- William Russell, the great correspondent who reported
the carnage of imperial wars, may have first used the expression "blood
on his hands" to describe impeccable politicians who, at a safe distance,
order the mass killing of ordinary people.
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- In my experience "on his hands" applies especially
to those modern political leaders who have had no personal experience of
war, like George W Bush, who managed not to serve in Vietnam, and the effete
Tony Blair.
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- There is about them the essential cowardice of the man
who causes death and suffering not by his own hand but through a chain
of command that affirms his "authority".
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- In 1946 the judges at Nuremberg who tried the Nazi leaders
for war crimes left no doubt about what they regarded as the gravest crimes
against humanity.
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- The most serious was unprovoked invasion of a sovereign
state that offered no threat to one's homeland. Then there was the murder
of civilians, for which responsibility rested with the "highest authority".
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- Blair is about to commit both these crimes, for which
he is being denied even the flimsiest United Nations cover now that the
weapons inspectors have found, as one put it, "zilch".
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- Like those in the dock at Nuremberg, he has no democratic
cover.
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- Using the archaic "royal prerogative" he did
not consult parliament or the people when he dispatched 35,000 troops and
ships and aircraft to the Gulf; he consulted a foreign power, the Washington
regime.
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- Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W
Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions
of "endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are
a matter of record.
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- All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice,
Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State
of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment
in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: "I
must have war." He then had it.
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- To call Blair a mere "poodle" is to allow him
distance from the killing of innocent Iraqi men, women and children for
which he will share responsibility.
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- He is the embodiment of the most dangerous appeasement
humanity has known since the 1930s. The current American elite is the Third
Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget
that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting
American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan
as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly
or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American "interests",
such as a voracious appetite for the world's resources, like oil.
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- When you next hear Blair or Straw or Bush talk about
"bringing democracy to the people of Iraq", remember that it
was the CIA that installed the Ba'ath Party in Baghdad from which emerged
Saddam Hussein.
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- "That was my favourite coup," said the CIA
man responsible. When you next hear Blair and Bush talking about a "smoking
gun" in Iraq, ask why the US government last December confiscated
the 12,000 pages of Iraq's weapons declaration, saying they contained "sensitive
information" which needed "a little editing".
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- Sensitive indeed. The original Iraqi documents listed
150 American, British and other foreign companies that supplied Iraq with
its nuclear, chemical and missile technology, many of them in illegal transactions.
In 2000 Peter Hain, then a Foreign Office Minister, blocked a parliamentary
request to publish the full list of lawbreaking British companies. He has
never explained why.
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- As a reporter of many wars I am constantly aware that
words on the page like these can seem almost abstract, part of a great
chess game unconnected to people's lives.
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- The most vivid images I carry make that connection. They
are the end result of orders given far away by the likes of Bush and Blair,
who never see, or would have the courage to see, the effect of their actions
on ordinary lives: the blood on their hands.
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- Let me give a couple of examples. Waves of B52 bombers
will be used in the attack on Iraq. In Vietnam, where more than a million
people were killed in the American invasion of the 1960s, I once watched
three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation,
unseen above the clouds.
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- They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in
what was known as the "long box" pattern, the military term for
carpet bombing. Everything inside a "box" was presumed destroyed.
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- When I reached a village within the "box",
the street had been replaced by a crater.
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- I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell
hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of
children thrown into the air by the blast.
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- The children's skin had folded back, like parchment,
revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact,
stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that
the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited.
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- I am being purposely graphic. This is what I saw, and
often; yet even in that "media war" I never saw images of these
grotesque sights on television or in the pages of a newspaper.
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- I saw them only pinned on the wall of news agency offices
in Saigon as a kind of freaks' gallery.
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- SOME years later I often came upon terribly deformed
Vietnamese children in villages where American aircraft had sprayed a herbicide
called Agent Orange.
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- It was banned in the United States, not surprisingly
for it contained Dioxin, the deadliest known poison.
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- This terrible chemical weapon, which the cliche-mongers
would now call a weapon of mass destruction, was dumped on almost half
of South Vietnam.
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- Today, as the poison continues to move through water
and soil and food, children continue to be born without palates and chins
and scrotums or are stillborn. Many have leukaemia.
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- You never saw these children on the TV news then; they
were too hideous for their pictures, the evidence of a great crime, even
to be pinned up on a wall and they are old news now.
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- That is the true face of war. Will you be shown it by
satellite when Iraq is attacked? I doubt it.
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- I was starkly reminded of the children of Vietnam when
I travelled in Iraq two years ago. A paediatrician showed me hospital wards
of children similarly deformed: a phenomenon unheard of prior to the Gulf
war in 1991.
