The seeds of our Death

[Guest guest]

John Pilger is a renowned investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker.

 

 

 

Six Days of Shame by John Pilger

 

Dissident Voice

March 26, 2003

 

 

TODAY is a day of shame for the British military as it declares the Iraqi city

of Basra, with a stricken population of 600,000, a "military target."

 

You will not read or hear those words in the establishment media that claims to

speak for Britain.

 

But they are true. With Basra, shame is now our signature, forged by Blair and

Bush.

 

Having destroyed its water and power supplies, cut off food supply routes and

having failed to crack its human defences, they are now preparing to lay siege

to Iraq's second city which is more than 40 per cent children.

 

What an ignominious moment in British history. Here is an impoverished country

under attack by a superpower, the United States, which has unimaginable wealth

and the world's most destructive weapons, and its"coalition" accomplice,

Britain, which boasts one of the world's best"professional" armies.

 

Believing their own propaganda, the military brass has been stunned by the Iraqi

resistance.

 

They have tried to belittle the militia defending Basra with lurid stories that

its fighters are killing each other.

 

The truth is that the Iraqis are fighting like lions to defend not a tyrant but

their homeland. It is a truth the overwhelming

majority of decent Britons will admire.

 

The historical comparison Tony Blair and his propagandists fear is that of the

British defending themselves against invasion. That happened 60 years ago and

now "we" are the rapacious invaders.

 

Yesterday, Blair said that 400,000 Iraqi children had died in the past five

years from malnutrition and related causes. He said "huge stockpiles of

humanitarian aid" and clean water awaited them in Kuwait, if only the Iraqi

regime would allow safe passage.

 

In fact, voluminous evidence, including that published by the United Nations

Children's Fund, makes clear that the main reason these children have died is

an enduring siege, a 12-year embargo driven by America and Britain.

 

As of last July, $5.4billion worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN

and paid for by the Iraqi government, were blocked by Washington, with the Blair

government's approval. The former assistant secretary general of the UN, Denis

Halliday, who was sent to Iraq to set up the "oil for food programme",

described the effects of the embargo as "nothing less than genocide".

 

Similar words have been used by his successor, Hans Von Sponeck.

 

Both men resigned in protest, saying the embargo merely reinforced the power of

Saddam.

 

Both called Blair a liar.

 

And now Blair's troops are firing their wire-guided missiles to "soften up"

Basra.

 

I have walked the city's streets, along a road blown to pieces by a US missile.

The casualties were children, of course, because

children are everywhere. I held a handkerchief over my face as I stood in a

school playground with a teacher and several hundred malnourished youngsters.

 

The dust blew in from the southern battlefields of the 1991 Gulf War, which

have never been cleaned up because the US and British governments have denied

Iraq the specialist equipment.

 

The dust, Dr Jawad Al-Ali told me, carries "the seeds of our death".

 

In the children's wards of Basra's main hospital, deaths from a range of

hitherto unseen cancers are common and specialists have little doubt that up to

half the population of southern Iraq will die from cancers linked to the use of

a weapon of mass destruction used by the Americans and British - uranium tipped

shells and missiles.

 

ONCE again, the Americans are deploying what Professor Doug Rokke, a former US

Army physicist, calls "a form of nuclear weapon that contaminates everything and

everyone".

 

Today, each round fired by US tanks contains 4,500 grams of solid uranium, hose

particles, breathed or ingested, can cause cancer.

 

This, and the use by both the Allies of new kinds of cluster bombs, is being

covered up.

 

Once again, the British public is being denied the reality of war.

 

Images of bandaged children in hospital wards are appearing on TV but you do not

see the result of a Tornado's cluster bombing.

 

You are not being shown children scalped by shrapnel, with legs reduced to

bloody pieces of string.

 

Such images are "not acceptable", because they will disturb viewers - and the

authorities do not want that. These "unseen" images are the truth.

 

Iraqi parents have to look at their mutilated children, so why shouldn't those

of us, in whose name they were slaughtered, see what they see?

 

 

 

Why shouldn't we share their pain? Why shouldn't we see the true nature of this

criminal invasion?

 

Other wars were sanitised, allowing them to be repeated.

 

In 1932, Iraqis threw out their British colonial rulers. In 1958, they got rid

of the Hashemite monarchy.

 

Iraqis have shown they can overthrow dictators against the odds.

So why have they not been able to throw out Saddam?

 

Because the US and Britain armed him and propped him up while it suited them,

making sure that when they tired of him, they would be the only alternative to

his rule and the profiteers of his nation's resources.

Imperialism has always functioned like that.

 

The "new Iraq", as Blair calls it, will have many models, such as Haiti, the

Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, all of them American conquests and American

ruled until Washington allowed a vicious dictatorship to take over.

 

Saddam only came to power after the Americans helped install his Ba'ath Party in

1979. "That was my favourite coup," said the CIA officer in charge.

 

 

It's the kind of patriotism, wrote Tolstoy, "that is nothing else but a means of

obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous

desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason and

conscience."

 

John Pilger's website at: http://www.johnpilger.com

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

John Pilger touches very good points. One of those however

set me off, as it indicates a typical Western lack of true

understanding of a "modern" dictatorship. Also, it casts

a shadow of suspicion on everything else he's writing:

if he's unable to comprehend such a simple trivial

point, what other more subtle issues has he

overlooked? Thus to me he's no more than

propaganda - picking bits of truth and

mixing them with other stuff and

"spices" to cook a dish of his

taste - but not mine.

> In 1932, Iraqis threw out their British colonial rulers.

> In 1958, they got rid of the Hashemite monarchy. Iraqis

> have shown they can overthrow dictators against the odds.

> So why have they not been able to throw out Saddam?

 

For the same reason Russians got rid of Tzars, and of Provisional

Government shortly thereafter - but were stuck with Lenin/Stalin,

who presumably killed somewhere near 60 millions of Russians. Up

until Gorbachev *allowed* the system to disintegrate, there were

no chances whatsoever - the stories of dissidents filling forced

labor camps are abundant. How come they have not been able to

throw out even Brezhnev, let alone Stalin?

 

Especially infuriating is the fact that when those few who managed

to escape to the West, complained to the press and politicians,

the respose they received was stunning: "If Stalin is as bad

as you claim - they why do you keep electing him? Just elect

somebody else."