Iran: the war
ahead
The sailors' ordeal was a
diversion from the bigger danger. The US and UK identified their
new enemy long ago and are preparing the propaganda for the war
ahead.
New Statesman
16 April 2007
John Pilger
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes
the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train
to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. "They were sick
and some were dying," she says. "Then my mother saw these German
women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became
very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from
the side'."
It is time we in Britain stopped looking from
the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious
crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair "long war"
edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation's
independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the 15
British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals
(with tales of their "ordeal" almost certainly authored by the
Ministry of Defence - until it got the wind up) is both a farce
and a distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance
with Blair, has spent four years preparing for "Operation
Iranian Freedom". Forty-five cruise missiles are primed to
strike. According to Russia's leading strategic thinker General
Leonid Ivashov: "Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets .
. . at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat
nuclear weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive
contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond."
And yet there is a surreal silence in Britain,
save for the noise of "news" in which our powerful broadcasters
gesture cryptically at the obvious but dare not make sense of
it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the
consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the
truth be revealed.
"The days of Britain having to apologise for
its colonial history are over," declared Gordon Brown to the
Daily Mail. "We should celebrate much of our past rather than
apologise for it." In Late Victorian Holocausts, the
historian Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million
Indians died unnecessarily in famines criminally imposed by
British colonial policies. Moreover, since the formal demise of
that glorious imperium, declassified files make it clear that
British governments have borne "significant responsibility" for
the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5
million people throughout the world from military interventions
and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain. The
historian Mark Curtis calls these victims "unpeople". Rejoice!
said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the
difference.
Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton,
John Edwards and the other warmongering Democrats he admires and
who support an unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation of
the Middle East to "our interests" - and Israel's, of course.
Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed Iran's
democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi,
whose regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the
world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of
torture" that was "beyond belief" (Amnesty).
True carnage
Look behind the one-way moral screen and you
will distinguish the Blairite elite by its loathing of real
democracy. They used to be discreet about this, but no more. Two
examples spring to mind. In 2004, Blair used the secretive
"royal prerogative" to overturn a high court judgment that had
restored the very principle of human rights set out in Magna
Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in
the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as any
dictator, Blair dealt his coup de grâce with the
lawless expulsion of the islanders from their homeland, now a US
military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and Afghanistan
and will bomb Iran.
In the second example, only the degree of
suffering is different. Last October, 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 direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing
Street officials derided the study as "flawed". They were lying.
In fact, the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence,
Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods
as "robust" and "close to best practice", and other government
officials had secretly approved the "tried and tested way of
measuring mortality in conflict zones". The figure for Iraqi
deaths is now estimated at close to a million - carnage
equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic siege
of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a
million infants under the age of five, verified by Unicef. That,
too, was dismissed contemptuously by Blair.
"This Labour government, which includes Gordon
Brown as much as it does Tony Blair," wrote Richard Horton,
editor of the Lancet, "is party to a war crime of
monstrous proportions. Yet our political consensus prevents any
judicial or civil society response. Britain is paralysed by its
own indifference."
Such is the scale of the crime and of our
"looking from the side". According to the Observer of 8
April, the voters' "damning verdict" on the Blair regime is
expressed by a majority who have "lost faith" in their
government. No surprise there. Polls have long shown a
widespread revulsion to Blair, demonstrated at the last general
election, which produced the second lowest turnout since the
franchise. No mention was made of the Observer's own
contribution to this national loss of faith. Once celebrated as
a bastion of liberalism that stood against Anthony Eden's
lawless attack on Egypt in 1956, the new right-wing, lifestyle
Observer enthusiastically backed Blair's lawless attack
on Iraq, having helped lay the ground with major articles
falsely linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks - claims now regarded
even by the Pentagon as fake.
As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq,
read Iran. According to the former US treasury secretary Paul
O'Neill, the Bush cabal decided to attack Iraq on "day one" of
Bush's administration, long before 11 September 2001. The main
reason was oil. O'Neill was shown a Pentagon document entitled
"Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts", which outlined
the carve-up of Iraq's oil wealth among the major Anglo-American
companies. Under a law written by US and British officials, the
Iraqi puppet regime is about to hand over the extraction of the
largest concentration of oil on earth to Anglo-American
companies.
Nothing like this piracy has happened before
in the modern Middle East, where Opec has ensured that oil
business is conducted between states. Across the Shatt al-Arab
waterway is another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as non
existent weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for
democracy had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so
non-existent nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the coming
American onslaught on Iran. Unlike Israel and the United States,
Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed
routine inspections under its legal obligations. The
International Atomic Energy Agency has never cited Iran for
diverting its civilian programme to military use. For the past
three years, IAEA inspectors have said they have been allowed to
"go anywhere". The recent UN Security Council sanctions against
Iran are the result of Washington's bribery.
Until recently, the British were unaware that
their government was one of the world's most consistent abusers
of human rights and backers of state terrorism. Few Britons knew
that the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, was
sponsored by British intelligence as a means of systematically
destroying secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young
British Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn
Anglo-American-backed jihad against the Soviet Union known as
"Operation Cyclone". In 2001, few Britons knew that 3,000
innocent Afghan civilians were bombed to death as revenge for
the attacks of 11 September. No Afghans brought down the twin
towers, only citizens of Saudi Arabia, Britain's biggest arms
client, which was not bombed. Thanks to Bush and Blair,
awareness in Britain and all over the world has risen as never
before. When home-grown terrorists struck London in July 2005,
few doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity
and that the bombs which killed 52 Londoners were, in effect,
Blair's bombs.
In my experience, most people do not indulge
the absurdity and cruelty of the "rules" of rampant power. They
do not contort their morality and intellect to comply with
double standards and the notion of approved evil, of worthy and
unworthy victims. They would, if they knew, grieve for all the
lives, families, careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair
and Bush. The sure evidence is the British public's wholehearted
response to the 2004 tsunami, shaming that of the government.
Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly
with Robert H Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States at
the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the end of the Second
World War. "Crimes are crimes," he said, "whether the United
States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not
prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would
not be willing to have invoked against us."
As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld,
who dare not travel to certain countries for fear of being
prosecuted as war criminals, Blair as a private citizen may no
longer be untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzón, the
tenacious Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for
indictments against those responsible for "one of the most
sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history" -
Iraq. Five days later, the chief prosecutor of the International
Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, said that Blair
could one day face war-crimes charges.
These are critical changes in the way the sane
world thinks - again, thanks to the Reich of Blair and Bush.
However, we live in the most dangerous of times. On 6 April,
Blair accused "elements of the Iranian regime" of "backing,
financing, arming and supporting terrorism in Iraq". He offered
no evidence, and the Ministry of Defence has none. This is the
same Goebbels-like refrain with which he and his coterie, Gordon
Brown included, brought an epic bloodletting to Iraq. How long
will the rest of us continue looking from the side?
John Pilger's new film "The War on
Democracy" will be previewed at the National Film Theatre,
London SE1, on 11 May.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/nft
http://www.johnpilger.com
--
John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary
film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British
journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy
awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of
the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San
Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter,
"unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I
salute him."
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