No Remembrance, No Remorse for the Fallen of Iraq
by
John Pilger
by John Pilger
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On Remembrance
Day 2007 – Veterans Day in America – the great and the good bowed
their heads at the Cenotaph. Generals, politicians, newsreaders,
football managers and stock-market traders wore their poppies. Hypocrisy
was a presence. No one mentioned Iraq. No one uttered the slightest
remorse for the fallen of that country. No one read the forbidden
list.
The forbidden
list documents, without favor, the part the British state and its
court have played in the destruction of Iraq. Here it is:
- Holocaust
denial
On 25 October,
Dai Davies MP asked Gordon Brown about civilian deaths in Iraq.
Brown passed the question to the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband,
who passed it to his junior minister, Kim Howells, who replied:
"We continue to believe that there are no comprehensive
or reliable figures for deaths since March 2003." This
was a deception. In October 2006, the Lancet published research
by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University
in Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as
a result of the Anglo-American invasion. A Freedom of Information
search revealed that the government, while publicly dismissing
the study, secretly backed it as comprehensive and reliable.
The chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defense, Sir
Roy Anderson, called its methods "robust" and "close
to best practice." Other senior governments officials secretly
acknowledged the survey’s "tried and tested way of measuring
mortality in conflict zones." Since then, the British research
polling agency, Opinion Research Business, has extrapolated
a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq. Thus, the scale of death
caused by the British and US governments may well have surpassed
that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the biggest single act
of mass murder of the late 20th century and the 21st century.
- Looting
The undeclared
reason for the invasion of Iraq was the convergent ambitions
of the neocons, or neo-fascists, in Washington and the far-right
regimes of Israel. Both groups had long wanted Iraq crushed
and the Middle East colonized to US and Israeli designs. The
initial blueprint for this was the 1992 "Defense Planning
Guidance", which outlined America’s post-Cold War plans
to dominate the Middle East and beyond. Its authors included
Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell, architects of
the 2003 invasion. Following the invasion, Paul Bremer, a neocon
fanatic, was given absolute civil authority in Baghdad and in
a series of decrees turned the entire future Iraqi economy over
to US corporations. As this was lawless, the corporate plunderers
were given immunity from all forms of prosecution. The Blair
government was fully complicit and even objected when it looked
as if UK companies might be excluded from the most profitable
looting. British officials were awarded functionary colonial
posts. A petroleum "law" will allow, in effect, foreign
oil companies to approve their own contracts over Iraq’s vast
energy resources. This will complete the greatest theft since
Hitler stripped his European conquests.
- Destroying
a nation’s health
In 1999,
I interviewed Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist at Basra
city hospital. "Before the Gulf War," he said, "we
had only three or four deaths in a month from cancer. Now it’s
30 to 35 patients dying every month. Our studies indicate that
40 to 48 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer."
Iraq was then in the grip of an economic and humanitarian siege,
initiated and driven by the US and Britain. The result, wrote
Hans von Sponeck, the then chief UN humanitarian official in
Baghdad, was "genocidal . . . practically an entire nation
was subjected to poverty, death and destruction of its physical
and mental foundations." Most of southern Iraq remains
polluted with the toxic debris of British and American explosives,
including uranium-238 shells. Iraqi doctors pleaded in vain
for help, citing the levels of leukemia among children as the
highest seen since Hiroshima. Professor Karol Sikora, chief
of the World Health Organization’s cancer program, wrote in
the BMJ: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy
drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States
and British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee]." In
1999, Kim Howells, then trade minister, effectively banned the
export to Iraq of vaccines that would protect mostly children
from diphtheria, tetanus and yellow fever, which, he said, "are
capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction."
Since 2003,
apart from PR exercises for the embedded media, the British
occupiers have made no attempt to re-equip and resupply hospitals
that, prior to 1991, were regarded as the best in the Middle
East. In July, Oxfam reported that 43 per cent of Iraqis were
living in "absolute poverty." Under the occupation,
malnutrition rates among children have spiraled to 28 per cent.
A secret Defense Intelligence Agency document, "Iraq Water
Treatment Vulnerabilities", reveals that the civilian water
supply was deliberately targeted. As a result, the great majority
of the population has neither access to running water nor sanitation
– in a country where such basic services were once as universal
as in Britain. "The mortality of children in Basra has
increased by nearly 30 per cent compared to the Saddam Hussein
era," said Dr. Haydar Salah, a pediatrician at Basra children’s
hospital. "Children are dying daily and no one is doing
anything to help them." In January this year, nearly 100
leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international
development secretary, describing how children were dying because
Britain had not fulfilled its obligations as an occupying power
under UN Security Council Resolution 1483. Benn refused to see
them.
