"We dropped a few civilians", said Sgt Eric
Schrumpf of the US Marines
by John Pilger
05 Apr 2003
WE HAD a great day," said Sgt Eric Schrumpf of the US Marines last
Saturday. "We killed a lot of people."
He added: "We dropped a few civilians, but what do you do?"
He said there were women standing near an Iraqi soldier, and one of them
fell when he and other Marines opened fire. "I'm sorry," said
Sgt Schrumpf, "but the chick was in the way".
For me, what is remarkable about this story is that I heard almost the
same words 36 years ago when a US Marine sergeant told me he had killed
a pregnant woman and a child because they had "got in the way".
That was in Vietnam, another country invaded by the US military machine,
which left up to two million people dead and many more maimed and otherwise
ruined. President Reagan called this "a noble cause". The other
day, President Bush called the invasion of Iraq, another unprovoked and
piratical act, "a noble cause".
In the years since Vietnam, the Americans have invaded and caused, directly
and through stooges, great suffering in many other countries, but none
tells us more about the current war than their enduring atrocity in Vietnam,
known as the first "media war".
Like their attack on Iraq, their invasion of Vietnam was accompanied
by a racist contempt for the people. The Vietnamese were "gooks"
and "slits" who would never fight, who would be crushed within
weeks. As in Iraq today, the uncensored evidence of America's killing
was not shown on TV but covered up.
General Colin Powell, Bush's "liberal" Secretary of State,
was promoted swiftly because he was given the job of covering up the infamous
My Lai massacre. In the end, the Vietnamese defied the Hollywood script
and expelled their invader, but at great cost.
The Iraqis, up against two western air forces and a Disneyworld of weapons
of mass destruction, are unlikely to share the same honour. And yet they,
too, are not keeping to the script; and their extraordinary resistance
against such overwhelming odds has required intensified propaganda in
Washington and London: aimed not at them, but at us.
Unlike in Vietnam, this propaganda, lying that is both crude and subtle,
is now dispensed globally and marketed and controlled like a new niche
product. Richard Gaisford, an "embedded" BBC reporter, said
recently: "We have to check each story we have with (the military).
And the captain, who's our media liaison officer, will check with the
colonel, and they will check with Brigade headquarters as well."
David Miller, a media analyst at Stirling University, calls it "public
relations genius". It works like this. Once the official "line"
is agreed and manufactured at the Coalition Press Information Centre in
Kuwait and the $1million press centre in Qatar, it is submitted to the
White House, to what is known as the Office of Global Communications.
It is then polished for British consumption by Blair's staff of propagandists
in Downing Street.
Truth, above all, is redundant. There is only "good" news or
no news. For example, the arrival in Iraq of the British ship Sir Galahad
with a miserable few hundred tons of humanitarian aid was a "good"
story given wide coverage. What was missing was the truth that the Blair
government continues to back Washington's deliberate denial of $5.4billion
worth of humanitarian aid, including baby milk and medical supplies. This
is "aid" which Iraq has paid for (from oil receipts) and the
UN Security Council has approved.
What was also missing from such a moving tale of Britain-to-the-rescue
was that, under pressure from Bush and Blair, the United Nations has been
forced to close down its food distribution system in Iraq, which barely
prevented famine in the pre-war period.
BLAIR'S lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and its alleged
links with al-Qaeda have been exposed and rejected by the majority of
the British people. He has since played his "conviction" card.
Perhaps his last propaganda refuge is a call to support "our boys".
On September 3, 1967, the Sunday Mirror published a dispatch of mine
from Vietnam under the front page headline: "How can Britain approve
a war like this?" Today's Mirror asks the same question of the invasion
of Iraq. The difference is that, unlike Blair, Prime Minister Harold Wilson
denied an American president the use of British troops for his "coalition".
A poll in yesterday's Mirror said that "78 per cent insist British
forces must not be brought home until the war is over." Polls themselves
can make propaganda, with the question predetermining the answer. What
if the question asked had been: "Do you support British forces being
in Iraq given the absence of any 'liberation' and the rising number of
civilian casualties?"
I doubt whether it would have been anywhere near 78 per cent. There is
undoubtedly a traditional reserve of support for "the troops",
no matter the dirty work they are sent to carry out. Blair's manipulation
of this should not be allowed to succeed. British troops may be better
trained than the Americans; but this does not alter the fact that they
are part of, indeed essential to, a criminal invasion of a country offering
us no threat.
Trained in media manipulation ("public relations"), British
military spokesmen lie as frequently as the Americans; if anything, their
nonsense about "uprisings" is too specious by half. The truth
they don't tell is that the British siege of Basra is strangling the civilian
population, causing great suffering to innocent, men, women and children
in their homeland.
Imagine if Iraqi troops were doing the same to Birmingham, a city of
comparable size. Imagine the outrage: the popular resistance, regardless
of who was in power in London. If we cannot imagine that, then we have
fallen victim to a big lie that reverses right and wrong. If we cannot
put ourselves in Iraqis' shoes, in the shoes of the grieving family of
the woman who was gunned down by Sgt Schrumpf, "the chick who got
in the way", then we have cause indeed to worry.
by John Pilger |
