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Date: November 15, 2007 8:07:38 PM CST
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Subject: Pilger / No Remembrance, No Remorse For The Fallen Of
Iraq / Nov 14
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Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-11/14pilger.cfm
==================================
ZNet Commentary
No Remembrance, No Remorse For The Fallen Of Iraq November 14, 2007
By John Pilger
On Remembrance Day 2007, the great and the good bowed their heads at
the Cenotaph. Generals, politicians, newsreaders, football managers
and stock-market traders wore their poppies. Hypocrisy was a
presence. No one mentioned Iraq. No one uttered the slightest
remorse for the fallen of that country. No one read the forbidden
list. The forbidden list documents, without favour, the part the
British state and its court have played in the destruction of Iraq.
Here it is:
1 Holocaust denial
On 25 October, Dai Davies MP asked Gordon Brown about civilian
deaths in Iraq. Brown passed the question to the Foreign Secretary,
David Miliband, who passed it to his junior minister, Kim Howells,
who replied: "We continue to believe that there are no comprehensive
or reliable figures for deaths since March 2003." This was a
deception. In October 2006, the Lancet published research by Johns
Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in
Baghdad which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of
the Anglo-American invasion. A Freedom of Information search
revealed that the government, while publicly dismissing the study,
secretly backed it as comprehensive and reliable. The chief
scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson,
called its methods "robust" and "close to best practice". Other
senior governments officials secretly acknowledged the survey's
"tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones".
Since then, the British research polling agency, Opinion Research
Business, has extrapolated a figure of 1.2 million deaths in Iraq.
Thus, the scale of death caused by the British and US governments
may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, making it the
biggest single act of mass murder of the late 20th century and the
21st century.
2 Looting
The undeclared reason for the invasion of Iraq was the convergent
ambitions of the neocons, or neo-fascists, in Washington and the far-
right regimes of Israel. Both groups had long wanted Iraq crushed
and the Middle East colonised to US and Israeli designs. The initial
blueprint for this was the 1992 "Defence Planning Guidance", which
outlined America's post-Cold War plans to dominate the Middle East
and beyond. Its authors included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and
Colin Powell, architects of the 2003 invasion. Following the
invasion, Paul Bremer, a neocon fanatic, was given absolute civil
authority in Baghdad and in a series of decrees turned the entire
future Iraqi economy over to US corporations. As this was lawless,
the corporate plunderers were given immunity from all forms of
prosecution. The Blair government was fully complicit and even
objected when it looked as if UK companies might be excluded from
the most profitable looting. British officials were awarded
functionary colonial posts. A petroleum "law" will allow, in effect,
foreign oil companies to approve their own contracts over Iraq's
vast energy resources. This will complete the greatest theft since
Hitler stripped his European conquests.
3 Destroying a nation's health
In 1999, I interviewed Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist at Basra
city hospital. "Before the Gulf War," he said, "we had only three or
four deaths in a month from cancer. Now it's 30 to 35 patients dying
every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the
population in this area will get cancer." Iraq was then in the grip
of an economic and humanitarian siege, initiated and driven by the
US and Britain. The result, wrote Hans von Sponeck, the then chief
UN humanitarian official in Baghdad, was "genocidal . . .
practically an entire nation was subjected to poverty, death and
destruction of its physical and mental foundations". Most of
southern Iraq remains polluted with the toxic debris of British and
American explosives, including uranium- 238 shells. Iraqi doctors
pleaded in vain for help, citing the levels of leukaemia among
children as the highest seen since Hiroshima. Professor Karol
Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme,
wrote in the BMJ: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemo-therapy
drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and
British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee]." In 1999, Kim
Howells, then trade minister, effectively banned the export to Iraq
of vaccines that would protect mostly children from diphtheria,
tetanus and yellow fever, which, he said, "are capable of being used
in weapons of mass destruction".
Since 2003, apart from PR exercises for the embedded media, the
British occupiers have made no attempt to re-equip and resupply
hospitals that, prior to 1991, were regarded as the best in the
Middle East. In July, Oxfam reported that 43 per cent of Iraqis were
living in "absolute poverty". Under the occupation, malnutrition
rates among children have spiralled to 28 per cent. A secret Defence
Intelligence Agency document, "Iraq Water Treatment
Vulnerabilities", reveals that the civilian water supply was
deliberately targeted. As a result, the great majority of the
population has neither access to running water nor sanitation - in a
country where such basic services were once as universal as in
Britain. "The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly
30 per cent compared to the Saddam Hussein era," said Dr Haydar
Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children's hospital. "Children are
dying daily and no one is doing anything to help them." In January
this year, nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn,
then international development secretary, describing how children
were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations as an
occupying power under UN Security Council Resolution 1483. Benn
refused to see them.
