Curveball and the Trucks
By Malcom Lagauche | February 17, 2011
The recent news that the person nicknamed “Curveball” lied to German authorities before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq is making headlines. The media make this sound like it is Earth-shattering. Even some CIA officials expressed shock and dismay at his current confession. How disingenuous. At the time of his revelations, even a nitwit could tell he was lying. Here is a chapter from my book The Mother of All Battles: The Endless U.S.-Iraq War that was released in October 2008. Currently, Powell is on a speaking tour of the US in which he tells how to become successful and rich. If one uses his formula, it is quite uncomplicated: lie and kill a few million people.
A couple of 15-year-old vehicles made world headlines in 2002. At first, the U.S. and British administrations heralded them as conclusive proof of Iraq concealing biological weapons. We all heard of the Iraqi “mobile germ factories” that traveled the highways of the country to keep from getting discovered. Dick Cheney said that inside these vehicles the most devastating germs were being manufactured and the Iraqis were going to pelt the east coast of the U.S. with a deadly brew that would kill millions. Cheney maintained that these germ weapons would be carried by secret drone aircraft that Iraq was developing.
Actually, there were a few drones being manufactured in Iraq and the Iraqis showed them to the world. They were made of balsa wood, had a range of about 25 miles and were used for mapping purposes. The east coast of the U.S. was a few thousand miles out of their range.
The actual importance of the two vehicles, alleged to be biological weapons factories, is minuscule, but their use for propaganda and the subsequent discovery that they were only used to pump hydrogen into weather balloons, put them on center-stage in world affairs.
The April 12, 2006 edition of the Washington Post ran a feature article, “Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War,” that brought back the subject the administration would rather the world forget. According to the article:
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.
The administration wasted no time in turning the issue around. At a hastily-called press conference, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan accused the media of unfair reporting. He did not answer questions about whether Bush knew of the results of the team of experts. If Bush did not know the information, McClellan would have quickly come forth with a reply. In this instance, silence seemed to be damning.
In addition to not being forthright with the issue, McClellan demanded an apology from the press for running the article. According to the Associated Press article “White House Defends Stand on Iraqi Trailers:”
McClellan dismissed the Post article and a report based on it that aired on ABC News Wednesday morning as irresponsible. He said ABC News should apologize and took issue with the way the Post story was written.
In 2002, these trucks took on a life of their own. They became dastardly vehicles to be used to cause a cataclysmic event in the U.S. that would be unprecedented in history. During this time, the Iraqi government had publicly stated that the trucks were used to fill weather balloons with hydrogen, but the U.S. public was told that you can’t trust the Iraqis because they lie and the U.S. doesn’t.
By November 2002, reports of these trucks, fueled by White House propaganda, began appearing in newspapers and magazines. Even the UCLA School of Public Health jumped on the bandwagon to create paranoia. On November 17, 2002, it ran an article from the Los Angeles Times called “Inspectors to Scour Iraq for Mobile Weapons Labs.” It was published in the “Bioterrorism” section of its website. Here are a few gems from the article:
* Rumbling along Iraq’s highways or threading their way through crowded streets, these mobile weapons labs may look like ice cream trucks, motor homes or 18-wheeler tractor trailer trucks, officials and experts say. But their cargo is believed to be germ agents such as anthrax, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin that theoretically could kill hundreds of thousands in an attack.
* Dubbed “Winnebagos of death,” the anonymous vehicles are hard to locate, even with sophisticated sensors.
* If the labs evade detection, U.S. intelligence analysts fear, the officers or scientists who operate them might try to use germ agents in a desperate counterattack or spirit the materials away to sell to terrorists or foreign governments.
* If such materials fall into the hands of a group such as Al Qaeda, that would turn the military campaign into what “could be the greatest proliferation disaster in history,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former National Security Council official and co-author of The Age of Secret Terror.
* The British and German governments, and the CIA and Pentagon, have all asserted the existence of the mobile labs in separate reports this year.
Here’s what Colin Powell said of the two trucks in his infamous deluge of lies he told the world in February 2003 at the U.N.:
* Iraq’s mobile BW program began in the mid-1990s — this is reportedly when the units were being designed.
* The source was an eyewitness, an Iraqi chemical engineer who supervised one of these facilities.
* Iraq manufactured mobile trailers and railcars to produce biological agents, which were designed to evade U.N. weapons inspectors. Agent production reportedly occurred Thursday night through Friday when the U.N. did not conduct inspections in observance of the Moslem holy day.
* An accident occurred in 1998 during a production run, which killed 12 technicians — an indication that Iraq was producing a BW agent at that time.
The CIA issued a report on May 28, 2003, without the knowledge of the secret team’s assessment of the truth behind the trucks, that smacked of the same preposterous allegations made by almost every pro-war reporter or politician in the Western world. Here is the overview of the report titled “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants:”
Coalition forces have uncovered the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.
The design, equipment, and layout of the trailer found in late April is strikingly similar to descriptions provided by a source who was a chemical engineer that managed one of the mobile plants. Secretary of State Powell’s description of the mobile plants in his speech in February 2003 to the United Nations was based primarily on reporting from this source.
Both Powell and the CIA cite an Iraqi chemical engineer who supposedly worked on the trucks and also told of 12 deaths. This source was discredited long before either Powell or the CIA used his bogus testimony.
An Iraqi who defected to Germany in 1999 was the originator of these falsehoods. His given nickname was “Curveball,” a designation of his slippery and swerving testimony. After the Germans heard the lies, they contacted the CIA with the information, but told the U.S. intelligence organization that he could not be trusted and said they would not give any credence to his information. The Germans described Curveball as a person not living in Iraq and as an “out of control” and mentally deranged alcoholic. One CIA report stated that Curveball was “a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq.” This description was not seen by many because the neocon Office of Special Plans overrode CIA information when it deemed it necessary to keep the war plans on schedule.
Curveball was a drunken liar who was paid to say things that the U.S. wanted to hear. He gained an easy payday for a while and then was taken off the payroll when it was discovered he was a fraud. The U.S. failed to listen to the Germans about Curveball’s dubious character.
On June 15, 2003, British newspapers wrote the truth about the two trucks and caused great embarrassment to Tony Blair because he went along with the U.S. script on the use of the vehicles. According to the Observer, in an article titled “Iraqi Mobile Labs Nothing To Do With Germ Warfare, Report Finds:”
An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis continued to insist.
A British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told the Observer last week, “They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were — facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”
Never have two old beaten up trucks gained the mythical status of the two Iraqi vehicles used for producing hydrogen. Millions and millions of dollars were spent on propaganda that elevated their standing to that of world-threatening devices that could kill millions of people instantly. An unknown Iraqi drunkard had his 15 minutes of fame and improved his finances immensely because of the trucks. More than a million Iraqi lives were lost because of the lies used to describe them.
On March 13, 2007, ABC News ran a story about Curveball. Despite people knowing of his real identity and calling for caution in 2003 about his testimony, the ABC report shocked much of the U.S. population because they had never heard of Curveball.
Powell got much mileage from Curveball’s lies at the U.N. in February 2003 when he told the world of the dastardly Iraqi mobile biological weapons factories. During the March 13, 2007 ABC News report, the commentator mentioned Powell’s assessment of the old story turned new. According to ABC News, “Powell said he is furious with what happened and his former chief of staff says he feels deceived.”
The perpetrator became the victim. Powell could have refused to bring up the mobile biological weapons factories (years later, he said he was not convinced with the information), but he put on an Academy Award performance in front of the world. That presentation led to the destruction of a country and the deaths of more than a million Iraqis and thousands of U.S. military personnel. These facts did not bother him as he worried only about his image and legacy.
While speaking to the U.N. in February 2003, Colin Powell told the world that Iraq’s mobile BW program began in the mid-1990s and that was the time the trucks were being designed. In reality, they were sold to the Iraqi army by the British firm Marconi Command and Control in 1987 as trucks to carry and fill weather balloons.
Depiction of Iraqi mobile biological weapons trucks as described by Colin Powell in February 2003.
According to his testimony, each truck had two accompanying vehicles to help produce the lethal agents.
A State of Permanent Human Bondage
By Malcom Lagauche | January 19, 2011
The goal of Desert Storm was to destroy the country of Iraq under the guise of liberating Kuwait. In February 1991, during the height of U.S. bombing, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark visited Iraq and reported his findings. At that time, few photos had come from Iraq showing the devastation. Most reporters left Iraq on the eve of the bombing campaign and spent their time in Saudi Arabia listening to the daily propaganda given by the U.S. military. They became so bored that they began to interview each other.
