Better Late Than Never

[rorystokes]

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)

[Mr.Vicchio]

This is one of the best peices of satire I have ever read.

[dotcoma]

Bad@ss first post, Rory!!! Don't assume that Vic even read it. I think he's got moveon.org tattooed on his retinas. Anything that conflicts with the Neocon/Socialist Trojan Horse party line is heresy. Just ignore the one-liners.

[PatrickHenry]

Thanks for an eyewitness to the humanity of Iraqis. Please stay and contribute to this debate community of volconvo. Those who don't post sources here lack credibility and may be safely ignored. You should also quote your sources and distinguish your own observations and thoughts.

Regarding Jo Wilding, here is one of her recent stories from:
http://www.occupationwatch.org/article.php?id=4105
Excerpt

The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I’m on the bus is that a journalist I knew turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Falluja, he’d been bringing out children with their limbs blown off, the US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were being stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down. He said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it getting there with foreigners, westerners, to get through the american checkpoints. The rest of the way was secured with the armed groups who control the roads we’d travel on. We’d take in the medical supplies, see what else we could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave. snip “Come,” says Maki and ushers me alone into a room where an old woman has just had an abdominal bullet wound stitched up. Another in her leg is being dressed, the bed under her foot soaked with blood, a white flag still clutched in her hand and the same story: I was leaving my home to go to Baghdad when I was hit by a US sniper. Some of the town is held by US marines, other parts by the local fighters. Their homes are in the US controlled area and they are adamant that the snipers were US marines. Snipers are causing not just carnage but also the paralysis of the ambulance and evacuation services. The biggest hospital after the main one was bombed is in US territory and cut off from the clinic by snipers. The ambulance has been repaired four times after bullet damage. Bodies are lying in the streets because no one can go to collect them without being shot. Some said we were mad to come to Iraq; quite a few said we were completely insane to come to Falluja and now there are people telling me that getting in the back of the pick up to go past the snipers and get sick and injured people is the craziest thing they’ve ever seen. I know, though, that if we don’t, no one will. snip The doctor rushes out to meet me: “Can you go to fetch a lady, she is pregnant and she is delivering the baby too soon?” Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window. We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle. I’m outraged. We’re trying to get to a woman who’s giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you’re shooting at us. How dare you? How dare you? Azzam grabs the gear stick and gets the ambulance into reverse, another tyre bursting as we go over the ridge in the centre of the road , the sots still coming as we flee around the corner. I carry on singing. The wheels are scraping, burst rubber burning on the road. The men run for a stretcher as we arrive and I shake my head. They spot the new bullet holes and run to see if we’re OK. Is there any other way to get to her, I want to know. La, maaku tarieq. There is no other way. They say we did the right thing. They say they’ve fixed the ambulance four times already and they’ll fix it again but the radiator’s gone and the wheels are buckled and se’s still at home in the dark giving birth alone. I let her down. snip First we go down the street we were sent to. There’s a man, face down, in a white dishdasha, a small round red stain on his back. We run to him. Again the flies ave got there first. Dave is at his shoulders, I’m by his knees and as we reach to roll him onto the stretcher Dave’s hand goes through his chest, through the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew his heart out. There’s no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out, crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He was unarmed. He just went out the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out since. No one had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the traditions of treating the body immediately. They couldn’t have known we were coming so it’s inconceivable tat anyone came out and retrieved a weapon but left the body. He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back. We cover his face, carry him to the pick up. There’s nothing to cover his body with. The sick woman is helped out of the house, the little girls around her hugging cloth bags to their bodies, whispering, “Baba. Baba.” Daddy. Shaking, they let us go first, hands up, around the corner, then we usher them to the cab of the pick up, shielding their heads so they can’t see him, the cuddly fat man stiff in the back. snip And then we’re in Baghdad, delivering them to the hospitals, Nuha in tears as they take the burnt man off groaning and whimpering. She puts her arms around me and asks me to be her friend. I make her feel less isolated, she says, less alone. And the satellite news says the cease-fire is holding and George Bush says to the troops on Easter Sunday that, “I know what we’re doing in Iraq is right.” Shooting unarmed men in the back outside their family home is right. Shooting grandmothers with white flags is right? Shooting at women and children who are fleeing their homes is right? Firing at ambulances is right? Well George, I know too now. I know what it looks like when you brutalise people so much that they’ve nothing left to lose. I know what it looks like when an operation is being done without anaesthetic because the hospitals are destroyed or under sniper fire and the city’s under siege and aid isn’t getting in properly. I know what it sounds like too. I know what it looks like when tracer bullets are passing your head, even though you’re in an ambulance. I know what it looks like when a man’s chest is no longer inside him and what it smells like and I know what it looks like when his wife and children pour out of his house. It’s a crime and it’s a disgrace to us all.