Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates
02/04/2003
- Opinión
On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers
scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from
the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home.
A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with
his older brother's marbles.
On March 21, the day after American and British troops began their
illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an "embedded" CNN
correspondent interviewed an American soldier. "I wanna get in
there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said. "I wanna take
revenge for 9/11."
To be fair to the correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he
did sort of weakly suggest that so far there was no real evidence
that linked the Iraqi government to the September 11 attacks.
Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the way down to the end
of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my head," he said.
According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the
American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly responsible
for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the
Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of Americans
believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What
percentage of America's armed forces believe these fabrications is
anybody's guess.
It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in Iraq are
aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein both
politically and financially through his worst excesses.
But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with
these details? It does not matter any more, does it? Hundreds of
thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas
masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper,
insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the
move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a
universe unto itself. It doesn't need to justify its existence any
more. It exists. It is.
President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy,
airforce and marines has issued clear instructions: "Iraq. Will.
Be. Liberated." (Perhaps he means that even if Iraqi people's
bodies are killed, their souls will be liberated.) American and
British citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake thought
and rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war. And
what a war it is.
After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions
and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its
knees, its people starved, half a million of its children killed,
its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure that most of
its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must
surely be unrivalled in history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of the
Willing"(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) -
sent in an invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It's more like Operation
Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.
So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its
old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily
confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the "Allies". Faced
with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the
world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and has even
managed to put up what actually amounts to a defence. A defence
which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful
and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us natives.
When we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all dignity,
we turn to guile and opportunism.)
Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the "Allies" are at war,
the extent to which the "Allies" and their media cohorts are
prepared to go is astounding to the point of being counterproductive
to their own objectives.
When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi
people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination attempt
in history - "Operation Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, the
British defence secretary, deriding him for not having the courage
to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward who hides in
trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation - Was it
really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was
it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turn
into a pumpkin if we really, really want it to?
After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when
a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed - a US
army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing themselves up!
"They're using very old stock. Their missiles go up and come down."
If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the
Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat to
world peace?
When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it's
denounced as "emotive" Arab propaganda aimed at orchestrating
hostility towards the "Allies", as though Iraqis are dying only in
order to make the "Allies" look bad. Even French television has
come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the awed,
breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise
missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is
described as the "terrible beauty" of war.
When invading American soldiers (from the army "that's only here to
help") are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it
violates the Geneva convention and "exposes the evil at the heart of
the regime". But it is entirely acceptable for US television
stations to show the hundreds of prisoners being held by the US
government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their
hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with
earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural
deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these
prisoners, US Government officials don't deny that they're being
being ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of war"! They
call them "unlawful combatants", implying that their ill-treatment
is legitimate! (So what's the party line on the massacre of
prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And
what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the
Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.)
When the "Allies" bombed the Iraqi television station (also,
incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva convention), there was
vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV had been
lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous
blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British
TV continue to advertise themselves as "balanced" when their
propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.
Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western
media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists
"embedded" with troops are given the status of heroes reporting from
the frontlines of war. Non-"embedded" journalists (such as the
BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed Baghdad,
witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned
children and wounded people) are undermined even before they begin
their reportage: "We have to tell you that he is being monitored by
the Iraqi authorities."
Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being
referred to as "militia" (ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent
portentously referred to them as "quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence
is "resistance" or worse still, "pockets of resistance", Iraqi
military strategy is deceit. (The US government bugging the phone
lines of UN security council delegates, reported by the Observer, is
hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the "Allies", the only morally
acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into
the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun
fire. Anything short of that is cheating.
And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half
people, 40 per cent of them children. Without clean water, and with
very little food. We're still waiting for the legendary Shia
"uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out of the city and rain
roses and hosannahs on the "liberating" army. Where are the hordes?
Don't they know that television productions work to tight schedules?
(It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls there will be dancing
on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall,
there would be dancing on the streets the world over.)
After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra,
the "Allies" have brought in a few trucks of food and water and
positioned them tantalisingly on the outskirts of the city.
Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each other for food.
(The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise the dying economy,
you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers
fought each other to get pictures of desperate people fighting each
other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo agencies
to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well. Their
message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves.
As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to
Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It didn't really make the
news. But now under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes of
humanitarian aid - a minuscule fraction of what's actually needed
(call it a script prop) - arrived on a British ship, the "Sir
Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day
of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?
Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for
the Independent on Sunday said that it would take 32 Sir Galahad's a
day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving before the
bombing began.
We oughtn't to be surprised though. It's old tactics. They've been
at it for years. Consider this moderate proposal by John McNaughton
from the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam war: "Strikes
at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a
counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly
to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet
Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled right -
might ... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction
does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it
leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?)
unless food is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the
conference table'."
Times haven't changed very much. The technique has evolved into a
doctrine. It's called "Winning Hearts and Minds".
