October 09, 2014 "ICH"
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In
transmitting President Richard Nixon’s
orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia
in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything
that flies on everything that moves”. As
Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against
the Muslim world since he was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria
and lies make one almost nostalgic for
Kissinger’s murderous honesty.
As a
witness to the human consequences of aerial
savagery – including the beheading of
victims, their parts festooning trees and
fields – I am not surprised by the disregard
of memory and history, yet again. A telling
example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and
his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with
today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
(ISIS). They, too, were ruthless
medievalists who began as a small sect.
They, too, were the product of an
American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.
According to Pol Pot, his movement had
consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed
guerrillas uncertain about their strategy,
tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s
and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone to work
as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s
ultimate demon could not believe his luck.
The
Americans dropped the equivalent of five
Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73.
They levelled village after village,
returning to bomb the rubble and corpses.
The craters left monstrous necklaces of
carnage, still visible from the air. The
terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer
Rouge official described how the survivors
“froze up and they would wander around mute
for three or four days. Terrified and
half-crazy, the people were ready to believe
what they were told … That was what made it
so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the
people over.”
A
Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry
estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in
the ensuing civil war and described the
bombing as the “first stage in a decade of
genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began,
Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed.
Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to
a formidable army of 200,000.
ISIS
has a similar past and present. By most
scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion
of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some
700,000 people -- in a country that had no
history of jihadism. The Kurds had done
territorial and political deals; Sunni and
Shia had class and sectarian differences,
but they were at peace; intermarriage was
common. Three years before the invasion, I
drove the length of Iraq without fear. On
the way I met people proud, above all, to be
Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that
seemed, for them, a presence.
Bush
and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now
a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda -- like Pol
Pot’s “jihadists” -- seized the opportunity
provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe
and the civil war that followed. “Rebel”
Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA
and Gulf state ratlines of weapons,
logistics and money running through Turkey.
The arrival of foreign recruits was
inevitable. A former British ambassador,
Oliver Miles, wrote recently, “The [Cameron]
government seems to be following the example
of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice
from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that
our Middle East policy – and in particular
our Middle East wars – had been a principal
driver in the recruitment of Muslims in
Britain for terrorism here.”
ISIS
is the progeny of those in Washington and
London who, in destroying Iraq as both a
state and a society, conspired to commit an
epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations
of a western state terror dispensed by a
venal imperial elite undeterred by the
consequences of actions taken at great
remove in distance and culture. Their
culpability is unmentionable in “our”
societies.
It is
23 years since this holocaust enveloped
Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War,
when the US and Britain hijacked the United
Nations Security Council and imposed
punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population
– ironically, reinforcing the domestic
authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a
medieval siege. Almost everything that
sustained a modern state was, in the jargon,
“blocked” -- from chlorine for making the
water supply safe to school pencils, parts
for X-ray machines, common painkillers and
drugs to combat previously unknown cancers
carried in the dust from the southern
battlefields contaminated with Depleted
Uranium.
Just
before Christmas 1999, the Department of
Trade and Industry in London restricted the
export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi
children against diphtheria and yellow
fever. Kim Howells, a medical doctor and
parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in
the Blair government, explained why. “The
children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable
of being used in weapons of mass
destruction”. The British Government could
get away with such an outrage because media
reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated
by the Foreign Office -- blamed Saddam
Hussein for everything.
Under
a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food
Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi
to live on for a year. This figure had to
pay for the entire society’s infrastructure
and essential services, such as power and
water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant
Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told
me, “setting that pittance against the lack
of clean water, and the fact that the
majority of sick people cannot afford
treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting
from day to day, and you have a glimpse of
the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is
deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to
use the word genocide, but now it is
unavoidable.”
Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN
Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His
predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally
distinguished senior UN official, had also
resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said,
“to implement a policy that satisfies the
definition of genocide: a deliberate policy
that has effectively killed well over a
million individuals, children and adults.”
A
study by the United Nations Children’s Fund,
Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998,
the height of the blockade, there were
500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants
under the age of five. An American TV
reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US
Ambassador to the United Nations, asking
her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright
replied, “We think the price is worth it.”
