http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger4.html
The New Statesman (London) January 10, 2004
by John Pilger
*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.
The disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself
appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about the
"discovery" of "a huge system of clandestine weapons laboratories," which
even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked, would be astonishing, were it
not merely another of his vapid attempts to justify his crime against
humanity. (His crime, and George Bush's, is clearly defined as "supreme"
in the Nuremberg judgment.)
This is not what the guardians of the faith want you to know. Lord Hutton,
who is due to report on the Kelly affair, will provide the most effective
distraction, just as Lord Justice Scott did with his arms-to-Iraq report
almost ten years ago, ensuring that the top echelon of the political class
escaped criminal charges. Of course, it was not Hutton's "brief" to deal
with the criminal slaughter in Iraq; he will spread the blame for one
man's torment and death, having pointedly and scandalously chosen not to
recall and cross-examine Blair, even though Blair revealed during his
appearance before Hutton that he had lied in "emphatically" denying he had
had anything to do with "outing" Dr. David Kelly.
Other guardians have been assiduously at work. The truth of public
opposition to an illegal, unprovoked invasion, expressed in the biggest
demonstration in modern history, is being urgently revised. In a
valedictory piece on 30 December, the Guardian commentator and leader
writer Martin Kettle wrote: "Opponents of the war may need to be reminded
that public opinion currently approves of the invasion by nearly two to
one."
A favorite source for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on 18
November, the day Bush arrived in London, which was reported beneath the
front-page headline "Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as
support for war surges." Out of 1,002 people contacted, just 426 said they
welcomed Bush's visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or
did not know. As for support for the war "surging," the absurdly small
number questioned still produced a majority that opposed the invasion.
Across the world, the "majority backs Bush" disinformation was seized upon
-- by William Shawcross on CNN ("The majority of the British people are
glad he [Bush] came..."), by the equally warmongering William Safire in
the New York Times and by the Murdoch press almost everywhere. Thus, the
slaughter in Iraq, the destruction of democratic rights and civil
liberties in the west and the preparation for the next invasion are
"normalized."
In "The Banality of Evil," Edward S. Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things
in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization'... There is
usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable,
with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals...
others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer
burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in
hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the
mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."
Current "normalizing" is expressed succinctly by Kettle: "As 2003 draws to
its close, it is surely al-Qaeda, rather than the repercussions of Iraq,
that casts a darker shadow over Britain's future." How does he know this?
The "mass of intelligence flowing across the Prime Minister's desk," of
course! He calls this "cold-eyed realism," omitting to mention that the
only credible intelligence "flowing across the Prime Minister's desk" was
the common sense that an Anglo-American attack on Iraq would increase the
threat from al-Qaeda.
What the normalizers don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the
"coalition" crime in Iraq -- which Kettle calls a "misjudgment" P and the
true source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding
journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the
extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely
acknowledged. For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American
and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that
radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been
warned not to approach contaminated sites. Readings taken from destroyed
Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army
survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves.
With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.
Of the 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have "mystery
illnesses" not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By
mid-April last year, the US air force had deployed more than 19,000 guided
weapons and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells. According to a November
2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Center, witnesses living next
to Baghdad airport reported a huge death toll following one morning's
attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since then, a
vast area has been "landscaped" by US earth movers, and fenced. Jo
Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad, has documented a
catalogue of miscarriages, hair loss, and horrific eye, skin and
respiratory problems among people living near the area. Yet the US and
Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency
to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium contamination in Iraq.
The Ministry of Defense, which has admitted that British tanks fired
depleted uranium in and around Basra, says that British troops "will have
access to biological monitoring." Iraqis have no such access and receive
no specialist medical help.
According to the non-governmental organization Medact, between 21,700 and
55,000 Iraqis died between 20 March and 20 October last year. This
includes up to 9,600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from
unexploded cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. These are conservative
estimates; the ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be
imagined. Neither the US nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic
suffering is "not relevant," according to a US State Department official
-- just as the slaughter of more than 200,000 Iraqis during and
immediately after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated in a Medical Education
Trust study, was "not relevant" and not news.
The normalizers are anxious that this terror is again not recognized (the
BBC confines its use of "terrorism" and "atrocities" to the Iraqi
resistance) and that the wider danger it represents throughout the world
is overshadowed by the threat of al-Qaeda. William Schulz, executive
director of Amnesty International USA, has attacked the antiwar movement
for not joining Bush's "war on terror." He says "the left" must join
Bush's campaign, even his "preemptive" wars, or risk P that word again --
"irrelevance." This echoes other liberal normalizers who, by facing both
ways, provide propaganda cover for rapacious power to expand its domain
with "humanitarian interventions" -- such as the bombing to death of some
3,000 civilians in Afghanistan and the swap of the Taliban for US-backed
warlords, murderers and rapists known as "commanders."
Schulz's criticism ignores the truth in Amnesty's own studies. Amnesty USA
reports that the Bush administration is harboring thousands of foreign
torturers, including several mass murderers. By a simple mathematical
comparison of American and al-Qaeda terror, the latter is a lethal flea.
