Mesopotamia.
Babylon. The Tigris and Euphrates
Arundhati Roy
The
Guardian (Wednesday
April 2, 2003)
How many children, in how many classrooms, over how many
centuries, have hang-glided through the past, transported on the wings of these
words? And now the bombs are falling, incinerating and humiliating that ancient
civilisation
On the steel torsos of their missiles, adolescent American soldiers scrawl
colourful messages in childish handwriting: For Saddam, from the Fat Boy Posse.
A building goes down. A marketplace. A home. A girl who loves a boy. A child
who only ever wanted to play with his older brother's marbles.
On March 21, the day after
American and British troops began their illegal invasion and occupation of
Iraq, an "embedded" CNN correspondent interviewed an American
soldier. "I wanna get in there and get my nose dirty," Private AJ
said. "I wanna take revenge for 9/11."
To be fair to the
correspondent, even though he was "embedded" he did sort of weakly
suggest that so far there was no real evidence that linked the Iraqi government
to the September 11 attacks. Private AJ stuck his teenage tongue out all the
way down to the end of his chin. "Yeah, well that stuff's way over my
head," he said.
According to a New York
Times/CBS News survey, 42 per cent of the American public believes that Saddam
Hussein is directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll says that 55 per cent of
Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. What
percentage of America's armed forces believe these fabrications is anybody's
guess.
It is unlikely that British
and American troops fighting in Iraq are aware that their governments supported
Saddam Hussein both politically and financially through his worst excesses.
But why should poor AJ and
his fellow soldiers be burdened with these details? It does not matter any
more, does it? Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks, ships, choppers, bombs,
ammunition, gas masks, high-protein food, whole aircrafts ferrying toilet
paper, insect repellent, vitamins and bottled mineral water, are on the move.
The phenomenal logistics of Operation Iraqi Freedom make it a universe unto
itself. It doesn't need to justify its existence any more. It exists. It is.
President George W Bush,
commander in chief of the US army, navy, airforce and marines has issued clear
instructions: "Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated." (Perhaps he means that
even if Iraqi people's bodies are killed, their souls will be liberated.) American
and British citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake thought and
rally behind their troops. Their countries are at war. And what a war it is.
After using the "good
offices" of UN diplomacy (economic sanctions and weapons inspections) to
ensure that Iraq was brought to its knees, its people starved, half a million
of its children killed, its infrastructure severely damaged, after making sure
that most of its weapons have been destroyed, in an act of cowardice that must
surely be unrivalled in history, the "Allies"/"Coalition of the
Willing"(better known as the Coalition of the Bullied and Bought)—sent in
an invading army!
Operation Iraqi Freedom? I
don't think so. It's more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me
Break Your Knees.
So far the Iraqi army, with
its hungry, ill-equipped soldiers, its old guns and ageing tanks, has somehow
managed to temporarily confound and occasionally even outmanoeuvre the
"Allies". Faced with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful armed
forces the world has ever seen, Iraq has shown spectacular courage and has even
managed to put up what actually amounts to a defence. A defence which the
Bush/Blair Pair have immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly. (But then
deceit is an old tradition with us natives. When we are invaded/
colonised/occupied and stripped of all dignity, we turn to guile and
opportunism.)
Even allowing for the fact
that Iraq and the "Allies" are at war, the extent to which the
"Allies" and their media cohorts are prepared to go is astounding to
the point of being counterproductive to their own objectives.
When Saddam Hussein
appeared on national TV to address the Iraqi people after the failure of the
most elaborate assassination attempt in history—"Operation
Decapitation"—we had Geoff Hoon, the British defence secretary, deriding
him for not having the courage to stand up and be killed, calling him a coward
who hides in trenches. We then had a flurry of Coalition speculation—Was it
really Saddam, was it his double? Or was it Osama with a shave? Was it
pre-recorded? Was it a speech? Was it black magic? Will it turn into a pumpkin
if we really, really want it to?
After dropping not
hundreds, but thousands of bombs on Baghdad, when a marketplace was mistakenly
blown up and civilians killed—a US army spokesman implied that the Iraqis were
blowing themselves up! "They're using very old stock. Their missiles go up
and come down."
If so, may we ask how this
squares with the accusation that the Iraqi regime is a paid-up member of the
Axis of Evil and a threat to world peace?
When the Arab TV station
al-Jazeera shows civilian casualties it's denounced as "emotive" Arab
propaganda aimed at orchestrating hostility towards the "Allies", as
though Iraqis are dying only in order to make the "Allies" look bad.
