by John Pilger
—
In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a "massive"
bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies
on everything that moves". As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war
against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the
orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for
Kissinger’s murderous honesty.
As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including
the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I
am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A
telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who
had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They,
too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.
According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000
poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics,
loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B52 bombers had gone
to work as part of "Operation Menu", the west’s ultimate demon could not
believe his luck.
The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural
Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning
to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of
carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A
former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors "froze up and
they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and
half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That
was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over."
A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000
Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as
the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger
began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the
Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.
ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush
and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000
people - in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had
done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and
sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common.
Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without
fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs
of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.
Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism.
Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot’s "jihadists" - seized the opportunity provided
by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed.
"Rebel" Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state
ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The
arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador,
Oliver Miles, wrote recently, "The [Cameron] government seems to be
following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from
the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy - and in
particular our Middle East wars - had been a principal driver in the
recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here."
ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in
destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an
epic crime against humanity. WikiLeaks cables (see below) show that the
US has been tracking, and exploiting, the rise of ISIS since 2006, when
the organisation first appeared in Iraq as a direct result of the
Bush-Blair invasion. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the
mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite
undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in
distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our"
societies.
It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after
the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations
Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi
population - ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam
Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a
modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked" - from chlorine for making
the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines,
common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers
carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with
Depleted Uranium.
Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in
London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children
against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary
Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. "The
children’s vaccines", he said, "were capable of being used in weapons of
mass destruction". The British Government could get away with such an
outrage because media reporting of Iraq - much of it manipulated by the
Foreign Office - blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.
Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was
allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay
for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as
power and water. "Imagine," the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von
Sponeck, told me, "setting that pittance against the lack of clean
water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford
treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have
a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I
have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is
unavoidable."
Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in
Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior
UN official, had also resigned. "I was instructed," Halliday said, "to
implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a
deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million
individuals, children and adults."
A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that
between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000
"excess" deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV
reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United
Nations, asking her, "Is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We
think the price is worth it."
In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions,
Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection
committee, "[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire
population a means to live." When I interviewed Carne Ross three years
later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. "I feel ashamed," he
said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how
a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and
maintaining the deception. "We would feed [journalists] factoids of
sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we’d freeze them out."
On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the
horror of Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a
warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned
and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the
former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In
1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq
for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain
abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an "apologist for Saddam". In 2003,
Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of
transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed
the invasion as a "fringe issue".
Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and
other support" for those "facing genocide" in Iraq and Syria. This will
further "the imperative of a political solution". Obama has the same in
mind as he lifts what he calls the "restrictions" on US bombing and
drone attacks. This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash
the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in
Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia - as they did in Cambodia,
Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a
village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen
civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.
The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck
happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by
the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost
inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance
of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those
regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other
across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria.
Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has
crossed the Atlantic. Lord Richards, until recently head of the British
military, wants "boots on the ground" now. There is a vapid, almost
sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their "coalition of the
willing" - notably Australia’s aggressively weird Tony Abbott - as they
prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the
blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing
and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one
potentially valuable ally, Syria. This is nothing new, as the following
leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:
"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a
special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and]
to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and
SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic]
incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a
necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will]
provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS should use...
capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment
tension."
That was written in 1957, though it could have been written
yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. Last
year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that "two
years before the Arab spring", he was told in London that a war on
Syria was planned. "I am going to tell you something," he said in an
interview with the French TV channel LPC, "I was in England two years
before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British
officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in
Syria... Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They
even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if
I would like to participate... This operation goes way back. It was
prepared, preconceived and planned."
The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the
west - Syria, Iran, Hezbollah. The obstacle is Turkey, an "ally" and a
member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf
medievalists to channel support to the Syrian "rebels", including those
now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition
for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a
major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most
ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.
A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this
imperial maze; otherwise, the beheadings will continue. That genuine
negotiations with Syria should be seen as "morally questionable" (the
Guardian) suggests that the assumptions of moral superiority among those
who supported the war criminal Blair remain not only absurd, but
dangerous.
Together with a truce, there should be an immediate cessation of all
shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of
Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open
wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic
extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope.
Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world
around them.
More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia
unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never
recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. With
impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has just
been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning
review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world order that
remained stable for a quarter of a century". Tell that to the people of
Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of
his "statecraft". Only when "we" recognise the war criminals in our
midst will the blood begin to dry.
Follow John Pilger on twitter
@johnpilger
—
READ a
2007 State Department cable published by WikiLeaks about the 2006 declaration of the "Islamic State of Iraq", the forerunner organisation of ISIS.
READ two US Congressional Research Reports on the
emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq under the leadership of Abu Omar
al-Baghdadi (the predecessor of ISIS’ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi), following
the death of the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, in
2006. See
here and
here.
READ a
2007 cable
showing Islamic State presence in Iraq during 2007, and how demographic
shifts in response to sectarian Shia-Sunni tensions, directly provoked
by the US invasion and installation of a Shia-dominated government, were
already playing into the hands of the group.
VIEW 113 Iraq War Logs documenting US forces encountering ISI in Iraq from 2007 onwards.
BROWSE nearly 3,000 documents published by WikiLeaks which mention the Islamic State of Iraq.
READ three US Congressional Research Report on the
history of the US-backed "Sons of Iraq" Sunni militias, formed to oppose
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The failure by the US-backed Shia
government to integrate the Sunni militias into the Iraq army later led
to many "Sons of Iraq" returning to the jihadi insurgency, swelling the
ranks of modern-day ISIS. See
here,
here and
here.
READ a
2009 cable on AQI/ISI in Mosul.
READ in
a 2010 State Department cable
how Syria’s head of intelligence Ali Mamlouk discussed with US
diplomats the migration of foreign "takfiri" fighters, such as the
Islamic State, into Syria from war-torn Iraq, and offered the US a
military and intelligence partnership to address them. Declining, the US
later lent support to jihadi groups as Syria’s "opposition" during the
Syrian civil war.
READ a
leaked 2010 STRATFOR email
containing a private intelligence product documenting the transition of
Islamic State leadership to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, after the killing of
former-ISI leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi in 2010.