4 Destroying a society
The UN estimates that 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every
month. The refugee crisis has now overtaken that of Darfur as the
most catastrophic on earth. Half of Iraq's doctors have gone, along
with engineers and teachers. The most literate society in the Middle
East is being dismantled, piece by piece. Out of more than four
million displaced people, Britain last year refused the majority of
more than 1,000 Iraqis who applied to come here, while removing more
"illegal" Iraqi refugees than any other European country. Thanks to
tabloid-inspired legislation, Iraqis in Britain are often destitute,
with no right to work and no support. They sleep and scavenge in
parks. The government, says Amnesty, "is trying to starve them out
of the country".
5 Propaganda
"See in my line of work," said George W Bush, "you got to keep
repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to
kind of catapult the propaganda." Standing outside 10 Downing Street
on 9 April 2003, the BBC's then political editor, Andrew Marr,
reported the fall of Baghdad as a victory speech. Tony Blair, he
told viewers, "said they would be able to take Baghdad without a
bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And
on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And
it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to
acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger
prime minister as a result." In the United States, similar
travesties passed as journalism. The difference was that leading
American journalists began to consider the consequences of the role
they had played in the build-up to the invasion. Several told me
they believed that had the media challenged and investigated Bush's
and Blair's lies, instead of echoing and amplifying them, the
invasion might not have happened. A European study found that, of
the major western television networks, the BBC permitted less
coverage of dissent than all of them. A second study found that the
BBC consistently gave credence to government propaganda that weapons
of mass destruction existed. Unlike the Sun, the BBC has credibility
- as does, or did, the Observer.
On 14 October 2001, the London Observer's front page said: "US hawks
accuse Iraq over anthrax". This was entirely false. Supplied by US
intelligence, it was part of the Observer's staunchly pro-war
coverage, which included claiming a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda,
for which there was no credible evidence and which betrayed the
paper's honourable past. One report over two pages was headlined:
"The Iraqi connection". It, too, came from "intelligence sources"
and was rubbish. The reporter, David Rose, concluded his barren
inquiry with a heartfelt plea for an invasion. "There are occasions
in history," he wrote, "when the use of force is both right and
sensible." Rose has since written his mea culpa, including in these
pages, confessing how he was used. Other journalists have still to
admit how they were manipulated by their own credulous relationship
with established power.
These days, Iraq is reported as if it is exclusively a civil war,
with a US military "surge" aimed at bringing peace to the scrapping
natives. The perversity of this is breathtaking. That sectarian
violence is the product of a vicious divide-and-conquer policy is
beyond doubt. As for the largely media myth of al-Qaeda, "most of
the [American] pros will tell you", wrote Seymour Hersh, "that the
foreign fighters are a couple per cent, and then they're sort of
leaderless". That a poorly armed, audacious resistance has not only
pinned down the world's most powerful army but has agreed an anti-
sectarian, anti al-Qaeda agenda, which opposes attacks on civilians
and calls for free elections, is not news.
6 The next blood letting
In the 1960s and 1970s, British governments secretly expelled the
population of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean whose
people have British nationality. Women and children were loaded on
to vessels resembling slave ships and dumped in the slums of
Mauritius, after their homeland was given to the Americans for a
military base. Three times, the High Court has found this atrocity
illegal, calling it a defiance of the Magna Carta and the Blair
government's refusal to allow the people to go home "outrageous" and
"repugnant". The government continues to use endless recourse to
appeal, at the taxpayers' expense, to prevent upsetting Bush. The
cruelty of this matches the fact that not only has the US repeatedly
bombed Iraq from Diego Garcia, but at "Camp Justice", on the island,
"al-Qaeda suspects" are "rendered" and "tortured", according to the
Washington Post. Now the US Air Force is rushing to upgrade hangar
facilities on the island so that stealth bombers can carry 14-tonne
"bunker busting" bombs in an attack on Iran. Orchestrated propaganda
in the media is critical to the success of this act of international
piracy.
On 22 May, the front page of the London Guardian carried the banner
headline: "Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out
of Iraq". This was a tract of unalloyed propaganda based entirely on
anonymous US official sources. Through-out the media, other drums
have taken up the beat. "Iran's nuclear ambitions" slips
effortlessly from newsreaders' lips, no matter that the
International Atomic Energy Agency refuted Washington's lies, no
matter the echo of "Saddam's weapons of mass destruction", no matter
that another bloodbath beckons. Lest we forget.
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