Both
the pro-war and anti-war people have got good and strong arguments.What
colours one's perception of it all is one's view of geopolitics and US
hegemony.It is a tough call.
-----Original Message-----
From: Kiggundu Mukasa [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 8:35 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: mambo_: Fw: from the Mirror.co.uk --- here's why "they hate us"
----- Original Message -----From: Sarah Paweni
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 9:24 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: from the Mirror.co.uk --- here's why "they hate us"
Hello all,
An interesting article about the impending war. It covers a lot of
different issues. Whether or not you believe or agree with what the article
has to say, I think one of the most important questions it raises is whether
or not we truly understand what war will do to human beings living in Iraq.
It's important to understand the true implications of war on human lives
even if you are pro-war in your beliefs. I guess it could be thought of as
informed consent. Do we really understand, on a concrete level, what we're
about to do if we actually pursue war? If we do understand it---are we
willing to pursue it?
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PILGER: BLAIR IS A COWARD
Jan 29 2003
John Pilger: His most damning verdict on Tony Blair
William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of
imperial
wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his hands" to describe
impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance, order the mass killing of
ordinary people.
In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern political
leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like George W Bush, who
managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete Tony Blair.
There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes death and
suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of command that affirms
his
"authority".
In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war crimes
left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes against
humanity.
The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that offered
no
threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of civilians, for which
responsibility rested with the "highest authority".
Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being denied
even
the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons inspectors have
found, as one put it, "zilch".
Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover.
Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not consult parliament or the
people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft to the Gulf;
he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.
Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now
totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of
"endless
war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.
All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and
Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the Union speech last
night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called
his generals together and told them: "I must have war." He then had it.
To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the killing of
innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will share
responsibility.
He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has known
since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times,
although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely
accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state
terrorism:
from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new
power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy
democracy wherever it collided with American "interests", such as a
voracious
appetite for the world's resources, like oil.
When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about "bringing democracy to
the people of Iraq", remember that it was the CIA that installed the Ba'ath
Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam Hussein.
"That was my favourite coup," said the CIA man responsible. When you next
hear Blair and Bush talking about a "smoking gun" in Iraq, ask why the US
government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of Iraq's weapons
declaration, saying they contained "sensitive information" which needed "a
little editing".
Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American, British
and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its nuclear, chemical
and
missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions. In 2000 Peter
Hain,
then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a parliamentary request to publish
the full list of lawbreaking British companies. He has never explained why.
As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the page like
these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game unconnected to
people's lives.
The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end result
of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who never see, or
would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions on ordinary
lives:
the blood on their hands.
Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used in the
attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people were killed in
the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched three ladders of bombs
curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the
clouds.
They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the
"long box" pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside
a
"box" was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the "box", the street had been replaced by a
crater.
I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch
filled
with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air
by
the blast.
The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and
burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight
ahead.
A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be
growing from a shoulder. I vomited.
I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even in
that
"media war" I never saw images of these grotesque sights on television or in
the pages of a newspaper.
I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices in Saigon as a
kind
of freaks' gallery.
SOME years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese children in
villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide called Agent
Orange.
It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it contained
Dioxin,
the deadliest known poison.
This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliche-mongers would now call a
weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South Vietnam.
Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and food,
children continue to be born without palates and chins and scrotums or are
stillborn. Many have leukaemia.
You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too hideous for
their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be pinned up on a
wall
and they are old news now.
That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when Iraq is
attacked? I doubt it.
I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I travelled in Iraq
two years ago. A paediatrician showed me hospital wards of children
similarly
deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf war in 1991.
She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed on grey
little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her eyes.
More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon of mass destruction,
were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly by the British.
Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled or ingested, causes
cancer. In a country where dust carries everything, swirling through markets
and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable.
For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment that would allow its
engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields.
It has also been denied equipment and drugs that would identify and treat
the
cancer which, it is estimated, will affect almost half the population in the
south.
LAST November Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the Junior Defence Minister Adam Ingram
what stocks of weapons containing depleted uranium were held by British
forces operating in Iraq.
His robotic reply was: "I am withholding details in accordance with
Exemption
1 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government Information."
Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will do to our fellow human
beings in a country already stricken by an embargo run by America and
Britain
and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian population, who are
denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the Pentagon in Washington
announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter Iraq "physically,
emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its people 800 cruise
missiles in two days.
This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the
entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.
A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American television: "There
will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer size of this has never been
seen before, never been contemplated before."
The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is apparently its proud
inventor. He said: "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the
nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes."
What will his "Hiroshima effect" actually do to a population of whom almost
half are children under the age of 14?
The answer is to be found in a "confidential" UN document, based on World
Health Organisation estimates, which says that "as many as 500,000 people
could require treatment as a result of direct and indirect injuries".
A Bush-Blair attack will destroy "a functioning primary health care system"
and deny clean water to 39 per cent of the population. There is "likely [to
be] an outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions".
It is Washington's utter disregard for humanity, I believe, together with
Blair's lies that have turned most people in this country against them,
including people who have not protested before.
Last weekend Blair said there was no need for the UN weapons inspectors to
find a "smoking gun" for Iraq to be attacked.
Compare that with his reassurance in October 2001 that there would be no
"wider war" against Iraq unless there was "absolute evidence" of Iraqi
complicity in September 11. And there has been no evidence.
Blair's deceptions are too numerous to list here. He has lied about the
nature and effect of the embargo on Iraq by covering up the fact that
Washington, with Britain's support, is withholding more than $5billion worth
of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security Council.
He has lied about Iraq buying aluminium tubes, which he told Parliament were
"needed to enrich uranium". The International Atomic Energy Agency has
denied
this outright.
He has lied about an Iraqi "threat", which he discovered only following
September 11 2001 when Bush made Iraq a gratuitous target of his "war on
terror". Blair's "Iraq dossier" has been mocked by human rights groups.
However, what is wonderful is that across the world the sheer force of
public
opinion isolates Bush and Blair and their lemming, John Howard in Australia.
So few people believe them and support them that The Guardian this week went
in search of the few who do - "the hawks". The paper published a list of
celebrity warmongers, some apparently shy at describing their contortion of
intellect and morality. It is a small list.
IN CONTRAST the majority of people in the West, including the United States,
are now against this gruesome adventure and the numbers grow every day.
It is time MPs joined their constituents and reclaimed the true authority of
parliament. MPs like Tam Dalyell, Alice Mahon, Jeremy Corbyn and George
Galloway have stood alone for too long on this issue and there have been too
many sham debates manipulated by Downing Street.
If, as Galloway says, a majority of Labour backbenchers are against an
attack, let them speak up now.
Blair's figleaf of a "coalition" is very important to Bush and only the
moral
power of the British people can bring the troops home without them firing a
shot.
The consequences of not speaking out go well beyond an attack on Iraq.
Washington will effectively take over the Middle East, ensuring an age of
terrorism other than their own.
The next American attack is likely to be Iran - the Israelis want this - and
their aircraft are already in place in Turkey. Then it may be China's turn.
"Endless war" is Vice-President Cheney's contribution to our understanding.
Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons "if necessary". On March 26 last
Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries "can be absolutely confident that in
the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons".
Such madness is the true enemy. What's more, it is right here at home and
you, the British people, can stop it.
* On Saturday, February 15, a great demonstration against an attack on
Iraq
will be held in London.
* Contact the Stop the War Coalition on 07951 235 915 and
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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