|
Recent
Stories
April
18, 2003
Uri
Avnery
Operation "Syrian Freedom":
This One's Not About Oil
Jorge
Mariscal
"They Died Trying to Become
Students": the Future of Latinos in an Era of War and Occupation
Mickey
Z:
Coalition of the Unindicted: Only Losers Get Tried for War Crimes
Hussein
Ibish
Syria and the Road to World War IV
Reza Ladjevardian
Tarqeting Iran? Do It With TV, Not Cruise Missiles
Matania
Ben-Artzi
You Are Not Protecting My Son's Rights: a Letter to the President
of Israel's Supreme Court
Bruce Jackson
Jews Like Us
Joe
Allen
My Lai Revisited
Carl Estabrook
Support Our Euphemism
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/18
Website
of the Day
Meet the Victims of War
April
17, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Patriot Gore: the Fatal Flaws in
the Patriot Missile System
Joanne
Mariner
Looting Antiquity: the Legal Implications
for the Pentagon
Issam
Nashashibi
Zalmay Khalilzad: the Neocon's Bagman
to Baghdad
Wayne Madsen
Another Sign of the "End Times" for American Journalism
Robert
Fisk
The Army of Occupation
Boris
Kagarlitsky
Virtual Saddam Takes Aim
Biljana
Vankovska
A Personal View of Iraq: Where
is the Truth?
Dan Brook
Oil War: Fueling the Empire
Stanley
Heller
Bomb and Steal: This is What Privatization Looks Like
Tim Robbins
A Chill Wind is Blowing Through This Nation
Harold
A. Gould
Iraq After the War
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/17
April
16, 2003
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Jason
Leopold
Halliburton's Bloody History: They'll
Work for Anyone
Kurt
Nimmo
The Destruction of Iraq: Hey, It's
Good for Business
Stephen
Green
Dancing to Sharon's Beat: the Road
to Unilateral Pre-emption
Diane
Christian
The Devil in Bush's Details
Carol
Norris
Mourning Iraq
Anthony
Gancarski
They Call Themselves Economists?
Michael
Sells
Nero in Baghdad
Alexander
Cockburn
Contract with Iraq
Ninan Koshy
India's Devious Middle Path Through the Iraq War
Brenda
Norrell
Lakota Leader: World Must Resist
American Empire
Wallace
Gagne
End of History; More in a Moment
Stew
Albert
On the Road Again
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/16
Hot Stories
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
Burn Your Sweatshop Clothes!
Buy Union Made Apparel!
|
April 19,
2003
Roadmap to Resistance
Apathy and Amnesia:
a Major Weapon of the Bush/Blair Alliance
by
PABLO MUKHERJEE
I have just come back from a two week
trip to India, having stopped over at Dubai both on the way out
and back. While still a comfortable distance from Iraq, the
Gulf Emirates and even India felt much closer to the full horror
of the Anglo-American invasion. Satellite and cable television
ensured that the presence of BBC and CNN could be felt in a Calcutta
restaurant and a Dubai café. But the availability of
numerous alternative local television channels, newspapers, and
above all the animated discussion in the streets suddenly made
me realise what a bliss it was to be out of the suffocating shield
of Anglo-American propaganda that passes, with grim irony, as
'free press' in the West.
Everywhere on my trip, as soon as it
came to be known that I worked and lived in Britain, I was besieged
with questions. Not only were the anguished queries about Blair's
motive behind destroying a society that he claimed he was 'liberating';
it was too late for that, and Arabs and Indians know only too
well about the sinister and murderous implications of 'liberation'
by British and Americans. But what people wanted to know was
about resistance to Blair within Britain. In Calcutta, probably
the most inspiring teacher and scholar I have ever met asked
me with whispered urgency what was happening to the long
and venerable tradition of British dissent, which he traced as
far back as Wat Tyler? People had seen more than a million march
in London on February 14. They were eager to build bridges with
them. The day I landed in Calcutta, 30th of March, more than
300,000 people gathered for an anti-war demonstration. They
wanted to know where the anti-war movement in Britain would go
next.