What Clark saw was not pretty. He stated:
The effect of the bombing, if continued, will be the destruction of much of the physical and economic base for life in Iraq. The purpose of the bombing can only be explained rationally as the destruction of Iraq as a viable state for a generation or more.
Clark’s message was not widely reported. After all, the U.S. version of events stated that the only reason for the aggression was to remove Iraqi soldiers from Kuwait. The lack of coverage of what was occurring in Iraq was convenient for the U.S. because it allowed the destruction of Iraq to continue with no world outcry.
After the bombing ceased, pictures began making their way to the outside world. When this information reached the U.S., the administration called it lies and propaganda. At other times, it accused Iraq of destroying its own institutions and blaming it on U.S. bombs. Once people from outside Iraq began to visit the country, the blatant U.S. lies were exposed. The following is a list of the numbers of facilities destroyed during the 42-day bombing campaign. It was compiled and published by the Iraqi Reconstruction Bureau:
· Schools and scholastic facilities — 3960
· Universities, labs, dormitories — 40
· Health facilities (including hospitals, clinics, medical warehouses) — 421
· Telephone operations, communication towers, etc. — 475
· Bridges, buildings, housing complexes — 260
· Warehouses, shopping centers, grain silos — 251
· Churches and mosques — 159
· Dams, pumping stations, agricultural facilities — 200
· Petroleum facilities (including refineries) — 145
· General services (shelters, sewage treatment plants, municipalities) — 830
· Houses — 10,000 to 20,000
In April 1991, a fact-finding team from Greenpeace visited Iraq and nobody was prepared for the display of massive devastation. When Greenpeace issued its report, it said Iraq had been bombed back to a pre-industrial era. The report added, “New technology did not make the U.S. military better at preventing destruction, it just made it more efficient at destruction itself.”
The U.S. press ignored most of the reports by various groups that visited Iraq after Desert Storm. The few words reported, along with the absence of photos, assured a lack of public outcry condemning the slaughter.
The massacre should not have surprised those who followed incidents leading to Desert Storm. As early as September 1990, a high-up military person mapped the plans for the invasion. On September 16, 1990, General Dugan stated that the proposed plans for combat included the destruction of the Iraqi civilian economy and infrastructure. At that time, no one could envisage the U.S. attacking Iraq because the Iraqi soldiers were in Kuwait and the U.S. demanded their exit. Most people thought, if there was to be a war, it would be conducted in Kuwait, not Baghdad. General Dugan was immediately removed from office. The Bush administration negated Dugan’s claims and discredited him. In hindsight, we see that Dugan’s testimony was about the only truth we heard from the U.S. government or military at that time. He let the cat out of the bag, but government damage control quickly led the people to believe he made up the scenarios he predicted.
For the first week of Desert Storm, everyone seemed to be mesmerized by the “smart bombs” that were going down chimneys and smashing through the windows of weapons warehouses. When the odd person asked about civilians being hit, the standard response was, “We’re not targeting civilians.” What we were not told was that 93% of the bombs dropped were “dumb bombs” and the civilian infrastructure of Iraq was being destroyed. Only about 30 to 40% of the dumb bombs hit their targets. The others randomly created havoc by killing civilians and destroying Iraq’s cities and towns.
After Desert Storm, some military people admitted the real nature of the attacks. Air Force General Tony McPeak stated on March 20, 1991, “I’ve got photographic evidence of several where the pilot just acquired the wrong target.” When asked why that information had not come forth earlier, he added, “It ain’t my call. I made some recommendations about this; it got turned around, quite frankly.”
Those who questioned the U.S. government’s reports of only hitting military targets had their fears verified on January 22, 1991. Pictures of a destroyed baby milk factory in the region of Abu Ghraib were broadcast worldwide. Many people were aghast at the bombing of a civilian industry crucial for the existence of youngsters.
The Pentagon immediately went into high gear to try to dispel the protests of those who questioned such barbaric actions. The administration stated that it was a biological weapons plant. Colin Powell said”
It is not an infant formula factory, no more than the Rabta chemical plant in Libya made aspirin. It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure — and we have taken it out.
The administration came up with the excuse that “Baby Milk Factory” signs around the plant were written in English and Arabic and they had just been mounted after the bombing to try to make people think it was a baby formula factory. The American public bought the excuse.
The public never researched to discover that many signs in Iraq included both English and Arabic versions because of the substantial English-speaking population who worked in Iraq prior to Desert Storm. The sign at the baby milk factory had been in place for several years prior to its bombing. Peter Arnett of CNN stated after Desert Storm that the same factory and sign were evident in a documentary that CNN produced in the late 1980s.
Nestlé of Switzerland is a leading producer of infant foods. A spokesman for the company said, “We know this was a state-built infant formula plant.” Company officials said they had regularly observed its construction in the past, “because we like to be aware of the competition.”
U.S. audiences rarely heard or saw what other countries reported concerning Desert Storm. A British TV show, “Panorama,” was broadcast on March 25, 1991 which included an interview with General Leonard Perroots, a consultant to U.S. intelligence in Desert Storm. He addressed the bombing of the baby milk factory and he quickly put the matter to rest as he said, “We made a mistake.”
The bombing of the baby milk factory put the world on alert that the information broadcast at the daily military briefings was untruthful. At that time, those who opposed Desert Storm were shocked at the widespread destruction in Iraq. They wondered how the U.S. public, which usually would have treated such barbaric designs with disdain, had acquiesced to cheering such actions. The answer lies in the demonizing of Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein.
In George Bush’s Thanksgiving speech to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in 1990, he stated:
Every day that passes brings Saddam one step closer to realizing his goal of a nuclear weapons arsenal, and that’s why more and more your mission is marked by a real sense of urgency. You know, no one knows exactly who they may be aimed at down the road, but we know this for sure, he’s never possessed a weapon he didn’t use.
At the time of his speech, Bush knew that Iraq was at least five years away from developing its first crude atomic weapon, yet he made it sound as though Iraq was on the verge of obtaining a comprehensive nuclear arsenal. In further speeches, he suggested that in six months, Iraq would be a nuclear threat to the world. The myth of an Iraqi nuclear warehouse was a prime excuse for Bush II invading Iraq in 2003. And, to this day, many U.S. citizens believe Iraq possessed nuclear weapons.
Even after the bombing of the baby milk factory, the U.S. denied bombing civilians or buildings used in civilian industries. When the Iraqi government stated that a village or suburb was hit, the U.S. government would say the Iraqis weren’t telling the truth. Because of the demonizing of Iraq, most Americans thought all Iraqi information consisted of lies.
On January 31, an independent source announced that the U.S. was bombing civilians. The Jordanian Foreign Ministry stated that coalition planes had bombed oil trucks and civilians moving along the highway from Iraq to Jordan. Again, the U.S. denied the allegations, but some eyes were being opened.
In Iran, reports were made stating that the bombing was so intense that the ground in Iran was shaking. On February 5, 1991, an official in Basra described “a hellish nightmare” of fires and smoke so dense that eyewitnesses say the sun had not been clearly visible for days at a time; that the bombing was leveling entire city blocks; and that there were bomb craters the size of football fields and an untold number of casualties.
On February 7, the military still denied that civilians were being targeted. When asked about the allegations, General Richard Neal told the press, “It’s a target-rich environment and there’s plenty of other targets we can attack.”
While Neal was making his statement, Ramsey Clark was traveling throughout Iraq but his assessment differed greatly from that of the general. In describing the reality in Iraq, Clark stated:
Over the 2,000 miles of highway, roads and streets we traveled, we saw scores, probably several hundred, destroyed vehicles. There were oil tank trucks, tractor trailers, lorries, pickup trucks, a public bus, a mini bus, a taxi cab and many private cars destroyed by aerial bombardments and strafing. We found no evidence of military equipment or supplies in the vehicles.
Along the roads, we saw several oil refinery fires and numerous gasoline stations destroyed. One road-repair camp had been bombed on the road to Amman (Jordan). As with the city streets in residential and commercial areas where we witnessed damage, we did not see a single damaged or destroyed military vehicle, tank, armored car, personnel carrier or other military equipment, or evidence of any having been removed.
Basra was probably the hardest-hit city during Desert Storm. There was evidence of weapons that are normally used against military personnel having been deployed in civilian areas of Basra: cluster bombs. Clark saw this evidence and reported:
Small, anti-personnel bombs were alleged to have fallen here (Basra) and we saw what appeared to be one that did not explode imbedded in the rubble. We were shown the shell of a “mother” bomb which carries the small fragmentation bombs.