In the past 50 years, the US has supported and trained state terrorists in
Latin America, Africa and Asia. The toll of their victims is in the
millions. Again, the documentation is in Amnesty's files. The dictator
Suharto's seizure of power in Indonesia was responsible for "one of the
greatest mass murders of the 20^th century," according to the CIA. The US
supplied arms, logistics, intelligence and assassination lists. Britain
supplied warships and black propaganda to cover the trail of blood.
Scholars now put Suharto's victims in 1965P66 at almost a million; in East
Timor, he oversaw the death of one-third of the population: 200,000 men,
women and children.
Today, the mass murderer lives in sumptuous retirement in Jakarta, his
billions safe in foreign banks. Unlike Saddam Hussein, an amateur by
comparison, there will be no show trial for Suharto, who remained
obediently within the US terror network. (One of Suharto's most outspoken
protectors and apologists in the State Department during the 1980s was
Paul Wolfowitz, the current "brains" behind Bush's aggression.)
In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were
routinely attacking and terrorizing the weak, and those dying were black
or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and
Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful,
spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.
This is not to say the threat from al-Qaeda and other fanatical groups is
not real; what the normalizers don't want you to know is that the most
pervasive danger is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in
journalism and scholarship cast always as benign: capable of misjudgment
and blunder, never of high crime. Fueled by religious fanaticism, a
corrupt Americanism and rampant corporate greed, the Bush cabal is
pursuing what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic
modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert
mass discontent into nationalism," inspired by fear of lethal threats.
Bush's America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself and to mankind."
The unspoken truth is that Blair, too, is a menace. "There never has been
a time," said Blair in his address to the US Congress last year, "when the
power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood or when, except in
the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction
for our present day." His fatuous dismissal of history was his way of
warning us off the study of imperialism. He wants us to forget and to fail
to recognize historically the "national security state" that he and Bush
are erecting as a "necessary" alternative to democracy. The father of
fascism, Benito Mussolini, understood this. "Modern fascism," he said,
"should be properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state,
military and corporate power."
Bush, Blair and the normalizers now speak, almost with relish, of opening
mass graves in Iraq. What they do not want you to know is that the largest
mass graves are the result of a popular uprising that followed the 1991
Gulf war, in direct response to a call by President George Bush Sr. to
"take matters into your own hands and force Saddam to step aside." So
successful were the rebels initially that within days Saddam's rule had
collapsed across the south. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed
close at hand.
Then Washington, the tyrant's old paramour who had supplied him with $5bn
worth of conventional arms, chemical and biological weapons and industrial
technology, intervened just in time. The rebels suddenly found themselves
confronted with the United States helping Saddam against them. US forces
prevented them from reaching Iraqi arms depots. They denied them shelter,
and gave Saddam's Republican Guard safe passage through US lines in order
to attack the rebels. US helicopters circled overhead, observing, taking
photographs, while Saddam's forces crushed the uprising. In the north, the
same happened to the Kurdish insurrection. "The Americans did everything
for Saddam," said the writer on the Middle East Said Aburish, "except join
the fight on his side." Bush Sr. did not want a divided Iraq, certainly
not a democratic Iraq. The New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, a
guard dog of US foreign policy, was more to the point. What Washington
wanted was a successful coup by an "iron-fisted junta": Saddam without
Saddam.
Nothing has changed. As Milan Rai documents in his new book, Regime
Unchanged, the most senior and ruthless elements of Saddam's security
network, the Mukha-barat, are now in the pay of the US and Britain,
helping them to combat the resistance and recruit those who will run a
puppet regime behind a facade. A CIA-run and -paid Gestapo of 10,000 will
operate much as they did under Saddam. "What is happening in Iraq," writes
Rai, "is re-Nazification... just as in Germany after the war."
Blair knows this and says nothing. Consider his unctuous words to British
troops in Basra the other day about curtailing the spread of weapons of
mass destruction. Like so many of his deceptions, this covers the fact
that his government has increased the export of weapons and military
equipment to some of the most oppressive regimes on earth, such as Saudi
Arabia, Indonesia and Nepal. To oil-rich Saudi Arabia, home of most of the
11 September hijackers and friend of the Taliban, where women are
tormented and people are executed for apostasy, go major British weapons
systems, along with leg irons, gang chains, shock belts and shackles. To
Indonesia, whose unreconstructed, blood-soaked military is trying to crush
the independence movement in Aceh, go British "riot control" vehicles and
Hawk fighter-bombers.
Bush and Blair have been crowing about Libya's capitulation on weapons of
mass destruction it almost certainly did not have. This is the result, as
Scott Ritter has written, of "coerced concessions given more as a means of
buying time than through any spirit of true cooperation" -- as Bush and
Blair have undermined the very international law upon which real
disarmament is based. On 8 December, the UN General Assembly voted on a
range of resolutions on disarmament. The United States opposed all the
most important ones, including those dealing with nuclear weapons. The
Bush administration has contingency plans, spelt out in the Pentagon's
2002 Nuclear Posture Review, to use nuclear weapons against North Korea,
Syria, Iran and China. Following suit, the UK Defense Secretary, Geoffrey
Hoon, announced that for the first time, Britain would attack non-nuclear
states with nuclear weapons "if necessary."
This is as it was 50 years ago when, according to declassified files, the
British government collaborated with American plans to wage "preventive"
atomic war against the Soviet Union. No public discussion was permitted;
the unthinkable was normalized. Today, history is our warning that, once
again, the true threat is close to home.