberation movement accepting Israel as a legitimate state!

Recognition of this kind cannot be taken back. It is a fact in the minds of millions of Israelis and Palestinians, and of the world at large. This is the basic change forged in Oslo.

FOR THE vast majority of Israelis, Oslo is dead. Their story is quite simple: we signed a generous agreement. And "the Arabs" broke it, as they always do. We did everything possible for peace, we let the devious Arafat come back into the country, we even gave arms to his security forces - and what did we get? Not peace. Just terrorist attacks. Suicide bombers.

The lesson? The Arabs don't want peace. They want to throw us into the sea. As Yitzhak Shamir put it so succinctly: "The Arabs are still the same Arabs, and the sea is still the same sea."

For many Palestinians, of course, the lesson is the very reverse. The Oslo agreement was a cunning Zionist trick to continue the occupation in another form. Indeed, the situation of the Palestinians under occupation became much worse. Before Oslo, Palestinians could move freely throughout the country from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, from Nablus to Gaza, from Haifa to Jericho, from everywhere to Jerusalem. After Oslo, this became impossible.

SO WHAT is the truth? Is Oslo dead?

Of course not.

The most important creation of the Oslo agreement, the Palestinian Authority, is very much alive, though not kicking.

One may think about the Authority what one wants, good or bad, but it certainly is there. It is recognized by the international community as a state in the making, attracting donations and capital. It is the visible embodiment of the Palestinian national presence.

In spite of the all-pervading oppression by the military occupation regime, there is a dynamic, vital, self-governing Palestinian society in both the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, enjoying wide international support.

On the other hand, peace seems far, far away.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the signing of the agreement (called the "Declaration of Principles") on the White House lawn, we convened a large meeting in Tel Aviv for the peace forces to discuss its merits.

None of us had any illusions. It was a bad agreement. As Arafat put it: "the best possible agreement in the worst possible situation." Not an agreement between equals, but between a strong military power and a small, almost helpless, occupied people.

Some of us proposed condemning the agreement outright. Others, including myself, proposed accepting it conditionally. "The actual paragraphs are less important," I said, "The main thing is the peace dynamic set in motion." Today I am not certain that I was right, but neither am I sure that I was wrong. The jury is still out.

THE MAIN fault in the agreement was that its ultimate aim was not stated. While it seemed obvious to the Palestinians (and to many Israelis) that the aim was to pave the way to peace between the State of Israel and the soon-to-be-established State of Palestine, this was not clear at all to the Israeli leadership.

It was an interim agreement - but interim to what? If you want to go from Berlin to Paris, the interim stations are quite different from those you pass on the way from Berlin to Moscow.

Without agreement on the final destination, a quarrel was bound to break out about every single station on the way. The mood of reconciliation quickly changed into distrust on both sides. It went sour almost right from the beginning.

One can compare Rabin to a general who has succeeded in breaking through the lines of his opponent. A general in such a situation should not stop to think things over. He should rush forward and throw everything he has got into the breach. But Rabin did stop, allowing all the forces of opposition in Israel to gather, regroup and start a fatal counterattack.

By nature, Rabin was no revolutionary. On the contrary, he was a rather conservative type, a military man with not much imagination. By exercising sheer logic, he had arrived at the conclusion that it was in the best interest of Israel to make peace with the Palestinians (a conclusion I had arrived at 44 years earlier, treading the same path.) At the age of 70, he changed his whole outlook. For this he deserves much respect.

But once there, he hesitated. As the Germans say, he had Angst at his own courage. Instead of rushing forward, he haggled at length over every detail even while an intense fascist-type propaganda campaign was let loose against him. For this he paid with his life.

SO WHO broke the agreement first? I would blame my own side.

It was Rabin who proclaimed that "there are no sacred dates!" (To which I responded "I wish he would convince my bank manager of that.") Breaking dates set down in a contract means breaking the contract. The timetable for starting the serious negotiations for final peace was ignored, and so of course was the date set for the conclusion: 1999. By that time, nobody was even thinking about Oslo any longer.

Another fateful violation was the failure to set up the "four safe passages" between the West Bank and the Gaza strip. In the beginning, road signs saying "To Gaza" were indeed set up on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, but no passage was ever opened.

The result of this became apparent only much later, when Hamas assumed power in the isolated Gaza Strip, while Fatah clung to in the West Bank. It was "divide et impera" at its best (or worst).

In the agreements following Oslo, the occupied West Bank was divided into temporary zones, A, B and C. Area C was to remain for the time being under complete Israeli control. Soon enough it became clear that Israeli military planners had devised the map carefully: Area C included all the main roads and the sites earmarked for Israeli settlements.

The people who devised all these things did not have peace on their mind.

