- In the end, I think we are just tired of being lied to.
Tired of being talked down to, of being bombarded with Second World War
jingoism and scare stories and false information and student essays dressed
up as "intelligence". We are sick of being insulted by little
men, by Tony Blair and Jack Straw and the likes of George Bush and his
cabal of neo-conservative henchmen who have plotted for years to change
the map of the Middle East to their advantage.
-
- No wonder, then, that Hans Blix' blunt refutation of
America's "intelligence" at the UN yesterday warmed so many hearts.
Suddenly, the Hans Blixes of this world could show up the Americans for
the untrustworthy "allies" they have become.
-
- The British don't like Hussein any more than they liked
Nasser. But millions of Britons remember, as Blair does not, the Second
World War -- they are not conned by childish parables of Hitler, Churchill,
Chamberlain and appeasement. They do not like being lectured and whined
at by men whose experience of war is Hollywood and television.
-
- Still less do they wish to embark on endless wars with
a Texas governor-executioner who dodged the Vietnam draft and who, with
his oil buddies, is now sending America's poor to destroy a Muslim nation
that has nothing at all to do with the crimes against humanity of 11 September.
Jack Straw, the public school Trot-turned-warrior, ignores all this, with
Blair. He brays at us about the dangers of nuclear weapons that Iraq does
not have, of the torture and aggression of a dictatorship that America
and Britain sustained when Saddam was "one of ours". But he
and Blair cannot discuss the dark political agenda behind George Bush's
government, nor the "sinister men" (the words of a very senior
UN official) around the President.
-
- Those who oppose war are not cowards. Brits rather like
fighting; they've biffed Arabs, Afghans, Muslims, Nazis, Italian Fascists
and Japanese imperialists for generations, Iraqis included -- though we
play down the RAF's use of gas on Kurdish rebels in the 1930s. But when
the British are asked to go to war, patriotism is not enough. Faced with
the horror stories, Britons -- and many Americans -- are a lot braver than
Blair and Bush. They do not like, as Thomas More told Cromwell in 'A Man
for All Seasons', tales to frighten children.
-
- Perhaps Henry VIII's exasperation in that play better
expresses the British view of Blair and Bush: "Do they take me for
a simpleton?" The British, like other Europeans, are an educated
people. Ironically, their opposition to this obscene war may make them
feel more, not less, European.
-
- Palestine has much to do with it. Brits have no love
for Arabs but they smell injustice fast enough, and are outraged at the
colonial war being used to crush the Palestinians by a nation that is now
in effect running US policy in the Middle East. We are told that our invasion
of Iraq has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- a burning,
fearsome wound to which Bush devoted just 18 words in his meretricious
State of the Union speech -- but even Blair can't get away with that one;
hence his "conference" for Palestinian reform at which the Palestinians
had to take part via video-link because Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel
Sharon, refused to let them travel to London.
-
- So much for Blair's influence over Washington -- the
US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, "regretted" that he couldn't
persuade Sharon to change his mind. But at least one has to acknowledge
that Sharon -- war criminal though he may be for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila
massacres -- treated Blair with the contempt he deserves. Nor can the
Americans hide the link between Iraq and Israel and Palestine. In his
devious address to the UN Security Council last week, Powell linked the
three when he complained that Hamas, whose suicide bombings so cruelly
afflict Israelis, keeps an office in Baghdad.
-
- Just as he told us about the mysterious al-Qaeda men
who support violence in Chechnya and in the "Pankisi gorge".
This was America's way of giving Vladimir Putin a free hand again in his
campaign of rape and murder against the Chechens, just as Bush's odd remark
to the UN General Assembly last September 12 about the need to protect
Iraq's Turkomans only becomes clear when one realizes that Turkomans make
up two thirds of the population of Kirkuk, one of Iraq's largest oil fields.
