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Lest We Forget
By John Pilger
11/15/07 "ICH" -- -- 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 to 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.
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