On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American
soldiers scrawl colorful messages in childish handwriting: For
Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse. A building goes down. A
marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child who only ever
wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.
On March 21, the day after American and British troops began
their illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, an
"embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American
soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty,"
Private AJ said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."
To
be fair to the correspondent, even though he was
"embedded" he did sort of weakly suggest that so far
there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government to the
September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all
the way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's
way over my head," he said.
According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of
the American public believes that Saddam Hussein is directly
responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of
Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida.
What percentage of America's armed forces believe these
fabrications is anybody's guess.
It is unlikely that British and American troops fighting in
Iraq are aware that their governments supported Saddam Hussein
both politically and financially through his worst excesses.
But why should poor AJ and his fellow soldiers be burdened with
these details? It does not matter any more, does it? Hundreds of
thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs, ammunition, gas
masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet paper,
insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the
move. The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it
a universe unto itself. It doesn't need to justify its existence
any more. It exists. It is.
President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army,
navy, air force and marines has issued clear instructions:
"Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated." (Perhaps he means that even
if Iraqi people's bodies are killed, their souls will be
liberated.) American and British citizens owe it to the supreme
commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops. Their
countries are at war. And what a war it is.
After using the "good offices" of UN diplomacy
(economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to ensure that Iraq
was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million of
its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after
making sure that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an
act of cowardice that must surely be unrivalled in history, the
"Allies"/"Coalition of the Willing"(better
known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought) - sent in an
invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so. It's more like
Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.
So far the Iraqi army, with its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers,
its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow managed to temporarily
confound and occasionally even outmaneuver the "Allies".
Faced with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful armed forces
the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and
has even managed to put up what actually amounts to a defense. A
defense which the Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as
deceitful and cowardly. (But then deceit is an old tradition with
us natives. When we are invaded/ colonized/occupied and stripped
of all dignity, we turn to guile and opportunism.)
Even allowing for the fact that Iraq and the "Allies"
are at war, the extent to which the "Allies" and their
media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to the point of
being counterproductive to their own objectives.
When Saddam Hussein appeared on national TV to address the
Iraqi people after the failure of the most elaborate assassination
attempt in history - "Operation Decapitation" - we had
Geoff Hoon, the British defense secretary, deriding him for not
having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward
who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition
speculation - Was it really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it
Osama with a shave? Was it pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it
black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin if we really, really want
it to?
After dropping not hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad,
when a marketplace was mistakenly blown up and civilians killed -
a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were blowing
themselves up! "They're using very old stock. Their missiles
go up and come down."
If so, may we ask how this squares with the accusation that the
Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the Axis of Evil and a threat
to world peace?
When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties
it's denounced as "emotive" Arab propaganda aimed at
orchestrating hostility towards the "Allies", as though
Iraqis are dying only in order to make the "Allies" look
bad. Even French television has come in for some stick for similar
reasons. But the awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers,
stealth bombers and cruise missiles arcing across the desert sky
on American and British TV is described as the "terrible
beauty" of war.
When invading American soldiers (from the army "that's
only here to help") are taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV,
George Bush says it violates the Geneva convention and
"exposes the evil at the heart of the regime". But it is
entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the
hundreds of prisoners being held by the US government in
Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied
behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles and with earphones
clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural
deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these
prisoners, US Government officials don't deny that they're being
being ill-treated. They deny that they're "prisoners of
war"! They call them "unlawful combatants",
implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what's the
party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif,
Afghanistan? Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured
to death by the special forces at the Bagram air force base?
Doctors have formally called it homicide.)
When the "Allies" bombed the Iraqi television station
(also, incidentally, a contravention of the Geneva convention),
there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact Fox TV
had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a
righteous blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American
and British TV continue to advertise themselves as
"balanced" when their propaganda has achieved
hallucinatory levels.
Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the western
media? Just because they do it better? Western journalists
"embedded" with troops are given the status of heroes
reporting from the frontlines of war. Non-"embedded"
journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from
besieged and bombed Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by
the sight of bodies of burned children and wounded people) are
undermined even before they begin their reportage: "We have
to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi
authorities."