In
2007, the senior British official
responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross,
known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary
selection committee, “[The US and UK
governments] effectively denied the entire
population a means to live.” When I
interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he
was consumed by regret and contrition. “I
feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare
truth-teller of how governments deceive and
how a compliant media plays a critical role
in disseminating and maintaining the
deception. “We would feed [journalists]
factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he
said, “or we’d freeze them out.”
On 25
September, a headline in the Guardian
read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must
act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a
warning of the suppression of informed
memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets
or shame. The author of the article was
Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office
minister responsible for Iraq under Blair.
In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the
extent of the suffering in Iraq for which
the Blair Government shared primary
responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s
Newsnight as an “apologist for
Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s
invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of
transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour
Party conference, he dismissed the invasion
as a “fringe issue”.
Now
Hain is demanding “air strikes, drones,
military equipment and other support” for
those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria.
This will further “the imperative of a
political solution”. Obama has the same in
mind as he lifts what he calls the
“restrictions” on US bombing and drone
attacks. This means that missiles and
500-pound bombs can smash the homes of
peasant people, as they are doing without
restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan
and Somalia -- as they did in Cambodia,
Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a
Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in
Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as
a dozen civilians, including women and
children. None waved a black flag.
The
day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday
and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in
London and came to visit me. They were not
shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a
politician, but lamented the enduring,
almost inexplicable absence of intelligent
diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of
truce. Across the world, from Northern
Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other
as terrorists and heretics have faced each
other across a table. Why not now in Iraq
and Syria.
Like
Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called
“perpetual war” has crossed the Atlantic.
Lord Richards, until recently head of the
British military, wants “boots on the
ground” now. There is a vapid, almost
sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama
and their “coalition of the willing” –
notably Australia’s aggressively weird Tony
Abbott -- as they prescribe more violence
delivered from 30,000 feet on places where
the blood of previous adventures never
dried. They have never seen bombing and they
apparently love it so much they want it to
overthrow their one potentially valuable
ally, Syria. This is nothing new, as the
following leaked UK-US intelligence file
illustrates:
“In order
to facilitate the action of liberative [sic]
forces … a special effort should be made to
eliminate certain key individuals [and] to
proceed with internal disturbances in Syria.
CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt
to mount minor sabotage and coup de main
[sic] incidents within Syria, working
through contacts with individuals... a
necessary degree of fear... frontier and
[staged] border clashes [will] provide a
pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS
should use... capabilities in both
psychological and action fields to augment
tension."
That was written in 1957, though it could
have been written yesterday. In the imperial
world, nothing essentially changes.
Last year, the former French
Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that
“two years before the Arab spring”, he was
told in London that a war on Syria was
planned. “I am going to tell you
something,” he said in an interview with the
French TV channel LPC, “I was in England two
years before the violence in Syria on other
business. I met top British officials, who
confessed to me that they were preparing
something in Syria … Britain was organising
an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even
asked me, although I was no longer Minister
for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to
participate … This operation goes way back.
It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”
The
only effective opponents of ISIS are
accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran,
Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an
“ally” and a member of Nato, which has
conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf
medievalists to channel support to the
Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling
themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its
long-held ambition for regional dominance by
overthrowing the Assad government beckons a
major conventional war and the horrific
dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse
state in the Middle East.
A
truce – however difficult to achieve – is
the only way out of this imperial maze;
otherwise, the beheadings will continue.
That genuine negotiations with Syria should
be seen as “morally questionable” (the
Guardian) suggests that the assumptions
of moral superiority among those who
supported the war criminal Blair remain not
only absurd, but dangerous.
Together with a truce, there should be an
immediate cessation of all shipments of war
materials to Israel and recognition of the
State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine
is the region’s most festering open wound,
and the oft-stated justification for the
rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden
made that clear. Palestine also offers hope.
Give justice to the Palestinians and you
begin to change the world around them.
More
than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger
bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of
suffering from which that country has never
recovered. The same is true of the
Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With impeccable
timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest
self-serving tome has just been released
with its satirical title, “World Order”. In
one fawning review, Kissinger is described
as a “key shaper of a world order that
remained stable for a quarter of a century”.
Tell that to the people of Cambodia,
Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the
other victims of his “statecraft”. Only
when “we” recognise the war criminals in our
midst will the blood begin to dry.
