Do
not forget the horror
By John Pilger
21 April, 2003
Last Sunday, seated in the
audience at the Bafta television awards ceremony, I was struck by the
silence. Here were many of the most influential members of the liberal
elite, the writers, producers, dramatists, journalists and managers
of our main source of information, television; and not one broke the
silence. It was as though we were disconnected from the world outside:
a world of rampant, rapacious power and great crimes committed in our
name by our government and its foreign master. Iraq is the "test
case", says the Bush regime, which every day sails closer to Mussolini's
definition of fascism: the merger of a militarist state with corporate
power. Iraq is a test case for western liberals, too. As the suffering
mounts in that stricken country, with Red Cross doctors describing "incredible''
levels of civilian casualties, the choice of the next conquest, Syria
or Iran, is "debated'' on the BBC, as if it were a World Cup venue.
The unthinkable is being
normalised. The American essayist Edward Herman wrote: "There is
usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable,
with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals
... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas,
a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate
flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts,
and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general
public.''
Herman wrote that following
the 1991 Gulf War, whose nocturnal images of American bulldozers burying
thousands of teenage Iraqi conscripts, many of them alive and trying
to surrender, were never shown. Thus, the slaughter was normalised.
A study released just before Christmas 1991 by the Medical Educational
Trust revealed that more 200,000 Iraqi men, women and children were
killed or died as a direct result of the American-led attack. This was
barely reported, and the homicidal nature of the "war'' never entered
public consciousness in this country, let alone America.
The Pentagon's deliberate
destruction of Iraq's civilian infrastructure, such as power sources
and water and sewage plants, together with the imposition of an embargo
as barbaric as a medieval siege, produced a degree of suffering never
fully comprehended in the West. Documented evidence was available, volumes
of it; by the late 1990s, more than 6,000 infants were dying every month,
and the two senior United Nations officials responsible for humanitarian
relief in Iraq, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned, protesting
the embargo's hidden agenda. Halliday called it "genocide".
As of last July, the United
States, backed by the Blair government, was wilfully blocking humanitarian
supplies worth $5.4bn, everything from vaccines and plasma bags to simple
painkillers, all of which Iraq had paid for and the Security Council
had approved.
Last month's attack by the
two greatest military powers on a demoralised, sick and largely defenceless
population was the logical extension of this barbarism. This is now
called a "victory", and the flags are coming out. Last week,
the submarine HMS Turbulent returned to Plymouth, flying the Jolly Roger,
the pirates' emblem. How appropriate. This nuclear-powered machine fired
some 30 American Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraq. Each missile cost
£700,000: a total of £21m. That alone would provide desperate
Basra with food, water and medicines.
Imagine: what did Commander
Andrew McKendrick's 30 missiles hit? How many people did they kill or
maim in a population nearly half of which are children? Maybe, Commander,
you targeted a palace with gold taps in the bathroom, or a "command
and control facility", as the Americans and Geoffrey Hoon like
to lie. Or perhaps each of your missiles had a sensory device that could
distinguish George Bush's "evil-doers'' from toddlers. What is
certain is that your targets did not include the Ministry of Oil.
When the invasion began,
the British public was called upon to "support'' troops sent illegally
and undemocratically to kill people with whom we had no quarrel. "The
ultimate test of our professionalism'' is how Commander McKendrick describes
an unprovoked attack on a nation with no submarines, no navy and no
air force, and now with no clean water and no electricity and, in many
hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to amputate small limbs shredded
by shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how this is done, with a gag in the
patient's mouth.
One child, Ali Ismaeel Abbas,
the boy who lost his parents and his arms in a missile attack, has been
flown to a modern hospital in Kuwait. Publicity has saved him. Tony
Blair says he will "do everything he can'' to help him. This must
be the ultimate insult to the memory of all the children of Iraq who
have died violently in Blair's war, and as a result of the embargo that
Blair enthusiastically endorsed. The saving of Ali substitutes a media
spectacle of charity for our right to knowledge of the extent of the
crime committed against the young in our name. Let us now see the pictures
of the "truckload of dozens of dismembered women and children''
that the Red Cross doctors saw.
As Ali was flown to Kuwait,
the Americans were preventing Save The Children from sending a plane
with medical supplies into northern Iraq, where 40,000 are desperate.
According to the UN, half the population of Iraq has only enough food
to last a few weeks. The head of the World Food Programme says that
40 million people around the world are now seriously at risk because
of the distraction of the humanitarian disaster in Iraq.
And this is "liberation"?
No, it is bloody conquest, witnessed by America's mass theft of Iraq's
resources and natural wealth. Ask the crowds in the streets, for whom
the fear and hatred of Saddam Hussein have been transferred, virtually
overnight, to Bush and Blair and perhaps to "us''.
Such is the magnitude of
Blair's folly and crime that the contrivance of his vindication is urgent.
As if speaking for the vindicators, Andrew Marr, the BBC's political
editor, reported: "[Blair] said they would be able to take Baghdad
without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating.
And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.''
What constitutes a bloodbath
to the BBC's man in Downing Street? Did the murder of the 3,000 people
in New York's Twin Towers qualify? If his answer is yes, then the thousands
killed in Iraq during the past month is a bloodbath. One report says
that more than 3,000 Iraqis were killed within 24 hours or less. Or
are the vindicators saying that the lives of one set of human beings
have less value than those recognisable to us? Devaluation of human
life has always been essential to the pursuit of imperial power, from
the Congo to Vietnam, from Chechnya to Iraq.
If, as Milan Kundera wrote,
"the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting", then we must not forget. We must not forget
Blair's lies about weapons of mass destruction which, as Hans Blix now
says, were based on "fabricated evidence". We must not forget
his callous attempts to deny that an American missile killed 62 people
in a Baghdad market. And we must not forget the reason for the bloodbath.
Last September, in announcing its National Security Strategy, Bush served
notice that America intended to dominate the world by force. Iraq was
indeed the "test case". The rest was a charade.
We must not forget that a
British defence secretary has announced, for the first time, that his
government is prepared to launch an attack with nuclear weapons. He
echoes Bush, of course. An ascendant mafia now rules the United States,
and the Prime Minister is in thrall to it. Together, they empty noble
words liberation, freedom and democracy of their true
meaning. The unspoken truth is that behind the bloody conquest of Iraq
is the conquest of us all: of our minds, our humanity and our self-respect
at the very least. If we say and do nothing, victory over us is assured.