Increasingly, on British and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are
being referred to as "militia" (ie: rabble). One BBC
correspondent portentously referred to them as
"quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defense is
"resistance" or worse still, "pockets of
resistance", Iraqi military strategy is deceit. (The US
government bugging the phone lines of UN security council
delegates, reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.)
Clearly for the "Allies", the only morally acceptable
strategy the Iraqi army can pursue is to march out into the desert
and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down by machine-gun fire.
Anything short of that is cheating.
And now we have the siege of Basra. About a million and a half
people, 40 per cent of them children. Without clean water, and
with very little food. We're still waiting for the legendary Shia
"uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out of the
city and rain roses and hosannahs on the "liberating"
army. Where are the hordes? Don't they know that television
productions work to tight schedules? (It may well be that if
Saddam's regime falls there will be dancing on the streets of
Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be
dancing on the streets the world over.)
After days of enforcing hunger and thirst on the citizens of
Basra, the "Allies" have brought in a few trucks of food
and water and positioned them tantalizingly on the outskirts of
the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each
other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalize
the dying economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks,
desperate photographers fought each other to get pictures of
desperate people fighting each other for food. Those pictures will
go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy magazines
that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand,
distributing fishes and loaves.
As of July last year the delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies
to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair Pair. It didn't really make
the news. But now under the loving caress of live TV, 450 tonnes
of humanitarian aid - a minuscule fraction of what's actually
needed (call it a script prop) - arrived on a British ship, the
"Sir Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr
merited a whole day of live TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?
Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, writing
for the Independent on Sunday said that it would take 32 Sir
Galahad's a day to match the amount of food Iraq was receiving
before the bombing began.
We oughtn't to be surprised though. It's old tactics. They've
been at it for years. Consider this moderate proposal by John
McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam
war: "Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not
only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at
home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with
China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however
- if handled right - might ... offer promise. It should be
studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By
shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread
starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided - which
we could offer to do 'at the conference table'."
Times haven't changed very much. The technique has evolved into
a doctrine. It's called "Winning Hearts and Minds".
So, here's the moral maths as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis
estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf war. Hundreds of
thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At least that
lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every
day. Tens of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war
officially declared "disabled" by a disease called the
Gulf war syndrome, believed in part to be caused by exposure to
depleted uranium. It hasn't stopped the "Allies" from
continuing to use depleted uranium.
And now this talk of bringing the UN back into the picture. But
that old UN girl - it turns out that she just ain't what she was
cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she retains her
high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino
cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from
Thailand, the Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's
employed to clean other peoples' shit. She's used and abused at
will.
Despite Blair's earnest submissions, and all his fawning, Bush
has made it clear that the UN will play no independent part in the
administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide who gets those
juicy "reconstruction" contracts. But Bush has appealed
to the international community not to "politicize" the
issue of humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for
the immediate resumption of the UN's oil for food program, the UN
security council voted unanimously for the resolution. This means
that everybody agrees that Iraqi money (from the sale of Iraqi
oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because
of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.
Contracts for the "reconstruction" of Iraq we're
told, in discussions on the business news, could jump-start the
world economy. It's funny how the interests of American
corporations are so often, so successfully and so deliberately
confused with the interests of the world economy. While the
American people will end up paying for the war, oil companies,
weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in
"reconstruction" work will make direct gains from the
war. Many of them are old friends and former employers of the
Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress
for $75bn. Contracts for "re-construction" are already
being negotiated. The news doesn't hit the stands because much of
the US corporate media is owned and managed by the same interests.
Operation Iraqi Freedom, Tony Blair assures us is about
returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That is, returning Iraqi
oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like Shell,
like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here?
Perhaps Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US
vice-president Dick Cheney (who is a former director of
Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?
As the rift between Europe and America deepens, there are signs
that the world could be entering a new era of economic boycotts.
CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into gutters,
chanting, "We don't want your stinking wine." We've
heard about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they're
called now. There's news trickling in about Americans boycotting
German goods. The thing is that if the fallout of the war takes
this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most. Its homeland may
be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its economy
is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed
and vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet
is buzzing with elaborate lists of American and British government
products and companies that should be boycotted. Apart from the
usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's - government agencies
such as USAID, the British department for international
development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill
Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General
Electric, and companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap - could find
themselves under siege. These lists are being honed and re fined
by activists across the world. They could become a practical guide
that directs and channels the amorphous, but growing fury in the
world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of
corporate globalization is beginning to seem more than a little
evitable.
