Iraq
Is A War Of National Liberation
By John Pilger
17 April, 2004
New Statesman
Four years ago, I traveled the length
of Iraq, from the hills where St. Matthew is buried in the Kurdish north
to the heartland of Mesopotamia, and Baghdad, and the Shia south. I
have seldom felt as safe in any country. Once, in the Edwardian colonnade
of Baghdads book market, a young man shouted something at me about
the hardship his family had been forced to endure under the embargo
imposed by America and Britain. What happened next was typical of Iraqis;
a passerby calmed the man, putting his arm around his shoulder, while
another was quickly at my side. "Forgive him," he said reassuringly.
"We do not connect the people of the west with the actions of their
governments. You are welcome."
At one of the melancholy
evening auctions where Iraqis come to sell their most intimate possessions
out of urgent need, a woman with two infants watched as their pushchairs
went for pennies, and a man who had collected doves since he was 15
came with his last bird and its cage; and yet people said to me: "You
are welcome." Such grace and dignity were often expressed by those
Iraqi exiles who loathed Saddam Hussein and opposed both the economic
siege and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland; thousands of
these anti-Saddamites marched against the war in London last year, to
the chagrin of the warmongers, who never understood the dichotomy of
their principled stand.
Were I to undertake
the same journey in Iraq today, I might not return alive. Foreign terrorists
have ensured that. With the most lethal weapons that billions of dollars
can buy, and the threats of their cowboy generals and the panic-stricken
brutality of their foot soldiers, more than 120,000 of these invaders
have ripped up the fabric of a nation that survived the years of Saddam
Hussein, just as they oversaw the destruction of its artifacts. They
have brought to Iraq a daily, murderous violence which surpasses that
of a tyrant who never promised a fake democracy.
Amnesty International
reports that US-led forces have "shot Iraqis dead during demonstrations,
tortured and ill-treated prisoners, arrested people arbitrarily and
held them indefinitely, demolished houses in acts of revenge and collective
punishment."
In Fallujah, US
marines, described as "tremendously precise" by their psychopathic
spokesman, slaughtered up to 600 people, according to hospital directors.
They did it with aircraft and heavy weapons deployed in urban areas,
as revenge for the killing of four American mercenaries. Many of the
dead of Fallujah were women and children and the elderly. Only the Arab
television networks, notably al-Jazeera, have shown the true scale of
this crime, while the Anglo-American media continue to channel and amplify
the lies of the White House and Downing Street.
"Writing exclusively
for the Observer before a make-or-break summit with President George
Bush this week," sang Britains former premier liberal newspaper
on 11 April, "[Tony Blair] gave full backing to American tactics
in Iraq... saying that the government would not flinch from its historic
struggle despite the efforts of insurgents and terrorists."
That this "exclusive"
was not presented as parody shows that the propaganda engine that drove
the lies of Blair and Bush on weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda
links for almost two years is still in service. On BBC news bulletins
and Newsnight, Blairs "terrorists" are still currency,
a term that is never applied to the principal source and cause of the
terrorism, the foreign invaders, who have now killed at least 11,000
civilians, according to Amnesty and others. The overall figure, including
conscripts, may be as high as 55,000.
That a nationalist
uprising has been under way in Iraq for more than a year, uniting at
least 15 major groups, most of them opposed to the old regime, has been
suppressed in a mendacious lexicon invented in Washington and London
and reported incessantly, CNN-style. "Remnants" and "tribalists"
and "fundamentalists" dominate, while Iraq is denied the legacy
of a history in which much of the modern world is rooted. The "first-anniversary
story" about a laughable poll claiming that half of all Iraqis
felt better off now under the occupation is a case in point. The BBC
and the rest swallowed it whole. For the truth, I recommend the courageous
daily reporting of Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad.
Even now, as the
uprising spreads, there is only cryptic gesturing at the obvious: that
this is a war of national liberation and that the enemy is "us."
The pro-invasion Sydney Morning Herald is typical. Having expressed
"surprise" at the uniting of Shias and Sunnis, the papers
Baghdad correspondent recently described "how GI bullies are making
enemies of their Iraqi friends" and how he and his driver had been
threatened by Americans. "Ill take you out quick as a flash,
motherf****er!" a soldier told the reporter. That this was merely
a glimpse of the terror and humiliation that Iraqis have to suffer every
day in their own country was not made clear; yet this newspaper has
published image after unctuous image of mournful American soldiers,
inviting sympathy for an invader who has "taken out" thousands
of innocent men, women and children.
What we do routinely
in the imperial west, wrote Richard Falk, professor of international
relations at Princeton, is propagate "through a self-righteous,
one-way moral/legal screen positive images of western values and innocence
that are threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence."
Thus, western state terrorism is erased, and a tenet of western journalism
is to excuse or minimize "our" culpability, however atrocious.
