[casi] "A piratical war that brought terrorism and death to Iraq"

[H Sutter <citext@DELETETHISchebucto.ns.ca>]

"Listen, that's the sound of freedom", said a BBC
TV producer to his mother on the phone. He meant an
American fighter aircraft flying overhead.

"The moment young Omar discovered the price of war",
was run a headline in the Observer. And the price? The
death of Omar's mother, father, two sisters and brother.

In a 'normal' society one might expect such callousness
from psychopaths. But this is no longer a normal society.

Einstein predicted this shift in an essay "The danger
of the military mentality in America" (1947). The
military mentality discounts human values, thought,
and happiness. Human beings are seen as a mere
commodity. What counts are atomic weapons, strategic
bases, weapons of all kind, and reserves of raw
materials. - Unfortunately, Einstein turned out to
be right, it seems.

--Elga

<START FWD>

http://www.newstatesman.com/ [subscriber]
http://pilger.carlton.com/print/132898

New Statesman (London) April 10
by John Pilger

A piratical war that brought terrorism and death to Iraq.

They have blown off the limbs of women and the scalps of
children. Their victims overwhelm the morgues and flood
into hospitals that lack even aspirin.

A BBC television producer, moments before he was wounded
by an American fighter aircraft that killed 18 people with
"friendly fire", spoke to his mother on a satellite phone.
Holding the phone over his head so that she could hear the
sound of the American planes overhead, he said: "Listen,
that's the sound of freedom."

Did I read this scene in Catch-22? Surely, the BBC man was
being ferociously ironic. I doubt it, just as I doubt that
whoever designed the Observer's page three last Sunday had
Joseph Heller in mind when he wrote the weasel headline:
"The moment young Omar discovered the price of war". These
cowardly words accompanied a photograph of an American
marine reaching out to comfort 15-year-old Omar, having
just participated in the mass murder of his father,
mother, two sisters and brother during the unprovoked
invasion of their homeland, in breach of the most basic
law of civilised peoples.

No true epitaph for them in Britain's famous liberal
newspaper; no honest headline, such as: "This American
marine murdered this boy's family". No photograph of
Omar's father, mother, sisters and brother dismembered and
blood-soaked by automatic fire. Versions of the Observer's
propaganda picture have been appearing in the
Anglo-American press since the invasion began: tender
cameos of American troops reaching out, kneeling,
ministering to their "liberated" victims.

And where were the pictures from the village of Furat,
where 80 men, women and children were rocketed to death?
Apart from the Mirror, where were the pictures, and
footage, of small children holding up their hands in
terror while Bush's thugs forced their families to kneel
in the street? Imagine that in a British high street. It
is a glimpse of fascism, and we have a right to see it.

"To initiate a war of aggression," said the judges in the
Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, "is not only an
international crime; it is the supreme international crime
differing only from other war crimes in that it contains
within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." In
stating this guiding principle of international law, the
judges specifically rejected German arguments of the
"necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against other
countries.

Nothing Bush and Blair, their cluster-bombing boys and
their media court do now will change the truth of their
great crime in Iraq. It is a matter of record, understood
by the majority of humanity, if not by those who claim to
speak for "us". As Denis Halliday said of the
Anglo-American embargo against Iraq, it will "slaughter
them in the history books". It was Halliday who, as
assistant secretary general of the United Nations, set up
the "oil for food" programme in Iraq in 1996 and quickly
realised that the UN had become an instrument of "a
genocidal attack on a whole society". He resigned in
protest, as did his successor, Hans von Sponeck, who
described "the wanton and shaming punishment of a nation".

I have mentioned these two men often in these pages,
partly because their names and their witness have been
airbrushed from most of the media. I well remember Jeremy
Paxman bellowing at Halliday on Newsnight shortly after
his resignation: "So are you an apologist for Saddam
Hussein?" That helped set the tone for the travesty of
journalism that now daily, almost gleefully, treats
criminal war as sport. In a leaked e-mail Roger Mosey, the
head of BBC Television News, described the BBC's war
coverage as "extraordinary - it almost feels like World
Cup football when you go from Um Qasr to another theatre
of war somewhere else and you're switching between
battles".

He is talking about murder. That is what the Americans do,
and no one will say so, even when they are murdering
journalists. They bring to this one-sided attack on a weak
and mostly defenceless people the same racist, homicidal
intent I witnessed in Vietnam, where they had a whole
programme of murder called Operation Phoenix. This runs
through all their foreign wars, as it does through their
own divided society. Take your pick of the current
onslaught. Last weekend, a column of their tanks swept
heroically into Baghdad and out again. They murdered
people along the way. They blew off the limbs of women and
the scalps of children. Hear their voices on the unedited
and unbroadcast videotape: "We shot the shit out of it."
Their victims overwhelm the morgues and hospitals -
hospitals already denuded of drugs and painkillers by
America's deliberate withholding of $5.4bn in humanitarian
goods, approved by the Security Council and paid for by
Iraq. The screams of children undergoing amputation with
minimal anaesthetic qualify as the BBC man's "sound of
freedom".

Heller would appreciate the sideshows. Take the British
helicopter pilot who came to blows with an American who
had almost shot him down. "Don't you know the Iraqis don't
have a fucking air force?" he shouted. Did this pilot
reflect on the truth he had uttered, on the whole craven
enterprise against a stricken third world country and his
own part in this crime? I doubt it. The British have been
the most skilled at delusion and lying. By any standard,
the Iraqi resistance to the high-tech Anglo-American
machine was heroic. With ancient tanks and mortars, small
arms and desperate ambushes, they panicked the Americans
and reduced the British military class to one of its
specialities - mendacious condescension.

