[Reader-list] Bush's Vietnam

[Rana Dasgupta]

Important to circulate these insights into the highly manufactured language
of official accounts of the war.

R


Published in the June 23, 2003 issue of the New Statesman

Bush's Vietnam
Once More, We Hear That America is Being "Sucked Into a Quagmire". The
Rapacious Adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are Going Badly Wrong.

http://commondreams.org/views03/0625-04.htm

by John Pilger

America's two "great victories" since 11 September 2001 are unraveling. In
Afghanistan, the regime of Hamid Karzai has virtually no authority and no
money, and would collapse without American guns. Al-Qaeda has not been
defeated, and the Taliban are re-emerging. Regardless of showcase
improvements, the situation of women and children remains desperate. The
token woman in Karzai's cabinet, the courageous physician Sima Samar, has
been forced out of government and is now in constant fear of her life, with
an armed guard outside her office door and another at her gate. Murder, rape
and child abuse are committed with impunity by the private armies of
America's "friends", the warlords whom Washington has bribed with millions
of dollars, cash in hand, to give the pretence of stability.

"We are in a combat zone the moment we leave this base," an American colonel
told me at Bagram airbase, near Kabul. "We are shot at every day, several
times a day." When I said that surely he had come to liberate and protect
the people, he belly-laughed.

American troops are rarely seen in Afghanistan's towns. They escort US
officials at high speed in armored vans with blackened windows and military
vehicles, mounted with machine-guns, in front and behind. Even the vast
Bagram base was considered too insecure for the defense secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, during his recent, fleeting visit. So nervous are the Americans
that a few weeks ago they "accidentally" shot dead four government soldiers
in the center of Kabul, igniting the second major street protest against
their presence in a week.

On the day I left Kabul, a car bomb exploded on the road to the airport,
killing four German soldiers, members of the international security force
Isaf. The Germans' bus was lifted into the air; human flesh lay on the
roadside. When British soldiers arrived to "seal off" the area, they were
watched by a silent crowd, squinting into the heat and dust, across a divide
as wide as that which separated British troops from Afghans in the 19th
century, and the French from Algerians and Americans from Vietnamese.

In Iraq, scene of the second "great victory", there are two open secrets.
The first is that the "terrorists" now besieging the American occupation
force represent an armed resistance that is almost certainly supported by
the majority of Iraqis who, contrary to pre-war propaganda, opposed their
enforced "liberation" (see Jonathan Steele's investigation, 19 March 2003,
www.guardian.co.uk). The second secret is that there is emerging evidence of
the true scale of the Anglo-American killing, pointing to the bloodbath Bush
and Blair have always denied.

Comparisons with Vietnam have been made so often over the years that I
hesitate to draw another. However, the similarities are striking: for
example, the return of expressions such as "sucked into a quagmire". This
suggests, once again, that the Americans are victims, not invaders: the
approved Hollywood version when a rapacious adventure goes wrong. Since
Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled almost three months ago, more Americans
have been killed than during the war. Ten have been killed and 25 wounded in
classic guerrilla attacks on roadblocks and checkpoints which may number as
many as a dozen a day.

The Americans call the guerrillas "Saddam loyalists" and "Ba'athist
fighters", in the same way they used to dismiss the Vietnamese as
"communists". Recently, in Falluja, in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, it was
clearly not the presence of Ba'athists or Saddamists, but the brutal
behavior of the occupiers, who fired point-blank at a crowd, that inspired
the resistance. The American tanks gunning down a family of shepherds is
reminiscent of the gunning down of a shepherd, his family and sheep by
"coalition" aircraft in a "no-fly zone" four years ago, whose aftermath I
filmed and which evoked, for me, the murderous games American aircraft used
to play in Vietnam, gunning down farmers in their fields, children on their
buffaloes.

On 12 June, a large American force attacked a "terrorist base" north of
Baghdad and left more than 100 dead, according to a US spokesman. The term
"terrorist" is important, because it implies that the likes of al-Qaeda are
attacking the liberators, and so the connection between Iraq and 11
September is made, which in pre-war propaganda was never made.

More than 400 prisoners were taken in this operation. The majority have
reportedly joined thousands of Iraqis in a "holding facility" at Baghdad
airport: a concentration camp along the lines of Bagram, from where people
are shipped to Guantanamo Bay. In Afghanistan, the Americans pick up taxi
drivers and send them into oblivion, via Bagram. Like Pinochet's boys in
Chile, they are making their perceived enemies "disappear".

