How many children, in how many classrooms,
over how many centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported
on the wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating
and humiliating that ancient civilisation.
On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers
scrawl colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the
Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who
loves a boy. A child who only ever wanted to play with his older
brother's marbles.
On March 21, the day after American and
British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an
"embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American soldier.
"I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ said.
"I wanna take revenge for 9/11."
To be fair to the correspondent, even
though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so
far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the
September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the
way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over
my head," he said.
According to a New York Times/CBS News
survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein
is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of
Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What
percentage of America's armed forces believe these fabrications is
anybody's guess.
It is unlikely that British and
American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments
supported Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his
worst excesses.
But why should poor AJ and his fellow
soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any more,
does it? Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs,
ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying
toilet paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are
on the move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it
a universe unto itself. It doesn't need to justify its existence any
more. It exists. It is.
President George W Bush, commander in
chief of the US army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clear
instructions: "Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated." (Perhaps he means
that even if Iraqi people's bodies are killed, their souls will be
liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme
commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their
countries are at war. And what a war it is.
After using the "good
offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons
inspections) to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people
starved, half a million of its children killed, its infrastructure
severely damaged, after making sure that most of its weapons have been
destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in
history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of the
Willing"(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) -
sent in an invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think
so. It's more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break
Your Knees.
So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry,
ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow
managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the
"Allies". Faced with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful
armed forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage
and has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defence. A
defence which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as
deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with us
natives. When we are invaded/ colonised/occupied and stripped of all
dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)
Even allowing for the fact that Iraq
and the "Allies" are at war, the extent to which the
"Allies" and their media cohorts are prepared to go is
astounding to the point of being counterproductive to their own
objectives.
When Saddam Hussein appeared on
national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the most
elaborate assassination attempt in history - "Operation
Decapitation" - we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence secretary,
deriding him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed,
calling him a coward who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of
Coalition speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was
it Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it
black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want it
to?
After dropping not hundreds, but
thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly blown
up and civilians killed - a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis
were blowing themselves up! "They're using very old stock. Their
missiles go up and come down."
If so, may we ask how this squares with
the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of
Evil and a threat to world peace?
When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera
shows civilian casualties it's denounced as "emotive" Arab
propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the
"Allies", as though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the
"Allies" look bad. Even French television has come in for some
stick for similar reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft
carriers, stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert
sky on American and British TV is described as the "terrible
beauty" of war.
When invading American soldiers (from
the army "that's only here to help") are taken prisoner and
shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention
and "exposes the evil at the heart of the regime". But it is
entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of
prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on
the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque
goggles and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete
visual and aural deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of
these prisoners, US Government officials don't deny that they're being
being ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of war"!
They call them "unlawful combatants", implying that their
ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what's the party line on the massacre
of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And
what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special forces at the
Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.)
When the "Allies" bombed the
Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the
Geneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media.
In fact Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen
as a righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and
British TV continue to advertise themselves as "balanced" when
their propaganda has achieved hallucinatory levels.
Why should propaganda be the exclusive
preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better? Western
journalists "embedded" with troops are given the status of
heroes reporting from the frontlines of war. Non-"embedded"
journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and
bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies
of burned children and wounded people) are undermined even before they
begin their reportage: "We have to tell you that he is being
monitored by the Iraqi authorities."
Increasingly, on British and American
TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as "militia" (ie:
rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as
"quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence is "resistance" or
worse still, "pockets of resistance", Iraqi military strategy
is deceit. (The US government bugging the phone lines of UN security
council delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.)
Clearly for the "Allies", the only morally acceptable strategy
the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed
by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is
cheating.
And now we have the siege of Basra.
About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children. Without
clean water, and with very little food. We're still waiting for the
legendary Shia "uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out
of the city and rain roses and hosannahs on the "liberating"
army. Where are the hordes? Don't they know that television productions
work to tight schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls
there will be dancing on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush
regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world
over.)
After days of enforcing hunger and
thirst on the citizens of Basra, the "Allies" have brought in
a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the
outskirts of the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight
each other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise
the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate
photographers fought each other to get pictures of desperate people
fighting each other for food. Those pictures will go out through photo
agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines that pay extremely well.
Their message: The messiahs are at hand, distributing fishes and loaves.
As of July last year the delivery of
$5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It
didn't really make the news. But now under the loving caress of live TV,
450 tonnes of humanitarian aid - a minuscule fraction of what's actually
needed (call it a script prop) - arrived on a British ship, the
"Sir Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a
whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?
Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for
Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that it would
take 32 Sir Galahad's a day to match the amount of food Iraq was
receiving before the bombing began.
We oughtn't to be surprised though.
