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June
2, 2003
The Day of the Jackals
On
War and Occupation
By ARUNDHATI ROY
Editors' Note:
Arundhati Roy has become one of the best-known voices of the
international opposition to George W. Bush's war on the world.
A former film designer, actor and screenplay
writer in India, Roy is the author of the novel The
God of Small Things, for which she received the prestigious
Booker Prize in 1997. She has become equally well known as an
activist in the international antiwar and global justice movements.
Her latest book is a collection of essays called War
Talk, published by South End Press. On May 31, Roy spoke
at a national antiwar teach-in in Washington, D.C., sponsored
by United for Peace and Justice. Here, by permission, we reprint
her speech.
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 have fallen, incinerating
and humiliating that ancient civilization.
On the steel torsos of their missiles,
adolescent American soldiers scrawled colorful messages in childish
handwriting: "For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse."
A building went down. A market place.
A home. A girl who loved a boy. A child who only ever wanted
to play with his older brother's marbles. On the 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 A.J. 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, 2001, attacks. Private A.J.
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.
***
When the United States invaded Iraq,
a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of
the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly
responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll said that 55 percent
of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported
al-Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because
there isn't any). All of it is based on insinuation, auto-suggestion
and outright lies circulated by the U.S. corporate media. Public
support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on
a multi-tiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated
by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the press.
We had the invented links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. We had
the manufactured frenzy about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction."
No weapons of mass destruction have been found. Not even a little
one. Now--after the war has been fought and won, and the contracts
for reconstruction have been signed and sealed--the New York
Times reports that "The Central Intelligence Agency has
begun a review to try to determine whether the American intelligence
community erred in its prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's
government and Iraq's weapons programs." Meanwhile, in
passing, an ancient civilization has been casually decimated
by a very recent, casually brutal nation. Throughout more than
a decade of war and sanctions, American and British forces fired
thousands of missiles and bombs on Iraq. Iraq's fields and farmlands
were shelled with three hundred tons of depleted uranium. In
their bombing sorties, the Allies targeted and destroyed water
treatment plants, aware of the fact that they could not be repaired
without foreign assistance. In southern Iraq, there was a fourfold
increase in cancer among children.
In the decade of economic sanctions that
followed the war, Iraqi civilians were denied medicine, hospital
equipment, ambulances, clean water--the basic essentials.
About half a million Iraqi children died
as a result of the sanctions.
The corporate media played a sterling
role in keeping news of the devastation of Iraq and its people
away from the American public. It has now begun preparing the
ground with the same routine of lies and hysteria for a war
against Syria and Iran--and, who knows, perhaps even Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps the next war will be the jewel in the crown of George
Bush's 2004 election campaign. Though he may not need to go
to such great lengths since the Democrats have announced that
their strategy for the 2004 election is to charge that the Republicans
are weak on national security. It's like a small-town teenage
bully telling the Mafia it has too many scruples.
America's presidential election sounds
as though it will be a complete waste of everybody's time. Although
that's not exactly breaking news.
***
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was perhaps
the most cowardly war ever fought in history.
After using the "good offices"
of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections)
to ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, after making sure
that most of its weapons had been destroyed, the "Coalition
of the Willing"--better known as the Coalition of the Bullied
and Bought--sent in an invading army.
Then the corporate media gloated that
the United States had won a just and astonishing victory!
TV watchers witnessed the joy that the
U.S. Army brought to ordinary Iraqis. All those newly liberated
people waving American flags, which they must have somehow hoarded
during the years of sanctions. Never mind that the toppling
of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square (shown over
and over on TV) turned out to be a carefully choreographed charade
played out by a handful of hired extras coordinated by the U.S.
Marines. Robert Fisk called it the "most staged photo-op
since Iwo Jima."
Never mind that in the days that followed,
American soldiers fired into a crowd of peaceful, unarmed Iraqi
demonstrators who were demanding that U.S. troops leave their
country. Fifteen people were shot dead. Never mind that a few
days later, U.S. soldiers killed two more and injured several
people who were protesting the fact that peaceful demonstrators
were being killed. Never mind that they murdered 17 more people
in Mosul.
Never mind that in the days to come,
the killing will continue. (But it won't be on TV.) Never mind
that a secular country is being driven to religious sectarianism.
Never mind that the U.S. government helped
Saddam Hussein's rise to power and supported him through his
worst excesses, including the eight-year war against Iran and
the 1988 gassing of Kurdish people in Halabja, crimes which
14 years later were reheated and served up as reasons to justify
going to war against Iraq.
