Distant Voices Read online

  February 15, 1991

  NEW AGE IMPERIALISM

  I NEVER MET Bobby Muller during his time in Vietnam. I first saw him at the Republican Party convention in 1972. From the floor, his booming eloquence reached the candidate for president, Richard Nixon, over the cat-calls of the Nixon faithful. He described Nixon accurately as a liar and the perpetrator of an unnecessary and atrocious war. For that, he and other disabled Vietnam veterans were thrown out, in their wheelchairs.

  Five years later I saw him again, out in the sun on the steps of City Hall, New York. It was Memorial Day, the day America remembers its ‘foreign wars’. There were flags and medals and dignitaries; then former Lieutenant Robert O. Muller of the US Marines, a much decorated American hero of the kind Ronald Reagan and John Wayne never were, whose legacy of that ‘unnecessary and atrocious war’ was never to walk again, took the microphone and caused even the construction site beyond the crowd to fall silent.

  He spoke about the killing of Vietnamese civilians. He described how half of those who had carried America’s battle colours were now unemployed or beset by alcohol and drugs; and he said that as many Americans who had died in the war had since taken their own lives. Finally, he proposed that such an adventure should never happen again. ‘Wake up, America!’ he said and wheeled himself away.41

  Bobby Muller and his comrades founded the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation in 1976 and have devoted themselves to preventing a repeat of their war. They have travelled frequently to Indo-China, to promote reconciliation with a people who remain fixed in America’s demonology. They have initiated and sustained projects for Asian children orphaned and handicapped by the war, and for the victims of US foreign policy in Central America. At home, they have financed a curriculum for schools and colleges on the Vietnam War, seeking to end the ‘historical amnesia’ that has allowed the same gang in Washington to prosecute ‘other Vietnams’ in Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and now in the Middle East.

  They are only too aware of the enormity of the task they have set themselves. When Bobby Muller was invited to the White House one Veterans Day, he heard Ronald Reagan mention every American war since 1776 – except Vietnam. As Reagan was leaving, he found his way blocked by Bobby Muller’s wheelchair. ‘I said to him, “Mr President, when are you going to listen to us?” His reply was unbelievable. He said, “Bob, the trouble with Vietnam was that we never let you guys fight the war the way you could have done, so we denied you the victory all the other veterans enjoyed. It won’t happen like that again, Bob . . .”’42

  ‘Victory’ in the Gulf will no doubt remove the canker of Vietnam from the American establishment – Hollywood has almost completed its first Gulf movie. At the same time America’s ‘historical amnesia’ will deepen, the obsolescence of truth will quicken and the mendacity of state propaganda will be transmuted into history for the majority. The Gulf War will be promoted as a ‘noble cause’ triumphant; and this will justify ‘other Gulfs’ and form the basis for the ‘new world order’.

  I mention Bobby Muller because he is coming to London this week and because he represents those whom Martha Gellhorn once described as ‘that life-saving minority of Americans who judge their government in moral terms, who are the people with a wakeful conscience and can be counted on . . . they are always there’.43 They are not a political grouping – the left died long ago in the United States – and those like Richard Falk, Noam Chomsky, Bobby Muller and others are now classified as ‘dissidents’. Certainly, their notions of decency, of democracy as more than an exchange of power between elites, have long been manipulated by fundamentalists whose belligerent sense of moral superiority, not to say paranoia, spawned the fatuous term ‘anti-American’.

  I have known and admired many of them: from freedom riders who braved the segregated South, to Bobby Muller and his heretics who have analysed the militarism that demands more than half of every tax dollar. These Americans believe that their Government ought to behave abroad according to the democracy its leaders claim for it at home. They reject the divine right of intervention that is the essence of the American empire, from the Monroe Doctrine, to Vietnam, to the Gulf. Their warnings, therefore, are critical today.

