Distant Voices (22 page)

Normality in much of the world's affairs is determined by an imperialist logic. This has been the case for a very long time, and there is nothing in current developments to suggest that the historical pattern is about to be broken. On the contrary, unparalleled and unchallenged power, concentrated now in a single imperial source, ensures that the trend is reinforced.

Indeed, editorial writers are wrong to criticise President Bush for ‘prevaricating' over the present turmoil in Iraq. Bush
is conducting US policy in an entirely consistent manner, doing no more or less than Presidents Reagan, Carter, Ford and Nixon did in the region and much of the world. He is ensuring that a substantial minority – in this case, the Kurds – are crushed so that a reigning tyranny can retain control of a strategically important country and, presumably with the usual help from the CIA, replace the present tyrant with one considerably less uppity and more amenable to Washington's demands.

As for the anguished call for a ‘democratic and demilitarised Iraq', contemporary history blows a raspberry at that. The Iraqi opposition say they will support Kurdish autonomy if a democratic regime is installed in Baghdad. The Kurds themselves include democratic and socialist elements. Thus, they are doomed. When the Ba'ath Party – Saddam Hussein included – seized power in Iraq in 1968, it was able to do so thanks in large part to the lists of opponents supplied by the CIA: trade unionists, socialists and assorted dangerous pluralists, many of whom were murdered.

When another tyrant, an ‘acceptable Saddam Hussein', is duly installed, and thousands of Kurdish and Shi'a dead are added to the 200,000 said to have been slaughtered during ‘Hannibal' Schwarzkopf's ‘march', normality will be resumed. This is already past the planning stage. The
Independent
last week reported from the United Nations: ‘Fearing the Kurdish rebellion will cause the break-up of Iraq and further destabilise the oil-rich region, the US and other permanent members of the UN Security Council have determined that Baghdad should be permitted to use its fighter and ground attack aircraft to quell internal dissent once it has accepted the Security Council's plan for a formal ceasefire in the Gulf.'
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While accepting the imperialist logic of this, one might pause to reflect on the recent months of sanctimonious waffle about the ‘new role' of the United Nations. One wonders what decisions imposed by the Security Council have to do with the spirit of the UN Charter. ‘We, the peoples . . .' begins the Charter. Tell that to the Kurds, the Palestinians,
the Khmer, the Panamanians, the Guatemalans, the Timorese and the Iraqi children now dying from disease in cities and towns bombed by the Allies. ‘We, the powerful regimes . . .' the preamble should read, ‘We, the underwriters and keepers of the new imperialist order . . .'

Although fighting like lions, the Kurds must be under no illusions. Betrayed by the colonial powers in the 1920s, bombed by the RAF, they have tested the faith of every imperialist ‘saviour' only to become its victims. In 1975, having been led to believe that Washington looked favourably on their hopes for nationhood, they were told by the CIA to fight on, and given $16 million worth of secret American military aid. But this was a double-cross.

As the Pike Congressional Committee investigating the CIA later revealed, America's support for the Kurds was not intended in any way to help them, but to strengthen the Shah of Iran's hand in finalising an oil deal with Iraq. Washington's true policy, reported the Pike Committee, ‘was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting. Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical exercise.'

Unaware of this, the Kurds appealed to Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state: ‘Your Excellency . . . our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way with silence from everyone. We feel, your Excellency, that the US has a moral and political responsibility towards our people who have committed themselves to your country's policy.'
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The Shah got his deal; the Kurds were abandoned.

Today, while the killing goes on in Iraq, normality is being re-established elsewhere in the region. President Bush has said he wants ‘a slowdown in the proliferation of weapons of all kinds' because ‘it would be tragic if the nations of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf were now to embark on a new arms race'.
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Within three days of his making that announcement, the
New York Times
reported, ‘The US has emerged from the war as the Gulf's premier arms seller. The White House has told Congress in a classified report it wanted five Middle East allies to buy an $18 billion package
of top drawer weapons.'
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This will be the biggest arms sale in history.

