Six Days Of Shame
By John Pilger
March 26, 2003
Today is a day of shame for
the British military as it declares the Iraqi city of Basra, with a
stricken population of 600,000, a "military target".
You will not read or hear
those words in the establishment media that claims to speak for Britain.
But they are true. With Basra,
shame is now our signature, forged by Blair and Bush.
Having destroyed its water
and power supplies, cut off food supply routes and having failed to
crack its human defences, they are now preparing to lay siege to Iraq's
second city which is more than 40 per cent children.
What an ignominious moment
in British history. Here is an impoverished country under attack by
a superpower, the United States, which has unimaginable wealth and the
world's most destructive weapons, and its "coalition" accomplice,
Britain, which boasts one of the world's best "professional"
armies.
Believing their own propaganda,
the military brass has been stunned by the Iraqi resistance.
They have tried to belittle
the militia defending Basra with lurid stories that its fighters are
killing each other.
The truth is that the Iraqis
are fighting like lions to defend not a tyrant but their homeland. It
is a truth the overwhelming majority of decent Britons will admire.
The historical comparison
Tony Blair and his propagandists fear is that of the British defending
themselves against invasion. That happened 60 years ago and now "we"
are the rapacious invaders.
Yesterday, Blair said that
400,000 Iraqi children had died in the past five years from malnutrition
and related causes. He said "huge stockpiles of humanitarian aid"
and clean water awaited them in Kuwait, if only the Iraqi regime would
allow safe passage.
In fact, voluminous evidence,
including that published by the United Nations Children's Fund, makes
clear that the main reason these children have died is an enduring siege,
a 12-year embargo driven by America and Britain.
As of last July, $5.4billion
worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN and paid for by the
Iraqi government, were blocked by Washington, with the Blair government's
approval. The former assistant secretary general of the UN, Denis Halliday,
who was sent to Iraq to set up the "oil for food programme",
described the effects of the embargo as "nothing less than genocide".
Similar words have been used by his successor, Hans Von Sponeck.
Both men resigned in protest,
saying the embargo merely reinforced the power of Saddam.
Both called Blair a liar.
And now Blair's troops are
firing their wire-guided missiles to "soften up" Basra.
I have walked the city's
streets, along a road blown to pieces by a US missile. The casualties
were children, of course, because children are everywhere. I held a
handkerchief over my face as I stood in a school playground with a teacher
and several hundred malnourished youngsters.
The dust blew in from the
southern battlefields of the 1991 Gulf War, which have never been cleaned
up because the US and British governments have denied Iraq the specialist
equipment.
The dust, Dr Jawad Al-Ali
told me, carries "the seeds of our death". In the children's
wards of Basra's main hospital, deaths from a range of hitherto unseen
cancers are common and specialists have little doubt that up to half
the population of southern Iraq will die from cancers linked to the
use of a weapon of mass destruction used by the Americans and British
- uranium tipped shells and missiles.
ONCE again, the Americans
are deploying what Professor Doug Rokke, a former US Army physicist,
calls "a form of nuclear weapon that contaminates everything and
everyone".
Today, each round fired by
US tanks contains 4,500 grams of solid uranium, whose particles, breathed
or ingested, can cause cancer.
This, and the use by both
the Allies of new kinds of cluster bombs, is being covered up.
Once again, the British public
is being denied the reality of war.
Images of bandaged children
in hospital wards are appearing on TV but you do not see the result
of a Tornado's cluster bombing.
You are not being shown children
scalped by shrapnel, with legs reduced to bloody pieces of string.
Such images are "not
acceptable", because they will disturb viewers - and the authorities
do not want that. These "unseen" images are the truth. Iraqi
parents have to look at their mutilated children, so why shouldn't those
of us, in whose name they were slaughtered, see what they see?
Why shouldn't we share their
pain? Why shouldn't we see the true nature of this criminal invasion?
Other wars were sanitised,
allowing them to be repeated.
If you have satellite TV,
try to find the Al Jazeera channel, which has distinguished itself with
its coverage. When the Americans bombed Afghanistan, one of their "smart"
bombs destroyed the Al Jazeera office in Kabul. Few believe it was an
accident. Rather, it was a testimony to the channel's independent journalism.
Remember, it is not those
who oppose this war who need to justify themselves, regardless of Blair's
calls to "support our troops". There is only one way to support
them - bring them home without delay.
In 1932, Iraqis threw out
their British colonial rulers. In 1958, they got rid of the Hashemite
monarchy.
Iraqis have shown they can
overthrow dictators against the odds. So why have they not been able
to throw out Saddam?
Because the US and Britain
armed him and propped him up while it suited them, making sure that
when they tired of him, they would be the only alternative to his rule
and the profiteers of his nation's resources. Imperialism has always
functioned like that.
The "new Iraq",
as Blair calls it, will have many models, such as Haiti, the Dominican
Republic and Nicaragua, all of them American conquests and American
ruled until Washington allowed a vicious dictatorship to take over.
Saddam only came to power
after the Americans helped install his Ba'ath Party in 1979. "That
was my favourite coup," said the CIA officer in charge.
Keep in mind the cynicism
behind these truths when you next hear Blair's impassioned insincerity
- and when you glimpse, if you can, the "unacceptable" images
of children killed and mangled in your name, and in the cause of what
the Prime Minister calls "our simple patriotism".
It's the kind of patriotism,
wrote Tolstoy, "that is nothing else but a means of obtaining for
the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the
abdication of human dignity, reason and conscience."