I flew back to Britain just in time to
join the anti-war rally on April 12. I was back in the land
of 'embedded' journalists being congratulated for having a good
war. Where Geoff Hoon, Jack Straw and Tony Blair were publicly
congratulating themselves for using cluster bombs, for having
plotted the fall of Baghdad so meticulously, for having stood
shoulder to shoulder with the Bush regime. The mood in the rally
was sad, angry but also determined. A Guardian/ICM poll published
today (15.4.03) showed what it calls one the most dramatic swing
in public mood in Britain. Whereas at one point about 70 per
cent of Britons opposed a war against Iraq without a second U.N.
resolutions, now about the same number of people supported the
war. What has changed between January and April?
During this period, the thinking of the
British people seem to have developed along these lines
(a) Britain has seen one of the most intense debates about its
foreign policy in its entire history. The Parliament had taken
note of the strength of the anti-war movement, but had voted
to go to war. Once the troops go in, it is unpatriotic not to
'back our boys'; (b) the war has gone well with minimal
British casualties and 'acceptable' levels of Iraqi civilian
deaths. Tony Blair has drummed in the message that although
every Iraqi civilian death is regrettable, more of them were
dying unheard and unseen under Saddam Hussein's regime; (c) Unlike
the U.S., where companies have been lining up to carve up Iraq
for their profit (the process that with cruel irony, has been
dubbed the 'reconstruction' of Iraq), the British role in the
looting of Iraq has been a relatively low key affair so far.
This surely means that Blair was in it for the reasons he tirelessly
cited bringing democracy to Iraq and the moral imperative
of getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
Only one of these points, of course,
begins to engage with the core arguments of the anti-war movement.
Britain was taken into war by Tony Blair for three reasons
Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction and was capable
of causing direct harm to Britain; Iraq was a direct military
threat to its neighbours; Saddam Hussein was a murderous dictator
and Britain wanted to liberate the Iraqis. Against this, the
anti-war movement argued that there was no evidence of Iraq's
capacity to develop and deliver weapons of mass destruction;
Iraq's neighbours did not feel threatened by it and there were
no demands for the invasion from the region; and, while there
was no doubt about the nature of Saddam's regime, the history
of Anglo-American support for him in the past as well as the
proposed American occupation (direct and indirect) of the country
after the war would not lead to either 'liberation' or democratisation
of Iraq.
The war has almost entirely vindicated
the anti-war movement's position. The much-vaunted biological
and chemical weapons of Iraq have failed to turn up. A regime
of this nature and facing annihilation would almost certainly
have used them if it had the capacity of developing, storing
and delivering them. The repeated 'news exclusives' about US
marines discovering these weapons have all turned out to be false.
There is still a chance that US will plant some form of evidence
in Iraq , perhaps some of the weapons-grade anthrax that seems
to have 'escaped' from US army laboratories after September 11
and helped stoke the spectre of a world Islamic terror. A while
ago I had written about a leaked Russian intelligence report
that suggested Pentagon would plant some WMD in Iraq, after a
decent interval, to vindicate the Washington hawks. All in all,
the war has proved beyond doubt that Iraq was not a WMD threat
to any country in the world. Similarly, Iraq's neighbours had
always expressed deep misgivings about the invasion, not because
of the possibility of Iraqi retaliation but because of the consequences
of the destruction of the remnants of Iraqi society. Turkey,
deeply threatened by Kurdish nationalism, had at one point in
the war actually ordered its army to cross over into Iraq to
pre-empt any Kurdish nationalist aspirations. It remains extremely
wary. Syria finds itself being branded as a Ba-athist dictatorship
with weapons of mass destruction by the Pentagon and the warlord
Rumsfeld, and is looking nervously across the border at the massed
US troops and firepower, wondering when its turn will come.
There is absolutely no doubt that these states are far more threatened
by the proximity of US military machine than they ever were by
a degraded and contained Saddam Hussein.