Even French television has come in for some stick for similar reasons. But the
awed, breathless footage of aircraft carriers, stealth bombers and cruise
missiles arcing across the desert sky on American and British TV is described
as the "terrible beauty" of war.
When invading American
soldiers (from the army "that's only here to help") are taken
prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush says it violates the Geneva
convention and "exposes the evil at the heart of the regime". But it is
entirely acceptable for US television stations to show the hundreds of
prisoners being held by the US government in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the
ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blinded with opaque goggles
and with earphones clamped on their ears, to ensure complete visual and aural
deprivation. When questioned about the treatment of these prisoners, US
Government officials don't deny that they're being being ill-treated. They deny
that they're "prisoners of war"! They call them "unlawful
combatants", implying that their ill-treatment is legitimate! (So what's
the party line on the massacre of prisoners in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan?
Forgive and forget? And what of the prisoner tortured to death by the special
forces at the Bagram airforce base? Doctors have formally called it homicide.)
When the "Allies"
bombed the Iraqi television station (also, incidentally, a contravention of the
Geneva convention), there was vulgar jubilation in the American media. In fact
Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack for a while. It was seen as a righteous
blow against Arab propaganda. But mainstream American and British TV continue
to advertise themselves as "balanced" when their propaganda has
achieved hallucinatory levels.
Why should propaganda be the
exclusive preserve of the western media? Just because they do it better?
Western journalists "embedded" with troops are given the status of
heroes reporting from the frontlines of war. Non-"embedded"
journalists (such as the BBC's Rageh Omaar, reporting from besieged and bombed
Baghdad, witnessing, and clearly affected by the sight of bodies of burned
children and wounded people) are undermined even before they begin their
reportage: "We have to tell you that he is being monitored by the Iraqi
authorities."
Increasingly, on British
and American TV, Iraqi soldiers are being referred to as "militia"
(ie: rabble). One BBC correspondent portentously referred to them as
"quasi-terrorists". Iraqi defence is "resistance" or worse
still, "pockets of resistance", Iraqi military strategy is deceit.
(The US government bugging the phone lines of UN security council delegates,
reported by the Observer, is hard-headed pragmatism.) Clearly for the
"Allies", the only morally acceptable strategy the Iraqi army can
pursue is to march out into the desert and be bombed by B-52s or be mowed down
by machine-gun fire. Anything short of that is cheating.
And now we have the siege
of Basra. About a million and a half people, 40 per cent of them children.
Without clean water, and with very little food. We're still waiting for the
legendary Shia "uprising", for the happy hordes to stream out of the
city and rain roses and hosannahs on the "liberating" army. Where are
the hordes? Don't they know that television productions work to tight
schedules? (It may well be that if Saddam's regime falls there will be dancing
on the streets of Basra. But then, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would
be dancing on the streets the world over.)
After days of enforcing
hunger and thirst on the citizens of Basra, the "Allies" have brought
in a few trucks of food and water and positioned them tantalisingly on the
outskirts of the city. Desperate people flock to the trucks and fight each
other for food. (The water we hear, is being sold. To revitalise the dying
economy, you understand.) On top of the trucks, desperate photographers fought
each other to get pictures of desperate people fighting each other for food.
Those pictures will go out through photo agencies to newspapers and glossy
magazines that pay extremely well. Their message: The messiahs are at hand,
distributing fishes and loaves.
As of July last year the
delivery of $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq was blocked by the Bush/Blair
Pair. It didn't really make the news. But now under the loving caress of live
TV, 450 tonnes of humanitarian aid—a minuscule fraction of what's actually
needed (call it a script prop)—arrived on a British ship, the "Sir
Galahad". Its arrival in the port of Umm Qasr merited a whole day of live
TV broadcasts. Barf bag, anyone?
Nick Guttmann, head of
emergencies for Christian Aid, writing for the Independent on Sunday said that
it would take 32 Sir Galahad's a day to match the amount of food Iraq was
receiving before the bombing began.
We oughtn't to be surprised
though. It's old tactics. They've been at it for years. Consider this moderate
proposal by John McNaughton from the Pentagon Papers, published during the
Vietnam war: "Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only
to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly
to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union.
Destruction of locks and dams, however—if handled right—might ... offer
promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people.
By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation
(more than a million?) unless food is provided—which we could offer to do 'at
the conference table'."
