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John Pilger: The Unthinkable Is Becoming Normal
John Pilger
Independent UK
Sunday 20 April 2003
Do
not forget the horror. The saving of one little boy must not be a
cover for the crime of this war.
Last
Sunday, seated in the audience at the Bafta television awards ceremony,
I was struck by the silence. Here were many of the most influential
members of the liberal elite, the writers, producers, dramatists,
journalists and managers of our main source of information, television;
and not one broke the silence. It was as though we were disconnected
from the world outside: a world of rampant, rapacious power and great
crimes committed in our name by our government and its foreign master.
Iraq is the "test case", says the Bush regime, which every day sails
closer to Mussolini's definition of fascism: the merger of a militarist
state with corporate power. Iraq is a test case for western liberals,
too. As the suffering mounts in that stricken country, with Red Cross
doctors describing "incredible'' levels of civilian casualties, the
choice of the next conquest, Syria or Iran, is "debated'' on the BBC, as
if it were a World Cup venue.
The
unthinkable is being normalised. The American essayist Edward Herman
wrote: "There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising
the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set
of individuals ... others working on improving technology (a better
crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments
that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of
the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for
the general public.''
Herman wrote that following the 1991 Gulf War, whose nocturnal
images of American bulldozers burying thousands of teenage Iraqi
conscripts, many of them alive and trying to surrender, were never
shown. Thus, the slaughter was normalised. A study released just before
Christmas 1991 by the Medical Educational Trust revealed that more
200,000 Iraqi men, women and children were killed or died as a direct
result of the American-led attack. This was barely reported, and the
homicidal nature of the "war'' never entered public consciousness in
this country, let alone America.
The
Pentagon's deliberate destruction of Iraq's civilian infrastructure,
such as power sources and water and sewage plants, together with the
imposition of an embargo as barbaric as a medieval siege, produced a
degree of suffering never fully comprehended in the West. Documented
evidence was available, volumes of it; by the late 1990s, more than
6,000 infants were dying every month, and the two senior United Nations
officials responsible for humanitarian relief in Iraq, Denis Halliday
and Hans von Sponeck, resigned, protesting the embargo's hidden agenda.
Halliday called it "genocide".
As of
last July, the United States, backed by the Blair government, was
wilfully blocking humanitarian supplies worth $5.4bn, everything from
vaccines and plasma bags to simple painkillers, all of which Iraq had
paid for and the Security Council had approved.
Last
month's attack by the two greatest military powers on a demoralised,
sick and largely defenceless population was the logical extension of
this barbarism. This is now called a "victory", and the flags are coming
out. Last week, the submarine HMS Turbulent returned to Plymouth, flying
the Jolly Roger, the pirates' emblem. How appropriate. This
nuclear-powered machine fired some 30 American Tomahawk cruise missiles
at Iraq. Each missile cost £700,000: a total of £21m. That alone would
provide desperate Basra with food, water and medicines.
Imagine: what did Commander Andrew McKendrick's 30 missiles
hit? How many people did they kill or maim in a population nearly half
of which are children? Maybe, Commander, you targeted a palace with gold
taps in the bathroom, or a "command and control facility", as the
Americans and Geoffrey Hoon like to lie. Or perhaps each of your
missiles had a sensory device that could distinguish George Bush's
"evil-doers'' from toddlers. What is certain is that your targets did
not include the Ministry of Oil.
When
the invasion began, the British public was called upon to "support''
troops sent illegally and undemocratically to kill people with whom we
had no quarrel. "The ultimate test of our professionalism'' is how
Commander McKendrick describes an unprovoked attack on a nation with no
submarines, no navy and no air force, and now with no clean water and no
electricity and, in many hospitals, no anaesthetic with which to
amputate small limbs shredded by shrapnel. I have seen elsewhere how
this is done, with a gag in the patient's mouth.
One
child, Ali Ismaeel Abbas, the boy who lost his parents and his arms in a
missile attack, has been flown to a modern hospital in Kuwait. Publicity
has saved him. Tony Blair says he will "do everything he can'' to help
him. This must be the ultimate insult to the memory of all the children
of Iraq who have died violently in Blair's war, and as a result of the
embargo that Blair enthusiastically endorsed. The saving of Ali
substitutes a media spectacle of charity for our right to knowledge of
the extent of the crime committed against the young in our name. Let us
now see the pictures of the "truckload of dozens of dismembered women
and children'' that the Red Cross doctors saw.
As
Ali was flown to Kuwait, the Americans were preventing Save The Children
from sending a plane with medical supplies into northern Iraq, where
40,000 are desperate. According to the UN, half the population of Iraq
has only enough food to last a few weeks. The head of the World Food
Programme says that 40 million people around the world are now seriously
at risk because of the distraction of the humanitarian disaster in Iraq.
And
this is "liberation"? No, it is bloody conquest, witnessed by America's
mass theft of Iraq's resources and natural wealth. Ask the crowds in the
streets, for whom the fear and hatred of Saddam Hussein have been
transferred, virtually overnight, to Bush and Blair and perhaps to
"us''.
Such
is the magnitude of Blair's folly and crime that the contrivance of his
vindication is urgent. As if speaking for the vindicators, Andrew Marr,
the BBC's political editor, reported: "[Blair] 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.''
What
constitutes a bloodbath to the BBC's man in Downing Street? Did the
murder of the 3,000 people in New York's Twin Towers qualify? If his
answer is yes, then the thousands killed in Iraq during the past month
is a bloodbath. One report says that more than 3,000 Iraqis were killed
within 24 hours or less. Or are the vindicators saying that the lives of
one set of human beings have less value than those recognisable to us?
Devaluation of human life has always been essential to the pursuit of
imperial power, from the Congo to Vietnam, from Chechnya to Iraq.
If,
as Milan Kundera wrote, "the struggle of people against power is the
struggle of memory against forgetting", then we must not forget. We must
not forget Blair's lies about weapons of mass destruction which, as Hans
Blix now says, were based on "fabricated evidence". We must not forget
his callous attempts to deny that an American missile killed 62 people
in a Baghdad market. And we must not forget the reason for the
bloodbath. Last September, in announcing its National Security Strategy,
Bush served notice that America intended to dominate the world by force.
Iraq was indeed the "test case". The rest was a charade.
We
must not forget that a British defence secretary has announced, for the
first time, that his government is prepared to launch an attack with
nuclear weapons. He echoes Bush, of course. An ascendant mafia now rules
the United States, and the Prime Minister is in thrall to it. Together,
they empty noble words – liberation, freedom and democracy – of their
true meaning. The unspoken truth is that behind the bloody conquest of
Iraq is the conquest of us all: of our minds, our humanity and our
self-respect at the very least. If we say and do nothing, victory over
us is assured.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this
material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes.)
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