When he left Iraq in February 1991, Clark gave an overview of the situation:
United States annual military expenditures alone are four times the gross national product of Iraq. The use of highly-sophisticated military technology with mass destructive power against an essentially defenseless civilian population of a poor nation is one of the greatest tragedies of our times.
A few days after Clark left Iraq, an incident occurred that astonished the world. On February 13, a pair of Stealth F-117 bombers dropped two 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs on a concrete building in the Amiryah section of suburban Baghdad. The case-hardened bombs were directed to penetrate the steel reinforced roof and detonate inside. It was a civilian bomb shelter.
The reports of the number of civilians killed in the building — more than half were children — ranged from 400 to more than 1,000. Because the bodies were so badly burned and melted, no one will ever know the exact total.
The U.S. administration first proclaimed that the target was an Iraqi command-and-control post and the dead were Iraqi military personnel. The cameras eventually showed charred bodies of women and children, so the U.S. story had to be revised. The administration then said that the building was a military target in which Saddam Hussein placed civilians to protect the military personnel. Dick Cheney, then the U.S. Secretary of Defense, stated, “Saddam might be resorting to a practice of deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way.”
The U.S. government scrambled to try to explain the massacre of so many people inside a civilian bomb shelter. General Neal stated the government’s case as he said, “From a personal point of view, I’m outraged that civilians might have been placed in harm’s way, and I blame the Iraqi leadership for that.” Unfortunately, many Americans believed Neal’s twisted excuse of blaming the Iraqi leadership for the incineration of hundreds of people by deadly superbombs.
Within a few hours, the truth emerged. The Amiryah bomb shelter was built for civilian defense during the Iran-Iraq War. The engineer who designed it appeared on television and told the world there was no way it could be a military asset.
After the lies were put to rest, it became evident that the U.S. had either mistaken the target as a military venue, or it had deliberately destroyed it knowing it was a bomb shelter. Since February 14, 1991, the subject of the bombing of the Amiryah bomb shelter has been left unspoken in the U.S.
Those inside the bomb shelter died horrific deaths. First, a 2,000-pound bomb crashed through the shelter, creating a massive tunnel in which the second 2,000-pound projectile entered. Then, both exploded, leaving a huge hole. Those who died saw the first bomb and had a few seconds of life left before the second burrowed its way into the shelter and discharged.
Despite the ensuing international outcry about the destruction of the Amiryah shelter, the U.S. did not cut back on the bombing. Actually, the bombing of the Iraqi infrastructure increased. According to Greenpeace in a report called On Impact::
Despite numerous statements of U.S. military leaders that the Iraqi army had been defeated, as well as some confidence that contact between Baghdad and the front in the south had been severed, communications targets, mostly serving civilian functions, continued to be struck and re-struck to the end. If fact, according to Air Force Times, during the final ground phase, “Baghdad was targeted for some of the heaviest bombardments since January 17.”
The cease-fire did not solve all the problems for the civilians of Iraq. Shortly after, George Bush called for the Iraqi people to “take matters into their own hands” in ridding Iraq of its government. For the next few weeks, some Shi’ites in the south, heavily aided and infiltrated by Iranians, wreaked havoc, while certain Kurdish factions started an insurrection in the north of Iraq. There was bloody fighting and at one time, the Shi’ite and Kurdish elements controlled 16 of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Both movements eventually were brought under control by the Iraqi government. Not content with destroying Iraq by bombing it back to a “pre-industrial era,” Bush prompted even more destruction by urging factions within Iraq to overthrow the government. He promised both groups military assistance from the U.S., but none came.
In April 1991, the outside world saw Iraq for the first time since it had been destroyed by U.S. bombs and missiles. The nightmarish pictures started to appear. They showed a country that was bombed so heavily that the most common sites were craters and twisted, melted and devastated structures.
Ramsey Clark made another trip to Iraq to document the devastation. Once there, he noticed an ongoing operation that was meant to terrorize the population:
On our second night there, and several other times, at about 2:30 a.m., U.S. jets flew over the city (Baghdad), deliberately creating an enormous sonic boom that sounded as if the bombing had started again. The next morning, people would describe how their children had awakened in terror.
Clark chronicled the civilian industries that were demolished during the bombing of Iraq:
Twenty minutes outside the city (Baghdad), in Al Taji, we saw the country’s largest frozen meat storage and distribution center; one of two main centers for the entire country, which also included a laboratory for testing meat quality. It had been completely obliterated by the bombing. The center held 14,000 tons of frozen meat. The plant had been bombed three times, at 8:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m., and 8:00 p.m., and workers inside the plant had been killed.
All over Iraq, Clark saw the same mindless destruction. In Babylon, he visited a textile weaving plant that was totally destroyed. The plant was bombed at 3:00 in the afternoon and two women were killed working at their stations. According to the plant manager, Mr. Hassan, the factory was built by an Italian company and the new structure next door, containing no equipment, was untouched.
Dr. Al Qaysi, an Iraqi medical official, put everything in perspective when he stated:
No home remained untouched, no family unharmed, if not through death in the war, through malnutrition, disease, or new-found poverty. This is a return to colonialism. The U.S. is asking for terms like another Treaty of Versailles. Iraq is dependent on the outside world to repair its infrastructure and I fear Iraq will be in a state of permanent human bondage.
The Iraqi Minister of Trade, Mohammed Mahdi Saleh, realized the enormity of the task of trying to rebuild Iraq, particularly with the encompassing trade embargo in place. Despite the U.S. administration maintaining that Iraq was able to import humanitarian goods, there was virtually no way to obtain food, medicine, and parts to repair destroyed machinery. Saleh stated, “If it was possible, the Bush administration would have prevented the air from coming in.”
Playing the genocide card
The Politics of Genocide, an unflinching attack on Western meddling in foreign affairs, challenges the idea that external intervention can be a force for good.
By Tara McCormack | The Spiked Review of Books | August 2010
What does it mean to oppose Western intervention and military campaigns today? In a sense, it appears to be a mainstream position, as the million-strong protests against the Iraq War showed. Anti-war sentiments are not only found amongst certain protest-prone sections of the public; they are also expressed amongst the highest echelons of the political class. For instance, UK prime minister David Cameron recently accused Israel of creating an open-air prison in Gaza, and Lib-Con deputy prime minister Nick Clegg claims to have been against the Iraq War form the outset. Clare Short, who was a key member of the New Labour administration, never tires of denouncing the military intervention in Iraq as a form of neo-imperialism.
However, while a kind of ersatz anti-interventionism and criticism of government propaganda is now mainstream in relation to Iraq, critiquing Western powers’ meddling in other conflicts – such as those in the Former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sudan – invites serious charges, including comparisons with Holocaust denial. These conflicts have become fixed moral signifiers in an age otherwise ridden with moral and political uncertainty. They have come to be understood as simple cases of good vs evil, conflagrations that have sprung up in previously harmonious societies, in which one side, driven by vicious ethnic hatred, attempts to exterminate their fellow citizens. To speak of political root causes or the impact of external intervention here will invite derision and fury – and in particular from those on the left.
In fact, one of the most striking aspects about the Western response to the conflicts in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in particular was the way in which large sections of the left abandoned some core left-wing positions on foreign policy. There was a religious-style conversion to the merits of Western intervention. Erased from memory was the recent history of the West in the developing world (and in the poorer states of Europe): the exploitation, the establishment of murderous ‘friendly’ regimes, the role of the West in creating instability and war. In the 1990s, many on the left claimed that in the post-Cold War era, Western states could be a ‘force for good’ in the world. Demands for ‘humanitarian intervention’ became common; such intervention symbolised for many a new progressive post-national politics. Conflicts were no longer interpreted through a political framework, but through a moral one of victims and aggressors, innocents and ‘genocidaires’.
Certainly no one could accuse Edward Herman and David Peterson, authors of The Politics of Genocide, of being part of the new left that cheers on the humanitarian potential of Western guns and bombs. At times, their book reads like an old-school, left-wing polemic against Western intervention and the way in which the killing of millions by the West is widely ignored or accepted as a necessary evil.
The fundamental point of their book is that all killings are not treated as equal. We might assume that, in an era in which human rights are meant to be triumphant and the rule of law is supposedly being spread by supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Court, all ‘crimes against humanity’ will be judged equally. Yet mass murder committed by the US and its allies tends either not to be regarded as such or to be deemed as necessary for the greater good, as part of the fight against terrorism, the suppression of women, and so on.
