Distant Voices Read online

  March 8, 1991

  LIBERAL TRIUMPHALISM

  WHILE AN ESTIMATED fifty children die each day as a result of the deliberate bombing of Iraq’s water, power and sewage systems, the triumphalists claim their place in the victory parade. Some do not want to be seen in the streets shoulder to shoulder with the ‘boys’. This is understandable. They prefer to march gently in print, not as Worsthornes and other Kitcheners reincarnate, but as the liberal shareholders of Just War PLC (shortly to display its ‘combat-proven’ wares at the Dubai Arms Fair).

  So they are triumphant, yes, but confused, alas. They describe as a ‘famous victory’ the crushing of a small Third World country and the killing of the equivalent of the population of Norwich: mostly conscripted soldiers running away, and civilians. But their use of the term ‘victory’ is puzzling, though it is not as mysterious as their correlation of a triumphant moral and intellectual position with triumphant onesided slaughter. So there is a nervousness about their triumphalism, as if they are concerned that the ‘famous victory’ will not endure and their supporting role will be fully acknowledged.

  Liberal triumphalism is as important after this war as liberal defeatism was after Vietnam. Both serve to protect the nobility of the cause and the rightness of the war aims, and especially to state repeatedly the purity of ‘our civilised values’. Following the Vietnam War, the United States’ ‘honest mistake’ and ‘tragic innocence’ were promoted in the liberal media. There are many examples. For me, the finest is Stanley Karnow’s 700-page Vietnam: A History, which describes the war as a ‘failed crusade’ fought for the ‘loftiest of intentions’. To Karnow, the Vietnamese were ‘terrorists’ who were ‘merciless’ and ‘brutal’ in contrast to the Americans, who were ‘sincere’ and ‘earnest’ and whose ‘instincts were liberal’. Good guy Lyndon Johnson ‘mistakenly imputed [American] values to the communists’, believing ‘they would respond like reasonable people’ (to US threats to destroy their towns) but they were ‘rarely troubled by heavy human tolls’. Karnow gives the My Lai massacre one line, and other atrocities not a word. His book is one of the most widely read histories of the war.59

  The protection of the West’s ‘civilised values’, as expressed in the conduct of the Gulf War, is well in hand. Reading the liberal press on both sides of the Atlantic, John Bunyan’s Mister Facing-Both-Ways seems to be everywhere. The war was horrible, the massacre on the Basra road especially so, yet we are assured the West is growing ‘more squeamish’ about this sort of thing. One of the reasons for the ceasefire on February 28 was ‘the genuine panic of Western political leaders at the scale of the killing. They had caused it, even willed it. But they had not imagined what it would be like.’ It was the ‘stain’ on their otherwise ‘clean fighting record’.60 When Phillip Knightley was asked on BBC Radio about the ‘news blackout’ at the start of the land war, he replied that its aim was clearly to prevent the outside world knowing the ferocious nature of the Allied assault. The BBC dropped the programme. Not ‘imagining’ what 500-pound bombs do in populated areas, what B52s do, what ‘daisy cutters’ do, what ‘fuel air explosion’ bombs do, what Rockeye clusters do (used to great effect on the Basra highway) is akin to not imagining what a bullet does when it is fired point blank at the human brain.

  Without a hint of irony, Adrian Hamilton wrote in last week’s Observer, ‘To accept that US intentions in the Gulf may be well meant is not to say they are innocent . . .’ As part of these ‘well-meant intentions’ America’s ‘domestic political aim’ in the war was ‘to win a decisive victory that would erase the memory of Vietnam, with the lowest possible Allied casualties’. Thus, tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children were obliterated in order to ‘erase the memory of Vietnam’.61

  What is so horrific about this is that the ‘memory of Vietnam’ – that of defeat and a ‘failed crusade’, as reflected in the angst-ridden Hollywood movies – is a Big Lie. Central to this Big Lie is that the war was a ‘quagmire’ into which the United States ‘stumbled’, for which there are not so faint echoes in current assessments of the Gulf War. In truth, the Vietnam War was waged by America against Vietnam, North and South. The massive official documentation of the Pentagon Papers, leaked in the early 1970s, alone confirms this. Far from being vanquished, the United States succeeded in devastating, blockading and isolating Vietnam and its ‘virus’ and subordinating to American interests most regimes in the region. In fact, Washington had a significant victory. Not even Hollywood has understood the scope of this achievement.

