- So, three years after the international crimes against
humanity in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania we were bombing Fallujah.
Come again? Hands up those who knew the name of Fallujah on 11 September
2001. Or Samarra. Or Ramadi. Or Anbar province. Or Amarah. Or Tel Afar,
the latest target in our "war on terror'' although most of us would
find it hard to locate on a map (look at northern Iraq, find Mosul and
go one inch to the left). Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we
practise to deceive.
-
- Three years ago, it was all about Osama bin Laden
and al-Qa'ida; then, at about the time of the Enron scandal - and I have
a New York professor to thank for spotting the switching point - it was
Saddam and weapons of mass destruction and 45 minutes and human rights
abuses in Iraq and, well, the rest is history. And now, at last, the Americans
admit that vast areas of Iraq are outside government control. We are going
to have to "liberate" them, all over again.
-
- Like we reliberated Najaf and Kufa, "to kill
or capture Muqtada Sadr'', according to Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt,
and like we lay siege to Fallujah back in April when we claimed, or at
least the US Marines did, that we were going to eliminate "terrorism''
in the city. In fact, its local military commander has since had his head
chopped off by the insurgents and Fallujah, save for an occasional bloody
air raid, remains outside all government control.
-
- These past two weeks, I've been learning a lot about
the hatred Iraqis feel towards us. Trowelling back through my reporter's
notebooks of the 1990s, I've found page after page of my hand-written evidence
of Iraqi anger; fury at the sanctions which killed half a million children,
indignation by doctors at our use of depleted uranium shells in the 1991
Gulf War (we used them again last year, but let's take these things one
rage at a time) and deep, abiding resentment towards us, the West. One
article I wrote for The Independent in 1998 asked why Iraqis do not tear
us limb from limb, which is what some Iraqis did to the American mercenaries
they killed in Fallujah last April.
-
- But we expected to be loved, welcomed, greeted, fêted,
embraced by these people. First, we bombarded Stone Age Afghanistan and
proclaimed it "liberated", then we invaded Iraq to "liberate"
Iraqis too. Wouldn't the Shia love us? Didn't we get rid of Saddam Hussein?
Well, history tells a different story. We dumped the Sunni Muslim King
Feisal on the Shia Muslims in the 1920s. Then we encouraged them to rise
against Saddam in 1991, and left them to die in Saddam's torture chambers.
And now, we reassemble Saddam's old rascals, their torturers, and put them
back in power to "fight terror'', and we lay siege to Muqtada Sadr
in Najaf.
-
- We all have our memories of 11 September 2001. I
was on a plane heading for America. And I remember, as the foreign desk
at The Independent told me over the aircraft's satellite phone of each
new massacre in the United States, how I told the captain, and how the
crew and I prowled the plane to look for possible suicide pilots. I think
I found about 13; alas, of course, they were all Arabs and completely innocent.
But it told me of the new world in which I was supposed to live. "Them''
and "Us''.
-
- In my airline seat, I started to write my story for
that night's paper. Then I stopped and asked the foreign desk in London
- by this time the aircraft was dumping its fuel off Ireland before returning
to Europe - to connect me to the newspaper's copytaker, because only by
"talking" my story to her, rather than writing it, could I find
the words I needed. And so I "talked" my report, of folly and
betrayal and lies in the Middle East, of injustice and cruelty and war,
so it had come to this.
-
- And in the days to come I learnt, too, what this
meant. Merely to ask why the murderers of 11 September had done their bloody
deeds was to befriend "terrorism". Merely to ask what had been
in the minds of the killers was to give them support. Any cop, confronted
by any crime, looks for a motive. But confronted by an international crime
against humanity, we were not to be allowed to seek the motive. America's
relations with the Middle East, especially the nature of its relationship
with Israel, was to remain an unspoken and unquestioned subject.
-
- I've come to understand, in the three years since,
what this means. Don't ask questions. Even when I was almost killed by
a crowd of Afghans in December 2001 - furious that their relatives had
been killed in B-52 strikes - The Wall Street Journal announced in a headline
that I had "got my due" because I was a "multiculturalist".
I still get letters telling me that my mother, Peggy, was Adolf Eichmann's
daughter.
-
- Peggy was in the RAF in 1940, repairing radios on
damaged Spitfires, as I recalled at her funeral in 1998. But I also remember,
at the service in the chancel of the little stone Kentish church, that
I angrily suggested that if President Bill Clinton had spent as much money
on research into Parkinson's disease as he had just spent in firing cruise
missiles into Afghanistan at Osama bin Laden (and it must have been the
first time Bin Laden's name was uttered in the precincts of the Church
of England) then my mother would not have been in the wooden box beside
me.
-
- She missed 11 September 2001 by three years and a
day. But there was one thing she would, I feel sure, have agreed with me:
That we should not allow 19 murderers to change our world. George Bush
and Tony Blair are doing their best to make sure the murderers DO change
our world. And that is why we are in Iraq.
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