Bush's
Vietnam
By John Pilger
New Statesman
26 June, 2003
America's two "great victories" since 11 September 2001 are
unraveling. In Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually
no authority and no money, and would collapse without American guns.
Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless
of showcase improvements, the situation of women and children remains
desperate. The token woman in Karzai's cabinet, the courageous physician
Sima Samar, has been forced out of government and is now in constant
fear of her life, with an armed guard outside her office door and another
at her gate. Murder, rape and child abuse are committed with impunity
by the private armies of America's "friends", the warlords
whom Washington has bribed with millions of dollars, cash in hand, to
give the pretence of stability.
"We are in a combat
zone the moment we leave this base," an American colonel told me
at Bagram airbase, near Kabul. "We are shot at every day, several
times a day." When I said that surely he had come to liberate and
protect the people, he belly-laughed.
American troops are rarely
seen in Afghanistan's towns. They escort US officials at high speed
in armored vans with blackened windows and military vehicles, mounted
with machine-guns, in front and behind. Even the vast Bagram base was
considered too insecure for the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
during his recent, fleeting visit. So nervous are the Americans that
a few weeks ago they "accidentally" shot dead four government
soldiers in the center of Kabul, igniting the second major street protest
against their presence in a week.
On the day I left Kabul,
a car bomb exploded on the road to the airport, killing four German
soldiers, members of the international security force Isaf. The Germans'
bus was lifted into the air; human flesh lay on the roadside. When British
soldiers arrived to "seal off" the area, they were watched
by a silent crowd, squinting into the heat and dust, across a divide
as wide as that which separated British troops from Afghans in the 19th
century, and the French from Algerians and Americans from Vietnamese.
In Iraq, scene of the second
"great victory", there are two open secrets. The first is
that the "terrorists" now besieging the American occupation
force represent an armed resistance that is almost certainly supported
by the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-war propaganda, opposed
their enforced "liberation" (see Jonathan Steele's investigation,
19 March 2003, www.guardian.co.uk). The second secret is that there
is emerging evidence of the true scale of the Anglo-American killing,
pointing to the bloodbath Bush and Blair have always denied.
Comparisons with Vietnam
have been made so often over the years that I hesitate to draw another.
However, the similarities are striking: for example, the return of expressions
such as "sucked into a quagmire". This suggests, once again,
that the Americans are victims, not invaders: the approved Hollywood
version when a rapacious adventure goes wrong. Since Saddam Hussein's
statue was toppled almost three months ago, more Americans have been
killed than during the war. Ten have been killed and 25 wounded in classic
guerrilla attacks on roadblocks and checkpoints which may number as
many as a dozen a day.
The Americans call the guerrillas
"Saddam loyalists" and "Ba'athist fighters", in
the same way they used to dismiss the Vietnamese as "communists".
Recently, in Falluja, in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, it was clearly
not the presence of Ba'athists or Saddamists, but the brutal behavior
of the occupiers, who fired point-blank at a crowd, that inspired the
resistance. The American tanks gunning down a family of shepherds is
reminiscent of the gunning down of a shepherd, his family and sheep
by "coalition" aircraft in a "no-fly zone" four
years ago, whose aftermath I filmed and which evoked, for me, the murderous
games American aircraft used to play in Vietnam, gunning down farmers
in their fields, children on their buffaloes.
On 12 June, a large American
force attacked a "terrorist base" north of Baghdad and left
more than 100 dead, according to a US spokesman. The term "terrorist"
is important, because it implies that the likes of al-Qaeda are attacking
the liberators, and so the connection between Iraq and 11 September
is made, which in pre-war propaganda was never made.
More than 400 prisoners were
taken in this operation. The majority have reportedly joined thousands
of Iraqis in a "holding facility" at Baghdad airport: a concentration
camp along the lines of Bagram, from where people are shipped to Guantanamo
Bay. In Afghanistan, the Americans pick up taxi drivers and send them
into oblivion, via Bagram. Like Pinochet's boys in Chile, they are making
their perceived enemies "disappear".
"Search and destroy",
the scorched-earth tactic from Vietnam, is back. In the arid south-eastern
plains of Afghanistan, the village of Niazi Qala no longer stands. American
airborne troops swept down before dawn on 30 December 2001 and slaughtered,
among others, a wedding party. Villagers said that women and children
ran towards a dried pond, seeking protection from the gunfire, and were
shot as they ran. After two hours, the aircraft and the attackers left.