  The logic follows that the slaughter of people in the Gulf War – people who had nothing to do with the American adventure in Vietnam or its ‘memory’ – was entirely unnecessary as a ‘domestic political aim’. Indeed, their deaths have merely allowed one Big Lie to follow another.

  The new Big Lie has many components. For example, it is said to be the first war of ‘smart’ weapons whose ‘precision’ and ‘reliability’ make possible ‘short, sharp wars of the future’. One story never published in the British press was reported recently in the International Herald Tribune. It said that ‘estimates of the accuracy of US bombs dropped on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait suggest that hundreds of precision-guided munitions as well as thousands of “dumb bombs” have missed their targets and in some cases struck unintended sites, according to US officials.’ The report described these ‘dumb bombs’ as ‘simple shell-encased explosives, including some with designs dating back to World War II that follow unguided trajectories to their targets, usually hitting within 50 to 100 feet but sometimes missing by much greater distances.’ ‘Dumb bombs’ were used against targets in populated areas.62

  Perhaps the most important element in the new Big Lie concerns sanctions – the preferred alternative to killing tens of thousands of Iraqis. In a new study, the Glasgow University Media Group has found that ‘ironically, as the war drew nearer, evidence of the power of sanctions was just beginning to emerge’, but at the same time the option of sanctions ‘effectively disappeared as a news story’.63

  During this critical period, found the researchers, clear evidence was available that the effect of sanctions was ‘devastating’; but only the Guardian and the Morning Star argued against force; the Guardian quoted a CIA report that sanctions had stopped 97 per cent of Iraqi exports. The rest of the press associated sanctions with ‘appeasement’ (‘Spineless appeasers’ – the Sun). Television news contributed: ‘All efforts to find a peaceful solution to the Gulf crisis seemed to have ended in failure tonight’ (BBC, January 15) and ‘War in the Gulf looks unavoidable . . .’ (ITN).64

  Under the new Big Lie, Iraqis, Palestinians and Arabs in general are to be demonised by Hollywood, as the Vietnamese were. Gulf War movies on the way include: Desert Shield, in which the US Navy heroically destroys chemical warheads in Iraq (no mention, of course, that the United States gave Iraq much of its chemical warfare technology); Desert Storm, in which Iraqis plot to wipe out Israel (originally this one was called Shield of Honour and the forces of evil were Libyan); The Human Shield, which depicts an Iraqi officer attempting to murder an old woman and child and kidnapping the brother of a US colonel; and Target USA, in which US heroes unravel an Iraqi terrorist plot . . .

  In his speech to Congress last week President Bush said the United States would maintain forces in the Gulf for years. This was not envisaged by those who believed, with invincible naivety, the yarns about ‘defending Saudi Arabia’ and ‘liberating Kuwait’. Perhaps they should have listened to authentic establishment voices.

  Interviewing the American ambassador to Britain at the outbreak of the war, David Dimbleby said, ‘Isn’t it in fact true that America, by dint of the very accuracy of the weapons we’ve seen, is the only potential world policeman? You may have to operate under the United Nations, but it’s beginning to look as though you’re going to have to be in the Middle East just as, in the previous part of this century, we and the French were in the Middle East.’65

  Q
uite so.

  March 15, 1991

  NORMALITY IS RESUMED

  THE PARADE HAS not yet begun, but the triumphalists are falling silent, their angst on show. It was not meant to be thus. Kuwait is free, yes – free to kill and torture Palestinians and to dispossess a million of its citizens. The Iraqi Army was pounded to bits as it cut and ran; alas, in contravention of the Geneva Convention, the dead of war were not ‘honourably interred’ but shovelled and bulldozed into open pits.