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- She kept a photo album of those who had died, their smiles
undimmed on grey little faces. Now and then she would turn away and wipe
her eyes.
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- More than 300 tons of depleted uranium, another weapon
of mass destruction, were fired by American aircraft and tanks and possibly
by the British.
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- Many of the rounds were solid uranium which, inhaled
or ingested, causes cancer. In a country where dust carries everything,
swirling through markets and playgrounds, children are especially vulnerable.
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- For 12 years Iraq has been denied specialist equipment
that would allow its engineers to decontaminate its southern battlefields.
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- It has also been denied equipment and drugs that would
identify and treat the cancer which, it is estimated, will affect almost
half the population in the south.
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- LAST November Jeremy Corbyn MP asked the Junior Defence
Minister Adam Ingram what stocks of weapons containing depleted uranium
were held by British forces operating in Iraq.
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- His robotic reply was: "I am withholding details
in accordance with Exemption 1 of the Code of Practice on Access to Government
Information."
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- Let us be clear about what the Bush-Blair attack will
do to our fellow human beings in a country already stricken by an embargo
run by America and Britain and aimed not at Saddam Hussein but at the civilian
population, who are denied even vaccines for the children. Last week the
Pentagon in Washington announced matter of factly that it intended to shatter
Iraq "physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining
down on its people 800 cruise missiles in two days.
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- This will be more than twice the number of missiles launched
during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.
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- A military strategist named Harlan Ullman told American
television: "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad. The sheer
size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."
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- The strategy is known as Shock and Awe and Ullman is
apparently its proud inventor. He said: "You have this simultaneous
effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or
weeks but minutes."
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- What will his "Hiroshima effect" actually do
to a population of whom almost half are children under the age of 14?
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- The answer is to be found in a "confidential"
UN document, based on World Health Organisation estimates, which says that
"as many as 500,000 people could require treatment as a result of
direct and indirect injuries".
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- A Bush-Blair attack will destroy "a functioning
primary health care system" and deny clean water to 39 per cent of
the population. There is "likely [to be] an outbreak of diseases in
epidemic if not pandemic proportions".
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- It is Washington's utter disregard for humanity, I believe,
together with Blair's lies that have turned most people in this country
against them, including people who have not protested before.
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- Last weekend Blair said there was no need for the UN
weapons inspectors to find a "smoking gun" for Iraq to be attacked.
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- Compare that with his reassurance in October 2001 that
there would be no "wider war" against Iraq unless there was "absolute
evidence" of Iraqi complicity in September 11. And there has been
no evidence.
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- Blair's deceptions are too numerous to list here. He
has lied about the nature and effect of the embargo on Iraq by covering
up the fact that Washington, with Britain's support, is withholding more
than $5billion worth of humanitarian supplies approved by the Security
Council.
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- He has lied about Iraq buying aluminium tubes, which
he told Parliament were "needed to enrich uranium". The International
Atomic Energy Agency has denied this outright.
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- He has lied about an Iraqi "threat", which
he discovered only following September 11 2001 when Bush made Iraq a gratuitous
target of his "war on terror". Blair's "Iraq dossier"
has been mocked by human rights groups.
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- However, what is wonderful is that across the world the
sheer force of public opinion isolates Bush and Blair and their lemming,
John Howard in Australia.
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- So few people believe them and support them that The
Guardian this week went in search of the few who do - "the hawks".
The paper published a list of celebrity warmongers, some apparently shy
at describing their contortion of intellect and morality. It is a small
list.
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- IN CONTRAST the majority of people in the West, including
the United States, are now against this gruesome adventure and the numbers
grow every day.
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- It is time MPs joined their constituents and reclaimed
the true authority of parliament. MPs like Tam Dalyell, Alice Mahon, Jeremy
Corbyn and George Galloway have stood alone for too long on this issue
and there have been too many sham debates manipulated by Downing Street.
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- If, as Galloway says, a majority of Labour backbenchers
are against an attack, let them speak up now.
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- Blair's figleaf of a "coalition" is very important
to Bush and only the moral power of the British people can bring the troops
home without them firing a shot.
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- The consequences of not speaking out go well beyond an
attack on Iraq. Washington will effectively take over the Middle East,
ensuring an age of terrorism other than their own.
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- The next American attack is likely to be Iran - the Israelis
want this - and their aircraft are already in place in Turkey. Then it
may be China's turn.
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- "Endless war" is Vice-President Cheney's contribution
to our understanding.
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- Bush has said he will use nuclear weapons "if necessary".
On March 26 last Geoffrey Hoon said that other countries "can be absolutely
confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear
weapons".
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- Such madness is the true enemy. What's more, it is right
here at home and you, the British people, can stop it.
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