Bush's Vietnam
by John Pilger
New Statesman
June 22, 2003
America's
two "great victories" since
11 September 2001 are
unravelling.
In Afghanistan, the regime of
Hamid
Karzai has virtually no
authority and no money, and would
collapse
without American guns.
Al-Qaeda has not been defeated, and the Taliban
are
re-emerging. Regardless of showcase
improvements, the
situation of women and children remains
desperate. The
token woman in Karzai's cabinet, the courageous
physician
Sima Samar, has been forced out of government
and is
now in constant fear of her life, with an armed
guard
outside her office door and another at her
gate. Murder,
rape and child abuse are committed with
impunity by the
private armies of America's "friends", the
warlords whom
Washington has bribed with millions of dollars,
cash in
hand, to give the pretence of
stability.
"We are in
a combat zone the moment we leave this
base," an American
colonel told me at Bagram airbase,
near Kabul. "We are
shot at every day, several times a
day." When I said
that surely he had come to liberate and
protect the people,
he belly-laughed.
American
troops are rarely seen in Afghanistan's towns.
They escort US
officials at high speed in armoured vans
with blackened
windows and military vehicles, mounted
with machine-guns,
in front and behind. Even the vast
Bagram base was
considered too insecure for the defence
secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, during his recent, fleeting
visit. So nervous
are the Americans that a few weeks ago
they "accidentally"
shot dead four government soldiers in
the centre of Kabul,
igniting the second major street
protest against
their presence in a week.
On the day
I left Kabul, a car bomb exploded on the road
to the airport,
killing four German soldiers, members of
the international
security force Isaf. The Germans' bus
was lifted into the
air; human flesh lay on the roadside.
When British
soldiers arrived to "seal off" the area, they
were watched by a
silent crowd, squinting into the heat
and dust, across a
divide as wide as that which separated
British troops from
Afghans in the 19th century, and the
French from
Algerians and Americans from Vietnamese.
In Iraq,
scene of the second "great victory", there are two
open secrets. The
first is that the "terrorists" now
besieging the
American occupation force represent an
armed resistance
that is almost certainly supported by the
majority of Iraqis
who, contrary to pre-war propaganda,
opposed their
enforced "liberation" (see Jonathan Steele's
investigation, 19
March 2003, www.guardian.co.uk). The
second secret is
that there is emerging evidence of the
true scale of the
Anglo-American killing, pointing to the
bloodbath Bush and
Blair have always denied.
Comparisons
with Vietnam have been made so often over
the years that I
hesitate to draw another. However, the
similarities are
striking: for example, the return of
expressions such as
"sucked into a quagmire". This
suggests, once
again, that the Americans are victims, not
invaders: the
approved Hollywood version when a
rapacious adventure
goes wrong. Since Saddam Hussein's
statue was toppled
almost three months ago, more
Americans have been killed than during the war.
Ten have
been killed and 25 wounded in classic guerrilla
attacks on
roadblocks and checkpoints which may number as
many as
a dozen a day.
The
Americans call the guerrillas "Saddam loyalists" and
"Ba'athist
fighters", in the same way they used to dismiss
the Vietnamese as
"communists". Recently, in Falluja, in
the Sunni heartland
of Iraq, it was clearly not the
presence of
Ba'athists or Saddamists, but the brutal
behaviour of the
occupiers, who fired point-blank at a
crowd, that inspired
the resistance. The American tanks
gunning down a
family of shepherds is reminiscent of the
gunning down of a
shepherd, his family and sheep by
"coalition" aircraft
in a "no-fly zone" four years ago, whose
aftermath I filmed
and which evoked, for me, the
murderous games American aircraft used to play
in
Vietnam, gunning down farmers in their fields,
children on
their buffaloes.
On 12 June,
a large American force attacked a "terrorist
base" north of
Baghdad and left more than 100 dead,
according to a US
spokesman. The term "terrorist" is
important, because
it implies that the likes of al-Qaeda
are attacking the
liberators, and so the connection
between Iraq and 11
September is made, which in pre-war
propaganda was never
made.
More than
400 prisoners were taken in this operation. The
majority have
reportedly joined thousands of Iraqis in a
"holding facility"
at Baghdad airport: a concentration camp
along the lines of
Bagram, from where people are shipped
to Guantanamo Bay.
In Afghanistan, the Americans pick
up taxi drivers and
send them into oblivion, via Bagram.
Like Pinochet's boys
in Chile, they are making their
perceived enemies
"disappear".
"Search and
destroy", the scorched-earth tactic from
Vietnam, is back. In
the arid south-eastern plains of
Afghanistan, the
village of Niazi Qala no longer stands.
American airborne
troops swept down before dawn on 30
December 2001 and
slaughtered, among others, a wedding
party. Villagers
said that women and children ran towards
a dried pond,
seeking protection from the gunfire, and
were shot as they
ran. After two hours, the aircraft and
the attackers left.