The picture is not altogether one-sided. During the Oslo period Palestinian armed attacks on Israelis did not cease. Arafat did not initiate them, but neither did he go out of his way to prevent them. He probably thought that they would needle the Israelis into going ahead with implementing the agreement. They had the opposite effect.

THE ASSASSINATIONS of Rabin and Arafat put an end to Oslo for all practical purposes. But reality has not changed.

The considerations which led Arafat by the end of 1973 to conclude that he must negotiate with Israel, and which led Rabin in 1993 to talk with the Palestinians, have not changed.

There are two nations in this country, and they must choose: to live together or to die together. I hope they choose life.

With obscene imperial arrogance, President Obama proclaimed that the "world" - not he - has drawn a bloody "red line" in Syria. "I didn't set a red line," said Obama, at a stop in Sweden on his way to a Group of 20 nations meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia. "The world set a red line."

That's news to the rest of the planet, including most of the Group of 20 and the meeting's host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who described Obama's claims that Syria used sarin gas against civilians in rebel-held areas as "completely ridiculous." "It does not fit any logic," said Putin, since Syrian President Assad's forces "have the so-called rebels surrounded and are finishing them off."

It's news to China, which will surely join Russia in vetoing any Security Council motion to provide legal cover for Obama's aggression. And it's news to the usually compliant UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who this week reaffirmed that "the Security Council has primary responsibility for international peace and security" and "the use of force is lawful only when in exercise of self-defense in accordance with article 51 of the United Nations Charter and or when the Security Council approves such action."

It's news to Great Britain, America's temporarily wayward poodle, whose parliament rejected any military entanglement in Obama's red line. As esteemed political analyst William Blum points out, 64 percent of the people of France oppose their government's planned participation Obama's Battle of the Red Line.

Apparently, a young and impressionable Obama took the 1985 USA for Africa song "We are the World" too literally, and believes that all one need do is sing or shout the words to make it so.

A new Reuters poll shows 56 percent of the American public oppose U.S. intervention in Syria, with only 19 percent backing Obama. The First Black U.S. President, who was hired (by corporate sponsors, and later elected) to put a new face on U.S. imperial policy after his predecessor's defeat and international isolation over Iraq, now finds himself more alone in the world than George Bush, and with even less support at home.

Nevertheless, Obama will doubtless press forward with his aggression, for the same reason that Bush defied world opinion and a vibrant domestic anti-war movement, ten years ago. U.S. imperialism has no option but to bang its military fist on the table to reset the global game board, just as it attempted - and ultimately failed - to do in Iraq in 2003, and as a unified NATO temporarily accomplished, after a 7-month bombing campaign, in Libya in 2011.

Obama's Syria crisis is another chapter in the Euro-American response to the so-called "Arab Spring" that threatened to upset western dominance in the center of global energy extraction - the end game for global capitalism as we know it. Within a week of Mubarak's fall from power in Egypt, the U.S. State Department informed the press corps that Washington prefers monarchs to autocrats in the Middle East - a very loud signal that the U.S. had suddenly become far more dependent on the royal thieves of the Persian Gulf, the only Arab forces in the region on which the U.S. could depend. Peering into the abyss of sustained popular agitation in the Arab world, the U.S. and its European and royal Arabian allies attempted to leap ahead of the curve of events with a massive display of NATO force against Libya and a mobilization of jihadists in the region, mustered mainly by Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The goal was to transform the character of the Arab Spring into a battle against secular socialist regimes in Tripoli and Damascus, along with a general Sunni jihad against heretical Shiites of one sect or another. The mission was to remove those states whose very existence threatened the monarchies while at the same time diverting the masses' energies into sectarianism. (All of which is fine with Israel, whose strategy since its founding has been to foster chaos and division in the Arab world.)

Libya fell with the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi (Hillary Clinton : "We came, we saw, he died"), but the Assad government in Syria has held on for almost three years, and was prevailing in its battle against the U.S./Saudi/Qatari-backed jihadists. The 2011 game plan was coming undone. This summer in Egypt, where the West's nightmare of eviction from the entire Mideast began two and a half years ago, the military seized total power and went on a killing spree against the Muslim Brotherhood, exponentially complicating the U.S. regional jihadist strategy. General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi's government, which is carrying out a ghastly pogrom against its own Islamists, opposes the U.S. strike against Syria and tells its followers that the U.S. might turn against the Egyptian military regime, next. (This, despite massive infusions of cash from the Arab monarchs to the military government.) Both sides in Egypt's divided society now accuse the other of being allied with Enemy Number One: the U.S. The crisis that Washington hoped to get ahead of, with the attack on Libya, had metastasized. Egypt was wholly unmanageable, and Syria was defeating Washington's jihadists.

