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London, April 19, 2004 Get
Out NOW By John Pilger,
The New
Statesman  IRAQ
- Invaders have ripped up the
fabric of a nation that survived Saddam
Hussein. This is a war of liberation and we are
the enemy. Four years ago, I travelled the length
of Iraq, from the hills where St Matthew is buried
in the Kurdish north to the heartland of
Mesopotamia, and Baghdad, and the Shia south.
I have seldom felt as safe in any country. Once,
in the Edwardian colonnade of Baghdad's book
market, a young man shouted something at me about
the hardship his family had been forced to endure
under the embargo imposed by America and Britain.
What happened next was typical of Iraqis; a
passer-by calmed the man, putting his arm around
his shoulder, while another was quickly at my side.
"Forgive him," he said reassuringly. "We do not
connect the people of the west with the actions of
their governments. You are welcome." At one of the melancholy evening auctions where
Iraqis come to sell their most intimate possessions
out of urgent need, a woman with two infants
watched as their pushchairs went for pennies, and a
man who had collected doves since he was 15 came
with his last bird and its cage; and yet people
said to me: "You are welcome." Such grace and
dignity were often expressed by those Iraqi exiles
who loathed Saddam Hussein and opposed both the
economic siege and the Anglo-American assault on
their homeland; thousands of these anti-Saddamites
marched against the war in London last year, to the
chagrin of the warmongers, who never understood the
dichotomy of their principled stand. Were I to undertake the same journey in Iraq
today, I might not return alive. Foreign terrorists
have ensured that. With the most lethal weapons
that billions of dollars can buy, and the threats
of their cowboy generals and the panic-stricken
brutality of their foot soldiers, more than 120,000
of these invaders have ripped up the fabric of a
nation that survived the years of Saddam Hussein,
just as they oversaw the destruction of its
artefacts. They have brought to Iraq a daily,
murderous violence which surpasses that of a tyrant
who never promised a fake democracy. Amnesty International reports that US-led forces
have "shot Iraqis dead during
demonstrations, tortured and ill-treated
prisoners, arrested people arbitrarily and held
them indefinitely, demolished houses in acts of
revenge and collective punishment".  In
Fallujah, US marines, described as "tremendously
precise" by their psychopathic spokesman,
slaughtered up to 600 people, according to hospital
directors. They did it with aircraft and heavy
weapons deployed in urban areas, as revenge for the
killing of four American mercenaries [like
the civilian contractor, right]. Many of
the dead of Fallujah were women and children and
the elderly. Only the Arab television networks,
notably al-Jazeera, have shown the true scale of
this crime, while the Anglo-American media continue
to channel and amplify the lies of the White House
and Downing Street.
"Writing exclusively for the Observer
before a make-or-break summit with President
George Bush this week," sang Britain's
former premier liberal newspaper on 11 April,
"[Tony Blair] gave full backing to
American tactics in Iraq . . . saying that the
government would not flinch from its 'historic
struggle' despite the efforts of 'insurgents and
terrorists'." The
Bush/Blair EngineThat this "exclusive" was not presented as
parody shows that the propaganda engine that drove
the lies of Blair and Bush on weapons of mass
destruction and al-Qaeda links for almost two years
is still in service. On BBC news bulletins and
Newsnight, Blair's "terrorists" are still
currency, a term that is never applied to the
principal source and cause of the terrorism, the
foreign invaders, who have now killed at least
11,000 civilians, according to Amnesty and others.
The overall figure, including conscripts, may be as
high as 55,000. That a nationalist uprising has been under way
in Iraq for more than a year, uniting at least 15
major groups, most of them opposed to the old
regime, has been suppressed in a mendacious lexicon
invented in Washington and London and reported
incessantly, CNN-style. "Remnants" and "tribalists"
and "fundamentalists" dominate, while Iraq is
denied the legacy of a history in which much of the
modern world is rooted. The "first-anniversary
story" about a laughable poll claiming that half of
all Iraqis felt better off now under the occupation
is a case in point. The BBC and the rest swallowed
it whole. For the truth, I recommend the courageous
daily reporting of Jo Wilding, a British
human rights observer in Baghdad (www.wildfirejo.blogspot.com). Even now, as the uprising spreads, there is only
cryptic gesturing at the obvious: that this is a
war of national liberation and that the enemy is
"us". The pro-invasion Sydney Morning Herald
is typical. Having expressed "surprise" at the
uniting of Shias and Sunnis, the paper's Baghdad
correspondent recently described "how GI bullies
are making enemies of their Iraqi friends" and how
he and his driver had been threatened by Americans.
