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. The Blood by John Pilger
As
the world protests against war, we hear again the lies of old. "A
painful decision," say the supporters of an invasion. But it is not
they who will feel the pain: it will be the Iraqi infants writhing in the
dust when the cluster bombs fall In
"Dulce et decorum est", his classic poem from the First World
War, Wilfred Owen described young soldiers, doomed to die, "like old
beggars under sacks", and a man's "hanging face, like a devil's
sick of sin". If
you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come
gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene
as cancer, bitter as the cud Of
vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,- My
friend, you would not tell with such high zest To
children ardent for some desperate glory, The
old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro
patria mori. What
has changed since Owen wrote those words, not long before his own
death in the trenches? In the Gulf war in 1991, the slaughter of
Iraqi conscripts was conducted in a similar industrial way. Three brigades
of the The
policy of General Norman Schwarzkopf, the American field commander, was
that the Iraqi dead were not to be counted. "This is the first war in
modern times," said one of his aides, "where every screwdriver,
every nail, is accounted for." As for human beings, "I don't
think anybody is going to come up with an accurate count for Iraqi
dead." In
fact, Schwarzkopf did provide figures to Congress, indicating that at
least 100,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed. He offered no estimate of
civilian deaths. Almost a year later, the Medical Education Trust in As
in 1914-18, the war was a bloodfest, with one difference. Almost all the
casualties were on one side, and as many as half of them were civilians. A
quarter of the 148 American soldiers who died were killed by other
Americans. Most of the British who died were also killed by Americans,
including nine blown to bits by an American tank. Little of this was
reported at the time. The massacre of conscripts and the wounded was
revealed six months later by one tenacious reporter, Knut Royce, in Little
had changed since 1914-18 when the Times correspondent Sir Philip Gibbs
(compliant media stars were knighted then; nowadays it's more likely to be
an OBE) wrote: "We were our own censors . . . some of us wrote the
truth . . . apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses, and
criticism of the facts which did not come within the liberty of our
pen." When the Gulf war was over, the BBC's foreign editor, John
Simpson, reported from Baghdad: "As for the human casualties, tens of
thousands of them, or the brutal effect the war had on millions of others
. . . we didn't see much of that." If the Gulf war was the most
"covered" war in history, it was also the most covered-up. With
honourable exceptions, the massacre of so many human beings was not
considered news. Every
effort is now being made to repeat this travesty, this "old
lie". In his interview on 6 February with the Prime Minister, the
BBC's Jeremy Paxman's only reference to the human cost of the Bush/Blair
adventure was to repeat a question from a woman in his audience. "She
asked you," said Paxman to Tony Blair, "about the deaths of
innocent people. I mean, as a Christian, how do you feel about innocent
people dying?" He then allowed Blair to get away with a self-serving
answer that included the lie that, prior to Nato's attack on Paxman
made no mention of a United Nations estimate, based on World Health
Organisation figures, that "as many as 500,000 people could require
treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries" and that an
attack was "likely to cause an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if
not pandemic proportions". Neither did he ask Blair how he could
justify attacking a nation where almost half the population were children,
and a large proportion of them were stricken from the consequences of an
American and British-driven blockade. If the American and British
governments had no quarrel with the Iraqi people and wished to liberate
them, Paxman might have asked, quoting Blair himself, why was the No,
the BBC's inquisitor was more concerned with the complexities of a second
UN resolution, a fig leaf, an amoral contrivance. The clear implication
was that as long as the killing of large numbers of innocent human beings
was backed by a second resolution, "the problem" was solved.
That the Security Council's principal members were themselves the sources
of numerous human rights crimes was not deemed relevant. Suppressing
the human cost of war is the "old lie" in Wilfred Owen's
wonderful poem. Yet in 2003, a privileged establishment journalist paid
large amounts of public money ensured that the prime minister did not have
to justify the old lie, just as he ensured that Blair did not have to
explain the hypocrisy and double standards of The
opposition of the great majority of the British people, and of people all
over the world, to an unprovoked attack on another country has illuminated
the indecency of those who claim to speak for and share the public's
essentially liberal values. From behind a humanitarian mask, they promote
killing. To this "liberal" lobby, it is wrong to kill innocent
people if you are Saddam Hussein (evil) and right to kill them if you are
Tony Blair (good). The actual deaths and the crime of killing are
irrelevant; the attitude of their killers is what matters. On
3 February, I pointed out that the Observer, in its editorial of 19
January, had finally buried the principled "freethinking" legacy
of its great editor, David Astor. The paper that had stood against British
imperialism's attack on "The
easy bit" will be an onslaught of hundreds of missiles on a
defenceless population, resulting in countless, and uncounted, civilian
casualties. Defending the right of rapacious power to do what it likes
when it likes, from Unlike
the witness-nothing windbags, who appear almost to yearn for war, I have
seen the victims of cluster bombs. From many snapshots, here is one. Two
children writhe on a dirt floor, their bodies displaying hundreds of small
open wounds. They have been showered with tiny plastic objects from an
American "pellet bomb", the prototype of the cluster bomb. As
the darts move through their vital organs, they die a terrible death, the
equivalent of swallowing acid. "For
many of us [supporting an attack on Who
among the "liberals" who say their motive for backing Bush and
Blair is to "liberate" the Iraqi people has spoken out against
this medieval siege that has "liberated" hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis from life? Their specious compassion is like that of the man who
stands besides a torturer, reassuring the victim that his ordeal will end
if he accepts the torturer's terms. "Nothing about hard
for Pilger," wrote Aaronovitch. "He was opposed to the
containment of Saddam through the enforcement of the no-fly zones,
dismissive of the threats to the Kurdish people of the north." Once
again, the unworthy victims are airbrushed. The fishermen, farmers,
shepherds and their families and sheep, slaughtered by marauding
"coalition" aircraft, are simply omitted. Their deaths are
documented in a United Nations security section report and verified by the
UN humanitarian co-ordinator for As
for "the threats to the Kurdish people of the north", year after
year, Kurdish villages in northern I
read a letter recently by a former conservative Australian politician, Bob
Solomon, writing on behalf of other Australian Tories. Its deeply offended
and angry tone is representative of the feelings of millions. He wrote:
"Wilful mixing of the 'war against terrorism' with alleged threat
from Iraq is an insult to our intelligence, and if there's one thing I
like less than mindless war, it's being treated like an idiot by people
not bright enough to know we know or too full of their own importance to
care. George Bush Junior is the worst leader of a major democracy I have
observed for more than 50 years." Today,
all over the world, the common decency of the majority of humanity is
ranged against Bush and Blair and their suburban propagandists, who can
either listen and draw back and save countless lives - or they can do as
Bertolt Brecht suggested in "The Solution": The
Secretary of the Writers' Had
leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating
that the people Had
forfeited the confidence of the government And
could win it back only By
redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In
that case for the government To
dissolve the people And elect another? 
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