Thus, the transparent frame-up of Assad, with direct U.S. participation. It was a panicky move, with the fate of the Empire at stake. Mistakes in execution were surely made, and will come to light - which is why U.S. intelligence agencies hedge their accusations against Assad, leaving room to construct alternative scenarios as the original fable falls apart under the weight of facts and logic.

Obama may well get permission from the U.S. Congress to smash the Syrian state. The president reserves the right to launch the attack, unilaterally, and will not be punished if he does so. It is quite possible that Assad will soon be dead, and Al-Nusra jihadists will be cutting off heads in what's left of central Damascus. But one thing is certain: the U.S. has no long term allies among the Arab people - certainly not the jihadists, who will also turn on their royal paymasters at the first opportunity. The game board cannot be reset - not for long - and, at some point in the not too distant future, the U.S. will be ejected from much of the Arab world.

It was September 19, 2002, and US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was scheduled to address the Senate Armed Services Committee about why it was necessary to invade a country that never attacked us: Iraq.

I was so concerned about the pending war that I flew to Washington DC from my home in San Francisco. It was the first congressional hearing I had ever witnessed. My heart was pounding as my colleague Diane Wilson and I pulled out banners that read "UN inspectors, not US war", and proceeded to ask Rumsfeld our own questions: how many innocent Iraqis would die, how many US soldiers, how many of our tax dollars would be poured into this war of choice, and how much money would Halliburton make from the war. We were hauled out of the room by the Capitol police.

Fast forward to September 3, 2013, and I found myself in a hearing with Secretary of State John Kerry telling members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee why it was necessary to invade a country that never attacked us: Syria. By now I'm a pro, having attended countless hearings over the last decade. My CODEPINK colleagues and I came prepared. We took out signs that read "Syria Needs a Ceasefire, Not War" and "No US Attack on Syria", and we rubbed red paint on our hands to signify that the blood of Syrians would be on the administration's hands if it went ahead with the attack.

With an intense feeling of deja vu, I got up to speak right after Secretary Kerry gave his opening remarks. Kerry had said he was proposing limited strikes, not a war. It sounded to me just like the false "cakewalk" argument from the Iraq war sales pitch. I responded that lobbing cruise missiles into another country's sovereign territory was indeed a war, and that the consequences could be devastating. I also insisted that the American people - and the entire global community - did not support US military intervention. I was hauled out by Capitol Police, arrested and charged with "disorderly conduct", a charge I have received many times over the last 11 years.

Kerry responded to my intervention by evoking his youth. "You know, the first time I testified before this committee when I was 27 years old, I had feelings very similar to that protester," he said, referring to when he spoke out against the Vietnam War in 1971 as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. "And I would just say that is exactly why it is so important that we are all here having this debate, talking about these things before the country, and that the Congress itself will act representing the American people."

But what does it mean to represent the American people? In the case of Iraq, the US public had been whipped up by the government and the media to believe that Saddam Hussein played a key role in the 9/11 attacks. That's why a clear majority - 60 percent - supported the Iraq invasion. This time, the public is what some call "war-weary" - but I would call "war-wise". This time, 60 percent of Americans have not bought the government and media hype and are instead opposed to this intervention.

In the congressional vote for the Iraq war, almost all the Republicans lined up to support the war, along with 40 percent of the Democrats. But now that the war is not pushed by a rough-and-tumble Texas Republican but by a more refined, sweet-talking, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Democrat, it's unclear how the votes will shake out. Many of the traditional anti-war Democrats have become pro-war, and we in CODEPINK find ourselves applauding the stand of Tea Party favourites like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul or small-government Republicans like Michigan Congressman Justin Amash. Amash has been outspoken in his criticism of military action, holding town halls across his district to discuss the issue. He tweeted that 95 percent of those he met with opposed US military action in Syria.

There is little time left to stop this new, mad rush to war. Just as the British people put pressure on their members of parliament and insisted they steer clear of this American folly, so, too, the American people are mobilising. We are making our opposition known in town hall meetings throughout the country, and in a flood of calls, petitions, emails and visits to our elected officials. At both the Senate and House hearings, officials mentioned that their constituents were overwhelmingly opposed to intervention.

We are insisting that there are much better ways than cruise missiles to tell the Syrian people that we care. We are calling for increased US support for the more than two million refugees who are overwhelming the neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. With the UN's financial needs only 40 percent fulfilled, the billions of dollars that our government would spend on war would be far better spent addressing the mounting refugee crisis.

We are also telling our elected officials that if they are truly concerned about the violence that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians, they should pressure the administration to invest its considerable influence and energies in brokering a ceasefire and seeking a political settlement. This is obviously no easy task. Neither Syrian President Bashar al-Assad nor the divided rebel forces (including the growing al-Qaeda elements) are eager to sit down for talks, as both sides think they can win through force. Yet in the end, this civil war will end with a political settlement, and the sooner it happens, the more lives saved.