- Destroying
a society
The UN
estimates that 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every
month. The refugee crisis has now overtaken that of Darfur as
the most catastrophic on earth. Half of Iraq’s doctors have
gone, along with engineers and teachers. The most literate society
in the Middle East is being dismantled, piece by piece. Out
of more than four million displaced people, Britain last year
refused the majority of more than 1,000 Iraqis who applied to
come here, while removing more "illegal" Iraqi refugees
than any other European country. Thanks to tabloid-inspired
legislation, Iraqis in Britain are often destitute, with no
right to work and no support. They sleep and scavenge in parks.
The government, says Amnesty, "is trying to starve them
out of the country."
- Propaganda
"See
in my line of work," said George W Bush, "you got
to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to
sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
Standing
outside 10 Downing Street on 9 April 2003, the BBC’s then political
editor, Andrew Marr, reported the fall of Baghdad as a victory
speech. Tony Blair, he told viewers, "said they would be
able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end
the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points
he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely
ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight
he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a
result." In the United States, similar travesties passed
as journalism. The difference was that leading American journalists
began to consider the consequences of the role they had played
in the buildup to the invasion. Several told me they believed
that had the media challenged and investigated Bush’s and Blair’s
lies, instead of echoing and amplifying them, the invasion might
not have happened. A European study found that, of the major
western television networks, the BBC permitted less coverage
of dissent than all of them. A second study found that the BBC
consistently gave credence to government propaganda that weapons
of mass destruction existed. Unlike the Sun, the BBC has credibility
– as does, or did, the Observer.
On 14 October
2001, the London Observer’s front page said: "US hawks
accuse Iraq over anthrax." This was entirely false. Supplied
by US intelligence, it was part of the Observer’s staunchly
pro-war coverage, which included claiming a link between Iraq
and al-Qaeda, for which there was no credible evidence and which
betrayed the paper’s honorable past. One report over two pages
was headlined: "The Iraqi connection." It, too, came
from "intelligence sources" and was rubbish. The reporter,
David Rose, concluded his barren inquiry with a heartfelt plea
for an invasion. "There are occasions in history,"
he wrote, "when the use of force is both right and sensible."
Rose has since written his mea culpa, including in these pages,
confessing how he was used. Other journalists have still to
admit how they were manipulated by their own credulous relationship
with established power.
These days,
Iraq is reported as if it is exclusively a civil war, with a
US military "surge" aimed at bringing peace to the
scrapping natives. The perversity of this is breathtaking. That
sectarian violence is the product of a vicious divide-and-conquer
policy is beyond doubt. As for the largely media myth of al-Qaeda,
"most of the [American] pros will tell you", wrote
Seymour Hersh, "that the foreign fighters are a couple
per cent, and then they’re sort of leaderless." That a
poorly armed, audacious resistance has not only pinned down
the world’s most powerful army but has agreed an anti-sectarian,
anti-al-Qaeda agenda, which opposes attacks on civilians and
calls for free elections, is not news.
- The next
blood letting
In the
1960s and 1970s, British governments secretly expelled the population
of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean whose people
have British nationality. Women and children were loaded on
to vessels resembling slave ships and dumped in the slums of
Mauritius, after their homeland was given to the Americans for
a military base. Three times, the High Court has found this
atrocity illegal, calling it a defiance of the Magna Carta and
the Blair government’s refusal to allow the people to go home
"outrageous" and "repugnant." The government
continues to use endless recourse to appeal, at the taxpayers’
expense, to prevent upsetting Bush. The cruelty of this matches
the fact that not only has the US repeatedly bombed Iraq from
Diego Garcia, but at "Camp Justice", on the island,
"al-Qaeda suspects" are "rendered" and "tortured",
according to the Washington Post. Now the US Air Force
is rushing to upgrade hangar facilities on the island so that
stealth bombers can carry 14-ton "bunker busting"
bombs in an attack on Iran. Orchestrated propaganda in the media
is critical to the success of this act of international piracy.
 On
22 May, the front page of the London Guardian carried
the banner headline: "Iran’s secret plan for summer offensive
to force US out of Iraq." This was a tract of unalloyed
propaganda based entirely on anonymous US official sources.
Throughout the media, other drums have taken up the beat. "Iran’s
nuclear ambitions" slips effortlessly from newsreaders’
lips, no matter that the International Atomic Energy Agency
refuted Washington’s lies, no matter the echo of "Saddam’s
weapons of mass destruction", no matter that another bloodbath
beckons.
Lest we forget.
John
Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been
a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London,
he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's
highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his
work in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape in June.
©
John Pilger 2007
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