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. 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'."
That 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, motherfucker!" 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 histor-ian 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".
When 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
Free-lance 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." (john pilger)