Blair Hypocrisy
by
John Pilger
Dissident Voice
March 1, 2003
Having
failed to fabricate a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and prove that Iraq has a
secret armoury of banned weapons, the warmongers have fallen back on the
"moral case" for an unprovoked attack on a stricken country. Farce
has arrived. We want to laugh out loud, a deep and dark and almost grief-laden
laugh, at Blair's concern for the "victims of Saddam Hussein" and his
admonishment (reprinted in the Observer) of the millions of protesters:
"There will be... no protests about the thousands of [Iraqi] children that
die needlessly every year..."
First, let's look back to
Saddam's most famous victim, the British journalist Farzad Bazoft, who was
hanged in 1990 for "spying", a bogus trial following a bogus charge.
Those of us who protested at his murder did so in the teeth of a smear campaign
by the British government and a press determined to cover for Britain's
favourite tyrant.
The Sun smeared Bazoft by
publishing his conviction for stealing when he was a student - information
supplied by MI5 on behalf of the Thatcher government, which was then seeking
any excuse not to suspend its lucrative business and arms deals with the Iraqi
dictator. The Mail and Today suggested that Saddam was right - that Bazoft was
a spy. In a memorable editorial, the Sunday Telegraph equated investigative
journalism with criminal espionage. Defending Saddam, not his victim, was
clearly preferable.
What did Tony Blair say
about this outrage? I can find nothing. Did Blair join those of us who
protested, on the streets and in print, at the fact that ministers such as
Douglas Hurd were commuting to Baghdad, with Hurd going especially to celebrate
the anniversary of the coming to power of the dictator I described as
"renowned as the interrogator and torturer of Qasr-al-Nihayyah, the
'Palace of the End'"?
There is no record of Blair
saying anything substantive about Saddam Hussein's atrocities until after 11
September 2001 when the Americans, having failed to catch Osama Bin Laden,
declared Saddam their number one enemy. As for Blair's assertion that there
have been "no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly
under his rule", the answer is straightforward.
There have been years of
protests about the effect of the Anglo-American embargo on the children of
Iraq. That the US, backed by Britain, is largely responsible for hundreds of
thousands of innocent Iraqi deaths is the great unspoken in the so-called
mainstream of politics and journalism. That the embargo allowed Saddam Hussein
to centralise and reinforce his domestic control is equally unmentionable.
Whenever the voluminous evidence of such a monumental western crime against
humanity is laid out, the crocodile tears of Blair and the rest of the
warmongers barely disguise their cynicism.
Denis Halliday, the former
assistant secretary general of the United Nations who was the senior UN
official in Baghdad, has many times identified the "genocide" of the
American-driven sanctions. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)
has paid tribute to the Iraqi rationing system, giving it credit for saving an
entire population from famine. This, like the evidence and witness of Halliday
and his successor, Hans von Sponeck, and the United Nations Children's Fund
(Unicef) and the Catholic Relief Agency (Cafod) and the 70 members of the US
Congress who wrote to President Clinton describing the embargo as
"infanticide masquerading as policy", has been airbrushed out. In
contrast, the gassing of the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 has become part of
Blair's and Bush's vocabulary. Eleven months after this atrocity, the assistant
US secretary of state James Kelly flew to Baghdad to tell Saddam Hussein:
"You are a source for
moderation in the region, and the United States wants to broaden her
relationship with Iraq."
What did Blair say about
this? I can find nothing. Read the Murdoch press at the time. There is nothing
about Saddam being "another Hitler"; no mention of torture chambers
and appeasers. Saddam is one of us, because Washington says so. The Australian,
Murdoch's flagship in the country of his birth, and currently a leading
warmonger, thought the most regrettable aspect about Iraq's use of chemical
weapons at Halabja was that it had "given Tehran a propaganda coup and may
have destroyed western hopes of quiet diplomacy". Like other Murdoch
papers, it defended Saddam by suggesting that Iraq's use of chemical and nerve
agents was purely defensive.
Of the media warmongers in
this country, it is difficult to choose the most absurd. Murdoch's blustering
hagiographer, William ("Mr X") Shawcross must defer, alas, to David
Aaronovitch, the retired Stalinist apologist now employed by the Guardian Group
to poke a stick at its readership and whose penchant for getting things wrong
makes him the doyen. In his condescending lecture to the millions who marched
on 15 February, Aaronovitch wrote:
"I wanted to ask,
whether among your hundreds of thousands, the absences bothered you? The Kurds,
the Iraqis - of whom there are many thousands in this country - where were
they? Why were they not there?"
There were more than 4,000
Kurds marching en bloc. The Kurds foresee clearly yet another sell-out by the
west, now that Washington is encouraging the Turkish military to occupy Iraqi
Kurdistan. According to my Iraqi friends, there were "a minimum of 3,000
Iraqis" marching. Two years ago, I attended an Iraqi festival at
Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall. More than 2,000 Iraqis were present with
their families. When Denis Halliday called for an end to the economic siege of
Iraq and the implementation of that crucial passage of Security Council
Resolution 687, which requires a ban on weapons of mass destruction throughout the
region, in Israel as much as Iraq, he received thunderous applause. Everyone
there, it seemed to me, had little or no time for Saddam Hussein; but none
wanted their country strangled, attacked and occupied by the west yet again.
Patrick Tyler, a perceptive
writer in the New York Times, says that Bush and Blair now face a
"tenacious new adversary" - the public. He says we are heading into a
new bipolar world with two new superpowers: the regime in Washington on one
side, and world public opinion on the other. In a poll of half a million
Europeans, Time magazine asked which country was the greatest threat to peace:
5.8 per cent said North Korea, 6.8 per cent said Iraq and 87 per cent said the
United States. In other words, the game is up.
People have become aware,
above all, that the most dangerous appeasement today has little to do with a
regional tyrant, and everything to do with "our" governments.
John Pilger is a renowned investigative journalist
and documentary filmmaker. His latest book is The New Rulers of the World
(Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s website at: http://www.johnpilger.com