Iraq

The war correspondent James Cameron was smeared as a “dupe of communism”. “When they call you a dupe,” he told me, “they’re really complaining that you are not their dupe”.

Writing in the Daily Mirror, John Pilger asks whether the latest inquiry called by Tony Blair – into the “failure of intelligence” – will turn out, like the Hutton inquiry, as a whitewash.

Kosovo – the site of a genocide that never was – is now a violent “free market” in drugs and prostitution. What does this tell us about the likely outcome of the Iraq war?

Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign “insurgents”. In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our name.

“Anti-Americanism” has long been a pejorative, used to denigrate critics of an imperial system. But it is the opposite, “Americanism”, which threatens a war on the world.

By voting for Blair, you will walk over the corpses of at least 100,000 people, most of them innocent, slaughtered in defiance of international law.

Speaking in Sydney, Australia, at a rally to commemorate the second anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, John Pilger said that his compatriots who opposed the invasion should be proud of their achievements and those of millions like them.

Those who regard themselves as commissars of the respectable, moral, liberal class do not convey to us the enormity of what happened in Iraq. Their silence is quite disgusting.

Is there to be no honest accounting for the events in Basra? Do we simply accept John Reid’s customary arrogance?

The destruction caused by Katrina has enabled us to glimpse realities that are usually carefully hidden away. And what we discover is that New Orleans and Baghdad are not so far apart.