So, here's the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to
have been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands dead
because of the economic sanctions. (At least that lot has been
saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens of
thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war officially declared
"disabled" by a disease called the Gulf war syndrome, believed in
part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn't
stopped the "Allies" from continuing to use depleted uranium.
And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But
that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was
cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her high
salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino
cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand,
the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to
clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will.
Despite Blair's earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has
made it clear that the UN will play no independent part in the
administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those
juicy "reconstruction" contracts. But Bush has appealed to the
international community not to "politicise" the issue of
humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the
immediate resumption of the UN's oil for food programme, the UN
security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means
that everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil)
should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US
led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.
Contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq we're told, in
discussions on the business news, could jump-start the world
economy. It's funny how the interests of American corporations are
so often, so successfully and so deliberately confused with the
interests of the world economy. While the American people will end
up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms
dealers, and corporations involved in "reconstruction" work will
make direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and
former employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has
already asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts for "re-construction"
are already being negotiated. The news doesn't hit the stands
because much of the US corporate media is owned and managed by the
same interests.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about returning
Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi oil to the
Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell, like
Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps
Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US vice-president
Dick Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet
Iraqi?
As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs that
the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts. CNN
reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters,
chanting, "We don't want your stinking wine." We've heard about the
re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they're called now.
There's news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods.
The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is
the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by
border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out
across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable
to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with
elaborate lists of American and British government products and
companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets,
Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's - government agencies such as USAID, the
British department for international development, British and
American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express,
corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and companies such
as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find themselves under siege. These
lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world.
They could become a practical guide that directs and channels the
amorphous, but growing fury in the world. Suddenly, the
"inevitability" of the project of corporate globalisation is
beginning to seem more than a little evitable.
It's become clear that the war against terror is not really about
terror, and the war on Iraq not only about oil. It's about a
superpower's self-destructive impulse towards supremacy,
stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the
people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same
process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case
it's an IMF chequebook. In the other, cruise missiles.
Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)
In the fog of war - one thing's for sure - if Saddam 's regime
indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an astonishing
degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of extreme
provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were
bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could we expect
the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear
warheads in their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and
biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas?
Would it?
Excuse me while I laugh.
In the fog of war we're forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an
extremely responsible tyrant. Or - he simply does not possess
weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of what happens
next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US
government.
So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave threat to world peace, paid-up
member of the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq, invaded, bombed, besieged,
bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed by cancers,
its people blown up on the streets. And here's all of us watching.
CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here's all of us, enduring
the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda and
enduring the slaughter of language as we know and understand it.
Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried potatoes). When
someone says "humanitarian aid" we automatically go looking for
induced starvation. "Embedded" I have to admit, is a great find.
It's what it sounds like. And what about "arsenal of tactics?"
Nice!
In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a
racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by racist
regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody - perpetrators,
victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the debate, it lays
out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidal wave
of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In
Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it
every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely sources.
Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all the
crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd
inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation
of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same
carelessness with which they say, "All Muslims are terrorists").
Even in the grotesque universe of racist insult, the British make
their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called.
Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being "anti-American" and
"anti-west", find myself in the extraordinary position of defending
the people of America. And Britain.
Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would do
well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and British
citizens who protested against their country's stockpile of nuclear
weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters who forced
their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should know that
the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US
government and the "American way of life" comes from American
citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their
prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they should
remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and
American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The
Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not
people. More than one third of America's citizens have survived the
relentless propaganda they've been subjected to, and many thousands
are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic
climate that prevails in the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi
fighting for his or her homeland.
While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia
Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place
in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been the most
spectacular display of public morality ever seen.
Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of American
people on the streets of America's great cities - Washington, New
York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only institution
in the world today that is more powerful than the American
government, is American civil society. American citizens have a
huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not
salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that
responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.
At the end of it all, it remains to be said that dictators like
Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the
central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them
installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace
to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil
society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the case of
Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them. (It's
odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't
hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to
war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism,
and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers".)
Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot
dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and
pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the locomotive force
that drives the political and economic engine of the US government,
currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he
makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's true that he is a
dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far
more dangerous than the man himself.
Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to file
a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's weakest
enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W Bush is
certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US president
would have probably done the very same things, but would have
managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps
even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his
brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has
done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and
scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the
ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the
nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.
Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire) has
been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker than
the pundits predicted.
Bring on the spanners.
Source: ZNet (http://www.zmag.org).
https://www.alainet.org/es/node/107248
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- Un arma que necesita ser afilada 25/01/2004
- Democracia Imperial de Mezcla Instantánea: Compre uno y llévese otro gratis 17/10/2003
- Buy One, Get One Free 19/05/2003
- Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates 02/04/2003
- Bush to Attack Mesopotamia on March 15 (The Ides of March) 07/03/2003
- Confronting Empire 27/01/2003
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