Herman and Peterson begin with a discussion of what they term a ‘constructive genocide’: the sanctions inflicted on Iraq during the 1990s. The consequences of these sanctions have remained little discussed, despite later widespread opposition to military intervention. Yet this collective punishment of a nation resulted in the collapse of what had been a more or less developed country and in the deaths of hundreds of thousands due to extremely harsh limits on everything from medical equipment to basic tools.
In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, was asked in a television interview if she thought that the reported deaths of half a million Iraqi children due to sanctions was a price worth paying. She replied that she did indeed think so. And, not content with the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, Albright went on to play a key part in the bombing of Serbia in 1999. In light of the ever-tightening sanctions on Iran by the Obama administration, this should give pause for thought to anyone who thinks that non-military intervention is more ‘humane’.
Herman and Peterson describe other mass killings as ‘benign bloodbaths’ – those committed by Western allies and which are far removed from normal media outrage, like the thousands of Turkish Kurds killed by Turkey during the 1980s and 1990s. While the US, under the Clinton administration, and the UK, under the Tony Blair-led New Labour government, were regularly bombing Iraq during the 1990s to enforce a ‘no-fly’ zone, ostensibly in order to protect Iraq’s Kurdish population, Turkey was engaging in a military campaign against its own Kurdish population. Turkey even regularly bombed the adjoining Kurdish area of Iraq, its military planes taking off from the same airport that British and American planes would take off from to patrol the ‘no fly’ zone in defence of Kurds…
Herman and Peterson also discuss the massacres committed by Indonesia after its occupation of East Timor in 1975. Whilst East Timor became a fashionable humanitarian cause in 1999 and 2000, journalists had largely ignored Western complicity in the arming and installing of General el-Haj Mohammed Suharto as leader of Indonesia as part of US-backed coup in the mid-1960s. Today, some of the key figures in the contemporary human-rights crusading brand of journalism, such as Samantha Power, Roy Gutman and Christiane Amanpour, simply tend to ignore Western-backed violence in their fiery polemics alerting the world to ‘war crimes’ and ‘human rights abuse’. As always, all rights are not equal and whether or not the world will pay attention to your plight depends on your relationship to powerful states.
In a sense, Herman and Peterson’s discussions of Iraq, Turkey, Indonesia and Latin America go over old ground. However, their arguments about Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Darfur threaten some of the most cherished certainties of the post-Cold War left. They argue that the wars in Yugoslavia have been completely misrepresented by the West as a simple tale of evil nationalistic Serbs seeking to exterminate innocent Muslims. And much of what has been accepted as indisputable fact has turned out to be totally fabricated. For example, the death toll has been vastly inflated and Serbs have been wrongly accused of setting up ‘rape camps’.
It is a little-known fact that the biggest single act of ‘ethnic cleansing’ during the Yugoslav civil wars was conducted by Croatian forces (trained by American private military contractors and supported by NATO jets) in 1995, when Croatia expelled the Serbian population of the Krajina region. But Serbs had been so demonised by the Western media by then that little attention was paid to the event other than perhaps to say that they got what they deserved. This was not considered an act of ‘genocide’, nor was it brought up at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Yet the expulsion of 250,000 Serbs from Croatia was, in Herman and Peterson’s terminology, a ‘benign bloodbath’.
The same process of propaganda and misrepresentation occurred in Kosovo in 1999. At least this time there were some vocal critics in the UK against Western intervention and against the way in which the conflict was being presented. Figures in the British Labour Party, such as Tony Benn, Tam Dalyell and Alice Mahon, were very vocal in their arguments against the NATO bombing and against the demonisation of the Serbs. At the time Clare Short, self-professed anti-war heroine during the Iraq invasion, compared her critical colleagues to Nazi appeasers.
As for the 1994 killings in Rwanda, Herman and Peterson suggest these may have been even more misrepresented than the Yugoslav wars. The events in Rwanda have been portrayed as one of the greatest acts of evil in the twentieth century, an event of unimaginable barbarism. The accepted narrative is simple: genocidal Hutus launched a sudden and inexplicable attack on fellow Tutsi citizens, massacring hundreds of thousands until stopped by the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Paul Kagame. Herman and Peterson argue that this turns the real history of the conflict on its head. Kagame and the RPF, trained by American forces, in fact launched an invasion and occupation of Rwanda.
Any kind of evidence that has challenged the established tale has been quashed or dropped. For example, research done by the academics initially sponsored by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTFR) revealed that by far greater numbers were killed in areas controlled by the RPF than in those controlled by government forces. In 1994, a UN investigation and report commissioned by the UN High Commission for Refugees found similar patterns, but was subsequently suppressed. When a former ICTFR investigator brought forward evidence that the infamous assassination of Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana (supposedly a signal for the Hutu attacks to commence) was actually perpetrated by members of the RPF (which would clearly challenge the entire Western presentation of the conflict), chief prosecutor Louise Arbour dismissed his evidence. She argued that it was not within the remit of the ICTFR.
Kagame has gone on to rule Rwanda with an iron fist, killing thousands of Hutu refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and has been a key actor, along with Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, in the destabilisation and looting of the DRC. In his spare time, Kagame hangs out with members of the global elite, such as former US president Bill Clinton, Microsoft-millionaire Bill Gates, and Starbucks-founder Howard Schultz.
The Politics of Genocide is a compact, sharp and unflinching attack on Western aggression, demolishing the propaganda that has structured Western orthodoxies around international conflicts. The only caveat is that Herman and Peterson raise several questions that they do not, in the end, answer. For instance, to the authors the explanation for post-Cold War Western involvement, deception and propaganda is simply ‘business as usual’ – the pursuit of Western interests. But when it comes to Iraq and Rwanda, for instance, it is unclear exactly what interests were at stake for the West.
Herman and Peterson argue that America sponsored Kagame as he was a willing ally, yet Habyarimana was not in the slightest hostile to Western interests. As for Saddam Hussein, he in no way threatened Western interests – quite the opposite, he was a loyal ally. Even his invasion of Kuwait was done with America’s knowledge. Yet Western powers turned Saddam into a pariah and began to stop Iraq from selling its oil.
In order to understand contemporary Western intervention we have to move beyond an assumption that material interests lie at the heart of it and reconsider the realities of the post-Cold War political context.
Tara McCormack is a lecturer in international politics at the University of Leicester. She is author of Critique, Security and Power: The Political Limits to Critical and Emancipatory Approaches to Security, published by Routledge.
Related articles
- Madeleine Albright and Iraq Genocide Memorial Day (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- The Case for a Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy (alethonews.wordpress.com)
The “New” Iraq
By Ghali Hassan | May 4, 2010
Seven years after the illegal invasion of Iraq by the Anglo-American fascist armies, it is clear today that the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Iraqi nation was a premeditated and unprovoked act of naked aggression aimed at expanding U.S.-Israel Zionist power. These barbaric crimes ‘should never be forgotten and never be forgiven’.
“By violating international laws and conventions in 2003 in order to attack a defenceless nation for no reason [other than serving Israel’s Zionist-fascist ideology], George W. Bush [and Tony Blair were] reclaiming those most primal instincts that had led the Mongol barbarians Hulagu and Turko-Tamerlane to destroy Baghdad in 1258 and 1401 respectively. And by going back to the law of the jungle, Bush [and Blair] did not just destroy Baghdad and the whole of Iraq, but [they] also instigated a treacherous plan against the precious legal and institutional heritage that mankind has been laboriously building since the Treaty of Westphalia of October 24, 1648, generally considered the founding document of the nation-state and the first attempt at outlawing the right of might”, writes Tunisian journalist Hmida Ben Romdhane (La Presse de Tunisie, April 11, 2010). Unlike the destruction of Baghdad by the barbarian Mongols, the destruction of the Iraqi society by the West’s most recent militarised religio-fascist alliance of George Bush and Tony Blair is an act of terrorism that will live in infamy.
Unprovoked Aggression
There is no doubt that the barbaric attack on Baghdad in March 2003 will remain one of the most violent acts of terrorism in the history of mankind. According to U.S. officials, “Shock and Awe” was aimed at terrorising the entire Iraqi population and intimidating Iraq’s neighbours, particularly Syria and Iran. After 13 years of genocidal sanctions, that deprived Iraqi children and the population as a whole of essential medical supplies and nutrition, Iraqis are virtually defenceless in the face of overwhelming violence.
It is estimated that the 13-year long U.S.-Britain imposed sanctions – coated with the United Nations despicable colour – caused the death of more than 2 million innocent Iraqi civilians, including the death of more than 600,000 children under the age of 5 years. The sanctions were accurately described as the real weapons of mass destruction (WMD). According to John Mueller and Karl Mueller, the brutal and inhumane sanctions against the Iraqi people have caused far more deaths over time than the combined use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the two world wars (Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999).