When he resigned at the end of January the head of Italian naval forces in the Gulf said, ‘I wondered if, in a certain sense, we hadn't all been made fools of . . . if they [the United States] hadn't drawn us into a much larger game. I still wonder about that.'

April 5, 1991

PRESIDENT BUSH DESCRIBED
the Gulf War to David Frost as ‘the greatest moral crusade since World War II'. To date, the war has virtually destroyed the infrastructure of two countries, caused the violent death of as many as 200,000 people, triggered an ecological disaster, ensured that a fascist regime retains power in Iraq and stimulated the world arms trade. (Reviewing its war budget, the Pentagon reports a ‘profit' of several billion dollars.)

It is now clear to many people who honestly defended the war on the basis of George Bush's word and John Major's word that they were misled. It is the Kurds' struggle for life that has opened eyes and allowed people to perceive the ‘moral crusade' as one whose aim was never to ‘liberate' anyone, but to weaken Iraq's position in relation to other US clients in the Gulf and Israel, and to demonstrate America's unchallenged military power in the ‘post-Cold War era'.

The propaganda was always fragile; hence the ferocious attacks on those who identified and resisted it. What has given the game away is the suffering of the minority peoples of Iraq, especially the Kurds and the Shi'a. Why, people now ask, if the war was a matter of right against wrong, of good against evil, as its salesmen pitched it, was the regime of the ‘new Hitler' preserved, deliberately and legalistically, and his victims left to their fate? Why did Bush, who saluted before Congress ‘the triumph of democracy', refuse to meet Iraq's democratic opposition until Saddam Hussein's terror apparatus had been restored?

To people in Britain watching the news, who live their
lives by the rules of common decency, none of this makes sense – unless they have been lied to. In undermining Iraq, then watching the Kurds perish, the Americans are doing what the British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese in their time did elsewhere. Imperialism has no use for democracy, which may be difficult to control, or for troublesome minorities, which threaten to upset the imperialist board game with its frontiers intended to divide ethnic nations. History provides no evidence that imperialist wars have anything to do with ‘morality'. Rather, they are about power and naked self-interest, and are fought accordingly with the utmost ruthlessness.

If further evidence is required to demonstrate this, the massacre of the Iraqi minorities
during
as well as since the Gulf War is a testament. I am not referring here to the actions of Saddam Hussein, whose barbarism towards the Kurds has been graphically documented (notably by Martin Woollacott in the
Guardian
). What has been overlooked is that the Allies have been more successful in killing, maiming and terrorising the Kurds and other minorities than Saddam Hussein: a considerable achievement.

During the war little attention was paid to the fact that Iraq was not a homogeneous nation. Little mention was made of the Kurds and Shi'a as the Allied bombs fell on populated areas. Certainly ‘Hannibal' Schwarzkopf did not say he was bombing Kurdistan or Shi'a communities. Anyway, where
was
Kurdistan? Was it marked on the war-room map at Rupert Murdoch's Wapping HQ?

And why were the Iraqi prisoners-of-war so pleased to see their captors? Only a careful scrutiny of the media coverage will suggest why. Reporting from the carnage on the Basra road, where American pilots conducted their famous ‘turkey shoot' on a retreating convoy, Kate Adie said: ‘Those who fought and died for Iraq here turned out to be from the north of the country, from minority communities, persecuted by Saddam Hussein – the Kurds and the Turks.' Shortly afterwards, Jeffrey Archer reported for ITN: ‘The Shi'as have a powerful incentive for opposing Saddam Hussein. Most of
the thousands of conscripts who died in the trenches of Kuwait were Shi'as.'
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In other words, those sections of the Iraqi Army least loyal to Saddam Hussein and most likely to rise up against him – the very people to whom Bush issued his call to rise up – were massacred by the Allies. They were conscripts, positioned on the southern frontline while the loyalists were held further north. Schwarzkopf knew this; Bush must have known it. So for those of us now grieving for the Kurds struggling towards the Turkish border and pursued by Saddam's gunships, let us also grieve for the tens of thousands of Kurds and Shi'a slaughtered as the price of Schwarzkopf's ‘famous victory'.