Times haven't changed very
much. The technique has evolved into a doctrine. It's called "Winning
Hearts and Minds".
So, here's the moral maths
as it stands: 200,000 Iraqis estimated to have been killed in the first Gulf
war. Hundreds of thousands dead because of the economic sanctions. (At least
that lot has been saved from Saddam Hussein.) More being killed every day. Tens
of thousands of US soldiers who fought the 1991 war officially declared
"disabled" by a disease called the Gulf war syndrome, believed in
part to be caused by exposure to depleted uranium. It hasn't stopped the
"Allies" from continuing to use depleted uranium.
And now this talk of
bringing the UN back into the picture. But that old UN girl—it turns out that
she just ain't what she was cracked up to be. She's been demoted (although she
retains her high salary). Now she's the world's janitor. She's the Philippino
cleaning lady, the Indian jamadarni, the postal bride from Thailand, the
Mexican household help, the Jamaican au pair. She's employed to clean other
peoples' shit. She's used and abused at will.
Despite Blair's earnest
submissions, and all his fawning, Bush has made it clear that the UN will play
no independent part in the administration of postwar Iraq. The US will decide
who gets those juicy "reconstruction" contracts. But Bush has appealed
to the international community not to "politicise" the issue of
humanitarian aid. On the March 28, after Bush called for the immediate
resumption of the UN's oil for food programme, the UN security council voted
unanimously for the resolution. This means that everybody agrees that Iraqi
money (from the sale of Iraqi oil) should be used to feed Iraqi people who are
starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal US-led war.
Contracts for the
"reconstruction" of Iraq we're told, in discussions on the business
news, could jump-start the world economy. It's funny how the interests of
American corporations are so often, so successfully and so deliberately
confused with the interests of the world economy. While the American people
will end up paying for the war, oil companies, weapons manufacturers, arms
dealers, and corporations involved in "reconstruction" work will make
direct gains from the war. Many of them are old friends and former employers of
the Bush/ Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice cabal. Bush has already asked Congress for
$75bn. Contracts for "re-construction" are already being negotiated.
The news doesn't hit the stands because much of the US corporate media is owned
and managed by the same interests.
Operation Iraqi Freedom,
Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. That
is, returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people via corporate multinationals. Like
Shell, like Chevron, like Halliburton. Or are we missing the plot here? Perhaps
Halliburton is actually an Iraqi company? Perhaps US vice-president Dick Cheney
(who is a former director of Halliburton) is a closet Iraqi?
As the rift between Europe
and America deepens, there are signs that the world could be entering a new era
of economic boycotts. CNN reported that Americans are emptying French wine into
gutters, chanting, "We don't want your stinking wine." We've heard
about the re-baptism of French fries. Freedom fries they're called now. There's
news trickling in about Americans boycotting German goods. The thing is that if
the fallout of the war takes this turn, it is the US who will suffer the most.
Its homeland may be defended by border patrols and nuclear weapons, but its
economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and
vulnerable to attack in every direction. Already the internet is buzzing with
elaborate lists of American and British government products and companies that
should be boycotted. Apart from the usual targets, Coke, Pepsi and
McDonald's—government agencies such as USAID, the British department for
international development, British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill
Lynch, American Express, corporations such as Bechtel, General Electric, and
companies such as Reebok, Nike and Gap—could find themselves under siege. These
lists are being honed and re fined by activists across the world. They could
become a practical guide that directs and channels the amorphous, but growing
fury in the world. Suddenly, the "inevitability" of the project of
corporate globalisation is beginning to seem more than a little evitable.
It's become clear that the
war against terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only
about oil. It's about a superpower's self-destructive impulse towards
supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony. The argument is being made that the
people of Argentina and Iraq have both been decimated by the same process. Only
the weapons used against them differ: In one case it's an IMF chequebook. In
the other, cruise missiles.
Finally, there's the matter
of Saddam's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. (Oops, nearly forgot about
those!)
In the fog of war—one
thing's for sure—if Saddam 's regime indeed has weapons of mass destruction, it
is showing an astonishing degree of responsibility and restraint in the teeth
of extreme provocation. Under similar circumstances, (say if Iraqi troops were
bombing New York and laying siege to Washington DC) could we expect the same of
the Bush regime? Would it keep its thousands of nuclear warheads in their
wrapping paper? What about its chemical and biological weapons? Its stocks of
anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas? Would it?
Excuse me while I laugh.