Unsatisfied by the enormous atrocity and resilience of the Iraqi people and their government, the U.S. and Britain concocted a pretext (WMD and link to terrorism) to justify an illegal act of aggression to occupy Iraq. After the pretext was exposed as a lie, the U.S. and U.S. accomplices concocted a new pretext to justify the illegal aggression, the West’s “moral responsibility” and concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people. The so-called “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P – not applicable to the Palestinians – was the same concept used by the German Nazis to justify Nazi terror. The difference was that the Nazis were allegedly “protecting ethnic Germans” in Poland and Russia.
Not since the Fascist army of Adolf Hitler invaded and occupied parts of Europe has the world witnessed such barbaric violence and destruction as that being perpetrated by the Anglo-American fascist armies. [Editor notes that the author seems to be forgetting the barbaric atrocities committed by the European and US powers in Malaya, Kenya, Korea, Algeria, Vietnam etc…] For most Iraqis today, living under U.S. military Occupation is no less brutal than Poles or Russians were living under the brutal Nazi occupation that most Westerners considered barbaric.
Prior to the invasion, Iraq was subjected to a massive and vicious propaganda campaign. The country was portrayed as a pariah state by mainstream-Zionist media and their despicable journalists distorting facts and promoting aggression. Iraq’s late president Saddam Hussein was demonised and used as a moral compass to justify Anglo-American aggression and war crimes.
Western opportunists and America’s apologists who pretended to be “against” the Anglo-American aggression and hide behind the “No War for Oil” Zionist deception have long fallen in line. The so-called “liberal class” and “progressives” have often described the murderous Occupation as a “failure” and “incompetence”, praised the U.S.-staged fraudulent elections and attacked the legitimate Iraqi Resistance as “violent insurgency” and “bigoted Sunnis”. Their criticism of the Occupation and U.S. imperialism has always been an intellectual cowardice. If the U.S. failed to impose its Zionist-imperialist agenda on Iraq, credit must go to the Iraqi Resistance. It shatters the myth of invincibility of the ‘world’s only superpower’.
From time to time the “liberal class” and “progressives” criticise Barack Obama’s policies and calling him ‘worse than Bush’, as if Obama has the power to make changes to U.S. criminal policies. The motive is to manipulate the public and deflect attention away from the anti-Muslim Zionist ruling class that control the centres of power and finance in America. We all know that Obama has no real power to make changes. He is just another product, a tool, of the Zionist ruling class. Indeed, the Obama Administration is the most Zionist administration in U.S. history.
After seven years of hibernation, the “liberal class” and “progressives”, including Israel’s apologists are back to show their loyalty (backflipping), attacking Iran and condemning Iran’s alleged “rigged” elections. It is important to remember that Iran doesn’t pose a threat to any nation, but Israel with its fascist ideology and an arsenal of nuclear weapon poses a threat not only to entire region but to the world. The same Zionist propaganda that led to the aggression against Iraq is being recycled.
The Zionists’ (the architects of the war) murderous strategy in Iraq was to destroy the fabric of the Iraqi society, and turn Iraq into a colonial dictatorship subservient to U.S.-Israel Zionist power. There was no “failure” or “incompetence” on the part of the U.S. government, as suggested by the loyal “opposition”. The destruction of Iraq was planned at least two years before the aggression in 2003. It was driven by the neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologues (in lay terms, Zion-fascists) with strong ties to Israel’s fascist regime. “They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a U.S. war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-U.S. puppet regime”, writes American sociologist James Petras.
As a result of the illegal invasion and seven years of murderous Occupation, an estimated 1.5 million defenceless Iraqi civilians, mostly women, children and young men, have been murdered, with the majority by the invading Anglo-American armies. It is the most premeditated and barbaric mass murder of innocent civilians in the history of human civilisation. The “new” Iraq is a nation of orphans and widows.
Furthermore, many American officials and international organisations have quietly acknowledged that the destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage was deliberate and premeditated. It was designed to remove Iraq’s history as the birthplace of civilisation. Even Adolf Hitler never thought of committing such heinous crimes during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Priceless cultural artefacts may have been stolen by Nazi officials but never destroyed. In Iraq, Museums and galleries holding the history of world civilisation were trashed and looted. Libraries were ransacked and books were burned en masse. It was all performed under the watchful eyes of the invading armies. As James Petras noted: “[T]he destruction of the scientific, academic, cultural and legal foundations of an independent state means increasing reliance on the Western (and Chinese) multinational corporations and their technical infrastructure – facilitating imperial economic penetration and exploitation”.
In the “new” Iraq, Iraqis are living in a climate of fear and terror today. From the outset, the Occupation fomented violence in order to destroy the Iraqi society. Before the invasion, Iraqis lived side-by-side in every city and town regardless of ethno-religious backgrounds. They accommodated intermarriage and live in a cultural and mosaic society. To encourage anarchy and insecurity, the occupying army disbanded the Iraqi Army, police and security forces and replaced them with Kurdish warlords, political gangsters, imported death squads, and religious militias. “The ‘war of all against all’ served the interests of the U.S. Occupation forces”, writes James Petras. From the outset of the Occupation, the U.S. sought to control Iraq through violence and the colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ by handing out political positions to expatriates along strictly ethno-religious lines. The so-called “political process” was designed to achieve this division of Iraq.
By propping up corrupt criminals, religious fundamentalists and terrorists who were parachuted into Iraq by the invading armies, the American and to a lesser extent the British governments were able to hide behind a facade of corrupt expatriate stooges and blaming them for the Occupation-generated violence and crimes. Corruption is one of the most effective colonial tools, brought into Iraq to deflect attention away from the Occupation. Transparency International has ranked (the ‘new’) Iraq as the fourth most-corrupt nation in the world in its annual survey. Indeed, the creation of a corrupt and illegitimate puppet government inside the Occupation Headquarters (known as the ‘Green Zone’) aimed at transforming Iraq into a “failed state” that needs Western interference and “help”.
Expatriate stooges were appointed and encouraged to compete against each other for the title of Iraq’s “strongman”. The more violent and corrupt the “strongman” the more accepted by the U.S. administration. Hundreds of young men are disappearing every month (if not every week) into “secret” prisons, where they are routinely tortured, raped, humiliated and many of them later murdered. Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) were the first to blame the puppet government for crimes committed under the radar screen of the occupying forces while they remain silent when Iraqis are tortured, raped and massacred by U.S.-British invading armies. Both, AI and HRW reports on Iraq were consciously prepared to exonerate the occupying armies and depict Iraq as a “sovereign” nation marred by violence and violation of human right law.
Violence will continue to engulf Iraq’s major cities; just enough to justify the ongoing murderous Occupation. This serves U.S.-Israel Zionist interests and diverts public attention away from the Occupation. Furthermore, to enforce colonial divisions and facilitate the liquidation of anti-Occupation Resistance leaders, the U.S. occupying army used Nazi-like methods to separate populations along ethno-religious lines by erecting walls around neighbourhoods in Baghdad and other cities. For example, the Capital Baghdad with its marked ghettoes and perpetual violence is a mirror image of Warsaw under Nazi occupation under wretched living conditions.
Deterioration of Living Conditions
Since 2003, living conditions in Iraq continue to deteriorate. Once a middle-class nation, Iraq has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution. In the “new” Iraq, nearly half the population live in extreme poverty. A report by the British charity organisation, Oxfam, shows that 43 percent of Iraqis live in absolute poverty and some 8 to 10 million Iraqis need emergency aid. The country is still under the genocidal sanctions. The official unemployment rate is more than 50 percent of the Iraqi active population. The illegitimate puppet government’s own statistics revealed that 45 percent of Iraqis live in absolute poverty lacking the necessities to survive. Nearly 62 percent (15.8 million) of Iraqis ‘completely depend’ on the food rationing system to survive from month to month. The system was created by President Saddam Hussein to confront the genocidal sanctions and avert mass starvation. Despite the reduction in the number of food and non-food items by the illegitimate puppet government, many Iraqis still depend on the system to survive.