Our dead are counted; theirs are not. Our victims are worthy; theirs
are not.
This is an old story;
there have been many Iraqs, or what Blair calls "historic struggles"
waged against "insurgents and terrorists." Take Kenya in the
1950s. The approved version is still cherished in the west first
popularized in the press, then in fiction and movies; and like Iraq,
it is a lie. "The task to which we have set our minds," declared
the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is to civilize a great mass of
human beings who are in a very primitive moral and social state."
The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were never called nationalists,
was British government policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that
the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white settlers.
In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32 Europeans, compared with the estimated
10,000 Kenyans killed by the British, who ran concentration camps where
the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month.
Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children were commonplace.
"The special prisons," wrote the imperial historian V.G. Kiernan,
"were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese establishments."
None of this was reported. The "demonic terror" was all one
way: black against white. The racist message was unmistakable.
It was the same
in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of the American massacre in the village
of My Lai was described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American
tragedy," not a Vietnamese one. In fact, there were many massacres
like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported at the time.
The real tragedy
of soldiers policing a colonial occupation is also suppressed. More
than 58,000 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same number,
according to a veterans study, killed themselves on their return
home. Dr. Doug Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium project
following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more than 10,000 American
troops have since died as a result, many from contamination illness.
When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and shook
his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he said. "Tens
of thousands of Iraqis men, women and children were contaminated.
Right through the 1990s, at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi
officials approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the Ministry
of Defense and ask, plead, for help with decontamination. The Iraqis
didnt use uranium; it was not their weapon. I watched them put
their case, describing the deaths and horrific deformities, and I watched
them rebuffed. It was pathetic." During last years invasion,
both American and British forces again used uranium-tipped shells, leaving
whole areas so "hot" with radiation that only military survey
teams in full protective clothing can approach them. No warning or medical
help is given to Iraqi civilians; thousands of children play in these
zones. The "coalition" has refused to allow the International
Atomic Energy Agency to send experts to assess what Rokke describes
as "a catastrophe."
When will this catastrophe
be properly reported by those meant to keep the record straight? When
will the BBC and others investigate the conditions of some 10,000 Iraqis
held without charge, many of them tortured, in US concentration camps
inside Iraq, and the corralling, with razor wire, of entire Iraqi villages?
When will the BBC and others stop referring to "the handover of
Iraqi sovereignty" on 30 June, although there will be no such handover?
The new regime will be stooges, with each ministry controlled by American
officials and with its stooge army and stooge police force run by Americans.
A Saddamite law prohibiting trade unions for public sector workers will
stay in force. Leading members of Saddams infamous secret police,
the Mukhabarat, will run "state security," directed by the
CIA. The US military will have the same "status of forces"
agreement that they impose on the host nations of their 750 bases around
the world, which in effect leaves them in charge. Iraq will be a US
colony, like Haiti. And when will journalists have the professional
courage to report the pivotal role that Israel has played in this grand
colonial design for the Middle East?
A few weeks ago,
Rick Mercier, a young columnist for the Free-Lance Star, a small paper
in Virginia, did what no other journalist has done this past year. He
apologized to his readers for the travesty of the reporting of events
leading to the attack on Iraq. "Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims
drive our coverage," he wrote. "Sorry we let a band of self-serving
Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powells
performance at the United Nations... Maybe well do a better job
next war."
Well done, Rick
Mercier. But listen to the silence of your colleagues on both sides
of the Atlantic. No one expects Fox or Wapping or the Daily Telegraph
to relent. But what about David Astors beacon of liberalism, the
Observer, which stood against the invasion of Egypt in 1956 and its
attendant lies? The Observer not only backed last years unprovoked,
illegal assault on Iraq; it helped create the mendacious atmosphere
in which Blair could get away with his crime. The reputation of the
Observer, and the fact that it published occasional mitigating material,
meant that lies and myths gained legitimacy. A front-page story gave
credence to the bogus claim that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks
in the US. And there were those unnamed western "intelligence sources,"
all those straw men, all those hints, in David Roses two-page
"investigation" headlined "The Iraqi connection,"
that left readers with the impression that Saddam Hussein might well
have had a lot to do with the attacks of 11 September 2001. "There
are occasions in history," wrote Rose, "when the use of force
is both right and sensible. This is one of them." Tell that to
11,000 dead civilians, Mr. Rose.
It is said that
British officers in Iraq now describe the "tactics" of their
American comrades as "appalling." No, the very nature of a
colonial occupation is appalling, as the families of 13 Iraqis killed
by British soldiers, who are taking the British government to court,
will agree. If the British military brass understand an inkling of their
own colonial past, not least the bloody British retreat from Iraq 83
years ago, they will whisper in the ear of the little Wellington-cum-Palmerston
in 10 Downing Street: "Get out now, before we are thrown out."
Copyright: New Statesman.