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CounterPunch
February
15, 2003
The Case Against War
Tales to Frighten
Children
By ROBERT FISK
In the end, I think we are just tired of being
lied to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with
Second World War jingoism and scare stories and false information
and student essays dressed up as "intelligence". We
are sick of being insulted by little men, by Tony Blair and Jack
Straw and the likes of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative
henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map of the
Middle East to their advantage.
No wonder, then, that Hans Blix's blunt
refutation of America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday
warmed so many hearts. Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world
could show up the Americans for the untrustworthy "allies"
they have become.
The British don't like Hussein any more
than they liked Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as
Blair does not, the Second World War; they are not conned by
childish parables of Hitler, Churchill, Chamberlain and appeasement.
They do not like being lectured and whined at by men whose experience
of war is Hollywood and television.
Still less do they wish to embark on
endless wars with a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the
Vietnam draft and who, with his oil buddies, is now sending America's
poor to destroy a Muslim nation that has nothing at all to do
with the crimes against humanity of 11 September. Jack Straw,
the public school Trot-turned-warrior, ignores all  this, with Blair. He brays at us about
the dangers of nuclear weapons that Iraq does not have, of the
torture and aggression of a dictatorship that America and Britain
sustained when Saddam was "one of ours". But he and
Blair cannot discuss the dark political agenda behind George
Bush's government, nor the "sinister men" (the words
of a very senior UN official) around the President.
Those who oppose war are not cowards.
Brits rather like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims,
Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations,
Iraqis included--though we play down the RAF's use of gas on
Kurdish rebels in the 1930s. But when the British are asked to
go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with the horror stories,
Britons--and many Americans--are a lot braver than Blair and
Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell in A Man
for All Seasons, tales to frighten children.
Perhaps Henry VIII's exasperation in
that play better expresses the British view of Blair and Bush:
"Do they take me for a simpleton?" The British, like
other Europeans, are an educated people. Ironically, their opposition
to this obscene war may make them feel more, not less, European.
Palestine has much to do with it. Brits
have no love for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough and
are outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians
by a nation that is now in effect running US policy in the Middle
East. We are told that our invasion of Iraq has nothing to do
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--a burning, fearsome wound
to which Bush devoted just 18 words in his meretricious State
of the Union speech--but even Blair can't get away with that
one; hence his "conference" for Palestinian reform
at which the Palestinians had to take part via video-link because
Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let them travel
to London.
So much for Blair's influence over Washington--the
US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted" that
he couldn't persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at least
one has to acknowledge that Sharon--war criminal though he may
be for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres--treated Blair with
the contempt he deserves. Nor can the Americans hide the link
between Iraq and Israel and Palestine. In his devious address
to the UN Security Council last week, Powell linked the three
when he complained that Hamas, whose suicide bombings so cruelly
afflict Israelis, keeps an office in Baghdad.
Just as he told us about the mysterious
al-Qa'ida men who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi
gorge". This was America's way of giving Vladimir Putin
a free hand again in his campaign of rape and murder against
the Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark to the UN General Assembly
last 12 September about the need to protect Iraq's Turkomans
only becomes clear when one realises that Turkomans make up two
thirds of the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest oil
fields.
The men driving Bush to war are mostly
former or still active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they
have advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation. Richard
Perle, one of Bush's most influential advisers, Douglas Feith,
Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning
for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was elected--if
he was elected--US President. And they weren't doing so for the
benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm ( http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
) called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for
the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu
and produced by a group headed by--yes, Richard Perle. The destruction
of Iraq will, of course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear
weapons and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever
colonial settlement Sharon has in store.
Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss
this with us--a war for Israel is not going to have our boys
lining up at the recruiting offices--Jewish American leaders
talk about the advantages of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed,
those very courageous Jewish American groups who so bravely oppose
this madness have been the first to point out how pro-Israeli
organisations foresee Iraq not only as a new source of oil but
of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris river to
the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this
topic must be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins
University, tried to do in the Wall Street Journal the day after
Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations' objections
to the war might--yet again--be ascribed to "anti-Semitism
of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes
to Jews a malignant intent." This nonsense, it must be said,
is opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri Avnery,
argue that an Iraq war will leave Israel with even more Arab
enemies, especially if Iraq attacks Israel and Sharon then joins
the US battle against the Arabs.
The slur of "anti-Semitism"
also lies behind Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe".
He was talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and
the "old" France of collaboration. But the France and
Germany that oppose this war are the "new" Europe,
the continent which refuses, ever again, to slaughter the innocent.
It is Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the "old" America;
not the "new" America of freedom, the America of F
D Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolise the old America that
killed its native Indians and embarked on imperial adventures.
It is "old" America we are being asked to fight for--linked
to a new form of colonialism--an America that first threatens
the United Nations with irrelevancy and then does the same to
Nato. This is not the last chance for the UN, nor for Nato. But
it may well be the last chance for America to be taken seriously
by her friends as well as her enemies.
In these last days of peace the British
should not be tripped by the oh-so-sought-after second UN resolution.
UN permission for America's war will not make the war legitimate;
it merely proves that the Council can be controlled with bribes,
threats or abstentions. It was the Soviet Union's abstention,
after all, which allowed America to fight the savage Korean war
under the UN flag. And we should not doubt that--after a quick
US military conquest of Iraq and providing 'they" die more
than we die--there will be plenty of anti-war protesters who
will claim they were pro-war all along. The first pictures of
"liberated" Baghdad will show Iraqi children making
victory signs to American tank crews. But the real cruelty and
cynicism of this conflict will become evident as soon as the
"war" ends, when our colonial occupation of a Muslim
nation for the US and Israel begins.
There lies the rub. Bush calls Sharon
a "man of peace". But Sharon fears he may yet face
trial over Sabra and Chatila, which is why Israel has just withdrawn
its ambassador to Belgium. I'd like to see Saddam in the same
court. And Rifaat Assad for his 1982 massacre in the Syrian city
of Hama. And all the torturers of Israel and the Arab dictatorships.
Israeli and US ambitions in the region
are now entwined, almost synonymous. This war is about oil and
regional control. It is being cheer-led by a draft-dodger who
is treacherously telling us that this is part of an eternal war
against "terror". And the British and most Europeans
don't believe him. It's not that Britons wouldn't fight for America.
They just don't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if
that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to fight for
Blair either.
Yesterday's
Features
CounterPunch News Service
Slow
Lerner: It May Not Help Kids in Iraq, But It Sure Got Michael
Lerner Airtime
Andrew Murray
Tony
Blair Versus the British People
Ben Tripp
President
A**hole
Peggy Thomson
My
Close Encounter with Saddam
Gary Leupp
Meet Mr. Blowback:
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, CIA Op and Homicidal Thug
Saul Landau
Bush and Corporate Fraud
Adam Engel
A Civilian Occupation:
The Politics of Israeli Architecture
Anthony Gancarski
Jacksonville in Crisis
Rick Giombetti
Specific Threats to Democracy
Jean-David Levitte
A Warning on Iraq from France:
Make War the Last Option
Ian Gurney
Whose Side is Bush On?
Maria Engqvist
Did
the FARC Shoot Down a US Military Plane in Colombia?
Ron Jacobs
This Madness Must Cease
Josh Frank
Call to Washington:
Stonewall Bush
Website of the Day
Rock
Out Against War
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February 8
/ 9, 2003
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The
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by Alexander
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and Jeffrey St. Clair
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