Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates
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
Arundhati Roy
Wednesday April 2, 2003
The London Guardian
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.
by Arundhati Roy
|
