The
Worse the Crisis in Iraq, the Bigger the Lies
that Tony Blair Tells Us
We
are now in the greatest crisis since the last
greatest crisis. That’s how we run the
Iraq war - or the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair
of Kut al-Amara would now have us believe. Hostages
are paraded in orange tracksuits to remind us
of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release
of women held prisoner by the Americans. Abu
Ghraib is what they are talking about. Abu Ghraib?
Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty
little snapshots? But don’t worry. This
wasn’t the America George Bush recognised,
and besides we’re punishing the bad apples,
aren’t we? Women? Why, there are only
a couple of dames left - and they are "Dr
Germ" and "Dr Anthrax".
But
Arabs do not forget so easily. It was a Lebanese
woman, Samia Melki, who first understood the
true semantics of those Abu Ghraib photographs
for the Arab world. The naked Iraqi, his body
smeared with excrement, back to the camera,
arms stretched out before the butch and blond
American with a stick, possessed, she wrote
in Counterpunch, "all the drama and contrasting
colours of a Caravaggio painting".
The
best of Baroque art invites the viewer to be
part of the artwork. "Forced to walk in
a straight line with his legs crossed, his torso
slightly twisted and arms spread out for balance,
the Iraqi prisoner’s toned body, accentuated
by the excrement and the bad lighting, stretches
out in crucifix form. Exuding a dignity long
denied, the Arab is suffering for the world’s
sins."
And
that, I fear, is the least of the suffering
that has gone on at Abu Ghraib. For what happened
to all those videos which members of Congress
were allowed to watch in secret and which we
- the public - were not permitted to see? Why
have we suddenly forgotten about Abu Ghraib?
Seymour Hersh, the journalist who broke the
Abu Ghraib story - and one of the only journalists
in America who is doing his job - has spoken
publicly about what else happened in that terrible
jail.
I’m
indebted to a reader for the following extract
from a recent Hersh lecture: "Some of the
worst things that happened that you don’t
know about. OK? Videos. There are women there.
Some of you may have read that they were passing
letters out, communications out to their men.
This is at Abu Ghraib... The women were passing
messages out saying please come and kill me
because of what’s happened. And basically
what happened is that those women who were arrested
with young boys, children, in cases that have
been recorded, the boys were sodomised, with
the cameras rolling, and the worst above all
of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking..."
Already,
however, we have forgotten this. Just as we
must no longer talk about weapons of mass destruction.
For as the details slowly emerge of the desperate
efforts of Bush and Blair to find these non-existent
nasties, I don’t know whether to laugh
or cry. US mobile site survey teams managed,
at one point, to smash into a former Iraqi secret
police headquarters in Baghdad, only to find
a padlocked inner door. Here, they believed,
they would find the horrors that Bush and Blair
were praying for. And what did they find behind
the second door? A vast emporium of brand new
vacuum cleaners. At Baath party headquarters,
another team - led by a Major Kenneth Deal -
believed they had discovered secret documents
which would reveal Saddam’s weapons’
programme. The papers turned out to be an Arabic
translation of A J P Taylor’s The Struggle
for Mastery in Europe. Perhaps Bush and Blair
should read it.
So
as we continue to stagger down the crumbling
stairway of our own ghastly making, we must
listen to bigger and bigger whoppers. Iyad Allawi,
the puppet prime minister - still deferentially
called "interim prime minister" by
many of my reporter chums - insists that elections
will be held in January even though he has less
control of the Iraqi capital (let alone the
rest of the country) than the mayor of Baghdad.
The ex-CIA agent, who obediently refused to
free the two women prisoners the moment Washington
gave him instructions not to do so, dutifully
trots over to London and on to Washington to
shore up more of the Blair-Bush lies.
Second
Iraq War indeed. How much more of this tomfoolery
are we, the public, expected to stomach? We
are fighting in "the crucible of global
terrorism", according to Lord Blair of
Kut. What are we to make of this nonsense? Of
course, he didn’t tell us we were going
to have a Second Iraq War when he helped to
start the First Iraq War, did he? And he didn’t
tell the Iraqis that, did he? No, we had come
to "liberate" them. So let’s
just remember the crisis before the crisis before
the crisis. Let’s go back to last November
when our Prime Minister was addressing the Lord
Mayor’s banquet. The Iraq war, he informed
us then - and presumably he was still referring
to the First Iraq War - was "the battle
of seminal importance for the early 21st century".
Well,
he can say that again. But just listen to what
else Lord Blair of Kut informed us about the
war. "It will define relations between
the Muslim world and the West. It will influence
profoundly the development of Arab states and
the Middle East. It will have far-reaching implications
for the future of American and Western diplomacy."
And
he can say that again, can’t he? For it
is difficult to think of anything more profoundly
dangerous for us, for the West, for the Middle
East, for Christians and Muslims since the Second
World War - the real second war, that is - than
Blair’s war in Iraq. And Iraq, remember,
was going to be the model for the whole Middle
East. Every Arab state would want to be like
Iraq. Iraq would be the catalyst - perhaps even
the "crucible" - of the new Middle
East. Spare me the hollow laughter.
I
have been struck these past few weeks how very
many of the letters I’ve received from
readers come from men and women who fought in
the Second World War, who argue ferociously
that Blair and Bush should never be allowed
to compare this quagmire with the real struggle
against evil which they waged more than half
a century ago.
"I,
now 90, remember the men maimed in body and
mind who haunted the lanes in rural Wales where
I grew up in the years after 1918," Robert
Parry wrote to me. "For this reason, Owen’s
’Dulce et decorum est’ remains for
me the ultimate expression of the reality of
death in war, made now more horrific by American
’targeted’ bombing and the suicide
bombers. We need a new Wilfred Owen to open
our eyes and consciences, but until one appears
this great poem must be given space to speak
again." It would be difficult to find a
more eloquent rejoinder to the infantile nonsense
now being peddled by our Prime Minister.
Not
for many years has there been such a gap - in
America as well as Britain - between the people
and the government they elected. Blair’s
most recent remarks are speeches made - to quote
that Owen poem - "to children ardent for
some desperate glory". Ken Bigley’s
blindfolded face is our latest greatest crisis.
But let’s not forget what went before.
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