- 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.
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- 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.''
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- 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.
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- 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".
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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''.
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- 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.''
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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 ö liberation, freedom and
democracy ö 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.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
- http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=398722
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