After seven years of murderous Occupation and deteriorating living conditions, Iraq is suffering the worst refugee crisis in history. “Iraq would be the world’s second-worst crisis, as the report points out, second only to Afghanistan, and ahead of Sudan. So the strain on Iraq’s neighbours, particularly Jordan and Syria, and to a lesser extent on Lebanon is immense”, said Jessica Mathews, President of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a U.S. propaganda think-tank known for its pro-Israel Zionist bias. At least 2.7 million Iraqis are internally displaced (by violence) and living in conditions of extreme poverty, enduring constant attacks and eviction from temporary shelters. An estimated 3 million Iraqis, with the means to do so, have fled Iraq into exile in neighbouring countries. Only a small number of Iraqi refugees were allowed into those Western nations who pretend to have “liberated” Iraq. The majority of Iraqi refugees have found a safe haven in Syria and Jordan. Most of Iraqi refugees are in ‘legal limbo’, unable to work and with no hope of returning to their country. The primary causes for Iraqi refugees’ flight are violence, lack of access to water, sanitation, electricity, health care and education.
Targeting Iraq’s Education
Iraq’s education, once the best in the region, has been the target of the Occupation. Iraq’s education has been dismantled by the invading armies and their collaborators. The Iraqi curriculum has been changed to distort history and depicts the U.S. and Israel as democratic and civilised societies by covering up their war crimes, flagrant violations of international law, human rights, violent ideology, corruption, growing inequalities, gross injustices and racist policies at home and abroad. It is estimated that only 30 percent of the 3.5 million of school age were attending schools. The majority of the dropouts are female. According to a report by UNESCO, school attendance prior to the Anglo-American aggression was nearly 100 percent. The crisis is exacerbated by the increase number of orphaned children. There are at least 5 million Iraqi orphans, many of them live on the streets.
Iraqi universities and colleges have been besieged by U.S.-created extremists and criminals. Tens of thousands of prominent Iraqis, including academics, doctors, teachers and political personalities have been murdered in cold blood in a U.S-Israel orchestrated assassination campaign dubbed “De-Ba’athification”. Many had to leave Iraq for safety reasons, which contributed to brain drain.
The planned campaign was designed not only to kill Iraq as a nation by destroying Iraq’s human resources and independence, but also to remove the base of the Iraqi Resistance to the Occupation. Professional Iraqis who survived the murderous campaign have left the country, leaving an education system in a state of collapse. Students are being graduated en masse without the necessary professional knowledge, especially those who work in the health care services. “There is really a huge difference between now and the times of Saddam Hussein, when medical graduates left college with competence to treat any patient”, said Professor Fua’ad Abdel-Razak of Baghdad university (IRIN, 16 May, 2007). Before the invasion, education and healthcare with modern health facilities were universal.
Deterioration of Iraq’s Healthcare
Iraq’s healthcare system has deteriorated at an alarming rate with a devastating impact on the health of the Iraqi people. The deterioration of the healthcare services has seen a marked increase in mortality. According to UNICEF, under the Occupation, Iraqi children are now dying faster than before invasion. One in four children under five years of age is chronically malnourished. One in eight Iraqi children die before the age of five, and millions of Iraqi children are affected by post traumatic disorder. “Healthcare in Iraq since 2003 is worse than during the sanctions. At that time we had little equipment and medicine, but in the last three years we have lost almost all the specialists”, said Dr Majeed al-Naomi in a Baghdad clinic. It is estimated that at least, 25 percent of Iraq’s 18,000 physicians had left the country since the invasion in 2003 which is devastating the healthcare system.
Furthermore, Thousands of tons of white phosphorous shells, ‘depleted’ uranium (DU), napalm, cluster bombs, and neutron bombs were dropped on Iraqi population centres, including Baghdad Basrah and Fallujah. The Anglo-American armies used more than 1700 tons of DU during the 2003 invasion on top of more than 320 tons of DU used in 1991 attacks on Iraq. In the natural environment, these weapons’ particles have extremely long half-lives and there is strong evidence of their detrimental effects on the health of the Iraqi people.
Iraqi officials are reporting incidences of cancer, deformed babies and other health problems have risen sharply since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Many suspect the causes are contamination from weapons used in years of Anglo-American criminal wars and unchecked pollution. In Fallujah, Iraqi children are suffering from brain damage, deformity and cancer. An Iraqi doctor said that the rate of deformity and cancer among children in Fallujah is extremely high when compared with the rate of cancer and deformity of that in 2003. A spike in the number of births of stillborn, deformed and paralyzed babies there has alarmed doctors. Fallujah was the target of two massive assaults by the U.S. military. In Basra, Doctor Jawad al-Ali said: “We have seen new kinds of cancer that were not recorded in Iraq before the 2003 war, types of fibrous (soft tissue) cancer and bone cancer. These refer clearly to radiation as a cause.” In Basra, Leukaemia cases were up by 600 percent since 1990.
Access to clean water remains inadequate in many parts of the Iraq. According to the World Bank survey, 87.5 percent of the population have no adequate water supply, and 20 percent proper sewage disposal. In many parts of Iraq, including Baghdad and Basra, the water, soil and air are contaminated with radio-active particles caused by DU shells without adequate healthcare services the situation is rapidly worsening for the most vulnerable Iraqis, including women and children.
The Status of women
According to UNICEF, before the Anglo-American invasion, “Rarely do women in the Arab world enjoy as much power and support as they do in Iraq”. After seven years of U.S. Occupation, the status of Iraqi women has deteriorated beyond belief. The U.S.-imposed constitution has stripped Iraqi women of all the civil and basic rights that they enjoyed before the invasion and condemns them to statutory second-class citizens. Unemployment among Iraqi women is nearly 80 percent. A report by the Organisation for Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) released on the fourth anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion stated that: “women of Iraq have gradually lost most of their 20th century gains and privileges in the last 4 years of occupation”. You would think European Islamophobes who pretend to support Muslim womens’ “liberation” in Europe would be concerned about Iraqi womens’ rights under Occupation. Instead, they are engaged in a fascist campaign of anti-Muslim hatred to justify Western war on Muslims.
According to Professor Maha Sabria of Al-Nahrain University in Baghdad, “The status of women here is linked to the general situation. The violation of women’s rights was part of the violation of the rights of all Iraqis. […] At the same time women do not have freedom of movement because of the deteriorated security conditions and because of abductions of women and children by criminal gangs”. (Inter Press Service, 12 March 2010).
Furthermore, as a result of the U.S. Occupation and its violence, there are 2.5 million widows in Iraq, the highest in the world. According to the United Nations, in 2006, 90 to 100 women were widowed each day by the Occupation and its collaborators. Many of these widows do not know what happened to their spouses and most of them receive no assistance from the puppet government.
Throughout Iraq, women are living in fear of their lives and dignity. Kidnapping and rape are the common crimes under the Occupation. Over 10,000 women have suffered detention at the hands of U.S. forces and their Iraqi collaborators. The majority of detainees remain without charges. They are tortured and abused on regular basis. (See my: Iraq: A cluster of torture prisons, Online Journal, March 08, 2006). The situation for Iraqi women reflects the country’s situation under U.S. military Occupation.
Elections and Colonial Dictatorship
The recent U.S.-staged illegitimate elections were conducted in an atmosphere of terror and execution perpetrated by the Occupation forces and their collaborators. The final outcome of fraudulent elections was ensured. Like the 2005 elections, the 2010 elections were widely regarded, both in Iraq and outside Iraq, as rigged and fraudulent elections. The elections designed to legitimise the Occupation and validate a corrupt U.S.-imposed colonial dictatorship led by U.S. stooges. With a puppet government in place, the U.S. can claim that Iraq is sovereign and that U.S. Occupation of Iraq is legitimate (See my: Iraq’s Fraudulent Elections, New Matilda, January 19, 2005; Iraq: A Colonial Dictatorship, Global Research, April 29, 2005).
Unlike Iran’s recent free elections that have been condemned as “rigged” by the Zionist media and Western opportunists, Iraq’s fraudulent elections – under murderous foreign military Occupation – were promoted and praised as “democratic”. While Iyad Allawi, the U.S.-created thug claimed “victory”, prolonged post-elections’ wrangling is the norm. He has called for the privatisation of Iraq’s industries and Iraq’s oil and gas resources. Before he was parachuted into Iraq, Allawi was a Western-paid terrorist based in Europe. He still is a paid terrorist. In Iraq, Allawi and his associates were involved in terrorism, including the bombing of buses used by schoolchildren. Whatever, there is no evidence that a puppet government will demand an end to the Occupation. Meanwhile, Nori al-Maliki, the Iranian quisling has not given up his chance to continue serving U.S. and Iran interests from his office in the ‘Green Zone’.
