The Daily
Horrors Of Iraq
Have Been Brought Home
By
John Pilger
21July , 2005
Socialist
Worker
No one doubts the atrocious inhumanity
of those who planted the bombs that killed and caused mayhem in London.
No one should also doubt that this outrage has been coming since the
day Tony Blair joined George Bush in their bloody invasion and occupation
of Iraq.
They are Blairs
bombs, and he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet
another unctuous speech about other peoples violence. He was warned.
Indeed, the only reliable warning from British intelligence in the run-up
to the invasion of Iraq was that which predicted a sharp increase in
terrorism with Britain and Britons a target.
Had Blair heeded
that warning--instead of conspiring to deceive the nation that Iraq
offered a threat--the Londoners who died yesterday might be alive today,
along with tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
Three weeks ago,
a classified CIA report revealed that the Anglo-American invasion of
Iraq had turned that country into a focal point of terrorism. None of
the intelligence agencies regarded Iraq as such a flashpoint before
the invasion. On the contrary, in 2003, the CIA reported that Iraq exported
no terrorist threat to his neighbors, and that Saddam Hussein
was implacably hostile to al-Qaeda.
Blair and Bushs
invasion changed all that. In invading a stricken and defenseless country
at the heart of the Islamic and Arab world, Blairs adventure became
self-fulfilling, and his epic irresponsibility has brought the daily
horrors of Iraq home to Britain.
For more than a
year, he has urged the British to move on from Iraq, and
this week, it seemed that his spin doctors and good fortune had joined
hands. The awarding of the 2012 Olympics to London created the fleeting
illusion that all was well, regardless of messy events in a faraway
country.
Above all, the G8 meeting in Scotland and its accompanying "Make
Poverty History" campaign and circus of celebrities served as a
cover for what is arguably the greatest political scandal of modern
times: an illegal, rapacious invasion conceived in lies.
Over the past two
weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the G8, its marches and
pop concerts, and another global event has been salutary.
The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no coverage,
yet the evidence it has produced, the most searing to date, has been
the silent specter at the Geldof extravaganzas.
The tribunal is
a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation,
the kind governments dare not hold. Its expert, eyewitness testimonies,
said the author Arundhati Roy, a tribunal jury member, demonstrate
that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not
aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq.
The most shocking
was given by Dahr Jamail--for me, the finest reporter working in Iraq.
He shames the flak-jacketed, cliché-crunching camp followers
known as embeds. He described how the hospitals of besieged
Falluja had been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment--with
U.S. Marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and
American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and
emergency blood prevented from reaching them. Children and the elderly
were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
We have heard little
of this. Imagine for a moment the London hospitals that received the
victims of yesterdays bombing under such an attack. Unimaginable?
But it happens, in our name.
The two men responsible
for this, George Bush and Tony Blair, arrived smiling at the G8 meeting
at Gleneagles. No one in the British mainstream has made
the obvious connection of what they have done in Iraq. No one has stood
up and said that Blairs smoke-and-mirrors debt cancellation
at best amounts to less than the money the government spent in a week
brutalizing Iraq, where British and American violence is the cause of
the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein
was overthrown.
The unstated theme
of the G8 week has been silencing and pacifying and co-opting dissent
and truth. The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop stars
in Hyde Park beckoned a willful, self-satisfied ignorance. There were
no images of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their
heads, cut down by Bush's snipers. They and the suffering inflicted
on their country have been airbrushed.
On the front page
of the Guardian, the Age of Irony celebrated as real life became more
satirical than satire could ever be. There was Bob Geldof resting his
smiling face on smiling Blairs shoulder--the war criminal and
his knighted jester.
Elsewhere, there
was a heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs
as saviors of the worlds poor while lauding compassionate
George Bushs war on terror as one of his generations
greatest achievements; and there was Gordon Brown, the enforcer of unfair
rules of trade, saying incredibly that unfair rules of trade shackle
poor people; and Paul Wolfowitz, beaming: This is the man who,
before he was handed control of the World Bank, devised much of Bushs
so-called neo-conservative putsch, the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion
of endless war.
And if you missed
all that, there is a downloadable pdf kit from one Campaign
e-mail to help you organize your very own ongoing Live8 party.
The suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldof decreed
in an environmental theme park in Cornwall, far from the vaunted global
audience, was described correctly by Andy Kershaw as musical apartheid.
For the politicians
and pop stars and church leaders and polite people who believed Blair
and Brown when they declared their great moral crusade against
poverty, Iraq was an embarrassment. The killing of more than 100,000
Iraqi civilians by mostly American gunfire--reported in a peer-reviewed
study in The Lancet--was deleted from mainstream debate.
Has there ever been
a censorship as complete and insidious and ingenious as this? In our
free societies, the unmentionable is that the state has lost its
mind and is punishing so many innocent people, wrote the playwright
Arthur Miller, and so the evidence has to be internally denied.
Not only denied, but distracted by an entire court of jesters.
Deploying the unction
of Geldof, Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney and company, the invaders and
plunderers of Iraq and the pawnbrokers of Africa, headquartered in London
and Washington, have pulled off an unprecedented scam: the antithesis
of February 15, 2003, when 2 million people brought both their hearts
and brains and anger to the streets of London.
The people killed
and maimed in Iraq and the people willfully impoverished in Africa by
our governments and our institutions in our name, deserve the return
of that anger--before Blair and his court can exploit the atrocity and
tragedy that has now befallen London, and which need never have happened.