It's become clear that the war against terror is not really
about terror, and the war on Iraq not only about oil. It's about a
superpower's self-destructive impulse towards supremacy,
stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the
people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same
process. Only the weapons used against them differ: In one case
it's an IMF checkbook. In the other, cruise missiles.
Finally, there's the matter of Saddam's arsenal of weapons of
mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about those!)
In the fog of war - one thing's for sure - if Saddam 's regime
indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it is showing an
astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth of
extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi
troops were bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC)
could we expect the same of the Bush regime? Would it keep its
thousands of nuclear warheads in their wrapping paper? What about
its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of anthrax,
smallpox and nerve gas? Would it?
Excuse me while I laugh.
In the fog of war we're forced to speculate: Either Saddam is
an extremely responsible tyrant. Or - he simply does not possess
weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of what
happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than
the US government.
So here's Iraq - rogue state, grave threat to world peace,
paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq, invaded, bombed,
besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children killed
by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here's all of
us watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here's all of
us, enduring the horror of the war, enduring the horror of the
propaganda and enduring the slaughter of language as we know and
understand it. Freedom now means mass murder (or, in the US, fried
potatoes). When someone says "humanitarian aid" we
automatically go looking for induced starvation.
"Embedded" I have to admit, is a great find. It's what
it sounds like. And what about "arsenal of tactics?"
Nice!
In most parts of the world, the invasion of Iraq is being seen
as a racist war. The real danger of a racist war unleashed by
racist regimes is that it engenders racism in everybody -
perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the
debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There
is a tidal wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart
of the world. In Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I
encounter it every day. Sometimes it comes from the most unlikely
sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students, and they bring to
it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal politics.
That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America
is a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the
same carelessness with which they say, "All Muslims are
terrorists"). Even in the grotesque universe of racist
insult, the British make their entry as add-ons. Arse-lickers,
they're called.
Suddenly, I, who have been vilified for being
"anti-American" and "anti-west", find myself
in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America.
And Britain.
Those who descend so easily into the pit of racist abuse would
do well to remember the hundreds of thousands of American and
British citizens who protested against their country's stockpile
of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war resisters
who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should
know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the
US government and the "American way of life" comes from
American citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation
of their prime minister comes from the British media. Finally they
should remember that right now, hundreds of thousands of British
and American citizens are on the streets protesting the war. The
Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of governments, not
people. More than one third of America's citizens have survived
the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to, and many
thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the
ultra-patriotic climate that prevails in the US, that's as brave
as any Iraqi fighting for his or her homeland.
While the "Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising
of Shia Muslims on the streets of Basra, the real uprising is
taking place in hundreds of cities across the world. It has been
the most spectacular display of public morality ever seen.
Most courageous of all, are the hundreds of thousands of
American people on the streets of America's great cities -
Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the
only institution in the world today that is more powerful than the
American government, is American civil society. American citizens
have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. How can we
not salute and support those who not only acknowledge but act upon
that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.
At the end of it all, it remains to be said that dictators like
Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in
the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of
them installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a
menace to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of
civil society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the
case of Iraq), there is no easy, pristine way of dealing with
them. (It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as
utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy
reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install
democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to
"rid the world of evil-doers".)
Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these
tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The
real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the
locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of
the US government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing
is fun, because he makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's true
that he is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he
handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.
Despite the pall of gloom that hangs over us today, I'd like to
file a cautious plea for hope: in times of war, one wants one's
weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President George W
Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US
president would have probably done the very same things, but would
have managed to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition.
Perhaps even carry the UN with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and
his brazen belief that he can run the world with his riot squad,
has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers, activists and
scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the
ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the
nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American
empire.
Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire)
has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker
than the pundits predicted.
Bring on the spanners.
� Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy, 42, is the author of The
God of Small Things (Random House, 1997), which won the Booker
Prize, sold six million copies, and has been translated into forty
languages. Here is link to an interview with Arundhati in the
April 2001 issue of The Progressive Magazine: http://www.theprogressive.org/intv0401.html
