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 and other Western countries 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, 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. John Bolton, formerly Bush’s man at the United
Nations, recently spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan
for the Middle East is an agenda to maintain division and instability.
In other words, bloodshed and chaos equals control. He was referring to
Iraq, but he also meant Iran.
One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and
Blair get out of their homeland – that is the real news: not our nabbed
sailor-spies, nor the political danse macabre of the pretenders to
Blair’s Duce delusions. Whether it is treasurer Gordon Brown, the
paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid, who sent British troops
to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or any of the others who sat through
cabinet meetings knowing that Blair and his acolytes were lying through
their teeth, only mutual distrust separates them now. They knew about
Blair’s plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake 45-minute
“warning”. They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next “enemy”.
Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: “The days of Britain having to
apologise for its colonial history are over. 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).
Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will distinguish the
Blairite elite by its loathing of the humane principles that mark a 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 gr-ce 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. They knew that 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. 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
Garz�n, 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?