"I'll take you out quick as a flash, motherf-cker!"
a soldier told the reporter. That this was merely a
glimpse of the terror and humiliation that Iraqis
have to suffer every day in their own country was
not made clear; yet this newspaper has published
image after unctuous image of mournful American
soldiers, inviting sympathy for an invader who has
"taken out" thousands of innocent men, women and
children. What we do routinely in the imperial west, wrote
Richard Falk, professor of international
relations at Princeton, is propagate "through a self-righteous, one-way
moral/legal screen positive images of western
values and innocence that are threatened,
validating a campaign of unrestricted violence". Thus, western state terrorism is erased, and a
tenet of western journalism is to excuse or
minimise "our" culpability, however atrocious. Our
dead are counted; theirs are not. Our victims are
worthy; theirs are not. This is an old story; there have been many
Iraqs, or what Blair calls "historic struggles"
waged against "insurgents and terrorists". Take
Kenya in the 1950s. The approved version is still
cherished in the west -- first popularised in the
press, then in fiction and movies; and like Iraq,
it is a lie. "The task to which we have set our
minds," declared the governor of Kenya in 1955, "is
to civilise a great mass of human beings who are in
a very primitive moral and social state." The
slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were
never called nationalists, was British government
policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that
the Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic
white settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32
Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000
Kenyans killed by the British, who ran
concentration camps where the conditions were so
harsh that 402 inmates died in just one month.
Torture, flogging and abuse of women and children
were commonplace. "The special prisons," wrote the
imperial historian V G Kiernan, "were
probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese
establishments." None of this was reported. The
"demonic terror" was all one way: black against
white. The racist message was unmistakable. It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the
discovery of the American massacre in the village
of My Lai was described on the cover of
Newsweek as "An American tragedy", not a
Vietnamese one. In fact, there were many massacres
like My Lai, and almost none of them was reported
at the time. The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial
occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000
American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same
number, according to a veterans' study, killed
themselves on their return home. Dr Doug
Rokke, director of the US army depleted uranium
project following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates
that more than 10,000 American troops have since
died as a result, many from contamination illness.
When I asked him how many Iraqis had died, he
raised his eyes and shook his head. "Solid uranium
was used on shells," he said. "Tens of thousands of
Iraqis -- men, women and children -- were
contaminated. Right through the 1990s, at
international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials
approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and
the Ministry of Defence and ask, plead, for help
with decontamination. The Iraqis didn't use
uranium; it was not their weapon. I watched them
put their case, describing the deaths and horrific
deformities, and I watched them rebuffed. It was
pathetic." During last year's invasion, both American and
British forces again used uranium-tipped shells,
leaving whole areas so "hot" with radiation that
only military survey teams in full protective
clothing can approach them. No warning or medical
help is given to Iraqi civilians; thousands of
children play in these zones. The "coalition" has
refused to allow the International Atomic Energy
Agency to send experts to assess what Rokke
describes as "a catastrophe". US
Concentration CampsWhen will this catastrophe be properly reported
by those meant to keep the record straight? When
will the BBC and others investigate the conditions
of some 10,000 Iraqis held without charge,
many of them
tortured, in US concentration camps inside
Iraq, and the corralling, with razor wire, of
entire Iraqi villages?  When will the BBC and others stop referring to
"the handover of Iraqi sovereignty" on 30 June,
although there will be no such handover? The new
regime will be stooges, with each ministry
controlled by American officials and with its
stooge army and stooge police force run by
Americans. A Saddamite law prohibiting trade unions
for public sector workers will stay in force.
Leading members of Saddam's infamous secret police,
the Mukhabarat, will run "state security", directed
by the CIA. The US military will have the same
"status of forces" agreement that they impose on
the host nations of their 750 bases around the
world, which in effect leaves them in charge. Iraq
will be a US colony, like Haiti. And when will
journalists have the professional courage to
report the pivotal role that Israel has played
in this grand colonial design for the Middle
East? A few weeks ago, Rick Mercier, a young
columnist for the Freelance Star, a small
paper in Virginia, did what no other journalist has
done this past year. He apologised to his readers
for the travesty of the reporting of events leading
to the attack on Iraq. "Sorry we let
unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage," he
wrote. "Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi
defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for
Colin Powell's performance at the United
Nations . . . Maybe we'll do a better job next
war." Well done, Rick Mercier. But listen to the
silence of your colleagues on both sides of the
Atlantic. No one expects Fox or Wapping or the
Daily Telegraph to relent. But what about
David Astor's beacon of liberalism, the
Observer, which stood against the invasion
of Egypt in 1956 and its attendant lies? The
Observer not only backed last year's
unprovoked, illegal assault on Iraq; it helped
create the mendacious atmosphere in which Blair
could get away with his crime. The reputation of
the Observer, and the fact that it published
occasional mitigating material, meant that lies and
myths gained legitimacy. A front-page story gave
credence to the bogus claim that Iraq was behind
the anthrax attacks in the US. And there were those
unnamed western "intelligence sources", all those
straw men, all those hints, in David Rose's
two-page "investigation" headlined "The Iraqi
connection", that left readers with the impression
that Saddam Hussein might well have had a lot to do
with the attacks of 11 September 2001. "There are
occasions in history," wrote Rose, "when the use of
force is both right and sensible". This is one of
them." Tell that to 11,000 dead civilians, Mr
Rose. It is said that British officers in Iraq now
describe the "tactics" of their American comrades
as "appalling". No, the very nature of a colonial
occupation is appalling, as the families of 13
Iraqis killed by British soldiers, who are taking
the British government to court, will agree. If the
British military brass understand an inkling of
their own colonial past, not least the bloody
British retreat from Iraq 83 years ago, they will
whisper in the ear of the little
Wellington-cum-Palmerston in 10 Downing Street:
"Get out now, before we are thrown out." |
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