Iraq's Epic
Suffering Is Made Invisible
By John Pilger
Znet
September 12, 2003
For
the past few weeks, I have been watching videotapes of the attack on
Iraq, most of them not shown in this country. The tapes concentrate
on the epic suffering of ordinary Iraqis. There are photographs, too,
that were never published here. They show streets and hospitals running
with blood, as American and British forces smashed their way into Iraq
with weapons designed to incinerate and dismember human beings.
It is difficult
viewing, but necessary if one is to understand fully the words of the
Nuremberg judges in 1946 when they laid down the principles of modern
international law: "To initiate a war of aggression... 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."
Guiding me through
this visual evidence of a great crime is the diary of a young law graduate,
Jo Wilding, who was in Baghdad with a group of international human rights
observers. She and the others stayed with Iraqi families as the missiles,
bunker busters and cluster bombs exploded around them. Where possible,
they hurried to the scene of civilian casualties and followed the victims
to hospitals and mortuaries, interviewing eyewitnesses and doctors.
Their work received scant media coverage.
Jo has described
to me, in detail, attacks on civilian targets that were - she is in
no doubt - deliberate. In any case, the sheer ferocity of the assault
on elusive Iraqi defenders could not fail to kill and injure large numbers
of civilians. According to a recent study, up to 10,000 civilians were
killed.
"One of the
stunning things about the quick coalition victory," John Bolton,
George Bush's under-secretary of state for international security, told
me in Washington recently, "was how little damage was done to Iraqi
infrastructure, and how low Iraqi casualties were."
I said, "Well,
it's high if it's 10,000 civilians."
He replied, "Well,
I think it's quite low if you look at the size of the military operation."
Quite low at 10,000.
And multiply that many times when the figure includes the killing of
mostly teenage conscripts who, as a Marine colonel said, "sure
as hell didn't know what hit them". Keep multiplying when the wounded
are added: such as 1,000 children maimed, according to Unicef, by the
delayed blast of cluster bomblets.
What does it take
for journalists with a public voice and responsibility to acknowledge
the truth of such a crime? Are those who stand in front of cameras in
Downing Street and on the White House lawn, incessantly obfuscating
the obvious (a technique they call objectivity), that conditioned? The
resistance to the illegal Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is now propagated
as part of Bush's "war on terror". The deaths of Americans,
Britons and UN people are news; Iraqis flit across the screen: otherwise,
they do not exist.
For Blair's ministers,
the cover-up, like almost everything, originates in Washington. Read
the armed forces minister Adam Ingram's replies to the tireless questioning
by Llewellyn Smith MP and his message is almost identical to Bolton's.
The "regrettable" loss of life is really not too bad, considering
"a military operation of [this] size". As to numbers of people
killed, "we have no way of establishing with any certainty..."
Whoever Adam Ingram is, remember the name, for he embodies the mundane,
routine, amoral apologist for state murder.
Of course, if the
great crime in Iraq was represented not by the poignant moment of a
dead squaddie's flag-draped coffin returning, but by the unrelenting
horror I have watched on unseen videotape, the cover would crack. And
the illusion presented by the Hutton inquiry would be revealed. As it
is, Hutton is the magician Blair's best trick so far, for an inquiry
into the death of one man ensures that real public investigation into
why Blair took Britain into war will not happen. It ensures that while
we are allowed to read internal e-mails in Whitehall, we are denied
scrutiny of the traffic between Blair and Bush, which almost certainly
would expose the biggest lie of all, and reveal that the decision to
invade was taken long before Washington dreamt up the charade of weapons
of mass destruction. That would sink Blair.
Instead, we have
glimpses of truth. On 17 September 2001, six days after the attacks
in America, Bush signed a document, marked Top Secret, in which he directed
the Pentagon to begin planning "military options" for an invasion
of Iraq. In July last year, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security
adviser, told another Bush official: "That decision has been made.
Don't waste your breath" (Washington Post, 12 January 2003; New
Yorker, 31 March 2003). On 2 July last, Air Marshal Sir John Walker,
the former chief of defence intelligence and deputy chair of the Joint
Intelligence Committee, wrote a confidential memo to MPs to alert them
that the "commitment to war" was made a year ago. "Thereafter,"
he wrote, "the whole process of reason, other reason, yet other
reason, humanitarian, morality, regime change, terrorism, finally imminent
WMD attack... was merely covering fire."
The unfettered disclosure
of this would present an uncontrollable crisis to the clique that runs
Britain: the secret service, the civil service, Downing Street, the
favoured City and the courted media. Few spooks and mandarins have much
time for the strange, Messianic Blair, but they will strive to protect
him in order to protect themselves and to ensure that their version
of Lord Curzon's "great game" (ie, imperialism), continues
unopposed.
It is a game exemplified
by the arms fair that opened in London on 9 September, hosted by a government
and an arms industry that are together the world's second-biggest merchant
of death, selling to the usual tyrants and state killers. Their ruthlessness
was expressed when the same fair last convened in 2001, and 11 September
happened. Public events, such as the TUC conference, were abandoned
out of respect for the victims in New York and Washington. The arms
fair was told to keep going.
"The kaleidoscope
has been shaken," Blair said in the wake of 11 September. "The
pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let
us re-order this world around us." Whoever wrote that inanity might
have left Downing Street now; but Blair tells us constantly that he
believes what he says, and perhaps he does. Several of the defendants
at Nuremberg offered the same plea, and so have other state murderers
at The Hague. Like them, Blair should have his day in court.