Madonna and Child
4. A MIRE OF DEATH, LIES AND ATROCITIES
THE GHOSTS OF VIETNAM
BY
ROBERT FISK
Who said this and when?
"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows… We are today not far from a disaster."
Answer: TE Lawrence (of Arabia fame) in The Sunday Times in August, 1920. And every word of it is true today. We were lied to about weapons of mass destruction. We were lied to about the links between Saddam Hussein and September 11th, 2001. We were lied to about the insurgents—remember how they were just "dead-enders" and "remnants"?—and we were lied to about the improvements in Iraq when the entire country was steadily falling outside the hands of the occupying powers or of the government of satraps that they have set up in their place. We are, I suspect, being lied to about elections next month.
Over the past year, there has been evidence enough that our whole project in Iraq is hopelessly flawed, that our Western armies—when they are not torturing prisoners, killing innocents and destroying one of the largest cities in Iraq—are being vanquished by a ferocious guerrilla army, the like of which we have not seen before in the Middle East. My own calculations—probably conservative, because there are many violent acts that we are never told about—suggest that in the past 12 months, at least 190 suicide bombers have blown themselves up, sometimes at the rate of two a day. How does this happen? Is there a suicide-bomber supermarket, an off-the-shelf store? What have we done to create this extraordinary industry? Time was, in Lebanon, when a suicide bombing was a once-a-month event. Or in Palestine/Israel a once-a-week event. Now, in Iraq, it is daily or twice daily.
And American troops are sending home increasingly terrible stories of the wanton killing of civilians by US forces in the town and cities of Iraq. Here, for example, is the evidence of ex-marine staff sergeant Jimmy Massey, testifying at a refugee hearing in Canada earlier this month. Massey told the Canadian board—which had to decide whether to give refugee status to an American deserter from the 82nd Airborne—that he and his fellow marines shot and killed more than 30 unarmed men, women and children, including a young Iraqi who got out of his car with his arms up. "We killed the man, "Massey said. "We fired at a cyclic rate of 500 bullets per vehicle." Massey assumed that the dead Iraqis didn't understand the hand signal to stop. On another occasion, according to Massey, marines—in reaction to a stray bullet—opened fire and killed a group of unarmed protesters and bystanders. "I was deeply concerned about the civilian casualties," Massey said. "What they (the marines) were doing was committing murder." The defector from the 82nd Airborne, Jeremy Hinzman, told the court that "we were told to consider all Arabs as potential terrorists… to foster an attitude of hatred that gets your blood boiling".
All this, of course, is part of the "withholding of information" It took months before the Abu Ghraib torture and abuses were made public—even though the International Red Cross had already told the American and British authorities. It took months, for that matter, for the British government to respond to the outrageous beatings—and one killing—carried out on defenseless Iraqis in Basra, first exposed by The Independent. In the first seven months of last year, the authorities maintained that they still "controlled" Iraq, even though—when I drove 70 miles south of Baghdad in August—I found every checkpoint deserted and the highways littered with burnt American trucks and police vehicles.
Still we are not told how many civilians were killed in the American attack on Fallujah. The Americans claim that they killed more than 1,000 insurgents—only insurgents, mark you, not a single civilian among them—is preposterous. Still we are not free to enter the city. Nor, given the fact that the insurgents still appear to be there, is it likely that anyone can do so. Why are American aircraft still bombing Fallujah, weeks after the US military claimed to have captured it?
It is difficult, over the past year, to think of anything that has not gone wrong or grown worse in Iraq. The electrical grid is collapsing again, the petrol queues are greater than they were in the days following the illegal invasion in 2003, and security is non-existent in all but the Kurdish north of the country.
The proposal to put Saddam's minions on trial looks more and more like an attempt to justify the invasion and distract attention from the horrors to come. Even the forthcoming elections are beginning to look more and more like a diversion. For if the Sunnis cannot—or will not vote, what will this election be worth? Donald Rumsfeld gave us the first hint that things might not be going quite to plan when he spoke before the American election about a poll in "parts " of Iraq. What does this mean" Yet, still the invaders go on telling us that things are getting better, that Iraq is about to enter the brotherhood of nations. Bush even got re-elected after telling this lie. The body bags are returning home more frequently than ever—we are not supposed to ask how many Iraqis are dying—yet still we are told that the invasion was worthwhile, that Iraqis are better off, that security will improve or—my favourite, this one—that they will get worse the nearer we get to elections. This is the same old story that Bush and Rumsfeld used to put about last spring: that thing are getting better—which is why the insurgents are creating so much violence; in other words , the better things are the worse thing are gong to get. When you read this nonsense in Washington or London, it might make sense. In Baghdad, it is madness. I wouldn't want to try it out on the young American soldiers who were so arrogantly informed by Rumsfeld that "you go to war with the army you have".