This brings us to the only position of
the warmongers that ahs any validity the removal of Saddam
Hussein. Despite allegations that the anti-war movement was
actually a front for Stalinists and authoritarians of all shapes
and kinds secretly in love with the Ba-athist ideal, there is
almost no individual in it who mourns the departure of Saddam
Hussein. What they mourn is what has come to pass in post-Saddam
Iraq. As I write this piece, news is filtering in of 12 Iraqi
protesters shot dead by the US marines at Mosul. They were demonstrating
against the occupation and the US appointed 'governor'. The
Shia organisations have boycotted the talks about the political
future of Iraq because they have been outraged by the fact that
only those invited by the US and were on the occupying army's
'guest list' could attend the meeting. The massive condescension
with which Blair and Bush declared that Iraqi civilians would
welcome the invading army with flowers and music has been exposed
by the Iraqi civilians 'No Saddam, No US' was the chant
in 'liberated Iraq' yesterday captured on BBC news.
In the face of this evidence, why then
has a majority of the British people apparently swung back to
a pro-war position? I think a number of factors interlock to
produce this particular British structure of feeling. First,
there is the persistent 'Little Englander' parochialism that
battle against the instinct of internationalism in Britain.
During one of the more energetic anti-war rallies, one of my
students said how surprised she was to find so many young people
there because no one in her generation really cared about what
happened to Iraqis anyway. A portion of the anti-war sentiment
was certainly generated by a fear of the consequence of British
entanglement in Iraq army casualties, increased risk of
terrorist attack, global resentment against Britain etc. Once
it became clear that British soldiers would not die in large
numbers, that Britain was probably not a less safer place than
before the campaign, and that global resentment was overwhelmingly
focussed on the US these fears were allayed. Then, there
is the deeply rooted British nostalgia for global imperial and
moral authority. Despite its murderous history, the British
empire had always been sold and repackaged to Britons as a force
of moral good. In contrast to the French, Spanish, Belgian,
Russian, and now (whisper it) American imperial systems, the
British has always claimed to be a force for the rule of law
and moral authority. Blair understands this and has cleverly
pitched his argument accordingly. Britain's stake in the war,
claims Blair, unlike the US- is not Iraqi oil or reconstruction,
but the moral and ethical satisfaction of seeing a murderous
tyrant removed. This façade is carefully maintained by
differentiating British rhetoric British battle strategy (for
example in Basra) from the American. We talk about liberating
and compassion, we don't carpet bomb Basra, our forces ensure
access to humanitarian measures, our boys don't hide behind
space-age helmets and shades but chat to Iraqis in their berets
the British public murmur. This appeals to their sense
of decency. They begin to grudgingly admire the Prime Minister.
Finally, this confluence of British parochialism and latent 'moral'
imperialism are maintained in Britain by an almost blanket bombardment
of misinformation and propaganda by the media. This is not
just that portion of the media owned by the self-confessed admirers
of the US imperium like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black whose
newspapers and television channels regularly convey vitriolic
and militant racist calls for the subjugation of Muslims, immigrants,
Arabs, liberals and other 'aliens'. What has affected those
Britons sceptical or opposed to the war is the much more insidious
campaign by the so-called 'objective' or 'liberal' organs of
information. 'Embedded' reporters have regularly presented the
campaign from either the invading army's perspective, or from
the perspective of the crumbling Iraqi information ministry.
The effect has been the further demonisation of the Iraqis as
habitual liars (summed up in the presentation of the hapless
Iraqi Information minister nicknamed 'comical Ali') and pathetically
defeated people against the earnest, triumphant, organised British
and American forces. The obligatory shots of the Iraqis celebrating
their 'liberation' have been fed directly to bolster the moral
claims of Jack Straw and Tony Blair without any qualifications
that the handful of Iraqis who did come out to celebrate
were also a part of the overwhelming majority who are opposed
to US-UK presence in their country just as they were against
Saddam Hussein. The murder of the protesters in Mosul by the
US marines on the 15th of April is a clear signal of the US empire's
lack of patience with any Iraqi demands for genuine democracy.
In British liberal press today, this first significant murderous
crackdown by the US on free 'Iraq' is buried deep within accounts
of the 'reconstruction' meetings organised by the American Generals
Jay Garner and Tommy Franks. Despite its commitment and occasional
living up to the standards of 'objective' reporting, even those
sections of the British media outside the baneful influence of
Murdoch and Black are saturated with (ultimately racist) assumptions
about Iraqis and remain biased in favour of the spurious 'liberation'
rhetoric of Downing street and the so-called achievements of
the invasion. As these remain the main sources of information
for the war-sceptics, they make the relatively easy switch to
being in favour of Blair's position once the war has been declared
a success.
