American
Terrorist
By John Pilger
Znet
09 January, 2004
The
disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself
appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about
the "discovery" of "a huge system of clandestine weapons
laboratories", which even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked,
would be astonishing, were it not merely another of his vapid attempts
to justify his crime against humanity. (His crime, and George Bush's,
is clearly defined as "supreme" in the Nuremberg judgment.)
This is not what
the guardians of the faith want you to know. Lord Hutton, who is due
to report on the Kelly affair, will provide the most effective distraction,
just as Lord Justice Scott did with his arms-to-Iraq report almost ten
years ago, ensuring that the top echelon of the political class escaped
criminal charges. Of course, it was not Hutton's "brief" to
deal with the criminal slaughter in Iraq; he will spread the blame for
one man's torment and death, having pointedly and scandalously chosen
not to recall and cross-examine Blair, even though Blair revealed during
his appearance before Hutton that he had lied in "emphatically"
denying he had had anything to do with "outing" Dr David Kelly.
Other guardians
have been assiduously at work. The truth of public opposition to an
illegal, unprovoked invasion, expressed in the biggest demonstration
in modern history, is being urgently revised. In a valedictory piece
on 30 December, the Guardian commentator and leader writer Martin Kettle
wrote: "Opponents of the war may need to be reminded that public
opinion currently approves of the invasion by nearly two to one."
A favourite source
for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on 18 November, the day Bush
arrived in London, which was reported beneath the front-page headline
"Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war
surges". Out of 1,002 people contacted, just 426 said they welcomed
Bush's visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or did
not know. As for support for the war "surging", the absurdly
small number questioned still produced a majority that opposed the invasion.
Across the world,
the "majority backs Bush" disinformation was seized upon -
by William Shawcross on CNN ("The majority of the British people
are glad he [Bush] came . . ."), by the equally warmongering William
Safire in the New York Times and by the Murdoch press almost everywhere.
Thus, the slaughter in Iraq, the destruction of democratic rights and
civil liberties in the west and the preparation for the next invasion
are "normalised".
In "The Banality
of Evil", Edward S Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things in
an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation' . .
. 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."
Current "normalising"
is expressed succinctly by Kettle: "As 2003 draws to its close,
it is surely al-Qaeda, rather than the repercussions of Iraq, that casts
a darker shadow over Britain's future." How does he know this?
The "mass of intelligence flowing across the Prime Minister's desk",
of course! He calls this "cold-eyed realism", omitting to
mention that the only credible intelligence "flowing across the
Prime Minister's desk" was the common sense that an Anglo-American
attack on Iraq would increase the threat from al-Qaeda.
What the normalisers
don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the "coalition"
crime in Iraq - which Kettle calls a "misjudgement" - and
the true source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding
journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the
extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged.
For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British
forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation
illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not
to approach contaminated sites.
Readings taken from
destroyed Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a
British army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face
masks and gloves. With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on
and around the tanks.
Of the 10,000 Americans
evacuated sick from Iraq, many have "mystery illnesses" not
unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By mid-April
last year, the US air force had deployed more than 19,000 guided weapons
and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells.
According to a November
2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Centre, witnesses living
next to Baghdad airport reported a huge death toll following one morning's
attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since then,
a vast area has been "landscaped" by US earth movers, and
fenced. Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad, has
documented a catalogue of miscarriages, hair loss, and horrific eye,
skin and respiratory problems among people living near the area. Yet
the US and Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International Atomic
Energy Agency to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium contamination
in Iraq. The Ministry of Defence, which has admitted that British tanks
fired depleted uranium in and around Basra, says that British troops
"will have access to biological monitoring". Iraqis have no
such access and receive no specialist medical help.
According to the
non-governmental organisation Medact, between 21,700 and 55,000 Iraqis
died between 20 March and 20 October last year. This includes up to
9,600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded
cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. These are conservative estimates;
the ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be imagined. Neither
the US nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic suffering is
"not relevant", according to a US State Department official
- just as the slaughter of more than 200,000 Iraqis during and immediately
after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated in a Medical Education Trust study,
was "not relevant" and not news.
The normalisers
are anxious that this terror is again not recognised (the BBC confines
its use of "terrorism" and "atrocities" to the Iraqi
resistance) and
that the wider danger it represents throughout the world is overshadowed
by the threat of al-Qaeda. William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty
International USA, has attacked the anti-war movement for not joining
Bush's "war on terror". He says "the left" must
join Bush's campaign, even his "pre-emptive" wars, or risk
- that word again
- "irrelevance". This echoes other liberal normalisers who,
by facing both ways, provide propaganda cover for rapacious power to
expand its domain with "humanitarian interventions"
- such as the bombing
to death of some 3,000 civilians in Afghanistan and the swap of the
Taliban for US-backed warlords, murderers and rapists known as "commanders".