Meanwhile, Obama’s “commitment” to troops’ withdrawal by the end of 2011 is flawed. It is a propaganda designed to manipulate the public and promote the perception that Iraq is a free and sovereign nation. The Occupation continues, but it is “invisible occupation”, as Priya Satia of Stanford University rightly called it. “In reality, most of the ‘withdrawing’ forces are merely relocating to forward operating bases where they appear to be hunkering down for a long entr’acte [pause] offstage in expensive, built-to-last [military bases]” (Financial Times, July 01, 2009). “But Iraqis are too shrewd to fall for invisible occupation again: indeed they never fall for it the first time … in 1932”, added Satia. Moreover, the so-called “Status of Forces Agreement” between the U.S. military and the puppet government is a fraud, because it was never ratified by the Iraqi people. It is a deal between an occupier and a puppet government.
American military bases are being built (against the wishes of the Iraqi people) to enforce a permanent colonial occupation and to serve U.S.-Israel Zionist interests… There are nearly 300 U.S. military bases in Iraq; many of them are the size of small towns. American advisors (at least 1,400 CIA agents) will remain stationed in the largest embassy in the world in the centre of Baghdad as a symbol of U.S. imperialism. In addition, there are at least 100,000 mercenaries (‘private war contractors’) fanning violence throughout Iraq.
Finally, the impacts of the murderous Occupation on the lives of the Iraqi people are reflected in numerous Western polls that revealed a significant majority of Iraqis despise the presence of U.S. troops and mercenaries and want an end to the murderous Occupation. Hence, without armed resistance, it is unlikely the U.S. will end its illegal colonial Occupation of Iraq. The legitimate Iraqi Resistance to the Occupation will continue until Iraq is liberated.
The premeditated and deliberate destruction of Iraq in pursuit of U.S.-Israel Zionist expansion constitutes a war of aggression that resulted in genocide. The ultimate responsibility of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Anglo-American fascist armies in Iraq rests with those who deliberately planned and executed an act of unprovoked aggression. George Bush, Tony Blair and their accomplices are guilty of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Their crimes are reminiscent of the crimes committed by Nazi leaders. In civilised societies they would be hanged for their crimes.
The Iraqi people have the right to live in a sovereign nation free of repression, torture and terrorism; to enjoy justice and respect for human rights, and prosperity. The only condition to build a new Iraq for all Iraqis, proud of its history and Arab identity, is the liberation of the Iraqi people from U.S. colonial Occupation.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.
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Electronic Intifada and the mudkicker
By M. Idrees | Pulse Media | May 1, 2010
The Electronic Intifada has on its front page a ludicrous, factually challenged and logically flawed attack on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s work — work that has been pivotal in shifting the debate on US Middle East policy. It is not clear to me what EI was hoping to achieve with this self-defeating move. But I don’t blame the author of the article — the fellow is clueless, he has cobbled together his screed from arguments and quotes randomly lifted from Noam Chomsky’s writings — I blame EI’s political and editorial judgment. At a time when Israeli colonization is intensifying, with the land in the grip of a neo-Fascist government, one’s priorities must be seriously upside down to spend precious time impugning the invaluable work of allies. It appears for some supporters of Palestine the need to feel self-righteous takes precedence over the imperative to be effective. Now, it is beneath me to respond to someone who freely purloins others’ work, misuses sources, and constructs a slipshod argument. But I’ll give two illustrative examples of the kind of deliberate distortions that keep resurfacing in these ideological assaults on M & W (in both cases the specific claims have been ‘borrowed’ from Chomsky):
Chomsky has long maintained that the war in Iraq was for oil. He always produces the same evidence to support his case. A state department document from 1945, a quote from Zbigniew Brzezinski and another from George Kennan. Chomsky argues that Middle East oil is ‘a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ (State Department), and anyone who controls Iraq’s vast oil reserves gains ‘critical leverage’ (Brzezinski), indeed ‘veto power’ (Kennan), over competitors. All of this is indisputable: the United States would no doubt like to control Iraqi oil; it recognizes the ‘critical leverage’ the control affords it; and the critical leverage no doubt would grant it ‘veto power’. Now here is the problem: The State department document Chomsky cites is about Saudi Arabia, not Iraq. And it recommends that, precisely because Saudi oil is so important, US must always maintain friendly relations with the kingdom. Also, it does not follow that regime change is the only means to achieve these goals. Indeed, all of these claims have been just as true the past half century, but they did not necessitate war. The US has long preferred shoring up authoritarian regimes which could ensure its dominance and maintain a stable flow of oil.
Secondly, The Iraqi government was not withholding its oil; it was the US-led sanctions that were preventing it from reaching the markets. There is no evidence that Iraq was unwilling to cede control of its oil to the United States. Indeed, in the months leading up to war Saddam Hussein’s government made several attempts to stave off war by offering the United States exclusive concessions to its oil reserves. If oil was indeed the motivation, then one would expect plentiful evidence of oil interests influencing policy, or at least in selling the war. Chomsky offers none. Nor does he inform readers that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man whose words he cites as evidence of Iraq as a ‘resource war’, was one of its most vocal opponents. Bzrezinski has called the war ‘a historic, strategic, and moral calamity…driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris’.
In his peculiar reading of Brzezinski, Chomsky ascribes him a view that is an inversion of what he actually says. Brzezinski, who saw the invasion as an unnecessary war by the pro-Israel neoconservatives, avers:
American and Israeli interests in the region are not entirely congruent. America has major strategic and economic interests in the Middle East that are dictated by the region’s vast energy supplies. Not only does America benefit economically from the relatively low costs of Middle Eastern oil, but America’s security role in the region gives it indirect but politically critical leverage on the European and Asian economies that are also dependent on energy exports from the region. Hence good relations with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates… is in the U.S. national interest. From Israel’s standpoint, however, the resulting American-Arab ties are disadvantageous: they not only limit the degree to which the United States is prepared to back Israel’s territorial aspirations, they also stimulate American sensitivity to Arab grievances against Israel. (my emphasis)
Since the EI scrivener reproduces Chomsky’s exact interpretation of the ‘critical leverage’ quote along with Kennan’s on ‘veto power’, it is clear that he hasn’t even bothered reading the original sources. The same is true of his other comment about Israel serving as an offshore base for the US (which he mistakenly attributes to Chomsky, who is in fact quoting Alexander Haig). What this fellow doesn’t know is that the comment was uttered in a certain context: i.e., Haig’s bureaucratic struggle against Reagan (whom he saw as an intellectual inferior) in which he was keen to enlist Israel lobby support. (For more on this, see Patrick Tyler’s excellent A World of Trouble or my review of it). So long as the de-contextualized quotes fit preconceived notions, who cares what was actually said or done?
The French sociologist Emile Durkheim called this the ‘ideological method’: the use of ‘notions to govern the collation of facts, rather than deriving notions from them’. In the a-historical writings of these analysts-on-the-cheap, one frequently finds that two and two add up to yield twenty-two. If US support for Israel and its interests in the region’s oil have remained constant over the years, it must mean the two are complementary. They aren’t. As I explained elsewhere:
United States Middle East policy has been defined since World War II by the tension between two competing concerns: the strategic interests which require good relations with Arab-Muslim states, and domestic political imperatives which demand unquestioning allegiance to Israel. That the US interest in the region’s energy resources has remained consistent, as well as its support for Israel, leads some to conclude that somehow the two are complementary. They aren’t. US President Harry S. Truman recognized the state of Israel the day of its founding over the strenuous objections of his State Department in order to court the Jewish vote and, more significantly, Jewish money for his re-election campaign. Every president since — with the exception of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush, who saw no cause to feign balance — has sought to address this tension with attempts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. All these efforts have so far foundered. A study of US policy in the region over the decades, then, is inevitably a study of the causes of these failures [among which the Israel lobby looms largest].
It is not clear to me why The Electronic Intifada would undermine years of valuable work by giving platform to this discreditable piece of charlatanry. It has certainly made me reconsider any future association with the publication. We are at a juncture that calls for political maturity, to make the most of the openings recently created. This type of reactionary posturing and myopic absolutism merely serves as an alibi for inaction.
Related article
- Chomsky Acknowledges the Neocons as the Dominant Force in Pushing for Iraq War (alethonews.wordpress.com)
When will Israel attack the USA – again?
By Jeff Gates – 30 April 2010
Israel has long been waging war on the US by way of deception. To date, its operatives have worked from the shadows, hoping not to be detected. Their duplicity typically includes the displacement of facts with what the American public can be deceived to believe.
Thus, the need to create a widely held belief around Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi ties to Al-Qaeda, Iraqi meetings in Prague, Iraqi mobile biological weapons laboratories and Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger. Though all five “facts” were false, only the last claim was conceded as phony prior to inducing our invasion of Iraq.
There lies our national security challenge as the groundwork is being laid for another 911.
