A Conflict Driven by the Self-Interest of
America
By Robert Fisk
� 2002 Independent
Digital (UK) Ltd
2-17-3
- In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied
to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with Second World
War jingoism and scare stories and false information and student essays
dressed up as "intelligence". We are sick of being insulted by little
men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes of George Bush and his
cabal of neo-conservative henchmen who have plotted for years to change
the map of the Middle East to their advantage.
-
- No wonder, then, that Hans Blix' blunt refutation of
America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday warmed so many hearts.
Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world could show up the Americans for
the untrustworthy "allies" they have become.
-
- The British don't like Hussein any more than they
liked Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as Blair does not, the
Second World War -- they are not conned by childish parables of Hitler,
Churchill, Chamberlain and appeasement. They do not like being lectured
and whined at by men whose experience of war is Hollywood and
television.
-
- Still less do they wish to embark on endless wars with
a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with
his oil buddies, is now sending America's poor to destroy a Muslim
nation that has nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of
11 September. Jack Straw, the public school Trot-turned-warrior, ignores
all this, with Blair. He brays at us about the dangers of nuclear
weapons that Iraq does not have, of the torture and aggression of a
dictatorship that America and Britain sustained when Saddam was "one of
ours". But he and Blair cannot discuss the dark political agenda behind
George Bush's government, nor the "sinister men" (the words of a very
senior UN official) around the President.
-
- Those who oppose war are not cowards. Brits rather
like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian
Fascists and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included --
though we play down the RAF's use of gas on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s.
But when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is not enough.
Faced with the horror stories, Britons -- and many Americans -- are a
lot braver than Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told
Cromwell in 'A Man for All Seasons', tales to frighten children.
-
- Perhaps Henry VIII's exasperation in that play better
expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: "Do they take me for a
simpleton?" The British, like other Europeans, are an educated people.
Ironically, their opposition to this obscene war may make them feel
more, not less, European.
-
- Palestine has much to do with it. Brits have no love
for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough, and are outraged at the
colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians by a nation that is
now in effect running US policy in the Middle East. We are told that our
invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
-- a burning, fearsome wound to which Bush devoted just 18 words in his
meretricious State of the Union speech -- but even Blair can't get away
with that one; hence his "conference" for Palestinian reform at which
the Palestinians had to take part via video-link because Israel's Prime
Minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let them travel to London.
-
- So much for Blair's influence over Washington -- the
US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted" that he couldn't
persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at least one has to acknowledge
that Sharon -- war criminal though he may be for the 1982 Sabra and
Shatila massacres -- treated Blair with the contempt he deserves. Nor
can the Americans hide the link between Iraq and Israel and Palestine.
In his devious address to the UN Security Council last week, Powell
linked the three when he complained that Hamas, whose suicide bombings
so cruelly afflict Israelis, keeps an office in Baghdad.
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- Just as he told us about the mysterious al-Qaeda men
who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi gorge". This was
America's way of giving Vladimir Putin a free hand again in his campaign
of rape and murder against the Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark to
the UN General Assembly last September 12 about the need to protect
Iraq's Turkomans only becomes clear when one realizes that Turkomans
make up two thirds of the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest
oil fields.
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- The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still
active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have advocated destroying
the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush's most
influential advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and
Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long
before George W Bush was elected -- if he was elected -- US President.
And they weren't doing so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A
1996 report, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the
Realm':
-
- http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
-
- ... called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the
US but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu,
and produced by a group headed by -- yes, Richard Perle. The destruction
of Iraq will, of course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons
and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial
settlement Sharon has in store.
-
- Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss this with us
-- a war for Israel is not going to have our boys lining up at the
recruiting offices -- Jewish American leaders talk about the advantages
of an Iraqi war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish
American groups who so bravely oppose this madness have been the first
to point out how pro-Israeli organizations foresee Iraq not only as a
new source of oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the
Tigris river to the parched Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion
of this topic must be censored, as Professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns
Hopkins University, tried to do in the Wall Street Journal the day after
Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European nations' objections to
the war might -- yet again -- be ascribed to "anti-Semitism of a type
long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a
malignant intent." This nonsense, it must be said, is opposed by many
Israeli intellectuals who,
-
- like Uri Avnery, argue that an Iraq war will leave
Israel with even more Arab enemies, especially if Iraq attacks Israel
and Sharon then joins the US battle against the Arabs.
-
- The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lies behind
Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe". He was talking about the
"old" Germany of Nazism and the "old" France of collaboration. But the
France and Germany that oppose this war are the "new" Europe, the
continent which refuses, ever again, to slaughter the innocent. It is
Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the "old" America; not the "new" America
of freedom, the America of F D Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolize
the old America that killed its native Indians and embarked on imperial
adventures. It is "old" America we are being asked to fight for --
linked to a new form of colonialism -- an America that first threatens
the United Nations with irrelevancy and then does the same to NATO. This
is not the last chance for the UN, nor for NATO. But it may well be the
last chance for America to be taken seriously by her friends as well as
her enemies.
-
- In these last days of peace the British should not be
tripped by the oh-so-sought-after second UN resolution. UN permission
for America's war will not make the war legitimate; it merely proves
that the Council can be controlled with bribes, threats or abstentions.
It was the Soviet Union's abstention, after all, which allowed America
to fight the savage Korean war under the UN flag. And we should not
doubt that -- after a quick US military conquest of Iraq, and providing
'they' die more than 'we' die -- there will be plenty of anti-war
protesters who will claim they were pro-war all along. The first
pictures of "liberated" Baghdad will show Iraqi children making victory
signs to American tank crews. But the real cruelty and cynicism of this
conflict will become evident as soon as the "war" ends, when our
colonial occupation of a Muslim nation for the US and Israel
begins.
-
- There lies the rub. Bush calls Sharon a "man of
peace". But Sharon fears he may yet face trial over Sabra and Shatila,
which is why Israel has just withdrawn its ambassador to Belgium. I'd
like to see Saddam in the same court. And Rifaat Assad, for his 1982
massacre in the Syrian city of Hama. And all the torturers of Israel and
the Arab dictatorships.
-
- Israeli and US ambitions in the region are now
entwined, almost synonymous. This war is about oil and regional control.
It is being cheer-led by a draft-dodger who is treacherously telling us
that this is part of an eternal war against "terror". And the British
and most Europeans don't believe him. It's not that Britons wouldn't
fight for America. They just don't want to fight for Bush or his
friends. And if that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to
fight for Blair
either.
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