Withdraw
The Troops
By Tariq Ali
12 August, 2004
The Guardian
Most legends contain a small grain of
truth, but none is to be found in the fraudulent images being presented
each day by the BBC (and the US networks). The print media is not much
better. Official propaganda is constantly repeated in sentences such
as: "On June 28 the United States and its coalition partners transferred
sovereign control of Iraq to an interim government headed by prime minister
Ayad Allawi. The transfer of sovereignty ended more than a year of American-led
occupation". Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies admit that the
size of the resistance increases every day. If Moqtada al-Sadr were
to be captured or killed in the fighting taking place in Najaf, the
steady trickle of recruits could become a flood. In such a situation
and with no official opposition to the occupation in the Commons it
should be the responsibility of the media to ensure that some truth,
at least, is regularly reported.
The capitulation
of the BBC has been in evidence ever since the Hutton whitewash. This
is not just a question of journalists censoring themselves. Earlier
this summer the new director-general Mark Thompson reportedly told a
meeting of the corporation's news board there was a "perception"
that BBC news was too leftwing and critical of the government - a perception
which needed to be corrected. He must be happy now.
The notion that
Iraq today is a sovereign state governed by Iraqis is a grotesque fiction.
Every Iraqi citizen, regardless of political views or religious affiliation,
is aware of the actual status of the country. And if the BBC carries
on in this fashion, its credibility, already at an all-time low, could
disappear altogether. Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser,
declared some months back: "We want to change the Iraqi mind."
But the US-funded Arab TV channel called Truth has proved a dismal failure.
And now, to prevent any alternative images from reaching Iraqis and
the rest of the world, a plucky puppet at the "ministry of information"
has banned al-Jazeera TV from reporting out of Iraq - a traditional
recipe from an oppressive cookbook.
The "handover",
designed largely to convince US citizens that they could now relax and
re-elect Bush, was also an invitation to the western media to downgrade
coverage of Iraq, which it dutifully did. As Paul Krugman noted in the
New York Times last week: "Iraq stories moved to the inside pages
of newspapers, and largely off TV screens. Many people got the impression
that things had improved. Even journalists were taken in: newspaper
stories asserted that the rate of US losses there fell after the hand-off.
(Actual figures: 42 American soldiers died in June, and 54 in July)."
Like previous confections
to justify the war, this one is not working either. Of the two Iraqis
plucked from obscurity to be the front men for the occupation, "President"
Yawar is a relatively harmless telecoms manager from Saudi Arabia. He
was perfectly happy to don tribal gear for official functions and photo
ops with Rumsfeld and the boys. "Prime minister" Allawi was
at one time a low-grade intelligence employee for Saddam, reporting
on dissident Iraqis in London. Subsequently, Anglo-American intelligence
outfits recruited him. After the first Gulf war he was sent to destabilize
the regime. His hirelings bombed a cinema and a bus carrying children.
Before the war Allawi
helped manufacture the 45-minute WMD delivery systems warning for the
dodgy dossier men in No 10. After the occupation he was rewarded and
put on the "governing council". He then hired a lobbying firm,
which spent $370,000 campaigning in Washington for him to be made prime
minister, and also got him a column in the Washington Post.
As "prime minister"
he cultivates a thuggish image. On July 17 in a remarkable despatch
from Baghdad, Paul McGeough, the Australian correspondent, (and former
editor of the Sydney Morning Herald) alleged: "Iyad Allawi, the
new prime minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as
six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before
Washington handed control of the country to his interim government,
according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.
"They say the
prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall
in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which
they were held at the al-Amariyah security center ... They say Dr Allawi
told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and
they 'deserved worse than death'."
McGeough's report
continued: "The prime minister's office has denied the entirety
of the witness accounts in a written statement ... saying Dr Allawi
had never visited the center and he did not carry a gun. But the informants
told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about
a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the prime minister's
personal security team watched in stunned silence." McGeough appears
regularly on TV and radio to defend his story, which does not go away.
The fact is that
Iraq is in a much bigger mess today than before the war. The situation
was summed up by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib prison: "We want
electricity in our homes, not up the arse."
The citizens of
the aggressor states can see this for themselves and regardless of the
media will, one must hope, punish their leaders for taking them to war
- regardless of the fact that the alternatives on offer are so weak.
In the US, Senator Kerry is an unconvincing politician. Unlike some
of his liberal apologists, he does not like to portray the Democrats
as the consistently less aggressive of the two parties. It was, after
all, Democratic - not Republican - presidents who launched the wars
in Korea and Vietnam. The Republican Eisenhower's electoral appeal in
1952 was based on being the more peaceful of the two candidates. In
1960 Kennedy attacked the Republicans for the "missile gap",
denouncing their weakness before the Soviet threat. Carter, not Reagan,
launched the second cold war. And in 1992 Clinton was thundering against
Bush senior's weakness on Cuba and China. Now Bush junior has outpaced
any Democratic rival in accelerated militarism. But it is enough to
remember that on the eve of 9/11, Hillary Clinton and Joseph Lieberman
organized a letter, signed by nearly every Democratic senator, denouncing
Bush's Middle East policies. They wanted more support for Israel.
It is necessary
to bear this record in mind, as pressure has built up for the US left
to fall into line behind Kerry. Many will, understandably enough, vote
for him to get rid of a warmonger government. If they succeed, he must
be put under immediate pressure to withdraw from Iraq. If there had
been no resistance in Iraq, the triumphalism of warmongers would have
drowned out oppositions of every hue. The defeat of the warmongers,
if it happens, will be the outcome of what is happening in Baghdad and
Basra, Falluja and Najaf. Even if they try and brush aside the 37,000
Iraqi civilians killed in this conflict, according to a recent estimate
by an Iraq-based NGO, Bush and Blair will not forget the names of the
cities whose people refuse to surrender. There is only one serious option:
the unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops from Iraq.
· An updated
paperback edition of Tariq Ali's book, Bush in Babylon: the Recolonization
of Iraq, is published by Verso next month
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