Schulz's criticism
ignores the truth in Amnesty's own studies. Amnesty USA reports that
the Bush administration is harbouring thousands of foreign torturers,
including several mass murderers. By a simple mathematical comparison
of American and al-Qaeda terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In the
past 50 years, the US has supported and trained state terrorists in
Latin America, Africa and Asia. The toll of their victims is in the
millions. Again, the documentation is in Amnesty's files. The dictator
Suharto's seizure of power in Indonesia was responsible for "one
of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century", according to
the CIA. The US supplied arms, logistics, intelligence and assassination
lists. Britain supplied warships and black propaganda to cover the trail
of blood. Scholars now put Suharto's victims in 1965-66 at almost a
million; in East Timor, he oversaw the death of one-third of the population:
200,000 men, women and children.
Today, the mass
murderer lives in sumptuous retirement in Jakarta, his billions safe
in foreign banks. Unlike Saddam Hussein, an amateur by comparison, there
will be no show trial for Suharto, who remained obediently within the
US terror network. (One of Suharto's most outspoken protectors and apologists
in the State Department during the 1980s was Paul Wolfowitz, the current
"brains" behind Bush's
aggression.)
In the sublime days
before 11 September 2001,when the powerful were routinely attacking
and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned
non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there
was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly
on 9/11, there was terrorism.
This is not to say
the threat from al-Qaeda and other fanatical groups is not real; what
the normalisers don't want you to know is that the most pervasive danger
is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in journalism
and scholarship cast always as benign:
capable of misjudgement
and blunder, never of high crime. Fuelled by religious fanaticism, a
corrupt Americanism and rampant corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing
what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern
strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass
discontent into nationalism", inspired by fear of lethal threats.
Bush's America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself and to
mankind".
The unspoken truth
is that Blair, too, is a menace. "There never has been a time,"
said Blair in his address to the US Congress last year, "when the
power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood or when, except
in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction
for our present day." His fatuous dismissal of history was his
way of warning us off the study of imperialism. He wants us to forget
and to fail to recognise historically the "national security state"
that he and Bush are erecting as a "necessary"
alternative to democracy.
The father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, understood this. "Modern
fascism," he said, "should be properly called corporatism,
since it is the merger of state, military and corporate power."
Bush, Blair and
the normalisers now speak, almost with relish, of opening mass graves
in Iraq. What they do not want you to know is that the largest mass
graves are the result of a popular uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf
war, in direct response to a call by President George Bush Sr to "take
matters into your own hands and force Saddam to step aside". So
successful were the rebels initially that within days Saddam's rule
had collapsed across the south. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed
close at hand.
Then Washington,
the tyrant's old paramour who had supplied him with $5bn worth of conventional
arms, chemical and biological weapons and industrial technology, intervened
just in time. The rebels suddenly found themselves confronted with the
United States helping Saddam against them. US forces prevented them
from reaching Iraqi arms depots. They denied them shelter, and gave
Saddam's Republican Guard safe passage through US lines in order to
attack the rebels. US helicopters circled overhead, observing, taking
photographs, while Saddam's forces crushed the uprising. In the north,
the same happened to the Kurdish insurrection. "The Americans did
everything for Saddam," said the writer on the Middle East SaId
Aburish, "except join the fight on his side." Bush Sr did
not want a divided Iraq, certainly not a democratic Iraq. The New York
Times commentator Thomas Friedman, a guard dog of US foreign policy,
was more to the point. What Washington wanted was a successful coup
by an "iron-fisted junta":
Saddam without Saddam.
Nothing has changed.
As Milan Rai documents in his new book, Regime Unchanged, the most senior
and ruthless elements of Saddam's security network, the Mukha-barat,
are now in the pay of the US and Britain, helping them to combat the
resistance and recruit those who will run a puppet regime behind a facade.
A CIA-run and -paid gestapo of 10,000 will operate much as they did
under Saddam. "What is happen-ing in Iraq," writes Rai, "is
re-Nazification . . . just as in Germany after the war."
Blair knows this
and says nothing. Consider his unctuous words to British troops in Basra
the other day about curtailing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Like so many of his deceptions, this covers the fact that his government
has increased the export of weapons and military equipment to some of
the most oppressive regimes on earth, such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia
and Nepal. To oil-rich Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 11 September
hijackers and friend of the Taliban, where women are tormented and people
are executed for apostasy, go major British weapons systems, along with
leg irons, gang chains, shock belts and shackles. To Indonesia, whose
unreconstructed, blood-soaked military is trying to crush the independence
movement in Aceh, go British "riot control" vehicles and Hawk
fighter-bombers.
Bush and Blair have
been crowing about Libya's capitulation on weapons of mass destruction
it almost certainly did not have. This is the result, as Scott Ritter
has written, of "coerced concessions given more as a means of buying
time than through any spirit of true co-operation" - as Bush and
Blair have undermined the very international law upon which real disarmament
is based. On 8 December, the UN General Assembly voted on a range of
resolutions on disarmament. The United States opposed all the most important
ones, including those dealing with nuclear weapons. The Bush administration
has contingency plans, spelt out in the Pentagon's 2002 Nuclear Posture
Review, to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Syria, Iran and
China. Following suit, the UK Defence Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, announced
that for the first time, Britain would attack non-nuclear states with
nuclear weapons "if necessary".
This is as it was
50 years ago when, according to declassified files, the British government
collaborated with American plans to wage "preventive" atomic
war against the Soviet Union. No public discussion was permitted; the
unthinkable was normalised. Today, history is our warning that, once
again, the true threat is close to home.