-
- The men driving Bush to war are mostly former or still
active pro-Israeli lobbyists. For years, they have advocated destroying
the most powerful Arab nation. Richard Perle, one of Bush's most influential
advisers, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton and Donald Rumsfeld
were all campaigning for the overthrow of Iraq long before George W Bush
was elected -- if he was elected -- US President. And they weren't doing
so for the benefit of Americans or Britons. A 1996 report, 'A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm':
-
- http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
-
- ... called for war on Iraq. It was written not for the
US but for the incoming Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu,
and produced by a group headed by -- yes, Richard Perle. The destruction
of Iraq will, of course, protect Israel's monopoly of nuclear weapons and
allow it to defeat the Palestinians and impose whatever colonial settlement
Sharon has in store.
-
- Although Bush and Blair dare not discuss this with us
-- a war for Israel is not going to have our boys lining up at the recruiting
offices -- Jewish American leaders talk about the advantages of an Iraqi
war with enthusiasm. Indeed, those very courageous Jewish American groups
who so bravely oppose this madness have been the first to point out how
pro-Israeli organizations foresee Iraq not only as a new source of oil
but of water, too; why should canals not link the Tigris river to the parched
Levant? No wonder, then, that any discussion of this topic must be censored,
as Professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins University, tried to do in the
Wall Street Journal the day after Powell's UN speech. Cohen suggested that
European nations' objections to the war might -- yet again -- be ascribed
to "anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing
that ascribes to Jews a malignant intent." This nonsense, it must
be said, is opposed by many Israeli intellectuals who,
-
- like Uri Avnery, argue that an Iraq war will leave Israel
with even more Arab enemies, especially if Iraq attacks Israel and Sharon
then joins the US battle against the Arabs.
-
- The slur of "anti-Semitism" also lies behind
Rumsfeld's snotty remarks about "old Europe". He was talking
about the "old" Germany of Nazism and the "old" France
of collaboration. But the France and Germany that oppose this war are
the "new" Europe, the continent which refuses, ever again, to
slaughter the innocent. It is Rumsfeld and Bush who represent the "old"
America; not the "new" America of freedom, the America of F D
Roosevelt. Rumsfeld and Bush symbolize the old America that killed its
native Indians and embarked on imperial adventures. It is "old"
America we are being asked to fight for -- linked to a new form of colonialism
-- an America that first threatens the United Nations with irrelevancy
and then does the same to NATO. This is not the last chance for the UN,
nor for NATO. But it may well be the last chance for America to be taken
seriously by her friends as well as her enemies.
-
- In these last days of peace the British should not be
tripped by the oh-so-sought-after second UN resolution. UN permission
for America's war will not make the war legitimate; it merely proves that
the Council can be controlled with bribes, threats or abstentions. It
was the Soviet Union's abstention, after all, which allowed America to
fight the savage Korean war under the UN flag. And we should not doubt
that -- after a quick US military conquest of Iraq, and providing 'they'
die more than 'we' die -- there will be plenty of anti-war protesters who
will claim they were pro-war all along. The first pictures of "liberated"
Baghdad will show Iraqi children making victory signs to American tank
crews. But the real cruelty and cynicism of this conflict will become
evident as soon as the "war" ends, when our colonial occupation
of a Muslim nation for the US and Israel begins.
-
- There lies the rub. Bush calls Sharon a "man of
peace". But Sharon fears he may yet face trial over Sabra and Shatila,
which is why Israel has just withdrawn its ambassador to Belgium. I'd
like to see Saddam in the same court. And Rifaat Assad, for his 1982 massacre
in the Syrian city of Hama. And all the torturers of Israel and the Arab
dictatorships.
-
- Israeli and US ambitions in the region are now entwined,
almost synonymous. This war is about oil and regional control. It is
being cheer-led by a draft-dodger who is treacherously telling us that
this is part of an eternal war against "terror". And the British
and most Europeans don't believe him. It's not that Britons wouldn't fight
for America. They just don't want to fight for Bush or his friends. And
if that includes the Prime Minister, they don't want to fight for Blair
either.
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