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The New Statesman
April 17, 2004

Get out now

Iraq - Invaders have ripped up the fabric of a nation
that survived Saddam Hussein. This is a war of
liberation and we are the enemy.

By John Pilger

Four years ago, I travelled the length of Iraq, from
the hills where St Matthew is buried in the Kurdish
north to the heartland of Mesopotamia, and Baghdad,
and the Shia south. I have seldom felt as safe in
any country. Once, in the Edwardian colonnade of
Baghdad's book market, a young man shouted something
at me about the hardship his family had been forced
to endure under the embargo imposed by America and
Britain. What happened next was typical of Iraqis; a
passer-by calmed the man, putting his arm around his
shoulder, while another was quickly at my side.
"Forgive him," he said reassuringly. "We do not
connect the people of the west with the actions of
their governments. You a! re welcome."

At one of the melancholy evening auctions where Iraqis
come to sell their most intimate possessions out of
urgent need, a woman with two infants watched as their
pushchairs went for pennies, and a man who had
collected doves since he was 15 came with his last bird
and its cage; and yet people said to me: "You are
welcome." Such grace and dignity were often expressed
by those Iraqi exiles who loathed Saddam Hussein and
opposed both the economic siege and the Anglo-American
assault on their homeland; thousands of these anti-
Saddamites marched against the war in London last year,
to the chagrin of the warmongers, who never understood
the dichotomy of their principled stand.

Were I to undertake the same journey in Iraq today, I
might not return alive. Foreign terrorists have ensured
that. With the most lethal weapons that billions of
dollars can buy, and the threats of their cowboy
generals and the panic-s! tricken brutality of their foot
soldiers, more than 120,000 of these invaders have
ripped up the fabric of a nation that survived the
years of Saddam Hussein, just as they oversaw the
destruction of its artefacts. They have brought to Iraq
a daily, murderous violence which surpasses that of a
tyrant who never promised a fake democracy.

Amnesty International reports that US-led forces have
"shot Iraqis dead during demonstrations, tortured and
ill-treated prisoners, arrested people arbitrarily and
held them indefinitely, demolished houses in acts of
revenge and collective punishment".

In Fallujah, US marines, described as "tremendously
precise" by their psychopathic spokesman, slaughtered
up to 600 people, according to hospital directors. They
did it with aircraft and heavy weapons deployed in
urban areas, as revenge for the killing of four
American mercenaries. Many of the dead of Fallujah were
women and children and the ! elderly. Only the Arab
television networks, notably al-Jazeera, have shown the
true scale of this crime, while the Anglo-American
media continue to channel and amplify the lies of the
White House and Downing Street.

"Writing exclusively for the Observer before a make-or-
break summit with President George Bush this week,"
sang Britain's former premier liberal newspaper on 11
April, "[Tony Blair] gave full backing to American
tactics in Iraq . . . saying that the government would
not flinch from its 'historic struggle' despite the
efforts of 'insurgents and terrorists'."

That this "exclusive" was not presented as parody shows
that the propaganda engine that drove the lies of Blair
and Bush on weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda
links for almost two years is still in service. On BBC
news bulletins and Newsnight, Blair's "terrorists" are
still currency, a term that is never applied to the
principal source and cause of t! he terrorism, the
foreign invaders, who have now killed at least 11,000
civilians, according to Amnesty and others. The overall
figure, including conscripts, may be as high as 55,000.

That a nationalist uprising has been under way in Iraq
for more than a year, uniting at least 15 major groups,
most of them opposed to the old regime, has been
suppressed in a mendacious lexicon invented in
Washington and London and reported incessantly, CNN-
style. "Remnants" and "tribalists" and
"fundamentalists" dominate, while Iraq is denied the
legacy of a history in which much of the modern world
is rooted. The "first-anniversary story" about a
laughable poll claiming that half of all Iraqis felt
better off now under the occupation is a case in point.
The BBC and the rest swallowed it whole. For the truth,
I recommend the courageous daily reporting of Jo
Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad
(www.wildfirejo.blogspot.com).

Even now, as the uprising spreads, there is only
cryptic gesturing at the obvious: that this is a war of
national liberation and that the enemy is "us". The
pro-invasion Sydney Morning Herald is typical. Having
expressed "surprise" at the uniting of Shias and
Sunnis, the paper's Baghdad correspondent recently
described "how GI bullies are making enemies of their
Iraqi friends" and how he and his driver had been
threatened by Americans. "I'll take you out quick as a
flash, motherfucker!" a soldier told the reporter. That
this was merely a glimpse of the terror and humiliation
that Iraqis have to suffer every day in their own
country was not made clear; yet this newspaper has
published image after unctuous image of mournful
American soldiers, inviting sympathy for an invader who
has "taken out" thousands of innocent men, women and
children.

What we do routinely in the imper! ial west, wrote
Richard Falk, professor of international relations at
Princeton, is propagate "through a self-righteous, one-
way moral/legal screen positive images of western
values and innocence that are threatened, validating a
campaign of unrestricted violence". Thus, western state
terrorism is erased, and a tenet of western journalism
is to excuse or minimise "our" culpability, however
atrocious. Our dead are counted; theirs are not. Our
victims are worthy; theirs are not.

