John Pilger, London
In a valedictory piece on December 30, the Guardian commentator and leader writer Martin Kettle wrote: "Opponents of the [Iraq] war may need to be reminded that public opinion currently approves of the invasion by nearly two to one."
A favourite source for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on November 18, the day US President George Bush arrived in London, which was reported beneath the front-page headline "Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war surges".
Out of 1002 people contacted, just 426 said they welcomed Bush's visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or did not know. As for support for the war "surging", the absurdly small number questioned still produced a majority that opposed the invasion of Iraq.
Across the world, the "majority backs Bush" disinformation was seized upon — by William Shawcross on CNN ("The majority of the British people are glad he [Bush] came..."), by the equally warmongering William Safire in the New York Times and by the Murdoch press almost everywhere. Thus, the slaughter in Iraq, the destruction of democratic rights and civil liberties in the West and the preparation for the next invasion are "normalised".
Current "normalising" is expressed succinctly by Kettle: "As 2003 draws to its close, it is surely al Qaeda, rather than the repercussions of Iraq, that casts a darker shadow over Britain's future."
How does he know this? The "mass of intelligence flowing across the prime minister's desk", of course! He calls this "cold-eyed realism", omitting to mention that the only credible intelligence "flowing across the prime minister's desk" was the common sense that an Anglo-American attack on Iraq would increase the threat from al Qaeda.
What the normalisers don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the "coalition" crime in Iraq — which Kettle calls a "misjudgement" — and the true source of the worldwide threat.
Outside the work of a few outstanding journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged. For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by US and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach contaminated sites.
Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.
Of the 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have "mystery illnesses" not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By mid-April last year, the US Air Force had deployed more than 19,000 guided weapons and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells.
Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad, has documented a catalogue of miscarriages, hair loss, and horrific eye, skin and respiratory problems among people living near the area. Yet the US and Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium contamination in Iraq.
According to the non-governmental organisation Medact, between 21,700 and 55,000 Iraqis died between March 20 and October 20 last year. This includes up to 9600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded cluster bombs are put at 1000 a month. These are conservative estimates; the ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be imagined.
Neither the US nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic suffering is "not relevant", according to a US State Department official — just as the slaughter of more than 200,000 Iraqis during and immediately after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated in a Medical Education Trust study, was "not relevant" and not news.
The normalisers are anxious that this terror is again not recognised (the BBC confines its use of "terrorism" and "atrocities" to the Iraqi resistance) and that the wider danger it represents throughout the world is overshadowed by the threat of al Qaeda.
William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, has attacked the anti-war movement for not joining Bush's "war on terror". He says "the left" must join Bush's campaign, even his "pre-emptive" wars, or risk — that word again — "irrelevance". This echoes other liberal normalisers who, by facing both ways, provide propaganda cover for rapacious power to expand its domain with "humanitarian interventions" — such as the bombing to death of some 3000 civilians in Afghanistan and the swap of the Taliban for US-backed warlords, murderers and rapists.
Schulz's criticism ignores the truth in Amnesty's own studies. Amnesty USA reports that the Bush administration is harbouring thousands of foreign torturers, including several mass murderers.
By a simple mathematical comparison of US and al Qaeda terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In the past 50 years, the US has supported and trained state terrorists in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The toll of their victims is in the millions. Again, the documentation is in Amnesty's files.
The dictator Suharto's seizure of power in Indonesia was responsible for "one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century", according to the CIA. The US supplied arms, logistics, intelligence and assassination lists. Scholars now put Suharto's victims in 1965-66 at almost a million; in East Timor, he oversaw the death of one-third of the population: 200,000 men, women and children.
Today, the mass murderer lives in sumptuous retirement in Jakarta, his billions safe in foreign banks. Unlike Saddam Hussein, an amateur by comparison, there will be no show trial for Suharto, who remained obediently within the US terror network. (One of Suharto's most outspoken protectors and apologists in the State Department during the 1980s was Paul Wolfowitz, the current "brains" behind Bush's aggression.)
In the sublime days before September 11, 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorising the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.
This is not to say the threat from al Qaeda and other fanatical groups is not real; what the normalisers don't want you to know is that the most pervasive danger is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in journalism and scholarship cast always as benign — capable of misjudgement and blunder, never of high crime.
Bush, Blair and the normalisers now speak, almost with relish, of opening mass graves in Iraq. What they do not want you to know is that the largest mass graves are the result of a popular uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf war, in direct response to a call by President George Bush senior to "take matters into your own hands and force Saddam to step aside". So successful were the rebels initially that within days Saddam's rule had collapsed across the south. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed close at hand.
Then Washington, the tyrant's old paramour who had supplied him with $5 billion worth of conventional arms, chemical and biological weapons and industrial technology, intervened just in time. The rebels suddenly found themselves confronted with the US helping Hussein against them. US forces prevented them from reaching Iraqi arms depots. They denied them shelter, and gave Hussein's Republican Guard safe passage through US lines in order to attack the rebels. US helicopters circled overhead, observing, taking photographs, while Hussein's forces crushed the uprising.
In the north, the same happened to the Kurdish insurrection. "The Americans did everything for Saddam", said the writer on the Middle East, Said Aburish, "except join the fight on his side." Bush senior did not want a divided Iraq, certainly not a democratic Iraq.
The New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, a guard dog of US foreign policy, was more to the point. What Washington wanted was a successful coup by an "iron-fisted junta" — Saddam without Saddam.
Nothing has changed. As Milan Rai documents in his new book, Regime Unchanged, the most senior and ruthless elements of Hussein's security network, the Mukha-barat, are now in the pay of the US and Britain, helping them to combat the resistance and recruit those who will run a puppet regime behind a facade.
A CIA-run and -paid gestapo of 10,000 will operate much as they did under Saddam Hussein.
Blair knows this and says nothing. Consider his unctuous words to British troops in Basra the other day about curtailing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Like so many of his deceptions, this covers the fact that his government has increased the export of weapons and military equipment to some of the most oppressive regimes on earth, such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Nepal.
To oil-rich Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 9/11 hijackers and friend of the Taliban, where women are tormented and people are executed for apostasy, go major British weapons systems, along with leg irons, gang chains, shock belts and shackles. To Indonesia, whose unreconstructed, blood-soaked military is trying to crush the independence movement in Aceh, go British "riot control" vehicles and Hawk fighter-bombers.
On December 8, the UN General Assembly voted on a range of resolutions on disarmament. The US opposed all the most important ones, including those dealing with nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has contingency plans, spelt out in the Pentagon's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Syria, Iran and China. Following suit, the UK defence secretary Geoffrey Hoon announced that for the first time, Britain would attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons "if necessary".
This is as it was 50 years ago when, according to declassified files, the British government collaborated with US plans to wage "preventive" atomic war against the Soviet Union. No public discussion was permitted; the unthinkable was normalised. Today, history is our warning that, once again, the true threat is close to home.
[Abridged from .]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, January 21, 2004.
Visit the