  The ‘famous victory’ is not what it was. Instead, normality is reasserting itself, bringing a truth so obvious that even those celebrants who called on us to go to the ‘bitter end’ in the cause of a ‘just war’ appear to be having difficulty remaining in the one spot, rather like weathervanes during a high wind. ‘The victory is being turned into a defeat,’ laments an Observer headline, while, beneath, its columnist calls on the Allies ‘to commit themselves to a democratic and demilitarised Iraq . . .’ (And earlier: ‘But it is wishful thinking to suppose a post-sanctions Iraq would have been much better.’ Does the saving of as many as 200,000 lives qualify for the ‘much better’ category?)66

  Normality in much of the world’s affairs is determined by an imperialist logic. This has been the case for a very long time, and there is nothing in current developments to suggest that the historical pattern is about to be broken. On the contrary, unparalleled and unchallenged power, concentrated now in a single imperial source, ensures that the trend is reinforced.

  Indeed, editorial writers are wrong to criticise President Bush for ‘prevaricating’ over the present turmoil in Iraq. Bush is conducting US policy in an entirely consistent manner, doing no more or less than Presidents Reagan, Carter, Ford and Nixon did in the region and much of the world. He is ensuring that a substantial minority – in this case, the Kurds – are crushed so that a reigning tyranny can retain control of a strategically important country and, presumably with the usual help from the CIA, replace the present tyrant with one considerably less uppity and more amenable to Washington’s demands.

  As for the anguished call for a ‘democratic and demilitarised Iraq’, contemporary history blows a raspberry at that. The Iraqi opposition say they will support Kurdish autonomy if a democratic regime is installed in Baghdad. The Kurds themselves include democratic and socialist elements. Thus, they are doomed. When the Ba’ath Party – Saddam Hussein included – seized power in Iraq in 1968, it was able to do so thanks in large part to the lists of opponents supplied by the CIA: trade unionists, socialists and assorted dangerous pluralists, many of whom were murdered.

  When another tyrant, an ‘acceptable Saddam Hussein’, is duly installed, and thousands of Kurdish and Shi’a dead are added to the 200,000 said to have been slaughtered during ‘Hannibal’ Schwarzkopf’s ‘march’, normality will be resumed. This is already past the planning stage. The Independent last week reported from the United Nations: ‘Fearing the Kurdish rebellion will cause the break-up of Iraq and further destabilise the oil-rich region, the US and other permanent members of the UN Security Council have determined that Baghdad should be permitted to use its fighter and ground attack aircraft to quell internal dissent once it has accepted the Security Council’s plan for a formal ceasefire in the Gulf.’67

  While accepting the imperialist logic of this, one might pause to reflect on the recent months of sanctimonious waffle about the ‘new role’ of the United Nations. One wonders what decisions imposed by the Security Council have to do with the spirit of the UN Charter. ‘We, the peoples . . .’ begins the Charter. Tell that to the Kurds, the Palestinians, the Khmer, the Panamanians, the Guatemalans, the Timorese and the Iraqi children now dying from disease in cities and towns bombed by the Allies. ‘We, the powerful regimes . . .’ the preamble should read, ‘We, the underwriters and keepers of the new imperialist order . . .’

  Although fighting like lions, the Kurds must be under no illusions. Betrayed by the colonial powers in the 1920s, bombed by the RAF, they have tested the faith of every imperialist ‘saviour’ only to become its victims. In 1975, having been led to believe that Washington looked favourably on their hopes for nationhood, they were told by the CIA to fight on, and given $16 million worth of secret American military aid. But this was a double-cross.

  As the Pike Congressional Committee investigating the CIA later revealed, America’s support for the Kurds was not intended in any way to help them, but to strengthen the Shah of Iran’s hand in finalising an oil deal with Iraq. Washington’s true policy, reported the Pike Committee, ‘was not imparted to our clients, who were encouraged to continue fighting. Even in the context of covert action, ours was a cynical exercise.’

  Unaware of this, the Kurds appealed to Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state: ‘Your Excellency . . . our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way with silence from everyone. We feel, your Excellency, that the US has a moral and political responsibility towards our people who have committed themselves to your country’s policy.’68 The Shah got his deal; the Kurds were abandoned.

  Today, while the killing goes on in Iraq, normality is being re-established elsewhere in the region. President Bush has said he wants ‘a slowdown in the proliferation of weapons of all kinds’ because ‘it would be tragic if the nations of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf were now to embark on a new arms race’.69 Within three days of his making that announcement, the New York Times reported, ‘The US has emerged from the war as the Gulf’s premier arms seller. The White House has told Congress in a classified report it wanted five Middle East allies to buy an $18 billion package of top drawer weapons.’70 This will be the biggest arms sale in history.