  These warnings – paraphrased here – are as follows: the ‘new world order’ is a new age of imperialism. Wearing the UN figleaf, Washington’s divine rightists will now do virtually as they like. They will continue with the old system: that is, to discipline the US global network with a phalanx of local servants and thugs, many of whom will be installed and replaced at will. But should a ‘regional dispute’, such as that in the Gulf, threaten US imperial interests or Washington’s current, obsessive need to be seen as ‘world leader’, the USS Wisconsin can now be brought up to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles.

  In this new age, territorial acquisition by force will not necessarily be outlawed. Rather, the world policemen in Washington will decide which aggressors are to be punished and which encouraged. In the case of another Saddam Hussein – installed and equipped by Washington, even given the benefit of American chemical warfare technology – he will be encouraged. However, if he gets too cocky and intrudes elsewhere in the empire for whatever reason, he will be judged an ‘Unacceptable Aggressor’ and expelled forcibly. As in the Gulf, a ‘coalition’ may be formed with large bribes and the false promise that an economic blockade is the goal.

  There are exceptions to this, of course. Another US client, Israel – which has invaded, occupied and terrorised Palestinian, Jordanian and Lebanese territories and has been condemned by almost every government on earth in a series of UN resolutions – has permanent status as an Acceptable Aggressor. As America’s moored gunboat in the Middle East, as well as an agent of American policy and terror far from the region, Israel is to be encouraged in almost all circumstances.

  Should this be doubted, it is necessary only to recall that Iraqis were recently slaughtered for the unacceptable aggression of their leader, while Israel, whose record of aggression in the Middle East is unequalled, was praised for its ‘restraint’ and promised more weapons and dollars. Indeed, at the very moment the Unacceptable Aggressor was being punished with American bombs, the Acceptable Aggressor was moving its citizens on to Palestinian land and deporting more Palestinians from their homes.

  In the new age, the red menace will no longer provide a cover for intervention. Instead, new ideas will be market-tested, such as the ‘War on Drugs’; and new Hitlers will be invented. Saddam Hussein has been quite brilliant in this role: so much so that those currently concerned with his atrocities in Kuwait are those who for years ignored his atrocities against the Kurds, the Iranians and his own people. But of course he was an Acceptable Aggressor in those days.

  In the new age, there is a new world vocabulary. The imposition of the imperial will is known as a ‘peace plan’ – as in Cambodia, where Pol Pot, an Acceptable Aggressor, is given new opportunities to terrorise and regain power. Genuine peace plans and genuine attempts to resolve regional differences will be described as ‘nightmare scenarios’ and ‘muddying the diplomatic waters’. Regardless of successful diplomatic overtures, an Unacceptable Aggressor will be given until high noon to get out of town, while an Acceptable Aggressor – Israel – will get twenty-four years to think it over.

  In the new age the word imperialism will be, as A. Sivanandan wrote, ‘a non word, an unfashionable word, a word that has gone out with the Cold War, as though it was a counterweight to “actually existing socialism”, its antonym. And with the writing off of the word, in an age where the word is deemed to be “as material as the world” and discourse the currency of power, the Third World has been written off . . . except as an occasion for grieving, an object of charity, a virtuous venue for righteous wars.’44

  In the new age, the poor will revert to their traditional role of providing resources and products for markets in the rich world. This will be better organised than before, now that technology allows capital to be truly ‘multi-na
tional’ and usurps labour’s power of denial. This will progress beneath an apparently calm surface, as if control is complete and history has ended; then people, and their popular movements, will do as they have always done, and the phenomenon of great change and renewal will begin again. This is already happening: in Latin America it is well advanced in Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile and Uruguay.45

  As for Britain in the new age, the numbers of unemployed and disaffected will grow. This will not necessarily disturb those in comfort, until those on the other side of prosperity realign, which they will. Meanwhile, as in a previous age, the British elite is back on the world beat, with violent solutions for political problems, wielding a highly efficient, go-anywhere military force: Desert Rats, Tornadoes, SAS, nukes. They, at least, have found the role they lost, doing what they do best.

