The
Independent
London, Saturday, April 10, 2004 The planners of
the war in Iraq have just one answer to their
critics: 'shut up' Thanks
to the subservience of many members of the press,
the US administration has had an easy
time Robert Fisk JUST shut up. That's the new
foreign policy line of our masters. When Senator
Edward Kennedy dubbed Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam",
US Secretary of State Colin Powell told him to be
"a little more restrained and careful" in his
comments. I recall that when the US commenced its
bombing of Afghanistan, the White House spokesman
claimed that some journalists were "asking
questions that the American people wouldn't want
asked". Back in the early 1980s, when I reported on
the Iranian soldiers on a troop train to Tehran who
were coughing Saddam's mustard gas out of
their lungs in blood and mucus, a Foreign Office
official told my then editor on The Times
that my dispatch was "not helpful". In other words,
stop criticising our ally, Saddam. So maybe the policy has been around for quite a
while. When the occupation authorities deliberately
concealed the attacks against US troops after the
start of the Iraq occupation last year, journalists
who investigated this violence were told that they
weren't covering the big picture, that only small
areas of Iraq were restive. And there was a lot of
clucking of tongues when a few of us decided to
take a close look at US proconsul Paul
Bremer's press laws last year.  A
whole team of "Coalition Provisional Authority"
lawyers was set up to see how they could legalise
the closure and censorship of Iraqi newspapers that
"incited violence". And whenever we raised
questions about it, the CPA spokesman -- and its
current attendant lord, Dan Senor, (right),
used the same phrase last week -- would announce
that "we will not tolerate incitement to
violence".
So when Bremer's own closure last week of
Muqtada Sadr's silly little weekly --
circulation about a quarter that of the Kent
Messenger -- incited the very violence he
supposedly wanted to avoid, what did the American
High Commissioner announce? "This will not be
tolerated." One of the paper's major sins was to have
condemned Paul Bremer for taking Iraq down
"Saddam's path", an article which Bremer condemned
in painstaking detail in his signed letter -- in
execrable Arabic -- to the editor of the miscreant
paper. Now I'm all against
incitement to violence. Just like I'm against
incitement to war by the use of fraudulent
claims of weapons of mass destruction and secret
links to al-Qa'ida. Just like I'm against the
use of Saddam's army against Iraqi cities and
the use of America's army against Iraqi cities.
For let's remember that some of Muqtada Sadr's
dangerous militiamen fought Saddam in the 1991
insurgency -- the one we supported and then
betrayed. Saddam, of course, knew how to deal with
resistance. "We will not tolerate...," he told his
commanders. And we all know what that meant. No,
the Americans are not Saddam's army. But the siege
of Fallujah is likely to give that city the heroic
status among future generations of Iraqi Sunnis as
Basra -- surrounded by Saddam's hordes in 1991 --
holds among Iraqi Shias today. BUT still, we must shut up. I remember how last
autumn the cabal of
right-wing neo-conservatives who urged the Bush
administration into this war suddenly went to
ground. What was this so-called neo-conservative
lobby behind Bush and Cheney, a New York
Times columnist demanded know, these so-called
former Likudist supporters of Israel? When one of
them, Richard Perle, turned up on a radio
show with me a few weeks ago, he insisted that
things were getting better in Iraq, that we were
all en route to a cracking little democracy in
Mesopotamia. The moment I suggested that this was a massive
case of self-delusion, Perle replied that Fisk had
"always been for the maintenance of the Baathist
regime". I got the message. Anyone who condemned
this bloody mess was a secret Baathist, a lover of
the dictator and his torturers. Thus far have the
falcons of Washington fallen. Of course, the "shut-up" principle works both
ways. Back on 16 March 2003, when the world was
obsessed with the war that would break out in Iraq
three days later, a tragedy occurred on another
battlefield 500 miles west of Baghdad.  On
that day, an Israeli soldier and his commander
drove a nine-ton Caterpillar bulldozer over a young
American peace activist called Rachel Corrie
who was unarmed, clearly visible in a fluorescent
jacket and trying to protect a Palestinian home
that the Israelis intended to destroy. The
Caterpillar was part of the regular US aid to
Israel. Israel acquitted its own army of
responsibility for Rachel's death -- which was
taped on video by her appalled friends -- and the
Bush administration remained gutlessly silent. Rachel's grieving mother Elizabeth has been a
picture of dignity. US citizens, she wrote, "should ask themselves how it is that
an unarmed US citizen can be killed with
impunity by a soldier from an allied nation
receiving massive US aid... When three Americans
were killed, esumably by Palestinians, in an
explosion on October 15th, 2003 ... the FBI came
within 24 hours to investigate the deaths. After
one year, neither the FBI nor any other US-led
team has done anything to investigate the death
of an American killed by an Israeli." Well, the answer is that Bush and his
administration know how to shut themselves up when
it pays them to do so. That's what Condoleezza
Rice initially tried to do when summoned before
the 11 September hearings. And, thanks to the
subservience of many members of the White House and
Pentagon press corps, the administration has an
easy time. Why, for example, no press conference
questions about Rachel Corrie? It seems that as long as you say "war on
terror", you are safe from all criticism. For not a
single American journalist has investigated the
links between the Israeli army's "rules of
engagement" -- so blithely handed over to US forces
on Sharon's orders -- and the behaviour of the US
military in Iraq. The destruction of houses of
"suspects", the wholesale detention of thousands of
Iraqis without trial, the cordoning off of
"hostile" villages with razor wire, the bombardment
of civilian areas by Apache helicopter gunships and
tanks on the hunt for "terrorists" are all part of
the Israeli military lexicon. In besieging cities -- when they were taking
casualties or the number of civilians killed was
becoming too shameful to sustain -- the Israeli
army would call a "unilateral suspension of
offensive operations". They did this 11 times after
they surrounded Beirut in 1982. And yesterday, the
American army declared a "unilateral suspension of
offensive operations" around Fallujah. Not a word on this mysterious parallel by
America's reporters, no questions about the even
more mysterious use of identical language. And in
the coming days, we shall -- perhaps -- find out
how many of the estimated 300 dead of Fallujah were
Sunni gunmen and how many were women and children.
Following Israel's rules is going to lead the
Americans into the same disaster those rules have
led the Israelis. But I guess we'll shut up about
it. In the end, I suspect, the Iraqis will probably
have a greater say in the US presidential elections
than American voters. They will decide if President
Bush loses or wins. The same may apply to Mr
Blair. Funny thing, that a far away people,
just 26 million, can change our political history.
As for us, I guess we'll be expected to shut
up. | ![[]](../../std/dings/list.gif){kind=small}
write to David
Irving