  When he resigned at the end of January the head of Italian naval forces in the Gulf said, ‘I wondered if, in a certain sense, we hadn’t all been made fools of . . . if they [the United States] hadn’t drawn us into a much larger game. I still wonder about that.’

  April 5, 1991

  WHO KILLED THE KURDS?

  PRESIDENT BUSH DESCRIBED the Gulf War to David Frost as ‘the greatest moral crusade since World War II’. To date, the war has virtually destroyed the infrastructure of two countries, caused the violent death of as many as 200,000 people, triggered an ecological disaster, ensured that a fascist regime retains power in Iraq and stimulated the world arms trade. (Reviewing its war budget, the Pentagon reports a ‘profit’ of several billion dollars.)

  It is now clear to many people who honestly defended the war on the basis of George Bush’s word and John Major’s word that they were misled. It is the Kurds’ struggle for life that has opened eyes and allowed people to perceive the ‘moral crusade’ as one whose aim was never to ‘liberate’ anyone, but to weaken Iraq’s position in relation to other US clients in the Gulf and Israel, and to demonstrate America’s unchallenged military power in the ‘post-Cold War era’.

  The propaganda was always fragile; hence the ferocious attacks on those who identified and resisted it. What has given the game away is the suffering of the minority peoples of Iraq, especially the Kurds and the Shi’a. Why, people now ask, if the war was a matter of right against wrong, of good against evil, as its salesmen pitched it, was the regime of the ‘new Hitler’ preserved, deliberately and legalistically, and his victims left to their fate? Why did Bush, who saluted before Congress ‘the triumph of democracy’, refuse to meet Iraq’s democratic opposition until Saddam Hussein’s terror apparatus had been restored?

  To people in Britain watching the news, who live their lives by the rules of common decency, none of this makes sense – unless they have been lied to. In undermining Iraq, then watching the Kurds perish, the Americans are doing what the British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese in their time did elsewhere. Imperialism has no use for democracy, which may be difficult to control, or for troublesome minorities, which threaten to upset the imperialist board game with its frontiers intended to divide ethnic nations. History provides no evidence that imperialist wars have anything to do with
‘morality’. Rather, they are about power and naked self-interest, and are fought accordingly with the utmost ruthlessness.

  If further evidence is required to demonstrate this, the massacre of the Iraqi minorities during as well as since the Gulf War is a testament. I am not referring here to the actions of Saddam Hussein, whose barbarism towards the Kurds has been graphically documented (notably by Martin Woollacott in the Guardian). What has been overlooked is that the Allies have been more successful in killing, maiming and terrorising the Kurds and other minorities than Saddam Hussein: a considerable achievement.

  During the war little attention was paid to the fact that Iraq was not a homogeneous nation. Little mention was made of the Kurds and Shi’a as the Allied bombs fell on populated areas. Certainly ‘Hannibal’ Schwarzkopf did not say he was bombing Kurdistan or Shi’a communities. Anyway, where was Kurdistan? Was it marked on the war-room map at Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping HQ?

  And why were the Iraqi prisoners-of-war so pleased to see their captors? Only a careful scrutiny of the media coverage will suggest why. Reporting from the carnage on the Basra road, where American pilots conducted their famous ‘turkey shoot’ on a retreating convoy, Kate Adie said: ‘Those who fought and died for Iraq here turned out to be from the north of the country, from minority communities, persecuted by Saddam Hussein – the Kurds and the Turks.’ Shortly afterwards, Jeffrey Archer reported for ITN: ‘The Shi’as have a powerful incentive for opposing Saddam Hussein. Most of the thousands of conscripts who died in the trenches of Kuwait were Shi’as.’71

  In other words, those sections of the Iraqi Army least loyal to Saddam Hussein and most likely to rise up against him – the very people to whom Bush issued his call to rise up – were massacred by the Allies. They were conscripts, positioned on the southern frontline while the loyalists were held further north. Schwarzkopf knew this; Bush must have known it. So for those of us now grieving for the Kurds struggling towards the Turkish border and pursued by Saddam’s gunships, let us also grieve for the tens of thousands of Kurds and Shi’a slaughtered as the price of Schwarzkopf’s ‘famous victory’.