It's old tactics. They've been at it for years. Consider this moderate
proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during
the Vietnam war: "Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely
not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at
home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China
or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however - if handled
right - might ... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction
does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads
after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food
is provided - which we could offer to do 'at the conference
table'."
Times haven't changed very much. The
technique has evolved into a doctrine. It's called "Winning Hearts
and Minds".
So, here's the moral maths as it
stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf
war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At
least that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed
every day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war
officially declared "disabled" by a disease called the Gulf
war syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to depleted
uranium. It hasn't stopped the "Allies" from continuing to use
depleted uranium.
And now this talk of bringing the UN
back into the picture. But that old UN girl - it turns out that she just
ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she
retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the
Philippino cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from
Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's
employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will.
Despite Blair's earnest submissions,
and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play no
independent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The US will
decide who gets those juicy "reconstruction" contracts. But
Bush has appealed to the international community not to "politicise"
the issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for
the immediate resumption of the UN's oil for food programme, the UN
security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means that
everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be
used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions
and the illegal US-led war.
Contracts for the
"reconstruction" of Iraq we're told, in discussions on the
business news, could jump-start the world economy. It's funny how the
interests of American corporations are so often, so successfully and so
deliberately confused with the interests of the world economy. While the
American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons
manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in
"reconstruction" work will make direct gains from the war.
Many of them are old friends and former employers of the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice
cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for $75bn. Contracts for
"re-construction" are already being negotiated. The news
doesn't hit the stands because much of the US corporate media is owned
and managed by the same interests.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair
assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is,
returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals.
Like Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot
here? Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US
vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of Halliburton) is
a closet Iraqi?
As the rift between Europe and America
deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era of
economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine
into gutters, chanting, "We don't want your stinking wine."
We've heard about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they're
called now. There's news trickling in about Americans boycotting German
goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes this turn, it
is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may be defended by
border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy is strung out across
the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack in
every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with elaborate lists of
American and British government products and companies that should be
boycotted. Apart from the usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's -
government agencies such as USAID, the British department for
international development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson,
Merrill Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General
Electric, and companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find
themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and re fined by
activists across the world. They could become a practical guide that
directs and channels the amorphous, but growing fury in the world.
Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of corporate
globalisation is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.
It's become clear that the war against
terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only about
oil. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse towards
supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made
that the people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the
same process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case
it's an IMF chequebook. In the other, cruise missiles.
Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's
arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about
those!)
In the fog of war - one thing's for
sure - if Saddam 's regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is
showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the
teeth of extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi
troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could we
expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of
nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What about its chemical and
biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas? Would
it?
Excuse me while I laugh.
In the fog of war we're forced to
speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or - he
simply does not possess weapons of mass destruction. Either way,
regardless of what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling
sweeter than the US government.
So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave
threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq,
invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its
children killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And
here's all of us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here's
all of us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the
propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as we know and
understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried
potatoes). When someone says "humanitarian aid" we
automatically go looking for induced starvation. "Embedded" I
have to admit, is a great find. It's what it sounds like. And what about
"arsenal of tactics?" Nice!
In most parts of the world, the
invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a
racist war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in
everybody - perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters
for the debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking.
There is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart
of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I
encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely
sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to it all
the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics. That absurd
inability to separate governments from people: America is a nation of
morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same carelessness
with which they say, "All Muslims are terrorists"). Even in
the grotesque universe of racist insult, the British make their entry as
add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called.
Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for
being "anti-American" and "anti-west", find myself
in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And
Britain.
Those who descend so easily into the
pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of thousands
of American and British citizens who protested against their country's
stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war
resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They
should know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of
the US government and the "American way of life" comes from
American citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of
their prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they should
remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British and American
citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The Coalition of the
Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not people. More than one
third of America's citizens have survived the relentless propaganda
they've been subjected to, and many thousands are actively fighting
their own government. In the ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in
the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.
While the "Allies" wait in
the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the
real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It
has been the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.
Most courageous of all, are the
hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America's
great cities - Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is
that the only institution in the world today that is more powerful than
the American government, is American civil society. American citizens
have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we not
salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon that
responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.
At the end of it all, it remains to be
said that dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in
the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin
America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US
government, are a menace to their own people. Other than strengthening
the hand of civil society (instead of weakening it as has been done in
the case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them.
(It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't
hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war:
to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most
entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers".)
Regardless of what the propaganda
machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to
the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is
the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of
the US government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is
fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's true that he
is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far
more dangerous than the man himself.
Despite the pall of gloom that hangs
over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times of
war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And
President George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely
intelligent US president would have probably done the very same things,
but would have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition.
Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his
brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad, has done
the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and scholars have
striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the ducts. He has placed
on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the
apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.
Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary
Person's Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could
be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted.
Bring on the spanners.
Arundhati Roy