The Unthinkable Is
Becoming Normal
John Pilger
Independent (UK)
Sunday 20 April 2003
Do not forget the horror.
The saving of one little
boy must not be a cover
for the crime of this
war.
Last Sunday, seated in
the audience at the Bafta
television awards ceremony,
I was struck by the silence.
Here were many of the
most influential members
of the liberal elite,
the writers, producers,
dramatists, journalists
and managers of our main
source of information,
television; and not one
broke the silence. It
was as though we were
disconnected from the
world outside: a world
of rampant, rapacious
power and great crimes
committed in our name
by our government and
its foreign master. Iraq
is the "test case",
says the Bush regime,
which every day sails
closer to Mussolini's
definition of fascism:
the merger of a militarist
state with corporate power.
Iraq is a test case for
western liberals, too.
As the suffering mounts
in that stricken country,
with Red Cross doctors
describing "incredible''
levels of civilian casualties,
the choice of the next
conquest, Syria or Iran,
is "debated'' on
the BBC, as if it were
a World Cup venue.
The unthinkable is being
normalised. The American
essayist Edward Herman
wrote: "There is
usually a division of
labour in doing and rationalising
the unthinkable, with
the direct brutalising
and killing done by one
set of individuals ...
others working on improving
technology (a better crematory
gas, a longer burning
and more adhesive napalm,
bomb fragments that penetrate
flesh in hard-to-trace
patterns). It is the function
of the experts, and the
mainstream media, to normalise
the unthinkable for the
general public.''
Herman wrote that following
the 1991 Gulf War, whose
nocturnal images of American
bulldozers burying thousands
of teenage Iraqi conscripts,
many of them alive and
trying to surrender, were
never shown. Thus, the
slaughter was normalised.
A study released just
before Christmas 1991
by the Medical Educational
Trust revealed that more
200,000 Iraqi men, women
and children were killed
or died as a direct result
of the American-led attack.
This was barely reported,
and the homicidal nature
of the "war'' never
entered public consciousness
in this country, let alone
America.
The Pentagon's deliberate
destruction of Iraq's
civilian infrastructure,
such as power sources
and water and sewage plants,
together with the imposition
of an embargo as barbaric
as a medieval siege, produced
a degree of suffering
never fully comprehended
in the West. Documented
evidence was available,
volumes of it; by the
late 1990s, more than
6,000 infants were dying
every month, and the two
senior United Nations
officials responsible
for humanitarian relief
in Iraq, Denis Halliday
and Hans von Sponeck,
resigned, protesting the
embargo's hidden agenda.
Halliday called it "genocide".
As of last July, the
United States, backed
by the Blair government,
was wilfully blocking
humanitarian supplies
worth $5.4bn, everything
from vaccines and plasma
bags to simple painkillers,
all of which Iraq had
paid for and the Security
Council had approved.
Last month's attack by
the two greatest military
powers on a demoralised,
sick and largely defenceless
population was the logical
extension of this barbarism.
This is now called a "victory",
and the flags are coming
out. Last week, the submarine
HMS Turbulent returned
to Plymouth, flying the
Jolly Roger, the pirates'
emblem. How appropriate.
This nuclear-powered machine
fired some 30 American
Tomahawk cruise missiles
at Iraq. Each missile
cost £700,000: a
total of £21m. That
alone would provide desperate
Basra with food, water
and medicines.
Imagine: what did Commander
Andrew McKendrick's 30
missiles hit? How many
people did they kill or
maim in a population nearly
half of which are children?
Maybe, Commander, you
targeted a palace with
gold taps in the bathroom,
or a "command and
control facility",
as the Americans and Geoffrey
Hoon like to lie. Or perhaps
each of your missiles
had a sensory device that
could distinguish George
Bush's "evil-doers''
from toddlers. What is
certain is that your targets
did not include the Ministry
of Oil.
When the invasion began,
the British public was
called upon to "support''
troops sent illegally
and undemocratically to
kill people with whom
we had no quarrel. "The
ultimate test of our professionalism''
is how Commander McKendrick
describes an unprovoked
attack on a nation with
no submarines, no navy
and no air force, and
now with no clean water
and no electricity and,
in many hospitals, no
anaesthetic with which
to amputate small limbs
shredded by shrapnel.
I have seen elsewhere
how this is done, with
a gag in the patient's
mouth.
One child, Ali Ismaeel
Abbas, the boy who lost
his parents and his arms
in a missile attack, has
been flown to a modern
hospital in Kuwait. Publicity
has saved him. Tony Blair
says he will "do
everything he can'' to
help him. This must be
the ultimate insult to
the memory of all the
children of Iraq who have
died violently in Blair's
war, and as a result of
the embargo that Blair
enthusiastically endorsed.
The saving of Ali substitutes
a media spectacle of charity
for our right to knowledge
of the extent of the crime
committed against the
young in our name. Let
us now see the pictures
of the "truckload
of dozens of dismembered
women and children'' that
the Red Cross doctors
saw.
As Ali was flown to Kuwait,
the Americans were preventing
Save The Children from
sending a plane with medical
supplies into northern
Iraq, where 40,000 are
desperate. According to
the UN, half the population
of Iraq has only enough
food to last a few weeks.
The head of the World
Food Programme says that
40 million people around
the world are now seriously
at risk because of the
distraction of the humanitarian
disaster in Iraq.
And this is "liberation"?
No, it is bloody conquest,
witnessed by America's
mass theft of Iraq's resources
and natural wealth. Ask
the crowds in the streets,
for whom the fear and
hatred of Saddam Hussein
have been transferred,
virtually overnight, to
Bush and Blair and perhaps
to "us''.
Such is the magnitude
of Blair's folly and crime
that the contrivance of
his vindication is urgent.
As if speaking for the
vindicators, Andrew Marr,
the BBC's political editor,
reported: "[Blair]
said they would be able
to take Baghdad without
a bloodbath, and that
in the end the Iraqis
would be celebrating.
And on both of those points
he has been proved conclusively
right.''
What constitutes a bloodbath
to the BBC's man in Downing
Street? Did the murder
of the 3,000 people in
New York's Twin Towers
qualify? If his answer
is yes, then the thousands
killed in Iraq during
the past month is a bloodbath.
One report says that more
than 3,000 Iraqis were
killed within 24 hours
or less. Or are the vindicators
saying that the lives
of one set of human beings
have less value than those
recognisable to us? Devaluation
of human life has always
been essential to the
pursuit of imperial power,
from the Congo to Vietnam,
from Chechnya to Iraq.
If, as Milan Kundera
wrote, "the struggle
of people against power
is the struggle of memory
against forgetting",
then we must not forget.
We must not forget Blair's
lies about weapons of
mass destruction which,
as Hans Blix now says,
were based on "fabricated
evidence". We must
not forget his callous
attempts to deny that
an American missile killed
62 people in a Baghdad
market. And we must not
forget the reason for
the bloodbath. Last September,
in announcing its National
Security Strategy, Bush
served notice that America
intended to dominate the
world by force. Iraq was
indeed the "test
case". The rest was
a charade.
We must not forget that
a British defence secretary
has announced, for the
first time, that his government
is prepared to launch
an attack with nuclear
weapons. He echoes Bush,
of course. An ascendant
mafia now rules the United
States, and the Prime
Minister is in thrall
to it. Together, they
empty noble words
liberation, freedom and
democracy of their
true meaning. The unspoken
truth is that behind the
bloody conquest of Iraq
is the conquest of us
all: of our minds, our
humanity and our self-respect
at the very least. If
we say and do nothing,
victory over us is assured.
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