Much of the media ‘coverage' that galvanised support for the war concentrated on Saddam Hussein's mistreatment of the environment – an issue close to the hearts of many in the West. When, shortly after the outbreak of war, two tankers off Kuwait started pouring oil into the Gulf at a rate of four million gallons a day, Bush claimed that the Iraqis deliberately caused the spill. For this ‘crime', he said, Saddam Hussein was ‘kind of sick'. It now appears that Iraqi claims at the time – that American bombers had hit the tankers – were correct. An American scientist, Richard Golob, a world authority on oil spills, told the
Boston Globe
that the 10.9 million gallons discharged by the
Exxon Valdez
tanker could turn out to be a ‘small fraction' of the damage caused by Allied bombing in Iraq and Kuwait.
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The propaganda also misled people on the nature of the bombing itself. Pentagon sources now say that only 7 per cent of American explosives dropped during the war were high-tech ‘smart' bombs: that is, bombs programmed to hit their targets; and shown around the world doing so.
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How convincing this made the military boast, of the kind heard frequently in Peter Snow's sandpit, that war, at last, had become a science. The truth was the diametric opposite. Seventy per cent of the 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraq and Kuwait missed their targets completely. The fact that most of these found other ‘targets' in populated areas
ought to be enough for us to conjure up the human consequences.
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In Britain, the drum beaters are still mostly silent on this carnage and the reasons for it. Instead they are ‘disappointed' in Bush, who goes fishing and plays golf while Kurdish children freeze on the Turkish border. Bush, they say, is ‘remarkably insensitive', even ‘uncaring'. Oddly, none of this indignation was directed at Bush while his planes were shredding Kurds on the Basra road and incinerating Shi'a conscripts in their Kuwaiti trenches. But those were the days when such people were designated ‘turkeys'; only recently have they become news-fashionable.

These same moral crusaders used to tell us that the old Cold War was a war of attrition between the two superpowers, between East and West. But this was only partly true. Most of the Cold War was fought in faraway, impoverished lands with the blood of expendable brown- and black-skinned people. The Cold War was an imperialist quest for natural resources, markets, labour and strategic position. It was not so much a war between East and West as one between North and South, rich and poor, big and small. And the smaller the adversary the greater the threat, because a triumph of the weak would produce such a successful example as to be contagious.
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As we now know, the ‘new world order' is the old Cold War by way of Saatchi and Saatchi. The enemy, for imperialist Washington, remains nationalist, reformist and liberation movements, as well as irrepressible minorities. A leading US defence journal has called them ‘that swirling pot of poison made up of zealots, crazies, drug-runners and terrorists'.
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The means of combating them is currently a matter of conjecture and competition within the US war establishment. According to a classified study for the Pentagon, the US Air Force wants to send its Stealth bombers against the Third World (they can fly 14,000 miles non-stop), and the US Navy wants to send its carriers and cruise missiles.
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In the end, the means of ‘keeping the violent peace', as they say in Washington, will almost certainly be the usual,
reliable client regimes and their revolving-door tyrants, who are encouraged to use all forms of violence and are equipped and trained accordingly. The crimes committed against the Kurdish and Iraqi peoples by Saddam Hussein and George Bush are but current examples.

April 12, 1991 to June 1992

THERE IS AN
epic shamelessness about the symmetry of current, imperial events. An honorary knighthood is hand-delivered by the Queen to General Schwarzkopf, while his victims, mostly young children, continue to die in Iraq, in conditions described by the United Nations as ‘near apocalyptic'.
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Certainly, the general's most enduring accomplishment ought not to go unrecognised. On May 11, the former US attorney general, Ramsey Clark, set up an international commission of enquiry and war crimes tribunal, which will investigate what was really done in the Gulf, as opposed to the version represented by the artifices of media images and the measured cant of both government and opposition politicians. Not surprisingly, the Clark Commission has been all but ignored by the media. Ramsey Clark distinguished himself as America's chief law officer under President Johnson. He is an authority on the prosecution of war crimes and believes the law is not as equivocal in that area as it is often presumed.