It would be pleasant to record some happiness somewhere in the Middle East. Palestinian elections in the New Year? Well, yes, but if the colourless and undemocratic Mahmoud Abbas is the best the Palestinians have to look forward to, after the far too colourful Yassir Arafat, then their chances of achieving statehood are about as dismal as they were when Arafat resided in his Ramallah bunker.
The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is not trying to close down illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza because he want to be nice to the Palestinians; and his spokesman's dismissive remarks about the West Bank—that the Gaza withdrawal will put Palestinian statehood into "formaldehyde"—does not suggest that the occupied are going to receive statehood from their occupiers. Which means, one way or another, that the Intifada will restart. At which point, the Israelis will complain that Abbas cannot "control his own people", and the Israelis and the Palestinians will return to their hopeless conflict.
It is impossible to reflect on the year in Iraq without realizing just how deeply the Israeli-Palestinian struggle affects the entire Middle East. Iraqis watch the Palestinian battle with great earnestness. Saddam Hussein's support for the Palestinians was one with which many Iraqis could identify—even if they loathed their own dictator. And I doubt very much if the suicide bomber would have come of age so quickly in Iraq without the precedent set by the suicide bombers of Palestine and, before them, of Lebanon.
It is this precedent-setting capacity of events in the Middle East—not the mythical "foreign fighters" of George Bush's fantasy world—that is costing America so much blood in Iraq. When Sharon tries to prevent Palestinian statehood, Iraqis remember that his closest ally is represented in Iraq by an army which most of them regard as occupiers. When US forces learn their guerrilla warfare techniques from the Israelis—when they bomb houses from the air, when they abuse prisoners, when they even erect razor-wire round recalcitrant villages—is it surprising that Iraqis treat the Americans as surrogate Israelis?
We shouldn't need the evidence of ex-marine Massey to show us how brutal the occupying armies have become—and how irrelevant Iraq's "interim" government truly is. In Washington or London, these "ministers" play the role of international statesmen, but in Baghdad, where they hide behind the walls of their dangerous little enclave, they have as much status as rural mayors. Besides they cannot even negotiate with their enemies.
Which leads us to the one clear fact about the last year of chaos and anarchy and brutality in Iraq. We still do not know who our enemies are. Save for the one name "Zarqawi", the Americans—with all the billions of dollars they have thrown into intelligence, their CIA mainframe computers and their huge payments to informers—simply do not know whom they are fighting. They "recapture" Samarra—three times—and then they lose it again. They "recapture" Fallujah and then they lose it again. They cannot even control the main streets of Baghdad.
Who would have believed, in 2003, as US forces drove into Baghdad, that within two years they would be mired in their biggest guerrilla war since Vietnam? Those few of us who predicted just that—and The Independent was among them—were derided as nay-sayers, doom-mongers, pessimists.
Iraq is now proving all over again what we should have learned in Lebanon and Palestine/Israel: that Arabs have lost their fear. It has been a slow process. But a quarter of a century ago, the Arabs lived in chains, cowed by occupiers and oppressive regimes. They were a submissive society and they did as they were told. The Israelis even used a "Palestinian police force" to help them in their occupation. Not any more. The biggest development in the Middle East over the past 30 years has been this shaking off of fear. Fear—of the occupier, of the dictator—is something that you cannot re-inject into people. And this, I suspect, is what has happened in Iraq.
Iraqis are just not prepared to live in fear any more. They know they must depend on themselves—our betrayal of the 1991 rising against Saddam proved that—and they refuse to be frightened by their occupiers. It was we who warned them of the dangers of civil war, even though there never has been a civil war in Iraq. As a people, they watched Westerners turn up by the thousand to make money out of country that had been beaten down by a corrupt dictatorship and UN sanctions. Is it any surprise that Iraqis are angry?
The American columnist Tom Friedman, in one of his less messianic articles, posed a good question before the 2003 invasion. Who knows, he asked, what bats will fly out of the box when we get to Baghdad? Well, now we know. So we should repeat Lawrence's chilling remark—without the quotation marks and the date 1920. We are today not far from a disaster.
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5. DEPLETED URANIUM: THE TROJAN HORSE
BY
LEUREN MORET
"HEAT NOT A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE SO HOT THAT IT DO SINGE YOURSELF."
(William Shakespeare)
The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the US, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human one, and yet the US continues to do so with full knowledge of the destructive potential of DU.
Since 1991, the US has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair, an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium—from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India—to the US geostrategic imperatives.
The fact is that the US and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.
Describe as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years the age of the earth. And, as Uranium 238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government's own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture move it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout.
A 2003 independent report for the European Parliament by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) reports that based on Chernobyl studies low level radiation risk is 100 to 1000 time greater than the International Committee for Radiation Protection models estimate which are based on the flawed atomic and Hydrogen Bomb studies conducted by the US Government. Referring to the extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of the 46 international radiation expert authors of the ECRR report, describes it as:
"The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide."
