Alas,
Mr Sanctimonious Blair's love affair with
Mr Illiterate Bush is already leaving some
ugly morning stains on the bedspread.
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November
16, 2004 (Tuesday)
London
(England) HOW unfortunate. Only last night
we witnessed the Dickensian spectacle of a
frock-coated Mr Sanctimonious Blair
attending a Guildhall banquet with his smirking
foreign secretary Mr Lugubrious Straw;
Britain's much-loved Socialist and wartime prime
minister was delivering a speech promising that he
and his sturdy friends in Washington DC were going
to bring democracy to the world, starting with the
Middle East. Two days ago we saw the same Mr Blair
grandstanding in a pulpit in Liverpool, shamelessly
attending a memorial service for Ken Bigley,
recently beheaded in Iraq; he read the Lesson,
ending with the line, "and now remain these three,
Faith, Hope, and Love" -- I always preferred the
reading, Charity -- "but the greatest of
these is Love." Alas, Mr Blair's love affair with Mr Illiterate
Bush is already leaving some ugly morning
stains on the bedspread. This morning British
television news reports and newspapers are full of
an NBC newsreel clip from the fighting in Falluja,
first broadcast yesterday. It shows two or more US
Marines, -- they are seen entering a mosque, the
floor littered with debris, and finding three men
propped up, bleeding against a wall, having been
shot the day before and left untended -- a
brutality which is itself a crime in war. One, an
Arab with a pink headdress, evidently between sixty
and seventy years old, is still alive, but probably
dying; a third, who somehow survives, and may
become a witness, is covered with rags some feet
away. Perhaps they had sought refuge in the mosque;
this seems no less likely than that they were
fighters, "insurgents," or "terrorists," with which
concepts the American invaders comfort themselves
as they kill. A dead man lies next to the old man
propped against the wall, his arm draped
pathetically across him for comfort. Perhaps father
and son? The old man raises one arm weakly in a
gesture of surrender (perhaps the other arm is shot
to pieces). A gallant Marine calls out that these are
"wounded men" here, and yes, still alive; he walks
purposefully to within six feet of the old man and
blasts that wise old head apart with a round from
his automatic rifle; the head explodes -- an image
so grisly that it is pixelled out on British
television. I wonder if it is even seen by American
viewers back home. 
WE can remember with a certain Schadenfreude
with what pomp and circumstance the ineffable Mr
Paul Bremer announced that thanks to the
liberation from Saddam Hussein's brutal
dictatorship, the people's biggest trade now, in
post "mission-accomplished" Iraq, was in television
receivers and satellite dishes.
Now those dishes are bringing to the Iraqi
natives the ghastly images of what their liberators
are up to. How dearly their Quisling, their puppet
prime minister Iyad Allawai, must wish those
dishes away! He must quake for his own security at
each image of a heavily armed American plainsman
killing yet another elderly and defenseless
Muslim. Was this latest outrage an isolated television
episode? Well almost, because the American military
commanders have restricted media coverage. If it
were not for the Internet, we would probably not
even be seeing this. - Thanks to the Internet we have seen the
helicopter gunships in Iraq and Afghanistan
mowing down at long range civilians possibly,
but not obviously, going about felonious tasks
in their fields and prairies.
- American forces have shot up wedding parties
in remote Afghan villages, and have later
claimed that the wedding parties "fired on" them
-- meaning, with their ancient flintlocks, on
the US airforce's AC130 Specter gunships,
circling thousands of feet overhead; to conceal
the truth, the ground commanders have then sent
in troops to remove every piece of hardware and
shell fragment from the shattered village.
- We have also seen the gallant American raid
on an Iraqi settlement near the Syrian border --
another wedding party; if it were not for the
typical wedding videos taken before the raid,
and the rather less typical ones taken
afterwards by the few surviving guests, showing
the pianist in his coffin and other wedding
guests in similar accommodation, we would never
have known of this atrocity.
