Fri Nov 16 18:19:36 MST 2007

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.