According to a United Nations
investigation, 52 people were killed, including
25 children.
"We identified it as a military target," says
the Pentagon,
echoing its initial response to the My Lai
massacre 35
years ago.
The
targeting of civilians has long been a journalistic
taboo in the west.
Accredited monsters did that, never
"us". The civilian
death toll of the 1991 Gulf war was
wildly
underestimated. Almost a year later, a
comprehensive study
by the Medical Education Trust in
London estimated
that more than 200,000 Iraqis had died
during and
immediately after the war, as a direct or
indirect consequence
of attacks on civilian infrastructure.
The report was all
but ignored. This month, Iraq Body
Count, a group of
American and British academics and
researchers,
estimated that up to 10,000 civilians may
have been killed in
Iraq, including 2,356 civilians in the
attack on Baghdad
alone. And this is likely to be an
extremely
conservative figure.
In
Afghanistan, there has been similar carnage. In May
last year, Jonathan
Steele extrapolated all the available
field evidence of
the human cost of the US bombing and
concluded that as
many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost
their lives as an
indirect consequence of the bombing,
many of them drought
victims denied relief.
This
"hidden" effect is hardly new. A recent study at
Columbia University
in New York has found that the
spraying of Agent
Orange and other herbicides on Vietnam
was up to four times
as great as previously estimated.
Agent Orange
contained dioxin, one of the deadliest
poisons known. In
what they first called Operation Hades,
then changed to the
friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, the
Americans in Vietnam
destroyed, in some 10,000
"missions" to spray Agent Orange, almost half
the forests
of southern Vietnam, and countless human lives.
It was
the most insidious and perhaps the most
devastating use
of a chemical weapon of mass destruction ever.
Today,
Vietnamese children continue to be born with a
range of
deformities, or they are stillborn, or the
foetuses are
aborted.
The use of
uranium-tipped munitions evokes the
catastrophe of Agent
Orange. In the first Gulf war in 1991,
the Americans and
British used 350 tonnes of depleted
uranium. According
to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy
Authority, quoting
an international study, 50 tonnes of
DU, if inhaled or
ingested, would cause 500,000 deaths.
Most of the victims
are civilians in southern Iraq. It is
estimated that 2,000
tonnes were used during the latest
attack.
In a
remarkable series of reports for the Christian Science
Monitor, the
investigative reporter Scott Peterson has
described radiated
bullets in the streets of Baghdad and
radiation-contaminated tanks, where children play without
warning.
Belatedly, a few signs in Arabic have appeared:
"Danger - Get away
from this area". At the same time, in
Afghanistan, the
Uranium Medical Research Centre, based
in Canada, has made
two field studies, with the results
described as
"shocking". "Without exception," it reported,
"at every bomb site
investigated, people are ill. A
significant portion
of the civilian population presents
symptoms consistent
with internal contamination by
uranium."
An official
map distributed to non-government agencies in
Iraq shows that the
American and British military have
plastered urban
areas with cluster bombs, many of which
will have failed to
detonate on impact. These usually lie
unnoticed until
children pick them up, then they explode.
In the
centre of Kabul, I found two ragged notices warning
people that the
rubble of their homes, and streets,
contained unexploded
cluster bombs "made in USA". Who
reads them? Small
children? The day I watched children
skipping through
what might have been an urban
minefield, I saw Tony Blair on CNN in the lobby
of my
hotel. He was in Iraq, in Basra, lifting a
child into his
arms, in a school that had been painted for his
visit, and
where lunch had been prepared in his honour, in
a city
where basic services such as education, food
and water
remain a shambles under the British
occupation.
It was in
Basra three years ago that I filmed hundreds of
children ill and
dying because they had been denied cancer
treatment equipment
and drugs under an embargo
enforced with enthusiasm by Tony Blair. Now
here he was
- shirt open, with that fixed grin, a man of
the troops if
not of the people - lifting a toddler into his
arms for the
cameras.
When I
returned to London, I read "After Lunch", by Harold
Pinter, from a new
collection of his called War (Faber &
Faber).
And after
noon the well-dressed creatures come To sniff
among the dead And
have their lunch
And all the
many well-dressed creatures pluck The swollen
avocados from the
dust And stir the minestrone with stray
bones
And after
lunch They loll and lounge about Decanting
claret in convenient
skulls
John Pilger
is a renowned journalist and documentary
film-maker. A war
correspondent and ZNet Commentator,
his writings have
appeared in numerous magazines, and
newspapers such as
the Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the
Independent, New
Statesman, the New York Times, the
Los Angeles Times,
the Nation, and other newspapers and
periodicals around
the world. His books include Heroes
(2001) Hidden
Agendas (1998) and Distant Voices (1994).