"How many prisoners were taken during the raid?"
one female BBC interviewer guilelessly asked the
American spokesman, and got no answer other than
that a "full investigation" would take place. If it
did, its results have not been published, and there
is unlikely to be any prosecution of the guilty
commanders. The excuse: the Americans have had to raid such
tiny settlements, and cities like Falluja and
Mosul, to rid them of foreign militias and
fighters. What are the US Marines, if not foreign
militias and fighters?
THE cynic in me, the real-historian, says: If this
is what is seen on newsreels, we can only
speculate, and shudder, at what is going on
off-camera. How many prisoners are the Marines
taking? Any at all? Or has some high commander,
like General George S Patton Jr before
HUSKY, the Allied invasion
of Sicily in July 1943, told his men in a
pre-battle harangue that prisoners are a hindrance
to forward movement and that they should avoid
taking along such a burden in battle. Hundreds of
German and Italian prisoners were led away and
liquidated. Times however have changed: when word of
Patton's speech reached higher commands early in
1944, he was summoned to London from his
headquarters at Knutsford, Cheshire, for a very
uncomfortable confrontation with General Dwight
D Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, and
very nearly stripped of his rank and sent home as a
punishment. Eisenhower was a chivalrous supreme commander,
cast in the Erwin Rommel mould. He even sent a
formal message of apology through Switzerland to
the German High Command, the OKW, in March 1945
when a trainload of nine hundred German prisoners
of war was suffocated to death in a railroad
sidings at Frankfurt. (I found the details in his
papers in Abilene, Kansas.) Not so the modern Pentagon. This morning
American damage-control is in action. A gnarled
Marine lieutenant general, John F Sattler,
in suitably grimy battledress, stands before a
teleprompter and haltingly reads a message
asserting that all US troops are aware of military
law, and promising an investigation. An investigation was already promised yesterday
into a similar incident where Marines were filmed
in an alleyway, having seen an injured man fall off
a roof. A Marine clambers up on a wall, calls out
that the man is lying injured on the ground, and
aims his rifle at him. Peng, as the Germans
would say. "He's gone," he calls out nonchalantly
as he clambers down: and he doesn't mean, got away.
The TV camera recorded it all. Shooting an injured
man, who is hors de combat, is just not
de rigueur in war. It is what people were
hanged for at Nuremberg, Landsberg, and Hamelin
after the Second World War. It is banned by the Geneval Convention, of which
Mr Bush's new attorney general Alberto
Gonzales recently spoke so dismissively. (He
called Geneva quaint.) Gonzales is the former White House "legal
counsel" who earlier this year asked the Pentagon
for legal advice on how far US army interrogators
could go in torturing prisoners and get away with
it under US law. Anthony Biddle and those
other famous US attorney-generals who do not share
a common background with the mafia-gangsters and
druglords of South America must be turning in their
graves at this new appointment.
IT was not for nothing that even Winston
Churchill, one of Britain's leading Gentile
Zionists, as he confessed himself, turned a deaf
ear on the demands of Chaim Weizmann and the
others pleading the Jewish cause during his
war. Churchill was a Zionist, but a pragmatist too:
he weighed the merits of the few million surviving
Jews on the one hand, and the vast multitudes of
two hundred million or more Muslims on the other,
and he saw writing dimly appearing on the wall each
time that Weizmann came knocking on the door of No.
10. Bush and his satraps have chosen so far to
ignore it. They have passed special laws protecting
their troops from prosecution for committing war
crimes; they have proclaimed themselves, formally,
above and beyond International Law; they have
refused to ratify the laws setting up the
International War Crimes Tribunal. To the illiterates, the writing may look like
graffiti right now, but with each fresh atrocity
mirrored on the television screens, and brought to
the Arab world through those helpful satellite
dishes, the message will become ever
clearer. [Previous
Radical's Diary]  -
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dossier on Winston Churchill
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David Irving