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6. THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY AT HOME
BY
EDWARD S. HERMAN
The Privatization of Government
Private power and the incessant demands of capital as the main engine of the economy have always influenced, and for long periods completely dominated, the US political system. Modest change can be effected, however, when things get bad enough and when the interests of the fragmented majority coalesce, usually briefly. These circumstances bring moderate reforms that alleviate pressures from below. But they arouse great anxiety among the dominant elites, who denounce the extremism of "special interests" and their spokespersons in these periods of crisis of democracy" and "democratic excess" (i.e., approach to actual democracy).
The processes by which the excesses are contained, although they may make democracy a formal affair without much democratic substance, are institutionalized and made to seem natural by the established institutions. Their seamier features are glossed over or suppressed. The civics texts in schools and the mainstream media focus on the nominally democratic forms, the wonderful system of checks and balances, and the superficial elements of the electoral horse races. As is the case in demonstration elections in El Salvador and other client states, the media stress personalities and the positive, while avoiding a critical look at whether the fundamental requirements of free elections are met, such as reasonable equality for funding and access to the mass media by representatives of all major classes and constituencies. The possibility that important options which might serve the interests of large numbers are systematically excluded from the political arena, because any candidate espousing them would be defunded by the main sources of money in politics—as well as vilified as an extremist by the mass media—is itself excluded from discussion. As only "moderate" positions can be adequately financed and treated respectfully and as "serious" by the mainstream media, the severely circumscribed options are made to seem natural and normal, like the competition among the "moderate" parties ink El Salvador and Guatemala.
The belief by a considerable proportion of the population that elections in and of themselves represent genuine democracy in action, and give sovereignty and free choice to the public at large, is a tremendous achievement of the western system of governance. It legitimates elite control and weakens the force of criticism of western governments and institutions. The public is rendered quiescent because "it" has spoken , and significant numbers are impressed with the argument that protest is improper because the government represents the popular will, validated by a democratic election. In the classic phrase of 'William Penn: "Let the People think they Govern and they will be Governed."
A further factor contributing to quiescence is the belief that, given the freedom and opportunity for personal achievement in the US failure is a result of individual inadequacies (or bad luck), not defects in institutions. We need more "moral fiber," which will only be weakened by coddling the lazy and ne'er-do-wells.
Of course the system must produce some minimal payoff for the underlying population—or at least for a significant fraction of that population—in order to keep the excesses under control. In the provinces, where this has been more difficult, the US establishment has often actively colluded with and even helped organize National Security States to keep the masses apathetic and passive by means of state terror (always called, however, counterinsurgency, pacification, the restoration of stability, or even counter terrorism). While this has not been necessary on such a grand scale at home as yet, it is clear from the support of so many terror states abroad that it remains a viable option if needed. The record of the state in the Wilson Palmer raids and Truman-McCarthy and Cointelpro eras demonstrates how quickly gross violations of civil liberties—from simple harassment to outright murder—can be instituted when it serves establishment interests.
The Crisis of Democracy
The 1960s produced a "crisis of democracy" in the minds of US elites. Neither before nor after this period did they see a crisis, despite the decline in voter participation (now below 19th century levels), the plutocratizing of politics, the diminished substantive content of electoral campaigns, and the increased importance of demagoguery and news management. The fact that nobody can compete seriously for national political office who poses a serious challenge to the security state and Military Industrial Complex, or takes a strongly populist position on tax-expenditure policy, is not seen as a problem. This is the way things ought to be: the permanent interests in firm control, the "business" of politics making the two parties into branches of a single property party, and the "transaction costs" too high to make organizing the effectively disenfranchised masses worthwhile. The financial requirements of plutocratic politics gives the property party an effective monopoly.
Some establishment spokespersons make no bones about the fact that the characteristic of the 1960s that merited the designation "crisis" was the arousing of the masses and their organization into groups that could lobby and protest. Some establishment commentators and analysts were openly nostalgic for the times when a quiescent public allowed the government to be run by a small clique of Wall Street lawyers and bankers. In consonance with this vision of the 1960s as an era of threat and irrational upheaval, the main stream media in recent years has portrayed the period as one of violent protest and mindlessness.
In short, for the dominant elite, democracy means rule by themselves without challenge from or participation by ordinary citizens. This parallels usage, and even more, practice, in dealing with the Third World, where , for example, a crisis in Nicaragua that arouses the US leadership to action, to see a need for free elections and "democracy," is the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship and the coming into power of a group pursuing "the logic of the majority." Somoza's mode of governance was acceptable, not challenged for any electoral or democratic deficiencies. The US mass media did not actually call Somoza's rule democratic, but neither did they call attention to its failing or US support of highly undemocratic rule. Our alliance with the terror state was rationalized and protected in many ways—people not ready, "traditional" modes of rule, Central American human nature, moving toward democracy under our tutelage, and, of course, eye aversion. Where elections were held under conditions of massive state terror, as in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s, but with power in the hands of groups pursuing the logic of the minority, the media rushed to applaud the "fledgling democracies" with "elected" leaders.
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