The Iraqis who fight are "terrorists", "hoodlums",
"pockets of Ba'ath Party loyalists", "kamikaze" and "feds"
(fedayeen). They are not real people: cultured and
cultivated people. They are Arabs. This vocabulary of
dishonour has been faithfully parroted by those enjoying
it all from the broadcasting box. "What do you make of
Basra?" asked the Today programme's presenter of a former
general embedded in the studio. "It's hugely encouraging,
isn't it?" he replied. Their mutual excitement, like their
plummy voices, are their bond.

On the same day, in a Guardian letter, Tim Llewellyn, a
former BBC Middle East correspondent, pointed us to
evidence of this "hugely encouraging" truth - fleeting
pictures on Sky News of British soldiers smashing their
way into a family home in Basra, pointing their guns at a
woman and manhandling, hooding and manacling young men,
one of whom was shown quivering with terror. "Is Britain
'liberating' Basra by taking political prisoners and, if
so, based on what sort of intelligence, given Britain's
long unfamiliarity with this territory and its inhabitants
... The least this ugly display will do is remind Arabs
and Muslims everywhere of our Anglo-Saxon double standards
- we can show your prisoners in... degrading positions,
but don't you dare show ours.".

Roger Mosey says the suffering of Um Qasr is "like World
Cup football". There are 40,000 people in Um Qasr;
desperate refugees are streaming in and the hospitals are
overflowing. All this misery is due entirely to the
"coalition" invasion and the British siege, which forced
the United Nations to withdraw its humanitarian aid staff.
Cafod, the Catholic relief agency, which has sent a team
to Um Qasr, says the standard humanitarian quota for water
in emergency situations is 20 litres per person per day.
Cafod reports hospitals entirely without water and people
drinking from contaminated wells. According to the World
Health Organisation, 1.5 million people across southern
Iraq are without water, and epidemics are inevitable. And
what are "our boys" doing to alleviate this, apart from
staging childish, theatrical occupations of presidential
palaces, having fired shoulder-held missiles into a
civilian city and dropped cluster bombs?

A British colonel laments to his "embedded" flock that "it
is difficult to deliver aid in an area that is still an
active battle zone". The logic of his own words mocks him.
If Iraq was not a battle zone, if the British and the
Americans were not defying international law, there would
be no difficulty in delivering aid.

There is something especially disgusting about the lurid
propaganda coming from these PR-trained British officers,
who have not a clue about Iraq and its people. They
describe the liberation they are bringing from "the
world's worst tyranny", as if anything, including death by
cluster bomb or dysentery, is better than "life under
Saddam". The inconvenient truth is that, according to
Unicef, the Ba'athists built the most modern health
service in the Middle East. No one disputes the grim,
totalitarian nature of the regime; but Saddam Hussein was
careful to use the oil wealth to create a modern secular
society and a large and prosperous middle class. Iraq was
the only Arab country with a 90 per cent clean water
supply and with free education. All this was smashed by
the Anglo-American embargo. When the embargo was imposed
in 1990, the Iraqi civil service organised a food
distribution system that the UN's Food and Agriculture
Organisation described as "a model of efficiency . . .
undoubtedly saving Iraq from famine". That, too, was
smashed when the invasion was launched.

Why are the British yet to explain why their troops have
to put on protective suits to recover dead and wounded in
vehicles hit by American "friendly fire"? The reason is
that the Americans are using solid uranium coated on
missiles and tank shells. When I was in southern Iraq,
doctors estimated a sevenfold increase in cancers in areas
where depleted uranium was used by the Americans and
British in the 1991 war. Under the subsequent embargo,
Iraq, unlike Kuwait, has been denied equipment with which
to clean up its contaminated battlefields. The hospitals
in Basra have wards overflowing with children with cancers
of a variety not seen before 1991. They have no
painkillers; they are fortunate if they have aspirin.

With honourable exceptions (Robert Fisk; al-Jazeera),
little of this has been reported. Instead, the media have
performed their preordained role as imperial America's
"soft power": rarely identifying "our" crime, or
misrepresenting it as a struggle between good intentions
and evil incarnate. This abject professional and moral
failure now beckons the unseen dangers of such an epic,
false victory, inviting its repetition in Iran, Korea,
Syria, Cuba, China.

George Bush has said: "It will be no defence to say: 'I
was just following orders.'" He is correct. The Nuremberg
judges left in no doubt the right of ordinary soldiers to
follow their conscience in an illegal war of aggression.
Two British soldiers have had the courage to seek status
as conscientious objectors. They face court martial and
imprisonment; yet virtually no questions have been asked
about them in the media. George Galloway has been
pilloried for asking the same question as Bush, and he and
Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, are being
threatened with withdrawal of the Labour whip.

Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the
Prime Minister is a war criminal who should be sent to The
Hague. This is not gratuitous; on the prima facie
evidence, Blair is a war criminal, and all those who have
been, in one form or another, accessories should be
reported to the International Criminal Court. Not only did
they promote a charade of pretexts few now take seriously,
they brought terrorism and death to Iraq. A growing body
of legal opinion around the world agrees that the new
court has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University
wrote, to investigate "not only the regime, but also the
UN bombing and sanctions which violated the human rights
of Iraqis on a vast scale". Add the present piratical war,
whose spectre is the uniting of Arab nationalism with
militant Islam. The whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is
just beginning. Such is the magnitude of their crime.
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