[Reader-list] arundhati on war in guardian

[Rana Dasgupta]

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

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

Arundhati Roy
Wednesday April 2, 2003
The Guardian

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.