Never mind that after the first Gulf
War, the Allies fomented an uprising of Shias in Basra, and
then looked away while Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt and
slaughtered thousands in an act of vengeful reprisal. After
the invasion of Iraq, Western TV channels' ghoulish interest
in the mass graves they discovered evaporated quickly when they
realized that the bodies were of Iraqis who had been killed
in the war against Iran and the Shia uprising...The search for
an appropriate mass grave continues. Never mind that U.S. and
British troops had orders to kill people, but not to protect
them. Their priorities were clear. The safety and security of
Iraqi people was not their business. The security of whatever
little remained of Iraq's infrastructure was not their business.
But the security and safety of Iraq's oilfields was. The oilfields
were "secured" almost before the invasion began.
It's worth noting that the reconstruction
of Afghanistan, which is in far worse condition than Iraq, hasn't
merited the same evangelical enthusiasm in reconstruction that
Iraq has. Even the money that was so publicly promised to Afghanistan
has not for the most part been handed over.
Could it be because Afghanistan has no
oil? It has a route for a pipeline, true, but no oil. So there
isn't much money to be extracted from that vanquished country.
On the other hand, we were told that
contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq could jumpstart 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.
***
The talk about Iraq's oil for Iraqis
and a war of liberation and democracy and representative government
had its time and place. It had its uses. But things have changed
now...
Having escorted a 7,000-year-old civilization
into anarchy, George Bush has announced that the U.S. is in
Iraq to stay "indefinitely." The U.S., in effect,
has said that Iraq can only have a representative government
if it represents the interests of Anglo-American oil companies.
In other words, you can have free speech as long as you say
what I want you to say.
On May 17, the New York Times said, "In
an abrupt reversal, the United States and Britain have indefinitely
put off their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form
a national assembly and an interim government by the end of
the month. Instead, top American and British diplomats leading
reconstruction efforts here told exile leaders in a meeting
tonight that allied officials would remain in charge of Iraq
for an indefinite period." Long before the invasion began,
the world's business community was tingling with excitement
about the scale of money that the reconstruction of Iraq would
involve. It has been billed as "the biggest reconstruction
effort since the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe after World War
Two." Bechtel Corp., based in San Francisco, is leading
the pack of jackals moving in to Iraq. Coincidentally, former
Secretary of State George Schultz is on the board of directors
of Bechtel, and happens also to have served as the chairman
of the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of
Iraq. When asked by the New York Times whether he was concerned
about the appearance of a conflict of interest, Shultz said,
"I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from
it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of
company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something
you benefit from." Bechtel already has a contract for $680
million, but, according to the New York Times, "[I]ndependent
estimates are that the final cost for the reconstruction effort
of the extent outlined in Bechtel's contract with USAID would
be $20 billion." In an article appropriately headlined
"Feeding Frenzy Under Way, as Companies From All Over Seek
a Piece of the Action," the Times notes (without irony)
that "governments around the world and the companies whose
causes they support have besieged Washington in a campaign to
win a piece of the reconstruction action in Iraq." "The
British," the article notes, "though their appeals
are understated, offer what some Bush administration officials
argue is the most convincing case: that they shed blood in
Iraq."
Whose blood was shed has not been clarified.
Surely they didn't mean British blood, or American blood. They
must have meant the British helped the Americans to shed Iraqi
blood. So "the most convincing case" for reconstruction
contracts is when a country can argue that it is a co-murderer
of Iraqis. Lady Simmons, the deputy leader of the UK House of
Lords, recently traveled to America with four leaders of British
industry. Apart from staking their claim to contracts based
on their status as co-murderers, the British delegation also
invoked their colonial past, again without irony, making the
case that British companies "had a long and close relationship
with Iraq and Iraqi business from the imperial days in the early
20th century until international sanctions were imposed in the
1990s." Glossing over, of course, that this meant Britain
had supported Saddam Hussein through the 1970s and 1980s.
***
Those of us who belong to former colonies
think of imperialism as rape. So you rape. Then you kill. Then
you demand the right to rape the corpse. That's usually known
as necrophilia. Extending this horrible analogy, Richard Perle
said recently, "Iraqis are freer today and we are safer.
Relax and enjoy it." A few days into the war, the news
anchor Tom Brokaw said: "One of the things we don't want
to do...is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in
a few days we're going to own that country." Now the ownership
deeds are being signed. Iraq is no longer a country. It's an
asset.
It's no longer ruled. It's owned. And
it is owned for the most part by Bechtel. Maybe Halliburton
and a British company or two will get a few bones.
Our battle has to be against both the
occupiers and the new owners of Iraq.
Today's
Features
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
Ron
Jacobs
Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
Ciaccorra
Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
America: Pay More to Die Sooner
Kimberly
Blaker
Vouchers for Jesus
Harry
Browne
Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
the Top of the IRA
Stew
Albert
Cops of the World
Steve Perry
Greens 04: In or Out?
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