  March 1, 1991

  A BLOODFEST

  WHAT OUGHT TO have been the main news event of the past week was that as many as 200,000 Iraqis may have been killed in the war in the Gulf, compared with an estimated 2,000 killed in Kuwait and 131 Allied dead. The war was a one-sided bloodfest, won at a distance with the power of money and superior technology pitted against a small Third World nation.

  Moreover, it now appears that a large number of the Iraqi dead were slaughtered – and the word is precisely meant – during the brief land war launched by Washington after Iraq had agreed in Moscow to an unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. And most of these were in retreat, ordered to withdraw, trying to get home. They were, as Colin Hughes wrote in the Independent, ‘shot in the back’.46

  So ‘ring your churchbells’ and ‘rejoice’ in such a ‘great victory’: a military operation of ‘almost aesthetic beauty’ . . . and so on, and on, ad nauseam.

  ‘The glee’, wrote Colin Hughes, ‘with which American pilots returning to their carriers spoke of the “duck shoot” presented by columns of Iraqis retreating from Kuwait City [has] troubled many humanitarians who otherwise supported the Allied objectives. Naturally, it is sickening to witness a routed army being shot in the back.’ This ‘duck shoot’, suggested Hughes, ‘risked staining the Allied clean-fighting war record’. But no; it seems the Iraqis were to blame for being shot in the back; an Oxford don, Professor Adam Roberts, told the paper that the Allies ‘were well within the rules of international conduct’.47 The Independent reported the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis on its front page, while inside a leading article referred to ‘miraculously light casualties’.48

  Yet the Independent was the only British newspaper to give consistent, substantial coverage to this slaughter. ‘The retreating forces huddling on the Basra beachhead’, reported Karl Waldron, ‘were under permanent attack yesterday from the air. Iranian pilots, patrolling their border 10 miles away, described the rout as a “rat shoot”, with roaming Allied jets strafing both banks.’49 Waldron described the scene as ‘Iraq’s Dunkirk’.

  The Iraqi casualty figures are critical to the ‘great victory’. Leave them out and the Murdoch comic version applies: Western technology, and Western heroism, has triumphed. Put them in and the picture bleeds and darkens; and questions are raised, or ought to be, about the ‘civilised values’ for which ‘we’ fought. The Guardian announced the death of 150,000 Iraqis in the body of a piece on page three. The Times and Telegraph performed a similar burial.50 The next day, the Telegraph referred to a ‘massacre’ on the road to Basra. American pilots were said to have likened their attack on the convoy to ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. Ducks, rats and now fish were massacred. No blame was apportioned.51

  On the contrary, most newspapers carried prominently a photograph of a US Army medic attending a wounded Iraqi soldier. Here was the supreme image of tenderness and magnanimity, a ‘lifeline’ as the Mirror called it: the antithesis of what had actually happened.52 Such a consensus was, to my knowledge, interrupted only once.

  During a discussion about the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, the BBC’s Radio Four delivered a remarkable live report from Stephen Sackur on the road to Basra. Clearly moved and perhaps angered by what he had seen, this one reporter did as few have done or been allowed to do. He dropped the ‘we’ and ‘them’. He separated ordinary Iraqis from the tyrant oppressing them. He converted the ducks, rats and fish into human beings. The incinerated figures had been trying to get home, he said. Among them were civilians, including contract workers from the Indian subcontinent; he saw the labels on their suitcases.53

  However, on the evening television news bulletins there was no Stephen Sackur. Kate Adie described the ‘evidence of the horrible confusion’ that was both ‘devastating’ and ‘pathetic’. The camera panned across the ‘loot’ – toys, bottles of perfume, hair curlers: pathetic indeed – strewn among the blackened dead. There had first been a ‘battle’, we were told. Battle? A US Marine lieutenant looked distressed. They had no air cover, he said: nothing with which to defend themselves. ‘It was not very professional at all,’ he said, ambiguously; and he was not asked to clarify that.54

  Apart from his words, I could find none, written or spoken, that expressed clearly the nature of this crime, this mass murder that was there for all eyes to see, and without the Iraqi Ministry of Information to ‘supervise’ those eyes. One recalls the interrogation by satellite that the BBC’s man in Baghdad, Jeremy Bowen, had to endure following his harrowing and personally courageous report of the bombing of the air-raid bunker in which hundreds of women and children died. ‘Are you absolutely certain it wasn’t a military bunker?’ he was asked:55 or words to that effect. No such interrogation inconvenienced his colleagues on the road to Basra. The question, ‘Are you absolutely certain that Allied planes did this deliberately to people running away?’ was never put.