What then of those in Britain who have
remained convinced about the political, ethical and moral failings
of this invasion? Does the anti-war movement have enough reserve
to continue the slow and painful task of winning the hearts and
minds of the British majority? I hope so. I have seen British
school children mobilise and unite against the war, often in
the face of serious disciplinary threats, with a conviction that
has put veteran trade union leaders to shame. I have seen Labour
party members occupy their own regional offices to protest against
their party leader and prime minister. I have seen the senior
Labour MP Tam Dalyell take the extraordinary step of calling
for the indictment of Tony Blair. I have seen journalists walk
out of their jobs in frustration with their bosses who have instructed
them to follow the government 'line' on the war. I have seen
teachers suspend their classes and organise debates with their
students about the invasion of Iraq. The roots of the movement
are sinking deep in Britain. Even more crucially, the movement
has internationalised Britain to perhaps an unprecedented degree.
Over Afghanistan, and now Iraq, the Britons have felt that they
are a part of a global movement against war, an international
coalition for peace and justice and against the US imposed 'new
world order'. This 'alternative' globalisation will also sustain
the people here.
Perhaps even more than during the conflict,
it is now the time for the anti-war movement in Britain to make
its presence felt. Leaders like Bush and Blair rely on apathy
and amnesia to push through their agenda. How else can Tony
Blair look his MPs and the electorate in the eye and say 'just
as we did in Afghanistan, we shall liberate Iraq'. Afghanistan,
where even last week 'stray' American missiles killed at least
11 villagers; where the puppet ruler Hamid Karzai's closest associates
have been assassinated and Karzai himself relies on American
protection for survival; where the promised elections have failed
to materialise and the country carved up again by the warlords;
where less than a month ago a western Red Cross worker was gunned
down and his Afghan assistants warned that the same fate awaited
them if they worked for 'foreigners'. This is the result of
'liberation' US style. Blair can afford to shamelessly use this
as a justification for further wars precisely because he knows
that the media will work tirelessly to make people forget what
happens when the cameras leave. The same way the media is now
lying, omitting and manipulating the reality of post-Saddam Iraq.
It is the instilling of this amnesia
that the anti-war movement has now got to fight in Britain:
We must not forget the reasons we were given for this invasion
and we must not let them forget that none of them have been justified
by the subsequent events
We must call Blair and his coterie to
account every time the army of occupation kills Iraqis protesting
against the American presence
We must ask what is happening to Iraqi
oil, to Iraqi reconstruction, to the American companies circling
like vultures to move in for the kill as soon as the country
is 'pacified'
We must call on the media to keep following
up on Iraq. Iraqis, Afghans are not circus creatures whose torture,
death and grief can be served up as prime time television and
then replaced by East Enders once the war is over. We want their
oppression under US occupation to be kept in the full glare of
the cameras. We want to see what Blair-Bush's liberation looks
like in real life.
We must extend our support to Iraqis
in the democratisation of their society, and oppose Pentagon-appointed
rulers and governors who will oversee the transferring of Iraqi
wealth to the US and its allies.
To do this we must continue to write,
to march, to strike, to protest, to discuss as long as it takes.
This is not going to be a soft ride.
Iraqis have been repeatedly betrayed
by both the official 'left' and 'right' in Britain for too long.
For the sake of our common human future, we cannot betray them
once again through apathy and amnesia.
Dr Pablo Mukherjee teaches in the school of english at University
of Newcastle. He can be reached at: pablo.mukherjee@ncl.ac.uk
Today's
Features
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Robert
Jensen
Self-Determination in Iraq? Then the
US Must Leave
Dr.
Susan Block
The Rape of Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Aiming at Syria: Stop Them Before They Kill Again
Robert
Fisk
The Final Sacking of Baghdad
Col. Dan
Smith
Post-War Iraq: Asking the Right Questions
Ali
Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
A Cycle of Chaos and Confrontation: Misadventures of the NeoCons
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/15
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|