This is an old story; there have been many Iraqs, or
what Blair calls "historic struggles" waged against
"insurgents and terrorists". Take Kenya in the 1950s.
The approved version is still cherished in the west -
first popularised in the press, then in fiction and
movies; and like Iraq, it is a lie. "The task to which
we have set our minds," declared the governor of Kenya
in 1955, "is to civilise a great mass of human beings
who are in a very primitive ! moral and social state."
The slaughter of thousands of nationalists, who were
never called nationalists, was British government
policy. The myth of the Kenyan uprising was that the
Mau Mau brought "demonic terror" to the heroic white
settlers. In fact, the Mau Mau killed just 32
Europeans, compared with the estimated 10,000 Kenyans
killed by the British, who ran concentration camps
where the conditions were so harsh that 402 inmates
died in just one month. Torture, flogging and abuse of
women and children were commonplace. "The special
prisons," wrote the imperial histor-ian V G Kiernan,
"were probably as bad as any similar Nazi or Japanese
establishments." None of this was reported. The
"demonic terror" was all one way: black against white.
The racist message was unmistakable.

It was the same in Vietnam. In 1969, the discovery of
the American massacre in the village of My Lai was
described on the cover of Newsweek as "An American
tragedy", not a Vietnamese one. In fact, there were
many massacres like My Lai, and almost none of them was
reported at the time.

The real tragedy of soldiers policing a colonial
occupation is also suppressed. More than 58,000
American soldiers were killed in Vietnam. The same
number, according to a veterans' study, killed
themselves on their return home. Dr Doug Rokke,
director of the US army depleted uranium project
following the 1991 Gulf invasion, estimates that more
than 10,000 American troops have since died as a
result, many from contamination illness. When I asked
him how many Iraqis had died, he raised his eyes and
shook his head. "Solid uranium was used on shells," he
said. "Tens of thousands of Iraqis - men, women and
children - were contaminated. Right through the 1990s,
at international symposiums, I watched Iraqi officials
approach their counterparts from the Pentagon and the
Ministry of Def! ence and ask, plead, for help with
decontamination. The Iraqis didn't use uranium; it was
not their weapon. I watched them put their case,
describing the deaths and horrific deformities, and I
watched them rebuffed. It was pathetic." During last
year's invasion, both American and British forces again
used uranium-tipped shells, leaving whole areas so
"hot" with radiation that only military survey teams in
full protective clothing can approach them. No warning
or medical help is given to Iraqi civilians; thousands
of children play in these zones. The "coalition" has
refused to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency
to send experts to assess what Rokke describes as "a
catastrophe".

When will this catastrophe be properly reported by
those meant to keep the record straight? When will the
BBC and others investigate the conditions of some
10,000 Iraqis held without charge, many of them
tortured, in US concentration camps insi! de Iraq, and
the corralling, with razor wire, of entire Iraqi
villages? When will the BBC and others stop referring
to "the handover of Iraqi sovereignty" on 30 June,
although there will be no such handover? The new regime
will be stooges, with each ministry controlled by
American officials and with its stooge army and stooge
police force run by Americans. A Saddamite law
prohibiting trade unions for public sector workers will
stay in force. Leading members of Saddam's infamous
secret police, the Mukhabarat, will run "state
security", directed by the CIA. The US military will
have the same "status of forces" agreement that they
impose on the host nations of their 750 bases around
the world, which in effect leaves them in charge. Iraq
will be a US colony, like Haiti. And when will
journalists have the professional courage to report the
pivotal role that Israel has played in this grand
colonial design for the Middle East?

A ! few weeks ago, Rick Mercier, a young columnist for
the Free-lance Star, a small paper in Virginia, did
what no other journalist has done this past year. He
apologised to his readers for the travesty of the
reporting of events leading to the attack on Iraq.
"Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our
coverage," he wrote. "Sorry we let a band of self-
serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell
for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations .
. . Maybe we'll do a better job next war."

Well done, Rick Mercier. But listen to the silence of
your colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic. No one
expects Fox or Wapping or the Daily Telegraph to
relent. But what about David Astor's beacon of
liberalism, the Observer, which stood against the
invasion of Egypt in 1956 and its attendant lies? The
Observer not only backed last year's unprovoked,
illegal assault on Iraq; it helped create the
mendacious atmosphere in whi! ch Blair could get away
with his crime. The reputation of the Observer, and the
fact that it published occasional mitigating material,
meant that lies and myths gained legitimacy. A front-
page story gave credence to the bogus claim that Iraq
was behind the anthrax attacks in the US. And there
were those unnamed western "intelligence sources", all
those straw men, all those hints, in David Rose's two-
page "investigation" headlined "The Iraqi connection",
that left readers with the impression that Saddam
Hussein might well have had a lot to do with the
attacks of 11 September 2001. "There are occasions in
history," wrote Rose, "when the use of force is both
right and sensible. This is one of them." Tell that to
11,000 dead civilians, Mr Rose.

It is said that British officers in Iraq now describe
the "tactics" of their American comrades as
"appalling". No, the very nature of a colonial
occupation is appalling, as the families ! of 13 Iraqis
killed by British soldiers, who are taking the British
government to court, will agree. If the British
military brass understand an inkling of their own
colonial past, not least the bloody British retreat
from Iraq 83 years ago, they will whisper in the ear of
the little Wellington-cum-Palmerston in 10 Downing
Street: "Get out now, before we are thrown out."