  Thus, self-censorship remains the most virulent form. At the time of writing, the message of a war with ‘miraculously light casualties’ drones on and on. There is a radio report of the trauma suffered by British troops who had to bury the victims of the atrocity on the Basra road. In the commentary, there is no recognition of the victims’ human rights even in death; and no acknowledgement of the trauma awaiting tens of thousands of Iraqi families for whom there will be no proper process of grief, not even a dog-tag.

  Like the bulldozers that cleared the evidence on the Basra road, the propagandists here now attempt to clear away the debris of our memories. They hope that glimpses we had of the human consequences of the greatest aerial bombardment in history (a record announced with obvious pride) will not form the basis for a retrospective of the criminal nature of the relentless assault on populated areas as part of the application of criminal solutions to political problems. These must be struck from the record, in the manner of modern Stalinism, or blurred in our consciences, or immersed in celebration and justification.

  Celebration, of course, is a relatively simple affair. For those of us lacking churchbells, David Dimbleby will have to do. However, justification is quite another matter, especially for those who seem incessantly to describe themselves as ‘liberals’, as if they are well aware that their uncertainty, selectivity and hypocrisy on humanitarian matters is showing. Bereft of reasoned argument, they fall back on labels, such as ‘far left’, to describe those with humanitarian concern.

  According to Simon Hoggart of the Observer, one of the myths spread by this ‘far left’ is that ‘the Allies were unnecessarily brutal to the Iraqi forces . . . Of course the death of thousands of innocent conscripts is unspeakable. But you cannot fight half a war.’ The basis for Hoggart’s approval of the ‘unspeakable’ is apparently that his sisters are married to soldiers who went to the Gulf, where they would have been killed had not retreating Iraqi soldiers been shot in the back and Iraqi women and children obliterated by carpet-bombing.56

  Robert Harris, the Sunday Times man, is even more defensive. He writes that Rupert Murdoch did not tell him to support the war: a familiar refrain. Murdoch, of course, didn’t have to. But Harris adds another dimension. Disgracefully, h
e insults Bobby Muller, the former decorated US Marine who lost the use of his legs in Vietnam, as a ‘cripple’ and a ‘cardboard figure’ whom I ‘manipulate’.57

  Even Muller, who is a strong personality, was shocked by this; and at a large meeting in central London last Monday night invoked Harris’s name in the appropriate manner. Unlike Harris, he has fought and suffered both in war and for his convictions. Harris’s main complaint, it seems, is that those against the war have neglected to mention Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Kuwait – which apparently justify slaughtering tens of thousands of Iraqi conscripts and civilians.

  The intellectual and moral bankruptcy of this is clear. First, as children we are told that two wrongs do not make a right. Second, those actively opposed to the war are the same people who have tried to alert the world to Saddam Hussein’s crimes. In 1988, 30 MPs signed Ann Clwyd’s motion condemning Saddam Hussein’s gassing of 5,000 Iraqi Kurds. All but one of these MPs have been steadfastly against the war.

  In contrast, those who have prosecuted and promoted the war include those who supported Saddam Hussein, who armed and sustained him and sought to cover up the gravity of his crimes. I recommend the current newspaper advertisement for Amnesty International, which describes the moving plea of an Iraqi Kurdish leader to Thatcher following Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds.58

  ‘One of our few remaining hopes’, he wrote, ‘is that democrats and those who cherish values of justice, peace and freedom will voice their concern for the plight of the Kurds. That is why I am making this direct appeal to you . . .’ The letter was dated September 16, 1988. There was no reply. On October 5, the Thatcher Government gave Iraq more than £340 million in export credits.