The same fact-displacing modus operandi is again at work. In the parlance of national security analysts, psy-ops specialists are “preparing the mind” to accept another generally accepted truth at odds with the facts. This time the objective is Iran. Or Pakistan.
Except that this time national security is shining a bright light in the shadows where such operations are launched.
The displacement process
As a reasoning species, we depend on rationality to stay alive and thrive. That’s why the displacement of facts requires preparation. First, the public’s shared field of consciousness is flooded with thoughts and impressions to ease the displacement process.
A decade before the thematic Clash of Civilizations was used as a rationale to invade a nation that played no role in 911, Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington published this thesis in Foreign Affairs, a publication widely read by opinion-makers. The Clash premise first appeared in the writings of Bernard Lewis, a Jewish-Zionist academic at Princeton.
By the time Huntington’s book with that title appeared in 1996, 100 organizations were prepared to promote it. As that process gained momentum, the Cold War consensus was replaced by a new generally accepted truth: the Global War on Terrorism. The widespread embrace of that theme was catalyzed in September 2001 by a mass murder on US soil.
Such a seamless segue from one generally accepted truth to another requires both mental preparation and an emotionally wrenching event. In combination, those two influences create an ideal framework for explaining to ourselves what we now know was a pre-staged storyline. A myth need not be true; it need only be plausible – and only temporarily so.
Prompted by false intelligence fixed around a predetermined goal, The Clash emerged as the latest generally accepted truth. With the rebranding of Saddam Hussein, a former US ally, as a plausible Evil Doer, the stage was set. As the war began, the term “Islamo-fascist” crept into the rhetoric to reinforce the theme that a new enemy had emerged – by consensus.
Anyone not outraged at this mental and emotional manipulation is ill informed about the common source of this ongoing deceit. In the information age, this is how wars are catalyzed. And how treason is committed in plain sight and, to date, with legal impunity.
The next provocation
With chilling consistency, the myth makers responsible for this latest corruption of US intelligence have proven adept at inducing serial conflicts that hollowed out our economy, damaged our credibility and undermined our faith in our own government.
There was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, the rationale that took us to war in Vietnam. Israel was not endangered in 1967 when it began the Six-Day war. Phony intelligence rationalized a massive land grab guaranteed to provoke antagonisms that undermined our security.
In rationalizing the war in Iraq, who deceived us? Who had the means, motive and opportunity? Are our minds again being prepared to wage yet another war that is not in our interest? Are we again being subjected to a seductive psy-ops as a prelude to war, awaiting only the emotional catalyst of another mass murder?
The mental threads have been laid. For example, in March 2005, author Jerome Corsi published Atomic Iran, urging that either the US or Israel kill the “mad mullahs” of Iran.
In July 2006, Corsi released Minuteman. Citing the president’s “failed immigration policy”, this Israeli asset claimed that Iran-supported terrorists are “invading from Mexico” to stage another 911. “We have definitive proof that we have Hezbollah – the terrorist group that Israel is fighting today – sleeper cells that are here.”
This prepare-the-minds publication appeared two weeks after Israel invaded Lebanon to combat “Hezbollah terrorists”. Where was the book launched? If you answered Ground Zero, the 911 site in Manhattan, you understand how psy-ops experts deploy the power of association to displace facts with fictions.
Such “associative” duplicity can only succeed in plain sight. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer broadcasts from “The Situation Room” with its White House-associative branding. What “the most trusted name in news” fails to tell you is that Blitzer worked 17 years for The Jerusalem Post and authored a sympathetic book on Israeli master spy Jonathan Pollard.
Treason in plain sight
The mental preparation is well advanced. The missing ingredient is another mass murder. Strongly-provoked emotions are critical when staging psy-ops designed to displace facts with what “the mark” can be deceived to believe. Plus, of course, it helps to muster some evidence that plausibly links the attack to Iran or Pakistan. That will suffice.
Or perhaps not. This time around, those who took an oath to defend this nation from all enemies – both foreign and domestic – may well have better tools to do their job.
There is but one possible source able to sustain such operations with impunity inside the US. Only one nation has the requisite intelligence capabilities to operate from within our government in plain sight yet non-transparently.
As yet, few dare speak its name. Instead, four-fifths of those in “our” Congress recently proclaimed themselves loyal to a foreign nation and insisted that our commander-in-chief maintain an “unbreakable bond” with what the facts confirm is an enemy within.
Will the US again be attacked? If so, will we focus our forces on the real enemy? Our veterans’ community is 27 million strong. Let your voice be heard. Our nation is at stake.
Chilling memories of US mass murder
By Linda S. Heard | Online Journal | February 17, 2010
February 13 marked 19 years since the US bombing of Baghdad’s two-storey Al Amiriya bomb shelter when 480 civilians were literally incinerated by two American 2,000 pound laser-guided “smart bombs,” designed to penetrate multiple layers of concrete. Most of the victims were Iraqi, but there were also a number of Syrians, Jordanians, Palestinians and Egyptians who were consumed by the blasts.
It was 4:30 in the morning on February 13, 1991, when the pilots of two stealth bombers released their deadly cargo. Until then, the women, children and elderly inside had felt they were safe in the purpose-built facility designed to protect against nuclear attack — and equipped with bunk beds, televisions, bathrooms, kitchens and a clinic. Their spirits were high after celebrating Eid Al Fitr the previous evening, but some were worried about fathers, brothers and husbands who had remained in their homes to ensure that there was enough room in the shelter for their loved ones.
In the event, their own lives were tragically cut short. Those sheltering on the upper floor were burnt to death; in some instances their silhouettes — carbonised by high temperatures — were eerily seared onto the walls, including that of a woman clutching onto her baby. Most of those in the lower hall were killed by boiling water that gushed from the shelter’s two enormous water tanks following the impact of the bombs.
Only 14 survived, but they could hardly be considered the lucky ones since the majority sustained terrible injuries from the blasts. Rescuers who rushed to the scene were frustrated by a lack of electricity to power their equipment and a thick steel door that was so hot it was glowing. All they could do was listen to the screams and the cries of the dying.
The US government initially claimed that it had received intelligence reports that the bunker was not a civilian shelter, but one of Saddam Hussain’s military command centres.
However, the US Department of Defence later admitted that they knew the facility had previously been used for civil defence purposes. No evidence that the site had been used by the military was ever found, but that didn’t deter the White House from accusing Saddam of using “select civilians” as a cover for the facility’s true mission. Like many other US accusations this turned out to be untrue.
Today, Al Amiriya shelter stands as a monument to the dead; its walls adorned with photographs of victims, commemoratory brass plaques, prayers and flowers. Visitors who must steel their emotions before entering often emerge traumatised. Writing about the experience Na’eem Jeenah relates: “A feeling of revulsion and disgust towards these creatures we call human beings and for the ease with which we allow ourselves to become less than human.”
Ebrahim Alloush says anyone with “one-tenth of a heart and one percent of a conscience will shake with rage and anguish as they try to hold back the tears.”
Outside Iraq and the Middle East, the story of Al Amiriya was soon forgotten as the world celebrated St Valentine’s Day just hours after the attack. Now, a young Moroccan-born French filmmaker based in Dubai is determined to keep alive the memories of those who died such a terrible death.
Fervent hope
For her first short film, Faces of Wrath, that focused on the horrors in Gaza, Siham Jouhari received an award from Al Jazeera’s fifth International Documentary Film Festival 2009 in the category ‘New Horizon.’ It is her fervent hope that her second — and much more ambitious — film, Al Amiraya: The Shelter, will be completed in time to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Al Amiriya tragedy.
The script is a simple, uncomplicated yet poignant account of real people who lost those they cared for most, such as Abu Ali and his wife Saoussan who were robbed of their four children. It also recounts the story of a taxi driver Yousuf who lost his entire family, save one son, and Ahmad, a young man in love, whose burns were so severe that he had to be sent abroad for treatment, but who never stops searching for his beautiful childhood sweetheart Bouchra.
We will never know what extraordinary accomplishments these ordinary people could have achieved had they been allowed to continue with their lives, but they deserve to be acknowledged and remembered — firstly, as a reminder to mankind to never again sink to such depths and, secondly, to honour their memories and the memories of all the innocent victims of Iraq.
For some, Al Amiraya: the Shelter may be hard to watch, but its essence is one of hope and courage. Those of us who are appalled at the callous way big powers write-off innocent deaths as “collateral damage” can only wish Jouhari well with her respectful and loving mission to ensure that there’s one American valentine signed in blood that we must never ever forget.
Linda S. Heard is a British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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