[Reader-list] Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates

[Harsh Kapoor]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,927849,00.html

The Guardian April 2, 2003

Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates

How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many
centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the
wings of these words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating
and humiliating that ancient civilisation

by Arundhati Roy

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now that the blueprint (The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire)
has been put into mass circulation, it could be disabled quicker
than the pundits predicted.

Bring on the spanners.