Published on Wednesday, January 29, 2003 by the Daily Mirror/UK
Blair is a Coward
by John Pilger
William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of
imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his
hands" to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance,
order the mass killing of ordinary people.
In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern
political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like
George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete
Tony Blair.
There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes
death and suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of
command that affirms his "authority".
In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war
crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes
against humanity.
The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that
offered no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of
civilians, for which responsibility rested with the "highest
authority".
Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being
denied even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons
inspectors have found, as one put it, "zilch".
Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover.
Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not consult parliament
or the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft
to the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.
Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now
totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of
"endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.
All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz,
Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the
Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in
1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: "I must
have war." He then had it.
To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the
killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will
share responsibility.
He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has
known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich
of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget
that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of
unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped
cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of
countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy
wherever it collided with American "interests", such as a voracious
appetite for the world's resources, like oil.
When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about "bringing
democracy to the people of Iraq", remember that it was the CIA that
installed the Ba'ath Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam
Hussein.
"That was my favorite coup," said the CIA man responsible. When you
next hear Blair and Bush talking about a "smoking gun" in Iraq, ask
why the US government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of
Iraq's weapons declaration, saying they contained "sensitive
information" which needed "a little editing".
Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American,
British and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its
nuclear, chemical and missile technology, many of them in illegal
transactions. In 2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister,
blocked a parliamentary request to publish the full list of
lawbreaking British companies. He has never explained why.
As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the
page like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game
unconnected to people's lives.
The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end
result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who
never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their
actions on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands.
Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used
in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people
were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched
three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in
formation, unseen above the clouds.
They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known
as the "long box" pattern, the military term for carpet bombing.
Everything inside a "box" was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the "box", the street had been
replaced by a crater.
I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a
ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children
thrown into the air by the blast.
The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins
and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared
straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that
the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.
I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even
in that "media war" I never saw images of these grotesque sights on
television or in the pages of a newspaper.
I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices in Saigon
as a kind of freaks' gallery.
SOME years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese
children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide
called Agent Orange.
It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it contained
Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.
This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliche-mongers would now
call a weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South
Vietnam.
Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and
food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and
scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukemia.
You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too
hideous for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be
pinned up on a wall and they are old news now.
That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when
Iraq is attacked? I doubt it.
I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I traveled in
Iraq two years ago. A pediatrician showed me hospital wards of
children similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the
Gulf war in 1991.
She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed
on gray little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her
eyes.
continued in next post...
Blair is a Coward
by John Pilger
William Russell, the great correspondent who reported the carnage of
imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood on his
hands" to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance,
order the mass killing of ordinary people.
In my experience "on his hands" applies especially to those modern
political leaders who have had no personal experience of war, like
George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete
Tony Blair.
There is about them the essential cowardice of the man who causes
death and suffering not by his own hand but through a chain of
command that affirms his "authority".
In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders for war
crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes
against humanity.
The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign state that
offered no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder of
civilians, for which responsibility rested with the "highest
authority".
Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which he is being
denied even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the weapons
inspectors have found, as one put it, "zilch".
Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic cover.
Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did not consult parliament
or the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and ships and aircraft
to the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington regime.
Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now
totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of
"endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record.
All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz,
Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the
Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in
1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: "I must
have war." He then had it.
To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him distance from the
killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for which he will
share responsibility.
He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement humanity has
known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third Reich
of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget
that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of
unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped
cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of
countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy
wherever it collided with American "interests", such as a voracious
appetite for the world's resources, like oil.
When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about "bringing
democracy to the people of Iraq", remember that it was the CIA that
installed the Ba'ath Party in Baghdad from which emerged Saddam
Hussein.
"That was my favorite coup," said the CIA man responsible. When you
next hear Blair and Bush talking about a "smoking gun" in Iraq, ask
why the US government last December confiscated the 12,000 pages of
Iraq's weapons declaration, saying they contained "sensitive
information" which needed "a little editing".
Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed 150 American,
British and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with its
nuclear, chemical and missile technology, many of them in illegal
transactions. In 2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister,
blocked a parliamentary request to publish the full list of
lawbreaking British companies. He has never explained why.
As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that words on the
page like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great chess game
unconnected to people's lives.
The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They are the end
result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair, who
never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their
actions on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands.
Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers will be used
in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million people
were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched
three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in
formation, unseen above the clouds.
They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known
as the "long box" pattern, the military term for carpet bombing.
Everything inside a "box" was presumed destroyed.
When I reached a village within the "box", the street had been
replaced by a crater.
I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a
ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children
thrown into the air by the blast.
The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins
and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared
straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that
the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.
I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and often; yet even
in that "media war" I never saw images of these grotesque sights on
television or in the pages of a newspaper.
I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices in Saigon
as a kind of freaks' gallery.
SOME years later I often came upon terribly deformed Vietnamese
children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide
called Agent Orange.
It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly for it contained
Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.
This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliche-mongers would now
call a weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half of South
Vietnam.
Today, as the poison continues to move through water and soil and
food, children continue to be born without palates and chins and
scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukemia.
You never saw these children on the TV news then; they were too
hideous for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even to be
pinned up on a wall and they are old news now.
That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by satellite when
Iraq is attacked? I doubt it.
I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when I traveled in
Iraq two years ago. A pediatrician showed me hospital wards of
children similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the
Gulf war in 1991.
She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles undimmed
on gray little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe her
eyes.
continued in next post...