"Search and destroy", the scorched-earth tactic from Vietnam, is back. In
the arid south-eastern plains of Afghanistan, the village of Niazi Qala no
longer stands. American airborne troops swept down before dawn on 30
December 2001 and slaughtered, among others, a wedding party. Villagers said
that women and children ran towards a dried pond, seeking protection from
the gunfire, and were shot as they ran. After two hours, the aircraft and
the attackers left. According to a United Nations investigation, 52 people
were killed, including 25 children. "We identified it as a military target,"
says the Pentagon, echoing its initial response to the My Lai massacre 35
years ago.

The targeting of civilians has long been a journalistic taboo in the west.
Accredited monsters did that, never "us". The civilian death toll of the
1991 Gulf war was wildly underestimated. Almost a year later, a
comprehensive study by the Medical Education Trust in London estimated that
more than 200,000 Iraqis had died during and immediately after the war, as a
direct or indirect consequence of attacks on civilian infrastructure. The
report was all but ignored. This month, Iraq Body Count, a group of American
and British academics and researchers, estimated that up to 10,000 civilians
may have been killed in Iraq, including 2,356 civilians in the attack on
Baghdad alone. And this is likely to be an extremely conservative figure.

In Afghanistan, there has been similar carnage. In May last year, Jonathan
Steele extrapolated all the available field evidence of the human cost of
the US bombing and concluded that as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost
their lives as an indirect consequence of the bombing, many of them drought
victims denied relief.

This "hidden" effect is hardly new. A recent study at Columbia University in
New York has found that the spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides on
Vietnam was up to four times as great as previously estimated. Agent Orange
contained dioxin, one of the deadliest poisons known. In what they first
called Operation Hades, then changed to the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand,
the Americans in Vietnam destroyed, in some 10,000 "missions" to spray Agent
Orange, almost half the forests of southern Vietnam, and countless human
lives. It was the most insidious and perhaps the most devastating use of a
chemical weapon of mass destruction ever. Today, Vietnamese children
continue to be born with a range of deformities, or they are stillborn, or
the fetuses are aborted.

The use of uranium-tipped munitions evokes the catastrophe of Agent Orange.
In the first Gulf war in 1991, the Americans and British used 350 tonnes of
depleted uranium. According to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority,
quoting an international study, 50 tonnes of DU, if inhaled or ingested,
would cause 500,000 deaths. Most of the victims are civilians in southern
Iraq. It is estimated that 2,000 tonnes were used during the latest attack.

In a remarkable series of reports for the Christian Science Monitor, the
investigative reporter Scott Peterson has described radiated bullets in the
streets of Baghdad and radiation-contaminated tanks, where children play
without warning. Belatedly, a few signs in Arabic have appeared: "Danger -
Get away from this area". At the same time, in Afghanistan, the Uranium
Medical Research Center, based in Canada, has made two field studies, with
the results described as "shocking". "Without exception," it reported, "at
every bomb site investigated, people are ill. A significant portion of the
civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internal contamination
by uranium."

An official map distributed to non-government agencies in Iraq shows that
the American and British military have plastered urban areas with cluster
bombs, many of which will have failed to detonate on impact. These usually
lie unnoticed until children pick them up, then they explode.

In the center of Kabul, I found two ragged notices warning people that the
rubble of their homes, and streets, contained unexploded cluster bombs "made
in USA". Who reads them? Small children? The day I watched children skipping
through what might have been an urban minefield, I saw Tony Blair on CNN in
the lobby of my hotel. He was in Iraq, in Basra, lifting a child into his
arms, in a school that had been painted for his visit, and where lunch had
been prepared in his honor, in a city where basic services such as
education, food and water remain a shambles under the British occupation.

It was in Basra three years ago that I filmed hundreds of children ill and
dying because they had been denied cancer treatment equipment and drugs
under an embargo enforced with enthusiasm by Tony Blair. Now here he was -
shirt open, with that fixed grin, a man of the troops if not of the people -
lifting a toddler into his arms for the cameras.

When I returned to London, I read "After Lunch", by Harold Pinter, from a
new collection of his called 'War' (Faber & Faber).

And after noon the well-dressed creatures come
To sniff among the dead
And have their lunch

And all the many well-dressed creatures pluck
The swollen avocados from the dust
And stir the minestrone with stray bones

And after lunch
They loll and lounge about
Decanting claret in convenient skulls



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Rana Dasgupta
www.ranadasgupta.com
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