According to a United Nations investigation, 52 people were killed,
including 25 children. "We identified it as a military target,"
says the Pentagon, echoing its initial response to the My Lai massacre
35 years ago.
The targeting of civilians
has long been a journalistic taboo in the west. Accredited monsters
did that, never "us". The civilian death toll of the 1991
Gulf war was wildly underestimated. Almost a year later, a comprehensive
study by the Medical Education Trust in London estimated that more than
200,000 Iraqis had died during and immediately after the war, as a direct
or indirect consequence of attacks on civilian infrastructure. The report
was all but ignored. This month, Iraq Body Count, a group of American
and British academics and researchers, estimated that up to 10,000 civilians
may have been killed in Iraq, including 2,356 civilians in the attack
on Baghdad alone. And this is likely to be an extremely conservative
figure.
In Afghanistan, there has
been similar carnage. In May last year, Jonathan Steele extrapolated
all the available field evidence of the human cost of the US bombing
and concluded that as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives
as an indirect consequence of the bombing, many of them drought victims
denied relief.
This "hidden" effect
is hardly new. A recent study at Columbia University in New York has
found that the spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides on Vietnam
was up to four times as great as previously estimated. Agent Orange
contained dioxin, one of the deadliest poisons known. In what they first
called Operation Hades, then changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch
Hand, the Americans in Vietnam destroyed, in some 10,000 "missions"
to spray Agent Orange, almost half the forests of southern Vietnam,
and countless human lives. It was the most insidious and perhaps the
most devastating use of a chemical weapon of mass destruction ever.
Today, Vietnamese children continue to be born with a range of deformities,
or they are stillborn, or the fetuses are aborted.
The use of uranium-tipped
munitions evokes the catastrophe of Agent Orange. In the first Gulf
war in 1991, the Americans and British used 350 tonnes of depleted uranium.
According to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, quoting an
international study, 50 tonnes of DU, if inhaled or ingested, would
cause 500,000 deaths. Most of the victims are civilians in southern
Iraq. It is estimated that 2,000 tonnes were used during the latest
attack.
In a remarkable series of
reports for the Christian Science Monitor, the investigative reporter
Scott Peterson has described radiated bullets in the streets of Baghdad
and radiation-contaminated tanks, where children play without warning.
Belatedly, a few signs in Arabic have appeared: "Danger - Get away
from this area". At the same time, in Afghanistan, the Uranium
Medical Research Center, based in Canada, has made two field studies,
with the results described as "shocking". "Without exception,"
it reported, "at every bomb site investigated, people are ill.
A significant portion of the civilian population presents symptoms consistent
with internal contamination by uranium."
An official map distributed
to non-government agencies in Iraq shows that the American and British
military have plastered urban areas with cluster bombs, many of which
will have failed to detonate on impact. These usually lie unnoticed
until children pick them up, then they explode.
In the center of Kabul, I
found two ragged notices warning people that the rubble of their homes,
and streets, contained unexploded cluster bombs "made in USA".
Who reads them? Small children? The day I watched children skipping
through what might have been an urban minefield, I saw Tony Blair on
CNN in the lobby of my hotel. He was in Iraq, in Basra, lifting a child
into his arms, in a school that had been painted for his visit, and
where lunch had been prepared in his honor, in a city where basic services
such as education, food and water remain a shambles under the British
occupation.
It was in Basra three years
ago that I filmed hundreds of children ill and dying because they had
been denied cancer treatment equipment and drugs under an embargo enforced
with enthusiasm by Tony Blair. Now here he was - shirt open, with that
fixed grin, a man of the troops if not of the people - lifting a toddler
into his arms for the cameras.
When I returned to London,
I read "After Lunch", by Harold Pinter, from a new collection
of his called 'War' (Faber & Faber).
And after noon the well-dressed
creatures come
To sniff among the dead
And have their lunch
And all the many well-dressed
creatures pluck
The swollen avocados from the dust
And stir the minestrone with stray bones
And after lunch
They loll and lounge about
Decanting claret in convenient skulls
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