In the fog of war we're
forced to speculate: Either Saddam is an extremely responsible tyrant. Or—he
simply does not possess weapons of mass destruction. Either way, regardless of
what happens next, Iraq comes out of the argument smelling sweeter than the US
government.
So here's Iraq—rogue state,
grave threat to world peace, paid-up member of the Axis of Evil. Here's Iraq,
invaded, bombed, besieged, bullied, its sovereignty shat upon, its children
killed by cancers, its people blown up on the streets. And here's all of us
watching. CNN-BBC, BBC-CNN late into the night. Here's all of us, enduring the
horror of the war, enduring the horror of the propaganda and enduring the
slaughter of language as we know and understand it. Freedom now means mass
murder (or, in the US, fried potatoes). When someone says "humanitarian
aid" we automatically go looking for induced starvation. "Embedded"
I have to admit, is a great find. It's what it sounds like. And what about
"arsenal of tactics?" Nice!
In most parts of the world,
the invasion of Iraq is being seen as a racist war. The real danger of a racist
war unleashed by racist regimes is that it engenders racism in
everybody—perpetrators, victims, spectators. It sets the parameters for the
debate, it lays out a grid for a particular way of thinking. There is a tidal
wave of hatred for the US rising from the ancient heart of the world. In Africa,
Latin America, Asia, Europe, Australia. I encounter it every day. Sometimes it
comes from the most unlikely sources. Bankers, businessmen, yuppie students,
and they bring to it all the crassness of their conservative, illiberal
politics. That absurd inability to separate governments from people: America is
a nation of morons, a nation of murderers, they say, (with the same
carelessness with which they say, "All Muslims are terrorists"). Even
in the grotesque universe of racist insult, the British make their entry as
add-ons. Arse-lickers, they're called.
Suddenly, I, who have been
vilified for being "anti-American" and "anti-west", find
myself in the extraordinary position of defending the people of America. And
Britain.
Those who descend so easily
into the pit of racist abuse would do well to remember the hundreds of
thousands of American and British citizens who protested against their
country's stockpile of nuclear weapons. And the thousands of American war
resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam. They should
know that the most scholarly, scathing, hilarious critiques of the US
government and the "American way of life" comes from American
citizens. And that the funniest, most bitter condemnation of their prime
minister comes from the British media. Finally they should remember that right
now, hundreds of thousands of British and American citizens are on the streets
protesting the war. The Coalition of the Bullied and Bought consists of
governments, not people. More than one third of America's citizens have
survived the relentless propaganda they've been subjected to, and many
thousands are actively fighting their own government. In the ultra-patriotic
climate that prevails in the US, that's as brave as any Iraqi fighting for his
or her homeland.
While the
"Allies" wait in the desert for an uprising of Shia Muslims on the
streets of Basra, the real uprising is taking place in hundreds of cities
across the world. It has been the most spectacular display of public morality
ever seen.
Most courageous of all, are
the hundreds of thousands of American people on the streets of America's great
cities—Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. The fact is that the only
institution in the world today that is more powerful than the American government,
is American civil society. American citizens have a huge responsibility riding
on their shoulders. How can we not salute and support those who not only
acknowledge but act upon that responsibility? They are our allies, our friends.
At the end of it all, it
remains to be said that dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other
despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin
America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US government,
are a menace to their own people. Other than strengthening the hand of civil
society (instead of weakening it as has been done in the case of Iraq), there
is no easy, pristine way of dealing with them. (It's odd how those who dismiss
the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly
dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy,
eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of
evil-doers".)
Regardless of what the
propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest
threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all
is the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the US
government, currently piloted by George Bush. Bush-bashing is fun, because he
makes such an easy, sumptuous target. It's true that he is a dangerous, almost
suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man
himself.
Despite the pall of gloom
that hangs over us today, I'd like to file a cautious plea for hope: in times
of war, one wants one's weakest enemy at the helm of his forces. And President
George W Bush is certainly that. Any other even averagely intelligent US
president would have probably done the very same things, but would have managed
to smoke-up the glass and confuse the opposition. Perhaps even carry the UN
with him. Bush's tactless imprudence and his brazen belief that he can run the
world with his riot squad, has done the opposite. He has achieved what writers,
activists and scholars have striven to achieve for decades. He has exposed the
ducts. He has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts
of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire.
Now that the blueprint (The
Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire) has been put into mass circulation, it could
be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted.
Bring on the spanners.