[Reader-list] Robert Fisk on why no one is supporting this war

[Rana Dasgupta]

The case against war: A conflict driven by the
self-interest of America
 
15 February 2003
Robert Fisk, The Independent, UK

In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied
to. Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded
with Second World War jingoism and scare stories and
false information and student essays dressed up as
"intelligence". We are sick of being insulted by
little men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes
of George Bush and his cabal of neo-conservative
henchmen who have plotted for years to change the map
of the Middle East to their advantage.

No wonder, then, that Hans Blix's blunt refutation of
America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday warmed so
many hearts. Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world
could show up the Americans for the untrustworthy
"allies" they have become.

The British don't like Hussein any more than they
liked Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as
Blair does not, the Second World War; they are not
conned by childish parables of Hitler, Churchill,
Chamberlain and appeasement. They do not like being
lectured and whined at by men whose experience of war
is Hollywood and television.

Still less do they wish to embark on endless wars with
a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam
draft and who, with his oil buddies, is now sending
America's poor to destroy a Muslim nation that has
nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity
of 11 September. Jack Straw, the public school
Trot-turned-warrior, ignores all this, with Blair. He
brays at us about the dangers of nuclear weapons that
Iraq does not have, of the torture and aggression of a
dictatorship that America and Britain sustained when
Saddam was "one of ours". But he and Blair cannot
discuss the dark political agenda behind George Bush's
government, nor the "sinister men" (the words of a
very senior UN official) around the President.

Those who oppose war are not cowards. Brits rather
like fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims,
Nazis, Italian Fascists and Japanese imperialists for
generations, Iraqis included – though we play down the
RAF's use of gas on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s. But
when the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is
not enough. Faced with the horror stories, Britons –
and many Americans – are a lot braver than Blair and
Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell
in A Man for All Seasons, tales to frighten children.

Perhaps Henry VIII's exasperation in that play better
expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: "Do they
take me for a simpleton?" The British, like other
Europeans, are an educated people. Ironically, their
opposition to this obscene war may make them feel
more, not less, European.

Palestine has much to do with it. Brits have no love
for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough and are
outraged at the colonial war being used to crush the
Palestinians by a nation that is now in effect running
US policy in the Middle East. We are told that our
invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a burning, fearsome
wound to which Bush devoted just 18 words in his
meretricious State of the Union speech – but even
Blair can't get away with that one; hence his
"conference" for Palestinian reform at which the
Palestinians had to take part via video-link because
Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, refused to let
them travel to London.

So much for Blair's influence over Washington – the US
Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted" that he
couldn't persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at
least one has to acknowledge that Sharon – war
criminal though he may be for the 1982 Sabra and
Chatila massacres – treated Blair with the contempt he
deserves. Nor can the Americans hide the link between
Iraq and Israel and Palestine. In his devious address
to the UN Security Council last week, Powell linked
the three when he complained that Hamas, whose suicide
bombings so cruelly afflict Israelis, keeps an office
in Baghdad.

Just as he told us about the mysterious al-Qa'ida men
who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi
gorge". This was America's way of giving Vladimir
Putin a free hand again in his campaign of rape and
murder against the Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark
to the UN General Assembly last 12 September about the
need to protect Iraq's Turkomans only becomes clear
when one realises that Turkomans make up two thirds of
the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest oil
fields.

The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still
active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have
advocated destroying the most powerful Arab nation.
Richard Perle, one of Bush's most influential
advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton
and Donald Rumsfeld were all campaigning for the
overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush was
elected – if he was elected – US President. And they
weren't doing so for the benefit of Americans or
Britons. A 1996 report, A Clean Break: A New Strategy
for Securing the Realm
(http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm) called for
war on Iraq. It was written not for the US but for the
incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin
Netanyahu and produced by a group headed by – yes,
Richard Perle. The destruction of Iraq will, of
course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons
and allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose
whatever colonial settlement Sharon has in store.

Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss this with us
– a war for Israel is not going to have our boys
lining up at the recruiting offices – Jewish American
leaders talk about the advantages of an Iraqi war with
enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish
American groups who so bravely oppose this madness
have been the first to point out how pro-Israeli
organisations foresee Iraq not only as a new source of
oil but of water, too; why should canals not link the
Tigris river to the parched Levant? No wonder, then,
that any discussion of this topic must be censored, as
Professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins University,
tried to do in the Wall Street Journal the day after
Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that European
nations' objections to the war might – yet again – be
ascribed to "anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead
in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a
malignant intent." This nonsense, it must be said, is
opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who, like Uri
Avnery, argue that an Iraq war will leave Israel with
even more Arab enemies, especially if Iraq attacks
Israel and Sharon then joins the US battle against the
Arabs.

The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lies behind
Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe". He was
talking about the "old" Germany of Nazism and the
"old" France of collaboration. But the France and
Germany that oppose this war are the "new" Europe, the
continent which refuses, ever again, to slaughter the
innocent. It is Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the
"old" America; not the "new" America of freedom, the
America of F D Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolise
the old America that killed its native Indians and
embarked on imperial adventures. It is "old" America
we are being asked to fight for – linked to a new form
of colonialism – an America that first threatens the
United Nations with irrelevancy and then does the same
to Nato. This is not the last chance for the UN, nor
for Nato. But it may well be the last chance for
America to be taken seriously by her friends as well
as her enemies.

In these last days of peace the British should not be
tripped by the oh-so-sought-after second UN
resolution. UN permission for America's war will not
make the war legitimate; it merely proves that the
Council can be controlled with bribes, threats or
abstentions. It was the Soviet Union's abstention,
after all, which allowed America to fight the savage
Korean war under the UN flag. And we should not doubt
that – after a quick US military conquest of Iraq and
providing 'they" die more than we die – there will be
plenty of anti-war protesters who will claim they were
pro-war all along. The first pictures of "liberated"
Baghdad will show Iraqi children making victory signs
to American tank crews. But the real cruelty and
cynicism of this conflict will become evident as soon
as the "war" ends, when our colonial occupation of a
Muslim nation for the US and Israel begins.

There lies the rub. Bush calls Sharon a "man of
peace". But Sharon fears he may yet face trial over
Sabra and Chatila, which is why Israel has just
withdrawn its ambassador to Belgium. I'd like to see
Saddam in the same court. And Rifaat Assad for his
1982 massacre in the Syrian city of Hama. And all the
torturers of Israel and the Arab dictatorships.

Israeli and US ambitions in the region are now
entwined, almost synonymous. This war is about oil and
regional control. It is being cheer-led by a
draft-dodger who is treacherously telling us that this
is part of an eternal war against "terror". And the
British and most Europeans don't believe him. It's not
that Britons wouldn't fight for America. They just
don't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And if
that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to
fight for Blair either. 

Source:
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=378428



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