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BEST ANALYSIS OF THE WAR AGAINST IRAQ

By Arundhati Roy
The Guardian 02 04 03

On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers
scrawl colourful 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 Centre 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.

'HELPING' IRAQ

President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy,
airforce 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 outmanoeuvre 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 defence. A defence 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/ colonised/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.

SADDAM SHOULD NOT HIDE

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 defence 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 airforce base? Doctors have
formally called it homicide.)

MEDIA BIAS

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 defence 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.

BASRA MISCALCULATION

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 tantalisingly 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 revitalise 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.

VIETNAM TACTICS

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.

BOMB FIRST, BUILD LATER

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 "politicise" the issue of humanitarian
aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the immediate resumption
of the UN's oil for food programme, 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
globalisation 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 chequebook. In the other, cruise missiles.

WHERE ARE ALL THOSE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION?

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. SEE: http://www.newamericancentury.org/
Start by clicking Statement of Principles.