- 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 favorite 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 "normalized."
-
- In "The Banality of Evil," Edward S. Herman
wrote, "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests
on 'normalization'... There is usually a division of labor in doing and
rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing 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 normalize the unthinkable
for the general public."
-
- Current "normalizing" 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 normalizers don't want you to know is the nature
and scale of the "coalition" crime in Iraq - which Kettle calls
a "misjudgment" - 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 Center,
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 Defense, 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 organization 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 normalizers are anxious that this terror is again
not recognized (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 antiwar movement
for not joining Bush's "war on terror." He says "the left"
must join Bush's campaign, even his "preemptive" wars, or risk
- that word again - "irrelevance." This echoes other liberal
normalizers 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 harboring
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 terrorizing 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 normalizers 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 misjudgment and blunder, never of high crime. Fueled 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 recognize 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 normalizers 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 happening 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 cooperation"
- 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 Defense 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 normalized. Today, history is our warning
that, once again, the true threat is close to home.
-
- http://www.johnpilger.com
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